Excess Of It : GW2

A while back Tobold estimated that Guild Wars 2 had about 300 hours of PvE solo content. He extrapolated this from the percentage map completion achieved and how long it had taken, which in his case was 12% in 32 hours.

Last night I discovered that GW2 has a command called /age. It tells you how many hours you have logged, both for the character currently logged in and for the account. My Charr ranger has racked up 268 hours so far. The account he's on is at 345 hours. Map completion stands at 47%, which is exactly where it was last time I mentioned it more than a week ago.

To my way of thinking this points up one of the biggest difficulties in assessing the success of an MMO. GW2 is self-evidently working for me as a player: I'm logging in every day even though I have a wealth of other MMOs vying for my attention. My interest isn't waning and indeed the more comfortable I become with the systems and the world, the deeper and more abiding my interest becomes.

Have snorkel, will travel

On the other hand, by the most obvious measure my progress has come to a complete standstill. My level 80 hasn't found a new place or done a new thing for more than a week. Moreover, neither have any of my many other characters, the furthest-along of whom is my Asuran Engineer, who yesterday reached the giddy heights of level 35.

Just over a month after launch a typical day's play has already settled into the following pattern:

Me! Pick me!

• Log in  Charr Ranger, Level 80, almost certainly in Frostgorge Sound. If not, run there (not wasting two whole silver on a waypoint!).
• If Jormag's up, kill him. Anything from a few minutes to almost an hour, depending what stage the event's at. Grab loot from chest, grumble "No Yellows" in guild chat, sell loot at nearby vendor for six silver.
• If Jormag's not up, go to Orichalcum and Ancient Sapling nodes and harvest, unless there's been a server re-set, in which case run all over Frostgorge looking for where they hid the nodes this time.
• Kill one each of anything that might count for Kill Variety. Including rabbits.
• Report a dozen or so bots, some not for the first time.
• Log Charr Ranger out, log Asuran Engineer, Level 35 in. Probably in Ebonhawke these days. Find some events, harvest some nodes. 
• Get distracted and end up spending half an hour trying to climb a rock or something equally productive.
• Realize time is getting on, Kill Variety is still at 11/15 and Daily Events at 1/5.
• Swap to Asuran Necromancer, Level 11, usually found at Cooking Station in Black Citadel. Go to Plains of Ashford, do four "dynamic" events in five minutes to finish Daily Achievement.
• Swap accounts. Do it all again, only minus Jormag and plus Wayfarer Foothills.

One ram good, two rams better

Once the two Dailies are out of the way I generally take a look at the state of WvW with a view to chipping away at the Monthly. An hour of WvW is generally enough for me but 50 kills in a month is nicely attainable at an hour every couple of days. Throw in Jormag whenever he's around. Other than that I mostly potter.

On a weekday that takes up much of the evening after work. At the weekend I get a lot more pottering done, write something like this about it and generally let my characters drift upwards as they wander around the maps I like.

Even by the highly inaccurate measuring-stick of Map Completion, as a player I have consumed less than half of the content available at launch and I'm well aware that the flagged content is only a taster of what's there to be found. Not that I'm making any significant attempt to find it. I've settled into a groove (you can call it a rut - I call it a groove) that suits me just fine.

Comfortable? Why, yes I am, thanks for asking

ArenaNet are making something of a song and dance about the volume and frequency of new content they intend to add. For my money (I know, what money, eh?) they could hold off on all of that and put everyone on bot-killing duties. A bot-free Tyria is needed much more urgently than a bigger or deeper Tyria.

Isn't GW2 freakin' huge for an MMO at launch, anyway? The level cap could have clamped down at 50, we could have lost a race or two and a couple of starting cities and Blazeridge Steppes and Sparkfly could have been the end zones and it would still have launched as the biggest MMO for years. For me Tyria has already established itself next to Norrath, Telon and Telaria as places where I'm happy to spend unlimited hours for no better reason than I like being there. It doesn't need to grow, yet.

I think we are in bots' alley...

It's not just that there's really a lot more than 300 hours of content even on the first run through. There's immeasurable replayability. I'm already in "replay" mode and I'm not even halfway through "playing" yet! New content I don't need!

And that's why these things are so hard to assess. Some people are going to be finished in a few weeks, some will never finish. Some are already done, some are never going to catch up.

Enough, no more, 'tis not so sweet now as it was before. Oh, alright, yes it is! Go on then!

