Underpromise, Overdeliver: EverQuest II

When I first read the official announcement  outlining the events Daybreak had scheduled for EverQuest II's fifteenth anniversary celebrations I was underwhelmed. Granted, anniversaries that end in five generally carry less significance than those that end with a zero - and fifteen is definitely neither ten nor twenty. Still, fifteen years of continual operation is a notable achievement for an MMORPG. It deserves recognition and respect.

For what was described as "our big 15th Anniversary event" we were promised something called "Dragon Attack": dragons were scheduled to attack the Ulteran Spires in four zones, Thundering Steppes, Everfrost, Loping Plains, and Nektulos Forest. Backing this up came a tradeskill event, in which we would be tasked with "constructing permanent, impressive statues commemorating the 15 years that have passed since the Age of Destiny".

Is he looking at me? He's not, is he?

The list of rewards from the crafting quest looked a tad thin and there was no mention of the pay-off for protecting the spires from dragons. The press release also tied the annual Heroes Festival, which falls at this time each year, into the anniversary celebrations as if it was part of them. That seemed a bit cheeky to me.

It didn't help that there was a 15th Aniversary Celebration Bundle in the store, stuffed to bursting with really tempting treats including a crafting table that works for any tradeskill, a 66-slot bag, a 100% fee-reducing, 100 slot broker crate, speed-enhancing boots, a mount and lots more. Very good value at $34.99 but perhaps a little galling when compared with what I thought were rather lackluster in-game rewards.

And then I logged in and discovered I was wrong on every count. The event is excellent and so are the rewards. I spent most of yesterday killing dragons and having a rare old time. As I sit here now I'm alternating between writing this post and killing more. Whether by good fortune or good design, EQII's fifteenth birthday party is turning out to be one of the most enjoyable I've attended for quite a while.

Note bunny and shovel from previous events. Cloak too, probably.

Dragon Attack and Heroes Festival mesh a little chaotically but work well together. Structurally very similar, they each consist of a series of public quests in which very large creatures with quadrillions of hit points appear at easy-to-access locations on a fairly predictable schedule.

All the mobs are raid-level so it relies on a good turnout if things are going to go smoothly. We certainly have that for now. Heroes Festival is a little more forgiving on numbers, although not by much.

It features "clothwork" puppets representing famous villains from the lore. They're notionally operated by a theater troupe of NPCS and are nothing more than giant pinatas. I'm not sure if they even fight back. Dragon Attack features guess what? Dragons. They do fight and there are even some tactics required, as outlined in the wiki.

You can't fool me. You're not a real dragon!

All of the dragons and most of the puppets appear right next to a wizard spire, meaning anyone can get to them with the minimal of travel time. There's a ten minute warning before they arrive and once they're in place there's a nominal timeframe in which they have to be killed, something like 90 minutes.

Each dragon has a one-hour respawn time and right now they're taking five or ten minutes to die. With people doing them in a fairly strict rotation that means the next is along in about the same time it takes to kill one, if not sooner.

Indeed, because the two events are on different schedules, there's frequently a dragon and a puppet up at the same time. It's possible to chain-kill with no more than a few five or ten minute intervals now and again. I did that for about four hours at a stretch yesterday and it was a lot of fun.

Everyone lines up along the crater rim for this one. People are weird.

There's a real carnival atmosphere at the moment, on this first weekend. Every dragon and puppet draws a crowd, even on my low-pop server, Skyfire. Yesterday afternoon and evening there were sometimes enough people to spawn second instances of the zones. I crashed twice because of the strain a hundred players, their pets and minions put on my graphics card.

General chat is busy with people asking which dragons or puppets are up and with people who are killing them reporting the progress. We even had someone roleplaying a TV reporter for a while. I've heard no complaints save one - someone was moaning that having these two events plus the expansion beta all at once meant there was too much to do!

My haul from Saturday,
not including the stuff I equipped.

As for the rewards, which I turned my nose up at when I read about them, I was completely wrong. They're great! Very generous and sufficiently desirable to bring people out of their usual instances to get them.

