Bless Online : First Impressions, Part One

Steam tells me I've played five hours of Bless. That's not long. Perhaps I'd be jaded too, if I'd played for nine hundred hours like the reviewer who called Bless a "generic KMMO with nothing special to offer", or seven hundred and fifty hours, like the "ex-emissary" who warns " DO NOT buy this game or even if its free to play DO NOT download".

Those aren't outliers, though. The huge majority of recent Steam reviews for Bless Online are overwhelmingly negative. The exceptions are from those who, like me, bought it at 67% off in the recent sale. Maybe cheapskates just have lower standards. Or maybe our expectations are more realistic.

There's a key phrase in one of the reviews that probably sums up the feeling that stands behind much of the terrible press Bless is getting: "I was as a lot of other people hungry for another MMO, and I got info that Bless was gonna release in EU and NA.So when it released I bought the game for €150". Surprisingly, this reviewer gives the game a Thumbs Up. Where most people feel their money has been wasted, he felt his was well spent.

If you come to any new MMO in a state of hyped-up, amped-out excitement, fueled by a long wait behind the velvet rope, chances are you're going to be disappointed. Add in a significant financial outlay and a game that, by all accounts, was released long before it was ready and you can expect a backlash.

Let's be clear, because I'm about to say some nice things about my five hours so far: I would not pay 150 Euros for Bless. That would be batshit insane. I very much doubt the current Early Access version even justifies a full price ticket of $39.99. At the price I paid, however, around $13 (actually £9.98) I think I'll definitely get my money's worth.

Preamble over. On to the actual impressions.

Performance

There are plenty of complaints about this in the reviews but I haven't had any issues to speak of. The only real problem has been the loading times, which are terrible. The game seems to want to load in a stream of files - the same files - every time it boots up and that takes about two minutes. Then it goes through another set of routines after you press "Play". I have to allow the best part of four or five minutes before I see the gameworld. That's about twice as long as EQ2, the slowest-loading MMO I play, and EQ2 has the excuse of a decade and a half more content to parse than Bless.

Once I'm in, however, things run pretty smoothly. I don't usually pay attention to my framerate but this time I had FRAPS running so the numbers were there in front of me. I'm getting around 60FPS consistently, which seems fine to me. That's running at the default settings on a 3.3GHz i5 with a GeForce 960 and 8GB Ram under Windows 10.

UI

I like it. It's simple, intuitive, not weird. The default key presses are what you'd expect - "I" opens your inventory, "M" opens your map. There's not much on screen until you put it there, which suits me. I like a minimal look.

I did run into a few issues where I couldn't immediately figure out what the game wanted me to do, as in when it asked me to drag the icon for my mount to a specific place that I couldn't find, but those were primarily shortcomings in the translation rather than anything intrisically wrong with the UI itself.

Talking to NPCs and quest-givers and interacting with objects all work smoothly. You have the choice of hitting "F" for most interactions or clicking an on-screen prompt. I found it all pleasant and straightforward to use. The auction house NPC herself is something of a star turn. I'd love to know her back-story. And I seriously want those gloves...

The only thing thing that's genuinely irritating is the endless stream of huge, intrusive notifications that appear in banners across the top and middle of the screen. There's the typical Eastern MMO insistence on announcing what other people are doing on the market or what amazing gear they've crafted, but worse by far are the Guild territory notifications.

I haven't read this up but as far as I can tell, Bless has a PvP system that relies on guild ownership of territory. Every time you enter a new area that's owned by a guild, which seems to be almost everywhere, a huge banner appears right across the center of the screen telling you whose turf you just invaded. If you're in a city, it can happen over and over again since different guilds can own different districts or possibly even buildings.

There might be a way to turn the notifications off but I haven't found it yet. What with those and the audio warning every time you enter a factional safe-zone the game can be somewhat over-protective at times. It could use an "I'm a grown-up and I'll look after myself, thanks" button.

Graphics and Sound

See yesterday's post. I'm well under the maximum graphical settings but the game looks absolutely beautiful. Most Eastern MMOs do but I think Bless has better art design than Revelation Online and better textures than Blade and Soul. It's very similar, visually, to Black Desert Online, which is a significant compliment, since BDO is one of the best-looking games I've played.

