The Return Of Rose Online - or - Always Pack A Spare Pair Of Shoes

If there's one thing that must be obvious to everyone who's been reading this blog of late, it's that what I really need right now is another mmorpg. I mean, I'm juggling the ones I'm already playing so gosh-darned amazingly, it'd be a snap to slot in another and do it full justice, right?

Okay, maybe not. But I'm doing it anyway. Or I will be, as soon as the servers come up.

Rose Online, the game in question, is far from new. In fact it's seventeen years old, with a checkered history of cancellations and changes of ownership. I remember it fairly well from the distant past but only as a name. 

By 2005 I was playing EverQuest II and past the stage of trying every single mmorpg I could get my hands on (Well, pretty much.) and I definitely never played Rose Online, although I do have a vague memory of thinking about it. At the time, though, it wasn't anything like as easy to register accounts with Korean publishers. I imagine it looked like more hoop-jumping than my mild interest merited.

Things have changed, I'm very pleased to say. This afternoon it took me no more than five minutes to go from reading about Rose Online's imminent Early Access launch, happening today, to having the client downloaded and an account registered. 

Of course, when I went to log in at the appointed time of 6 PM, the current owners, Rednim Games, had announced a thirty-minute delay for a last-second patch. The server is up now, but I'm still waiting to get in as I type this, three hours later.

Fortunately, for the purposes of this post, I already had something planned that doesn't require that I actually play the game at all. I was going to make some observations on a few things I read on the website as I was looking to find out what the game is all about.

First, the classes. There are four, which is very normal for these kinds of games. Usually you can predict  what they're going to be without even looking. If, when you do look, the names seem a little unusual, you can easily break it down to the inevitable Fighter, Mage, Cleric and Rogue.

Not here, you can't. Guess what these four do: Soldier, Muse, Hawker, Dealer. It was seeing those class names that got me intrigued. Soldier is obvious but the others?

Muse turns out to be the magic-user but also the healer, depending on which specialism you eventually choose. All base classes split into two separate paths, although not for a long time. As far as I understand it, you don't even get to choose a base class until Level 10 and specialization doesn't come until Level 100! If levelling is at 2005 speed, that could take a year.

Soldier splits into Knight and Champion, which looks like Warrior and Paladin to me. That leaves Hawker and Dealer. Any guesses?

Well, this is a 2005 mmorpg so the basic MMO Trinity is likely to be in full effect. We have our Tank and the Mage is doing double service as Healer and Magic DPS so we're probably going to need a melee DPS and some kind of bow-user. Say hi to the Raider and the Scout. They have those  disciplines covered.

 

So far, so straightforward, discounting the eliptical naming conventions. What's left for the Dealer? Crowd control, maybe? General support?

Yeah, not really. Dealers are crafters and traders. Apparently trading is a whole, separate career option in this game, which "features its own in-game economy which is directly controlled by players. Things become even odder when the time comes for a Dealer to specialize. At Level 100 you have the option of becoming an Artisan, which is fairly self-explanatory, or a ...

Come on. Guess!

Bourgeois! 

Okay, who had that? Brings a whole new meaning to the term "Class", doesn't it? For any number of verry good reasons, no developer would think of calling an mmorpg class "Bourgeois". Except of course, back in 2005, someone did.

To make it even weirder still, the Bourgeois appears to be a pet class. They can hire mercenaries to fight for them. They also turn out to be good for crowd control and support after all, only not in any way you could possibly have imagined: "Bourgeois characters use their financial abilities to gain control and influence over their opponents and to make sure their allies are well supplied."

Seriously? I can play a character who has so much money they can bribe monsters to leave them alone? Awesome! Also, I get to bankroll my party, which sounds a lot less appealling. 

Anything else worth mentioning about the classes? Oh, I don't know... how about their dress sense? 

Rose Online has to be the only mmorpg I can remember that finds it appropriate to include fashion tips in the class descriptions. There isn't exactly a dress code, other than the usual restrictions on armor types, but how about these subtle hints?

"As religious devotees, Clerics prefer wearing neat, clean clothing, and light colored armors."

"Usually, Mages wear armor that makes them look gloomy, evil or eccentric. Sometimes they put on long and pointed hats, making them look like witches..."

"Raiders are sharp dressers and can wear stylish feathered hats."

"Scouts... always carry a quiver, and seem to like wearing animal furs."

"Bourgeois... wear lightweight, yet luxurious clothing that emphasizes their wealth. They can carry an extra pair of shoes for long trips."

"Artisans prefer dark clothing, as well as a broad brimmed hat to block the glare of the sun when they travel."

Doesn't some of that seem weirdly specific?  An extra pair of shoes? Neat, clean clothing? All those hats?

It all sounds jolly interesting, anyway. If the server ever settles down, I think I'll check in and find out for myself if the game lives up to the promise of the website. If I find anything worth reporting on, maybe there'll be a First Impressions post sometime.

Just not tonight. This launch is getting a little too convincingly 2005 for me right now. I think I'll go play something that works.

The Main Idea

A few seemingly random ideas, floating around the blogosphere of late, coalesced into a mini-epiphany for me this morning: How We Play Now. Or how I play now, anyway. 

First there was MassivelyOP, asking how good a fit alts are for the genre these days. Then there was Shintar, talking about the appeal, or lack therof in Star Wars: the Old Republic's new combat styles. Redbeard was musing at length about the joys of old-school class quests in World of Warcraft and Yeebo was enjoying the parts of EverQuest II that time seems barely to have touched.

Meanwhile, I was sailing happily through Guild Wars 2's latest expansion, End of Dragons, following the story and ticking off boxes. Story's a big thing in mmorpgs nowadays. Given Final Fantasy XIV's surge it could well become bigger still. Kaylriene's surely not the only one wondering if narrative spines with the heft of movies are where the future lies. Maybe BioWare were right all along.

I did take a brief sidetrip to Norrath to check out EQII's latest dungeon but other than that all the mmorpgs I'd happily been playing this year are back on the virtual shelf. By now my house in Chimeraland must be thick with moss and I can't even remember what I was doing in Lost Ark. I know I was well past the flooded dungeon Wilhelm enjoyed so much but there's still a fair old way to go before I can join in the latest bizarre event, for which you need to be a minimum of Level 50.

Cast adrift behind me as I navigate these choppy seas are the abandoned hulls of countless mmorpgs, some of them rotting hulks, barely breaking the waterline as they sink into oblivion, others calmly adrift, so many Marie Celestes, just waiting for the crew to return. It's a very different picture from the way things looked a decade ago, let alone back at the beginning, when the century was just about to turn.

The Friendly Necromancer, aka Stingite, has just started playing New World. He's not bothered that he's arriving in Aeternum just as everyone has left. Nor should he be. It's a great game for at least fifty levels. After that... well, I wouldn't know. 

