A Window On The Future: ArenaNet's Plans For Guild Wars 2

 

Oh, isn't that just typical! Couldn't have released this yesterday, could you, ANet? Thanks a bunch!

If the massive "Studio Update" (Seriously? Can't call it a "Producer's Letter" like everyone else?) had dropped a day earlier I could have incorporated much of it into my "Guild Wars 2 is World of Warcraft wearing a hat" post. It would have stood up nearly every point I was trying to make. Also, why did I not think of that title yesterday? It's so much better than the lame one I went with.

Let's leave that in the dust for now in favor of ripping through the massive screed to see if there's anything in there worth talking about. Gotta be something. Oh, hey, here's one... 

"The number of active Guild Wars 2 players has more than doubled over the last three years."

Weirdly misreported by MassivelyOP, in quotes, as "the last two years." I wonder if they got it wrong or it's been changed at source? Either way, it's a very interesting statistic. As a regular player, the game always seems very well-populated although the megaserver tech makes it hard to be sure. I was a little puzzled when Belghast described GW2 as "a game that deserves way more attention than it receives." It always seems to get plenty to me. Now I guess it's going to get even more.

 At first it seems like a trend-bucking stat. We're used to mmorpg populations declining inexorably over time. Then again, these have not been normal times. I wonder just how many mmorpgs have populations that increased during the pandemic and how many of those new or returning players are still hanging around as the panic winds down. Maybe it matters more than I thought, whether that growth happened over three years or two.

Let's have another quote. How about this one? 

"We need to prioritize delivering consistent updates for our players...specifically, how we provide regular content updates to our players and what those updates contain."

Ya think? Ten years of whiffling about cadences and here we are, almost a year on the far side of the last new non-expansion content. Yeah, I'd say you need to prioritize that. Also make your minds up on a delivery schedule and fricken' stick to it.

"This means continuing to tell compelling stories that expand the world of Tyria while providing a better experience for those who enjoy game modes such as World vs. World, Player vs. Player, and endgame group content."

I find that worrisome. Not so much because I don't think all those interest groups deserve service, more because I doubt ANet's ability to keep that many balls in the air at once. There's been precious little sign of them being able to do it over the last ten years. Arguably (And I'd be one to argue it.) all these groups have the opposite of synergy. They fight each other for scraps like a pack of starving dogs and there aren't enough scraps to throw to keep all of them from tearing each other apart. Good luck keeping them all satisfied.

What next? Oh yes, Steam launch!

"You only get to launch on Steam once, and we want to make sure we do it right... We’re not ready to commit to a hard date for Steam quite yet, but our hearts are set on launching this year. "

Kicking it down the road for now. Fair enough. I wonder just how big a deal it would be anyway? Obviously it's a whole new potential audience but there are quite a lot of mmorpgs on Steam these days and none of them seem do great numbers. Okay, Lost Ark. Still, better to be on Steam than not.

And now the BIG SURPRISE..."Living World Season 1 Returns."

Oh ffs! You're kidding me, right? I only just got finished banging on about how so much better than all the rest Season One was, because it was a one-off, never to be repeated, live game experience that managed to convince us that playing a video game somehow mattered! It wasn't memorable for the story, that's for sure. 

Sticking the key plot points into five instanced chapters of the Living Story isn't a horrible idea. It'll be nice to have the option to see some of the events again, not to mention Scarlet Briar. Don't begin to kid yourself it's going to be like "being there", though. If they do a really great job it'll be like watching the Woodstock movie compared to, y'know, having been at Woodstock. If they do a bad job, I guess it'll be like being at Altamont.

How about World vs World, the game mode that was "a cornerstone" last summer but which, for End of Dragons, got... fishing. And even that doesn't work. 

"Now that Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons is released, we can further increase our support for WvW."

That's nice. What are you going to do for it? 

"Our priorities for WvW are largely unchanged from what we talked about in our “Future of World vs. World” blog post in September of last year."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't those the same priorities you talked about in the previous two major statements, going back several years? We've been waiting on the Alliances remodel since at least 2018. Forgive us if we don't take the roof off cheering when you tell us you're still working on it.

This paragraph, however, I found much more intriguing:

"As we mentioned last year, once population balance and rewards are addressed, our theory is that WvW gameplay will see a significant shift. At that point, we intend to look very hard at core WvW systems (upgrades, scoring, siege, etc.) and balance them to ensure that the WvW experience is still reflecting our vision."

The original "vision"for WvW was as a massive PvPvE battle for territorial advantage and possession. Over time, as more and more PvE players bounced and more and more RvR players boiled away. WvW has moved significantly towards being all about the fights.The people who care what the fights are about are in a minority now and have been for a while.

My interpretation of the paragraph above is that ANet want to get a lot more PvE players into WvW, as was originally intended. That means making the scores matter because PvE-oriented players like that kind of structure. Just running about looking for people to kill isn't going to do it for them.

If the changes successfully bring back casual WvW players from the PvE game in large numbers I foresee a lot of conflict with the self-defining "WvW Players". Could be a bloodbath, especially if certain factions organize, something the Alliance system is pretty much designed to facilitate.

Coming to the end now....

"We’re happy to confirm that we’re working on the next story update for Guild Wars 2, including a new map set in the Cantha region."

Kinda figured we'd be hanging around there for a while. Is that story update in addition to the Season One highlight reel or do we have to wait for that to roll out before we get something that's actually new? Oh, wait, there's a timeline... let's see... nothing before the end of June, by when we'll have had just two of the first five S1 chapters. If that's the cadence, expect nothing new until the autumn at the earliest, then, I guess.

And finally...

"We’re happy to confirm that there will be a fourth expansion for Guild Wars 2!"

Oh thank the lord! No more of this "Will they, won't they?" nonsense. No more saying "Probably not happening" when you're already working on it. And yes, ANet, we know "Expansions take a very long time to develop" but most companies manage it in about half the time End of Dragons took to cook. I don't expect an expansion every year - I mean, it's not like you have Daybreak's resources after all - but an expansion every other year ought to be within your grasp.

I think that's everything I wanted to mention. There's some other stuff in there but those are the bones. I'm very happy to hear the game's picking up players. Let's hope it can hang on to them. 

