Drunder In The Air: EQ2

This week's left-field notion from those wacky folk over at Daybreak Games is a doozy.

A prison server.

To save anyone clicking the link here's Holly "Windstalker" Longdale's proclamation:

"Later this week we plan to release a server we are calling “Drunder,” which is a “prison server.” What does that mean, exactly? Ultimately, players who are caught breaking our rules and disrupting EQ2 live server gameplay will be flagged for this server, and no others -- ever. Characters on these accounts will be copied to Drunder (the “prison server”) and can never leave or transfer to another server.

This is a server our Customer Service Game Masters have requested over the years in order to manage disruptive players. They will determine who goes there. As gamers, we recognize there are some players who like to step outside our rules.

Drunder will get no customer service support and it will require a maintained membership to access and play. Rather than disrupt live servers in an attempt to join the “prison server,” players can use our /petition system and ask to join Drunder. To be clear: You won’t be able to move individual characters to this server, while maintaining characters from the same account on another server. This is a ONE-WAY trip for an entire account forever.

Ultimately, players who break the rules – or want to – will have a world of their own to do… whatever they will.

As I said, this is an experiment. We wanted to see what happens given it's not a very common option.

Let's see where this takes us…"

Insanity. That's where.

I claim sanctuary!

As Feldon gleefully reported this bizarre idea is getting all kinds of attention from both the gaming and mainstream media. Wilhelm is keeping a handy scorecard of blog responses for future reference.

The whole thing gives me the creeps to the point where I almost do not want to log in. It's an emotional response not a rational one because, in effect, having your account moved to a "prison server" is a more lenient penalty than the one that's been in effect for the entire time I've played EQ2, namely an outright account ban. A ban is morally neutral, though. Being sent to "A Prison Server" is anything but.

If the theoretical possibility of having my account permanently taken away never gave me a moment's pause, why does this feel so much more threatening? Well, emotionally, it feels as though it affects my characters directly, not just me. I am responsible for their well-being and I feel threatened when they are threatened.

If (Brell forbid) I were to engage the wrath of someone in Customer Service to the point where they flagged my account as Banned I would, of course, be extremely upset. My characters, however, would be oblivious. For them, nothing would have changed. They would be able to go about their business doing whatever it is they do when I'm not directing them. It would, in effect, be no different for them than any other period when I'm not playing.

If the whole account gets moved to another server, however, their entire environment will change. That's already going to happen when we get the server merges, which is an uncomfortable enough issue in itself, but at least there we don't expect to be plunged into anarchy, murder and worse. Not even with Nagafen joining us.

They'll never find me out here!

On Drunder my characters wouldn't dare leave their houses. The world outside wouldn't be safe any more (and most of them live in Freeport so their concept of safety is already stretched thin enough). I am not willing to take that risk without their informed consent. We're all going to have to have a group meeting about this. Ironically I guess I'll have to log in for that.

As for we, the players, life on Drunder would be...different. It reminds me a bit of the old Everquest "RP" server Firiona Vie, which turned into a very odd place over time, nothing remotely ressembling what it was intended to be. With no Customer Service and no GMs, the players on Drunder will be able to do anything they like. Botting is going to be the very least of it. Hacking of any and every kind will go unchallenged. Duping? Go right ahead. Speedhack, teleport, walk through walls? Carry on.

If someone works out how to crash the server (as has happened at least twice to my memory) they can, presumably, keep on doing it until they get bored. I wonder if someone will end up reverse-engineering the whole thing and taking the game in a new direction altogether?

How are they going to punish anyone even if they do catch them, anyway? Send them to another prison server? Make them play Landmark? And what happens when we get more server merges? One day Drunder might be the most populated (and profitable) server of all. It could be the last EQ2 server left running!

It's a bad idea in so many ways. But mostly it's bad because its immoral. My characters haven't done anything. Why punish them for my sins?

