Are You Trying To Be Difficult Or Are You Just Slow? : WoW Classic

Telwyn's post this morning touches on something I've been mulling over for several days. SynCaine was talking about something similar yesterday. It's a question that's been hanging over WoW Classic ever since the game launched - all of a week although it seems so much longer.

That question is: is Classic World of Warcraft "harder", or more "difficult", than either WoW Retail specifically or modern MMORPGs in general? The answer, perhaps unsurprisngly, seems to come down to how you choose to play.

I'm talking only about the leveling game. I'll let someone else delve into whether raiding has gotten easier, harder or simply changed so much no meaningful comparison can be made. My conclusion is this: Classic is no more difficult than pretty much any MMORPG you care to name. It's easier than many, even those that launched long after WoW.

But... and there's always a but - Classic is slower. Much, much slower. I struggle to think of any MMORPG I've played in the last few years that can match its stately pace. Yes, leveling in Classic may be faster than even modern-day EverQuest, although I wouldn't count on that, and it's much, much faster than an EQ or EverQuest II progression server, but those are Vanilla WoW's contemporaries and pre-decessors, not games developed after WoW's success had already been established and the trail blazed.

Telwyn puts his finger on one of the many drag anchors Classic drops to slow you down. It's only one of many but it's a big one:

"...many of the quests are super basic kill animals and bring back their bits. The drop rate on these are often pretty low and, unlike in the modern game, not shared pickups...for all four of us in our leveling static to get those six crab legs, we have to kill a minimum of 24 (because each crab has only one leg!), but in actuality it’s more like 70+ as the drop rate is below 33%… This wasn’t the only quest like this at all, all of the animal culling quests are the same."

This affects him directly because he runs with  a static group, who naturally like to quest together. As many have learned, when being asked to group for quests in Classic, which happens a lot more than in any modern game I've played for a very long time, you have to assess the quest before accepting.



My Hunter accepted two invites in Redridge the other day. One was a kill quest for gnolls. I'd been soloing it but the gnolls were two or three levels higher and I could only pick off singles. With a partner, even though he was three levels below me, we were able to take pairs easily and trios at great risk.

We knocked that quest out much faster than either of us could have done it alone. My Hunter then moved on to a quest that required ten drops from Murlocs. There was someone there when I arrived and he invited me right away.

Wetlands at night. This zone would be perfect for quad kiting in EQ.

In Classic, after just a week, I am already breaking the habit of many years and accepting pretty much every invite that's thrown my way. Since I've had more invites in a week than in the rest of the year, I've been grouping quite a bit.

This one was a mistake. Not a bad one. It was fun for a while. We added a third player and between us we culled Murlocs as fast as we could find them. After about twenty-five minutes or so I had only acquired five of the ten fish I needed.

I'd found a few fins, a quest item for which I didn't have a quest. One of my groupmates did and since most quest items in Classic are tradeable (when did you last see that?) I passed them on to him. Eventually he had all his fins and was about to leave.

We agreed to do one final spawn on the little island. I'd had about enough of swimming down to the bottom of the lake, killing a Murloc, running out of breath and swimming back to the surface. Another drag anchor.

When we'd killed the previous spawn, about five or six in total, the Murlocs' deaths had been reasonably spaced. Habituated as I am to EQ spawn timers, I expected the mobs to respawn in the order and at the intervals they'd been killed. The Defias I'd camped a day or two earlier did exactly that.

The Murlocs didn't. The entire island respawned as one. We were standing in the middle and the whole lot aggroed before we could even react. All three of us died. Since we were going to stop anyway we said our goodbyes and the group broke up. Unpredictable respawns; another drag anchor.

It's quiet. Too quiet...

I'd had enough of Murlocs so instead I went to kill Black Dragon Whelps and Gnolls for a couple of quests that had drops attached. I got two invites while I was doing it but I turned them both down.

Even though I had to kill far more Whelps and Gnolls than the number of drops, because as we know, drop rates in Classic are excruciatingly low, I made far more xp in half an hour than I'd made in the group, and I finished both quests. I also got all the coin that dropped and all the loot.

Most importantly, it was a lot more fun. I was in control of the pulls, the pacing and how long I wanted to stay in one spot. I roamed a lot. I did enjoy the conviviality and conversation of the Murloc group but I found the lack of progress frustrating, especially since I was convinced I could go faster alone.

Telwyn challenged anyone to suggest that the way drops work in Classic is better design than the shared drop system in Retail. It is counter-intuitive but I have an argument in favor of the Classic version: it teaches you not to focus on quests but to hunt, explore and experience the world more fully through your character in the game.

WoW introduced the concept of leveling primarily by questing but it also popularized the idea that MMORPGs could be comfortable for solo players. It's very clear to me, playing Classic, that most quests have been specifically designed to meet the requirements of solo players but also to lead them gently into the grouping part of the game.

Chains frequently start solo and end with Elites that can't be soloed at level by most players. SynCaine's player skill does come into consideration here and Shintar, writing on her WoW blog Priest With A Cause, recounts watching a Level 24 mage almost soloing a Level 25 Elite, but for the huge majority of players leveling up, Elite equals group required.

All your gnoll are belong to us.

The quests that aren't long chains were almost certainly never intended to be done in groups, which is why drops aren't shared. The low drop rate is self-evidently calculated to keep progress to a desired pace. Grouping up to do "Kill Tens" (or more likely "Kill Eight/Kill Eight/Kill Six", another drag anchor) can be efficient but I'd wager that wasn't intentional.

