Tequatl The Sunless : GW2

Yesterday I met my first Tyrian dragon. I'm not a big fan of dragons in MMOs. They tend to be overused and under-impressive. Not so here.

I believe there's some back-story that I haven't really been following concerning Elder Dragons. I hope Tequatl's one of them because if he's just a Junior Dragon I may need a bigger screen.

 

The fight itself lasted a few minutes. For a good deal of the time I was running around playing cub reporter taking photos and shooting video and for quite a while I was stuck inside a bone wall Tequatl dropped right on top of me, so I missed the finer points of the battle, such as whether that Asuran Laser ever fired.


In the end the dragon was defeated somehow and I got Gold for doing...something. Best dragon fight I have had in any MMO. Bring on the big ones!

Gold? Don't Talk To Me About Gold! : GW2

"You’ve got the brawn, I’ve got the brains / Let’s make lots of money"

Neil Tennant probably wasn't thinking about MMOs but that about sums up the opportunities on offer in most of them. Pick up your club, march through the city gates, find things weaker than you, hit them repeatedly until they fall over, then take all their stuff and sell it. It's either that or find out who's buying what, work out where to get it then either make what's selling or sell what's making what's selling to whoever's making what sells. Hunt or gather; your choice.

Generally the fastest way to bootstrap a fresh character in any MMO, new or old, is to gather raws and sell them to crafters. Doing your regular quests and general slaughtering will just about keep your head above water but selling ore to armorsmiths will make you rich, although the more industrious, long-term planner may prefer to keep the materials and learn how to use them. Those crafters doing the buying must be raking it in somewhere down the road, right?

Oh, how we hate you, Globby Gloop

Well, maybe. In GW2 money is tight. Really, really tight. I can't remember the last time I played a mainstream MMO where my first character stayed so poor for so long. At first I thought it was down to the continued absence of the Trading Post, but now the Black Lion has its act together sufficiently to keep the doors open most of the time that turns out not to be the case.

Partly it's because creatures in Tyria drop far less coin and and their body parts are worth much less than in just about any other imaginary world I can think of. The universal Glob of Globby Gloop (stupidest standard drop I have ever seen, by the way, and one about which I complained bitterly in beta, obviously to no avail) sells for 3 copper at level one. By level 50 it's selling for 9 copper. Three times bugger all is still bugger all. Even magic weapons at level 50 don't reach the dizzy heights of two silver a time if you offer them to a vendor. When it comes to money-making opportunities, brawn does not appear to be the way to go.

Saville Row, here I come

Tobold was complaining that "There simply doesn't appear to be a point to crafting in Guild Wars 2". Many people put him straight in the comments - crafting gives a lot of experience, is fun and relaxing, has "end-game" relevance and so on - but his substantive point, that you can't make any money by crafting isn't actually true anyway. It is true that you can't make as much money by selling the finished item as you would have done by selling the bits you used to make it, but the crafted gear I'm making sells fast and consistently on the Trading Post for two to three times the price a vendor would give me for it.

If I was adamantly opposed to doing any crafting at all I would be considerably richer than I am, although less poor might be a better way to put it. As far as I can tell there's no subtle motivator baked into GW2 that pushes you into crafting. It remains one of the few realms of activity that can safely be ignored by anyone not actively interested in taking it up. Gathering my own mats, crafting probably isn't a net loss and I am smartly dressed in clothes I sewed myself, but had I sold those mats to crafters and bought my gear I'd be a lot richer and better-dressed yet.

Is this what you want? I think not.

If the game design doesn't particularly encourage crafting, gathering's a very different kettle of cod. Unlike most MMOs, GW2 does expect you to gather plants, chop trees and mine ore. If you resolutely refuse to do so not only will you miss out on a sizable chunk of very easy xp, you will never complete a Daily Achievement because for each of those you need to gather twenty items. Do that every day and you'll soon get the habit. (There's a nice guide to Daily Achievements here, by the way - did you know that rabbits, armadillos and other critters count for both Daily Kills and Kill Variety? I didn't until I read it there).

What with that spur and the magnificent non-competitive nature of nodes, gathered materials, especially ore and wood, are extremely common on the Trading Post and I'm not sure whether the effort required to fill a stack would be worth the reward. The riches on offer to those prepared to go low-level grubbing in WoW or EQ2 may be missing from GW2.

