Fifteen Days To Fly

That's me up there, riding my griffin. Griffon. Gryphon. One of those.

He's called Jepus. Perhaps we'd better stick with that. Although it's a terrible name. Would you call your griffin Jepus? I wouldn't. I didn't. He was called Jepus when I got him.

Jepus is the final reward in what I'm assuming is just the first in an ongoing series of log-in incentives. The way they work feels heavily biased towards slackers, something I find curious. 

The current round lasts two weeks but you only need to record eight non-consecutive log-ins to get everything. For those of us like myself who have absolutely no self-control are hoplessly addicted enjoy an entirely healthy but very enthusistic relationship with the game, it means there's nothing to look forward to for most of the second week. 

Well, except the game itself, of course. Never forget there's a game attached to all these freebies. Anyway, I haven't gotten to Day Nine yet. Maybe something else will happen tomorrow.

Now I come to think about it, there's another way to interpret all this. Jebus is great and all - a cool, flying mount that crackles with lightning - what's not to love? I'm very happy with him. Only there's one thing I forgot to mention: I don't get to keep him.

Jebus is a two-week rental. Don't you just hate those? Of all the money-making gimmicks Free To Play games rely on, rented items have to be the worst. 

It makes a lot of sense commercially, I get that. It also explains why they'd be so quick to hand out what feels like it ought to be a perk from much later in the game. Give me a couple of weeks flying around on this thing and I'm not likely to want to go back to bouncing along the ground on a sheep, am I? I might be ready to spend some money to avoid doing just that.

But maybe I won't have to. In Noah's Heart I have a ton of temporary stat-bonus titles but they might as well be permanent. I receive the same awards repeatedly for doing the same content in each season. Since the rewards are cumulative and I get the new ones well before the old ones expire, the rental period never runs out. 

Looked at that way, if the current set of log-in rewards for Dragon Nest 2: Evolution never change, then so long as I keep logging in every day, I'll always get a new Jepus before the old one goes away. It seems a funny way to run a business but it could happen.

I hope it does because Jepus is great. He's fast and he flies pretty high. If the camera in DN2:E actually worked properly, I'd have some amazing screen shots.

Unfortunately, it's about as much use as the 1980s model Minolta AF-DL my ninety-three year-old aunt left me in her will. I mean, it works... that's about the best you can say for it.

In fact, given how bloody awful the camera controls are in the game, I'm pretty darned pleased with the shots I did manage to get. If I ever get around to doing that post comparing the in-game photographic options of various MMORPGs, DN2:E is not going to come out of it well. 

Then again, at least it has options, which puts it well ahead of just about every Western-made game I've ever played. Why the feature hasn't been cloned wholesale beats me. I consider it essential, now.

As well as having a camera that acts like it's being hand-cranked up a pole sticking out of my backpack, the photo-function's default setting insists on using extreme close-up focus, so everything but my character looks like the work of a pavement chalk artist on a rainy day. You can correct that by adding a filter but if you do, you lose the normal color settings, which is why any screenshot you see that looks sharp is either awash with pink or washed out.

Still, it gives me something to do. Imagine how dull life would get if everything worked properly, eh? 

In other Dragon Nest 2: Eolution news, I'm Level 20 at time of writing. I made more than two levels in about as many minutes this morning just by doing the Scholar's Hall activity, where you have to answer ten questions about the game. I got all ten right, half of them with educated guesses. 

Quizzing to level up sure beats fighting monsters. More games should do it. I have been fighting monsters as well, though. I mean, you have to if you want the plot to keep moving. I'm pleased to report my button-mashing technique is still working and there's no sign as yet of the rumored forced grouping. 

Until that changes, I guess I'm playing Dragon Nest 2. At least until the Palia open beta begins...

*** Obviously, this is one I prepared earlier. My griffin is about to go back to wherever loan mounts go when the contract expires and I haven't played DN2 since Dawnlands arrived. I haven't played Palia since then, either. Predicting the future is a mug's game. ***

You'll Never Get Me Up In One Of Those Things...

I played a lot of Chimeraland today. I took loads of screenshots, some to remind me of things I wanted to write up in a post, others because the game can be so goddam pretty, when it wants to be. In the end, I played so long and took so many shots there's probably enough material for three or four posts, easily. it would be three in the morning before I finished typing it all up.

Yeah, I'm not doing that. I thought about doing another photomontage-with-footnotes instead. They're always fun and they don't take too long to put together. In the end, though, I decided to stick to the one thing I knew I was going to write about as soon as it happened, which was that I got myself a flying mount!

That's him, right there. He's not much to look at, is he?

He's a vulture or, to be exact, a Vultura. Most creatures in Chimeraland are... well, they're chimeras. Two or more animals melded together by some freakish magic. What animal other than a vulture was involved in this combination I have no idea. When you see a Litiger it's pretty easy to work out what happened (A Lion and a Tiger loved each other very much...) but when all you have to go on is a loose letter "A" and what looks like a halloween mask grafted onto a bird's head, well I'm open to suggestions.

I learned today, as I was grubbing around the Chimeraland subReddit, trying to work out how to get my supposed "flying" mount to lift me higher than three feet off the ground, that you can do the mix-and-matching yourself. You can graft wings onto a big cat and fly in style... if you know how.  

I don't, yet. I think it involves feeding one kind of animal to another and hoping the traits you want carry over. Or something. Like all of Chimeraland's systems it's bound to be complex and require both thought and effort.

