Read All About It! Cat Scratch Fever Hits Hethereau!

Any fear I may have had that Warren Continent would prove so compelling, I'd forget all about Hethereau itself, has proved unfounded, albeit not through any conscious choice of mine. I was just starting to work my way through the second difficulty level, Challenge, when I was interrupted by external factors (Social visits, work...) and next thing I knew I was back doing the regular dailies. City life just seemed quietly to reassert itself.

In fact, I found myself playing for an hour or so today before I remembered the 999 Nights content was still there. Oh, how soon we forget! I will get back to it soon. I need to kill the Molten Dragon one more time and do a couple of other things to fill my dance card for the update, if nothing else.

Mostly, though, I want to go back just for the fun of it. My general suspicion of repeated content of that sort has been pushed aside thanks to the excellent entertainment on offer in this particular case. And anyway, I'd hardly have a moral leg to stand on, looking down at repeated content, considering what I've been doing instead. Something that makes re-running dungeons look positively benign. 

That's not addicted behavior at all, is it? Not compared to frenziedly buying and scrubbing away at scratch cards, anyway. Which is what I was doing this morning. Not, thankfully, outside the newsagent around the corner from my house, if only for the extremely good reason there is no newsagent around the corner any more and hasn't been for a couple of decades. 

No, I was scratching away, standing on the sidewalk outside a Midnight Catzebo In Hethereau. I can't remember which one it was. There are a bunch of them now. They're new. And they're run by cats. Very big cats.

Maybe I should explain what they are. I'm not sure the name really gives it away. "Midnight Catzebo" is a chain of newsstands dotted around the city of Hethereau. Allegedly you can buy papers and magazines there but I can't say I saw them sell any. 

What they do sell are scratch cards. They have five kinds at prices ranging from 10k to 50k. Specifically, there's a 10k card, a 20k card and three 50k cards. The prizes range from 10k to 2.5m, with the higher-price cards offering the biggest wins.  

There's a limited number of cards of each type available at each stand. I'm not sure what the limit is but I bought one stand out of 10k and 20k cards and it felt like I bought maybe twenty of each? Bit of a blur, if I'm honest.

I'm also not sure if each stand is independent of the others, with its own stock, or whether draining one dry drains them all. I couldn't easily tell by googling it and I'm sure as hell not going to go round spending my own money to test it.

They refill overnight, meaning you can theoretically buy all the cards once a day, every day, for as long as the event lasts. Oh, yes. It's an event. I didn't realize that at first. It was added with the 999 Nights update but I totally missed it because I totally missed everything about the update, except for Warren Continents, which absorbed 100% of my attention for a week or so. 

The name of the event is Mews Flash, which makes me wonder whether someone came up with the pun first and then decided to make the stallholders cats or if it was the other way around. There's a backstory of sorts, although it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Allegedly, the Midnight Catzebos were set up by Grandpa Miles as a way to fund his Midnight Newsstand, possibly the last functioning newsstand in the city. Social media and smartphones have basically done for newspapers in Hethereau. 

As Catvioli explained to Flora this morning,  Grandpa Miles sank all his savings into the project. Where the cats come in is anyone's guess. I met two of them They both had "cat" names, Catvioli and Cat Cake. I feel like I need to visit every stand in the city now, just to find out what the rest are called. 

When I saw Grandpa Miles' name, it reminded me I was halfway through a quest involving him. Before the game went all medieval on us, Flora was trying to find out why he was suffering attacks of delirium. Was he showing the early effects of dementia or was there an anomaly at the root his confusion?

Flora met Grandpa Miles when she happened to be passing his newsstand and noticed a blue exclamation point hanging over his head. That being the universal symbol for "Talk to me and you may learn something to your advantage"  in every game since 2004, she jogged over and introduced herself. 

Thus began a very long, well-written, emotionally satisfying quest concerning an old man, his childhood friend, her grand-daughter and the old man's busy but concerned son. The narrative touched on the changes technology brings, the impermanence of memory and how the past needs to be preserved if it's not to be lost. 