The Dragons drop very good gear for Mercenaries (every piece I've had has been a major upgrade), Illegible Spell Scrolls (needed for spell upgrades and something I virtually never see drop as a solo player), and Infusers for gear (which I'm saving to use on the inevitable upgrades from questlines in the upcoming expansion).

The most important drop for me, though, is Mount equipment. Levels and gear for mounts was a keynote feature of last year's expansion, Chaos Descending, but it was one that I spent most of the year ignoring. Until this weekend none of my mounts had a single piece. Now I have a saddle and some barding equipped and more than a dozen more mount items in my bags.

Last, and very much not least, there's an Achievement for killing all four dragons. I'm not much for Achievements in general but it's different when they come with one of the best "mounts" I've ever seen in the game.

It may seem odd that I'm sounding so enthusiastic about a mount when only a few weeks ago I was bemoaning their very existence but the name of the mount in question should go some way to explaining why that is: Reveal Inner Dragon.

Technically an actual mount, this is really an illusion. You place it in your Mount Appearance slot (you can put it in the main Mount slot if you want but it doesn't have very good stats) and you become a dragon. A really good-looking dragon at that.

Look at me! I'm a dragon!

I want one for all my Level 110s. The Berserker has one and the Warlock will before I finish this post. That leaves four more. I may well get it for the lower level characters on other servers too. While the dragons are Level 110 Epic X3 raid mobs, you get credit for just being there when the kill happens so any level can complete the achievement provided they don't mind dying now and again.

That's the adventurer side of Dragon Attack. To keep this post to a manageable length for once I'll cover the crafter's version separately. Suffice to say it's pretty good, too.

As for the returning Heroes Festival, which I so glibly dismissed on sight as "more of the same", I'd completely missed the part of the press release that mentions the five new collections added this year. Even if I'd seen it, I wouldn't have known that the rewards for those include three new mounts.

Not really! Don't kill me!

As for the new items added to the Heroes Festival vendors to be bought with the currency you get for doing the event, if it wasn't for the invaluable EQ2 Traders I wouldn't have known there were some wonderful old school paintings (the ones without the horrible new frames) and one of the best sets of appearance armor I've seen in the game for years. The PR team might have mentioned that...

Dragon Attack runs until December 6th and Heroes Festival to November 19 so there's plenty of time to get everything done. At the moment everything is buzzing and it's easy and fun but as people run their alts through the cycles and get all the rewards they want I imagine it will quieten down considerably.

I wouldn't leave it too long - all the targets are raid mobs and I can tell you from experience that even with the puppets that don't fight back it takes a handful of players an awfully long time to whittle one down. I imagine that's why the event allows an hour and a half for the kill.

All in all I give this anniversary celebration a hearty cheer. So much better than I thought it was going to be. Thanks and congratulations to the dev team once again. Maybe someone needs to pop round to the PR department and have a quiet word...



(IntPiPoMo count 55)

All Or Nothing - Post Mortem And Review: GW2

Following Jeremai's advice in the comments on my earlier post on Guild Wars 2's latest Living World episode, All or Nothing, I'm going to say a few things about what I saw there. If anyone hasn't played through the storyline yet but intends to, I'd look away now...

SPOILER BREAK - SPOILER BREAK - SPOILER BREAK  

Go Left! No,The Other Left! : GW2

This post is all spoilers - turn back now or rue the day...

Why We Fight: GW2

Today my cat and I went walking.

It was another lovely day. The sun was warm. The water cool.

 We sat together for a while.

After, as we walked on, he said, "Everything is so beautiful. Why must we fight the dragons? Why can't we just play and fish and sleep in the sun?".

"Oh, Charlie", I said, "You are such a cat!"

And then I took him to The Brand.


So he would understand.

Unintended Consequences : GW2

The wealth of activity the Queen's Jubilee brought to Tyria will all have vanished in a few weeks. The changes to the infrastructure that arrived alongside it will stay with us for the foreseeable future, landing with an impact that has far greater potential for change than a few hot air balloons dotted around the countryside.

The Living Story wrapper tends to obfuscate the normal patching process. Every two weeks we all cast the runes trying to decipher the rambling, incoherent narrative and chase madly after the shiny at the end of the Achievement rainbow.

