Mail Call: Regnum, The Missing Ink

Checking some of my many email addresses yesterday I came across a message from NDG Studios, operators of Regnum Online (aka Champions of Regnum, formerly known as Realms Online, not to be confused with The Realm Online). Despite having one of the worst identity crises in MMOdom, Regnum (let's settle for that) seems to be doing rather well for a six-year old game that gets very little publicity.

I discovered it very late and first wrote about it just under a year ago. It seemed quiet then, although certainly not moribund but things may be looking up. I'd already noticed that each infrequent time I remembered to log in there seemed to be a patch, which I always take to be a healthy sign, and both the website and the launcher got makeovers which make them look very handsome, but the capper came in the mail: Regnum is now available through Steam.

Wanna race?

Being on Steam (provided your game actually works) can't but be a good thing. I don't know an awful lot about how Steam operates or how difficult it is for a game to gain access to the platform, but NDG were stoked about getting Regnum into the line-up, as well they might be. They were so stoked they thought they'd celebrate by sending me a Hyena.

They sent me a load of other stuff too - a lockbox, some elixirs, the usual festive package, but it was the Hyena that caught my attention. It's a limited-duration mount that lasts 30 days and it looks great. I had no plans at all to play Regnum this month but I'll be darned if my little fox-lemur is going to miss the opportunity to ride around on a mean-looking Hyena.

So, congratulations Regnum and thanks for the ride.

Not looking quite so bright, at least not yet, is the Kickstarter campaign for The Missing Ink. Pete at Dragonchasers has a piece up about Kickstarter that gives chapter and verse on some of the drawbacks. So far my hand hasn't entered my pocket for a Kickstarter campaign.

I've followed several and they've broadly broken into two camps: No Hopers and Dead Certs and

Adventure ahoy!

it seems pointless for me to contribute either way. In every case all I'm interested in is playing the game when it releases. I find most of the inducements and sweeteners are largely irrelevant and I don't suffer from the inexplicable desire many seem to have to "donate" to what are, after all, commercial businesses. About the only time I can imagine getting my credit card out would be near the end of a campaign where success looks touch and go and my contribution might have material significance.

The first tranche of MMOs I took an interest in on Kickstarter all failed hard, at least as far as their campaigns went. Storybricks carries on, in some mysterious way, behind closed doors. Dark Solstice also appears to have withdrawn behind a veil, leaving only this tantalizing glimpse of what may one day emerge in its place. Panzer Pets, it appears, took the Kickstarter hint and gave up. Their website remains but nothing has been updated since the campaign crashed and burned.

Glad you clarified that.

Red Bedlam and The Missing Ink start a long way ahead of any of those. They have a fully working and eminently playable beta up and running on the PC, which they are actively and effectively developing. The game is already fun and very well worth trying. The Kickstarter campaign is for additional funds to bring it cross-platform to iOS and Android (although the Kickstarter verbiage only mentions Android in the leader and then goes on and on about iPads...).

So far they have 29 backers and have made just over 10% of their very modest target. I foresee another limp failure. I hope I'm wrong, because not only do I like The Missing Ink very much, I'm pretty sure I'd like it even more on a Tablet. I just hope that if they do fail on Kickstarter it doesn't put paid to that prospect altogether.

Meanwhile the Old Big Beasts continue to maunder out of the primordial gaming swamps, drawing lost worshipers in hordes. For now, I'm happy to sit back and watch them fight it out.

Blue Skies All The Way? : EQ2, EQNext

So it turns out that EQNext won't have permadeath after all:

In case people did not catch the sarcasm I was kidding about EQN having permadeath :)
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) March 7, 2013

 He wasn't joking about this, though

we're making major changes in the F2P matrix of restrictions on EQ and EQ II. massively.joystiq.com/2013/03/07/eve… - just common sense
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) March 7, 2013

 
And that's probably going to be the last time I embed a tweet. It's like having an ant shout in your ear through a megaphone.