If your goal is to level as quickly as possible then grouping may be the way to go - in dungeons, preferably, assuming you can get a group. Belghast can help you with that if you're finding it a challenge.

For the regular leveller, interested in seeing the world and all it has to offer, and especially for anyone looking to settle in to a virtual world, there's far more to Classic than how fast the xp rolls in. Quests are important but they can all too easily become a to-do list that sucks the fun out of the game.


I spent an hour the other night in Wetlands, farming Level 23-24 gnolls for Wool with my Level 20 Hunter. It was fun, engaging and profitable. I got enough wool to send to my Warlock/Tailor to make us both several 8-slot bags.

It was very good fun indeed. It kept me thinking. It was involving and entertaining but most importantly I felt I was there, in the world. It was a place that made sense and my Hunter was doing something meaningful that he'd chosen.

The xp was pretty good, I got some nice drops and I achieved what I set out to do. I also had a wide area with many spawns almost completely to myself, and that in prime time with the server at High.

What have you seen, Bear?

The next night I took the Warlock (Level 11) out to level up a bit. He has to level up because tradeskill progress is locked to adventuring level, one of the few design decisions Blizzard went with that I unequivocally dislike. He was doing quests involving targets level 12-13. They were Kill quests and he would have grouped, had anyone invited him, but they didn't.

Again, honestly, I probably had more fun going solo than I would have had I grouped. I have some control issues, I know, but it's not just that. I really like the pacing of Classic's solo play. It just seems right. I'm very happy to group for quests that were meant to be grouped - the social aspect there is most welcome - but quests meant to be soloed I prefer to have all to myself.

Making all quests completely comfortable for groups, as was done later, risks making the leveling process go that much faster. It's not what I personally would want to see. A small step on the road to perdition, perhaps, but a step all the same.

So, Classic is not difficult. As SynCaine quite rightly points out, "Pre-60 there is NOTHING in WoW that would be a challenge to anyone serious about a challenge in videogames." The very fact of the game's lack of true difficulty in a niche genre famous for being hard work was one major reason WoW blew up the way it did.

It does, however, require more thought and a lot more patience than we've become used to in MMORPGs and that can take some adjustment even for those of us who are familiar with the concept. I have to admit my own solo leveling skills are rusty – spacial awareness, how to manage adds with very limited resources, how to split pulls... (WoW gives far fewer tools for this than some other MMORPGs of the period).

Not the fanciest bridge I've ever seen.

Also, the consequences of death are much lighter, meaning there’s a tendency to stay with a dangerous situation too long before bailing (also the relatively short leashes on mobs mean I tend to run late – sometimes too late). As SynCaine points out, "... if you aren’t paying attention or generally play below-average, you will progress slower. You will die more often which delays you".

The light death penalty actually works as another drag anchor. Not only is your progress interrupted but you also have to run back to your corpse, contributing to Classic's greatest drag anchor of all, travel time. Vanilla WoW's contemporaries often had much heavier penalties for dying but that made players determined not to die if they could possibly help it. I wonder which approach really slowed progress the most?

I could go on. The number of design choices and mechanics Classic uses to keep leveling speed where the designers wanted it are legion. Long runs to get almost everywhere, no mounts until Level 40, aggressive, relatively high level Elites roaming leveling areas, five or even ten  minute griffin rides masquerading as "fast travel"... those are just a few of the techniques Classic employs. The game is nothing but timesinks or, if you will, drag anchors. And yet, they are largely invisible to anyone deeply immersed in the world.

And for me it all works very well. I don't want to go faster. Progress already seems very fast compared to what I was once used to. In just a week of not that heavy play I already have a Level 20 Hunter and a Level 12 Warlock. 

I played a Ranger, EverQuest's closest match to a Hunter, in my early EQ days. It took something like two weeks to get her to Level 12 and I would have been playing twice, or more likely three times, the hours I'm putting into Classic.

Competetive ground spawns for quests. Another drag anchor.

After that I leveled a Necromancer, a close match to the Warlock, to seventeen in a few weeks, although that was on Test, which was slow leveling at the time. I think it was before they added a permanent double xp bonus to compensate for the endless disruption. Leveling in Dark Age of Camelot was even slower. I never managed to hit the cap of 50 there even though I played for almost a year. The closest I got was the low 40s.

Whatever way you choose to look at it, Classic is slower to level in than almost any MMORPG made since 2007 or so but much, much faster than most of the games it was launched to compete with. In terms of difficulty, by which I mean the degree of player skill required to prosper, it stands well towards the "Easy" end of the scale.

None of that matters. As I said earlier, the pacing just feels right. Combat is viscerally quick compared to any of Vanilla's contemporaries and fairly fast even by today's standards.It allows the game to feel both fast and slow at the same time.

But who cares if its easy or hard, slow or fast, compared to other games? We're not playing other games. We're playing WoW Classic and it just works.

Okay, it works for me. I'm not claiming it's intrinsically "better" than either WoW Retail or any other game in the genre. I am saying that it has a coherency and throughline of design that later development, both for WoW and most of its progeny, has lost. And that's a big part of why I'm playing it and enjoying it when I wasn't expecting to find all that much to hold my attention.

In the end, Vanilla WoW wasn't broken. It didn't need fixing. Let's see if Blizzard and other developers can learn that lesson.

