Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses Coming In In All Directions

At about half-past one this afternoon I decided to log in to Lord of the Rings Online to claim my free horse and whatever else Standing Stone was giving away out of embarassment after the 64-bit server debacle. As I type this, I still have no horse. It's ten past four and the damn thing hasn't patched yet.

It's not even as though I haven't updated recently. I did it when they announced the compensation package a couple of weeks ago, or at least I think I did. I can't remember if I actually logged in. Even if I didn't get that far, though, you wouldn't think it would take another two or three hours to get everything up to date.

What I'd been thinking of doing after I chose my horse was to ride around on it for a while, take a few screenshots and cobble some kind of post together from that. Now I don't imagine I'll have time. Even if the thing is done patching in, say, half an hour, which frankly I wouldn't bet on, by then it'll be time for tea and we have to go out after that to vote in the stupid election for the ridiculous regional mayor, that fantasy position one of the delusional administrations of recent times decided would make life in 21st Century Britain feel more like living in the Ruritania of their dreams. Or more likely their old nanny's dreams.

Okay, I suppose we don't have to vote. When the polling cards (Which no longer even do anything since they mandated photo-identitifcation at time of voting, so why they still print and post them is beyond me...) dropped through the letter-box, I said I had no intention of wasting my time on it. But Beryl needs a walk and she likes to go to the polling station because it means going somewhere she's been often enough to remember it but not so often it's well-known to her and that sort of thing gets her very excited, so I guess we may as well. Not to mention that, when you're of a certain age, voting becomes just something you do because it's time to do it, not because you want to or because you care about the result

That said, even though I have neither respect for nor interest in the office, know nothing about any of the candidates and feel confident whoever is elected will make no material difference to anything, I still have my tribal loyalties to enact. It's been quite a while since I was in the happy position of being able to cast a vote expectantly and excitedly in favor of a candidate or a party but I sure have cast plenty as spoilers against people and policies I wanted no part of, so why stop now?

That's five dense paragraphs about something completely irrelevant, not to say inappropriate, given the normal scope and range of this blog, and LotRO is still patching. I think it's past three hours now. I wonder if it stopped when I went to have a lie down after lunch?

I don't usually nap in the afternoons. I'm not that old. It's just that I've had really bad hay-fever this week and it's left me feeling unusually tired and sleepy in the day, mostly because it's made it hard to sleep at night when I'm supposed to.

I lay down and fell asleep for half an hour and then, when I woke up, I stayed there because there was a very good adaptation of H. G. Wells' Ann-Veronica on the radio, with Bill Nighy as Wells and I like both Wells' social histories and Nighy's soothing radio voice, so I stayed to listen to the whole thing. Akso because Beryl came in half way through and asked to get up on the bed and then went straight to sleep and I didn't want to disturb her.

Anyway, following our example, the PC had also gone to sleep when I came back in to check how the update was going (Actually it never occured to me it wouldn't have finished.) so I suppose patching might have been suspended when that happened. I'm not sure how it works. I'd lay odds no other game's patcher would give up so easily, though. The LotRO patcher seems happy to take any excuse not to let anyone into the game.

How do they get away with it? It has to be one of those situations where most people who play regularly are so inured to the iniquities of the software by now they don't even notice them. It's only people like me, who come and go, that complain about it. It's just as well they have a good game and a great IP or they'd have closed down years ago. And then someone would have put up an emulator, which I bet would have patched a damn sight faster, so maybe that's a mixed blessing.

I think I'm going to have to abandon any notion of posting about that horse for now. Or about the game, either. Maybe another day. Not tomorrow, though. I'm going to do a music post tomorrow, or that's the plan. You've been warned.

 

Since this was going to be a horse-related post, though, I might as well throw in something about that extremely odd horse-mystery MMORPG we heard about not so long ago, Equinox: Homecoming. When I posted about I said it was "in production" but it seems it was a lot further along than anyone knew. According to MassivelyOP it'll be playable to all in exactly a week from now, on 8 May.

It isn't exactly "launching" in the accepted meaning of the word. It's going into Early Access with a $25 buy-in. That upfront payment gets you just "eight to twelve hours gameplay" according to the article, which includes "the first act of its greater grim plot as well as multiplayer activities like races, riding clubs, and more".

It doesn't sound like a lot and I wouldn't have considered it but then it goes on to say the game, when it officially launches, will have a monthly subscription, but EA players can avoid it because the $25 pack comes with a lifetime subscription. The MassivelyOP piece is a bit confusing on that point but the game's Steam page makes it entirely clear: "Anyone who purchases the game during Early Access will get a lifetime subscription with no additional, future subscription costs."

I'm not crazy about virtual horses, either racing them or breeding them, but I do like the mystery element and the setting and twenty-five dollars isn't much of a risk. I very much doubt the game will have a sub, or if it does it won't have one for long, but it most probably will always have some sort of subscription-like perks that Lifetimers will get for free, so if anyone has any interest at all in playing, this seems like the time to pony up. (Can't believe I went there...)

If nothing else, since it's on Steam you'll at least be able to patch the blasted thing and log in in less than an entire afternoon, which is very much not the case with LotRO. It's been at it for about four hours now and it's still going...

Killing Time

If there's one thing that ticks me off it's finally settling down to play an mmorpg, only to find the servers are down for a patch. Or an update. Or a hotfix. Or whatever. Lots of names for the same thing: Closed. Come Back Later. 

It's not like the dark days of the twenty-oughts, of course. Back then, mostly, if your online game of choice was offline, so were you. You might, if you were lucky, still be able to read the forums, although as often as not they'd be Undergoing Maintenance at the same time. 

Before the free to play revolution, most of us didn't play multiple mmorpgs. I'd take a bet that an overiding majority played just one. Subscriptions cost money and making any kind of progress in the games of the day required a major investment in time. Even if the cost wasn't an issue, you didn't want to spread yourself too thin. 

Nevertheless, even from the start I always had a back-up plan. I applied to every mmorpg beta I heard of and sometimes I got in. There were more than you might imagine, too, although by no means all of them made it to launch.

Some of those betas seemed to go on for years. Even now, a couple of decades later, I can remember a few of the ones I'd turn to, when the servers in whatever game I would much rather have been playing went down. 

 

I can remember them but I can't necesarily remember what they were called, although a few stick in the mind. There was Endless Ages, of course, supposedly the first mmofps and also the first game I played where I had a character who could fly. Or use a flying mount. One or the other. I forget the specifics but I know I used to flap up and land in trees. 

That one did eventually launch. And fold. And relaunch. 

Another, Planeshift, is, amazingly, still running. Even more amazingly, two decades on, it's still in alpha.

I'm kidding. Sorta. It's in "Unreal Alpha" so I guess it's not a real alpha after all. Boom tish! Tip your waitress, I'll be here all week. 