Everyone involved showed exemplary levels of responsibility, self-sacrifice, compromise, and empathy, including the JTF officials, who turned up towards the end, looking suspiciously like Men In Black, as they always do. The whole storyline felt rich in compassion and adult in theme, making it yet another fine example of why I find this and similar games an awful lot more satisfying to play than more traditional fantasy titles these days. (Ironic, considering the Warren Continent digression, I know...)

Having been reminded of its existence by a cat in a suit, I went back and finished the whole thing before I bought any more scratch cards. (At that point I'd only bought a couple, just to try them out.) The quest, which goes by the name of either“Gift for the Little Book Lover” or "Books Are Like Old Friends", depending on whether you've accepted it yet or not, is a lengthy one but it would be one whole hell of a lot longer if you waited for each of the many two-day delays to pass in game-time.

This is a mechanic I just do not get at all. I understand how developers might want to time-gate progress for any number of reasons but why would anyone build a whole bunch of delays into a quest like that and then allow all of them to be freely bypassed by moving the clock forward? 

Even that might make sense if events in the game-world took place according to a fixed calendar, as they do in the "My Time At..." series or any number of Stardew Valley type games. Then there'd at least be some notional cost to skipping a few days. Missing a festival or an event, perhaps.

As far as I can tell, though, there's no such mechanic in Neverness To Everness. Turning the hand forwards on the clock makes the sun go down and the moon come up and that's about it. The only discernable effect I could see when I did it was a change in the light and the removal of the restriction preventing me from carrying on with the quest. 

Oh, and the rain. It was gloriously sunny on the day I set the clock spinning for the final time but when the hands stopped moving we were in the middle of a thunderstorm. It was raining as hard as I've seen it in Hethereau. The streets were awash. There was forked lightning flickering across the sky. Everyone either had their umbrellas up or they were holding books or magazines over their heads and running for cover.

NTE has some of the best weather effects I've seen in a game. Everything changes when it rains, from the quality of the light to the reflections in the wet surfaces to the behavior of the people all around. Except, of course, for all those poor NPCs who have to talk to the player. They just stand there, getting drenched. As did Flora.

We got it all sorted in the end, despite the rain. Between us, we managed to bring Grandpa Miles back to himself without destroying Aria's grandmother's precious diary or nullifying the Old Diary anomaly, which turned out to be entirely benign. It was the Good Ending, for sure. Not that there was any alternative.

All of which didn't entirely jibe with the giant cat's assertion that Grandpa Miles, having brought his past and present into alignment, had then rushed out to invest his life savings in what can at best be described as a venture of dubious morality or, probably more accurately, a flat-out scam.

Although that, I imagine, will depend on how you feel about gambling. I'm neutral about it, myself, but as several reddit threads confirm, some people are less sanguine to see it added to the game. (Again, ironic, considering it's a gacha game...) Then again, I imagine you  might have some doubts about the event if you'd just lost two or three million Fons on it. 

I did not lose that much. In fact, after what felt like about half an hour of non-stop scratching (Could have been more, could have been less. I didn't time it.) I think I was pretty much back where I started (Didn't keep an exact tally of my wins and losses, either, but the numbers look much as I remember them.)  I do know I'd had fun, though. And I got a whole load of gifts to hand out to all the characters I'm trying to ingratiate myself with because you get one of those every time, win or lose.

I really enjoyed the tactility of the whole thing. You get a different scratchcard on screen for each of the five types you can buy and you can scratch off each image with the mouse, It's an extremely convincing replication of the physical version, or what I remember of it, not having scratched an actual card in a decade or two. 

There is a button to remove all the coatings instantly if you don't, as I do, find doing it yourself with the mouse hugely satisfying. That seems daft to me. Why simulate a scratchcard and then invite people not to scratch it? Why would you be in such a rush you'd skip the whole thing? Presumably because you only bought it to win the money. In which case more fool you! Of course, you aren't going to win the money!

The most I won was 160k on a card that had five small wins. About 80% of the cards had a single win that gave the exact amount the card cost. A few had nothing and a few had slightly more or less than the cost of the card. 

