Can't We All Just Be Friends?

We all like a virtual dust-up. If we didn't we wouldn't be playing MMORPGs. They're all about the fighting, aren't they? Just about everything we ever do there involves combat at some point or other.
The majority of quests end in violence. Often begin with it, too, with plenty more liberally scattered along the way. Dungeoneering is home invasion on the grand scale. Raiding is violent revolution.

Then there's PvP: battlegrounds, realm vs realm, warfronts, world vs world, ganking, piracy, duelling, sovereignty - none of them amount to much more than a thin excuse for a ruck. You can gussie it up with a lot of talk about loyalty, pride and skill but really it's a bunch of kids trying to kick lumps out of each other in the park of a Saturday night because one lot looked at the other lot funny.

Crafting isn't much better.  Apparently innocuous activities like brewing and potion-making frequently involve the use of body parts ripped out of creatures (or people) who hadn't finished with them yet. Even picking up a few logs to make a chest of drawers generally involves killing half a dozen wolves and a goblin who had the temerity to think he was safe in his own part of the woods.

To quote The Slits - "There must be more to life"

I've never really had a problem with it. Well, how could I? It would be a bit like complaining tennis would be a fine game if it wasn't for all that knocking a ball across a net. Still, you can have too much of a good thing and despite what you might have heard not everything becomes a nail just because you're holding a hammer.

Of late I've taken to moaning about all the obligatory fighting that gets between me and GW2's Living Story narrative, where it does sometimes feel like trying to read a novel while the author challenges you to an arm-wrestling competition in the middle of every chapter. Hard to believe, I know, but sometimes yet another a fight really isn't synonymous with added value in an MMORPG and that doesn't only hold true for purely narrative content.

It was as I was exploring the excellent new "jumping puzzle" area added to the Silverwastes map in the last update that I realized that for once I wasn't being asked to fight anything. Nor even to avoid fighting anything. There just wasn't anything much there to be fought. It felt strangely liberating.

Clambering over those rocks, just exploring for the heck of it, made me recall a few other memorable explorations. There was that time in DAOC, when a bunch of us pushed all the way into Muspelheim not long after launch, before Mythic had found time to put any monsters in there. There were the hours I spent clambering around the rooftops in Felwithe; the days it took to find the way up to the Ironforge Airfield; all the many times I wandered across some unfinished dungeon or lair in Vanguard.

MMOs - they're all about the conversations you have, aren't they?

Thinking about it, some of my clearest, most lasting memories of nearly every MMO I've played consist of lengthy explorations in parts of the world where nothing actually lived, or indeed happened.  It isn't only exploring that goes better when things aren't trying to eat you either. I spent most of today sorting all the bags on eleven characters, cycling it all through two guild banks, getting it stacked and organized. That's one of my favorite ways to spend a Sunday. It's an experience that wouldn't be enhanced if I had to beat the banker around the head for thirty seconds every time I wanted to open another vault.

Then there's the gathering arts: foraging, mining, logging and all the rest. When I set out with my sickle in one hand and my basket in the other I instinctively search for the areas with the fewest creatures likely to chew on me. In EQ2, where gathering is a way of life, I used to know all the spots where you could just get on with filling your bags and forget about fighting for an hour or two.

Once you start to think about it there are plenty of activities in MMOs apart from exploring, gathering, crafting and listening to stories, that aren't obviously improved by close combat . All those shinies we love to collect, for example. The fun from those comes in searching for them, finding them and completing the collections, doesn't it? And what about achievements? Are the tick-boxes and titles you got for building snowmen or eating pies any less satisfying than the ones you got for killing a thousand foozles?

It's not the giving, its the receiving.

Then there's building and decorating, two in-game pastimes that have generally steered clear of combat in the past. The trend appears to be going the other way of late with plug-in home dungeons and do-it-yourself PvP arenas but at root homemaking remains primarily a non-combat option. As for the supposed bedrock of any game's longevity, socializing, it's often claimed that people continue to log in long after they've lost all interest in progressing their characters just so they can stand around in the safe zones chatting to their friends.

All of which makes me wonder if there would be any future for an MMORPG where combat was, at most, a minor background activity. What would be the commercial prospects for such a game? Would it attract any kind of audience? Would anyone pay to play something like that?

The history for non-combat MMOs isn't encouraging but there have been a few. A while back I wrote about The Endless Forest, arguably more of an art project than an MMO. Then there's Myst Online.  Both of those are still up and running but as community enterprises rather than commercial propositions.

Glitch, which I loathed, hoped to make money, launched, reverted to beta, then closed. The venerable "A Tale In The Desert" has done far better than that and does, I believe, run commercially to a degree although it's described in its indicia as "primarily self-funded". It can hardly be called mainstram though. The only self-identifying, openly commercial non-combat MMO I can recall was Seed. It wasn't a shining example; it closed down after just 149 days, making it possibly the shortest-lived MMO ever.

