There's No Place Like Home : SOE, PSS1

It's well over two years since I first posted about SOE's deal with German satellite TV company PSS1. No point rehashing the whole sorry saga. For anyone who hasn't been following this particular slow-motion train wreck, EQ2Wire has a brief outline of the long, twisty trail that today ended, inevitably, right back where it began.

Yes, as many predicted all along, especially those of us who lived through SOE's similarly brief, equally ill-judged (but far less coercive and therefore less controversial) fling with UbiSoft, it just didn't work. As of right now anyone in the PSS1 region who plays or wants to play any SOE game can do so without going through a middleman and as of July all DCUO, EQ2 and Planetside2 accounts made or registered with PSS1 transfer to SOE.

It's always been my strong feeling that this whole deal was pushed onto SOE by whichever division of SonyCorp they report to (is it still the PlayStation division?). Feldon's EQ2Wire article includes one vital piece of the jigsaw that I hadn't previously picked up, which pretty much confirms my suspicions: that being the licensing of the entire Sony Pictures "entertainment library" to PSS1. Collateral damage I think they call it. Or maybe friendly fire.

I always doubted the arrangement would hold long enough for EQNext to feature in any PSS1 package. When Landmark was announced as a standalone project outside the remit of the deal the writing was on the wall. Then, as Player Studio began to move front and center in SOE's five year plan and the extreme complexities of setting up the necessary international legal framework became more widely understood, the likelihood of finding a viable way to include both versions of all the games that would rely on paid-for, taxable player-made content passed out of the realms of wishful-thinking and into the arena of psychotic delusion.

Whatever, it's over now. I'm sure the behind-the-scenes story would be something worth reading. Maybe when Smed retires and writes his autobiography.

It would also be oh so nice to think that lessons had been learned but when you're a small, regional cog in a vast, global machine no-one "important" really cares what you may or may not have learned. You either do what your told or they find someone who will.

So I'm not saying we won't be back here or somewhere strikingly similar in another few years. All I am saying is that, if there's one thing you can generally rely on SOE for it's to bumble through until they get things there-or-thereabouts right. In the end. Eventually.

Sometimes you do have to wait an awfully long time before that end comes around. All too often the road takes an awful lot of wrong turns along the way. Still, better late than never, isn't that what they say?

Now, everyone close your eyes, cross your fingers and toes, click the heels of those little red shoes I know you're all wearing and make a wish for Vanguard.

WildStar Reaction Round-Up

It took most of yesterday morning and some of the afternoon to plow through the nearly two hundred posts that piled up in my Feedly feed while we were away. I did take both my Android tablet and my iPod Touch with me but hotel WiFi, at least in the kind of hotels we end up staying in, has yet to reach a state of grace where web browsing offers an attractive alternative to sitting on the balcony reading a good book. Or a bad book. Or the label on a sauce bottle.

If there was any apparent trend evident in the wealth of posts it must be that quite a lot of bloggers are playing WildStar even if some of them hadn't exactly planned on it. The most space-happy of all? That would probably be Liore at Herding Cats, who by her own admission doesn't want to write about anything else right now. Also at the front of the pack and bouncing with enthusiasm is Syp, although he's had some of the shine taken off his experience by a series of connectivity issues and bugs, something The Nosy Gamer suspects might be at the root of the swift drop-off that saw WildStar fall almost 25% in XFire log-ins this week.

Channeling Eeyore rather than Tigger, yet still very much committed to giving the new game a good run out, comes Tobold, who announced his intent to get his three months in a while back. His enthusiasm appears only mildly dimmed by the growing controversy over Casual vs Hardcore and what it might mean for the long-term future of the game (a better example of which would be hard to find than Jaedia's account of her first low-level dungeon run). He's a lot less enthusiastic about keeping up his WildStar Journal, which limped to eight entries and then closed up shop, although that hasn't stopped him making some pointed observations on the current state of crafting in the game.