Taxi To The Financial Zone : WildStar

When I chose the name for this blog I had some quasi-situationist fancy that I'd write about nothing but bags, boxes and banks (which would have been a pretty good alternative blog title, come to think of it). Luckily I realized that, like most situationist pranks, it was an idea better imagined than executed . Still, I am fascinated by inventory space in games and I do consider inventory management to be content in and of itself.

Prior to playing WildStar I think the game I played, at least for more than a session or two,  that had the most restrictive inventory was Allods. Back in beta I seem to remember working with just one bag that held about twenty items, for about fifteen levels. Maybe it was fewer. Items, that is, not levels.

Allods, however, was a free-to-play title from the start and selling inventory space for real money is a commonplace and entirely legitimate way for F2P operators to earn a living and keep the servers running. It's hardly surprising space was at a premium. WildStar, at least for a little while longer, is a subscription game. I'm scratching my head trying to think of another subscription MMO that both starts you off with so little bag space and appears to be set on keeping it that way.

The basic starter backpack has sixteen slots. You also get a Tradeskill Bag, into which all your crafting mats go automatically. Not sure how voluminous that is - I haven't found much to go in it yet.  Then there's a separate inventory for quest items. Maybe sixteen slots doesn't sound that bad....


As a rule it takes an appreciable while in most MMOs before bag space becomes an issue. Often there's an extra small bag or two early on as a quest reward. Sometimes monsters drop them. They tend to be one of the earliest items you can craft. And even so I can usually get through a few play sessions before having to think about the options. So far I've seen nothing like that at all in WildStar. I guess that could be because I skipped the entire starting zone.

Last night, at level seven, I didn't only run out of bag space, I ran out of things I was willing to sell or destroy to make space to pick up more things to sell or destroy, which was what I'd been doing for the two levels before that. The only vendor I could find willing to sell me a bag was offering one that added two spaces. Two spaces! That's not a bag. That's barely a purse.

I told her to keep her measly 2-slotter and flounced off in a huff. Didn't actually occur to me that perhaps I could have bought several of the things and expanded my bag by six or eight slots. Which it turns out you can. Bit late now.

I wanted to keep all the armor and weapons I'd outgrown because I don't yet understand (read: haven't bothered to find out) how the appearance/cosmetic system works. What with those and things I couldn't throw away because I didn't quite grok what they were for yet I found myself in a bit of a quandary.

The obvious thing to do would be to bank everything but that meant finding a bank and the guards at Woodhaven didn't seem to know of one. (Turns out banks are accessible only in capital cities for some stupid 2004-era rose-tinted nostalgia/deeply immersive, hardcore, roleplay-friendly reason). Fortunately, even though I didn't know that at the time, I remembered seeing a sign for financial services when I was wandering around Thayd the day before, so I got a taxi (at some considerable expense) and went back there.

Once I'd done that and knocked off a couple of challenges (one of which gave me a purple
quality house item, which I'm sure will look just dandy, when I have a house) I just about had time to get a taxi back to Woodhaven before it was time to go to bed.

I'm increasingly aware that there's one whole heck of a lot that I don't understand about WildStar and by that I mean the real basics - like how the inventory, appearance and crafting systems work, for example. It seems a bit pointless to dig into it now, though, when quite probably a lot's going to change when the F2P conversion arrives.

Maybe I should just go play on the F2P beta server and learn the new ropes instead. Hmm. That's an idea...

Those Are The Headlines. Happy Now?

There certainly does seem to be a lot of news lately. Come to think of it there always is. If it isn't some game about to close down or some company about to go bust it's another going into open beta or hitting a crowdfunding target. I could link all those but why bother? There'll be another bunch along tomorrow.

To render the whole thing manageable and comprehensible I have to compartmentalize. Does this directly affect me? Indirectly? Do I want it to start affecting me? Can I dismiss it out of hand as irrelevant to anything I'm ever likely to do or want to do or think about doing?

Examples:

Funcom getting into difficulties is notionally troubling. I like The Secret World a lot; even though I don't actually play it these days I'm far from feeling I'm done with it. I own a boxed copy of Age of Conan and I've never even installed that one far less played it but I always have it somewhere in the back of my mind that I will one day.