Meanwhile the traditional tuning and tweaking that marks the progress of an MMO in full sail creaks and groans in the background. In other times, in other games, those are the changes that would be the hotly-debated talking points; here they can pass with barely a comment.

Two innovations slipped in by the back door this time, both greeted with quiet but apparently universal acceptance. Firstly, The Wallet pulls a number of items that were previously held as virtual physical icons out of storage and into a game-window. It's a common practice in MMOs seeking to avoid currency clutter. Secondly, all Champion mobs now leave a Steel Chest behind when they die. Each of these changes has wide-ranging implications for how the game will be played in the future, one very personal, the other very public.

Don't go in dungeons much, eh?

The Wallet raises issues that are mostly metaphysical. For the vast majority of players it will almost certainly be received as a universal good. Who doesn't want to have all their currencies neatly tabulated and stored in one place rather than spread out across the inventories and banks of half a dozen characters? Who doesn't want the vault space back?

Well, people who play their characters as individuals, perhaps? Players who don't see their characters as an amorphous mass of "Toons", mere ciphers of the hand behind the keyboard. Players who don't see why an Engineer who never lifted a flamethrower to defend his borderland should be able to claim a thousand Badges of Honor that were earned in hard battle by some Ranger the Engineer never even met.

It's hardly worth bothering about in GW2, of course. The base unit there is and always has been The Account. All this new refinement really does is shift the underlying structure towards a more coherent form. The game arrived with an ill-thought-out muddle of Account- and Character- based functions that already required a good deal of double-think to reconcile.

As a character-player of longstanding I regret the trend toward Account-based play now becoming widespread across the genre. It makes for lazy play on my part when, as I inevitably do, I take advantage of the indisputable convenience it brings. Under any system, however, character-play ultimately rests in the hands of the person guiding the characters. If I was really that interested I could still keep notes of who earned what to make sure no-one got a free ride.

Alternatively (and it's the lazy fix I choose to make) I can consider all my characters part of a team, create an organization for them in my head and play them accordingly. With two accounts I even have two separate teams, which allows for both co-operation and competition. And banter.

They also serve who only stand and wait at the bank

So The Wallet is assimilable into most existing playstyles. Any changes to gameplay that it brings to the individual player are invisible to others around him or her. Not so the Champion Chests.

This isn't the first time ArenaNet have fiddled with the reward mechanism for stronger creatures. At first Champions, the unnamed Nameds of Tyria, dropped nothing, or rather they had exactly the same chance at dropping exactly the same loot any other, weaker mob around them might drop. So no-one killed them if they could help it. A lot of extra work for no extra reward.

After a few months Champions received a pass that guaranteed they would always drop something. That prospect caused some excitement, which quickly dissipated when it was found that what they always dropped was a Blue item worth a few copper to a vendor or, if you were very lucky, a Green worth a silver or so. End result, Champions continued to be ignored.

Other designs are avaialble

Last week all that changed. Every Champion now drops a Steel Chest. The chest drop mechanic was itself added earlier this year, providing a visual indicator of the quality of loot as it hits the ground. A bag is Basic, Fine or Masterwork, a wooden chest Rare and a steel chest means you've found something Exotic or Ascended. Top of the shop, in other words.

In the case of Champions there's another wrinkle. Inside the chest is the drop the Champion used to have, if any, plus some kind of Exotic bag or pouch and inside that you'll find coin, skill points, crafting materials, weapons and armor, and if you're very, very lucky, a unique weapon skin. And that has become, overnight, quite literally a game-changer.

A few months ago a similar change was made to "World Bosses", the Dragons and other meta-events around Tyria. They began to give first a flurry of Rares and then another guaranteed Rare on top of that. For a while there was a frenzy, which then settled to a routine. All but the least-accessible "dragons" were dutifully farmed by medium-sixed zergs day and night.

I first observed the new emergent behavior that has replaced this tradition when I was crossing Frostgorge Sound in search of balloons. Map chat was alive with people calling "Drake", "Shark" and pinging waypoints. It transpires that within days, quite possibly hours, of the new loot changes a whole culture has sprung up. PvE "Commanders" sporting their 100g tags are leading zergs of greed-crazed adventurers on kill sprees through any high-level zone that sustains a large population of fast-respawning Champions.

