Sleeping Dogs: Quick Thoughts

I was holding back on getting this game, mostly because I wasn’t sure when I’d ever have the time to play a GtA clone in between all the other games that usually take my attention, and it was always regularly going on 75% off so I could always get it another time, right?

Seeing one of my friends who rarely plays Steam games on a habitual basis pick it up and stick with the game for around 4 days running (a record for this friend, really) suggested there was something fairly captivating about this title.

At 80% off, I was finally moved enough to put down some cash to take it out for a spin.

Turns out… it’s pretty good.

The opening sets the scene for what to expect.

If you’ve watched any Hong Kong action / cop movie, the game hits several bullseyes on flavor and theme. While I don’t know how much is 100% faithful to the actual city, the architecture -feels- like it’s captured some of its essence.

Martial arts, that staple of the genre? Got it in spades. That’s what you’ll be using to beat up thugs most of the time, Batman-style, minus the utility belt.

Sleeping Dogs follows the story of Wei Shen, a cop going deep undercover in the triads, and his struggle to balance both sides of his existence.

That blood… it’s not mine. At least, I don’t think it is…

The morality aspect is, unfortunately, not addressed very well in player-chosen interaction.

I was, at first, pretty thrilled to realize that there were both cop missions and triad missions to do, and that violent actions increased triad score, while doing un-cop-like things subtracted from cop score. But some of the illusion of choice fades away when you realize that it’s a linear story and the chapters won’t progress until you do the compulsory missions on both sides.

And more fades away even further when you accidentally kill your first innocent through vehicular manslaughter via controls that don’t let themselves well to finesse and realize the only ramifications are a small negative number to said cop score, rather than getting yanked out of the undercover mission, charged in court and jailed for being totally off one’s rocker.

I suppose it wouldn’t be a Grand Theft Auto type of game if you couldn’t get away with vast quantities of crime and carnage.

As much as I wanted to pretend to be a good cop at heart and immerse into the setting at face value, roleplaying for all it was worth, small little niggling details do tend to induce shortcut taking – like being stuck in a traffic jam of three cars while waiting for the traffic light to turn green (always takes forever when you’re waiting for it to) and having some dumb AI of a bus ram you from behind while you were STATIONARY and curse you in Cantonese for being a m—-f—ker that doesn’t know how to drive properly.

That’s exactly the time you decide to hit the accelerator and swerve into the perpetually empty lane meant for oncoming traffic, ramming the idiotic bus for good measure during the maneuver, and speed through the red traffic light to be on your dang way to the next mission checkpoint, driving on the left side of the road be damned.

(Nice as it feels for someone in a historically British colonized country to be able to drive in a game on the ‘correct’ side, for once.)

The story and cutscenes question lifetaking by an officer of the law, even while undercover – as in, they’re not supposed to, but the game itself throws you into scenarios where you have a gun and a dozen people shooting at you, and doesn’t give you any achievement or indeed, seem to have any expectations at all that you’ll try to do it the hard way by kung-fu disarming and beating down every one of them down with your fists, instead proffering tutorials on how to slow motion vault over tables and shoot multiple enemies in that same breath action movie style.

Very soon, I found myself deciding to treat the game less like a simulation of real life, and more with movie morality. Ie. Cops get to shoot at bad guys and the extras will just fall down out of scene and there will be no repercussions from this excessive slaughter.

That said, if you treat Sleeping Dogs like a movie, it’s a pretty fun one. With a decent amount of authenticity.

At least he doesn’t grab the gun like how many movie actors would do it – with their fingers on the trigger.

I was especially impressed to find a not-insignificant amount of voice acting in actual Cantonese.

Yes, Cantonese. Not Mandarin.

The differences may not be entirely obvious to those unfamiliar with the region and speak neither language, but Cantonese is a dialect used in a region of China (the Guangdong Province, historically Canton) and historically, as migrants from this southern region of China spread further south into Hongkong and Malaysia/Singapore, they brought their language with them.

(Southeast Asia also picked up other chinese dialects from migrants from other regions of China, resulting in some rather colorful amalgamations of cursewords and slang from various languages like Hokkien and Teochew, mixed with the local Malay, but that’s another story.)

Mandarin, or Standard Chinese, on the other hand, originated in yet another region of China (Beijing and the northern regions), and has been used as a lingua franca and ‘official language’ by which people from one region could make themselves understood to people from another – especially regarding issues of governance.

Bottom line. They’re not the same. People in Hongkong speak Cantonese. People in China speak Mandarin. (More or less.)

As someone who can understand both tongues, even if one struggles to express non-babytalk sentences in either, it adds a great touch of authenticity to Sleeping Dogs to even hear some phrases in the right language. (They are subtitled in English, so you won’t miss any meanings.)

There have been some debates on exactly -how- authentic the Cantonese used is, and yeah, while I don’t doubt that true Hong Kong residents using their variant of Cantonese will find distinctly strange accents on some of the voice actors, I’m of the opinion that it remains understandably Cantonese.

Language, after all, is notorious for evolving over regions.

Take for example, this spin on English by a native Singaporean English speaker, Ruby Pan, as she takes us on a whirlwind tour of American English, British English, two kinds of Singaporean English and Filipino English. How authentic is her English?

I’m sure her American English will still sound accented to some American English speakers. Hell, people in two regions of America may still have an accent to each other. Ditto people from Britain or Australia.

But it’s more or less all understandably English until we really get to the more significant dialects – I probably would struggle to understand Yorkshire English as much as some would struggle to understand Singlish or Filipino English, for example, due to loan words from other languages, but the main part of it is still -mostly- English.