As I said in a comment on his post "I got well over a couple of hundred hours out of it before I drifted away. If that was a single-player title I think we'd all agree it was value for money. Why mmorpgs are supposed to provide endless entertainment for the same box price is unclear."

It's a question that was a lot easier to answer back when nearly all mmorpgs came with a monthly subscription. They were supposed to provide endless entertainment because we were endlessly paying for them. Now they're mostly either free or the same single purchase cost as any other video game, that doesn't really wash.

Even if we were content to take our forty or sixty or a hundred hours of value and move on, mmorpg developers can't afford to let us leave satisfied. They need to keep us around so we'll spend money in the cash shop or pay the premium that stands in for an optional sub. Preferably both.

A chunk of cash from the box sale is a nice bonus but as many developers have found to their cost, even a one-off charge can dampen interest to the point where it's deemed to have damaged the game's long-term prospects. If you have to give the game away free, focus moves to keeping players logging in long enough to spend money, which is why we end up with both huge swathes of Free Stuff! just for turning up and insanely long, drawn-out or difficult grinds to get anything worth having.

In-game goals that take forever or have you doing the same thing over and over again are, of course, intrinsic to the genre anyway. Free to Play didn't invent this stuff. Remember one of EverQuest's many snide nicknames - Evercamp? 

The whole genre has always revolved around extremely time-consuming content, frequently highly repetitive, often not all that entertaining, if looked at objectively. Over time those unappealing yet compulsive concepts have been refined and concentrated until they're about as potent as they can be. They've also largely been shifted away from the begining of the games so as not to frighten away nervous customers.

There's always been a high reported rate of attrition in the early stages of all games but at least, when you were making people pay an up-front fee, there was a fighting chance sunk cost woud keep them around, at least for the time they'd paid for. Investment in a free to play mmorpg is more fragile; no more than the few minutes it took to download.

That's why all F2P mmorpgs start off easy, something that's pretty much the diametric opposite of the introduction subscription games used to offer. If your first experience of a new free mmorpg consisted of falling off the starting platform and not being able to find the way back up, forcing you to re-roll, or having the first questgiver you spoke to punch you to death, chances are you'd uninstall.

It's also why story feels so important now. Levelling doesn't matter any more and no-one really cares about gear or skills until the cap. There has to be something to attach yourself to, something to keep you playing until you get to the endgame. Why not "What happens next?"

There's not much that's inherently bad about any of this. It's not like the old ways of playing were flawless fun. What's ironic is the way some of the changes seem to work in direct opposition to the supposed goals.

Let's go back to that question about alts and whether playing multiple characters in the same game works any more. Why did people do it in the first place? I can't speak for players in general but I know why I did: to have new experiences.

In the older mmorpgs, starting a new character usually meant playing through new content. Most games had multiple starting areas, usually based around race. Dwarves generally did not live with Elves nor Orcs with Humans. There would be a new town to visit and a different newbie zone or two at the very least. Sometimes the hunting zones wouldn't converge until you'd been playing a character for days or even weeks.

In those days, classes often tended to be race-locked, too. There's a controversy today concerning gender-locking that derives from a desire to see real-world identity accurately represented in the gameworld but locking race to class is purely a gameplay issue. If you start from the premise, as most high fantasy games do, that in-game races have hardcoded belief systems, meaning you have to roll an evil race to play a Shadowknight but a good race to play a Paladin, any player who wants to find out which class suits them better is going to have to make at least one alt.

Many of us ended up making alt after alt not because we wanted to play those characters at endgame but because we wanted to see the places where they lived and try out the classes they could become. There aren't many old school mmorpgs I've ever played where I haven't left half a dozen characters behind. In some it's double figures and in one or two it's more than a score.

As I played those characters, some of them grew on me while others didn't. I never knew which would click until I tried so I kept trying. There are mmorpgs I ended up playing for twice as long as I expected because an alt caught my attention and carried on well past the point where I was back playing the same game I'd already played as someone else.

Having new things to see, fresh creatures to kill and different stories to follow extended the life of the games and kept me logging in. I was never a player who aimed for the endgame. If I got there at all I usually saw it as the perfect opportunity to roll another character and go back to the beginning - a new start.

All of that would seem on the surface to be an ideal fit with the supposed desires of free to play developers; keep the punters playing and maybe we can sell them stuff. Of course, it's not quite that simple.

One of the more expensive aspects of running a live service mmorpg has to be content creation. Five genuinely different races with five genuinely different starting areas is five times the work for artists, animators and writers. Okay, maybe not five times; there are probably some synergies. It's more work, though, for sure, and work costs money.

As well as the cost of creating all that extra content there's the non-trivial risk of splitting the playerbase. Free to play games rely on looking Busy! and Popular! to new players. When you make your first character and log in to a new mmorpg, you want to be sure you're making the right choice. There are so many to choose from nowadays. You wouldn't want to pick one no-one else plays.

If you have five starting areas, even if they're all equally popular, which they won't be, each of them is going to be eighty per cent emptier than if you funnelled everyone into the same one. Apart from the first few days or, if your game is exceptionally successful, weeks, pretty much anywhere outside The Bubble is going to feel empty enough, without having people starting on different continents.

Once you've made everyone start in the same place, you might as well make them all look the same, too. It certainly saves on animators and it's well-known that most players want to play pretty people who look like idealised versions of themselves. The whole Dungeons and Dragons derived notion of racial advantages and disadvantages got thrown under a bus years ago so racial choices are purely cosmetic. They have to be or they get metagamed and no-one rolls the bad ones.

There's a trend at work here, even if it didn't start with F2P and it's far from universal or consistent. Every developer has some idiosyncratic ideas that don't fit the mold, whether it's Chimeraland with its dozens of wildly varying racial appearances, all entirely irrelvant to gameplay, or New World with its multiple starting areas, where every new player arrives with the identical back story.

The trend is convergence. Whatever variety the games once had it's less now. Sometimes that's managed with the player's convenience in mind, others very much the reverse.

Shintar's post, linked above, discusses the recent change to SW:tOR that allows players to try out different combat styles without having to re-roll as the classes to which they have hitherto been locked. As Shintar acknowledges there are pros and cons, but from an outsider's perspective it does at least look like a well-intentioned addition to the game.

The revelation that ArenaNet have chosen to lock every new End of Dragons Elite Specialization behind story completion looks, by contrast, very much like a cynical attempt to compel players to spend a lot longer replaying the same content than they might otherwise have done. As Eliot at MOP archly observes, it does make you wonder whether some of these people even play their own game.

It's not hard to see where this is all going. FFXIV, arguably the current market leader in the West, is pretty much there already. With every class and job being available to a single character and every racial appearance just a glamor away, there was never much incentive to roll alts there. Some people, inevitably, did it anyway. but as the Main Story Quest grows to the length of several movie box sets, the number of players who are likely to try seems vanishingly small. 

