Storm On The Horizon: Rift

So we bought Storm Legion, the Storm Chaser deal that comes with that 12 months game-time that isn't a subscription (see below). We have a friend from EQ2/GW2 joining us and between us we have about eight level 50s so we are probably, maybe, sort of ready to Rift.

We all logged in the other night for a merry round of Guild invites, server transfers and general housekeeping. Meridian and Sanctum appear to be under perpetual attack by extremely large and very noisy invaders from the Plane of Air, something very familiar to me from the countless happy hours I spent repelling their advances on the Chancel of Labors in Iron Pine Peak back in the day ("the day" in this instance being "last year").

Makes it very hard to concentrate on sorting out your bank, but boy, does the gold, xp and planarite blow in on those icy winds! Join the Instant Adventure and you'll soon be a wealthy man. Dwarf. Whatever.

Just as disruptive but a lot less welcome was the following message, a variation of which greeted each character as I logged them all in one by one:

Are there any souls or roles that didn't require a full refit? If there were, I didn't have any of them. I have very little patience for, or indeed interest in, Talent Trees to begin with and I reckon I've had to re-do some of these three or four times already. It really isn't fun any more, if it ever was.

Luckily, Trion seem to have picked up on this little drawback and what was once supposed to be one of the jewels in their crown, the infinitely flexible Soul System, now comes front-ended by what looks to me remarkably like a list of fixed classes. Optional, sure, but classes all the same, and very welcome they are, too.

For the time being I'm just picking one role per character. Time to get fancy when I can actually remember what the icons mean and where the controls are.

I suppose we should be taking advantage of the pre-expansion Bonus Bonanza, especially to start leveling up our Guild, which I believe we only created just before we left and which still has the cellophane on.

 I think we get all that, even though the Storm Chaser FAQ clearly states:

The Storm Chaser edition includes one year of game time and is not a subscription.

The Veteran Reward Fairy certainly thinks we're entitled:

All my mailboxes were bursting with goodies and the changes to item stacking means I even have space to accept them this time.

And so here we are, back in Telara once more. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing these supposedly vast new zones - Rift's zone design has always been superlative. Ten more levels is something to look forward to as well - I do love me a level cap rise. And then there's the little piece of Telara to call my own.

All I have to do is drag myself away from GW2 for few hours once in a while. That shouldn't so hard? Should it?

Lost Shores - Be There or Be Square: GW2

Probably as a result of the furor that followed the Mad King's controversial one-time literal pop-up event in Lion's Arch, ArenaNet decided to post a schedule for the upcoming Lost Shores extravaganza. It comes in three Acts, beginning on Friday November 16th and running through Saturday and Sunday with a special event each day at Noon PST.

The press release is fascinating, showing, I think, just how extraordinarily difficult it is going to be to balance a genuinely "dynamic" virtual world with customer expectations of a commercial product. Taking ANet's description of the event at face value, there's an intrinsic and apparently insoluble problem and in just three-paragraphs they hammer home relentlessly precisely what it is :

"we want to make sure that you are not missing out"

"an Event in Lion’s Arch that you don’t want to miss"

"make sure you will not miss it"

"this will only run once, so make sure you will be there!"

C'mon bird! You must have seen something!

Whether the event will live up to the hype, whether it will be truly world-changing, that doesn't matter. What does matter is the insistence that this is something all Guild Wars 2 players must not miss. That raises expectations that simply cannot be met in full. A lot of people aren't going to be there, no matter how much they'd like to be. The balancing act between building excitement and fostering resentment is a high wire to walk, that's for sure, and the fall is steep on either side.

The timing of the events is intriguing in itself. The opening Act falls on a Friday which is, as far as I can tell, a normal workday in the United States. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management Schedule of Public Holidays for 2012 has nothing listed for November 16th, anyway.  The first event that we don't want to miss kicks off at midday Pacific Standard Time, which is three in the afternoon on the East Coast and eight in the evening GMT.

An elephant? No, wait, is it two camels playing Twister?

Well, it works for me. I'll be comfortably home from work when it all gets going. Much of America, however, will still either be at work or at school. Just as well they "will be able to enjoy additional content afterwards even if [they] cannot make the kick-off time" then, although whether that will make up for missing the unmissable special event (albeit an event not as special or unmissable as Sunday's "big Finale") I beg to doubt.

The same timings repeat on Saturday and Sunday for the following acts. Less problematic, obviously, on a weekend, but again I'd say it strongly favors players in GMT timezones and using the exact same times does risk locking out the same people from each phase. The timing seems especially odd when you consider that GW2 has separate European servers, but as other MMOs have discovered, letting half your customers in on a secret before the rest get to find out what it is never plays well.

Ships they come, ships they go...