More to look at, less to kill? I dunno - when I go on holiday I always take a machete.

What all those examples have in common is that not one of them looks or plays much like a traditional MMO. Neither does the newest contender for the non-combat crown, Wander. I hope that one bucks the trend and does well. I'm all for diversity and variety. What I'd like to see one day, though, is something much closer to WoW, EQ2, LotRO, GW2 or any of the other several hundred roughly diku-mud-derived MMOs, only this time with much less focus on killing mobs or fighting other players.

Not a sandbox, where a non-combat role is one option among many so long as you do all the creative heavy lifting for yourself; there are a few of those and more due to come on-stream very soon. No, I'd like to see a themepark-style game with a plethora of professionally produced content provided and almost none of it combat.

Would it be feasible to provide sufficient new explorable areas, collections, achievements, tameable pets, crafting recipes, quests, events, storylines and all the rest to make it feel there was always enough to do without taking up 50% or more of the players' time by getting them to whittle health bars? Wouldn't that be prohibitively expensive?

Told you it would end in tears.

When you look at the incredible time and effort that goes into "balancing" combat classes for both PvE and PvP, a job that never, ever ends, and into the design and scripting of raids that are seen only by a small percentage of the playerbase, you'd have to think it's a possibility. When you consider the incredible work ANet's artists and map designers put in producing spectacles like the Bazaar of the Four Winds, The Durmand Priory Library or Glint's Lair, things they seem to be able to produce like shelled peas and which last about as long, you might decide the odds have improved.

Even if it was economically viable, though, would it work? Allowing that it was handled as well as the average moderately successful triple-A MMO? That's not a very high bar come to think of it. /wave Trion.

I'm not sure. Combat seems to be baked into the traditional themepark/diku MMO model. No matter how much fun you might be having decorating your nine-room mansion or sorting your crafting mats into ascending order by tier and tradeskill there always comes a point when you just want to get out there and kick some gnoll butt. Or maybe that's just me.

Still, I'd love to see someone try it someday.

The Past Is A Different Country: GW2

Ravious has a very positive post up about the latest Living Story installment, Seeds of Nightmare. I'm not quite as impressed as all that but I liked it too. Well, what there was of it.

Adrian observed in the comments yesterday " It was shorter than the last one and not a whole lot happens." That about does it. I would guess there's maybe 10-15 minutes of dialog and cut scenes. There is a lot of really quite intriguing back-story and lore but the main storyline comes to a dead stop.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that after completing the entire episode I have no more idea why Caithe took Glint's egg, where she went with it or what she might be about to do next than I had two weeks ago, when she ran off with the dam' thing in the first place. I do, however, know a lot more than I did about the Sylvari in general and several of that race's featured players in particular. If I was asked to sum up what I now know I think something along the lines of "they're a race of sociopaths" would probably cover it.

Take my word for it - you don't want to. Not this lot.

Of course, that description fits the Asura pretty tightly too. It's hard to say which sequence in the current chapter is the more unpleasant - the Inquest and their vivisection lab for sentient races or the Sylvari runaway-slave-recovery/ethnic cleansing squad. Either would sit a lot more happily against the relentless grimdark of The Secret World than the watercolor wash and neon rainbow backdrop of Tyria.

Safe to say there aren't a lot of laughs in this episode. The only one of either Destiny's Edge or the Biconics to make an appearance is Marjory and she's never a barrel of laughs at the best of times. Even less so now she's carrying her dead sister in the form of a six-foot sword and brooding on fantasies of revenge.

She and your character visit The Pale Tree, who is not best pleased when she learns you let Caithe get away with the egg. She's positively snappy in fact. She reminded me of a mother who just found out her son "forgot" to deliver a note from school. I never trusted her anyway and not one thing I have heard her say thus far gives me any reason to change my mind.

Pwincess! Come back from the edge!

After that it's the usual traipsing about to find this or that location, before entering an instance, where you have some fights. The McGuffin this time around is a handful of Memory Seeds that let you relive significant events in Caithe's past, the idea being that you might thereby get some handle on her future, viz and to wit where she went with the egg. Well I can't say that worked for me. Don't have a clue.

The traveling is done as yourself with Marjory tagging along. There's a nice new widget that uses a "...warm, warmer, now you're getting cold..." routine to locate the exact spot and then it's into Caithe's memories you go. Marjory stays outside, presumably guarding your inert body, while you get to spin and leap about in the form of Caithe.

Caithe is a thief. I have a level 80 Thief but I rarely play her. Leveling up I pretty much used the bow and spammed Heartseeker and that was it. Shadow Refuge if that didn't work. Whether Caithe's skills bear any resemblance to a player-thief's I can't say, partly out of ignorance and partly because I didn't bother to examine them. I followed the tried and tested method of spamming everything all the time whenever it wasn't on cooldown, dodge included.

Look, I've told you once. You'll be going in the bag if this carries on.

