Seasons In The Mists : Guild Wars 2

I take a lot of screenshots. I always did and since I've had a blog I've taken even more. In seven and a half years I have accumulated in excess of twelve thousand shots of Guild Wars 2 alone. Almost as many of EverQuest II. Every MMORPG I've played for more than five minutes contributes at least a few hundred to the pile.

I snap anything and everything I might use in a post, often from several angles, but most of those shots never see the outside of a folder on my back-up drive. I see them, though. Some of them, at least. I flick through the stacks, now and again, looking for illustrations for posts or just wallowing in nostalgia. And I always have a screenshot folder set to pull up desktop backgrounds on a ten minute refresh. But I don't remember to change the folder as often as all that. I never see more than a small fraction of the whole.

One reason I welcome IntPiPoMo each autumn is that it always spurs me to dig a bit deeper. I never have to make an effort to hit the fifty picture target because I use more shots than that every month of every year but for once I thought I might dig deeper and come up with one or two pure picture posts. So naturally here I am typing up a storm...

If we're talking words, some of my favorite shots are really just that. In games that have the "speech bubble" function I always have it on. If I say anything I find particularly amusing or perceptive I screenshot myself saying it. I am that solipsistic.

What passes for "amusing" in our house is something of an acquired taste. Mostly it's snark passing between Mrs Bhagpuss and myself, often in character, frequently with spelling and grammar reflecting the juvenile - no, infantile - personalities of... well, I was going to say of our characters but realistically more like those of the people playing them.

Sometimes the in-jokes, fractured phrasing and twee quotient surpass even my ability to parse. Take this cryptic exchange...

 "Sostidges" can mean "sausages" but it can also refer to players from the Sea of Sorrows server. This shot wasn't taken in World vs World, though. It looks like it's from the area in Divinity's Reach where the Queen's Gauntlet holiday event takes place.

"Farrens" refers to an NPC by the name of Lord Faren (note both the mispelling of his name, almost certainly because I associate it strongly with one of my all-time favorite writers, Mick Farren, and the lack of capitalization, which is just my sloppy typing).  As his extraordinarily lengthy and detailed wiki entry attests, Lord Faren has played a significant part in GW2's convoluted storyline but he may be most famous for his speedos.

Mrs Bhagpuss was not impressed but I can't see why we'd have been talking about his legs as sausages. Or maybe I can.

These days we rarely group, so opportunities for recording any banter are few and far between. I don't play much GW2 any more, mostly just dailies. Mrs Bhagpuss plays more than I do but far less than she used to. When we are playing it's usually at diferent times and even when our sessions co-incide we mostly talk in Guild Chat, which doesn't show up in speech bubbles.

Given the erudite and sophisticated nature of our interlocution that's a great loss to posterity.

The word "baddies" has a secondary meaning in video game terminology these days, someone who doesn't know how to play their class, but we use it in the way it would have been employed at the Saturday Morning Pictures, which, of course, neither of us ever attended. My cousin, a few months younger than me, apparently did, so I guess we could have done but I always think of them as something that died out in the 1950s. It seems not.

"Baddies" here appear to be members of one the other teams in WvW. Possibly some sostidges. Mrs Bhagpuss seems to find them quite amusing. She's literally rolling around on the plankworks, helpless with laughter. Another joke lost to The Mists... of time.

World vs World was vibrant back then, around the time of the first Season. We were clearly enjoying ourselves, even if there were some drawbacks to the way the competition had been organized.

The way the event was set up involved some achievements that were considered a grind by many. Use of siege equipment had never been so fraught. ArenaNet changed most of that for the second Season but even so the stress burned many players out. It's the given reason why there have been no more WvW Seasons since. We had a great time, though, and I have the evidence to prove it!

Naturally, this being Yaks Bend, everything played out in a rather particular fashion. The server had a playstyle that made it infamous for several years although few playing today seem to remember. Don't let anyone ever tell you server culture doesn't exist...

I miss those days. We will never see their like again but these shots bring it all back.

WvW in 2019 is a wasteland by comparison. There's a school of thought that believes the coming of mounts to the game mode was the final nail in the coffin and heaven knows I'm as anti-mount as anyone, but maybe we only have ourselves to blame.

This seems to have turned into a nostalgia post about World vs World. I had a whole boatload of snappy snaps sorted, some of them quite possibly a deal more amusing than the ones I've ended up using, but IntPiPoMo has a while to run yet. Plenty of time for those.

