GW2: Wot I Think About Raids, Now That The First is Here

Two days later, the jury’s still out on my personal reaction to raids.

Things I Like:

• It’s new content. It’s a puzzle to be solved. It challenges a player to get better in multiple ways.

Folks are doing a lot of thinking right now. Thinking about how to use the existing flexible and exciting GW2 combat system to solve new problems. What builds to use, what gear or traits would help X situation, and so on. It demands a fair amount of practice at reaction response time and situational awareness as well.

This learning and improving is core ‘hard fun’ gameplay, so to speak, in contrast to the multitudes of ‘easy fun’ grind already available.

• This group learning aspect is an interesting theoretical challenge for me personally.

By nature, I am very much a loner. It has not slipped my attention that in real life, in the workplace for example, many people are much more social and prefer to work in groups as a team. That even schools and universities are starting to wise up to this and encouraging teamwork and group learning as a matter of course, to prepare students for ‘the real world.’

John Seely Brown says he’d rather hire a high level World of Warcraft player (preferably a guild master) than a Harvard MBA. Why? Because if you can herd cats to do raids and lead a guild of hundreds, you’ve probably demonstrated remarkable leadership and collaborative skills, not to mention probably have good organizational and social competencies to boot.

(I presume this assumes you’re the head of a mature and respectful kind of long-lasting guild or other organized community, rather than the many that collapse from guild drama or the internet fuckwad type.)

On a personal level, I’m more interested in the small stuff. The ways I can sneakily (okay, “diplomatically”) influence others and change their behaviour without directly putting someone on the spot. Observing how small groups function, make decisions and learn. Things that will transfer over to real life and improve my skill set, pretty much.

As a strong introvert, I’m never going to feel super-happy-bouncy energized in groups, but we have to learn how to mask and get by in some situations that demand teamwork or relating in a social manner to other people.

(As long as I can still snatch some time to be alone and have my peaceful introspective recharge breaks, I guess it’s an ok compromise.)

• The current rewards seem reasonable. Both motivating, yet not -too- motivating to the point of feeling forced. They make sense.

I’m going by what is currently advertised on Reddit as the reward vendor. Seems like there will be RNG drops of Ascended chests for some lucky people, and less lucky individuals can still earn tokens towards said Ascended chests over time.

Given that the eventual plan is for the final boss to be defeated by everybody decked out in Ascended gear, it is only sensible to make the earlier raid bosses a way to get said Ascended gear in all the different desirable stat varieties possible.

For folks who don’t even want to go near raids, they can still craft Ascended gear at higher cost, so there’s an alternate option and it’s not forcing anybody to do something they don’t like.

At the moment, non-raiding people will miss out on (apparently) some unique skin drops and minis of the raid bosses. Which imo, makes sense and is perfectly reasonable. It is still a way for raiders to show off what they have accomplished (between their titles, skins, minis, etc.) but nothing that skews the stat or gear curve.

What really worries me is the Legendary Armor aspect. If raids are the only way to get a component of this, it’s a form of gating and forcing that we’re better off avoiding, imo.

One might argue that Legendary Weapons require things like world completion and ‘forcing’ into WvW or PvP or dungeons, and Mawdrey requires stepping into Fractals, which I’d grant you in part that the stepping in portion is unavoidable and even desirable (to persuade someone to have a taste and/or show that they’re broad enough to have experienced different aspects of the game), but my point is that earning sufficient currency for those activities is not that hard in difficulty or restrictively time-consuming. Raids, on the other hand…

Of course, if you make Legendary Armor or the required raid component non-account bound and tradeable, then all my criticisms go out the window because there’s an alternate path of spending phenomenal amounts of gold while making raiders incredibly wealthy in the process (mutual win-win), but given the recent trend, it’s like everything is getting account-bound these days.

So yeah… we’ll see. For now, the rewards feel fair.

• Whoah, is Anet visibly taking steps to encourage a non-toxic, respectful raid community? (Indirect, though it may be.)

As much as ArenaNet loves to take time to repeat over and over praise for the generally well-behaved and higher maturity level of the GW2 community (ie. what is praised is demonstrated more often), I also have to suggest the reverse side of that is a few hard-hitting public examples of what-not-to-do.

We’ve seen it with Dhuum bannings in GW1; Chris Cleary being the GW2 equivalent of sometimes overenthusiastic doom. In GM/dev comments on Reddit threads and forums where some account-banned beggar is clearly shown the door by publically displaying the egregiousness of the verbal abuse torrent they unleashed, the obnoxious racism of the name they chose, how many accounts they were using at one time or whatever else exploit they were up to when their time of judgment arrived.

Sadly, an entire community caught some serious tar-and-feathering from the ill-considered actions of probably just a few, but it’s still an object lesson in the kind of behaviour ArenaNet would prefer to promote and the kind that Anet punishes.

Let’s hope the future direction and tone is set properly this time, so that we don’t end up down the elitism “u salty, bro?” slippery slope too quickly.

(I’m not sure it actually is possible to have a non-toxic raid community… it kinda sounds like the dream of a non-toxic MOBA or PvP community… maybe the people attracted to that style of gameplay just have personalities that skew that way, but maybe, just maybe, a good part of it is cultural and can be addressed with both support from the often silent majority and the authorities.)

Things I Dislike:

• There’s definitely more interest in trying out raids than there are willing leaders to organize.

For map metas and WvW, you can end up with a many to one ratio of followers to leaders and everyone’s happy. For ten-man raids, you end up with a bunch of excess followers standing by on the playground hoping to be picked.

(Why we went backwards to a set limit when Anet is supposedly the king of dynamically level-scaling challenges and flex raids are a thing even in WoW is beyond me.)

Exclusion can be real and let’s just say some leaders are better than others at letting people down, while others don’t give a damn and are happy to fling elitist min-max rhetoric around.

Surprisingly at the moment I am not finding this as frustrating as I might have thought – I think it is a combination of there not being any MUST-HAVE-NOW-BLATANTLY-BETTER-THAN-EVERYTHING-ELSE rewards locked behind raids (not sure how this might change once we see Legendary armor requirements), a long term mindset (I am assuming that a month later, strategies will be locked down to the point where you could probably copycat a publicized build and PUG it if sufficiently motivated, or at least organize a guild group around it) and the consolation prize that there are a shit ton of collections and things-to-do for legendary weapons that are also going to take a humongous amount of time/effort and can be done solo.

