Get Lucky : GW2

Today's update in GW2 took me somewhat by surprise. I was expecting the much-heralded Balance changes but I thought we still had a couple of weeks to go before Lunar New Year, since the Chinese New Year on which it's modeled doesn't end until until February 15th.

Apparently Chinese and Lunar years are more than a year long. The last one started on January 28th 2017 and it's still going strong. We seem to have a bit of overlap.

As I think I've commented a few times before, holidays in Tyria can be underwhelming. There aren't all that many of them and they tend not to change very much. Lunar New Year is a slight exception in that we're at least guaranteed to get a different animal every time. This time it's the Dog's turn.

Lunar New Year might be my favorite Tyrian holiday although that phrase could go into the dictionary under "damning with faint praise". Still, it does at least manage a couple of features that I look forward to more than anything we get at Halloween or Wintersday.

For a start, there's Dragon Ball. I'm a small-time fan of instanced battleground PvP in other MMOs but GW2's standard offering takes itself far too seriously for my taste. Dragon Ball is cheerfully anarchic by comparison and I always enjoy its short visit.

Unfortunately, at my advancing age it gives me a lot of shoulder pain from the sudden changes of direction and the general tension. If I do the two-match daily on all three accounts that's about enough for me.

Then there's the financial element. Every day you can buy 16 Lucky Envelopes per account from the vendor in Divinity's Reach. They cost a gold each and you're guaranteed to get at least 88 silver of that back in every one you open. If you're lucky you can get something worth ten times as much.

There are other things in there that sell for a fair few silver too. On a good day I make 8-16g per account. On a bad day I just about break even. It's like gambling without the risk. I always enjoy it.

This year, as there was for Wintersday, there's also a race. It seems that now we have mounts ANet are determined we're going to use them. It's not particularly original but at least it is something new so I'm not complaining. Plus I really like races.

So, it seems, do a lot of other people, at least they do when they haven't got the achievements yet. There were over seventy riders in the race I did an hour ago.

It's a harder course than the Wintersday one and longer. Nevertheless, I was able to get the Mini Gourdog (don't ask) that comes with finishing in under three and a half minutes, even though on one run I was using the base model rented raptor that's your only choice if you haven't bought Path of Fire.

Speaking of minis, there's a great one for sale on the vendor for just under nine gold. It's a "horse" with a skritt rider. Tyria famously has no horses so I imagine the ANet devs responsible for holiday planning must have come out in a cold sweat when someone told them next year is The Year of the Horse. If this is the dry run for 2019 I foresee strong sales of tar and feathers in China.

There's also a new "adventure". Adventures in GW2 are one of the most inaccurately named additions to the game in five years. They came with Heart of Thorns, they were hated by almost everyone and they were conspicuously absent from Path of Fire.

I thought we'd seen the last of them but apparently I was counting my chickens to soon (and roosters were so last year). I haven't tried the new one yet but I probably will at some point. Can't say i'm looking forward to it.

Anyway, there's stuff to do that we haven't done to death yet, which is nice. Also, since you can't fight anything there, Divinity's Reach doesn't crash every five minutes like the rest of the game does right now. To no-one's surprise the vast raft of changes to skills and systems that came with today's patch have introduced some bugs that make all three modes, PvE, WvW and sPvP largely unplayable until they find out what they broke and get it fixed.

With a bit of luck that'll all be sorted out by the time I wake up tomorrow. I'll probably find out after I've bought my Lucky Envelopes and lost another few games of Dragon Ball.

Oh, wait - they fixed it while I was writing this. I guess my luck's in!

Stay lucky!

Please Let Me Come Mooch Round Your House : EQ2

It was this post at MassivelyOP that started it. I was nodding away in agreement with by M.J. for once as she listed EQ2's unparalleled storage options, when I came across the section on what she calls "stashes".

I've been aware of both Personal and Guild Depots for a very long time, all the way back to when they were first introduced to the game. I have a vague memory of them once being either ferociously expensive or extremely rare or more probably both.