Which brings me back to where I started, namely my own mini-epiphany. I used to have a clear view of my identity as an mmorpg player; when it came to alts, I wasn't just an altaholic, I was a player who simply did not have either "alts" or "mains". I just had characters, some of which I played more than others.

For a long time that was objectively true. I had lower level characters in some games with more played hours than higher ones. I logged in characters according to mood and whim every bit as much as what I was meant to be working on right then. I would play healers or tanks or crowd control or dps to fit in with other people or just because that's what I wanted to play, forget about whether it fitted anyone else's agenda at all.

It's been a while since almost any of that was true. I just hadn't noticed until now. About the last new mmorpg I played where I followed that pattern has to be Guild Wars 2 and that's a decade old this summer. 

I certainly followed my pattern there at first, buying three accounts and making more than twenty characters. It's been a long time, though, since I can truly say I play more than a handful of them and I can't deny any longer that I clearly have a Main, my original Asura Elementalist. 

Until End of Dragons I had a "Story Main", too; my Asura Druid, who I'd played through both previous expansion storylines and every Living Story episode as well. This time around he stayed on the bench as I took my Ele through the story instead. It seems I really am down to just the one Main.

If I look at all the recent mmorpgs I've played and written about here recently - Lost Ark, Chimeraland, New World, Bless Unleashed - or the mmo-adjacent Valheim and Genshin Impact - I have just one character in all of them. 

Going back a little, I only made single characters in Blade and Soul, Riders of Icarus, SW:tOR, Elder Scrolls Online, Secret World Legends, ArcheAge... Even in mmorpgs where I did roll more than one character, Black Desert for example, it was only because I came back and started over from scratch.

Some of it - a lot of it - comes down to the kinds of content compaction I've been describing but I think I also need to accept that, after more than twenty years of doing this, the allure of starting over in the same game doesn't have the magnetic pull it once did. Time was, I just couldn't stop myself. Now I find it all too easy to say no.

Once again, I'm not sure it's a bad thing. I'm going to have to think about it. It may be that, now I've drawn my own attention to what's been happening, I'll begin behaving differently. Sometimes all it takes is an awareness for perceptions to shift. 

Or maybe I'll just settle into it, get comfortable, learn to enjoy playing the way other people have always played. After all, it looks as though I've been playing that way for a while without even realising. Maybe I like it better and just don't know, yet.

However it pans out, one thing I can say for certain sure is that I will not be playing through the entirety of the End of Dragons story nine more times. Not even if it's the last expansion GW2 ever gets. 

It was good but it wasn't that good. ANet need to get over themselves.

The Return Of The Necromancer or How To Turn A Bug Into A Feature.

After yesterday's cheery assessment of the new EverQuest II expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, I ran smack-bang into an unfortunate glitch. A very unfortunate glitch. A glitch worthy of Amazon's New World, except that if it happened there it would probably affect everyone and make news around the world rather than just affecting me and making one tiny ripple on the EQII forums.

Remember how I said after I remembered to put on all the gear from Tishan's Lockbox, everything was fine and the only death I had was self-inflicted? Yeah, well that didn't last. When I logged back in after finishing the blog post something very strange had happened. Something much worse than the original problem I'd been having.

Somehow, instead of being better able to withstand the blows in his new armor, my Berserker had become about as brittle as one of those roses supervillains like to dunk into liquid nitrogen before shattering to let the hero what's coming next. 

He'd become the absolute definition of a glass cannon. If Ihe opened with one of the Ascension spells and blasted a mob - any mob - from a safe distance, the mob would drop to the ground, dead. If, however, he was careless enough to let the mob hit him first, it would be his turn to hit the floor, instantly.

It made for some very odd gameplay, especially for a melee character. It's possible if he'd been a wizard I might not even have noticed but the traditional Berserker pull tactic of charging up to something and spinning was working about as well as running face-first into a steel door. Hard to miss that.

I spent a while reading combat logs and checking settings. I managed to get some questing done but it wasn't enjoyable at all. In the end I posted on the forums about it and went to bed.

This morning someone had replied, suggesting I might need to reset all my AAs. He'd had the same issue and it had fixed it for him. That has actually happened to me before and it worked for me that time, too. I'd forgotten all about it. So I did that and it didn't make any difference at all.

Being me, I then decided to run a few tests and make a few notes. I wondered if it was only happening in the new expansion. Before all this happened, my Berserker had felt extremely comfortable killing stuff in the opening zones of the previous expansion and close to godlike in the one before that. Would he feel the same way now?

I went back to both, walked the Berserker up to an aggressive mob, stood there and let it hit him. 

He died. Instantly. 

Not every time. A few mobs seemed to do normal damage, but most of them were happy to one-shot him in his fancy new armor. Some of the adornments from VoV don't work in earlier content but even with those out of action, he still had over 800 million hit points. When he did some of those older zones the first time he probably didn't have a tenth of that.

I made a note of the damage he was taking. It was spectacular:

Sand Rock Lizard , Svarni Expanse - 9,293,912,700
Swamp Needler, Svarni Expanse - 4,215,656,200
Rock Growler, Echo Caverns - 5,973,298,500
Enormous Rhino Beetle, The Blinding - 2,947,716,400

Clearly, a character with 992,827,858 HP, as he has in the new expansion, is not going to get far if he's been hit for several billion hit points in a single attack. Also, just as clearly, this cannot be working as intended. 

I went back to the forums and found someone had added a comment to say they'd seen this happen in beta. They also said there'd been a thread on it in the bug forum but the explanation had been misinterpreted as the reporting player not having equipped the right gear and the thread had been marked closed.

The commenter had helpfully opened a new thread reporting the bug was not fixed after all so I added my findings to that. I also did an in-game bug report. We'll see if anything comes of it.

That still left me largely unable to play but I still wanted to play. I was also curious to test whether the problem affected my whole account or just that one character. It seemed like an ideal opportunity to throw a rock at a couple of birds and see if I could knock them both out of their tree. 

It's at times like this that having multiple characters at the cap begins to feel like an insurance policy rather than an indulgence. I've been aware for some time that a Berserker isn't the best class to take through new content and I've been wanting to transition to using my necromancer instead. Well, here was my opportunity. 

Luckily, I'd already tidied her up and got her ready in anticipation of playing her in VoV. All I had to do was port her over and swap out all her panda gear for the stuff in the box. 

I was more than a little anxious that the same thing would happen to her as had happened to the Berserker but I'm very happy to say it didn't. I wheeled her through all the quests the Berserker had done at breakneck speed, not needing to read any of the dialog since I could still remember most of it from last night. 