Some voice actors in Sleeping Dogs have distinctly better grasp of the intonation and timings of Cantonese (Mrs Chu, Winston’s Chu mother sounds particularly authentically fearsome, channeling every Asian mum and mother-in-law there is) and others, usually the younger ones, struggle a little more.

Others complain that there’s a heck of a lot of English used for something supposedly set in Hong Kong, and that it sounds weird to have sprinklings of Cantonese mixed into English phrases as if it sounds cool, or we were in some Firefly universe where people pepper in Mandarin oddly into every other English sentence (Trust me, Firefly speakers sound distinctly odd, probably because they are mangling each Chinese word they’re struggling to pronounce.)

However, people who grow up with two languages are known to code-switch, forming a linguistic blend that is sometimes only understandable by people of that community.

So in a sense, while it may not be fully authentically Hong Kong, the setting turns into an interesting fictional amalgam of Hong Kong triad mixed with American-Born-Chinese style Western gangsterism (thank you, Grand Theft Auto roots.)

H-Klub Radio, from the in-game radio soundtracks in cars, features songs from 24Herbs that evoke the setting really well – Hip Hop… in Cantonese…

Yeah, you kinda have to laugh, while enjoying it.

Some bits of Sleeping Dogs are more reminiscent of a cheesy Hong Kong comedy movie, but that’s ALSO part of the whole atmosphere being recreated, y’know?

I escorted a bride-to-be around as a chauffeur, and a simple errand to get a wedding cake somehow turned into a death-defying pursuit sequence where in a similar movie, stuntmen would be employed to fly on wires out of one car onto the hood of another.

I was laughing through most of it as the initially cautious and slightly freaked out bride screaming about damage to her car when I scraped it against a parking meter turned out pretty darned ruthless when she realized it was -her- wedding cake on the line. “What? FASTER. GO FASTER!”

Right after we (ok, I) rescued the cake by tossing the driver out of the van and taking over the wheel, we (ok, I) ended up “volunteered” to steal the perfect flower for her wedding. from a group of monks – which involved disguising as one and fast talk about balance and the cosmos, kung fu’ing one’s way out of the temple and shaking off the cops at speed post-heist.

The car wasn’t too worse for wear at the end of the day, all things considering…

Controls and bugs-wise, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag.

I was really impressed to find that the game auto-swapped between keyboard controls and gamepad controls without much of a hitch. This means the tutorial prompts for keys actually stay pretty relevant, rather than the usual case scenario of trying to figure out exactly which keyboard key was mapped to button X or Y on a gamepad.

For a PC port, standard keyboard and mouse controls functioned fairly well and felt quite similar to a slightly clunkier Batman game for 95% of the time… with maybe just a tinge of unpredictable lag when pressing left or right mouse buttons to punch or counter… right up to the point I got a gun and was asked to shoot something.

This is where it broke.

Left click refused to shoot. With any semblance of consistency. It would beep repeatedly rather than shoot.

I’m not sure if this was because I did have a gamepad plugged in also and was thus on auto-swap, possibly causing some conflicts, instead of switching permanently to mouse-keyboard in the options, but after some struggle, I defaulted back to the gamepad to get through the sequence.

This is rather annoying, since the one place mouse aiming would have really come in handy would be aiming a gun, but well, that’s why I own a USB gamepad, for dealing with the vagaries of PC ports.

Then there were the repeating cases of the accidentally hijacked taxi, due to the same button being used for Hiring a Taxi (press and hold) and Hijack a Vehicle (just press.)

Moral of the story: Try not to stand near the front doors of a taxi, and make sure the conversation option is available, before hitting the button. Else you will end up chauffeuring yourself instead of getting someone else to do all the work.

Taxis, when they work though, are a pretty handy waypoint system for a negligible cost – useful for when one is too lazy to drive through Hong Kong traffic with highly dubious AI to get to the next waypoint.

I had a couple of audio skipping issues or the game tries to switch between fullscreen and windowed mode by itself, usually occurring after playing the game for a while – which could be due to my toaster’s poor specs as usual. Restarting the game or hitting Alt+Enter to switch back usually fixes it. Your mileage and luck on Sleeping Dogs playing nice with your hardware may vary.

But when all is said and done, despite the little niggles that would prevent me from paying full price for this game, I find myself wanting to know how the story is going to end.

Which ultimately reflects pretty well on Sleeping Dogs.

GW2: Megaserver Misadventures

You know, I don’t think I ever gave enough credit for how successfully GW2 built a sense of community, enough to attract even an asocial player like myself…

…Until it was taken away.

One of the reasons I played A Tale in the Desert for as long as I did was how it managed to recreate the “small-town feel” that I never felt anywhere in any MMO, save for the first MUD I played.

(You know what they say about your first MMO… it sticks with you long after you leave. You get used to that community of 300 odd players online, many of whose names you recognize and see every day. Some of whom you dislike and tend to ignore, sort of like that mad relative everyone keeps their distance from, but the rest of whom become part of an extended family.)

In ATITD, this was recreated by geographic proximity. Your neighbors were literally your neighbors. You learned to live with them, or you moved away.

With that sort of implicit social pressure and threat of ostracism from game progress (there are points where life is much easier if you have a group of friends), many people defaulted to civility.

Guild Wars 2 is a huge MMO, filled with a LOT more players than would play A Tale in the Desert or any random MUD.