I'm very pleased to hear that EQNext  won't have permadeath. I did indeed miss Smed's sarcasm, as did Feldon at EQ2Wire. More surprisingly, I have mixed feelings about the loosening of the reins on EQ2's F2P matrix.

One ratonga good, two ratongas better

I'm very pleased that all races and classes bar Beastlord and Freeborn will be available to everyone. There is no downside to more ratongas. On the other hand, I gained a huge amount of value from the restrictions on storage. As I mentioned only the other day, having limited bag space affects the way I play and in some respects improves the experience. I'm well aware that next time I play EQ2 and see all those freshly-opened inventory slots on all my Free and Silver characters the chance that I will resist the temptation to throw capacious empty bags into all of them is vanishingly small.

Gis a job, I can do that

Once you have half a dozen 44-slot bags you just know you're going to end up filling them all with stuff that you'll never need but won't dare throw away. By the time you need the space it's taking up you'll have forgotten why you thought it was all worth keeping in the first place and it would take too long to find out, so, well, safest to hang on to everything, eh?

Beckavar? Do I know a Beckavar?

The storage limitations were kind of like a stern-but-fair nanny, making you put all your toys away neatly and giving the ones you didn't play with any more to other children who would appreciate them. (I hasten to point out I never had a nanny, although I did see Mary Poppins several times at an impressionable age...)

The quest restrictions I found equally welcome. All my Gold characters have bulging quest books, filled with long-forgotten, half-finished, barely-started tasks for NPCs whose names no longer ring the faintest bell.

It's been common practice for years for me to begin any session in a new area with fifteen minutes of rootling through my Journal trying to second-guess my future self. Which half-dozen quests can I safely delete to make room for these six highly important new ones that I really will finish this time, I promise, without my future self reaching back into the past and throttling me when he has to start over from scratch because the quest I thought he'd never miss turns out to be the essential prerequisite for something crucial I haven't found yet?

More questing, less editorializing please.

Temporal anomalies aside, honestly, it doesn't matter how deep you make the quest pot. I'm just going to fill it to the brim. If there were no restrictions I'd just take every quest because, why not? I need protecting from myself.

All in all, though, the changes do sound welcome. As time rolls on in that way that it has, all these bumps in the road to a F2P experience that's both genuinely enjoyable for the player and profitable for the producer are beginning to smooth out. There's nothing "free" about Free to Play and as that becomes clearer to everyone the options are expanding. It's all about a smarter way to pay and, very slowly, we do seem to be getting somewhere. Maybe we can have nice things after all.

EDIT:  When I made the "ant" comment about the tweets linked above, those tweets were displaying on the blog in the same enormous boxes you see if you click through the links. Overnight they have converted themselves to a much neater, less shouty format. I did nothing. One of the mysteries of the interwebs. The ant joke doesn't work any more, though. If it ever did...

Direction Of Travel: GW2

I wanted to slap Saturday's breathless, Herbie inspired gasp of approval up because it occurred to me that a lot of what I write about GW2, both here and in comments on other blogs, not to mention much of what I say out loud at home, may come across as overly negative. If so, that doesn't accurately reflect the experience I'm having in game. I'm having a whale of a time.

I woke up this morning intending to carry on in much the same vein. That was until I read this  excellent piece at Healing The Masses. It helped quite a few things fall into place and made sense of some confusion I've been having lately over why it is that I find myself disapproving of so much about the way GW2 seems to be going yet at the same time having so much fun playing it.

GW2 is turning out to be an entirely different experience than I anticipated, and indeed than the experience I was having in beta and for the first few months after launch. It's no longer the game we were "promised" or the game we were sold and far from breaking any molds or creating any new paradigms it increasingly appears to be looking back to long-established MMO tropes for inspiration.

...and over the next hill? Another hill...

In beta GW2 gave me one of the best open-world exploring experiences I've ever had in an MMO. Skeptical though I remained, it did seem that there was at least the prospect of an ever-changing world.  That optimism continued in the whirl of Headstart and through the first few weeks after launch. Looking back at my posts from that time there's plenty about exploration and the surprises it brings.