I'll be staying. A couple of months back I wasn't so sure I'd be saying that come the spring. End of Dragons has restored some of my affection for the game. We'll see if it lasts.

Yes, Of Course I Know How To Use A Hammer. You Hold It At The Long End, Right?

 

Just a very quick post on New World. Yes, really. Very quick. I promise. I was out most of the day, visiting my mother. When I got back I did my Guild Wars 2 dailies, then a couple of hours in New World. After that I had to eat and now it's getting late. I'd really like to get back in and do just a little more before the day ends, so yes, this is going to be quick.

Did you see the news about those pesky afkers? Their running into walls days are numbered! To be honest, I've seen almost as many people doing it in GW2 recently as I have on Zuvendis, where there's rarely any significant queue, at least in my playtime.

Why would people fake-afk in a game like GW2, where there are no queues at all? You might well ask, although, if you did, it would tell me you don't play World vs World. There haven't been queues to get into any other part of the game in living memory but WvW frequently has them, particularly at the weekends and especially in Eternal Battlegrounds. 

The maps only have a capacity of around a couple of hundred players or so it's believed. If you get three full squads running around, one for each team, and a smattering of roamers, the shutters come down and newcomers have to wait for someone to leave before they can get in. 

Last week there was a WvW event to tie in with the Alliances week-long beta test that ended up lasting all of two hours and whenever there's one of those we get inundated with PvE players, trying to farm pips for their various Legendary weapon requirements. Or something. I don't pay much attention to it so I'm not entirely clear what they think they're doing.

I do know that they all want to be on maps that have the Outnumbered buff because that gives them bonuses on top of the bonuses but most of them have no clue there are any other maps apart from Eternal Battlegrounds, so they all try to get in there anyway. Afkers aren't always the brightest, it would seem.

 

When ANet introduced the pip system there was an absolute explosion of this kind of behavior. You couldn't move in Citadel (the totally safe area) for people afking hour after hour. 

At that time there was no afk timer to speak of. There still isn't in the PvE maps. I can log my elementalist in after breakfast to do her dailies, tab out while she's loading in, get involved in something else, forget I was going to play her and leave her standing on the bearskin rug in Krennek's Lodge for several hours before I remember and when I tab back she'll still be there.

In response to the complaints from people who wanted to go fight people, not just sit at spawn for days on end, counting their pips, ANet eventually instituted a fairly short afk timer in WvW only. That was when people began running head-first into walls. Mostly they don't now because no-one really plays WvW except the hardcore masochists who haven't decamped to other games but on weekends and when there are bonuses you do see the occasional wall-runner.

Usually I log out of games when I go afk for more than a few minutes. It just seems tidy, not to mention polite. I was curious how long the timer was in New World, though, what with all the talk about shortening it or adding checks or whatever it is they're planning, so this evening I left my character standing around in town while I went to have something to eat. 

I still don't know exactly how long it takes before the game kicks you out but I can say it's not as long as it takes me to eat two baked potatos and a bowl of wholemeal pasta. And make a coffee. And read a few pages of On The Road Reluctantly by Dyan Sheldon (A surprisingly depressing read for a travel book by a children's author.)

In the couple of hours I did get to play today I made a whole bunch of random stuff at every crafting station in Monarchs Bluffs. I love the way the recipes pull straight from your storage but only the storage in that town. It's quite brilliant.

Mostly, nothing much of note happened except a lot of numbers went up, which as many people have noted is key to New World's astonishing success. People love making numbers go up. 

 

The one unusual thing was what happened when I smelted a whole load of iron and hit Smelting skill 20. I got an achievement for that, which didn't surprise me. You get achievements for turning round suddenly in New World. Not literally. Don't go trying it. You'll crick your neck.

What did surprise me was that I also got a title. Titles are much rarer. I only have the same four or five as everyone else, the ones you get for playing the game in the first place and for joining a faction. 

Only now I also have one for being extra super handy with a two handed warhammer. Which is nice. Or would be, if I'd ever used one. My character not only has no skill whatsoever in that weapon, she has never even equipped one. I do own a couple but they're in the bank along with all the other weapons I haven't tried yet.

I have no clue what triggered the achievement unless it's somehow incorrectly linked to the smelting one. I'm fairly sure, although not one hundred per cent, that it appeared at the same time. I was doing all kinds of things around then, though, and there was a bit of lag so who can say for sure?

Presumably it's a bug. I ought to bug report it, I suppose. There is a feedback option in game although I couldn't find a specific bug-reporting tool when I wanted to report the annoying notification window that appears when you leave an area with an event going on before the event ends. 

That one stays until you log out. Even dying won't shift it. I did feed that back but I'd be more motivated to send in bug reports if there was an actual reporting tool. I can't imagine whoever reads the feedback is going to do much about it, if indeed any human ever sees it at all.

Not being one to turn down a free title, my novice hatcheteer and semi-trained sword-and-boarder is out there right now, running around claiming to be a "War Hammer Expert". If anyone asks I'll tell them I was a great Squig Herder in my day.

The other big excitement came when I opened one of the many level-based chests that come from questing and out popped my first ever Rare quality piece of gear. The chest was flagged "Level 23" and I'm only level 20 but I thought I might as well see if there was anything good inside. I've had several nice greens out of these things but never a blue, until now.

Curiously, the item was level 19, making me wonder whether the algorithm is one of those points-based ones, meaning the higher quality stole points from the level and forced it down. EverQuest II has a system that works just like that.

Then again, there's plenty about New World gear I don't yet understand. There's a Gear Score that's supposed to allow for easy comparisons but as often as not I find myself preferring the lower gear score piece I'm wearing to the supposed upgrade because of the specifics of the stat bonuses or the perks. 

I'm not really sure what the point of an automated comparison mechanic is when you have a design ethic that's so nuanced and situational. The blue piece I got is much higher level, much better quality and not surprisingly has a much higher Gear Score than the piece I'm wearing in that slot, but it's Light armor and I'm wearing Heavy, so it's a huge downgrade as protection and the bonuses strongly favor a ranged character, whereas I'm playing a melee.

I put it into storage with all the rest. I'd say one of my characters will end up wearing it some day but of course I can only roll one other character. There are only two character slots.

