PvP: It's Not Going To Kill You

This week brought several interesting posts about PvP. Wilhelm took Syp to task, in the mildest manner, over the commonly-held belief that EVE is "a gankbox". The biggest takeaway from the lengthy discussion there seemed to be that no-one really knows what a "gankbox" is. Or agrees on what costitutes "ganking" for that matter...

UltrViolet had something to say about PvP in FFXIV. Once I'd got over the shock of finding that FFXIV has PvP (who knew?) some of his observations had me re-assessing my own attitudes and assumptions.

Lastly, Jeromai had plenty to say about the recent, significant changes to GW2's World vs World. This is PvP I actually know, in some depth, from personal experience and yet at times he seemed almost to be describing a game I'd never played at all.

The crux of the problem seems to me to fall squarely where it usually does - on definitions. Like "MMO", the term "PvP" has become so stretched by overuse, so baggy and warped, that it can be fitted over almost anything. Badly.

I see Commander Chris Goes Deep in there so I'm guessing he ran off a cliff and we all followed. We'd follow him anywhere except to Jade Quarry, which is where he went :(

UltrViolet is uncomfortable with what he describes as "a pervasive attitude of what I’ll call … well, cowardice, for lack of a better term" among PvPers in MMORPGs, something he compares unfavorably with pre-MMO days, when "in a fight with someone in Quake, they usually fought back, and a duel ensued (a duel with rocket launchers)". It's apparent that what underpins his understanding of the term "PvP" is a literal stand-off, head to head, toe to toe, between individual players, conducted primarily, probably entirely, for the honor of a clean victory.

In Wilhelm's comment thread, however, Gevlon defines PvP in an utterly unromantic, purely functional fashion. PvP for the Greedy Goblin is "an in-game reason to fight, you seek to complete an in-game objective". When he says "...it’s competition" he means competition for resources.

Gevlon dismisses fighting other players for the sake of fighting them as merely a means of staving off boredom or promoting an out-of-game self-image. For him, and indeed for several other commenters in the thread, PvP is primarily a means to an economic or political end, not any kind of an end in itself.

Jeromai, meanwhile, in a series of lengthy, detailed and thoughtful essays, analyses both his actions and his motivations, which, unsurprisingly for any regular reader of "Why I Game", largely seem to revolve around testing and refining the limits of his own skill and ability.

The new reward system gives me the pip.

These three approaches, which most likely represent only the shallowest foothills of the mountain of nuance that exists to be scaled on the topic, amply demonstrate that, where any discussion of PvP is concerned, what we are most likely to see are people talking past each other. As in all negotiations, without agreed definitions at the outset, little progress can be made towards consensus.

It would help if, when we talk about PvP in MMORPGs, we made it clearer what kind of PvP we were talking about. There are well-established names for some of these subdivisions, after all.

Let's take Dueling, for example. Dueling is the apex of the consensual, one-on-one, "honorable" fight. Most MMOs offer it in some form or other.

I absolutely, utterly loathe dueling. It was the single aspect of EverQuest I most hated from the moment I began playing. In all the time I ever played, from 1999 to now, I only ever dueled once. That was in a Guild event, when I did it with extreme reluctance so as not to seem "difficult". I won, easily, as it happens. No-one was more surprised than me.

My objection to dueling has nothing whatsoever to do with whether I would or would not be any good at it. My issue is with the extreme intimacy. I find it skin-crawlingly creepy. To be locked in a virtual rope-fight to the death with another human being is just beyond anything I ever expected or wanted to discover in a fantasy world. I set all duel acceptances to "automatically decline" where the game allows and never accept or respond to them where it doesn't.

Left a bit..left a bit...right a bit...FIRE!

GW2's complete lack of a duel function is unexpected and also one of the very best things about the game. Unsurprisingly, I don't try to replicate dueling there in the kind of lone-wolf WvW roaming Jeromai describes.