That meant it felt pretty safe to keep buying the 10k and 20k cards, which I did until they ran out. They mostly paid for themselves. As soon as I got to the 50k cards, though, it was clear two or three bad cards in a row would put me further behind than I'd be likely to make up, so I stopped.

I found the whole thing an entertaining diversion. I'll probably do it a few more times before the event ends but I certainly won't be trying to grab every card, every day, the way some people supposedly have been doing. 

There's a conspiracy theory on reddit suggesting Hotta have added the event purely to bankrupt people so they'll have to buy more Fons with real money. Seems a bit far-fetched to me but then I would say that, wouldn't I? I've never had a real problem stopping before I lose only very slightly more than I'm happy to lose. 

And it's not as though you get nothing for your money. I have a whole load of gifts to give away. 

Now, who am I going to give them to? 

Tumbling Dice : GW2

If we're going to define gambling as "doing something the exact outcome of which is not entirely a foregone conclusion" (and regrettably it seems the consensus is that we are) then gambling in GW2 is very much not restricted to Gem Store purchases. It is, indeed, embedded in the game to such an overwhelming extent that it's somewhat surprising anyone plays at all, given the apparent propensity of gamers to quit at the first suggestion that there may be some element of chance involved in the enterprise.

Consider, for example, the Mystic Forge, an elaborate construction whose outlets in Lions Arch, The Mists and any number of pay-to-enter velvet-rope enclosures form a conduit to some netherworld dungeon, in which the Djinn Zomorros languishes, incarcerated for an indeterminate period by persons unknown for unspecified crimes. Here adventurers come in their thousands and tens of thousands to deposit rare or exotic weapons by their millions in the hope that Zomorros will turn them into pre-cursors.

Mostly he doesn't but people keep trying. The lure of a Legendary leads many to try their luck at the Mystic Toilet, so named because it's like throwing your money down one.

Then there are the Skritt with their enterprising, entrepreneurial, ectoplasm exchange. This feels a lot more like actual gambling. People call it playing the Ecto Slot Machine. In fact, you always get something back, even if it's often less than you put in, so it's really just buying a pig in a poke from a rat in a coat.

Open the box!

The original Skritt gold sink (for that is its true function) arrived unannounced along with the revamped Lions Arch. It was, indeed, so very far being announced that most players probably still don't know it's there and half of those who do can't find it. For reference, it's here and there's another one, which you're even less likely to stumble upon by accident, in Skrittsburgh.

As a company ANet is famous, among other things, for iteration; a design ethos whereby you do the same thing over and over and over again until either it works or you stop noticing that it doesn't, whichever seems most expedient. They have also talked about five and even ten year development arcs.

Who knows what their long-term plans might be? Is it unreasonable to suspect that the entire game was devised as a half-decade long softening-up process aimed at rendering lockbox sales palatable? Probably, although I do tend towards the maxim "if you can think of it someone, somewhere is doing it".

Tinfoil hattery aside, by the time Path of Fire arrived, ArenaNet clearly felt they no longer needed to hide behind Skritt collaborators in caves. This time they brought the whole operation out into the open, with a full-scale Casino in the main expansion city, Amnoon.

The ecto lottery became a fully-fledged card game for hugely inflated stakes.  Disappointingly, not really. The "fully-fledged card game" part, that is. The "hugely inflated stakes" is true.

You're getting colder...

I was hoping for something like FFXIV's Triple Triad, where you play a hand of cards against an NPC. What we got was just another merchant selling lootboxes.

These are just a few examples of the cradle-to-grave integration of "gambling" in GW2. There are many, many more and yesterday I happened, completely by chance (ironically) upon another.

Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent much of Sunday doing Map Completion in Desert Highlands. It took a very long time because as I have mentioned before, and as I am finding to be truer and truer the deeper into the expansion I delve, Path of Fire is hardcore.

Well, hardcore by GW2 standards. Certainly the most hardcore open world content since the original Southsun. Heart of Thorns is decidedly casual-friendly by contrast. Anyway, that's really a post for another day.