How did I get my Vultura, anyway? Was it some login freebie or a quest reward? Was it hell! I caught it myself. Not only that, I did it unprompted, spur of the moment, seat of the pants, all that good stuff. Here's how it happened.

I was out looking for a chilli pepper bush to photograph for that ranger whose picture I used in yesterday's post to illustrate the "come back and do this every day" nature of modern mmorpgs. She's human (I think) but she hangs around in one of the beast villages, the only one I've found so far, even though she has this thing about wanting to see the world.

My character had a chat with her... hell, I may as well use my character's name for once, seeing as how it's there in every one of the selfies I've been posting... Floradyne chatted with the ranger, trying to persuade her to go travelling but reading between the lines there's some kind of romantic tryst the ranger's hoping will happen if she just hangs around where she is for long enough, so she's going nowhere.

What she wants is for Travellers (Which is what player-characters and, confusingly, NPCs that behave like players, are called in the game.) to take snapshots of various things and show them to her, so she feels like she's seeing the world. It's that panda from EverQuest II all over again. The things she's interested in seeing are about as random as Yun Zi's, too. Today she wanted me to photograph a chilli plant, a Vuldo (It's a big, blue bird.) and my dressing table. 

The village is on the edge of the desert and I figured there might be chilli plants there so I was out on the sands looking (And overheating - as I think I mentioned, Chimeraland has a well-developed weather system complete with debuffs.) when I noticed something flapping around not too far above me.

I knew there were flying mounts in the game although I haven't yet seen anyone fly by on one. There are also mounts that go underwater, something I very much need to do. There's stuff on the sea bed I need. I'd already been out looking for one of those, without success but I hadn't made much of an attempt to find a flying mount yet.

Actually that's not entirely true. I caught a weird giant mosquito yesterday. I had hopes for that but it turned out to be a combat pet, not a mount, which is probably just as well. It would give me nightmares to ride the thing. I'd show you a picture but for once I don't seem to have taken any, which should tell you plenty about how repulsive it is.

Seeing a bird about her own size gave Floradyne the idea to try and capture it. She'd just crafted a much-improved capture-gun (Look, it has a proper name but I can't remember it and I'm up against a deadline here so I don't want to have to log back in and check, okay? Just go with it!) and she'd been having great success with it so her chances looked good.

Capturing creatures is fun and fairly easy once you get the hang of it. I may go into in more detail another time but the gist is this: you beat up the creature you want to capture until it's all but dead, then you bring out your capture-gun and blast at it until a big, blue bubble wraps the creature up and drops a tiny version of it at your feet. Or, more likely, a hundred yards away in some bushes.

Nearly always, what you get is a temporary version of the pet, one you can summon for five minutes before it vanishes for ever. That sounds feeble but the real purpose of those is to feed them to your proper pets. That does...something. I'd tell you what but I haven't tried it yet. I have a bag full of temporary pets and feeding them to the permanent ones is on my to do list. I'll get back to you when I've done it.

Once in a while, instead of a temporary pet you'll get an egg. That's when you dance around, waving your hands (Or paws.) in the air and singing for joy. If you have a Hatcher in your house you can put the egg in it, sit yourself down on top, wait a couple of minutes and out pops a permanent pet version of whatever it was you caught.

Again, there's a bit more to it than that, although I'm not sure how much. The temperature has to be right, I know that. 

I was exceptionally lucky. I only had to kill a couple of vultures before an egg dropped. I was so excited! I ported home but just as I was about to pop the egg on the Hatcher i noticed it was night and the temperature had fallen to fifteen degrees Celsius. I checked the egg and it said it needed "Warm" temperatures to hatch. I didn't know what that meant, exactly, but Floradyne figured so long as she was neither shivering nor feeling dehydrated it was probably about right.

Still, we waited until the sun came up and the temperature rose to a balmy 20C before we started. That turned out to be exactly right. As the process runs you can see two temperature gauges on screen, one showing the current ambient temperature and the other the temperature the egg needs to be. They were identical. Phew!

At this point I still didn't know for certain whether the Vultura would be a mount or a combat pet. It wasn't until the egg hatched and I was able to look at the details in the Pet window that I saw it was flagged as a "Mount". 

Obviously I couldn't wait to try it out. I "Deployed" it and went outside to give us plenty of room. Then I pressed "G" to mount. Next thing I knew I was upside down, high in the air, moving. The world lurched and we were right-way up as the vulture barrelled across the river at speed. I tried to change direction but the whole world span crazily again and before I could figure anything out we were on the far bank, back on the ground.

I won't go into details about the next twenty minutes. There was a lot of getting on and getting off. There may have been some swearing. If you've read any Terry Pratchet, think of Granny Weatherwax trying to get her broom started. Reddit, for once, was no help at all and the lack of anything remotely resembling a wiki is a distinct problem when it comes to moments like this.

Finally I noticed a tiny on-screen prompt down in the bottom right-hand corner. That's where the game puts little indicators to let you know what keys to press in certain situations. To get a flying mount to, y'know, fly, you don't do any of the usual things I've learned from other games. You don't hit the space bar or Page Up or use mouselook. You press "Shift". 

Of course you do. Never mind it's the "Sprint" key. 

Once I'd gotten that sorted we were airborne. And then we were back on the ground. Again.

It took me a while longer to realize the mount uses up stamina to fly in exactly the same way a character uses it to sprint. Okay, now that choice of key is starting to make sense.