I do, however, travel alone in WvW all the time, scouting, taking objectives, simply moving from place to place. I'm not remotely apprehensive about being alone and vulnerable because, as Hording says in Wilhelm's thread, in "games with no consequences you just shrug and continue from the graveyard or waypoint. Who killed you – who cares?".

If someone attacks me in when I'm alone in WvW I simply wait for them to kill me. Then I waypoint and get on with whatever I was doing. I have no skill as duelist and no interest in acquiring any. My interests and aptitudes lie in matchplay. I want our team to win. I want to do my part. Dueling harms not helps that objective so I feel virtuous for avoiding it.

When I play, even five years in, I care whether we hold all our own keeps. I care whether we win the Skirmish and the match. I care where we place in the table, even though everyone agrees the whole scoring system has been so broken for so long it's effectively meaningless.  

It doesn't much matter to me that it's all pointless, repetitive and silly. It's an MMO. Of course it is! I'm as easily able to suspend my disbelief to become immersed in the fortunes of my server as I am to believe that each battle against Tequatl is the only one needed to defeat him forever, even though I already killed him twice today and the moment he dies I can look up his next scheduled appearance on a website created for that purpose. If you can't believe, why play at all?

Personally, I'd "fix" WvW by removing every single "reward" other than the score. If that means only a hundred people left playing then at least it would be the right hundred.

GW2's mass combat - army against army, battling to take and hold territory - is perfect for me. It removes all of the uncomfortable intimacy while retaining a very strong sense of purpose and identity.

That same approach  - wanting to be an effective part of a team and to see the team prosper - scales well. I prefer the larger stage but I enjoy most types of instanced, group PvP. I liked all the various Battleground options in DAOC, Warhammer, Rift, WoW, and EQ2, but they come with a self-limiting factor that's absent from WvW, which I can and do play, quite literally, for hours at a stretch.

I find battleground matches exciting for a while but they come with diminishing returns - after an hour or so I begin to feel enervated. Still, I always go back, eager for more, once my synapses have had a chance to discharge.

When conflict-phobic players like Syp talk about PvP in terms of dread they generally don't mean the kind of sanitized, organized, structured - ultimately safe - play we see in instances, however large or small. The two things that terrify them, it seems, are the specter of loss and the prospect of becoming a target.

I'd keep the bags - I just wouldn't put anything in them.

I can see their point. No-one likes to lose stuff or have their time wasted. Even dedicated PvPers don't like a bully. Few rational voices will be raised to defend the handful of sociopaths who spend lonely evenings on their max-level characters or level-locked twinks, killing the same newbies at spawn over and over until they force the hapless neophytes to log off and uninstall.

Still, there's a world of difference between that kind of apocryphal abuse and real, open-world PVP as it actually happens, be it consensual or otherwise, with or without item or xp loss, level restricted or FFA.

Yes, in theory it can seem a bit more unsettling, certainly more personal, to be jumped by another player when you're alone in the wilds, especially if you're half-health and locked in a tough fight with a wyvern at the time. In practice, though, is it really very much different to being blindsided by a Sand Giant as you concentrate on killing a mummy, only to be rooted by a ghoul as you try to run away? Or, worse, being trampled by someone's train as they exit the dungeon just as you zone in?

Pre-WoW MMO worlds - even Vanilla WoW, by reputation - were dangerous places. You didn't need your PvP flag on to get ganked - a griffon or a werewolf would take you out without malice or mercy just as quickly as any player. You could lose a level or, worse, your corpse and everything on it.

They also serve, who only stand and scout.

We lived in fear every day of our gaming lives back then. And, yes, having players as predators did make it scarier still. But not orders of magnitude scarier, the way random, unconfined, unexpected, non-consensual PvP appears to so many MMO players today.

I'm not advocating a return to xp and item loss as standard. Nor am I nostalgic for the days of Zone Sweepers and corpse runs. I'm certainly not suggesting all MMOs are better with PvP in the mix. I don't, by and large, choose to play on open PvP servers, given the option, even now. Virtual life can be hard enough with just the A.I. on your case.