Let's finish with a dedication to all those comrades lost forever in The Mists. These are real character names of people I used to run alongside every day. Not seen either of them for years but a screenshot never forgets.

And a shout-out to my all-time favorite Guild... to kill. What could be better for a Charr than Cat Biscuits?

 Just ignore the guy photobombing in the foreground. They only do it for attention.



(IntPiPoMO count for the month so far - 41)

Time Of The Season : GW2

Everyone's off playing ESO. A bleak wind blows across all the other MMOs, making NPCs clutch onto their pointy exclamation hats as they wonder how they'll ever get those ten rats out of the old barn now.

Or something like that. A few weeks (or was it months?) back, when ESO was having beta weekends twice a week and three times on Sunday, it was widely believed that you could see the drop in GW2's population, particularly in World vs World. The topic came up in map chat quite often. Some reckless individualists even admitted to a personal desire to go try the thing for themselves. We burned them as witches, naturally.

Finally we got to the  Five Day Head Start, then the Three Day Head Start and eventually the velvet ropes came down altogether, the doors opened wide and in poured the desperate millions long-starved of quasi-naturalistic earth tones and fixed-cursor mouse-click combat. Or so I read. The only problem is, no-one seems to have told Henge of Denravi.

She said through a mouthful of moss...

A week and a half back, GW2's second WvW Season, aka The Tourney, aka Spring Tournament, began. Not to be confused with the second Season of GW2's Living Story, for which no date has been revealed, nor with GW2's sPvP Tournament of Legends, which begins either at the end of April (EU) or the beginning of May (NA). Really, someone at Anet needs to buy a thesaurus.

The second WvW Season (I'm going to stick with Season) follows a different format to the first, which had a fixed schedule. What's now good enough for dragons is no longer good enough for players, so we're going Swiss. It seems that in addition to cuckoo clocks, Heidi and negotiable neutrality the Swiss are apparently famous for a system of competition that irons out differences and matches like with like.

Who knew? Well, chess nerds and ANet's WvW dev team, it would seem. I imagine there's some kind of a Venn diagram that could be drawn there somewhere. The upshot is that after the first couple of weeks it should all settle down with top worlds playing each other, the middle playing the middle and you get the picture.

The importance of accurate, detailed intel cannot be overstated.

We had to start somewhere, though, so the first week used the existing Glicko system (invented by one of the lesser-known Marx Bros. or so you could be forgiven for thinking, given the results it produces). Yak's Bend, following an increasingly desultory and lacklustre performance, largely the result of burnout on the back of the extreme effort expended by all during Season one, had slipped to the bottom of Tier 4, landing us solidly in Silver League again for Season two.

The first match was a repeat of the last pre-season teaming - Yak's Bend, Borlis Pass and Sanctum of Rall. We'd won that match handily and we improved on our performance in Round 1. Six points in the bag. Under the Swiss System that gave us the other two six-pointers as our opponents in Round 2. Step up, bookies' favorites for the title, Fort Aspenwood, and dark horse, long-odds gamble, Henge of Denravi.

FA we know of old. We played them often way back at the beginning, when matches turned over much faster, and we've run into them many times since. There's fairly good feeling between the two servers, certainly no history of grudges that I'm aware of, and we respect FA as a borderline T2 server that has almost always been more than a match for us.

NPCs - they really do care!

HoD are a completely unknown quantity. I imagine we must have fought them at some point but no memory of it remains. For as long as I can remember they've been in a tier below us but in the weeks preceding the season it became apparent that something strange was happening down there. HoD were consistently racking up scores that emphasized their dominance in Tier 5, something that became increasingly relevant as Yak's Bend appeared to be hanging on to the edge of T4 by our fingertips.

I did a bit of research. Henge of Denravi, it seems, is the latest in a long series of Bandwagon servers: lower tier worlds to which a bunch of large and/or powerful guilds, disenchanted with or disenfranchised from the organizational hierarchies of their higher tier homes, move en masse, hoping to bootstrap a failing team back up into the big leagues. The most famous example is Kaineng, a server that propped up the other 23 North American worlds for months until, in a move resembling performance art more than competitive gaming, a huge influx of T1/T2 guilds pushed it almost all the way to the top before the inevitable crash and burn sent Kaineng tumbling all the way back to the bottom of the pile.

When the tag is down the tag is DOWN. No backseat driving.