Then came the Karka and with them Fractals and Ascended gear and we all know where that went. What hadn't really sunk in with me until today was how much my own expectations have changed as a result of what happened back in November. Effectively, GW2 turned into roughly the same kind of MMO as EQ2 or Rift and my approach to playing it adapted accordingly without my really noticing.

Might have been better if we'd let them win

Most MMOs have an "end game" with which I don't engage. Usually it's raiding, usually it involves a gear grind. Before the Karka the nearest GW2 had was Legendaries, which I took to have been included merely as an ironic nod to the established obsessiveness of some original Guild Wars players. I fully expected 95% of GW2 players to ignore Legendaries completely.

That they seem to have been accepted as a rite of passage by a substantial segment of the playerbase shouldn't surprise me, given that I was there when Epics were introduced to Everquest. Epics, however, were extremely powerful weapons that made your EQ character substantially more capable in combat. Legendaries just look pretty. So, yes I am surprised. Apparently Barbie went Hardcore while I wasn't looking.

Life begins at 40

Legendaries aside, it was with the arrival of a whole new tier of gear that everything changed. It's been discussed to death so suffice it to say that no matter how many new routes to Ascended Gear may be added and no matter how accessible it can be made, the gear grind genie cannot be forced back into the bottle. J3w3l makes this point very clearly indeed. A lot of people are likely to find themselves increasingly boxed in by this one change and the prospects for players playing even the traditional Main and Alt look bleak.

Bleak, that is, if they are the kind of players who value efficiency, who want to be the best they can be, who are, for want of a more elegant term, Min-Maxers. I'm not. Never have been, never will be. And that's part of why I'm still having a roaring old time in Tyria.

J3w3l comments on leveling alts "The different classes are a lot of fun to play even if leveling them isn’t..." but of course for me it is. I love leveling and GW2 offers enormous variety and potential. My seventh run through, Mesmer, is half-way there. She dinged 40 yesterday. I'm already impatient to get her to 80 so I can start my second ranger, an Asura this time, and play him or her up through a lot of the Southern areas I don't really know very well. And since I have no intention of getting Ascended gear for any of my characters, there's no sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach at the prospect of adding another to the roster.

Why would you want to?

GW2 for me has turned into a still-new, still-shiny version of every other MMO. There's an increasingly big part of the game, the part the developers seem mainly focused on and to which players are expected to aspire, from which I have largely opted out. Even though I've had very thoughtful and welcome invitations in the comments here from readers and bloggers like Ursan and Phil to join them in doing some of the content I appear to be missing out on, I haven't taken the offers up so far because I really don't feel I am missing out.

Like many MMOs before, where I had ample opportunities and offers to go raiding, for example, I find I have more than enough things I want to be getting on with already. As Calvin and Hobbes would say, the days are just packed. I still don't like or approve of the direction GW2 has taken, something I may examine in more detail another time, but I absolutely can live with it so long as I keep finding this much content that I'm both eager and able to do.

Don't need to tell me twice!

There are unexpected, possibly unintended side effects to the New Direction. I purely love the new loot changes. It embarrasses me to admit not just that my current gameplay revolves around a completely artificial, un-immersive map-hopping circuit of lag-ridden loot-fests but that I'm loving every minute of it. Everything from studying the timers to riding the event wave to the banter in map chat while we wait to the frame-rate killing firework display when the Boss spawns to the "what's in the box?" reveal - fun fun fun fun FUN!

I have a lot of max level characters to dress. Most of them were in Masterwork greens with a smattering of Rare yellows before this change. Steadily those greens are being replaced by yellows and the yellows I can't use are being converted into ectos to become exotics. Mrs Bhagpuss has looted Final Rest twice, along with a couple of other named weapons. I haven't been so lucky but I open every chest in the knowledge that this could be the time.

It's exciting, it's satisfying, it's entertaining and it's easy. I think it's time I admitted to myself that after a decade and a half that may not be all I want from an MMO but it's enough to be going on with, at least until something better comes along. And if nothing better does come along, well I'm having fun and that's the important part.