Rolling in somewhere in the middle, unconvinced but still willing to give WildStar the benefit of the doubt for the sake of seeing something if not new then at least newly painted, come Rowan and Saylah. Go in with your expectations low and you're less likely to be disappointed, especially if you arrive in good company. Syl, meanwhile, admits to being confused why she's playing WS instead of the other MMOs she knows she ought to prefer. She's having a fine old time despite all that, so much so that she's thinking about putting down roots.

Finally, bringing up the rear, indeed possibly leaving an inch-deep heel-trail in the ground, there's J3w3l, who couches her announcement that she's caved and bought WildStar in a pithy and revealing explanation of why ESO turned out to be a lot less than sum of its parts. Come to think about it, though, she might have some competition as the least-enthusiastic purchaser of the New Shiny, even so. Keen has posted just once about his experiences, exactly two weeks ago, at which point the thought uppermost in his mind was already the problem of falling behind the rest of the guild he's supposed to be leading.

Of those not writing about the game, Stargrace, at least, is in fact playing. Only her position with Carbine mitigates against blogging about it. Most everyone else is stalwartly ignoring the new upstart altogether or waving it past with a vague promise to maybe go look at it someday, when there's nothing better going on and/or the price is right. Perhaps the most curious blogosphere non-show when it comes to WildStar is the KTR team, specifically Zubon and Ravious, who flew out to Carbine's Arkship press junket the Spring before last, put up a short series of pieces about it and then never mentioned the game again.

Me, I'm somewhat torn. WildStar does look and sound like a lot of fun and I definitely didn't not enjoy the beta. It's still mostly that I don't have time to play another MMO, at least not enough to make the box+sub cost worthwhile. It's a shame to miss the new MMO experience, though. As Murf says in his first full-blown non-blog MMO article "If you want to have your finger on the pulse of any MMORPG, it is best to start fast and early."

Maybe I'll get a second bite at that cherry with the F2P conversion.

Don't Look Down

After an immensely enjoyable week spent touring the Pyrenees, much of which involved driving down single-track roads beneath chasms of rock hundreds of meters high or up single-track roads along sheer drops hundreds of meters deep, it feels more than a tad ironic to log into GW2 and find myself immediately overwhelmed by the depth and complexity of a faux-3D image on a screen. Nevertheless, that's what just happened and it's what happens every time I return to MMOs from a complete break of more than a few days.

It's not just that the forced perspective gives me mild vertigo and a flurry of motion sickness. It's the incredible wealth of detail that seems almost like a sensual assault. The spell effects! The explosions! All the strange creatures scurrying and gesticulating. Even the motes in the air and the beams of sunlight through the trees.

It takes a brief while for my protective mental limiters to power up, before my brain begins to filter out the "noise", before things return to everyday normal. Just for an hour or so it's like it was way back in the day, when MMOs were new and everything was wild, fresh and magical.

I guess if I only played a couple of hours a week things might always seem that way. But then how would I ever get my dailies done?

First Cut Is The Deepest

I'm not stalking Syp. Honest. Nor have I run out of ideas of my own and found myself reduced to mining Massively for inspiration. I just happened to read his insightful piece on Lord of the Rings Online as I was tabbed out from Everquest while I was logging in my enchanter.

One of my enchanters, I should say. I have three. At least three. It's hard to remember. The one I've played the most is a dark elf, I think my only dark elf. He's somewhere in the fifties as I recall. Then there's my favorite, a gnome, inevitably, somewhere in the thirties. The one that I'm currently, repeatedly, getting killed (enchanter is hard, yo! Especially when you're wearing full raw silk and wielding a mithril quill like it's 1999) is a human and she's level 19.

I forget which of them came first. They've all been around for a while. About as long as EQ, give or take a year. This one has a /played of just over 6 days and she was born in August 2000. I created her as an apprentice to what was then my "main" character (a meaningless term given the way I approach MMOs), my first gnome necromancer. Her job was to go places he couldn't and get him stuff.