This had me throwing myself around like Batroc ze Leaper on amphetamines but it seemed to get the job done. I died once, thereby discovering Caithe has no downed state and the health of her enemies resets so I made sure not to die again, which wasn't difficult. Normally I'd say I'd rather play my own character but frankly anything that gets these obligatory fight sequences over faster is worth a try.

There's a bug in the Inquest Lab section where Caithe can get stuck in perma-stealth, meaning she can't fight or interact with objects - game over, start the instance again in other words. That happened to me but luckily Faolain was already in combat so I just sat back and watched while she cleared the room. She's unkillable but she has the DPS of an elderly armadillo so it took a while.

Oh yes, Faolain. Wherever you go in Caithe's head Faolain is sure to be there. She's Caithe's quondam lover and current leader of The Nightmare Court, a bunch of bona fide, full-on psychopaths who broke away from The Pale Tree a couple of decades ago so they could be free to act like emo teenagers. And kill people. Most of this chapter is effectively their origin story.

Canach shows his softer side. I think he's over that now.

It's also Canach's origin story and Trahearne's origin story. It's like a Secret Origins Annual! They come out of things about the opposite of what I'd have guessed. Trahearne acts like a stubborn, bigoted ass while Canach is empathic and sympathetic. I wondered if someone swapped a Post-It on someone else's desk back in the writers' room. Can't deny I found it intriguing though.

On it goes like that. Lore, backstory, characterization, no plot progression. Having riled up The Fans throughout Season One by seemingly turning their faces against anything that happened in Tyria prior to 2012 Earth Time, the writers appear to have done a one-eighty and decided the past is where it's at. Or The Fans are where the money comes from and long-term future of the game, if it's going to have one, has to be curated to their satisfaction. Both, probably.

I played a bit of Guild Wars. Origins around launch, Eye of The North and Origins again much later, when I was warming up for GW2. A smattering of the rest - I own all the expansions. I am no kind of GW lore buff though. About all I know of Abaddon or The White Mantle are the names. Consequently I am beginning to feel slightly at sea. I have to wonder how appealing this stuff is to the GW2 players who only know GW2.

Pwincess! Pwincess! I'm sorry I yelled at you. Oh, where did she go?

I imagine that's the demographic that wasn't quite so gosh-wow over the books in the Durmand Priory Library; the players who'd quite like the story to be more about the big dragon we're fighting now and less about things that happened twenty years ago. There are rumblings of dissatisfaction on the forum to this effect although that proves nothing. Rumblings of dissatisfaction is the forum.

It'll all lead somewhere. Most probably to an expansion in the Spring or early Summer. All will no doubt be forgiven and forgotten then. Meanwhile we'll take our story in drip-feed form and like it. It's not like we have a choice.

What's more, the story formed only the most minor part of this update. There was a big revamp of the PvP game, a small addition to the overland map and a humungous new jumping puzzle. To no-one's surprise more than my own it's the jumping puzzle that looks like being the highlight. It may well be getting its own post here, when I have time to explore it further. I spent a very enjoyable hour there today, mostly taking screenshots of my Charr Ranger in heroic poses (see above).

Charr ranger is categorically the worst class/race combo for jumping puzzles so next time I'll be taking an Asura. That'll mean a lot of screenshots looking up. As for that story about a big dragon...next year for that I guess. Hope he's the patient type of dragon.

Skip To The Good Part : GW2

Sometime today the latest installment of Guild Wars 2's Living Story will hit the megaservers. I'm a little vague as to what chapter we're on but I know there's a trailer on YouTube. It's very short and choppy and when I watched it on a Tablet at work a few days ago it made me feel momentarily depressed because I knew I'd have to play through the unedited version eventually.

The first Living Story "Season" was muddled, chaotic and frequently infuriating. It had highs and lows and plenty of plateau states to bridge them. For all its flaws and shortcomings, however, I saw every single episode to its conclusion on both of my accounts. I never felt I wanted to skip one.

ArenaNet fielded a lot of criticism over LS1 and clearly it was criticism they took to heart. The second arc has been much, much tighter; more focused, more purposive, more targeted than the first. The writers have made a heroic effort to reconnect their rambling narrative with the lore established in the first Guild Wars. They have re-introduced important players from the past of both games: Destiny's Edge, Trahearne, Canach, The Pact.

In another popular move a significant amount of new virtual real estate has been added, first with the Dry Top map and then the adjoining Silverwastes. The achievement structure has been re-tooled to appeal to actual Achievers. All of the content has been allocated as much permanency as any content in an MMO can ever expect to enjoy.

All of this and more has been managed and yet the result, for me, is an increasing loss of interest. When each new chapter drops I dutifully follow the markers, talk to the NPCs, watch the cut scenes, grind through the fights, collect my rewards and that's it. It's all done in one evening. It takes maybe a couple of hours.

Turn round real slow Pwincess...I think it's really them!