After a while I'd just about gotten the hang of it. The controls aren't the smoothest or the easiest but like most things in Chimeraland that just adds to the sense of involvement. Not to mention the Vultura is most likely about as entry-level a flying mount as you're likely to find. Pretty sure no-one's going to be keeping one once they've grafted wings onto a Litiger. I expect the bigger ones are steadier. They'd pretty much have to be.

My Vultura will very much do me for now, though. I've had plenty of flying mounts in my time, nearly all of them flashier and cooler than this one, but I'm not sure I've ever felt such a sense of satisfaction in getting one off the ground before.

I Can Fly : Riders of Icarus

Before I went on holiday I had a mild disagreement with Jeromai over flying mounts in the comments on his post about Guild Wars 2's Skyscale. The gist is this: I like mounts that operate exactly as though I'm controlling my character directly. I don't like mounts that feel as if I'm controlling my character, while they control another character, one who has independent movement.

Put more simply, I like an extremely gamified version of flying, one with no hint of simulation. I feel the same about all mounts and vehicles in MMORPGs. My feeling is that if I wanted to play a driving game or a flight simulator I'd be playing one, not playing an MMORPG.

That said, I purely love flying mounts. I was very dubious about them before I'd ever tried one. I tended to endorse the idea that free flight would trivialize the worldliness of the setting and lead to shortcuts and exploits that would allow people to avoid conflict.

When I got to fly for the first time, which my ever-unreliable memory tells me would have been in Vanguard, those fears proved to be both true and untrue. Far from trivializing the worlds, flying freely high above them has much the same effect on me as Yann Arthus Bertrand's famous aerial photographs or even the iconic Earthrise.

Seeing the world from above renders it more real, not less. It has the exact opposite effect of trivializing what I see; it adds gravitas. Conversely and paradoxically, my second concern turned out to be both true and no concern at all.

Being able to fly over and thereby avoid conflict in which you would prefer not to engage is liberating. It makes everything about the experience of traveling through a virtual world better. It may harm the game as a game but it enhances and expands the conceit that it's the journey that matters.

With all this in mind, it's perhaps surprising that I haven't paid much attention to those MMORPGs that put flying at the very heart of their worlds. Long, long ago I played Flyff, whose very name is an acronym for "Fly For Fun". I wouldn't know how accurate that acronym is because, as with my run in the later and better-known Aion, another game predicated on flight, I didn't last long enough to get my wings.

I've never felt any desire to try Flyff again. Aion got a fairly recent makeover, which did make me consider returning, but the urge soon passed. But there is one other flight-centric MMORPG I once tried that still lurks in the back of my mind: Riders of Icarus.

I first played Riders of Icarus back in July 2016. I wasn't impressed. I posted about it just once, summing up the experience by comparing it unfavorably to another Eastern import, Dragomon Hunter, concluding "Riders of Icarus is flashier and takes itself more seriously but feels a lot more corporate and bland. Most importantly, though, I actively like my DH character whereas my RoI avatar is a cipher."

Dragomon Hunter lasted a mere seventeen months before closing. Riders of Icarus will be three years old next month. You can play it via Steam, where it has three stars out of five and a 65% favorable rating from over 8000 reviews.

When I posted a list of the MMORPGs I currently have installed on my hard drive(s) a couple of weeks ago, Riders of Icarus was one of them. I annotated the entry with a gnomic observation: "Never underestimate the power of a plush wolf with stars on".

This was a reference to a screenshot at The MMOist. I am highly susceptible to promotions in MMORPGs that appear to have been designed to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of a six-year old. If it has sparkles, stars or rainbows, I want it. If it closely ressembles a cuddly toy, I really want it.

Since very, very few six-year olds must actually play any of the MMORPGs in which these promotions appear, I can only assume my predelictions are more commonplace than might be imagined. Most games, even those with 12 or higher PEGI ratings, seem to work on the general principle that a significant proportion of their audience consists of would-be Disney Princesses.

In this case, the plush wolf seems to have been part of a limited-time login event in February, one which also came with several highly-desirable cats. I'm sorry I missed it. As with all good MMORPGs, however, no sooner does one limited-time event end than another begins.

The current RoI initiative involves Cherry Blossom, always popular in games of Eastern origin (cf Black Desert). There don't seem to be any special mounts or pets although the event vendor is a rabbit in a hat.

I picked up a few cherry blossom petals as I wandered around the impressive capital, Hakanas. I'd flown there on my brilliantly-colored parrot, a seven-day, limited duration mount gifted me for... well, for finding my way to the big city, I think.

In the aforementioned list, Riders of Icarus fell into the "Been meaning to play these again for ages" category. When I wrote that I had a strong feeling it would be sooner rather than later and so it proved.

I patched the game up via Steam yesterday, logged in to find my only character idling in a quest hub not far from the starting area. Within a few moments I was questing mindlessly and enjoying it considerably more than I expected. 

The controls felt familiar. Combat, at low levels at least, seemed extraordinarly straightforward. The scenery was attractive, the wildlife was curious, the experience ticked over. I dinged eight, following the questlines without really following them.


A couple of solo instances flicked past. Some NPC gave me a ride on his griffin. Another lent me a parrot. And then I was flying.

It took me a moment to acclimatize to the controls and then I was home, free in the sky. Hakanas looked impressive enough from the ground but from the air it was laid out beneath me like a fascinating puzzle. I swooped and soared and landed and ran. I took breadcrumb quest after breadcrumb quest until I knew every major square and landmark. I met the King. Somewhere along the way I dinged nine.

Two hours had passed. I hadn't tabbed out once. My mind hadn't wandered. I realised I was thirsty and a little stiff from sitting so long in the same position.

