Level Best : EQ2

EQ2 is in a strange place these days when it comes to leveling. The devs seem keen for players to get a move on and not hang around in the low and mid levels. We get regular boosts, sometimes for everyone, other times just for the paying few.

This weekend Gold players (we used to call them Subscribers but that's Olden Days talk now, apparently) enjoyed a 150% bonus to both adventure and craft xp and last week SOE bumped up the instant high-level Heroic Character option so that it starts at 90 instead of 85. A while back, when someone was fiddling about under the hood trying to sort out the mess the expansion had made of tradeskill xp, the whole crafting xp curve got compressed so now leveling a crafter takes a fraction of the time it used to do.

The message coming from SOE Towers is mixed. Even though the devs want us to get on with it, they still seem to have clear (if occasionally conflicted) views on how and where we should be leveling. A number of changes came in along with the Altar of Malice expansion that were ostensibly intended to persuade players to do the final five levels in the newest content, changes that were seen by some as heavy-handed and coercive. Over the following weeks adjustments and tweaks were made to address some concerns but then the controversial decision was taken to remove all xp from player-made dungeons, thereby shutting down the most popular option for fast leveling. 

The whole thrust seems to be all about getting players through the first 90 levels as quickly as possible, skipping them altogether if necessary, so everyone can cluster together in a critical mass in the content that was created during the last 12-18 months. As a way of getting around the longtime problem of population-dilution that relatively-successful MMOs have always suffered it seems to be working.

There's another motivation behind the drive to get everyone to the top of the ladder, too, it seems: a belief that old content just doesn't do a good job of representing the best an MMO has to offer. The cutting edge content, artwork and gameplay are all to be found in whatever zones, maps or expansions the designers worked on most recently, goes the argument, so to direct players anywhere else would be to do them a disservice.

It's not a belief that's unique to SOE of course. Blizzard chose to funnel everyone into the last 10 levels by bundling a free Level 90 character with the current expansion. That clearly paid off - well enough that we should probably expect to see something similar become an industry norm, at least for the few themepark MMOs that do well enough to get expansions.

Companies using a F2P model will necessarily hope to monetize the process (a Heroic Character in EQ2 will run you $35 if you buy your Station Cash at face value, although most regular EQ2 players probably get theirs for a lot less than that) but it may well be that future expansions will see everyone get one free bunk-up to somewhere near the top.

No doubt there will be variations on the theme. There's speculation that GW2's "expansion", if and when it comes, will use some kind of level-splitting mechanic to encourage (or even force) players to start over, all in the same place, perhaps effectively creating two separate games. Whatever the mechanics used, though, it does begin to beg the question "So what are all these levels for, then?".

It's not just levels though, is it? Once you start to pull on this thread the whole tapestry begins to unravel. Why keep all these old, barely-used maps and zones and dungeons? Or these ancient quests and events and raids that no-one ever does any more? In fact why waste time on a "world" in the first place? Instead of spreading everything out wouldn't it be easier to sell each of these "expansions" as a brand-new, standalone game - the next episode in an ongoing series? Just close down each version when the new one's ready.

Transfer the characters (maybe just the names) and you're off and running. All the thrills and all the publicity of a new product launch without the trouble of having to come up with an actual new product. You could even sell alpha/beta access to the new one for, oh, what, say half the lifetime of the old? Run them in perpetual overlap.

The benefits are obvious. No need for divisive stat squishes or re-balancing: there's no power creep and the "inflated economy" resets before it becomes a major pain. Could probably even re-use a lot of the art assets if you go with the ever-popular cataclysm scenario. Once you start to look at it this way it's hard to remember why anyone ever thought a truly "persistent virtual world" was a good idea in the first place.

Naturally the games need to stay online. We need that social media integration. Can't keep the digital downloads flowing without all those Twitch streams and Twitter feeds. We can keep "massively multiplayer" too - more players = more microtransactions (although perhaps we should start calling them macrotransactions? "Micro" is a tad unambitious after all...). So I guess we can still market these things as MMOs. Be a shame to lose the brand recognition...