All in all, what I conclude from this and from my time in Rift is that truly dynamic events are hard to bring off without riling up a sizable portion of your player-base, and that's without even considering what events different players would recognize as "dynamic" in the first place. Trion made a lot of tweaks to the way they did theirs, with the result that, in my opinion at least, they bled virtually all of the dynamism out.

ArenaNet seem much more determined to match the addition of ongoing, universally available content ("There will be plenty of content available to enjoy that will remain permanently in the world as a result of the outcome of this event") with genuine Saint Crispin's Day moments. So far, at least. Going to be very interesting see how the policy plays out over time.

One thing's for sure - my much-anticipated first weekend of Storm Legion is now holed below the water-line!

Another Bite Of The Apple : Regnum Online

With so much attention focused on GW2 it's easy to forget that other worlds have their Halloweens too. Hardly surprising, what with it being the only major holiday for the undead, I guess.

Oh but wait! It's not, is it? There's Dia de las Muertas, which  conveniently falls the following day on November first. And since Regnum Online is a Latin American MMO, that's the one they choose to celebrate.

I'd forgotten about RO after my brief flirtation back in May this year but they sent me an email reminding me not to miss the celebrations so I popped in for a minute or twenty.

But they looked so red and juicy!

I love the clean, stylized look of RO. I doubt there's much depth there but the surface is lovely. Look at those crisp, clean shadows and that cool blue snow.

As usual in a game I've not visited for a while I ran around aimlessly, gawping. Since I was there looking for spooky holiday fun I was lucky to bump into a cauldron full of apples all ready for a bobbing.  

One was enough, though. What would an MMO holiday be without costumes and illusions? Rubbish, that's what, so it's just as well these apples turned out to be magic! One bite and presto! Quilted legless dwarf!

Less magic was my internet connection which chose exactly that moment to fritz out on me and when I got back the Cauldron had vanished. I traveled a lot further than I've ever been before and found some interesting and attractive mountain towns, but I never found another. Spooky holiday fun, there was none.


RO appears to have had some updates since I last was there and the website looks splendid. According to the Roadmap the dev team is hard at work on both new features and content. The Auction House they mention there as scheduled for September-December is already in which bodes well for that third expansion! I saw quite a few people running around even though I must have been miles form the center of the action. It seems like a fine game and it's nice to see it thriving. I'd be very happy to give it more time if only I had more time to give.

How Many Rangers...

Zubon made an interesting observation about the GW2 Ranger ability Healing Spring:  "You play a ranger for ranged DPS with condition stacking and a pet. I did not expect to get a great support ability as an unadvertised bonus". Having played a ranger since BWE1, this came as no surprise to me but I do find the various conceptions and pre-conceptions of what a ranger is or should be quite intriguing.

I mentioned to Mrs Bhagpuss yesterday that I thought the Warrior had better bow options than the Ranger and she was mildly outraged. She sees rangers in all games as archers first and foremost. I've never really seen rangers primarily as archers, or even as ranged specialists. I guess it depends whether you feel the origin of the class derives from Robin Hood or Aragorn. I've always tended towards the latter, so my conception of a Ranger falls towards a craggy, taciturn woodsman, thick across the shoulders, strong in the arm and favoring a rather large sword. The bow is definitely a back-up option.
 

Yes, it's a sword. YES. Really!

At my somewhat late induction into fantasy gaming, when I sat down to roll my first ever AD&D character, post-university in my early 20s, the class I chose was Ranger. Of all the available archetypes it was the one most familiar to me from fiction, and also, I thought, the coolest.That ranger ended up wielding a +4 Flaming Sword and favored melee combat up close. His bow was definitely secondary.

He's been ill, okay?

Since then I've played a number of Rangers or ranger analogues in a slew of games from Baldur's Gate to Guild Wars 2. The bow is a constant accessory, accompanied either by a sword or an axe, and while some games do push the class into a stand-off, plink-plink role, I still like to get in there and swing whenever possible.

Often, perhaps usually, there is also an animal companion. A pet. "Pet" is such an odd term to have gained so much currency in MMO gaming circles. The Magician has his summoned and bound elementals, the Necromancer her mindless undead slaves; Shamans of all stripes stand beside their spirit guides as they hurl curses while Beastmasters urge their trained killers forward. Pets, all of them.

For Everquest rangers, origin of a thousand cruel jokes

(Q: How can you tell a ranger tried to break into your house?
A: Your cat is camping his corpse)

the only pet was an unreliably Charmed animal, always likely to turn on its master mid-fight, often with fatal consequence. In the original Guild Wars rangers still needed to Charm their pets, something of a tussle, but once the glamor took hold the pet stayed as long as it was needed.

