Evil Is As Evil Does

It seems very old-fashioned now, but when EverQuest launched back in 1999, good vs evil was a real thing. Among a number of really quite significant choices you had to make at character selection was whether you were going to be a goodie or a baddie. Yes, Virginia, back then that sort of thing actually mattered!

If you chose to be Evil with a capital E you'd pick an Officially Evil race, Troll being the most reviled until the first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, when they had to cede that honor to the Iksar. Ogres came next followed by Dark Elves, who were more your suave, sinister evil masterminds. Or you could pick a good or neutral race and be Necromancer or a Shadowknight, which would mean your career would overwrite your racial heritage, a popular choice for anyone who wanted to be a Bad Gnome.

Most races had a city of their own and there were a lot of races. For maybe the first decade, most MMORPGs came with multiple races, alignments, classes and starting cities. Extensive choice was was one of the defining principles of the genre. If you picked an evil class that had to share space with goody-goodies, you'd get your own secret hideouts within the walls, often underground or in the sewers.

And you'd better have done your homework before you started. Character creation in the early days didn't mean tweaking sliders until you had something you could bear to look at. It meant getting a character you'd be able to play for more than a few sessions before you were forced to re-roll and start over. 

It was entirely possible to gimp your character, that being the awkward term in common use back then. If you picked the wrong race/class combo you might not even know anything was wrong until you started to look for groups and found no-one willing to take you on. 

The more immediate problem, though, came when you walked past some innocuous-looking guard standing next to a tower along the roadside out in the middle of nowhere, only to find yourself back at your spawn point, when it turned out you were the evil monster he was guarding that tower from.

In EQ, all of that was fixable over time. You might start out evil (Or good.) but you didn't have to stay that way. Every race had Faction and Faction was a Stat and one of the often-forgotten aspects of EverQuest's gameplay is that it includes a whole raft of stats that go up with use. Everyone talks about leveling up in that game but no-one talks about raising skills, even though EQ is as much skills-based as it relies on levels.

Another, mostly uncelebrated, fact about EverQuest is that at the start it was much more of a sandbox than a theme-park. There was no central storyline and questing, even though it was right there in the name, mostly seemed like an afterthought. There was a great deal of setting your own goals and working towards them and one goal a lot of players who'd picked Team Evil at the start liked to set for themselves was Getting Everyone To Like Me.

I did a bit of that. Not as much as some but enough for it to be the main thing I did for a few weeks on certain characters. My Ogre Shadowknight killed scores of corrupt guards until his faction was good enough to let him hand in their helmets for extra credit, then scores more until eventually he could stroll into the bank in North Freeport and get service like a regular citizen.

I did it partly to see if I could, partly because killing guards was great xp, and mostly because otherwise banking was a fucking nightmare. I'd have had to go all the way back to Oggok in the swamps, three or four zones away, or else to the dark elf city of Neriak, a trek to get there only to end up wandering the maze-like corridors for far too long before I figured out where I was going wrong. 

Before the second expansion, Scars of Velious, which added the icebound city of Thurgadin, filled with dwarves so cut-off from civilization they'd lost most of their prejudices and would trade with anyone, Evil characters were very restricted in things like where they could bank or shop or find services of any kind. Even traveling on the roads through what looked like open countryside could be fatal. The same thing applied to Good characters in reverse, of course, but somehow it never seemed to inconvenience them nearly as much.

The difficulty was compounded by race, meaning evil humans or gnomes would get a pass in places where Ogres and especially Trolls would be killed on sight. Dark Elves flitted somewhere in the middle, their options often hugely improved by the class choices available to them. There was a very good reason why so many DEs decided to become Enchanters, a class with a whole line of spells designed to let them impersonate other races or fool people into treating them nicely.

Thurgadin was all very well but it was even more inconvenient to get to than the racial starting cities. It wasn't until the third expansion, Shadows of Luclin, opened travel gates that took us to the moon, where no-one knew or cared what your alignment was, that it became practical to stay all evil, all the time. 

From then on, alignment and faction gradually lost their power and influence. Well, I say "gradually"... It was more of a landslide.

The fourth expansion, Planes of Power, didn't just add a completely neutral city, it filled that city with every conceivable service and facility, making it by far the most appealing place to set your bind spot, particularly since the expansion also came with the game's first instant, on-demand travel service. Granted, you still had to get to a physical object in the game-world, a "Book", and click on it, but there were Books outside every starting city and in plenty of other places, too, so that wasn't much of a problem.

That was, to most intents and purposes, the end of Good and Evil as a limiting factor in the game. There was and still is a residual effect - try rolling up a High Elf and strolling into Oggok and see how far it gets you - but for almost all practical purposes, it makes no difference any more. We're all murder hobos together and every newly discovered continent or plane or dimension can't tell us apart.

Planes of Power came out in 2002, a couple of years before EverQuest II appeared. You might have thought the experience the dev team had garnered by then might have led them to the understanding that, while some players quite enjoyed the challenge of a faction grind, most preferred to be able to play the game without having to prep first.

Not a bit of it. EQII launched with a hard-coded Good/Evil split that made even Classic EQ look like Hello Kitty Online. Everyone had to be either GOOD or EVIL. The big difference from the elder game was that your alignment was no longer tied to your race. You could be a good troll or an evil high elf. Unlike before, though, you couldn't be a neutral anything.

That was because in EQII your alignment was decided not by anything so crass as what you looked like. What mattered was where you lived. When you reached the end of the introduction on the Isle of Refuge, you had to choose to take ship either to Freeport or Qeynos. Going to Freeport meant you were evil. If you went to Qeynos you were good.

And don't think it wasn't going to matter much in the long run, either. Years after EverQuest had made it seamless for all races and alignments to work together, EQII decided it would be great if it wasn't only the characters who couldn't mix. How about if the players couldn't, either?

You could be in the same guild together but to form the guild everyone had to be of the same alignment and the guild hall would be in that alignment's city so good luck to anyone from the other side who joined later, trying to use the facilities. There was no mailing items to the opposition and quest credit and guild status had some sort of blocks on them, too, as I recall. Shared guild missions were supposed to be a big content driver but apparently no-one in the dev team had thought about that.

That was on a PvE server, of course. On a PvP server you couldn't even group together, let alone share a guild. In fact, screw grouping - you couldn't even talk to the other side. The two cities spoke different languages. But hey, PvP, right? Suck it up!

You didn't have to do that. In both PvP and PvE there was a long and complicated process you could undertake to switch sides. If you were really bloody-minded abut it, you could pause in the middle and become de facto neutral, but that only meant everyone hated you.

Was it popular? Maybe for PvP. On the PvE side of the divide, hell, no, it was not! Everyone hated it, surprise, surprise. Faction restrictions were some of the earliest to be revised and eventually removed. Even before the whole game was revamped by Scott Hartsman a year or so after launch, most of the alignment restrictions for PvE players had already melted away.