Eh? What? What's happening? Hmmm, I think I might have nodded off for a moment there. Was I having some sort of bad dream? What was I going to write about? Oh yes, my weekend in EQ2.

Well, the berserker didn't quite make 100. Topped out at 99.7. Even with 150% server xp, full vitality and a 110% potion running, the xp that dribbled in from the AoM questline wasn't all that impressive, so it was back to Freeport to see a Chronomage and off to good old Chelsith for a couple of circuits before banging through a few mentored dungeons. If they want us to do the new content perhaps they might make it competitive. Wait, I didn't say that! I like my mentoring xp!

The new zones are gorgeous though. A visual feast and beautifully designed. Tons to look at and pleasingly little to fight before you get to see it. I took a lot of screenshots and gosh-wowed all over the place. That globe is freakin' amazing! And I got a version for my house!

The storyline continues to be interesting if completely confusing. I lost track of what was going on a while back but I know the Akheva are in it up to their necks and something about the Shissar? Anyway, the last few quests should just about see me over the line even without bonuses.

Also I got some crafting in that took my Sage from 62 to 75 in just over an hour. I remember when that would have taken a week. And the sage started Raffik's questline. It was nice to see the little fellow again. So, a fun weekend, all in all. Let's do it again sometime soon. And when I'm a hundred I might start a new character. Er.. when the Berserker is level 100 I mean. Not much chance of me going a hundred hours without making a new character somewhere.

There's nothing like leveling up, is there? I love it. Can't get enough.

All The Burning Bridges: GW2

Jeromai has a deeply disturbing speculative post concerning the upcoming Big Announcement that ArenaNet have planned for Pax South at the end of the month. The gist is this: what if the whole of the first three years of GW2 were just the bait for the biggest bait&switch in the history of MMOs?

It all comes out of the recent video teaser entitled "Point of No Return", an apparently innocuous little squib that I watched when it came out and then immediately forgot. Others, however, saw more in it than I did. Some found their thoughts drifting back to Tyrias's past; to The Searing.

The Searing was - I guess is, since you can go and experience it right now by logging into the original Guild Wars and playing through the Origins campaign from the beginning - the previous holder of the oscar for "Biggest Bait&Switch In An MMORPG". I remember it vividly from my original playthrough back in 2005. It remains one of the most impressive and disturbing uses of the MMO form for what you could loosely call an artistic purpose.

Steering clear of the lore and avoiding detailed spoilers (although even knowing 'something happens' is itself a spoiler), Guild Wars begins by allowing you to make a character and letting you believe you're playing a particular kind of MMO in a particular kind of setting before smashing the whole thing up with a big hammer and making you start over again from scratch. This video catches the tone quite nicely although you can only get the emotional impact by playing through the game itself.

At the time it happened I hated it. I really hated it. I loved pre-Searing Ascalon from the moment I stepped out onto those golden, autumnal grasslands. I loved the petty problems and the little quests. I was ready for weeks, months of the same. Then I got to about level five and all of that was snatched away. I was hopping mad.

Still, I'd only been playing for a few hours and my character was only level five. I got over it pretty quickly, especially when what came next turned out to be quite compelling. By the time I'd reached the conclusion of the Origins storyline and was able to look back from the dizzy heights of level 20, over the month or so the journey had lasted, I was already taking a much more sanguine view of the whole approach. Yes, it was shocking but it was a real coup of storytelling and a highly impressive use of the limited narrative tools available to an MMO designer at the time. +1 ANet.

Now here we are all these years later. There's a dragon stirring and we know from the examples of Orr and The Far Shiverpeaks that, when dragons wake, everything changes. Orr is a wasteland, drowned and razed, filled with undead following Zhaitan's rise. The formidable, if inscrutable, Kodan, supposedly immortal, creators of city-sized ships hewn from ice, live as refugees, driven south by the awakening of Jormag. No-one knows what's happening down in The Crystal Desert, where Kralkatorrik fell after the abortive battle with Destiny's Edge because no-one has been able to go there or return ever since.

Mordremoth, the latest dragon to stir from its slumber, turns out to have been sleeping right below us. Given the examples of recent history how can we expect to carry on as normal now Scarlet has woken him up? Here we have motive, we have opportunity and we have form. Hence the speculation.