Naturally that didn't last long. She had other ideas and struck out on her own, although given that it's taken her fourteen years to do nineteen levels that may not have been the wisest career move. Her current awakening results from my recent purchase of the White Wolf EQRPG Scenario Book "Befallen". It made me want to go play through Befallen again. Go figure. (I wonder, given the resurgence of tabletop gaming posts from bloggers I follow, such as Ravious, Tobold, Tipa and Ardwulf, whether there's anyone out there running an EQRPG campaign. I'd be very interested in joining an online version if so...).

Anyhoo, to get to the point, I think Syp really put his finger on it when he says

"We form strong attachments to our first experiences and areas in the game for both that new zone smell and because we've gone through those areas on alts so many times."

No matter how long I play MMOs, and it'll be fifteen years this autumn, it remains an unshakeable fact that what I like to do most of all is play character after character through the same low to mid level zones. It literally never gets old.

For a long time there were practical reasons for that. MMOs got harder as you leveled up. Often a lot harder. Nowadays newer MMOs like GW2 do a brilliant job of evening the playing field so that the transition from low to mid to end game is both seamless and painless and yet it's still the lower zones that hold the strongest appeal.

It's not a simple cut-off. For Syp the grey mist comes down at the end of the original game that shipped when LotRO launched, most probably because that game has a linear progression. No LotRO expansion ever arrived with a brand new starting area, unlike Everquest, EQ2, WoW or many others. Every re-start offers the possibility of a new emotional connection akin to the original, something expansions that increase the level cap only can never match.

So, I have something close to the same affection for Field of Bone as I have for East Commonlands, for Darklight Woods as I have for Antonica. Close but not quite the same. It's still the zones that launched with the very first iteration of any MMO that have the edge. It's not an insuperable advantage, to be sure, but if developers want their new creations to attract the same degree of commitment as their initial offerings they don't just need to reach that bar, they need to vault it in style.

I'm off on holiday next week so it will be quiet here for a while, but when I return all eyes (well, all eyes that aren't on WildStar) will be on ArenaNet's second season of The Living Story. We're all just about as certain as we can be that with it will come with the first new, permanent map we've had since Southsun and the first real expansion of the boundaries of Known Tyria since the game began.

That's a challenge. Here's hoping Anet can meet it. History suggests otherwise.

Letting The Mat Out Of The Bag : GW2

Syp, wearing his work hat and his Sunday best name, was kind enough to link yesterday's Argo post on Massively, which makes for a nice synchronicity since I'm opening today's with a link to his colleague Anatoli Ingram's opinion piece on GW2's reward system. I was planning on writing something on the topic but Anatoli beat me to it and he's covered much of what I was going to say.

One of the most regularly-heard complaints, both from players inside GW2 and from people giving reasons on forums outside the game explaining why they aren't playing, is that the rewards are terrible. In the absence of a standard gear progression ladder it's hard to say what a good reward would look like (although the palpable excitement and envy in map chat every time anyone links a rare Ascended drop gives you a clue), but as Anatoli's analysis implies, if you design your game around aspirational cosmetics and then put the majority of skins, mini-pets and toys behind a cash wall, you're not likely to endear yourself to those who already see the F2P model as a machine for separating fools from their money.

So, I largely agree with the premise that GW2's reward system is broken and I largely agree with the reasons given in the linked piece as to why that is. No need to go over the same ground again. There's one extra twist that doesn't get a mention, though: boxes. Yes, boxes. Boxes and bags, chests and purses, containers of every shape and size, Tyria's stuffed to bursting with them all.

We're all familiar with the Lockbox concept, loathed by many, loved by few, used by every F2P marketing team to eke the odd few thousand extra dollars out of customers with a poor grasp of probability theory and a low threshold on self-control. GW2 has had its own version since launch in the form of Evon Gnashblade's Black Lion Chests, the icon for which got a flashy makeover only this week and for which you can buy keys at the Gem Store for around a dollar a throw or occasionally (very occasionally) find for free in game.

