Extract From ADL Labs Report: Celestial Crafting - Illustrated Version (Suitable For Bookahs) : GW2

Top Of The World! : GW2

Gnashblade probably supplies the Ballot Boxes. Just sayin'

Achievements aside (and boy, what a worm-can that turned out to be) I really like the current episode of GW2's Living Story. Not that there seems to be all that much of a story to it. Is it my imagination or are the conversation and the cut-scene between Ellen Kiel and Magnus in the wrong order? She seems to be talking to him about what he's asked her to do before he asks her to do it. And what exactly is her job, anyway? Is she a soldier, a policewoman, a diplomat, a trade delegate or just some kind of Pirate Superwoman?

Next week we get to vote her onto the Lion's Arch Captain's Council so it's just as well she's added Ship's Captain to her already-impressive C.V. Magnus is going to have to haul back on the sarcasm when he uses her honorific or people might begin to suspect she's not a Captain at all. I'm voting Gnashblade, anyway. I hope we get campaign buttons.

Les Dawson! I thought I recognized you!

Labyrinthine Cliffs is an astonishing place, absolutely on a par with the original five cities in terms of detail, complexity and exploreworthiness (yes it's a word). At first I thought it was another island like Southsun but it seems to be the extreme south-western tip of the otherwise inaccessible Deldrimor Front peninsula. It had been mooted that, while the Zephyr Sanctum airship would certainly be departing at the end of this event, the landmass to which it was anchored, the Labyrinthine Cliffs map itself, might stay with us. No such luck, according to the Dulfyc Oracle.

Ironic foreshadowing, folk-club style

It seems almost immoral to create something this beautiful and just to throw it away, although I guess it's more "put it back in the cupboard" than "chuck it in the bin". No doubt the Bazaar will open again some day but then again maybe it won't so best make the most of it while it's here.

There's a lot more to do than lollygawp like a tourist and take a thousand photos, not that that isn't what I did for the first few hours. No, there are Sky Crystals to be parkoured, races to be run, unholy writ to be read backwards, shows to be seen, trades to be made, recipes to be scribed...the whole place is as filled with opportunity as, well as a Bazaar.

My personal favorite is the race. I'm fond of racing in MMOs. It seems a very organic, believable way to include non-combat activities without things getting excessively gamey. That's the theory; implementations vary. This is a good one.

It does have some oddities, such as the way you tend to start your first race entirely on your own with no other competitor in sight. The reason for that becomes clear when you pass your first checkpoint and realize you're running dead last in a race that started without you. Works quite well as an informal tutorial, I found.

There are a bunch of the dreaded Achievements for taking part including one for doing the whole thing 25 times. Suffice it to say I have already done that plus a few for luck. By the time the Zephyr Sanctum casts off my tally may well be nearer 50 than 25. I just like running it, what can I say?

It's certainly not that I'm any good at it, although as with anything practice does make a difference. Early on there seemed no chance whatever of getting the Achievement for coming in the top three, far less the one for winning outright but now I have both. Actually, I came first twice, only in one of those races I was the only person running. It was nice to have the box ticked but I'm very glad I really did win one race later on or I'd feel a bit of a cheat.

I'm no fan of jumping puzzles. I can do them if I have to but I tend to find them stressful not entertaining. I've read a few observations that the new Map is fundamentally one huge jumping puzzle, which didn't have me looking forward to it much. If it had turned out to be true I'd probably have had a very unfun time. It's not and I didn't.

It's alright for you. You've got wings!

The Bazaar of the Four Winds is a settlement that has made some left-field choices in its public transport policy. It reminds me of places I've visited where you ride funiculars and cable-cars to get from one part of the city to another. Apart from one brief segment (the second one) the entire map is navigable with no jumping skills at all (and with the help of a friendly Mesmer even that part can be circumvented). Once done and waypoints opened you're free to enjoy all the fun of the Bazaar at will.

A plan!

Unless, of course, you decide to collect Sky Crystals. I wasn't planning to do that. It's jumping and I don't like jumping, as I said. Well it isn't jumping. It's climbing and that's a cat of a wholly different color.