After doing the story instances on one account I lose any interest in repeating them on the other. I just open my mail to flag the account in case I might one day want to come back to it; something that looks increasingly unlikely.

The open world maps fare a little better. When Dry Top was new I returned to it a number of times over several weeks. Silverwastes, however, has only seen my characters on the first couple of days and once later on when I had a new build I wanted to test. Other than for the rewards there really seems no reason to go back and the rewards don't do much for me.

The fundamental problem with LS2 from my perspective is how very formulaic it has become, and in so short a time, too. The first season was a hotch-potch. An awful lot of it didn't make much sense. Some of the writing was really quite poor. What it never was, however, was predictable.

We lived through a refugee crisis, saw huge, zone-wide attacks across multiple maps, explored new dungeons, met a whole raft of new characters, reveled in the best event ever added to the game (Marionette), took part in an election, even played a cameo role in a film noir pastiche. Mysterious artifacts appeared, entirely unannounced, all across Tyria and The Mists. A major city was turned into a battleground for weeks on end.

How d'you expect me to keep up with all this dragon stuff?
I've been here two years and I only just found my own kitchen last week.

LS1 was an attempt at a distributed narrative. Not always a successful attempt, that's undeniable, and it was certainly an attempt whose ambition was rarely recognized at the time. In retrospect, however, and particularly with the second season for comparison, I feel a little sorry I didn't appreciate it more. Although I did give it a B- which is a passing grade.

Let's not get too revisionist here. LS1 was no great work of art. Neither was it revolutionary or even particularly original in its approach. Plenty of MMOs have attempted distributed or accretive narratives before GW2 and some of them have made a better fist of it. Probably most of them. Still, it was more interesting and certainly more daring than what has replaced it.

The current Season appears to have condensed into a format as rigid as a crossword puzzle. For the main narrative, each week we speak to some NPCs, go to an instance, fight a mini-boss, speak to some more NPCs, go to another instance, fight a boss. Then it ends.

Some of the instances are spectacular it's true. Some of the boss fights have interesting mechanics (not interesting to me - I'd prefer a "Skip Fight" button - but they amuse some people). Regardless of the quality, however, the whole thing feels increasingly formulaic. It's all very well MMOs using repetitive structures - indeed it's intrinsic to the form - but when the player begins to notice the repetition that indicates a problem.

There has to be a better way...

The new, permanent open world content is much the same. Dry Top and Silverwastes have no real "feel" as parts of Tyria. They look and play like instanced battlegrounds not open world maps. It's as though all the effort that was expended throughout the original game to try and conceal the repetitive nature of the ironically-named "Dynamic Events" has finally been deemed a waste of development time. Instead of events triggering each other in cascading chains that branch according to outcome we get a series of set pieces on an unvarying timer.

It's a bit dull. I think that's what I'm saying. And it requires more effort than I feel it deserves. I'm not bored with the Living Story as such. I still want to know what happens next. I'm just not sure I can be bothered to trudge through the hoops to find out. I might just watch the highlights on YouTube. Someone's sure to post the cut scenes.

I'm not bored with GW2 itself either. I'm still exploring the world. There's a lot I haven't seen yet and a lot of what I have seen I've forgotten. I'll happily go round again. There are plenty of places in Tyria where it's fun just to spend time and be. Sadly, neither of the new maps is one of those places.

Twenty omegas to take a tower. Can we say "Overkill"?

As for WvW, since Yak's Bend graduated to Tier 2 after the last Tourney every match has been exciting, especially across the weekends. We have a bunch of great commanders and there's nearly always something going on. The fighting is more intense, there's more of it and it happens more often. The results are not always easy to predict.

Mrs Bhagpuss suggested a new build so I tried it and then tweaked it to an extreme. It's working very well for me. It certainly makes a change, not dying every second fight, although there's a question over whether I could solo a sentry let alone a camp. Still, I'm hell on wheels when it comes to holding a ring.

WvW somehow manages to be both repetitive and unpredictable at the same time. That's very much what I look to an MMO to provide. The open world of Tyria offers a wonderful environment to explore and relax in, which is also very much something I come to MMOs to experience. I'm not quite sure what value the current iteration of Living Story adds.

Today's LS update will be the last before Wintersday. That's good. I've about had enough of it already, short though the recent run has been, and I'm really looking forward to Wintersday this year. I didn't pay it much attention last go round, a oversight I intend to correct.

Get your airship warmed up, Tixx! My bank's full of stuffing and there are minis to be made. Saving the world from dragons? That can wait 'til next year.

More Is Less : EQ2

When I came back to EQ2 on a semi-regular basis last month I had to decide which character would take first crack at the new expansion. The choice was between my Berserker, already sitting comfortably at the then-max level of 95 and my Beastlord, just a few bubbles behind in the middle of 94.

