Rocky Road To Yak's Bend : GW2

How the plan is meant to go:

Wake up around 7.30am. *** Make cup of tea, butter some toast while PC gets itself sorted. *** Click little red dragon to see if servers came up early. If so, log in. If not, wait for scheduled start at 8 am. *** Log in my account and make a Charr Ranger on Yak's Bend. *** Log in Mrs Bhagpuss's account since she'll already have left for work and can't do it herself. *** Make two placeholder characters on Yak's Bend for her, to reserve the names she wants. *** Stop being her, go back to being me.  *** Make guild. *** Play 'til I pass out.

How the plan does, in fact, go:

Wake up at 7.00am. *** Make cup of tea, eat cereal while PC wakes up. *** Type password repeatedly for an hour or so for the chance to see this message ***

Click through once to see this explanation ***

Finally decide to google and see if anyone knows anything more useful *** Discover it really is a Firewall issue, not login server congestion after all *** Switch off Firewall *** Log in immediately *** Find three-quarters of US servers full *** Including Yak's Bend *** Panic ***

Make Charr Ranger on Borlis Pass on grounds that a) Borlis Pass is quite near Yak's Bend and b) it's available *** Make two characters for Mrs Bhagpuss but only get one of the names she wants, the other already having been taken *** 

Play uncomfortably for a while, worrying about people we were planning on meeting up with probably now being on Yak's Bend while we are on Borlis Pass *** Make guild anyway, since I now have the one silver fee required *** 

Look in Gem Store for server move options. Can't find any. *** Tab out and google "GW2 Server Moves" and find it's an option from Character Select *** Log out to Character Select, find the button, see that all the US servers that were "Full" are now just "High". *** Move all characters to Yak's Bend. *** Heave sigh of relief.

Make a coffee *** Play with much more pleasure and enthusiasm for two hours ***

Get suddenly and unexpectedly disconnected *** Try to log back in only to see my old friend "Guild Wars 2 has encountered an error" *** Disable Firewall again, this time to no effect ***

Hence this post. If I could be playing I would be playing. Ah well, could be worse. We're on the right server, 50% of the names wanted were available (okay, just the one name but it sounds more impressive as a percentage) and I got to play for nearly three hours. For day one of a headstart that's well above par.

Time for lunch. Let's hope I'm not back here later on today.

What To Do 'Til GW2

Wave goodbye to the Guild Wars 2 beta. There it goes, trudging over the hill with all its belongings in a hankie on a stick. I won't miss it. In the end I logged in just once over the last weekend, when I made that unfortunate and unloved cabbage elf.

I'm prepped and ready for headstart on the 25th, not just the weekend cleared but a whole ten days off work. I know what race I'm playing first (Charr) and what class (Ranger). Second up will be an Asura, probably an Engineer. After that, ABS (Anything But Sylvari).

What to do with the thirty-three days until then?

Well, there's The Secret World, which I'm still enjoying a great deal, although something odd has occurred. I currently have around 130 unspent Action Points and no desire whatsoever to spend any of them. The cap for saved AP is 175 so this is going to become a problem sooner rather than later. It's all getting a bit Brewster's Millions. No matter how much I spend I keep earning more and it's getting harder and harder to think of what to buy next.

It's a nice problem to have but I'm entirely happy with the build I'm using. It does everything I need it to do, l understand it, I'm practiced with it and it works. This puts me in something of a quandary. All I can do with my ever-increasing pile of AP is buy new abilities, but I don't want any new abilities. What I'd like to do is upgrade the abilities I've got, but there's no option for that.

Worse still, if I buy new abilities I can only use them if I drop abilities I'm currently using and there are none I want to drop. I've studied the entire Assault Rifle and Chaos trees and there are literally no abilities anywhere in them that I'd prefer to have over the ones I'm using. My skill wheel currently stands at 8% complete but as far as I'm concerned it might as well be 100%.

When I hit 175 points I'll have to buy something. Can't just let xp fall into a hole. I wouldn't enjoy that at all. My current plan is to go into Blades as an alternative and probably Blood after that but it does feel a bit pointless. I thought the whole "no classes, anyone can do everything" deal looked great on paper but in practice it seems I'd rather have separate characters after all.

The Secret World is likely to take up most of my time until GW2 but there are two more City of Steam alphas, next weekend and the weekend after. I'm really beginning to sour on playing up characters that are going to be deleted. I never really had a problem with it in old-school betas that went on for months but the novelty of making a character that lasts a weekend, or even two or three weekends, has worn right off. Even so, I like City of Steam enough that I'll almost certainly pay another visit, disposable though my time there may be.

EQ2 comes thumping back into the room on Tuesday with GU64, "Qeynos Rises". The Freeport revamp about which I was so nervous last year turned out fine so I'm optimistic for the Qeynos version. I haven't found time to log on to Test and scope it out but Mrs Bhagpuss has and she reports that it "doesn't look much different". I'm looking forward to doing the new Class and Race quests. I really enjoyed the Freeport ones. Also looking forward to the changes to Battlegrounds that should mean no longer having to level cap at 39 if you're looking for a punch-up.

Still no firm date on the Vanguard F2P relaunch. If that comes before the last week of August, I'll be there. If they leave it later then maybe I won't. Depends how deep GW2 is able to sink its claws, I guess. I'll always come back to Vanguard eventually, though, or at least as long as there's a Vanguard to come back to. F2P can only be good for the old girl.

Last and very much not least, Summer has finally arrived. Time to get out and explore the huge MMO I can see out my window, the one with the famously wonderful graphics but no real storyline, and also time to sit in the garden and play Celtic Heroes on my iPod, perhaps. Been meaning to write something about that one for a while.