Decisions, Decisions

I spent most of yesterday trailing my many characters around Tyria opening up the necesary waypoints so that each of them could hop to any of the Big Chest events at an instant's notice. I had a great time and while I was on auto-run I had time to come to a few decisions:

• I am not stopping at eight. Even with a Mesmer not yet finished and a Guardian barely started I am already itching to make a new character. I have two free slots and they are both going to get used.

• My next two characters will be an Asuran Ranger and a Charr Engineer. Yes, I have two Asuras and two Charrs already. Yes, one of them is a ranger and the other an engineer. That's not good enough. I want them both ways round.

Ignore me at your peril

 

• The Asuran ranger will level up mainly south of Lion's Arch. I have barely touched Metrica Province and Caledon Forest and it was apparent running through them several times as I did yesterday that they must be fascinating places to explore. My Asuras should know their adopted homeland as well as my Charr know theirs but both of them have barely set foot there. The new one will be different.

• I've been toying with the idea of writing some "Potterer's Guides" for a long time. Nothing serious, as befits the title. Just a surface skim of MMOs or parts of MMOs from the perspective and for the benefit of players whose motivation is mainly to wander about and amuse themselves without having to put themselves out very much. I will turn my whimsical thought-project into something a little more substantial.

The first of these decisions to be acted upon was the last. I've drafted the first four Potterer's Guides, one for each of the low-level, chest-dropping meta events. The first, The Frozen Maw, is finished and I'm posting it immediately after this. The rest should be up in a couple of days. After that I plan to do the dragons. Yes, all this information is already widely available, but never mind that. They were a lot of fun to write and that was why I wrote them although I hope they are also entertaining to read. If anyone finds them useful, well that's just sugar.

Or Google Head Office as we know it

That seemed to be more than enough decisions for one day. Then I read Syp's post on the demise of Google Reader, followed by a whirlwind of similar outraged, upset or glumly blog posts found, ironically, in my Reader. The whole sorry show has been discussed enough so I won't go on about it, other than to say that it prompts me to more decisions:

I will fully archive Inventory Full. I was doing this but I got out of the habit when it began to take days rather than hours. I will run HTTrack for a month if need be but I will get it all stored away out of the cloud.

I will begin to move anything that matters away from Google. I wouldn't give twopence for Blogger's long-term survival. I'll hang on here while it lasts if only because when it goes maybe there will be some deal made to carry history over to other platforms. I will look into the possibility of migrating before then, though.

I will also look into alternatives to Gmail. I don't care about losing it as an email service. Those are ten a penny. The issue is that most MMOs now require an email address as log-on ID and I have lazily created a seemingly endless series of Gmail accounts to satisfy them. If Gmail goes, so do most of my MMOs.

Like many, I used to positively like Google. When it wasn't all that well-known in the UK I recommended it to people often. I still like what it does but I can no longer trust it. There are plenty of alternatives and I will make an effort to find and use them. Eggs in a basket? Not so much any more.

Go Play Outdoors! : GW2

For quite a while The Nosy Gamer has been publishing a league table of MMO log-ins garnered from X-Fire under the name of The Digital Dozen. I think I first came across it back when I took my blog-reading cues from VirginWorlds and I haven't done that since before I started Inventory Full.

It's a controversial enterprise because who really knows how many MMO players use X-Fire, Raptr or any other third-party launcher? I'm 99.9% certain that if I'd asked in any guild I've been in in the last decade there'd have been tumbleweed blowing across the chatbox. It would be pushing the envelope to ask most people I've played with over the years to find the official forum of the game they were subscribed to; downloading and installing a third-party app so they could log into a game that had its own perfectly serviceable launcher would be looked on as a sign of insanity.

You said "in the water" !

Nevertheless, by dint of persistence alone, The Digital Dozen has become both useful and instructive. It may not tell you how many people are playing MMOs in general or the commercial success of any MMO in particular but it does provide an internally consistent benchmark of one against another, at least insofar as users of X-Fire are concerned.

Since Guild Wars 2 launched it has been pegged in second place behind World of Warcraft. The numbers go up, the numbers go down, the positions stay the same. GW2 is not going to overtake WoW as the West's leading MMO any time soon.

That said, the direction of travel I alluded to recently seems to me to make it more likely that the gap between them will gradually close. As GW2 shifts ground towards the territory staked out out by WoW, so will more barriers preventing players who came to MMOs through WoW from making a comfortable transition drop. And should Blizzard choose to borrow some of GW2's clothes and retro-fit GW2 conveniences to WoW in an attempt to stave off disloyalty and curiosity, that in itself may go some way to buttering defectors paws in their new home.

Hire more tellers!

Both Mrs Bhagpuss and I remarked this week on how very, very busy Yak's Bend has become. There seem to be players pretty much everywhere we go at all times of day and night. I couldn't even see the banker in Lion's Arch through the crowd for most of Sunday and the sewing line at the Tailoring station was six deep.

Part of this may well be more actual people logged in; new players, returnees, regular players playing more. ANet have certainly been very bullish recently both about their sales and their concurrency. One thing that's definitely making the game feel buzzy and busy and bustling right now, though, comes as the direct result of the loot changes in the February update.