 ArenaNet have done this before, after all, and it worked. It's almost becoming their Modus Operandi: there's not only The Searing to consider but the long, slow death of Lion's Arch. A region; a city; why not the whole known world?

That's the in-game logic with a salting of house style. There's more to it though. ArenaNet have been adamant since launch that GW2 will not have boxed expansions. They leave the tiniest wriggle room but emotionally the tone has always been "Not on our watch". Instead we've been served the thrashings and churnings of The Living Story plus intermittent Feature Packs that purport to offer (yet evidently do not), the free equivalent of a standalone, purchased add-on.

NCSoft reports show earnings declining, while trade reports confidently outline the expected action to remedy that problem - the release of planned expansions. Meanwhile ANet was spared in NCSoft's latest round of cost-cutting and there's known to be a large development team working on...something.

For a while I've been wondering how ANet might find a way to square the circle of having to release an expansion for financial reasons while still being able to claim, for reasons of personal prestige, that no expansion was released. This could be the answer. Instead of adding a whole new region or continent replace an existing one. That way Tyria hasn't been "expanded"; it's been "changed".

Well, it would be a bold move, that's for sure. A hubristic, arrogant, "Look at me Mummy!" attention-seeking move, yes, but undeniably a bold one. What it wouldn't be, of course, is original. Wasn't there another MMO that tried something really quite similar not so long ago? Stap me if there wasn't a dragon behind that one, too.

Dominant though WoW has been in the genre, this particular piece of Blizzard wisdom would be an odd model to emulate. I don't think Cataclysm is generally reckoned to be WoW's finest hour. Wasn't that the period when the game really began to bleed subscriptions? Why, yes it was.

After nearly three years observing the outcomes of whatever passes for decision-making at ANet Towers, though, I really wouldn't put anything past the current regime. The tastes or interests of players seem to bear little or no relevance in the lurches in direction the game spasmodically suffers. Neither does anyone seem especially interested in maximizing revenue streams.

Rather, they seem to revel in making changes a lot of players don't like while attempting to sell them things they don't want. It's true that MMO players are a notoriously curmudgeonly audience, willing to ascribe the worst motives to everyone but themselves, but even in that light GW2's relationship with its audience has been...difficult. For me, most everything that happens seems to be best understood as a series of internal power-plays and positionings, which, to be fair, is probably how companies with hundreds of career-minded individuals all focused on a single product usually tend to operate.

Even so, even with the most self-obsessed, solipsistic of world-views, sealed in the hermetic bubble of management meetings and focus groups, surely tearing down the world and starting again from scratch couldn't seem like a good idea to anyone.

Could it?

Normal Service Will Be Resumed When I Get Around To It : GW2, EQ2, Istaria

It's been a quiet week around these parts at least as far as blogging goes and it looks like might stay that way over the weekend. It's not due to any lack of ideas or enthusiasm - just time.

What time I have been able to find has gone straight to playing, which I guess is a good thing. In GW2 there's been one heck of a tussle going on in The Mists all week. T2 has turned into a right old grudge match and it's been hard not to spend every available minute manning the cannons or walking the yaks. Anything less feels like slacking.

Then there's the interminable Wintersday. If only I'd missed a round right at the start but no, I had to get into a perfect run of dailies every day (yes, even Christmas Day) on both accounts. Now I'm stuck on some kind of self-inflicted "I've started so I'll finish" treadmill. So unlike me. Well, I have been ill.

Thank the gods the Charr don't believe in that I never got going on Frostfell this year. As Wilhelm observed, Frostfell is still going, too. What is it with MMO holidays? Why do they always have to limp on and on? Especially the midwinter ones. Oh well, only another few days.

Speaking of EQ2, the other factor mitigating against blogging this weekend is the 150% bonus xp bonanza for subscribers members that just began. It's too tempting to ignore and I really should try and hit 100.

Istaria has cat-people? When did that happen?

For some reason I derailed myself a while back by maxing Weaponsmith and I've barely logged in since. I think somehow it flipped some kind of "I've finished" switch in the same way filling my free player Labor Points bar did in ArcheAge (which I also would like to get back to playing, some time).