Everyone loves fireworks

As for where the game is going, I suspect ArenaNet are painting themselves into a corner with an increasingly restrictive, coercive, hardcore end-game bolted onto a free-wheeling, roistering, genuinely casual-friendly open-world leveling game. Unless they have better solutions than anyone else has come up with so far this is a road that can only lead to a fractured, dislocated playerbase where different interest groups lobby hard for their individual, incompatible aspirations.

Same place as every other MMO, then.

Oh That's Good, No That's Bad: GW2

Sam the Sham knows. Got it back to front though.

Long gap between posts. Hate that.
Reason? Playing. Love that.

Back to work, less time to play or write. Big patch dropped late evening last day of week off. Liked it a lot. Patch, not going back to work.

Did anyone see that? Tell me you saw that!

• Best part: 

Loot fix. Big event chests drop Rare every time now. Probably. Heard someone say small chance to miss out. Not happened to me. Get more than one sometimes. Exotics too. 

Vast crowds at all events opening night. Days after. Biggest lag since Karka Island. Massive, massive fun.

It's not easy cleaning green.

Fired me up. Work on gear, raise crafts, make stuff. Mrs Bhagpuss got Final Rest, wasn't even looking for it. Can happen.

Not your momma's duck stick.

• Next best part: 

New Dailies. See? Choice can be good. Different list every day, new jobs all the time. Spice and variety. Fun.

• Next next best part: 

Living Story. Speeded up a bit. Still slow but something brewing. Dredge and Flame Legion up to stuff, need stopping. Can do that.

Ah! There you are!

Also, loads of other stuff. Guild missions. Pass on them. Dungeon tweaks. Pass on them. Come back later. Maybe. Busy killing dragons, stealing treasure.

Off to do that now. Bop dragons with lollipop.

BOP!

Talking A Good Game: GW2

I spent much of this morning reading the transcripts of a massive interview with Colin Johanson and another, much shorter, interview with Mike Ferguson. The Johansen interview is a few days old and has been much discussed elsewhere. The Egg Baron focused on the information on the new Guild events and Healing The Masses has a detailed analysis of the WvW material.

Colin Johanson's previous interviews and pronouncements have tended to rub me up the wrong way somehow and this long series of ambling, amiable replies to some rather soft questions is no exception. Filter out the fluff, though, and it's very revealing in what it lets slip about the underlying mechanics and state of the game.

The Mike Ferguson interview is much shorter and very much more focused, but the same points keep coming through: GW2 is poorly-constructed and under-resourced. Here are some quotes:

"Population limits are an unfortunate fact of life with the current wvw design" (MF)

"...bigger we can’t do currently with our existing tech, those are the biggest maps we can make. It’s actually just an engine limitation which means fixing that is gonna be a nightmare." (CJ)

"It’s very difficult to increase the size of the maps due to technical limitations" (MF)

"It’s a fixable problem, but we need some time from a very specialized type of programmer for that job and they’re all currently busy with other tasks." (MF)

Does anyone know the way out of this mess?

"Right now there’s really not very much at all that we can do with the UI, like resizable elements or anything...it would take huge engineering [...] to pull off." (CJ)

"the same couple of people who are required to do a lot of the guild features, are the same couple of people who need to do all the server back-end... anything that involves large amounts of server messaging or things, those are always bottle necked by the very very best programmers we have who can work on that extremely difficult set." (CJ)

"Matchmaking has the same problem as everything else I just said, which is basically the same couple who have to fix that also".  (CJ)

"We’re always leveraged by how many engineers we have, that’s our biggest issue at any given time. It is “how many programmers do we have that can actually code anything?” (CJ)

And so it goes on. Read the whole thing for many more examples. It's always surprising to discover that something that has had so much money spent on it, took so many years to be ready and has been so successful can still have so much structurally wrong with it and have such limited resources to make improvements.

What we need here is some Blue Sky Thinking

At one point Colin Johanson happily latches onto a gushing assertion that, unlike most other MMO studios, ANet are "open with the process".