That hasn't been the case for a long while. Mrs. Bhagpuss had some back when she was playing, half a decade ago and I vaguely remember buying one once myself. I'm fairly sure there were some in our Guild Hall for a while, although the glory days of the Guild Hall mostly happened while I was busy in Tyria.

Similarly, I was dimly aware of the existence and usage of Prestige Home Portals. I'd even installed one or two in some my own houses, although I couldn't tell you which.

Portal to Mara

What I had never done until this weekend was to put all of this together. As I read M.J.'s effusive description of the capacity of the Depots the full potential began to sink in. I decided to do a little research and the results were more than just surprising - they were quite literally game-changing.

• The storage capacity of the Personal Harvest Depot (Large) is breathtaking. It holds one thousand unique items and each item can stack to 99,999.
• You can set permissions on the house so that anyone with "Trustee" status can use the PHD(L).
• If you place Crafting Stations the recipes will draw their required materials from the PHD(L) automagically.
• A Prestige Home requires no rent and is always open and available.
• An unlimited number of free Portals to the Prestige Home can be acquired at will and placed in any house, Prestige or Normal.
• Once placed, these portals create a network. Any home on that network can be accessed from any other by means of the portal

This means you can create what is effectively a free equivalent to a guild hall, without needing to deal with upkeep or any of the usual guild issues, which you can use just for yourself or for any subset of friends to whom you wish to allocate permissions.

Moreover, it provides immediate access via the housing system to every location with a house on the network, which is potentially more places than you can reach via the World Bell or Instant Travel. For example, due to the nominal existence of Good and Evil faction in EQ2, a Qeynosian can't use the travel system to enter Freeport - but she can arrive there by house portal and just step out of the door.

The more I thought about it, the more amazing it seemed. It occurred to me that not only could I set this up to benefit all the characters on my All Access account but that I could include every other character I have on my half a dozen unsubscribed accounts as well.

Everyone on every account could pool their resources. Instead of spending (literally) hours logging characters and accounts in and out and searching through dozens of boxes and bags on each for a specific resource I could just take anyone who needed something straight to the shared depot and there it would be!

It wouldn't just be for crafting, either. There are Depots for Collectibles, for Lore and Legend quest items, for Food, Drink, Potions... with a little effort (alright, quite a lot of effort) I could set all my characters up as a Collective, free hundreds of inventory slots and save myself countless hours of busywork. Does any other MMO have anything even remotely close to this?

I love the physicality of EQ2's storage. All those boxes are packed with stuff.

I spent a very happy and satisfying Saturday doing exactly that. I had several Prestige Homes available but I decided on The Isle Of Mara because of its long association in my mind as a crafting hub, going back to my days on Test.

First I checked the prices of the various Depots on the Broker and found them to be both plentifully available and (by modern EQ2 economic standards) very reasonably priced. I bought one of every kind there was and placed them in a convenient location.

Next I used the guild roster to set all my characters up with Trustee status. Then, with my All Access account up and running I signed into my former All Access account as well. EQ2 runs quite smoothly in multiple instances on my current PC. I spent several hours logging in every character on my two main accounts, going through all of their storage, stripping out every item that the depots would hold and piling them all in.

As I went along I placed House Portals in some of my homes to form the beginning of a travel network. That requires the owner of the Prestige Home to visit the other character's house to place the portal, which is a fun little project in itself.

These portals are annoyingly difficult to place and when you try and move them you often fall in.

It was only right at the end that I realized I could have saved myself a lot of running by paying a week's upkeep on our long-abandoned Guild Hall, slapping a portal in there and using it as a hub to get everyone to the new place.

I suppose I could just have revived the Guild Hall and run it for myself but there's something depressing about being in a once-bustling Guild Hall all on your own. Personal housing is somewhere that feels entirely natural to use solo - and as I said, if you use the Prestige version it's free, too!

I could do a whole post about how great EQ2's sort options are.

This is going to be a big project and for all its very obvious advantages there may be a few worrying downsides. Everything comes at a cost.

This morning I visited the City Merchant in Freeport and bought an Elegant Forge and Desk for status points, something I could have done years ago. The reason I never did is that I love crafting in areas where I can see and hear lots of other people crafting alongside me. I always try to find the busiest place to do my writs or make upgrades.