Pictures Or It Didn't Happen: WoW Classic

Within minutes of stepping out into the dwarf starting area (it has a name but I can never remember what it is and no-one ever uses it anyway) I started to notice things that seemed like they might be worth remembering for when the time came to write a blog post about WoW Classic. As Monk would say, this is both the curse and the blessing of being a blogger. You can never quite switch off, no matter how immersive the experience.

I grabbed a notebook and started jotting down my observations and thoughts. Things like "can't fire a rifle in melee range" and "no indication where to hand in quests". Later that day I wrote a "First Impressions" post and naturally forgot to look at my notes at all.

In the event I remembered most of the points I'd been meaning to include, but next time I played Classic I thought of a much better way of recording those aha! and hmm? moments. Instead of writing them down I took a screenshot.

Whenever I'm playing any game I take screenshots of pretty much anything that might be useful, just in case I decide to blog about what I've been doing. It's a lot easier than having to log back in when I'm writing the post and try to recreate the situation for a screenie.

What's more, I usually browse through the screens before I write the post so I can crop, edit and re-color the ones I might use. I used to do it after I finished writing but I've learned that it's generally quicker to do some of the picture-work beforehand, then backfill as needed at the end.

All of which means I can create this post just by dropping in the shots I took to remind me of some little quirk or idiosyncracy I happened upon in Classic, then do some commentary to explain and amplify what you see. So here we go. It really messes up the symmetry but you can't have everything.

Kill Ten Rats became a byword for generic quest design. Go here, kill ten of these creatures I don't like, come back, I'll pay you. Meat and potatoes of the MMORPG experience, along with FedEx (take this letter to my pal over there, bring me back the reply, I'll pay you) and Escort (come with me and kill all the mobs I deliberately run at and aggro, get me where I'm going in one piece, I'l pay you).

The thing is, it's kill ten rats because at the time the expression was gaining currency ten was considered to be quite a lot of rats. Or at least I always thought so. Certainly, modern MMORPGs tend to ask you to kill five or even three rats and call it a wrap.

In Classic WoW, ten rats would be an amuse bouche. It's not a proper quest until you've killed at least twenty. It's immediately apparent as you level up that every new area demands more slaughter than the last. When I took the shot I was about Level 7 and the NPC was already asking for twenty-two kills. The guy next to him wanted twenty-five. Neither of them had the least intention of killing anything themselves, of course. When do they ever?

Killing twenty-two animals, all either at level or a tiny bit above, took me the best part of an hour, what with all the running from adds, healing up and having to compete (very good-naturedly) with all the other adventurers looking to do the exact same thing.

I made more experience killing the creatures than I got from the quest. In fact I'm all but certain now that I would level faster by finding a good, fast spawn with a safe pull spot and just grinding like I was playing EverQuest c. 2001. The thing that makes leveling slow in Classic isn't TTK or poor gear or a wicked xp curve - it's the huge amount of time you spend doing daft things for NPCs instead of just getting on with your own business.

When I finished that quest I went to Ironforge to train all my missing skills, equipped a better axe and ran back. On the way I decided to kill every animal that came in range of my blunderbuss. I did half a level in about a quarter of the time it took me to do that one quest. Lesson learned.

Next time I ran back to Ironforge it was to train one-hand sword. I'd been lucky enough to get my first green drop in the Snow Troll cave and I wanted to use it. I asked a guard for directions to the weapons trainer and went to talk to him. Turns out he only trains martial arts weapons and some other nonsense I can't use. Why he's doing it in the Dwarven hometown I have no clue.

He was kind enough to redirect me to Woo Ping, who I can't help feeling sounds more likely to be the one to know something about martial arts. Is that racist, just based on his name? I hope not. It's hard to be sure in a world where people go by names like Bixi Wobblebonk.

Woo Ping lives in Stormwind because of course he does.That probably makes some people playing dwarves and gnomes quite cross. "Now I have to go all the way to the human city just to train? What is this? The dark ages?"

My reaction was the exact opposite. I frickin' loved it! This is what I've been missing! Proper world-building. NPCs who live where they live because it's where they live, not because it's convenient.

Okay, it's a pale shadow of having to run from Freeport to Highpass to buy your Level 16 Enchanter pet spell, dodging Level 30 Hill giants and Level 40 undead all the way then running a gauntlet of gnolls, all the while knowing you'll lose your level if you die so you won't even be able to mem the damned spell anyway. It's not that but it's not nothing.

Also, I got to ride the Deeprun Tram, which is still awesome even in 2019. What it must have felt like in 2004 I can only imagine. Like someone had spiked your Mountain Dew, I would guess. (Mountain Dew being all anyone ever seemed to drink back then. I still don't really know what Mountain Dew is, although I'm sure someone's going to tell me in the comments).

When I got to Woo Ping he wanted ten silver to train me. I had six silver to may name. That was how I ended up doing a level and a half in Elwynn Forest and Westfall and how I got Old Blanchy's Feed Pouch, one of my favorite low-level quest rewards because it's a four-slot bag! Also Old Blanchy's Blanket, the cloak you can see my hunter wearing in the picture. (Most of the rest he crafted for himself but crafting in classic isa whole other post).

All the quests I picked up in Westfall were orange or red to me and the mobs were way above my level. It was prime-time EU by then. Even the RP server was showing High and most of the rest were Full. It was busy enough that I was able to do the two or three quests that just involved fetching stuff or talking to someone . I still managed to get killed once but it was worth it because four slot bag! Also huge xp on the hand-ins.

