Waiting For The End Of The World : GW2

Far and away the biggest news in MMOs this week was ArenaNet's posting of a discussion document on the proposed changes to GW2's World vs World. Well, it was big news in our house. Or you'd have thought it would have been...

I'm not sure Mrs Bhagpuss has actually read it yet. I drew her attention to it at the earliest opportunity but her interest was, shall we say, muted. She'd been playing WvW while I was at work and the post on the forums had been up for a while but she hadn't heard anything about it until I told her.

I was expecting her to tell me people had talked of nothing else all day in /team and guild chat but apparently it hadn't earned a mention. It didn't get an airing in the session I played that evening either and it wasn't until the next evening that I first heard someone raise the topic.

Priorities.

That was a single question dropped into the guild chat of the 500 WvW member guild I'm in on Yak's Bend. You could hear the tumbleweed rolling by. Since our superstar Commander and guild leader packed his yak and departed for pastures unknown just before Path of Fire arrived the guild has been moribund so the lack of response wasn't surprising. It's rare for anyone to speak in that guild these days.

Eventually a desultory conversation began, mostly between me and the person who raised the topic. No-one else seemed to care. As for Team and Map chat, which are both generally lively, I have yet to hear the subject come up. Maybe this weekend, which is always the peak time for conversation between people who don't play all that much WvW but think they know more about it than anyone else. Or maybe people who actually play WvW are just beyond caring these days.

There are always forum warriors willing to fight any battle, of course. The main thread on the changes is impressively voluminous. As I write it stands at 33 pages, made up of 1.3k posts, viewed 82.9k times. If you read through it, though, as I mostly have, a very large number of those posts are the same handful of people relentlessly bickering amongst themselves. There's even a very lengthy sub-debate going on about how the changes will impact the roleplaying community outside of WvW that threatens to hijack the entire thread.

Vision of the future.

The devs have been fairly active in answering questions and concerns but because a thirty page thread full of giant, nested quotes is extremely hard to navigate those replies are difficult to find, especially using the less-than-stellar "Dev Tracker" function. Fortunately Raymond Lukes, presumably the ANet employee who lost the last office game of one-potato-two-potato, has pulled all the replies into a makeshift FAQ.

The changes themselves are radical and would be shocking...if they weren't by and large a revamp of the "Battlegroup" changes that were leaked several years ago. Back around then, just before he left for good, Colin Johansen confirmed that ANet had spent a year on a "major WvW overhaul".

That plan largely collapsed in a firestorm of protest and controversy after the disastrous imposition of the Desert Borderlands maps that came with Heart of Thorns almost killed WvW off completely. A lengthy period of retreat and retrenchment followed, during which the game mode pulled out of its death dive only to stabilize at a much lower level.

Existential angst.

Following the usual reluctance of MMO companies to own up to the need for server merges, the ongoing issue of falling populations and declining interest was bodge-fixed with the current "Linking" system, whereby smaller worlds are rammed together with bigger ones then re-sorted every couple of months according to some invisble criteria that no-one understands.

That has been unpopular with many. I kind of like it myself because it adds an element of surprise and variety but it certainly does absolutely nothing for community spirit, stability or genuine balance.

Linking does at least have the benefit of being very simple to understand and implement. The proposed new system is neither. It's hideously overcomplicated, ferociously arcane and, in the opinion of many commenters, likely to create hitherto unimagined possibilities for exploitation by the players.

Given Anet's five year history of being entirely incapable of managing either player behavior or expectations, my own take is that this will be an unmitigated disaster. So far players have proved themselves capable and willing to run rings around the developers' intentions at just about every turn. I can guarantee that already the self-appointed movers and shakers of WvW will be organizing the most effective ways to bend the new rules past breaking point.

The proposal does come with the usual caveat that it may never happen. As McKenna Berdrow, who wrote the original proposal, warns: "If the reception is not great for this system, then the other alternative is most likely to continue World Linking."

A bad day.

ArenaNet, more than any MMO developer whose games I have ever played, runs scared of player opinion. Even so, nervous as they always are when announcing them, unpopular changes often do go through. As they float this change for WvW they are clearly in a mood to bite the bullet for what they see as the good of the game because there are also a bunch of potentially unpopular class  and system revamps due in the upcoming balance patch.

I think the WvW changes are mostly a bad idea but if they do go through I'm sanguine. While we will get the class balance patch very soon, whether we want it or not, the WvW revamp, if it ever happens, is probably something like six to twelve months away, so there's no point worrying about it yet.

If, as I expect, based on previous patterns, it gets put to some kind of vote I will almost certainly opt  to keep the status quo. I quite like the linking system and I value the existing world naming conventions over and above supposedly "balanced" matchmaking.

A good day.

I'm far from convinced in any event that "Balance" is a goal worth chasing. Balance in WvW, on the rare occasions it has been achieved, has felt a lot like boredom. My expectation for the new system, should it ever happen, is that it will produce anything but balance.

Should it finally go ahead, what I imagine we'll get is a period of utter chaos followed by a slow apprehension that far from fixing the underlying problems the new system has made them worse. At the very least it should be entertaining.

Whether or not I'll still be playing either WvW or GW2 by then, who can say? It's been a long run and if it wasn't for Mrs Bhagpuss's continued dedication to Tyria in general and The Mists in particular it might well be that I would already have moved on. If she doesn't take to the new WvW then that could be the end - at least of GW2 making up 80% of my gaming.

Sometimes I just sit and think.

Of course, that doesn't mean I would quit. GW2 is the poster child for pick up/put down gameplay among MMOs. People drop in and out all the time, for a few weeks, a few months, a few years. And there would need to be something more attractive to take its place - something else I'd want to play for several hours every day. I'm not sure there is, just yet.

There's absolutely no doubt in my mind, though, that, removing named "Worlds" from the equation will loosen the ties that bind me to the game. I picked Yaks Bend for reasons that have only deepened over the last five years and while YB is very much not what it used to be it is still something.

Worlds that last two months then vanish into the ether, guilds that are pushed around like bargaining chips, alliances that form and dissolve according to expediency, none of that can hope to replace the feeling of belonging that came with a permanent home world.

