When You Climb To The Top Of The Mountain

I arrived in Bloodstone Fen last night in the middle of a heated discussion in map chat over whether or not GW2 was a "grindy" MMO. The first line I read was "if you don't like it go back to WoW" so it was already clear any further contribution on my part would be pointless. Not that I let that stop me.

A little while later, tabbing to check Feedly between zones (GW2 has some of the longest zone loading times I have ever seen, although the new PC has improved things somewhat) I came across Aywren's plaintive post entitled "MMO Soul Searching: How Do You Learn to Relax at End Game?". The two events, co-inciding, set me thinking.

Aywren's post has attracted some excellent, thoughtful and helpful comments from Jeromai, Dahakha, Karinshastha and several more. Some could easily stand as blog posts in their own right and the thread is well worth reading in full.

My own reply there is perhaps more negative than I intended but the question of what to do at the cap has always been a thorny one for MMO players. The traditional vertical progression model, developed in the days of a near-universal subscription model, has always relied very heavily on building retention, often at the expense of entertainment. As I said in my comment "these games rely on players never reaching a plateau where they can stop, relax, look around and take stock. If that were ever to happen there would be a significant proportion that would conclude they had “beaten” the game; they would stop playing and stop paying".

I missed that memo. Again.

As a natural Low Energy gamer, playing primarily for relaxation and amusement, I have not spent a great deal of time at the cap in most MMOs. My tendency has been either never to reach the maximum level at all, even in games I played for a significant period of time (Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, LotRO), or to quit altogether soon after I did (Wizard 101, Rift).

It's very telling that the handful of games in which I continued to play just as fervently after hitting the cap are those that heavily encourage the making and leveling of "alts". (Alts is a term I have always disliked and avoided but that's a topic for a post of its own. I'll stick with it for clarity).

Aywren's difficulties in FFXIV, as she describes them, are twofold. Firstly, the activities necessary to continue playing and - most importantly - to feel she is pulling her weight at the cap, tend to be stressful rather than relaxing. Secondly, due to the game's "do all the things on a single character" design, the escape hatch offered by other games of simply rolling another character is firmly closed.

As she says, "FFXIV really discourages alts...in fact, rolling an alt just feels like even more work". My own short time with the game, which I loved in many respects, told me exactly the same thing. Indeed, the sheer implausibility of ever playing and enjoying multiple characters in Eorzea was one of the main reasons I declined to subscribe after the free month.

Now what, Piggy?

MMOs in which I have had - or currently do have - one or more max level characters all take the opposite approach. EverQuest, EQ2, Vanguard and GW2 each have many races and many more classes, multiple starting areas and an array of disparate leveling paths that make it not just possible but positively appropriate to repeat the leveling journey over and over, even when the destination has already been reached.

They all also benefit very strongly from having either a huge choice of horizontal content, alternative and discrete vertical progression paths, or both. Frequently, if you would like to become self-sufficient - always one of my goals, if one that's seldom achieved - an army of alts is not an indulgence but a necessity. Players of the traditional "one Main, one Alt" variety find this approach as unattractive as I find it delightful, which is, of course, how game economies are built.

The argument in map chat over GW2's "grindiness" fell down over definitions: one person's "grind" is another's "farm". I confess to willfully contributing to the confusion. Sometimes I just can't help myself.

I have a very straightforward definition of "grinding" in MMOs: grind is any form of repetitive activity I don't enjoy. "Farming", on the contrary, can readily be defined as "something in game that I'll happily do over and over and over just for the fun of it". 

Harvesting nodes for materials or killing easy mobs for faction so that I can make an item that will make my character more powerful or allow her to use a vendor that currently won't trade with her  - these are classic farming activities. Running the same dungeon over and over to kill a boss who may, but most likely will not, drop a piece of gear I need to raise an arbitrary statistic on a specific slot by a small amount so she can edge a step closer to passing a gear check to enter another grade of the same dungeon and begin the process all over again is a classic grind.

Farming and Flying

There is no natural law that says spending time on one of these activities is morally superior to the other. It's all pixels as the saying goes. Some people absolutely loathe harvesting or faction grinding, seeing it as busy-work of the worst possible kind. I'm not attempting to place any of these essentially frivolous ways of passing the time into any kind of hierarchy of value.

What I am saying is that, while there may not be any extrinsic difference in worth between grinding or farming, there is a difference nonetheless. That difference is Agency.

When you farm you have complete control. It's a pick-up and drop activity. You can start it when the mood takes you and jack it in when you get bored. No-one is relying on you to hit one more Ancient Wood node or kill one more Corrupt Guard. No-one, that is, but you.

What's more, farming generally allows you to be as social as you wish. You can chat on all your channels, with your guild, your friends, randoms in zone, while keeping the mats or the faction flowing. By contrast, for all, its supposed social benefits, grinding, at least in its modern LFG/LFR form, has become a soulless, mechanical, silent drudge. If you're lucky.

The invention of Dailies muddied the distinction between grind and farm and between agency and obedience. Dailies were introduced, in part, to counter discontent with the perceived "grind" of faction farming (see how confusing these terms are?). They replaced killing large numbers of creatures Faction A disliked in order to make that faction like you by doing a small number of tasks for Faction A instead.

Easy Dailies!

This approach, which caught on and replicated across the genre like a virus, offers an uncomfortable half-way house for Agency. You have a limited freedom over which Dailies to choose and when (or rather whether) to do them but they tend to offer a much smaller range of options to achieve the same result and they come with a timer that the old farms happily lacked.

You don't have to do your dailies every day but, hey, they're called "Dailies" for a reason, aren't they? Miss a day and feel yourself slipping behind. And that's also the innate problem with vertical progression for anyone who isn't wholly on board with a life of High Energy High Achievement as a preferred way of spending their leisure hours.

Story time. There was a brief period when I was at the cap in EverQuest. It wasn't even that brief: I'd been at the Velious cap of 60 since some point in the life of the following expansion, Shadows of Luclin. I reached the  increased level cap of 65 during the Planes of Power expansion in 2002. I remained there until the cap was raised to 70 in Omens of War two years later.

