A Window On The Future: ArenaNet's Plans For Guild Wars 2

 

Oh, isn't that just typical! Couldn't have released this yesterday, could you, ANet? Thanks a bunch!

If the massive "Studio Update" (Seriously? Can't call it a "Producer's Letter" like everyone else?) had dropped a day earlier I could have incorporated much of it into my "Guild Wars 2 is World of Warcraft wearing a hat" post. It would have stood up nearly every point I was trying to make. Also, why did I not think of that title yesterday? It's so much better than the lame one I went with.

Let's leave that in the dust for now in favor of ripping through the massive screed to see if there's anything in there worth talking about. Gotta be something. Oh, hey, here's one... 

"The number of active Guild Wars 2 players has more than doubled over the last three years."

Weirdly misreported by MassivelyOP, in quotes, as "the last two years." I wonder if they got it wrong or it's been changed at source? Either way, it's a very interesting statistic. As a regular player, the game always seems very well-populated although the megaserver tech makes it hard to be sure. I was a little puzzled when Belghast described GW2 as "a game that deserves way more attention than it receives." It always seems to get plenty to me. Now I guess it's going to get even more.

 At first it seems like a trend-bucking stat. We're used to mmorpg populations declining inexorably over time. Then again, these have not been normal times. I wonder just how many mmorpgs have populations that increased during the pandemic and how many of those new or returning players are still hanging around as the panic winds down. Maybe it matters more than I thought, whether that growth happened over three years or two.

Let's have another quote. How about this one? 

"We need to prioritize delivering consistent updates for our players...specifically, how we provide regular content updates to our players and what those updates contain."

Ya think? Ten years of whiffling about cadences and here we are, almost a year on the far side of the last new non-expansion content. Yeah, I'd say you need to prioritize that. Also make your minds up on a delivery schedule and fricken' stick to it.

"This means continuing to tell compelling stories that expand the world of Tyria while providing a better experience for those who enjoy game modes such as World vs. World, Player vs. Player, and endgame group content."

I find that worrisome. Not so much because I don't think all those interest groups deserve service, more because I doubt ANet's ability to keep that many balls in the air at once. There's been precious little sign of them being able to do it over the last ten years. Arguably (And I'd be one to argue it.) all these groups have the opposite of synergy. They fight each other for scraps like a pack of starving dogs and there aren't enough scraps to throw to keep all of them from tearing each other apart. Good luck keeping them all satisfied.

What next? Oh yes, Steam launch!

"You only get to launch on Steam once, and we want to make sure we do it right... We’re not ready to commit to a hard date for Steam quite yet, but our hearts are set on launching this year. "

Kicking it down the road for now. Fair enough. I wonder just how big a deal it would be anyway? Obviously it's a whole new potential audience but there are quite a lot of mmorpgs on Steam these days and none of them seem do great numbers. Okay, Lost Ark. Still, better to be on Steam than not.

And now the BIG SURPRISE..."Living World Season 1 Returns."

Oh ffs! You're kidding me, right? I only just got finished banging on about how so much better than all the rest Season One was, because it was a one-off, never to be repeated, live game experience that managed to convince us that playing a video game somehow mattered! It wasn't memorable for the story, that's for sure. 

Sticking the key plot points into five instanced chapters of the Living Story isn't a horrible idea. It'll be nice to have the option to see some of the events again, not to mention Scarlet Briar. Don't begin to kid yourself it's going to be like "being there", though. If they do a really great job it'll be like watching the Woodstock movie compared to, y'know, having been at Woodstock. If they do a bad job, I guess it'll be like being at Altamont.

How about World vs World, the game mode that was "a cornerstone" last summer but which, for End of Dragons, got... fishing. And even that doesn't work. 

"Now that Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons is released, we can further increase our support for WvW."

That's nice. What are you going to do for it? 

"Our priorities for WvW are largely unchanged from what we talked about in our “Future of World vs. World” blog post in September of last year."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't those the same priorities you talked about in the previous two major statements, going back several years? We've been waiting on the Alliances remodel since at least 2018. Forgive us if we don't take the roof off cheering when you tell us you're still working on it.

This paragraph, however, I found much more intriguing:

"As we mentioned last year, once population balance and rewards are addressed, our theory is that WvW gameplay will see a significant shift. At that point, we intend to look very hard at core WvW systems (upgrades, scoring, siege, etc.) and balance them to ensure that the WvW experience is still reflecting our vision."

The original "vision"for WvW was as a massive PvPvE battle for territorial advantage and possession. Over time, as more and more PvE players bounced and more and more RvR players boiled away. WvW has moved significantly towards being all about the fights.The people who care what the fights are about are in a minority now and have been for a while.

My interpretation of the paragraph above is that ANet want to get a lot more PvE players into WvW, as was originally intended. That means making the scores matter because PvE-oriented players like that kind of structure. Just running about looking for people to kill isn't going to do it for them.

If the changes successfully bring back casual WvW players from the PvE game in large numbers I foresee a lot of conflict with the self-defining "WvW Players". Could be a bloodbath, especially if certain factions organize, something the Alliance system is pretty much designed to facilitate.

Coming to the end now....

"We’re happy to confirm that we’re working on the next story update for Guild Wars 2, including a new map set in the Cantha region."

Kinda figured we'd be hanging around there for a while. Is that story update in addition to the Season One highlight reel or do we have to wait for that to roll out before we get something that's actually new? Oh, wait, there's a timeline... let's see... nothing before the end of June, by when we'll have had just two of the first five S1 chapters. If that's the cadence, expect nothing new until the autumn at the earliest, then, I guess.