Her pet could tank everything without seeming to take any damage at all and when I deliberately let things hit the Necro to see what kind of damage they were doing, the numbers in the combat log were as you'd expect - nothing much over 20-40 million hit points. With a health pool of almost 200 million that's barely going to raise a bruise.

I ended up taking her into the first instance, where she acquitted herself well against the regular mobs. The first boss proved to much for her but mostly because of the really awkward positioning. He's an archer who stands on a high rock and also teleports. She died but not for any weird reasons. 

All of which leaves me in a slightly odd position. I'm a little annoyed that I can't play my Berserker, especially since he's by far my most prepared character out of combat, being a maxed Weaponsmith and Adorner among other things, but it's past time I transferred my attention to the Necromancer and this is a nudge in the right direction.

I also ought to take my Warlock, who's a max level Sage and can make the upgrades for the Necro's spells, through the tradeskill signature line rather than the Berserker, because who needs a weaponsmith? No-one! Certainly not me.

There's absolutely no doubt that a Necromancer in EQII is much better suited to my solo playstyle. The Berserker is enormous fun to play in combat with all his AEs and death saves but the Necro is the Swiss Army Knife of classes, able to pop out the right tool for any occasion. She kills everything much faster than he does and she can do all kinds of other things, too. Not to mention she can always drop and feign dead if I need to go answer the door. That's incredibly handy.

I very much hope someone at Darkpaw takes note of the report and fixes the bug sooner rather than later because I do want to keep my Berserker up to speed but I can't say I'm unhappy at the turn of events. This could and indeed should mark a turning point, where I return to my EQII roots and go back to playing the class I played so happily for years, before I was lured away by the knockabout fun of first the Bruiser and then the Berserker.

I'll Get Off This Blasted Allod If It's The Last Thing I Ever Do...

Y'know, I think I might make a good subject for hypnosis. I'm certainly suggestible enough. All I had to do was spot a passing reference to Allods Online in a blog post about something else entirely and next thing you know I've patched the thing up and logged in.

I can't even remember whose blog it was. Oh, wait, yes I can! It was Gnomecore, writing about finishing the Shadowbringers expansion in Final Fantasy XIV. He happened to mention that in Allods "...you could walk through the older leveling dungeons with a generic group of NPCs filling the missing roles... You barely needed to sneeze in enemy’s direction, and trash packs and bosses died in mere seconds"

Gnomecore didn't like that much but I thought it sounded great.  

MassivelyOP has a discussion thread up about whether mmorpgs should be "hard", based on something Damian Schubert said on Twitter, reported by MOP as "...Vanguard was set up as the anti-WoW/EverQuest II, the hardcore solution to “soft MMOs for wimps,” complete with brutally punishing corpse recovery as in the Old Days."

I think the ethereal drain's blocked again

I contributed an irritable correction to that partial and mainly inaccurate description of why Vanguard failed but I don't disagree with his premise, which if I understand it correctly, seems to be that to be truly "massive", mmorpgs need to be easy or at least highly accessible.

It depends, of course. On what? On everything. That's the mmorpg dev's dilemma. The genre predicates on accessibility. Massively multiple implies everyone. If you let 'em all in, though, they don't necessarily want the same things and, people being people, they'll clique up and lobby to have it their way.

The trick, it seems to me, is to remember that as an mmorpg developer your business is running the mall, not the concessions inside it. The company is the landlord, management's the operator and each design team owns a franchise.

And all those franchises have their own clientele, who need to be given appropriate, individual service. Sure, you'd like the other customers to feel curious as they walk past. You'd like them to step through the open doors, wander around, try things out. There are potential synergies you don't want to ignore.

Where did you get that hat?

What you don't want is for the only access to the ice-cream parlor to be directly through the jewellery store, which is what happens when you put raid mechanics into social content. Not an exact analogy. Know your audience is what I'm saying.

Then there's mood to consider. As a player I don't always feel like playing the same way. Some days I want to chill out with something easy or repetitive or both. Other days I feel energized, ready for a challenge. Sometimes I want to relax, sometimes I want a rush. It can change from morning to evening.

I could modify my experience by playing different games but that's the last thing the developer wants. The developer wants me to keep playing their games and if they're an mmorpg developer chances are they only have the one so they'd like me to keep playing that. Unless I'm a minor in China, of course, in which case they just want me to go away before someone sees me.

Making every activity in the game feel the same is asking for people to go outside the ecosystem, which is why the really big, truly massively multiple mmorpgs try to be everything to everyone.Which also has its problems.

Ever get the feeling someone's got their eye on you?

The irony, as Wilhelm often points out, is that overreach often leads to failure. Not many developers have both the talent and the resources to roll out good content in many styles consistently and reliably. To do that you need to be Blizzard or Square Enix and as we've seen of late even Blizzard couldn't keep it up forever.

I had plenty of time to think about all that this morning as I tried to get back on the Allods horse. Patching up wasn't a problem. I still have the game installed and my MY.games password still works. I just have to hope they never send me any emails that need a reply because the email address I used, which is also my username, expired years ago. 

The Allods client is charmingly small compared to modern-day bloat. If I'd had to reinstall it would only have been a 12GB download. As it was, I just needed a 2GB patch. The news ticker on the launcher talks about a "new platform", arriving on December 4th but for now the old one works just fine.

I'm not sure when I last played Allods. Oh, wait... I have a blog... looks like the last time I patched was almost exactly six years ago. I do remember that for a while I was playing it on a tablet, where it works surprisingly well.

I think he's part Pointer.

That was six months earlier, in March 2015, when the game added a new race. I believe I made the account I'm now playing then, too, because when I logged in the only character waiting for me was a Priden, the first race added to the game that doesn't automatically fall into the clutches of either the Alliance or the Empire.

I would hesitate to recommend starting as a Priden. There's nothing much wrong with the race itself, "A hearty race that seemingly prefers to run around naked on four legs like an uncivilized tribe of half-beasts", according to the official website. The problem isn't who so much as where

Priden begin on their own island or, I guess, their own allod. They have a very detailed, some would say over-detailed origin and backstory, all of which plays out in a lengthy racial questline. In common with everything in Allods there's a lot of reading to get through before you kill anything.

As well as the seemingly numberless elders and trainers and wise ones, all of whom can't use ten worlds where a hundred will do, there are delegations from both the main factions, the aforementioned Empire and Alliance. As you will have guessed, assuming you've ever played any other mmorpg, at some point your character is going to have to make a choice between the two and throw in with whichever looks like the least horrible.

Even the pet pays respect.

I thought that would happen at level ten. It did not. Then I thought it would surely happen at level fifteen. I was guessing. I couldn't be sure because at level thirteen I ran out of quests. That's why I stopped last time. And the time before that.

