World Vs World Vs The World

It's been a while since I said much about Guild Wars 2's large-scale factional warfare system, World vs World. There's been very little to say.

Like much of GW2, WvW seems to have been drifting for a long time. Drifting? Hell, it's been in freefall. As with PvE, it's not so much that nothing ever changes, more that the things that do have little in common with the things that should.

Of course, ArenaNet claim to have a grand plan for WvW. They first told us about it... hang on now, when was it? Oh yes, the original announcement came all the way back in February 2018, more than two years ago in a forum thread that bloated to forty-nine pages as players debated the pros and cons of scrapping all the current servers in favor of a complex and poorly-understand patchwork of "Alliances". 

There were two more official updates in 2018 and since then nothing. The most recent thread on the topic, started in January 2020 by a player who asks "Is this still coming?", has only managed to muster a desultory couple of pages of replies so far, none of them from anyone with a red name.

At the time of the original Alliance proposal WvW was already thought by many to be in a bad way. That's why it needed such a radical overhaul. Two years of benign neglect have done little to iprove the situation. Populations have dwindled, commitment has waned, interest has faded.

Over the years my own relationship with the game mode has spiralled from fervor to indifference to irritation. For much of the last twelve months about my only involvement has been a few minutes before work as I tick off my dailies. There's a selection of WvW dialies that are faster and easier to knock out than almost anything on the PvE checklist, odd though that seems.

If it wasn't for that I might not be playing any WvW at all... Or so I was starting to believe. Then something changed.

This morning, entirely unplanned, I spent ninety minutes in the Mists. I only popped up to do those dailies but I ended up defending a keep for the best part of an hour and a half. That's the kind of thing that would have happened routinely a few years ago. It's been happening a lot more often of late.

I put the difference down to three things. The first is the sweeping revision to combat skills in World vs World that happened a few weeks ago.

GW2, like all MMORPGs, suffers from eternal re-balancing. Very few of those changes ever seem to have much of an impact other than to create new flavor of the month builds or change the meta from something everyone hates to something everyone hates even more. This one was different.

ANet had one primary goal in the changes they made and that was to make fights last longer. Almost every class got nerfed, some of them hard. I noticed the difference immediately. When I got ganked it took me ten seconds to die instead of two.

Since the end result was the same, you might think it wouldn't make much of a difference, but it does. Together with the nerf to mount speed and the addition of a passive buff that makes anyone running alongside a mount move at the same pace, combat somehow feels more tactile, more organic.

There were, as there always are when a big change happens, some bonuses and bribes to entice lapsed and reluctant WvW players to try give it another try. Usually that results in a weekend of mayhem followed by a slump. This time quite a few players seem to have liked what they found and stuck with it, at least for now.

The second change is the tsunami that's raising all boats. Wilhelm commented on the uptick in attendance over in EVE Online. Reports elsewhere suggest it's a phenomenon affecting many MMORPGs. Turns out, if you make everyone stay indoors, a lot of folks end up playing video games.

All the games I'm playing seem noticeably busier but they have done for quite a while. All this year, in fact.

Last autumn I felt several of them were noticeably slack. Worryingly so in a few cases. Since the new year, though, there seem to have been people everywhere. There are always people at the East Freeport bank on EverQuest II's Skyfire server these days. The Guild Lobby on the Luclin server where I play EverQuest is back to reporting "too many names" on a /who search.

By my observations, that predates the pandemic effect but recent weeks have only seen numbers increase. On the servers where I play World vs World I'm now seeing occasional queues for the most popular map, Eternal Battlegrounds, not just around reset but on weekday evenings, which is far from being primetime on US servers.

The third thing that's changed only affects a select group - those of us who play on GW2's Yaks Bend server. For almost the entire lifetime of the game, YB has been a hotbed of WvW. Once it was notorious for a particular playstyle, one that most other servers despised, but even in recent times, when those days are scarcely a memory for most, our population has been ranked either Full or Very High.

In then end even we couldn't escape the creeping malaise that had overcome so many. Our population declined to High. In the North American division there are four tiers of three teams. That means a dozen "Host" servers get to use their own names, while another dozen, making up the original twenty-four from launch, have to cling to their coat-tails as "Guests".

At the end of March, when the music stopped and the new bi-monthly links were decided, for the first time ever Yaks Bend found itself without a chair. We're tagging along as junior partners with Henge of Denravi until the end of May.

And it's wonderful! I already knew how good a fit HoD was for my playstyle because I've been linked with them a couple of times on my Ehmry Bay account. For some reason, HoD still seem to approach WvW as if it was 2015. They scout, they siege, they respond to callouts, they pay attention to the map, they even seem to be interested in the score.

In other words, from my perspective at least, they play the game properly. Almost no other server does that any more. Maybe Blackgate but they're something else entirely. Playing on Henge of Denravi feels unnervingly like playing on Yaks Bend several years ago, albeit without the obsessive siege building and the unfortunate habit of living in other people's keeps all week.

All of these things together have made World vs World a much more enjoyable experience these past couple of weeks. How long it will last is another matter.

If the proposed Alliance revamp ever does happen, of course, it will wipe the slate and press the reset button and any number of other cliches. It could save the game mode or destroy it or just leave it floundering all over again.

Now that the third expansion has been announced, it wouldn't surprise to me to learn that Alliances were going to be one of its features. They tried that in Heart of Thorns and it nearly killed WvW for good but I doubt that would stop them trying again. Also, five or six years in the making would just about fit ANet's infamous glacial development pace.

For now, I'm going to carry on as if nothing had ever been said about Alliances. If they happen, fine. If not, as recent developments have shown, there's still a little fun to be wrung out of the old rules, one way or another.