Crafting alone, in my own, personal crafting hub, risks missing out on that sense of community. I won't hear someone beside me ding loudly as they level or hear the rattle and scrape of the machines. It will be less like playing an MMO than I'd prefer.

And then there are my established houses. I've been in the habit of returning to at least two of them at the end of every session, my Berserker's and my Warlock's, because they have the plant from the Kunark Ascending questline that gives a daily rare and a bushel of mats.

Yesterday I moved both of those plants to the Mara Estate. It seems probable that, if the new hub establishes itself as I imagine it will, I'll gradually move all my housing amenities there so everyone can use them.

That will be a major increase in utility because currently and historically I haven't made much use of anything like that. I've tended to place the item in someone's house and forget about it. With all of those things in a readily accessible central location they will see far more use but will I end up with everyone living in the Mara Estate while their own homes go unvisited for months or even years on end?

I'm going to try and minimize that risk by getting every single one of my homes onto the new network. With a bit of luck that added convenience will act as a counterweight to the gravitational pull of the hub itself.

Either way, the decision's made now and with the Planes of Prophecy signature crafting line due sometime this month it couldn't have come at a better time.

Gold! : GW2

Only took me five and a half years!

My first dedicated WvW character was a Norn Elementalist and I played WvW only on my second account for some reason I can no longer remember. I didn't really start getting into world vs world properly for a few months and it took a lot longer than that before I began to gain a faint glimmer of understanding as to how it all worked.

At the start almost no-one took the ranks and titles seriously. ArenaNet stated that they'd designed the whole thing to fit the expected ten-year lifecycle of the game but for casual players ten years would be nothing like enough. Even for dedicated WvW specialists who played every day it was a lot to ask. 

Nevertheless, eventually the titles started to appear on players in the game. I have most of them now on my primary account, which became my main WvW account around the time rewards were added to the ranks in 2014. I play an Elementalist still but she's an Asura now, which somehow feels a lot faster and more exciting - probably because of the three feet and rising perspective.

Mrs Bhagpuss, who is both a much more skilled and a much more committed WvW player than I am, is already Gold rank on her secondary account. Her main is deep into Platinum. Most of the regular names I see, the characters who've been around for years, are probably Platinum or Mithril, although it's hard to be sure. An odd quirk of GW2 is that you can see your enemy's rank but not your friend's.

Some of the top Commanders and the really insane devoted are Diamond rank. I think I would be part of the actual carboniferous strata of the planet before I got there.

I would be a bit further on than I am if I did what just about everyone seems to do and ran boosters every time I played. I don't really like consumables in any MMO, mostly because I always forget to keep them in my bags. Not much use in the bank, which is where mine always are when I realize I want them.

These last few months, though, I've made an effort to keep some kind of bonus xp boost running when I follow the zerg and it does make a substantial difference.

I also find the steady progression of the ranks in WvW quite motivating. They are functionally meaningless other than for making you an increasingly attractive target for enemy players and the chests you get for "ranking up" almost never contain anything of interest. Even so, it's a form of leveling and in a game that makes a huge deal out of having no vertical progression that's very much not nothing.

One annoying thing about gaining a tier in rank is the way the rank titles cycle back to the beginning. It's somewhat disheartening to go from being a Legend back to being a mere Invader. Still, it's the color that counts and I'm very happy indeed to be gold at long last.

Waiting For The End Of The World : GW2

Far and away the biggest news in MMOs this week was ArenaNet's posting of a discussion document on the proposed changes to GW2's World vs World. Well, it was big news in our house. Or you'd have thought it would have been...

I'm not sure Mrs Bhagpuss has actually read it yet. I drew her attention to it at the earliest opportunity but her interest was, shall we say, muted. She'd been playing WvW while I was at work and the post on the forums had been up for a while but she hadn't heard anything about it until I told her.

I was expecting her to tell me people had talked of nothing else all day in /team and guild chat but apparently it hadn't earned a mention. It didn't get an airing in the session I played that evening either and it wasn't until the next evening that I first heard someone raise the topic.