And finally...

"We’re happy to confirm that there will be a fourth expansion for Guild Wars 2!"

Oh thank the lord! No more of this "Will they, won't they?" nonsense. No more saying "Probably not happening" when you're already working on it. And yes, ANet, we know "Expansions take a very long time to develop" but most companies manage it in about half the time End of Dragons took to cook. I don't expect an expansion every year - I mean, it's not like you have Daybreak's resources after all - but an expansion every other year ought to be within your grasp.

I think that's everything I wanted to mention. There's some other stuff in there but those are the bones. I'm very happy to hear the game's picking up players. Let's hope it can hang on to them. 

I'll be staying. A couple of months back I wasn't so sure I'd be saying that come the spring. End of Dragons has restored some of my affection for the game. We'll see if it lasts.

The Turtle Is The Mirror To The Soul... Or Something.

Roger from Contains Moderate Peril dropped into the comments on the recent post concerning the upcoming changes to Lord of the Rings Online's free to play offer, something about which he'd already posted. Among other things, Roger mentioned he hoped I'd carry through with my notion of leveling up a new character in LotRO since, as he put it, "It is always interesting to read someone’s new experience of something that you personally are quite au fait with.".

It's true. It refers back to something I said in a slightly different context recently, when I was writing about the function of the review process: "Reading reviews after the fact feels far more appropriate to me than reading them in advance." Shintar observed in the comments that one of the reasons for going to other people's opinions after the fact is "to gain a better understanding of the material and [your] feelings about it."

It can be particularly revealing when the person describing their experiences is coming to the game fresh. One of the inevitabilities of a long-term relationship is familiarity and there are few places where the heavy hand of experience feels more crushing than in the perpetual present of an mmorpg. 

I've been reading Belghast's series of posts on Guild Wars 2 with mixed emotions. It's always nice to see someone so enthusiastic about a game you, yourself enjoy and when it's someone you know you also feel happy for them for having such a good time. On the other hand, it can point up some of the things in "your" game that you may not be as comfortable with as the person who's seeing them anew. 

When it comes to Belghast's newfound interest in GW2 there's another level of complexity in that, by his own account, it's a game he's always struggled to enjoy in the past. He even resigned from the closed beta because he felt it wasn't a game for him.

Now he's having a much better time for all kinds of reasons, many of which he explains in detail in his recent posts. Clearly, Bel has had an epiphany that's allowed him to see and play the game in a way he previously hadn't been able to do but as I read his explanations and analyses of why that might be, I'm painfully aware of an uncomfortable subtext: one of the reasons GW2 may be working for players for whom it hasn't worked in the past is that it's no longer the game it was.

Replying to Bel's most recent post on the game, in which he outlines a number of shortcomings he sees in the way GW2 introduces new players to its systems and prepares them for the content they're going to be asked to consume, I expressed my long-held opinion that the game lost its way within a matter of weeks after launch. Making this argument in the past, I used to go on to say "and it never recovered" but patently that's no longer a reasonable interpretation, if ever it was.  

The problem from my perspective is that it recovered all too well. GW2 set out to be the alternative to what at the time was the norm for the genre: World of Warcraft clones. Unfortunately for ANet, that turned out to be an idea very much ahead of its time. As I said in my comment on Bel's post "...they’ve spent the rest of the nine and a half years since simultaneously refitting their game to make it as much like WoW as possible while also dragging their feet and trying to act as though they’re doing anything but."

The interim result, because of course it's an open-ended project, is a exactly what Bel describes: an mmorpg whose "design ethics feel like the deck is stacked against anyone who is not extremely motivated to learn the game" and one which can only be recommended "...with a long list of caveats."

These are not just the inevitable complexities of an mmorpg that's been in active development for almost a decade. Every similar title that's enjoyed even marginal success over a similar timescale presents newcomers with a patina of accessibilty layered over a palimpsest of obscurity. In the case of Guild Wars 2 it's not so much evidence of organic evolution over time as the awkward compromise arising from an attritional battle between opposing ideologies.

As vicious shorthand, I like to say the only real difference now between GW2 and WoW is what ArenaNet calls the quests they claim their game doesn't have. As Bel worked out pretty quickly, they call them "Achievements" but quests is what they are.

It's not quite that easy. There's a bit more for Azerothian incomers to learn before they fit in than a few local phrases. Bel's right to point out that GW2 remains a tricky switch for players coming to it from WoW or FFXIV expecting a seamless transition. Significant differences between the games remain but the gap is closing all the time. I suspect one of the reasons Bel didn't bounce on his latest attempt is because this time the game has moved a good way onto his ground to meet him. 

Reading his detailed dissections of what is and isn't working for him is instructive for me as a longtime player. A veteran, even. Some of the things he approves are the very things that make me cross. Others I find equally delightful. 

While my immediate reactions have been predictable, at a remove his commentary has made me ask myself some awkward questions. I really like End of Dragons, for example. Do I like it mostly because it's more like the version of GW2 I used to like or is it because it's less like the version I don't like? Certainly, some of the things Bel's going through in the Living Story remind me painfully of what I don't miss about the era when those chapters were current.

I always claim to strongly prefer the original conception of the game, a much more freeform, almost abstract experience with no questing and no extrinsic framework other than the Personal Story, which taks place in instances, gatekeeps nothing and can easily be ignored. If that's so, why did I welcome the introduction of Mastery tracks with Heart of Thorns, along with the increased focus on overtly questlike content with the Elite Specialization weapons and similar Collections?