I played EQ for four expansions at the 65 cap. I had two max level characters, a Cleric and a Shadowknight. I didn't raid but I both healed and tanked regularly for full groups in at-cap content for a couple of years.

I also played umpteen lower level characters throughout the run. By and large I managed to retain a Low Energy approach even though much of the activity was nominally High Energy. The way I did that was by retaining the maximum possible amount of agency throughout.

I did the entire Bard Epic. I never even played a bard.

At that time Mrs Bhagpuss and I were in an active guild and we did a lot with them but our primary social resource was a cross-guild custom chat channel. This was started by a friend of the time with our encouragement and over a couple of years we used it to build a network of like-minded individuals.

We invited people who enjoyed running dungeons for the fun of it, not just to get specific drops. We were laid-back enough about it all that, generally, we wouldn't even need to use /random to determine who would get most items. People were added to the channel based on whether they were good company not on how well they played.

How good anyone's gear was didn't even get a look-in when we were handing out invites or picking groups, although we did end up with a couple of top tier raiders, who appreciated the opportunity to kick back and relax once in awhile. As a Cleric I should have had my Epic. All clerics had to have their epic. But I didn't and it didn't matter.

Epic Quests were on the list of things I didn't fancy much, like raiding and getting flagged for the higher Planes, so I passed. Ironically, I did take part in several, but only as one of the party or raid helping someone else to get their Epic weapon.

I even once tanked Trakanon (the relatively easy triggered version) for a friend's Bard epic, probably the highlight of my limited tanking career but the only Epic I ever completed on my own behalf was the famously short and simple (relatively speaking) Beastlord version.

Another day, another Epic.

That was years later on another server and by then I was high enough level to solo most of it. Another Low Energy option - wait it out. Meanwhile, back in the PoP era, my capped characters opted out of the gear grind and yet were able to enjoy a full and varied palette of max-level content for a couple of years until EQ2 came along and derailed the train.

 At the beginning of my reply to Aywren I claimed "I think it is, both by definition and by design, impossible to have Low Energy fun *and* remain competitive in the endgame of a vertical progression MMO – especially one that uses a subscription-based payment model". The key word in that sentence is *and*.

If your goal is to live a relaxed, low energy life at the cap of an MMO designed around vertical progression you have to accept that you will not be competitive. You won't have the best gear. Your iLevel or equivalent will be sub-optimal. You won't be top of any ladders, meters or leader boards. You will, in the estimation of some, be coasting. You may feel your more driven friends are carrying you and they may be.

This is fine. You don't need to be competitive. You merely need to be competent. As Jeromai says "Priorities shift so that it’s no longer mission critical to be considered best of the best… “Good enough” will do". And "good enough " is by definition good enough. Your friends, if they are your friends, will be willing, happy even, to take some of the weight but that doesn't mean you need to be a burden.

Venril Sathir - is that the Druid Epic? It's all just a blur.

I was a good healer as a cleric in those days. I didn't have my Epic and my gear wasn't cutting edge but I knew what to cast, when and on whom, I didn't panic in a crisis and I kept people up when they might have gone down. My cleric was a first pick when groups were being made, partly because back then all groups wanted a cleric, but also because I was a good team player and because I was "good enough".

As a low energy gamer playing for relaxation and fun at the cap it is, in my opinion and from my experience, essential to be "good enough" while taking things seriously but not too seriously. You are there to enjoy yourself. If you find that, for whatever reason, that's not happening then it's time to make a polite excuse and leave.

If you can hold on to some agency you can enjoy life at the cap as much as you enjoyed the ride that took you there. Some MMOs, like GW2, make that a much, much easier thing to do but if it can be done in classic EQ then it can be done anywhere. Even FFXIV.

I look forward to hearing how Aywren squares that circle.

The Russians Are Coming!

Today is the first day of Blaugust. Last year I shadowed the event. I didn't sign up because a) I don't like filling out forms and b) I didn't want the prizes. I just posted every day to see if I could.

And I could, or so it seemed. At least, I managed a post every day last August. It wasn't unpleasant or even particularly onerous but when I started thinking about whether to do it again this year I soon realized it was an experiment I wasn't keen to repeat.

Of course, because Bhelgast is running a chilled-out version this time around, with no prizes and no specific requirements for posting, there was no reason not to sign up other than laziness. And being disorganized. And a) above, again.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I didn't. I haven't. But thinking about it did set me off looking at my blogging stats. They are weird.

July 2016 was my "best" month ever. Over 28,000 page views. It didn't start out like that. Half way through the month it looked as though there was going to be a summer slump. Then the spikes began.

The first half of the month is what I would call genuine traffic. It runs between 500 and 600 page views a day. Steady. Unspectacular.

With five years of posts in the bank these days most of my traffic comes from various flavors of Google. All of the blogs that used to feature on my Top 10 referrals have now vanished except for Keen and Graev, who still send me a lot of visitors.

Then around the middle of the month everything went nuts. There are two huge spikes on the 21st and 27th with several lesser but still large hits before and after. What's going on?

It would be nice to think that I'd been quoted on some forum or linked on reddit or something  - these things happen periodically and often cause a sudden surge of interest in a particular post. It's always possible to track these hits back through Blogger's stats.

I often know if Syp has included one of my posts in his Massively OP "Global Chat" column before I even read it just by seeing "MassivelyOP" pop up in the referral list, for example. In this case there was no clue what was causing the flurry of page hits.

It wasn't my shameless coat-tail riding of the Pokemon GO phenomenon. That certainly kept the coals glowing, bringing in a no doubt confused and disappointed trickle of Pokemaniacs all month. Nearly three times as many as any other post in July, although that's as nothing compared to the post on building a raft in Black Desert from earlier in the year, which is now my most-viewed post ever.

No, as far as I can ascertain this is probably "referrer spam". This stuff used to show up in the stats so at least you could tell which bots were artificially inflating your numbers but now it seems to leave no trace. Apart, that is, from in the "Audience" section.