I was well into Level 9 by then and I had sixteen silver. I felt rich. I ran back to Woo Ping and paid him to train me but before I could move away soemone opened a trade window and handed me a green shotgun. This is something that used to happen all the time in early EQ. I got given so much free stuff by friendly passers-by it sometimes felt a bit embarassing to take it.

When was the last time a random stranger gave you a good item for your level in a modern MMORPG? Doesn't help that many games don't even allow direct trading, of course.

I'd already had to figure out how to trade in Elwynn Forest, when someone called out to me in /say and then asked me if I had one light leather I could spare. Sicne I had over 60 on me at the time (my hunter is an obsessive skinner) I was more than happy to hand one over - once I'd asked the guy how to split a stack (Shift-r-click. He wasn't too sure either.).

The cynics who said conversation on Classic wouldn't amount to more than a string of abbreviations were dead, dead wrong. The whole social aspect, at least in these first few days, could have been transplanted wholesale from the very early 2000s.

This is how I remember it being in EverQuest, Dark Age Of Camelot and the rest of the first wave. Only, it's significantly more mellow, civilized, even, presumably because almost everyone playing is a decade and a half older. The mellow may fade but I think we'll be keeping the polite  communication for a good while yet.

Talking of lazy NPCs that expect you to do all their work for them, I was taken quite by surprise to find this metatextual joke. Someone was already hyper aware of the tropes of the genre before WoW even launched. There's a lot more of this hidden in the vanila version of the game than I expected. I was familiar with the pop culture references but I didn't realize WoW had this level of irony, this soon.

Here I am, sitting in the chair in the Inn at Kharanos, my day's work done. I finish every session by sitting down in this particular seat before logging off. It must have been the fourth or fifth time I'd done it when I happened to notice that a) there was a massive tome on the table beside me and b) it was interactable.

I can't say I've noticed readable books in WoW before. I guess there must be plenty dotted around. They wouldn't have been a new thing back in 2004 - I remember them from EQ's Kunark expansion, I think, but being able to sit in a seat and read a book on the table next to you must have been quite stunning at the time. It felt pretty impressive even now.

I lightened this shot so the picture stands out. It's a bit harder to see in game. This is the same room at the Inn in Kharanos. You can see the book on the table and, like that book, even though I've been in this room several times over the last couple of day,s I hadn't noticed the picture until last night.

Shows how observant I am. When I did spot it it puzzled me quite a bit. This in is the heart of Dwarven territory. Ironfoge is just up the hill. The Inn caters exclusively to dwarves and gnomes.

Why would a dwarven innkeeper choose to put a huge oil painting of a human woman in her underwear on the wall of his inn? I suppose it could be a reproduction of some famous Azerothian work of art but it looks an awful lot more like a slice of cheesecake to me.

Is there a painting of a female dwarf in her lingerie hanging on the wall of the Inn in Goldshire? I don't think so! I haven't checked but I feel pretty safe on that one, all the same. Do dwarves (and/or gnomes) find human females sexually, or even aesthetically, desirable? It seems highly unlikely but I admit I am more than sketchy on the lore here.

Come to think of it, someone had to draw that painting (Can you draw a painting? I guess you can. English is weird). I doubt it's lifted from a real work of art. What exactly were the artists and designers thinking of when they were building this world?

It all adds to the rich panoply of life in Azeroth, doesn't it? I guess it's hard to cavill over a cheesy painting when there are NPCs named after Monty Python stalwarts staffing the stores (Looking at you, Terry Palin).

I'll keep on photo-documenting the oddities I run across. I have the feeling there are going to be more than a few.

In fact, I think I'll go do that right now. My hunter dinged ten last night. It's pet time!

This Is No Time To Stop And Smell The Flowers : GW2

Ascalon is my favorite region of Tyria. Plains of Ashford and Diessa Plateau were the maps where I began my long love-affair with GW2 all the way back in beta and their power to charm hasn't faded though the crowds that used to fill them have. Over the long drift down from launch I've become used to roaming the burnished fields, brittle and golden in the eternal Ascalonian summer's end, alone.

Well, those days are over. The Megaserver's here and with it the crowds are back. Diessa even has some kind of Champ Train running - Nageling Giant, Spider, Seperatist Agitator, Wurm. I'm learning the names if not the rotation. The reports of the Death of the Champ Train turned out to be greatly exaggerated, by the way. Rumor has it most zones have one now.

There was a line for the Breached Wall vista, one of the hardest vistas in the game. I had to stop twice and wait for some Norns to play through because there wasn't room to make a couple of the more difficult jumps. The hard skill point at the end of the underwater tunnel at the West of Blackblade Lake wasn't very hard at all with a constant flow of people making sure the Veteran mage who guards it rarely got to cast his devastating AEs.

Vet's dead, baby. Vet's dead.

It's not quite like it was at launch. MMOs only ever have that extreme, hysterical pitch when everyone levels together in the first few frenzied weeks or in the bubble that forms after the release of specific level-based content like a new race or an expansion with a raised level cap. Instead it's more the steady hum of like-minded players all choosing to be in a particular place for specific reasons of their own.