The Berserker offered a couple of rather convincing arguments as to why he should get the call. For one thing he had two maxed craft skills: Weaponsmithing and Adorning. The Beastlord barely knows what a crafting table looks like. More importantly, the Berserker as a class is just more fun to play.

In fact it's pretty much easy-mode when it comes to soloing. Spec and gear a Berserker appropriately and you get something not dissimilar to The Tasmanian Devil if he had Wolverine's regen mutation. Basic strategy consists of running into the middle of a bunch of mobs and spinning in a circle until everything's dead. And that's without even popping the merc.

"You do have all the proper scrollwork for this merchandize? Correct?"

The Beastlord, on the other hand, is comparatively fiddly and significantly more fragile. There's a whole lot of building and finishing going on, plus a roster of pets that all do different things, and a bunch of stances and who knows what-all else going on. You have to think when you play a Beastlord. It's fun when you're in the mood but if you're planning to play mostly at the end of the evening, in short bursts, that's a mood that might not always be easy to summon.

So, Berserker it was: which brought up a problem. Due to a series of complicated and less than foresightful decisions, the Berserker isn't on my All Access account and neither is my All Access account in my name, which means I can't transfer him. Since Age of Malice opened for AA Accounts a couple of weeks before it opened for F2P that meant I'd either have to sub or wait.

I subbed. You'd imagine that would be an unalloyed improvement. I'm not so sure it is.

G`Thal's not quite the stickler for details that Agamennus is. That used to be a thing.

There was a very good reason that the Berserker was on a F2P account to begin with. He was born on the day the prototype F2P server, Freeport, allowed the creation of permanent characters. Some stage of the beta - I forget the exact details. I could have used my regular AA account back then but I chose not to because I specifically wanted to play under the restrictions F2P demanded.

At that time I was quite jaded with EQ2. The idea of a less-forgiving, less-accommodating version was appealing. I paid for the one-time $5.00 Silver upgrade, which removed just about all of the really irritating restrictions, leaving what I felt were tantamount to improvements. I had, for example, far less bag space, although it was still far more than many MMOs offer as a maximum. That meant I couldn't just hoard everything until I ended up with a huge mess that would take me days to clean up. Then there were the restrictions on what gear could be equipped, which meant that the gear I crafted or got from quests or drops seemed much more valuable and desirable. A number of the supposed clouds had linings that positively gleamed.

Comes with over 5m status!

On balance I felt that EQ2, played under the "Silver" regime, was probably the best iteration of the game I'd experienced. Lots of the "barriers" that I was regularly being exhorted to subscribe to remove I came to see as benefits. Not being able to change the slider for AA experience led directly to my Berserker becoming, by some margin, the most filled-out, complete character I have ever played since launch and having to think about every item he equipped led to him having better gear than my characters usually enjoy.

I even really liked buying "Unlockers" from the Station Cash store to modify armor, weapons or spells above my Silver status into ones he could use. I found that to be a much more involving, meaningful and enjoyable "choice" in gameplay terms than most of the choices I've been offered in MMOs. It was always tangibly satisfying to use an unlocker on a Fabled drop and see it turn into something useable. Those unlockers cost 50 cents each, half that when the SC came from a sale as it often did. It always felt like money well spent.

You also had to buy classes and races separately (in bundles of three), something I really appreciated. Doing that was just plain fun in the way buying a donut is - pointless, self-indulgent fun. The range and variety of restrictions and the means by which they could be individually or collectively overcome opened up  whole avenues of creative play for me and I consider the first couple of years after Freeport arrived to be the highlight of my tenure in EQ2, at least in terms of actual gameplay.

The 66-slotter.
More inventory in a single bag than you get in some entire games

Over time, sadly, most of the restrictions got whittled down. The inventory slots were opened up, everyone could wear Legendary and Fabled gear and use Master spells and abilities. Eventually the whole Silver tier was done away with leaving just Free to Play or Subscribed as the options. The differences now are primarily that F2P players get fewer character slots, can't use broadcast chat channels or the (outgoing) mailing system and have to pay per item to sell on the Broker, while Subscribers get a play-money stipend, a discount at the store and lots of bonuses to xp and various in-game currencies. Oh, and the AA slider is still locked on F2P although there's no mention of that in the FAQ.

So, for the first time, my Berserker can send things in the mail and sell anything on the broker, which would be all fine and dandy if it wasn't for another, coincidental, change that happened right around the same time I paid his dues. Along with the expansion came a couple of the usual "quality of life" improvements, from which everyone benefits, whether or not they bought the box. In this case it's access to both the Broker and the Mail from anywhere in the world - providing you're an All Access member.

We have that in GW2 of course and I never think twice about it. It's just how Tyria operates. Norrath however, doesn't. In Norrath instant access to mail and brokerage services from anywhere is just WRONG. I remember when we didn't even have mailboxes for Brell's sake! I remember when getting a mailbox that would work from the inside of your inn room was a big deal! I remember when the proximate location of the nearest Broker was a material factor in deciding where to live!