A residue remains, all the same. The two cities still nominally retain their alignments although these days there are plenty of other starting cities to pick if you want to be free of the worst of it. Those tend to lean towards one side or the other, even so.

Perhaps the greatest legacy of those bad, old days are the two mighty starting zones, Antonica and Commonlands, the former stretching out from the gates of Qeynos to the Thundering Steppes, the latter from Freeport to Nektulos Forest. Together with the cluster of very low-level zones attached to each city, these vast stretches of land kept most adventurers both busy and apart for the first twenty levels or so.

Back in 2004, I found the whole thing confusing and counter-intuitive. By inclination, I prefer to play neutral or good-leaning characters but Qeynos lagged so badly at launch I couldn't stand to be there. As I remember it, which may not be strictly accurate, Mrs. Bhagpuss and I started off trying to play in Qeynos but had to re-roll because it was just untenable. Freeport had its problems but at least it was a lot easier to move around. 

That we'd also both preferred Freeport to Qeynos in EQ was probably a factor. In EQ, Freeport was more like a neutral city than an evil one. Trolls and Ogres weren't tolerated but Dark Elves and evil classes could move safely through the parts of the city not controlled by the religious factions. Qeynos was a lot less sanguine about that sort of thing and felt a lot more restrictive.

That was how we ended up playing multiple characters on both side of the ideological divide, especially once the lag got sorted out and I'd upgraded my PC. It meant I got to know both Antonica and Commonlands pretty well. 

Maybe next time I'll even get around to talking about one of them.

Retire At Sixty?

This morning I finally dinged sixty in New World. Only took me eight months. I'd put up a screenshot of the onscreen acknowledgement but unfortunately, even though I took one, I don't have it. Neither do I have any of the other shots I took with this post in mind as I edged my way through the back half of level fifty-nine .

Playing New World by way of Steam by way of GeForce Now causes a few practical problems when it comes to taking screenshots. All three have their own ideas about which keys I ought to be using for a start. 

New World's own settings tell me the screenshot function is bound to F7 but pressing that key seems to do nothing at all. Print Screen works, if I can be bothered to tab out and paste the result into Paint.net but that seems awfully like having a dog and barking myself so I'm very resistant to doing it.

I thought I'd figured out a good solution when I realized pressing F12 caused the Steam screenshot confirmation to trigger. I could see the little thumbnail pop up at the bottom right of the screen. I happily snapped away as I played, then I logged out, planning on sorting through them this morning.

After breakfast I sat down with Beryl the dog on my lap. She went to sleep and I spent an unsatisfying hour looking through every conceivable folder on my three hard drives, trying to find where those screenshots had gone. I couldn't find them anywhere and for a very good reason: they weren't there. 

After much googling and YouTubing I learned of several possible locations where the screens might have been. It was good information. All of those places did indeed contain screenshots from the game; just not the ones I took yesterday. 

Eventually I stumbled across a comment on a forum that explained what had happened. The F12 key I'd been using is linked to my Steam Profile, something I have never looked at since the day I made the account. 

When you use that key in game, if you want to keep the shot you also have to press Shift-Tab to open the Screenshot Uploader, then upload the file to your Profile. All the shots you take are held in temporary storage for the duration of the session but if you don't upload them they're permanently deleted as soon as you log out.

I expect everyone reading this knew that already. I wish I had! 

It still doesn't explain how I have a whole folder on one of my drives, filled with screenshots of New World , all taken via GeForce Now. I must have known how to do it once, even if I don't know any more.

I kept looking until I found another mention somewhere that suggested using Ctrl-1 to take screenshots that would go to GeForce Now's Gallery. I logged in yet again to test it and it worked! That's where the shots in the post come from. Now all I have to do is remember for next time, which is the main reason I'm putting all the tedious detail in this post.

By the time I'd done all of that, Beryl was fidgeting so it was another hour or so before I was able to get back in and complete the final quest in the Marauder Faction line. I wanted to do that so I could become a Commander and have access to the level fifty-eight gear in the Faction shop.

Happily for me, no-one seems to use GeForce Now on a weekday morning. I must have logged in and out half a dozen times and there wasn't a single person ahead of me in the queue, not even once. Even though I only have a Free account, it effectively gives me instant access during my usual play-hours, while letting my ancient PC run games it struggles to play natively. I think a little bit of fiddliness over screenshots is a small price to pay for that.

I'd had the Level Sixty Faction quest for a a long, long time. I did all the others at or usually below the recommended level but the penultimate one was quite tough so I thought it might be pushing it to try a "Recommended 60" quest in the very low fifties, as I was when I took it.

The quest asked me to find and kill a Marauder officer called Silas, who'd succumbed to Corruption. The location was inside a fort, deep in the Ebonscale jungle and I was imagining a tough battle with a Boss. Even when meant to be soloed, some of New World's named targets can be ferocious.

In the event I did end up dying to Silas the first time and having to go back for a second try but not because he was particularly big or tough. Very much the opposite, in fact.

Oh, he was tough enough to make it a decent fight but the reason I died the first time was that I was already down in health from running past a bunch of guards when I barrelled into him. He was at the top of some steps as I was trying to find my way to the marker on the map and I ran slap into him as he was coming towards me. 

I spotted the blue lozenge, indicating a quest target, next to his nameplate but I  assumed he must be for some ordinary faction-board quest I'd hoovered up somewhere. There were a couple of potential adds but I didn't expect too much trouble so I piled into him, expecting him to go down like any other guard.

He put up a lot more of a fight then expected but I'd still have had him easily enough. If the guards hadn't joined in. If I'd been full health at the start. Yeah, yeah... familiar story, I know.

It was only when I came back a second time and realized my quest marker was in exactly the spot I'd just died that I twigged what was going on. This time I cleared any adds as I came, made sure I was full health before I pulled and everything went much better.

Okay, yes, I did still die to yet another roaming guard but not until after Silas was on the ground and my quest was complete. I could still have gotten away in one piece easily enough even then, only it seemed prudent to let the guard finish me off.  That way, I could revive in Ebonscale, where the hand-in was, saving myself a longish run back. Death portals are never a good look but no-one was there to see and sometimes I'm just that lazy.

With the hand-in came the achievement and the title, Marauder Commander. It also raises the cap on faction tokens to 75k, which is a relief. The previous cap was 49k and I've been flat against the ceiling for weeks. maybe months. I've been buying salvage utilities hand-over-fist just to save wasting all the credits I've been earning from all the faction missions I've been taking to level up.