Of course, it's Super Adventure Box this week so by the time you read this the Mists will probably be empty again...

WvW Is Not Fight Club: GW2

Over the years, ArenaNet has made a series of very poor decisions concerning World vs World, the mass-combat siege warfare mode originally intended to provide the PvPvE endgame for Guild Wars 2. Probably the most infamous disaster was the imposition of the Desert Borderland, a "feature" of the Heart of Thorns expansion that halved the active WvW population overnight.

Much less talked about, but arguably just as damaging to the long-term fortunes of the game, was the banning of so-called "match-up threads" on the official forums. For the first year or two, every week would see the creation of a new thread for each of the tri-partite matches. Forum warriors would then slog it out with insults and zingers while armchaire commanders offered predictions and analyses of the results.

Even with ANet's hyper-aggressive moderation (there's an automated feature that turns every conceivable pejorative into the catch-all euphemism "kitten", for example) these threads often turned nasty. Rather than try to keep everything civil, which would have required even more moderators taking an even more pro-active stance, ANet decided they could do very nicely without the hassle, thanks.

Ever since then any post that even mentions the names of two different Worlds is as likely as not to receive the stern response "Match-up threads are not allowed", whereupon the entire thread will be locked. This heavy-handed behavior has led to the closure of any number of perfectly innocuous discussions but the decision itself is emblematic of a much deeper problem: ArenaNet simply don't understand the needs of their own players.

Inc to defend Hills (by air)

When GW2 was new it attracted a very significant number of players who were looking for the next Dark Age of Camelot or Warhammer Online. There haven't been all that many MMORPGs that set out their stall based on "Realm vs Realm" but there's an established audience always on the lookout for the next one that tries.

The buzz and hype didn't last long. The lack of permanency was a factor. The game-mode had originally been predicated on matches lasting two weeks. That never happened. Eventually ANet settled on week-long matches but before then there was a lengthy sorting and data-gathering period using shorter periods, which made for a fractured and disconnected start.

Weekly resets didn't help but the main reason ex-DAOC and WAR players were unimpressed with what they found was probably the perceived pointlessness of the whole affair. Where DAoC had access to the Darkness Falls dungeon to fight over and WAR had structured progression both in land ownership and gear acquisition, WvW relied on a basket of buffs doled out to the entire server according to how well the world was doing in its current match.

Most people never even noticed those buffs, except when a normally dominant world slipped and PvE players logged in to find they'd lost a chunk of hit points. That was popular...

All of which left one overriding motivation to drive participation in the Mists: pride. For a while, server pride was undoubtedly real. In the same way true sports fans will support their team - and only their team - regardless of how badly the players play or what jackasses the coaches are, so GW2's hardcore WvW aficionados battled for nothing more than the pride of the name.

Inc to defend Hills (on foot)

The coming of Multiserver technology poked a hole in that balloon. Where it used to be common practice for a beleaguered world to send someone to Lion's Arch to rally the militia over map chat, multiservers meant such pleas reached the ears of every server in the region. It quickly became both embarassing and unproductive and no-one did it any more. (The repeated destruction of Lion's Arch and the concomittant loss of a generally-accepted hub zone didn't help much either).

Over the years, ANet have tried any number of gimmicks to encourage players into The Mists. There were the Tournaments, which I loved but which had the unfortunate effect of initiating severe burnout in commanders. There have been numerous "special event weeks" - there's one on right now - and various carrots in the form of Ascended and Legendary armor have been dangled.

Nothing has made much of an impact on the steady decline in numbers of people logging in to fight over structures that don't matter on maps that never change. In a last-ditch attempt to keep the game mode alive we now have the doomsday proposal on Alliances that will rip everything up and start over.

Maybe that will work. Maybe it won't. What it has done, amazingly, is revitalize WvW for those who expect the worst.

In preparation for the new system (even though we have no idea when it will come or much of a clue what it will look like) a bunch of self-selecting heavyweight guilds decided they'd give the Alliance thing a go right now. That resulted in worlds thought dead coming back from the grave.

Guarding Hills (the spare one)

Something I didn't know when I wrote about the phenomenon a few weeks ago was that the bulk of the carpetbaggers who resurrected Anvil Rock were guilds from Yaks Bend, my own server. Because I haven't bothered to sign up for the new YB Discord I missed all the drama but apparently Things Were Said that cannot be unsaid and Claims Were Made that must not be allowed to stand.

The upshot is that Yaks Bend is at war with Anvil Rock. And by great good fortune, since the split, we have found ourselves in the same match a couple of times. Suddenly we have something to fight for once again: pride.

As Wilhelm has frequently demonstrated in his tales of EVE Online, there's nothing like a grudge to get people to put in the extra hours. The Imperium took a thrashing and Circle of Two did a few things that won't be forgotten and all that fed months of economic grinding and a whole new War in the North.

EVE players, rightly, may regard most other MMORPGs with systems of territorial acquisition as something less than child's play by comparison, but children hold grudges too. The first week we played Anvil Rock was widely believed to be one of the most exciting Yaks Bend has had in six years. This week, the rematch, is pretty good too.

When the half-dozen or more sizeable and active guilds (aka "The Traitors") were with us I rarely saw full zergs on YB outside of weekends. With those people gone, we have them often.

We have commanders working in series to maintain "raids" for 10, 12, 24 or even 40 hours. I was in a squad last night where the commander tag hot-swapped twice without my even noticing, a practice which successfully keeps people following the tag for longer. I see names playing now that I haven't seen for years. The atmosphere is vibrant and exciting and the result is that I have played more WvW in two days than I normally play in a week.