By the accounts of the unfortunate players on Crystal Desert and Northern Shiverpeaks, who had to face them week after week, HoD have incredibly high numbers and incredibly low skill. Screenshots showed how they could queue a map like a T1 server (meaning they had so many players trying to get into WvW that they had substantial queues on all four maps simultaneously) but the consensus view was that once they ran up against a well-organized, seasoned, close-to-T2 force like Fort Aspenwood those numbers, largely representing a disorganized, opportunistic rabble capitalizing on the work of a much smaller core of experienced transfers, would melt away.

And at first it seemed that was how it would go. Early in the weekend the sheer size of the zergs HoD were able to bring to several maps at the same time was staggering. Mrs Bhagpuss's PC gave up in despair, sometimes requiring her to roam the Northern towers, refreshing siege and lobbing poisoned cows at distant supply camps, while her GPU had a little lie down and a quiet cry. I had a field day (and a camp day and a keep day) raining meteors on the never-ending waves of HoDs who seemed willing, happy even, to stand in the fire and die then run back to do it again and again again.

Gradually, though, their zergs thinned out a little and their organization, marginally, improved. The numbers were still enormous all the same. On Yak's Bend we all knew this would be a very different week to the previous one, when at one point we briefly held the full 695 available points for the tick and when, on average, we ticked over 400 throughout.

Every hour after after midnight counts double

Like all matches where one team runs rampant things were far, far less entertaining than you might imagine on the winning side, although I doubt it was a barrel of laughs for the teams being trampled over either. I have to say that I always feel a lot more motivated to log in and Fight for the Honor of the Yak when we are getting a drubbing than when we are running tedious, boorish Karma trains for hour after hour.

In magnificent contrast, this weekend was largely one of stolid, sometimes desperate, defense against overwhelming numbers and it was more enjoyable and very, very much more exciting because of it. I've always enjoyed keep defense and we had ample opportunities to savor it in all its flavors this weekend. Could have done with the repair bill thing happening a couple of weeks early but otherwise it was all good.

With Henge of Denravi an unknown quantity, we did entertain hopes that our acknowledged strength in defense might see us holding second, should HoD turn out be as disorganized as we'd been led to believe and should FA tear through them as expected. After the weekend it seems clear we are looking at third place with our much-vaunted defense at best making defeat appear respectable. No points for style, sadly. Much more surprisingly it seems FA might not have the measure of HoD after all.

Bringing in the Yaks, Bringing in the Yaks, We'll come rejoicing, Bringing in the Yaks.

WvW matches have a variety of interlocking rhythms. Reset night, weekend, time zones, all can have significant impacts on the relative performances of the teams involved. Consequently it's too early yet to be certain of the result. Nevertheless, as I write this, just after midday on Monday, Henge of Denravi have a solid lead over Fort Aspenwood of twenty thousand points with Yak's Bend gamely hanging in there 15k behind FA.

A win for HoD would be a real upset. If it happens I wonder if FA will call on TESO to take the blame. I see absolutely no sign whatsoever that it's had any impact at all on Yak's Bend. All the familiar names are there (except one, the charismatic commander who arguably led the entire server to victory (well, second place but it felt like victory) who's allegedly left for good in favor of playing StarCraft) and there are countless names appearing that I haven't seen for weeks or even months.

No second place for us this time round I fear. Pre-season predictions mostly place us fifth but I think we could do better than that. There's a long way to go yet so don't go counting those North Camp chickens just yet, HoD.

Match Report: YB/SBI/EB Season 1 Week 6 : GW2

It's been an epic week. Alliances, spies, emo meltdowns, excuses and accusations, commanders who never sleep and best of all action that matters all day, every day. This was the week we saw WvW as it can be and, in my opinion, as it should be.

Alliances were the big theme of the week. Should they happen? Are they allowed? Do they break the Rules of Conduct or are they Working As Intended? The arguments raged all week across the thirty-page threadnought that dominated last week's GW2 Match-up Forum. Not surprisingly, most of the naysayers were on the server being allied against but there was a strong element of denial from the Allies themselves, many of whom were at some pains to deny there was an Alliance at all.

As far as I can gather, not being privy to the High Councils of War on either Yak's Bend or Ehmry Bay, there was some discussion between a handful of guilds on each server prior to the match on the possibility of working in tandem to stem the tide of Stormbluff Isle's inexorable progress but no formal agreement was made. Come reset night there was a general rush of blood to the head and thoughts of alliances were largely forgotten.

And so it was!

In the first few days I can attest that there was very little open discussion of co-operation with Ehmry Bay. I didn't see a lot of evidence that we were timing our attacks to co-ordinate with theirs. Rather, both we and they had the same objective: don't let SBI have any of our stuff, take all of theirs.