Yet it made tremendous strides in improving the social experience by ensuring that folks welcomed the sight of any other players – gathering nodes could be shared, events would scale up to provide more mobs and loot, of which you get your own personal rolls and don’t have to compete for either.

WvWvW was a format that took this one step further by creating the notion of a server community. WvW maps are limited in population size and naturally self-select by only including people with an interest in WvW. WvW guilds were formed. Players who loaded into these maps started seeing the same regular names around, from players to guild tags.

This expanded back into the PvE open world as many players don’t just play one format primarily and the same tags could be seen, hanging around in cities, or occasionally out and about on guild missions.

Add on to that other guilds compromising of different interest groups – such as PvE, roleplaying, even furries, and your server starts developing a certain flavor from that mix of familiar guild tags.

You may have no interest in actually joining that guild, but they are there, as part of the background scenery that builds familiarity.

Did all servers develop something as unique? Maybe not. I sympathize with those who didn’t want to be on a lower-population server but somehow had no recourse to move elsewhere, but I suspect a great many medium-to-large sized servers did.

Not all guilds are mercenary and content to cycle through servers like changing clothes. Some form the core of a server. Gaiscioch is inextricably linked with Sanctum of Rall in my eyes. AARM is TC’s mega guild. Even in WvW, we have guilds that associate themselves with a server and are highly reluctant to displace themselves. NNK and TFV don’t seem to be inclined to move anywhere from Dragonbrand, for instance.

My experience with other servers is more limited, but I’m sure residents of any server would be able to tell you the familiar guilds they -used- to come across. Or just the familiar collections of people. Mrs Ravious is mourning the loss of her Sanctum of Rall karka compatriots, fer instance.

Personally, I feel displaced.

Like I no longer belong.

And this is coming from a person with three, maybe four, communities to fall back on.

In NA time, I’m clinging onto my NA guild like a rock. Ditto SEA time with my SEA guild.

In WvW, I log onto Mumble and revel in the fact that everyone on that map is from my server and that I can see familiar guild names again.

I even have the option of logging into TTS teamspeak and just hang around with the core, doing whatever the hell they’re doing.

Problem is, I don’t really FEEL like doing anything.

If I try to run Teq or Wurm, the experience becomes an exercise in fighting the Megaserver. TTS is split across three different maps or more, and half of each teamspeak channel is filled with guests.

And these are the POLITE guests who actually care enough to come onto the Teamspeak, and with whom we don’t mind teaching (though the chance of failure goes up with the proportion of inexperienced players to experienced ones.)

Knowing the bitter voice-no-voice debate, how many more are on the map and patently not listening to directions or willing to be organized – in a fight designed for coordination and organization in order to succeed?

A couple leechers is okay. A few people being carried is fine. I like that random people can have a chance of encountering something bigger than themselves, that they haven’t seen in their prior experience before, and being inspired to join up or participate.

But the proportions are wrong. When less than half of the players on a map are trying to get something organized, and having difficulty trying to include others within the same guild on the same map, are being asked to share the same space with folks lazily jumping in without prep time, who don’t care enough to have exercised any prior effort finding an organized community or even listen, but are merely hoping to get lucky… well, that’s a recipe for fast running out of patience.

Impatient folks react in different ways. Some lash out with anger, frustration and abuse, allowing ugly elitism to show. Others demonstrate avoidance and simply can’t be bothered to show up. (I’m in the latter cohort, I can’t bring myself to make any scheduled times since megaserver.)

My load times for each zone have gone up.

Way up.

I’m already on lowest settings, there’s nothing more I can do to fix this.

If I have to wait 2-5 minutes for each zone to load, it makes me seriously reconsider wanting to load any zones in the first place.

I log in, do my dailies, log out.

Minimizing contact allows me to minimize contact with the people who have suddenly felt more freedom to be dicks on mapchat.

Internet fuckwad theory suggests that anonymity provides tacit permission for people to indulge in being a jerk, as there are much less repercussions or consequences.

Who cares about strangers whom you’re never going to see again? They are -other.- They are not -us.-

Humans can be terribly bestial apes to -others-.

Personally, I think it’s working. I feel more trolly.

I jump into hotjoins and stack the hell out of a team, relishing in tearing up those too inexperienced to work as a team or quit a losing battle. I’m getting rewarded for being a bully.

I’m spending more time out of game trawling Reddit and the official forums, being grumpy.

I’d be bitchier and more combatative if I dared to be, except I still fear outside social consequences – such as my internet reputation, or losing forum posting rights or the entire account – since Anet was clever enough to impose suspensions and bans for inappropriate behavior.

THAT is what we are lacking with the Megaserver.

Oh, and as for reset night, that part of the week I look forward to the most – the part where all our server’s WvW guilds come together and put their game face on for another week?

My guild was spread across three different Gendarran Fields maps. My party wasn’t even in the same map as each other.

In my map, I had people patently from Blackgate WvW guilds (Icoa, AoI) along with TC WvW guilds.

At one glance, I could look and announce to all and sundry which guilds would be going to which map, simply by observing who was standing by which portal, should I have felt the urge to.

My map failed to activate the WvW portals in a timely fashion. No one could click F and get in, even when others on other maps were echoing the fact that they were in over voicechat.

I spent two hours in queue, milling around in the Edge of the Mists in a faceless zerg as one of a sea of names I don’t even recall.

Thank you, Megaserver!

The game certainly is very busy now!

It’s just that I’ve never been the sort of person to want 500+ Facebook friends, when five close ones who shared similar interests would do…

P.S. Risk of Rain went on Steam sale yesterday. I bought it.