I never really liked Planeshift. At that time it was one of those typical prototypes, where all you could really do was wander around and wonder why you were there. I used to fire it up now and again, more out of desperation than desire. I'd spend half an hour doing nothing very much then log out and wish I'd just read a book instead.

There wasn't a whole lot more you could do in the vikingesque mmorpg being developed by some obscure Scandinavian studio I used to visit every few months. I can't recall the name of either the company or the game. I think it began with a "D".

 

I liked, whatever it was called, even though it never really ofered even as much content as the most fly-by-night early access game would give you now. The shovelware floodgates hadn't yet opened and anything that let you make a character and walk around a couple of acres of barren tundra seemed like a gift.

It wasn't all alphas and betas. For much of my EverQuest/Dark Age of Camelot/EverQuest again career I did actually subscribe to a second mmorpg, The Realm. It, too, is still running. As I've observed on many occasions, mmorpgs are hard to kill. 

The Realm had one great advantage over other subscription games - it was cheap. The sub cost less than half the going rate. I forget exactly how much it was but $3.49 comes to mind. Or maybe it was £3.49. 

It seemed a fair price. In the age of 3D mmorpgs, The Realm was 2.5D. Playing it felt a little like moving cardboard figures with a stick, an approach adopted even more enthusiastically by another game I used to play, whose name also escapes me, although I remember it was being developed by a company called Missing Ink. No, wait, that was the name of the game. Gone now, all gone.

In the realm of The Realm, very much still with us, not much seems to have changed in a quarter of a century. These days a subscription will run you $4.99 although there is, inevitably, a free to play option. 

 

Who would choose to play any of these games today, given the overwhelming choice available, much of it for free, is an intriguing question, albeit one for another day. I didn't come here to wax nostalgic about these long-forgotten, even if still played games, nor to exhume them in exhaustive detail.

I could, quite easily. I could research the missing names, give historical context, describe the arcs of anticipation and disappointment, achievement or failure. It's all there in the strata. I've done it before, too. No doubt I'll do it again.

Not this time. The point of this post is to kill an hour while I wait for the EverQuest 2 servers to come back up, so I can play that game while I wait for New World to come out of "downtime" (As Amazon innocuously describe today's small adjustment to the recent, giant, disruptive and controversial patch.)

I could, naturally, have played any number of other mmorpgs while I waited, maybe Fallen Earth, Elyon or Allods Online, just to name three I've recently said I'd like to find time to play, but you know how it is. When the servers are down in the game you want to play, somehow all other games lose their luster.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've just checked and the servers are back up, so I'll be off. I have a Necromancer to dress and with luck it should take me just about as long as it takes Amazon to finish putting right those things they got wrong last time.

The little things, that is. Not the big ones. Fixing those could take a little longer.

Bad Image

When I sat down this morning to get my fix of New World there was a big, yellow message across the bottom of the screen warning the servers were about to come down for a scheduled patch, expected downtime five hours. I got half an hour in before the deadline and it's now exactly five hours later so let's see if the servers have come back, shall we. Last time they went over by several hours more so I'm not holding my breath.

Twiddles thumbs as he waits for the game to patch. I could have thought of doing this earlier, couldn't I?

I might have, had I not used my unexpected free time to knock out another post for the Pitchfork 25 series. That will go up on Saturday, when I'm working. I'm at work Sunday, too, so I need to get another done before the weekend. Then I can put up two posts no-one's going to read.

I really need to miss a day's posting deliberately, just to break the run. I haven't missed one since July and now I have this thing going where I have to post every day, whether I want to or not because you can't break a streak. Everyone knows that.

I knew it would happen but I thought it wasn't going to be a problem because, as I was boasting back in Blaugust, I never run out of things to write about and I like blogging at least as much, probably more, than I like gaming. Hubris.

It was true enough until I started playing New World. The thing is, once again as I've mentioned a few times along the way (I do repeat myself, don't I?) much though I enjoyed my time in the original alpha, as New World grew and changed, I felt it was becoming less and less like a game I'd want to spend a lot of time with and more and more like something I could happily dip in and out of as the mood took me.

Which is not what happened. 

Patch is 80% downloaded, by the way.

No, what happened is that New World turned out to be one of those games I think about when I'm not playing and wake up wanting to play. They don't come along all that often although Valheim was one so that's two this year.

Valheim, though, as I keep saying, is not an mmorpg. It feels a lot like one but it's nowhere near as huge, sprawling and open-ended and it doesn't have infinite things to do. As many people commented, for all its addictive properties, once you'd killed the last boss it felt like you were done.

I didn't even kill the last boss. There didn't seem much point since you got nothing for it except a few changes that made the game harder and less fun. I got to the point where I could have killed him and then I stopped. That would never happen in an mmorpg.

Patch finished. Logging in.

Valheim may not be an mmorpg with endless patches adding more and more things to do but it is in early access so there will be a stream of updates and additions over the coming months and most likely years. Unfortunately, unlike an mmorpg, it looks as though they may be on the kind of cadence that allows us to forget we were playing and, judging by the first milestone, Hearth and Home, why we bothered in the first place.

And now Easy Anti-Cheat throws an error for the New World patch. Unknown File Version. Let's try that one more time.

I've played maybe an hour of Valheim since H&H. I was willing to give it a go but when I got into the game I found I just wasn't feeling it. I already built my home there. I've seen all the interesting stuff or nearly all. I read about what had changed and it was just not very interesting. 

I never bothered with the animal breeding that we already had. I don't think I've ever gotten involved with animal breeding systems in any game. The whole concept doesn't appeal to me in any way. The food changes looked dull, the new housing items uninspiring, the changes to biomes minor and forgettable. I have, in fact, forgotten what they were.

 

Another error. Bad Image of the .exe file this time. Not looking good, is it? Third time lucky?

Steam tells me I played Valheim for 381 hours. That's a lot. Some of it would have been tabbed out while I wrote posts about it but even so. I played Bless Unleashed for 80 hours. That's two games this year I've given huge amounts of time. 

New World, so far, 72 hours. How long is it since it launched? A couple of weeks. Still way behind Valheim at the same stage but when Valheim came out it was cold, dark and wet outside and we were locked down and nothing was open. Now it's unseasonably warm, unexpectedly sunny, and everything's open. Not really a fair comparison.

New World throws yet another error. Reddit tells me I should "rightclick on the game in the steamlibrary, properties, local files, verify integrity of games files" so that's what I'm doing. We'll see if it helps. I bet it doesn't.

One piece of good news. With New World down, I took the opportunity to log Mrs. Bhagpuss's account into Guild Wars 2 and have another go at the mount race in Mad King's Lab. A stunning success!