Ehmry Bay bunkered down in their borderland, picking targets of opportunity as and where they could find them and for whatever reason SBI chose to leave them alone and concentrate their forces elsewhere. That was possibly their greatest tactical mistake. As I reported earlier, Yaks burned hard for the entire weekend from reset onwards, taking and holding an unexpected lead, while EBay's watchful patience and SBI's obsession with Stonemist Castle saw the supposed strongest server pushed into third place.

It seemed too good to last and it was. By Monday afternoon normality seemed to be re-asserting itself. As predicted the coming of the working week put a crimp in YB's ability to do much more than defend one map at a time, while SBI's stronger Oceanic timezone population saw them chewing through the points buffer we'd built up across the weekend. Ehmry Bay were shoved aside into third place as SBI came after us, snarling.

Call your guild Cat Biscuits, you're going to get Charr. Just sayin'

One of the most tense periods of the week saw one of our best Commanders staying on long after he should have taken a break while another sulked in his tent like Achilles, brooding on the loss of territory and the undoing of all his efforts of the long night past. Our long-suffering, unfed, un-rested leader tried several times to pass the baton to other Commanders but everyone had their hands firmly behind their backs so on he went, heroically and increasingly hysterically. In the end Achilles returned to the field, where he remained, seemingly sleepless, for the entirety of the rest of the match. 

By Tuesday things were beginning to look bleak. We still held the lead but the SBI dogs were snapping at our heels. Then came the spies. I was in Shadaran Hills on Stormbluff's Borderland, a keep we'd held since soon after reset, when the first spy was spotted, grabbing our vital supply by the armful and using it to build ballistas in a tunnel under the keep where they could serve no useful function.

From there things escalated from espionage to blatant cheating and the whole tenor of the competition changed. It's claimed by some, Mrs Bhagpuss among them, that the bad sportsmanship, carried out though it almost certainly was by only a tiny and unrepresentative segment of our enemy's population, had the immediate effect of galvanizing the wider Yak's Bend population in a determination to kick the crap out of SBI. If our previous supposed animosity towards them had been largely on the level of hissing a pantomime villain, suddenly it had crystallized into a very real anger.

You can never have too many golems - traditional Yak's Bend saying.

Least said about the copycat retaliation the better, I think. I'm all in favor of genuine espionage (Ash Legion, me...) and I believe sneaky tactics like making characters on other servers and infiltrating TeamSpeak channels to relay back intel all adds to the excitement and tension. Being able to destroy golems and deplete supply openly with total impunity, however, isn't spying, it's exploiting loopholes in game design and should be dealt with accordingly by the authorities prior to those loopholes being closed.

Whoever did what to whom when, there's no doubt that this was the point when the tide began to go back out for SBI. As the week wore on their progress stalled then went into reverse. The points gap between Yak's Bend and Stormbluff Isle began to grow and kept on growing. Excuses flew wildly - it was TESO beta weekend, it was Thanksgiving/Hanukkah, there was a huge PvE update, guilds had transferred in, or out...

All of these, of course, if they meant anything at all meant the same to all the servers involved. Bethesda's Beta invites didn't go out exclusively to key guilds on one GW2 server and no other; we all have populations more interested in PvE than WvW. Hollow words. Yak's Bend, for whatever reason, was able to motivate and mobilize its forces more effectively than SBI and that told and kept on telling.

Told you I was Ash Legion.

And so back to the Alliance. By mid-week that was very definitely A Thing. Tuesday and Wednesday evening it was still on the level of ad hoc, opportunistic timing of attacks, with YB and EB each paying attention to what the other was doing and changing plans accordingly, always with the joint intention of doing SBI harm. By the time I came home from work on Thursday, matters had progressed.

At this stage Yak's Bend had built what was almost certainly an unassailable lead. There was no doubt but that we'd take first place in the match. That was when the focus shifted from the week to the Season. We lifted our heads and looked to the horizon and there we saw the glint of Silver. It wasn't enough just to win: we needed SBI to come third.

There followed the most surprising and impressive segment of this already surprising and impressive match. For the best part of two full days, with no infrastructure provided within the game to foster cross-server alliances and no means whatsoever of enforcing them beyond encouragement, instruction and sheer peer pressure, Yak's Bend and Ehmry Bay managed to co-operate across four maps to work tirelessly and ceaselessly towards a single goal: keeping EBay's Points Per Tick far enough above SBI's to push them into second and keep them there.

Yak's Bend High Level Strategy Meeting.