Ironically, now I have barely enough to buy even one piece of Commander-grade armor. I hadn't really looked at the cost requirements until today. Each piece costs tens of thousands of tokens, which sounds like a lot but really isn't that bad. You get thousands of the things for even the simplest missions. I'll be glad to have something to spend them on.

Weapons are the most expensive at 50k a pop but luckily I don't need to worry about those. As soon as I dinged sixty I was able to equip the hatchet and sword I got from the Winter Convergence event back in January. I've had them in my bags just waiting for the moment ever since.

I hadn't really thought much further than Level 60 and Commander rank but looking ahead now I can see there's a good deal more enjoyable, manageable progression before I get to the boring grind everyone complains about.  

For a start, I need to decide what mix of armor I want. I did try to sort it out back in the thirties but upgrades then kept coming so thick and fast I gave up and just wore whatever dropped. If I'm going to buy a full set of Faction gear I probably ought to take time to do some research. 

I'm going to have that time, too, because as well as tokens there's a stiff gold cost to consider. Coin comes more easily in New World now than it once did but I don't have so much I can just blow through my savings without a care. I need to earn before I can spend.

It's a good feeling, though, hitting sixty. I was slightly concerned it might signal the end of my active involvement with the game for a while but it very much looks like it's going to mean the opposite. I'm not much of a one for post-cap gear grinds in any game but I do relish getting a capped character into what I consider to be a "finished" state.

New World still strikes me as a very good option for a casual, solo player who considers mmorpgs as marathons rather than sprints. Or, better yet, as invigorating country hikes, which, come to think of it, pretty much describes New World's gameplay, at least as I've experienced it so far. 

I'm glad to say it looks like the end of this journey still lies some way up the trail.

Who Would Live In A Place Like This?

The delightful scene above is a pretty fair representation of what I've been looking at for most of the afternoon. That's Weaver's Fen in New World. Charming, isn't it?

I've had it in mind for a few days to say something about how New World follows the unfortunate pattern of most mmorpgs in making the zones increasingly unatractive, not to say hellish, the higher up the levels you go. That's certainly been my experience so far, with the bright, colorful, coasts of First Light and Monarch's Bluffs shading into rich farmlands and autumnal glow of Everfall, before the gloom descends with the haunted house aesthetic of the ironically-named Brightwood and the dismal swamps of Weaver's Fen.

My faction, Marauders, by far the weakest on Zuvendis, holds just a single zone now. We did have two but we lost First Light days ago and despite warring for it ever since show no signs of getting it back. 

Our stronghold, such as it is, is the truly awful Reekwater, a zone that is, I'm sad to say, very accurately named. I imagine the only reason we hold it is because no-one else wants it. No-one with anywhere else to go would dream of setting foot on the rotten, rickety planks of the shanty town it calls a capital, let alone raising a flag.

I went there to see what our faction town was like, just in case I might have wanted to settle there. I think you get some benefits for crafting and so forth in zones owned by your faction. In my case that gives me a choice of one.

Reekwater is apparently a level 58-60 zone but I had no trouble whatsoever getting there in my early thirties. Well, maybe I did have a little trouble. The first time I tried to come in via the road that travels eastwards out of Everfall but that turns out to run right through the middle of a ruined village populated by angry ghosts. I took one look and thought better of it.

Next time, I came down from the north, along the road from Weaver's Fen. It's one of the bigger roads, not just a track. By and large in Aeternum, the wider the road, the safer it is. It helps that just about everything seems to have the same run speed. Provided you get past something, it can't catch you, so long as you don't turn around to see how far behind you it is.

And this is the nice part of town...

One quick trip around the waterlogged decks of Reekwater town confirmed all my fears. It's a classic mmorpg end game zone - ugly, dark, miserable and depressing. They're always either that or frozen solid or on fire.Of the three, I think swampland is the worst.

Based on everything I've seen for myself so far, I'd have been justified in lambasting Amazon's designers for falling into the trap of making the path from character creation to cap a journey from comfort to despair, visually at least. Only I've heard otherwise.

Belghast dinged fifty today and he's been pondering where he might settle down when he caps out and buys a house. He's thinking about Ebonscale Reach, a level 50-60 zone, which he describes as "...really gorgeous... its layout somewhat reminds me of the temples in Pandaria with everything terraced out of the face of a mountainside." 

Someone else (I apologize to whoever it was. I know it was someone whose blog I follow but I can't remember where I read it.) was talking the other day about one of the later zones looking like the Plains in Valheim, an aesthetic that strongly appeals to me. Unfortunately, I also can't remember which zone it was. This isn't helping much, is it?

The point is, there's anecdotal evidence building up that not every endgame zone in New World is dank, dark and deacayed. It looks as though there's actually some geographical logic to it, not just a desire to exploit the inevitable correlation between the aesthetic tastes of players most likely to make it to the level cap and the kind of imagery traditionally found on the covers of heavy metal albums.

It seems that, from the center to the south-eastern coast, the isle of Aeternum is covered by one massive swamp. Upward from that, along the coast, by all reports the climate improves. I'm going to have to go and check it out for myself.

So far I've visited eight of New World's fourteen zones. I find almost all of the game's progression systems compulsive but by far the most satisfying of them all are the Standings. In a way it's nothing more than the faction we're familiar with from many games but the mechanics and implementation and the fact it's linked directly to the towns themselves make it feel different. And desirable.

Where would you rather live? I mean, come on...

 

Improving my Standing in Everfall made up the main thrust of my gameplay from the moment I decided that was where I wanted to buy my first house. I only changed focus when I started to feel a little burned out from running town and faction missions back to back, session after session, by which time I was already Respected, the title you earn at Standing 15.

At that point I was also Standing 13 in Monarch's Bluff and Standing 10 in Windsward, meaning I could have bought a house in any of them. I'm also at least Standing 5 in First Light, Brightwood and Weaver's Fen by now. Everywhere I go I make an impression, it seems.

You can't really help it. The missions bring in the most credit, of course, but just as everything you do gives you xp, so it gives you Standing. Even running along a road from one side of a new zone to the other without stopping will usually get you enough Standing from discovery xp to raise your profile from Stranger to Newcomer.

I took a couple of sessions off from grinding Everfall faction to go level up a bit. That took me from the late twenties into the early thirties and also filled all my resource pools to the brim. At Level 32 this afternoon I couldn't receive any further Azoth rewards, faction tokens or faction reputation. If I could change one thing about New World it would be to take those caps and hurl them into the ocean.

I made some armor I didn't need and ported somewhere I might just as well have walked to get my Azoth down. I bought a rune of holding for 3000 tokens (and 500 gold, which I could ill afford) to let me earn yet more tokens.

The faction reputation, though, I could do nothing about. I'd run up against the hard cap of a new Rank. 