The race popped within seconds of me logging in. I paid my gold to hire the vendor and that completed another of the Annual achievements. Apparently you need to hire a bunch of vendors for one. Hadn't spotted that. 

I managed to get to the start line with only two visits to the rental guy. A plastic spider bit the first one and when I used the tail swipe to kill it the mount despawned. It really is the worst implementation of the mechanic I've ever seen. 

Fortunately I had plenty of time to get a replacement before the whistle went for the start or the race. There isn't really a whistle. Maybe there should be. 

 

Steam finished validating but the validation failed. It says "Two files failed to validate and will be reacquiired" Is that the historic future tense? Guess I'll try logging in again and we'll see.

There was a Commander running a squad around the Lab so some of the lanes were clear. There was another player racing and they drew some of the aggro ahead of me. I loped round without getting knocked off or even stunned, which meant I made the two minute timer with relative comfort.

And somehow that completed both the Daily and the Annual achievements. Don't ask me how. I am certain I'd only had one success before then and you need three for the Annual. I was so astonished I logged out in case someone popped up and told me it was a mistake. 

Login fails again. Same error as the first time. Unknown File Version. Time to check the Amazon forums.... Okay, it's me, it seems. NA West and EU have extended downtime but NA East is finished and my server, Zuvendis, is up. One more try at validating and if that doesn't work it's a full re-download and re-install.

I realize this doesn't make for the most thrilling of posts but what can you do? Well, I guess one thing is finish up here and go write that other Pitchfork 25 post. Gotta get it done sometime. Might as well be now.

Here's hoping I get into New World some time today. Or ever again. I was locked out of EverQuest for several weeks once with an error no-one could solve. Eventually it fixed itself. They always do, eventually.

That's online gaming.

Inconvenience Regretted

This week is Developer Appreciation Week in Blaugust, something that used to be a thing of its own, once upon a time. I found it a bit odd then and, if I'm honest, a little uncomfortable, heaping praise on people I tended to think of primarily as technicians, beauraucrats and functionaries or on companies I knew to be, well, companies. 

Over time, though, I've either changed my mind or had it changed for me by my peer group. It seems that praising game devs and the people who employ them is a thing we do, so who am I to argue? And it fits very nicely with something I was going to post about anyway, so there's that!

It isn't so much a paean of praise to any particular developer or team as it is a general observation. I've noticed a difference in attitude between some of the companies behind what we in the West like to call imports and the way our home-grown game producers tend to operate. 

 

In all the years I've been playing, scheduled interruptions to service (aka maintenance) have been a routine, background hum that everyone accepts, sometimes irritably, usually stoically. Only one mmorpg that I play has managed to do away with downtime altogether and that's Guild Wars 2. The game remains seamlessly available except for the briefest moments, a few minutes at most, when players have to log out to download a patch. Even then, the servers themselves stay up. 

The game uses a megaserver configuration so there's never even a time when individual servers go offline. Everything just keeps chugging along.

Does anyone notice? No. Does anyone think it's unusual or exceptional? No. Players of every other game I can think of have to take enforced breaks but GW2 players can keep playing until their fingers bleed without fear of interruption. I guess that's a good thing? I'll say thank-you ArenaNet for it, anyway.

In all those games where the servers do come down periodically, players are generally expected to suck it up and power through, at least so long as there's notice beforehand. Back in the days when subscriptions were the norm I did occasionally see some of the more combative forum warriors suggest there ought to be some kind of extension to their subs if maintenance overran, as it often did, but their complaints would be drowned out by people telling them to grow up and get real.

Only when unforeseen circumstances lead to unplanned downtime is there any meaningful discussion of "compensation". EverQuest II, for example, does sometimes add a day or two to holiday events that have been disrupted by the servers not being up when they should. For anything approaching an actual compensation "package" to appear, though, it takes something like the SOE hack or a hardware failure that leads to unrecoverable rollbacks.

In other territories the culture is different. I've played a few mmorpgs where every time the servers go down, planned or otherwise, something turns up in my in-game mail to compensate for the inconvenience. It's in my mind right now because since I started playing Bless Unleashed I've been making bank on both scheduled and unscheduled interruptions to the service.

This is a game that just launched. Naturally there are some teething problems. Happily for the developers and publishers both, the game seems to have been received with more enthusiasm than they were expecting so there's been some congestion. Not everyone has been able to get onto the server they wanted, when they wanted, all the time. 

Also, unsurprisingly, the influx of players has brought a few hitherto unknown bugs and glitches to light, so a few extra fixes have been needed. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary by genre standards. Indeed, I'd say the game feels remarkably polished and stable for an mmorpg just a few days past launch. 

For all of these issues there have been both apologies and gifts. I've had lots of gold, some resurrection scrolls, a few speed buffs, an extra bag slot and also plenty of promises like this : "We will do our best to provide a better environment for your game play". Or this : "We will always make efforts to provide a stable service of Bless Unleashed PC".

There have been thank-you packages, too. Thanks to the players not just for putting up with the disruption (minimal as it's been) but just for playing the game at all. I've had a costume and I think I got a mount, although I've had so many things in my mailbox I've kind of lost track of where most of them came from.

It's a bit much, actually. I'm not complaining but I'm not sure all of this apologizing and compensating is really necessary. Okay, I'm sure it's not necessary. Free stuff is free stuff, though, so I'll take it.

So, thanks to Round 8 Studios, who make the game, and NEOWIZ, who publish it for the PC. If I had to pick between the radio silence of most developers and your effusively apologetic approach, I guess I'd pick the one where I get given stuff.

I'm not sure how much good it does from the developers and producers perspective. I had to look both of their names up because even though I'm playing Bless Unleashed all the time at the moment, I had no idea who'd made it. Why would I need to? It's on Steam, isn't it?

I suppose that means I ought to thank Valve too, while I'm at it, then. They make the whole experience so seamless and unobtrusive I don't even know whose games it is I'm playing. 

Truly, this is a brave new world we're living in! Oh, wait, that's next month.

Can't Complain

Gamers can be a superstitious bunch. In the glory days of EverQuest inumerable charms and rituals were passed on from guild officer to new recruit when a rare spawn was proving to be rarer than expected. Or, in the case of the Ancient Cyclops or Quillmane, exactly as rare as expected

Of all the supposed cure-alls, perhaps the one that I've heard invoked most often of all across many games, is the cantrip of complaint. The theory is this: that only when you finally snap and humiliate yourself with a tirade of self-pity over your terrible bad fortune will the damn thing finally pop, purely to embarass you.

The trick of it is to hold off until the frustration genuinely boils out of you, uncontrolled. Faking it won't fool the rng gods. 

Maybe it was that. 