Even more worryingly, I berate the introduction of mounts to the game at every opportunity and yet I've been spending an inordinate amount of time on both my griffin and my springer these past few weeks, indulging in an mmorpg mini-game that goes back all the way to the earliest days of EverQuest, namely seeing how far up things I can climb.

How far have things gone, though? And is it too far already? Looking at the increasing proliferation of siege turtles it's almost impossible not to make the emotional leap and decide the Wowification of GW2 is complete. Nothing says WoW as loudly or clearly as a horde of gigantic multiple-seater mounts getting in everyone's way.

Does it make the game more or less fun to play, though? And if the answer is "less", then why am I playing so much right now? Do I not know what I like? These are the kinds of questions you find yourself asking when you begin to see the game you know so well through the eyes of someone who barely knows it at all. 

As Shintar says in her post on the new character experience in Star Wars: the Old Republic following that game's latest revamp, you can't un-know everything about a game after ten years of playing.That kind of insight, though, can come vicariously. Whether the knowledge and understanding it brings is welcome or not, that's another matter entirely. 

If I do end up going back for annother run at LotRO, a game with which, like Bel and GW2, I have so far never truly managed to click, I'll be very happy to give my impressions and interpretations of the experience here. If it happens, I just hope Roger doesn't end up regretting what he wished for. Seeing ourselves as other see us can be a sobering experience.

I'm Right Here...

Going to be a short post today because I actually went to work for once. Seems like a long time since I was last there and that's because it was. I'm not going to be putting anything coherent together this evening, that's for sure. Might as well have a pot luck post.

Let's start with a few things I've been watching on tv. I just read Wilhelm's post on the same topic and it reminded me I meant to mention "The Woman in the House across the Street from the Girl in the Window", starring Kirstin Bell, although I'm not sure you can just "mention" something with a title like that. You have to take a run-up.

I really enjoyed it, even though it was very different from what I was expecting. It was clearly flagged as a comedy by Netflix when I first added it to my watchlist and the current page calls it "darkly comic" and "deadpan, absurd, offbeat", all of which are true but almost incidental. What it mostly is is a fully-fledged, properly plotted mystery-thriller. It just also happens to have some good jokes and some surreal set-ups.

Kirstin Bell is excellent throughout although I'm pretty sure if her character really drank the astonishing amount of wine she's supposed to have been putting herself outside of since her daughter got eaten by a serial killer on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, she'd look a damn sight worse for wear than she does. Compelling though the lead character, Anna, is I was distracted for the longest while by her friend and agent, Sloane, who I was sure was played by the same person who played Shannon in Kim's Convenience. She's not. Two totally different actors. This is when I miss not watching television with a roomful of people in the years when you couldn't just look stuff up online. That argument could have fueled an entire drunken evening.

Sloane (aka Mary Holland) in blue, Shannon (aka Nicole Power) in black.
It's not just me, is it?

I'd say it has a really good twist at the end but I hate it when people even reveal there is a twist in things like this. Except of course there's a twist! The whole show is twists!

Did I see it coming? Yes. Long before it happened? No. I got it just in time to say I'd figured it out for myself but I'd have felt pretty dim if I hadn't.

The fight scene that ensues, though, that I did not see coming. I'm willing to bet no-one did and if they say different then they're lying. The whole thing rounds off with the world's heaviest "Second Season Coming" drop. I'm down for that.

Talking of second seasons, I've either just finished or am just about to finish three of them and I was minded to write a whole post about the trouble with sophomore seasons off the back of it but this is not that post. I'll just say the second season of Raising Dion is at one and the same time overblown and undercooked and the second season of Final Space rips most of the pathos from the wounded heart of the first. 

Despite their many, many flaws, I'm thoroughly enjoying both. That's always been the great thing about television. It really doesn't have to be good to be good to watch. Just as well, really.

Upload also wobbled crazily at times as its second season flashed past but then so it did during the first one. Despite huge chunks of the premise, let alone the plot, not making any sense at all if thought about for more than a moment, the character arcs and the throughline do all hang together, somehow. Things got so fractured I didn't think the writers were going to be able pull it all together but then they managed to hail mary all the hanging plotlines in the last five minutes of the final episode with such success that I can't wait to find out what happens in season three.

Unfortunately I will have to wait and quite a while, too, because apparently Upload takes longer both to write and make than most Netflix shows, which is why we only got a paltry seven episodes this time. I really hope things work out for Ingrid when the next season does finally get here. She's my favorite character and she deserves a break.

That'll do for a TV round-up. Not quite sure what I'm going to be watching next, either. I think the fourth season of Stranger Things is due soon and the second set of Russian Doll, too. And wasn't there some talk about another season for Umbrella Academy?  The one thing I could really do with is another long-running half-hour sitcom, something that maybe notched up seven to ten seasons but that I miraculously haven't yet seen. And that's on Netflix or Prime. Not been able to come up with any good candidates so I'm open to suggestions.

Games, then. Other than an awful lot of Guild Wars 2, about the only thing I've been playing is the awkwardly-titled Steamworld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech. It's a bit of a departure for me, being a card battler. It's not a genre I know much about let alone one I'm any good at and generally I find the idea of deck-building about as tedious and annoying as talent trees in mmorpgs but SQ:HoG also has a surprisingly strong, linear plot and that's mostly what's keeping me playing.

The characters are unusually distinctive for this sort of game, too. They aren't subtle but they have strong personalities. It feels a bit like an rpg in some ways. For all I know, that's what all these kinds of games are like. It's not like I've played many to get a feel for the genre. I've read a lot of blog posts where other people wrote about them, though, and I can't remember anyone even mentioning there were plots or characters, let alone whether they were any good or not.