Russia is a big territory for MMOs. They play a lot of them over there. They even make some of their own. EQ2 had dedicated Russian servers until just recently. What's more, I know for certain fact, because I was once able to trace and visit the website, that Inventory Full posts have been cloned, copied and used as content in the past by at least one Russian MMO news agency.

I've also been linked on Russian gaming forums and had traffic that way so some visits from that part of the world are to be expected and welcomed. Not, however, half of an entire month's traffic in ten days. This is evidence of some bot farm operation or some other nefarious unseen activity.

This is the sort of thing that makes it so hard to work out just how many readers you really have. There's a ridiculous difference between my paltry fifteen subscribers (why is that number so low and what is a "subscriber" anyway?) and my topline figure of more than 28,000 monthly visits.

My guesstimate is that this blog has maybe 250-300 regular readers It perhaps gets a few thousand casual but interested clickers-by each month on top of that. The Google Analytics report, which I look at a couple of times a year, if that, generally shows a lower number of page visits but an encouraging amount of time spent at the site once people find it. Why those figures differ from the Blogger ones when both are supplied by Google is a mystery to me.

In the end there's not a lot of point worrying about it or worrying away at it to find out what's going on. Like many hobby bloggers I tend to evaluate success by the number of comments and the liveliness of discussion below the line.

Still, I would love to know what's actually going on over there in Russia. I do get quite a lot of hits from Yandex.ru, Russia's homegrown version of Google. Those are probably real. Who are those people? Are any of them reading this right now?

And I'd like to know why I get an ever-increasing number of hits from Google Images - over a hundred and fifty from Images.Google.fr and Images.Google.de last month alone. Are they searching for pictures of ratongas or asurans posing against dramatic backdrops? If so, how are they doing that? I would too, if I knew.

I'll probably never find out. But if anyone has any light to shed, well, you know where the comment section is!

Chilling At Ground Zero : GW2

Jeromai has an excellent post up analyzing the attractions of GW2's new map, Bloodstone Fen and the way it plays to an entirely different demographic than the raid content ANet have been pumping out for the rest of this year. He neatly outlines the attitudes and expectations of two major playstyles - Low and High Energy - both which should be immediately recognizable to anyone who's played MMORPGs over the last fifteen or twenty years.

If you browse the official forums you can easily spot the two demographics as they give feedback on Bloodstone Fen. The high energy crowd are complaining the map is small, boring, has nothing worth getting and anyway they've already finished it in a just a session or two. The low energy folks are praising it to the skies, saying what a great time they're having, how they have their freedoms back and how this is what the game is meant to be.

It won't surprise anyone who reads this blog to know I'm in the latter camp. If I had a motto for gaming it would go something along the lines of "if it's not fun, don't do it". I have no issues about dropping things as soon as I notice I'm not enjoying them. Life is already filled with things we don't want to do but can't avoid. I see no rational reason for dragging that painful inevitability into any voluntary leisure activity as well.

Being able to sort all activities easily into "this is fun" or "this isn't fun" and keeping or discarding as appropriate was one of the key attractions of Guild Wars 2 in the first place. The original game didn't require you to do anything specific at all. The player was given absolute agency.

Take the Personal Story as an example. Most MMOs these days have a core storyline, a narrative that the designers expect players to follow. Star Wars: The Old Republic built the entire game on that "fourth pillar". Final Fantasy XIV gated almost all significant character progression behind steps in the story. World of Warcraft, in Cataclysm, constructed a leveling path that was predicated on completing each quest hub before any new ones would open up.

At launch GW2 had a detailed "Personal Story" with multiple, branching starting points for each race that eventually came together in a unified sequence for everyone that climaxed with the death of an Elder Dragon. After four years and with sixteen max-level characters I have never finished it on any of them. It blocks nothing and not doing it has absolutely no effect on any other aspect of the game.

In the original conception of GW2, everything was optional: dungeons, World vs World, PvP, PvE, storyline - they all existed in glorious isolation. There were some small anomalies, like having to open WvW maps for PvE map completion, but not only were such things the exception. Once pointed out, ANet's response was generally to remove them.

In the run-up to launch there was a lot of talk about flat leveling curves and horizontal progression. There was to be no gear grind. You would be able to level your character by doing literally anything - fighting monsters, following the narrative, exploring, crafting. Even picking up other players after they fell down would give experience.

There would be no quests because, as Mike O'Brien put it, "we’ve all clicked so many exclamation points and accepted so many quests in our lives that we’re pretty immune to quest text". Instead we would get a "Living World". It all sounded amazing. A lot of people bought into the concepts outlined in the now-notorious "Manifesto".

For a while what was promised was, broadly, what we got. I don't remember any occasions where "a centaur wheels a siege machine up to the outskirts of a village" nor has either of my elementalists ever picked up a boulder thrown by a "Stone Elemental" and used that boulder "to create a meteor storm" but hey, things can change in beta. In essence the game we got at launch was the game we were expecting.

The entire conception of GW2 as it was back then seems to have been designed with Jeromai's "Low Energy" gamer in mind. The kind of player who, in his words, wants "to relax, be comfortable and content, be relieved, feel peace". While committing mass murder, arson and wholesale devastation of communities and ecosystems, naturally...

It was too good to last and it didn't. Without rehashing the whole sorry timeline, ANet blinked at the first confrontation with the very audience they'd supposedly rejected - the players who craved a competitive, directed experience with vertical progression, power creep and formal grouping. "High Energy" players, whose primary motivation was achievement and overcoming obstacles, in other words.

From then on the story was one of increasingly desperate appeasement. Beginning with the addition of fractals, ascended gear and achievements, it was a path that led inevitably and, we can but hope, finally, to raids. Like many, most, MMOs before it, GW2 spiraled down the rabbit hole of trying to be all things to all players, with the inevitable result that it ended up being nothing special to most.