I see Sleeping Dogs is on sale today.

GW2: You Get No XP For Running Away

This isn’t a leveling guide per se.

I’m not teaching any shortcuts, efficient paths to circle around or profitable events or other things people do to SPEED their way through levels. That’s power-leveling. Such abnormal rates are best left to veterans to figure out for themselves when they want to level their alts (eg. via crafting and tomes of knowledge and alt-switching in dungeons and twinking out an alt, etc.)

This is an exploration of the set of questions that seem to pop up on Reddit or the official forums every so often from inexperienced or newbie players:

Why am I leveling so slowly?

Help! I’ve completed all the hearts and mapped the entire zone and I’m still not the correct level to go to the next zone! Or visit my personal story!

Versus my own personal leveling experience, both then (at launch) and now, where this problem simply doesn’t exist.

To sate my own curiosity, I thought I’d make an effort to track the source of where my XP was coming from, as I leveled an engineer in the Plains of Ashford from level 12 to 15 for fun.

(Yes, I could skip with an Experience Scroll, but I enjoy the experience of leveling and wandering through a map.)

—

Two things, first of all.

The NORMAL rate of experience in GW2 is a level an hour, give or take 15-30mins.

GW2 has a flat, not exponential, leveling curve. In theory, it takes just as long to go from level 11-12 as 78-79. (Though you’ll find in practice, it’s easier to rush through the later levels from accumulated power and ample sources of xp.)

If one is used to other games where you can hit level 10 in under an hour or something like that, it’s NOT going to happen in GW2 on your first character unless one adopts the more abnormal methods of leveling, and those won’t teach you anything about how the game or combat works, nor how to play your character and class well.

The next thing I’d advise is the value of prep time.

The following method of leveling presupposes that you will take the time every now and again to keep all your gear current and that you’ve experimented with the class you’re playing long enough to be familiar with various weapons and skills.

That you’ve developed a build and style of play that you’re comfortable with, where you can actually kill a normal mob in 5 seconds or less. (Give or take a few seconds.)

-Take- the time to learn how.

Why do I consider this so important?

Because if you CAN’T, your first impulse will be always to run away from mobs, in order not to get locked into an endless fight which takes forever, or where you might die and end up back at a waypoint.

You get no xp for running away.

You are not going to level up fast by avoiding fights and skipping everything. (Unless you just want to trade real money for gems, convert that into gold and craft your way to 80. All power to you, then.)

—

Here’s an actual example to demo what I do:

(Obviously, this is not the only way to level. It’s not the fastest method by far, it uses no special boosters and such, but I believe this is an -affordable- way of leveling normally and enjoying the process.)

Preparation: A leisurely 20-30 min, because I’m not hurrying to break any records, just showing how I do it in the course of normal play.

Logging into my level 12 engineer alt reveals that her equipment has gotten a little outdated at level 6 and under, when she’s hit level 12.

Time to visit the nearby town of Smokestead and the trading post.

I set up a preliminary broad filter of level 8-12 Fine (blue) equipment to check which is the closest level range that has Power stats.

(To save my mind and too much scrolling, I only look for one type of armor, in this case, boots.)

I sort by price and notice that they’re all in the affordable 1-3 silver range (which is good, I try not to buy overpriced stuff and would rather look for the dropped equipment level ranges which have ample supply).

The closest to my level, with Power stats, is 11. Perfect.

We proceed to narrow down the search to level 11-12, and swap between all armor locations to buy the correct weight class of armor. Medium, in this case, for an engineer.

(TP improvements to actually search by appropriate armor weight class can’t come soon enough.)

We can also look for jewelery by searching for Trinkets. Again, buy whatever’s closest to your level that gives Power, assuming it’s affordable. (If it’s not, it’s also possible to trawl the wiki and look for karma vendors that sell Power jewelery that is closest in level, but eh, that’s too much effort for me, personally. I have a crafter, and tons of stockpiles, so I craft it if I don’t want to buy it.)

Yes, this presupposes that a newbie has enough money to buy decent gear.

The solution is to gather and SELL all the things, especially on the TP.

Buy all harvesting tools from the vendor and go around harvesting nodes as you level. As gear you can’t use falls into your inventory, TP it off. Don’t sell to a buy order already sitting there, set the price and wait.

In my little leveling experiment for this post, I sold off all the copper ore, green wood logs, blue and white drops, etc. at the lowest sell order, just to see what a newbie might receive, and earned 40 silver without real difficulty. This can pay for decent equipment from the TP, and I didn’t even check each piece of gear to see if someone was sneakily posting stuff for a couple silvers cheap to flip and turn a profit that way.

This next part is the closest to twinking as it gets.

The idea is that we want as much Power for our stats as possible. More Power, more dps, less time taken to kill a mob, more xp/time and you won’t be tempted to run around a mob rather than just cut your way through it.

Search for “Minor Rune of” and look for all the runes with +10 Power on the first rune application. We will buy one each of a different type – the cheap ones – and then stick ’em onto every armor slot we have. Once you can wear helm and shoulders, that makes +60 Power. Every little bit helps.

Search for “Minor Sigil of Bloodlust” and if it’s affordable, buy one for your weapon too. As you kill stuff, this builds up even more Power to kill things.

I used to like to put a minor sigil of speed on too, to give swiftness as we kill our way through mobs and make running around faster – but the price has shot up to 8 silver currently for whatever unknown reason. I don’t need to be fast THAT badly. Yes, I am cheap.

(At higher levels, one can move on to Major Runes and Sigils once one can put ’em on one’s gear.)