Ranks have a different name in every faction. In the Marauders, the third rank is Ravager. To become a Ravager you need to do a "Trial", just as you did for the previous rank, Gladiator. 

The trial, which is just a fancy name for a quest, is recommended for Level 35. The Gladiator one didn't just recommend Level 30, it required it or so I thought. I think now I may have misunderstood what was going on because I was able to get the Ravager quest at 32. 

Except when I got it it said it was recommended for Level 40. Gulp! Oh well, it's not like anyone stays dead in Aeternum, is it? (Actually it is but that's a whole other post...) So I followed the marker and went to see how far I could get. 

All the way. With ease. Literally the only difficult part about it was getting to the first of the three or four villages I needed to cleanse. That one was inconveniently crammed between a cliff and a town full of highly agressive Elite mobs, capable of sending me back to spawn in a couple of hits.

Once I'd navigated a route past those obstacles, though, despatching the requisite ten mobs was ridiculously easy. Yes, some of them were six or seven levels higher than me but mobs in New World vary incredibly in difficulty and threat compared to most other mmorpgs I've played. These were all Lost and for my build at least, Lost are just about the softest of kills.

So now I'm a Ravager, which means I can buy the third grade of faction armor. I don't want to, because I don't need it, which is just as well. I can buy it but I can't equip it. Clearly the developers did indeed expect players wouldn't be doing these quests until they hit 35 or even 40 because those are the level requirements to wear the bloody stuff!

Seriously? What do I have to do to get some respect around here? Arm-wrestle alligators? Because I will!

 

Never mind. At least I can gain reputation with the Marauders again and make my way towards the fourth trial so I can become a Destroyer. And there are some useful utilities I can buy for tokens.

Along the way I did do a few more missions in Everfall. My Standing there is now 19, just one level short of being able to buy the Tier Three house I wanted. Note past tense.

I might still want it. I'm not sure. It's a great house. And Everfall is a great town. There's just one problem. It's also an insanely busy town. I get more frame-rate lag there than anywhere else in the game. I can barely move after eight in the evening. I'm begining to think it would be a mistake to settle there.

Then again, I have all that Standing. It would be a shame not to take advantage of it. I can't see myself waiting until I hit the mid-50s to start all over again in Ebonscale Reach, no matter how delightful it is. 

And in the long run, it'll be the endgame zones that are busiest, won't it? It usually is. By then, Everfall might have slipped back into being a quiet, low-level backwater. 

I hope so although I suspect not. It's just too conveniently placed and as we all know... location, location, location.

One thing's for sure. Wherever I end up living it won't be Reekwater, no matter how damn quiet it is. I have some standards, at least!

Seventeen Days : WoW Classic

So... WoW Classic. Soon to be upon us like a speeding locomotive in just a couple of weeks plus change. Will it drive all before it or crash spectacularly into the buffers?

As reported by Massively:OP, subs are up: "Subscribers in World of Warcraft® increased since mid-May, following the release date announcement and beta for World of WarcraftClassic and the Rise of Azshara™ content update.". And as Bree observes "...wouldn’t it be worrisome if they weren’t?".

Well, yes it would, although maybe not quite yet. True, you have to have a subscription to join in the revivalist fun. On the other hand, if all you want to do is party like it's 2004, it's bit early to pull the switch. What are you going to do for the next two weeks? Money wasted, isn't it?

Makes a lot more sense to re-sub just before the launch date. That way you get a full month of Classic play, which I'm guessing is going to be a week or two more than a lot of people are going to need before they discover that subbing hasn't made them fifteen years younger after all.

That's what I'm going to do. I had already decided to do it purely based on the blogging opportunities it's sure to afford but last night I asked Mrs Bhagpuss (in guild chat in Guild Wars 2 because why get up and walk into the next room?) whether she was interested in re-subbing for Classic and she replied with an unequivocal "Yes".

I wasn't sure she even knew WoW Classic was a thing. I don't think we've talked about it before. She's also not much for going back to MMORPGs she's stopped playing. She did return to EverQuest, EQII and Vanguard but all of those were more than a decade ago.

But then, Mrs Bhagpuss did like WoW when we played, possibly more than I did. She made it to a slightly higher level and carried on playing for a few weeks longer. Conversely, I've been back many times to futz about at low levels, whereas she's never played a session since she stopped about a decade ago.

This is where it all begins. Well, after a bit of a jog. Get your snowshoes ready.

The thing is, we both missed out on World of Warcraft when it was a cultural phenomenon and an unstoppable force in the genre. By the time we got around to trying it, sometime around 2009, WoW was mid-WotLK, considered by some to be the zenith of the game. 

I found that version very enjoyable. There was still plenty of granularity. Mobs didn't fall over from a hard stare. Leveling took a while. The world felt open, connected and real.

On the other hand, a lot of the more interesting mechanics I'd read up about had already left the game. I was particularly disappointed to find that pet management for hunters was no longer a thing.

Because of the way I came to WoW, a great deal of my interest in Classic relies not on nostalgia but on a desire to experience something I missed out on first time around. I'm aware it's going to be a recreation but I'm expecting it to be a convincing one.

As we get closer to launch a few questions arise. With Mrs Bhagpuss signed up I know I won't be playing entirely alone but I'd quite like to have a few other contacts, not least so we can do some dungeons. WoW dungeons are quite good fun.

There will, of course, be a huge number of guilds recruiting and Mrs Bhagpuss, who is a lot more social in games than I am, will quite likely end up in one. That said, she's nowhere near as game-social as she used to be. I don't think any of us are, The games themselves have largely removed the need to make that effort. Whether the old social skills will return remains to be seen.

No pandas, space goats or jolly green goblins in 2004 2019!

I'd be interested in joining a guild made up of bloggers from the local blogosphere but so far I haven't heard of anyone planning to start such a thing. Even if someone does, it will either be a European guild on an EU server, where I won't be playing, or an American guild on a US server, where I will play, but mostly when everyone is asleep.

I prefer U.S. servers for a number of reasons. I've played on many EU servers over the years and they tend to be really bad-tempered compared to US or Global servers. U.S. players just seem generally more cheerful. 

More importantly, though, I really don't like playing MMORPGs in their prime time. I like a busy environment but prime time in a successful game isn't just busy, it's heaving. Playing prime time  is like choosing to go and do your weekly shop at lunchtime on Saturday, when you can't get around the aisles for families shooting the breeze with their friends and neighbors and every checkout has a line ten deep.

Much better to play shoulder hours. As a UK resident, I'm five hours behind the East Coast, nine behind the West. That means things are beginning to liven up around the time I get home from work and just starting to get really busy when I log off to go to bed. Weekends are generally comfortably populated from lunchtime onwards and weekdays I have the place to myself, unless the game has a lot of Australian players, which many do.