I don't have a lot to say about the sound. It was way too loud on the default setting but then what MMO isn't? There definitely was music but I don't remember what it was like, other than it didn't annoy me. If there was much in the way of ambient chatter or environmental atmospherics I don't recall that either. I could log in to check but it seems more significant to record that nothing I heard comes to mind.

Character and Animations

See last Friday's post. I really like the character design in Bless. It's top-class. The characters and NPCs look great when they're standing still. I like the confident resting pose and the way my little Mascu stares straight at the camera. The detailing on the clothing and armor is attractive and intricate. I noticed, when I equipped a new item, I could see it appear as a pouch on my character's belt.

The running animation on the Mascu is a little awkward. I think it's supposed to be cute and mostly it is but the way her arms stick out makes it look like she has sticks down her sleeves. Perhaps she does.

I can't really comment on the combat animations. Most of the time I'm so focused on trying to hit the right key and not dying I can barely spare time to look at the screen. Which brings us to...

Combat

Hmm. This is a tough one. Bless has one of the daftest combat systems I've seen for a while but I don't entirely hate it.

NeoWiz don't seem to have been able to decide between the traditional tab-target-and-hotbars set-up (WoW style as it's often known) and full action MMO controls like Neverwinter or DCUO. Instead they've gone for some kind of half-baked hybrid that pleases no-one.

Unless you play a Berserker, who for some reason gets the original action gaming version that was removed from all other classes a while back, you have full control of your mouse pointer at all times. You also have several sets of hotbars into which you can drag and drop skills, items and so on. You can then use the hotbars by clicking on them or hitting a key as you prefer.

So far, so sensible. Except you can only add a few basic attacks to your hotbar and those don't do nearly enough damage to ensure a comfortable win against most enemies. For real DPS you have to rely on chaining skills.

Icons for the chains appear on screen as you trigger them but you can't activate those with a mouse-click. You have to hit "R" or "T" or some other key I forget. There's probably some kind of rhythm or rotation to it but I have yet to work it out. Mostly I click the two main attacks with my mouse and hammer on the "R" key.

It's not intuitive or comfortable and I'm sure it's making the fights harder than they need to be. Also the game doesn't seem to auto-target the next enemy when a mob dies so I also have to remember to do it manually by hitting Tab, which is something I don't think I've had to do in a themepark MMO for a decade or more.

My impressions of combat so far are limited to one class - the Ranger. Other classes may play very differently. The ranger might as well be a melee class. The range on the bow is very short and there's no means of stopping the mob closing on you (no pet, snare or root) so every fight consists of you getting a couple of quick shots in as the mob rushes towards you then firing your bow at point-blank range while glugging health potions as the mob tries to rip your head off.

It's very likely there are better ways to play a ranger. It might be possible to kite or circle-strafe although not with my dexterity. There may be skills I'm missing or chains I should be concentrating on that would make the experience less frenzied and frenetic.


The thing is, I haven't looked for solutions to any of these problems because I'm having fun. The fights are crazy and chaotic and I like that. Lots of them are really close but I win most of them. For low-level solo play it's unusually intense. I've died quite a lot but not so much it's been off-putting. More like "Right, I'll have you this time, Sonny Jim!"

Aggro is interesting. Namplates are green, yellow or red. Green denotes an interactable NPC, yellow is a non-aggro animal or mob. Red means it's going to attack you as soon as you get in range. So far, so familiar.

What's unusual is that in a bandit or orc camp many of the mobs will be flagged yellow or even green. In the outer areas only the scouts will be aggressive and even if they attack nearby yellow-flagged mobs won't assist them.

This means that, with care, you can work your way past the outer defences without a fight to get to the inner areas where your quest target may be hiding. Or just because you're nosy. I got myself into considerable trouble this way.

End of Part One

I have a lot more to say but this is running long already. Next time, I'll get into the tutorial experience, questing, story, leveling, taming, loot and the rest of the good stuff. I'll probably have played a couple more hours too, so who knows what new wonders or horrors may be revealed?

Pictures Or It Didn't Happen : Bless Online

Bless Online is beautiful. I'm in two minds whether it's as beautiful as Black Desert Online but it very well might be. It's been too long since I last played BDO to remember exactly how it looked but I do recall being stunned by the scenery and mesmerized by the realism of the architecture.