Tog3ther For3v3r

In GW2 the ranger arrives with a loyal and allegedly much-loved pet already by his side. It's an option at character select. Despite that, I don't believe I've seen my supposed feline soulmate for about 65 levels because  all a ranger needs do in the new Tyria is walk up to a Juvenile animal, click his fingers and watch it morph into  his willing accomplice, bodyguard, enforcer and escape plan of last resort. I swapped my "beloved" jungle cat for a Wolf-Bear and a Murellow weeks ago. (Which, come to think of it, is about the last time I saw my Warband...)

Given the source material, it really should come as no surprise that a Ranger makes a great, supportive team-mate. Robin Hood worked best in a group and Aragorn was the ultimate steadying hand in a crisis. Rangers (and their close analogue, Hunters) have a poor reputation for group-worthiness across many MMOs but that may have a lot more to do with the kind of personality drawn to play them than the skill set gifted them by design.

I know he's not much to look at...

The Ranger often has options for crowd control, being able to snare, root or pet- park adds. He can reduce agro range, cast invisibility or stealth across the group, even evac when all hope is lost. Often he can throw some heals and he frequently offers a smorgasbord of buffs. Sure, he's there mainly for the damage he can do, but a Ranger who focuses only on that risks contributing to the archetype's reputation for selfishness and monomania.

Still, in the end the Ranger walks apart. The skills he brings to a group are skills he has forged first for his own survival. They can be bent to the service of others but that's not why they were learned. As a choice for the player who wants to feel secure in his ability to go where he pleases and do as he will, yet still pull more than his weight in a group, the Ranger is hard to beat.

The Carnival Moves On : GW2

Call that a dynamic event? It's cultural vandalism, I tell you! The empty plinth in the Grand Piazza stands in mute testimony to the lengths to which some people will go to get attention. And I'm not just talking about Mad King Thorn, either!

There's something missing...

The pumpkins have all been packed away, the bats have flown back to their caves. The candy corn high as an elephant's eye has popped (although once in a while you can still see one flicker into view in some ghostly glitch). All that's left is that empty plinth and a guy in an unconvincing home-made Mad King costume.

I'd be spitting nails if it wasn't for this from ANet Dev Josh Foreman:

"I worked way too hard on that thing to throw it away! That would make me cry. Haha… spent a lot of my free time on it actually. You know it has 4,000 frames of animation, and I had to hand track every single frame that a splash happened on every single fish for the audio guys to sync it up. Not that we will never permanently destroy anything. In fact… well, I can’t say more than that. But NOT the lion statue. It’s the symbol of LA. Like the Statue of Liberty is for New York or the Eiffel Tower is for Paris."

You're a lot shorter than I expected

Although later in the same thread, from "North American Community Team Lead" Regina Buenaobra:

 "The Lion’s Arch lion statue is gone for now. Mad King Thorn really did a number on it. As to whether it will return—anything is possible."

I'm all for meaningful change but not the Lion !!  Which, of course, is the problem. You can have change to things that don't really matter and no-one will be upset, but then no-one will care much either. Or you can make a real and lasting change that affects everyone and trust the thrill to carry you through the complaints. The Lion is a great example of how hard it is even to tell which is which.

There's been much discussion of late about whether MMOs can or should have change. How much? How often? How deep? How sudden? Azuriel and Syl  both have something to say about that and so do their commenters. Some people think removing a bit of street furniture barely qualifies as change at all, while others practically need counseling.

C'mon, lady! Get a grip!

When it comes to change there's concern both over how sudden and unexpected it is and whether it's a one-time "you had to be there" thing or a "no hurry, we'll be here all week" affair.

When Rift threw its very first major event the climax was a one-off that many players missed. It didn't go down well and Trion have made sure since then to keep their events inclusive, in keeping with the changes they made throughout the game in late beta and just after launch, when the inconvenience of planar armies wiping out quest hubs and invading troops killing players all along the pathways was deemed to outweigh the excitement and Telon became a blander, if safer place.

I think it says something about spoons

It's far too early yet to say which way ArenaNet will jump. With Halloween down they've moved surprisingly quickly to announce the next, non-holiday event Lost Shores. The iconic statue may have vanished but at least we have beached whales! And flyposting! And endless speculation between now and the 16th of November, a day on which both I and Mrs Bhagpuss will be at work.

Will we miss it all again, like we missed three-quarters of Halloween? Whether we do or don't, plenty will. Does that matter? For all I know we may be enjoying Storm Legion so much by then that we'll opt out anyway. In the end we can't do it all and it would be crazy to try. On balance I'd rather miss out on something amazing than never have anything amazing to miss out on.

As to whether something can truly be called "amazing" if it goes on happening indefinitely to order, well that tends to depend on what's so amazing about it to begin with. If it's a Mad King tearing down a giant statue, that can really be amazing only once. An incredible, intricate work of art, though, that has the power to be amazing always.

Put it back. Now.

Candy Cornucopia : GW2

I was mildly annoyed when I found out that the Guild Wars 2 Halloween event was scheduled to start on the very day we flew to Barcelona for a week. After a day' spent dancing with the Mad King I'm beginning to think it was lucky timing.