Blizzard just released their initial list of server names. Most of them are... odd. TAGN has the full list. I'm inclined towards Bloodsail Buccaneers, which has the virtue of a memorable name, almost the only US server that can make that claim, and a PvE-RP ruleset. It's also physically located on the East Coast, which, by dint of the transatlantic cable, generally gives me at least as good a ping as most EU servers.

I don't do a lot of RP (sorry, Psychochild) but I am very much "RP compatible" as Wilhelm describes it. I'm happy to be around people who roleplay, I pick character names that don't offend the lore and I like to talk "in character" if the opportunity arises. Mostly, though, I find that my playstyle just slides by unnoticed on an RP server.

After choosing a server comes faction, race and class. I really don't think there's much of a decision to be made here. I tend to prefer Alliance to Horde. Goblins are a huge draw but there are no goblins in Classic so Alliance it's going to be.

Wrong. Just wrong.

For race I strongly prefer the short of stature. That means Dwarves or Gnomes. My general preference is for Gnomes but WoW Gnomes are a bit creepy, at least the male ones. I think it's the mustaches. That means it's most likely going to be a Dwarf.

Actually, it has to be a Dwarf because my class of first preference is Hunter. As I mentioned, I was somewhat disappointed to miss out on the pet management aspect of the class and I'm very keen to explore that. Also I really like having to manage arrows as  a resource rather than having a magic bow that never runs out of ammunition.

If I end up hanging around for a while I'll almost certainly make a Gnome Warlock. I like the class and it suits a Gnome. I'd entertain the idea of playing a Druid but the only Alliance race that can be one is Night Elf and I'd uninstall rather than play one of those. I might try a Tauren Druid for the Horde if Classic sticks.

That about covers everything, I think. It's tempting to re-sub now but if I did I'd just end up boring myself with the dull Legion content my Hunter is lumbered with or, more likely, not log in at all. I'll have to exercise restraint and wait until sometime around the 25th or 26th.

Nice to have something to look forward to in MMORPGs for once, even if it is a decade and a half out of date!

A Secret Understanding: Why Faction Matters

Following Friday's post and the comments it provoked, I've been thinking some more about faction in MMORPGs. It's clear that the word has two very different meanings, which I confusingly conflated, both in the piece and in my replies.

The original spur for the post was Blizzard's rumored retrenchment on the long-established bi-partisan structure of World of Warcraft, wherein players choose sides at character creation like children in a playground, then spend the next however many years thumbing their noses at the opposition while sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting "La la la not listening!". I am very much not in favor of that approach - at least not in most kinds of PvE setting.

It works well enough for PvP, provided players can be induced to split into roughly equal numbers. I prefer having regular sides rather than being assigned a team at random. It gives what can often be a somewhat artificial enterprise at least a veneer of purpose.

Gnome Magician

Being a sensitive little flower, I actually prefer PvP environments where opponents are prevented from trash-talking each other, so the imposed rule of silence works for me. There's also an argument for it in competitive PvE, such as EverQuest II's Proving Grounds. (Does anyone still do those? I only tried a couple and I hadn't thought about it for years until I started writing this)

Even there I don't think it's strictly necessary. The crucial factor is that the restrictions only apply while you're doing that content, not across the entire game. The rest of the time, you can make your choices about who to group or talk with for all the usual bigoted, prejudiced and irrational reasons without having to delegate your snap judgments to software.

The other kind of faction is far more interesting. I was surprised to see someone as well-versed in the genre as Tyler Edwards express what seemed to me to be surprise after my lengthy reply to his original comment, in which I waxed somewhat lyrical about the good old days of EverQuest. Not, I should hasten to clarify, that he seemed surprised to find me banging on yet again about how everything in EQ was better - god knows that's a record I broke years ago.

What did suprise me was that he seemed to be unaware of the complex network of NPC factions that formed the engine that drove much of EQ's original content. It hadn't really occured to me to what extent that concept, once a key driver in the genre, had fallen into disuse.

Half-elf Ranger

To clarify for anyone who hasn't experienced the way those factions worked - and for that matter still do work, in modified form, in some of the current game - we are not talking about what I believe is known in WoW as "rep grind". EverQuest had that as well and the two things are closely inter-related but they aren't the same.

Your journey in Classic EQ, as in most MMORPGs, began with your choice of race, class, gender and deity. Gender was purely cosmetic. It had no effect of any kind on gameplay, although if you chose to play a female troll it might have a big effect on your EQ social life.

Class had the same obvious gameplay connotations of any rpg, compounded both by the fact that classes were race-locked and that their distribution did not follow strict lines of Good vs Evil. Most classes were effectively neutral (a warrior is a warrior is a warrior, after all). Some were inherently one or the other - there's no such thing as a neutral Necromancer, for example - and a few cleaved to their own rules, which stood outside of morality altogether .

If you wanted to be a Shaman, for example, you had to choose one of the races considered to be more primitive. In the original game this meant Ogre, Troll or Barbarian. Ogres and Trolls were evil. Barbarians were good.

Some races could only be Evil. Some could only be Good. Some could be either and some were Neutral. But picking an alignment didn't in itself dictate how others would see you. Just how "Good", "Evil" or "Neutral" you were was itself nuanced by your race, which God you followed, what class you were.

The Gypsy camp in Oasis. Oasis was a popular zone because it was handily-placed between Freeport and Oggok and Grobb and the gypsies would trade with anyone.

"Good" in Norrath always seemed a more monolthic concept than "Evil". Choosing between wood elf and high elf or Tunare or Karana did have consequences, but they tended more along the lines of which shopkeepers wanted your trade than who would race out of a nearby building and try to cleave you in two with a greatsword.

Gnome Rogue

If you were "Evil" it made a big difference just how evil. Trolls lived down at the very bottom of the pit. Even Ogres couldn't stomach them. Good races generally didn't see much difference between trolls and ogres but an Ogre who chose to be a warrior and follow the God of War, Rallos Zek, could scrape by in a Neutral city like Freeport. Well, the bad parts of it, anyway.

On the other hand, going gnome and calling yourself "Neutral" didn't cut much with slack with the good guys if you took up Necromancy in the name of Bertoxxolous. Evil is as Evil does - and as it worships. Most gnomes followed The Duke of Below, Brell Serillis, who generally didn't get many people's hackles up, but If you wanted to be truly neutral you had to go with Agnostic, which fortunately was an option.

To players used to the more straightforward choices of modern MMORPGs this is probably already looking over-complicated but it's just the start of how faction could affect your life in old Norrath. Every NPC you would ever meet, from the lowliest moss snake to the King of Ak'Anon, (possibly not the best example since the gnomes actually built themselves a clockwork king so they wouldn't have to keep changing him when he died)  would weigh you in an exceeding detailed set of invisible scales before deciding how to react.