That's a lot of work for 10 AP!

What's more, we are winning both the territory-holding game and many of the big, set-pece battles. And I'm killing a lot of pesky AR. I'm still working on getting my Ultimate Dominator title by completing the Realm Avenger achievement, for which I need to record fifty thousand player kills. After six years I'm up to 36,200 and I got almost 900 of those on Saturday and Sunday evening. Nine hundred kills in two sessions!

As I type this, Yaks Bend holds every structure on Anvil Rock's borderland. We have waypointed all of their keeps, which was the plan when I logged out last night. While most servers like to waypoint one enemy keep for convenience, waypointing all of them - particularly their Garrison - is considered bad form by many. It's something you do to make a point.

The point in this case is that, contrary to the exit line taken by the Traitor guilds, Yaks Bend has not "fallen apart without them". Rather the other way around, if anything. And this is what competetive games are all about: pride and rivalry.

Pride and rivalry will motivate more people for longer than any amount of rewards. People will stay up late and go into work without having had enough sleep if it means they can hold their heads up and wave their colors high. It's not pretty and its not nice but it works.

Which is why ANet should never have banned match-up threads.

Resurrection Shuffle : GW2

Last night was re-linking in World vs World. It happens on the last Friday of every even-numbered month. The link system began in the Spring of 2016.

For North America that meant the elision of two dozen servers, then competing in eight tiers, into a dozen, fighting in four. The twelve most populated servers became "Hosts" while the rest became "Guests". All servers kept their names and behind the scenes the Glicko score of the guests continued to tick over but from then on Hosts got top billing and guests got to see their names in small print.

As with anything ANet has a hand in, the system has undergone numerous iterations since then. The way population is calculated has changed. We now use a two-hour Skirmish system with points to keep score rather than raw Glicko as we used to do. We also currently labor under a "one up, one down" promotion mechanic that makes everything a lot more predictable and a lot less volatile than it used to be.

For a long time the whole enterprise was wildly controversial. Prior to the linkings "Server Pride", while not as strong as it once was, still meant a good deal to many. For months after the change, the forums dripped with anguished threads about loss of identity, while more pragmatic players created server guilds to keep the flag flying.

At the time, many people - probably most people - felt it was the end for the dozen servers that had lost their ability to headline a match. The feeling was that after a decent interval those names would be quietly expunged and we'd have de-facto server merges.

Didn't happen. Instead the guest servers carried on, sometimes in more than just name. Crystal Desert, which missed the original cut, even managed to claw back Host status, replacing Darkhaven. That resurrection appeared to be the exception, however. Until recently.

Here I am this morning, thirty seconds after logging in, on my way to retake Hills. It never stops.

WvW has always been prone to bandwagons. Sometimes it happens when self-appointed Community leaders decide to rah-rah for a specific project, as when the attempt was made to drag the eternal bottom server, Kaineng, all the way to Tier One. Mostly it's more a form of self-interest as people try to attach themselves to a rising star.

With the announcement that WvW would be receiving a top to bottom revamp in which all existing worlds would be removed and replaced with a system of Alliances, a number of high net-worth individuals (aka Guild Leaders aka Wrecking Balls) took it upon themselves to game the existing system while it lasts, partly for profit but mostly out of pure devilment.

In addition, as Server Loyalty and identity continues to fragment and both guilds and individuals seek to ask not what they can do for their World but what they can do for themselves, the game mode moved into a period of high volatility, with guilds transferring at an ever-increasing frequency, often fracturing and splitting communities in the process.

The results have been spectacular. In the last round of links at the end of June, Kaineng returned from link purgatory to Host status, displacing Crystal Desert. Yesterday saw that process accelerate, with two switches as Anvil Rock and Sanctum of Rall regained their independence after two years in the shadowlands.

If that wasn't surprising enough (and it surprised the heck out of me when I logged in this morning and read the new linkings) then the Worlds that went grey most certainly were. Out of the Hosting business go Dragonbrand and... Jade Quarry!

Dragonbrand has always been a strong server, largely due to having the word "Dragon" in its name. Certain demographics have very strong affiliations to certain images and ideas and the mere use of a word that brings those to mind will strongly influence server choice.

I felt sufficiently motivated to put my Charr Warrior into full exotics. She's been in a rag-bag of Rares for the best part of six years.

Many Eastern players, as I understand it, find the Dragon an appealing banner to fight under. The same reason led to Jade Quarry attracting a large number of players from outside of the Americas. (This, incidentally, is why I replied to Keen's post on choosing a server with the opinion that the name of the server is the most important indication of its likely community, outside of the ruleset itself).

Jade must have been even more magnetic a draw than Dragon because Jade Quarry dominated the WvW rankings for years. For the first three years the server never fell out of the top three and it has remained a major force and title contender throughout the life of the game. Until now.

To see JQ drop to link status is akin to seeing Manchester United relegated to the National League (formerly The Conference). It's something that just can't happen. Only, in GW2, it just did.

In some ways this is good. I have a soft spot for Anvil Rock, who were Yak's Bend's very first link and who have partnered with us several times. They had great spirit, some strong commanders and were always good company.

One of the nicest commanders I ever ran with, Frozen, formed a server guild called Anvil Resistance to keep that spirit going. They're still around. I often see the tag. I hope Frozen is still playing and glorying in the well-deserved resurgence of his World, even though I imagine it's a very different place right now, stuffed to the gills with carpet-baggers.

Sanctum of Rall, which was famously named after a player who died before GW2 began, owes its resurgence to a campaign started by Foghladha to see out the final days of the old matchmaking system in some kind of glory. There were some doubts expressed as to the motives behind the move but the results are plain for all to see. Sanctum of Rall has its name back.