Heart of Thorns saw the apogee of that process. Even the raids that have churned out over the succeeding six months are a part of the HoT experiment not an extension from it. GW2's first expansion underperformed both critically and commercially and the narrative ever since has been one of damage limitation and brand reconstruction.

All of which brings us to Bloodstone Fen, a rather small map that, in Jeromai's words once more, "looks like it was cobbled together using a ton of re-used assets"  as it "specifically addresses a number of reaction feedback from HoT" in "a mad iterative stopgap scramble to band-aid fix some issues".

And yet Bloodstone Fen is fantastic. It brings back the complete freedom of action, of player agency, that so many found missing in Heart of Thorns. There are no long "meta" event chains to complete, no map-wide timers, no overarching targets to hit.

Instead there are the small, medium and large Dynamic Events of the kind you'd expect in Core Tyria, the maps that came with launch. There's gathering and exploring and general pottering about to be had. You can set your own pace, come and go as you like. It's a Low Energy map with High Energy graphics.

Oh, it isn't perfect, not by any means. It's genuine "high level" content of a kind the original manifesto suggested GW2 would never have, for one thing. You can't even enter Bloodstone Fen without a level 80 character. Technically, there is still one loophole they haven't closed that would get you in but you won't be having much - or indeed any - fun without a full set of gliding masteries.

As several posters on the forums have complained, there's an absence of the kind of quotidian NPC activity that made the original maps feel so convincingly lived-in. Bloodstone Fen is not a place where you can imagine anyone choosing to settle down. I guess that's hardly surprising given it was Ground Zero for a continent-rocking explosion not a week ago but there's no sign that anyone ever lived there.

Following on from my recent post on the attractions of low-level gaming in MMOs and the appeal of adding new places to begin even as the games mature, it's sad to say I don't see any prospect of that happening in GW2. ANet have wedded themselves to the concept of horizontal progression at the existing cap of 80 and it looks certain that all future content will be constructed with that paradigm in mind.

If so, I hope Bloodstone Fen is a strong indicator of how they'll seek to achieve that goal from now on. It may be missing the depth of detail that make most of the sub-80 maps such a joy to explore but at least it has the Low Energy, endlessly repeatable gameplay I came to GW2 in search of four years ago, and that's something that has become increasingly hard to find in recent times.

Managing Expectations : GW2

Yesterday Guild Wars 2 saw the long-awaited arrival of Living Story 3. The update became available around six in the evening, my time. I finished the whole thing just after midnight. Therein lies the conundrum ArenaNet have yet to unravel.

Of course, the Summer Quarterly update or whatever we're calling it now has a lot more going for it than just LS3. There's a new fractal and a lot of tweaks to that game mode. There's a revamped sPvP map. There are the usual slew of class nerfs and boosts, bug fixes and Quality of Life improvements.

On the last of those, why it's taken four freakin' years for ranger pet names to become persistent is beyond me. How was that not a) the original default or b) fixed in beta? ANet seem almost to make a feature of the incredible amount of time and effort it takes them to do things other MMO developers knock off without thinking as a matter of routine.

During the six hours I was playing (in reality nearer five thanks to a number of re-patches and server outages during which I wandered off and did other things) I took over eighty screenshots. Some of those were in anticipation of writing this post but most were in response to the usual excellent visuals. You can fault ANet on many things but the quality of their art department isn't one of them.

Speech-maker, ice sculptor, Commander of the Pact...is there no end to my talents?

What is a problem, however, is using most of those shots to illustrate this piece. There's a spoiler in just about every one. This happens every time. I'd love to discuss the nitpicking details of the plot with anyone who's got to the end but I don't want to spoil anything for those who haven't.

It's a spoiler even to say that the update adds a new map but I'm going to go that far. It does. At first sight it seems like a small one, along the lines of the original, partial introduction of Dry Top, but on exploration it turns out to be much larger than it looks.

Bloodstone Fen rivals Verdant Brink for verticality, which makes the use of "Fen" in the map's name ironic at best. Has anyone at ANet ever seen a fen? Or looked the word up in a dictionary?

Faulty geographical nomenclature notwithstanding, Bloodstone Fen is a fine new map. Wait, let me qualify... Bloodstone Fen is a fine new map if you have all your gliding masteries and jumping mushrooms unlocked.

Updraft Central

It's very much a post-HoT map. You can go there at 80 but if you can't use updrafts, stealth while gliding, ride ley-lines and hop about via mushrooms I struggle to see how you could even survive let alone prosper.

If you do have all those, though, it's great! There's a ton of things to do. Dynamic Events, champion battles, collections, achievements, all the usual entertainment is there and in quantity. There are some new additions - for the first time you can fight while gliding - and some nice twists to old ones.

There also seems to be no overarching meta this time, which is refreshing. Instead the map has its own set of Dailies discrete from the regular ones. That suits me very well.

From what I've seen so far I give the new map four stars out of five. I'd give the storyline about the same. It would have been less if I hadn't just seen Mrs Bhagpuss finish the final boss fight with ease.

Without going into any spoilery detail I found the two boss fights that end the adventure as tedious and annoying as most of the ones in LS2 but it turns out that was mostly because I made the mistake of doing them on a berserker staff elementalist. When you don't have to dodge and heal for ninety per cent of the fight just to stay alive it seems things go a lot faster. Who knew?
 

That's how I shall always think of you from now on, Rytlock. Uncle Trombone.

The best part of the story this time around is definitely the humor. I laughed out loud on five separate occasions. The writing is snappy, the voice acting solid but the star by far is Rytlock, who gets all the best lines and delivers them superbly. Taimi is on good form too, particularly in her sparring with the odious Phlunt.

There's a lot of non-combat action, all of which is either amusing or emotionally engaging. It's always surprising to find out my character has skills of which I was previously unaware. I had no idea she could ice-sculpt like a professional artist, for example. There are also some puzzles simple enough that even I could manage them although I recommend failing at least once for another chuckle.

In a week or two I'll probably feel able to discuss the narrative developments, some of which are intriguing. GW1 veterans are, once again, very definitely the target audience. The final cliffhanger was a surprise to me.