I love climbing in MMOs and have done since I first went buildering through Felwithe long, long ago. First I started picking up the Crystals I happened to spot as I explored, then I started actively searching for them and in that way half of Sunday disappeared. As I write I'm 33/40 on the Achievement. There are supposedly over fifty of the things but so far the harder part has been finding them not getting to them. I only know of two that I haven't tried for yet.

If I do a handstand
will all the gold fall out my pockets?

So far I have looked up absolutely nothing out of game, which brings me back to the discussion about Achievements. If there wasn't an Achievement for finding Sky Crystals I wouldn't know there were at least five I haven't found. I might stop looking for them having found 35 and think I'd found them all. Would that be bad? Or good? Does it make any difference at all? If I wanted to understand this sort of thing shouldn't I have studied Philosophy instead of English? Should I just stop over-thinking things and play?

Dunno. I just know I'm enjoying this update a lot more than the last one and quite possibly the most of any so far. I'm off to find those last few Crystals then trade some of my crafting overspill for recipes. Then I'm going to go see how this crystal charging thing works.

Achievement Fatigue: GW2

Google, a company with which I am increasingly falling out of like, decided overnight to reorganize my mail. They've joined the faction to which Feedly also belongs that believes everything is better if you put it in a box. It seems to be a common view amongst designers these days. It's not a view I share.

Both Google and Feedly, however, stand higher in my estimation in this regard than ArenaNet because although those companies might think they know what I want better than I do myself they are at least prepared to let me disagree and bumble on in my own, inefficient, disorganized fashion if that's what I prefer. Which it is.

Putting things in boxes is all well and good when you have the time and inclination. In MMOs it can take the form of naming actual imaginary boxes with real see-them-on-the-screen names. I do that now and again. It's amusing to have a Dressing-Up Box with cosmetic items in, for example. Alright, not all that amusing. Anyway, amusing or not, it's largely useless because to see the name requires a mouseover or a click and by then you could just as easily have opened the box and looked inside.

Yellow on Brown. Is it 1974 again?

No, I prefer lists. Alphabetized, chronological, positional; any of those is good. The way GW2 Achievements were sorted and displayed before the recent change wasn't perfect but it suited me; it's much worse now. The main listing down the left-hand side requires extra clicking to get to what you want and when you do get there you have to scroll down an enormous array of identical icons that bounce directly off the retina without leaving a trace of meaning.

Clearly whoever designed the new interface has a far more visual memory than I do. I found it so much easier to follow the old simple screen of clear text than this color-washed pictorial grid. I much preferred the simple, elegant version with progress bars, exact numbers and plain text descriptions, all laid out like the page of a notebook. Having a floating window appear on a  mouseover is in no way that I can determine any possible kind of improvement, either aesthetically or practically.

Plain in every sense.

So much for the form; on to the function. I'm coming to the conclusion that I really loathe Achievements. I first encountered them in LotRO, where I found them highly entertaining and funny. I loved the unexpected messages that would pop up seemingly at random informing me I was now a Breakfast Expert or a Slug-Squasher. Somehow that innocent pleasure has curdled. What started as a light-hearted sprinkle of glitter on top has become the dark engine that drives entire games.

One might argue that Achievements remain optional but when a particular game-system is foregrounded to the extent Achievements have been in GW2 the opt-out option starts to fall in beside other rarely-seen idiosyncrasies like tanking without pants (and yes, I have grouped with those people, more than once. Nowadays there's probably an Achievement for it). The trend has been picking up steam almost since launch but the recent patch sees it hit full speed, becoming an irresistible locomotive force to which the only responses are to jump aboard, jump aside or be crushed.

Opting out of the Achievement rat race now puts your character in the same position as those poor folks who rolled a half-elf druid in Everquest back in 1999. Doomed forever to be less effective, less powerful, even less wealthy than your peers because of a simple desire to play the character you want the way you want to play it. I would contend that it's one thing to opt out of running dungeons and fractals and thereby foregoing the gear that comes with it, entirely another to miss out on permanent percentage-based upgrades to your account and every character ever made on it because you chose to focus on activities that aren't currently being flagged as expected gameplay.