Wait for meeeeeee

In the spirit of enquiry I joined zergs in Frostgorge and Cursed Shore last night. I learned a lot. For example, the Escort event near Anchorage Waypoint in Cursed Shore can be farmed for anything up to thirty or so Steel Chests in a ten minute run. When it ends there's just enough time to sell the loot and race around another half-dozen Champion spawns in the zone before returning for another go.

This event recycles constantly with an eight-minute refresh, provided you do it right. I forget whether we were supposed to Fail or Succeed, but get that the wrong way round and it's a two-hour wait. We were fortunate enough to have some Commanders guesting from another server where that had happened, or rather where the event had, as they bitterly described it, "been trolled" .

On the right target for once

Our guests were unimpressed with our zerg, which had mustered perhaps thirty or forty people. It was big enough to spawn the Champions required but too small to kill them efficiently. Apparently their own server is already in the habit of bringing three hundred workers to this particular farm. They were also critical of our rotation and our naming conventions, which again have apparently already been codified and set in statute on their home server in less than a week.

This is but the latest revolution in a repeating cycle in which ArenaNet introduces a change that is seen by a significant proportion of the playerbase as a quick and dirty route to loot. It began with the Fractals, which differed slightly in that the driver was loot you couldn't get anywhere else, then moved to the Dragons and now to Champions. Interspersed or layered on top are the limited duration hotspots like the Southsun riots and the current Crown Pavilion.

I'm the last person to say this kind of gameplay isn't fun and people certainly seemed to be having a good time, as was I with the best part of a bottle of red inside me, but I do have to wonder why it's only become fun now that there's a substantial material reward tagged on the end. After all, exactly the same gameplay was available two weeks ago but absolutely no-one was interested in doing it back then.

In 2010 Mike O'Brien, President of ArenaNet, published the GW2 Design Manifesto. In the opening paragraph he wrote "We believe that gamers want to try new things, new experiences, and that they’ll reward the companies who can bring them something new."

Or you could just let them run around smashing loot pinatas. That works too.

Go Play Outdoors! : GW2

For quite a while The Nosy Gamer has been publishing a league table of MMO log-ins garnered from X-Fire under the name of The Digital Dozen. I think I first came across it back when I took my blog-reading cues from VirginWorlds and I haven't done that since before I started Inventory Full.

It's a controversial enterprise because who really knows how many MMO players use X-Fire, Raptr or any other third-party launcher? I'm 99.9% certain that if I'd asked in any guild I've been in in the last decade there'd have been tumbleweed blowing across the chatbox. It would be pushing the envelope to ask most people I've played with over the years to find the official forum of the game they were subscribed to; downloading and installing a third-party app so they could log into a game that had its own perfectly serviceable launcher would be looked on as a sign of insanity.

You said "in the water" !

Nevertheless, by dint of persistence alone, The Digital Dozen has become both useful and instructive. It may not tell you how many people are playing MMOs in general or the commercial success of any MMO in particular but it does provide an internally consistent benchmark of one against another, at least insofar as users of X-Fire are concerned.

Since Guild Wars 2 launched it has been pegged in second place behind World of Warcraft. The numbers go up, the numbers go down, the positions stay the same. GW2 is not going to overtake WoW as the West's leading MMO any time soon.

That said, the direction of travel I alluded to recently seems to me to make it more likely that the gap between them will gradually close. As GW2 shifts ground towards the territory staked out out by WoW, so will more barriers preventing players who came to MMOs through WoW from making a comfortable transition drop. And should Blizzard choose to borrow some of GW2's clothes and retro-fit GW2 conveniences to WoW in an attempt to stave off disloyalty and curiosity, that in itself may go some way to buttering defectors paws in their new home.

Hire more tellers!

Both Mrs Bhagpuss and I remarked this week on how very, very busy Yak's Bend has become. There seem to be players pretty much everywhere we go at all times of day and night. I couldn't even see the banker in Lion's Arch through the crowd for most of Sunday and the sewing line at the Tailoring station was six deep.

