GW2: That Multiheaded Hydra – Choice Paralysis & Dailies & Story Overwhelm

Guild Wars 2 has always been a haven in the MMO space for horizontal progression.

No vertical forever-treadmill where one chases higher and higher numbers, for glory and ambition or merely for the sake of not falling behind. Proponents of lateral progression, of which I am one of them, herald the inherent freedom in being able to strike out along multiple paths and feel like one is still earning valuable rewards.

Instead of a blinders-like simplicity of hanging clothes on your virtual doll to make numbers go up, there are the spicier complex options of following your heart and intrinsic motivation (or simple whim) and having a variety of stuff fall into your pockets regardless, or strategically optimizing different maximized routes towards different goals.

Such goals could be specific pretty clothes for your virtual doll, or specific gear/resources that make numbers go up (to a point) or change the numbers around more easily, or gaining knowledge and practice in improving player skill (thus making numbers also go up), or making other numbers (gold, achievement points, etc.) go up.

Lately though, I’ve been wondering if there might come a point when enthusiastically added content over a long period of time might ever amount to TOO much.

Take GW2 dailies:

We began with a simple daily tab (and a weekly tab that has now since been removed). There were PvE dailies, PvP dailies, WvW dailies. Doing a mix of those or solely those in the game mode one prefers, nets you the daily reward. Sounds great! Flexibility of choice and all that, no?

Somehow, over time, we’ve had EVEN MORE daily tabs added. There’s festival dailies, when a festival is running. Dailies for strike missions, dailies for fractals, dailies for a whole bunch of living world season zones if you happen to be still doing those and a very random one for krait hunting and swim infusions.

Roughly a week ago, Mailvatar was lamenting about how dailies in most games cause FOMO. I can confidently say that GW2 does not have that specific problem with its dailies, because there is no human being that can finish all of GW2’s dailies in a day, and repeat that feat for days on end.

No, seriously, the above are not all the dailies there really are in GW2. GW2efficiency will tell you that THESE are all the things that reset on a daily cycle that would net you rewards.

All 286 of them. Many on timers. Some group content. All the jumping puzzles in the world (literally.) Go.

Go on, go.

Go do your dailies!

Hahahaha. Mental shutdown is more likely.

Out of pure survival, I can pretty much guarantee that every single GW2 player knows how to pick and choose what dailies they want to do. Be it absolutely none of them (except by accident) or a very specific subset of them.

But rest assured, it IS a subset.

Heck, I’m a GW2 veteran, dealing with dailies is small beans. When I decided to restart GW2 and go after Chuka and Champawat, I made my own mini-kanban on Notion to figure out what dailies I wanted to do. Priority: earn game money; Condition: please don’t make me face instanced group content daily.

The actual three dailies for 2 gold, the ley line anomaly, maybe some map metas or world bosses that bring in gold, some gathering nodes and so on are on the list. Everything else is not.

When I get bored of that pattern, I’ll change it up. It’s not like I have a SHORTAGE of possible dailies I could be doing.

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The quest for Chuka and Champawat followed the same idea.

Here’s a long term project that you’ve decided is your goal, here’s your customised quest list to go get the materials you want. Direction. Focus. Narrowing down of options amidst a sea of possibles.

Yesterday though, that quest came to an end.

The let’s-make-it-a-big-deal UI screen. Somewhat gratifying, yes.

I was a -little- confused when the shortbow disappeared from my inventory. After a bit of panicked searching, I eventually figured out that it auto-added to my legendary armory, because gen 2 legendaries are account-bound.

Ah well. Okay, then.

Is it weird that I would have liked to have a tangible virtual icon to play around with for a moment, before I selected the Add to Legendary Armory option? Simply because the whole process of legendary making is so involved, it ought to result in a simulated object?

The overly smart “let me shortcut that process for you” caught me off-guard for a bit.

Regardless, all my shortbow wielding characters now have a black, red and gold tiger bow that can swap stats at will. So that’s nice.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I have this mental post-it note that I might want to bring the ranger out again to make my beginner way through PvP or WvW roaming.