Currently residing in the "Where Are They Now?" file.

With the changes likely to come into play around the same time as the release of other Realm vs Realm options like Crowfall and Camelot Unlimited I feel this is very much a desperate last roll of the dice for WvW. Whether it can do anything to halt the slide I very much doubt but I guess it will be interesting to watch it try.

The bigger question is how much longer does GW2 itself have? We all realize now that MMOs can go on for years, decades even, but if even Blizzard are wary of hitching the company fortunes to a single title, how much more uncomfortable must ArenaNet grow as each year passes with nothing new to offer beyond some skins and lockboxes and the occasional expansion for a single, aging game?

Something to come back to in a while, I'm sure. For now, I'm off to play some old-style WvW - while I still can.

Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned : GW2

This weekend saw some lively discussions chez Bhagpuss over the current state of Guild Wars 2's World vs World mode. So much has happened over the last few months it's hard to keep track.

Yak's Bend is back in Tier 1 again after a precipitous plummet to Tier 4 and a cartoonish rebound back to the top. Our Celebrity Commander is back along with a host of names from the past, including our original CiC, now commanding regularly again for the first time in what seems like years. I even saw one of our very first Commanders yesterday, albeit not tagged up; one of the handful who bought the tag when most people didn't even understand what it was for, when a hundred gold was an unattainable fortune for most players rather than the pocket change it is today.

This time round, the ever-controversial linking system brought us Ferguson's Crossing for our new best friends. They'll be with us for a couple of months and they are a great asset, bringing numbers and several strong guilds and commanders.

You should probably keep that to yourself.

FC is a server, like Anvil Rock, who we had when the linkings first began, that I don't remember ever playing against. That's most likely why there don't seem to have been any community problems with the links we've had so far. It would be different if we'd been coupled to any of the servers that have a reason to hate us, which is basically everyone we've ever fought. Someone new to the server asked yesterday if there were any servers that didn't hate Yak's Bend, to which the answer was mostly laughter.

In this week's match we're facing Tarnished Coast, home of several major guilds with whose leaders our own top brass seem to be on extremely bad terms, including one who was a big cheese on YB for a while but left under something of a cloud. TC started out as GW2's self-elected roleplaying server and there's still a moony, renaissance fayre glimmer around much of what they do but they put their spikiest armor on when they play us.

The other server in the mix is Maguuma, GW2-NA's designated bad neighborhood. Maguuma is where some of the more notorious MMO guilds rolled when they thought GW2 might be something they'd enjoy - or enjoy wrecking. Some are even still there - I saw Starfleet Dental out in minor force over the weekend .

That's because it's difficult to type when you're laughing that hard.

Anyway, Maguuma has been known as the Troll Server ever since; accused, often with good reason, of not just tolerating but encouraging most forms of cheating and exploiting, while all the time expounding the virtue of the mythical Good Fight. We've run up against the Magpies a few times and it's always been a bruising encounter but I wasn't really aware of any great animosity, nothing like the deep and abiding hatred between YB and FA or SBI or...well, it's a long list.

Some hot words were spoken at the start of this match, though, and I fear such news travels fast when there are spies around. This time it all seems to have gotten very personal. Of course it's anyone's guess who's actually on Maguuma right now.

The current Maguuma is a bandwagoned version. Everyone who fancies a run at easy karma and effort-free rewards in T1 (everyone who's never been there knows the T1 borderlands are paved with gold) simply chips in a few hundred gems and moves to Mag's linked server, Kaineng. Remember them? They were the original  bandwagon, long ago.

Anyone fancy a game of footie?

Kaineng languished at the bottom of the table for  months until some bored high-tier guilds set out to see if they could bootstrap a server all the way to the top. If I recall correctly they got to Tier 2 before the wheels fell off. Well, Kaineng is the ghost in Maguuma's machine, clinging to the running boards as it tries to drive Yak's Bend clear off the track. It's a real team effort, too, because Tarnished Coast are dead set on achieving the same goal, to the point of really, truly double-teaming with Mag to get the job done.

As a rule I dismiss claims of double-teaming out of hand. Every single match features loud claims that X is allied with Y against Z although it's rarely anything more than an ad hoc, momentary partnership of convenience if it's anything at all.

This time, though, there apparently really is a formal alliance between the other two servers - across one time zone at least. The evidence of this brutal weekend is convincing.

Brutal? Yes, but also wildly enjoyable. Mrs Bhagpuss, like many on YB, is not a fan of 2v1 grudge matches but I tend to favor the views of a forum commenter philosophizing  on the subject recently : "Organised 2v1’s are very fun and should be encouraged, the fights happen at your doorstep instead of having to chase them down."

I certainly spent far more time in WvW this weekend than I'd planned, including an unbroken six-hour session last night. The action quite literally never stopped. It was heating up even further when I had to go to bed. As someone who rates sieging and defending structures against heavy and determined opposition as about the most fun you can have in a PvP mode, my main problem right now is having too much of a good thing.

The problem, as mentioned already, is that not everyone sees it that way. Indeed, the real problem with WvW is that almost no-one sees anything "that way". Everyone has a different conception of what the game mode is, is for, could be, should be.

Theorycrafting for Dummies.

MMOs at large are portmanteau formats but usually there's some clarity of intent when it comes to the individual components. There's generally a consensus on how to use an instanced PvP battleground or a 5-man dungeon and everyone knows what a bank is for.

WvW has never had that clarity. To some it's a stage for large-scale PvP battles, for others it's a siege warfare sim. There are those who want to roam alone or in twos and threes to test their skill and prowess and those who are interested only in the current score or their server's standing in the league. There are vocal constituencies arguing that WvW should be geared towards Guild vs Guild contests or even individual duels.

Many of these interest groups do not play well together even when they are supposed to be on the same team. The whole mess isn't helped by Anet's unwillingness to truly own the form and settle on a clear and unequivocal direction for development.

Across the summer we suffered a series of often fatuous, occasionally momentous polls. We've been in a running series of "Live Betas" for most of this year and there seems to be no prospect of that awkward scenario ending. The entire game mode is being warped and twisted around us, changing from week to week, as a handful of developers attempt to wrest meaning from chaos without apparently having a set of blueprints or even some notes on the back of a napkin.