Blade & Soul announcing a 2016 launch and a buy-in beta, on the other hand, barely raises an eyebrow. I wasn't interested in it before and I'm not interested in it now. A nudge closer to accessibility doesn't change anything.

Every day brings a torrent of similar stories, large and small, trivial and portentous. It's lucky MassivelyOP is there with a big net to catch them all. If we learn nothing else at least we know that if MMOs are dying they're certainly not going quietly.

I have to scan them all, at least. Sometimes there's real, solid information that I need to know. Details of the upcoming server merge for EQ2, for example. Like Wilhelm, none of my characters get merged with any of my other characters so, apart from waiting to hear what happens about names, (there was a bizarre rumour everyone would lose their names and there'd be a land rush to grab them back when the servers open) that one can sit and simmer a while.

Then there's the news that there's going to be news. That's possibly the most annoying kind. It's not quite PR fluff because there's a kernel in there somewhere but it's not really  much more than an appointment to find out a real fact sometime later.

Blizzard did it recently when they trailed the Big Announcement that turned out to be Legion. ArenaNet have just pulled a similar stunt:

"On Saturday, August 29, ArenaNet President Mike O’Brien and Game Director Colin Johanson will host a special fan and press conference titled “Guild Wars 2—The Journey Ahead.” There they’ll be making a number of big announcements that will define the future of Guild Wars 2 and—as many of you have been waiting for—reveal a major feature coming in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™"

What the future-defining announcements are or the (presumably previously unnanounced) major feature could be I have no clue. All sounds mighty important though. Better not miss it. Pity I'm working that Saturday.

Whatever it is I guess it's something in addition to the "challenging group content...the intense challenges that will define your endgame experience in the expansion". That gets a separate announcement of its own. Or does it? Hard to tell.

I find myself less excited over this than I am nervous.It can't be good news, can it? Doesn't sound like good news. I kind of always thought of GW2 as an MMO that neither had nor needed an "endgame". I guess those days are over.

We'll just have to wait another ten days to find out. Hope I can weather the news onslaught until then. I'd hate to be all burned out before the big day.

Off Piste : WildStar

Yesterday I played WildStar for several hours. It was a session that fell, roughly, into three phases.

• Phase One : Wrestling with the UI.
  

WildStar's UI is, in many ways, quite atrocious. It's aesthetically harsh, ferociously over-complicated and missing some key options. It needs a makeover and some serious simplification to be ready for F2P.

If you dig hard enough it does have plenty of options but not always the ones I wanted. Almost the very first thing I do in any - every - MMO is locate the Screenshot and Hide UI functions and rebind them to the Minus key on the numpad and F10 respectively. Those are the defaults in Everquest and I have muscle memory.

WildStar doesn't even have bindable keys for those functions. It uses PrtSc for taking shots and Alt-Z to hide the UI. Both are awkward. Neither is documented in-game. I had to google.

All the screenshots in this post were taken with FRAPS because I am not faffing around with PrtSc especially when it sends the shots to a folder buried somewhere no-one would ever think to look for it. Alt-Z is a really annoying combination to use but so far I haven't found a workaround. Given that, in the course of my first extended session, I took just short of a hundred screenies, I'd be very grateful for any clue how to get the UI out of shot without having to perform hand yoga every time.

That done, the next task was switching off almost all of the insane amount of visual clutter or cruft, as my new favorite word would have it. All those miscellaneous names and messages I could not care less about. If I'm not targeting something I don't want to see text telling me what it is. I want to see the scenery and nothing but the scenery.

It was at this point that I came across the option to switch off all of the telegraphs WildStar is infamous for. I knew it was there. I saw it in beta. I'd toyed then with the idea of switching them off but in the end I erred on the side of caution (and self-preservation).

This time I had a thought. Surely, if the developers believed the game couldn't be played without these visual cues, they would never have put in an option to remove them? So I switched them off. All of them.