Eventually it may start to bug me, especially if raids start to be held up as the be-all and end-all of everything (something I made a point of avoiding in all my MMOs – I’m ok if raiders are seen as slightly mad pariahs, akin to those that made a regular habit of Triple Trouble, or the dungeon community, or the hardcore WvW guilds, etc. but I sure hope it’s not going to be all raids all the time next year – a 6 monthly schedule release, maybe, punctuating actual Living World/Story movement as a side seasonal activity sounds nice, 3-4 months at the soonest.)

Right now though my squirrel attention has essentially shattered trying to already balance the idea of daily fractals for a legendary backpack, legendary precursor collections and HoT-related achievements, let alone worry or sulk about being left behind raid-wise.

(I’m already behind! Everywhere! Aaaaaah! So is everybbbbody else! Time spent doing one thing is time spent not doing another thing! Panic! Breach! Broken! Falling! Screaming! Dying! *AHHHH*)

• The perennial lack of tanks and healers

But wait, GW2 protests, we are not like other MMOs! We have made sure any class can tank or heal (aka be bunkery and survivable and hold aggro by manipulating toughness and having crowd control options, or be all supporty and healy)…

…Well, for one, many people don’t want to be in such a position of responsibility. Kinda like leadership. So there’s an inherent imbalanced ratio and shortage to begin with.

And right now, for another, it is both so tedious and costly to switch stats, traits, build and have multiple sets of armor and weapons and trinkets for different functions, without even build saving/loading. My inventory bags are bursting, ascended stuff costs money and the meta is in flux, so one would currently be gambling on experimental builds.

I’ll grant that this might alleviate after some time, when people have had time to adapt to the changes and decide if they like one particular role more than another, when progress is such that even failed raids are earning raid tokens for Ascended gear, when some tank or heal builds have been publicized, and so on. But for now, it’s still mildly annoying.

(WTB build saver/switcher like in PvP pls. I will spend money -in-game and real world – unlocking all the things for more options and flexibility. I just don’t want them in my bags anymore.)

• Watching people do eyebrow raising things because they’re operating on a different schema as opposed to others, and being unsure which strategy is better / makes more sense

I’ve only joined two raid attempts so far (which I’d define as semi-PUG, being essentially comprised of guilded randoms just going in to give it a try in a nonserious nonhardcore way, aka no min-maxing class cherry picking or uber meta strategy in mind) and already I am 50% of the way to seriously considering if it’s worth the money/effort/time trying to find the right class and build and learn how to play a semi self-sufficient tank with heals.

Mostly because I keep resisting the urge to vomit blood every time someone who has the aggro decides to drag the boss into the group stacking on the circle because “OOOH, CIRCLE, MUST STACK TO PREVENT RAID WIPING DAMAGE” and now the group has to deal with a frontal cleave from the boss as well as the distributed damage from the attack.

I am currently geared as a viper/sinister guardian (after a mad scramble over a few days pre-raid launch to invest in an Ascended condi set for greater role flexibility – coincidentally, DnT’s Obal released a condi guide to the burn guardian while I was midway through this process . I was both gratified to see that my self-selected choices mostly matched up and rather relieved, because now I had a backup opinion to point to in case anyone laughed at the thought of a condi guardian.

By the way, it’s pretty sick damage. I paid 20 gold for Viper and Sinister amulets in PvP *grumble goldsink grumble* to prototype before the PvE investment, and I couldn’t believe I was ticking for 7-9k burn damage on multiple golems while still flailing around for decent direct damage with a greatsword.)

The thing about choosing to stat like this is that I have zero toughness or vitality and guardian hp is low to begin with. My health pool acts like a mine canary. It is super-sensitive to anything, anything going a little wrong.

I see the boss charging directly at me and I am liable to panic, because a 5k hp frontal cleaving Punch from him means I am literally half dead at 11k hp. Add on the possibility of absorbing 2-3k damage from the Distributed Magic mechanic from standing in the circle, and I end up scrambling around either praying that I catch an AoE heal from a happy druid healer or using up my own big self-heal. If a red seeker comes in, and doesn’t get pushed back, the aura damage from it means I go down. No two ways about it.

My first raid attempt had a mix of 3 people who all sorta kinda wanted to tank and had high toughness, who were spinning the boss dizzingly back and forth between them, leading to a fair amount of difficulty trying to avoid the boss for everybody else. Add on one particular tank who seemed determined to get in the circle dragging the boss behind him (because apparently “the lightning strike hurts the boss” was the schema he was operating from) and this was more than a bit of a disaster until we managed to coax him to stay out of it.

In my second attempt, I’d done a bit more thinking beforehand and decided that I could take on a bit more personal responsibility making sure that I don’t get killed in the circle, irregardless of a tank determined to pile on in there. So I gave up my greatsword and put on a shield, which provides a nice little shield bubble that knocks away seekers and can pulse a small heal. Except it has a cooldown and I can only do that every second circle or so.

So I came up with the alternate strategy of choosing to NOT get in the circle when I don’t have my shield cooldown and I’m either far away or low on health and I already see 7-8 people piling in and the boss going after them, since you only need 4 in there. No doubt, I now look like the odd moron out, missing circle cues.

(I’m thinking mace/shield for my third attempt to see if I can get a bit more pulsed healing that way. A coordinated water field with blasts would be so so nice though, or just designated slightly sturdier circle runners, but I don’t think the raids I’m getting in have quite gotten up to that level yet.)

Alternately, it is also somewhat tempting to find the right build and gear and volunteer to tank, so that I can see if it is humanly possible to execute such a basic tanky concept as “oh, face the boss away from the main group most of the time?” (I am so so broke though.)

It was somewhat gratifying that after a seemingly eternity of the boss deciding to go after the admittedly very good druid healer (who was inexplicably high toughness for some reason) and who insisted on getting into the circle (presumably to save everybody else’s squishy asses) in my second raid attempt, a revenant said he could spin up to higher toughness than the druid and volunteered to take the aggro, whereupon he did a very presentable job running the boss in a small predictable circle and all I had to do as a mostly ranged damage dealer was sit in the center of the circle and spin around to deal consistent damage.

(Possibly much to the aggravation of the melee damage dealers, because they seemed intent on trying to catch up with the boss on his merry go around, but they didn’t say anything. Maybe they appreciated the predictableness too. Who knows.)

Equally alternatively, I could possibly avoid some of the getting sidelong damaged aggravation by choosing to gear more conservatively with toughness and/or vitality, except then there is the worry about being able to meet the demands of the enrage timer later down the road.