Prior to that, the place to be was grinding in Fractals or Dungeons, instanced off out of sight. With everyone farming for Ascended or Legendary progression the outside world risked becoming a place to pass through on the way to Map Completion then swiftly forget.

Never has nuclear clean-up seemed so...worthwhile.

That wasn't really going to happen, of course, because plenty of people have other things on their mind than vertical gear progression. The open world was busy enough with explorers and wanderers, the casual and the curious. Big ticket events were already funneling in the hordes for a crack at the slim chance of finding something worth having in the Big Chest.

Post-patch, that funnel has turned into a fire-hose. Maps with events featured on Guild Wars Temple's Dragon Timer now go into overflow as often as not. If you want a shot at Jormag's Claw you'd best be there before the 75-minute window of opportunity even opens. Latecomers can cool their heels in an alternate Frostgorge with only some bonus Orichalcum for consolation (although they may be lucky as I was to find the Claw screeching his defiance even in Overflow).

Barbecue at the beach...

There are rumbles of discontent, albeit mild ones. Guesting is currently taking the brunt of lock-out bitterness as disgruntled locals complain that incomers are taking all their dragons. There's some occasional graveyard humor about GW2 becoming the world's first AFK MMO. In general, though, people seem to be enjoying themselves.

The run up to every chest-dropper is like a little mini-event in itself, with impromptu costume brawls, dance parties and heavy map banter. The spirit is good because, by and large, people are getting what they want and they don't mind waiting for that. The effect on the surrounding world is positive, too, with plenty of players spreading out around the area as they wait, working on Dailies, doing events and generally making the place look lived in.

The new loot route may be as unimmersive and artificial as the one that preceded it, but having it happen out of doors makes all the difference. The guild bounties and missions are equally artificial but they too occur outdoors and that matters. If game design tends to direct players towards certain paths of achievement, it's much better if those paths are out in the open where anyone passing by can join in.

...barbecue at the bank.

So, it's hard to tell if GW2 really is pulling in more people but there's absolutely no doubt that it feels that way from the inside. Subjectively, the game is heaving and it feels great. And if curious heads do poke in from the MMO world outside, how much better for them to find us all having one enormous party rather than looking at a ghost town and wondering where everyone went.

Patch Day Blues

So far this morning I have patched :

Everquest
EQ2
Rift
The Secret World
Vanguard

As I write this I am patching:

Lord of the Rings Online.

I was already patched and up to date on:

GW2
Regnum
The Missing Ink
DCUO

I would patch the following, but for various reasons I can't right now:

Fallen Earth (on a dodgy portable hard drive I no longer trust)
Dragon Nest (on a USB stick I can't lay my hand on right now)
Argo (waiting for supposed new "global" version)

Apart from TMI, which is a beta, those are all MMOs in which I have characters that I care about and that I am still theoretically leveling up and/or working on. It's not an exclusive list, either.

Taken 2013 - could be 2003

All this activity was prompted by Syp, who re-started his monthly "What are you playing?" poll last month and just posted the results. I completed the poll and was shocked by how few MMOs I'd logged into even once during February. That, compounded with Wilhelm at TAGN making the disturbing observation that guild leadership in Rift passes automatically if you don't log in regularly, determined me to make more of an effort to drag myself away from GW2 and get out and about more. (Virtually out and about, that is. It's bloody freezing outside!)

While all the others were patching away in the background I spent an hour and a half in Everquest. I started off doing what I almost always do when I log back in after a few weeks or months away, namely wander round Plane of Knowledge randomly checking vendors for bargains.

Now this is the kind of change I like

It's at this point that I usually realize I am so out of touch I have no idea what a bargain looks like any more, so off I go into The Bazaar where I open the /barter window to see what people are buying. From there it goes to looking in my bags, then comparing my gear with what's for sale to see if a new wave of expansion trash drops has completely out-dated whatever I'm wearing and that's how a morning passes.

This time I did at least kill a few Sand Giants in Oasis, which was hardly much of an ask for a  level 84 Beastlord, but hey, Sand Giants = plat pinatas. Challenge not required. And speaking of pinatas, after EQ it was on to Rift.

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo... oh sod it, kill em all.

All my level 50s there (and yes they are all still only level 50 and likely to stay that way) are in those New Lands of which I have yet to learn the names, or care. Couldn't face that so I woke up my warrior in Meridian and had him bounce around on balloons for a couple of minutes, after which I lost the will to live and logged out.

Kudos to Kaozz for keeping it up for a couple of hours. I wholeheartedly agree that Rift is going in a terrible direction. The attitude of the Dev in the linked thread appears to be "last year it was easy and you all got what you wanted. Well, we'll soon put a stop to that!" If his approach is in any way representative then I think all hope is already lost.

Dignity? What's that?

Patching technology appears to have plateaued at a highly acceptable level. Everything went very smoothly and quickly. (Well, not always quickly. Nothing happens when it comes to LotRO - it's still patching as I write this, although to be fair to Turbine I haven't logged in for over six months). Keeping all these MMOs patched up shouldn't be a problem but playing them obviously will be. Nevertheless, I mean to give it the old Innsmouth Academy try.  

For now though, it's back to GW2. Dailies to do, dragons to loot, and most importantly fun to be had. So. Much. Fun.

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!