Other than that... nothing. I logged into EverQuest II, thought about making some spell upgrades to try and get past the tough boss in the Adventure Signature Quest, decided it was too much like hard work and logged out again. Haven't logged into Chimeraland since End of Dragons came out or Lost Ark since I got my egg pet. Blade and Soul is patched but I still haven't gone back. 

I'd blame ANet for making a good expansion although judging from what I read on the forum I might be the only one who thinks they did. As for the immediate future, we're in the middle of a spell of glorious early Spring weather that's set to last all week, so I might be outside a lot. I might not be doing all that much gaming until it starts raining again but I'm sure that won't be long.

Going to wind up this quick filler post with a tune, one that YouTube's happy little algorithm offered up while I was watching all those Glastonbury long-listers. I wanted to put it in the post last time but it was thematically inappropriate. And now it's not!

Motorbike - Gretel Hänlyn

There's nothing about this I don't love. The relentless bass riff, the deadpan vocals, the color keying, the way she reminds me of Paula Wilcox in Man About the House... I could write a list. Best of all, 1.30 when she yells "Hey! You're not being loud enough!" and someone turns up the volume. Not far enough for my money.

That's all I got. Peace out!

Back To The Shire?

Do I really want to play Lord of the Rings Online? It's a question I've asked myself many times without ever coming up with a definitive answer. Now I find myself asking it yet again.

Next month the game celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. There will be celebrations. Fireworks are involved. Lots of fireworks. Significant though the anniversary is - it ends with a five after all - it's little more than a footnote to the big announcement in the latest Producer's Letter, a sweeping revamp to the notorious payment model.

Ever since LotRO went free to play that model has been the subject of some fairly sustained, often intense criticism. Standing Stone Games have tweaked and fiddled with it numerous times but finally they seem to have decided to just do what every other mmorpg does - stop charging directly for old content.

With the next update, due sometime in April, "all quests, areas, instances, and expansions released between the original launch of LOTRO back in 2007 and up to – and including! - the release of Helm’s Deep will be available for free to everyone." That's SSG's boldface, not mine. They think it's a big deal and they're right.

It was always a peculiar way to do F2P, charging almost by the quest for leveling content over a decade old. Most mmorpgs do what they can to rush new and returning players through the legacy levels so as to get them into the current endgame bubble as quickly and painlessly as possible. They offer accelerated leveling and sell level boosts - or even hand them out for free. LotRO made you pay for the pain.

Even with the upcoming changes, it's not as though there's an express elevator to the endgame. The level cap in LotRO is currently 140 (I know! I couldn't believe it either.) but the newly-free zones and quests only take a free player to 95. It's still a hell of an improvement over the current free deal, all the same. Right now a purely free player gets Bree-land, Ered Luin, Lone-lands and the Shire, which might get you into the mid-30s if the level ranges on the Wiki are correct.

Of course, during the pandemic SSG did very generously give a lot of the remaining quest packs away for free but you had to make the effort of logging in to claim them and the offer did eventually go away. I got mine but I never did anything with them.

My problem with LotRO has never been the payment model, anyway. It's always been a combination of lackluster interest and some poor experiences. I have very mixed feelings about The Lord of the Rings  itself, for a start.

Despite having read it two and two half times (Finished it twice, got half way through and gave up twice more.) I'm still not sure if I even like it let alone whether it's any good or not. As for the movies, I saw all of them on release at the cinema, including the Ralph Bakshi animated version but although I own the Peter Jackson trilogy on DVD, I've never watched it. Once was enough.

Like Jimi Hendrix, whose influence sent ripples through the culture that set my teeth on edge for decades, it's really not the quality or worth of the original that matters. It's the endless, bludgeoning, boorish copyists, hammering away talentlessly at their half-assed attempts to recreate something they never understood in the first place.

LotRO, to give it credit, is no half-baked imitation. If you were going to set about building a replica of Middle Earth you could do a lot worse and I'm sure many have. It's not so much a question of whether it's been done well as whether it was a good idea to do it all.

Bad time to buy.

I guess it was. It's a solid-enough mmorpg set in a well-realised world. Even without the Tolkein trappings it would be worth a try. I think, though, that only a strong affection for the source material would keep someone playing for long.

Without that added attraction the game does tend to turn into a trudge. Leveling is slow by modern standards and travel even slower. The graphics somehow manage to show off the landscapes to their best effect, while leaving the characters behind. As for the UI and the systems it supports, the less said the better.

And then there are the quests. The new payment model opens up every quest in the sub-95 level range, something I'm sure most current and potential players will welcome. Unfortunately, I'm on record as claiming I had a better time with the game when I played as a free player and most NPCs wouldn't speak to me.

It's true, too. In my original run through LotRO I payed my subscription and quested my way into the forties, when the cap was just fifty. It was fun at first but after a while it turned into a slog and I say that as someone who loves levelling in mmorpgs. 

The thing is, I don't especially like leveling by doing quests. I like quests if they're amusing or entertaining or exciting and I like getting rewards for doing them. What I don't much like is having to do dozens, scores, hundreds of quests purely to get the xp needed to level.

For that I'd rather do tasks or just kill stuff. It may seem like a mere semantic distinction but the thing about tasks is you only have to read a single, brief instruction before you get on with doing them. There's no fatuous backstory. Tasks don't need several hundred words of dull, uninspired dialog and a half-marathon of jogging between different NPCs before you collect your fee.