A lot of people are clearly bent on map completion. Map chat rings with questions about specific PoIs and vistas and how to get to them. There are also a heartening number of genuine new players, asking typical new-player questions like "does anyone need a 5-slot bag?" (answer: no, no-one in the entire world, not even if it is purple") and "what's Meatoberfest"? (answer: it's a Charr thing. You wouldn't understand. Maybe if you're a Norn...)

Warm beer, burnt meat, explosives - I think I was at that party in 1982

Against my normal run of play I, too, was Doing Map Completion. Partly because I want to try and gauge how the new changes play with what I take to be the normative new-player playstyle, which would be to finish a map before moving to the next, and partly because I might as well get in practice because Map Completion is one of the prime requirements for obtaining Traits through gameplay.

I have two things to say about Map Completion:

• The level ranges given on the maps in no way reflect the level required to complete them

•  Not only is Map Completion not exploring, it is the very antithesis of exploring

GW2 was never designed to allow a player to level steadily and sequentially through adjacent, level-appropriate maps. This was a major issue for many players at launch but players have learned or the culture has changed and you rarely hear complaints about it any more. Far from it. People seem much happier to level at the fastest conceivable pace by any means that comes to hand (crafting, Champ trains, Living Story, WvW) then come back and finish off the bits they missed (aka nearly everything) at a comfortable Level 80 with all the mis-scaled downlevel advantage that brings.

Who are you calling chicken?

At launch I was the one in map chat patiently (or not) explaining to some guy that GW2 wasn't "that sort of MMO", that you didn't have to finish a map before moving on, that it didn't matter that you had finished your racial starter map at level 10 but the map said it was supposed to go 15, that it was fine to go to another racial starting city and do their starter map too, that you could get xp doing almost anything - crafting, gathering, helping Blood Legion NPCs in full plate armor to stand up after a dandelion seed floating by on the breeze had knocked them unconscious. ..  That was then. Now I am that guy.

Truth be told, as a Charr I always had a problem with the whole set-up. It's bad enough that your Personal Story takes a dozen episodes teaching you the supreme importance of loyalty to your Warband and the Charr military-industrial complex, then cuts you loose from both as some kind of half-assed secret agent. The Personal Story is utter twaddle but at least it has some kind of narrative to cling on to, to explain why you're doing everything but what you imagine your character might actually want to do.

Yes, that's bad, but It's worse still if you decide to ignore it all and just run around doing whatever you like. So what am I now? A Gladium? A renegade? How come they don't arrest me for desertion the moment I set foot in Black Citadel? It's not like they don't know who I am - everyone I speak to calls me by my name and recaps my back-story.

You just ate meat from a guy who lives in a cave full of giant spiders. What did you think would happen?

So its hard enough staying in character just exploring Ascalon. I can just about rationalize it as some kind of rite of passage to discover my Charr heritage and I guess, at a push, I could stretch it to cover Getting To Know The Enemy in Kryta or Cultural Exchange in the Shiverpeaks but the further you stretch it the thinner it gets.

Which makes it a problem that so far I'm completing each map in about half to two-thirds of the supposed intended level range. And come to think of it, why does that happen, exactly? Because leveling in GW2 is about as difficult as eating a jam donut, that's why! And always has been.

I "finished" the level 15-25 Map Diessa Plateau last night by dinging 20 on Map Completion.

Well that's an hour of my life I'll never get back

I'd started it several hours earlier at exactly Level 15, wearing a complete set of Fine quality crafted armor that I'd made for myself at the forge in Black Citadel. I had 11 Fine quality crafted Weapons I'd made, one of every type a Guardian can use. Every piece had appropriate Runes and Sigils that I'd bought from Our Benevolent Benefactor Evon Gnashblade (if only they'd listened to him...) through the Black Lion Trading Post. I'd made food and sharpening stones. I'd spent well over an hour prepping.

First Heart out the gate took me about 2-3 minutes and the grateful vendor  offered me a major upgrade for my entire armor set. It went on like that from there. I literally didn't get more than two or three minutes' wear out of some items before the upgrade arrived. Moreover, within half an hour I was turning down the upgrades on offer for the content I was completing because I couldn't equip it for three or even five levels.

Clearly whoever designed the Heart flagged "Level 23" expected that the players completing it would be...level 23 or higher. That's why you need to be that level to wear the armor it rewards. I was soloing those at level 17 at a pleasantly satisfying challenge level. If other people happened by and joined in, as they often did, the challenge level dropped to somewhere between trivial and gimme now!

It would be tempting to blame this on the difficulty pass ANet gave the whole sub-80 world to compensate for the later arrival of Traits. That may have something to do with it but I wrote this after Beta Weekend Two, in which I observed "I moved to the level 15 - 25 areas when I dinged 13 and roamed around leveling up on mobs between 2 and four levels higher than me for most of Sunday." It might have gotten even easier but it was always easy.

Gotta get all that human blood off this armor somehow

Okay, some of it does come down to elder characters. A first character would be able to open all the Karma vendors, who in Diessa are stuffed to bursting with really good stuff - armor, weapons, jewellery, kits, many, many recipes - but wouldn't necessary have enough Karma to buy everything the way I did with 4.5m karma in the bank. It hardly matters, though, because having all that kit only makes things go extremely fast instead of just very fast.

Is this a bad thing? No, not as such. If this was my first character I very definitely would not have been pushing ahead at such a pace because I'd have been exploring. Yesterday I was doing Map Completion so I didn't explore at all. It sounds contradictory but it's really not.