Some warning on this would have been nice.
Oh well, not going to use them anyway.

Safe to say, then, that I don't like what Achievements represent, something in which I'm not alone. I like my MMOs to be far less structured than that. I like them to require of each player logging in a moment of reflection while said player reviews his or her own personal goals before deciding on a plan for the day. I don't approve of being handed a checklist and being told to go complete it. Or at least not this frequently, in this much depth and with such negative consequences for non-compliance.

Okay, it's not that black and white. I like the way ANet do Dailies and Monthlies. It's a list of stuff you'd likely be doing anyway unless you're one of those folk who sit in Lion's Arch all day chatting, in which case you presumably don't care - respect! Those things aren't really "Achievements" though - they just piggyback on the Achievement process for tracking purposes. I don't have a problem with that.

These color schemes just get worse.

I do have a considerable problem with the way the Achievement system now dovetails into The Living Story, itself another aspect of the game about which I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable. What we are falling into is a pattern whereby, on a specific day (Tuesday, let's not beat around the bush) a chunk of new content falls from the sky (literally in recent weeks) bringing along with it a scorecard.

What it reminds me of more than anything is being back at school. Teacher Anet sets the assignment, we have a couple of weeks to complete it then we hand it in and get our grade. If we've done our homework well enough we even get a small prize.

That's not quite why I started playing online fantasy roleplaying games. I had this strange idea I would be able to imagine myself under the skin of creatures very unlike me doing things I'd never be able to do in places I'd never be able to go. To live their lives, at least in some small way. And stap me if that's not what happened. What's more amazing, it still does, even with games designers apparently determined to stamp out the last vestiges of such airy-fairy, unproductive, ill-disciplined, self-centered, wishy-washy nonsense  .

Anyone want to play Sweetshops?

The ironic thing is, even with all these Achievements racking up the points that bring the current flood of rewards there's almost nothing I want, need or use. In nearly a year of playing I still have 99% of all the jugs of karma, mystic coins, laurels, boosters, utilities, consumables, skins and currencies I've ever been awarded. For me at least, ANet succeeded right from the start in making a completely non-aspirational MMO, where all you ever needed to do to have endless fun was just go out and explore.

If I wasn't a hopeless, incurable packrat I would just destroy all this stuff as it pops into my packs. Almost none of it will ever be used. Instead I'll probably end up spending gold to buy gems to increase my bank vaults just to store it. And then resent the game for making me do it. There's nothing rational going on here.

Yet I'll keep playing. Tyria is beautiful, Ascalon especially. The sound foundation that was laid down will be hard to break even under the weight of all these Achievements. My patience is another matter.

Please Yourselves

Generally I try to avoid meta-posts about blogging and specifically it's a busy week and I don't have time both to blog and play, but I wanted to get my two-penn'orth in before the whole End Of Days thing slides past uncommented.

I forget who started this off. It was probably Wilhelm but I'll link to Jeromai becuse he links to everyone else and it saves me the trouble. The gist of the debate is this: there may or may not be a cold wind blowing for The Blog, or more accurately for the MMO Blog. There might be fewer of them than there were, more could be going dark faster than they used to and fewer might be starting up to replace them. Either the bloggers or the readers have moved to Twitter or G+ or no-one's reading or writing anything any more because we're all Livestreaming.

Sometimes I like to claim I'm not a Gamer. Occasionally I've even claimed I'm not a writer. Neither of those claims really stands up to analysis. I've been playing video games since the late 1970s and writing since the early 1970s. Occasionally I have a few months off from one or the other and sometimes I think that might stick but it never does. I always come back.

I only started blogging a couple of years ago. I'd made a concerted effort to stop writing back in the late 1990s and for the best part of a decade I was convinced I'd cured myself of the addiction until one day I had an epiphany. All those hundreds of thousands of words I'd written on gaming forums starting about two weeks after I discovered Everquest in 1999? That was writing, too. I gave up giving up, gave in and embraced my demon.