The prospect of being able to run errands for countless guards, rangers, wardens and farmers for the dubious benefit of learning their tedious life stories as imagined by a bored cubicle worker on slow Tuesday doesn't set my senses tingling. I wouldn't patch the game up for that. Nevertheless, I am patching, as I write this and god knows, it's taking long enough. Coming up on two hours now. Whatever else is new at Standing Stone it doesn't seem to include the infamously awful patcher.

What's inspiring me to give LotRO yet another try is the rest of the stuff SSG has chosen to add to the free pile, namely most of the previously paywalled classes and races and especially the zones formerly locked behind expansions you had to buy. Whether or not I have it in me to do the leveling to see any of them is another matter but at least I could roll up some new characters. I was only thinking the other day I'd like to get back to my old habit of rolling new characters in old games. This seems as good an opportunity as any.

The cherry on the hobbitty cake and the real reason I'm taking the trouble to bring the client up to date, however, is the news that the Shire is getting an extension. Like a lot of people, I always enjoy a run around the Shire in LotRO. I'm not quite sure why. I don't even like Hobbits. It just seems so... restful, somehow.

The April update adds an area called Yondershire to the game. It's unclear whether it's a complete new zone or just a new area attached to an existing one but either way it sounds worth visiting. Described as "a sparsely populated region of moor, thicket, and fen that has long been home to Hobbit recluses and troublemakers", we're promised "more delightful Hobbit adventures". Why not? 

There's no firm date for Update #33 but with luck my client should have just about finished patching when it arrives. I might even have enough time to get in there and do some prep work so the sight of all those tiny icons and overstuffed bags doesn't drive me to log straight out again when the time comes. Or maybe I'll just start over on a new server.

We'll see. I'm not really expecting much. Mostly when I go back to LotRO I last a handful of sessions at best. Whether the relaxing of the reins is going to make much difference I rather doubt. But you have to try, don't you?

Apparently I do, anyway.

New Bands ETC

Today turned out to be unexpectedly musical, thanks to this news, which I saw at NME. To save you a click, it's the long list for Glastonbury Festival's 2022 Emerging Talent Competition. 

I always read the full line-up for Glastonbury and I usually watch at least some of it on tv but I confess I wasn't aware the ETC was a thing that existed. This does seem a little remiss of me, especially since it's very far from new. 

It's  also surprisingly hard to research. You'd think there'd be a Wikipedia page listing all the winners, at least but there isn't. Eventually, I tracked the origin of the competition down to around 2003, based on this piece from BBC Somerset in 2008, which mentions it was then in its fifth year. 

The number of entries and the method of selcetion seems to have varied over the years. At one time there were as many as a hundred and twenty acts on the long list and as recently as 2019 the selection was made by "30 bloggers", which does get the pulse racing, although I suspect that description may be interchangeable with this year's panel of "30 music writers".

The long list for 2022 is ninety strong, culled from "thousands" of submissions. The official Glasto website has a handy breakdown of the thirty participating music journalists, each of whom gives a brief account of their three favorites. 

Supposedly, you can hear a sample track from each and every one of the ninety on this official ETC Soundcloud playlist, although for the life of me I can only see seventy-four tracks. What's more, some of the sixteen missing artists are ones picked out as standouts by the panel. It's hard to miss when one of the awol artists is the wonderfully-named My Fat Pony.

There appears to be a good reason for My Fat Pony's absence. Despite one of the entry criteria to the competition being "a link to one original song on SoundCloud", a search on the site itself finds only a picture of the band and a blank "Nothing to hear here". It's a pity because the band looks very intriguing on their one and only YouTube video, a half-hour live performance. The sound quality's terrible but I do like a trumpet.

Enough about what's missing. Let's get back to what's there. Seventy-four songs by seventy-four acts. I had a quick look through for names I recognized. I found two: Barbara, who we had here only the other day, when I was picking through the Louder Than War list of hopefuls, and English Teacher, who have been on a bunch of up-and-comer lists I've seen.

English Teacher are very much in that current wave of bands with singers who don't sing. It's a big thing at the moment, Yard Act being probably the prime proponents. We've had them here, too, but I don't think we've had English Teacher yet. I could be wrong but in case I'm not, let's have them now.

R&B - English Teacher  

I listened to at least some of all seventy-four tracks this afternoon. The quality was astonishingly high. Not everything was to my personal taste, although there was very little I wouldn't happily listen to if it came on the radio, but other than the sheer quality, at the risk of repeating myself, the most striking thing about the experience was how very familiar almost every one of them sounded.

It's about time I just accepted that everything mirrors everything else now and got on with it. It's either good or it isn't or I like it or I don't. I'm not going to stop making historical references when I talk about these things but I am going to stop sounding surprised about it. 

Choose A Life - Wings of Desire

The very first band on the playlist turned out to one of the most impressive of all. Wings of Desire isn't a great name in my opinion but with a sound as thick as theirs they don't need a hooky name. And it does have the merit of being easy to remember. If I heard that coming out of Radio 6 I'd be googling them in a heartbeat.

They're another of those talk-sing bands. The Germans had a word for it all the way back in the nineteenth century. Unlike all the others I 've heard, Wings of Desire also have a monolothic slab of a sound that never uses two chords when one will do. I have always been an absolute sucker for that. Wouldn't you love to play bass for them? I would. It's one note ffs!

They're so good we ought to have another. I listened to most of their stuff on YouTube and it all sounded like like this, like the Jesus and Marychain wanted to be Talking Heads instead of the Beach Boys. I hope they just keep on doing it and don't end up all sludgy like the Marychain did.