Priorities.

That was a single question dropped into the guild chat of the 500 WvW member guild I'm in on Yak's Bend. You could hear the tumbleweed rolling by. Since our superstar Commander and guild leader packed his yak and departed for pastures unknown just before Path of Fire arrived the guild has been moribund so the lack of response wasn't surprising. It's rare for anyone to speak in that guild these days.

Eventually a desultory conversation began, mostly between me and the person who raised the topic. No-one else seemed to care. As for Team and Map chat, which are both generally lively, I have yet to hear the subject come up. Maybe this weekend, which is always the peak time for conversation between people who don't play all that much WvW but think they know more about it than anyone else. Or maybe people who actually play WvW are just beyond caring these days.

There are always forum warriors willing to fight any battle, of course. The main thread on the changes is impressively voluminous. As I write it stands at 33 pages, made up of 1.3k posts, viewed 82.9k times. If you read through it, though, as I mostly have, a very large number of those posts are the same handful of people relentlessly bickering amongst themselves. There's even a very lengthy sub-debate going on about how the changes will impact the roleplaying community outside of WvW that threatens to hijack the entire thread.

Vision of the future.

The devs have been fairly active in answering questions and concerns but because a thirty page thread full of giant, nested quotes is extremely hard to navigate those replies are difficult to find, especially using the less-than-stellar "Dev Tracker" function. Fortunately Raymond Lukes, presumably the ANet employee who lost the last office game of one-potato-two-potato, has pulled all the replies into a makeshift FAQ.

The changes themselves are radical and would be shocking...if they weren't by and large a revamp of the "Battlegroup" changes that were leaked several years ago. Back around then, just before he left for good, Colin Johansen confirmed that ANet had spent a year on a "major WvW overhaul".

That plan largely collapsed in a firestorm of protest and controversy after the disastrous imposition of the Desert Borderlands maps that came with Heart of Thorns almost killed WvW off completely. A lengthy period of retreat and retrenchment followed, during which the game mode pulled out of its death dive only to stabilize at a much lower level.

Existential angst.

Following the usual reluctance of MMO companies to own up to the need for server merges, the ongoing issue of falling populations and declining interest was bodge-fixed with the current "Linking" system, whereby smaller worlds are rammed together with bigger ones then re-sorted every couple of months according to some invisble criteria that no-one understands.

That has been unpopular with many. I kind of like it myself because it adds an element of surprise and variety but it certainly does absolutely nothing for community spirit, stability or genuine balance.

Linking does at least have the benefit of being very simple to understand and implement. The proposed new system is neither. It's hideously overcomplicated, ferociously arcane and, in the opinion of many commenters, likely to create hitherto unimagined possibilities for exploitation by the players.

Given Anet's five year history of being entirely incapable of managing either player behavior or expectations, my own take is that this will be an unmitigated disaster. So far players have proved themselves capable and willing to run rings around the developers' intentions at just about every turn. I can guarantee that already the self-appointed movers and shakers of WvW will be organizing the most effective ways to bend the new rules past breaking point.

The proposal does come with the usual caveat that it may never happen. As McKenna Berdrow, who wrote the original proposal, warns: "If the reception is not great for this system, then the other alternative is most likely to continue World Linking."

A bad day.

ArenaNet, more than any MMO developer whose games I have ever played, runs scared of player opinion. Even so, nervous as they always are when announcing them, unpopular changes often do go through. As they float this change for WvW they are clearly in a mood to bite the bullet for what they see as the good of the game because there are also a bunch of potentially unpopular class  and system revamps due in the upcoming balance patch.

I think the WvW changes are mostly a bad idea but if they do go through I'm sanguine. While we will get the class balance patch very soon, whether we want it or not, the WvW revamp, if it ever happens, is probably something like six to twelve months away, so there's no point worrying about it yet.

If, as I expect, based on previous patterns, it gets put to some kind of vote I will almost certainly opt  to keep the status quo. I quite like the linking system and I value the existing world naming conventions over and above supposedly "balanced" matchmaking.