Or I could bring another class to the raid. Which is another min-max strategy that no doubt many players will choose to use later down the road, only taking the ‘best’ and most optimal classes, rather than viable but not optimal can-dos.

So, mismatching schemas all busy hashing it out. “Fun.” *sigh*

• The regularity of needing a set group and the time commitment required to progress within a reasonable timeframe (meaning by the time the next raid comes out) / “I have to do HOW MUCH of this to get the reward I want?”

I’m really not getting any younger. Real life has a knack of getting in the way eventually. I can probably pull off 1-3 months of being consistently hardcore (hey, some people don’t even stick with one game that long) and it’s hard to foresee things from there. It’s certainly impossible to match the free time of a college student.

And I seriously dread ArenaNet deciding to place the time yardstick too high for whatever raid requirement is needed for Legendary Armor – look at the Yakslapper title for a ridiculously calculated goal, only took 3 years to eventually change it.

(Really though, what’s functionally appealing about Legendary Armor is the flexibility of stat swapping. Though we will still have the problem of runes then. If that is recreated elsewhere by having to buy and save 12 sets of Ascended armor without taking up bank/bag space, I’d be okay with that, astronomical cost and all! Legendary armor as prestigiously shiny skin is still motivating for many people.)

The general uncertainty is a drag.

Right now I have no certain answers along this front, so my overall opinion about raids in GW2 is still relatively unformed. Too early to say “yea” or “nay.”

GW2: Prioritizing Things To Do, Post-Heart of Thorns

We’re about two weeks into the Heart of Thorns expansion. I guess now’s a time as good as any to finally come up for air.

The 64-bit client has worked wonders for me as a stopgap measure to stave off memory leak crashes (at last, upgrading to Windows 7 and a new computer with 16GB of RAM has been rewarded.)

On average, it chomps about 3-3.5 GB of RAM just doing normal things and goes up to about 4-4.5GB consumed during insanely packed meta events where a hundred players are in the vicinity, all sporting their own combination of wardrobe and dyes and particle effects.

Bright side, it doesn’t crash (at least, not yet, *touches wood*)

(I stress tested it the other day by walking into the Svanir Shaman Frozen Maw daily with full default graphics and name tags on. I figure, if it doesn’t freeze up and die then, it’s probably okay.)

Thus I get to see more of Heart of Thorns on a graphical setting beyond potato.

Granted, it’s rather hard to frame a screenshot sans UI when you’re worried about getting randomly gibbed by a Mordrem sniper, a punisher, or *urgh* a stalker.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve become rather relaxed about goals in the expansion.

A seasonal cadence of two weeks/four weeks lent a level of stress that encouraged me to grind out all the rewards I wanted “before it went away.” There was a “limited-time” pressure that was sometimes obvious and sometimes subconscious, which made me more prone to frustration and impatience.

Faced with a deluge of possible rewards to buy and skins to collect, one would think that I’d be freaking out right about now, but knowing its permanence (assuming the HoT zones stay unchanged reward-wise as long as Dry Top and Silverwastes has existed is likely a safe bet), I’ve been looking on most of it as a long term goal. The slow chase will likely last me another year, if not two, and I’m okay with that.

If anything, I’ve been confronted by that age-old lateral progression bugaboo that we veterans keep advising newbies about: “Help! I’ve reached X threshold, and there are so many things to do! What should I be doing first?!”

My usual naggy refrain to these folks is that beyond a certain point (ie. get exotic armor as a baseline, strive towards Ascended trinkets and more,) we can’t really tell you what to do next because it all depends on what you value and want to prioritize.

Like story? Like dungeons? Like shiny skins? Like gold? They all head down different roads.

Similarly, I look at Heart of Thorns and I’m like, “Masteries? AP achievments? Raids (be it prep for the closed ones, or open world ones?) Gold + Relaxation? (So many nodes to hit, so much money players are willing to spend *twitches compulsively*) Shinies? (Like chase a HoT skin collection, a core Tyria legendary, a core Tyria precursor, or prep for a Maguuma legendary?) So many collections? Aaahhh collect all the things? *falls over dizzy like Skritt in Tarir*”

So I decided to put my money where my mouth is and prioritize my own shit:

• New Stuff
• Raids (while new)
• Harvest Nodes
• AP
• Certain shiny objects
• Gold
• Masteries
• Collect all the things
• Raids (when they’ve gotten old)

This totally non-scientific list was mostly ordered by just choosing two things at random, eg. “Chase AP or Harvest Nodes to Relax” or “Chase AP or Gold?” and deciding which one I valued more, or which I’d pick if I could only do one thing that day.

It’s a little fuzzy around the edges, because technically, harvesting nodes is my main gold stream, but given the amount of gold I’m liable to invest into chasing AP or if the gold had to come from other sources like chasing events or doing dungeons, then certainly I’d choose to focus on easier AP goals first.

Yet if you were to ask me if I’d prefer harvesting nodes to chasing AP, I’d only have to look at my still undone Golden Badges in the Silverwastes to tell you that I’ve been hitting all the nodes first over something like that. Eventually I’ll buckle down and shove that priority up a tad, but as a general guideline, the above list works for me.

New stuff goes without saying for me. I was camped out in Tangled Depths over two weekends and quite a number of weeknights trying to bring down the Chak Gerents (all four of them.)

It may be potato graphics, but this reward chest has never looked shinier.

The end result of succeeding the meta was mostly a great big hole blasted through to Dragon’s Stand, a couple of crystallized cache chests and a strongbox made accessible. Plus a piece of Mistward something that’s presumably used for making Mistward armor, when I get around to it. (Probably around the time I finally get around to making a Revenant.)

Once that succeeded once, it was like a great big load fell off my mind and I could start voluntarily choosing to ignore some raid sessions, knowing that more would be organized every day / every week. There would be time to accumulate the zone currency gradually. Now I could prioritize other things with my GW2 play time to catch up on other stuff.

Some of that involves getting more or less prepped for the impending *ugh* closed 10-man raids to hit GW2.

I’m still looking on that activity with a fair amount of dread – mostly because it’s hellish to try and match timezones and turn up at a regular schedule, plus there’s always that rejection feeling from an activity with such small number limits.

(Look at how guild missions have been complained about, when they inadvertently only reward 15 players, leaving the other… oh… 35 people who showed up feeling jipped? Or left repeating the same goddamn guild puzzle over and over until maybe most people get their reward, except a few that seem permanently glitched? Speaking of which, they really need to get around to fixing that. So bloody annoying. I was certainly never one who asked for them to make guild missions closed instances.)