At least I still have plenty of room to hoard stuff. That's another thing New World gets right. For all the good things about the game I think it's a bit rich of me to complain about a few bugs here and there. So I'll shut up now. 

I said I'd make it quick!

It's Beta, Baby! GW2's First WvW Alliance Test Goes Down In Flames.

For once, when I woke up this morning I had something of a plan. I was going to log in to Guild Wars 2 to take a look at the first of what's set to become a series of beta tests for the proposed World vs World Alliance system.

For those who haven't been following the plot, which would be everyone in the world who doesn't play GW2 and most of those who do, the idea is to remove the "Worlds" from WvW and replace them with "Alliances". This dates back at least four years and was originally supposed to have happened in a matter of months. 

It was always a timeframe that even the most wildly optimistic among the WvW community found hard to accept. As things turned out even the most wildly pessimistic of us underestimated ArenaNet's ability to do absolutely nothing at all for years on end. 

I thought it would take at least a year, maybe two. After two years I was minded to believe it would never happen. After three I was certain.

So now it's happening. It took several changes of leadership, the re-hiring of some key personnel who'd been let go and, I wouldn't mind betting, some firm direction from somewhere outside the company but for now, at least, Alliances are very much back on.

It's a very, very complicated and ambitious program. Having read countless forum posts and threads on it over the years and having heard it discussed at length inside the game I feel confident in saying many, possibly most, active WvW players don't fully understand even the intent behind the change, much less the details of how it will actually affect them.

I'm not claiming I do, either, not least because the whole thing has been in flux forever and elements of it keep changing. Add to that the new emphasis on consultation and iteration and it's plain that whatever we end up with could be very different from what's been proposed so far.

I have no intention of attempting to explain any of it here. I possibly could but no-one who doesn't play WvW is likely to care and nor should they. If anyone reading this does find themselves burning with curiosity about how the whole thing might work, I direct them to this exhaustive official announcement from a couple of weeks ago.

 

The first of the scheduled beta tests was due to go live last night at reset, around midnight my time since I play on North American servers. EU reset is a few hours earlier so they were due to start first. 

Before any of that, earlier in the week we all had to select a guild as our official WvW choice so the new mechanics could sort everyone, like first years at Hogwarts, into newly-devised "Teams". Since the proposed system operates on a multi-level sliding scale of Teams/Alliances/Guilds/Players and players can be in up to five guilds and guilds can be bigger than Alliances (?!), this was always going to be interesting.

Mrs Bhagpuss and I had a brief chat about it and decided to put our characters who had the option into the now dormant but once dominant WvW guild we'd been inducted into back in the days when Yaks Bend was an actual force in the game. The other accounts we left in our personal guild of two.

I was very curious to see how this would work out. That big guild is very quiet these days. All the leaders have long stopped playing and although most of the people who were ever in the guild are still on the roster, with the option of five guilds not many choose to rep that tag. 

This morning, after I'd eaten breakfast, had a bath and done some much-needed housework, I sat down at the computer to see how things were going. Before I even went to log in I thought I'd check the website I've been using for almost as long as been playing GW2 to see how the current matches were going.

I didn't know quite what to expect. A whole bunch of new "Team" names, maybe, although that was optimistic. More likely a slew of "Red" "Green" and "Blue", the default colors for the three starting positions. Most likely of all, a broken website with a lot of gibberish, which is what happens most time ANet change anything.

What I didn't expect was the exact same set of world names as yesterday, albeit in a slightly different order. Everything looked exactly the same as it would on a regular, non-beta Saturday.

Maybe it was just the website, pulling old API data that hadn't been changed for the test. I logged in to find out. 

 

Everything in game was just as the tracking site said it would be. I wandered around for a minute or two, waiting to see if anything felt different. It didn't. No-one was saying much and I didn't want to be that guy who logs in and asks the same question the last twenty people asked so I did my dailies quickly and logged out again.

From there I went straight to the forums, where I found my answer. Yes, the beta test had begun on time, at EU reset. It was supposed to run for the whole week. It lasted two hours. 

Whether it was a complete, unmitigated disaster or a highly useful and successful test run depends where you stand. From what I read on the forum it seems pretty much nothing worked as intended and much didn't work at all. 

Among other things, players were sorted into different Teams from those they'd nominated, there were multiple instances of the same borderland maps running simultaneously, there were massive queues that didn't resolve properly and didn't reflect in-game populations and there were multiple display bugs that meant players couldn't even tell what was going on, right or wrong.

After a couple of hours of that ANet pulled the plug. They kicked everyone out of WvW and reset the mode back to its pre-beta state. Only EU players ever got to see what could have been. By the time NA reset rolled around our test had already been cancelled.

Opinions on the forums range from "What did you expect? It's ANet" to "What did you expect? It's beta." My feeling is much closer to the latter. You run tests to find out what doesn't work much more than what does. As Josh Davis, the WvW lead dev said in the thread

 "Obviously things didn't go the way we had intended, but it was still an incredibly valuable exercise for the team. We learned a lot, to say the least. We aspire to have our testing environments mirror the Live servers as much as possible, but there's nothing like having thousands of real players crash into a system all at once to expose issues!"

My main objection would be to the terminology. Clearly this wasn't any kind of "beta". As several commenters suggested "alpha" or even "pre-alpha" would have been more accurate. We're clearly a very long way indeed from anythihg you could justifiably call a "beta".

Ummm... where is everyone?

 

Other than that, I imagine it was immensely useful, if frustrating for the team behind it all. I imagine they'll have a much clearer idea now of what they did wrong and what they need to do next. How long that will take them and how successfully they'll be able to fix things is another matter entirely.

This, after all, is just a test of the most basic element of the new infrastructure, the sorting of players into teams. If that doesn't work, nothing will. On the other hand, once you've got the foundations down you can get on with building the house.

It's clear from some of the comments that there were people who expected the entire new Alliance system would be up and running in a couple of tests. ANet never said that or suggested it. It was always my expectation they'd aim to have the thing running smoothly by the time End of Dragons is ready early next year.