By then I'd moved off forums and into the comment threads of blogs, which I discovered well after the famous Warhammer Blogsplosion, something about which I only became aware way after the dust had settled and the fires started to die back. It occurred to me, belatedly, that it was probably quite rude to write comments longer than the blog posts I was commenting on, especially since some poor bloggers got the benefit almost every time they put something up, so I started my own blog.

It turned out to be a very familiar experience. In fact it turned out to be exactly like writing and publishing apazines, which I did obsessively for a decade and a half in the 1980s and 90s. The community was very similar, the same kind of characters appeared, the same cliques, the same mutual admiration societies, mortal enemies, in-jokes and running gags. I felt pretty comfortable.

I still do. I've been especially touched to see my name and this blog mentioned in the current navel-gazing round. There really is some kind of a community happening here, even if most of us could pass each other on the street without a second glance since few have ever met.

Blogging may not last in its current form. Bloggers who post every day right now may stop at any time and never post again. Technology will change faster than we can keep up. In the old apazine days contributors came and went all the time. New enthusiastic members joined, burned brightly, jaded, faded and left. Old stalwarts plodded on. Some of them are probably out there, still cranking the mimeograph as I type

Will people who love writing stop writing about stuff they love? I don't think so. There'll always be more to read than there's time to read it, just like there are always too many games to play. And in the end, even if the only person reading me is me, well that's the audience I've been trying hardest to please these last 40 years. I'll just keep on doing that.

I encourage anyone reading this who's thought about blogging but hasn't given it a go to do the same.

Mmmm! Tasty Words! : GW2

I've been rather grumpy about GW2 recently. Tonight I logged in, looked at the Achievement changes and got grumpier still.

Then I went to The Bazaar of the Four Winds.

Now I'm not grumpy any more.

Hello, I'm Smelly Cat. You may remember me from the 1990s. And Vanguard.

All breakages must be paid for. In blood.

I smell a subplot.
Or maybe just background color

Look up! Oops, sorry! Didn't mean to scare you - it's not Jormag.

I hate krait. We all hate krait.

Where's my Krewe? I bet we could get this thing working. Whatever it is.

Bet you never thought I'd get even this far. I know I didn't.

Gah! Photo-bombed again!

More coherent commentary to follow at some stage. Possibly. For now I recommend not reading anything about this update at all. Just go and explore.

Easy Mode

Keen, with whom I find myself agreeing on a disturbingly regular basis these days, had a post up a few days back commenting on one of Mark Kern's many pronouncements. Mark Kern's the man behind the soon-come MMOFPS Firefall, which I mentioned briefly last month and which J3w3l has covered extensively throughout its patchy beta progress, most recently here where she explains, as the game heads into Open Beta on July 9th, why she likes it.

Someone mention a Road-map?

Mark Kern's a busy man, what with heading Red5 Studios as they bring their big project to market but he still finds time to pen a series of columns for MMORPG.com, telling us How MMOs Should Be. (That's not the name of it, by the way, although it might as well be). The diatribe Keen quotes was actually entitled "Have MMOs Become Too Easy?", to which semi-rhetorical question the author's answer appears to be "Yes, when they aren't called Firefall".

His latest observation is the rather less snappy "Up to 90% of MMO Real Estate is Wasted". Again, this is apparently an indisputable fact, at least for MMOs other than his own. The ever-frisky MMORPG.com commenteriat takes issue with Mark over a number of details, such as where he gets his figures from, why he doesn't seem to have noticed some major development trends that could be said to invalidate most of his arguments and, most forcefully, why he gets to advertise his upcoming game for free in what's supposed to be an objective feature on game design.

I liked what little I saw of Firefall and I plan on giving it a run when it soft-launches this week. Like many commenters, however, I will be frikkin' amazed if it turns out to be the answer to all the myriad problems against which Mark Kern rails. Problems that, while they may have some basis in reality, arguably exist more in the imaginations of people who no longer play certain MMOs than in the day-to-day experience of those still enjoying them.

Is it me or does that merc look kinda jaded?

I played Everquest yesterday. Not some grey-market, time-warp Golden Age version but the current build. Now fourteen years old, EQ has released 19 Expansions giving Norrath something upward of 375 zones, a handful of which are "Hot". Recently, after more than a year of living with the same Hot Zones, someone decide to swap in a great new set. Since it was also a double XP extravaganza for the 4th of July weekend I thought I'd come home for the holidays.