All I'm suggesting is that PvP comes in many flavors. A little taste of it, once in a while, can be delicious. A whole meal can be gloriously satisfying, provided you order from the right menu. It's an acquired taste, for sure, but, like most such, it's worth acquiring.

It's been a very, very long time since the letters "PvP" included anywhere in the description of an upcoming MMO caused me make the sign of the cross and back away. Now I take every case on merit. As Dire Necessity says about Syp's oft-repeated concerns over the risk of being ganked " He’s really not talking about EVE as typically played at all, he’s talking about the stories he hears about EVE."

In most MMOs these days the only thing to fear from PvP is the fear of PvP itself. Don't listen to scare stories. Try it out and see for yourself. What's the worst that could happen?

A Familiar Story: EQ2

Last week saw the delayed arrival of EQ2's 103rd Game Update, "The Menagerie", named for the  new class of creature it brings to the game - Familiars. As you'd expect, these are pets that don't fight but do boost your stats.

I was quite keen to get my hands on one. It turned out to be both harder and easier than expected.

There are three paths to Familiarity: quest, drop or purchase. I've tried all of them but so far only my trusty Daybreak Cash Trust Fund has come up with the goods.

For reasons that seem more sentimental and nostalgic than anything else, I started off by trying to get one as a drop. In the olden days that would have been the only way and it would have taken weeks, possibly months of camping some Named or other.

It still does, in a way, only now you camp alongside forty or fifty of your new best friends. The Familiars, which come in Cages, have been added to the loot tables of the current Public Quests, which run in three of the four original Kunark zones, Fens of Nathsar, Jarsath Wastes and Kylong Plains, plus a quest-triggered PQ in the new Obulos Frontier.

I'm currently doing the Tequatl event in GW2 every day because I don't know why. This is exactly the same. There's a bit of a wait for the event to start then a frenzy of activity for ten minutes or so, at the end of which I get a bunch of stuff I don't need or want and someone links the thing I did want in chat. Then we all go somewhere else to twiddle our thumbs until next time.

It's fun or I wouldn't do it. I like the community spirit, the in-jokes, the bustle and fuss. It's not a particularly effective way of getting a specific item, though. RNG is unkind.

Questing is more reliable. If you can complete the quest you get the reward. Unfortunately the "quests" that reward Familiars aren't quite the quests you'd like. Okay, they technically aren't "quests" at all - they're "Missions".

The thing about Missions in EQ2 is that they don't give a specific reward. They end with a chest that might contain a whole load of things but usually has exactly what you got last time or the thing you were least interested in getting at all. RNG at play once more.

I haven't yet done a Mission since the Familiars arrived so I can't say how commonly they appear in the chests but I note that Naimi Denmother got hers from a boss chest in a Mission rather than the reward chest itself, which is good.

There seems to be just one full-fledged quest that guarantees a Familiar at the end. Unfortunately it requires you to complete a match in the new Proving Grounds.

The Proving Grounds is the other major addition to the game in GU103. It's not proving to be very popular, at least not according to the forum thread, which is almost entirely composed of bitter complaints and claims of accounts being cancelled.

EQ2 players often appear to use cancellation of their accounts the way your mother might raise one eyebrow and frown so I don't take that too seriously as an indicator of passion but it's undeniable that The Proving Grounds are a buggy mess.

There's already been one hotfix and a major patch is due tomorrow to try to wrestle the thing into some kind of shape. The forums blame all this on the dire state of DBG, the extreme lack of resources and the skeleton crew left working on the game. I wonder how many of them have played any other MMOs in the last few years.

GW2, which almost certainly has fifty times more devs working on it,  has improved somewhat under Mike O'Brien's direct leadership (wasn't that supposed to be a temporary thing...?) but back in Colin Johansen's day we had update after update in which major elements didn't work properly or at all. Indeed, it became a truism that there was no point playing a LS episode the day it dropped because it would need four or five hot-fixes before you could even tell how it was supposed to work.