Compared to other MMOs, though, Black Lion Chests are a background detail They don't even drop all that frequently. I doubt I see more than two or three a week. Even when they were a lot more common they were always easy to ignore and since the drop rate was heavily reduced a long time back they barely register as a thing any more. No, it's not the pay-to-unlock boxes that are getting out of hand. It's the unlocked ones we get for free.

Every type of content has its own goodie bags to offer. Simple monsters drop bags and every monster seems to have his own copyrighted design. Even players drop them in WvW. A quick countdown of the varieties available on Trading Post comes to over a hundred.

Then there are the Champions, each of whom also has a special kind of bag to keep his greens in, along with his skill scrolls, crafting mats and all his other odds and ends. Achievements pop up chests in windows and World vs World ranks set little chests jiggling in the lower right corner of the screen. That's the same place you find the daily chest, the World Boss Guaranteed Rare Chest and last week's Tournament Reward Chest (if you were lucky enough to get one. It's still bugged). Not to mention the whacking great chest every World Boss leaves behind him on the ground when he dies.

There's a positive plethora of chests. A bonanza of bags. That has to be good, right? We all love loot. Well, yes, you'd think so. Within reason.

I love goodie bags. I love random loot in principle and I love opening containers that have random loot in them. Yet even I'm beginning to feel this might be too much of a good thing. It's not just the sheer volume, overwhelming though that has become. It's the nature of the contents, particularly the crafting materials, which so many of these bags contain.

It's one thing to feel a thrill of excitement as you open a chest from a slain creature anticipating, perhaps, a magical weapon or ring. It's entirely another to have every single crafting material randomized across scores of mobs. That's not entertaining so much as it is irritating.

And where's the consistency? The parity between crafts? If I want copper I can go mine copper nodes. If I want wood I can go chop down trees. If I want cloth, though, or claws or scales, or one of the hundreds of body-parts that mysteriously make the mundane magical, it's off we go to slaughter hundreds of not-so-innocent creatures and even that's not the end of it. Its a trope of MMOs that metal and wood come from nodes while cloth and leather come from mobs but in other MMOs at least you know for certain sure which mobs. In GW2 its a lottery.

And therein lies the nub of the problem: in GW2 everything's a lottery. Worse, it's a nested set of lotteries. Kill the mob, see if he dropped a bag. Open the bag, see if it has the thing you want. As someone who positively wants to open boxes to see what's inside (it's the credo of this entire blog for Pete's sake!), if I'm starting to feel worn down by the sheer number of bags to be opened, then other people must surely be screaming with frustration by now.

I never thought I'd see the day when I started to see opening goodie bags as a chore but some days, when I have a stack of fifty or more to get through, it begins to feel that way. It's taking the edge off what should be an exciting moment of gameplay and turning it into a humdrum task that needs to be gotten out of the way in a hurry.

It would be nice to see the whole loot delivery process get an overhaul. Fewer bags with better things inside them. Crafting mats as standard body drops tied to specific mobs. More control handed to players to seek out and obtain the things they need and desire. Less reliance on RNG for absolutely everything. Return some agency to the player and some structure to the play.

Until that happens, like Anatoli says, GW2 will go on being all about the gold.

Used MMO, One Previous Owner, Seeks Players : Argo

Massively, which can usually be relied upon for timely notice of new developments across the MMO genre, failed to register the arrival of the resurrected Argo into open beta. How such a momentous event could pass unnoticed beats me. I mean, it's not as though there was anything going on in the MMO world right now.

It would have been handy to have known the open beta was up since my closed beta application was unsuccessful. Well, I say unsuccessful. Hard to tell, really. I can't remember which of my throwaway email addresses I used to apply for it and it's a racing certainty I never checked that inbox again after the first couple of days. Anyway bridge, water, under it.