Until then, let's go back to the conundrum to which I referred at the top of the post. It took me one evening to wrap up the entire narrative element of a quarterly update. Mike O'Brien hopes they might speed that up to bi-monthly. Whoop and if you will pardon the hyperbole de doo.

Can we say "ironic foreshadowing"?

It isn't that GW2 is actually being unreasonably parsimonious in its content right now. With the drip of WvW tweaks, the Current Events and the general QoL improvements that come in the usual two-weekly updates the game has been getting a fair amount of new stuff. This update includes several decent medium-term goals including new Masteries and an  Ascended Backpack to work towards.

If they didn't have a past history of hyperactive oversupply and a very unfortunate tendency to mismanage expectation they would have no more of a problem than most MMOs in keeping the audience from throwing cushions. But they do and despite all the pre-emptive damage limitation there is a clear belief  among many that LS3 will be pumping out enough content to keep everyone busy all the time.

So far they have tried continual development of narrative in the open world and very fast delivery of packaged content in instances and each time the main complaint has been "is that all there is"? Players are never satisfied. Players never will be satisfied. That's why you under-promise and over-deliver, because that way you stand a fighting chance of getting grudging approval.

So much subtext.

If you check the forums it's plain that quite a few people are still expecting LS3 to roll out a new episode every two weeks, while the ones who have been paying attention are now focused on "every two months", which was an aspiration, rather than "every three months", which is the commitment. Managing expectations is an art every bit as important to the success of a business as delivering content and it's an area that needs a lot of work.

That said, it's a more substantial, more entertaining, more satisfying update than I was expecting. I can't really see it as a great deal more than we got in, say, two LS2 episodes, making it about half the size we used to call "not enough" but it's not at all bad. It should keep me amused for a couple of weeks and here's hoping for more Current Events to keep the hoop spinning.

Overall I give Out of The Shadows a B+. Good but can do better.

The Low Level Life : WoW, EverQuest, EQ2

It didn't take long for MMORPGs to develop a reputation for being all about the "end game". I'll have been neck-deep in the hobby seventeen years come November but the only brief respite I ever had from the bitter knowledge that everything happens at cap came way back at the turn of the 21st Century.

For the first six weeks or so that I played EverQuest I played with the /ooc channel switched off. Back then I had this quaint idea that I was involved in some kind of role-playing experience, living a vicarious life in a virtual world. Conversations about sports or current affairs or even just general chit-chat were immersion-breakers I could do without so I did without them. For a while.

As the weeks drifted on and the initial, overwhelming wonder began to bleed out into a less intense yet more urgent need to know, so the research phase began. I discovered EQAtlas, Allakhazam, Caster's Realm, The Newbie Zone. And I switched the /ooc channel back on.

From my foreshortened perspective down in the twenties much of the conversation was hard to parse but it was impossible any longer to ignore that Norrath, like every other society, had its clades and hierarchies. This was still a couple of months before the release of EverQuest's first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, the expansion Wilhelm likes to refer to as "the best MMO expansion ever and the mood was one of impatient expectation.

My Nightmare

Until RoK arrived in March the cap remained at the launch level of 50. The out of character chat channel revealed to me a whole dissident world; discontented, fractious, self-identifying as "bored". These were the Level Fifties, tired of Lower Guk, done with Nagafen's Lair, already looking past The Plane of Hate toward the jungle coasts of Kunark.

The pecking order was well established. At the apex, the ten percent: proto-raiders, developing DKP and strats. Below them the rest of the Fifties, running the treadmill handful of high-level dungeons over and again, complaining all the while. Then came the Dungeoneers in their Trinities, pushing to the cap as fast as the merciless mechanics allowed.

These three groups appointed themselves the Royalty, Aristocracy and Nobility of Norrath. The Commonality, making up the great bulk of the ever-growing population, toiled away in overland camps and semi-open dungeons from The Commonlands to The Karanas. Many of those commoners would gain enough confidence to become Dungeoneers in time. Others toiled all the way to the top under open skies, making do with the lesser xp, all the while attempting to shrug off the contempt of their peers.

On the fringes mavericks and malcontents soloed, some with arrogance, some with self-loathing. Druids, bards and wizards and most especially necromancers, they camped static spawns, killed guards, kited. Verant/SOE's official position, as expressed by a series of deeply unpopular Community Managers, particularly Abashi and Absor, seemed to suggest soloing was a necessary evil, not something to be encouraged. Bottom-feeders was one of the more polite descriptions.

I'm sorry, that was just a noise.

Regardless of the status of your clique there was an expectation so ingrained it never needed to be articulated: everyone was heading, however slowly, to the top. When the Ogres began launching their terrifying barrel rafts towards The Overthere every player clinging to the rigging knew Kunark meant the future. Only in Kunark could you hope to break the statistical ceiling and soar, or scrabble, to Level 60.

And yet, Kunark did not arrive as a neatly packaged new ten levels to bolt on to your existing game. Kunark came as a continent. A whole New World. It brought a new playable race, the Iksar, with their great city Cabilis and their four (count 'em - four!) starting zones.

My initial Kunark experience, once I'd recovered from the loss of half a level and an unrecoverable corpse for my mid-20s druid, who retired to The Karanas to rethink her options, consisted of leveling an Iksar Shadowknight from Level One. When Scars of Velious, the second expansion, followed just nine months later (believe it!) there was no longer a logjam at the top.

Phat Lewts!

Kunark was vast. Velious arrived long before most people were done with it. New hierarchies had barely had time to establish themselves before the paradigm changed again. Some would say it was a Golden Age. From there the train rolled on through a total of twenty-two expansions and counting but only twice more did an expansion amount to a complete reboot.

Shadows of Luclin, the much-maligned but loved by me third expansion added not just a new continent but an entire new world. Cats on the moon and another new start, this time one that took. My Iksar SK is still somewhere in the high teens or low twenties but for a long time my Vah'Shir Beastlord was my highest EQ character, topping out at 84 before the Heroic Boost saw my Magician hurdle her and push on into the nineties.