Or maybe, as Argent Defender and Wilhelm both dropped into the comments on yesterday's post to point out, it was the change Iron Gate made in today's patch:

* Missing Moder spawn location in some worlds fixed (NOTE: For existing worlds "genloc" command needs to be run manually in a local game with dev commands enabled to generate new locations, this is only needed if your specific world has this issue, this is not very common)

I spotted that before I logged on a few hours ago. The patch was described as "small" but it had quite a few interesting changes, several of which related directly to posts I've made over the past few weeks.

Inventory didn't get a boost but storage did, with the reinforced iron chest increasing in size to a couple of dozen slots. I'll be making a few of those to reduce the chest clutter that's already out of hand in my more popular homes.

The entrance to the sunken crypt was tweaked "to stop tombstones getting stuck", which was exactly what happened to me. And the console commands I used to fix my own problem when it did are being pushed out of general view behind an optional "launch argument". 

I knew what one of those was. I've used them in EverQuest and Guild Wars 2. I had to google to find out how to apply one in Steam. I thought I'd better do it even though I had no idea whether my difficulty finding Moder was down to the "not very common" bug. It seemed worth a try, at least.

Of course, after I'd done it I was none the wiser. I checked what the "genloc" command does before I applied it and although the explanations were vague it seems it just resets all the data. It doesn't add anything to your map. Clearly you need to run it to add a spawn marker that never existed in the first place but it doesn't solve the problem of finding it. You just know now that it is there. Somewhere.

I suspect that particular bug wasn't the cause of my problems anyway. As this reddit thread explains, the problem people were reporting was that when they found the vesigir it didn't add a location to their map. I just couldn't find the vesigir.

Still, I did it anyway because why not? I was happy the devs changed the console code from "imacheater" to "devcommands". Makes the whole thing feel a bit less uncomfortable. Not that it could be construed as "cheating" when the patch notes tell you to do it, but still.

With that out of the way it was off to carry on with the search. I'd made a deal with myself that I'd give it no longer than today and tomorrow. If I still couldn't find the vesigir after that, I'd use the trick that opens the entire map (not in your actual game). I'd squint at the screen and put my fingers over my eyes and hope to spot Moder's spot without spoiling anything else.

Luckily I didn't need to take that chance. After a couple of false starts, one or two more unsuccessful mountain trips and several distractions along the way, I found myself sailing along the coast of yet another island. In the middle was the biggest mountain I'd seen yet. It was huge. If that didn't have a black tower then sod it. Nothing would.

I only found it by mistake, naturally. I was heading for a different island entirely, one I'd just clipped in a previous voyage but hadn't investigated. Everything was going well. The wind was with me. Visibility was good. And then the fog came in.

Fog in Valheim, like every weather condition, is no joke. I couldn't see anything. I slowed down so as not to run aground on an unseen shore. Land would probably mean either plains or swamp and both would be deadly in thick fog. And then the wind swang around to the west.

By the time I could see where I was going I was a good way from where I'd meant to be but there was land ahead so I changed my plan. Flexibility is important. As the longship flew across the waves I was stunned to see a giant mountain peak looming out of the distant haze. Better yet, it was just the tallest of a range that went on further than I could see.

All along the shore were plains. I ran parallel to the coast, looking for a patch of meadow or black forest but the plains stretched on and on. Finally, just as I was reaching the southernmost tip of the island, I spied a tiny patch of green. Meadows!

Of course, there was a massive draugr village right where I beached the boat because why wouldn't there be? I did consider clearing it out and making it my base but I'd already spent enough time on displacement activities for one session. (Did I really need to dig out an underground bunker for the portal on that last island?). 

Throughout the whole of this very, very long search I've been extraordinarily careful. Being so far from home makes corpse runs a truly terrifying prospect. I've been assiduous about establishing beachheads, planting portals before exploring, staying well-fed, not going outdoors at night. 

I've even taken to carrying a spare boat since the time I stepped through a portal and came out the other end to find a troll trying to smash it with a tree-trunk. You can never get totally stranded because if worst comes to worst you can destroy your bed and get yourself killed to force a respawn back at the big altar on the starting island. 

But who wants to die? Not me. And by taking proper precautions in this whole lengthy enterprise I believe I've only died two or three times in about a week. And all of those were when I kept pushing on far longer than I should have. Mostly I haven't done that, which is unusual for me. Maybe I'm not too old to learn new tricks after all.

Once I was set up in a house the draugr weren't using, with my portal installed, secured and working, I set off to find the mountain. It was big enough. You'd think it would be easy enough to see. 

Yes, well, it wasn't. It seems to be an oddity of Valheim that you can see the heights from the ocean but not from the land. All those trees get in the way. 

There were only a couple of choices. One of those was through the plains so I took the other. I was expecting more plains to appear at any moment, or if not plains then swamp, but the country remained joyously forested as I pushed further and further north. And then there it was, looming majestically ahead. The big mountain.

There was a tiny strip of plain to cross but it was empty of life. In moments I was leaping up the snow-covered slopes in the peculiar bunny-hopping fashion that passes for mountain-climbing in Valheim. Wolves came at me from all directions but wolves stopped being any kind of threat long ago. When you've climbed as many mountains as I have you learn to swat them down without breaking stride.

Drakes are even less of a threat but a lot more of a nuisance. If you ignore them they just keep coming and all that screaming and blue lightning is distracting. I stopped and potted them as they arrived. Their frost glands I left where they fell. I have stacks of those back at home.

Night was begining to fall and I was still in the foothills. Wooden shelters are worthless in the snows. Drakes and golems destroy them in moments. I looked for a solid rock face and took out my pick. A cave is both safe and comfortable. One day I'm going to dig myself a really big one and make a proper mountain retreat.

The next moning I set off again, onward and upward. I was almost at the summit when I thought I saw something unnatural. Something made. 

At last! A black tower. Only the second I'd ever seen. It was small and in bad shape. There were figures moving around near the base. Draugr. 

That threw me. I was under the impression all the towers were populated only by skeletons. They own the tower franchise in Valheim or so I thought. Some people even refer to the black towers as "skeleton towers". 

Draugr it was, though. Two of them. I popped one with a single arrow. His companion, around the corner, didn't even notice. When he wandered back into view I popped him as well. So much for them.

I scree-surfed down to the tower. Even before I slid to a halt I could see the tell-tale red glow inside. A vesigir. Yes!

I was so determined to record the event I took a screenshot before I even clicked on it, which was tempting fate. Imagine if a golem had arrived just then and chased me off before I'd used the stone to mark my map. Imagine if I'd died.

It didn't happen. I didn't die then or on the way back to the cave, where I spent another night, or on the journey back through the black forest, although a deathsquito did chase me into the trees. (I turned and blapped him with my silver sword and that was the end of him). 

Before any of that I explored the mountain range some more, curious to see if there were any more black towers. I found one. It didn't have a vegisisr.