In a game where xp is easier to come by than money I wonder whether the better strategy isn't just to level poor and get rich later. There must be more money at eighty, mustn't there?

Starring Cualli and Sloolap In ...

Back to work means less time to post if I want to play. I do want to play.

Just wanted to mention something Heartless threw away in one of his posts recently:


"there is a fat and happy bonus for killing some of the monsters that haven't been knocked off in a while (I was seeing 40 bonus experience in some cases, 2x what an equal level kill would net in a zone my level)".

This may be in the online manual which I haven't read, but it's the first time I've heard of it. I had noticed the bonus, which can get huge. I was getting 250xp bonus on a 90xp kill in Timberline Falls. I had no idea what was causing it. An excellent incentive to get out there and poke into those places no-one else is using - and there are plenty of them.

There's also a Hint that pops up very early on that says something along the lines of "killing monsters higher than you gives an increased chance of better loot". Push the envelope and you will be rewarded, in other words.

Speaking of Timberline Falls, it's my favorite zone so far for looks and it also has two of my favorite NPCs, Cualli and Sloolap. On the whole, GW2 NPCs are pretty bland but these two are an exception. I really hope there's a back-story.

Not a spoiler as such, just a teaser...

Ding 50! : GW2

The flat leveling curve was one of Guild Wars 2's several USPs.  For a while it seemed  it might take no longer to get from level 79 to 80 as it took you to reach level two after setting foot on Tyrian soil.  That always seemed a tad utopian. It turns out there's a slight downhill slope to the curve (if such a thing is topologically possible) as far as level 30, after which things do indeed flatten out.That's how it feels, at least.

GW2 is not an MMO where you study levels closely, but content is gated behind them all the same and levels do matter. Traits and skills come in tiers for which you need both points to spend and the right level against your name. For traits there's a third requirement: coin.  Your trainer doesn't just want to ID your level before he'll show you how to access your Major Traits, he wants a gold coin for the book that tells you how to do it.

No, you won't be the only Pink Moa in Timberline

I imagine this was considered a trivial sum in design, and now the Trading Post is finally up perhaps it will be. When my ranger hit 40 however, he had scarcely a gold to his name and rather than return to the rag-picking poverty of his cubhood he chose to wait a while before bankrupting himself to buy the book. By level 50 he'd scratched up just over two gold and finally paid up.

Without the Trading Post he's been relying on what he finds or can make for himself. An extended and highly enjoyable romp through Blazewood and Dredgehaunt Cliffs netted enough Claws, Blood, Fangs and sundry body parts to raise leatherworking to just shy of 225, start of the next tier. Astonishingly, this means he can now make Rare (yellow) quality armor to match his adventure level. Keen claimed recently that crafting was the way to go for gear. I was sceptical when I read that and Mrs Bhagpuss more so, but it turns out to be no less than the plain truth, at least if self-sufficiency is your goal.

Black Citadel branch of World of Leather

In beta I was mildly miffed with the speed of leveling. I felt it was too fast, not by much but by enough to notice. Of course, non-optional scaling forbids you from out-leveling anything or anywhere, which mitigates (not eliminates) any problem there might have been in leveling too quickly, but in any case, now that I have more experience than I had in beta (and more levels) I withdraw my reservations.  Leveling speed is fine.

It's fine because there really is a lot to do in Tyria. Tobold extrapolates a base 300 hours of PvE content from his play thus far, which may be true if you play one character systematically through all the content once, as Syp is doing. Normative MMO play would presumably be more recursive than that, although who really knows? Everyone presumably thinks his or her own playstyle is "normal". For those not limiting themselves either to a single character or a single visit to each location.  My plans, such as they are, are to play all eight classes. Whether all of them will get to 80 I doubt but it's sure going to take me a lot longer than 300 hours trying.

The belated appearance of the Trading Post is going to prove a mixed blessing when it comes to leveling up, I fear. As someone in my guild pointed out last night, a global auction house with upward of a million players pumping their drops and crafted gear onto it day and night is going to mean very low prices and very wide availability. Fine if you like to twink, which I do on occasion, but conversely debilitating when it comes to valuing your own efforts.

The thrill of seeing a rare yellow weapon drop is inevitably going to diminish when you know there will already be several hundred like it for sale at no more than a copper or two above vendor. Any pride in the gear you've cobbled together through graft and enterprise may be hard to maintain against the nagging knowledge that you could just open the TP and upgrade every slot for peanuts.