Two years ago I summed the game up like this: "Riders of Icarus is by no means a bad game or a bad MMO but with so many others to choose from I'd struggle to come up with a good reason to play it rather than something with a bit more soul". Nothing I saw or did yesterday changes that fundamental impression, only sometimes "more soul" isn't exactly what I need.

Sometimes I just want to fly.

Ain't No Mountain High Enough : GW2

As I may have mentioned a few times in passing, I am not a fan of the mounts that were added to GW2 as a major feature of last year's Path of Fire expansion. My issues with them, which are manifold, include the way they were introduced, what they look like, how they work and how they have been merchandised. There isn't much I do like about them.

Despite the company line for many a year holding that mounts neither fit the game nor were necessary, I wasn't one of those who felt aggrieved when I heard that ArenaNet had chosen to add them. I like mounts in MMORPGs. As well as their obvious utility, I think they add color and flavor for the individual characters that ride them as well as providing a visual spectacle for everyone else. They also represent an additional form of content for players who enjoy collecting things.

There are drawbacks. Although most MMOs begin with relatively straightforward mounts that fit the milieu and the lore of the world - horses, camels, perhaps wolves or large lizards - it's never long before surrealism and hyperbole set in. The sight of a dozen players clustered around the banker, mounted on everything from smoke-belching motorcycles to thirty-meter long fire-breathing dragons can be somewhat immersion-breaking, not to say antisocial.

Even entirely lore-appropriate mounts can be intensely irritating. One of the reasons I moved from a Live server to Test in EQ2 was the introduction of flying carpets with the Kingdom of Sky expansion. They were so annoying - not only visually but in the way everyone insited on talking about them all the time in general chat - that I felt it was worth moving to a far less-populated environment just to get away from them.

Then there's the way mounts affect gameplay. Those carpets didn't actually fly - they just drifted along a foot above the ground - but eventually all MMOs face the decision on whether to introduce genuine flying mounts. The argument against them is that they trivialize content. The argument in favor is that they make content easier to access.

I lean very much towards the latter. I love flying mounts. My experience in every MMORPG I've played that has them is that they open up the world, make my time there more enjoyable and encourage me to play more than I otherwise would have done.

Developers, even though they are the people who added the ability to fly in the first place, often have much more ambivalent feelings about it. Sometimes they try to hedge their bets by gating the right to a flying mount behind lengthy questlines or a high monetary cost but inevitably the time comes when almost everyone can fly.

At that point the choice is either to design content around the fact or risk a player revolt by taking the option away. Blizzard tried that and things were ugly for a while before the current, grudging compromise was established.

The GW2 devs have tried to avoid the flying problem by offering mounts that almost-but-not-quite fly. The Griffin can stay aloft for a good while - if you find a high place to start from and work the keyboard effectively. Most of the time it doesn't do that. It bunny-hops in way that's both jarring and embarrassing.

Even though they have, so far, avoided the issues that arise from giving players the unfettered power of flight, the combination of powered gliding on a Griffin, vertical ascent on a Springer and the ability to treat water as though it were solid on a Skimmer has rendered much of the original content of the game, if not obsolete, then at least avoidable. With the right mount you can go over, around or through just about anything in Tyria these days.

I don't use my mounts very often. I enjoyed getting the Griffin but it's fiddly and unsatisfying as a regualr ride. I pop it out if I need to keep up with a zerg when running dynamic events in PvE, but that in itself is something I very rarely do these days. Indeed, the reason I don't is because to do so now you pretty much have to be mounted or you get left behind. Rather than mount up I've opted to bow out of that content altogether.

One of the few things I do occasionally enjoy doing with my mounts is scrambling up mountains to see how high I can get. I took my Springer and Griffin out in Timberline Falls a week or two ago, when I happened to be down there hunting Krait, and I was amazed just how high I was able to get.

The sad thing is, there isn't all that much to see in Core Tyria when you get that high. Unlike Heart of Thorns or Path of Fire, which were designed as three-dimensional spaces from the get-go, the original maps were built with the expectation that they'd be seen on foot. All you get when you climb a mountain there is a lot of flat, featureless rock and a view that looks like a schematic.

GW2's implementation of mounts seems to me to have benchmarked against just about all the worst aspects of the feature. With particular irony the designers have contrived at "realism" while simultaneously embracing the wildest fantasies of fashion.

The base offer is exceptionally small at just five animals. They are all somewhat bland, supposedly consistent with the game's look and lore, but "skins" are available (at a cost), which provide a seemingly never-ending stream of carnival costumes. The result is an eye-gouging display, seemingly unrestricted not just by lore or realism but by any sense of taste or aesthetic judgment.

The fatuous adherence to an imagined authenticity reaches its nadir with the momentum added to the mounts' movement. Unlike the slick, smooth, satisfying travel possible in just about every other MMO I've ever played, GW2 mounts insist on lurching and skewing like drunken teenagers in a stolen car. Leaving aside the propensity this has to cause motion sickness, it baffles me that anyone could find the experience in any way enjoyable, let alone convincing.

People do, though. My dislike of GW2's mounts is very much a minority view. It has, nevertheless, contributed in no small part to the reduced amount of time I spend playing GW2 these days and to my diminished interest in the game over the last six months or so.

When I do play, I mainly restrict myself to those areas of the game where mounts are either less relevant (Core Tyria, Heart of Thorns) or banned altogether (WvW). I barely ever visit the Path of Fire of maps. As I anticipated, my interest in that expansion, which was never strong, ended the moment I completed the main storyline and finished the Griffin quest.