SOE's last shot at starting over came five years later with The Serpent's Spine, an expansion that had its moments but proved to be the death-note for growing the base. For the following decade everything has been about keeping the established order onside, about adding more storeys to the teetering top of the skyscraper.

And that, by and large, has become the model for every MMO, for the genre. The base game establishes the setting and the world, sets the criteria for success. Most every subsequent expansion, update or DLC adds content at the cap.

Even Guild Wars 2, the supposedly level-neutral poster child for horizontal progression, has settled into a penthouse life. When Living Story 3 debuts later today you will be required to have a Level 80 to follow the plot. Of course, ANet have removed any need for you to go through the tedious process of leveling one. To play through LS3 you also must have the Heart of Thorns expansion and that comes with a Level 80 character boost ready to pop.

I bet they have better weather at the cap.

 Legion, when it appears at the end of next month, adds another ten levels to Azeroth. Ten levels appears to be the industry standard for building on top these days although some games scrape by with five. Once again, with the box comes the option to skip the tedious chore of getting there. One hundred levels of content you don't need any more.

Except that it turns out some of us do. I do. Playing EQ2 and WoW through again as I am right now I find it is, after all, this low-level and mid-level path that I want to follow. It seems I can indeed go home again and, what's more, find a welcome equal to any I've had before.

Playing through the low levels in MMORPGs is fun. Not for everyone, that's apparent, but for me. I enjoy high level content. I enjoy new content. I like novelty and I enjoy a sense of achievement. In the end, though, I have to accept the evidence: by choice I return, over and over, to begin again at the bottom.

There really is nothing to match the satisfaction, the involvement, yes, the immersion. Stepping out in rags with a rusty sword or a knobbled stick, making your way in a hard, harsh world, being useful, helpful and always, of course, violent. Learning a craft, finding a path, seeing your rags turn to riches or at least to leathers.

Sure Kyle, only some of us have other plans...

Taming pets, earning mounts, flourishing your first cloak. Seeing your reputation rise. Watching the world open up around you. Making space to stash the treasures you find. Paying the rent on your first home and laying down the pelt of that great bear you slew, in front of a roaring fire you made all on your own.

At the cap the explosions are louder, the colors brighter, the numbers bigger but somehow the magic dries out. Not always, not inevitably, but often. Sometimes it can all go a bit Nigel Tufnel.

I miss the days when we had it all. When expansions meant both much more to do for the ennui-ridden capped and a new start for the dilettantes at the bottom. When the expectation was that new players would want to jump in at the beginning, would grab a fresh opportunity with all claws. I miss the days when developers were able to look out on occasion, not always in.

Yes, I miss those days and it would be so fine to have them back but the world doesn't turn the other way, not even for Superman. Wishing doesn't make it true but luckily, for me, it doesn't need to. Recent events prove to my satisfaction that all the old magic is still there, just waiting on a click of  the character create button.

If MMO developers are determined to keep adding to the top I'll just keep diving to the bottom. It's funny but I find I can breathe much better down there.

That Summer Feeling

We're more than half-way through 2016 now and these are the MMOs I've played and blogged about so far this year:

ArcheAge

Black Desert

Blade and Soul

Celtic Heroes

City of Steam

Dragomon Hunter

Dragon Nest: Oracle

EverQuest

EverQuest 2

Guild Wars 2

Landmark 

Otherland 

Project Gorgon 

Riders of Icarus

 Rift

The Secret World

World of Warcraft

The lion's share has gone to GW2, as it has done for almost four years now. I've played every single day. I always do the dailies on all three of my accounts. It rarely takes more than three-quarters of an hour to knock them all off. Depending on my work schedule I either run through them all before breakfast or after tea. It's relaxing and enjoyable.

Most days, once I've cycled through the two minor accounts, I settle on the only one that has Heart of Thorns enabled. It's been good having three accounts in different states because the dailies vary according to whether or not the account has HoT and also according to the level of the highest character.

To maximize the difference in dailies offered I've made sure that the account I bought during ANet's 75% off sale has no level 80s. Indeed, it doesn't even have any level 70s. I've retired an Engineer and a Ranger both at 68 and now I'm leveling a Necromancer.

Next up to the plate: The Necromancer

The recent half-price sale caused a moment of anxiety. I didn't want to miss out on a good deal and somewhat to my surprise I find myself looking forward to going through the whole HoT process again - Masteries and Ascended weapons particularly. On the other hand, I don't have any characters on the account that has 80s but no HoT that I particularly want to play right now, while I am very fond of all the characters on the account that isn't allowed to get to 80.

In the end I solved the dilemma in the way I usually do - by kicking the problem down the road. Instead of upgrading either account from within the game, as Mrs Bhagpuss did with her second account, I went to the website and bought a standalone half-price HoT. Now I have the code available to upgrade either of the accounts if and when I feel like it, or I can use it to start a fourth one.

Meanwhile I carry on doing whatever takes my fancy - World vs World, World Bosses, Current Events, HoT Metas and so on. I play each day until I either run out of things I feel like doing or out of time to do them. Then I log out and play another MMORPG.
 

Somehow it's just not the same without DK and Chris.

The GW2 content drought has made a lot of space for other MMOs, which is the very definite upside of an otherwise unfortunate situation. The desultory state of WvW hasn't helped, what with one of our main Commanders upping sticks to move to Isle of Janthir and the other going on hiatus due to a combination of unresolved internet issues and pending vacation time. Mrs Bhagpuss, who generally only plays one MMO at a time, has drifted away from playing as much as she did, spending more time watching documentaries and playing non-MMOs.

Having no particular goals left in GW2 right now, with Mrs Bhagpuss often absent from the game and not feeling the call to Defend the Honor of The Yak as strongly, I have slipped into a routine of playing three or four different MMOs each day. The choice varies. Earlier in the year I was taken up by a couple of refurbished imports, Blade and Soul and Black Desert but, while I thoroughly enjoyed them both at the time, neither seems to have stuck.