We finish our prep with a nice and cheap way to get an XP bonus.

Cheap consumables. That also preferably help us to kill things.

One can look up the GW2 wiki for food that best matches your level range, and I’m a big fan of +Power on kill foods. This is less handy for endgame folks who want an always-on boost, rather than have to always have something dead first and keep killing things within 30 seconds to maintain the buff, but when leveling, this is very easily achieved as you go through lots of small mobs, rather than big reservoirs of hp or players who won’t cooperate and die within the time limit.

And yep, more Power the merrier.

Get a food. Get a wrench. The sharpening stone tends to be less useful for raw Power, but it is cheap as hell, and adds an extra xp bonus that one may as well have on.

—

Buffed to the gills, we set out on our leveling adventure!

So here’s how this works:

• Check the map, pick a direction, probably towards an uncompleted heart, point of interest (POI) or waypoint (WP).
• Head that way with minimal reference to the map, killing ANY mob in your way, red or yellow.
• If you see an event, go towards it and do it.
• If there’s a gathering node in your minimap, go harvest it.
• When you eventually arrive at your destination, complete it and pick a new direction.

(Have your adventure along the way. No, adventure does not mean running past everything, not looking at it! You only get XP for skipping in dungeons!)

—

For instance, in this real example, I walk out of Smokestead to stumble on an active Dynamic Event involving harpies and mortars. This yields 880xp for kills, and 375xp for the event completion.

Finishing it, I head to the nearest vista to grab it, killing everything along the way. 123xp from gathering, 346xp from killing, and 90xp for the actual vista.

I’m using a rifle on this engineer, having experimented previously and decided I can operate it without too much problems. Autoattacking from range 5 times tends to kill most normal mobs. I have an immobilize on skill 2 to stop them coming nearer. I can go into close range and shotgun blast with 3 when I need extra burst damage, and pound on skill 5 to jump and AoE damage wherever my mouse cursor points to. I tend to leave 4 untouched as I don’t need such a strong knockback in regular PvE play – it’s an option to remember that one has, to be used situationally. Further AoE damage comes from F2, the tool belt bonus from having a grenade kit equipped.

When I need even moar AoE, I swap into the grenade kit and spam all the things.

Elixir H seems decent enough as a heal, and provides valuable boons both in itself and in its tool belt skill. Utility goggles is a stun break, gives fury, and its tool belt skill applies vulnerability. (Moar damage, the merrier.)

Couldn’t care less if it’s meta or not at this stage, just mostly concerned that it can kill things and that one is comfortable using it. Plenty of time to experiment as we level up further.

Next, I head into Barradin’s Vault for the POI at the end. Thankfully, the ghosts have been completed, but I shoot my way through all the veteran oozes just the same, rather than run blindly past. 35xp from gathering a mushroom, 311xp for kills, 90xp for the POI.

Onward to the next vista, and then the next WP, stumbling into Badazar’s Champion along the way.

For fun, I decide to solo it.

See, this is what teaches you the limits of your class and pushes you to improve your play. Never assume that just because it says Group Event, that it can’t be done, especially in lower level zones where mobs tend to be simpler.

If you can’t solo it, there’s something you haven’t yet learned about GW2 combat – be it dodging, how to read animations, kiting at range, how your class works, etc.

It turns out, that Badazar’s Champion can be shot quite safely from range, with only one big attack that he will shoot at you. This is telegraphed by him drawing back his staff and then thrusting it out with a lightning bolt that zaps its way toward you. DODGE when he draws back his staff, and you’ll EVADE his lightning bolt quite handily.

Now, if you don’t have ready access to Vigor to regenerate back endurance, you will run out of endurance on the third attack. This is a perfect time to figure out what other class skills you have that can be used to absorb it. In this particular engineer’s case, I just toughed it out by throwing on a random boom (hopefully it turned out to be regen or protection) and healing it up with the heal skill. A guardian can “block” this, for example, and so on.

41xp for the dead champion (with a champion bag that yielded 1 silver 26 copper), and 396xp for the event completion.

On and on through the Plains of Ashford, from one waypoint or POI to another, doing all the events along the way, and massacring every mob within view.

On the whole, people don’t kill mobs very frequently, and this, I suspect, is where they are losing out on hefty chunks of xp.

Especially if the mob has been sitting untouched for a long time, in an out-of-the-way place, and has loads of bonus xp. Yes, killing them and hoovering up the xp is your reward for exploring off the beaten path.

The final result:

3 levels in 2h 45min, at a leisurely pace which included one merchant/TP break of 10-15+ minutes, sucking up my food time, plus me stopping every now and then to record numbers down on an Excel sheet.

45.1% of my XP came from killing things (both along the way – about 2/3 of it – and in events – about 1/3 of it.)

The event completion reward yielded 22.5% of the total XP gain.

Heart completion reward yielded 11.1% of total XP gain.

The other stuff, gathering, reviving NPCs, visiting vistas and WPs/POIs were much smaller contributions individually, but combined, make up the remaining 21.4%.

And I still haven’t even map completed all of Plains of Ashford yet. Or touched Personal Story. Or crafted. All of which are extra sources of xp.

 

—

Now I’m sure if someone else measured their XP rates using a different style of play – say,  race from heart to heart, doing the bare minimum, and covering a much wider map area, I daresay their proportion of XP from heart completion will be much higher.

But here’s the thing: folks are -complaining- that they’ve run out of map and places to go, that they’re leveling super slowly and getting their asses beat up by mobs their level or 1-2 higher (which are perfectly doable if you take the time to figure out what weapons skills are the most damaging and how you’re going to mitigate damage), and are getting told to go visit all the other starter zones like some twisted version of the Grand Tyrian Marathon or something.