Giving me free access to these facilities from the UI does not enhance my gameplay. It diminishes it. Fortunately I have walked this road long enough now to recognize these potholes before I fall into them. I may be paying for these "enhanced" services but I darn well don't have to use them and I'm not going to. Well, not when it doesn't suit me.

UI functions represented as physical objects in the gameworld.
That's the way to do it.

If I have mail I still go to the mailbox to collect it. It's nice that I can send mail now as well - that's a perk I do appreciate. I still go to the supercilious, sarcastic broker in East Freeport for most of my marketplace needs. Now I can sell there as well as buy I visit him even more often. Judging by the number of oversized mounts that still get in the way I'm not the only one using his services although since, for the while at least, we have no option but to go to the Bank when we want to get something out of store, it's probably the Banker opposite that most have come to see. No doubt remote banking services are already next thing up on some dev's "play the game for you" list.

The line between texture and inconvenience can be hard to define. Someone at ANet decided that buying and selling on the Trading Post remotely was fine but you'd have to go to an NPC to pick up your items or money. That was probably motivated at least in part by the desire to sell consumable pop-up NPCs in the cash shop but also by an awareness that you need to give players reasons to congregate at facilities in cities if the game is going to look like there are actually people playing it.

Too much convenience and the whole experience risks feeling empty and unconvincing; too little risks provoking players into looking around for somewhere less irritating to spend their time and their money. At the moment, across the genre as a whole, I tend to feel the pendulum has swung just a little too far in favor of convenience but there are plenty of signs that it's beginning to fall back. In the meantime I'll just try and exercise a little personal restraint.

Rallics Of The Past : EQ2

As far as content goes, EQ2's Altar of Malice expansion seems to have been well-received, by and large. Still, there have been a lot of grumblings and mutterings among the faithful concerning two aspects: the supposedly inferior perks and/or excessive cost of the Collector's Edition and the approach the dev team has taken over xp gain for the added five levels.

On the CE I have nothing to add beyond that I've yet to see one for any MMO that I'd have given more than a few dollars above base price for. On the latter, well, Feldon at EQ2 Wire felt strongly enough about it to write an editorial on the subject that just about covers everything.

It seems the feathers of a proportion of the playerbase have been ruffled particularly brutally by two separate decisions: to reduce xp in "contested dungeons" outside of the expansion and also in Dungeon Maker instances. The details of exactly what was included, who the changes affected and precisely how the xp was altered are arcane beyond the patience or interest of anyone but the most dedicated EQ2 archivist and opinions vary over whether and to what degree these changes were either necessary or appropriate. What no-one argues, however, is that some degree of choice on how to approach leveling was removed from the players. Taking away peoples' options rarely goes down well.

A question that I fear will soon become all too familiar...

On top of that, as I mentioned earlier, the tradeskill questline tops out with three more craft levels yet to go. Feldon has a sobering analysis in the article already linked of what that means to the average crafter. It's not pretty.

The situation is compounded by the mature (irony unintended) state of EQ2's playerbase. Many, possibly most, players have several max-level adventure characters; plenty of players maintain a stable of max-level crafters. Even those who are comfortable taking their first character from 95 to100 largely by questing in the current expansion will balk at going through those same quests (let alone those writs!) over and over just to bring all their team into contention for the new end-game content. 

I have a lot of sympathy with those who feel the whole "we made great new stuff and we want you all to appreciate it" approach has gone too far. You'd like to think that if the content is that great (and what I have seen so far really is pretty darn good) it should be able to stand on its own without needing to be propped up by nerfs to potential competition from the game's past glories. 

I can at least look at this with some equanimity. My own enjoyment is largely unaffected. save as the furore sours the mood of the players around me, which it observably is doing. I'm happy enough questing away and I'm in no hurry. Playing EQ2 as my secondary MMO, it's unlikely I'll have time to level more than one adventuring class to 100 before changes have been made or new content added anyway. Tweaks to the xp rate are already happening. Moreover, the nerfs don't seem to have affected mentored xp at all. That remains a very viable option for nipping ahead of the questing curve, should I need to apply a boost.

As for crafting I plan on sticking to just the one class for the time being. Having completed the questline I am now leveling my Weaponsmith purely by doing the crafting daily in Twilight Sea. I tend to play GW2 for most of the evening then spend an hour or so in Norrath before bedtime, of which Skrit's crafting daily takes 5-10 minutes and gives about 8% or so of a craft level. At that rate it will take me a couple of months and I'm comfortable with that.

As of a couple of nights ago, though, I have a new motivation to get to 100 sooner rather than later. Skrit tasked me with catching the grimling runner to find out what he was delivering. I vaguely remembered a "grimling runner" from old Luclin but I couldn't immediately place the name. It seemed an odd "crafting" quest but who can say for sure what goes on in a ratonga's mind? So off I went to catch me a grimling.
 