It all comes down to this in the end.

It's also good to see the whole bag of marbles shaken up once in a while. Earlier in the year WvW felt very stale. Now it feels unpredictable and chaotic. That suits me fine.

On the other side of the argument I can see some serious problems. The matchmaking system and scoring are already in disrepute. Many players don't see the point of keeping score at all when we know the whole system is going away and even those who do feel the current scoring method is deeply flawed.

Add instability on this level to the mix and you risk WvW turning into nothing much more than a free-for-all where everyone fights for the sake of fighting. Some people like that but I'm not one of them.

On balance, though, I like where we are now better than where we were a few months ago. No-one expects the proposed revamp to happen this year. I wouldn't be surprised to see it attached to the third expansion as some kind of feature, which would mean mid-late 2019 at the very earliest. Until it gets here we need some motivation and the current resurgence of certain World identities adds that.

It also puts the fear of Zhaitan into the rest of us. If Jade Quarry can fall, no-one's safe, not even mighty Blackgate, currently, unthinkably, languishing in Tier Three.

Yak's Bend is enjoying a mini-renaissance of its own right now. Half a dozen medium to large guilds left last month, which you might think would be bad news. As it happens, they were mostly "fight" guilds. They and a few others had had a fairly long run on YB, changing the culture from our longstanding siege meme to something less hated but also less interesting.  I was happy to see them go.

Superstar Commander says "Look into my eyes..." Also "Get that cat out of the way"

Even before they left things were starting to change back. Not only did our own King over the Water return from another of his sabbaticals but he somehow persuaded his long-lost helpmeet and ally, thought gone forever by most, to return as well.

Those two, along with a number of others, some of whom have also re-appeared, were the foundations of Yak's Bend's infamous Golden Age of Arrow Carts. ACs themselves have been heavily nerfed and things right now do feel a little more like a re-union tour, where everyone just wants to hear the hits, but it's a huge improvement on what we had to put up with under the previous so-called leadership.

In a final twist, the other World I play on, Ehmry Bay, was linked with Yak's Bend for (I think...) the first time ever. For the next two months I have all my characters not just in the same match but on the same side! Seeing as how I chose EBay for my third account because of the famous alliance between YB and EB against SBI in the first WvW tournament Season, it feels like we've come full circle at last.

It's astonishing how WvW still manages to dominate my GW2 gameplay six years on, despite all its manifold faults and shortcomings. It's ridiculously addictive. I hate to think what it would be like if ANet ever managed to balance the combat and come up with a meanigful scoring system too...

Get Real

After I got home from work last night (yes, on a Sunday. Poor me, eh?) I had my tea and logged on to GW2 to do my dailies. Three hours later I logged off, having done nothing but World vs World from the moment I logged in. This morning, just after ten, I logged into GW2 to do my dailies. Four hours later I logged off to have lunch, having done nothing but WvW from the moment I logged in.

World vs World isn't in a good place right now. Balance, as usual, is all to hell. Population across the board is at an all-time low, reflecting the general interest - or rather lack thereof - in the game mode. Among the people who are still playing there's a sense of fin-de-siecle recklessness. Everyone knows we're living in the end days. We just don't know the exact moment of our demise.

While we wait for ANet to iterate and reiterate on the Alliance proposal, grinding it down until they abrade every last shard of interest and enthusiasm from its imagined sheen, preparing the dull, inert husk we'll be expected to inhabit thereafter and forever, the more excitable, self-appointed community cheerleaders are running their own unofficial pre-alliance beta, stacking servers and gutting guilds as they go, leaving a trail of chaos and tears in their wake.

Matches mean nothing and haven't for months. Many would say years. World vs world has descended into self-parody, or possibly ascended into archetype. Those NPCs who talk about the endless wars in the Mists, the battles without purpose or glory or end, the eternal Valhalla of the not-yet dead? It turns out they were on the money all along.

Conversations with people you don't know about things you don't understand. #VirtuallLife.

As I was driving back from the shops before I started playing this morning I heard a brief snatch of a radio program angsting over screen-time for children. An Expert opined that parents need to provide exciting alternatives to convince their addicted offspring that there are more exciting prospects in gaming (yes, in gaming - the goal was merely to move to more rewarding gaming options, not away from the games themselves, let alone the screens) than winning another battle royale in Fortnite.

Are there, though? Really? Are you sure about that?

Raph Koster, someone who gives every indication of being exhausted by the way the world has turned, is quoted by Massively:OP as saying (on Twitter, naturally, because where else does one go for philosophical insight these days?)

“Certainly no one has ever accused me of being non-passionate about online worlds or non-innovative with MMOs… and yet I don’t enjoy most of them these days. My inspirations for better ones mostly comes from outside what has become a stagnant field…”

 M:OP spins that into a discussion document. I did comment. I said I liked MMOs, still like them, can't see why I shouldn't. I didn't add that I wished people who didn't like them would just bugger off and find something they do like instead. But I thought it.

Zubon, in a much more thought-provoking post, which will see far less attention, takes aim at permanence. Waxing unusually poetic, he concludes:

"Your parents tell you to be careful what you post online, because the internet is forever. Maybe some of your data is archived forever, but much of it is as lasting as a fallen leaf. It grew. It changed colors. It feel beautifully and perhaps unseen. In the spring it was dust, new mulch for new growth."

I commented there, too. "Same as everything else, then", I said.

Really, what do people expect? This is Existentialsm 101, isn't it? We're here, we do stuff, we die. Nothing matters except that we make it matter. Our experience defines us and we define it.