There's nothing remotely rational about such reactions. They aren't choices or decisions. They just occur. It's disturbing how frequently an apparently innocuous, often quite positive event in an MMO, particularly the completion of a personal goal, leads to my interest in playing that game dissipating. I bet that's something developers don't allow for in their retention plans - or maybe they do and I just set unexpectedly achievable goals. 

I hardly help the situation by diversifying yet further into more MMOs but I'm doing that too, of course. The time that I could and otherwise probably would have spent playing EQ2 this month has mostly gone to Istaria. Yes, that old thing.

The reason that came about was serendipitous. Or is that fortuitous? Co-incidental? Whatever, I didn't plan on doing it, that's for sure. I bought Horizons on release and although I never played it to any meaningful degree it looks as though I must have used my regular email address to sign up (something I absolutely never do - or haven't for a decade and more. Shows how long ago it must have been) because since the game, renamed Istaria, came under its current management some years back, I get a kind of Annual Report every December that outlines what has been added to the game during the year.

The bells! The bells!

It's always impressive. This year it was impressive enough that I was goaded into downloading it for, what, the fourth time? Every other attempt at playing Istaria lasted just a session or two but this time round I seem to be making some progress. Level 9 in my main combat skill at least! I may just stick at it a while. It would be nice to see something past the first zone.

So, just a set of excuses for why I haven't written much lately. Next week Mordremoth returns in the latest Living Story hiccup and towards the end of January there's the heavily-trailed Future of GW2 reveal at Pax South. That should generate plenty of commentary, complaint and speculation even if I am futzing around in a couple of decade-old has-beens and never-weres instead.

Plus there's an Istaria report to put together. I think I need to get a little further for that, though. Meanwhile, those damned handbells won't ring themselves...

What's In A Name? : Project:Gorgon

Project: Gorgon is the little MMO that could. It failed two Kickstarters but it just keeps on going. Last week the game Greenlighted on Steam. It also has a spiffy new website , a wiki and of course you can actually play it right now. There's an enjoyable and stable "very early" version of the game available, which is well worth taking a look at, especially if you're one of the gang that's hoping someone might come up with a new old-school MMO "done right".

Eric Heimburg, the developer behind Project: Gorgon, seems to know what he's about more than most indie MMO devs. He's doing everything he possibly could to turn his dream into a reality and making a pretty good fist of it, too. So, the question has to be asked: why did he give his little darling such a terrible name?

Almost every positive post you come across (and everyone who's tried Project: Gorgon is positive about it) mentions the name. No-one has a good word to say about it. It doesn't work on so many levels.

It includes the word "Project", for a start. That makes it sound experimental and unfinished. It's only two words long and yet there's a colon in there, which makes it awkward to say out loud (you have to drop in an uncomfortable, half-beat pause) and even more awkward to abbreviate. (When you do shorten it to initials you get "P:G", which both looks weird and suggests the equally inappropriate concepts of "Parental Guidance" and piano-moving primates - or at least it does where I come from).

If I say it's my house it's MY HOUSE, alright?

It's also the kind of name that sounds as though it might "mean something" yet nothing I've been able to find on the website or while playing the game offers any clue as to what that something might be. Is it a game based around Greek Mythology? (Clue: no, it's not). Maybe cheesemaking? (hmm...could be). Beats me. Eric?

However the game came by its name, that name can't be helping things. But then, how important is a name to to the success of an MMO anyway? It's not as if there's a long and illustrious heritage of meaningful and elegiac titles throughout the history of the genre, is it?

There's the "Name Of Existing IP With "Online" Tacked On" approach that's been the go-to for conservative marketing managers since 1997: Ultima Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online, The Elder Scrolls Online... There was arguably a point to that back when being "online" was both unexpected and a selling-point but it seems curiously archaic now, although it's a choice that does at least have the benefit of clarity.

Underwater effects may need a little tweaking...

Then there's the "Big It Up" approach - EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Second Life, where the name tries to sell you on something that's just too vast to be contained in any petty offline space. Or the ever-popular Made-Up Fantasy Place Name - Alganon, Istaria, Zentia, Mabinogi - seemingly chosen from a random Scrabble hand - that hopes to convince you there's an entire world to explore rather than just a handful of lackluster maps.