"You have to be able to get out there and be like “hey, you know we really blew it on this, we are responding to that and we are gonna change our plans because of that” (CJ)

Later, while addressing a question about the Karka event, he says

"You know for five years, we spent five years saying “If it’s not ready doesn’t matter, just wait and then we’ll put it out when it gets ready”. And then we got into the live space it was “we have to keep free updates going, we have to have this fun stuff going on”. It really didn’t give us an opportunity to stop and catch our breath, say like “is this the right thing to be doing, is this the stuff we should be putting in the game?” (CJ)

Which is all very well, only aren't all these deep infrastructure problems you keep bringing up as the reason so many things can't be done the very same things you were building during those five pressure-free years? If it was "ready" when you put it out, why does so much of it not work?

And relax...

The takeaway from this seems to be that due to a lot of less than optimal design decisions made before launch, most of the first year of GW2's life is going to be taken up with trying to rebuild the house from the foundations up while we're all still trying to live in it. We shouldn't expect much, if anything, in the way of real new content, by which I mean new explorable landmass, this side of an expansion (the development of which is probably where a lot of the effort is allocated right now although no-one's being very "open" about that).

I remain sanguine. GW2 turns out to be an MMO like any other. It wasn't finished when it launched, it will never be finished. Bits of it work, other bits don't. Every time one thing gets fixed something else will break. That's MMOs for you. I get the strong impression that there's still something of a disconnect between the developers and their audience in these open discussions, but that's always the way. MMO players are a disparate, rag-tag bunch with countless conflicting agendas and expectations and trying to communicate with them at all must be a nightmare.

As for MMO developers themselves, the concept of hubris seems to be all Greek to them. Even the Greek ones (/wave Aventurine).

Same Same But Different : GW2

J3w3l at Healing The Masses has a piece up about starting a second character in GW2. It's fascinating to read a view of this aspect of the game (indeed the genre) from someone who takes such a diametrically opposed view of it as I do. To me MMOs are entirely about alts and leveling them up; once a character hits the level cap they are pretty much done and it's time to start a new one. That's if I can wait that long.

I have six level 80s in GW2 now, all different classes. I'm currently leveling up a Mesmer who should ding 30 today and after that there's just guardian to go. Well, I say that - in fact since I have two accounts and ten character slots I 'll almost certainly make two more characters and level those up as well. A good deal of my time is spent duoing with Mrs Bhagpuss, who has a similar number of 80s, it being both our intentions to have the full set of all 8 classes at 80.

Are you sure those things are, y'know, safe?

In most guilds I've been in over the years there's been a fairly equal mix of players, some with several characters that they played regularly and others with one Main and, after a good long while, one Alt. It's hardly surprising that many players with one Main often had a highly sophisticated and knowledgeable understanding of the the class they were playing but were vague in the extreme about what most of the other classes in the game could do. The altaholics, on the other hand, while often not being more than solid but unspectacular players of any of the classes in their roster, tended to have a better grasp of  group dynamics and were much more open to and understanding of the flexibility, potential and synergy of classes operating in unconventional roles or combinations.

I'd say that in most if not all of the MMOs I've played for any length of time the classes play very differently indeed. Playing a Disciple in Vanguard, for example, is a totally different experience to playing a druid - you could be playing a different game. Same with playing, say, a Necromancer and even a  superficially similar class such as a Magician in Everquest. The mobs you kill to level up may be the same but almost everything else is completely different.

Deep knowledge, I haz it.

Deep knowledge of the subtleties and capabilities of the class probably isn't needed in most leveling games and solid understanding of and competence in the core class abilities and tactics will see you through most solo and single-group content you meet on the way to the cap. On the harder stuff that comes after that I imagine you may want a real specialist. I wouldn't really know because it's when that stuff comes in that I generally bow out and make another character.

GW2, though, is an extreme example. Not only are all the classes really very significantly different to play, each differs widely within itself. Swapping weapons can be like swapping classes, as can slotting in different traits. I'm not sure I've ever played an MMO where such a range of playstyles can be accommodated on a single character without a respec.