Pirates Ahoy! : Pirate 101

Sneak Peak for Pirate 101 is on as I write. Just popped in long enough to do the tutorial, reach Skull Island and take these few screenshots. 

Character creation is a question and answer session very similar to Guild Wars 2. My parents were eaten by a squid and I was raised by the dogs of Marleybone. Tarzan out of 20 Leagues Under The Sea!

Combat animations on the Stork companion were exceptionally impressive. Only to be expected given Wizard 101's similar set pieces. I imagine you'll get to see these hundreds, probably thousands of times so they need to be good!

Ship-to-ship combat is never my favorite thing and even here, in the tutorial of a lighthearted game aimed at a young audience, I thought it was a bit slow and labored. Not sure it can ever be anything else - its always two ships going in circles until one sinks, isn't it?

And here we are on Skull Island. That's a lot of pirates! Looking forward to exploring the Sky Seas with all o' ye!

Look! Over There! They're Coming Right At Us!

There's an awful lot going on in the MMO world this year and like an ill-chosen pair of hipster slacks there's some bunching up around the back end. Mainly to keep it straight in my own mind, here's what I can remember of the soon-comes on my maybe list.

Pirate 101
Almost upon us! Goes live on October 15th. Wizard 101 was a favorite Chez Bhagpuss for a while. Pirates is a theme that doesn't do an awful lot for me, but the KingsIsle style and try-before-you-buy model makes this a definite, although I'll probably have to wait for a more favorable tide before setting sail.

Marvel Heroes
Closed Beta just started. I was going to wait for launch but I cracked while getting the link for this post and signed up!  As a lifelong reader of superhero comics I really would like a super-hero MMO in my rotation but COH and Champions never really did it for me and while I like DCUO a lot, I did feel I'd been there and done that after a couple of months. Maybe this is the one.

City of Steam 
 Beta in November. No invite yet. I played Sneak Peak and Alpha so I'm hoping to get in. Absolutely love this game. If I'm in I'll be playing and writing about it. Wish it would hurry up and go Live but can't fault the team behind it for wanting to get it right - it's clearly a real labor of love and we need more of those in the genre, or at least we do if they're done as well as this.

FFXIV A Realm Reborn  
FFXIV closes its servers in early November then re-opens them shortly after to beta this reboot. Release date for take two is still "2012" although that seems to be optimistic. After my experiences in FFXIV beta I haven't bothered to apply this time round. It's a beautiful world and the atmosphere is like nothing anywhere else. Haven't seen the payment model details yet but it's bound to be some form of subscription. If I don't also have to buy a new client I'll probably at least try it. Not this year, though.

Rift: Storm Legion
November 13th for this. A huge addition to a game I already know I like a lot, with what looks to be an interesting take on housing to say the least. No question that both Mrs Bhagpuss and I will get this but again mid-November is probably too soon and I really don't feel that nag to be there day one for expansions the way I do for new games. If Rift was F2P I'd buy an expansion immediately, of course, even if I didn't yet have time to play it. With a subscription it'll have to wait until I have a good month clear, bare minimum. Again, not this year, I think. 

EQ2: Chains of Eternity 
There isn't even an official SOE page for this, and yet apparently it's due in November. Possibly. Firm information seems astonishingly hard to come by if that's true. We're a bit soured on EQ2 at the moment because of the PSS1 thing but we are still subbed and it's unthinkable that we won't eventually get this. Don't feel any need to rush, though. 

Otherland
"Q4 2012" release, according to the FAQ. I think they've had one beta weekend so far, to which I did get an invite, but which clashed with something else so I didn't even log in. I'd be surprised if this does launch this year. The IP has superb potential but I'm less interested than I was now it has "Action" attached to the "MMO". Still going to give it a try. It's F2P so why wouldn't I?

Neverwinter
And another for Q4 2012. I just wrote about this. Resisted signing up for beta so far because I don't want to end up spending hours creating scenarios that will vanish into the aether when beta ends. How long my willpower will hold up I wouldn't like to say but even if I'm able to resist the siren call of beta I'll be there day one when it goes Live, that's for sure. 

Planetside2
Some sources had this as a 2012 release but I note that the FAQ now only says "We will have more information on this in the months ahead". Beta is up and running and there's a buy-in pack, though so it's as good as out already. I've been in beta for a while but I haven't played much. I'm all patched up but the several times I've tried to log in lately the servers have been down - just bad luck. FPS is so not my genre but again, F2P and I can use my existing SOE account so it's going to happen.

Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Other big releases that aren't on my personal radar would include Panda Panda, Who's Got The Panda? (which I admit sounds quite fun according to quite a few bloggers whose opinions I respect) and LotRO: Riders of Rohan. I still have LotRO installed. I still log in once in a while. My highest character is in the 40s. There's the math, you do it. And of course we have GW2 which is going to see out this year for me and next and the one after that no doubt, and The Secret World, to which I will most definitely return once the pay barrier drops. Oh and Free Realms added a new zone. I do like Free Realms, when I remember it exists. And that's just new stuff this year. All the old favorites still deserve attention, too.

So much. So too, too much. Roll around in it like Scrooge McDuck. Let's not even think about WildStar, ArchAge, EQNext...


All images copyright relevant owners. If it's yours and you want it gone, it's gone.
  

Umm... That One's The Brake: GW2

With my Charr Ranger tucked tidily away at 80th, popping out just once or twice a day to pick up his permitted ration of Orichalcum and Ancient Logs, my focus has shifted away from the possible problems of whatever end game Guild Wars 2 may or may not have. "Alts" is a term I don't much like, carrying with it as it does a vague aura of the also-ran, the second-best but like it or not, alternative characters is what they are and where I am.

Rift was the first MMO I ever played where I made a conscious decision to stick to one character all the way to level cap before rolling an army. My willpower failed me, but by the time I had my Level 50 I believe I only had one other character, around 20th. Shame I wasn't blogging back then or I could just flip my back pages and check.

Want to be Level 80? Press this button.

For all the long years before, my natural inclination had been to make half a dozen or more characters within the first few days and let them fight for my attention. Eventually one or two would establish themselves and become by practice if not by design my "main" characters. If the world ended up being one where I lived for a good while, Telon, Norrath old and new, Telaria, for example, a point would come when those favored characters could add no more levels to their count. Not until next expansion, at least.

Before WoW that process took years. Expansions for Everquest arrived faster than I could level. I didn't have two characters at cap there until Planes of Power, if I remember rightly, and that didn't last long. My current highest is beached at 84th and despite Rain of Fear ushering in the century in November that's likely to be where she'll stay.

As the years pass, leveling curves have shortened. I had two level 50s in Vanguard in the first nine months. From memory I think it took me a couple of months to hit fifty in Rift. For someone whose primary interest when it comes to what we now seem to be calling "progression" comes from leveling itself, this is probably a good thing. I'm not entirely sure. I like to play a lot of characters and being able to get more of them further, faster sounds like it would be a good thing.

Max level! Enjoy it while it lasts.

On the other hand, it takes time to bond with a character, or if you prefer something less fey, for that character to gel. I have deeper affinities with some of my old Everquest characters who barely got out of single figures than I do for some of my more recent high-levels elsewhere. It's hardly surprising. I almost certainly spent more time getting my troll shaman to 14th, where he still rests well over a decade later than I spent with my Pyromentalist on his trip to fifty in Rift.

All of which brings me to a surprising observation. Leveling speed in GW2 is variable and control is in our hands.

I was wondering why it seemed to be taking my Asura Engineer much longer to level up than it had taken my Charr Ranger. Usually the second character goes much faster than the first; you know the best places to go, you don't take ages learning new game systems, you have more resources from already having a higher character and so on. My second focus character was going more slowly.

I wondered if it was the class, but no, the Engineer is a DPS machine, killing far faster than the ranger while enjoying equal survivability. The race? Surely the days of racial penalties (another reason I spent so long with that Troll shaman) are long gone? Was I just playing him badly? Always a possibility!

Finally I figured it out. I have a penchant, a predilection, even an obsession with low-level zones in MMOs. One of the reasons I used to make so many new characters was to be able to play repeatedly through the starting and early leveling zones that I love. Mentoring in its various forms meant even older characters could relive their youth and GW2 goes that vital step further - it rolls time back for you wherever you travel.

These centaurs don't kill themselves, y'know

Consequently my Engineer has barely left the level 1-15 maps. All his dailies are done in Plains of Ashford, Queensdale or Wayfarer Foothills. Occasionally, for a real adventure, he might step into Diessa Plateau or even Brisban Wildlands. With what must be around the same time played, my Asura Engineer is 26 while Mrs Bhagpuss's Asura Engineer is 36. She's in Lornar's Pass doing mid-30s events while I'm defending the Armory from the Flame Legion's crack level 6 assault force for what must easily be the fiftieth time.