Black Desert has had a graphical upgrade since then. I really ought to patch it up and take a look. For now, though, my visual cortex is too busy being overwhelmed by Bless.

Playing GW2, I'm somewhat habituated to extraordinary architectural sights. ArenaNet's art department gosh-wows for a day job. The towns and villages in both Black Desert and Bless - and indeed in a number of Eastern imports - seem somehow more solid and, dare I say it, realistic.

The flagstones seem more weathered, the bricks have a patina that comes from years of sun and rain. Weeds and moss grow in the cracks. Everything has a lived-in look. Compare it with Divinity's Reach, that stunning set-piece of a city, and Queen Jenna's capital has the look of a movie set rather than a working town.

The interiors in Bless are equally stunning. The rooms I've seen are properly furnished for purpose. The state rooms are luxurious and imposing, the academic halls and labs are cluttered and characterful and the rural lean-tos are spartan and shabby.

In common with almost every on and offline rpg with a supposedly high-medieval setting I've ever played, the sense of scale is off the scale. Why is it that no-one can put in a ceiling without leaving enough headroom for a giraffe? I realize I'm exaggerating the dimensions by always playing the shortest possible characters but even so.

There are a lot of moving parts in a mining town in Bless. Cables stretch across the sky. Cars carry coal to the furnaces. Paternosters shunt endlessly between the upper and lower decks. It's no Black Citadel but then what is? I love my sheet metal.

In the mountains the air is clear and the grass is too tall for a Mascu to peer over. The grey scree reminded me a little of FFXI but the inspiration for much of the game is very clearly - very clearly - FFXIV. More on that, perhaps, when I get to my First Impressions post. Tomorrow, I hope.

Thus far I'm enjoying Bless a lot. It doesn't mean much. I enjoy all new MMOs a lot at first if they have gorgeous scenery and easy leveling. I've played around five or six hours, I think. I could log into Steam and check but if I do I'll end up playing more and I have dailies to do in Tyria first. I'm finding Bless quite compulsive.

One area in which Bless can't begin to compete - literally - with either BDO or FFXIV is player housing. It has none. Apparently it might one day but at the moment its just an item on a wish list. Until then, I'm claiming this entire village. There's no-one here but me.

More on Bless to follow. Try and stop me!

Warm Fuzz - EQ2

It's Developer Appreciation Week and yet again I'm going to praise the same team I always do. As Shintar pointed out in the comments, Ravalation hosted DAW last year and I contributed, expressing the somewhat left-of-center opinion that Daybreak Games, with a much reduced team, had improved considerably on the flailing, directionless chaos we'd come to expect from late-period SOE.

In the year that's followed I'm delighted to say that things haven't changed. Actually, yes they have. They've gotten even better!

I know that's not what everyone thinks. Feldon, when he closed EQ2Wire, made some fairly damning comments about what things were like behind the scenes and I do believe he would have been in a position to know.

I'm not. I have no idea what goes on behind closed doors at Daybreak Towers. All I can judge by is the quality of the games. If you flip through my back pages for the last year or two, pretty much all you'll find about EverQuest and especially EQ2 is post after post where I ramble on about what a great time I'm having, how much I'm enjoying myself and how much better EQ2 is than it used to be. And it was always good (at least after Scott Hartsman saved it).

Over recent updates we've seen the addition of new  familiars, new holidays and new (okay, refurbished) dungeons. We've had a really top-notch new expansion that seems to have been better received than any for years. Even the concerns I had over the loss of the inestimable talents of tradeskill queen Domino proved groundless when the delayed signature crafting quest from Planes of Prophecy finally arrived.

Possibly the warmest, fuzziest character in Norrath.

With what have to be severely reduced and very limited resources compared to the old days under Big Sony, the EQ2 team has consistently provided solid, entertaining content in updates and expansions, punching far above their weight. What's more, they hit their deadlines and the content seems to arrive with fewer bugs.

I play two MMORPGs more than any others these days. I would guess ArenaNet have at least ten times as many developers, designers and coders working on GW2 as DBG have on EQ2 but my satisfaction as a player runs in inverse proportion to those numbers.