A little more front-and-center was the thought of getting the hang of the revenant/renegade/herald what-have-you fancy schmancy “new” heavy armor class that I barely understand.

Condi renegade is apparently quite a thing, though it takes a while to ramp up and I don’t know if I’ll ever learn, let alone master, the optimised dps rotation. But taking it for a spin in the open world, and learning each skill slowly, over time? Yeah, maybe. Could be fun. Shiny new shortbow was one of those steps towards that project.

Turns out, it’s a little more involved than that.

I have heavy legendary armor, so gearing up that part was quite easy. The shortbow covered one weapon set. I had an older legendary axe that covered half of the other weapon set. Mace? Er. Nope, no legendary maces here. So I yanked out an ascended one left over from raid drops and committed it to Viper stats for good.

Trinkets though. Urgh. Legendary trinkets are on the to-do list. Digging through the horrible mess that is my banked storage for ascended trinkets is not a project I particularly enjoy. Committing ascended trinket stats is hard. I always worry that I won’t have enough for a particular need if I make too many of one type or another. At present, I have a really weak grasp / overview of all my characters and what they’re equipped with and what they need, and I don’t really feel like sitting down to organize them all.

For now, the shortcut was that I flung some spare celestial stat Ascended trinkets onto the poor chap (still missing half of them) and took it out for a very casual spin.

It’s not bad. Quite fun, actually, even though I’m pretty much only spamming shortbow skills at the moment, having nothing more in my brain capacity to learn the other bits as yet. Those can come later. We all start somewhere.

Runes? Sigils? Nope, still yet to be equipped. Traits? Barely any, enough to flip over into renegade, is about it. I still have to bring him hero pointing for enough points to finish off all the revenant traits.

Long story short, from one goal of “get legendary shortbow,” it’s morphed into three additional goals:

1. Get enough hero points to get full traits for the renegade
2. Figure out some kind of solution for the renegade’s trinkets (wait for legendary trinkets? assess my ascended trinket inventory and what I can afford? Use some random stopgap stats that I already own?)
3. Put runes and sigils on the renegade

Oh, you multi-headed goal hydra, you.

Then again, I’m in the throes of post-legendary “I’m broke and poor now” syndrome.

Legendaries eat up an enormous amount of banked resources. More than 500g of mystic coins? Wiped out. Every last T6 trophy I own? Gone. 500 T5 trophies of each type are also consumed, so even that most populous category is at dangerously low levels.

I broke into the gold bank to buy the components to mystic forge my remaining amalgamated gemstones, so I need to re-top it up to the tune of 110g or so. (I also wiped out 400g of spending money on the Dreamthistle skin collection – something I was waiting for literal years to come back into circulation so that prices lowered.)

All in all, that adds up to one of those over-arcing back-of-the-mind goals of play more GW2 and keep accruing all the things because -everything- needs restocking.

Problem is, where do I even start?

It’s not a new problem. Plenty of GW2 newbies run headlong into this and simply shut down. They can’t process the overwhelming number of things they -could- be doing with their game time, and get caught up in choice paralysis, ending up doing none of them and backing away from the game instead.

Regular GW2 players will keep harping on the fact that learning how to make these decisions is a vital player skill for thriving in GW2’s open smorgasbord of gameplay activities.

It’s not like the developers don’t try to help narrow this down for players from time to time. Sometimes there are festivals, or over-arcing events like world boss tour or added rewards in WvW week and so on. So there’s a pretty big nudge in the direction of current events.

Then the developers had the brainwave of re-cycling Living World episodes (themselves over-arcing events that drew focus at the time of their release) and creating new achievements to point the way to visiting a particular zone for a week. Hence all the “Return To _____” achievements lately.

Oh, how nice, a guide list for things you might want to do in the Sandswept Isles.

In order to ensure that people who aren’t logged in for a period of time don’t miss out, they leave the Return to achievement tabs available for all time, so that any returning players can get caught up on them later, at leisure. (Though some group stuff might be a little more difficult to accomplish, the long tail of trailing players means a certain level of activity is still likely in the older zones.)