Strawberry Milkshake - SOFY

You know that cliché, where Americans hear a British voice and go "I really love your accent"? Fun fact: British people feel exactly the same about British accents that aren't exactly the same as their own. Just listen to the way she says "feel". I just love it. Rex Orange County has the number one album as I write this. Just sayin'.

FUZZY - Bandicoot

If SOFY sounds like it was written and recorded this year... okay, I know I said I wouldn't but seriously guys? I do like a bit of glam, even now, though. Me and Kanye both. One of my favorite songs of the nineties was called Fuzzy, too. It all comes together. 

 dial your number - Julia-Sophie

Bandicoot like ALL CAPS. Julia-Sophie's lower case. I know which I think is cooler. When you leaf through lists like these you're always hoping you'll find someone you'll end up following for years. Sometimes it happens but you can't make it happen. Just the possibility is exhilarating, all the same. I got a frisson of the future from several of the tracks I heard today. This was one of them.

Sparky - Nuha Ruby Ra

This was another. It's the one that feels the most "modern" to me even though it also sounds really eighties. It's more talk-singing too, isn't it, even though it sounds absolutely nothing like the others. You know stuff like this used to chart, right? Does it still? I don't follow the charts although I'm wondering if I ought to start. Start again, that is.

Deirdre's Luggin' Boxes at Bargain City - Joel Harkin

Cheating a tad here. The track on the playlist is Vada but after I heard it I went looking for a video on YouTube and there isn't one but there is this, which is just wonderful. The title grabbed me by the scruff and dragged me and then the performance is so... it's so there, isn't it? His bleach-blond pudding-bowl haircut, the bass player's truly unfortunate trousers, the way Nicole's mic is just a hair too low in the mix, the fucking intensity of it all... They're Irish, of course, as if you couldn't tell.

Chew My Cheeks - Prima Queen

Everything doesn't have to be raw emotion. An arched eyebrow and a quirky dance routine can take you a long way. Just ask Wet Leg. Of course you have to have the killer tune. Luckily Prima Queen have more than one.

What If - Sasa Zola

We seem to be in the cool zone now. This just oozes sophistication. Remember when this what what you put on the stereo system when you were giving a dinner party? Oh yes, that was a thing that happened. No use trying to pretend it wasn't.

Stuck - Smoothboi Ezra

There was a time when everything seemed to sound like this and it wasn't that long ago. For me it represents the moment in the timestream when I began to slip back in. Laura Marling, Peggy Sue and the Pirates, it seemed so new to me, the way they sang. It was so different to the way people sang before and somehow I'd missed the transition. Thanks, EverQuest. Now it's the way people sing but only one of the ways because everyone sings so differently to how they used to sing and it's SO. MUCH. BETTER!! Really, I don't know how we used to put up with music the way it used to be.

Mean Rock N Roller - MeMe Detroit

Then again... It would, as they say, be so boring if we all liked the same things, right? Not sure what it is about this one but there is something...

Okay, I could keep this up all night (I said they were all good and there are seventy-four of them, not to mention all the others I found in the YouTube suggestions...) but I'd probably better wrap it up. Let's go out in style.

Night Wars - Lees

Speaks for itself, I think. 

The long list gets boiled down to a shortlist of just eight. Not sure when that happens but I'll try and remember to come back and report on whether any of my picks made the cut.

Thursday Night FIsh Fry

That blur above is my Elementalist, killing a shark. I suppose I should really call her my Tempest. She's been using the Heart of Thorns elite specialization since it first became available. I still think of her as a Staff Ele. She carries a staff and mostly uses core Elementalist spells. She only uses Tempest for the Overloads. She doesn't even have the Tempest's signature Shouts in her build at all.

I dabbled with the Weaver elite specialization when it was added to the Elementalist's toolkit with Path of Fire but although it was powerful I found it a bit too hands-on for my tastes. I don't like to have to time things to perfection and the Weaver needs a certain amount of finesse to shine.

Then, the Elementalist has always been reckoned a fairly challenging class by Guild Wars 2's admittedly lenient standards. It makes it a strange choice for someone as self-avowedly lazy, not to mention old and fat-fingered as myself. 

Over the first year or two of the game's life I tried all the classes, spending probably the majority of my time with the notoriously easy-mode Ranger but once I started playing World vs World regularly, for reasons I can't now remember or even easily reconstruct, the Elementalist became my favorite. I think I just like setting things on fire. Especially other players.

Fire looks different underwater. I guess it would, wouldn't it?

Luckily for her - and me - she hasn't even started to look at the latest elite spec, Catalyst, yet. According to the latest patch notes, people were just having too much fun with it so it had to be nerfed into the ground. 

I will get to it. All in good time. I'm working steadily through my End of Dragons to-do list and it's on there, somewhere.

Yesterday I completed the fourth and final EoD map, Dragon's End. I'm sorry to have finished. I wish there were more. The first two maps were relatively straightforward but Echovald Wilds and Dragon's End were so convoluted I would still be working on them if I hadn't had the benefit of advice from some helpful people on YouTube. 

I would strongly recommend getting outside help when doing map completion in GW2. Either that or hire a local guide. Unless you enjoy spending hours examining maps with a magnifying glass, that is. And even then, you can't know just by looking whether a particular point of interest is locked behind some event that needs to be completed or accessed via a tunnel, whose only opening is on the far side of the map.

Why yes, I bet I do look good on the dance floor. Thank you for noticing.