Exploring is looking around you, paying attention to your surroundings, seeing something interesting or puzzling and going to investigate. It's spotting somewhere you think you just might be able to get to and taking a hour finding out you can't, but not minding because of the half a dozen fascinating things you found, trying.

Map Completion, conversely, is opening your map, checking where the next PoI or vista or waypoint is, running there using speed buffs, dodge rolls, stability or whatever you have that means you don't have to stop or engage with anything along the way, getting the UI flash that tells you you've ticked the box then barreling on to the next. All the time I was doing mine, other people were doing theirs, zipping past me, looping round and running back. No-one stopped for anything. I was about the only one who even bothered to watch the Camera Obscura at the vistas.

Vet's dead, baby...oh, you already heard that one?

Cut to the chase: did I have fun? Hell, yes. Thinking it through I come to the only conclusion I seem able to reach when GW2 comes under analysis: it is what it is. I loved Diessa Plateau in beta, when I was almost literally the only one there and I played it as though I was soloing in early Everquest. I loved it just after launch when there seemed to be hundreds on the map and nearly all of them Charr or Norn. I've loved it ever since, soloing it, duoing it, farming, exploring or just visiting favorite spots (the Cowtapult, the Sniper Rifles, the Meatoberfest fireworks, so many to choose from).

The Megaserver gives yet another face to Diessa, as does racing through it to complete the map. GW2 was built with an infrastructure where fun, and even the more elusive satisfaction, seem riveted on as firmly as the panels on the walkways of Black Citadel itself. It's gameplay that's very hard to break (although God knows sometimes it seems like ANet are doing their best to try) and I'm still not seeing anything in the recent revamp that looks like it could come close to breaking it for a new player. 

So, what comes next? At 25 there's an odd hiatus in the Charr leveling path. There is no Ascalonian map that covers 25-30 and the 30-40 map, Fields of Ruin has no safe entry point from lower levels, as I found out the hard way so I'd have to go via Divinity's Reach, which my Guardian doesn't want to do. I might do Map Completion in Wayfarers, something I'm not sure I've ever done despite having spent an inordinate amount of time there, or I might go to Lornar's Pass to evaluate the megaserver impact some more.

Whatever I choose fun is guaranteed.

Picking Up The Pace : GW2

When GW2 arrived back in late summer of 2012 it sought to bring a number of new concepts to the MMO table. Two in particular attempted to address shortcomings perceived to have dogged the leveling process in earlier MMOs.

First there was the supposed problem of inverse progress. In most MMOs the early levels pass in a blur, things come into focus in the mid-levels and finally everything goes into slow-motion for the final grind to cap. Level five might take ten minutes, level thirty ten hours, level 80 a week. GW2 attempted to solve this inequality with something occasionally referred to, somewhat oxymoronically, as the "flat level curve".

According to Isaiah Cartwright on the ArenaNet Blog back in 2010 (long-vanished from the official website but handily preserved here) the idea was for every level to take roughly the same amount of time. Discounting the tutorial and possibly the very first few levels, the intended time-per-level all the way to 80 was planned to come in around a couple of hours or so, as evidenced, albeit with some interrogative fudging, in this Cartwright quote: "...it takes about the same time to go through each level. It’s pretty simple; if we expect you to level up every few hours, then why shouldn’t it be that way all through the game?". 

Is ectoplasm flammable? I hope not...

The second dragon to be slain by the sword of the new paradigm was wasted sub-cap content. One reason for the years-long development cycle of triple-A MMOs is the immense amount of artist and designer hours it takes to create the topography and activity that makes up the virtual world. Games that attempt to control costs by launching with restricted leveling paths and minimal low and mid level zones risk taking a serious PR hit in terms of predicted re-playability. Rift would be an example.

The Catch-22 has long been this: you need to come out of the gate with a big, sprawling open world or MMO players won't take your game seriously. The established games that make up your competition have had years to build up portfolios of zones numbered in the dozens or even the hundreds. At the same time, you know that a few months after launch almost no-one will be using any of your expensive zones other those at the beginning and the end of the level curve.

MMO fashion has already moved on in just the couple of years since ANet thought they'd found a solution. If they were making GW2 now no doubt we'd be reading all about their marvelous procedural processes and emergent AI. Back then, though, the buzzword everyone was using was "Dynamic" and along with Dynamic Events in a Dynamic world they gave us Dynamic Level Adjustment.

I know Charr are big cats but this is ridiculous

What that meant in practice was that your character would never outgrow a map. A level 70 passing through a level 25 area would be seamlessly re-calibrated to match the level of his surroundings. If an event popped he could jump right in without either spoiling things for the natural lower-level players around or wasting his own time. He'd be challenged as though he was still 25th but he'd gain xp and karma appropriate to his actual level. All maps would therefore remain attractive to all levels forever.

That, at least, was the theory. Very quickly, however, it became apparent that most level 80s weren't interested in doing level 25 content for the fun and the challenge. They hadn't leveled all the way to the top just so they could drop back down to the bottom again and futz around there forever. They didn't need the xp, there were better ways to get the Karma and, with the possible exception of crafting mats, they had no use for the level 25 loot.

ANet attempted to make the idea more attractive by changing things so that loot dropped based on the character's actual rather than dynamic level, but even so it turned out that most players just weren't all that interested in revisiting maps they'd "done" (unless, of course, there was a hefty bribe, a nice, fat loot pinata like The Shatterer, say, or a no-effort, goof-off Champ Train).