The Goddess Tunare

The NPCs would have some of the same criteria as a player character. Everything had a race (with species being the same thing for the purpose of the game). Animals and monsters presumably had a class under the hood, so to speak, although it wasn't always made plain. Humanoids and/or sentients also had deities and guild affiliations.

Oh yes, NPCs had guilds and they mattered. Every NPC had some kind of allegiance to a city-state or similar legislature plus membership of one or more professional, trade or specialist organizations. Certain cities didn't get on with others. Certain guilds were in commercial competition, professional rivalry or were just implacably opposed on ethical, religious or philosophical grounds. And all of them expected you to fit in with their prejudices if you wanted to trade with them, learn from them, quest for them or simply walk past them without getting your head ripped off.

If this sounds astoundingly complex that's because it was. And it still wasn't everything. In the very early game there were wild cards, creatures that would usually leave you alone but occasionally might take against you for no apparent reason. Elephants in West Karana were a famous example. Other species, like Aviaks, were so easy-going most of the time that almost everyone thought they were harmless - until you happened to add someone playing a Troll to your group.

Players were also given a wide range of tools to modify their faction and that of others. Enchanters, for example, could illusion themselves as other races, gaining the benefits or disadvantages that came with the appearance, but they couldn't hide their own religious beliefs. It's all very well looking for all the world like a high elf but the guards outside Felwithe can smell a follower of Innoruuk from a hundred paces.

A magician's pet pretending to be a grimling. Pets started out carrying the player's hate list (I believe) but never had specific faction of their own (again, I think...). Grimlings hate everything except other grimlings.

Some of the options were counter-intuitive in the extreme. As a druid I spent a lot of time in wolf form because everyone likes a puppy, apparently. Going wolf allowed my druid, a human worshiper of Karana, free access to the Ogre capital, Oggok. Provided I kept clear of one specific guild, that is. I forget which but I think it might have been the Warriors.

All of this was more than enough to keep your mind busy when soloing or simply moving from place to place. Imagine the situation when there were six of you in a full group. Because EverQuest put absolutely no restrictions on who could group with whom, you might easily find your Barbarian Shaman grouped with an Ogre Warrior, a Dark Elf enchanter, a Halfling Rogue, an Erudite Wizard and some random Half-Elven ranger who you'd invited out of pity.

That combo could give your group half a dozen races, deities and classes, any and all of which could have theoretically predictable but practically unfathomable effects on just about any NPC you might meet. And it didn't stop there.

Good guards doing their job. Because everything has faction, NPCs and mobs know who to fight and who to ignore. They fight among themselves all the time, something a smart player can readily use to their advantage.

Oh, no. Not hardly. While certain aspects of who your character was were hard-wired, many were mutable. EQ's version of rep grind meant that you could, if you put the hours in, make NPCs who hated you start to take a more moderate view. If that Ogre tank had done what my Shadowknight did and spent countless hours skulking around the back streets of Freeport, luring bad guards to their deaths and handing in their helmets to the good ones as proof, he might be able to wander past the Knights of Truth and swagger into the bank just like a regular citizen.

Oh, didn't I mention the "good guard/bad guard" thing? Just because an NPC looked and dressed exactly like all the other ones nearby and had the same name under his portrait didn't mean he was the same as them. Looks can be deceiving.

All in all it was a lot to take in. I loved it. I thought then and think now that it was a huge part of what made EQ the runaway success it was. We hear a lot now about how slow the old MMORPGs were, how much grind there was, how hard it was to do anything on your own. What we hear far less about was how much they made you think.

Felwithe gate guards, always mindful of sneaky dark elven enchanters trying to weasel their way in.

When today's players wonder how we old ones could stand it, all that sitting and medding and camping and shouting /lfg and basically not playing for half or three-quarters of the time, what they're missing is the thinking. I was always thinking about the implications of everything I did, everything I was planning on doing. I had to. If I didn't the consequences, well they wouldn't bear thinking about.

If I had to put my finger on a single difference between the original wave of MMORPGs, EverQuest in particular, and what came later it would be that the old games were more cerebral. Faction was a big part of that, although by no means all.

EverQuest itself eventually moved towards a much simpler set of coded relationships within the game, as this informative thread explains. That was the right choice in the commercial environment of the time, but in the years since then I feel the pendulum has swung too far, not just for EQ but for the genre itself.

All of the above are NPCs. Mr Fizzle is going to win.

There's room in all our MMOs for more complexity. Not more button-pushing or fancier combos but for in-game systems and mechanics that make us think. That's why, I believe, The Secret World was such a hit with a certain segment of the audience, one that's been badly served for years.

We're overdue for some MMORPGs that recognize there's more to virtual life than flashier animations and bigger hats (although I never say no to a good hat). Complexity doesn't have to be limited to ever more challenging dance moves.

I can't imagine we'll ever see the like of EQ's original conception of faction again but we can surely do a lot better than the schoolyard name-calling of Horde vs Alliance. Let's consign player factions to history and put the hate back where it belongs - in the imaginary hearts and minds of our NPCs.

Why Can't We Live Together? : WoW, EQ2, Rift

According to Massively: OP, the cinematic Blizzard released to promote World of Warcraft's latest update strongly hints at some kind of lasting rapprochement between the game's two long-standing antipathetic factions, The Horde and The Alliance. If true, the developers would be following in some well-trodden footsteps indeed.

The MMORPG genre grew out of a wider tradition of roleplaying games in which a fundamental schism between belief systems was almost always a given. Dungeons and Dragons finessed the split with a complex alignment system but in the end it still came down to Good vs Evil.

The usual alternative to such a moralistic, not to say religious, dichotomy was the supposedly more universal choice between Order and Chaos. Warhammer plumped for that one, first with the original tabletop miniature wargame, then with the paper and pencil RPG and finally with the online game.

When MMORPGs arrived in the late 1990s they took the concept and ran with it. EverQuest turned alignment into faction and assigned allegiances to every mobile object in the game, players not excepted. You had to make some serious choices before you could even set foot on Norrath. Deciding whether to be Good or Evil at character creation was a decision whose significant consequences you'd have to live with for years.

WoW and EverQuest II, when they went live in 2004, both had similar faction systems. Your choice didn't just dictate which NPCs would give you quests, it had impact on which players you could group with, what guilds you could join and even who you could talk to.

I didn't play WoW at the time but from what I can gather, the hard line went down rather well. People chose their side and stuck with it, treating allegiance in a not dissimilar way to supporting a sports team. In EQII the system was almost universally reviled.

EQII was a horrible mess of a game at launch. It had countless design flaws, almost all of which would require correction over the course of the first twelve months. The merciless delineation between Freeport (Evil) and Qeynos (Good) was one of the first to go.

