Touch My Stuff (You Can Die) : Very First Impressions of Stash

Having said I was in no need of novelty in my New Year's gaming diet, what did I do today but download a new MMO. I blame MassivelyOP.

The MMORPG in question is one I was vaguely interested in a year or three back but had completely forgotten about. Given its title - Stash - and its focus on storage and loot I suppose it was inevitable I'd at least take a look at it but while it was in buy-in Early Access I was never curious enough to pay for that privilege.

That just about sums up the predicament of the modern-day MMO industry, doesn't it? Even when you come up with a passably original idea and implement it efficiently, players who should be your target audience expect to get it for nothing. I plead guilty to being part of the problem and what's more I have no suggestions as to what the solution might be. Other than bigger lootboxes, obviously.

Characters come affixed to a "Peg", which you can customize, making them look and feel like tabletop miniatures.

The very day I learned Stash had officially launched as a Free to Play title and I didn't have to pay, well, naturally I grabbed it immediately. It downloaded and installed via Steam in a matter of minutes. Registration asked for nothing more than an email address and a password, plus a name, which of course I made up, because who uses their real name on the internet?

I spent a couple of hours in - hang on, the world has a name, just let me look it up... Primordiax. Trips off the tongue, that one, doesn't it? And...it was an enjoyable and refreshingly atypical experience.  Although it's scarcely sane to try and come to any kind of a judgment about an MMO after a couple of hours and a couple of levels, I do think this one at least has potential.

Character creation is simple, straightforward and well-documented. There are four classes. Warrior, Elementalist, Hunter and Healer, the same as you'll find in any F2P MMO of the last half-decade and more. All that ever changes is the names and those not very often.

I made this warrior purely because a +6 axe dropped and my Hunter couldn't use it. That speaks volumes.

The selection of races on offer is considerably more impressive. Where most F2P MMOs offer, at most, a choice between short human, tall human and childlike human, Stash extends that to Human, short Human (Dryad), Human with a Dog's Head (Lukoi), Human with a Cat's Head (Catfolk) and Human Made Out Of Rocks (Trulloc).

Unusually for a Western MMORPG, some of the races are gender-locked. In fact, they all are, except for Humans. Lukoi and Trulloc can only be male, Catfolk and Dryads can only be female.

If you sense something distinctly old-fashioned about the way those options have been allocated, well it really doesn't stop there. Stash is pretty darn old-school in lots of ways.

I say "visit an inn". I mean "visit the inn". There is only one. This one.

For example, all the classes have their own armor types and no-one can wear anyone else's. From Level five onwards you accrue experience debt when you die. Your character doesn't regenerate health automatically after a battle - you have to eat food, drink potions, visit an Inn or construct a camp to rest. You can't just spawn a camp at will, either; you need materials in inventory to build it.

Even the experience bar itself is eerily reminiscent of EverQuest's, something that's compounded by the terminology in the tool tips. I was getting flashbacks as I watched my xp bubbles fill.  As for getting the experience in the first place, how does wandering about in the wilderness picking fights with the wildlife or poking your nose into dungeons sound?

Stash is not quest-based. Oh, it does have quests (well, tasks at least) but you don't need to do them. Far from it - the game actively discourages you. The one task-giver I found was in the main city and came with a clear notice that the tasks were optional and could be ignored. The impression I got was that quests were only there because the developers knew someone would make a fuss if they weren't.

Laylia has all your tasks. And I mean all your tasks.

Even without the turn-of-the-century game design, though, Stash really isn't your average, cookie-cutter free-to-play cash grab. For a start combat is entirely turn-based. In gameplay it reminded more than anything of Wizard 101, only without the card deck.

The view is some kind of semi-free-camera, third person isometric perspective. The "world" looks like a tabletop game board. Almost surreally you can use WASD to get around the main map although it feels far more natural to use click-to-move.

Studded across the map like molehills are Encounters, Resources and Dungeons. Each can be "conned" in classic EQ style, with color-coding at Level One going from White (evens) up to Purple (notify next of kin before entering). Once I'd leveled up the White Encounters turned Blue so I'm guessing there's the usual spectrum above and below your own level.

Level 2 and already twinked. Shocking.

Interacting with Encounters opens an instance in a way that will be familiar to any W101 player. The game then goes into Turn mode and battle plays out. Entering a dungeon puts you into another explorable zone which is itself populated with Encounters. Resources also open an instance but as yet I haven't managed to acquire any harvesting tools so I can't say from experience how that works.

I liked the combat. I found it easy to slip into and enjoy and it exuded a strong "just one more" vibe that kept me playing for considerably longer than I'd planned. I was soloing, of course, but the game is designed for group play and some of the Dungeons are open-world, where you can run into other groups.

An intriguing aspect of Stash and one of its defining features is player housing. You get a Base Of Operations, "BOO" for short, which is a personal instance. Mine looks like a clearing in a forest - I don't know if they vary at all. You can supposedly decorate and even build a house but I'm vague on how and the wiki sure isn't helping any. As yet, most of the entries are unedited stubs.

Go for the eyes, Boo! Wait, wrong game...