Everyone’s also kinda dreading their reward scheme for raids – many because it seems like Anet’s reward adjustments feel like throwing darts at a dartboard while blindfolded, rather than following any sort of real plan.

Me, I’m bloody terrified that it’s going to be a one-way no-alternate-path “forcing” of players into their shiny new activity that they are so damn proud of and want to collect salty player tears on (What’s going on with that adversarial relationship anyway?)

Take the sudden account-binding of Nuhoch Hunting Stashes and fractal thingumies (I haven’t done fractals seriously post-expansion, I have no idea what’s been going on there.)

I had -thought- it was a clever way to provide players an alternate route to gaining currencies for activities they’d rather not prefer to engage in, while giving players who LIKE those activities an income stream from the players who hate it but want some of the rewards from that activity anyway. Meanwhile, the trade sinks gold via the TP. Win win, no?

No. Apparently, if you want Heart of Thorns zone currencies, you better just grit your teeth and grind events. Vice versa for fractals, though with all the bitterness coming from that front, it doesn’t exactly encourage me to do that activity until everything is given another look.

I don’t know.

My assumption is they’ll keep freaking iterating until they get it right, and we only need to wait until then, but damn, this iteration is SLOW.

In the meantime, I may as well do stuff that’s right in front of me, not get baited by a million and one design traps, and freak out only when there’s solid info to get grumpy about. (Like how I can’t actually prioritize a precursor rifle hunt because some poor bastard who wanted to do it first found out that bits of it were buggy and don’t work.)

One example of those things right in front of me is the revelation that I’m really most comfortable on my charr guardian as a main – I haven’t been playing any other character through Heart of Thorns for any long period of time – so I may as well take some small steps in getting him raid-ready. Like an Ascended greatsword and possibly a mace too – he already has an Ascended sword/focus and scepter/torch, but it’s been super-obvious that Heart of Thorns really really likes you to go AoE in certain scenarios… bottom line, guardian greatswords can do that and my nerfed (but pretty) Fiery Dragon Sword just can’t cut it.

I’ve a warrior and necromancer alt that also needs to be run through Heart of Thorns, and pushed towards raid-readiness, so that’s something to be doing too.

Considering that my warrior still hasn’t finished the personal story, that’s quite a bit of story chapters to go. It’s kinda nice to replay it all again, now that they’ve finally fixed the flow and put back the “greatest fear” arc, after leaving it broken for…how long?

Masteries, thankfully, I’ve knocked out most of the crucial ones, which leaves the nice-to-haves as a slow goal to work toward while doing other things.

Between that, attending open world raids, and maybe replaying the story for achievements, chasing mastery points and hero points for elite specs and harvesting all the things while the guild hall material demand is sending the economy into wild swings, I shouldn’t run out of still-viable things to do while waiting for fixes and iterations to the more egregious issues that have arisen, seemingly all over the game.

Looks like everyone, devs and players alike, will be quite busy until next year.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Darkwing Tigercharr! (God, I love the charr gliding animation. It’s like they’re pouncing on some mice below. Also, winged cats are awesome. Not very immersion-y, but eh, that boat sailed a long time ago. Still awesome.)

State of the Games

It’s Lunar New Year season, both online and offline.

Spring cleaning’s exhausting. There are a million and one undone errands. There are traditional customs and ritual celebrations that have to be prepared for and performed in the days ahead.

Adding on to the list of things on everyone’s mind over here: A very old relative just got discharged from the hospital after a big low blood sugar scare that had them comatose and kidney function that wasn’t terribly good to begin with going the wrong way. Surprisingly, after a couple days of IV drip and replacement of pretty much all necessary nutrients, kidney function returned, so the body can be an amazing beast, after all. Except now they have a bedsore to contend with, after the unavoidable hospital visit.

(Yeah, well, the whole family is already expecting this individual’s lifespan to be in the weeks or months. So it won’t come as a shock or tragedy. Said individual also has dementia and has been in decline for a couple years now. It’s just been making them comfortable and giving them as much quality of life possible, before their passing, for a very long time now.)

On a personal front, yours truly has also been on the tail end of one of those ubiquitous “winter” colds/flus/unidentifiable and highly annoying (but thankfully not fatal) respiratory illnesses that spread like wildfire through crowded offices and various forms of public transport.

After heroically attempting to brave it out with one’s own immune system and plenty of ginger tea and chicken soup, the darn infection proceeded to coat most of my lungs with thick phlegm of interesting colors and then spread to my eyes, presumably via the very clogged sinuses.

That would be the time I wussed out and headed promptly to a doctor’s for a whole bunch of antibiotics in eyedrop and tablet form, and mucus thinners, which fortunately, worked as prescribed.

It has, however, worked to create a bit -more- gaming time than normal, as being too ill and tired to leave the house or indeed, move from a seated or sleeping position, yields a whole bunch of sitting in front of the computer.

Which was good, because my previously nicely balanced trifecta of gaming – GW2, Minecraft and extra Steam game, sort of expanded suddenly this past week or so.

(Causing blogging to fall behind, but I’m trying to fix that with this whopper of an update post.)

Guild Wars 2 – Time here has cut back down to mostly dailies. Dailies, and more dailies.

Lunar New Year dailies involve a whole bunch of firecracker clicking and desultory Dragon Ball attendance (just to get the bare minimum of participation. The “wins” one is just insane and places stress on the wrong thing, imo. Especially when half the participants are ready to self-adjust and autobalance via quitting a losing match, and the other half has no interest in winning, are just here for participation, couldn’t care less to try, etc…

And don’t get me started on the AFKers, who have presumably developed the solution of “winning” through probability over a long period of time. Though how they eventually score a win is beyond me, since the opposing team tends to use them as free score punching bags, and the rest of their teammates quit, rather than fight an uphill battle – catching up is hard/impossible in Dragon Ball – or reward the AFKer with an improbable win.)

The red packet lottery itself isn’t too bad. For about less than a gold daily, I get a bunch of luck to up my magic find, some spare food and fireworks and stuff. I got the ram backpack on the second day, which was pretty lucky, I suppose, and that took off quite a bit of stress. Prices aren’t too bad on the TP either, I don’t think. The drop rates have been less insane for this particular red packet thing.