At what point though, I wonder, does this list start to look like the Dailies tab?

That’s getting to be quite a LONG bulleted list. And long bulleted lists veer towards scary and overwhelming territory.

Sure, you could just pick one tab at random to complete and ignore all the others till done, and get through all of them in a sequential fashion that way. It’s doable. It’s decision-making. Of a sort. Certainly has focus and direction. May not be -optimal- though.

Min-maxers might want to do a bit more strategizing. Look at all the stuff they have yet to complete. Get a bigger picture. Try to organize like goals together and do them all at once. Layer overlapping goals so that everything that needs to be done in one zone gets done, before moving on to the next, and so on. That sort of thing.

The part that has finally broken MY mind, somewhat, is the onset of the Festival of the Four Winds.

Oh look, here’s a festival ON TOP of your Return To content, as well as your dailies, if you are so inclined.

You know, as a vet, I’ve already finished the three tabs above this one, so I don’t have to worry about it. One wonders how the new players deal.

The festival lasts 21 days, so yeah, there’s plenty of time. The annual stuff is easily done in a couple of days. Forever in the back of my mind though, for the next three weeks, is going to be some FOMO that if I’m not farming champion bags in Boss Blitz, I’m losing out. Or at least, incurring some serious opportunity cost. *sighs*

That opportunity cost is likely going to have to be incurred, because I have a serious amount of leftover Return To achievement tabs I want to get cracking on.

The most onerous part of each tab has been the story episodes.

I mean, I could replay them all in a supremely focused fashion by taking my main through each required story instance, but that would mean zero rewards beyond getting an achievement ticked and getting it done as fast as humanly possible.

I thought it might be nice to take a new character through the story, in a sort of story marathon to experience the story uninterrupted by months and years of development time in between updates, and earn rewards and unlock story chapters and stuff at the same time.

Thing is, I vastly underestimated just how lengthy and meandering these story instances have been.

My enthusiasm for re-experiencing the story started to dry up as the NPCs talked at each other for 5 minutes or longer each instance, before progressing on to the next scripted step, that produced even more talking, until maybe there would be a quick fight (utterly destroyed by a power-creeped spin-to-win reaper shroud) and then even more talking. Oh, and a gimmick fight or two which takes FOREVER in contrast to slowly solo mechanics, in contrast with the reaper’s overpowered AoE.

When you start playing songs in Youtube in the other window and hoping the scripted NPCs will start moving, you know you’ve quite lost it with any pretense of keeping up with the story.

It doesn’t help that there have always been issues with GW2 storylines.

Some of it seems to be grand plans derailed by having four different teams take on conveying different parts of the story. Some of it seems to be horrible characterization as produced by writing committee. Some of it seems to be shoehorned-in excuses for stuff that needs to happen plot-wise because we have certain level designs and maps and things we need to hit somehow.

Taimi can be a competent and bratty progeny in most scenes, but then suddenly turn into a wailing freaked out human girl cosplaying as tiny asura because the PLOT needed her to get in trouble and be rescued by the Commander.

We need Marjory to become a greatsword reaper and sell a samurai sword gemstore skin, so let us create a new baby sister (with samurai sword) for Marjory, kill her off abruptly in the next couple of story chapters, then bring her back as a ghost to magically charge up the greatsword skin, which Marjory will now use. Can I have some instant grief on tap for Marjory please? Thanks!

Yo, this egg needs to exit stage left, because the Commander can’t have it until they buy the Heart of Thorns expansion. And we need to hint that the sylvari are all going nuts because Plant and Mind dragon. I know, let’s have Caithe just grab it and go. Cos reasons.

Apparently we wanted to do something with the Nightmare Court, except later it will make no sense at all because it got cut during HoT development. But let’s zoom in for now close onto Caithe’s and Faolain’s relationship and backstory… except the relationship reads like an adult man trying to write two female teenagers calling each other sweet nothings… and one of the females acts like the world’s most gaslighty, illogically manipulative villainess, ordering people around and making demands of everyone. So… why exactly was Caithe in love with this person again? And so willing to do as she asked? Now that’s a mystery that could have used some storytelling… which we never get answered.