On a purely mechanical level the game works pretty well. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it feels polished - I noticed some typos and textual artifacts here and there - but I certainly didn't run into any bugs and everything seemed solid and as easy to understand as any new MMO ever is.

Aesthetically I found the UI appealing and intuitive and the font was clear and comfortable to read. In design terms I spotted one or two appealing and original touches. Player-to-player trades happen by way of the the well-known "stall" method but uniquely in my experience there's a global interface for searching through them, which comes in the form of a "Newspaper".

Stallholders can place Advertisements in the paper to let potential customers know what they're selling. That's one example of both a whimsical approach and an attention to detail that I find encouraging.

And they say the internet killed classified advertising.

Frogdice, the developers, make some very big claims for Stash: that it's "bringing the magic back to MMORPGs" and that it's "more than just a game". They all say that, though.

More convincing than the rhetoric is the company's record, running Threshold, a " text based, role play required MUD still in operation after 20+ years (opened June 1996)" . Then there's the lengthy list of influences and inspirations they draw on, which includes "Dungeons and Dragons tabletop gaming, Warhammer miniature gaming, the “Gold Box” AD&D video games, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, Temple of Elemental Evil, Bard’s Tale, Wizardry, and a variety of other turn based RPGs we have played over the years".

I guess the old school vibe shouldn't come as much of a surprise after all. I don't know whether I'm going to find the time to invest in this one that it certainly requires and possibly deserves but it's tempting. It may look funny but it's a proper, real MMORPG and that's not nothing, not nowadays.

The Solo Player's Guide To GW2 World Vs World Dailies

Reading the frustrated reports of very experienced, skilled gamers like Aywren, UltrViolet and most recently Azuriel amply demonstrates just how badly GW2 introduces and explains key gameplay elements to new or returning players.

One thing that should be very simple are the three "dailies" required to gain the rather generous stipend of two gold pieces that most new or returning players would really like to slip into their virtual wallet each day. Back in the mists of time you would get your dailies just for playing the game but those days are long, long gone.

Dailies come in three types, one for each of the major silos of the game: PvE, PvP and WvW. You can mix and match any three dailies from any of the categories but most new or returning players focus their attention on PvE.

Once, that made sense. You used to be able to do your PvE dailies anywhere and there were plenty of them. Not any more. Nowadays you get your dailies based on the highest level character on your account and the expansions you have purchased and you get told which map to do them in.

This is awkward enough even on a first character leveling up. For anyone who has taken a short-cut to endgame, either by using one of the Level 80 boosts that came with an expansion or by means of one of the in-game boosters such as Tomes of knowledge, it can be disastrous.

With a fresh level 80 you risk getting dailies in maps you have never visited and can't easily access. You may be asked to complete "Adventures", which most players avoid like the plague. You may be asked to kill Champions in a group event or World Bosses you've never even heard of.

Don't despair. World vs World will rescue you.

World vs World has a very small range of dailies and they are almost all very easy. Most of them are also very quick. Everyone can access all the WvW maps (F2P players need to be Level 60) and even if you don't have a Level 80 you will be bumped up to play as though you did.

But it's PvP, isn't it? I'll get ganked before I can do anything!

No you won't. Many of the WvW dailies can be done with a very high degree of safety at very low risk. Chances are you won't see, let alone fight, an enemy player. What's more, with the current low level of interest in WvW, it's even less likely than ever that you'll bump into anyone. Depending on your World and the time zone in which you play you may not see anyone at all!

Enough pre-amble: what about the dailies? Here's the list from the Wiki, with my - hopefully helpful - comments. I've also given them a star rating based on a combination of ease, speed and safety. The more stars the better. And I even made some maps!


***** Big Spender

Spend at least 25 Badges of Honor.

This daily takes seconds to do and is guaranteed 100% safe. If you do WvW you'll have more of these than you know what to do with but if you don't you may still have plenty. You get a hundred in every Achievement chest and once you start doing WvW dailies you'll get some more for every one you do.

The simplest way to do this daily is to buy two Traps from the Tricks and Traps vendor. They cost 15 badges each and they stack. There's a T&T vendor at every spawn-in and at your home Borderland Citadel.


*** Caravan Disruptor
Destroy a supply caravan.

A "supply caravan" is a Dolyak. They spawn at every supply camp and walk (or run) to towers and keeps. If there's no friendly structure for them to supply they just stand in the camp and chew the cud. You can see them on the map - they are the little icon that looks like a Dolyak (surprise surprise).

If they are in transit they don't fight back but they will defend themselves if they're still in the camp. The safest option is to use the map to locate a camp your team doesn't own but which is next to a waypoint you can use (you may need to visit the WPs once to open them if you have never been to that map before, same as PvE). Several of the camps on Desert Borderland are structured so you can get to the yaks in camp without aggroing any guards. The northern camp just behind Citadel is particularly good for that, with four yaks in a stable under the raised platform.

Wait somewhere safe until a yak leaves the camp and then jump it once it's out of range of the guards. Or pick one that's on a lonely stretch of its route. If the camp is upgraded (has two or three shields over the camp icon on the map) the Dolyak may have NPC guards so an unupgraded camp is easiest. Camps change hands all the time so finding a weak camp is not usually a problem.