Whether this will set that agenda back is impossible to say. If I had to bet I'd say the thing will either be operational by EOD or we'll never see it at all. And given the big statements of commitment to WvW they've been tossing around recently I don't think they can afford for it to be never.

For now, though, it's everyone back to the worlds we know. Matchmaking goes on as before. New links, which should have happened last night on a normal cycle, will come next Friday. If anyone still cared about any of that I'm pretty sure they don't any more.

I know I don't. I do care that the double xp event is staying for the whole week, though. I'd like to be as high a rank as possible when/if the Alliance sysyem does arrive, just in case they end up incorporating that into the sorting process, somehow.

At this stage, frankly, they could do anything and no-one would raise an eyebrow.

The Rain, The Park And Other Things

It rained all day today. It's still raining now. I spent hours in World vs World, mostly defending our one and only T3 Keep or retaking the rest of our stuff after we lost it, which was about every five minutes. 

This week's event must have been wildly successful if the marker of success is how much time I've spent playing, when I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I killed close to a thousand players, ranked up more times than I can remember and made it into the final set of skirmish rewards, Diamond, for the first time in years.

Activity was about as manic as I've seen it. For most of the day no side in our match owned more than one upgraded keep. Almost everything was paper. There were players running around all over the place. Crystal Desert were on a mission to overtake us and go up to Tier Three at the weekly reset later tonight. They had close to a full squad runing all day, even at the times when there are normally none of them to be seen.

Just keep telling yourself that.

Despite all that action and chaos and effort, I didn't see a queue on any map, not even once. I've barely seen one all week and even the couple of times I did it was only one or two people. Measured by that metric, things were actually busier a few weeks ago, when there was no event of any kind.

This is Tier Four we're talking about, of course. Maybe the matches above us had deeper queues and more of them. Then again, much of the time when I check, Yaks Bend is listed as "Full" and you can't get any more populated than that. You'd think, right?

It doesn't work that way. No-one knows how it does work, exactly, but we do know it's not a head-count. It's an algorithm or I imagine it is. Everything's an algorithm nowadays. All ArenaNet will admit to is that they calculate how busy Worlds are by reference to a number of factors including but not limited to how many people log in to WvW, how long they stay and what kind of things they do while they're there.

By that measure, earlier this week about two-thirds of the servers were flagged "Full". Today it was just over half. It changes all the time but if there's a pattern to it I don't know what it is. 

I do know that when people wanted to move to a server that was always "Full" they would sometimes stay up until three or four in the morning in the hope they could catch it in one of the brief windows when it dropped to "Very High". Back in the days when people used the forums for more than just arguing and badmouthing developers, you'd sometimes get public-service posts letting everyone know some server or other had opened for transfers, which, naturally, meant that server would be "Full" again at the next update.

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I had a brief discussion abut it in guild chat as we were running to defend something or other this morning. I was venting my irritation at people who don't care about the match result and Mrs. Bhagpuss was explaining to me why I could go boil my head. She takes the very widely held view that server pride died when ANet changed the rules on transfers and moving to the winning team every six to eight weeks became the meta. 

I can't really argue with that. Server pride doesn't make much sense when there's a whole playstyle devoted specifically to switching servers. Even harder to take it seriously when you factor in the link system, where you don't even know which server it is you're on half the time. 

Just keep telling yourself that.

Even so, a competition is a competition and a match is a match. You don't get a prize or a title for after a pick-up game in the park but I would contend that you do still care who wins. Yes, when you all come back the next day and pick teams again you're probably going to end up playing alongside the kid you were trying to kick in the shins the day before but each pick-up match is a discrete event and each one matters or else none of them do.

That is the problem in a nutshell for a lot of people. None of them do. So why do they bother? Same million reasons anyone does anything in mmorpgs. Loot, gear, achievements, bragging rights, social pressure, fun, boredom... When GW2 began, ArenaNet wanted WvW to be the endgame. They included the maps in world completion and tied a bunch of stuff in the Mists to other features of the game. 

You can guess how that went down with PvE players. Once the dedicated WvW crowd that arrived expecting DAOC 2.0 had left in a huff, ANet moved quickly to pacify the people they had left. The problem was, they had a set of maps, rules and mechanics designed neither for pure PvP players nor monster-bashers. We've been living with a series of passive-aggressive compromises ever since.

Just keep telling yourself that.

All the many, many redesigns have failed. The last one, the supposed mega-revamp that would do away with Worlds entirely and heave everyone into some kind of ludicrously over-complicated parody of high-school, with everything built on popularity and cliques, thankfully appears to have died of lack of interest. What might replace it remains unspoken. 

My guess would be nothing. There's a conspiracy theory, so widely accepted now it might as well be confirmed fact, that ANet make major bank on transfer fees. Another of their dirty little secrets is how the links are decided every other month. Some of the decisions seem so nihilistic that monetary gain appears the only rational explanation.

Whether it's true or not that they couldn't do without the income generated by thousands of people paying to change the name of their team every few weeks, I suspect another well-founded theory will be proven to be correct. There's no-one left at ANet who cares enough about WvW to try to make it less disfunctional. 

Okay, maybe don't keep telling yourself that. And definitely don't tell anyone else.

There was a moment of moderate shock recently when one of the former WvW devs returned to work on it again. That was seen by some as a sign that life might be about to be breathed back into the corpse. It seems a bit of a stretch. It's not like much changed the last time he was in charge. Or, rather, things did change. Just, well, nothing that mattered...

The moment of truth will be when we get to hear the full feature list for End of Dragons. Back when Heart of Thorns was in development it included the biggest shake-up WvW has ever had. That was an unmitigated disaster. Path of Fire didn't even mention WvW let alone change anything there. PoF is generally reckoned to have been a popular, successful expansion. A lot of people still detest HoT. Draw your own conclusions.

As far as I see it, WvW is in maintenance mode now. It's there. It works. If you want to play it you can. People do. Still, even now, quite a lot of them. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played it for five or six hours today. It was fun.

Maybe that could be the WvW slogan: "Raining out? Bored? Can't think of anything better to do? Come play WvW"!

There are worse ways to spend a wet friday in May.

I Will Ascend

When I sat down at my desk this morning, the game I really wanted to play was Bless Unleashed but for the very sensible reasons I gave yesterday I managed to talk myself out of it. My second choice would probably have been to try and finish Broken Sword 5 but for some reason I only like to play that in the evenings.