As I said, the proof is in the posts I write. I love GW2 but I sometimes despair of both the direction and execution of its content. I'm often sarcastic and snarky about the game. Any appreciation I do offer tends to be directed mainly at the unsung hereoes working on the filler content between big releases - filler that frequently feels more satisfying than the main course.

When I write about EQ2, though, I can't stop gushing. It's so much fun. The current development team seem determined that everyone should have a good time and no-one should be left out. They also understand that there's far - far - more to an MMORPG than endgame content and punching gods in the face.

I'm not going to run on any more.  I've made my point. I've played EQ2 since beta and I've seldom enoyed it more. I just hope that when we get to Developer Appreciation Week in 2019 all I'll need to do is link to this post and say "Again! Again!"

Bless Online - Creating A Character

Bless Online hasn't had the best of receptions since it arrived on Steam. The lifetime rating stands at "Mixed", a 45/55 positive/negative split across nearly five thousand reviews. Even that flimsy fig-leaf is slipping. The "Most Recent" rating, tallying verdicts from the last thirty days, puts Bless in the "Mostly Negative" zone, with only 38% of just over 400 respondents willing to recommend the game to others.

NeoWiz must have been hoping for a better reception in the West. Presumably they wanted to improve on their experience back at home in Korea, where Bless tanked. Twice. It went on to fail again in Japan and Russia, which suggests either a dogged determination to bring the game to new audiences or a complete denial of reality. Given a track record like that it's perhaps surprising it ever made it as far as the West but I imagine they were eyeing the kind of success Black Desert has achieved.

I've played most of the big Eastern imports of the past few years. With homegrown games studios preferring to focus their attention elsewhere, literally the only game in town for anyone jonesing for a fix of fresh AAA themepark MMO goodness has been the translated and localized versions of overseas successes - even if some of those successes were actually failures first time around.

And by and large I've enjoyed them, for a while. I had some fun times in Blade and Soul and Black Desert, both of which I played quite intensively for several weeks, but by the time Revelation Online arrived, I felt the law of diminishing returns kicking in.

Nevertheless, I had thought about trying Bless. It looked moderately intriguing. I wasn't interested enough to pay £30 to satisfy my curiosity, particularly since the game was still in Early Access, but I put it on my wishlist. Then I forgot all about it until, as I explained towards the end of yesterday's post, I spotted it on offer at two-thirds off, making it cheap enough to buy with my IntPiPoMo winnings.

On Thursday morning, since I wasn't at work, I found the time to download the game. First I had to make some room. The minimum specs suggested it would need 55GB of free disk space but in the event it squeezed itself into 40GB. The download took about half an hour. I went and had a couple of bagels and a coffee and read a few chapters of Martin Millar's excellent Lonely Werewolf Girl and  it was done when I came back.

Creating a character took longer. Not for bad reasons. Very much the opposite. Bless might have the best character creation system I've seen yet. There are a ton of pre-sets, all of which are good. There are sliders and a weird "pull on the body part" gimmick that I played around with for altogether too long. I was easily able to make just the kind of character I was hoping to play (a very short, pudgy animal-girl with a big bushy tail), which made a nice change.

One of the reasons I pulled the trigger on buying Bless was finding out there are several non-human options. Natturally there are all the usual human-variants and elves. There have to be, since between them those probably account for 90% of all the characters that are ever going to be made and without them no-one would make any money at all. For the rest of us there are wolf people and furry Lalafels with tails.

Ok, they're not called Lalafels, any more than EverQuest's halflings are called Hobbits, but you still know what they are. They're actually called Mascu and there is one very major point of difference between them and FFXIV's mini-race - Mascu can be created using either "human" or "beast"mode.

If you opt for "human" they look like pre-adolescent children, a look that can be kind of problematic in the West even when non-sexualized, as these are. If you go for "beast", as I did, the addition of catlike ears and a tail largely defuses any potential culture bombs. The end result is cartoony and innocuous enough to pass most appropriateness tests.

Before the vital concerns of race and gender comes fact ion. Bless is a two-faction game built around open-world PvP. It may be crucial which faction you choose...if you plan on sticking around. If, like me, you know you'll be done and gone before you even hit the open PvP zones (Level 30) then I don't imagine it makes much difference.