Because the scaling is so smooth, so unobtrusive and especially because you get drops proper to your actual level not your scaled level, it's very easy not to notice that the experience you're getting doesn't scale the same way. So easy that I didn't notice. You get xp, of course you do, and Karma, but more appropriate to the Map.

I knew this, but I didn't know it. I was intellectually aware of the existence of the mechanism but in game I was so engaged with what I was doing that I didn't remember that I knew it. The higher I climbed, the slower I was going.

Now that I understand, I have my hand on the varispeed slider. If I want to go slower, I go lower. Faster, I move where mobs and events come in at or better yet slightly above my real level. I always wished MMOs would let me choose how fast I wanted to level. This is a baby step in the right direction.

Legendary or Leisurely? : GW2

In my first post on GW2 in the excitement of the first Beta Weekend I wrote "what I've seen is an excellent implementation of traditional, standard and familiar MMO tropes. Guild Wars 2 looks to be a really first-class AAA theme-park MMO. If that's what you want then you're going to be very happy".

In my defence I qualified that view: "Caveat being that any comments are based on just a few hours gameplay that have taken me only as far as level 6". Oh really? Well let's all just sit here at your feet in awe shall we, Master?

Anyway, how wrong I was. About the "happy" part, obviously.

Here we are a month and change into Live and there's much disturbance in the sphere. Talk of one month or three. All done and over already. Heading back home or on to the Next Big Thing. Maybe just giving up.

Mrs Bhagpuss pointed out something to me yesterday that I had not noticed. On the Character Select screen for Guild Wars 2, over there on the right-hand side, hang your Account Medals. Well, yes of course I'd noticed them. I just hadn't ever moused over them to see what they were for.

What are they for?
 
The top one is for Map Completion, which has nothing to do with how much of the world you have seen, only how many of those little markers on the maps you have made to light up. With a single character. Not the whole account. Mine's at 47%.

The three below are Badges marking initiation into the three Orders of the Pact. Running from left to right, Durmand Priory, Vigil and Order of Whispers. The orders are exclusive. Each character can join only one. I'm in Whispers.

The last row, running again from left to right, are PvP Rank, Realm Avenger and Legendary Treasures. Only my WvW has begun to darken.

What does this suggest? First of all it suggests I'm not very interested in Achievements or in goals set for me by other people. After more than a month of looking at that screen several times a day I hadn't even thought about what those symbols were for, let alone made the small hand-movement that would have let me find out.

More meaningfully to anyone who is not me, the presence of those particular badges of achievement and their specific requirements would seem to suggest a set of expectations. Perhaps they represent what the development team expected the normative player would want to achieve during the lifetime of the game; more likely a benchmark showing the most a player could aspire to; most worryingly, what the development team expected a player to achieve.

Whichever or whichever combination of those, clearly it can't be done with just one character and equally clearly at least one character must reach maximum level. As a player, no part of the game can be skipped. To fill those badges you must defend your realm, you must compete in team PvP, you must do at least some of your Personal Story on no fewer than three characters, you must explore the world.

Ah, but what about crafting? What about Dungeons? I can skip those, can't I? Well, no. Take a look at this list of what's required to complete a Legendary Weapon that I borrowed from Stargrace:

Each legendary weapon requires at least the following:

• Precursor weapon specific to the legendary
• 500 Dungeon Tokens specific to the legendary
• Two level 400 crafting professions specific to the legendary
• 200  Skill Points
• 525,000  Karma
• 120  Gold Coins
• 100% World Completion
• 500 Badges of Honor
• 250 Globs of Ectoplasm
• 250 Vicious Fangs
• 250 Vicious Claws
• 250 Vials of Powerful Blood
• 250 Elaborate Totems
• 250 Armored Scales
• 250 Ancient Bones
• 250 Piles of Crystalline Dust
• 250 Powerful Venom Sacs

In addition to the above, the player must also gamble the following materials to obtain Mystic Clovers. One success results in a single Mystic Clover and 77 clovers are needed. The chances of success are currently unknown, therefore depending on the final chances, the recipe could require anywhere from 77 to 1,000 attempts.

• 0.6 Skill Points
• 2100 Karma
• 1 Mystic Coin

 You'll notice somewhere in that frankly insane shopping list mention of 500 Dungeon Tokens and two craft skills at 400. Be thankful they didn't make you do all eight.

You want me to do what ?!