When I have time to kill, I pop over to the Silverwastes to score some additional magic find boosts before opening the 16 daily red packets. The difference between 300 and 500 magic find is probably mostly in my head, but hey, who knows, right? And Silverwastes drops champion bags and other loot, so the time ain’t wasted.

Evolve – Yep, still at it for an hour or two a day, give or take.

My multiplayer experience has been more than a little shaky, lately.

I think part of it is my geographic region, which probably dumps me into an Asian matchmaking server or something. So one is likely to play with players from all over this region, many of which might not even speak English, and are probably half my age.

Ok, straight up, not being a bigot or anything, I can tell you, there are cultural differences between NA, EU and the Asian regions. You can feel this in FPS games, MMOs, MOBAs, the works.

I’ve always really liked playing in the NA region. NA folks, in general, are fairly open-minded and cooperative and more tolerant. Casual communities form pretty quick. My best Team Fortress Classic days were spent playing in some West Coast servers, when I was residing in the States. Organizations like TTS to gather, figure out and subsequently teach a bunch of randoms how to fight Tequatl and Wurm are NA-originated constructs.

EU folks, again speaking in super-general terms, I find, are also pretty decent. In fact, sometimes MORE than decent. They’re good. They’re pretty damn pro and serious about their games. If you like playing with /good/ players, the EU is worth seeking out, but they also tend to take on a certain slightly more closed-doors elitist mindset, possibly partially due to language differences. The French are over here, Germans over there (and maybe the Swiss and Swedes, or whoever) the UK represents over yonder, and Eastern Europe and/or Russia are somewhere else, and you get these little cliques. That get a little hard to break into.

And then there’s their ping, which is usually great within their own region, shakier communicating with the US (sorta like the difference between Asia and Australia, ~200ms) and absolutely total crap when you try and hook Asia and Europe up (~350-400ms.)

This keeps my interacting with EU folks pretty limited in general, but I remember pretty good times playing high difficulty Alien Swarm with a bunch of random Ukrainians, and really good times in a WvW guild zerg led by a semi-open to PUGs who listen and don’t die EU commander when I was staying up like an insomniac.

Conversely, one tends to want to cry when stuck only interacting with an Asian playerbase.

Games are just not taken as seriously or accepted culturally over here. They’re for kids.

While the number of adults that play games (and openly admit to playing games) is growing over here, it’s just not growing as fast as in the West. It’s ironic that the selling point used to promote the digital media and video games industry over here is that they are multi-million dollar industries. Say the word, “games?” Instinctual laughter. Say “$$$” and oooh, people listen. Welcome to materialistic Asia.

Oh, and the adults that do play games? They have to do it in between their work, whose regular hours can stretch to 9-12 hours daily. Weekend warriors? You bet. Ever notice how the quality of GW2 Silverwastes or other such maps suddenly goes to absolute shit on the weekends?

Basically, most of Asia plays like that, all the time. (With maybe some exceptions for still-schooling students who can afford to devote a ton of time to one game, like LOL or something.)

And you can’t blame them because duh, they just aren’t getting the hours in to practice and then play any better. That’s just life. That’s HOW IT IS.

Culture here doesn’t really use mics. Can’t blame ’em, I don’t either. It’s rough to disturb one’s family doing that, and oh, there’s that whole ‘game-playing’ stigma that talking to a monitor is not going to alleviate.

So… no to little communication. Add on the possibility of not understanding typed communication if the opposite number doesn’t speak your language (or have an Asian keyboard that can type or even see Korean/Chinese/Japanese characters.) Add on a competitive afraid-to-lose competitive culture.

And you get a delicious recipe for tears and rage in any kind of team-based cooperative game that requires a little more organization or strategic thought beyond point-the-gun-that-way-and-shoot individual rambo deathmatch.

It’s really just my luck that I like games like that. Team Fortress. Natural Selection. Left 4 Dead… and now, Evolve.

Maybe my experience has been a little skewed because I haven’t been playing at peak hours for Asia either, but in the past few days, each attempted multiplayer game has either yielded an incompetent team of Hunters (where our medic ran off and got himself killed in all kinds of creative ways beyond our reach, despite our vain attempts to call him back to us) or less than a full team.

Whereupon I guiltily proliferate the problem and drop out as well, because if it’s just me, another random person I probably can’t count on and a monster player, I may as well play a solo game with bots and actually -enjoy- myself, rather than just feed the monster player’s ego.

Perhaps it’s because I haven’t been playing Evolve super-heavily, which keeps my level at the very odd middle point of being in the teens, making it much harder to matchmake. (I presume the supremely hardcore and good quality players are already level 20+ and probably 30-40 by now.)

In which case, I just need to continue on my slow road to progress, playing little bot games until I get out of the baby levels and into more of the big leagues.

The bot games, anyway, are pretty enjoyable. One can actually hotswap between the various Hunters, so I can, say, possess a Trapper and trap the Monster in the mobile arena, then swap over to Support to back up the bots, and switch over to something else if I wanted more fine control, etc.

It’s also a good avenue to work on some of the weirder requirements to progress and unlock other Hunters, since an actual game with players would mean actually using all one’s weapons to full advantage, while a bot game means you can just camp say, a harpoon gun and work on racking up as much harpooning of the monster as possible, dps be damned.

I’d really love to get some friendly games in with people I know, but I suppose that’s for later, when Evolve actually drops to an affordable price for more people. (Aussies were apparently screwed over by the starting price, for example. Which -may- explain why the quality of the Asian server has been so shitty. Oceania tends to be my little haven of occasionally cooperative sanity in this region.)

FORCED – Instead, my avenue for cooperating with known people has been this quaint little indie action-puzzler.

You know, for folks who miss the well-divided roles, the try-try-again aspect and necessity for communication of strategy and cooperation while implementing a plan of action, aka MMO raiding, they would do well to give FORCED a try and play it at a hardcore level.

Being that I’m mic-less and most of my friends are at a distinctly more casual level, we’ve just been dipping our toes into the waters and being just content with finishing each stage, rather than trying to beat any challenges or finish in record times.

It’s a fun game all the same. You can play solo, but you miss the added complications and give-and-take of playing with an additional 1-3 players.

So far, I’ve tried solo, 2-player and 3-player mode (the last courtesy of a game with Eri and another friend.)

There are four roles: a hammer smash damage melee type, a claw-wielding quick attack dps Wolverine-sort of melee user, a lighting bow ranged attacker with control and stealth options, and an ice shield control & tanky melee sort.

The goal of the game is to fight and puzzle one’s way through little arena rooms filled with both puzzles to complete and waves of enemies that get in your way of doing so.