Despite the dire warnings on the boards I thought I'd go see for myself. The new Proving Grounds matches use the old Battlegrounds cross-servers lobby and log-in. I vaguely remembered where the zone-in was but I completely failed to work out how to queue for a match so I had to go and look that up (it's Alt-Z).

I could have called out in the /LFG channel to get a group the old-fashioned way. The lobby was full of people doing just that. I didn't, because I haven't done any serious grouping in EQ2 for about five years and since I was playing my new, boosted level 100 Necromancer I figured it would be best to keep a low profile. I only wanted to get a screenshot or two for the blog, anyway.

Things went better than expected, especially given the horror stories I'd read. We managed to kill the first boss without mishap. I haven't played a Necro for a long time but the class was my "Main" for several years and I could remember the basics, just about.

The first boss was standing about twenty feet from the zone-in. It was when we tried to move forward that the problems began. We ran along a ledge covered in roots and every root we stepped on spawned a beetle. A very tough beetle.

After we wiped someone said we shouldn't step on the roots. That was helpful. The group broke up and I left as well. After the obligatory five-minute penalty I queued again.

Optimal path. Allegedly.

This time I joined a party that had already killed the same boss and moved past the roots. I clambered along the wall to join them, thereby avoiding death by beetle, and we pulled and killed several trash mobs.

There was another partial wipe but we reformed and clambered back. We set ourselves up for Boss #2, a treant going by the great name of Galumph. Someone had done him before so we were warned about his huge knock-back.

We all stood with our backs to a rock, someone pulled him and we went at it like a swarm of hornets. Six DPS, no tank and no healer. There's a problem with the automatic group matchmaker. It's supposed to get fixed tomorrow.

Take a look at what you could have won.

We got Galumph to around 20% and then he did something and we all wiped. "He hits hard without a healer", said Captain Obvious and the group broke up again.

Contrary to the bleak reviews on the forum, I thought The Proving Grounds looked like they could be good fun. If they fix the most egregious of the bugs and if I was playing a class I felt confident to group with, this might be something I'd do, now and again.

The real problem is that DBG have chosen to add a number of Best In Slot items to the Proving Ground vendors, along with a lot of other very good gear. It means nothing to casual players like me but for regular players who want to remain fully competitive at endgame it makes this content anything but optional. That's probably not a great development plan.

Even though I waited until the match ended and I got the pop-up window to say I'd completed it, my quest didn't update. Not sure if that's a bug or if you actually need to win a match for it to count. Either way, I didn't get a Familiar.

So I bought one. It was that simple. I could have done it at the start and saved myself an hour or two of messing about but the messing about was pretty entertaining so it's all good, as our Commanders like to say when we lose the last tower on our home borderland and end up cowering in our Citadel.

A single Familiar Cage costs just 599DBC. With my member's 10% discount that's 539DBC, fractionally more than the monthly stipend that comes with membership. I have well over 10K DBC on the account I'm currently subbed with and maybe twice that on the one I used to pay for so money was not an issue.

I stumped up and opened the cage. Inside was a low-slung lizard that looks remarkably like my Magician's mount in EQ1. It has a gormless look I like. Apparently it's a Lowland Tuatara. I re-named it Totoro although I thought of another name I could have given it...

Don't ask me. I just got him.

And that was more or less that. Familiars, like Mercenaries and Mounts, are another thing to collect, which is good. I wouldn't be at all surprised if at some time in the future we get Familiar Gear and a Familiar Leveling System. That would also be good.

If I wasn't playing so many other games right now I would be quite happy to run Missions, do PQs and queue for Proving Grounds matches to fill out my Familiar Family as well as gear myself up. Whether the people who are playing all the time feel the same way I'm not so sure.