Which brings me back to the beginning. Why anyone would want to do all of this in one lifetime is a mystery to me, but it seems apparent that the people who spent five years building this world thought they were catering for people who would. Either that or they were just so full of themselves over all the marvelous work they'd done they absolutely did not want anyone to miss out on any least part of it.

GW2 is a weird game. In some ways it's the simplest, easiest, most casual knockabout fun; in others it's a truly demented grindfest of the most hardcore proportions. The bone of contention, one of the bones anyway, is in how this all divvies up. The traditional Western MMO grindcore, ready and willing to break raids over weeks then farm them for months to get gear good enough just in time to do it all over again come next expansion are taking predictably badly to being asked to put in similar effort for a flashy weapon skin.

It's not working for them but it's working for me. I don't want to "achieve" anything or"progress". I'm happy to be. Tyria's a great place to hang out and what's more it mellows. I'm enjoying GW2 more now than I was two weeks ago because I'm doing less. My goals are smaller, I'm pottering more and all is good.

One month, three months, five years, a lifetime. Come and go. Visit or stay. Your choice. Play the game. Don't let the game play you.

Never Say Neverwinter

John Smedley believes user-generated content is the future. He may be right. It certainly has been in the past.

Ten years ago I spent a big chunk of time working on a module for Neverwinter Nights, much of it struggling with BioWare's custom scripting language, something with which I never really came to grips. Eventually the thing was as near to finished as it was ever likely to be and I uploaded it.

In the way of the internet, I was able to find it with only a small amount of effort this morning, still sitting in the IGN Neverwinter Nights Vault ten years on. As the comments clearly show, my scripting skills weren't up to the complexity of the task I'd set myself, although some people managed to enjoy parts of it despite all the things that just didn't work as they should have done.

I enjoyed making the module but once was enough. I didn't even buy NeverWinter Nights 2. When the Neverwinter MMO was announced, to be made by Cryptic and published by Perfect World, my ears perked up then perked right back down again at the dreaded phrase "action MMORPG".

I never really "got" action RPGs. The first and last one I ever bought was Dungeon Siege, which came out just before NWN in March 2002 (which, incidentally, suggests that MMOs had considerably less of a lock-hold on my gaming in 2002 than I would have remembered). I probably played it for three or four hours, tops. It's not that it wasn't fun; it was just too fast and too very obviously pointless.

Since then, "action" as a prefix has acted as a brake to any interest I might otherwise have had, doubly so when attached to "MMO", although since I've played and very much enjoyed Dragon Nest and DCUO, my longstanding ability to believe one thing while doing another clearly remains unimpaired.

How I felt after ten minutes in Torchlight2

All the same, I had been resolutely ignoring Neverwinter until I happened upon Massively's recent mention of the Neverwinter Foundry.  I already knew of Star Trek Online's Foundry. Tipa at West Karana used to write about it sometimes back when she wrote about MMOs not bridges. It always sounded intriguing but it was coupled to a franchise for which I have little affection so it slipped from my mind.

When EQ2's Age of Discovery expansion trundled up with the Dungeon Maker system in tow I was somewhat excited. I'd very much like to be able to tell some stories inside an MMO that I play, especially if I don't have to wrestle with scripts to make it happen. The Dungeon Maker hit the mark for ease-of-use but it worked about as well for telling a story as semaphore did for Wuthering Heights.

You've ruined your own foundry...

There's not much detail on the Neverwinter Foundry yet. Just a brief FAQ and some indistinct screenshots. Enough to pull the game off my MMO slush pile and shove it onto the ever-growing heap marked "Give this a go".

I suspect that if it's going to work for me, this set of dungeon creation tools will need an easy mode. It's not that I think I won't be able to master a more complex set of commands, it's that when it comes down to it I'd rather be playing. Or blogging about playing. I can knock up a dungeon in EQ2 in three or four hours. I'd be happy to double or treble that writing dialog to tell a story but much more and I'm going to get itchy.

When it comes to dungeons I'm probably more of a consumer than a creator. Won't be long before I can put that to the test. Release date for Neverwinter is listed in the FAQ as "4th Quarter of 2012". Even with traditional slippage that ought to see it out before next Easter.

If I do end up making a dungeon, Neverwinter is completely F2P so you're all invited.

International Day Of The Panda : WoW, EQ2

Pandas! Get yer pandas! Pandas! We got 'em!

What's that?

The wrong pandas?

What's wrong with 'em?

Not cute enough!?

Hey, buddy, these are all the pandas we got. If you don't like 'em, go back to WoW!