If I never go back to those maps it will suit me very well. The Heart of Thorns maps, by comparison, I still thoroughly enjoy and frequently visit, to explore or hang out there just for the fun of it.

Had Path of Fire been designed without mounts in mind, with maps intended to be seen on foot and from the air while gliding, I most likely would be exploring them happily even now. Unfortunately, not only are those maps dead to me but they have likely killed off most of my interest in whatever comes after them. Once introduced, mounted travel is in an MMO for ever.

All I can really hope is that, when the next expansion is announced, it will have a new sales driver that ANet want to prioritize. If so, mounts will take a back seat as the designers attempt to direct cash flow into whatever new idea they've come up with and perhaps that might be something more to my taste.

Let's Jump The Broomstick : GW2

GW2's business model is based in large part on selling "cosmetics" in the Gem Store. The idea is that players pay real money to purchase Gems with which they then buy outfits, pets, skins and the like. Utility items like harvesting tools are gussied up with effects to appeal to players' vanity and a way has even been found to add visual flair to services such as in-game mail - for a price.

It's not just the business model that runs on looks. With no real vertical progression to speak of, either in gear or levels, bragging rights, such as they are, come as much from how you look as what you can do.

Legendary weapons and armor, which take a very great deal of time and/or money (usually both) to acquire are no better at killing mobs or protecting players than their much easier to get Ascended equivalent. The point (apart from stats that you can switch on the fly) is for other people to see you wearing or wielding them.

My problem has always been that I think most of them look bad and would make my characters look bad. The Legendaries, with a handful of exceptions, are either pompous and overwrought or downright idiotic. Almost all high-level armor skins are even worse. Just browsing the style tabs of the Wiki or Dulfy is enough to dissuade me from making the effort and as for the never-ending stream of tat coming out of Evon Gnashblade's Emporium aka The Trading Post aka The Gem Store - well, the less said about that, the better.

So, when something finally does appear that fires my imagination and makes me reach for my wallet I think it deserves to be mentioned. And it happened this weekend.

Or to be accurate I noticed it this weekend. It probably happened when Halloween arrived a couple of weeks back but since I'm not in the habit of browsing the fashion shelves and since Mrs Bhagpuss, who is, hasn't played for a month, it was pure chance that I happened to catch sight of the promotional banner when I opened the store to start selling.

In five years, apart from upgrades to my account like extra character or inventory slots, about the only things I've ever bought from the Gem Shop have been "toys". Toys, in GW2 parlance, include Minis (short for Miniatures. which is what ANet call vanity pets), musical instruments, kites and balloons.

The  category also includes things that you ride around on that are definitely not mounts, oh no! In the long years when ANet denied such a thing would or could ever become a feature of the game, players jonesing for a ride had to make do with a Magic Carpet that moved at regular running speed.

As well as the carpet there was a tunneling drill and a sparking electrical storm... I bought them all. The only one I didn't buy was the broom. Either I kept missing it when it was around (because Evon likes to swap things in and out of his warehouse to create imaginary scarcities) or I just wasn't in a buying mood when it appeared.

Then yesterday morning I happened to see a cat. See a cat, want a cat is the way that goes, for me and for a lot of people, which is why you see so many cat-shaped things in stores both real and virtual. And it works. All Anet had to do was put two small triangles on top of the existing Commander tag and call it a "Catmander" and people were queuing up for WvW who'd never killed a player in their life.

This time it was "An Elonian Familiar", a strange black cat with orange "whiskers", ready for Halloween in a witches hat and riding a broomstick. Cats wear hats in Tyria. Last year I got the "Feline Familiar", a sleek, midnight-black cat that also wears a witches hat, albeit with significantly more elan.

Last year's cat has been padding alongside my Necro ever since but since she's the one who does all the busywork every Halloween she thought she deserved the new one, too. It was then, as I was looking at the price and deciding whether to stump up the 400 Gems, that I noticed the same cat looking at me from another store window.

ANet like package deals. They're always bundling things together, usually things that seem like a worse deal in a bind-up than they would be on their own. This one was different. It was good.

For 1000 Gems you can get the new mini, the Riding Broom and a broomstick skin for your glider. Now that's a decent offer, especially when you consider I was already going to get the mini, I've on-and-off wanted the broom for five years and I have had more fun and enjoyment out of the Magic Carpet glider skin I bought a while back than pretty much anything in the game ever.

A thousand gems is a lot. I don't think I have ever spent a thousand on a single item before. If you were going to buy them with real money it would cost you $12.50 - except you'd have to buy $20 worth to get a thousand because ANet only sell Gems in multiples of 800.

Are an imaginary cat, an imaginary broomstick and another imaginary broomstick worth $12.50? I don't know and I don't care because, of course, I bought them with Gold. I still don't entirely understand how game companies make a living selling virtual goods when they also allow you to buy said goods with virtual money as well but I'm not complaining.

Due to the aforementioned extreme shortage of anything I want to buy I have a lot of savings in my Tyrian bank account. Until yesterday I had over 6,000 gold on my main account and about 2,500 across the other two. It's a bit less than that now.

Before I bought anything, though, I went and told Mrs Bhagpuss. As I said before, she hasn't played GW2 for a month. In fact, since we got back from Italy she's played exactly once.

I had a suspicion she'd be somewhat miffed if she decided to start up again in a few weeks only to see me promenading around on a genuine flying broom with a cat on the front (did I mention the cat rides on the broom you use as a glider? No? Well it does!). So, I told her about it and she took a look.