A good day.

I'm far from convinced in any event that "Balance" is a goal worth chasing. Balance in WvW, on the rare occasions it has been achieved, has felt a lot like boredom. My expectation for the new system, should it ever happen, is that it will produce anything but balance.

Should it finally go ahead, what I imagine we'll get is a period of utter chaos followed by a slow apprehension that far from fixing the underlying problems the new system has made them worse. At the very least it should be entertaining.

Whether or not I'll still be playing either WvW or GW2 by then, who can say? It's been a long run and if it wasn't for Mrs Bhagpuss's continued dedication to Tyria in general and The Mists in particular it might well be that I would already have moved on. If she doesn't take to the new WvW then that could be the end - at least of GW2 making up 80% of my gaming.

Sometimes I just sit and think.

Of course, that doesn't mean I would quit. GW2 is the poster child for pick up/put down gameplay among MMOs. People drop in and out all the time, for a few weeks, a few months, a few years. And there would need to be something more attractive to take its place - something else I'd want to play for several hours every day. I'm not sure there is, just yet.

There's absolutely no doubt in my mind, though, that, removing named "Worlds" from the equation will loosen the ties that bind me to the game. I picked Yaks Bend for reasons that have only deepened over the last five years and while YB is very much not what it used to be it is still something.

Worlds that last two months then vanish into the ether, guilds that are pushed around like bargaining chips, alliances that form and dissolve according to expediency, none of that can hope to replace the feeling of belonging that came with a permanent home world.

Currently residing in the "Where Are They Now?" file.

With the changes likely to come into play around the same time as the release of other Realm vs Realm options like Crowfall and Camelot Unlimited I feel this is very much a desperate last roll of the dice for WvW. Whether it can do anything to halt the slide I very much doubt but I guess it will be interesting to watch it try.

The bigger question is how much longer does GW2 itself have? We all realize now that MMOs can go on for years, decades even, but if even Blizzard are wary of hitching the company fortunes to a single title, how much more uncomfortable must ArenaNet grow as each year passes with nothing new to offer beyond some skins and lockboxes and the occasional expansion for a single, aging game?

Something to come back to in a while, I'm sure. For now, I'm off to play some old-style WvW - while I still can.

Known Unknowns : EverQuest

This morning, purely by chance, I happened upon a surprising resource for EverQuest that was entirely new to me. It happened as I was replying to a comment by Shintar on yesterday's post.

I was googling exactly when the Mines of Gloomingdeep tutorial was introduced to EQ. I didn't get the answer I wanted but one of the results pointed me to a website called Almar's Guides.

Now, I admit at this point that it's entirely possible I've mentioned Almar and his guides before. My memory isn't what it was and it was never all that to begin with. I do seem to have some very vague recollection of posting some list of EQ resources but if I did I can't find it. I'm probably thinking of EQ2.

Regardless, it's an astonishingly detailed and useful collection of pages, full of very helpful information, clearly laid out and very well explained. If I mentioned it before I don't apologize for mentioning it again. It includes exceptionally detailed guides on how and where to level dependent on which expansions you have, whether you play solo, on regular or progression servers, with a mercenary or if, as so many do, you multibox.

I dipped into the multiboxing guides, which are extensive and somewhat daunting. Like most EQ players I have at one time or another at least dabbled with playing several characters at once. The complexity of the process has always put me off taking it up as a serious playstyle but if I was ever going to try I'd begin here.

As I browsed Almar's site I was scarcely able to believe that such a well-maintained and current resource could exist for a game fast approaching its nineteenth anniversary. The dedication and enterprise of players like Almar and Yeebo, who recently put up an excellent suite of guides for the almost equally ancient Dark Age of Camelot, deserves the highest praise and respect.

This is a cutaway of the center of my screen in EQ2. The four long hotbars are all in-combat abilities. I use most of them on cooldown in every fight that lasts long enough. To each side are ones I use more rarely along with some auto-populated stuff I haven't removed yet and the Ascended abilities that have very long cooldowns. If I included the full screen it would show three more hotbars for a grand total of ten, which is the maximum allowed. If I could have more I would!