Sorry. Sorry! I didn't mean you!

And yet, despite all of that, WvW remains enormous fun. Great entertainment. A compulsive, stay-up-too-late, miss-a-meal-without-noticing thrill. If you read the forums you'll hear that WvW is dying or dead but if you log in and play you'll find the corpse up and dancing the polka.

As I write it seems from the scores that we have recovered from our weekend mugging. We will still most likely end the match in third place and next week we should be back in Tier 2, where indeed we should be by rights, having only drawn a wild card to breach T1 these last two weeks in any case.

Our glicko rating will almost certainly have risen but straws in the wind suggest that may not matter for much longer. WvW looks set to endure a lot more tinkering under the hood before someone finally declares the old jalopy ready to race.

When that day comes, if it ever does, I feel confident that there will still be plenty of us left playing, no matter what lunacies we've had to endure along the way. Whatever the final outcome - and of course MMOs rarely have final outcomes until they sunset and sometimes not even then - the one thing I remain confident in predicting is that WvW will remain great fun.

Maybe there's a way to break even that but if so no-one seems to have found it yet.

Shines Up Nicely : GW2

The last ten days or so haven't gone at all the way I expected, either in my MMO gaming or on Inventory Full. It was only a couple of weeks ago that almost every post here featured a slew of screenshots of Black Desert. In the six weeks or so from the beginning of March to the middle of April I posted twenty-one times about BDO and only about half a dozen times about anything else. And then the posts stopped.

They didn't stop because there's nothing more to say about Black Desert. They didn't even stop because I have nothing more to say about Black Desert. Coverage here stopped for the simple reason that I'm not playing the game any more.

Oh, I haven't given up playing it. I haven't fallen out of like with it or become bored or disenchanted or anything dramatic like that. I haven't even stopped logging in. In fact "logging in" exactly and accurately describes my current relationship with Black Desert Online. BDO is an MMO to which I log in.

Every day I log in my account, click on "Claim Rewards", claim my daily stipend and my token for the event that's running in celebration of the addition of two new classes to the game. Then I log out. After that I log in Mrs Bhagpuss's account, which she bought but so far has never played, and do the same there.

I finally get to kill The Wyvern Patriarch in Verdant Brink.

It takes about five or ten minutes to go through all the loading screens. It's quite annoying. The only reason I'm doing it is for the free pet that comes with a dozen tokens. Pets are not generally all that easy to come by in BDO unless you want to spend real money so I'm making an effort.

On Thursday night, the day Game Update 100 launched, I patched up EQ2. Like Wilhelm, I'm happy to see the game getting this degree of care and attention and I'm also fond of Zek, the zone that's getting the best kind of MMO makeover - an alternate version that complements but doesn't replace the original.

I'm also excited about the new Experience Vial system, which might let me play my max level Berserker, something I love doing, while passing the xp he gets, which he doesn't need and can't use, on to my army of lower level characters. Indeed, just about everything about EQ2's huge, free (for subscribers) update looks good to me.

So, if I haven't lost interest in BDO and I'm excited over new content in EQ2, why am I playing neither right now? Nor, for that matter, any the plethora of other MMOs I bang on about wanting to play? And why didn't I post anything at all for most of last week?

Moving the Tarnished Traitor out from behind a meta-event locked door so he's now available to be killed at your convenience is emblematic of the new approach. Of course, he still gets killed after the meta too.

Bloody GW2, that's why! If ANet's intent was to revitalize interest in their allegedly fading game then the Spring Update has to be considered a major success. Every day since the patch I have actively wanted to play GW2, and I do mean play. Prior to the patch I was often logged for much of the day but I often spent more time tabbed out than I did playing. Not any more.

The update achieved two apparently contradictory goals. It made solo play more attractive and rewarding than it has been for months, while simultaneously enhancing and encouraging all forms of group and co-operative play as well. It's remarkable.

The Heart of Thorns maps received very significant revamps that make exploring alone not only viable (I would say it always was but that's a minority opinion) but profitable and satisfying too. The changes to Verdant Brink are probably the most significant, radically changing the way the whole map operates, entirely for the better. I've spent a lot of time there and enjoyed it immensely. I don't do dungeons or fractals but if guild chat is anything to go by those have picked up a lot of post-patch attention too.

The change that has made the most unexpected impact is probably the simple tweak to the LFG function. The patch simply expanded the range of pre-made, permanent categories under which you can post your group offer or request, but that, plus the ability to join squads via LFG rather than just groups has revolutionized the entire process.

Gliding in Verdant Brink is probably the single most enjoyable of many enjoyable things you can do there now. It always was, but that might just have been me...

It's now extremely easy to find an active, vibrant, buzzing map, filled with motivated players concentrating on completing specific content. As a direct result I've been doing Auric Basin and Dragon's Stand metas for no better reason than that they are really good fun and because I can. Oh, and also because now the rewards are better and you get them as you go along rather than all at the end.

Ironically - or perhaps that should be idiotically - even though I've been doing a lot of this on my fresh level 80 Revenant, I still haven't used the free instant level 80 package that came with the patch. I meant to but in trying to game the system I pulled the handle one time too many.

GW2 hands out Tomes of Knowledge like fliers at a festival. I had enough already banked to make three level 80s. I thought I'd be clever and go to 79 with those, thereby bagging all the leveling rewards along the way, including exotics and rares that can be reforged for profit. Only I went all the way to 80 by mistake.

That meant a choice: use the Level 80 boost and get only the care package or save it for another new character and get all the free armor and weapons too. I chose to save it but that meant I had to gear up my Revenant the old way (buying stuff with badges and karma mostly) and I now have a level 80 with no waypoints (you get those opened automatically with the free boost). He also needs to do two dozen Heart of Thorns Hero Points for his elite specialization.

I'd play WvW if there was literally no other reward beyond server pride, but Stuff is Good.

Which is brilliant! It's almost like getting a whole new game. The Revenant, as the new class that came with the expansion, has a whole load of collections to do for armor, plus the weapon specialization. I have all the hero points to get and a whole new set of skills to learn.