I was enjoying myself a lot until then. Allods, as I have said every time I've written about it, is a very good theme park mmorpg. In my opinion it's the best of the WoW clones that popped up like mushrooms in the late noughties and early 2010s. It's like World of Warcraft if it had been made by crazy Russians, which is pretty much the elevator pitch.

The elvator pitch for my Priden experience the last couple of times I played would be "Imagine WoW with no quests at all and the only zone is Mulgore". I did try grinding mobs to get to fourteen to see if a new questline opened up but it was so slow I just couldn't do it. And I like grinding mobs for xp.

After ten minutes in game this morning I was about ready to give up again. I still couldn't find a single NPC who wanted anything done and the spiders I killed gave no xp at all. As I was set to leave the game for another five years, I thought to check my bags to see if I'd missed anything. 

This might be the game where I finally play an elf...

There were no quest starters lurking in the corners but I did find a consumable that said it would boost my xp by 30k. It looked like it meant it would give me a boost per kill until until I'd made that much, which wasn't great but might at least do something to help. 

I must have misread the instructions because I clicked on it and BOOM! Instant level 14!

Yeah, level fourteen. It's no big deal, is it? Doesn't even end in a five or a zero. But it changed everything because at fourteen there it is! The next racial quest! And from there they just keep coming.

I spent the next two hours very happily questing away, vaguely trying to follow the increasingly baroque storyline and struggling to keep up with the never-ending torrent of upgrades. Every quest gave me something new and at one point I got more than a dozen boxes all at once, every one of which had an upgrade to a different item.

Probably should have saved those for later but based on my history with Allods "later" could be a long time coming. I've had this account six years and I've played one character and my total played time is eight hours and eight minutes. There are mmorpgs where I've played longer than that on launch day.

Advertisement for an expansion I'm never going to see.

When I logged out I was level seventeen. There was a heady moment around level sixteen when I thought I'd come to the end of the racial storyline and maybe I was going to get to choose a team but it was just the end of a chapter not the whole tale.

I finally went and looked it up. Priden don't get to leave the island until around level twenty-five. At this rate thta's going to be some time in 2025. 

Or maybe it'll be this weekend. Just so long as the quests keep coming. Allods is fun. Always was. I might keep playing. I would like to see some of those dungeons, with that team of NPCs that mows down everything without me having to lift a paw. I've never been in a dungeon in Allods since beta and that didn't go well as I remember.

No promises but I might be back. At least long enough to get off the damn island.

Black Cat Moan

I feel I ought to say something about the current "beta test" that's running in Guild Wars 2. I don't want to say anything about it. I don't have anything to say about it. I just feel I should.

I've been posting about GW2 since well before launch and I seem to have fallen into a pattern of reviewing, or at least commenting on, just about every update and event the game throws at me. If you maintain a gaming blog for long enough, this is a thing that happens. 

I absolutely did not start out intending to keep up a running commentary on certain mmorpgs like some kind of self-appointed sports announcer or game historian. I thought I'd post neat little vignettes about niche topics that interested or amused me, which is basically what I used to do when I wrote articles for comics fanzines in the 1980s.

The thing is, back then I only had to come up with a couple of topics each month at most. The zines I wrote for appeared at best bi-monthly or quarterly but schedules were flexible to be polite about it. Some months I was lucky if anyone was publishing anything at all. I certainly didn't have to come up with something fresh to write about every other day, week in, week out, year after year.

I couldn't have, then, even if anyone had asked me, which they didn't. Times change, though. As must have become obvious long since, I don't find it too much of a struggle, doing it now. I could probably give you five hundred words on why I have a twenty-year old box of fireworks in a 1950s kitchen cabinet in my front room. 

I mean, just read that sentence back. A sentence I pulled out of my ass thin air without preparation or forethought, by the way. Why fireworks? Why a quarter of a century? Why a kitchen cabinet? Why 1950s? Why the front room? 

It's all in there. This stuff writes itself. I don't claim it's worth reading when it's written but getting words on the page? That's easy.

And that's the kernel of the problem, if we're going to call it a problem. If you sit in front of a blank screen with no pre-conceived plan, the stuff that ends up on the page is going to be whatever's going on around you, what's in your mind, how you live, the things you do, the things you think about - the ambient, existential hum that surrounds us all. 

If you play games it's going to be those games. And once you get started, chronicling those games, it gets to be a habit, then a responsibility. It happens faster than you'd imagine.

Back up a minute. If that's how it works, how did fireworks get in here? Isn't that a bit of a weird, random call? Can't be any fireworks in my immediate environment at eleven on a Thursday morning, surely?

Well, it was like this. I wrote the first sentence of the third paragraph in this post and then I thought "I need an example to prove that's true or else I'm going to sound like I'm just making stuff up". Not that there's anything wrong with making stuff up but that's a different post.

I started thinking about that thing you do at school on a Wednesday afternoon, late in the term, where the teacher writes some bland phrase on the board and you're supposed to sit quietly for forty minutes writing something no-one's ever going to read. Classic burnout teaching.

It was often something like a "The life of a penny" or "My back yard". Not that anyone in my childhood would ever have said "yard" when they meant "garden". I'm not sure any of  this ever happened, now I see it in print. Maybe it's just in books and old children's TV shows. This is what I meant by making things up. 

Anyway, whether it did or it didn't we're there now.

The first thing I thought of was safety matches. I have no idea why. No, wait, yes I do. It was because I was thinking how boring a way to get kids to write it was and that made me think of other childhood hobbies that are infamously boring, which made me think of collecting cheese labels, a thing I often saw quoted as the definition of pointless obsession when I was growing up. 

Collecting cheese labels made me think of collecting matchbox labels which made me think of matches which made me think of "Which is better? Safety matches or regular matches?" as a topic, which is something I did once hear being discussed. 

I started to think about that but I bored myself before I even got going, which is presumably why my mind fluttered onto what you might do with the matches, safety or not, and that put the idea of fireworks into my mind.

"Fireworks" immediately made me remember I have a box of Black Cat fireworks in the white 1950s
kitchen cabinet with yellow trim that we have in the front room downstairs. I bought them back when the children were quite small, meaning to set them off in the back garden (never "yard") for Bonfire Night but on the day it was raining so we did something else.

The fireworks stayed in the cupboard and for a few years I kept meaning to use them but I never did, probably because we started going to organized displays instead of doing our own thing. Honestly, I don't remember. For whatever reason, the fireworks stayed there and after a time I started to think they might be so old they would be dangerous to use so they went on staying there.

Every year I wonder whether to get them out and give them a go but it always seems like more trouble than it's worth and anyway now I kind of like having them being so old and never used. Still with the shrink wrap intact. It makes them feel vintage. Can you even get Black Cat fireworks any more? 