Then she logged in, graciously allowed me to gift her the pack since she was, as always, broke, did the Halloween dailies, interrogated me about the new Halloween weapon skins and armor set, farmed the Labyrinth for about five hours and logged out. When I woke up this morning she was already in the Lab doing the dailies again.

I bought the pack on two of my three accounts. The screenshots are from my second account, the Ele modelling.

It's remarkably hard to get screenshots of Minis since they move about to keep a certain distance form your character. It's even harder to get screenshots of a glider in flight. And finding a clear, uncluttered backdrop is the hardest thing of all. Consequently it's not as easy to point out the best features as I wish it might be.

There are several really excellent flourishes in the detail. With the broom equipped as a toy and selected as a glider skin you appear to be broom-mounted at all times. The transition from ground to air is neatly covered in a flash of lightning that works wonderfully to distract the attention in true sleight of hand style.

In flight, the broom trails bats but the very best part - the thing that above everything sold it to me - is the outrageously joyous expression on my Asura's face. It makes me happy just to look at her. Whether it will look so convincing on a Charr I have yet to discover. I suspect not but it should be funny.

So, there we have it. That one item got me to spend 3000 Gems (actually about 750 gold at the current, very reasonable, exchange rate) and brought at least one wandering player back into the fold.

Here's hoping we get something as appealing for Wintersday. I should have replenished the coffers by then.

The Catbird Seat : GW2

The main reason I pushed forward to the end of Path of Fire's story so quickly was to get my griffon mount. That's not to suggest the griffon is a reward for finishing the storyline. It's not. Would that it were so simple.

No, completion of the main story is merely the prerequisite to open the first Collection that begins a sequence of what any other MMO would call "quests". And they are quests; of course they are.

Seriously, at this point in GW2's development the insistence on avoiding the Q word is nothing less than a fetish. The "Achievement" list is the quest journal, the events window in the upper right corner of the screen is the quest tracker, anyone asking questions in map or guild chat talks about "quests". Only Anet themselves cling to the tattered fig-leaf that supposedly hides the all too plain fact that in this respect at least their game did not break any molds or shatter any paradigms. Rather, after a brief and huffy bid for individuality, it turned around and meekly followed the herd, pretending it wanted to go that way all along.

The Griffon is the fifth of four Mounts in the expansion. Its existence was kept under wraps throughout the short beta and never mentioned in the PR blitz leading up to launch. Once the expansion went Live the existence of the Griffon mount remained a secret for, oh, nearly a day. Inside a week twenty-five thousand players owned one.

I had to wait a little longer than that but I have one now. In theory my quest (yes, I'm going to call it that) should have begun when I came across one of the clues that only begin to appear when your account gets flagged as Story Complete. The appearance of mysterious items in your loot, things like "A Strange Feather" or "A Strange Pellet of Bones and Fur" is supposed to lead you to Beastmaster Ghazal in the Garden of Sebhorin in Vabbi and thence to the Remains of the Last Spearmarshall, a talking corpse on a plateau, where the whole thing really kicks off.

In practice, since I already knew about the mount and the quest from numerous discussions in both guild and map chat, I didn't wait for the feather to drop. Instead I called up Dulfy's truly excellent guide and went straight to the fallen spearmarshal.

I didn't think to note down exactly how long the whole questline took to finish but I did it in several sessions across most of the week so it must have lasted several hours. I imagine it would have taken a lot longer without the guide to follow but the in-game instructions are reasonably clear and once you get the feel for the kind of places the eggs are hidden it's not exceptionally difficult to predict where you're likely to find them.

I have previously described the Path of Fire expansion as one giant jumping puzzle, which is kind of true and kind of not. It would probably be more accurate to describe the entirety of the open world covered by the five new maps as one giant Vista. There's little need for the kind of precision, dexterity or nerve sometimes required to complete GW2's official Jumping Puzzles but doing almost anything, anywhere, requires the kind of loose scramble previously confined to filling out those little map flags.

It turns out that suits me fine. I always loved Vistas. I've loved climbing in MMOs since the days early in the century when I discovered you could scramble across the roofs of Felwithe. There used indeed to be almost a cult of climbers within MMOs, people who would spend hours trying to find ways to reach places the developers never intended them to find, just so they could take screenshots and post them on forums to prove they'd done it.

That kind of organic, geographical, architectural exploration seems to me to be fully in tune with both the spirit and the history of the genre in a way designated Jumping Puzzles are not. Incorporating climbing into a quest seems fair and proper, whereas insisting on completion of an actual JP very much would go very much against the grain.

The many eggs you need to collect for the Griffon quest are placed atop pillars and cliffs that require some thought and ingenuity to reach. I loved it. Even with the guide to follow it necessitated a deal of creative thinking and puzzle-solving. Perfect explorer content in other words. Just as I enjoyed the Ascended Weapon quests in Heart of Thorns a lot more than I appreciated the main story quest, so I had a deal more fun getting my Griffon than following the plot that led to my being able to begin the quest in the first place. It was also in quest of my Griffon that I began, grudgingly, to learn to rely on my lesser mounts.

Path of Fire is an expansion designed around a single feature: Mounts. They are required in a much more intense and sustained manner than its predecessor Heart of Thorns ever required Gliding. It's not only that some areas are literally impossible to access without a Mount (specifically those that are accessible only via Jackal portals); it's more that although you can get to most places by clambering or gliding, it's so much easier to bounce on a bunny or glide on a skimmer; you feel you're wasting your time trying to do it any other way.