Existentialism is a little out of fashion, you'd think. That was the 1950s, wasn't it? The 1960s. It helped if you were French. Sartre, de Beauvoir, la Nouvelle Vague...

Everyone needs a purpose in life.

Then, authenticity is the defining trope of existentialism, isn't it? And what's the defining trope of the foremost philosophy in popular culture (Western) of the last decade? (That's Hipsterism in case you don't have your schedule to hand). Why, Authenticity. Of course it is.

Can the virtual be authentic? Is your online experience as experiential as your offline? Are your Facebook friends real friends? These are the burning questions of the day.

How much does it matter that things matter for it to matter that they matter to you? If Stonemist Castle changes hands outside your time zone does it make a sound? If I spend two hours building arrowcarts and escorting yaks to take our spare Hills (the one we keep on on SBI's borderland) to T3, then log off and never think of it again, have I been dilligent and productive or self-indulgent and childish?

I dunno. Don't look at me, I majored in English not Ethics. I just know that I did what I wanted to do and I don't regret a minute of it.

When the time comes - and let's hope it doesn't come any time soon - I hope I can say with my last breath "I wish I'd played more video games". Maybe "I wish I'd played more world vs world".

Long Distance Runaround : Guild Wars

As far as I know, "Maintenance Mode" for MMORPGs is a relatively recent innovation. While any number of MMOs may have slipped into de facto maintenance-through-neglect over the years, the first time I heard of one being officially mothballed was when ANet decided to "automate" the original Guild Wars in 2013, following the successful launch of the sequel, GW2.

Square Enix followed suit, pulling the plug on further development for FFXI a couple of years later. It was a decision driven primarily by the increasing difficulty of keeping the game running on ancient consoles, although, like ANet, Square no doubt also hoped to avoid splitting the audience after the eventual, successful resurrection of FFXIV.

Not a huge difference between this...

That turned out to be a famously ironic decision.  There was no maintenance mode for the PS2 or  XBox 360 players. Their versions simply stopped. For the PC players, however, things carried on almost as normal. Three years after development supposedly ceased, FFXI still receives more updates in "Maintenance" than many MMOs get in their prime.

It's a telling example of how "maintenance" can mean very different things to different developers. SmokyMonkeyS began by abandoning their intent to create a fully-blown MMORPG with Ninelives before going on to give up on the single-player version too. The game went into what they called "temporary suspension" but it remains up and running and it's even received a couple of significant updates since development came to a halt. Funcom's The Secret World, on the other hand, seems to have dropped off the radar entirely since it was replaced by Secret World Legends.

...and this.

ANet have left Guild Wars assiduously alone since they announced the end of active development. Their version of maintenance included the full automation of repeatable events like holidays, aniversaries and special bonus weekends. The idea was that the game would remain up indefinitely for those who still wanted to play but it wouldn't require - or receive - any input or resources to keep it running.

It was something of a surprise, then, to read last week that the game was getting a graphics overhaul. It's certainly true that many MMOs start to show their age in the visuals long before the gameplay dates. As the genre ages some developers have been puzzled, even dismayed, to find a significant number of their customers sticking with old favorites for far longer than expected, which has led a number of of them to attempt to give their fading stars a facelift  - with varying degrees of success.

More noticeable here.

That makes sense if the old game is still the one bringing in most of the revenue. Moreover, if a developer is entertaining even the smallest hope, however misguided, of attracting new players, it's true that 2005 graphics don't make for much of a shop window.

Guild Wars doesn't seem to be actively promoted any more, although you can still buy it from the website, so why bother tuning the graphics? Turns out it was one of those "passion projects" we often hear about, most of which turn out to be something else entirely.

Not this time. This one was genuine.  According to Eurogamer, a power surge at ANet's European data center led indirectly to a couple of developers using their off-hours to tweak the old Guild Wars engine to add a whole slew of new options inluding "windowed fullscreen support, a new 8X MSAA anti-aliasing option, 16x Anisotropic filtering support for the existing "use best texture filtering" option".

The new version looks sharper, something that was even more apparent in-game.

They also fiddled with the draw distance and the LODs and added a toggle to maximize both. In my experience, changes to draw distance can be one of the most revelatory changes a developer can make to a game. When SOE pushed EverQuest's draw distance out to the horizon it changed the game overnight. Huge areas that had been shorouded in thick fog for the years I'd been playing suddenly came into view. It was awesome.

The changes to Guild Wars aren't on that scale of magnitude for the simple reason that Guild Wars zones tend to be designed rather cleverly to give an illusion of space while actually being quite constricted. Unlike EQ, where the plains of West Karana stretch into the middle distance, regions like Deldrimor Font or Borlis Pass are full of twists and turns that restrict the line of sight. Even the mountains that form the backdrop are scarcely a jog-trot away.

If the differences between the first two pairs were subtle, here they are unmistakeable.

 Or perhaps I just went to the wrong zones to test the changes. Maybe I should have tried the snowfields of  the Far Shiverpeaks or the savannah of Elona. Instead I went to revisit Yaks Bend, one of my favorite spots in Tyria and also somewhere I can remember very clearly. I figured it might give me a better chance of appreciating the changes.

The difference is quite subtle but noticeable and certainly worthwhile. I think it's fairly easy to spot the Before and After in the screenshots. The new version removes a deal of the "fog" from the zone walls, bringing the mountains into sharper relief. It also reveals details like smoke from the fires and the occasional previously unseen peak. In one shot there's even a mysterious light in the sky that might be either a graphical glitch or an astronomical object.

Not only do the hills and far trees come into focus but smoke can be seen where there was none before.