Dolyaks are robust and take a while to kill but usually you will have plenty of time. If you are unlucky enough to be interrupted by an enemy player just keep killing the yak. If you die and the other player kills the yak you will still get credit for the daily. Dying in WvW costs you absolutely nothing other than a few seconds of your time so just let it happen - unless you think you can win, of course!


* Invasion Defender 
Kill three enemy players.

Avoid this unless you are going to join a squad and/or run with the zerg. If you're even considering getting your daily by killing other players solo you certainly don't need any help from me!


**** Land Claimer
Capture a sentry point. 
 
This is very easy and very low risk. Sentries are marked on the map by a flag icon. There are plenty of them and one or two can be seen and checked for safety from places where you yourself are invulnerable to attack. Many others are in places few players pass by regularly.

Possibly the easiest to get to quickly and safely is the one on the junction of the road between the north-west gate of Garrison and Dreadfall Bay. You can see that sentry from the safety of the platform above "Water Gate" at Garrison to check there are no enemies nearby.

Whichever sentry you pick will be a Veteran but they are veterans in name only. They die in a few hits. When you've killed the sentry, stand in the ring that pops until it fills. It only takes a few seconds. Daily done, waypoint to safety!


***** Master of Monuments  

Capture a shrine (Desert Borderlands) or a ruin (Alpine Borderlands).
 
(Wiki is out of date here. The Desert BL also requires "ruins" nowadays, not shrines, which are different places altogether).

This involves no combat at all. Just stand on a marked spot for around 60 seconds while a ring completes. The relevant spots are all clearly marked on your in-game map. They're all in the central area, which is the least-trafficked part.

If your team owns three out of five then on the map all five will be filled in with the color of your world. Ignore that. It means your side has Bloodlust and it was made to work that way when gliding was added to WvW, so that your glider could use the entire area.

What you need to do is check the spots visually, not via the map. You're looking for one that is at least partially uncolored on the ground. You can see two of them from the safety of the Alpine Garrison water gate (one from the Desert BL Garrison/Earth Keep equivalent). Pick one, run to it (or glide, if you have gliding opened for WvW) then stand looking around nervously for a minute while the ring fills.  Daily done!


*** Guard Killer 
Kill five veteran or higher NPC guards.

This is very manageable although it is potentially risky. I would recommend avoiding Desert Borderland; the guards there seem to be tougher. All guards count, at camps, towers or keeps. Sentries also count as does the Quartermaster in a camp even though he's not a Veteran. "Flavor" NPCs like Citizens or Soldiers at North Camp don't count.

This is another daily where it's important not to worry about being ganked. So long as the guard dies and you did enough damage you'll get credit even if another player butts in and kills you. Worst case scenario is that you're interrupted by a player on the same team as the guard you're trying to kill, which means the guard will live and you won't get anything. That hardly ever happens in my experience so long as you avoid busy areas.

**** Veteran Creature Slayer
Defeat the veteran warg, the harpy veteran, or the veteran wurm on a Borderlands map. 

Very easy and very safe and very quick, so long as your creature of choice is up. If you have a waypoint open at Dreadfall Bay the Wurm on Alpine is probably the easiest to get to but the Warg on the enemy Alpine BL where you have the south-west spawn point is even safer. The Harpy is, in my opinion, both the toughest and the most awkward to reach on Alpine but compared to most PvE content they are all easy solo kills.

The Wurm on Desert BL is very easy to find once you know where it is (see my map above) and so is the Warg but they do require some travel across exposed ground so there is an element of risk. I wouldn't even consider the Harpy on Desert BL because of how awkward it is to reach.

Often you won't have to solo the Veteran Creature, though. They are a ten minute spawn and if the one you've picked isn't up you will frequently find someone on your team already waiting for it. I have even waited with people from the enemy team, killed the creature (carefully avoiding using any AEs), bowed and left without a fight.

** Camp Capturer
Capture two camps.
 

This is a lot of fun but very high risk compared to most of the dailies above. Camps, as I said, change hands all the time and scouts (players watching the map) will report any activity if they're doing their job properly. Whether anyone responds is another matter but it takes some time to clear and take a camp solo - two or three minutes - and that's a long time to stand in enemy territory with a sign over your head.

On the other hand, it's every bit as likely that you'll be joined by someone on your own side, particularly if you are re-taking a camp on your own borderland. Most teams don't like to leave their camps in enemy hands. Once a camp is taken it cannot be re-taken for five minutes and you can see the timer for any camp by mousing over the icon on the map.

If you go to such a camp (particularly North Camp, which is also the easiest, safest and quickest to get to) just before the timer expires there's a very good chance others from your World will already be there, waiting to retake. Also, so long as you've killed any guard at the camp, you will get credit if that camp changes hands to your side at any time before you leave the map so it can be worth just popping a guard in passing if you plan to be there a while.

If you happen to be in a match or on a team where certain maps or areas are rarely visited, taking camps for dailies can be both enjoyable and useful for learning WvW and gaining confidence. Some teams don't seem to like playing on Desert Borderland and the southern camps there are often very quiet. I spent a lot of time re-learning and practicing my old EQ pulling techniques in the southern desert on my Ranger while I was leveling up.