Rift, with its multiple Soul system runs it close, but changing from one soul to another never felt as fluid or intuitive as swapping from Staff to Daggers on an Elementalist or swapping Kits on an Engineer. EQ2 has a ferocious number of classes, over two dozen at current count, but while some vary wildly from each other, the particular subtleties of, say, Dirge and Troubadour or Brigand and Swashbuckler are lost on me.

Life was so simple back then. And we had hats.

The classes of GW2 were one of the aspects of the game that least interested me in the couple of years leading up to launch. All those slow, teasing build-ups to each class reveal that generated such excitement left me cold. I didn't really have a favorite class from Guild Wars but I'd been playing a ranger through Eye of the North to get some Halls of Monuments points (now there's a part of the game that fell into a black hole on release. When was the last time you visited yours?) so when the beta rolled round I went with that.

I stuck with Ranger all through beta, began with it again at launch and didn't make another character until the ranger hit 80. I was very happy with it, it was absolutely the right choice for learning the game and it's probably my favorite still. When I have all eight classes, my ninth character will be another ranger. An Asura this time, because I frequently find that even replaying a class I've played before as a different race makes a huge difference.

Warrior. No, Warrior. Yes, "really"!

Even in MMOs where there is no statistical variation in the races, playing the same content as a three-foot high gnome feels nothing like playing it as an eight-foot tall ogre, no matter that they both be warriors. The abilities and the actions are the same but the perspective isn't and that changes everything. I see the whole world afresh that way, noticing things I never saw before even in places I've been a hundred times.

Playing GW2, at least as a ranger, didn't turn out to be the paradigm shift many hoped, as I pointed out all the way back in beta.It turned out to be a lot of fun all the same, and in the end it did have its share of surprises. I certainly got one when I began to work through the rest of the classes. Engineer was utterly different. The tactics required were so much more complex but when they worked the pay-off was huge. My Engineer could do things my ranger never dreamed of doing. Then I played a Necromancer and discovered what power really means. And so on.

I'm someone who can play through the same content repeatedly and get something new out of it each time. I'm not easily bored and I am easily entertained. Even so, leveling six characters through 80 levels in one game over the course of as many months ought to tax anyone's ability to keep themselves amused. Last night I spent a wonderfully entertaining and enjoyable four hours achieving map completion in Snowden Drifts playing my Mesmer in a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss's new Necromancer. Drifts is a map I first explored in Beta and which I've explored extensively with several characters since.

That I was able to do so says volumes both for the loving care and attention to detail with which the maps have been designed, but especially for the immense replayabilty baked into the class structure of this game. And, of course, to the enormous pleasure to be gained from playing these games with someone you love.

There's Bags Of Room In Here ! : GW2, EQ2

Two small news items caught my attention this week. Guild Wars 2 is having a sale on bag and bank slots until 26th February, the very day EQ2 patches in bag sorting.

When I decided to start a blog a couple of years or so back, I already had the name and a clear idea what I intended to blog about. I was going to write about one of my very favorite aspects of MMOs, one of the main activities that drew me into the genre in the first place and kept me hooked all these years: inventory management.

My first post here was emblematic of what I intended. I even called it "My Bag". A handful more posts on the topic followed but the theme soon sank out of sight under the tsunami of opinion, reportage, whimsy and general MMO noodling with which anyone who visits here now and again will be all too familiar.

Despite my inability to stay on message, however, I'm still extremely interested in inventory management. There's little I like better on a Sunday morning than a long, leisurely browse through my imaginary backpacks, picking up beautifully-drawn icons of logs of wood and chunks of ore, sorting medallions, sigils and runes into tidy stacks, poring through piles of weapons and armor deciding what to keep, what to sell and what to hand on.

When it comes to inventory, GW2 and EQ2 provide an instructive contrast in approach, both from a player's and a developers point of view. Both games operate on a form of free-to-play, generating at least some of their income stream through cash shops. In the classic F2P model, inventory space has tended to be used as a key driver of income.