Looking at it in the round, I'm sure I wasn't bugged. I just had very bad luck in the number of towers my seed generated. And in the vegisirs in the few there were. I agree with Asmiroth that it's a weakness in the design.  I don't mind the exploring. I enjoy it. But you can have too much of a good thing.

Now it's on to the fight itself. Well, once I get there. It's another long journey but that's okay.

Moder's altar is further to the north again. Further than Bonemass was. Further than I've ever been. But at least I know where I'm going, now. That makes all the difference.

Too Much Information

The last couple of weeks felt like something of a fallow period for the blog but this morning I woke up with enough ideas for several posts. I considered doing one of those portmanteu pieces with bullet points for unrelated topics but then I thought why not do several short pieces and  pad my post count for the month give each of the topics room to breathe?

Yesterday saw two of the most pointlessly overinflated sets of patch notes I have ever refused to read. Guild Wars 2 dropped its long-threatened "Competetive Content Update", Call To Glory, while EverQuest II unlocked the gates for the delayed opening of the Echoes of Faydwer expansion on the prgression server Kaladim.

The GW2 update brings a number of things to the game, including the long, long promised Swiss Tournaments for PvP and a new Reward track giving a skin for the Warclaw mount in WvW. Mostly what it does, though, is attempt a combat reset for both player vs player modes by way of draconian nerfs across the board to all classes.

The plan is to slow everything down, bringing fights back to the supposedly manageable level of a few years ago before Elite specifications from two expansions turned power creep into power sprint and fights degenerated into a competition to see who could hit their one shot skill macro fastest.

I can't say I'd really noticed. I play a Staff Elementalist in World vs World on all three accounts. I play that combo whether it's in fashion (like it was when Meteor Shower was buffed to one-shot whole zergs) or out (almost all the rest of the time). I might occasionally tweak a skill here or change a rune there but mostly I'm playing the same build on all three characters that I was playing before Heart of Thorns.

Consequently, even though I have getting on for twenty Level 80s covering all eight classes I only bothered to read the section on Elementalists, and then only the skills I use. Just as well. It's an opening paragraph and twenty-five detail entries. All the other classes get the same, often more.

The gist is "all your attacks do a lot less damage". They could have left it at that as far as I'm concerned. I went and soloed a Tier 1 camp this morning to see how bad it was (it was too busy last night - I literally couldn't take a camp without three people arriving out of nowhere to "help").

It was noticeably slower and I did have to back off and heal but I was still able to run into the middle, fire off everything as soon as it came off cooldown and clear the lot, so I'm happy. I wouldn't fancy trying it on an upgraded camp but even those should be fine if I go back to the old ways (aka playing properly) and actually pull stuff .

There was one change to Elementalist I really liked. ANet have buffed the heck out of the summoned pets. They now last two minutes on a forty second cooldown, meaning you can have one up most of the time if you want. It almost turns GW2's Elementalist into EQ's Magician, which works for me.

Even though I personally don't feel any need to read the nit-picking detail of every change to every ability of every class I play I can at least see the logic of tabulating them all out for everyone to study. Something will matter to someone in every case, I'm sure.

The same surely cannot be said about the torrent of detail unleashed in EQII's patch notes yesterday. Here's a sample:

• Wind-Scoured Confessor's Bracelet: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 55, Primary Att increased by 6, Stamina increased by 6, Potency increased by 0.5, Crit Bonus increased by 0.2, Crit Chance increased by 0.5, DPS increased by 1.8, Offensive Skills increased by 3, Base Resists increased by 1.
• Wind-Scoured Stalker's Bracelet: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 55, Primary Att increased by 6, Stamina increased by 6, Potency increased by 0.5, Crit Bonus increased by 0.2, Crit Chance increased by 0.5, DPS increased by 1.8, Offensive Skills increased by 3, Base Resists increased by 1.
• Facet of the Silver Dragon: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 55, Primary Att increased by 7, Stamina increased by 7, Potency increased by 0.5, Crit Bonus increased by 0.2, Crit Chance increased by 0.5, DPS increased by 2, Hate increased by 1.9, Mitigation Increase increased by 0.9, Defensive Skills increased by 2, Base Resists increased by 1.
• Earring of the Silver Dragon: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 55, Primary Att increased by 7, Stamina increased by 7, Potency increased by 0.5, Crit Bonus increased by 0.2, Crit Chance increased by 0.5, Haste increased by 1.4, Offensive Skills increased by 2, Base Resists increased by 1.
• Earhoop of the Silver Dragon: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 55, Primary Att increased by 7, Stamina increased by 7, Potency increased by 0.5, Crit Bonus increased by 0.2, Crit Chance increased by 0.5, DPS increased by 2, Offensive Skills increased by 2, Base Resists increased by 1.
• Hoop of the Silver Dragon: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 55, Primary Att increased by 7, Stamina increased by 7, Potency increased by 0.5, Crit Bonus increased by 0.2, Crit Chance increased by 0.5, Haste increased by 1.4, Offensive Skills increased by 2, Base Resists increased by 1.
• Medallion of the Sky Warrior: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 60, Primary Att increased by 13, Stamina increased by 13, Potency increased by 1.3, Crit Bonus increased by 0.4, Crit Chance increased by 1, DPS increased by 3.8, Hate increased by 3.8, Block increased by 1, Defensive Skills increased by 6.

That is just a tiny fraction.  A tiny, tiny fraction. Seriously, it has to be seen to be disbelieved. It goes on and on and on like that for pages. It took me fifty seconds just to scroll through it at top speed using the mouse wheel! I am not exaggerating - I literally just timed it.

Who needs to know this stuff? I'm sure someone working at Darkpaw does but players? I mean, it's reassuring to know they've put that much effort into re-itemizing and balancing EoF for the Time Limited Expansion server.. I guess... but I would have taken their word for it. I didn't need to see every single change in full.

Imagine being the one who had to type all that out. Then imagine having to proofread it. I'm going to have nightmares.

I know, I know. I shouldn't complain. It's supposed to be vague patch notes we get all twisted about not over-detailed ones. But I like patch notes. I look forward to reading them. Getting something like that is like ordering a steak and the waiter bringing a whole live cow. Not that I'd do that, being a vegetarian. Alright, pescatarian, but that's such a made-up word.

It has at least made me consider playing on Kaladim again. I have a level thirtysomething I was playing there - a Dirge, I think she is -  and I'm very well aware that EoF is a major gear reset. I could do a couple of sessions with her, questing in Butcherblock, and probably replace everything she's wearing.

I'm not sure I want to, though. I take SynCaine's point on progression but sometimes it feels just a little bit too obvious to be enjoyable. Still, good to have the option and EoF was a decent expansion.