Go fer yer guns, Black Jake!

This history was flitting through my mind on and off yesterday as I leveled my new Guardian from five to fifteen, a thoroughly absorbing, entertaining and satisfying experience but one that made me wonder, possibly for the first time, whether the Flat Leveling Curve and Dynamic Level Adjustment may not be such great ideas after all. It's a thought that surprised me because they were two of the pre-launch concepts that most attracted me to GW2 in the first place and which, I would have said until now, had served me well as a player.

In brief, what happened was this: my character developed. In the course of Easter Sunday, from early afternoon until around midnight, she acquired and learned how to use eleven types of weapon, trained in six of the eight tradeskills, made herself food, weapons and full sets of armor at level five and again at level ten, acquired and spent half a dozen skill points and gained, often at considerable risk and with considerable effort, Map Completion for Plains of Ashford.

Or you could go to WvW to bank, respond to a Map Call to Hills and end up level fifteen at 3 a.m.
That works too.

 That done, she stood back to take a look at herself. She saw a well-rounded, well-equipped adventurer; level twelve with plenty of room to improve. While I'd strongly prefer that all her weapon skills weren't finished just because opening them is a lot of fun and getting it done so fast feels a bit like eating all your Easter Egg in one go (something else I may or may not have done yesterday) but that's a minor regret. All the rest of the pleasurable process of developing and improving that character remains before me.

By implication, therefore, at 80 it will lie behind me. It will have been done. Being able to roam the world, a faux-ingenue, her orange exotics temporarily sprayed mastercraft green, her punches perforce pulled, simply cannot be as satisfying. It can be fun, yes, but fun only takes you so far.

The counter to this is to make a stream of characters, which is what I have done. But the trip to cap in GW2, even if you try to slow it down, takes no more than three or four weeks. Even leaving aside the cost of new slots, just how many characters can one person play?

Baby's First Maw

Perhaps after all it would have been preferable to have at least a modified version of the usual, unbalanced upward curve. Perhaps "completing" a map should take a few days, not a few hours, even for ANet's very specific value of "Complete". Perhaps it would be better to take a few months rather than a few weeks to climb the ladder to the roof. Perhaps by then all those maps might look fresher and more inviting to re-visit.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps I'd be complaining of the grind and the tedium and couldn't we just cut to the chase. Well, I probably wouldn't but very many would. Replayability is not an easily-solved problem for MMOs and it turns out that ANet didn't have the magic wand they thought they did, but still, GW2 makes a better go of it than many.

Whether the current fix will make the journey more compelling or more off-putting remains to be seen. At the moment I'm more open-minded about it than I expected. Fifteen levels have flown by even though I've been trying to take things slow and steady. So far I don't see any evidence of gameplay or design decisions likely to make a brand new player log off in frustration or boredom, never to return. The implementation may be iffy but it's possible the conception may yet be sound. And even if it's not I'm very happy I decided to go find out for myself.

Next up, Diessa Plateau and the Megaserver Experience:  Greatest Hits or that Difficult Second Album?

Like A Ratonga, Only Bigger : EQ2

Tears of Veeshan, EQ2's tenth expansion, went live last week. Not that I've seen anything of it, even though I've been playing quite a bit of EQ2 lately. I've mostly - well, entirely - been concentrating on the previous expansion, Chains of Eternity. We skipped that one when it released around this time last year but it comes bundled with the new one. Just as well because, as far as I understand it, all ToV content is aimed squarely at max level 95s and you need a bare minimum of CoE quest gear even to get started.

After all the recent hoohah about SOE selling or even giving away instant Level 85s, those who don't keep up with EQ2 may have gotten the impression that for a few dollars in Station Cash anyone can just bootstrap themselves to the top. Not so. Very, very much not so.

Leaving aside the unpleasant truth that in EQ2, as in many MMOs, the game a lot of people want to play could be said to start at max level rather than, as one might logically expect, end there, the issue of those ten levels remains. Going from 85 to 90 is, to use a technical term, a doddle. Ninety to ninety-five, on the other hand, is not.

Now those'd fetch a bob or two down the pawnshop, right enough.

When we pre-ordered Tears of Veeshan  our accounts were immediately flagged for Chains of Eternity. I woke my ratonga Berserker from his year-long slumber, found my way to the Ethernere and began to work through the first of the two overland adventure zones, The Eidolon Jungle. On arrival he was level 92 and 320 AAs exactly.

Six weeks on I have completed the entire signature quest line for the zone, along with a goodly number of side-quests and Advanced Solo dungeon instances in The Throne of Fear. I've continued the quest sequence through several more Advanced Solo dungeons - Sleeper's Tomb, Wurmbone Crag and Chelsith. Yesterday I finally returned to speak to Al'Kabor, the wizard who's dogged all our steps through a millennium or more of Norrathian lore and who now seems to have ascended to some form of godhood that requires us to address him as "The Duality". Yeah, right, Al baby. Like that's going to happen. I still remember the crappy spells you palmed off on aspiring wizards back in the old days so do me a favor with the airs and graces, why don't you?

She's still dead then? I thought she might have got better.

Ahem. Where was I?

So, after completing more than half of the main questline in Chains of Eternity, where exactly do I stand vis a vis progress towards max level? Currently, at 92.6 and 321 AAs, that's where. At this rate, completing the entire solo quest content for the whole expansion should get me somewhere approaching the middle of level 93 and I might even have, oh, as many as 323 AAs!