Oh, I'd have liked to have seen the Mad King himself burst out of the fountain in Lion's Arch. That must have been spectacular. I just hope someone's got the blueprints to put that statue back together. One of my favorite places to hang out, that was.

The decorations are jolly good. Of course, Halloween decorations are all much of a muchness but these are mucher than most. The spooky lighting effects are efficiently atmospheric and the hanging bats that furl and unfurl their wings made me smile. Most of the work seems to have gone into Lion's Arch but there was a camp in Plains of Ashford that, I think, appears when certain events are completed and no doubt there are others. Even the Mists have been decorated, which struck me as beyond the call of duty.

As for the content, variable would be a diplomatic way of putting it. I spent an hour or so doing the first six stages of the Scavenger Hunt, which was moderately entertaining. It wouldn't have been much fun without the walkthrough  I had up, but then what scavenger hunt is? The Mad King appears to have been born that way, judging by the tales told by the many, many ghosts his increasingly psychotic childhood outbursts left behind.

It's true that one shouldn't do these things for the reward, but it has to be said that the reward when it came was paltry in the extreme. When I realized there were another six volumes to collect I decided I knew as much about the Rabid Royal as I cared to and left it at that.

The Lunatic Inquisition looked like a lot more fun. It wasn't. It was okay, if confusing. It's basically Sardines with added violence. Each thirteen-minute match seemed to comprise about five minutes of action at best, with the bulk of the time spent with almost everyone converted into Lunatics chasing round and round the map looking for the last Villager. Maybe there were just some good hiders on when I popped in.

Reaper's Rumble was better, in that it was a lot easier to follow and there were actual fights. Made me nostalgic for Rift's Warfronts or EQ2's Battlegrounds. Ah, Rift and EQ2. The former has Events down to an art and the latter has enough Halloween content to launch an entire F2P title. Maybe I'm spoiled after those, and this is GW2's first ever holiday event after all, but the comparisons don't favor the newcomer.

It's not that there isn't plenty going on. There are new, easy recipes that make food and potions (two things I never remember to use and which I really don't have the bag space to carry). There are fantastically demanding recipes that make skins for weapons, which you'd probably need to be as mad as the King to attempt, although you can get the same looks on a four-hour fade from Merchants for your Candy Corn.

Candy Corn is the currency du jour. You can mine it from nodes that look quite disturbing. Or you can just buy it in vast quantities from the Trading Post from people with more time and patience than you. Going rate as I write is 7c per corn. I bought 150 to finish my Monthly, where the mysterious ??? has now resolved itself to a frankly banal demand that we gorge ourselves silly on the sugary stuff.

Pumpkin Carving is another activity on offer. I do like the frenzied animation that goes along with it. Whether I'll get a hundred and fifty of the things chipped out in  two days I doubt. There are the doors that pop up inviting you to Trick or Treat and then there's a dungeon, which I haven't entered and jumping puzzles, which sound hellish. The little jumper right outside the bank in Lion's Arch nearly drove me demented so I'll not be trying the others. I did eventually manage to jump into the pot and get spat out as a spider. Once was enough.

Goodie bags drop passably frequently. So far all I've had out of mine is yet more corn and a smattering of food. Whether they can cough up anything worthwhile I'm not sure. Possibly there's a tiny chance one of the many new Holiday items from the Gem Store might fall out. That's where a lot of the supposedly interesting stuff is - costumes, pets, skins and the like. None of it actually interests me and ArenaNet have to make money, so good luck to them. I did take the free pair of devil horns, which look quite debonaire on an Asura.


That's my first impression. There's probably lots more going on that I have yet to discover. I'm glad it's all going to be over in a couple of days and I'm not at all sorry to have come late to this party. I have mixed feeling about holiday events in general and this one has a particularly enervating edge.

I just hope they put that fountain back the way it was.

Home Again Home Again Jiggety Jig

As a week's total silence indicates, we've been on holiday. Well, I say holiday. Maybe it was a secret mission where we infiltrated the hometown of the bots. You be the judge.

I never trusted those dwarves...

We also saw a real dragon.

I said "real" not "live".

I was hoping to keep in touch via the amazing new invention of "the internet" but apparently when hotels say "WiFi available in all rooms, free of charge" what they actually mean is "unless your room is more than ten feet from Reception, and then only if anyone knows the password, oh and by "free" we meant 5 Euros an hour". Still, it was nice for my laptop to get out and about for once, even if it never actually got switched on.

Consequently I returned to over 250 unread blog posts in my Reader. If, as was supposed to happen, we got WiFi installed at work while I was away, I might get through the backlog by the weekend. If not, well I read and enjoyed them all in another quantum universe.

Off to see what's happening in Tyria. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.