Also, if anyone was thinking of jumping onto Kaladim and making a character for a bit of prog server fun, now would be the best of times to do it. Faydwer comes with a complete new starting area, a new race and a full leveling path. There will be lots of people starting over, plenty of groups, a buzz in the air (literally, with all the bixies), all that good stuff.

I think I might just have talked myself into it...

Like A Bad Head In The Morning

"And I might as well just grin and bear it
'Cause it's not worth the trouble of an argument"

Blur

I don't often rant but sometimes you just have to, don't you? I'll try and keep it short. After all, no-one reading this is likely to be part of the problem and there's nothing anyone here can do about it but a trouble shared is a trouble two people have to deal with instead of just the one. That is how the saying goes, isn't it? I thought it was pithier, somehow.

Also, complaining about people complaining (which is what I'm doing, although I realize I haven't actually said so yet) is such a bad look. I mean, who wants to be that guy? Or girl. (Why is it that "guys" plural can be gender neutral but "guy" singular is always male? Not that I'm complaining. Just observing. Or maybe I am complaining. Sometimes it's hard to tell.)

Bad look or not, I am going to be that guy. As I commented on this thread, which is what got me wound up in the first place, some people will complain about anything. This post proves it.

You can work out what my posting name is on the EQII forums from that link, by the way. Unless someone else said it as well. I mean, it's hardly an original aperçu, is it, "Some people will complain about anything"? It's not like I'm claiming copyright on it.

Not that the name I post under is a secret or should be, although if I wanted to be sneaky I do have several accounts, so I could post as different people. I could go on the forums and have a huge argument with myself, maybe even try to get one of me banned. That would be meta. Or postmodern. Or ironic. Or childish. And probably against the EULA.

Hauling the point back in on a very long rope, the substantive issue that some EverQuest II players are ready to quit over is this: instead of patching every week the game will now patch every other week.

I know, right? It's armageddon! Or at least one of the harbingers. I think it's in Revelations, somewhere. God forbid the developers should take more time to get things right or give the excellent, dedicated and tireless testing community longer to do their selfless, unpaid QA shuffle.

Clearly a move like this is a slap in the face, the last straw, incontrovertible evidence that the game is on fast track to maintenance mode. What are we paying them for, eh? EH??

EverQuest and EQII players both have what seems to me to be lower than average anger thresholds, although I strongly suspect there are other MMORPGs could give them a run if there was an award for "Most Easily Outraged". Just not any that I play. Thankfully.

The other hot button issue right now (or at least the latest - there's a line of them stretching right around the walls of Freeport and back over the hills half way to Qeynos) is the removal of descriptive text from crafting mats. It used to say what level items the material was used to make. Now it doesn't.

I admit it's an odd change although the ostensible reason is entirely valid in my opinion. Changes to the crafting system over time mean that what used to be a straightforward, vertical progression is now far more horizontal. In consequence those tool tips, once helpful, are now potentially confusing, especially to newer players.

That makes a lot of sense to me. I stopped looking at that text years ago for exactly that reason. If I want to know what mats to use nowadays I open the Recipe, where it always tells you, or if I have a material I'm unsure of I go to the invaluable EQ2 Traders and look it up there. 

It seems that I'm crazy. No-one should have to do anything as outrageous as looking stuff up. It should all be there, in front of you, on the object, all the time. And if it's not you should down tools and walk away.

The hills some people choose to die on! Unplayable lag, gamebreaking bugs that stop you logging in at all, PvE events that end in a FFA PVP brawl... (oh, wait, wrong game and working as intended...). Those I could see as legitimate reasons for remonstration. The removal of a few words of guidance text? Yeah... no.

The thing that annoys me most isn't people complaining per se. Everyone complains. I complain. I'm doing it now. It's human nature. What annoys me is people complaining on my behalf without asking me or even knowing me.

"Everyone hates...". "No-one wants...". "We all wish...". No we frickin' don't! Or maybe, yes, we do, but how do you know? And who elected you spokesbeing anyway?

Generalizations are fine. Necessary, even, to put a point over. But qualify them, ffs! "It seems to me like everyone hates...", "No-one I've ever heard about wants...", "Everyone I've spoken to wishes...". Is that so hard? You may still come over as insular and ignorant but at least you're not claiming to be omniscient.

It's particularly galling when, as so often seems to be the case, I'm having a great time and someone's telling me I'm not. Blood of Luclin is my favorite expansion for years, I've played more of it than I have most others in the Daybreak Era, the progression mechanics work better for me, I'm making more money, getting better gear and having more fun. I even like the changes to how crafting works, the ones that apparently mean crafters are "shafted" and crafting is ruined forever for everyone.

Don't tell me I'm not having fun when I'm having fun!

Anyway, I said I'd keep it short so I will. Feel free to complain I went on too long or missed the point or that I don't know what I'm talking about or I contradicted myself (I do realize that all the things I'm complaining about are remarkably similar to things I've been saying about GW2 for years now...).

That's what comments threads are for, isn't it? Complaining?

Girl Singing in the Wreckage : Final First Impressions

There's something about pirate-themed MMOs that just seems to demand an extended metaphor, isn't there? Maybe it's because coming up with them is just about as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, a mini-game that is, no doubt, in development on Wildcard's private test server even as we speak.

According to MassivelyOP, Atlas, after a hasty and ill-prepared launch, has slipped past the treacherous rocks of overwhelmingly negative reviews to sail into the calm seas of very satisfactory player retention. I'm sure we're all very relieved to hear that, not least the twelve thousand people who posted negative reviews on Steam.

Is Atlas an MMO, though? And if is, is it also an MMORPG? When first we learned of its existence we were excited, not to say astounded, to hear that Atlas would host "over 40,000 players in the same world, all exploring it simultaneously".

Go to bed fully dressed.

That sounds like a bold claim but M:OP reports a current concurrency of 44,000 and a high just shy of 59,000 while Steam gives a monthly average of 38,000. On the other hand, when I logged out this morning, the stats on my exit screen told me there were 19 other people playing. You do the math because I can't.

Let's give the confusing numbers a pass and agree that Atlas is in some ways both "Massive" and "Multiple". It's definitely "Online". So I guess it's an MMO. Is it an MMORPG, though?

No, it bloody well is not! There's one very simple reason that Atlas falls at the first hurdle in any race to join the ranks of bona fide MMORPGs: persistence. The key defining feature of MMORPGs is persistence, not only of the world but of your character's place in it. This is something Atlas, entirely by intent and design, neither has nor wants.

It's hard to find out accurate information at this early stage, but as far as I can tell Atlas follows the general principle of survival games when it comes to persistence, namely Use It Or Lose It. If you log out, any structures or craft you own are vulnerable both to predation and decay. If you stay offline for long enough to get a good night's sleep, let alone take a few days off, you will come back to find your corpse floating in the water or face down on the sand.