I picked the one that had the more attractive promo shot. That turned out to be the Hieron. I think they are the establishment, whereas the other faction, the Union, appear to be the rebels. I very much doubt it will matter but if it does (and if I care) I can always come round again.

There's a good selection of classes, all extremely familiar. A couple were locked. I didn't check if that's for racial, faction or cash shop reasons. They weren't anything I was particularly keen on anyway.

After some consideration I decided on the Berserker, an axe-wielding maniac with AE DPS and the defensive potential of a thoroughly sodden brown paper bag. That turned out to be a major mistake.

Not because of any particular shortcoming of the class. I never got to find out what the Berserker plays like. In what was apparently an extremely controversial move, the developers recently removed Action combat from the game, with the exception of a single class. Guess which one.

As things stand right now, Bless Online is a tab-target, hot-bar combat game with a free mouse pointer...unless you play a Berserker. No class can use action combat except the 'Zerker, who can't use anything else.

Given my dislike of action controls, the moment I discovered my error I benched my Berserker and re-rolled as a Ranger. Luckily I'd taken advantage of the option to save my character build while I was in character creation so I was able to recreate my look without going through all the options yet again.

Back in the world once more I set about mastering the controls and tweaking the UI to my satisfaction. There didn't seem to be a lot to change. I was happy with most of the defaults.

I then proceeded to play for about half an hour. Or so I thought. It was only when my stomach began to complain that I checked the time and realized I'd been playing for a couple of hours. Long enough for a First Impressions post.

I'll try to get to that tomorrow. If I'm not too busy playing.

Back On The Horse And How We Got There

We're at the half-way point of Blaugust now and I think it's fair to say it's been an unmitigated triumph. It's an especially impressive performance considering there was no Blaugust in 2017. In his inaugural post in July of this year, announcing Blaugust Reborn, Belghast gave some reasons why we'd skipped a year:

"...the tail end of 2016 and all of 2017 were extremely rough to struggle through.  There were events that happened in the real world and events that happened in gaming that caused people to fear for their own safety and sort of batten down the hatches."

This is true. I could (but won't) name bloggers who stopped blogging altogether around that time, giving exactly those explanations for their blogs going dark. The blogosphere was not a happy place just then.

There was also no New Blogger Initiative in 2017. No-one stepped up to organize it and there would most likely have been little enthusiasm if they had. As for Developer Appreciation Week, I don't actually remember if anyone hosted it last year or not. If they did it was very low-key.

Bel, with the indefatigable enthusiasm and energy he constantly demonstrates, had the genius idea to roll all three events into one. Bringing them back as a package deal was risky but it's a risk that's paid off wonderfully.

The list of blogs officially participating in Blaugust stands just shy of ninety, of which a great many are either entirely new or at least new to me. For the first time in ages there are more posts than I have time to read in a day and I've had to curtail my tendency to comment on anything and everything just to get through them.

The Blaugust Discord is lively and active every day. There are quite a few bloggers and blog-readers there who aren't officially participating but who have come to hang out and give their support. Anyone is welcome - it's not too late to join in. 

Blaugust Reborn has a loose structure, designed by  Belghast, for those who choose to follow it. This week is earmarked for the aforementioned outpouring of thanks and goodwill towards the people who make the games we all enjoy so much - or at least enjoy complaining about.

I was going to post about my ongoing appreciation for the sterling work Daybreak Games has done on the EverQuest MMOs since the dying days of the Smedley administration all but drove the franchise into the ground. I might still get to that later in the week (not that there is much "later" left) but I thought I'd turn things around and offer some much-deserved appreciation for the person who made all this possible in the first place - Belghast.

He may not be a developer but he's an elemental force in this corner of the blogosphere. I knew his name before I ever read his blog because so many bloggers would refer to his ideas and initiatives. Most people would be more than content with curating a single annual event like Blaugust: to curate three at once is going far beyond the call.

I'd like to think that 2017 wasn't missing its summer festival of blogging because of bad vibes. Instead I'd rather think of it as having taken time off to let the grass recover, like Glastonbury. After a year lying fallow it's back, bigger, brighter and more successful than ever and that's entirely thanks to Belghast.