There's nothing here that's going to pull in new customers but for anyone still playing or returning for a nostalgic visit it should come as a very welcome sign that someone's still paying attention. Stephen Clarke-Willson, one of the developers who did the voluntary work to make these changes happen, along with less-visible but equally welcome fixes for the tools used to report bots and RMT trades, is quoted as saying he'd "like this game to run for many years".

Let's hope he gets his wish.

It's Not The End Of The World Vs World : GW2

Of all the many and substantial changes brought about by Heart of Thorns, those that landed like an airburst on World vs World were arguably the most significant of all. Behind the curtain ANet may well be toiling away on the real WvW revamp but, when it comes, it can hardly be expected to have more of an impact than the arrival of the Desert Borderlands. It all but killed WvW.  

GW2's large-scale, open world, siege-based, three team PvPvE game mode, the wobbly third leg on the game's rickety tripod, had been limping in slow circles through the doldrums of neglect for the best part of year when HoT arrived. Never the success it was hoped, WvW had been intended to act as a kind of end-game for all; instead it had long ago settled, some would say slumped, into a specialist niche.

For a while the incursion of semi-regular "Seasons" into the endless, Valhallan cycle of weekly matches, succeeded in drawing the uncommitted, the curious and, especially, the acquisitive. The lure of Achievements and Titles and Stuff filled the Alpine Borderlands (then known only as The Borderlands) with nervous neophytes slumming it from PvE. Some of them even learned to like it and hung around.

Unravel the ancient mysteries of a lost civilization. Or just get a great tan.

Once Seasons fell into abeyance due to ANet's secret and as-yet unannounced plans, interest beyond the hardcore drained away fast. By the summer of '15 WvW was bumping along the bottom. Or so we imagined.

Only when Heart of Thorns arrived did we realize just how much further there was to fall. By then, Yaks Bend had been a Tier 1 server for a while. Even playing as we do just outside North American prime time, Mrs Bhagpuss and I had become used to seeing lengthy queues on two or three maps every evening. Come the weekend it was sometimes just too busy to bother and we tended to give WvW a miss until things quietened down.

The Desert Borderlands put paid to that little problem. It's been many weeks since I've seen a queue anywhere other than Eternal Battlegrounds. EBG, as it's known, was the only one of the four WvW maps not to be replaced. In one of the most striking examples I've ever seen of customers voting with their feet, almost the entire remaining population of WvW moved from their homelands to the contested but familiar territory of EBG.

What the heck is that thing?

The other three maps, featuring one of ANet's artists' finest ever creations, a stunningly beautiful, intricate, hauntingly mysterious landscape just begging to be explored, lay neglected, unused. Unused, at least, for their intended purpose, conflict. Instead they formed the backdrop for a desultory cavalcade of uncontested keep-takes as small zergs rotated the points.

That was in Tier 1. Several rungs down the ladder, as it bounces between Tiers 4 and 5, Ehmry Bay is home to my third account. Prior to Heart of Thorns, while we never had queues at the times of day I played, there was always a Commander organizing on the home Borderland and operations happening around the maps.

Now I had the place to myself. I could have been playing a single player game. Each day I trotted up to do my dailies - taking a sentry point and killing a dolyak, two of my favorites - secure in the knowledge that no-one from any other team was likely to try to stop me.

It's a desert, Jim, but not as we know it.

The silence and solitude were very useful. I was able to spend a lot of time learning the new layout, studying the mechanics, developing, testing and perfecting tactics for taking camps and smaller objectives on my own. It reminded me strongly of happy days spent scouting and clearing orc camps in the snows of Velious a decade and more ago.

It was, in other words, jolly good solo PvE. World vs World it paramountly was not.

Everyone seemed somewhat taken aback by the changes. Anet had chosen to trial the Desert Borderlands only in small, closed beta tests, before an invited audience. Although there was no NDA, surprisingly little information had filtered out. I tried to follow the discussion but, really, there wasn't one.

When the new maps and their significantly different mechanics finally arrived the reaction was hostile. Voices raised in favor were few and often qualified. The more, the most, common reaction was denial. These aren't the maps we want. We never asked for them. We're not going to use them.

And people left. For once, there was much else to do. A whole new expansion's worth. In retrospect, launching the new version of WvW at the same time as a large tranche of PvE progression, new sPvP content and the long-awaited (or dreaded) introduction of highly competitive raiding was not the cleverest of timing.

Oh, come on! Now you're just trolling.

Absolutely no-one who wasn't already playing WvW paid the changes even the slightest attention. Why would they? They were way down at the end of a long shopping list of far more interesting items, to be gotten to sometime, never.

Among the committed WvW core there was mostly consternation. There are people who only play WvW. They could hardly avoid the changes, although most wished they could and many tried. Some soldiered on but this was the demographic most disturbed by the upheaval.

We had players whose entire game-life revolved around sitting in keeps and towers watching for invaders. Every day. For hours. Overnight their entire purpose was removed. There were no invaders, not any more.

We had players who spent their mornings or afternoons building and maintaining siege, running supply and fortifying structures. Now no siege was needed and structures fortified themselves. Those players, for years among the most committed and appreciated, found themselves out of a job.

Most WvW players, however, also play other game modes. For them it was a very simple choice. They just gave up coming to the Borderlands at all.

Why would they? They didn't like the new maps, which were confusing, difficult to navigate, clearly designed with flight in mind and yet forbidden. The maps were empty so there was no-one to fight. Anyone who wanted fights was in EBG.

You want big fights? This is big fights.

The rest, which was almost everyone, was in Verdant Brink or Auric Basin, complaining about the grind or gosh-wowing about gliding or pushing through the story. Reports began to surface about the amazing final battle in Dragon's Stand, possibly the best large-scale event ANet had ever done and after that came the first Raid and of course there was Halloween and Wintersday, the two biggest holidays of Tyria's year and then the big money sPvP tournament started...