* Keep Capturer
Capture a keep.

Totally out of the question unless you join a zerg or squad or have the good timing to run into the keep just as your team is about to take it. Actually, keeps can be soloed. We have someone on Yak's Bend who does it for his own amusement. If you can do that you should be writing guides not reading them.

* Tower Capturer
Capture a tower.

Same as Keep. Ignore this one unless you're planing on joining a squad or zerg. Although technically easier to solo than a Keep I've never soloed one successfully. Mrs Bhagpuss has though. A few times.

**** Objective Defender
Defend an objective during an enemy assault. The achievement is rewarded when a defend event successfully completes.

Now this is a very easy daily that's often overlooked. "Defending" sounds like it means fighting but it also includes repairing. Mrs Bhagpuss does this one a lot. She just looks on the map to find a keep or tower that we own that looks "contested", which shows as crossed swords over the icon. Then she goes there and looks for a damaged wall or gate and repairs it.

Structures check their integrity every couple of minutes and when that tick passes anyone who's contributed to defence, either by killing an enemy player or repairing the structure, gets credit.

There you go. Dailies all done!

That Dog : DCUO

The main reason I still check Massively OP every day is for moments like this. I'd have been irked if I'd missed the chance to have Krypto running (or flying) around my superhero base.

Very irked. Not, it probably goes without saying, as irked as I'd be if I'd missed out on Streaky the Supercat (sadly not on offer - yet). I'd be be irked and then some. ("Irked" is an odd word, isn't it? Also, repeating it doesn't make it any less odd. Rather the reverse, in fact.)

Ahem. Getting back to the point, or at least to somewhere from which the point might possibly be seen with a decent pair of binoculars, I was a big fan of The Legion of Super Pets back when they were a thing, which was when I would have been about eight or nine, I guess.

From memory, the line-up was Krypto (Superboy's dog), Streaky (Supergirl's cat), Comet (Supergirl's horse), Beppo the Super-Monkey (some kind of lab animal?) and Proto (Chameleon Boy's pet). Four of the five had the powers of any Kryptonian, which made the Animal Avengers (as no-one ever called them, not least for reasons of copyright) pretty much the most dangerous bunch of animals ever to form a pack.

I do like to blend in.

Proto was merely a shapechanger, which you might have thought would have left him (it?) with a severe sense of inferiority but I seem to remember he (it?) was also the only one with human rather than animal thought processes. That made him the boss so it all worked out.

I haven't fact-checked any of that so don't quote me - imagining for a moment that any circumstance could possibly arise where you felt the need to. So far as I know, the LSP isn't about to make a comeback but you can never be absolutely sure.

Anyhoo...

I haven't played DCUO since November, when I got invited to join a guild and rashly accepted. I even suggested it might lead to regular team play. It didn't. I stopped playing altogether.

Thanks! I thought so.

 That was mostly down to bad timing. Things got very busy very quickly at work and it was all I could manage for a few weeks to come home and get a few dailies done in GW2. Unsurprisingly, when I logged in today to see about getting this dog, I found I'd been dumped from the DC Bombshells, so that's my putative grouping career over before it started. Although I got two more League invites this morning so maybe not.

For the time being, I cracked on with the new stuff alone. It's the sixth anniversary event, apparently, which surprised me. It feels like a lot longer than that since I finished the beta and made my first character when the game went live. Time is weird.

Things went a lot more easily than last time, when I was doing the Earth-3 event. I can't have spent more than five minutes skimming around The Watchtower before I found the right Terminal to get the starter quest and the right portal to enter the new zone.

I say "new". It's Metropolis with a sunrise filter. The antimatter glow matched my new look beautifully. I spent the first few minutes posing for myself and taking endless vanity shots.

Hang on a moment...isn't that the Sydney Opera House?

The exact part of Metropolis didn't seem all that familiar, now I come to think about it. I can't remember a marina with luxury yachts from any of my previous adventures. Maybe we're on the other side of the river, that part I've always looked at from on high and wondered why I couldn't go there.

This time the event didn't start with a compulsory group instance. It was straight into the usual collection of daily tasks. I've done enough of these now to realize they are always the same. You always have to kill some Officers or Leaders, destroy some Devices or Portals, Convert or Deprogram some citizens and reverse some Process or other. Plus there's an open-world group event where you just pile on.

I did all those and I did the solo instance as well. That was nice and short although the boss at the end was a bit tough. Probably shouldn't have started with that one. It went a lot better after the second death, when I stopped to renew my acquaintance with what my combat abilities actually do.

Flushed with undeserved confidence I decided to finish the session by queuing for the instance that completes the opening quest sequence. It turned out to be an eight-person "Event", which is a raid in DCUO terms.

That's me. The one with the scythe.

It went better than you might expect. Certainly better than I expected. Once I'd worked out how to queue as DPS I got an invite in a couple of minutes. I accepted and zoned in.

The loading screen offered me a tip about the importance of communication. It reminded me that co-operation was essential for success and that the game has built-in voice chat for that very purpose. It was strongly suggested that I use it or, if not, then I should at least talk in type. I joined my seven team-mates and we began.