Back when I was playing, I remember tiny bags and very limited storage being baked in to both Allods and Runes of Magic, generating intentional frustration which the cash shop stood ready to relieve at the flick of a credit card. EQ2, on the other hand, converted from a subscription model that offered what is probably the most profligately generous of all MMO inventory systems.

Like Everquest before it, EQ2 sends you out into the world with more storage at level 1 than many MMOs allow you when fully extended, expanded and kitted out at level cap. Even under the very first, most restrictive version of the EQ2 F2P template, a Bronze starter potentially had a couple of hundred inventory slots.

The irony is that it was under Allods extremely restrictive regime that I was able to hone and refine my own inventory management skills. Faced with the choice of keeping everything I owned in what would barely pass for a Halfling's waistcoat pocket in Norrath or paying real money for really not that much more, I opted for the former and learned to sort, sell and send smart.

Before that, spoiled by the vast vaultage of the  Norrathian banking system and the cavernous backpacks and boxes knocked out for a pittance by Norrathian crafters, I'd been in the habit of keeping everything. If I ever did run out of space I'd just create another character and presto, another few hundred empty slots! Suddenly, thanks to the developers of Allods and other penny-pinching, money-grubbing game-makers with their selfish desire to earn a living, feed their families and keep a roof over their heads, I learned if not to love then at least to accept the tiny bag.

Moreover, it was in Allods that I also overcame my irrational fear of automated sorts. Let's not go overboard here - I still don't like systems that shake up my bags and leave everything tidier in a microsecond than I could get it in a month of Sundays. Those invisible sorting elves are having all my fun and making me look bad while they're having it. But sometimes you just need stuff sorted and fun has to take a back seat.

The upshot is that I've played GW2 for six months without feeling the need to buy any bag space whatsoever. I've thought about it a few times. My mouse pointer has even hovered over the padlock on that second bank vault. In the end, though, there are two things stopping me clicking through and spending real money: I have enough space to get by without feeling frustrated and the cost of adding more is too steep.

Even at 20% off, each new bank vault costs around £5 and each additional bag slot around £3. Too much. Quite a lot too much. Of course, I could convert in-game Gold to Gems and pay that way, but still, gold is hard to come by and I just don't need the extra space that badly. Compare that to EQ2 where even though I don't really need more bag space either, SOE's frequent SC sales sometimes make it so so cheap to add extra storage to my Silver accounts that I'd be crazy not to take them up on it.

It seems to me that GW2 could have handled the sale of inventory space better, both in and out of the cash shop. Bags in-game are extortionately expensive. All bar the basic ones require various Runes of Holding sold by NPCs at prices ranging from four silver to ten gold. This establishes an irreducible base price for each type of bag or box and throws up a price ceiling that most players won't want to push through.

As the game began and money was tight, few would have wanted to go above the 12-slot bags and even now I would balk at paying two gold pieces for an 18-slotter, even making it at cost for myself. In fact, almost all my many characters manage just fine with ten-slot bags even at level 80. Four of those plus the 20-slot starter backpack is sufficient and the odd bonus along the way, like the 20-slot Ancient Karka Shell Box from the November event certainly helps.

With bags being sold at a high premium both inside and outside of the game, I feel ArenaNet have efficiently and successfully trained me to be satisfied, indeed happy, with limited storage options. I'm not complaining - it works for me. I'm just not sure it's for the best for the game. As a player it means I don't even bother to make bags for myself, probably the first time that's ever happened, and as a customer the single payment I made last September, when I bought a second account, may well be the only time I give them money this side of an expansion.

That second account turned out to be an excellent decision, by the way. It's served me extremely well ever since, providing me with all the character slots and storage space I'm ever likely to need, along with the invaluable option of mailing stuff to myself, something you can't do on a single account and which is incredibly convenient.

What with all this and the very generous and easy to get Guild Bank and its extensions, somewhat to my surprise I find myself looking forward more to EQ2's new bag sorting options than to the prospect of a fire sale on storage in Tyria. Indeed, if I was going to take advantage of any of ANet's current promotions, it would more likely be the 30% off the game itself. 

I don't really need a third account though. Do I?