It's hard to predict which MMOs will stick. I'm slowly and sporadically plugging away at both Dragomon Hunter and Celtic Heroes, with characters now in or around the twenties in both. Mostly, though, when I log out of GW2 it's to log into an old favorite not a new pretender.

The two EverQuest titles never really drop out of rotation. I am always doing something in one or the other. Still, it's quite unusual for me to find myself playing both concurrently, as I have been this month.

It really is quite embarrassing when the peak of your ambition is to kill "a small insect"

In the elder game I've been logging in almost daily to chip away at the levels on my Magician. A couple of days ago she finally dinged 92, a significant level in that it opens up a number of gear options I've been eying up on the Broker that require level 92 to equip. Somewhat awkwardly, she's on the F2P account but that does free up the All Access account to operate as a full-time storefront for the copious loot she acquires, since AA accounts are able to trade while offline.

In fact, there's a good deal of unattended play going on in EverQuest. Not only is my trader hawking his wares 24/7 but, at least when I remember, I log into EQ on the Magician's account and leave it running in the background while I play something else. The Magician, her Mercenary and her pet idle in the Guild Lobby, sopping up MGBs, so that when I come to playing them they're all raid-buffed.

Then the Mage scoots out to Plane of Knowledge on her Highland Craigslither (a kind of flat-to-the-ground lizard she got from a Legends of Norrath loot card), chats up Franklin Teek for a task or several and heads for the Hot Zones. The efficiency of this method of leveling is variable.

The change to how Hot Zoning works that happened back in the spring means there are three zones in rotation for each five-level bracket and they are by no means all either as convenient or as efficacious as each other. Currently the Level 80 zone is Valdeheim, the Giant's city from The Serpent's Spine expansion. It's very easy but the xp was poor at 91 and will be worse at 92.

Sometimes I just wander around the Guild Lobby slack-jawed.

The level 85 zone, much better xp, is currently Meldrath's Magnificent Mansion, which is too cramped for comfort. So it goes. They will all switch again soon so I'm hoping for something better suited to my playstyle. Both The Foundation and Gyrospire Beza (or was it Zeka?) would be preferable.

In EQ2 I'm plugging along with the new Bruiser I created for the patchwork pony deal. The pace seems just about right and I really love having a character who has to do everything for himself for once, rather than leaning on the immense largess of his well-established, high-level account-mates. Currently he's sitting at level fifteen in both adventuring and tradeskill.

When the Race To Trakanon reaches the finish line and the server closes down I'll move him to my regular server. Whether he'll level much further after that is another question altogether. I suspect that, if DBG follow the plan and replace RTT with another "event" I'll be more interested in starting over there instead of playing him up any more.

Lettuce? What do you want lettuce for? You're not a real rabbit!

It's not news to me but recent events have re-emphasized that what I enjoy most of all in MMOs is starting new characters and playing through the lower levels. The other MMO in my daily round at the moment is WoW, where my Gnome Hunter has also reached the dizzy heights of level fifteen, albeit in about a quarter of the time.

While I still believe WoW isn't quite as super-easy as people like to suggest - I'm not one-shotting anything for a start and a bad pull can still result in an ignominious scramble for safety - it certainly has gotten easier as I've acquired better gear. Now mostly in greens, every quest is easy (although finding the quest location sometimes is not). Much easier, definitely, than I remember the same areas and quests being back in 2009, last time I did them. Moreover, the amount of xp per quest seems to be enormous. I think that has changed and, for my tastes, changed too much. Still, it's a lot of fun.

I ran into a Blingtron 5000 two days running, which meant I was able to hit the Starter Account cap of ten gold and then some. By comparison I don't believe either my Starter Warrior or Goblin had hit that cap by level 20. At least it's allowed me to buy some extra bank space, although as yet inventory hasn't been an issue.

I don't usually accept gifts from strangers but in your case I'll make an exception. Now gimme!

The final piece in my present MMO jigsaw is Landmark, where I log in every few days to make sure my house doesn't fold itself up and put itself back in my pack. Then, inevitably, I end up tinkering around with things and stay there for an hour or several. I'd like to make time for several other MMOs too but there are only so many hours in the day so TSW, B&S, BD, RoI and the rest of the acronym crowd are just going to have to wait their turn. I have managed to log into Rift a couple of times. Come to think of it, that might be an interesting place to start over from scratch...

All in all it's been a very enjoyable and restful period of MMO gaming. I'm making the most of it while it lasts because, unless ANet really shoot themselves in the foot tomorrow, the next few weeks should set the focus firmly back on Tyria. 

Right now, though, I'm off with Mrs Bhagpuss to take a stroll around a real-life castle and, I hope, eat an ice cream in the sunshine. It is summer, after all.

Gnome Is The Hunter : WoW

When Blizzard announced the forthcoming sixth expansion for World of Warcraft almost a year ago it occurred to me that I might, for the first time ever, buy in at the beginning. The whole package sounded attractive, much more so than either dull Draenor or potty Pandaria.

There was going to be what sounded like a very welcome shift in gameplay to a more modern, less directive approach, borrowing from the trend begun by Guild Wars 2. The whole enterprise had a looser, more relaxed, less intense vibe than the war-torn drama and earnest work ethic of WoD, yet without crossing the credibility barrier into cartoonism that so tried the patience of the hardcore prior to the release of MoP.

Admittedly, a lot of the tent-pole features didn't do much for me. Order Halls sounded eerily like yet another way for Blizzard to wriggle out of offering real housing (something that, were they ever to take a proper run at it, would probably bring back literally millions of their missing subscribers and hold them, not for months but years). Demon Hunters didn't catch my fancy any more than Death Knights had. Artefact weapons are a thing I actively avoid in any MMO that has them.

There were ten new levels though, and although I tapped out at 69 on my original run, the expansion was set to arrive with the now-traditional boost to the previous cap, meaning I could start at 100 and go on from there. The half-dozen new zones of The Broken Isles sounded interesting. The new scaling mechanic meant they could be approached in any order and I've always been a sucker for an archipelago.