Information on how it used to be is remarkably hard to research, but from memory, all guilds had to be created in either Qeynos or Freeport and while anyone could join either, all guild-related quests and writs were faction specific, meaning guild members on opposite sides of the fence couldn't share them. I also seem to remember restrictions on what could be sent through the mail and naturally characters were kill on sight in the opposing capitals regardless of guild affiliation, which posed a problem seeing as all guild housing was located in one or the other.

Over time a lot of this was changed or simply fell out of use. The restriction on sharing quests was removed, guild halls got their own instance separate from any city, mailing restrictions went away. A betrayal system was introduced, allowing characters to change faction and Good vs Evil in the the game moved inexorably to a state of flavor.

Rift was another MMORPG I played that began with rigid barriers between two sides, the unhelpfully-named named Guardians and Defiant. As I recall you couldn't even make characters of the opposing faction on the same server, something that made sense in an open-world realm vs realm game like Dark Age of Camelot but less so in one with a very strong bias towards PvE.

As Rift's population declined those restrictions were inevitably relaxed and finally removed altogether. If there are any differences between the factions today I couldn't tell you what they are.

The attraction for developers of allowing all their players to play together seems so obvious it's more surprising that any of them start out with player factions to begin with than that those restrictions are eventually taken away. It's not even as though having Good vs Evil is essential to the form, or at least not for the players. MMORPGs that avoid hardwiring moral positions onto character creation seem to work just fine.

Once you've taken the decision to go with two implacably opposed sides, though, it's a lot harder to sell the "let's all be friends" line later on. If your designers and writers did their jobs properly, by then your players will be about as likely to accept a truce as fans of Manchester United and Manchester City would welcome a ground-sharing scheme.

In my experience, the watering-down of player factions leads to blandness. It's not the worst thing and the convenience definitely compensates, but over time you do find yourself wondering why you ever bothered to choose a side in the first place. Oh, yes, it was because the one place that decision never gets rescinded is at character creation.

And over time the absence of meaningful faction based on moral or universal tenets tends to percolate through the entire game. Not only does your "good" character find herself doing favors for NPCs she despises but the NPCs themselves seem to lose their focus.

I came across a great example of this in EQ2's Scorched Sky festival yesterday. There's a new quest, "The Heat Is On", which takes place in Darklight Woods, one of the ugliest zones in the entire game and also one of the starting areas for "evil" characters in general and Dark Elves in particular.

The quest involves finding and picking up first the eggs and then the hatchlings of a large lizard, so an NPC called Limora Roamhill can take them to a more suitable environment to hatch and/or grow up in safety. It's a standard-issue quest for any MMORPG but something about it immediately struck me as out of kilter.

The dialog is highly sentimental, both on the NPC side and in the responses provided for the player. It would be entirely unremarkable in Antonica, where the writ of "good" Queen Antonia Bayle runs and it would be par for the course in treehugging Greater Faydark, where elves and fairies prance. In Darklight Woods, the back yard of Neriak, home of the paranoid and sociopathic Thex dynasty, the quest sticks out like a severed thumb.

What's more, according to the Wiki, the questgiver herself is a Dark Elf. If so, how she could have survived to adulthood defeats me. In fact the wiki is wrong, since the quest clearly identifies her as an Ayr`Dal, a half-elf, which at least explains her name.

Even so, her dark complexion suggests a Teir`Dal as her elven parent and her presence just a few yards away from Neriak speaks to a familiarity with the dark side. Perhaps she's just addled. Her concern for the welfare of what most Norrathians would consider vermin certainly suggests as much.

Then again, who am I to talk? My berserker, a right-hand rat of  Lord Lucan, Tyrant of Freeport and current holder of the undisputed All-Norrath public execution title, having put a citizen to death on the hour, every hour since 2004, is supposed to be Evil with a capital "E". Judging by my character's paw-ringing response to the plight of the poor Tuatura mother, his betrayal not just to Qeynos but Kelethin can be but hours away, although not if I have anything to do with it.

This, unfortunately, is the sort of thing that happens once the bonds of faction loosen. I don't play much World of Warcraft so it won't impact me personally should the Horde and Alliance shake hands and swap phone numbers (I imagine there are telephones in Azeroth by now - I mean, they've had motorcycles for years...).

At this stage of play, fifteen years after launch, it's probably far too late to worry about the integrity of the faction system anyway. It's all about ease of use and letting friends play together by now. Which means WoW isn't planning on being much of a role-playing game any more.

Just like all the rest.

My Other Life : SW:TOR

Yesterday, when I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, I was struck by a mild irony. I'd just finished a post noting the blog's drift from fantasy to science fiction, quoting this game as proof, and what did I find myself doing? Placing runes on an altar in a dungeon to summon a demon.

And it didn't end there. In an entirely unrelated sequence of missions that took up much of the afternoon and evening I engaged in a series of ritual initiations so I could join a quasi-mystical cult, after which I delved deep into a vast mausoleum on a mission to seal tombs to keep ancient, dark spirits from rising.

Okay, I was killing the possessed minions with a rifle and sealing the crypt doors with a welding torch but that's hardly Science Fiction either. Action-adventure, maybe. More Indiana Jones than Han Solo.

I shouldn't really be surprised. TOR is "WoW in space", after all. And some old-school S.F. fans I know (and I know a few) would scoff at the Star Wars franchise being labelled "Science Fiction" in the first place. Even so, I found it disconcerting.

I was playing my second character, a Sniper, the ranged offshoot of the Imperial Agent class. I picked Agent because everyone seems to think it has the best story and Sniper because I'd read it had overwhelming AoE potential.

Those promises have, so far, been borne out in play. "Suppressive Fire", which is apparently the least-efficient AE, clears gangs of mobs faster than the Scoundrel can stealth past them. The only thing that slows me down is picking up all the loot.

I went with Engineering for the advanced spec. According to Dulfy's guide it's "the most challenging of the three Sniper specs", "very controversial" and "the hardest" - but only for PvP. Since I don't plan on doing much PvP that doesn't matter.

Another guide I like, VULKK.com, says the "recommendation for leveling would be either Marksmanship or Engineering. The former is better for target swapping, the latter excels at AoE". It was AoE I wanted so Engineering it was.

The disadvantage of the Sniper is that it has to use "Cover" for pretty much everything. Cover is a really irritating mechanic that I have rarely had to deal with in almost forty years of gaming. I know what it is but I can't recall playing a game that uses it. I've been lucky.

In TOR, the concept of "cover" is so attenuated it barely counts and yet I still find it annoying. If you boil away the flavor, what it mostly means is having to press an extra key every time you attack. Added to that there's not having your icons where you put them because a special cover bar replaces the regular one. The final indignity being stalked by a stupid green ghost that shows you where you can hide, mostly in some really stupid place you'd never pick in a million years and that's going to get you killed.