After that the world of Nexus began to show its true beauty. And it is gorgeous. The design ethos is coherent and superbly executed throughout. Yes, it's a highly stylized look, high concept even, but brilliantly conceived and carried through to perfection. It may not look as "realistic" as other virtual worlds but it has that ineffable sense of place that convinces the mind. And I love the color palette.

• Phase Two: Off The Map
  

It was only when I took off to explore that I began to appreciate what a huge and diverse place Nexus is. MMOs vary enormously in their explorability. Some, like Vanguard, make a big issue of it, claiming anywhere you can see, you can go. Others, like the original Guild Wars, go to the opposite extreme, constraining the character to specific paths, where a six inch kerb presents an insurmountable obstacle.

Nexus, to my considerable surprise, is closer to the Vanguard end of that scale. Indeed in one way it surpasses it: you can, quite literally, go exploring off the map.

Rather than throw myself straight into questing in the starting zone, Everstar, I decided to go for a wander. In very short order I found myself at the edge of either a lake or the sea. There was a cliff blocking the way so I swam round it and found myself in an undiscovered land.

Undiscovered that is by Exile, Dominion, indigenous wildlife or cartographers. WildStar appears to have a very significant area of geographically complete landmass that hasn't been prepared for gameplay. An explorer's dream come true.

I spent the next hour making my way along the coast, untroubled by mobs, NPCs or content,  heading all the time roughly East and a little South. The arrow representing me on the map edged out into blackness and then disappeared altogether. At one point I cut across a populated corner of Celestion but until I eventually ended up in Whitevale, a mid-20s ice zone, I was in uncharted territory. I had no idea where I was or where I was going. It was wonderful.

Arriving in the snowlands as a Level 4, surrounded on all sides by aggressive deep red cons, I discovered the second factor that makes WildStar a true explorer's MMO. Level neutral aggro.

Some devs clearly feel players should stick to the defined level ranges and not go poking their noses into places they have no right to see without first paying their foozle-killing dues. In those games, as you move further from your intended level range, so the wildlife picks you out as easy prey and comes bounding across the map to rip your fool explorer's head off.

Not so in Nexus. Everything I encountered had a small agro range that seemed consistent with what I'd experienced in the starting zone. What with that, the mini-map showing little radar dots for all mobs and the roads and pathways being relatively safe, it was excellent exploring all round. In two hours continual traveling I was never attacked once.

Even better there was stuff I could do. Other than take endless screenshots that is. I spent a few minutes digging up Lopp shinies and I could have handed them in if I hadn't spotted shinies of my own and wandered off somewhere. I found books to read and datacrons to listen to. I opened more Soldier missions than I could count although obviously I couldn't actually do any of them. Still, they're all in my book for later. I wasn't making any xp but who cares?

Eventually I got to some valley in Galeras that positively teemed with elementals or something very like them. I couldn't find a way around them and by this stage I was getting a bit tired. What's the worst that could happen? It might not be so bad to get sent back to spawn for a rest, at that. I tried running through them.

It went about as expected although, even though they were all twenty levels above me, it was no one-shot and done. If I hadn't managed to gather about a dozen of them as I twisted and turned I might even have made it. But I didn't and so began

• Phase 3: Doing What I Was Supposed To Do
  

Namely finding a map intended for my level and getting down to some questing. I wandered around Thayd for a while, seeing as how I'd respawned right next to the gate. It's probably just  some hick town but after what seemed like (and was) hours in the wilderness the bustle of the big city was a bit too much so I got in a taxi and took a ride to the Western end of Celerion, where the mobs were level six and every second NPC had a ! over his head.

Even then I was slightly getting ahead of myself. I hadn't done any questing in the official starting zone and I was still only level four, two levels two low for Celerion.

How did I get to Level 4 without questing? I killed stuff. Old school I know but it still works. I'd wanted to test the No Telegraphs thing so I killed a bunch of innocent wildlife. Following the trail of soon-to-be-dead was how I ended up at that shoreline in the first place.