EQ2 has a very hardcore hardcore these days. They seem to be grumpy about just about everything that doesn't directly lead to Heroic Dungeons, Raids or Fabled revamps of older zones. I do wonder why DBG don't simply stop trying to innovate and go back to spoon-feeding these people what they want. It's not like there isn't enough already to keep the rest of us occupied.

Despite the grumbling and the slamming doors the game seems busy enough. I have faith it will rumble on for a year or two yet. I'd still like to know what Columbus Nova's long-term plan is, though. Assuming they have one.

One Size Fits All: EQ2

I don't know. Step out of the room for five minutes and someone moves all the furniture around. I only popped over to The Secret World for a moment and not only did they fix up Qeynos while my back was turned but it seems they gave Battlegrounds and the Dungeon Maker a makeover while they were at it.

Both got the full "level agnostic" treatment, which is supposed to let anyone group with anyone regardless of level. The game sorts it all out behind the scenes. By magic.

Well, almost. Battlegrounds actually got split into two sizes: 30-89 and 90-92. Presumably the thought of autotuning a raider with max AA, Prestige Points and end game gear versus a level 30 in quested gear made someone's wig fly off.

Dino Wars

I tried both last night, as a level 66 Necro dressed largely in odds and ends she appeared to have found in a bin, who hadn't gotten around to updating most of her spells beyond Adept and as a 92/420/10 Berserker, CAs at Expert or better, dressed in good quality legendary and fabled quested gear. Somewhat surprisingly, the experiences weren't all that different.

EQ2 Battlegrounds use a highly counter-immersive but eminently practical system of random matching. You queue up and when your BG pops you can find yourself in either the Blue Team or the Red team, often fighting alongside some of the same people you were trying to kill in the last one. Although pre-mades can still queue together and exercise their heavily distorting effect on a match, at least there's no possibility of them steamrolling you ten times in a row until you throw your monitor out of the window (Hi, Whitefall Steppes!). You're as likely to be fighting with them as often as against them.

This is what I'll be wearing

My success or failure seemed to depend more on how our whole team was doing rather than on my relative level. When the Team did well, my contribution seemed about what I'd expect from my meagre PvP skills and current lack of practice. I was able to stay upright for a while, knock some other people down and generally not be a complete drag anchor on the rest of my team. On the other hand, when the whole team was doing badly (we had two total whitewashes), at least everyone else seemed to be dying as fast and as often as I was.

Thumbs up for the Level Agnostic thing then. It also seems to have revealed a previously-unknown bloodlust in EQ2's famously laid-back population. Both level ranges were popping in moments. I don't think I had to wait more than 20 seconds for one all night. As the evening wore on it got so busy a second instance of Champion's Respite spawned.

If I PvP for a year straight

That's the zone with all the PvP vendors and questgivers and therein may lie the key to all this sudden activity. It used to be that PvP armor was great for PvP but only so-so for PvE. You'd only want it if you wanted to do PvP in it, and unless PvP was all you did you'd still need another set for PvE. That's all changed.

GU64 made it so that your PvP stats derive from your PvE stats, meaning you can get started in your regular gear. The PvP gear you buy with the tokens you get from doing PvP makes you better at PvP but also now has comparable stats to equivalent PvE gear. Which means you can, if you so choose, get the equivalent of Solo Quested, Heroic Group and even Raid PvE gear purely by doing PvP.

If I wasn't about to spend what I hope will be a good while in Guild Wars 2, I would be thinking seriously about Battlegrounds as my main combat activity at 92. Lots of upgrades and very achievable solo.

Moving on to player dungeons, again the changes seem to have worked. The two big complaints about the Dungeon Maker have been

1. most people want to play their own character, not some weird "avatar"
2. most designers want to be able to tell stories and there aren't any tools to do it

 SoE had a go at the first on Test a long time back but the results were terrible. Worse than playing an avatar was the unanimous verdict. This time they seem to have got it right. I ran several DM dungeons solo this morning with my 90 Beastlord and they played pretty much like any other solo content in the game. All the fights lasted longer than with the avatars, which I see as a very good thing (I always found the avatars incredibly overpowered although some people seemed to find them the opposite).