Part of this may well be more actual people logged in; new players, returnees, regular players playing more. ANet have certainly been very bullish recently both about their sales and their concurrency. One thing that's definitely making the game feel buzzy and busy and bustling right now, though, comes as the direct result of the loot changes in the February update.

Prior to that, the place to be was grinding in Fractals or Dungeons, instanced off out of sight. With everyone farming for Ascended or Legendary progression the outside world risked becoming a place to pass through on the way to Map Completion then swiftly forget.

Never has nuclear clean-up seemed so...worthwhile.

That wasn't really going to happen, of course, because plenty of people have other things on their mind than vertical gear progression. The open world was busy enough with explorers and wanderers, the casual and the curious. Big ticket events were already funneling in the hordes for a crack at the slim chance of finding something worth having in the Big Chest.

Post-patch, that funnel has turned into a fire-hose. Maps with events featured on Guild Wars Temple's Dragon Timer now go into overflow as often as not. If you want a shot at Jormag's Claw you'd best be there before the 75-minute window of opportunity even opens. Latecomers can cool their heels in an alternate Frostgorge with only some bonus Orichalcum for consolation (although they may be lucky as I was to find the Claw screeching his defiance even in Overflow).

Barbecue at the beach...

There are rumbles of discontent, albeit mild ones. Guesting is currently taking the brunt of lock-out bitterness as disgruntled locals complain that incomers are taking all their dragons. There's some occasional graveyard humor about GW2 becoming the world's first AFK MMO. In general, though, people seem to be enjoying themselves.

The run up to every chest-dropper is like a little mini-event in itself, with impromptu costume brawls, dance parties and heavy map banter. The spirit is good because, by and large, people are getting what they want and they don't mind waiting for that. The effect on the surrounding world is positive, too, with plenty of players spreading out around the area as they wait, working on Dailies, doing events and generally making the place look lived in.

The new loot route may be as unimmersive and artificial as the one that preceded it, but having it happen out of doors makes all the difference. The guild bounties and missions are equally artificial but they too occur outdoors and that matters. If game design tends to direct players towards certain paths of achievement, it's much better if those paths are out in the open where anyone passing by can join in.

...barbecue at the bank.

So, it's hard to tell if GW2 really is pulling in more people but there's absolutely no doubt that it feels that way from the inside. Subjectively, the game is heaving and it feels great. And if curious heads do poke in from the MMO world outside, how much better for them to find us all having one enormous party rather than looking at a ghost town and wondering where everyone went.

Playing It Down

Psychochild has a post up that I found an interesting read. 

Scruffy, poster-child for low-level gameplay

My introduction to RPGs was AD&D 2nd Edition and I came to it relatively late, already a year or two out of university. A lot of my attitudes to MMOs derive from the three or four years in the mid 1980s when I played tabletop RPGs every Sunday afternoon. I think that's where I first developed a strong disinterest, even dislike, of high-level gameplay.
 
There were about five to eight of us at any given session, all in our early-mid 20s and I can clearly remember the increasing dissatisfaction of the group as the levels of our characters rose. Somewhere around level seven most of us were beginning to struggle to empathize with their increasingly baroque lives. I know I was, anyway. I retired my half-elf ranger at level 8 and rerolled a dwarf cleric, who didn't make it even that far. From then on our group played a series of  different RPGs, never getting much above low level and I think we were all a lot more comfortable with that.

Kill it? I'm getting a crick in the neck just looking at it!

The problem for me at least, was that I found the plots we were involved with and the opponents we were facing increasingly hard to care about. Help a village deal with bandit attacks on outlying farms? Fine! Investigate some ruins seen from the highway? Why not? Hire on to protect a merchant caravan? Good honest work. Travel to another plane to fight demons or demi-gods? Give me a break!

Newt or dragon? You decide.

Ever since then I've very strongly preferred low-level gameplay. In my first few months of Everquest I decided I would never kill a dragon, putting that down as a line in the sand between my characters and silliness. I managed to keep that rule for many years, although I broke it eventually. 


The attritional drip drip drip of high-level content in all MMOs got to me in the end. I've seen my share of gods and demons and defeated quite a few. Call it immersion fatigue. Still, though, I spend much more of my time clearing bandit camps and skinning animals. I imagine it'll always be that way. I hope so, anyway.