It was hard work. SBI fought like cornered tigers on the field while their forum warriors and spies tried everything to undermine our resolve. When I went to bed on Thursday night, far too late, Stormbluff looked broken. At one point they owned nothing at all and their PPT was zero. Ehmry Bay had closed the gap by some seven thousand points with less than four thousand more needed to regain second place. I woke up expecting to see SBI firmly back in third.

They were in second, nearly eight thousand points clear of EBay. Again. So many reasons why this rickety alliance should have shuddered apart. We'd won the match. We had the points. Ebay stood to gain nothing of practical value by soldiering on. There was only half a day left before reset. And still the alliance held.


Non-aggression pacts continued to be honored. Commanders who didn't approve of the tactics nevertheless grudgingly agreed not to actively disrupt the efforts of those who did. Our goal and methods were explained over and over in map chat to make sure our pugs and militia understood both what was going on and why. Every effort was bent towards the single goal of coming out of the match with four points in hand over SBI not just two. If that meant giving EBay permanent residence in some of our homeland or knocking down keep doors then standing back and letting them claim the points and the possession then so be it. By all means necessary it would be done.

The Tick That Launched A Thousand Screenshots

And it was done. By the time I came home from work on Friday, Ehmry Bay were ahead of Stormbluff. Just. SBI never rolled over. Even when it was no longer even mathematically possible for them to recover second place (long after it had been obvious they would never make it) they were still fighting tooth and claw over their last tower.

I stayed up for reset, something I haven't done since last year. When the end of match message flashed across the screen I felt an immense sense of satisfaction and pride in what we'd achieved. Not because of anything I'd done, although I put in a lot of hours and pulled my weight all week, but because of the way hundreds, thousands of people had been able to come together for a common goal and achieve it despite considerable practical and emotional obstacles in their way and because I'd been a small part of that.

It's why we play massively multiple online games, isn't it?

I Didn't See That In The Patch Notes : GW2

It seems a very long time ago indeed since we were all voting early and often for Evon Gnashblade or Ellen Kiel. Well, as we all know, Kiel won and yesterday she finally got around to fulfilling that election promise, the one about looking into the Thaumonova Reactor disaster.

Things have been a tad busy on Yak's Bend this week and anyway it's fractals, so I haven't had a chance to investigate yet. Jeromai and Ravious have and they bring mixed reports. I think I might just read Dulfy and watch YouTube for this one.

My time continues to be spent almost exclusively in WvW. Hoping to get a full match report up at the weekend following this intense and thrilling week - that is if the pressure eases long enough as we enter the final round. In the meantime, something strange has been sighted in the Mists...

That wasn't here before. I'd have noticed.

Some kind of sneaky SBI trick, I'll be bound

Can't see anyone...let's just give it a poke...

"Ow" indeed.

All very mysterious. Apparently there was something similar in GW1 and it spawned monsters or treasure or some such. All this one does is knock you backwards and tell you off. Color me intrigued.

Silver Over Gold : GW2

The inaugural GW2 WvW Season is drawing to a close. There's another match to come but as far as the North American Gold League goes we already know who's going to be king of the hill. Blackgate, sitting on 25 points from five straight wins, already lead by more than 50k points in this week's match, where they're playing the two weakest teams in their division, Maguuma and Sea of Sorrows.

They face stronger opposition in the final week when they come up against second-placed Jade Quarry and current third-placed Sanctum of Rall but chances are Blackgate will finish with the maximum 35 points, Jade Quarry coming in as runners-up. Third place could go either to SoR or Tarnished Coast.

Gold League is somewhat different to Silver and Bronze and not only because it features some massively populated worlds with very intense, dedicated WvW players. There are only six teams in the Gold League; the other two have nine each. With more servers the differences in ability, commitment, population and effectiveness are necessarily wider between the top and bottom and also in a short seven-week season a degree of luck of the draw is unavoidable.

Going into week six Silver League looks a lot more unpredictable, with just four points separating first and third place. As of last Friday's reset the smart money would probably have been on Fort Aspenwood to run out eventual winners with Stormbluff Isle a close second and Yak's Bend hanging on to third.

The final week sees FA and SBI play each other for the second time with sixth-placed Dragonbrand taking collateral damage. Yak's Bend had a fortunate draw, playing Fort Aspenwood only once in the season, which might have helped our chance of nabbing third place, something most of the pre-season forum warriors thought beyond us. All the same, you can only play the hand you're dealt and even with the favorable draw, going into the penultimate match third place is by no means guaranteed.