Instead, I did all my usual dailies in all my usual games. Later in the afternoon I put in a couple of hours in the Mists. Guild Wars 2 is running a double-xp-and-other-goodies event in World vs World this week. It tends to get quite manic at the weekends anyway but just now it's completely rammed. There's plenty of action.

I managed to get over a hundred and thirty kills, taking my lifetime total on my main account close to forty thousand. That may sound like a lot but to get the Ultimate Dominator title you have to kill a quarter of a million people. At the rate I'm going I'd have to keep playing GW2 until I was over a hundred years old. I guess it could happen...

In between I played some more in Genshin Impact. Quite a bit more. I'd let it slip for a couple of days after I started messing around with Bless Unleashed, just like I stopped playing Dragon Nest Origins as soon as I got back into Genshin Impact. I'm not sure why but I seem to find it hard to concentrate on more than one imported mmorpg at a time. Not that Genshin Impact is an mmo but the principle stands.

I started off in the usual fashion with the four daily Adventure Guild commissions. Then I had a look in my Adventurer's Handbook to see if there was anything I ought to be working on. I just finished Chapter Four last week but like everything in GI you get backdated credit for anything you've already done, so I'm already part-way through some of the next set of goals.

One that looked eminently doable was leveling three characters to forty. I already had two at thirty-five and one at thirty. Character level doesn't go up when you adventure or quest like it would in pretty much any other game you ever heard of. It's the account-based Adventure level that does that. 

To increase character level you have to spend specific resources you've acquired along the way, all of which are represented as books or papers, plus some gold, or Mora as the currency is called. Since the main way you get hold of all of those things is by doing all the normal questing, combat and exploring activities, if you stop and think about it you are leveling the characters in the traditional way. You're just deferring the xp so you can allocate it to specific characters rather than having it go to whoever is out at the time. 

I stood outside the main gates of Monstadt and blew through my resources until the Traveler, Diluc and Barbara hit forty. I had almost exactly the right amount. I couldn't have pushed any further, even if I'd wanted to, anyway. There's a soft cap at level forty. To get past it you have to Ascend. 

It's always "Ascend", isn't it? I first came across the expression in the original Guild Wars, where it was a huge rite of passage but since then I've seen it used in umpteen games. All the magic's gone out of the word. Time someone came up with a new one.

There's a button to press to Ascend so of course I pressed it to see what it did. It told me what resources I needed and, because Genshin Impact is exceptionally well-documented in game, clicking on those resources told me where I could get them. 

I had some of the stuff but there was still a fair bit to collect so I shelved that for the time being and took another look at the handbook. Another goal was Enhancing three weapons to Level 40. That sounded simple enough but when I looked at the weapons the Traveler and Diluc were using I saw they were locked at Level 20. 

Apparently those needed to Ascend as well although Barbara, who holds a book rather than a sword, the Healer's lot in so many games, seemed somehow to have gotten hold of an item that already went to forty. 

Once again, a quick click told me what materials were needed and where to get them. And I had everything for both the swords except for the imaginatively-named "Weapon Ascension Material". This vital ingredient can only be obtained from a Domain of Forgery, of which there are two, each of which is only open on alternate days. I don't know why. Union rules, maybe.

Except on Sundays, that is, when they're both up. It seemed like a good time to go find out how tough it was going to be to get the mats. I consulted the map and ported as close as I could get then ran over to the entrance to the Hidden Palace of Lianshan Formula. Yes, it is a peculiar name. No I don't know why it's called that.

The door offers a wide selection of options, varying both in level and reward. I spent a while sifting through them, cross-referencing names and images until I was sure I had the right one for the Traveler's needs. I picked Level 15, the lowest available setting, then I opened the door and went inside. 

I was anticipating a lengthy slog through an annoying dungeon with lots of platforms, traps and mobs trying to kill me. Instead, I got one big room with a glowing red key in the middle. I clicked on the key and it started a timed event. I had to kill twenty mobs in six minutes. It took me about thirty seconds.

And that was it. I couldn't believe it. I thought I must have missed something but nope, that was all there was. I clicked on the big statue at the end of the room and collected my reward, which included enough materials to Ascend the Traveler's claymore. Then I went outside, swapped to Diluc, and went back in again.

I did one more after that for luck and then I portaled back to town and Ascended the two weapons. That seemed to take fewer mats than I was expecting so the whole thing was a lot easier than I thought it would be. 

It occured to me then that three-quarters of my team were a lot more powerful than they had been back when I stopped playing in November last year. At that time I'd hit a point in the main storyline where I felt I was getting out of my depth. I'd driven Stormterror the dragon to his lair and I'd taken down the wards so I could follow him inside but it had been hard work. I'd decided the fight would be more than I could handle so I'd put the whole thing on hold and by the time I came back I'd pretty much forgotten about it.

Until now. Oh, what the heck. We can only die! So off I went to give it a go.

And again it was nothing like I was expecting. When I arrived all the crew were there, patiently wating for me to get on with the story: Amber, Venti and Diluc. It was a bit weird, having two Dilucs, but I tried to ignore that. After a bit of chat I clicked on the door and...

...found myself in some kind of on-rails shooting game. It was, in fact, the exact same scenario I remember from GW2's Path of Fire storyline, specifically that bit where you ride Aurene and fly behind Kralkatorik, shooting at him. 

It took me three goes and a YouTube video to get it right. The first time it made me feel nauseous and I couldn't figure out what to do. The second time I'd seen the video and I knew what to do - I just couldn't do it. The third time it was fine.

The next part, which once again reminded me very strongly of a similar set piece in GW2, that one where Mordremoth sticks his head through the wall in the Pale Tree's house, took me a couple of goes. The first time I was confused by a couple of things. Firstly, I was suddenly playing Venti, none of whose abilities I knew how to use. Secondly, despite everything looking normal, I was only able to move in some kind of half-assed, 2.5D perspective.

In spite of all of that, the whole thing was much less awful than I was expecting. I wouldn't say it was in any way fun but even with the failures it only took me about twenty minutes to get it done. Of course, I didn't know what was coming next.