If that wasn't enough I still have several specialist weapons to complete for other classes and then all the skills for those to learn and try to play with some degree of facility. I only just started trying to come to terms with playing a Druid last week for example,and I haven't even looked at Reaper or Chronomancer or Tempest, even though I've had all the Elite classes opened for months...

And that's just PvE. I've actually been spending most of my time in WvW., which has been insane all week. Just climbing up from third place in T1 to finish ahead of Jade Quarry has been a titanic struggle. The resurgent Blackgate hordes are uncontainable. The early part of the week consisted largely of either watching a slideshow until I died without knowing what had killed me or trying to find some quiet borderland backwater where fights were merely zerg vs zerg not gigantonormous blob vs blob.

Yak's Bend has always been at its best under pressure and it's been very instructive to hear the reactions of some of our more recent recruits, the players who are used only to seeing YB win. As someone who remembers regularly waking up on a weekend morning to log in and find us ticking in double figures, if we were lucky, this current setback seems like relatively small beer but some people are really feeling the pressure already.

This is the part I can help with - running supply, building catas, firing catas, all of that. Once the wall falls and the armies clash, though, I'm on frames per minute not frames per second. Still, they also serve, who only stand and build!

What the shake-up has done for me is to heavily re-inforce my already strong sense of server pride. Each evening when I get home from work I find I want to get my dailies done and then find a tag and Do My Bit. It may be mindless, pointless, meaningless pseudo-competition but by the Lord Harry it's fun!

Even so, fighting Blackgate is a somewhat uphill struggle. I was rather hoping that we might drop a tier this week (not supposed to say that but I know I wasn't the only one) but in the end our hard work paid off and it was Jade Quarry that went to T2. This week we get to fight Dragonbrand - or we do if Blackgate permit. We're in third again overnight but we always do badly at reset and right across the weekend. It's going to be another interesting week in WvW.

All of the above and more explains why there have been fewer posts than usual of late. My work schedule was at its least blog-friendly and the free time I had I wanted to give to gaming not writing about gaming. That's signifies a very sound success for Mike O'Brien's first foray into single-handed control of the game. GW2 almost feels like the game it was at launch. Let's hope it carries on this way.

Link Love? : GW2

Last Friday, while we were fast asleep in bed, ANet reset the underlying scoring mechanism for WvW and linked the bottom twelve servers with the dozen above them. The intent and effect is laid out clearly in this forum post:

We will be resetting glicko volatility and deviation for all worlds to the same value, but leaving their rating unchanged. What this means is:

• The first matchup will use current placements (T1 worlds vs T1 worlds, T2 worlds vs T2 worlds, etc.)
• The reset volatility and deviation values will come into effect at the end of that match.
• Worlds that win, especially by a large margin, will have their rating increased by a larger amount than normal.
• Likewise, worlds that lose, especially by a large margin, will have their rating decreased by a larger amount than normal.
• The result is that when a world no longer is meant to be in a specific tier, they’ll move out of it more quickly.

As a direct result, Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent most of this weekend in The Mists, joining in a largely futile attempt to hold the line against the resurgent Blackgate hordes. As I write, around fifty hours into the match, Yak's Bend is in second place, 4k ahead of Jade Quarry and just short of 50,000 points behind BG.

Yak's Bend's has never been at its best either at reset or across the weekend. We often start the working week a little behind and have to go hard to pull out a lead during the week. That trend goes back almost as long as I've been on the server, which is always.

Usually, though, the deficit is a few thousand points at most. Last weekend, with the changes imminent, we came out of Sunday chasing a 38k lead. This Monday it's 48k.

Like the enormous queues that caused a flurry of angry forum threads on Friday night and left a lot of people disgruntled all through the weekend, the large influx of people logging in to play WvW isn't entirely down to the linking of servers. In Tier One the addition of low population worlds like Anvil Rock and Eredon's Terrace to the mix probably has less impact than the transfer of one or two large guilds from one T1 server to another.

We lost nearly 2k just in the time it took me to write this piece...

Indeed, as could readily be seen the weekend before the patch, most of the effect was caused by dormant accounts waking up as lapsed players (or, at least, lapsed WvW players) logged back in to see what all the fuss was about. Blackgate, with a long history at the top, has a lot of dormant WvW accounts.

The primary, immediate result of the change has been a tidal wave of action. All four maps were in highly active play all weekend, with multiple zergs and blobs from all three servers circling the borderlands. In the larger battles, when two fifty-strong squads clashed over possession of a keep or struggled to take or break a choke point, my aging PC almost gave up altogether.

Playing a berserker staff elementalist, the classic glass cannon, going into slide show mode and losing any control over placement, movement or reaction should make the game unplayable. My character ought to be dead before I can see an attack coming. That she managed to survive any number of battles without being picked off and eliminated while helpless suggests that there are plenty of other players struggling to cope with the conditions.

This, of course, is how WvW used to be, years ago. This is why, back then, we rarely went to the most popular and populated map, Eternal Battlegrounds. Fighting in Stonemist Castle, the centerpiece of that map, often contested by all three zergs at once, used to crash the game for me with tedious reliability.

Visual metaphor

As GW2 in general and WvW in particular has bled out we have all come to accept and expect things to be quieter, more sedate. As Yak's Bend first ascended and then was shoved further up the ladder we heard a lot about Tier 1 and its high population. I expected major problems with my old hardware when we finally got to the top but our rise to glory coincided exactly with the arrival of Heart of Thorns, whereupon WvW numbers fell off a cliff. And as we all know there's no gliding in WvW.

Consequently these gigantic battles come as a bit of a shock. They are also by no means universally welcomed even by those who don't have technical issues. Gameplay in WvW has long been diverse. Although it's a game mode seen from the outside as a primitive clash of zergs, the format hosts a wide range of playstyles.

There are roamers who travel alone, hoping for single combat opportunities. There are havoc groups of two, three or half a dozen, hopping maps and hitting hard behind enemy lines. There are scouts sitting in towers and keeps, tagging siege and reporting on enemy movements. And, of course, there are the merry PPT crews, battling doors and walls and NPCs for the good of the team and their own karma.