We have a tough match this week : Stormbluff Isle and Ehmry Bay. SBI trounced us in our previous meeting back in week three, romping home with a lead of almost 200k. Last week while we ran our wxp trains and enjoyed our 500 point ticks there was much wise counsel warning against complacency and emphasizing the difficult times to come. To hold on to our podium place we needed to come second this week then win the final round, a repeat of our opening match against Ehmry Bay (again!) and Borliss Pass.

It's something a surprise, then, on this overcast November Sunday morning, to be sitting here looking at a scoreline that shows Yak's Bend not only more than 20k ahead of Stormbluff but SBI trailing third behind Ehmry Bay.

Thus far this has been an amazing match. Not so much because of the score alone; Yak's Bend has a reputation for coming strong out of the gate at reset and burning hard across the weekend. We've had leads over strong opposition before but come Monday the real-life responsibilities of our largely working-age, gainfully-employed population take over and we fade a little.

Well, so the story goes. Obviously I have no idea of the relative demography of our server or anyone else's but Yak's Bend has a narrative and that's part of it, along with our yak-like stubbornness and our obsession with siege engines. One of the things I most love about playing MMOs are the stories servers tell about themselves. To me those stories can often feel more powerful in terms of immersion than the lore of the game itself. It's something Yak's Bend has in spades.

This time it feels a bit different. SBI seem visibly weakened, their zergs smaller and more scattered, while there are more Yak boots on the ground than I can remember seeing for a long time. What's more, whereas last week our numbers were swelled by achievement-hunters joining the constant wxp trains farming easy targets and filling all the available channels with excitable chatter, last night map and team chat were consistently filled with good intel and tactical information and all activity was directed squarely at building a lead by taking territory and holding it.

I spent the entire evening on our own borderland. Given the choice I much prefer to defend our lands rather than take other people's. I walked more dolyaks from supply camps to keeps in an evening than I normally do in a month, and I wasn't alone. No four-legged yak set out on his ponderous journey without several two-legged Yaks speeding him on his way, hiding him from approaching threats and defending him from would-be yak-murderers.

Walking dolyaks is a vital but thankless task. The huge mobile haystacks set out from the various supply camps and stump along the frozen mud tracks to various keeps and towers delivering their mysterious "supply". Without this supply gates can't be reinforced nor walls fortified. Even when the walls and gates are as strong as they can be and the battlements bristle with cannons, maintaining a healthy level of "supply" inside the keep is essential for any protracted defense against a determined assault.

If no-one walks with the yaks any passing enemy can pick them off at will. They don't defend themselves and the NPC guards that an upgraded camp provides do little more than slightly delay the inevitable. Dolyaks walk very slowly and accompanying one from camp to keep takes several minutes. A good thief, striking out of nowhere, can down one in a few seconds. Keeping one alive requires a skilled player capable of soloing all-comers or, more likely, a bunch of less-skilled players providing a visible deterrent.

In my experience, walking a yak is either five minutes of tedious anxiety or a flurry of unexpected action followed by failure and sudden death. If the yak reaches the tower you get a small reward of xp and karma and the tower gets a small supply boost. Then you need to do it again. And again. And again. Unsurprisingly it's not the most popular of activities but last night there were, at times, more people willing to walk yaks than there were yaks that needed walking. I can't remember seeing that before.

Our new-found willingness to buckle down and get on with the things that matter wasn't limited to the mundanities of animal-minding. At one point, out of the blue, one of the homeland Commanders issued a map call not for our own map but for us all to jump across to SBI's borderlands to defend the Hills keep that we'd taken, fortified and waypointed there. I went immediately. In seconds I was part of a large zerg, racing from our spawn to the icons of the two Commanders battling to hold back a large SBI force whose Omega Golems were already battering at the inner gates. By the time Mrs Bhagpuss tried to switch maps a minute or two later the map was queued.

We successfully routed the "invaders" and chased them back to their Garrison, which we took later on that evening. I'm sure that kind of response is run-of -the mill in the higher tiers but it was new to me and quite thrilling.

What's behind the upswing in interest and focus I couldn't say for sure. Certainly a lot of our regulars are out right now, which was less the case last week, but I can't help wondering if we haven't picked up a significant number of new converts to WvW as a result of the earlier achievement-focused activity. Did some of those players, new or newly-returned to WvW, get a taste for something more than uncontested door-knocking and decide to come and see what it was like when the other side hits back?