No-one spoke, of course. There was no co-ordination, no co-operation and no communication. The mechanics were - fortunately - very simple and yet half the team ignored them. Players were fighting irrelevant NPCs in scattered clusters or alone while the Shards of Anti-Matter we were meant to be destroying went untouched.

Many "Vote" requests popped. Permission to leave the instance came up twice and was denied. Those players left anyway. Then someone else left. A request to open the instance to new recruits came up for voting and was denied.

I can't help feeling there's a pun here that I'm missing...

At this point I hadn't voted at all and it occurred to me that maybe my disavowal of my democratic responsibility was being read by the game as a default "No". I figured out how to vote and clicked "Yes" but the next vote still failed.

By then we were down to three players. I thought it unlikely three of us would beat a Boss intended for eight so when the next vote to open the instance to recruiting came up I made sure to Vote Yes. Finally the vote passed and in a matter of seconds we were back to full strength.

At that point we'd whittled down six of the nine Shards we were supposed to be handling as the "B Team" (as Oracle actually described us), while the "A Team" of real DC Superheroes (aka the NPCs) were runing a holding operation on the Anti-Monitor, the Big Bad set on devouring our universe. Literally. He eats universes. It's what he does.

The five new recruits seemed to be a lot more competent than the five dropouts. The rest of the Shards dropped in quick time and we joined the real heroes on the main target. It was slow progress for a while but we chipped away at his health bar, as you do, and I began to see light at the end of the tunnel.

After a single run through the dailies and main quest there was plenty I could have afforded but I'm holding out for the dog.

There was a frisson of uncertainty when we had to break off and kill twenty shadow demons before ten of them could get to the Anti-Monitor and charge him up (or something). He was running well ahead of us for a while but the final score was 20-7 in our favor.

We all piled back on him and he died fairly quickly after that. The Window of Unavoidable Judgment popped to show us all how we'd done and I looked for my name at the foot of the list. And didn't find it.

I thought at first I wasn't on the list at all. We'd had thirteen people in our eight-person instance in total. Maybe I dropped off the bottom. But no! I finally spotted my name - near the top. In second place on the DPS list, no less!

I tried to take a screenshot but of course I had it set to hide the UI so it didn't come out. You'll just have to take my word for it.

How many Qwardian Coins do you reckon that cost?

What I read into this unexpected proof of competence is that, as an Anniversary event, this thing has been tuned for players of the lowest possible skill level. I mean, I have no skill at all. I literally don't know what most of the buttons do and as for the complicated combos you're supposed to learn...

I just mash the mouse buttons as fast as possible and hit keys 1 to 6 at random to fire off specials. I don't know what they do either but I work on the principle that if they're off cooldown I might as well use them.

So long as I stick to the easy stuff it works. I played for over two hours. I had fun. I dinged a level. I made some money. I got some items for my base. I got an upgrade for one of my jewelry slots. Most importantly, though, I came away with 37 Qwardian Crowns, the currency needed to buy items from the event vendor.

Krypto costs 140 QC. I'm not sure how long the event runs but I would think I ought to be able to manage another three or four sessions before it finishes, which should give me more than enough. Especially if, like last year, there's a double QC weekend somewhere along the way.

Thirty seven down, a hundred and three to go.

If I do run into time trouble I have a fallback position. You can buy Qwardian Crowns for Daybreak Cash. The exchange rate is something like 450DBC for 50QC. If I find myself pushed for time I'll be happy to top up what I need from my 18k reservoir of unspent funny money.

I mean to have you, Krypto, even if it must be Pay To Win!

Ring Out The Old, Ring In... On Second Thoughts, Don't Bother!

Something changed this year. Okay, outside our firmly barred and bolted thick oak fantasy doors, a lot of things changed but the less said about most of that the better.

No, I'm referring to my own decreasing interest and desire for novelty in gaming. While various wise and respected commentators stroke their beards over the paucity of new MMORPGs in production and the supposed moribundity of the genre, I find myself surprisingly sanguine over the admittedly thin, not to say threadbare, coat the New Year's wearing.

In the last few months I have spent almost all of my leisure time playing just two MMORPGs: Guild Wars 2 and EverQuest 2. Not only are those games five and thirteen years old respectively but they are each sequels to older games- games that are both still up and running.

Guild Wars may be in mothball mode but it's still there and people still play it. I played it in preparation for Path of Flames and I ran into a few others while I was there. I even saw tickers scrolling across the screen announcing the results of PvP matches so I guess someone still cares.

EverQuest, a good few years GW's senior, is far from entering maintenance mode. As Wilhelm observed with satisfaction, the old game got yet another expansion this year. Moreover, as he says, "Somebody must be buying the $140 versions of those expansions if they keep offering them."

But then, "maintenance mode" is itself becoming both a viable business model and playstyle. Someone recently wondered whether Funcom has any MMOs that aren't in maintenance mode. It does seem the company fortunes have improved since they stopped even pretending to produce new content and began concentrating on simply polishing up and repackaging the old.

Case in  point. I'm pretty sure I was meant to know who he was. Maybe if I'd raided in the first PoP...