Some aim to pique your curiosity with their simplicity: EVE (the link I found to the origin of whose name now leads to a 404 error, making the mystery even more intriguing) Rift, There, Trove, while others rely on the emotional power of a descriptive phrase - Dark Age of Camelot, The Secret World, Pirates of the Burning Sea, City of Steam.

In the end, though, how much does a name matter? WildStar is a pretty solid title for an MMO with a space-opera setting and colorful, cartoonish visuals but it doesn't seem to have done anything to draw that game to the attention of an audience outside the specialist MMO ghetto. Rusty Hearts is one of the most evocative names yet to have graced any MMO but that one closed down a few months back and much though I admired the name I'd never even gotten as far as downloading it.

Forever autumn.

Certainly an MMO doesn't need a name that makes any sense if it's going to succeed. Runescape is one of the most successful MMOs ever despite having a name seemingly completely devoid of any semantic value whatsoever. Guild Wars 2, famously and controversially, is an MMO which doesn't accommodate Guild vs Guild combat. I can't help thinking, though, that, while an MMO may be able to rise above a poor title, having a name that generates a media-friendly acronym like WoW can't have done Blizzard any harm all these years.

So, Project: Gorgon may have a terrible name but is it really that much more terrible than most of the competition? You can argue precedent - MMORPG.com's extensive list of games includes four other "Project..." somethings. Of course, one of those is Blizzard's "Project: Titan", which is hardly a propitious omen, and the others are Blackout, Zomboid and Powder, which I'm willing to bet no-one reading this has ever bothered to investigate.

Just another idyllic Cotswold village.. apart from there's a freakin' praying mantis the size of a horse!

No, as far as I know, there's only one MMO that's ever achieved even a modicum of success with the "Project" label hung around it's neck and that's Project: Entropia, generator of all those news stories concerning unfeasibly large cash transactions for virtual islands over the years. It's probably not quite the model of MMO design and philosophy that Eric plans on emulating. And, anyway, even Project: Entropia changed its name, long ago, to the more professional-sounding Entropia Universe.

As SOE found with EQ: Landmark and EQ Next, if you're not careful you can find yourself stuck with a working title that no-one planned on keeping. The time to switch out a bad name is as soon in the development process as you realize just how bad it is. With Project: Gorgon now on Steam it's probably too late already.

Still, it could be worse. At least they didn't go with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.

Start As You Mean To Go On

I don't do New Year's Resolutions like Syp does. I don't really do Predictions like Wilhelm. I do, however, occasionally come up with some vague goals, like Keen.

This year I came up with a few that sounded like they might be feasible.

1. Spend a bit less time playing GW2 and a bit more time playing other MMOs. Any other MMOs would be an improvement. GW2 pretty much ate last year. And the year before that. A few new MMOs would be good. Or at least some different old ones.

2. Write more short blog posts. Shorter, anyway.

There's a synergy there. Or a failsafe. One of those. If the posts take less time to write then there's more time to play so I could get more games in even if I still played just as much GW2. It's a theory.

It all started well enough. Second day of the year and I'm level five in an MMO I've never played until couple of days ago and last night I re-installed an old MMO I've dabbled with once or twice without ever getting far. I'd say more about those but:

3. Don't start raving about MMOs I've only played for five levels and then, after two or three posts where I come off sounding like a children's TV presenter on Ecstasy leading an EST seminar, never mention them again. (Actually that's more of a Resolution than a Goal now I come to think about it...)

So, we'll get back to those new/old MMOs if and when I actually play them long enough to have an opinion on something beyond the tutorial. Maybe. Meanwhile...

GW2 had a sale. Character slots were 600 Gems. Down from 800. It was a 24-hour sale. There were only 10 hours left!  I bought one.

I had an excuse a reason. The two account plan has worked wonderfully for ages and it's still great for some things but the more ANet balance around the unity of the Account, not the Character, the more that plan frays around the edges.