Registration was simple enough, just an email address required. The download took about 15 minutes. Unpacked, Argo weighs in at just under 5GB, which is pretty hefty for a F2P translation. The new owners, UserGames (did they really think that name through?), require GameGuard, an annoying extra step that my virus checker strongly disapproves of, so that took a while, but eventually there we were at character creation.

Why are you all staring at me like that?

Argo has a lot of classes. Sixteen, or so it's claimed. That might be stretching a point. There are two factions - the militaristic, technological Noblians (makes me think of knobbly knees every time I read it) and the collective of superannuated flower-children with the unpronounceable name, The Floresslah. The classes appear to duplicate for each faction although not exactly. You can only play one faction and I've only tried the Noblians so its hard to be sure just how closely a Handler matches a Tamer or a Bomber a Wizard.

Plenty of choice when it comes to class but none whatsoever when it comes to gender because Argo is one of those irritating MMOs that gender-locks classes. I started off making a Bomber but Bombers have to be boys and I was already mildly miffed that I had to be human so I swapped to Shooter instead. I do like these elegiac, imaginative class names. So much better than boring old Shadow Knights or Bloodmages.

I've always felt that what most MMOs lack is a good Instep slider

Next up character customization, which is a cut above the average for this stripe of MMO, I think. There are about ten or so faces to choose from, the difference between which mostly seems to be scars and tattooos, although some of the men get wispy little beards or mustaches that make them look even more like adolescents than they already do. Eye and hair color are unusual in that the choices are exactly the same and none of them are brown. Or black. Or indeed any natural shade that human hair has ever been. I went for white hair as the only quasi-authentic option. It also had the welcome side effect of making my character look vaguely like an adult.

There are plenty of sliders to get the body shape you'd prefer. It's possible to flaunt a bit of excess poundage, especially on the hips and waist, but obesity's not an option. Fair enough, I guess. There's a war on and you've been drafted so you'd be expected to keep in reasonable shape. You can have arms like twigs if you want though.

Gosh! A whole training area just for li'l ol' me?

Once all that's out of the way it's on to the real business at hand: another seemingly endless tutorial. I remember this from the last time I played Argo. There's a nice introduction where you arrive at the training camp on a hoverbike the size of a tractor and then it's time to get down to the serious business of running about following blue arrows.

There's a guy who pops up in a window to explain the arcane color-coding system Argo uses for quests and a whole lot more important technical information, such as how to open your inventory and what key opens the mini map (It's "M" in case you were wondering). All of this is fully voiced by someone who sounds like a natural English speaker and probably a professional voice actor at that.

Oh, go on then...

They must have spent most of the tutorial budget on him because they clearly didn't have
enough left to hire a professional translator for the multifarious dialog windows. In common with many MMOs, Argo is verbose in the extreme. No quest-giver or trainer wants to let you in on the secret of which particular set of foozles he'd like you to eliminate until you've been formally introduced and each of you has learned something about the others thoughts, beliefs, feelings and way of life. Since I'm almost pathologically incapable of skipping narrative or background lore this tends to slow things down a tad.

Now that's what I call a Crit!

Eventually I extricated myself from the conversation and set out to cull some Pantheras, panthers that have grown an extra vowel. These supposedly deadly cats, which have been hunting the loggers and making life generally impossible, mill around in clumps not ten yards from the camp. Far from being a danger to Noblians going about their workaday routine they seem to be about as threatening as so many oversized kittens but hey, I'm in the army now. I'm just following orders.

Or I would be if I had my rifle equipped. Take the mickey out of tutorials all you like but if the talking head doesn't remind you to open your inventory and equip your weapon what do you do? You bitter vets, you think you know it all. Well you know nothing, Noob!

Take two, with weapon in hand:  down goes the Panthera. Eventually. Only takes half a dozen shots with an assault rifle at point blank range. This Noblian tech is impressing me already. One Panthera down, four to go. It's at this point that I notice the pop up asking me if I'd prefer to have someone do my hunting for me. Probably saw me trying to kill a Panthera by pointing my finger and going "Bang!" and figured I needed any help I could get.