Square Enix restarted FFXIV after it failed and that seems to have worked well for them. But then, as a company, they seem to have only the vaguest understanding of the concept of "stopping": FFXIV's predecessor, FFXI, is famously more active in supposed maintenance than many triple-A MMOs were at the peak of their success.

It goes on. Until NCSoft discovered the mountain of money that is Mobile gaming, its biggest earner was the near-two-decade old Lineage. That corner was finally turned not by Lineage's successor, the inevitable Lineage2, itself still bringing in the dollars, but by yet another Lineage, or rather two of them - LineageM and Lineage Revolution.

If it's not sequels or revamps it's versions. Blizzard's biggest reveal of the year wasn't the next WoW expansion. It was the news that they'd thrown in the towel and started work on bringing back Vanilla. They were probably swayed not only by the continuing interest in illegal time-travel via the Emu scene but also by Jagex's joyous capering under the the money-hose that is Old School Runescape.

Two decades and counting since the beginning of the MMORPG revolution and the huge majority of all the MMORPGs ever made are still running. It's news when one closes because it's so unusual.

When Brad McQuaid, John Smedley et al cooked up EQ they were hoping it might last three years. Modern developers think bigger. And longer. GW2 was designed with a ten-year lifecycle in mind and ArenaNet have said they have no plans to make any other new games. That will change, eventually, but when it does, what do you think the new game might be called?

I have actually finished the PoP Signature questline, I just haven't had the time to post about it. It was a lot better than the Path of Fire Story, that's for sure.

Indeed, once you have a successful MMO up and running, the need to come up with new ideas becomes significantly less pressing. Production of The Elder Scrolls series has effectively gone on hiatus with the success of TESO, for example.

CCP, the one major development team that really relishes the maverick tag, marked the exception to the rule with their advertisement for people to work on "a new and highly ambitious MMO" but then they've said that before, haven't they. And did it happen? Did it heck as like!

Mostly, for developers and players alike, the launch (or Early Access or Open Beta or Give Us Some Money And We'll Describe It For You) of an MMORPG is the beginning of a brave new world of updates, expansions and occasional graphical overhauls. The ship keeps on sailing, the scenery passes by, we dock at the occasional port, the band keeps on playing and we all keep on dancing.

And I like it. It suits me. I'm happy here in the happy house.

Oh, it's partly the season, I'll admit. The season and the weather. Short days, dark nights, rain, snow, warm socks and a comfy jumper. A night in with a mug of hot something and the familiar sights and sounds of 2012  - or 2007 or 2004 even 1999 - all bigger, brighter and less trouble than I remember.

Come the spring I may be yearning again for something fresh and new. As the leaves green and the sun brightens I could be back here, pounding out a thousand words wondering where all the new worlds have gone. I'll deal with that when it happens.

For now I'm quite content. Let this year roll over into next. I'll stay where I am, which is pretty much the same place I was last year. And the year before that.

Happy New MMORPG Year and let's have another one just like it. Please and thank you.

Making Your Own Entertainment : EQ2, EQ2, GW2

One thing I'm really feeling the lack of in my MMORPG diet these days is crafting. Tradeskills, if you prefer. It's historically ironic because there was a time, back around the turn of the century, when I positively seethed at the very existence of crafting in my virtual worlds.

Back then I had some very specific and, looking back, bizarre ideas about what MMORPGs were supposed to be. I came to the genre looking for a kind of always-on version of the tabletop rpgs I played for much of the 1980s.

You can't buy style.

 I imagined the computer as a species of tireless, patient, selfless G.M., handling the ruleset and setting out the miniatures and maps, while the magical internet would provide an endless supply of willing players to make up my surrogate gaming group.

Things did turn out something along those lines. When it came to adventuring, EverQuest and the rest of the early offerings managed to look at least a little like the gaming sessions I remembered from the eighties.

There were goblins and orcs and dragons, for sure. We whacked them with swords or fried them with fireballs. We had hit points and armor with stats and we talked to NPCs to get ideas about where to go and what to do and then we took a long time getting there and argued with each other as we traveled. So far, so familiar.

But then there was all this other stuff. An economy, for a start. I found myself bartering with other players for things I needed. What's more, if I wanted anything specific I had to spend half a session traveling across the world to some kind of souk, where I was expected to stand around for hours listening to people hawking their wares.

An entire Sunday's gaming might consist of nothing more than an extremely risky cross-country trip followed by three hours of reading a jumble of text scrolling up the screen, just so I could come away with a new sword that was just ever-so-slightly better than the one I started with.

It was exciting to do once or twice but as as far as fantasy wish-fulfillment went it seemed an awfully long way from dragon-slaying. I developed a strong antipathy to the very existence of player-run economies in MMORPGs and for several years I believed that all in-game economic activity should be restricted wholly and entirely to player-NPC transactions.

I felt almost as strongly about crafting. It was an alien concept to me. My tabletop group never once in five years of Sundays crafted anything. We played a lot of different RPG systems - AD&D, Swordbearer, Dragonquest, Golden Heroes, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu and at least three rulesets devised by members of the group - but I don't recall any of them even having rules for crafting, let alone anything in the games relying on make-do and mend.