Perhaps it has more to do with the nature of The Season itself. The end is in sight, we know what we have to do, there's honor and reward to be won and what's more there's the chance of pulling off a big surprise. I find it highly motivating. Maybe others do too.

Whatever's going on, it makes for some of the most compelling WvW gameplay since launch. It looked a tough enough ask to hang on to third. Aiming for second is going to require everyone to step up.

So, who cares who wins Gold in the Gold League? Silver in Silver, that's where it's at!

And we can do it! We're Yaks!

Sing When You're Winning : GW2

A very unusual match for Yak's Bend this week. We're playing the 8th and 9th placed servers in Silver League, Northern Shiverpeaks and Isle of Janthir respectively. We expected to win but the margin of victory has been a lot wider than I expected. At time of writing (10 am Tuesday morning) we have over 200,000 points, leading IoJ in second place by almost 140k.

We've been ticking over 400 pretty much continually since the match started, frequently going for long periods over 500. I heard there was an hour or so when we actually ticked over 600, although it must have happened while I was asleep. Back in March and April, when we met the zergforces that were Kaineng and Dragonbrand in their pomp, we were on the receiving end of this sort of thing quite often but I can't recall seeing it from the other side in quite this way before.

The strange thing is that with far less to play for than usual, this week's win being guaranteed, there appears to be more enthusiasm than ever for WvW and more Yaks on the field than ever before. It seems that far from wanting challenge and glory, a lot of people just like to get stuff done without those pesky other servers getting in the way.

Both new and recently-added incentives are bringing a ton of unfamiliar names into The Mists, all with agendas of their own. Of course, most folks who are interested in ticking all the world exploration boxes finished up months ago, but there are still a few late-adopters and plain old lazybones, of whom I'm one.

Cats. They'd be good at climbing. You'd think...

Despite hearing quite a lot of requests over the weekend along the lines of "Can we just take Veloka? I need the vista for World Completion", I hadn't thought to look at my own progress until I logged into Eternal Battlegrounds a few minutes ago to take a screenshot for this post.  Looking at the map I realized that although I was in the zerg that took both IoJ's and NSP's Overlook keeps yesterday I hadn't realized I had vistas still unchecked in each of them. Fortunately we still owned one and as I was hopping up the beams sticking out of the tower to reach the top a bunch of Omegas were already on the march to the other, so that's all sorted!

Is that all I get?

World exploration may be old hat but the Season Achievements and WvW Ranks are still fresh and interest in those is keeping the trains running on time. I'm familiar with Karma/WXP trains running when we are losing badly - they're often employed as a motivator and morale booster when there's little or nothing more effective open to us. Massive trains running virtually 24/7 when we have the ability to take stuff anywhere at will is a new one on me, though.  

The Rank system appears to be the mechanism of desire here. One of our best and certainly most popular commanders commented in Map chat that he was hoping to use this week to get to Gold status before the next match. The lowest Gold title comes in at Rank 1395. (The highest possible rank, Diamond Legend, appears at Rank 9,945, or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first). By running trains non-stop he reckons to average 100 ranks a day.

By the time I finished last night my Charr ranger, my primary WvW character although by no means my only one, stood at half-way through Rank 99. At 100 he moves on from being a General, a title I very much like, to become first a Veteran, then a Champion and finally a Legend. That all takes another fifty ranks until 150 when the clock gets rolled back and the entire sequence begins again from "Invader", only this time with "Bronze" stuck in front. I imagine I'll be long gone from GW2 before it becomes relevant, but in theory the entire process repeats five more times after that, going through Silver, Gold, Platinum and Mithril and ending at Diamond.

As for the Season Meta, I'm very happy to confirm that I completed that at the weekend, on one account at least. Mrs Bhagpuss is one achievement short of completing it on both accounts but two is too much for me. It's a distracting complication in many ways. I did some things I would never otherwise have done at all, such as all the Jumping Puzzles, and quite a lot of things I might have done but not right now or not all at once, like standing on fifty ruins for 45 seconds at a time in a borderland we already own.

The signs of these Achievements disrupting natural gameplay were everywhere; players draining vital supply to repair walls that were still being trebbed as they selfishly clocked up progress on Defense Restorer; players selfishly throwing down unnecessary ram blueprints hoping to get some hits towards Demolition Expert; players selfishly sitting on the circle at sentry points for Sentry Capturer Extraordinaire while map calls went unheeded.

First server problems

The difference this week is that whereas such behavior has previously been roundly condemned and peer group pressure has been employed to minimize it, in this match the general attitude towards the focus on individual rather than team goals has been much more laid back. All in all it's made for a relaxing change but I think most regulars would prefer a closer match.