It also inspires another kind of awe. Reading Almar I was struck once again by how ferociously complex and intimidating MMORPGs can be. Those of us who play them regularly and have done for a while hardly have any sense of the vast ocean of mystery that lies below the surface of almost every MMO.

For example, consider the making of Macros in EverQuest. I've know how to do this since somewhere around the turn of the century and I do use a few when I play but it's clear from reading this guide that I have barely begun to scratch the surface of what they can do. Most MMOs have systems and subsystems that are capable of radically restructuring the entire experience and yet how many of us understand them, let alone use them to the fullest?

It's not just the complex machinery under the hood that goes unremarked. Even simple, surface staples of gameplay like spell rotations or the efficient use of consumables go largely unreported. We all write and talk at considerable length about so many aspects of the virtual worlds we inhabit, from the way our characters look to the inconsistencies in the lore that lies behind the narratives they follow, but we rarely discuss in any detail the straightforward mechanics of how we go about playing the "game".

Indeed, as I can attest from just the few entries on Almar's site that I scanned, and as has come up many times in conversation on this and other blogs only in the last few weeks and months, there are often very basic elements that simply pass us by, either ignored or unnoticed. How often does the supposed difficulty, awkwardness or poor design of an MMO mask an unwillingness on the part of the player to engage fully with the mechanics required to make that "difficulty" go away? Do we even take the trouble to find out that such mechanics exist, let alone practice and master them?

Given that few of us are slow in pointing out the problems when they arise, it's all the more surprising that we discuss the fine details of the solutions so rarely. Perhaps, in a fashion, we feel that to do so would detract from the necessary illusion many of us try to maintain; that we live in another world which is, in some sense, true. There's a trick we have perfected of seeing one thing while doing another. No-one wants to draw too much attention the props and wires that make the trick work.

The deceptively simple center screen as seen by my Elementalist in GW2. Compared to EQ or EQ2 there's far less clutter but as the pop-up tool-tip shows there's plenty going on behind the scenes. GW2 relies much more than other MMOs I play on invisible synergies that have to be committed to memory. Or blind luck. Guess which I rely on.

At a meta-level, it's fine to lay out tactics and strategies. Many of us love to examine the greater structures, to elaborate on the design and approach that each game developer takes in making a world. All of that is fair game, along with any number of treatises on the interface between art and commerce.

It's a lot rarer to see posts that elaborate on the fine detail. How, exactly, we control the movement and action of our characters. What marks the precise outline of their capacity to interact with their environment. There aren't a great many people posting instructions on exactly which button to press when. Certainly I'm not about to start doing it.

Perhaps to do so seems to risk breaking the thin bubble that holds back reality. Or maybe it's just not as exciting to write about that when we could be gushing over what our characters are wearing or speculating about the latest industry blow-up.

The information is out there if we search for it. It's the preserve of analytical websites like Icy Veins or MetaBattle, places where all that matters is the "what" and the "how". To step through such a portal is to admit that what happens when we play is at the same time both far more complex and much more codified than we may care to admit.

All of which is just a way of admitting how little I still know. Mostly I think it doesn't matter but how can I be sure? I float along on my little island, enjoying the scenery but sometimes I catch a glimpse of the vast iceberg stretching away beneath me and I get a shiver down my spine.

Finding Almar's Guides gave me the chills.

All Roads Lead To Gnome : EverQuest, WoW

If there's one thing I don't need it's a new character in EverQuest. I have no idea how many I've left behind over the years, idling in banks or inn rooms or camped out in the wilds somewhere. For the longest time I tried to keep most of them ticking along, logging them in now and then, adding a level here and there. Now, though, as the years pile up like autumn leaves and my characters and I approach winter together, for many it seems less and less likely we will hunt together again.

Like Telwyn, who alluded to it in two consecutive posts this week, I believe strongly in character permanence. I, too, like to check in once in a while and touch base with my imaginary friends and alter egos. But nearly two decades and a hundred and fifty MMOs makes for an awful lot of characters. Some I'll never see again, far less play.