Looking to ease back in gently after a few months away I picked a mid-30s Enchanter from my large pack of characters. I spoke to Franklin Teek in Plane of Knowledge and he recommended Dawnshroud Peaks, an old favorite where I must have spent many hundreds of hours over the years. I claimed my clockwork merc, summoned my idiot animation and set out for adventure.

It was a simple enough run, first by book to The Nexus then through Netherbian Lair to Dawnshroud. I'd been tasked with killing five Sambata Tribal Gatherers, harmless, inoffensive primitives that, in the way of MMOs in general and EQ in particular, needed to die for no reason other than someone was paying me. All our characters are sociopaths, that's the long and the short of it.

Hi. I'm Franklin Teek. I pick someone's name out of a hat and then you go kill them.
It's all quite official. You let me worry about the paperwork.

I'd forgotten where they were, so on emerging from the tunnels of Netherbian Lair I was standing aimlessly looking around, when I spotted a lightcrawler and thought I'd warm up on him. He clearly had the same idea because a second later my entire screen had gone black. I'd forgotten lightcrawlers blind, which is why, in the old days, we stayed well away from them.

When a mob blinds you in EQ it's not just some flickering color filter around the edge of your screen and a missed auto-attack. Oh no, your entire monitor screen goes black and stays that way until the blindness wears off, which might not be so bad if lightcrawlers couldn't reapply it indefinitely.

As anyone who hasn't played since 2004 will tell you, EQ really has been dumbed down to the point that any toddler can level to cap in a couple of days so I didn't actually die. My animation finished the crawler while my merc kept us both alive (if an animated sword and shield can be said to be alive in the first place).

So, some monkeys died. Just look at that upgrade!

Suitably chastened I set off looking for Sambatas. After a run-in with a Zelniak (alright, I started that one) and a detour into Sanctus Seru to shake the half-dozen or so wolves that fancied a late afternoon Gnome snack I eventually found the Sambata pottering around their rocks outside the entrance to Maiden's Eye. Moving to pull one to what looked like a safe spot I triggered an invisible blood starved wolf, who chased me across the nearby zone line and then hung around outside in case I came back.

Eventually I got set up and successfully killed my five hapless monkey-men. Start to finish it had taken the best part of an hour to travel three zones from Plane of Knowledge and kill seven creatures. Was it easier than Back In The Day? No it flipping well was not. It was exactly the same - time-consuming, awkward, risky and enormously enjoyable. What had changed was the reward for all that effort. Because it was a Hot Zone I netted 8 plat and an extremely nice cloak.

One. More. Level. That's all I ask!

Flushed with this success I then made a foolish and rash decision to do something similar with my highest-level character, an 84th Beastlord. The level 80 Hot Zone is Hills of Shade, another Luclin zone but one largely unknown to me, my only previous acquaintance with it being a handful of nervy runs to a camp in the middle for a FedEx mission I did for a while a year or two back, during my last serious attempt to hit the then-level cap of 85.

I'll spare the details but more than an hour later I logged off having killed precisely nothing, gained exactly no xp, coin or loot and yet counting myself lucky things had gone as well as that. Everquest may not  be "I lost my level and my corpse and everything on it" hard these days but don't let anyone tell you that means it's easy.

Was it fun? Hell yes. Exasperating, frustrating, infuriating, irritating but always fun. Otherwise, after nearly a decade and a half, why would it still have seventeen servers running and general chat channels that scroll so fast you struggle to follow the conversation and fight at the same time?

Oh, and all that wasted real estate? Where I come from we call that a world.

The Community That Slays Together : The Secret World

It's July 2012. The Secret World has been Live for just a week. I'm immersed but already I'm speculating. Will I still be playing in a year's time?

"It's a safe bet that I won't be playing TSW with this intensity in July 2013, but will it still be in the mix? If there's some kind of Free-to-Play option, then absolutely. No question at all".