Well, with all that going on, no-one cared about WvW any more. The maps were horrible, no-one understood them, commanders didn't want to run them, and anyway the scoring system was as broken as it had always been so what was the point? WvW was as near to dead as it could be without actually being buried and forgotten.

Cue graphics: a gnarled, grasping hand thrusts up through the fresh-dug earth, clutching at a lowering, storm-filled sky. Three months on and the corpse begins to stir.

This last week or two has seen more activity than any time since before HoT landed. We had commanders with followings on three maps at once over the weekend. There have been big battles over keeps on home BLs. And this isn't just on Yaks Bend. I spent fifty minutes with an EBay commander last week, trying to take a single heavily-defended tower from Maguuma (and how good was it to be fighting Maguuma again? Boy, I've missed them).

I taunt you with my unplayable Tengu!

Gradually, very slowly, as people finish up their initial goals in the new maps and the last of the new car smell fades from the expansion, the WvW softcore is drifting back. Meanwhile the hardcore, particularly the command structure, has acclimatized. Commanders actually know how to lead a zerg from Impassive Rampart to Fire Keep without falling in the lava lake now. Players are beginning to get an inkling of how the Shrine buffs can change tactics, of when it's advisable to complete or counter the Oasis event, of where to place siege so it actually hits something.

It's been a steep learning curve and plenty have fallen off. Finally, though, some have made it to the top and others have picked themselves up and started to climb again. Just in time for today's Winter 2016 Quarterly Update to shake the ladder and send everyone flying in all directions.

Later today we'll get the first big, new content update since Heart of Thorns. It includes a major revamp to The Shatterer event, complete with a full set of achievements, the addition of gliding to all original open-world maps, the Lunar New Year holiday event and a bunch of smaller tweaks and changes.

It also includes some significant changes to the mechanics of WvW, almost all of which have been, perhaps for the first time in the history of the game, very warmly received by the people who actually play that game mode. Structures will still update automatically but only if the dolyaks get in, bringing purpose back to roaming and scouting. Player kills will increment war score, making skirmishing purposeful.

Last one to the Tower buys the drinks!

Most welcomed of all, only one opposing player will rally off the death of an opponent, down from five, and fully dead players will have to wait until combat around them has ended before they can expect to be rezzed. Those changes should significantly impact the ability of large, loose zergs to overpower smaller, more disciplined groups. Weight of numbers will still tell, but not in the overwhelming way it has until now.

Or so it's hoped. As always there may be unforeseen and unintended consequences. At the very least, though, these appear to be changes made in response to genuine concerns expressed by players who play WvW, not whipped up on the back of an envelope and dropped in on a whim to the mystification of all.

How long it will be before the full WvW revamp ANet aren't saying. What the game will look like after it comes, well they're not talking about that either. Rumor has it that Worlds themselves will be going away in favor of some as yet ill-explained Guild-based structure.

I had thought that, if that worst-case scenario did come true, the end of Yaks Bend would probably mean the end of WvW for me but, yet again, HoT threw me a swerve. In preparation for the changes to Guilds I joined a very large WvW focused guild, one that's synonomous with WvW on Yaks Bend and has been since the day the server opened.

It's a guild with absolute server loyalty, a guild that has never transferred servers and will never transfer servers. If ANet cut Yaks Bend away from under us, we will be Yaks Bend. In the meantime, the fight goes on. For The Yak! whatever the rules, whatever the map!

The View From Ehmry Bay or What's Wrong With This Picture? : GW2

A while back, when ArenaNet had the first of their 75% Off! sales, we each bought a third GW2 account. Since the coming of the Megaserver it really makes little difference which server you choose at character creation unless you plan on making some kind of serious run in the three-realm World vs World stakes.

Nevertheless it's not something you can opt out of nor is it something over which you have an entirely free hand. Here's a screenshot of the North American server list taken at 2pm UK time today, Tuesday. That's nine in the morning on the U.S. East Coast and six a.m. in the West. On a workday.

There are several Worlds that I have never seen other than full during my European play hours so I can only imagine they are permanently unavailable. As far as I'm aware, you can neither create a new character on a Full server, nor transfer an existing account there.

It seems rare for any server to fall below "Very High" these days.The rather well-handled, ongoing PR push for Heart of Thorns seems to have brought back a lot of lapsed players, while heavy discounting has filled the starting areas with eager ingenues. The ever-open-door policy of "Buy Once, Play Forever" means that no-one can ever really stop playing, only take a sabbatical, and almost every day sees the return of a flurry of names from the past.

Since we already have two accounts on Yaks Bend it seemed superfluous to add a third. I had already decided to concentrate all my efforts there onto a single account anyway as a result of the increasingly common and, to me, increasingly irritating trend of MMORPGs to move to an account-based model.

It's been so refreshing recently to return to playing EQ2, where each character has to stand on his or her own two paws rather then being towed along, willy-nilly, on the coat-tails of others. Even there the creeping specter of unearned perks looms, what with Heirloom items shared across the account, Daily Veteran Rewards being credited to the account not the character and experience bonuses being given for the account based on how many max level adventurers and crafters it has. Still, as yet it's a far cry from the Player-as-Unit model that GW2 suffers.

So, with all that in mind, I rolled my new account on Ehmry Bay, a server I still remember fondly from its brief moment of glory as Yak's Bend's Little Brother in Season One. I took a little tour before deciding, rolling on lower-ranked servers Devona's Rest and Ferguson's Crossing, but life in Tier 7 and Tier 8 looked just a bit too sedate.