So why start another? And why a gnome? As Mrs Bhagpuss said, when I told her what I'd done, "Haven't you got enough gnomes?".

Well, no, apparently I don't. And you can't ever have too many gnomes, can you? As for why now, I think there were two proximate causes. First there was something Syp said in an offhand comment at Bio Break. When he described the first dozen levels in WoW as "slow and boring" it triggered a burst of nostalgic desire in me for some good old-fashioned low level gaming.

I couldn't disagree more strongly with that sentiment, finding as I do the very low levels in WoW to be the best part of the game that I've seen. Indeed, the very low levels of most MMORPgs are among the best for some very good and well-known reasons.

The lowest levels represent the game's shop-window, so they tend to be designed to please. They are also usually the content that most closely represents the original vision for the game and as such are more coherent, consistent and convincing than most of what follows. Finally, staring zones have usually been around the longest so they have been repeatedly polished until they positively glow.

In terms of core RPG gameplay the hook never sets so deep and firm as in those first few levels, when every upgrade makes a substantial and noticeable difference to gameplay. Not only does your characters increase in power and capability almost with every item that drops but the way they look changes too.

The low levels are the most playful part of almost any MMO. There's room to experiment, to find out who your character wants to be. The time will come when decisions have to be made, points have to be spent, rotations have to be set. Eventually your "role" will have little to do with roleplay and much to do with learning your dance steps but in those first, few levels you're still free to move to whatever music you hear in your head.

So, that's why I made a new character. I wanted some of that. As for why a gnome, well I blame Isey for prompting me to realize that I really should have saved the title of the previous post for one about gnomes. And once I start thinking about gnomes it's only a short step to making one.

Given where I began, with that quip from Syp, I might have made a gnome in WoW. I'm currently playing WoW a little most days, pottering around on my endless free trial, exploring and evaluating the implications of the new level scaling.

Mostly I've been leveling up my Worgen Druid, spending almost all my time in cat form. It's been fun. The level scaling seems fine. Everything takes three or four casts or hits to kill, which is still ridiculously fast by any standards other than WoW's recent own.

I already have a level one Gnome there, ready to go, but he's a Rogue and I really don't want to play a Rogue. I have no idea why I made him. There were probably reasons.

When it came to it, though, there was no point fooling myself. I wanted to make an EQ gnome, start in Ak Anon and level up in Steamfont for a bit. So I did. Ah, the whirring and ticking of clockwork. There's nothing like it.

I'd actually managed to forget that Steamfont was one of the few Faydwer zones (the only one?) to get a visual makeover many years ago. Which is surprising considering I must have crossed it literally hundreds of times in the past few years, taking my highest level character to Dragonscale Hills and the rest of the zones in 2007's excellent Secrets of Faydwer expansion.

Even so, the new Steamfont has itself now been around so long and I've leveled up so many characters there (all of them gnomes) that it has its own nostalgia. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I can really remember what it looked like before. I might need to log in to P2002 and remind myself.

As in WoW, leveling in EQ is not the uphill slog it once was. Even so, it's hardly a downhill sprint, either. It took me about forty minutes to get to level two. It would have been faster but I had to run back to Ak Anon to zone a mountain lion and I died when I pulled a Krag Chick. They are still the same insane undercon they were in 1999.

When I dinged (that sound still so satisfying) I took the book to Plane of knowledge. I was very happy to see that well outside of U.S. primetime, on one of the less-popular servers, there were still over 70 players in PoK and a couple of hundred vendors trading in The Bazaar. Life in the old game yet.

After a visit to the bank, where my new gnome helped herself to a few hundred platinum from the shared vault, thereby bypassing about a year's gameplay from the  good old days, I logged out. Will I ever log her in again?

Who knows? What I do know is that one gnome leads to another. And if you can't find a gnome then a dwarf will do. Or any anthropomorphic animal that walks on its hind legs.

I have all next week off. I wonder how many new characters I could make in how many MMOs?