Specifically, I do a lot of WvW, and it would be really nice to have all those ranks stacked on the one account. Unfortunately my two favorite WvWers are split, one on each - the super-defensive ranger on the one, the hyper-offensive elementalist on the other. I've been planning to start a second Ele on the ranger's account for several weeks. I was waiting for a sale on character slots. I was betting there'd be one at New Year. I won that bet. Now I have to level him or her.

Oh well. Let's be positive about this. I have a lot of experience scrolls lying around. It takes no time to get to 80 these days. It shouldn't up my GW2 hours that much more. Probably.

And this post is quite short.

Goodbye 2014. Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out

Flappy birds come to Tyria - not 2014's finest moment

Everyone and his truckle-hound is coming out with Look Back At Last Year posts or Look Forward To Next Year posts and I was going to do something along those lines myself only there never seems to be the time. Ironic, huh?

Anyway, we all know what 2014 was like, when it came to MMOs. I could link to all this stuff but let's just take that as read :

A bunch of big-money super-spiffy new ones launched and everyone was like- pffffffft! Is that all you got?

A bunch more unfinished ones (unfinished? Some of them had barely gotten started!) slipped out the door on grab-a-buck licences and everyone was like - wait, you took money for that? Geez, man!

Meanwhile the rest of the geriatric old has-beens kept on doing that thing they do. Some of them even spat out an expansion or an update here and there (one of those did pretty well, too, so I heard) and everyone was like - yeah, cool, you still got it brah (that's how they talk on the World Boss train and I like to blend).

We know how to make our own entertainment in GW2
- which is just as well sometimes

Some MMOs closed down, which companies calling it "sunsetting" made no-one feel any better. Some of them started right back up again, legally or illegally or someplace inbetween.

And that was about it. Apart from all the Kickstarting and crowd-sourcing and "You Are The Developer" and greenlighting (WTG Eric!) and Alpha-for-Beta and "Expansions? We don't need no steenkin' expansions!" it was another MMO year like every other year. Alright. Some of that was new.

Not the greatest year ever, then, but definitely not the worst. I played a lot of GW2 and mostly loved it, even though I moaned about it most of the time. Played some EQ2, Landmark, Vanguard, ArcheAge, Secret World, WoW, Everquest, City of Steam, Project Gorgon, few more here and there. Wrote a bunch of stuff about some of them. Took a lot of screenshots. A lot of screenshots...

Next year I plan on doing much the same plus I have a few new ideas. Syp put up a handy little list at Massively namechecking 60 upcoming MMOs for 2015. Might try some of those. I have a few more in mind he didn't list, too.



MMOs over? Don't think so! Not this year. I mean next year!

Oh you know what I mean... Happy New Year everybody!

Crafting For Fun Not Profit : GW2, EQ2, WoW

Tobold's been scratching his head over crafting in Warlords of Draenor. It's the old conundrum: if crafted items are good enough to adventure with then why would you need to adventure? If dropped items are better than crafters can make, why would anyone want to craft? Well, there are a thousand reasons but only one I want to explore right now: fun.

For plenty of MMO players fun and crafting aren't words that naturally go together. Some  might well question whether crafting can ever be fun, even when what you're making is inarguably worth having. You might be able to stand at the forge in your racial capital and bang out twenty epic battleaxes in the time it takes forty raiders to wrest just one from the rigored claw of Paradox the Black and White Dragon but how long are you going to want to go on doing that before cleaning your oven starts to seem like a more rewarding and entertaining way to spend the evening?

Can crafting be fun in and of itself? That's the real question. Not "is it profitable?" Not "is it worth it?". In MMOs where tradeskills are a reliable way to get rich, or where highly-desirable items can only be crafted, even people who loathe crafting craft. We all understand how that works, but what makes people take up a craft when, even if they get to be really, really good at it, there's nothing they can make that they or anyone else much wants?

GW2 began as a crafting-optional game but swiftly transitioned over to crafting-mandatory mode. Consequently, now, everyone crafts and most of them moan about it. The days when we discussed the discovery method and wondered how it could hope to survive in the Wiki age seem hopelessly romantic. Does anyone still "discover"? Like Ravious I raised my first Chef from to 400 by randomly combining food groups. It was often frustrating but also hella fun.