Snaring him was simple enough. When I moved in to search his fallen body, as well as the quest item, something else flashed up in the loot window. At first I did genuinely think I'd imagined it but no, the grimling runner had indeed dropped the pattern for a Rallic Pack. What's more, to my great surprise and delight, it remained in my packs after I returned to Skrit for the hand-in.

Luclin has been whole (sort of) for months now but I felt the moon had truly risen again when I examined the recipe and received a scribable version for my recipe book. The Rallic Pack was a low-level signature quest of the Luclin era in EQ1, a quest I did several times and of which I have fond, if somewhat vague, memories even now.

I wanted my Rallic Pack then and I want my Rallic Pack now. I'm not yet sure what making one will require nor how useful it will be if I succeed in making it (85% weight reduction doesn't have quite the same draw these days), but I want it.

Things I really want in MMOs are rare. I savor them when I find them. To get my Rallic Pack I need an Artisan level of 100, which, I think, means having any tradeskill at that level. It's a tasty carrot to take away some of the bitterness in the grind.

Ratflation and Ratblocks : EQ2

Time was they only asked you to kill ten rats. Those days are over. Now it's a dozen of these, fifteen of those, twenty of the other.

Not complaining. Always liked a kill quest, me. These odd worlds we spend so much time in? They run on murder. Solution to every problem it is. Rats in the cellar? Kill 'em. Goblins in the barn? Kill 'em. Bandits stole your hat with the feather in it? Kill 'em.

Never kill 'em all, mind. You'd think that'd be a better way to solve the problem for good but no. It's always 'go and kill ten so the rest get the message'. Specially where revenge comes into it. Lizardmen killed your brother? Bribe some passing stranger to kill a dozen of them so they'll...

Ogres. What can you expect?

So they'll what, exactly? Feel your pain? Empathize? Desist from fratricide in the future? Maybe it's just so you feel you're doing something. Revenge - one of the stages of grief. Actually, the only stage.

Paid murder's not just for farmers or the recently bereaved. It's the tried and tested methodology of the research scientist too. Suspect the food supply's been poisoned? Toss a few chunks to the nearest Joe with a bow, tell him to go feed some wild animals then come back and tell you which ones died. Strange green glow around those weird little guys who turned up in the night? Send some adventurer off to kill a bunch, hack off a few chunks of flesh and bring it back for tests.

There's almost no problem that can't be sorted out quick and clean by murder. Just gotta kill enough people. If the first twenty didn't do the job send your amateur assassin back to take out twenty more. This is how we live now.

It's not so bad. Yes, there are more to kill. Always more to kill. But look how much faster they die nowadays. Really, when you think of it, a Kill Twenty is a lot less than a Kill Ten in the old money. More like a Kill Five. Not that anyone ever asked for just five. Well, not often.

Whatever way you slice it, having twenty to kill when there are forty or fifty milling about right there, in the camp or the field or the temple, that's a lot better than a kill list of five and you can't find 'em. Come to that, if only it was five.

I am. It's all on Zam.

This guide was handing out quests in Cardin Ward, Sunday afternoon. Why she was in Cardin Ward? Beats me. Oh, I know. She was doing something for some ghosts and Cardin Ward's in Obol Plains which is in The Ethernere which is where you go when you die. One of the places anyway.  So, ghosts.

Never would have known about it at all but someone was talking. Never would have gone all the way over there but he showed what she was handing out. Sixty-six slot backpack. Sixty-six slots. Say that again. That's like the biggest backpack you can imagine and a half. Worth some traveling, for sure.

A thousand plat says we never set foot in Kael

With guide quests you can't hang around. These guides, they pop up, do their thing, pop off. Never know when or if they'll come back. Sometimes you have to finish the whole thing before they go, which is a stresser. This one, no. Got it in the book, you can finish it whenever.

If you can find it. First problem right there. For some reason it's under Kael Drakkel although what it has to do with giants appears to be precisely nothing. Don't believe you even go to Kael. Asked her about that she had some excuse. Didn't really listen to be honest. Or much care. Sixty-six slots.

Plan was to knock the whole thing off this afternoon then do a little write-up here, go into the whole "Guide" thing, how we used to have GMs and Guides doing little turns all over, all the while, whether that was good or bad, like that. Not happening.


Ran into a problem early on. Found the little island in Phantom Sea with the Newsie (don't ask - nicer not to know), got her to explain what she wanted (hard going), found the first thing easily enough. Vellum. Undead rangers have it. Why? No idea. Apparently you can't wander morbidly around the ruins of the old ranger guild hut in what's left of Kithicor Forest without you have some vellum in your... on your... bones.

Old place has seen better days. Although, come to think of it, no it hasn't.

So, that part zipped by. Needed a dozen, killed a dozen, still a dozen wandering about. Good start on the vellum. Shame about the ink. Naturally, you want vellum, it's to write on; you want to write, you need ink. (Pen? Nope. Going to use her finger for a pen - again, best not to question these people - just go along with whatever they want. Saves killing a dozen Rotted Treants for twigs at least).