Eventually, I got whacked with a revelation.

GW2’s story suffers the same problem as its dailies as its achievements.

It’s doing too much. It’s carrying too much content. A multi-headed hydra of tangled plot threads.

No wonder players are overwhelmed. It lacks straightforward simplicity.

Nor do things tie together very well. It’s just a random assortment of stuff that happens. Braham has the world’s largest series of young person mood swings until he finally mutates into… well. something else.

Let’s make a charr warrior enact a Foefire Cleansing ritual with no prior research on exactly how this might work, and with all the expertise of a group of kids leaning over an Ouija board, so he can randomly generate a portal to the Mists and disappear inside to become a revenant, because marketing wants him in shiny black revenant heavy armor.

In the meantime, Rytlock can also pull double duty unseen in the background and release the Big Bad of our new expansion. because you know, we need a villain other than Elder Dragons, and gods might conceivably oppose Elder Dragons, and which god can we recruit for the Plot? Ah yes, someone who conveniently likes fighting, war, and fire, so he and his faction will look pretty cool. Because we don’t like any explanations at all, until we can retcon everything properly once the expansion is finally done, Rytlock will refuse to answer any questions about his experience in the Mists until we’re done figuring out what happened to him exactly.

Yea, well. K, whatever.

I’ve given up hoping it’ll make sense one day.

I’ll have way better luck just organizing my story to-dos for the sake of the chievos.

Which I did. In one night. Because I was sick of going through story mission after mission, seemingly without end.

Not knowing the full scope of it made it hard to grasp when it would ever be done.

This is much better. The stuff in bold are the missions that actually tick off the achievements for the Return To tabs.

I could see at a glance that I actually just have 6 episode chunks to go. One can probably plow through each chunk in 1-2 days. So suddenly from never-ending labor, the task scope becomes 12 days of effort, at max. Probably shorter.

I could also prioritize these chunks in a different order from sequential narrative order.

Living Story Season 2 has smaller number of story missions (though they tend to be very LENGTHY ones) and are almost done, so I could finish those off.

Living Story Season 3 is annoying because there’s a lot of story missions and only the first and last tend to count. I could put it off, or give up and just shortcut the process with my main. We’ll think about it.

Living Story Season 4 episode 2 is the current week’s episode, so it makes sense to do that first, once LS2 is done, so that I can get cranking on the current events and benefit from group interest while it’s there – like group bounties and so on.

We’ll get the story stuff done first, then clean up on the other achievements, and only then maybe we’ll have mental space for taking on and organizing the legendary trinket long-term project goals.

So it goes.

Guild Wars 2 drowns you in stuff you -could- be doing, if you wanted to.

And it’s on you to figure out if you want to, and where to even get started.

Could it be better? Possibly.

Are you going to wait until someone else makes it better for you? You’ll probably be waiting quite a while.

If you want it now, it’s on you to figure out how.

Here We Go Round the Grindberry Bush

You’d think I’d learn by now.

I don’t know why I even try to expect consistency from myself.

Not a few days after changing my blog layout to favor bigger pictures, in the expectation that I might be playing more simulation style games with lovely scenery like theHunter or new games where screenshots would help to illustrate the experience, I have suddenly decided that NOW is the perfect time to re-focus on the same old games and make a concentrated push for long term goal projects.

This mostly means that I’ve traded off staring nightly at stuff that looks like this:

To this:

Well, in the case of Warframe, I know why.

At the end of April, they announced the Prime Vault was unsealing to make Loki Prime earnable once more, as well as Volt Prime.

I have neither of them and I’ve been enjoying the basic Loki’s invisibility for certain missions of late, so this was very motivating for me to declare “farm relics to get the unvaulted primes” as a long term goal until July 3 or done (Preferably done way before that final vault sealing date.)

The less fantastic news is that relic farming is always intentionally grindy.

So I thought I may as well stretch it into a long term project rather than burn out attempting to farm 12 hours without stopping the first few days. (Yeah, right, who has that kind of game time any more? Dang college students/unemployed/retirees.)