I'm getting used to the mounts but I still dislike them. I don't suffer from motion sickness using them so that's not an issue for me. I just find them annoying, clunky and badly designed. They are, however, unavoidable. It's not just the otherwise difficult to access locations: it's becoming increasingly apparent that any activity that isn't undertaken entirely alone is going to demand a mount for the simple reason that mounts move at twice the speed of a player on foot. If you don't crack out a mount you simply can't keep up. Given the size of the maps, if you try to go it on foot, by the time you arrive at an event it's likely to have ended.

I finally had to admit that to myself last night, when I joined a Bounty Train for the first time. Bounties are PoF's answer to Core Tyria's World Bosses,  legendary monsters that drop decent loot and take what would in other games be described as a pick-up raid to kill. Unlike World Bosses, Bounties spawn when players take the bounty from a board in various settlements. This makes them ideal for one of GW2's favorite activities - the zerg train.

I was criss-crossing the Elon Riverlands searching for Mastery Points when someone announced they were tagging up and starting a train to do all the bounties on the map. It took about an hour and it made for a pleasant, entertaining and profitable session. It occurred to me that what Anet have effectively done here is to refine and institutionalize a player invention, which they previously disapproved of so heartily the nerfed it into the ground, the old Champ Train. I guess that's what they mean when they say they improve the game by "iteration".

After I missed a kill because I couldn't keep up with the zerg I caved and mounted up. For general overland travel I'm leaning towards using the Jackal. It's small, it doesn't lurch about and the triple-portal zips it forward at incredible speed. The Raptor yaws and sways like a yacht in a gale, the Springer is useless for anything but going straight up and the Skimmer gets stuck on hip-height ledges. The jackal it is.

For now but not for ever. The unmastered griffon is of limited use for ground travel, launching itself  in short hops then falling back to earth like one of those failed nineteenth-century attempts at powered flight. Once I have all those Masteries done, however, it will be tantamount to a fully functioning flying mount, as you can see in this lovely video.

Lest I give a false impression, I should emphasize there's a lot more to the Griffon quest than just collecting eggs. You have to visit all five maps, complete some specific Events, some of which can't be soloed, some of which have their own pre-reqs. You also need to complete two Hearts on each map to open the vendors, from each of whom you need to buy an item that costs 25 gold, giving the Griffon a monetary cost of 250 gold, which, in GW2, is not pocket change.

All that done you then have to complete an instance set in Kormir's Library, familiar from the main story but now overrun with demons seeking to reclaim it for Abaddon. Dauntingly, you need to kill ten Elites to get ten keys to open ten chests. There's a lot of angst about this on the forums because Elites can be a tough ask solo but I found it to be easy and enjoyable. I also found the chests easy to find. I only had to refer to Dulfy's guide once.

Finally, when you return to the fallen spearmarshal, a boss mob spawns and there's a big fight. To my considerable surprise it's fun and it lasts about as long as a fight should before wearing out its welcome.

All in all I found the Griffon quest to be just about ideally tuned for my personal tastes, preferences and abilities. There's a particular sweet spot for GW2 content that this exemplifies, along with the Caladbolg quest and the HoT Ascended Weapons collections. Curiously, this is also the content that comes with some of the rewards that I find most desirable. I wonder if the same team is behind the design of all of them?

The Griffon quest is definitely the most fun I've had in Path of Fire so far. Now it's back to the steady work of finding those Mastery points and filling out that experience bar. Which, if I'm honest, is pretty good fun too.

Onwards and, eventually, upwards!

Project Patchwork Pegasus : EQ2

The change of name and management from SOE to DBG has brought a lot of changes to the two EverQuest titles but one thing that has continued unabated is the long-established predilection of Sony Online Entertainment for experimenting with variant rulesets. It's an approach to curating MMORPGs that I have always endorsed wholeheartedly. I've even suggested that for any MMO to have two servers running under the same ruleset is a wasted opportunity.

Over the years I've done my best to taste all the flavors but even with the greatest goodwill and enthusiasm there are only so many hours in the day and you can only play so many characters. When Holly Longdale announced in her Producer's Letter back in May that two new servers would soon be available I read the rulesets and decided that I'd probably pass on the offer this time around.

Neither of the new servers looked especially appealing. The Isle of Refuge server, whose unique selling point is that almost all items that are flagged "Heirloom" on regular servers will be freely tradeable, seemed to me to be a re-run of EverQuest's Firiona Vie server minus the awkward (and quickly abandoned) "roleplaying" rules.

I played on Firiona Vie when it launched and for a few weeks afterwards. It was a unique and surreal experience. The RP rules included severe language restrictions that meant even characters of the same alignment couldn't communicate - dwarves and elves and gnomes had no common language for example.

The first few days seemed to consist mainly of language parties, where groups of characters of different races would sit in circles and spam each other in /say with repeated text in their own language. That's how you learned a language in  Norrath in those days.

The fact that almost the first thing players attempted to do on the RP server was nullify the very restrictions that had been implemented to encourage roleplaying foretold the story of Firiona Vie's future. Within a short time the only aspect of the ruleset that mattered was the free trading of just about everything, which in turn led to FV's status as the RMT capital of Norrath.

I'd remembered that Firiona Vie later fell into severe decline but it seems that's not the case. If it ever happened that decline has been reversed. I mentioned my belief in a comment to Wilhelm, who observed that FV sits at "Medium" on DBG's server status page, a level that puts it well above most servers for population.