And it seemed to work just fine. I stood toe-to-toe with whatever i wanted to kill, or whatever some NPC told me I ought to want to kill, swung my huge two-handed sword and everything fell over. (Why do I have a sword, by the way? Is this the middle ages in space?).

Not only did I not die, at all, even once, on the way from Level 4 to Level 7, fighting multiple mobs that began at two or even three levels above me and ended up even, I didn't often even come close to dying.

The Shiphand mission I soloed took the longest. Maybe the best part of an hour. I was so immersed in it I forgot the time. Didn't even take many screenshots. That was the hardest fighting I did and there were one or two low-health moments that had me backing off but since my Warrior has no heals whatsoever there was no real choice but to fight on through the pain. Which she did. And prevailed.

I found most of the quests entertaining and amusing. There were a couple of great set pieces, particularly the part where all the Greenbough Guardians emerge from the ground and stomp all over the Dominion position. And the bit after that, which I won't spoil.

How long leveling up as though telegraphs and dodging aren't even in the game is going to go on working remains to be seen. In beta, playing a Chua Engineer, I had the telegraphs on but ignored them and he got to the low teens with no trouble at all. We'll see.

And see we definitely will because so far I like WildStar. A lot. If I end up having to dodge like a demented flea then that may change but for now I'm having fun.

Opening The Door On WildStar

It's all Mercury's fault. He posted a really excellent "first impressions" piece on the current iteration of WildStar's new F2P build, currently available only in beta. It prompted me to stop prevaricating and jump through the necessary, tedious hoops to climb on board the sinking ship before the F2P tugs arrive in the Autumn to tow it out of the deep, hardcore waters where it's floundering, into the shallows of casual gaming where it probably should have stuck to cruising all along.

Mercury's review was the trigger but it had always been my intention to buy a copy of Wildstar before the re-launch. As with EQ2's Silver Membership deal back at the launch of Freeport, buying the box amounts to a single small payment for a greatly enhanced long-term experience. Among other highly desirable perks like additional bag space and more house item slots you get 12 character slots per realm instead of two, which is a huge bonus for altaholics.

It's also something that will not be available to anyone who chooses just to download a free copy of the game, even if they go on to pay the monthly Signature fee (subscribe in other words). In F2P WildStar additional character slots will have to be paid for:

"All accounts created after the transition without applying a key from a box or digital copy of WildStar will support 2 characters per realm by default. This is true for both Free and Signature service levels. Character slots are always an a la carte purchase".

If they follow GW2's pricing model those extra ten slots per realm would cost £85!

When MMOs transition from one payment model to another the process can be convoluted. It pays to read the terms and conditions very carefully. I thought I'd done that but as I fact-check for this post I find I haven't been as duly diligent as I thought.

My first idea was to buy the game from Amazon, where there are plenty of copies available starting at around £13. The delivery dates on those are long, however, and since no release date has been announced for the F2Plaunch other than the vague "Fall" I was slightly concerned it might go live before my box arrived.

In fact, reading the full FAQ, that wouldn't matter:

"you may still be able to find boxed copies in stores or on the Internet. These copies of the game will vary in cost depending on the seller, but the keys within will continue to offer the same promotion bonuses they do today...All accounts created using keys from a physical box, or with keys available from the website before the transition, will be grandfathered to support 12 characters per realm. This is true of box keys even after the transition." (My emphasis).

Another thing I didn't know or, more likely, had forgotten is that WildStar has a peculiar form of Region Locking. Your account is not, as is more common, region locked by IP or your physical address; it's locked to the origin of the code you purchase, be that in a box or an email from Carbine. I bought my copy yesterday directly from their website and it is locked to the EU servers, which would not have been my choice, although now it's happened I'll probably stick with it. What will happen to region locking when the game goes F2P is anyone's guess anyway.

Then there's the server choice. There isn't one. Well, strictly that's not true. There's one PvE server and one PvP server. Megaservers, supposedly. You can get a free transfer from PvE to PvP too - probably not the other way, I'd guess.