You get a little ball-wisp-spirit mentor thing that each player can call around with Spacebar, and this wisp is crucial for solving various puzzles like breaking up or activating shrines, blowing up statues, interacting and pulling little crates around to fit on little pressure plates, rescuing you from enemy crowd control that pins you in place and damages you till you die, etc.

As -all- players can control this wisp, a certain amount of communication or situational awareness is crucial for making sure it goes where it needs to, in a good amount of time.

Our super-casual goes at it occasionally lacked this communication, which leads to amusing Magicka-like moments where the other players are more lethal to you than the computer enemies. Still, the unpredictability is part of the fun, I’d say.

I’ve mostly been camping the ice shield tank on my two cooperative goes at FORCED, but I do think the roles feel good and useful, without becoming codependent on each other.

The ice shield user has quite a lot of knockdowns, if not high damage, and tends to draw aggro when the character hits anything. This puts me in very comfortable territory as I race over and body block (there is collision detection in this game –  sometimes much to my dismay when I realize I can’t fit into the same space as two other people and die to an insta-kill laser) and push away enemies from my friends.

And it has a temporarily-turn-into-ice-and-be-immune-to-anything skill, which feels absolutely like a GW2 guardian block, insta-negating something painful. All kinds of tanky tricks like kiting and dragging around enemies to optimally place them appear to be very doable in FORCED.

The fire hammer is more GW2 warrior-like, more offensively focused. I could tell there was a distinct lack of damage in my two player game, as opposed to my three player game where Eri came along and was all hammer-barbarian on the various mobs.

It has a little charge-up mechanic where slow and steady swings deal hefty amounts of damage, and a number of AoE damage skills.

I pretty much think of the green claw weapon-wielder as Wolverine. It’s very mobile, very quick-attacking, and can pump an AoE heal if the said skill is chosen. It’s very possible to melee kite in a circle with this character, dancing around the enemy doing a seemingly insignificant amount of damage just looking at one float-up number alone but hitting so many times it becomes the death of a thousand and one papercuts in short order.

It can also contribute to a team role by very rapidly putting on ‘marks’ on all enemies that allow for finisher skills to do greater amounts of damage.

I’m least versed with yellow-bow wielder, not having much of a ranged preference. It does seem to suit a friend that -does- enjoy being ranged, and seems to have a charge-up sniper sort of mechanic. Knockbacks and other such controls appear to be also a thing, and the bow user can also invis the entire team for stealth moments when desired.

I especially enjoy the action combat for being fair like GW2. Mobs have certain patterns of attack that can be avoided if you know how and/or are good at hand-eye coordination.

A bull-like Taurus will charge, so once you see it start its animation, move off sideways because it’ll go until it slams headlong into a wall and stuns itself. (Which rather brings to mind a certain fight in the Crucible of Eternity dungeon in GW2 almost immediately.)

A brawler has a heavy broadsword swing attack, so attack it, back off a little before it swings, and then attack again.

Cleavers, on the other hand, have a really nasty axe swing, and moving in to attack first WILL get you hit by this attack. So let -them- attack first, get their axe buried and stuck in the ground, before moving in to hit them, etc.

A spit-using imp has acid spit to be dodged, and a certain exploding knockback imp is pretty much a melee user’s nemesis unless I get my ice-immunity skill up in time… except there was once when my friend on the yellow bow managed to get them all first and quickly, and then I realized… Ooooh, look, team roles! The archer can actually deflect the pain of this enemy. (And presumably if I took a ranged skill, I might be able to deal with it too.)

Looking forward to getting a few more games of this, whenever people are free.

Blackguards – I’m not sure what prompted me to install this and try it out. It was just another one of those games turning up in my ever-expanding Steam games list after buying one too many Humble Bundle deals and the like.

The blurb on the store page read, “What happens when the only hope of a threatened world lies not with heroes in shining armor, but in the hands of a band of misfits and criminals?”

And I went, hrm, I don’t know, maybe it’ll be fun to play a fantasy game where my characters are scum and villains, let’s see how this plays…

Turns out, not too bad.

One of the big hurdles, I feel, is that your expectations have to be set right with regards to Blackguards. It’s not a full-fledged heavy customisation RPG in the vein of Fallout and its ilk. It feels like a game that very easily can and will find its way onto a tablet or mobile near you.

That is, it feels a bit like an app game. Most of the in-between combat consists of a world map and a bunch of fast-travel points to click on to progress from stage to stage, or region to region. Sort of similar to Puzzle Quest, in that sense.

The story seems to be of average quality, the voicework so-so but conveys the plot and characters well enough that you’re not -totally- cringing at something that didn’t fit, but tends toward being somewhat corny in places. It’s interesting enough, in an “I want to know more, so I will keep playing” fashion.

Your character begins in front of a dead body, apparently framed for their murder, and thrown into prison. You bust out of prison with two unlikely allies, a dwarf and a southerner mage (somewhat reminiscent of the Forgotten Realms, which ain’t a bad thing in my book) with the goal to find out more about what’s going on and what the heck happened to you. Standard fantasy trope, really, but functional.

The fights themselves are… not horrible. They could, I suppose, be a little more interesting.

But in the early game, it’s mostly been alternating between normal attack and Power Blow attack (with lower chance to hit), with only one mage sporting a few more varied spells like a fire bolt, a fireball, a barrier and some buff and debuff spells – most of which you won’t be able to cast too much of, or run out of mana very quickly.

The environments are pretty enough, with occasional possibilities for interacting with objects mid-battle, with traps and mechanisms to figure out the purpose of.

I can’t help but wonder if there are other things I’m missing, so to speak. There seems to be some kind of cover system in play, where your chances of evading ranged attacks are better when you’re behind cover. There appears to be some kind of swarm combat bonus at work, but none of it is made terribly clear. Sometimes you’ll have 75% chance to hit someone, sometimes 45% and is it because of facing? Or maybe the armor the individual is wearing? Who knows.

But for a change of pace and a few turn-based encounters here and there, it’s decent enough… and I’d sure like to know what’s going on with the story, and so, I play on.

Minecraft – I’ve been alternating between the Agrarian Skies and Wanderlust Reloaded modpacks rather frequently.

Ag Skies is my comfortable, established, so-called ‘mid-game’ factory/automation mod exploration goto, but occasionally it feels too safe and a little slow and boring to progress further.

Somedays, you just want to explore a big world and actually have procedurally generated land that you didn’t place block by block yourself.