Feeling vintage is why we have a kitchen cabinet in our front room, by the way. I was visiting my mother not that long before I bought those fireworks and she happened to mention how someone she knew was about to get rid of a 1950s kitchen cabinet, one of the ones that's six foot tall with glass doors and an enameled shelf that slides out. 

It sounded exactly like the one in our kitchen when I was growing up. Mrs Bhagpuss and I had not long moved into the house we're still living in now and we had plenty of space to fill. I asked my mother if she thought her friend would let me have the cabinet and she said she'd ask. A week later it was in our house.

Of course, it wouldn't fit in the kitchen. The kitchen has fitted units. There's no space for a six foot tall free standing cabinet. But the front room happened to have an alcove into which the cabinet fits perfectly and since it was a classic, retro design I thought it would look good there. Not that we ever use that room for anything but storage but still - front room, eh? A piece of furniture has to believe it's made it when it gets that spot, right?

All of which demonstrates two things:

1. I really can turnout 500 words about anything. Closer to 800 in this case.
   
2. I'd rather write about old furniture than GW2's latest Elite Specializations

Guild Wars 2 currently has, I think, twenty-seven "specs" for its nine official classes. Each class (or "Profession" as absolutely no-one but the devs ever call them) has the original Core version, each of which itself splits into far too many builds to count. 

Each of the two expansions then adds another Elite Specialization to every Core class. Most people think of those Elite Specs as though they were classes and the developers endorse that by referring to them and "balancing" them as if that's what they were. They should, because that's what they are.

Just as I seem to have locked myself into posting about every minor event in the game, so the devs have found themselves trapped in a recurring cycle of class escalation. Players expect new Elite Specs with every expansion, just as they expect new Legendary weapons. If ArenaNet attempted to foist an expansion on its core audience without both those things it would spell the end of the game.

Unfortunately, while the game can handle any number of spectacularly flashy weapons, since every last one of them has the exact same functionality, it cannot possibly cope with the ever-increasing number of classes, particularly given that, in order to be accepted by the people paying the bills, every new class needs to be demonstrably better - or at the very least different - to the ones we already have.

I am not the target market for any of this. I've been playing Guild Wars 2 as my main mmorpg for nine straight years now. I have three accounts and nineteen max level characters. I play every day. I do not own a Legendary weapon and nor do I want one. 

More cogently for this post, although I have characters of all the original eight classes, plus the ninth, Revenant (the only official new class, added with the first expansion, Heart of Thorns) I have only bothered to acquire fewer than half of the Elite Specs and of those I regularly play just one, the Tempest.

I know what I like. I tried a lot of variations and builds as I levelled in GW2 and fairly early on I settled for the Elementalist as my profession of choice. When Heart of Thorns arrived I tried out most of Elite Specs - Dragonhunter, Reaper, Scrapper, Chronomancer, Daredevil, Druid and Tempest - and did the Ascended Weapon quests (Please stop calling them quests!ANet) for several. 

It was fun. I like HoT and I like the weapon quests. I even played some of the specs for a bit - Reaper and Druid particularly. In the end, though, the only one that stuck was the Tempest. 

When Path of Fire arrived I was hoping for more of the same but I didn't get on with that expansion at all. I only tried three of the new elites - Firebrand and Scourge, because they were absolutely required in WvW at various times if you were playing a Guardian or a Necromancer and wanted people not to yell at you in zergs - and Weaver, the Elementalist elite.

I quite liked Weaver but it took a lot more effort and concentration to play than Tempest. Commanders continued to at least tolerate Tempests in WvW (and indeed Core Elementalists, too) so I dropped Weaver and carried on as I was. I like setting stuff on fire then running away, what can I tell you?

When End of Dragons, the third GW2 expansion arrives next year I'll try the new Elementalist Elite Spec. Can't tell you what it's called yet. It hasn't been announced. Who knows, maybe it will even be good enough to persuade me to replace Tempest with whatever it turns out to be.

I'll probably even give it a run when the beta process (aka promotional event) that features the Elementalist arrives. Might as well get myself vaccinated against disappointment early, I guess.

What I am not going to do, though, is make a whole series of temporary, disposable characters of classes I barely play just to see some Elite Specs I'll never use. Not out of any misplaced sense of obligation. Not even to get a post out of it, something I can manage perfectly well without even logging in  other than to get a screenshot of the blank slots. 

 Still, felt I should say something about it, if only out of duty and habit. So I have.

I Got Class

Telwyn put up a post about classes that started me thinking. It does seem like a given that more classes must be better, doesn't it? 

Without getting into the whole choice paralysis quagmire, when I look at a new game, the more classes there are, the more interested I'm likely to be. Conversely, when I see one of those generic Warrior/Mage/Thief/Healer set-ups, my inclination these days is to pass.

As a casual player (let's not start that discussion again...) there really aren't many downsides to a game having more classes than a community college. All I have to do is pick the ones I like and leave the rest. It's not like it's going to affect anything I'm going to be doing. A game would have to be very old school to insist on specific classes for solo leveling or at-cap solo content. 

Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you? Except it doesn't always seem to work that way. For example, I've taken all the core Guild Wars 2 classes up the eighty level ladder to the top and while it's true to say it's never been what you'd call difficult, boy, did it vary in how tedious or frustrating it felt.

I'm not alone in thinking that. You can hear people saying it most days in Queensdale, the starter map of choice for people with strong opinions. At nearly nine years old, GW2 still manages to attract an astonishing number of new players and they're not shy of introducing themselves and telling the world at large what they think of the game. 

Maybe it's the great community that ANet like to brag about that makes people feel comfortable about outing themselves as newbies and asking questions. Like the ever-popular "I'm new. What class should I play?".

Alright, the questions are usually more nuanced than that. And the players asking them aren't always exactly first-timers. Often it'll be more along these lines: "I'm thinking of starting a new character. I tried a Mesmer but I didn't really get on with it so now I'm thinking maybe a Guardian would be easier?" (Yes, a Guardian would be easier. The only thing easier than playing a Guardian would be hiring someone to play the game for you. Which, if you're playing a Guardian, you pretty much already did...).

Okay, okay. Cheap shot. My point is, even with just nine basic classes, plenty of people clearly feel overwhelmed.  

Except GW2 doesn't have nine classes, does it? It has nine classes multiplied by how many weapons each class can use because each weapon changes 100% of  the combat skills. (Yes, alright, 50% if you have two weapons and only change one. Don't be picky!)

I've been playing an Elementalist since 2013. Actually, since 2012, but at first I was moving from class to class like Tom Cruise on top of a train. Within a few months of GW2's launch I'd played all eight classes to the cap. It only took about two weeks for each of them. 

It took me a while to settle on a favorite but eventually I ended up mostly playing Eles on all three of my accounts. You might think that would mean I'd have a good idea by now how to play the class. I mean, 10,000 hours and all that, right? 