Move your ears, can't you? The reception's terrible..

There were, however, two standout features of Legion that made a re-up more likely than ever before: a real appearance system and Gnome Hunters. Add the super-sweetener that gnomes get clockwork pets and really, what more is there to say?

My highest character in WoW is a Dwarf Hunter. I found the class eminently playable and very enjoyable. As a rule I like dwarves in MMOs but playing a dwarf does have a certain effect on my demeanor and in-game personality. I tend to joke less and act more soberly. It's still more fun than playing most tall races but noticeably less amusing than playing a goblin, a ratonga or, yes, a gnome.

For this last year the prospect of being able to roll a gnome hunter at launch and take him or her clothes shopping as a career has kept the possibility of an early purchase of Legion alive. It was never a done deal because I have a lot of MMO pots on the boil right now and the end of August might not turn out to be the best time to commit to a subscription, but on balance I would have said it was more likely than not.

And then came came patch 7.0, forever to be known, around here at least, as The One Where They Gave Away The Farm. Not the Pandaria farm (anyone remember those?). No, just the very parts of the expansion that I would have been most willing to pay for.

The patch largely removed my need to buy the expansion but it gets better still (or worse, from Blizzard's point of view). As someone who has always tended to enjoy the ultra-low level game in MMORPGs most of all, I don't even need to subscribe to indulge my whimsy. Both gnome hunters and the new transmog system are fully available in the free starter edition that lets you play WoW with few restrictions up to level 20.

With that, I dusted off my old log-in details and gave birth to a new gnome. Thus far (level nine) it's been a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

The character creation screen seems to have changed a little since I made my Goblin nearly three years ago. It seems slicker and shinier than I remember, with a nice sliding-panel that shows off the limited selection of looks. It was easy to get a face I was happy to look at in screenshots and a hairstyle I could stand to look at from behind for hour after hour.

The Gnome Hunter arrives fully petted up - with a mechanical rabbit. It's an odd choice. I realize "rabbit" says "small woodland animal suitable for a newbie" but it's a machine not a mammal. I didn't have to go out at level one and tame it. If you're going to make a mechanical animal to fight for you, wouldn't you choose something more intimidating than a bunny?

None of which logic affects the simple fact that the rabbit looks great and fights like a tiger. Oh come on, you know what I mean...

As a major addition to the game, Goblins get what amounts to an entire ten level RPG of their own. Gnomes, being ever the Unlucky Alfs of Azeroth, probably need to count themselves fortunate to get even a very short introduction. I did initially take it to be something new for Gnome Hunters but on research it turns out to be merely the general post-Cataclysm reboot for the race, which I hadn't seen before.

Gnomes don't really do elegant, do they?

It's a short, tight tutorial with a couple of nice set-pieces. WoW does tutorials as well as MMOs tutorials can be done - in the world and not in your face - and Dun Morogh is one of the most aesthetically pleasing of the starting areas, so the first few levels passed very pleasantly.

I'm currently playing a ratonga bruiser on EQ2's new Race To Trakanon server, which has reduced leveling speed and higher difficulty settings, akin to those on the Time Limited Expansion servers. The difference between that experience and the one I'm having in WoW is instructive.

Neither is clearly "better" than the other - they are just different. There's a lot said about how incredibly fast leveling is in WoW these days but I suspect that's mostly hearsay, based on the accounts of players who burn through the levels using Heirlooms, Recruit-a-Friend and other leg-ups. With none of that, leveling is sprightly but no sprint. On RTT, by contrast, it's definitely a marathon.

It's also my feeling that the actual difficulty of the encounters and quests has changed a lot. I leveled through the pre-cataclysm Don Morogh several times back in 2009 and I remember it very clearly. Some of the quests haven't changed much, if at all. When I was killing Wendigos last night I had flashbacks to the frequent deaths I had in their caves in the past. I'm about certain that with one character I had to postpone that entire sequence and come back a level or two later because I couldn't solo it. Now it's a cakewalk.

Hunter's Moon. So it's told.

Even so, I managed to die twice. The first time was on the quest where I was meant to call on High Tinker Mekkatorque for "orbital" strikes to help kill sub-boss Crushcog. I was so busy enjoying the mayhem I forgot to notice Crushcog's many minions had killed my rabbit and were finishing up the job on me.

The second time I died while AFK looking up how a quest worked. For all its much-vaunted slickness and simplicity, I have always found WoW to be at least as fiddly and unintuitive as any other MMO and more so than many.

The quests use a myriad of systems that are often explained only vaguely if at all. In this particular one my admittedly perfunctory scan of the quest text led me to believe the gears I wanted were ground spawns when in fact they were drops. Close reading of the text could have cleared this up but so could the quest helper - which was no help at all!

Acquisition of gear and abilities at low levels is a  slow and steady process at best. At level nine my gnome is wielding a Poor (grey, vendor trash) bow rather than the Uncommon (green, quest reward) rifle because the grey one has better DPS. Same happened with two pieces of armor.

Gnomes come from Sunderland, apparently. Who knew?

The quest rewards can be odd. At level eight a quest gave me a choice of four items, the only one of which I could equip was a cloth robe. Since the patch also gave Hunters the right to wear Chain from level one (they previously started in leather and had to wait until 40 to equip chain) doing half a level in a dress seemed an idiosyncratic option at best.

Still, at least the frock didn't expose her bare, pale gnomish skin to the wicked Don Morogh wind. At level nine she replaced the robe with what appears to be a chainmail sports bra. Here's hoping something better drops before she gets frostbite.

 It's a racing certainty this gnome will make twenty. I like WoW. Every time I play I have fun. There's a vast amount of content I've never seen. It's highly likely that at some point I'll buy Legion and resubscribe.

For the moment, though, any sense of urgency to grab the digital download or buy an actual box in a real-world store has ebbed away. I still might jump on board at the end of August - the new expansion buzz is always a draw - but it all depends on what else is happening at the time.

For now I'm happy pootling about in Don Morogh. I always liked it there but it's even better with a robot rabbit.