After dabbling with a ton of the other modpacks that have HQM (some of whom seem fairly intriguing), most of them end up too hard or too confusing for poor ol’ me at this stage of mod ignorance. Spatial IO? Ender IO? Buildcraft? Computercraft? Wtf are those?

A number simply presume a baseline level that’s set a little too high for me to fully grasp. When I struggle with the first few HQM goals, that’s usually a good sign that it’s way beyond me for the moment.

Yet others are simply too hardcore lethal. The vanilla mobs hold no more terrors for these established Minecraft players, and so they turn up mob difficulty to 11… (or 13.) Mobs that ride spiders…that fly…and are on fire… that shoot explosive poisonous arrows… Uhhh, yeah. I’m not -that- well-versed with all the mods and stuff that I can tech up in the space of one day before night falls and be ready for mortal combat with buffed out zombies and creepers and skeletons sporting way too many hearts.

Wanderlust Reloaded is the only other modpack that I’ve managed to find -with- a nice HQM system to provide little goals to follow and learn new mods, while not being out to murderize you every minute.

It contains a couple of different mods from Ag Skies, like Botania, which is nice since I can learn a few different mods, but also has some similarities like Minefactory Reloaded, Thermal Expansion and Forestry, so that it doesn’t feel too alien and I can fall back on what I know previously.

(I do miss Ex Nihilo and Ex Aquilo though. I just love being able to produce everything from nearly nothing.)

The world it rolls up feels pretty great, more complex but still recognizably Minecraft. Just with more cool things –  plants, ores, and all, inside it.

Rollplay: Swan Song – Not precisely a game that I’m playing, but one that I’ve been finding really fun to listen to.

This has been my background accompaniment to playing around in Minecraft (since Minecraft’s audio/music sucks anyway after hearing it once or twice), having forgotten about it for several months and needing to binge to catch up with the storyline.

Man, it’s still good. And highly recommended.

Eavesdropping on a group of ruffians and ne’er-do-wells try to raise a burgeoning AI to not be a complete monster amidst a background of people perpetually dying after coming into contact with them and getting into serious trouble aboard the junker spaceship Swan Song, exploring a vast variety of planets created by the ingenious mind of Adam Koebel and the Stars Without Number tabletop RPG system, is great entertainment.

GW2: The Canach Lair Experiment

At least, it sure seems like one.

Almost as if ArenaNet was listening to feedback and said, “Oh, you sure you want what you’re asking for? Let’s give you what you want then, and see if you really like it!”

Imagine if you will, an instance with no trash mobs, doesn’t waste your time, and isn’t an ordinary tank-and-spank boss.

Or as some others might more bitterly say, a one-room “dungeon” which is so short it produces a “that’s it?” feeling at the end comprising of a very gimmick fight.

Depending on who you ask, the rewards of completion may be “crap” or “not worth it” or indeed, so worth it that it risks being farmed via character deletion and remaking exploit-line-skirting.

And of course, the very strange decision to enforce a -solo- instance went down as well as enforcing a -group- dungeon might, just with a completely different subset of people.

Poor Anet just can’t win, can they?

—

For the record, on the whole, I like it just fine. With some quantifiable nitpicks.

Let’s just get the venting about OPTIONS out of the way, shall we? Forcing anything is bad. Some people like to group. Let them fucking group.

I’m a solo-preferring player, I spend a lot of time arguing for the option to solo, but it sure doesn’t mean I want the option for people to group taken away. That just makes a different set of people unhappy.

The only thing I can possibly think of that this achieves is the idea of a “solo” tutorial, where it is guaranteed that everyone has been exposed to the mechanic in simpler form before unleashing them to wreck their unique brand of (un)communicative havoc in a group.

I’d live without the guarantee personally, if it means all the “forcing” goes away.

I like the concept of the step up tutorial though, as I made good use of it, going through the solo version to learn the mechanics in peace by myself, then poked my head alone into the explorable group version to see what else I could figure out there, and then finally joined a group or two.

The Solo Instance

I took my most masochistic character in first. Yes, my spirit weapon guardian who has been wandering around Southsun in magic find gear. This was on purpose, as I wanted to experience a glass cannon pop gun baseline. Just to see how a badly built casual player might find it.

Story-wise, I felt the linkage was a bit abrupt. We never really got to track Canach down. We’re just suddenly told, oh, look, we found him, he’s here, go get him.

The explanation of the mine detector gimmick was okay, as long as you’re the sort of player that bothers to talk to NPCs and read what they say. (Which apparently, some people don’t.)

I liked that there was an uninterrupted short stretch in front to play with the mine detector gun and get familiar with the scanning and conversion mechanic. The icon indicators for the traps were also decently clear, though the fog and steam doesn’t really help visibility-wise.

I’ve mentioned I like solo instances because it gives me time to take screenshots uninterrupted and admire the scenery – which was nifty.

Figuring out the Canach fight itself was pretty tough on first contact. This has a lot to do with the build, if you ask me.

I got the idea fairly quickly to get Canach into the converted land mines, as the caltrops or poison ones didn’t appear to do much to his health bar. I was able to read the buff he had on to figure out that he was immune to any standard weapon attacks.

I did miss until much later the helpful yellow text in my chat bar as to when he was doing what with the mines, as I was staring in the center of my screen, at him, trying to figure out his animations while dancing around the numerous traps and trying to scan and convert them and play the memory game of where is the land mine I’m looking for…

This led to a few accidents of getting knocked about by Canach and into traps, which then exploded and knocked off considerable amounts of hp, which led to me scrambling around trying to recover on a build not really made for healing up quickly and rapidly, which led to more opportunities for him to rush me and knock me down, or blow up all his mines, and generally set up a cascade chain of eventual failure.

So damnably close to reviving… then he blew up all his mines in my face.

I swapped utility skills to put on the more standard stun-breaker shouts, Stand Your Ground and Save Yourselves, and Retreat! for swiftness.

Which went a little better, though I was still having trouble using skill 5 to knock him back into traps a sufficient distance, and I was finding it tough as a squishy to stay in his melee range for long enough to kite him over a mine, and the charr still felt cumbersome and slowass. After about 3-4 deaths, I finally managed to lead him through enough land mines and down all his health.

I enjoyed the little story conversation epilogue between him and Ellen Kiel after. I appreciate that they put that into the solo instance so soloists didn’t miss that part of the story.