Buying and registering the game was a total pain as it often is with MMOs. I do wonder if half the reason so many of these games under-perform isn't down to how hard the companies selling them make it for us to give them money. It took me over half an hour just to navigate the various registration and security screens. 

It's no surprise there's such an issue with people re-using email addresses and passwords - I try to make a new email address for every MMO and always use totally unique passwords but it takes forever or feels like it. Add in the secondary security, the authenticators and the telephone call-backs and you have to be pretty committed to get to the end of the process. No wonder many people take shortcuts.

Even when all that was done for some reason the PayPal option didn't work. I think a lot of prospective customers would have jacked the whole thing in long before I did. I know I was close to bailing on the whole idea a couple of times. And of course after that came the multi-gigabyte download before I could play. These companies really need to read up on instant gratification if they want make money.

Or they could just copy Blizzard. If you want to play WoW on a whim you can be through the registration process in a matter of seconds and in character creation in a couple of minutes, while the download streams in the background. It's an almost seamless transition from having the urge to stepping onto Azerothian soil. Let's hope WildStar drops most of the barriers to entry when the transition comes. A streaming client is a must for a F2P MMO with a big footprint, even in these days of fast broadband, I would say.

With all that out of the way I only had time to make a character and run around the Arkship tutorial for half an hour before it was time for bed. I made as much of a mess of that as I had of the rest of the process. I was very happy with the way my new Aurin character looked but for some inexplicable reason I lumbered her with a ridiculous name that I am just not going to be able to live with so she's for the woodchopper before she gets off the Arkship.

This morning I made a Mordesh instead and I'm not wild about her name either. I think I'll delete the pair of them and start over. I was going to say something about the actual gameplay but this has run on so long that will have to wait for another post. At least the hard work is done...until I have to set up the next account for Mrs Bhagpuss, that is. 

Groan.

Malice: A Forethought : EQ2

There's a particular kind of quest that EQ2 does very well. It's the type that let's you know something big is about to happen. On a meta level the player often, though not always, knows where it's leading. There's usually been some press release or news item revealing an upcoming addition to the game - a new race, a new class, a seasonal event, an expansion.

For the great majority of players who don't give a thought to the game until they log in there's a heads-up by way of a log-in message or an in-game mail. Anyone who misses that will hear soon enough via general or guild chat that there's a new questline. They may have only a vague idea of what it's all about but hey, new quest, right? Where's it start? That's all you need to know.

For the character it's much more of a mystery. There will be a summons of some kind, one that you'd be wise not to ignore. Overlord Lucan D'Lere likes to make it very plain that Citizens of Freeport have duties as well as rights. Make that "instead".

I hardly ever do these questlines on the "good" side so I'm not sure what kind of pressure Antonia Bayle brings to bear. Probably some old nonsense about honor I imagine. Or maybe she just hands out bribes: buns for the halflings, beer for the barbarians, bows for the elves. (Either kind of bow. You've seen their hair.)

The current questline begins the pre-amble to this Autumn's expansion/campaign/add-on thingy. For a Freeportian it begins in Darklight Woods (or "Darlight" according to whoever typed the caption to that first screesnhot above) It moves on to Neriak and then progresses through The Commonlands, Enchanted Lands and Everfrost. It's not available at all on the TLE servers for the obvious reason that they won't be getting the expansion this year (look, I'm going to stick to "expansion" from now on, for the sake of sanity) not even if they vote "Yes" to each unlock every month from now 'til Frostfell.

As I mentioned earlier it took me just under an hour to run through the whole thing on my Berserker including time out for screenshots and looking up the bits I couldn't immediately work out for myself. Most of it was very straightforward but a couple of the clues were vague, to put it mildly. I won't go through the entire thing - there's a walkthrough on the wiki if anyone needs the full details - but the rest of this post is likely to be spoilerific so anyone that wants to be surprised probably should go do it for themselves. Please come back after.


Oh, and don't look at the pictures too closely!

Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier.

Okay, now they're gone here's what I know. Lanys is back! Wait, what? Did she go away? Remind me who she is again? Oh, that Lanys!

I always "liked" Lanys T'Vyl. I played on the server named after her for a long time and her invasion of Firiona Vie (the town, not the high-profile elf, or for that matter the server, although that might have been even better) was one of my all-time favorite Everquest events. She's one of the (many) gods and demi-gods and semi-demi-hemi-gods in the Everquest pantheon not to have made a reappearance in EQ2. Until now.

Every expansion needs a good villain. It's often Mayong Mistmoore and when it's not him it's Meldrath the Malignant. Anyone with alliterating Ms will do in a pinch. We'll get Mighty Mouse and Melina Mercouri in due time, I shouldn't wonder.

I like to be able to put a face to the existential threat. Not that I ever get to see the Generals and Potentates in person. That all happens in raids or at least it used to. Still, the scuttlebutt filters down and there's generally some grunt work for the rest of us to do, cleaning up the minions and the like, foot-soldier against foot-soldier as it were, while the kings fight the godlings somewhere far, far away.

Given that the last expansion (Ever? Let's not start that again...) was called Altar of Malice and this prequel is "Malice in the Woods/Grove (Delete as Applicable)" we can surely assume continuity. But AoM was all about Luclin, wasn't it? And Luclin is herself a goddess, isn't she?

I'm so confused and I'm not the only one. But then confusion over the lore is my natural state in any version of Norrath and it's just how I like things. I like to know enough to vaguely recognize the names so I can go "Oh is that her? You know, the one who was in that thing with the other one, what's his name? Oh you know him, he had a big stick with a lizard on it. HIM!" Just like when you watch a movie with your grandmother.

Recognition factor, that's all I need. I got a tingle when I learned that Lanys might be back and that's what I pay my All Access for. Also for good fun which this type of questline always is. The steps leading up to the big reveal were sprightly enough, too, although I might have a different choice of words if I'd not been able to look up the answer every time I got stuck.

Take "at the end of the path" for example. As this illustration shows there are several paths in The Commonlands and unsurprisingly they all have ends. If someone in Neriak tells you to go out the gate into The Commonlands and go to the end of the path you would expect it to be the end of that path from Neriak, wouldn't you? Well it isn't.

And what would you make of "where a landing is still?" There's officially only one "landing" in Enchanted lands - Bobbick's Landing. That's not the one. Turns out to be a completely unused dock in the extreme east of the zone that, as far as I recall, has never had any use or function since the day the game was launched. I had totally forgotten it existed. "Still" is quite a good pun there but you can only appreciate it after you find the dratted place.

I had to look both of those up in the end. I did work out the Everfrost clue on my own though and what I found there was unexpectedly shocking: the World Root , split down the middle, all the Numbfoot troglodytes who used to guard and worship it lying dead in the snow. I've killed them many times while questing there. It was...odd seeing them dead like that. Uncomfortable. Ironic how that works.

The battle also appeared to have done for some strange new species of fae. Did the World Root or its shaman turn the fairy to wood or did it start out that way? Can wooden wings fly? Does Norrath need a new breed of fairy? Looks like we're getting one, like it or not.

It's all very intriguing. My berserker reported back to his contact in Neriak, who naturally passed him on to someone else, as is the way of these things. The next stage would appear to be an open-ended bounty hunt, lasting until the middle of September, with a wide selection of house and appearance items as the incentive. EQ2 Traders has the full list with pictures, as always.

I'm off to track a few down now. I could use a new cloak. And a tyrannosaur's head for that spot over the fireplace.

60 Is The New 80 : GW2

One little ritual I thoroughly enjoy in GW2 is Doing My Dailies. It's generally the first thing I do each time I Iog in. Before I think of starting, though, I check the list to see what's on offer and assess the difficulty.