If you like both puzzles and exploring, though, it can be good time.  I've certainly been enjoying it. After finishing the Dragon's End map I gave myself a little victory lap by finding all the PoIs in the new hub zone, Arborstone. It doesn't officially count as a "Map" in the completion stakes. There's no reward for filling out all the blanks other than your own satisfaction but in a way that makes it even more appealing.

Also, that last PoI, the one that's seemingly impossible to find? It's Canach's casino and it's a nice treat when you get there. I won't spoil it by telling you how find the way in but I will say it's not through a broken stained glass window. Been there, done that, got the splinters.

The vendors at the bar sell all the fish recipes I'd been looking for, there are moa races and a some gambling machines and if you have the patience to collect a thousand of Canach's coins (I got about thirty in an hour so it'll take a while.) there are a few rather spiffy backpacks you can buy.

That really is a long-term project. I'll get back to it. Right now I'm working on my Masteries. That's how I came to be killing sharks.

Sharks, Naga, I'm not fussy.

Back in Heart of Thorns, the last time I worked on Masteries with any intent, I found the easiest, albeit not the fastest, way to get the necessary XP was to buff up with every XP bonus I could grab then go find some mobs in an out of the way place that hadn't been killed for a while and slaughter the lot. 

There's a huge bonus for fresh meat in GW2 although the exact nature of the calculations involved isn't always entirely apparent. Some mobs in the same spot give massive bonuses while others give less or sometimes none at all. Kill em all anyway is my motto.

It took me a while to find a good spot. I tried Echovald but it gets hectic there and it can be too easy to get more mobs than you bargained for. As usual, the neutral, non-agressive animals that everyone ignores are great for bonuses but for every crane and deer I killed, I got a bunch of rebels or jadebots of various kinds shooting at me from a distance. It was good xp but exhausting.

6.5K XP Bonus. That's the bunny!

After a while I jacked that in and tried Dragon's End. The meta had just started so I joined a tag and ran with the pack for a bit. The XP from the big mobs and events was good but there was too much downtime moving from place to place for it to feel efficient. Then we failed on the penultimate phase and the map closed and we all got kicked out so that was the end of that.

It's no wonder people are complaining non-stop about the Dragon's End meta event. I like it but it is very badly judged. It takes a long time, requires a great number of people, has a lot of moving parts and multiple fail states. As someone said in map chat just before we failed, it would go a long way in a two-hour event if there was some reward for trying. There isn't. If you fail you get nothing. That is not a great way to motivate people to keep coming back and if they don't come back they'll never learn to do it better.

Not that it's all that easy to work out how to do it at all. Belghast, a recent convert to GW2, pointed out how badly the game explains just about everything and it's absolutely true. It's always been that way and this latest meta demonstrates that, whatever else ANet have learned over the years, how to let players in on the secret of what they're supposed to be doing isn't one of them.

Naga in the hole!

Killing fish might be a lot less exciting but it's easy to understand and it's steady work. That's what I ended up doing, rather poetically, to fil out the XP for my final Fishing Mastery. I took the waypoint back to Seitung Province and spent a couple of hours in the calm waters just off the coast.

I had the place to myself. Judging by the multi-thousand XP bonuses for every tuna and jellyfish I killed, no-one had been there for a good, long while. I didn't see another player the whole time I was down there. 

What I did see, apart from countless fish and a lot of coral were plenty of chests to open. The sea bed is littered with them. I found an event, too, while I was poking around in a little hole. A bunch of Naga spawned and tried to eat me. That was fun. I did wonder what optimistic developer decided to put an event trigger down a coral tube on the bottom of the sea and just who they thought would set it off but then I thought, well I just did, didn't I? I guess they knew what they were doing after all.

Just as I emerged from the waters like the world's shortest Venus to claim my reward, the final Fishing Mastery, the map meta event kicked off right next to where I was standing. Someone tagged up and started a squad so I joined in just to see what it was all about.

Unlike Dragon's End, the Seitung Province meta takes about twenty minutes, most of it good, knockabout fun. There are even rides! It ends with a big boss fight that we won quite easily. The crowd was in a good mood throughout and everyone went home with presents. That's how to do a meta.

Okay, it's one way. Dragon's End will be a lot more memorable when it's tuned more sensitively and players understand what's expected of them. If anyone's still interested by then, that is. GW2 history shows players will learn if they feel there's a fair chance of success but also that for most of them the bar needs to be set relatively low before they'll make the effort. There are only so many elitie gamers to go around, after all, and right now I imagine most of them are still playing Elden Ring.

Next up on my dance card, Jade Bot Mastery. I'm about three-quarters of the way through. I think that should be something like five thousand sharks.

Chuchu! Egg Coming Through!

It took me a few months but I am now pretty much in the habit of checking my free games from Amazon Prime at the start of every month. As a result, I am starting to build up the kind of backlog everyone else is always complaining about. My days of being able to post smugly about how "I simply don't do backlogs, dahling!" are firmly in the past.

This month I even went so far as to play one of the games I'd claimed, the awkwardly-named SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech. It's one of those card-based battlers I keep reading about on various blogs. It has a peculiar hybrid steampunk/medieaval setting, charming graphics, likeable characters, a moderately amusing plot and at first it was fun for a short session at the end of the evening.

Unfortunately, it's fast becoming too tough for me on Normal difficulty, so its time as charming little divertissement may well be about to come to an end. I could reset the difficulty to Easy or I could go back and replay earlier chapters to overlevel the content but I'm not sure I'm sufficiently commited to do either.