Since I have a level 22 ranger there I took the trouble to log in and check. Using the very reliable benchmarks of /who in Plane of Knowledge, and the Guild Lobby, number of people in General Chat and number of Bazaar traders, all data points that can easily be compared between servers, I find that FV does indeed have a considerably higher population than Luclin/Stromm, my main server these days.

So, reports of Firiona Vie's failure seem to be apocryphal and it makes a lot more sense than I thought to see EQ2 attempting to replicate its comparative good health. Still doesn't make me want to play under that ruleset. When Isle of Refuge went live at the end of June I declined to attend the party.

The other server, which launched a couple of weeks later, looked if anything even less appealing. The server name, Race To Trakanon, is self-explanatory. This is the first of what Holly Longdale suggests may be a series of "Event" servers.

The server runs until the specified event is achieved, in this case the killing of the dragon Trakanon. There are set markers for players to achieve, which provide a variety of material rewards if hit, but soon after the dragon dies the server closes. At that point players get a free character move to the regular ruleset server of their choice and the server re-opens with a new target event.

This seems to me to be a good idea in principle. Over the years the various "Progression" servers for both games have tended to be seen by certain players and guilds as competetive "race to the top" environments. That hasn't always played well with the wishes and desires of the players who were looking to recreate the original Norrathian experiences of the past, or just to play through older content at a reasonable pace with a decent population around them.

Although I approve of the concept of Event servers, which should help to serve the needs of those conflicting communities, as someone who already plays far too many characters in far too many MMOs, much though I love that new server smell, the idea of starting yet another character on a server that won't exist in three months didn't really seem to make much sense. I was going to give this one a pass as well. And then I saw the sweetener.

Like Telwyn I couldn't resist the lure of a free flying mount for every character on my account. That really is a proper incentive. The mount itself isn't just a pegasus, something I have never owned, but a rainbow-hued patchwork pegasus. The patchwork versions of creatures, which appeared a few years back as part of the Bristlebane Day festivities, have always been one of my favorite looks.

What's more, the bar for obtaining this highly-desirable mount has been set exceptionally low. All you need to do is get to Level 10. Even under the slower xp rates and restrictions of the RTT server, that's no more than a couple of decent sessions.

It's very smart marketing. The server requires an All Access account to play on, which effectively makes it a Subscription-only option. Chances are most people playing there right now already had such an account but each of these "AA Only" additions to the game takes it further in the direction DBG clearly intends to go - back to a Subscription service with a generous free trial.

I've spent several hours playing on RTT very happily. Very happily indeed, actually. I forgot just how much fun starting a genuine new character with no access to the accrued wealth of high levels on the same account can be.

Right before I began writing this post my ratonga bruiser dinged ten and the free mount was mine. I could stop there, mission achieved, but I'm not going to do that. I'm having far too much fun.

I chose to begin in Qeynos because even after all these years there's still a great deal of content in Queen Antonia Bayle's capital that I have never experienced. I could have written three more posts already on new quests, new instances and new events that I've found, all of which I've never seen before.

When the time comes for my new bruiser to move home I'll be excited all over again for whatever comes next but it's not the event for which the server is named that's doing it for me. I'll never see Trakanon fall, not unless I watch it on YouTube. No, it's that starting over yet again has made me realize just how much there is still to see even after a dozen years of heavy play. That's been the real "event" for me.

I Can See Your House From Here!

Virtual worlds allow us to do many things we'll never really do. Fight with dragons. Conjure demons. Swim lakes in full plate armor. Close to the top of most of our lists is flying.

Immersion? We don't need no steenkin' immersion!

Really, who wouldn't want to be able to fly? We dream about it all the time. Although in my dreams of flying I'm not usually sitting on a reindeer.

The problem is, our virtual worlds are also games. Allowing players to move with complete freedom in any direction isn't always a great idea. Why would you fight your way through a heavily defended  pass if you could just fly over the mountain and wave? In the jargon it risks trivializing content.

  In MMOs that have flying hardwired into the milieu it's not an issue. You couldn't really have a superhero game without flying.

Wallet? Check! Keys? Check! Jetpack? ...

 It's when flying gets bolted on to a game that's managed without it for years that the trouble can really start. I was very apprehensive about the introduction of flying to EQ2. I didn't really think it would work. Well I was wrong.

Evaporation? Wash your mouth out!

Not only does flying work wonderfully well in EQ2, in all but the oldest zones it works seamlessly. All those desert mountain peaks, islands in the sky and vast plains seem to have been made for free flight all along. I suppose it really shouldn't come as such a shock. We've been cadging lifts from NPC flight-masters for years, after all. EQ2 had griffon flights even in beta. The real surprise is that it's taken so long.

No fair! I wasn't ready!!

The way that new freedom of movement for our characters has been introduced is exemplary. If I was skeptical about flying I was positively scornful of the proposed Leapers and Gliders. Ludicrous! Ridiculous! Laughable! But they really work. It's a great progression, from a ground mount to one that makes prodigious jumps to hang-gliding on the back of a giant flying lizard. Culminating in the glory that is true free flight.


The different mounts don't even supersede each other. There are places easier to reach with a leap upwards than by flying around and down. The ground mounts are much faster on land than the flying ones. It actually makes some kind of sense!


I'm not saying I'm sold on flying in every virtual world. We don't have it in Rift yet and I'm not sure what it would add there. But I'm much more sanguine now about the prospect that all MMOs will inevitably go airborne in the end.