The most I ever recall us doing would have been to take something to an NPC and come back a week later to pick up whatever we'd had him make for us. The idea that we'd sit down at two in the afternoon and spend three hours knitting chainmail, driving studs into leather or scribing spells into a book would rightly have been treated with derision. We had dungeons to delve and mysteries to solve!

Progression servers - the one place crafting still really matters.

Cut to EQ. Even now, the best part of twenty years later, I remember the afternoon I spent negotiating with a tailor to craft a set of studded leather armor for my druid. I remember haggling over the price, traveling to a meeting point, hanging around waiting for him to craft the stuff, opening the trade window and handing over most of my savings.

I also remember that I did it because, even though it took a couple of hours out of my adventuring schedule, to have made it myself would have taken me days. The entire process was time-consuming and laborious.

You had to kill animals to get the skins and they didn't always drop the right skins and you couldn't easily find the right animals. You had to buy basics from NPCs and they weren't always in the same place as the devices you needed to use to make stuff (although at least as a tailor you could carry your sewing kit with you).

Even when you had all the stuff it wasn't just a matter of clicking a button and the thing magically appearing in your bag. You had to have the skill and you got the skill by making stuff and you could fail to make stuff. You often failed and when you failed you lost the mats and had to get more. The worse you were the more likely it was to happen. You began bad and you got worse before you got better.

And yet you had to do it  - or pay someone to do it for you. In those days crafted gear was often not just the best you were likely to get - it was all you were likely to get. It was bad enough in EQ but DAOC took it to the next level. That's where I learned to loathe tradeskills.

Oh, my dear, no. I don't think there's any hope for you at all...

For some years my ideal MMORPG would have had no player economy whatsoever and if it had tradeskills they would have been purely for fun. Dropped or quested gear would in every case be superior to all crafted gear of equivalent level and much easier to get. At a push, maybe, crafters could make gimmicks, like tinkers.That would just about be acceptable, provided no-one actually needed anything they made for anything important.

And then, somehow, over the years, all that changed. The arrival of the Broker system with EQ's Shadows of Luclin expansion (actually about six months after, which is how long it took SoE to get it working) changed my entire belief system on economies.

My time in EQ from SoL through Planes of Power and up to somewhere around Depths of Darkhollow could be accurately characterized as The Dumpster Diving Years. I probably spent - literally and without exaggeration - more time trawling through NPCs' resale stock for items to put on the broker at vastly inflated prices than I did adventuring.

Meanwhile EQ2 and then, especially, Vanguard turned me into a crafter. I took up Provisioning at the start of EQ2 because it required the least effort. It was a useless craft at launch but once the devs actually added stats to food and drink I began to make made a good deal of money out of it.

And I enjoyed it. Crafting in EQ2 was a lot more active than in EQ. Although EQ crafting involved considerably more than just pressing a key and watching a progress bar, most of that was in the prep work. When it came to the moment it was just that - a moment.

Not really what you'd call a "crafting station"

In EQ2 you had to stay with the process from start to finish, nudging the machine along, playing progress against durability, fixing problems as they arose. You could even die if you got it wrong at a dangerous device like the Forge. It felt involving, active, entertaining.

Vanguard ramped that feeling up by a couple of orders of magnitude. Crafting in Telon was the first
time I felt as engaged by tradeskills as by adventuring. There were quests and factions and discoveries and the process itself was challenging and satisfying. It's still by some considerable margin the best implementation of crafting I've seen in an MMORPG. I miss it a lot.

Coming out of the end of Vanguard I ran straight into Domino's dominance of EQ2's crafting scene, a period when the whole tradeskill aspect of the game flourished and grew beyond anything I, or probably most players, had ever imagined. The end result was that I became a convert to crafting and you know how zealous and evangelistic converts can be.

For the last five years all I've really had to work with has been Guild Wars 2's dry tinder. The first few weeks after launch were exciting. I returned to my provisioning roots and took up Cooking.

What do you mean, "pothead"?

One way that GW2 tried to make crafting engaging was by dint of Discovery. You can follow recipes or you can just combine various ingredients and hope for the best. All crafts allow some discovery but Cooking runs entirely on random combines out of which you can learn to discern patterns.

That was fun for a while but soon there were lists online of every possible combination. I had the willpower not to read them but just knowing they existed took some of the purpose out of the process.

As the years rolled on, the GW2 developers ceased even to pay lip service to creativity in crafting. The focus moved from discovery to grind, from quality to quantity. You needed to make a lot of things and the things needed a lot of mats.

After a while crafting ceased even to be a craft. Many of the combines for anything worth having moved from crafting stations to The Mystic Forge and, lo and behold, there we were, back at my own original understanding of the concept of "crafting" in Adventureland.

In the modern conception of crafting in Tyria you collect a bunch of stuff and give it to an NPC, in this case the Genie Zommoros, who lives somewhere on the other side of the Mystic Forge. He then magically, flawlessly and instantaneously converts what you give him into the thing you want. And that's crafting.

I thought about this last night when Mrs Bhagpuss showed me the astonishing and astonishingly ridiculous Eggnog Helmet she'd just made. When I finish this post I'm going to log in and "craft" one for myself. It should take me about two minutes and most of that will be traveling from the bank to the forge.