The choice varies quite a bit. There are a few gimmes: tasks which don't involve any combat at all and can be knocked off in a matter of seconds, things like throwing a handful of items into the mystic forge or visiting a vista, for example. Then there are the easy ones that take a bit longer but pose no problems, mainly the various gathering options - foraging plants, mining ore, chopping wood.

For someone well-versed in WvW there are two freebies - spending badges means buying a few traps from a vendor and standing on a ruin is a short run and a thirty second wait - providing no-one ganks you, that is. There are also a couple of fast, easy single target kills for WvW, yaks and the sentry for Land Claimer, that don't take long and can be soloed easily.

Sometimes there's an option to attend an "Activity", one of a handful of mini-games, accessed via an NPC in Lion's Arch. That's another gimme in that you get credit for being there, not for doing anything, but you do have to wait for the event to run its course, which can take a few minutes, especially if it's Southsun Survival and some ingenue actually tries to survive.

There's always a full set of dailies for structured PvP so that players who do nothing else can get their quota without bothering the rest of us. In PvE there's often a World Boss on the list, which is easy enough but which can only be done at a specific time and there are a couple of Fractal dailies which, annoyingly, often seem to crop up together. The option to complete four events on a specified map is usually one of the most time-consuming, especially if the map in question is Snowden Drifts.

A good day is two gimmes and an easy. I can knock those out in five minutes or so. An average day is one gimme, an easy and something more fiddly that involves a deal of running around or waiting for events to spawn or timers to run down or which needs a zerg or offers the risk of being ganked and having to start over. An average day can run anything from 10 minutes to half an hour.

Very occasionally there's a horrible day with nothing easy at all and several, like the Fractals, that I won't even consider. The longest it's ever taken me on one of those days is an hour and a half. And then, of course, I have to do it all again on the second account. And then yet again on the third.

Only the third account is different. Not having a max level character on an account cuts out several dailies completely. You can't do Fractals unless you're level 80 so those are out (yay!). Some World Bosses de facto require a certain level. You could in theory fight the Claw of Jormag at any time, for example, but before you reach about level 75 you simply won't be able to land any damage or get credit, so you don't get offered those dailies if your level doesn't fit.

This is why my highest character on my third account is level 60 and holding. I am keeping him back deliberately so that each day I get a wider choice of dailies across the board. If I get Frostgorge Sound events as a PvE option for the first two accounts I know I'll have Wayfarer Foothills for the third. If the 80s get Claw of Jormag the young 'uns will get The Frozen Maw. It's more fun that way.

It makes me wonder what's going to happen when Heart of Thorns arrives. Nothing's been said about how it will affect dailies, as far as I know, but it's bound to have a significant impact. Players won't just be differentiated by level any more but also by whether or not they have the expansion registered to their account.

There are a lot of ways that could go. It only affects PvE dailies directly, since WvW and sPvP players will all get the Desert Borderlands and Stronghold maps by default, whether they buy the expansion or not. We could therefore keep the same number of dailies and some or even all of the PvE ones could mandate HoT zones and still no-one could claim they were being locked out completely.

That would appear quite harsh, even so. A softer option would be to expand the PvE choice from four to six or even eight, mixing expansion and non-expansion maps, or we could have two separate PvE sections, Pact Tyria and Heart of Thorns, or we could go back to having set tasks but freedom on where to complete them. Or they could revamp the entire daily system for the fourth time or do away with it altogether.

Whatever ANet decides to do I imagine I'll acclimatize but precedent suggests dailies will be less fun that they used to be. So far my favorite version was definitely the original, where we had the same dailies every day and a free choice of where to do them. Second-best was the next iteration, which brought in a rotating choice but still left it up to the player to pick the venue.

The current version is the worst of the three but I still get a lot of entertainment out of it. I'll probably manage to find a way to go on enjoying whatever they come up with next.

Whatever they go with it's a fair bet I'll be ticking off as many boxes in the old world as I'm allowed. And I plan on keeping one account with no level 80s and no Heart of Thorns to give myself the best possible chance of getting the kind of dailies I most like doing.

Very easy ones.