On a PvP server this is a mechanic designed to foster co-operation and competition. On a PvE server... I have no idea.

The game is unapologetically marketed and promoted as something suited to organized groups of players, be that clans, guilds or co-op teams. Presumably there's a market out there for PvE gameplay with almost all the downsides of PvP except for actually being killed by other players.

This is not to say that keeping your character alive and your stuff intact while also performing the necessary functions of an actual life is impossible, even playing solo. It's hard to be sure, though, as information at this stage is sketchy. I'm not even clear yet whether Storage Crates decay over time, for example, let alone buildings, so I can't say for certain whether true persistence is actually impossible or just very difficult to achieve. 

Wake up in your underwear.

You don't have to do everything yourself, even if you have no actual friends to lend a hand. Atlas
does have hireable NPCs - "Crew" - who can be set to perform all the necessary functions of running a ship, including repair. They don't do this for love, though; you have to pay them. If you run out of Gold they walk off the job and down goes your boat.

What's more, you have to supply them with the necessary materials to keep everything ship-shape. You also have to keep yourself fed, watered, healthy, not too warm and not too cold, all at the same time as earning enough gold to pay your crew and gathering enough materials to keep the entire operation afloat.

This, in my opinion, is not a game. Neither is it entertainment. It's a pastime, a hobby, and very possibly a great way of avoiding issues you'd rather not be thinking about. As an effective way to keep your hands, eyes and at least some of your brain occupied for most or even all of your waking hours it can hardly be faulted.

I'm on record as being very much in favor of hobbies and pastimes. I strongly prefer them to games. People do, however, tend have quite strong preferences, likes and dislikes, when it comes to hobbies and I'm no exception. While I'm entirely comfortable with spending inordinate amounts of time doing things that have little or no extrinsic purpose or value, I often find myself drawing my own personal line at treading water.

It's one thing to carry out repetitive actions for hours on end, to perform by hand repetitive tasks that could easily and more efficiently be automated, or to work through extended storylines and dialogs that you've already heard or read. It's another to do any of those things purely to prevent your character and your possessions from despawning.

Tobold has been talking about Progression. Atlas has it. Your character's level, statistics and skills neither decay nor disappear if you don't service them. They are truly persistent and, so long as you keep playing, they will continue to progress, at least  until you hit the caps.

I don't find that helps much. Neither does finding that a decade has passed in game since I last logged in a few days ago. When I logged out on Monday my character was twenty-three years old. When I logged in this morning she was thirty-five. That's the kind of progression I could do without.

A lot can happen

If I leave it another couple of weeks I'm guessing she'll be dead. As in permanently unplayable - she was dead in game when I logged in today. I might log in to find out, just out of curiosity. It's unlikely I'll be logging in to play.

I would play Atlas, if it was an MMORPG. If I knew I could log back in and find my character where and how I'd left her. If there was some persistence in the things that matter. I might also play it if the overall experience was something much more throwaway, if everything happened quickly and easily and having to start over was a pleasure rather than a pain.

Atlas is neither of those things. It's a harsh and unforgiving world, filled with hard knocks and vicious knockbacks. It demands constant attention and commitment without the promise of anything lasting or substantial in return. There's nothing wrong with that if that's what you want. It's not what I want.

Also, just to put the cap on it, while the game still runs well while I'm playing, some recent change
means that every time I log out my entire PC hangs for anything up to half an hour. It's almost as though the game is trying to tell me something.

in a dozen years.

I'm going to keep an eye on Atlas. The potential is huge. This month Wildcard are releasing the Developers' Kit which will open up the game for modding. I'm fairly sure someone will use it as the platform to build something interesting, somewhere down the line.

Next week's patch is also set to reduce the difficulty of getting started significantly. That's quite encouraging and it might have persuaded me to start over yet again if it wasn't for the fact that GW2's next Living Story update also drops on Tuesday.

Probably not. The incoming changes likely wouldn't have made enough difference to draw me back even without the competition. I've enjoyed learning what Atlas is trying to be, but as a PvE MMO, right now it's pretty much a bust. It's still a co-op survival game under the hood and that's a genre that's never appealed to me, no matter how fancy the paint job.

I'm still very happy to have bought and tried it. Atlas's journey has barely begun. It's going to be around for a long time.  If - when - things change, I'll be back to give it another look. For the time being, though, I think I'm done.

Now That's What I Call A Patch Message Vol 1

Hang on a minute... left ankle? Are we talking Long Johns here?



Source 

Tiger, Tiger : EverQuest

I didn't plan on posting tonight but Belghast's observation that he hadn't been able to log in to EverQuest because "the servers went down at 5:00 am EDT on the 18th and did not come back apparently until 2:30 am EDT on the 19th" led me to check the patch notes to see what was going on.

They are extensive to say the least. There's all the usual, expected, ongoing tweaking of content from the 19th Anniversary celebrations and the current expansion, Ring of Scale but there were also some changes that struck me as rather odd:

Tigers across Norrath celebrate by roaring in delight! Reverted tigers in older zones to their original appearance.

The Minotaur Hero will again terrorize the Steamfont Mountains. Newbie gnomes beware!

Handing in the Tome of Order and Discord to a Priest of Discord will again flag the character as Player Versus Player

Hmm. I believe all of those are reversions to changes made at various times over the years that were intended either to modernize the game, make it more accessible, or both. I'm sure I specifically recall The Priest of Discord being disabled to avoid the endless customer service problems caused by newbies handing in their Tomes without understanding the dire and irreversible consequences.

What's more, it was only a few days ago, while I was hunting in Emerald Jungle, that I was admiring the gorgeous tiger models there. I very nearly did a post specifically about them. Those are the models they have removed in favor of older ones. I wish I'd taken some better screenshots now.

I wonder what the older ones look like? I do remember when they changed the Dire Wolf models in Velious from the ones that looked like they came from a Tex Avery cartoon to the inferior ones we have today but I can't recall any goofy, cartoon tigers.

What this presages, I dread to think. There seems to be altogether too much of a "good old days" vibe going on in some parts of DBG. On the other hand, if they feel like reverting Freeport to its former glory they can change every animal model in the game back to 1999 spec and we'll call it even!

Not everything old is deemed gold, however. By far the biggest and potentially most controversial change is this:

Performed additional upgrades to both the client and server to utilize more modern hardware and operating system features.

- - EverQuest will no longer run on Windows Vista or older operating systems.

- - Please refer to the minimum system requirements on our website.

It  was only last week that there was a big discussion in general chat about Windows. The consensus seemed to be that EQ was best played on Windows XP, which was what most of the people expressing an opinion were still using.

EQ players generally do not like change. We'll see how this goes.