You don’t HAVE to do it that way if you don’t want to.

Moral of the story: You can, and should, be killing all the things.

If you’re not sure how, EXPERIMENT and ASK.

And you’ll handle your character a lot more confidently when you get to level 80, and hopefully, have some exciting adventures along the way.

GW2: So What Did You Do On Feature Patch Day?

$10 and 30 gold later, I finally got around to updating my necromancer’s look for PvP and his PvE condition gear.

(Whose stat type I didn’t actually own before today, either. And I opened the two Tequatl’s Hoards I’d been hoarding, for a dagger and staff to go with my Wand of the Sunless.)

Worth it.

I didn’t really need that frost wasp axe or drum this month anyway. 😦

—

This patch has been fiendishly devious in terms of giving new lateral progression things to do.

There’s the new grandmaster trait unlocks, which I suppose will get done over time as one does temples and such.

There’s trying to relearn and get used to all the new UI changes and whatever the hell they’ve done in the traits/profession rebalance.

I fixed my major character’s traits back to what they were using, and it’s been…hmm, different and same.

My one-hand crit guardian seems to have escaped the worst of it, and feels like he’s even gotten better in low leveled areas, thanks to the improved downscaling of crit damage (erm, ferocity.) Of course, his main purpose is to exist in open world PvE areas and kill things very fast – no group support needed and the bare minimum of survivability, so that’s not very high requirements either way.

The axe/horn banner warrior may have lost a bit of dps, but since he wasn’t optimized for super-duper-100%-efficient DPS and went the more group support route instead, it doesn’t -feel- that different. Still yet to test it out in tougher content though, which will be crucial since he’s my dungeoneering and wurm-killing main. I may have actually lucked out by going for empowered allies and group banner support before this – what was once second best and merely decent now seems to be becoming part of the new meta, now that the old meta build had its feet and DPS kicked out under it.

My thief seems to have gotten the worst hit, I kept trying to stealth-backstab random mobs and going, what, IS THAT IT? Totally unscientific since I failed to record prior damage numbers before, but it didn’t -seem- to be hitting as lethally as before. Still yet to fix his shiny new account-bound WXP traits and test him out there, nor have I gotten around to the WvW asura guardian either.

My necromancer is a total mess stat and gear wise. A month ago, I took him out of his stopgap minion master axe/horn zerker build that helped me get through the norn and his dog in the Queen’s Gauntlet, and swapped him into an experimental death shroud/well power build for PvE, running a few easy dungeons as a test and change of pace. (Did passable to fine, didn’t get kicked.) At the same time, he was in Dhuumfire/terrormancer condi PvP build for mah dailies.

Today, I said, “Ok, today is the day I get him shiny new PvE condition gear and get him all set up looks-wise like my other mains.”

Except I somehow managed to edit my PvE traits while sitting in the Heart of the Mists pondering what would be functional for PvP (I blame the trait trainer who oh so helpfully offered to bring up my traits panel.) Thankfully, the PvP build copied itself off the PvE build, so I didn’t have to change it a second time and now BOTH builds are specced towards condition and bleeds and I’ve forgotten what the hell the dungeoneering power build was.

Then all my attention ended up in the wardrobe trying to design the new look.

Naturally, the only gloves that I wanted were those I didn’t have. (I really should have bought those toxic gloves. I hope they come back some day.)

Eventually, vanity won over frugality, and the remaining $10 in the month’s gem store budget went to buying Trickster armor for a pair of really neat gloves. (Granted, the rest of the armor doesn’t look half bad and I might be able to use pieces for my mesmer some day. Having the skins permanently available in the wardrobe really nudged me over the edge. Sorry, drum. Next month.)

Then I spent 30 gold on one miserable piece of T3 sylvari cultural armor, thinking I’d gotten really lucky that the cultural armor was the rabid stats I wanted. Only when I looked at the vendor, did I realize the blasted thing only had rare stats. Gah.

I’m feeling a bit too poor to buy one more chestpiece of exotic stats today, especially since it has also hit me that his jewellery is all still zerker.  Some day, but not today, I’m going to have to sit down, rummage through my bank and wallet and see what exotics or ascended of the right condition stats I can afford and fix that up properly, stats and runes/sigils and all.

For now, he’s sitting in a PvE limbo of neither condition or power. Bah.

There’s a dreamcleaver axe and staff skin waiting in the bank for his power build too, when I get around to designing a second look, when I actually figure out what his power build should be. *sigh*

All in good time, I suppose.

Feels like being pulled in a dozen directions at once, and being completely confused and penniless at the same time.

Who needs an expansion to shake things up when one dang feature patch is all it takes, eh?

GW2: Wading in the Cesspool of Hotjoin sPvP

The other day, I queued up for my first ever solo queue sPvP match.

I ended that game with a stunning realization that I (almost, kinda, as of this moment anyway) preferred hotjoins.

Oh, the game wasn’t that bad. It was actually 5 vs 5 players, not 5 vs 4. It ended up 450-500, not in my team’s favor.

I tried a necro vs necro duel on a side point, which was damnably evenly matched, until I somehow no-idea-how managed to down him, whereupon I struggled with the finishing stage between having some 1000 hp left with his flesh golem still after me – not daring to even get close or within LOS, trying to wait out my heal’s recharge – and made an error in judgement, which resulted me falling over while he was at 1/5 downed hp remaining and both of us out of sight range of the other – except his danged flesh golem was still up and mine wasn’t, so he got to revive and I didn’t.