That makes it sound like it was something bad. It wasn't. It was something rather enjoyable but, yet again, very unexpected. I carried on following the main questline and from that point on it was like watching a movie. I had to do some traveling, first back to Monstadt and then on to Liyue and I had to talk to quite a few people to keep the dialog moving but for what must have been at least half an hour, maybe longer, all I was really doing was watching and listening.

I have to say Genshin Impact has a pretty good storyline. Obviously it's the same storyline as nearly every other mmorpg (yes, it's not an mmorpg, I know...), particularly those from the East, but as these things go it's one of the better ones. 

The dialog is well-written with an unusually academic bent. I'd be willing to bet that if you put it through one of those reading comprehension filters it would come out as "university level". Lots and lots of long words and abstruse concepts, always used correctly and appropriately. I'd love to see a few of the folks who bang on about the damaging effects of video games on the developing mind get a look at this questline. Of course some players probably skip through it all barely reading or listening but that's not really thdevelopers' problem. Certainly no-one can accuse them of dumbing down.

By the time I had to stop for lunch the Traveler was on the run from a sinister military force, having just witnessed and been implicated in the spectacular death of a god. I said "Bloody hell!" out loud when that happened. I'm very keen to find out what happens next.

As for the nominal reason I was there, raising my Adventure level, it's now close to twenty-five, which is where it will stall until I can bring myself to complete the AR25 Ascension quest. I've watched that on YouTube and this time it really is one of those long, difficult dungeons. It has several mobs I already know from experience I have huge difficulty beating and one of the fights is on a timer. I am not looking forward to it, to put it mildly.

I have a plan, of sorts. If I can get the mats to Ascend my characters I can level them up to fifty. I'm hoping that that will be enough to give me the edge I need to offset my very considerable lack of skill. It's going to take some time but I'm not in any kind of hurry and at least now I can go back to following the plot.

All in all a good day's work. The only thing I really did wrong was to forget to take any screenshots. Or, rather, I thought I was taking plenty but I was using the screenshot keys from a different game so in actuality I was doing nothing of the kind. That's why all the pictures in the post as so generic.

Next time I'll remember to take my Kamera.

This Is The Summer

Okay, then. Let's take a look at the Great Guild Wars 2 Summer of Fun! ArenaNet aren't calling it that, by the way. I am.

I might not even mean it ironically. I was quite impressed when I skim-read the program on the official web site. I'm curious to find out if it stands up to closer examination. 

One thing I noticed on the first read-through was that whoever put it together had eschewed chronology. Normally what you'd expect in something like this is linear progression through time. That's what a program of events traditionally requires. People don't just want to know what they're getting: they want to know the running order so they know when to line up and when to head for the bar.

If ANet had stuck to a strict timeline, though, they'd have had to open with 

May 11—Skills and Balance Update 

and no-one wants that.

Skills and balance updates somehow manage to be both predictable and controversial. At any given moment there's one bunch of yahoos wailing they need a full rebalance right now while another argues everything's just fine as it is so leave it the hell alone. Inbetween those poles you can find a lobby for every class and even every elite specialization in the game, all making their case for special treatment as all around the various camps trolls and troublemakers prowl, spreading the notion that various classes or abilites are gamebreakingly OP and ought to be nerfed into oblivion.

Whatever ANet says or indeed does about balance they know they can't win. Not hearts, not minds, not even arguments. Like some sisyphean ball of confusion, all they can hope to do is push it a little further up the slope than last time and hope that when it rolls back down it doesn't crush them on the way past.

So, although that little treat is the first course in this summer-long feast, it's been tucked away behind the big reveal. And the big reveal is... there's going to be a big reveal!  

 

July 27—Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons First Look

Believe it or not that genuinely is the most exciting prospect of the whole summer schedule. It fully justifies its place at the head of the program. I can't help feeling there's something just a little sad about it. The thing we're all the most thrilled to see is an announcement that there's going to be an announcement. Not even a date. Just what the new content is.

Don't care. Still excited. I'll be there on July 27 (probably not something any of us should be saying during the end times but you gotta stay positive). The stream's set to include "features, an introduction to the story, a new trailer video", all of which you'd expect, but also "elite specialization beta event information." 

I'm not all that interested in the beta event (or the elite specs) per se but I am interested to hear one's already being planned. Combined with the run of dates for this "Live summer", none of which extends into August, I'd guess we'll get the beta event(s) soon after the livestream, then some kind of anniversary celebration and the expansion will drop either at the end of August or in September.

If not, they're going to have to come up with a Fall Festival of Fun to follow this summer spectacular because we ain't getting another season of the Living Story, we know that much. No, End of Dragons late summer/early autumn. Mark your dance cards.

Of course, when I said the EoD reveal would be the most exciting prospect I was speaking objectively. From a personal point of view, as I made clear yesterday, the true highlight of the summer will be

 

July 13—The Twisted Marionette

I mentioned this to Mrs. Bhagpuss this morning, just after Yaks Bend's expiditionary forces had been unceremoniously dumped back on their own border following a failed assault on Dragonbrand's Air Keep. Her reply was "Oh, I liked the Marionette!", which stands in stark conrast to the kind of reply I usually get to conversational sallies of this kind, namely "What's that? I don't remember it". 

The Marionette fight was unforgettable, which is a lot more than I can say about every Living Story boss fight ever and just about every meta event since Heart of Thorns. Generic events have been the name of the game for so long now it's difficult to remember when ANet knew how to create fights that were actually interesting. Perhaps refurbishing this one will remind them how it's done.

Next comes something from the Quality of Life department. I didn't think ANet had one of those. It's certainly been underemployed these last nine years.

July 13 - The Legendary Armory

This doesn't interest me at all and for a very good reason. I have no legendaries. What's more, not only do I not plan to get any, I specifically plan never to get any. As in I have positive intentions to avoid getting any if at all possible. 

I'm not saying I wouldn't take a legendary if ANet decided to give them away but short of that I would rather not, thanks very much. Never saw the point of them and still don't now.

The thing is this: I really, really hate changing my spec. I like to decide on it once then play it forever. If forced, as has happened a couple of times, I will grudgingly and irritably make the necessary adjustments to fall into line with some new orthodoxy but having done so I will expect to get several more years out of the new set-up before something drives me to change it again. 