Turns out I can see the future. TSW is very definitely still in the mix and never more so than with the current slew of First Anniversary events; events that, perhaps unintentionally, exemplify how a common cause can bring an MMO community together.

TSW has an oddly disparate community to begin with. In roleplaying terms (and the game probably has a higher proportion of roleplayers than the average modern MMO) the three factions don't trust each other, which leads to a certain degree of separation. Then there's the issue of the largely anonymous servers, or Dimensions as they call them. In most MMOs I'd always know the name of the shard or server where each and every one of my characters lived but in TSW? No clue.

For the anniversary Funcom chose to do several things. 

• They had a sale in the cash shop. 30% off, threw in a couple of giveaways, a flare gun and yet another tee-shirt. So far, so meh. 
•  They handed out double xp potions. Handy but no big deal. 
•  They doubled both Ability and Skill point gain for a couple of days each. Getting interesting.
• They woke Gaia up and she's not happy.  And that's where the fun really starts.

In every zone there's a Guardian of Gaia. They take the form of towering elementals appropriate to the land from which they arise, so the Kingsmouth Guardian that spawns in the mudflats near Edgar's scrapyard is a tangled mess of metal and barbed wire, the Blue Mountain Guardian is a living boulder, the Shadowy Forest Guardian is twined in roots and so on.

Fine and dandy but in the normal run of things, well that's just it: there'd be a lot of running. The Secret World has an idiosyncratic transport system, The Agartha, a kind of hollow earth Metro. It's atmospheric and impressive but something of a pain to use, especially if you're in a hurry to, say, get to the other side of the world to bring down a giant elemental and grab some Phat Loot.

The Guardians spawn in all Dimensions either at random or on some pattern no-one seems to have figured out yet. The first sign is the appearance of The Gatekeeper, the cheery, mutton-chopped Victorian stationmaster previously only ever seen at his eternal post in the Agartha. He makes his ponderous way through the World Above to the summoning point. When he gets there he does something that I've yet to see and up pops a humungous elemental. 

After that it's All Pile On.  Or it is if you have enough All. The Guardians have 15,000,000 hit points and some very powerful attacks. Even with bee power that takes some whittling. Which is where the community comes in.

TSW has a lot of inbuilt tools to help people communicate and find each other, none of which are obvious. You can make and join global chat channels that span all Dimensions, for a start. I never knew that until this week. You can click on anyone's name in chat and add them to your Friends list, from where, with another click, you can Meet Up. Meeting up not only transfers you to your friend's Dimension, it moves you to their zone, so you can jump from Blue Mountain to City of the Sun God without the inconvenience of having to go through anywhere inbetween.

The result has been ad hoc MMO community-building at its finest. Within a minute or two of logging in on the first day I'd been advised in local chat to join the Anniversary channel and after a few more questions and clarifications and a couple of false starts I was zipping between Dimensions and continents like I'd been born to it.

In the first day or two The Gatekeeper only visited New England. The crowds were intense and so was the lag. Most of my fights were in freeze-frame. As the event rolled on the Gaian love spread across Egypt and into Transylvania and we spread with it. The upside is less lag; the downside less firepower.

The community steps up. People call the spawns, track the Gatekeeper, give co-ordinates and Dimension references, offer piggybacks. In the fights someone always tanks; just one person. How it's decided who it'll be I have no idea. Everyone else stands back and shoots. I heal with my assault rifle. Talk about a Magic Bullet...

For the while Guardian Hopping's a thing. There's an Achievement (of course there is) for killing them all and there's a Lore collection to complete as well. Then there are the Lucky Bags, one per kill, don't come back for the same one in under two hours. Inside the bags, plenty goodies; a pet of every Guardian, an eyepatch, glowing green eyes, signets, Black Bullion, lots of very desirable stuff.

The Anniversary event was supposed to last five days. What a feeding frenzy that would have been. Funcom, spotting the opportunity, extended that by a week. Whether the community spirit will last that long we'll have to wait and see but, as with the Secret of Southsun in GW2 not so long ago and numerous other Big Ticket open events in other MMOs over the years, yet again we see it proved:

If you build a giant loot pinata they will come.