Then I tried it again, except a teammate came to his rescue while mine were nowhere in sight, so fleeing was the better part of valor.

And ended up just team vs team duking it out in the center trying to off the opposing team faster than me or mine got offed.

But what I ended up taking home from that experience, besides the fact that solo queue wasn’t the devil after all and that I might do it again when I’m in the right mood and frame of mind with plenty of time to kill, is that it was SLOW.

Before you even get to the match, you have to queue up and wait.

I waited for three minutes out in the Heart of the Mists, steadily going out of my mind with boredom, threw up my hands and got into a hotjoin game which was pretty exciting for 4+ minutes when my queue popped and I was faced with the prospect of giving up a nice and easy ~540 rank points for a 1000 or bust (300) gamble, with the odds against me (since I’m sure I lack the experience to contribute as much as a veteran sPvPer.)

Then the match itself seems to be a more measured strategy chess match, where players actually stay on points and defend them with bunker builds, and 5 vs 5 tends to yield slower paced skirmishes of 1-3 players a side only. Between that and having more competent players on average taking the game format seriously, the match drags on much longer than a hotjoin would.

And suddenly, the prospective reward of 1000 rank points for a win doesn’t look as attractive in comparison to the time spent to -maybe- get it.

Of course, this boils down to what exactly your goal is in sPvP.

If you’re a warrior – a competitive sort that’s looking for an evenly matched “good fight” where you can test your individual skills and build against a controlled number of opponents (1-3 preferably, where you have a realistic chance of winning if you’re good to very good), solo or team queues are probably your ideal cup of tea.

Many PvPers, I suspect, fall into this category, hence the heralding of the game format as the pinnacle to strive toward and hotjoin derided as a cesspool of filth.

If you’re a soldier – the sort who prefers working in unison to achieve a goal and doesn’t mind taking directions and supporting the team, you’d probably prefer team queue or be out in WvW already, assuming your server hasn’t fallen in population to the point of WvW league failure.

(Quite a number of PvPers have both warriors and soldiers in ’em, so don’t take it as a dichotomy, more of a description of preferences.)

I’ve seven team tournaments on my non-PvPer belt, six of which were won. How?

I walked in as a guild team. Some of my guildies are more serious PvPers, but when they do a guild PvP event, they inclusively take in any old rabble, including me.

I’m not competitive, I’m not much of a PvPer, but I do try to use a meta build (could be outdated, who knows) due to my interest in performing at least decently if not 100% optimally, and I do have something of a soldier mindset, which lets me appreciate aspects of WvW.

The guild tells me to stick with so-and-so and follow him around. I do so. We go to a point. We sit on it.

I do my best to support, control, and help my teammate(s), and let them do the all the  communication stuff of sending a more competent roamer to one point or another to adjust the odds of battle. I only leave the point when they tell me or in a pinch, when it looks like no one else can respond in time. I try my best not to die, and since I’ve only brought a guardian and necro to sPvP, I’m conveniently rarely the primary target and when I am, well, both classes are designed to be annoyingly tanky and my innate tank nature loves being a frickin’ nuisance that way.

There was one memorable match where the guild’s team were down to 4 and had apparently just lost a match to a premade team when they went in with an extra pug that wasn’t on voice comms. Then they asked around on guildchat if anyone wanted in, and I decided what the heck, I need the experience, right?

And sidled my way in, warning them that I was pretty much a noob to team PvP. I had no mic either, and always just listen.

We ended up facing the exact same premade team. The prematch chat was very civil, praising the pug guardian as ‘very annoying.’ Then they asked about why the delay for the queue. “Oh, we brought a guildie in,” was the offhanded reply.

Good lord, the pressure, right?

The match was so lopsided it wasn’t even in question at any time. In our favor.

We sent three (me included) to the center point, two to our home point and just sat there. Repelling all comers.

1-3 would come by to the center, our leader would call a target, and they’d just fall over dead eventually. It was probably one of those coincidences of well synergized builds again that managed to counter the opposing team’s, but I don’t know what their reaction was in their own team’s communication channels when the final scoreboard came up and they saw that the only factor that was different between the previous match was a less than rank 20 necromancer.

(Who just happened to be in the same guild and on the same voice chat as the other four. Communication and coordination over skill, I guess.

Or you can blame the OP dhuumfire meta build, though I hear it’s already nerfed and fallen out of favor? I’m too lazy to change what works decently, though.)

I love my guild.

I’m way too much of a wuss to try team queue without a team I trust, that’s for sure.

You see, I’m not competitive.

Leaderboards and ranking do not interest me.

I’m not actually fired up by the prospect of an evenly matched 1 on 1 fight except as a technical exercise to just see if I can do it (or more likely, fail miserably in the process and try to figure out what the other guy was using and doing.)

All I really wanted in PvP was to get a dolyak /rank to play with. Because the more dolyaks the merrier, y’know?

Oh, and the extra 4 AP from the PvP daily doesn’t hurt.

(And I suppose, when the new PvP rewards and incentive scheme comes up with the feature patch, that would be something interesting to strive toward too.)

So my personal goal was rank. Enough to bootstrap me to 20. With as little time spent in the Heart of the Mists as possible, so that I can spend the rest on more compelling stuff.

Along the way, if I get a bit more PvP experience, that’s a bonus that comes with the territory of playing a minigame and learning as you go.

Lately, I’ve figured out that hotjoins are a decent enough vehicle for those non-ambitious goals.