That attitude has served me admirably across many mmorpgs and I see absolutely no need to change my behavior. Consequently, the attraction of items that are no more powerful than those I already have but which allow me to change my spec on the fly is utterly lost on me. 

I'm sure the Legendary Armory is going to be a boon for some people. It's nice that they're going to get it. Just don't expect me to care.

And finally, before we get to the list of regular holidays and returning weekend specials, here's the fifth pullout package. It's an odd one:

 

Beginning May 25—Living World: Complete the Cycle

I had to read this several times and I'm still not certain I understand it. Here's what I think is going to happen:

• There will be a series of week-long windows devoted to specific Living Story episodes from Seasons 2 and 3.
• Anyone who doesn't have that particular episode can get it for free during the week it's up.
• The featured episodes will get new achievements.
• If you complete all of the new achievements you get "a voucher for a Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons precursor weapon". This would seem to bootstrap you past the first segment of the interminable crafting process for a single Legendary weapon when EoD drops but that's about all. 
• There's going to be "a new meta-achievement for all three playable Living World seasons and The Icebrood Saga". If you complete that you get a legendary amulet. Whoop-di-doo. 

All of the above (except the getting them for free part) persists indefinitely so you can work on these time-consuming (let's not say time-wasting) tasks at your leisure.

I would literally rather spend my evenings cleaning my oven than ever do any of LS Seasons two or three again and as for achievements I never did most of those in the first place so that won't be happening. Once again, good luck to them as likes it. I'll pass, thanks.

That just leaves us with what you could call the usual suspects, otherwise known as 

 

Ongoing Summer Events

For once, there are a lot of them. They switch on at a slightly better cadence than twice a month for the whole of the designated "summer" season, beginning with the ever-popular World vs. World Weeklong Bonus.

I say "popular" because it generally seems to be but there are plenty of dedicated WvW players who hate these weeks with a passion. They attract hordes of ignorant, unskilled PvE players into the borderlands, afking at the bank, asking inane questions and generally getting in everyone's way. They do have their advocates, though. 

The more positive voices always call for patience, pointing out  the opportunities these events offer for introducing wide-eyed newbies to the joys of WvW. Meanwhile roamers relish the plethora of easy kills and the chance to re-inforce every prejudice and preconception PvE players already have about wicked gankers. I just like the chance to push my rank higher. 

There are a couple of events like that and something similar for the sPvP crowd, who also get tournaments, something that's been denied to WvW for many years. Instead, in WvW we get the marmite "No Downstate" event (June 18), which always kicks up a ruckus on the forums as people take extreme positions, claiming either that they'll never play WvW so long as they actually die when someone kills them or that they wish downstate had never been invented and the event should made permanent. I just find it a fun diversion for a week, which, I think, is all it's meant to be.

 

In PvE there's some kind of "Fractal Rush" in which I don't intend to learn about let alone participate in and then there's Dragon Bash, the festival in Hoelbrak, which I do. I notice there's no mention of the Queen's Jubilee or the Crown Pavilion but on refelction those both take place in August, so outwith the remit. I'm sure they'll be along on schedule to tide us over until the expansion arrives.

In fact, with the anniversary also in August, that does seem to fill the calendar nicely until the beginning of September. It's all falling into place.

Eliot at Massively OP wrote an op-ed piece this week on maintenance mode in mmorpgs. I know this is actually a lull before a major expansion, which is hardly the same thing, but as a program it does feel remarkably similar to what you might think of as active maintenance. I have to say it suits me quite well.

I'd happily sign up for no more Living Story, ever, in exchange for bi-annual expansions with a program like this in the off-seasons. That sounds like a manageable and sustainable business model to me. Especially if the best of the older events, like the Marionette, could be spruced up and re-introduced. I could make a list of those.

Probably lucky I'm not in charge, isn't it?

Donkey Ride

It very much looks as though I'm playing Black Desert again. That wasn't in any plan I'd made. Not that I make plans. Okay, I sort of do, a little. In my head. I don't go so far as to write them down or make blog posts out of them like February Goals: 2021 or February 2021 Gaming Goals or February Goals: Shaking Things Up. 

I could link to a whole lot more like those, not to mention all the ones where people review how things went last month, like Time To Loot Journal: January  or January In Review And Raiding. (Funny how no-one ever does "Gaming Goals: My Quarterly Report" posts. It's always either by month or by year. I wonder why that is?). 

Apologies to all the many blogs I could have linked to in these opening paragraphs but didn't. Thing is, there are a lot. We'd be here all day.

Sometimes I do knock together a post along the lines of Games I've Been Playing - January 2021 where I ramble about... well, about the games I've been playing. I don't usually name a month, though, And let's be honest, most of my posts are me rambling on about games I've been playing so it wouldn't serve much purpose to draw attention to the fact.

 

There have been a few times when I've put up something like Games For 2021. When I've actually had specific games I've been looking forward to, that is. Most of the potential candidates that come to mind right now have been pending for so long there hardly seems much point mentioning them again. Remind me: how many years has Camelot: Unchained been in development now? 

Dragging myself bodily back to somewhere within spitting distance of the point, as I said at the top of the post, Black Desert is once again a game I can say that I'm playing. I played yesterday. For several hours. 

I played two mmorpgs for several hours each yesterday, in fact, and Black Desert was the second. The first was Guild Wars 2. Specifically, World vs World. 

Oi! Put that mini away, noob!

 

I don't mention it much because there's not a lot to say about it and almost nothing that's of any interest to anyone outside the game. Certainly nothing I post about it here is ever going to get picked up by the gaming press as happened to Wilhelm recently.   

Even so, GW2's World vs World is undergoing what seems like a major resurgence. It might have something to do with half the planet being under a form of house arrest. Possibly it's because ArenaNet have been so busy with behind-the-scenes work on the upcoming expansion they haven't found time to mess about with the rules for months, meaning players have finally been able to settle into a rhythm. Who knows?