Take a bow, Bel!

Bandwagonesque : WoW

It feels slightly strange being a Battle for Azeroth refusenik right now. I never planned to buy WoW's latest expansion but I had been intending to re-subscribe for the pre-launch run-up. I thought I'd play during July and August. It would have given me something else to write about for Blaugust and I thought it might be amusing, be working my way through Legion when everyone else was in BfA.

In the event, the lead-up just didn't seem interesting enough to justify jumping the train. I still hadn't pulled  the trigger, when both GW2 and EQ2 dropped extremely effective spoilers. The Festival of the Four Winds and Return to Guk caught my fancy and I couldn't see any way I'd be able to find enough time to log into World of Warcraft often enough over the summer to justify even the minimal cost of a couple of months' subscription.

It's particularly unsettling, then, that I'm finding some of the reports and screenshots coming out of the new expansion to be more appealing than anything I've seen from WoW for years. The look and theme of the new continent (?) seems to be the closest WoW's come to the kind of classic MMORPG high fantasy on which the game was built since Wrath of the Lich King.

Classic high fantasy is really where my MMO heart lies. I came to EverQuest twenty years ago looking for it and all the MMOs I've most enjoyed in the ensuing years (EQ2, Vanguard, Rubies of Eventide, GW2, City of Steam) have had something of that hinterland. I'm all for bolting on some magitech, science fantasy and steampunk trappings but what I want most are cobbled streets, tiled roofs, wooden ships and scenery that wouldn't be out of place in a touring production of A Winter's Tale.

Call that a city?

 Boralus, the coastal capital of Kul Tiras, looks nigh-on perfect. Unlike Syp I love huge, sprawling cities. I don't mind getting lost in a maze of streets that wind and twist and leave me baffled. I always thought Stormwind was a pretty decent-sized city so to hear Boralus described as "the first WoW city that feels like it's really sprawling" makes me want to go see it for myself.

I'm also a major fan of the autumnal, in games and in real life. I've waxed poetical often enough about the eternal autumn of Ascalon in GW2. When Syp talks of "...an autumnal feel for Boralus, which plays well with both the sea and mountains around it. Definitely a city for pumpkin spice lattes, yoga pants, and unnecessary scarves" I fond myself thinking "that's my kind of town". Minus the yoga pants, of course.

So, much to my surprise, I find myself almost wishing I was there, experiencing all this first -hand along with every one else, not just reading about it in blog posts. Especially this one. I want Dolly and Dot to be my best friends too.

None of which gives me any more time to play. If I did buy BfA right now I strongly suspect it would suffer the exact same fate as Legion, which has remained unplayed since I got it for my birthday nearly two years ago.

I wonder if I could stow away?

What's more, I have just bought a new MMORPG. Not for actual cash, you understand. I finally decided to use the Steam credit Chestnut sent me for winning the draw at the end of last  year's IntPiPoMo. I bought Bless.

I had it in my wishlist. More accurately, it was my wishlist. (My Steam wishlist is now Unavowed, thanks to Jeromai and xyzzysqrl). Bless dropped to 67% off so I got it. Mostly because of this post from The MMOist. Any MMO that lets you make non-human characters has to be investigated. Plus I'm itching to level a new character in a fresh environment, something I don't seem to have done for months.

Before I can, I have to make space for a 55GB download. That's going to take some re-organization. Maybe even a new HDD.

All things considered it would be a crazy move to buy Battle for Azeroth right now. I think I'm going to put it on my birthday list. Maybe I'll even get around to playing it before the next WoW expansion comes out.

Get Smart : GW2

Festival of the Four Winds ends today. I had to be at work by eight in the morning so I thought last night's session was the last I'd see of The Crown Pavilion and Labrynthine Cliffs until next year.
I spent most of the evening on the newest of my three accounts, the only one that wasn't around last time we saw this content, grabbing bundles in the Treasure Hunt and doing any event I could find to earn Festival Tokens.

I just managed to scrape up enough treasure to by a kite and with my tokens I got a hot air balloon on a string and that yellow flower that goes on your back. The sense of satisfaction when I was finally able to buy them, just before the clock passed the absolute latest I could stay up and still be half-awake in work the next day, was disturbing. I haven't been that keen to get something in an MMORPG for a long while.