It's a very, very far cry from anything I'd call real crafting. Fortunately, I do have a fix on the way. The missing tradeskill Signature line that wasn't ready in time for EQ2's Planes of Prophecy expansion is due sometime in the New Year. Let's hope it's a good one At worst it'll be another ten levels of Weaponsmithing and Scribing and that's not nothing.

Still, I wish I'd taken more time to enjoy my crafting back when it was good. I wonder how the crafting is in Project: Gorgon...

Superstar D.J.

A couple of weeks ago I was pondering what to do for a New Year's post. Annual reviews and predictions were already beginning to pop up across the blogosphere.  People seemed keen to get started on looking back.

I enjoy reading those kind of posts but my memory is so unreliable I can barely recall what happened last week let alone twelve months ago so the thought of composing a retrospective of my own fills me with dread. Then I had an idea.

If there's one thing I associate with the turning of the year more than any other it's music. I think it's a legacy of Eighties' partying combined with decades of New Year's Eve music specials on TV, from Jools Holland's inevitable Hootenanny to Darlene Love on Letterman. Okay, that's Christmas but I have a habit of watching it on YouTube at New Year's. We never got the Letterman Show on broadcast T.V. in the U.K., more's the pity.

Anyway, it occurred to me that the three constants throughout the lifetime of this blog have been MMORPGs, screenshots and music. When I started this thing back in 2011 I had the idea I'd include a song and a link to an audio file in every post.  That turned out to be a straightjacket that didn't fit so I shrugged it off but I still try to shoehorn in as many musical references as I can manage.

This year, like every year, I've used a lot of song titles and snatches of lyrics as titles for posts. I always hope someone will comment and occasionally someone does but mostly I have to take it on trust that the pitch is landing.



So I thought how about dragging the whole thing into the light for a New Year's post. I have a YouTube channel, after all, even though I don't make much use of it. I've never made a playlist but how hard could it be?

Not at all. The hardest part was choosing the versions. I'd always rather link to a live performance or a video than a static image but sometimes there wasn't a live version that did the song in question justice. The first one is a still image, unfortunately, but I did them in the chronological order of the posts.

More awkward than that there were a few times where I'd picked a title that's been used for more than one song and I couldn't always remember which I'd had in mind when I wrote the post. Then there were the handful of post titles I'd unadvisedly let slip past quality control without due consideration as to whether I really wanted to associate myself with the band in question. I ended up leaving one or two off the list - I am really not prepared to put my name to anything that features The Eagles...

In the end I was left with forty-two songs and here they are. It makes for an incoherent playlist and there's way too much old stuff on there for my liking. My tastes these days run far more to music made in the last decade or two than this playlist suggests but the unfortunate fact is that, when I rack my brain for titles and quotes to run at the top of a post, it's the ones that got burned into my brain when I was younger that pop to the surface most readily.

Regardless, it is what it is and I stand by everything on this list. Yes, even Kylie.

There's a full listing, in order, below and the little widget on the top left of the YouTube panel opens a drop-down so you can select anything you fancy. If you just let the whole playlist run then I'm not responsible for the effects on your sanity. And the post title was Mrs Bhagpuss's idea!

So here you are - a bit early but who cares?

Happy New Year!

Buzzcocks - Moving Away From The Pulsebeat
The Style Council - My Ever Changing Moods
Cat Power- Keep On Running.
Genesis- I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)
Chubby Checker - Pony Time   
Tyrannosaurus Rex - King Of The Rumbling Spires
The Bluetones - Slight Return
Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - Brand New Friend
P.J. Masks - Ready. Set. Go!
Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel - Don't Give Up
Snowpony - Easy Way Down     
My Life Story - You Can't Uneat The Apple
Pizzicato Five - Magic Carpet Ride
Johnny Cash - I See A Darkness
Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Welcome Back My Friends
Captain Sensible - Glad It's All Over    
The Beach Boys - Busy Doin' Nothin'
New York Dolls - Stranded In The Jungle
Kylie Minogue - I Should Be So Lucky
Scooby-Doo! Camp Scare - Here Comes Summer
Kate Bush - The Big Sky
The Jam - This Is The Modern World
The Smiths - A Rush And A Push And The Land Is Ours   
The Shangri-Las - Past, Present, Future
Desperate Bicycles - The Medium Was Tedium  
The Mighty Wah - Come Back
Manfred Mann - Blinded By The Light  
Prefab Sprout - Lions In My Own Garden
Seers - Sun Is In The Sky
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark — The Punishment Of Luxury
Yardbirds  - Over Under Sideways Down 
Television Personalities - Psychedelic Holiday
Sandy Denny - Let's Jump The Broomstick
The Barons - Hitchin' A Ride
Rolling Stones - Tumbling Dice
Dolly Mixture - Side Street Walker
Roxy Music - Remake / Remodel
Buck 65 - Super Pretty Naughty
Belle and Sebastian - Photo Jenny
The Seeds - Pushin' Too Hard
The O'Jays - Give The People What They Want
Dolly Mixture - Winter Seems Fine