Although I've been able to keep up with the flow of new, free games, I've done a much worse job with the trickle of free stuff for games I already play. Every month sees Amazon toss out a slew of freebies for dozens of titles like a befuddled old lady casting handfuls of grain to a clutch of club-footed street pigeons. Like that familiar scenario, it's not necessarily something you'd want to encourage but when it's games you play...

The thing that got me to pay attention this month was the unexpected appearance of Guild Wars 2 in the list. I can't recall the game ever having appeared in the hand-out line before but this month you can pick up a pack of five Heroic Boosters in honor of the release of End of Dragons. Boosters aren't the most exciting of gifts but I have to say they will come in very handy in my quest for the large amount of experience required to complete the numerous Masteries I'm working on.

I can't see the expiry date for the offer on my account any more but I think it runs until the end of the month. I imagine most of them do. I note with interest that the Amazon Games/GW2 page has two more "Coming Soon" panels currently greyed out. I look forward with interest to finding out what we're getting next month and the month after that.

There are giveaways for no fewer than forty-eight different games in the March offer. There are several mmos, among them RuneScape, World of Warships, Black Desert Mobile, Lineage II, and Warframe. I don't play any of those so I let them pass but as well as GW2 I spotted three mmorpgs I do play, as well as another for which the freebie seemed too desirable to ignore.

When I briefly dabbled with Roblox a few weeks ago, I mentioned how having nothing but the basic, default avatar made me feel more conspicuous than if I was togged up in fancy-dress. Now, next time some enterprising hyperpopstar chooses Roblox as the venue for their first, faltering step into the metaverse, I will at least be able to greet them wearing a ridiculous "Mardi Gras Steampunk Hat."

None of the updates to New World since the rather good Winter Convergence festival have piqued my interest sufficiently to get me to log in but give me a free outfit and I'm there. The game has an annoying appearance system in that good-looking gear drops all the time but hardly any of it can be converted to a look you can keep.

Full outfits, however, the ones Amazon would like you to buy from the cash shop, are permanent and can be easily and conveniently applied from the paper doll - once you've navigated the arcane combination of mouse-clicks and menus required, that is.

They're not at all bad, either. When I logged her in, my character was
wearing the very cosy, fur-trimmed greatcoat from the winter event and most impressive it looked, too. Now she looks equally warm but considerably less formal in her free Cloaked Charlatan get-up, which from the front looks uncannily like an anorak I had when I was about nine years old.

From the back it looks rather different, with a knee-length, hooded green cloak that Robin Hood would have admired. The cloak moves curiously convincingly as she runs, occasionally folding into itself as though caught by a fierce gust of wind. It goes rather nicely with her shield, too.

For Lost Ark, another game whose pull I'd been managing to resist without too much trouble until I saw I could get free stuff, the lure is a pet. We'd all log in for a free pet, right? There's also five days of Crystaline Aura, the premium membership buff, and some Amethyst Shards, a currency you can spend at an NPC, always assuming you can find him.

I already had some Amethyst Shards. Apparently you get five hundred just for joining or forming a guild, something I did a while ago. I generally make a branch of the guild Mrs Bhagpuss and I created way back in EverQuest II over a decade ago in every game that will allow one person to be their own club. 

Lost Ark was happy for me to set up my shingle alone although the extremely restrictive naming rules meant I had to go with a severely truncated version of the name. Given how easy it was, not to mention that there's a tutorial quest that points you to it, I was very surprised to see that the Steam achievement I got says only just over a fifth of players have joined a guild at all.

The free pet turned out to be an egg on legs. Very small, spindly legs. I'm used to eggs following me around from EQII but they're not usually quite as creepy as these. They come in a choice of colors, each of which denotes a different buff or resistance. Since I had no clear idea what those did, I just went with the color I liked best, blue.

The eggs all have names - Bouncy, Chuchu and Bonbon. My pet blue egg is called Chuchu. I swear, sometimes I can't believe I'm typing this stuff. I got him (Her? Them? It?) out and ran around town for a while taking selfies then I put him away and got my trusty bunny back. The bunny, which as far as I know everyone gets as part of the tutorial, has all the same abilities as the egg but also a 10% crit bonus so the free gift is worth about what you paid for it, I guess.

The last Amazon freebie I claimed was for Blade and Soul. It looks to be the least interesting of them all, a collection of various upgrade materials used in some of the game's abstruse systems and I wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't that I've been itching to get back to B&S for a while, anyway. I don't know why but there it is. 

I'd include a picture of what I got there  only I haven't been able to get my hands on it yet. When I went to log in I realised there had been some big shift a while back, when the game converted to Unreal Engine 4. It's a 41GB download and it's been grumbling away behind the scenes the whole time I've been writing this post. So far it's managed just over 17GB so it's got a while to go yet.

What I take from this experience is that giving away free stuff is a very effective way to get people to look at your game again but not necessarily to get them to stick around. It took me longer to claim the freebies, patch the games and collect my gifts than I spent doing anything in the games themselves. In fact, all I did was take screenshots and I wouldn't even have done that if I hadn't been planning to blog about it.

I very much doubt if any of this is going to make me more likely to play any of the games. My overiding feeling on logging back in to both New World and Lost Ark was "I can't remember what I was doing last time and I really don't feel like trying." I think there's a better chance I'll play a bit of Blade and Soul because I already felt like going back to that one and yet it's the one game of the five for which I wouldn't have bothered to log in to get the free gifts at all.

It goes to show. You bribe people all you want and they'll happily let you - you just can't trust them to stay bribed.