On balance I'd still rather have the Trading Post than not. Drops are all very well but the one you get never seems to be quite the one you want. It's only another ten levels to my ranger's Grandmaster trait manual and that gouging trainer wants two gold pieces this time round. Have to make some money somehow.

The War With The Dredge : GW2

It was said that as we saw deeper into Tyria the complexity of the dynamic event system would begin to reveal itself in a way that hadn't been apparent in beta. Many took this with a large pinch of salt. Based on my experiences in Dredgehaunt Cliffs last night, my salt is going back into the cellar.

The camps there seem to be under perpetual assault by the Dredge, changing hands with the frequency and violence I remember so fondly from the glory days of Rift's later beta weekends. Below the ground events are stacked in cramped tunnels that open into breathtaking, chaotic Dredge mazeworks reminding me of Kasaravi gulch on amphetamines. Get beyond that and there appears to be a full scale war going on.

We were there for several hours and the action never stopped. What it will be like in a month or three, how this madness will manifest with fewer people passing through, who knows? Can't wait to find out.

Settling In : GW2

Over a week in and how green is the grass this side of the fence? Green as green, and scattered with daisies, that's how green. Oh, there's the odd dandelion here and there, and one or two molehills, but that's one fine lawn I'm looking at.

A few passing thoughts as I lie back in my striped deckchair sipping iced tea through a straw...

Auto Attack

Did you know you can set any of your main weapon skills as your Auto-Attack? There's a tiny line of text in the mouseover that tells you. Just highlight the skill you want and hit Ctrl-Mouse 2. Since every weapon only seems to get one skill with an instant refresh I'm not sure how much of a gift this is, but it's nice option to have.

Self-Combos

If you can use a torch you can set things on fire! No need for an elementalist - be your own combo. No wonder my charr ranger keeps yelling "I make a great team!"

One of my very favorite things as a pyro in Rift was being able to throw down a casting circle at my feet and stand inside it flinging spells. It was the most magelike thing I've ever seen in an MMO. Then they took it out and let you cast and move - boo! hiss! As a ranger I start every fight by setting the ground around me on fire with my torch, then I swap to my bow and fire arrows through the flames, setting both the arrows and anything they hit on fire. Trolls hate that so much!

An unmarked jug fills faster

Who would have thought that filling a progress bar to complete an event would be so much more entertaining than completing a count? Events that ask you, for example, to reduce the morale of centaurs without telling you exactly how many centaurs you need to kill are radically more emotionally involving, for me at least. The fewer actual numbers I see, the more I believe in what I'm doing.

Trains are back! 

Really, who could have predicted that? When a mob reaches the end of its leash and gives up it becomes non-aggressive as it runs backs to its stamping grounds, but other than that, fair game! I've been mining silver and had people run up to join me with a train of angry ettins and the ettins have preferred to stomp me first. I've had people run past me with something hot on their tail and had it spot and jump me instead. And with every train comes a potential derailment, the old trick of plunking an arrow into a pursuing predator and pulling it off its fleeing prey. Perfection!

Faction too

For a game that doesn't seem to have bothered with a faction system, boy does GW2 have a deep faction system. Play Attenborough for a while and go observe who doesn't like whom, what likes to eat which, whose territory must not be encroached. It's a complex nest of liking, loathing and toleration. And you can play one off against another to your benefit. Hours of imaginary anthropological research ahoy!

Falling Is funny

Did they get Disney in to do the character animations? No, it's more like Warner Bros circa 1942. Wonderful knockabout stuff. It's worth falling off something high just to see the flattened animation. Never seen the wind knocked out of a character more convincingly. When my Wolf-Bear gets hit with a knockback he flies through the air and bounces or lands spread-eagled like a hunting lodge rug. It's comedy gold!

On the molehill front, the blasted Trading Post still isn't working. Other than that nothing worth mentioning. A few rough edges that will soon smooth off. Onward and upward.

Alone Together Or...? : GW2

There's been much post-launch discussion of the GW2 dynamic event system and how it might scale once the population bubble floats up out of the lower levels. SynCaine thinks it will fail; Zubon thinks the design is smarter than that.

I have two questions:

• Is it true that the low-level zones will be mostly empty most of the time once the launch frenzy dies down?

•  Are GW2 events fun to do alone?

The model that keeps getting quoted for comparison is Warhammer Online. Public Quests there worked well in beta and for a while after launch, when there were plenty of people around but soon there weren't enough players to keep the plates spinning and it all fell down.