Or it would if you weren't so insanely OP, because those are the penalties you incur for being incredibly powerful in solo play. And I barely have any of the good skills yet. I can stand a few extra key presses to play a class that effectively one-shots three-spawns before they can even react.

I'm very happy with the class mechanics, even allowing for cover. I'm also increasingly interested in the story.

I haven't read any spoilers or walkthroughs but I have done a few searches on "best story". Agent is always in the top three; often first. The characters are stock and the writing and voice acting are at best solid but the plot is twisty, turny and unpredictable, which suits me.

Paradoxically, given my stated dislike of having to make "meaningful choices", I'm begining to chafe against the looseness of the bonds in TOR's faction system. I still can't always reliably predict whether an option will give Light or Dark faction, let alone whether my Companion will approve or disapprove. That's good.  In theory I wholeheartedly approve of the ambiguity. Since I learned that it really makes no difference to gameplay either way, though, I've started to wish that it would.

It's probably just as well it doesn't because, predictably, I find it all but impossible to make any response that makes me feel I'm not being polite, let alone take the ones that are clearly "evil". The way I'm heading, I'm going to end up playing Mary Poppins of the Stasi, floating in on my invisible umbrella, solving everyone's problems with a stern look, a few choice words of wisdom and a great deal of gunfire. Apparently that's a perfectly acceptable career choice in the modern-day (Evil) Empire.

So far walking the Imperial path hasn't been quite as uncomfortable as I expected. There have been a couple of "are you sure you want to play this game any more?" moments but nothing genuinely terminal.

I do find the casual, genre tone in TOR makes the nasty stuff more disturbing and less acceptable than the significantly darker, nastier material in The Secret World. I think it's because I never felt, while playing as a Templar, that I was expected to be complicit in abhorrent behavior. It might have been different if I'd gone with Illuminati.

There is some of that in TOR, although I'd have to say there's some in most MMORPGs. I usually play characters who oppose it, though. Or just ignore it by not engaging with the story at all. Playing Empire side in TOR seems to obligate a certain degree of complicity. I'm curious to see how long I can tolerate it.

There are no such problems with the locations. I started on Hutta, which was even more yellow than Taris, something I would not have believed possible. I like the Hutt. Well, I don't like them; they're repulsive. But they all remind me of Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, which helps a lot.

Hutta seemed to pass quite quickly, unlike the Imperial capital,  Dromund Kaas, where I feel like I've spent just short of forever. I realised I might have been there too long when I noticed that some of the mobs had already gone gray before I'd even made it out of the first area.

Level scaling in TOR is strange. I got annoyed by doing missions where all the mobs were giving me no experience so I went and looked up how it works but I still don't get it.

On the Republic side I can go back to Ord Mantell at 50 and get good xp killing Level 8 mobs but as an Imperial Agent, doing at-level missions at 17 with no level scaling in effect, the mobs I'm being asked to kill are too low to give XP. I'm willing to bet that if I come back in twenty levels and do those missions again I'll get the XP I couldn't get the first time around. That can't be ideal.

If you have to hang around, there are worse places. Hutta is acid yellow but Dromund Kaas is Kind of Blue. Or the city is, at least. There's a bizarre, rainy, round midnight, New York noir feel to the place. The New York of Man in the High Castle, that is.

I bought a Stronghold at the first opportunity (which messed up my "Have you ever thought of buying a stronghold?" mission) and the cinematic sets the tone perfectly. The moody shots on the rainswept balcony make me want to earn enough credits just to open that room before my subscription lapses.

Dromund Kaas took a while to get going. Like Taris, there are altogether too many circuitous paths to make cross-country travel a walk in the park. I seemed to be spending even longer than usual trail-finding, often ending up in a dead end or back where I started.

In time, though, the story opened out and I spent most of Sunday playing. I topped out at Level 21 with the Revan storyline on Dromund Kaas complete and my class storyline paused at what looked to be a crucial moment.

The whole thing would have gone a lot faster and more smoothly if it hadn't been so damned busy. The Empire seems to be a much more popular choice than The Republic. Dromund Kaas was positively heaving with people, which would have been great if it wasn't for another of TOR's old-school mechanics.

I don't think I've been KS'd this often since Ruins of Kunark. Over and over I found myself in the same area doing the same mission as two or three other people. No-one invited anyone to group (not that I can complain about that: I didn't either). We just all ran around leap-frogging each other, trying to kill the mobs or click on the things before someone else got there first.

There was one time when I literally could have joined a line to kill a boss for a Mission, something I last remember doing in the original Rift tutorial. I opted to go and do another mission instead. When I came back the boss was up but before I could attack him some crazed Sith leapt over my head with two elites chasing him and started to hack away at the boss with his Lightsaber. At least you get credit for the kill if you do enough damage, or so I discovered by going flat out with everything I had.

I guess this is evidence that the game is doing not too badly, population-wise. I'm playing on a North American server, too, so I'm not even seeing it at its busiest. Thank god!

I don't have a spaceship yet, nor the slightest suggestion that I'm likely to get one. The Smuggler story turns on getting your stolen starship back to the extent that, when it happened, I felt like I'd finished the whole thing. By contrast, and at about the same level, it seems as though the Agent storyline has barely started.

As must be obvious by now, I'm very much enjoying myself so far. I'm keeping my hand in on other MMORPGs but there's a good chance TOR will be my main game for a while. If I have any doubts they come, perhaps surprisingly (although perhaps not) from the stories.

Not the quality so much as the quantity. At times playing TOR can feel more like watching a TV show or reading a book than playing an MMORPG. You can sidestep that for a while by exploring or grinding mobs or running Heroics but the story is always going to suck you back in eventually. Like quicksand.

For now, that's okay. But I find the thought of six more class stories, not to mention the planaetary arcs and the story-heavy expansions to come, more daunting than encouraging. Looking at the Smuggler story, for example, I'm Level 51 and I haven't even got to the end of Chapter One. At this rate it would take me most of the year, playing all the time, to finish even the original class stories.

When I finished playing yesterday I told Mrs Bhagpuss I'd had to stop because my brain hurt. I wasn't tired in the way I often get in games from concentrating on the mechanics. I was reeling from too much storytelling.

I have never felt like that after a long session playing an MMORPG, not even story-heavy TSW. It's the enervating-yet-overfull sensation I associate with binge-watching tv or staying up too late to finish a novel, not with the supposedly relaxing pastime of playing games.

I think the truth is that I'm going to have to pace myself. At the rate I'm going I will burn out before I get to see the end of anyone's story. Also, when I return to work, as I will next week, I'm just not going to have the time to play the way I have been.

That's okay, though. I don't think TOR is going anywhere. I'll take my time.