EBay, as it has always, inevitably, been known, turned out to be a charming second home. In EU hours we generally have, at most, a single commander running and his "zerg" rarely adds up to more than a dozen even on a weekend. Most times gameplay in the Mists feels more like single-group play than zerging, with all three teams fielding single figure forces. It's all very 2012.

It feels refreshing, re-taking towers with a single, regular ram placed dead-center of the gate or marching to take a Keep with all of two alpha golems and half a dozen ground troops. Everything takes longer, the pace is stately, there are some amazing fights and even as a lowly uplevel I always feel both welcome and useful.

Good for me, but not, presumably for ANet, who can hardly wish for half of their servers to be providing content that appeals only to a fraction of one percent of the population. That, though, is scarcely the full picture.

World vs World is and has always been intensely volatile. Guilds move servers en masse, seeking all kinds of advantage or change, from the elusive "Good Fights" and the perennial, doomed attempts to set up the perfect environment to turn WvW into GvG - Guild Vs Guild - to a straightforward wish to just win a damn match for once or for their guild to be something other than cannon fodder in the pecking order.

Tier 2 has been a roiling cauldron of machinations and Machiavellian plots ever since we beached up there at the end of Season Three. There have been alliances, spies and trolls, concerted efforts to force Yaks Bend back into the outer darkness whence we came and, latterly, a grudging acceptance of the status quo. The hotly-tipped Yaks Bend Implosion never happened. We thrive on pressure. Meanwhile, around us, servers have been bandwagoned only to see the wheels fall off time and time again.

Currently Dragonbrand, who made it to T2 and looked for a while as if they'd push out Sea of Sorrows, are reportedly in freefall back in T3, their expected destination somewhere south of T5. Rumor is their ambitious guilds have gone to Henge of Denravi, something that seems likely given HoD's sudden surge, although for certain some came to The Bend.

This did not end well.

Maguuma, meanwhile, erstwhile home of some fragment of the infamous Goonswarm Federation, one-time worshippers of the Flame Ram and trainers of The Grub, always the least predictable, most volatile of servers, having crashed and burned for the how-many-is-it-againth time, is once again on the rise. They're burning through the tiers like a runaway sun on their way back to their supposed spiritual home in T2. Fear them.

It all makes for rough seas for small boats. Yaks Bend, being made of battleplate steel around a spent uranium core, takes the buffeting with grim determination and something almost like joy. Inside that bubble it's entirely possible my vision is warped. Having seen things from no other perspective in the 30 months I've played until now it's been very interesting to observe the action from EBay.

In the short time I've been there we've weathered HoD and Maguuma, neither of whom were a barrel of laughs, although I admit to always enjoying a match against the Magpies so long as I know they're going to be off fighting someone else the week after. With those forces of nature in effect I hadn't realized how much stronger than us Crystal Desert were, so it came as a shock to be knocked around by them like the inflatable dummy of a salaryman's boss for the last two weeks.

And then. And then this week we drew a wildcard and dropped a peg to face Sanctum of Rall and Anvil Rock in T6. I can't say we're having it entirely our own way, and indeed according to our Glicko score, which has fallen a little, we really should be doing better than we are, but suffice it to say that, when I logged in this afternoon, we owned everything. Everything.

Genius At Work.

This sort of thing happens a lot more often than you would expect. In order to render the whole affair less static and predictable, ANet long ago added a "wild card" system, whereby each Friday, when the new match begins, an algorithm runs to decide who will face whom. There's a very small chance for Worlds to be promoted or demoted not by merit but by luck. I say it's a small chance but it seems to happen surprisingly frequently. There have been suggestions that the "algorithm" is actually Colin pulling slips of paper out of a hat...and then swapping them around until he gets a result that amuses him...

When it does happen, however, the result is very often the same. The team that drops a tier steamrolls the unfortunate pair it meets - especially so if some unlucky world also got a wildcard up. What's more, because of how the Glicko system works, that server needs to steamroller without mercy because if it doesn't win by a wide enough margin it will lose standing in the rankings and begin to slide. 

It all tends to point up the extreme differences in coverage and population between the tiers, a very real problem of which everyone is already all too aware. A weak T2 server destroys the strongest in T3 and so on. Only when a server slumming it on a wildcard in the tier below chances to meet a bandwagon server bullying its way up do sparks fly and that doesn't happen very often.

When the expansion arrives we know we are getting new maps and new mechanics with them. We have been told there will be greater emphasis on and rewards for defense. For a while, as everyone comes to grips with the new environments and rule sets, there will be opportunities. The tectonic plates might even shift enough to crack open a passage into the closed shop of T1.

Aw, Bless!

If the underlying scoring system isn't addressed, from Glicko to Transfers, chances are such changes will be fleeting. For those of us enjoying the fights and feeling server pride perhaps that may not matter all that much but it won't do anything at all to improve the reputation of World vs World for those already jaded with its shortcomings.

That does at least represent some kind of hope for improvement, way off in the future somewhere, beyond the still-unanounced  launch of HoT. While we wait all we can do is make our own entertainment. Hence the plotting and the churn.

This would seem to be the ideal time to keep the masses happy with bread and circuses. A WvW season, derided though they always are, still gets people fired up. Surely one can't be hard to organize? In the absence of root-and-branch reform I'd take a meaningless competition with useless rewards. For now, anyway.

As yet there's no sign. It's now been more than six months since the last Season and several months since the ineffectual experimental rule change that was supposed to be the first of many. Like most aspects of GW2 other than the Gem Store and the failed eSport offerings in sPvP, everything seems to be on hold until HoT arrives. Whenever that might be.