This is where I need a tutorial

This is a development I don't remember at all from my first go round with Argo. It's not just the old auto-run to target feature, either. No, it's something much more sophisticated than that, a fully-configurable macro for automated hunting. You can set all kinds of parameters - when you need to be healed, which items or consumables or abilities you want to use, the skills and combat abilities to employ, the range at which you consider something should be considered a target. You can even specify what kind of items you want to loot and what you'd rather leave on the ground.

I'm not opposed to these systems in principle. I quite like the idea of leaning back eating a
sandwich and watching my character slaughter wildlife  discriminately. Coming after the very first kill, however, I found it a bit intimidating. All those choices. I let the Automatic Hunting run me through my four remaining Pantheras just to see how it went and then I turned it off. Easier to do it myself until I have several hours free to work out the settings.

Just nod and smile

Thus passed my first hour or so back in Argo. By the time I found myself being stalked by another player (one of those really creepy ones who follows you around but never says anything) and decided to call it a wrap and go back to Tyria I was level four and still deep inside the tutorial. At least all the training is in-world. I could just take a sharp right and hack off into the jungle on my own but no, I'm under military discipline. I'll see my training through to the bitter end.

How much time I'll spend in the world of Argo after that I wouldn't like to say. Not all that much I imagine. It did, however, grab me on this return visit in exactly the same way it grabbed me the first time round. The translations may not be perfect but they're endearing. The graphics may be undercooked but there's a real sense of place. The systems may be ridiculously overcomplicated but they're manageable. The controls are natural and comfortable and there's just an amiable, puppylike feel to the entire enterprise that makes being in that world a warm, pleasant experience. When you're not being stalked, at least.

If UserGames can keep a server up I'll keep popping in, much good may it do them. They aren't going to get any money from me and I find it hard to believe they'll get much from anybody else, although there does now appear to be a Cash Shop, which I don't remember from last time. I wouldn't bet on a long, successful second life for Argo but here's hoping.

Now someone bring back NeoSteam.

Traits And Megaservers Reconsidered : GW2

What with The Tourney, Boss Blitz and Bazaar of the Four Winds, the project to find out what leveling up feels like now we have Megaservers and a new trait system fell somewhat into abeyance these last couple of weeks. Before that, my Charr Guardian cruised through Ascalon in short order, completing Plains of Ashford, Diessa Plateau, Filed of Ruin and Blazeridge Steppes before finally topping out in the upper fifties while finishing one of my favorite maps, Iron Marches.

All of that wouldn't have given nearly enough experience so there were some side trips to The Shiverpeaks, where she completed Wayfarer Foothills, Snowden Peaks and Lornar's Pass. More experience trickled in from a few forays into the Borderlands and the odd jolly to visit a World Boss here and there, now and then. Currently she's level 66 and trudging through Fireheart Rise, which, while it has grown on me a lot over the years, still wouldn't make any list I might compile of Places In Tyria You Must See Before You Die.

The whole project has been very instructive. It certainly hasn't turned out as I imagined it might, let alone how I feared. It's not really possible for an experienced player of an MMO to put himself, emotionally, psychologically or pragmatically, in the position of someone who just installed the game for the first time that day but even taking that into account it seems that the hefty changes brought by The Feature Pack have made leveling in GW2 no harder, slower or more tedious than it ever was.

On my travels I have once or twice, no more than that, heard people express the opinion that they were feeling the lack of Traits at lower levels. It's certainly not a topic of conversation that comes up often among the endless rehashing of builds and torrent of "how do I...?" questions that buzz around the ever-busy open chat channels of the Megaserver Maps. At no point so far have I felt either underpowered or restricted in options because of the paucity of trait points. Indeed, it was only as I was writing this and popped into the game to check how many traits my Guardian had that I realized I haven't even spent the last two she received.