Nope. I can play a core staff elementalist and a staff Tempest and that's it. I have no more idea how to play an Ele wielding dagger and scepter than someone who'd never played the class at all. 

Exaggerating for effect there, obviously. There's a good deal of transferable knowledge in the traits and so on. But the spells? The rotation? The synergies? Not. A. Clue.

GW2 players and anyone paying attention will have noticed the word "Tempest" a couple of paragraphs back. That's another class. Wait, didn't he say there were only nine of them? Thanks for noticing and why, yes I did!

Tempest isn't a "class" nor yet a "profession" (We'll get to those. Be patient.). Tempest is an "Elite Specialization". Elite specs are what Anet use to make absolutely sure the game will never be balanced and most classes will be considered "broken" until the heat death of the universe.

When they were designing the first expansion and following some kind of precedent from the original Guild Wars, where collecting and combining skills to make different builds made up a huge part of the supposed charm, ANet thought it would go down well with the fans if they added a way to change your class without, y'know, actually changing your class.

Not that we have classes in GW2. Profession is the preferred term. (I said I'd get to it). And there are eight of them.

Sorry. Sorry! Nine. I meant nine. I forgot Revenants. I always forget Revenants and that's because I can't understand them. I have one. I levelled him to 80, no idea how. Never knew what he was doing. Never knew what I was doing, come to that. Didn't matter. Leveling in GW2 is that easy. They could put a thousand classes in there and it wouldn't make any difference. They could all face-roll to cap. Although as I said some of them would bore you into a coma doing it.

The Revenant, though, isn't a true core profession. It can't be. It isn't available in the core game. Not that the core game exists any more. And yet that core game set to remain the de facto default setting so long as it's all ANet's willing to give away for free. 

Come to think of it, you can't buy Heart of Thorns any more either, which is where the Revenant was introduced. If you want HoT now, you have to take it rolled up with Path of Fire, the second expansion, the one that doesn't include any new professions at all. Just nine more new elite specs.

Confused yet? Don't worry, so are the devs. Someone didn't think it through, did they? I guess when upper management were all chanting "We don't need expansions. We won't make expansions" it seemed safe enough. No more expansions means no more awkward additions to the roster and no more balancing nightmares. Well, no new balancing nightmares.

So they're making another expansion. And it has to have more classes - sorry, elite specs. Otherwise half the potential audience would walk away. And it doesn't matter what they're called, they're classes and with two expansions down we've got twenty-seven of them. 

When End of Dragons arrives we'll have thirty-six. We'll have to. People expect them. There'd be hell to pay if an expansion didn't come with more legendary weapons and a new elite spec for each of the professions.

New legendaries are safe. They don't affect gameplay at all. They just need to be flashier than the last lot. Elite specializations, though, those either have make the core class more powerful or allow it to do something it previously couldn't. If not, why would anyone be interested? 

That's what happened with every expansion to date (all two of them). The introduction of new classes brought sweeping changes to group composition in both competitive and co-operative play. For a while everyone wanted druids or weavers or firebrands or soulbeasts or scourges or whatever Metabattle told them they wanted. 

And for every new class that made flavor of the month, another lost their chair. (Maybe that's why ANet started selling actual chairs in the Gem store...). 

I focus on GW2 because I know it, because I play it and because I think it's a fairly extreme example of the problems that can come with adding new classes. 

At first sight ANet's task looks manageable. Just nine classes. That doesn't sound too bad. World of Warcraft has a dozen. EverQuest II has twenty-six. Only, as I think I've made clear, that's not really how it works.

If the third expansion follows precedent, GW2 will effectively have three dozen classes. Leaving aside the separate issue of who has access to what under the variety of various current, legacy and future combinations of expansion ownership and membership level, there's absolutely no evidence the developers on board have the capacity to balance the classes they already have so how they're going to manage with nine more on top is anyone's guess. Anyone's guess so long as that guess is "badly".

The worst part is that in order for the expansion to be as attractive as possible to the maximum number of players, the new classes will have to outperform the old ones for at least a few months before eventually being dialled back. Or players will have to believe they do. It's the same thing.

As anyone who's ever played an mmorpg and gotten themselves involved with the conversations around it will know, what players believe is going on and what is really going on have very little to do with each other. And it's not facts that matter. It's feelings.

More classes mean more people feeling their class is being ignored, more people calling for buffs to their favorites and nerfs for everyone else. It's not just just class envy, either. With the perception that one class is better than another comes the expectation that some classes are more worth playing than others. Even if someone enjoys their underperforming class there's peer pressure to drop it and swap to something more efficient. Or at least more fashionable.

I watched that happen in EverQuest when Beastlords were added. BLs weren't the best at anything much but they were great at lots of things. Having one in your group meant you could do without several other classes. I played a Beastlord then and even in friendly groups with people I knew well there was sometimes tension.

The bad feeling was such that a decade later, when it was announced the class was finally coming to EQII, the forums almost caught fire. Even today you can hear people complain about the very existence of Beastlords in the game.

If you play on your own, the way I play EverQuest II, that doesn't matter. I played a bruiser for years when aparently it was the most useless, broken, worthless class. I didn't even notice. Now I play a Berserker, which I learned recently is dangerously overpowered and ripe for a few hard swipes with the nerf bat. Didn't notice that, either.

But I can bet I'd be brought up to speed pretty fast if I ever decided to start grouping again. Players who talk to each other in mmorpgs tend to talk about which class is better quite a lot. It takes a strong personality to keep on playing the outliers when it feels like everyone's looking at you with either pity or contempt.

Of course, there's always the old saw about bringing the player not the class. That one works two ways. Sometimes it means design the game so any class can do the job and everyone can play anything they want. Sometimes it means if the player's good enough they can outperform most players even when they're playing at a disadvantage.

I don't mean any of this to suggest mmorpgs shouldn't have lots of classes. Not at all. It works for me. And even though the game isn't all about me, the flip of this coin is that nothing in mmorpgs is ever truly balanced. Balance itself is a myth. Yes, adding new classes always creates winners and losers but every balance patch does that anyway, if it does anything at all. With new classes you can just see it coming.

All I'm saying is that more classes isn't a universal good. It sounds like it would be but it's not. At best it's added complexity. At worst tt's a recipe for chaos, disruption and discontent.

And I'm fine with that. Just so long as they don't nerf Eles. 

Again.

Buckle Up! (The One And Only Spacey Catgirl)

One of the things that supposedly got me all excited for the launch of EverQuest II's Reign of Shadows expansion late last year was the inclusion of the Vah Shir as a playable race. One of my most-played characters in the original EverQuest was a Vah Shir Beastlord and I have a huge fondness both for the race and the lore surrounding it.

I say "supposedly" because although I was eager enough to fork over the required thousand Daybreak Cash for an extra character slot months ago it turned out I wasn't keen enough to use it until today.