How fair a comparison is this? Warhammer remains for many the very model of failed design. Mythic sold 1.2 million boxes and had 750,000 subscribers a month after launch. Two months on, more than half of those had left and the game has been in steady decline ever since. Four years after launch Warhammer is down to one U.S. and two Euopean servers.

Warhammer, like GW2, received glowing reviews at launch but a variety of poor design choices and  unfinished, rushed, content were soon exposed in actual play. Crucially, Warhammer Online required, as it still does, a subscription to play. An MMO that acquires a reputation as one that players are leaving in droves and which requires both an upfront purchase and a monthly fee to play will always struggle to attract new players.

An MMO that I know a lot more about than Warhammer is Everquest 2. EQ2 has done much better than Warhammer over the years but it too was struggling to attract new blood in the face of strong competition. The solution was first a walled-off Freemium offer and following the success of that experiment, the roll-out of the same model for all servers.

Low-level zones on Freeport, the original EQ2X "F2P" server, are never deserted. Not for the entire two years the server has been up have I ever seen fewer than two instances of the main starting zones and at peak times it runs to four or five even now. Moreover, the gameworld is well-populated at all levels, not just at the low and high ends. You can go into pretty much any zone on Freeport and expect to find it reasonably well-attended.

Taking away both the box and the subscription cost has resulted in a continual stream of new players to EQ2. Once through the doors, enough people seem to find enough to interest them to stay for a while. GW2 has one bump more than that - the box purchase from which ArenaNet presumably make most of their money - but they've proved adept at leveraging that model for eight years with Guild Wars. Pay Once - Play Forever seems to be a sufficiently attractive offer when you can put up something people might imagine they'd want to play forever.

So, I'm not convinced that the low and mid levels in GW2 will be deserted in a few months. The blogging focus on the scaling mechanic and what will motivate max level characters to return ignores the business model, which is to keep selling new boxes (or downloads) to new people. Having high-levels spend more time playing lower down, which the scaling world design will inarguably encourage to some degree, is icing on the cake.

Let's say the cake sinks and the icing slides off. Let's say there is no stream of new players keeping the low and mid levels hopping with events. Let's imagine you're there on your own as a newish player, wandering through Diessa Plateau or Snowden Drifts, seeing, if your lucky, the odd player run past in the other direction once every ten minutes or so. Will you still be able to have fun?

That's going to depend on what you call "fun", isn't it? Here we enter the perennial battleground, where your fun is my boredom is her "I hate this game!" I can only speak for my own fun, and for me GW2 is wonderful when no-one else is around.

On the comments thread over at Kill Ten Rats, Azuriel says "My experience has been Events suck by yourself, worse than leveling alone". That couldn't be farther from my own experience. I absolutely love the huge "all pile on" events, when dozens of players buzz around the map like wasps in a beer garden, but I equally love coming across an event that no-one's doing and trying it alone.

In beta I was often in sparsely populated areas on my own, particularly Diessa Plateau and Snowden Drifts, both designated 15 - 25 maps. I ran across many events where I was the only player there at first. Some, like the Champion giant attack on Nageling are utterly impossible for one player to affect in any way, but most that I came across, even the ones with multiple waves, can be chipped away at by a motivated player.


I made good progress alone dismantling the seige-weapons attacking Redreave, for example, and on the wave attack on Bloodsaw Mill. After a while other players did arrive, in small numbers and sometimes we won and sometimes we lost. Yesterday I had a marvelously entertaining twenty minutes trying to complete an event in the Drifts alone by pet-pulling, kiting, training to NPCs, reviving NPCs and generally rummaging through my old box of soloing tricks. I would have done it, too, if it hadn't have been for those pesky players who turned up right at the end and jumped in to help!

But of course it doesn't matter whether you win or lose an event in GW2 - it's the taking part that counts. You can get a Gold contribution award if you lose as well as if you win, and a "losing state" can result in a fork in the event chain that produces content that's new to you. It's only the NPCs who really "lose" - the player always wins.

I doubt many commentators feel that GW2 will fail hard, like Warhammer or, arguably, SW:ToR. Whether ArenaNet have baked their cake well enough to survive being left out in the rain we will only find out if the rain ever comes. It may just stay fine.

Of course, then the cake would go stale. A cake metaphor can take you only so far...