The “Play Now” button dropkicks me right into an ongoing game. I can leave at any time I want. The 8 vs 8 format is exciting in a casual team deathmatch style, with action flying around fast and nonstop furious, getting the adrenaline going with less “serious business” pressure weighing on one’s shoulder. Dying and respawning are painless and penalty-less.

(Ironically, it’s like Natural Selection 1’s Combat mode versus the RTS strategic mode, except there I really enjoyed the strategic side of it more. Population-wise, far more gravitated to mano-a-alien combat mode though.)

Yes, there is shameless stacking going on in hotjoins.

I paid my noob dues by losing a bunch of matches, wondering how the hell I kept ending up on a side with less players, whose collective PvP experience probably equated to one player on the winning team, getting relentlessly ganked by meta builds while sporting a non meta one, massively teamed up on, and whose only redeeming experience was learning how to harden the fuck up and attempt to survive as long as possible (tank mode, yeah!) against impossible odds.

Then I finally figured out the UI.

And got my own meta build.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and all that.

You know, with the new rank rewards, I don’t mind the stacking at all because it’s totally possible to game the system to get rank points (which, we have established, is one’s primary individual objective for playing hotjoins – the fun little cesspool of anything goes.)

First things first, identify the winning team. This comes with experience, and making a good guess when first entering a game. Or just memorize the higher scoring, higher rank, high-kill-achieving players in your first game (which will probably be on the other side.)

Then spam the fuck out of the “join their side” button.

Assuming you aren’t a total hopeless case who will pull down the team merely by being on their side, contribute to the cause by capping and scoring kills. Preferably by creating “teamwork” mini-scenarios where one ignorant person from the other team runs straight into a group of you playing together and meets the expected fate at the hands of 1 vs X.

Very soon, likely before hitting 200-300 points into the match, first one then another on the losing team will quickly give up and flee out of the game, seeking greener grass elsewhere.

Then the “dreaded” auto-balance button pops up on the side.

Many dread it. I revel in it.

I volunteer the fuck out of it. It’s an extra 25 rank. You guarantee yourself the winning rank reward of 500, no matter what happens (assuming your internet doesn’t die unexpectedly.)

Sure, the next part of the match turns into a stream of *your name* deaths littering the side of the game’s UI, but you know, the deaths are meaningless if your ego is not involved in it.

And it’s the absolute best of both worlds in one game.

First you get the steamroll experience of doing horrible horrible things to players who aren’t playing very well, and identifying their mistakes so that you improve by watching what -not- to do. It’s a primitive ego boost when you realize that you and your build have at least had miniscule improvement to the point where you aren’t -that guy- at  least some of the time anymore. You get to play alongside better players and a team that actually tends to cooperate with each other.

Then when you get switched, and you probably will, since everyone else was hoping they weren’t “it,” you get to test yourself against all the -good- players who have conveniently self-selected themselves out for you.

If 3 or more jump you and tangle you up in cc, obviously, you’re going down. Seriously, there’s no dishonor in it. It’s like you’re roaming alone in WvW and this 40 man zerg rounds the corner and over you. Nothing to be done about it. *shrug*

If it’s 2-3 players, it becomes a game of “see how long I can outlast and outwit.” Necros are built to be annoying, I hear. They’re supposed to waste your time. They can’t escape very well, but they can make you regret spending the time getting entangled up with trying to kill them. Hopefully a teammate or two or three come over eventually. If not, well, see above. Still a fun minigame of survival.

If it’s 1 vs 1, then well, things become interesting. It’s those duels that the PvP warrior types yearn for. Me, not so much, but as mini-practice within a larger game, why not? Sometimes, I even win. Which is pretty awesome when it does happen. If not, it’s a more-entertaining-and-firsthand-than-a-video experience of how a pro takes down an amateur. Chalk it up to the learning process.

It’s a hotjoin, you can choose to play it straight and sit on a cap and wait for people to come. (I like to lurk underwater in Raid of the Capricorn and bleed people to death until they get smart and bring more than one person.) If the game is really hopeless, then throw score to the wind and play for the fights. Your new team is already frickin’ losing anyway, with or without you. Run to the mess of players duking it out in the middle somewhere and see how many sneak attacks you can get in and maybe even turn the tide.

Absolutely rarely, the tide can even sometimes turn and your new team ends up winning (usually because the points shift a bit, some guy on the initially winning team decide to flee and leaves the team one man down, some other new fella joins the game and picks the team you’re on as the fan favorite to stack,) which then becomes a funny exercise in come-uppance, and is even a bit of an ego-booster. (Did -I- do that?! No wai.)

If not, expected team wins, but you get the reward anyway because you were a member of that team in the beginning. (And you even helped more people get the rank reward because you generously made way for more people to stack onto it. Let it not be said that GW2 isn’t a cooperative game!)

Hell, you have mathematically made it impossible for yourself to lose because you’re getting 500 rank points no matter which team wins.

Red versus blue? Doesn’t matter.

You are OMNI-TEAM. You are PAN-TEAM. You encompass multitudes. (Gogo minion or clone zerg.)

You get the full experience, meeting ALL skills levels from 0-50+, bumping into a spectrum of meta to weird builds, at a super-quick non-time-wasting pace.

It’s like ultra-rapid-fire LoL or something.

A hideous perversion of what the spirit of the game is probably supposed to be, but entertaining in its own right.

And 3-4 hotjoin games of this nature is surprisingly palatable for someone who just wants to get their dailies done and get in a couple hundred rank points per day.