Part of the reasoning for doling out Traits so slowly was supposedly to prevent new players from becoming confused and overwhelmed by choice. Even as someone who has never considered Choice to be a Universal Good I was skeptical about that argument. I very much doubt there would have been many players under the original system who threw up their hands in despair when faced with half a dozen options in half a dozen trait lines. That sort of thing tends to go with the territory when you play any kind of RPG, doesn't it?

Just because the old system probably wasn't broken doesn't mean it couldn't be improved, though, and somewhat to my surprise I think the new version is better, at least in some ways. It certainly makes me think much more carefully about which trait to choose and pay much more attention to what they all do than I used to, that's for sure. When you have to decide whether to spend money or do a specific task to open each individual trait it definitely focuses the mind and I've found the experience a lot more entertaining than I expected, in no way the frustrating time or money sink that people (including me) had speculated it might be.

There may be "nice grawl" but there's no such thing as "nice Flame Legion"

It's not all rainbows and roses, though. There are definitely ways it could be and needs to be tightened up. The main drawback remains the rate that traits are unlocked during normal gameplay. It barely happens at all. ANet seem to be aware of this. A recent patch made a good few changes to the detail, reducing over-reliance on Map Completion as a mechanic and increasing the emphasis on killing specific monsters or completing specific events.

It's a start but it doesn't go nearly far enough. After 66 levels, done almost entirely by completing level-appropriate content in the open world, my Guardian has unlocked precisely six traits out of a possible sixty-five (and she bought one of those at the Trainer). I don't think that a system that results in a character having around 90% of her traits still locked when she hits max level can be considered well-tuned.

This is the one I bought. Essential.

The other goal of the exercise was to see how the world felt under the jackboot of the Megaserver. There was a lot of strong feeling about this change when it happened and I was among those who felt strongly. Like most changes it turned out to be less of everything than expected - less of a boon for those that welcomed it and less of a curse for those that dreaded it.

Maps are consistently busier as was intended but maps that don't have a specific, popular mega-event are only busier by comparison to the wastelands they used to be. You certainly won't be trampled by the horde in Iron Marches or Fireheart Rise. Field of Ruin, remarkably, felt even quieter than I remembered it. My concern that the ambiance of the deep wilderness would be lost seems unfounded.

Whatever algorithm they're using to match players with friends/guilds/worlds has arguably improved slightly but my feeling is that there's still some inconsistency baked in that no one quite understands. There was quite an argument in Map chat over it yesterday with some people claiming it worked well for them while others expressed what has been my own experience, that it's at best hit or miss. I generally still have to right-click Mrs Bhagpuss's portrait to get to the same Megaserver Map about fifty percent of the time even when we are grouped. Given that the algorithm isn't managing reliably or consistently to place us together even though we are in the same Guild, on each other's Friends lists, share the same Home World and Language Group and are in the same frickin' Party...well it's not impressing me much.

The Great Jungle Wurm is under there somewhere. And so's my Guardian.

The effect on community has been interesting. I do still see a good few familiar Yak's Bend names around outside WvW and it has an interesting emotional resonance, rather like spotting someone you know in the crowd at a gig. I wonder how much that relies on me having known those names already from the pre-Megaserver days. Would a new player starting now ever even see anyone, outside their guild or WvW, often enough to build up that "know him by sight" kind of relationship? I suspect they might because there are now players from other servers that I vaguely recognize because they turn up at World Bosses at the same times I do.

Unlike the Trait revamp, about which very little now seems to be said, you can still hear people complaining about the Megaserver every day. There's often someone bemoaning its very existence in map chat, cursing its foibles and flaws or wishing for the return of at least one non-Megaserver Map (the consensus would probably be for Lion's Arch). Voices also speak strongly in defense, praising both the convenience and the liveliness it brings to events big and small. I would have expected people to have gotten used to it by now but it seems that it'll take a while longer before we forget how things used to be when we were all off in our own little worlds.

Overall I'd give the Trait Revamp 7/10 and Megaservers 5/10. Neither is as bad an idea as it first might have appeared but both could do with another pass or several with that famous ArenaNet polishing cloth.