Not that I'm complaining. The questline has been entertaining, if slightly demented. I recently praised the Advanced Solo instances and they continue to be extremely well tuned. The rewards have been appropriate and satisfying. Every time I log in it feels like I'm making good progress. I'm still going to be the best part of two levels short of starting ToV content when I wrap this up, but there's a couple of major Velious updates I've never seen plus a deal of Heroic content I've never done that I should be able to handle in my spiffy new quest gear.

Turn around. I need to re-program you. Yes, I do know what I'm doing!

On that note, I had a wander through the Tower of Frozen Shadows the other evening, just me and Dok my trusty clockwork mercenary. That went well enough until I hit up against some Named that has a trick to him that requires two actual people. If I can just persuade Mrs Bhagpuss to stop defending the Honor of the Yak in WvW for half an evening I'm sure we could make it to the top.

There is, though, an obvious drawback to EQ2's present predilection for combining ultra-slow leveling with a purely quest-driven approach: it's a lot of fun - once. Whether I'd want to do it a second time I'm not so sure.

Of course, I have been doing this on my Silver account, where the experience slider is firmly set to a mandatory 50/50 share between Levels and AAs. Progress doesn't have to quite as glacial as I'm making out unless you positively insist on being a complete cheapskate.

Going to need a really big frying pan.

I have a level 92 Beastlord on my Gold account. He'd be able to set the slider for full leveling speed and I have vaults full of various xp boosters so there's potential to speed the whole process up considerably when his turn rolls around, but still the thought of wading through the same quests in the same sequence so soon afterwards does put me off a little. It's one thing doing the same quests but doing them in the exact same order is where I begin to balk.

First time through, though, it's been a real pleasure, not least because some of the scenery is truly gorgeous. EQ2 is often, and often rightly, criticized for inconsistent and unappealing graphics but some of the dungeons are genuinely breathtaking. The sense of scale and depth just doesn't come across in screenshots, sadly. I spent ages trying to get some shots that did justice to the sheer. vertiginous, acrophobia-inducing cliff paths in Wurmbone Crag, for example, or the eerie, psychedelic vibe of Chelsith: The Ancient Vault. Largely without success,as you can see.

Hmm. I recognize those trousers.

Far beyond the beauty of the views along the way, however, the entire journey from Firiona Vie's pantomime demise onwards was made worthwhile by the discovery of the Giant Ratmen Of Kunark. They're called the Ashlok and my ratonga had been fighting them for quite a while before he realized the four-meter tall monstrosities he was getting a crick in his neck from looking up at were barbaric versions of his own kith and kin.

With the vile Roekilik and the pants-avoiding Chetari I make that four distinct rat races for Norrath but this latest one has a unique twist (as well as being the size of four or five ratongas standing on each others' shoulders, that is). The wiki tells us that the Ashlok "act differently during night and day".

Enquiring ratonga minds must know! What do they get up to at night? If that's not worth running through the whole thing all over again then I don't know what is!

Five Year Plan: Allods

Sadly not the wonderful band of the same name, who we put on gigs with a couple of times back in the day.

Imperial Square, Nezebgrad

Nezebgrad is a heck of a city. Huge. Imposing. Overwhelming. Grand. This is the way we thought the future would look before we ended up living there.
 
Allods has an idiosyncratic take on cyberpunk. Victoriana gives way to an elegant, sweetly ironic ostalgie. The Empire capital is a city built by Stalinist planners, lovingly rendered, lambently lit, peopled by irreverent, bureaucratic, meticulously dressed nutcases.

Moscow State University

Almost everyone you meet in Nezebgrad is at least a little unhinged. From Ilona, who thinks there's sewage in her kebab to Pavel who thinks his wife is turning into an elf, everyone has their own conspiracy theory. There's a secret policeman on every corner. Any beggar could be a spy. Even the bugs are bugged.

I think I ate there once.

Everyone has something for me to do and they all have forever to chat. I don't think I've ever seen such verbose quest-givers. Every quest window comes with a scroll bar. Sometimes you have to use it more than once. Is that a problem? Hardly! The quests are as lovingly crafted, as witty and knowing as the art direction. They're extremely well-translated into clear, idiomatic English yet they retain just enough of the flavor of the original syntax to give that slightly otherworldly feel that I love.

Elf porn. Just say No.

The actual combat is much easier and faster than I remember from beta, when Allods really harked back to the pace of Everquest or Dark Age Of Camelot. A couple of zaps from my lightning bolt and a charge from my trusty goblin and most things are down before they even reach me. My shaman is level 9 now and has yet to die. So why is it taking me an age to level up?

Well, apart from the lengthy conversations, the city is so spectacular I spend half my time gawping like a tourist, taking screenshot after screenshot, trying to get the best angle to capture the wonderful quality of of the light, the flare of the sun behind another statue, the majestic backdrop of mountain and cloud. And with no mount it takes a long, long time to cross these vast squares and boulevards as I run hither with my hyena ears and thither with my rat tails. 

The Adventurer's Journey: Painting pipes in the Sewage Plant

So far I'm having a great time in Allods. It's just as I remember it, only better. I've hardly stepped out of the city if you don't count the Sewage Plant and the Sewers. I think I have another three or four levels to go before I move out onto the plains and at the rate I'm going that could take another week. Or two. And that's fine. When the journey is this much fun, why hurry?