On a personal level it definitely has a lot to do with the links the servers I play on have pulled these last couple of rounds. Mrs Bhagpuss and I have both been very impressed with what we've seen of the Sea of Sorrows WvW community. If there's one thing the whole server linking system has proved beyond a doubt it's that, at least in large-scale PvPvE environments, server culture is very real. 

About as far as I usually get in a week.

Playing with SoS is like going back in time. The game feels almost like it did five years ago. Scouts are valued, everyone cares about the match score, Commanders respond to calls. All the stuff that made playing worthwhile, which endless tinkering with the form by ANet, along with their apparent policy of creative neglect, did its best to destroy; that's back. 

Also, having hordes of battle-crazed Aussies rampaging around the maps every day from my breakfast-time until well after lunch as I'm sat here at home with not much of any importance to do has been a real boon. And their rivalry with other Aussies on different servers is always hilarious. I can't help but wonder how many of them know each other out of game.

I've played so much WvW the last few days that by the time I logged out on Monday I was already into the gold rewards for the week. Usually it's as much as I can do to make it to the end of bronze over the full match. I might get as far as platinum this week, something that can't have happened for a year or more.

When I was done with that I had a think about what I wanted to play next and it turned out be Black Desert. I felt a bit guilty for dropping all the other mmorpgs I thought I was going to be concentrating on but no plan survives contact with a passing fancy, as the saying goes. Well, that's how it goes around our house at any rate. Not to mention I didn't have a plan in the first place.

So I played BDO for about three hours, which these days counts as a long session for me. I don't really do those all-day marathons any more. And by played I mostly mean "rode around on my donkey taking screenshots".  That wasn't planned, either, although it sure as eggs was predictable.

You've heard the expression "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it"?

 

Here's how it happened. I was reading and replying to the comments on my last post about Black Desert when I noticed the screenshot I'd used at the top showed my Shai sitting on a donkey. As the very helpful comments by Seanas and Mailvaltar reminded me, there was a lot about the game I didn't know, but it also occurred to me there was a lot I'd forgotten and one of those things was that I used to own a donkey. Maybe I still did?

I spent a good while checking my skills and looking through my bags in the hope of finding an ability or an item to call my faithful steed to my side. Nothing. I did a bit of googling and that didn't help much, either. Finally it occurred to me that maybe Black Desert might be something like Fallen Earth, where mounts either have to stay in the world or be stabled. 

I'd passed some stable or other on the way into town. I went to check in with the stable hand and there was my good old donkey. I'd even named him, although why I'd chosen to call him Cardew is beyond my capacity to imagine, let alone recall. 

Old Card was still level one but the three other mounts I could see were stabled in other towns and I couldn't figure out how to fetch them to me, if that's even possible. But things were slowly coming back to me. Didn't mounts level up just from being ridden around? Maybe I should just get Card out, trot him up and down the road for a while, see what happened.

Literally the only thing on the road slower than me - another donkey.

 

So I did. Well, once I'd managed to point him in the right direction. Turning a donkey in BDO is like turning a supertanker. The inertia is off the scale. God knows what that stable guy's been feeding him all these years but he seems to have put on several tons in weight.

Once I'd gotten him moving I started putting some more recovered knowledge into practice. I'd been reading up on how to take screenshots and I'd been going through all of the keyboard settings and options, trying to figure out this and that. Particularly how to switch on autorun.

The upshot was that I spent what felt like an hour or so cantering cross country on roads and dirt tracks with the UI switched off. All I had to do was twitch the mouse to the left or right once in a while. Other than that I just sat back and watched as though I was at the movies.

With the donkey going at a fair clip it seemed nothing could react fast enough to do me much damage. I got shot at by undead archers and a few orcs tried to chase me but by the time most things had registered my presence I was already vanishing over the horizon.

If this was Fallen Earth there'd be ants eating that parked horse.

 

I took a lot of screenshots and veered off the road into the bushes many times as I tried to figure out how to swing the camera around so I could get shots of something other than my Shai's boomerang and bouncing backside. Never did figure that out.

Eventually I ended up in Heidel, having taken the extremely very long and exceptionally scenic route. It took me about a twentieth of the time to ride back to Velia where I'd started, this time sticking to the main road. 

Along the way I was passed by just about everything other than another heavily laden donkey and few people on foot. Twice someone overtook me at speed on what looked like a grounded pegasus, a horse with wings that remained solidly earthbound. Once, some other creature flashed by so quickly it vanished in a blur before I could tell what it was. Another time, I saw someone riding a small elephant.

The most surprising thing to me was how clearly I remembered so much of the landscape. Even though it must be years since I passed through most of these places, not only did I remember what I'd done when I was there last but more often than not I found myself correctly anticipating where I would arrive next. Couldn't recall the names of any of them but I had a fair idea what sort of places they were, what creatures roamed or hunted there, whether it was safe to stop or better to ride hard and keep my head down, things like that.

Hey, Dopey! Where's the rest of your dumb crew?

When I eventually logged out Cardew was well into level eight. I went back and read most of the posts I wrote about Black Desert, when I first played it five years ago. Several things struck me, not least just how much I'd written about the game back then. Also how much time I must have spent playing it. 

I'd forgotten but it seems I played it almost exclusively for a solid month before dropping back to sporadic visits and then stopping for a couple of years. There's mention of having put in more than a hundred hours in that first month alone, although it is in the context of discussing just how much of that time I spent afk, fishing or riding, with the game minimized while I played GW2.

I also made quite a lot of how great a game it was for pure exploration and how the game parts almost got in the way of the worldliness of it all. It's no wonder that even after all those hours the highest any of my characters reached was the mid-twenties. Clearly I spent most of my time sightseeing.

It's too early to say if that will happen again. I do know that a vast amount of new territory has been added since I played before. There must be an astonishing amount to see out there. I'm guessing that most of it will be desperately dangerous for a low-level character to visit, so unless I plan on seeing everything from the back of a speeding donkey, I'm guessing I probably will have to concentrate a little more on typical character progression, at least for a while.

Maybe I'll see how many of those xp bonuses I can stack. Make a stab at getting into the fifties so I can go exploring farther afield. Possibly try to do it on one of the PvP-disabled seasonal servers so I don't have to think about being ganked as I lollygag. 

Hmm. That's begining to sound dangerously like a plan. 

Probably better just wing it.