As of now, most of those activities are on hold. Structures are barely defensible when fortified. Below that you can forget it. Even a well-drilled response team can't handle multiple roaming 30+ zergs on both sides of two or three maps at once. On Saturday havoc teams had to run twenty deep to have much hope of taking even a couple of camps. As for solo fights it is to laugh!

If all this comes as something of a shock to the system for players used to life in the top tiers, imagine the trauma for the conscripts from T8. Impressively, the Anvil Rock players we've picked up seem to have taken it in very good part.

If I'd known then what I know now...

A good few have outed themselves in map or team chat and I'm happy to say that the response from Yak's Bend has been exemplary.  We may be vilified for our gameplay but we have always had a well-deserved reputation as an open and welcoming server with little time for drama. I ran for a while on Saturday with a very nice guild from AR who seemed to be enjoying themselves a lot and there have been several AR commanders tagged up, which is great to see.

Over on Blackgate the story hasn't been such a happy one, at least according to the forums. There are some eloquent and impassioned posts from distressed Eradon Terrace exiles that explain very clearly why world-linking, good though it may be for the health of WvW in general, could be catastrophic for established server communities.

There do seem to be some major flaws in the plan. Freezing the glicko score of the junior partners, removing all visual signs of their previous identity, the knowledge that any pairing may be changed, perhaps as often as four times a year, all add up to a class system for WvW. A lot of players are going to feel like refugees, conscripts or second-class citizens.  Even at best they are going to feel like guests or junior partners.

First impressions

For players who transferred to lower tier servers specifically to escape the overcrowded upper levels or in search of specific types of gameplay, mainly roaming and small group fights, that were better supported by a low population, this must be particularly galling. Especially given that money changed hands to facilitate the move.

This, though, is the risk you take by choosing a low population environment in a commercial MMORPG. In my experience, low population servers often have tighter communities, better atmospheres and offer gameplay options that are hard to find on busier worlds. I always prefer to play on a low population server if I can find one.

The trade-off for a better quality of life is insecurity. Low pop servers get merged. If you're lucky, when that happens, you might get a choice about where you go but sometimes you just have to go where you're put.

I feel for the displaced of Eredon Terrace. My third account is on Ehmry Bay. EBay is now twinned with Henge of Denravi, a server I would never in a million years have chosen to support. Every time I log in to do my dailies I have to think twice to remember which is supposed to be my "home" borderland.

We are lucky on Yak's Bend. We kept our name. We welcome Anvil Rock - we even joke about changing the server's name to Yak's Rock but only because, well, we all believe that Yaks do rock. And, obviously, anvils don't bend...

I will not miss Fire Keep.

If I'd woken up on Saturday morning and found that I had to log into another server to play, though, I am certain it would have diminished my enthusiasm. I might have decided to go play Black Desert instead.

As some of us have been saying this weekend, trying to raise the spirits of certain disheartened players who are already finding the blobbing and the queuing and the lag to be more than they bargained for, it is only a beta. Over the next few weeks things will settle. The novelty will wear off. The dormant accounts will go back to sleep. The scores will adjust, worlds will find their level, things will go back to normal, albeit a new normal.

Then the Alpine Borderlands will come back and the whole frenzied cycle will begin over again. Interesting times. Fun to look back on; not so much to live through.

If there's one thing I've learned, though, it's that I really need a new computer.

Warm Impermanence : GW2

In just over a month's time the Alpine Borderlands maps that have been the mainstay of GW2's World vs World gameplay for the entire three year life of the game to date will vanish. When Heart of Thorns arrives they'll be replaced wholesale by the Desert Borderlands.

Unlike the new sPvP map, Stronghold, which has been made available several times for open play-testing, or even the PvE map, Verdant Brink, which has been revealed in piece-meal fashion to anyone willing to pre-purchase, the Desert Borderlands have remained shuttered behind a strict, invitation-only closed beta.

The absence of an NDA means those of us (almost everyone playing) who didn't receive an invite have been able to read the feedback of those who did and thereby garner some kind of impression. Nevertheless, unless ArenaNet choose to throw open the gates for open testing before the October 23rd launch, come the day we'll all be stepping off a cliff into the unknown.

That's just the beginning of what should prove to be an enormous shake-up for the niche activity that was originally posited as GW2's endgame. In an announcement that seems to have passed largely unnoticed and uncommented on, at least outside of the official WvW forums, ANet certified that following the launch and stabilization of the Heart of Thorns expansion their focus would move to sorting out World vs World once and for all:

"As work on Heart of Thorns wraps up, we’ll be treating resolving the remaining core areas in WvW as our #1 live development feature priority for the game".

John Corpening, the "game director for WvW", who made the announcement, lists a number of the longstanding problems that have dogged WvW ever since it began, with population imbalances, night-capping and the scoring system chief among them. He states that he wants to improve matters by encouraging "...Strategy, Competition, Collaboration, and rewarding the contributions of both players and guilds who participate in the daring adventures and epic battles that make up a great match".

The spectre of PvE hangs above the battlefield.

Whether by "Collaboration" he means more of the kind of "double-teaming" alliances between two of the three servers in a match that most WvW regulars revile and consider tantamount to open cheating isn't clear, although I strongly suspect that in going with a tri-partite system in the first place such alliances were always intended to be part of the plan. More likely he means collaboration between factions on the same team.

Changes already announced to the rules and processes for "claiming" structures like Keeps and Towers suggest that a huge plank of the forthcoming plan to save WvW rests on Guilds. Indeed it seems that with the arrival of the first expansion the development team have at last noticed that the name of their game does suggest, at least to players, war between guilds is what the game's about.

Mention this in map chat and someone will immediately explain the lore behind the name of the "Guild Wars" franchise, which has nothing whatsoever to do with player-run organizations. Commercially, however, it has never made much sense to have a PvP oriented game that features player guilds, call it "Guild Wars" and then do nothing whatsoever that relates to guilds fighting one another.

HoT is set to go some way to correcting that misleading impression with Arenas in the new Guild Halls and a GvG Leaderboard for Stronghold in sPvP but the area where ANet are particularly promoting the clash of guild against guild is in WvW. How that is going to work out in practice is something we won't even begin to understand until it's already upon us.