 Partly it's that I've had other things on my mind. First Disco Elysium, then Valheim. Serial game-buying isn't conducive to parallel game-playing, it would appear. Who'd have guessed?

Mostly, though, it was that I couldn't make up my mind what class to choose. I had it narrowed down to either a Magician or one of the Scouts, which wasn't really narrowing it down all that far. There are seven scouts.

As is usual with these dilemmas, really I knew what I wanted. I fancied playing a Mage. So a couple of hours ago I logged in and made a Swashbuckler.

It was a practical decision. I don't have any characters on Skyfire who wear chain armor. I keep getting the stuff and I can't do much with it other than transmute it for mats and I don't need any more mats right now. Selling it for a pittance to NPC vendors annoys me. I might want another cloth class but I need someone who wears chain.

For a given value of "need", that is. There's not much prospect of any new character I make getting played regularly, let alone seriously. I have six max level characters already and only one of them is up to scratch, even by my louche, casual standards.

Race and class decided, next came the rest of the panoply of choices: gender, appearance, alignment, starting city, server. And, of course, name. The tough one.

I looked at the male first. Geez... Remember the EQ Next Kerran? The one everyone hated? Looked a lot better than the male Vah Shir with his head shaped like an anvil - if the anvil was made out of dough. Hard nope.

The female didn't look a lot better until I hit randomize and a perfectly palatable cat-person appeared. She even had cheekbones. I spent a while going through the options. There didn't seem to be nearly as many as some other races get. Only five hairstyles? Six, if you count "Bald". Which I definitely don't. And Vah Shir have to make do with Kerran voices? Shabby.

Doesn't really matter how many or how few the options are, so long as you can get something you're happy with, I guess. I was pleased with my new look. Very different from anything else I play these days. 

Alignment was a given: Vah Shir have to be good. That means starting in one of three places: Qeynos, New Halas or Kelethin. Of the three I only really like Qeynos. Kelethin is just impossible. All those platforms. And elves. New Halas I find bleak and depressing. It makes me feel cold just looking at it. Can't they at least put doors on their shacks?

What I really wanted was a new starting area just for Vah Shir, of course. When I saw in the promotional material for Reign of Shadows that we'd be getting both the city of Shar Vahl and the zone outside it, Shadeweaver's Thicket, I naively imagined Vah Shir player-characters would get to start there, just like they did in EverQuest. 

No such luck. Everything in RoS is determinedly designed for level 120s only. As I discovered later, you even have to be max level to start the Vah Shir racial questline. 

I do get why Daybreak wouldn't want to add yet another starting area, even if they had the resources to develop one. We already have a choice of six and that's not even counting Qeynos and Freeport, which still retain almost all of the original starting content for anyone who knows where to go. Still, it's hard to call yourself a true mooncat if you have to grow up on earth. On Norrath. Oh, you know what I mean... 

Smell that sea air!

 

In the end it was a purely nominal decision. I picked Qeynos but I was only there for a few minutes. Taking Qeynos as your starting option doesn't mean you start in in Qeynos, anyway. Oh, no. That would be far too straightforward.

Logging in for the first time, I found myself once again on the good ship Far Journey. The days when that spurred a fizzling burst of nostalgia are long gone. I've done the trip to the Isles of Refuge to death in recent years. Fortunately, as a member, there's always the option of instant travel. 

Without moving from my spawn-in spot on deck I popped up the map and clicked on Qeynos. See that, Captain Varlos? No one needs you!

I'd already decided I was going to use a level boost. I have a fury in the nineties on Skyfire and a dirge in her twenties on Kaladim, both of whom I'm actively, if sporadically, levelling the old-fashioned way. I don't need to start over again just now. 

The question was, which level boost?

Now I want to go see if the Proving Grounds still exist...

Looking through my banks and /claim, I found half a dozen to choose from: two Level 100 boosts, three 110s and a 120. After the recent discussion on experience vials (two more sold overnight, by the way, but again to the same guy, who put them straight up for sale, so I'm still none the wiser) I thought I'd go for the 100 option and maybe experiment a little.

The boost I picked was one I'd picked up in some Proving Grounds promotion. Remember the Proving Grounds? No, I don't imagine anyone else does, either. Another flower gone to seed.

I applied the boost, dinged 100 and received a care package. I spent a few minutes unpacking it all, getting dressed and sorting out my new set of 24-slot bags. Then I opened my Knowledge Book and spent a lot longer reading every new combat art and slotting them all onto my hot bars (which I'd copied from my Berserker, as I always do, even though it means starting with a lot more slots than I'm going to need right away).

Next I opened the Claim window and claimed one of every "per character" item in there, except for the Veteran packs, half of which I know from experience will end up filling my bags with stuff I won't ever get round to using. 

For some incomprehensible reason the Proving Grounds boost comes with one of the most irritating mounts, a giant wiggly worm that gets in everyones' way at the bank and has an undulating motion that makes me nauseous. And I don't even suffer from motion sickness. Fortunately I have other mounts I can claim so it was off to the imaginary stables for Faerelith, The Obedient One.

Seriously? That's the mount you went with? It couldn't have been a horse?

It was all going nicely. I was about ready to go try out my new skills. And then it occurred to me. I was heading to Plane of Magic, the obvious, indeed possibly the only, choice at 100. And what would be waiting for me at the zone-in?

Tishan's Lockbox, of course. And inside it, a full set of gear and weapons that would make everything I'd just equipped obsolete. 

Fine! I'll just go swap it all out, then. It won't take a minute. So I did that. Only none of the gear comes with adornments. I have bags and bags full of those. I just have to remember who's got them. Or I could make some new ones. It's not like I don't have the mats.

But hang on... I'm going to need the Panda quest adorns, too. Good thing I have instant travel.

It's a big upgrade but the sad thing is
I had a load of even better Level 100 gear in the bank
until I melted it all down for parts.

I won't go on. I'm sure you get the drift. It took me the best part of an hour and a half to get my new Vah Shir Swashbuckler to the point where I felt ready to take her adventuring, by which time lunch was ready, so I had to log out. And then I came here to write this. 

Will I ever get to play her? Yes, I expect so. Eventually. I want to do the Vah Shir racial questline for one thing. Unfortunately, it starts in Shar Vahl and you need to be 120 before Animist Sanura will even speak to you. So I have some work to do.

In a way it makes me wonder how new and returning players manage but then they probably won't have anything like as many confusing, overlapping and conflicting choices as someone like me, who's been playing forever and still has nearly all the freebies ever handed out just sitting around, waiting to be used. If you were a real newbie you'd probably either begin at level one and play properly or you'd buy the latest expansion, use the max-level boost that comes with it and just accept what it gives you.

My way's more fun, though. No, it is. Really. I'm telling you...