The point is that I spent so very long trying to fill out PoIs that were next-to-impossible to find that I ended up discovering a slew of hidden rooms, corridors and caves that weren't marked on the map. Some of those had interesting things inside and some didn't. And then there was the Curious Bowl.

But who's counting?

The Curious Bowl is a small bowl sitting on the floor of a room at the end of a broken railway line half way down a forgotten crevice somewhere near the aptly-named Derelict Delve waypoint. Behind the bowl is a large statue of a kneeling demon. The bowl looks as though it might be where you place offerings.

If you inspect the bowl the game suggests you might like to drop a gold piece into it. Make an offering to an unknown demon? I should coco!

So, I dropped a gold into the bowl and next thing I knew I was inside a locked room. Facing me were two chests and two more demons. No exit. No NPCs. No mobs. No hints.

What else was there to do but select a chest at random and click on it? Aaaand...Bingo! Back in the room with the bowl. Now I'm down a gold and back where I started.

So naturally I did it again. With the same result. At which point I decided to google it. I'm not made of gold. Also, who knows what flags I might be setting?

It transpires this is the start of a nested "The Lady or The Tiger" trick only without the lady or the tiger. Instead, each successful choice puts a reward in your bags and flips you to the next room to try again.

Back to the day job.

There are four rooms. The rewards improve each time. Or, rather, the number of rewards reduces, leaving fewer, better items and therefore an enhanced chance of getting something good, although the wiki entry interprets this as "diminished returns".

In point of fact, other than an Achievement, there doesn't seem to be any rational reason to continue. There are no good rewards with the sole exception of a slim shot at a 24-slot bag in the final chest. Everything else is either very common indeed or can be bought from the Trading Post for much the same price as a single attempt.

It took me five tries to get a single chest to open at which point I called it quits while I was behind. I did have fun, though. Five gold well spent. Would play again - if it wasn't so much trouble getting there.

Let's face it, I am not a natural gambler. I was an unpopular presence at the table at college poker games because I would reliably stand up after a couple of hours with almost exactly the same in my pockets as I'd had when I sat down, a feat achieved by barely engaging with the process at all, other than the drinking and smoking parts.

I think it annoyed people even more that I really seemed to be enjoying myself. And I was. I like games of chance a lot so long as they don't involve any actual risk. The moment I feel anything that even hints at an adrenaline rush I stop.

It's just as well. I doubt I could play GW2 otherwise. After all, looked at from a certain angle, it's nothing more than a random number generator with a rococo front end.

Open The Box! Take The Money!

When I was a child one of my favorite treats was a trip to the fair. Not to ride the Dodgems or the Big Wheel, not even to lose another loose tooth to a toffee apple. All I wanted was a pocket full of pennies and a slot to stick them in. Penny Cascade was my favorite.

As a teenager I graduated to slot machines. Didn't need to wait for the Fair any more, nor a trip to the seaside and a long walk down a windy pier. City arcades were none too fussy about age checks so long as you kept pushing in the pennies.

By the time I was a student there were slot machines in pubs, chip shops, anywhere people stood around. It's a wonder they didn't think to build them into bus stops. They had heavy competition by then from Space Invaders, Galaxians, Frogger and the rest and I only had so much loose change but on a pub video game you always lose in the end. On a fruit machine you do occasionally win and if the coins going in were silver by then, so were the ones that came tumbling out.

So I've always gambled, yet I hate to lose money. Purely hate it. I was banned from playing poker in university because I'd play for hours and leave with the same cash I had when I arrived. Not the same amount. The very same notes and coins I came in with, near as dammit. I only like gambling when there's no gambling involved. I'm not really gambling at all. I'm buying amusement.

MMOs have always scratched this itch very well. All those Nameds in Everquest with their fair chance to drop something you didn't really want and their piddling little chance to drop something you really, really needed. What else were we doing when we camped the hill in Crushbone for hours on end, killing the Orc Trainer over and over again in the hope he'd finally drop the Shiny Brass Shield? Playing the slots, that's what. Pulling that arm one more time and hoping for a payout.