This huge, looming cloud of uncertainty is one of the prime reasons I'm not very invested in WvW right now. It seems rather pointless to commit time and energy and emotion to something that may be swept away in just a few weeks. In feeling that way I appear to be very much in the minority. Most people are behaving as though nothing is going to change at all.

Group hug!

Of course, we on YB are close to the culmination of what has been a very long campaign. Tunnel vision may have set in. Almost exactly a year ago Yak's Bend began an adventure that saw the server move from plucky T3/T4 stalwart with a history of slacking during normal play and over-achieving in the formal competition of The Season to unlikely contender, first for T2 and then T1.

It was a messy, bloody affair. Never a very popular server, in the long, attritional grind to the top, YB managed to fall out badly with just about everyone we encountered. Our enmities with Stormbluff Isle and Fort Aspenwood remain particularly vicious but they're just the most festering of a number of running sores from our past.

Typically, being Yaks, we profess not to care what anyone thinks of us and claim to thrive on the pressure. And by and large that's how it is in our bubble. Many times we were told we would be broken and yet here we are, more than holding our own in T1, having crashed the tidy little private party that Blackgate, Jade Quarry and Tarnished Coast ran for themselves for so long that it seemed it would always be that way.

To get there we somehow acquired a massive influx of guilds, some of which dropped down from T1 in an attempt to break the hegemony. As far as I know that was their choice. I don't believe we sought them but we welcomed them when they arrived with their carpet-bags in hand. They gave us weight of numbers and coverage that we had never had before yet surprisingly they seem not to have changed our deeply-loathed affection for and reliance on siegecraft and defense. Maybe that's what drew them to us or maybe we just assimilated them as we've done to so many before.

It wasn't meant to be like that. T2 was touted as "the fights tier" until we broke it. I believe that plan has been re-routed to T3. What T2 is like right now I'm not sure but there seems to be some plan afoot to establish a rotation that includes at least some of the two upper echelons, which would make a nice change. We had that in T3/T4 once and it was fun.

How can this even happen?

T1, now we're here, seems oddly familiar. We were led to believe that World vs World in the heady heights of T1 would be very different from what we knew from the minors. It's not. It's just the same only with more people. What does differ the higher up the tiers we rise is the politicking.

Back in T3/T4 eighteen months ago things were far more rough and ready. I barely knew the names of the guilds on other servers we fought against let alone the names of their commanders. These days I know plenty. What used to be an amorphous blob of red ants swarming across our precious borderland now has to be called out by tag and driver as we discuss the different tactics and styles of one guild over another. Behind the scenes deals are made, guilds work together, responsibilities are allocated. There's a modicum of seriousness to it all that never was there before.

That speaks to Anet's purpose. My feeling is that many playing WvW would welcome a structure that encourages and rewards a more formal, militarized approach. Personally I prefer anarchy, chaos and imagination and luckily I have a way to recapture that flavor one in a while. Two of my accounts are on Yak's Bend and always will be but my third account is on Ehmry Bay, down in the bush leagues of T5, and there the old, haphazard ways persist. It's like going on holiday to the past.

When GW2 began there was great hope among many for its three realm large-scale PvP. Old DAOC and Warhammer lags hoped to recreate the good times. Within a few weeks the shine went off that penny. Most of those hopefuls left, often in bad humor. And yet every day when I enter The Mists I find myself fighting alongside names I've known for a year, two years, even three. Some of our commanders have been tagged up since 2012. For a lot of people WvW just works.

It does for me. There's still no player versus player I've done in any MMO to date that compares with a two-hour keep defense like that of our Garrison on Saturday afternoon, when we held off the full map blobs of both JQ and BG working together under, if rumor is true, the command of two real-life brothers. Epic is not the word. Ok, epic is the word!

It'll be nice to have desert sunlight if nothing else.

So, for my money that Anet don't require me to pay, WvW is still working pretty well. Still, as John Corpening says, "...despite being a leader in large team open world battle games ...there are some areas that we can improve." I can think of a few for sure but whether any changes Anet can bring will ever be able to address the fundamental problem John outlines I tend to doubt.

He calls it a "concentration of talent", where "hardcore players from most worlds have migrated upwards through the tiers looking for new experiences and greater challenge", something that has led to "the most dedicated teams locked in near perpetual stand off against the same opponents week after week". And that's the thing; the best will usually want to play with the best. They won't spread out altruistically for the good of the community across all twenty-four servers just so everyone gets a good game.

It took months, literally months, of concerted effort for one server, Yak's Bend, to bull its way to the top. How equality, fairness and excitement is to be promulgated throughout all eight tiers of the North American league without the most committed, involved players clustering together in just a handful of servers for exactly the reasons he gives I have no idea. It would be good if it could happen but so would World Peace and flying penguins.

Still, whatever our Dev Masters have in mind, at least they are finally turning their long, slow gaze in our direction. I guess that's a good thing. I'm not quite sure. I don't quite know whether to be excited or afraid. Probably both I expect.

The Best Defense Is a Good Defense: GW2

Here's something I didn't expect to see this week: our Garrison with a waypoint. What's more we have another at Lowlands on Eternal Battlegrounds. There's even a chance we might have a third at Dreadfall Bay later this afternoon.

What's unusual about that? Golem Week, that's what.

The special event kicked off, unexpectedly early for those of us on North American servers, at EU reset on Friday. It threw the last few hours of the NA league matches into total chaos and I missed the start because I was in the middle of writing a blog post. As people realized what was happening the borderlands began to fill up with golems large and small. Within minutes virtually every Keep and Tower had changed hands. They kept doing that. They're still doing it.

Inside an hour or two even those, like myself, who'd been looking forward to the event, were beginning to have second thoughts. The majority of WvW regulars were talking about taking the week off and finding something more amusing to do like household chores or yard work. Mrs Bhagpuss, an inveterate defender, scout and strategist, was highly disgruntled. It seemed none of those qualities would be required while the event lasted.