Mental health issues. The Designer, that is.

Crucially, the difference between the weaker and stronger creatures in the dungeons was very clear. That has never been the case before. When I got to the final boss in one dungeon it was a very close-run fight. All in all, a big improvement.

So much for the player's side of things. How about the designer? Not had time to test it for myself yet, but the store now offers items that allow for text to appear on screen in locations of your choosing and you can also designate mobs to be non-combat, allowing for both extras and actors in your dramas. All these items, like all Dungeon Maker stuff, can be bough for the Marks you get from running and building dungeons - no Station Cash required.

I'll try to find time to play around with it before GW2. Making dungeons was already fun but this should add a whole new dimension to it.

Job well done, SoE. Patted backs all round.

Furglebin's Journal 4: EQ2

So here I am talking to gnomes. Only the first thing I notice is they do not sound like gnomes. They look like gnomes. They are shorter than mes. They are both wearing eyeglasses like gnomes always wears but when they speak there is no mentioning cognoggins or foozlewickets like you usually get with a gnome. Generally you get more of that sort of thing than you know what to do with with a gnome but not from these ones. No, they sound like Erudites or maybe even Dark Elfs with a lot of spouting on about battle and victory and suchlike.

Gnome?

Or No Gnome?

Well, I have my suspicions because I have seen a lot in this city by now and I know that everyone is not always what they wants you to think they are but all the same my whiskers are twitching and that means adventures. So I do what the "gnomes" tell me and go through their magic gateway. Which is another thing that is not right if you thinks about it because if they were really gnomes it would be some clockwork contraption with a lot of whirring and clicking and bits falling off and some other gnome would be cursing and hitting it with a spanner. It would not be a glowy magic thing what looks like a sea-shell that works perfectly every time.

Everyone mill about so it looks like there's more of us

Champions Respite is the place I end up. It is sort of a shopping mall and waiting room for people that want to murder each other. All sorts of people come in, Iksars and Trolls and Dwarves and just about anyone really. There is a Priest of Discord what sorts us all out into teams and asks us where we want to go. He gives four choices, called Smuggler's Den, Frozen Tundra, Battlefield of Ganak and Gears of Klak'Anon. I do not know anything about any of them but when I see that the teams for different places are different sizes I think I better go in the biggest team. Then I can just get into the middle of a crowd and figure it out as I go along.

Are you sure you're a priest?

Smugglers Den is the one where it is two dozen on each side and it is an amazing place, all towers and islands up in the air. I do not have a clue what I am doing so I just chase around with everyone else. Some Barbarian shouts out orders and mostly we do what he tells us. Tiger is being an armadillo, which is great for the killing other people part but does not work so well for keeping me alive so I die quite a lot. 'Course no-one stays dead. I pop back up in a few seconds every time but it is hard to get back to where everyone is so I try not to die if I cans help it.

Just when I am beginning to wonder how long all this is going to go on for it stops. Back in Champions Respite we all get our marks on how well we did and we won and I did alright I think, specially for a first time. I even get some Tokens to spend in the shops on stuff to help with fighting other adventurers 'cos it is different to fighting monsters, or so they say. Seems pretty much the same to me except adventurers don't keep still for you to kill them like an orc does and they swear more.

You take it! I took it last time.

Anyway I get the taste for it so I try again, only with Tiger being a bear which means at least I get healed a bit when the stupid healers on my team keep healing the fat tanks and not important DPS rats like mes. Funny how that keeps happening. The Priest of Discord likes to shuffle all the teams up so now and agains I end up killing someone what I was saving from being killed the time before. Makes it hard to remember who is on what side sometimes but I think it is a good plan cos it keeps things fairer so the same team does not win every match.