I guess these things come in cycles.

Having indulged the inner Explorer for a couple months, now the inner Achiever demanded to be let out to do its thing.

The problem with the inner Achiever (or at least with mine) is its intense desire to have whatever it’s aiming for -now-, stat, with very little clue about just precisely how it’s going to get there and very little tolerance for how long the whole process will take.

I get very very antsy.

In my befuddled brain that is the usual state of affairs, it tends to imagine that whatever it wants will somehow magically be presented to it, if it thinks about it hard enough, repeatedly enough, and keeps chasing after it like an overenthusiastic dog.

Project planning is a skill I seem to have largely missed the boat on.

Traditional project planning, much like traditional outlining, has never worked for me.

In the old days, it was pretty much do it that waterfall way or the highway, and I usually just opted for careening down the expressway flying by the seat of my pants and winging it by dealing with the loudest and most urgent thing and proceeding from there via subconscious guilt and nagging brain prompts.

In this enlightened Internet day and age, there are apparently more options than the two extremes, as consultants and professionals attempt to describe what the more average folks -actually- do to get by in their day to day lives, and then give it shiny new names and a marketing buff and polish to sell the technique back to us.

One such methodology that I randomly stumbled across is the Improvement Kata, something purportedly based on what Toyota’s management culture practices.

Beyond the business speak and filler for packaging into a format that can be sold as training to corporations, it seems to be based on a core common sense (which is never very common) concept of iteration.

1. Have a direction that you want to head towards, and an idea of the challenge you’ll need to overcome
2. Have an idea of where you currently are
3. Define a reachable “next target”
4. Experiment your way from 2 to 3
5. Repeat 2-4 until you reach 1, if ever

Besides the useful and common concept of breaking down your goal into smaller realistically achievable parts, I really like what Improvement Kata brought to step 4, where it is explicitly diagrammed as not a straight linear path, but a series of winding experimental steps where the path zigzags

This helps to assuage my perfectionist mind that it is okay to have backward progress or sidetreks in the course of attaining the target.

That like Edison’s light bulb, you may have to try a whole bunch of different things, fail, realise and learn what -doesn’t- work, in order to finally hit upon something that -does-.

That chasing up side avenues is fine.

That whatever gets you motivated to just keep making starts is good, you’ll learn more as you experiment your way forward.

That it’s more important to just check in now and then on where you are, on what you’ve learned since the last check-in and to keep refining those plans based on what you know now until you get where you want to go.

I tried out the practice on the Relic Farming project.

1. Overall Big Picture Target – Own Loki Prime, Volt Prime and maybe Odonata Prime

2. Where Am I Now – originally nothing; now, see below

I am almost there on Loki Prime, just missing the rarest and most annoying to obtain component. I got lucky cracking open relics, so I’m a little further along on Volt Prime than I’d dared to hope. No progress on Odonata, but that’s fine as it is the least priority.

3. Next Target – Loki Prime Systems

4. Experiment

Experiment-wise, I’d already conducted a bunch in the previous week to find out the best sources of relics and what tools I had at my disposal to obtain them, given my quirky limitations of preferring to solo, not wishing to buy stuff outright with platinum and being more limited than a max MR player

Several false starts and some time measurements later, it has boiled down to running through Void, Marduk – Sabotage with a Loki at my very average and not extremely fast pace of ~5min per mission to have a 6% chance of popping the correct Axi L4 relic.

I am collecting a great deal of other relics in the progress.

When bored of the former, the secondary fallback is that I can also do a Void, Mot – Survival up to 20 min for a 13% chance at the Axi L4 relic with a Nidus.

But survival with void enemies doing 4x more damage and needing to stay for an uninterrupted 20 minutes tends to be a little more nailbiting than running around mostly invisible.

So I wind up by preference going for 4 chances of 6%, as opposed to 1 chance of 13% to get what I want.

Is that better? If I remember my math classes more, I could probably figure it out.

(My hunch says: the combined probability of -not- getting the relic I want each time is 94%, multiplied by itself 4 times. So 0.94 x 0.94 x 0.94 x 0.94 = 0.78. So the chance I might have popped the relic after 4 goes is 1 – 0.78 = 22%?)