The underlying concept - doubling the run speed and damage of the asuran power suits while making them free and instantaneous to create - was always a risky proposition. It was always likely to favor attackers, very heavily, over defenders. Coupled with a slew of bugs that, among other things, permitted golems to use summoned weapons and be duped at no cost whatsoever, the whole thing looked set to become a total disaster.

Someone has too much time on his hands.

Certainly that was and largely remains the opinion of most posters on the merged Golem Rush Feedback Mega-Thread, where,  at a rough estimate, more than 90% of all posts are highly critical of either the concept or the execution or both. WvW players are almost unanimous in their contempt and derision for the event. The few positive opinions come from the occasional PvE player that happens to stumble on the thread.

If more PvE players visited the WvW forums the story would be very different. For PvE players with a casual interest in WvW it's rather a fine event. There's a phenomenon in GW2 known as Karma Training (KTraining for short) in which gangs of players from each team run around maps avoiding each other while battering down gates to capture undefended structures. Each capture gives large spoonfuls of regular xp, wvw xp, karma, loot and who knows what other goodies.

It's the very definition of reward without risk and like all such opportunities it's wildly popular with a certain demographic. The home of the KTrain has long been the Edge of the Mists map, which ANet added a long time ago as a kind of waiting-room with magazines for people queuing to get into the real wvw maps but which almost immediately became the domain of PvE players looking to level alts at a breakneck pace.

The current event not only comes with its own xp bonus but it takes place in some nice, flat maps (you can easily fall off the narrow walkways in EOTM) and the objectives are much closer together (there's a lot of running in EOTM), making it a more attractive alternative for trailing around and around in a circle sucking up xp for an hour or six. That's exactly what happened from the moment the rules changed and it's very likely what's happening on most servers and in most matches right now.

Let's be honest. On Yak's Bend every week is Golem Week.

It's happening in our match too but thankfully it's not all that's happening. Yes, there are KTrains running almost non-stop. I took advantage of one this morning, along with the good old World Boss Train, to finish the last ten levels on my Asura Warrior. He dinged 80 taking a tower in EBG with his bags too full to collect his loot. Inbetween stations, though, he hopped off to answer several map calls, defending the two Keeps we've so far, somehow, managed to hold long enough to fortify and waypoint.

We are, after all, Yaks Bend. Roundly criticized from all directions for siege-humping, known as the Home of The Superior Arrow Cart and, ironically, infamous for our golem rushes, it's sometimes forgotten that there's a reason we love our siege: we're defense obsessives, the lot of us. Somehow, even in the face of a set of rule-changes seemingly designed to render defense completely pointless, we have managed to develop strategies to Hang On To Our Stuff.

It's led to some amazing fights. The successful defense of Lowlands a few hours ago, when FA arrived with what looked to be at least two dozen Omega golems and as many ground troops, was one of the most exciting I've experienced for months. I answered a map call and arrived, in the guise of one of my two elementalists, to find the Lord down and the ring two-thirds complete.

I made the mistake of running in to contest and was insta-killed by a wall of spinning FA Omegas spitting double-damage fire like erupting volcanoes. Like every other Yak's Bender on the map I immediately ran back to throw myself into the fray again only this time I danced around out of range of the golem apocalypse and rained my own fire down on them instead.

The Golem "Dance"

The battle lasted what seemed like an age but was probably less than ten minutes. I was downed repeatedly but always rallied, or was revived, before I fully died. The ring remained stubbornly at 70% while we slowly whittled away at the FA Omegas, our own golems standing and spinning among them while the rest of us picked off the downed and chipped chunks off the metal men.

At some point Mrs Bhagpuss arrived, also on one of her elementalists, but the fight was so manic I didn't spot her until all the FA golems were destroyed, the ground troops killed or chased out and the Keep Lord revived and back in control. This was the kind of battle I'd hoped for when this event was announced.

How many similar fights are happening around the NA and EU leagues I have no idea. I'd guess not many. Was the golem event a good idea just because we've managed to make it into something a little more than a KTrain festival? No, it wasn't.

It was, as so many are complaining, both ill-conceived and ill-executed and if, as some suspect, it points to a future direction for WvW that ANet wants to pursue then that's a very ominous prospect indeed. I count myself very lucky that not only am I on a server that cares about defense but also that the event arrived when our server happens to be particularly strong and is able to enforce its will to some degree even against stiff opposition. On most servers and in most Tiers I would guess normal WvW is effectively on hold for a week while PvE has its head.

There was quite a lot of talk earlier this year about how Heart of Thorns would make defensive play and holding territory more important in World vs World. I hope that remains the vision and this week is no more than an aberration. As with almost everything about HoT, we won't know until it's here. And we still have no idea when that might be. This event does not instill confidence and that's putting it mildly.

If nothing else, though, at least I learned that Golems can dance.

The Christmas Day Offensive : GW2

Life in Tier 2 hasn't been at all like I expected. When ArenaNet announced the third World vs World Season back in the summer, Yak's Bend was deep in a lively and unpredictable tussle that saw five or six reasonably evenly-matched servers competing across Tiers 3 and 4. By the time the Season ended we'd won every match and found ourselves promoted to Tier 2.

There was much celebration and the huge majority of active WvWers were looking forward to life one notch nearer the top but, if we're honest, I imagine many were also anticipating a hard-knock lesson and a fairly swift return to our spiritual home in T3. That's not how things turned out.

We won our first match. Then the next. We kept on winning. We won every match from the start of the Season through to the beginning of December, rising to the highest ranking we've achieved since the launch of the game - 4th. As with all rising servers there was something of a bandwagon effect. Our population grew. We picked up some significant guilds.

There was speculation. Could we go further? The modified Glicko ranking system made that look unlikely but who knew? Then two things happened.

At the beginning of December a very influential and important guild decided to leave YB to go to Jade Quarry. The Coasters, who we had long since ceased to refer to as The Hair Bear Bunch, only arrived on YB in the summer but they were instrumental in YB's success  because they are both a highly skilled and organized guild and they play in EU primetime, a timeslot where we have always struggled for coverage.

It's quiet. Too quiet...