Would I do it today? I should coco! Now I follow guides like everybody else. Inventing the wheel is fun. Re-inventing it not so much.

That doomed attempt to instil some mystery into what would inevitably become, for most if not all, a rote activity is just one in a long line of experiments hoping to make crafting fun. When I first came across crafting in MMOs with Everquest in 1999, however, I have to say that fun was the last thing on my mind.

My first reaction, in fact, was closer to outrage than amusement. I was under the impression I was entering some kind of 24/7 online robo-DM'd version of the tabletop gaming I'd given up on in the mid-80s. In the five years I'd spent rolling dice and arguing I couldn't remember one single dice roll that related to baking a batwing crunchie. I'd been an adventurer, godammit! I didn't do catering and I certainly didn't sew my own robes.

It took me a little while to get my head around the basic concept but once that mental re-adjustment had been made I ran into another barrier. Crafting in EQ was hard. Oh, not the process. That wasn't hard: click a hotkey, watch a progress bar, bingo. That was the easy bit. The hard part...well, there were a lot of hard parts.

Crafting Daily - No actual crafting required

Getting the materials, that was one. Random drops, finding NPCs hidden out in the wilds, completing long quest chains that sometimes started out solo and ended in a 72-man raid. Lots of ways hard. Then, when you had the materials, there was the skill check. Just knowing the recipe wasn't enough. There was almost always a chance to fail and in failing lose one or more of the pieces. And the subcombines. Don't forget the subcombines. At the high end crafting had the white-knuckle tension of Russian roulette.

WoW went with a much-simplified version and, as with most aspects of the hobby, WoW's take became the genre's dominant trope. Post-WoW the greatest danger wasn't to your mental health but your carpal tunnel. Now, according to Tobold, with the advent of garrisons the crafting process has been automated to the degree that you don't even need to be a crafter to craft some of the best gear in the game. Something to look forward to for the rest of us, then, when that innovation rolls out across the genre.

EQ2, Vanguard, Fallen Earth and a few others went in another direction entirely, turning
crafting into a quasi-self-sufficient game mode all its own, complete with questing, gear progression, faction, titles, currencies - the whole nine yards. It's the approach I've come to prefer although my 1999 self would slap me on the back of the head for saying so.

Crafting this way can be a lot more relaxing and certainly a lot less frenetic than adventuring, especially in these days of never-stand-still. That probably explains why I spend an increasing amount of time crafting not adventuring.

Crafters and adventurers may have mutual dependencies the sheepman and the cowman in the Old West never shared but in one important way their relationship still mirrors that almost forgotten conflict : whatever advantages one tends to disadvantage the other. For all the added value and "balance", under the surface nothing much has changed. Over the years developers have mostly learned to throw a sheet over the problem while players have learned to pretend they don't know it's still there, lurking, waiting to bite.

So, as long as crafters get to make some things adventurers really want and adventurers get to plunder some things crafters could never make, then the two tribes manage to rub along, just about. It's yet another thing for designers to balance, though: PvE vs PvP, solo vs group, casual vs hardcore, F2P vs Subs - there are so many of these contradictory pairings it's a wonder the cogs spin at all.

In the end you have to wonder how much sense it makes to cram all these special interest groups and their necessary support systems into the same box. If we end up clustering in our little corners muttering to our own clan while casting angry looks at the competing clans clustering in corners of their own, muttering and glaring angrily back, is that any kind of surprise?

This year might be the long-promised Year of the Sandbox. Might be. In theory that model better supports and nourishes these disparate desires than the Theme Park Worlds we've lived in for a decade or so. We'll see. Well, I probably won't, actually. Sounds like a lot of busy-work to me.

No, I'll stick with my progress bars and my whack-a-mole mini-games. I'll make weapons no-one wants so that I can level up then break them down for scrap and make some more. I'll do my "make 10 rat trap" quests, hot-swap my crafting macros and generally futz around in safe cities surrounded by the reassuring clank and whirr of the crafting stations.

Why? Because crafting, against all the odds, has become something I do, not to make things I want or need, but because it's fun. Not everything has to be for a reason. Or, at least, not for any reason better than that.