I'm Gonna Buy Me A Dog : DCUO

Palawa Joko's deluded fans may think he's all that, what with his Awakened armies and his stolen Inquest tech, but he's a very minor player in the megalomaniac leagues. These past couple of weeks I've been taking time off between beating back Joko's hourly invasions to deal with a much greater threat.

The Anti-Monitor doesn't just want to conquer and rule. He's here to devour. His purpose is to destroy universes. According to the wiki he's "directly responsible for more deaths than any other known DC supervillain, having destroyed thousands of Universes."

Apparently he was first encountered in DC's 1985 mini-series "Crisis On Infinite Earths", which I not only bought and read but even reviewed at some length in one of the fanzines I was writing for at the time. I remember the piece I wrote but I don't remember him at all.

He's back now, looming over Metropolis, occasionally intoning threats in a booming, robotic monotone, while his endless minions attempt to convert the population into anti-matter. I've been zipping around on my flying discs trying, rather successfully, to put a crimp in his nefarious plans.

Once a week I've even met him face to face in a raid instance, where I and seven of my closest friends-I've-never-met-before have given him a surprisingly hard time, considering he eats universes for breakfast. You might not think a cosmic entity hundreds of feet tall, responsible for the deaths of Supergirl and The Flash, able to "effortlessly withstand blows from Superman" would be bothered by a slightly-built girl hitting him on the ankle with a stick but apparently you'd be wrong.

 The continued existence of the known universe aside, the reason I'm doing this is to get a dog. Krypto, to be precise.

I mentioned my intention to dognap the El family pet in a previous post and now I'm happy to report the deed is done. In the end I did put down a part-payment via the cash shop. The event runs another week, ending on January 31, so I would almost certainly have had time to earn the whole 140 Qwardian Crowns required before the clock ran out but why take the risk?

I was up to 112 QCs this morning but I decided to cough up the 540 Daybreak Cash required and buy another fifty. That's effectively my free monthly stipend for All Access membership, which I rarely spend, although I think Daybreak have just about the best in-game cash shop in MMOs.

It's full of things I could and would use, from good consumables like Tracking Scrolls to gorgeous Prestige Houses. There's also a very extensive range of player-designed housing and cosmetic items. Remember Player Studio? Well that turned out to be one of SOE's wild ideas that lasted.

DCUO isn't one of the games that benefits from the ingenuity of player-creators, presumably either for technical or, more likely, licensing reasons. It's a pity because it's a perfect setting for it, what with the limitless potential for costumes in a super-hero game and the well-developed and implemented addition of quality housing via the Base system.

Speaking of bases, mine is coming along nicely. Quite a lot of housing items drop from the reward crates of events and there are frequently free hand-outs with new releases and updates. It's not up to the standards of even one of my lesser domiciles in EQ2 yet, but it's beginning to feel quite like home.

The one thing I was really missing was a house pet. I love my house pets in EQ2. They wander about as though they own the place, flapping and buzzing and whirring. It makes the place feel lived in.

My DCUO base is a bit cavernous and forbidding but the addition of a cheerful, lively pet makes a big difference. And Krypto really fills the bill. A YouTuber named Torikumu put together a nice video showing all the hound's best moves, which saves me the trouble. I wonder where he got that cat at the end?

In a piece of very poor timing I bought the crate just fifteen minutes before the server came down for weekly maintenance so I had to scrabble a bit to get everything placed and working in time to take a few screenshots. I'm looking forward to getting back in to spend some quality time with the pooch.

I'm not much of a dog person but Krypto and I do have a lot of history. I followed his adventures when I was a small child. My very favorite comic, growing up, was The Legion of Super-Heroes, with Superboy a close second and Krypto featured regularly in both.

It's kind of incredible when I think about it. More than fifty years on, both Superboy and the LSH aren't just still around, they've moved further towards the core of the culture than anyone back then could conceivably have imagined possible.

The Anti-Monitor event has been a lot of fun and the rewards have been excellent. Krypto was one of the more costly items on the event vendor and well worth saving up for but there are a load more goodies there worth having. If I have any Qwardian Crowns left over at the end of the week I'll be spending them on a few upgrades.