FA supposedly have an issue with our defensive style and want shot of us so they can have more "good fights" while SoS are clinging onto their T2 place by their fingernails with a resurgent Dragonbrand breathing down their necks. Motive and opportunity came together. Immediately TC left, our opponents in T2, Fort Aspenwood and Sea of Sorrows, formed an alliance with the intention of knocking the wheels off our bandwagon and sending us back to T3 with the rest of the scrubs. I paraphrase - they were a lot less polite about it than that.

The alliance wasn't watertight but in certain timeslots there was clearly good co-ordination between several guilds and commanders. It's a tedious tradition of WvW that every match people claim the other two servers are ganging up on them, something that is almost never the case, but this time the alliance was real.

And so our rule of terror was broken. In Week 49 we were pushed into second place and in Week 50 we came third. That was that, then. Back to Tier 3. Although, of course, with the Glicko system it would be a slow drift not a sudden fall.

When I went to bed on Christmas Eve, with two days of the match remaining, we were in third place again, trailing by some 10,000 points. On Christmas Day I didn't log in until getting on for eight in the evening. We were in the lead.

What's more, we had most of FA's borderland under our colors. When I ported over to see what was going on we had half a dozen commanders there, fortifying everything and building siege like only YB can. We already had a waypoint in Hills.

For the rest of Christmas evening it was a succession of amazed, astounded, elated comments like mine above. As people around the world woke up or came home or finished Christmas lunch, depending on their timezone and cultural affiliation, they logged in and looked at the score in dumbfounded wonder.

How had this happened? Who had organized a Christmas Day push on this scale and made it work? Not being privy to the secret communications channels I can only have my suspicions. And I do. Whoever it was, they did a magnificent job. Across the rest of the match we held and increased our lead, running out winners at reset on Friday with a 15k advantage over Sea of Sorrows in second.

Sneak Attack? We'll show you a sneak attack!

This week the random factor gave us Dragonbrand instead of SoS. As I write we are in front of them with a 6k lead. FA are third again. Whatever happens by the end of the match, whether we can sustain our efforts into the New Year and stay in T2 or whether we falter and slip back, that Christmas Day Offensive will remain one of my golden MMO memories for as long as I play.

It's been said that GW2's WvW isn't really much more than a glorified battleground with nothing really at stake and nothing to win or lose. I've said it myself. Unlike a battleground, however, it has both persistence and history. For those who hop servers for success or sell their swords to the highest bidder, victories such as this may very well seem hollow. For those of us who keep the faith, however, they feel real and that feeling lasts.

Once a Yak, always a Yak as we say on Yaks Bend.

Go! Go! Go! : GW2

First post since Thursday.
Reason: GW2 World vs World Season Three.

Match #1 Yaks Bend vs Crystal Desert vs Dragonbrand

The match began at reset Friday. 2 am local. My contribution? Fast asleep in bed. Probably some snoring.

Saturday morning I woke up, made breakfast, logged into MOSMillennium on my iPOD Touch, hoping ANet hadn't pulled any last minute surprises but no, everything was fine. There we were, safe in Silver. Phew!

Back from work, too many hours later, I was able to log in at last and head straight for our Borderlands. Six hours later I looked up...where did the evening go?

Sunday was much the same only more so.

The traditional approach

It's been fast, frenetic and fun. Tactics have completely changed, from last season and from YB's normal pattern. We don't seem to be bedding down, sieging up and holding stuff the way we usually do. Huge zergs tear around like over-sized havoc groups, assaulting everything. There are  pitched battles everywhere.

Moar Trebs!

We still have golem rushes but now we have crash-builds too. Eight guild catapults up in seconds on a  wall. Five superior rams on a gate. And that's just for a tower. We had ten trebs hitting Bay from south-west camp at one point. Ten!

The Hair Bear Bunch: Extreme Close-Up

Some of this is down to changes in the mechanics. The new siege traps that render siege unuseable for 45 seconds have already dictated a new approach to placement. Many siege engines strung out in a line instead of a few clustered together. If traps catch much of the siege we pound on the door until the rams start up again or we just abandon it and charge on to somewhere else.

If you're sure you can manage without me,
I'll be off

Mechanics aside, most of the new approach is, I think, down to personalities. Our new, dominant WvW guild is fast and organized, burning with energy. They complement our steady, established order perfectly. While they wreck around Eternal Battlegrounds and the enemy Borderlands our familiar Commanders fortify the homelands or arrange to hold what's been taken.

We haven't entirely given up our old ways. On our home Borderlands yesterday we were at siege cap most of the day . People had to be told to let some of the trebs decay. Fears that the drastically reduced achievement requirements for Season Three (they can be completed in a matter of minutes and you can do them all in Edge of the Mists if you want)  would lead to a complete non-appearance of the PvE militias seems unfounded. We had queues, often, across the weekend.

That's one excuse...

Spies and saboteurs are up to the usual tricks, draining supply and strolling golems off of cliffs. If we get Stormbluff Isle next week, as seems likely if I understand the revised Swiss system correctly, things could get ugly. With the short format and freedom to transfer there will be carpetbagging too. Yak's Bend, unexpectedly successful runners-up in two longer, harder seasons before this, look a fair bet for first place this time, although the entire Silver League looks drum-tight. We may yet be bandwaggoned if we look like winning. I hope not but I already see a lot of unfamiliar names and guild tags.

Following the ranger revisions in Tuesday's patch and on hearing that the supposedly broken class I've happily played since beta was now uber I took a long look at my spec. It did not stand up to scrutiny. Not because there was anything inherently wrong with it. I'd wanted a condition damage ranger and I'd made a condition damage ranger. Thing is, I never play as though I'm playing a condition damage ranger.

Can't we use that boat? I hate getting my fur wet.

I re-traited and re-geared for burst damage and survivability and so far its a major improvement, just as it was when I finally cracked and rebuilt my Elementalist as a pure zerker. Sometimes it just doesn't pay to fight the meta. Now if I can just stop barrel-rolling into enemy zergs I should be fine.

ArcheAge opens for F2P scrubs tomorrow and I'm keen to get started but it may have to wait. Although if the Season carries on at this pace I might need to head there for a while just to catch my breath.