As time went on MMOs began to shuck the disguise. Why surrogate when you can simulate? And clearly there was demand. Players had been running games of chance inside MMOs for years. Some of them weren't even scams. Bringing the street operation into The House was not uncontroversial but in-game casinos fitted so smoothly into almost any milieu, once we had them we couldn't remember why we'd be making so much fuss. In EQ2 the Gigglegibbers set their slots up right there on the docks where the trade passes. In Fallen Earth the action's underground. Make it light and fluffy or dark and sleazy, it's all just good, clean fun.


Then came the Lockbox.

Hard to remember now they're so ubiquitous but I think I saw my first lockbox in Allods. The thing about a lockbox is it, it's not a game. You don't open it because it's fun to see the numbers spin. You open it for what might be inside. Might. And it costs. You don't just sidle up to it and slip a gold in the slot. You need a key and there are always more boxes than keys. You never have enough. But you can always buy more. That's a well that never runs dry.

Of course you need a motivator. If the boxes had stuff you could get elsewhere, why buy keys? So the boxes have strange allure stuffed inside. Pets, mounts, hats. Treasures craveworthy and rare. Did I say rare? There are hens walking round with toothfilled beaks more common.

Me, I quite like a lockbox, once in a while. But then, I can let a phone ring until it stops. My curiosity is malleable. I'm not uninterested in the contents of the scores of Black Lion Chests stacked in my bank but their mystery will keep until a Black Lion Key chances to appear, say when I complete a map now and again.

When I logged into Rift for the first time in months to see what presents F2P had brought it was no surprise to find lockboxes among them. Nice try Trion but Deeps is going to have a very long wait before he gets his dripping little claws on any of my money. The subscription was probably a better bet.

And it seems to have been a better bet for me than I thought, too. The substantial sum that Storm Legion and a year to play it cost had seemed wasted with barely a few hours logged in Telara since then. Now that it seems to have contributed to a very substantial stash of the new currencies, Loyalty and Credit both, I feel more sanguine. F2P seems to have made me money. Imaginary money, anyway.

There's plenty in the Store that catches my eye. All those Dimensions and the things to put in them. Mounts faster than most of my Level 50s ever rode. Extra bag slots and bigger bags than I was ever willing to craft to go in them. And I have 20k to spend. We seem to have moved an awfully long way from either adventure or roleplaying but hey, shopping with someone else's money is a kind of fantasy too.

Rift is up to speed with the new trends in a way GW2 isn't quite yet. In Tyria I'm farming coffers and shattering holograms that spawn in the world, for an event. These are the ones I love because they don't even need a key, not like the Southsun Supply Crates, but if I want them, crates or keys, I either have to fight stuff or buy from the Store. My Deeps' Lock Box Key in Rift I got just for logging in.

Daily and weekly log-in loyalty is where it's at now. We don't care what you do so long as you just turn up. If you ain't here we can't sell you anything. The past few weeks, other than when I was seeing real castles in Spain, I have logged into City of Steam and DinoStorm every day. Every. Single. Day. I don't play either much, not because they aren't good - they are - but because I have a lot to do and I can't fit in everything I'd like. But I sure make time for those two because every log-in is its own prize.

City of Steam presses buffs, currency and many lockboxes into my leather-gloved hands as I step onto The Nexus, slips in some keys as well. Never nearly enough to open the boxes. Clever that. DinoStorm is subtler still, loading me up each day with xp, potions and Gold Coins plus every few days a bandana, say, or a title. I got The Loyal last night. Smell the irony on that. Oh, and there's that once-a-day free spin on the Slot Machine that always pays out. Second spin uses those Gold Coins we just gave you so that's still sort of free, isn't it? All out of Gold Coins and you still didn't get the Big Win? Well hey, we can do something about that. Just step this way...

So as I say it doesn't bother me. Much. I have a decades-long history of gambling for fun without really spending any money. This is just another manifestation. Do I think it adds value to my fantasy adventure life? Not so you'd notice, no. I'd probably prefer that it went away. But it won't so I'm working with it. Fun is where you find it, after all.