That said, we have still had some fantastic battles on occasion. We were blithely circling the Northern Shiverpeaks borderland last night, helping ourselves to whatever we fancied, when NSP brought a zerg in and wiped us at their Garrison. We promptly picked ourselves up, made a swarm of Omegas and marched them north for retribution. The second battle was intense but we emerged victorious.

Later, the evening saw some ferocious fighting in Eternal Battlegrounds, with both Isle of Janthir and Northern Shiverpeaks fielding the largest numbers I've seen from them either in this or previous matches. There's intense competition between IoJ, who have come last in every previous match but who are currently in second place in this one and NSP, who stand to lose their place ahead of IoJ in the League if they can't overhaul IoJ's current 10k lead.

The dynamic of this match may be unbalanced but so far at least it's never been dull. All the same, it'll be nice to get back to normality next week, when we face the steamroller that is Stormbluff Isle and our old frenemies Ehmry Bay.

The Turning Of The Seasons : GW2

After a thrilling couple of hours of intense WvW combat yesterday evening, Mrs Bhagpuss and I were chatting in the kitchen while making a cup of tea. As the conversation ambled along It occurred to me that I was somewhat in the dark about several important aspects of the new Season.

All I really know about it is that each server gets five points for a win, three for second and one for third and that the winner of each League will be decided after seven weeks by a simple total of those scores. Also, there's a reward chest for everyone participating and the higher your server places in its League, the better the contents of the chest.

Come on! You can't all have found a pirate map.

Beyond that it was all a bit fuzzy. I found myself with a lot of questions:

• Will there be relegation and promotion?
• Does the next Season start immediately after the first one ends?
• Do the total points scored during each match matter?
• Does the old glicko system still run on in the background?
• If so, will the Leagues for next Season be decided on that basis rather than on who won this round?

So I did a bit of research, which mostly consisted of googling until I found this official announcement, which I'd already read and which answered precisely none of my questions and this slightly extended version of the same thing which adds some clarifications by Devon Carver that go some way towards answering at least a few.

We'll have none of that language here, thank you!

On reading the interview I found I'd fundamentally misunderstood the most basic concept of the WvW Season. I'd been under the impression it was a permanent change to the structure of WvW. It isn't. I thought we'd made a permanent and irrevocable move from a Ladder system to a League. We haven't.

Some quotes:

Carver said... that the team is focused on “getting all its ducks in a row,” with this first season, and once it is over the team will evaluate how well it did and how AreanNet wants to continue using the WvW season as a way to change up the WvW action.

“In terms of how frequently these seasons will occur, it will just depend on what makes the most sense for the community and for our general release plans.”

Teaching Tactics To My Dog Bear.

I'm still unclear on what happens when the Season ends. It may be that ANet haven't decided. It's clear, though, that we will not be moving directly to Season Two and I consider that a disappointment. Moreover, I feel that the sheer vagueness of the above approach will almost inevitably lead to a loss of momentum and confusion. At the very least we should have some kind of Schedule so that we know when the next Season will start, even if we are aware that the exact format may have to change.

Stop that cheering at the back...

For all the problems with uneven weeks and predictable outcomes, I find the League/Season system to have several major advantages over the open-ended Ladder we've had since launch.

• A League replicates a format familiar from Team Sports, whereas a Ladder replicates one normally used for Individual Sports.
• A Season has a defined Winner and defined Places for all contenders.
• A League offers the possibility of Promotion or Relegation.
• A Season has a finite duration and the prospect of a fresh start.

Anecdotally, I would contend that there has been a more evident and intense awareness of WvW as a result of the more familiar and easy-to-follow League structure and that there is a an enhanced sense of "Server Pride" because of it.

Arithmetic? We Ash leave all that technical stuff to Iron Legion.

The League system clearly needs tweaking. As I mentioned elsewhere, I would prefer two Leagues running concurrently: a Weekend League covering Friday to Sunday and a Weekday League covering Monday to Thursday. Seven days is too long for most matches, the result of which is rarely in doubt after the halfway point and there are well-known variations in the abilities of various servers to compete at different times of the day or week. One size does not fit all, nor should it need to.

Assuming I won't get my wish, however, and that ANet are unwilling to run multiple competitions, I would still very strongly prefer a permanent and ongoing series of seven-day/seven-week Seasons to a return to any of the previous variations on the Ladder we've suffered until now.

And I'm still no wiser on whether it matters not only whether we win a match but also by how much.