The Great Spring Update or Here, Let Me Show You How To Do It!: GW2

GW2's Spring Update dropped on Tuesday and so far the reaction seems mostly positive, which might be a first. As expected, there was little in the way of new content, with the meat of the patch being system revamps and revisions.

The parts of the game under focus were World vs World and the Heart of Thorns maps, all of which received substantial makeovers or, in the case of HoT, nerfs. Seldom can such extreme pruning and cutting have been greeted with such enthusiasm.

The ever-unpopular Desert Borderlands had their barricades torn down, their bridges widened and their annoying House of Fun mechanics toned down or switched off altogether. Where once awkward jump pads or dangerous scrambles provided the fastest routes now hastily bodged-in ramps make access to key areas faster and less fatal.

That all went down well with everyone other than the awkward cusses who professed to have liked the DBLs all along, although I can sense a certain nervousness around the impending return of the Alpine Borderlands among those who can now see the potential in the new maps that was previously hidden behind the Extreme Sports aesthetic.

Almost universally welcomed was the addition of sPvP style "Reward Tracks" to WvW. I've long been of the belief that adding extrinsic rewards to game modes in order to encourage more people to try them is counter-productive. There's some real-world evidence for this.

Given that "lack of rewards" has been one of the top three complaints about WvW since launch, though, rather than fight the concept I can only comment on the execution, which is not at all bad. It's a cut-and-paste from SpVP, for sure, with just one new track specific to WvW added, but it adds some flavor and more stuff is more stuff, however you cut it.

One very clever move was giving Commanders the option to allocate a portion of the reward credit accrued by a squad to specific squaddies, who might be away from the main action on guard or scout duty, tagging siege or walking the commander's basenji.

The main problem with that is that it feeds off a new "Participation" mechanic, whereby players' activity is tallied over the fifteen minute intervals between "ticks", finalizing and handing out permanent reward credit only at the "tick", when the War Score is incremented. That just happens to be the exact same mechanic that this patch removed from the PvE Heart of Maguuma maps (the new, official, name for what has sometimes been referred to as Magus Falls). A little consistency would be nice.

Last night the second shoe dropped for WvW as server merges world linking redued the number of competitors in the North American league from twenty-four to a round dozen. Yak's Bend linked with Anvil Rock, which made about as much difference as an eye-dropper does to an ocean. My third-account server, Ehmry Bay, linked with Henge of Denravi, which might be a tad more noticeable. Gone are the days of wandering around doing dailies and taking camps without seeing a red name, I fear.

It hasn't been half a day yet so how all this will pan out is anyone's guess but by far the strongest reaction on the forums was outrage at the huge queues, hundreds strong and hours long, that most servers had at reset. I suspect that will be seen as a big win at Anet Towers. If nothing else the changes will have at least attracted the interest of a lot of dormant players who are now piling back in to see if the game they didn't like enough to keep playing has anything left to offer.

That, in a nutshell, is the overriding theme of the Spring Update: do whatever it takes to get people back through the doors. The suspicion is that Heart of Thorns under-performed at launch and then proceeded to tank hard, dragging the rest of the game down with it. Colin Johansen fell (or was pushed) onto his sword, leaving Mike "Two Hats" O'Brien to awaken from his slumber, remount his shining charger and ride in to Save The Game.

And on this evidence he just might. The WvW changes, while not by any means perfect or complete, have been better received than anything done for or to the game mode since launch. The threads on the Forum are positively glimmering with faint praise. As for the downgrades to difficulty and upgrades to rewards for PvE in Heart of Thorns, if map chat is anything to go by people there are even happier.

No longer do you need to commit a minimum of an hour, maybe as long as two, just to be sure of getting the loot you came for. Participation has been replaced by straightforward as-it-happens, by the event rewards. You can drop in, do two or three events and leave or you can stay all day; it's up to you. Either way you get something worth having.

And what you get has improved. A lot. The reward tables have been fleshed out and plumped up. The various chests have more in them and better. The event rewards have a chance for desirable drops including Ascended items. The rate at which the various map currencies accrue is many times faster.

There's a permanent 50% increase in xp for killing mobs, the hated "diminishing returns" debuff that discouraged farming and grinding is gone, there's increased frequency of access and reduced difficulty for Adventures.  Many existing events have been restructured and many new events added to facilitate solo and small group play.

I soloed one Veteran mob last night that was flagged as an event. It took about twenty seconds (berserker staff ele - ymmv) and I got better rewards than I would have expected from fifteen or twenty minutes of Old HoT.

Oh, and you now get a free upgrade to level 80 with every purchase of Heart of Thorns, complete with all the gear you need and all the waypoints opened so you can jump straight into the expansion content without any of that tedious leveling nonsense. If you already have HoT and all your character slots are filled with 80s, don't worry - you get a big pack of goodies including dyes and some gold.

ANet are on a major love offensive with this update, that's obvious. The "new" regime is clearly prepared to break with any and all of the precepts of the team that got us to where we were until last Tuesday. The new mantra is "give the punters what they want". We even got autoloot in WvW and our old fireball graphics back. It's almost as though someone was actually listening to feedback!

Take dungeons: I don't do them myself so I have no anecdotal evidence to offer but it looks as though there has been a complete climb down on the aggressive decision taken months ago to all but kill that game mode off. Now the talk is all about how that was "unnecessary" and there are new rewards and plenty of encouragement to get back underground.

There's more - a lot more. It's all in the mother of all patch notes if anyone wants the full details.  The key takeaway, though, is that this seems to be about the best-received update I can remember for the game and that's almost entirely down to a complete 180 degree change of direction.

This update acknowledges what the majority of players and commentators have been saying for half a year or more: Heart of Thorns was misconceived, aimed at the wrong demographic (and missed it, too) and was bad for the future of the game. I actually liked HoT a lot more than I expected but I'm certain I'd have liked it a lot more, even than that, had it launched in this latest version.

The "Buy Heart of Thorns" pop up is back in the corner of the screen for my non-HoT accounts. Having done the unpleasant and humiliating work to make the expansion more palatable to those players who voted without their wallets, ANet naturally want to reap the reward of more sales.

I would already have recommended HoT because, as I said, I've enjoyed it and I feel I got my money's worth long ago. This re-envisioning is even easier to recommend. It's slicker, more polished, better-targeted and more accessible. Whereas I previously had no plans to add HoT to my second or third accounts, not because of the value but because I wouldn't have wanted to repeat the required grind, now it's quite likely that one or both will receive the upgrade at some point.

GW2's Spring Update isn't a second coming on the scale of FFXIV:A Realm Reborn but it's a major change of direction that bodes very favorably indeed for the second expansion. If they really have learned their lesson, as, on this evidence, it appears they may have, then the next expansion could be a real cracker!