Ink comes from squid. We don't have squid. We have octopuses. Near enough. Off to kill a dozen. Must be a long message. Except - no octopuses. No Savage Entanglers to give them their Sunday best name.

Quick! Get the camera!

Okay, some. Four found in just over an hour. Flew all over, low above the waves, looking. Used up a bunch of otter totems searching below the water. Thick like fog down there. Miserable.

There was a named one, called Plongeur. Fancy Dan. Killed him. He didn't count (didn't drop anything either) but he brought along a pal. He counted. That was the first. Proof of concept you could call it.

Right place then. Set off slaughtering sealife by the score - piranha, sea anglers, eels, turtles, some kind of weird biped thing on the sea floor - trying to make a bit of space for Entanglers to come in. Got a couple, three. Not nearly enough. So too slow.

So there it lies. To be picked away at as and when. There's a lot of flying to and fro between the 'kill fifteen Allu`thoa'  on one island and 'kill eight sulfuric viscids' somewhere else. It'll get done in time. With a sixty-six slot bag at the end of it you just better bet it'll get done.

Proves the point though. Nothing wrong with a bit of ratflation. It's the ratblocks you gotta worry about.

The Numbers Game : WoW, EQ2

As I observed not too long ago, it's been obvious for some time that Warlords of Draenor was generating a lot more, and a lot more positive, interest than the previous couple of WoW expansions managed. Even so, the revelation that WoD fever had tipped WoW's subscription pile back over the 10,000,000 mark was a surprise.

The pull of that vortex is now so strong it's moved on from consolidating the faithful to sucking in even the furthest outliers but no, I am not here to announce that I have joined the merry band of pod-people. I'm just here to compare that number, ten million, with the very much smaller number that Feldon of EQ2Wire has been dropping into conversation of late.

The number in question is 50,000. Apparently that's the the current "active" population of EQ2. Here's a quote "Otherwise, a game with some 50,000 active players gets unfairly tagged as a “ghost town”." I have no idea what the provenance of this 50k figure is but it sounds exceedingly low, not just by comparison to WoW's 10m, but even to Everquest's heyday of 500k.

So, what does constitute a viable population for an MMO from a large operator these days? If Feldon's figure is there or thereabouts accurate then it would seem fifty thousand customers gets you regular content additions up to and including an annual expansion (and one of pretty darn high quality at that, as these gorgeous screenshots attest). I believe Mark Jacobs suggested 50k would be sufficient to keep Camelot Unchained in business. Meanwhile Carbine's WildStar is widely perceived to be struggling with "hundreds of thousands of active players" (source).

No-one seems to like giving out detailed population figures any more but companies do seem happy to show vague traffic-lights on their server status page. As I write this late on Friday evening GMT, ten of EQ2's sixteen "Live" servers are showing "medium" and one "high". We are still some hours off of US prime-time. For that matter, a dozen of Everquest's eighteen servers are at "medium" too.

What "Medium" means in the context I have no idea. Could be a couple of hundred players, could be a couple of thousand. About all you can say is it must be better than "Low", which is the status for every one of Landmark's nine servers (and both of Dragon Prophet's but no one really cares about that).

In the end, as a player, I guess not much matters beyond enough people playing and paying to keep the lights on and the updates flowing. Then, too, the numbers playing very much do not seem to convert directly into quantity or quality of content provided. It's probably a fair bet that GW2 has ten times, if not twenty or thirty times, the players EQ2 does but the Altar of Malice expansion feels at least as substantial and satisfying (and considerably more coherent) than the sporadic, stuttering scattershot entertainment doled out this year in The Living Story.

It does rather feel as though one of these MMOs is over-performing while the other slides by on a bare minimum. Of course not everyone has to play by the exact same rules. As J3w3l points out, WoW seems to have special dispensation when it comes to keeping their vast horde of active players from wandering off: "How in the hell after over a year of absolutely no new content can they gain subscribers. Any other mmo doing that would be shutting down its servers about now yet they are thriving."

WoW loyalists, and there seem to be an inordinate number of them, are fortunate. They exist in a safe, certain world alien to almost all other MMO players. There is simply no prospect for them of waking up one morning to learn that their favorite MMO has gone dark. They certainly don't need to subscribe or play to feel secure that their game of choice will be there when and if they need it. Not for current or ex-WoW players the angst and uncertainty that LotRO players most likely feel gnawing at the back of their minds every day these days. No chance of Blizzard doing as NCSoft did with City of Heroes and closing down WoW because it's making money, just not enough.

I'm happy WoW's doing well. Much better that than for it to be slipping slowly into oblivion. A high tide lifts all boats as they say. I just hope some of the leaky vessels the rest of us prefer to sail in can keep bailing long enough to make it to their own safe harbors.