Then I logged on my asura guardian, having been now convinced through firsthand experience that this is a “dungeon” where squishy dps glass cannon builds do not help and a bunker build might very well excel. I even left on my WvW gear – soldier/clerics because I suspected the more tanky I was, the more it was going to be lol-worthy ez-mode.

Gee, that tickles.

It was. I pretty much stood next to Canach and watched as he hit me for 340 hp, then healed up 168 hp x 2 in the next few seconds before he could wind up for his next attack. This made kiting him onto the land mines extremely painless. This was the character I used to get the Lair-Light Foot achievement as it is much easier to look carefully where you’re stepping when you’re not worried about the possibility of dying.

So if you’re ever wondering why some players think Canach’s Lair is so damn easy, while others are struggling, I’d take a long hard look at what builds they’re running.

Not to mention, what classes.

Because I am slightly greedy and wanted to grab at least one more of the possibly unintended character reward of 26 silver plus 1 bag of 1 gold (found a CoF-like dungeon reward rate, woo!), but also too wussy to log ALL my lowbies and possibly risk a ban for exploiting, I decided to bring my last level 80 in and stop at three.

That last level 80 is a thief. He has swiftness on dodge, and signet of shadows. Canach couldn’t fucking touch him. And remember, I am a POOR thief. Game, set, mined and caught.

The Group Instance

As mentioned above, I poked my head in solo to check out how the explorable differed from the story version, and see if the cave had grown any extra rooms. (It hadn’t.)

I poked in on Mr Squishy Magic Find Charr so you can call me either brave or stupid too.

I did last long enough to note that the golem didn’t have the buff that made him immune to weapon attacks, attempted to attack it and noted with pleasure that I was actually denting him to the tune of 3-5% of his total hp bar (not bad for one person in magic find gear against a mob meant for five, it suggested that the devs had indeed erred on the side of easy with this instance and that it might conceivably be possible if difficult to accomplish solo.)

I lasted long enough to see his purple shield come up and work out the mechanic that he needed to be led onto land mines for his shield to fall off.

But the rate at which I was damaging it wasn’t really very quick and it was a struggle to keep alive alone on squishy charr and guildchat was starting the call for folks to do the explorable with, so I gracefully did a Brave Sir Robin and ran away.

Swapped to Mr Surprisingly Sturdy For His Stature, joined the guild group and went in.

The first go was messy. We were tackling Subdirector NULL with four members, as one was still making his way over and having problems with the zoning / party instancing / directions, while some others had triggered the fight. One of our party members was still trying to lead / talk the lost member to where we were, mid-battle, which couldn’t have been terribly good for his mobility. The automatic reaction was to spread out, and no one else had figured out what the purple shield did, so it made kiting the golem onto a land mine quite tricky. The orbiting energy things were an interesting pickle that made us dodge and move around quite a bit, and when the repair turret message came up, it took some time to scan the room and find where it was to take it down.

Despite all that, the health of the golem dropped quite rapidly. What eventually did us in was the electrolyze mini-enrage timer at the end, as I don’t think anyone realized what was happening in between all the party conversation going on trying to get the last member over, and scramble to revive people who were downed by getting too close to the golem.

The other three’s hp were close to one sliver from being downed and mine was at half full, while I was still trying to pick people up, before I finally noticed the little debuff on my bar that had 3-4 stacks of electrolyze going. Ohhh…

We wiped, and left the dungeon to get the last member properly zoned in. Second go was much better, we sorta kinda clumped together a little more, though it was still tricky to kite the golem to a mine when everyone seemed to have a different idea of which mine to lead the golem to. Plenty of damage burned the golem down once the shield eventually fell off though. Cue achievement. Cue reward chest (oooh, 50 silver, a rare, suhweet!) Cue chest in cave (two greens.) Pretty yummy for not very high difficulty, even if the fight was gimmicky.

Coordination is pretty important in this instance though.

There was one more guild group call out, two members had been attempting it in a duo and were defeated by the enrage timer at the end. I decided to test if the rewards for the group dungeon were character or account bound and logged on the squishy charr. (I did swap out of magic find and into pure berserker though.)

They were on voice and they had a plan.

We went to a corner of the cave that was apparently out of the way of the orbiting energy things, and was near to two traps – one a land mine, one a poison trap, both of which could break the shield. Mechanics were explained to those doing it for the first time. Then Null was attracted over and pounded on.

Went flawlessly. Went so quickly and easily it prompted a “Wow, that’s it?” from one or two people, and started a search for the third instance hinted at in the patch notes. (Which apparently will only exist next week, and is probably just a storytelling epilogue/finale.)

One nitpick is that there isn’t much of a story to the group instance. Perhaps that’s intended, so as to not leave the soloists in the lurch. The issue is probably with a sense of pacing, in that there’s no beginning, middle or end. With no trash mobs, it’s just “boss” then that’s it. And not a terribly difficult boss at that.

Stuff I Liked

• The inclusion of soloists with a solo instance (with the caveat that group-ists shouldn’t be excluded either)

• The story being told in an instance with time to enjoy it at one’s own pace and read the text

• The rewards of silver and stuff are pretty insanely good (to me, anyway, I don’t run CoF farms) for something so short and quickly achieved (If this is a daily feature, I’d be in here every day for sure. If it’s meant to be one-time ever only, then ok, not as great as I thought, but still nice for a one-time bonus.)

• The fairly painless difficulty level (this is subjective, of course, but I’d rather not waste hours of my time beating my head against a dungeon with a possibly ‘fail’ group for something that is merely part of a short-lived event. I have WvW XP to farm at doubled rates.)

Stuff I Didn’t Mind

• The whole mine detector gimmick (I’m sure some people felt they didn’t like it, especially when it made their class or skills fairly irrelevant. I kind of think that’s part of the point, to have everyone on the same playing field using the same skills – though builds and classes still do matter somewhat. GW1 had similar minigames. Canach may have been slightly cheesy in that he was immune to everything but mines though. Something more similar to Null where mines break a shield may have gone down better.)

• How short it was. (I suppose it could have been a room or two longer, with better pacing, but I’m not keen on all day dungeon marathon runs either. It’s probably friendlier for the largest amount of people to make it short and sweet.)

All in all, I don’t have anything that I strongly HATE in this. I don’t anticipate frustration factor building up very high. At most, people might get bored of it much quicker. So what? It’s a limited time one-off. The meta event is the one that we should be looking at with a fine tooth comb to see if it feels great, because -that’s- the one that’s going to go on repeat loop permanently.

Guess we’ll see next week.