I hear there's a cafe at the top

Cutting a long tale short, over the next few weeks I try all the Battlegrounds and they are all good except Frozen Tundra which is rotten. In that one it is all fighting monsters and I can do that anywhere. Gears of Klak'Anon is just this tiny room where everyone piles into the middle and someone grabs a little stone and tries to hang on to it while everyone else fights over who gets to hold it next. Battlefield of Ganak is a lot of running up and down a field grabbing the other team's flag and bringing it back and of course you got to stop them grabbing yours at the same time.

It is all good fun and very exciting but the thing is that everyone in the Battlegrounds is either exactly as far along in learning as I am or they have learned pretty much all there is to learn. It is one thing or the other and nothings inbetween. Which means that if I want to go fightings other adventurers for tokens I cannot learn anything new and that is not right. And that is why in the end I decide I have had enough running around grabbing flags and stones and towers and playing tag with adventurers.

It is about time I got on with learning how to be a Beastlord so that is what I am doing. When I have learned all there is to learn about that, then I will come back and try again.

Furglebin's Journal 3 : EQ2

So, I gets a room in Freeport in an Inn called The Jade Tiger. It costs 5 silver pieces a week, which is nothing! I can make that much in a minute just by setting Tiger on orcs. Commonlands is all over orcs so no-one is going to miss a few. I don't know how the Jade Tiger stays in business charging these rates but they must be doing alright 'cos there are people coming and goings at all times of the day and nights.

Health and safety mate? Never 'eard of it.

Once I am settled ins I go for a walk around town. I am looking ups at the Arcane Academy where all the finger-wagglers study how to blow things up and I am getting a crick in my neck cos it is so high, when some ratonga hisses at me. His name is Sneel Valiyn and he is the Ratonga Mentor or so he claims. He starts telling me some long story but I don't really listen until he asks me to go to Temple Street, which is where ratongas all used to live in Freeport until The Overlord decides to have a big tidy-ups.

Ratonga mentor or conspiracy theorist in a bathrobe?

Well, I go to Temple Streets and there are Ratongas there alright, but they have beens spending too long around gnomes, which cannot be good for anyone. There are mechanical mens strutting about everywhere and all the gnomes and all the ratongas are mumbling and plotting right and left and if Lucan finds out what they have done to his walls he will not be happy, let me tell yous!

Right you kids! Scrub that off this minute!

I do what Sneel asks me to do. Some clockworks get broken but never mind cos the gnomes will enjoy fixing them I expects. Best if gnomes got stuffs to do cos if not then they come up with Ideas and no-one wants that. Then Sneel sends me off to talk to some ratongas around town what think they have seen Roekilliks. I never heard of Roekilliks befores but as soon as Sneel says the word all the hair on my back stands up and Tiger growls.

Spend too long around gnomes and this could happen to you

Not much later I knows what they are. Bad rats. Very, very bad rats. I meet a few and it is a few too many. Tiger makes short work of them and it is in a secret hidey-hole what they skulks in so no chance of anyone finding what is left of them and getting me in trouble with the Militia. Although I think the Militia would probably give me a few silver and thank me for saving them the trouble. Sneel is so pleased with me he gives me a special ring only for Ratongas. I am very glad I met him cos now I am not so confused about my place in the worlds. I am beginning to feel like I belong in Freeport.

Standing next to a giant anchor does not give you gravitas.

Since then I have had a lot of adventures what I do nots have time to write about. I am very much tougher now and I know a lot about being a Beastlord. One really exciting thing did happen that I should say 'cos it is why I have not learned any new stuff for a while. I am strollings around Freeport just sniffing the salt air and thinking about what I am going to have for tea when two gnomes starts calling out to me. I know I should keep on walking but I am curious, it is my weakness, so I listen to them when they tell me all about testing my skills against other adventurers and it sounds exciting and a good idea the way they tell it.

I should know better than to listen to Gnomes with Ideas but this one time I think it turns out okay. But that is a story for another day, when I write about my adventures in the Battlegrounds.