Then I get home tonight, have my tea, read Feedly, log in and find the Festival's still there! I'm  listening to the sounds of preparations for Boss Blitz in the background as I type.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I had something to say about Boss Blitz. I really enjoy it as an exciting, involving event  but I also find it fascinating as a social and psychological experiment. Or perhaps it's a demonstration.

Boss Blitz isn't hard to understand or to do. The optimal way to run the event is for everyone to split into six teams of eight to ten people. Ideally, certain classes or builds concentrate on particular bosses that suit their abilities. There are some mechanics that need to be explained, such as Boom Boom Baines' healing turret, but most of the bosses are tank&spank with a lot of dodging.

Once set up, preferably under six Commanders using different colored tags for clarity, each team goes to its designated Boss. All teams then attempt to bring their Boss to 10% health at the same time. Some inevitably get there first, meaning they have to "hold" the Boss at that point without doing further damage.

Someone needs to call out the health of each boss at frequent intervals in a public channel. I often took it upon myself to do that bit. I like yelling. I got suppressed a few times for spamming map chat, something which is all too easy to do in GW2, where you can be banned from sending items to your own characters after two deliveries in quick succession. I should have used /squad which doesn't use the same anti-spam mechanics.

Once the slowest team gets their boss to 10%, their Commander gets to give the "Burn" command, whereupon everyone goes flat out to kill the boss in front of them as fast as possible. The reason for the co-ordinated kill is that each boss passes its signature ability (bombs, adds, banishment) on to all the other bosses when it dies, meaning each kill makes every other boss more difficult.

If everything goes to plan a good, organized map can complete this in about five minutes. The timer for the Gold award is eight minutes. This year I didn't get one Gold in three weeks. Four and five years ago I got plenty. I'm not sure what to read into that. Have GW2 players got worse? Is the event harder? Was I just unlucky with the maps I picked?

I did get lots of high Silvers (time limit sixteen minutes, we did it often in nine or ten) and any number of Bronzes (no time limit). I used the LFG tool to swap maps often until I got one that was at least trying to get Gold or Silver. There were fewer of those than you might expect.

Most of the maps were barely organized at all. Instead of doing it as described above (a description that I saw repeated in map chat many times by patient or frustrated players) people did what they do everywhere in GW2 - ran around in a huge zerg trying to overwhelm all opposition by weight of numbers. Some of the squads advertizing in LFG even said "zerg" or "bronze" in the description, indicating an active disinclination to make more than the minimal effort.

Of course, zerging means that not only does each boss get harder as it acquires the abilities of the ones who died before it, but GW2's scaling mechanic means every boss also gains a gigantic health pool to reflect the army of players opposing it. An event that is self-evidently intended to take between eight to sixteen minutes often stretches out to half an hour or more.

The fascinating part is that by the second week of the Festival everyone knew this and yet the majority of players carried on doing it anyway. Angry and embittered experts railed against the idiocy but it seems clear to me that most players preferred to zerg. They knew it would take longer and they just didn't care.

After all, it's not like they had anywhere else to be. This is the event of the moment so they were doing it. The rewards for finishing faster weren't significantly better so there wasn't much incentive to organize. And in any case, zerging is a social activity, not a competetive one.

Watching this drama enacted over and over again was instructive and entertaining. Some people were so angry they must have had steam coming out of their ears in real life. The accusation was almost always that those who wouldn't organize were too stupid to know what was expected of them but the replies very clearly indicated the opposite. Everyone knew what they "should" be doing - they just didn't want to do it.

I very much did want to do it properly. I love organized content. I like events where everyone has to get into teams and go to different places and do different things to achieve a collective success. I love Dragon's Stand and Auric Basin and my favorite event of all time in GW2 was Scarlet's Marionette.

And yet I still enjoy a good, mindless zerg, even when I'm well aware it's inefficient and even counter-productive. Running around in gang of fifty, taking on massive hit-point sponges and wearing them down by sheer bloody-mindedness has its own appeal.

I guess you can have smart, clever fun or dumb, stupid fun. Either way you're still having fun.

Give me the choice and I'll go for the smart option, though. Well, eight times out of ten.