Dunno. I await someone better at math to correct me. Intuitively, it kinda feels better, so we’ll run with that for now.

You’d think that project is sufficient to keep me occupied for the present, but between ArenaNet’s slightly improved communication and the anticipated release of the final Living Story 4 episode, my attention has been somewhat drawn back to GW2.

Not to insinuate that the game is some sort of many-armed monster, but… maybe.

To be honest, my relationship with GW2 was in a very bad place at the beginning of the year.

Some of the words that easily came to mind were “frustrated” “bored out of my skull” “burnt out” and “pushed beyond tolerance at the change in community sentiment.”

(Call me paranoid, but I rather suspect that similar emotions were running through a number of ArenaNet staff pre-layoffs.)

I just hadn’t reached a “quitting” frame of mind yet.

I was just stuck in a weird limbo of “I still kinda like the game, but I don’t like where it is nor where it seems to be going.”

Eventually, I decided that I’d delay reacting to it and give ArenaNet sufficient time to get their last few story episodes out and reassess what I felt about GW2 in April-May.

I guess I’m finally getting a little smarter with age and figuring out that delaying decisions can sometimes be a way forward.

The ArenaNet layoffs seem to have been a wakeup boot for the company. Not a great thing to happen to anyone, but making lemonade out of lemons is about the best one can do with a bad situation. Communication has stepped up a little (possibly due to certain policy makers voluntarily leaving). It’s a fire under them that forces a re-focus on what they’re trying to achieve with GW2.

From a steadily dropping and close to zero percent confidence level in the future of GW2 pre-layoffs and pre-communication, it at least feels like there’s a 35% chance now that there might be somewhat interesting future things for GW2. (Note: I’m a cynical pessimistic person by nature, so these are pretty decent numbers for my skewed viewpoint.)

Pursuant to figuring out how I will feel about the whole GW2 franchise once Living Story 4 draws to a conclusion, it occurred to me that regardless of me quitting or continuing, I should finish some of the long term goals that I always wanted to complete.

The biggest bugbear on that Unfinished Tasks list was Legendary Medium armor.

It is with some irony that I note that the raids part of it was completed long ago and by no means a bottleneck.

It was more a lack of motivation due to it being ugly as sin (and that’s giving sin a bad name), and the eternal time-gated nuisance of faction provisioner tokens which requires serious organized diligence to remember to feed various NPCs daily with the required objects for weeks on end. 25 days if you’re rich and go for 12 tokens a day, and for cheapskates like me, 42 days going at a 7 token a day pace.

That and the crippling cost of helping to sink a shipload of crafting materials by buying them with gold from other players.

Hence the spreadsheet, keeping track of what I have and still need:

The Step 4: Experiment stage of this has been surprisingly more entertaining than first anticipated.

Mostly because my miserly soul refuses to buy outright expensive things off the TP if there’s another way I can obtain them at a decent enough clip.

I’m time gated by provisioner tokens anyway, so it’ll be early June before I can be done.

The question is: what activities can get me more of what I need?

The various experiments in answering that have led me to do long ignored HoT metas, chase down the Winterberry farm once more for Unbound Magic to open bundles to see if their contents were worth anything, and learn more intently about the Living Story 4 maps that contain Volatile Magic as a reward, as those can be exchanged for trophy shipments.

It’s gotten my not-quite-raider self out of closed instances with my ego continually frayed by ever-excessively competitive people (not that it’s wrong, but type As exhaust everyone else around them – especially when they decide type B aren’t worthy of respect, or would be better off dragged up the mountain and would appreciate it once they see the view at the top)

Cartoon taken from https://www.simplypsychology.org/personality-a.html

and back out into the open world where things are either slightly more chill, or where I can solo in peace.

I finished most of the crafting and mystic forging. I ran through a HoT meta or two and picked up most of the tokens I’d need.

I bought stuff I’m not likely to be able to farm for myself in good time from the TP.

My timing is terrible, as the legendary greatsword is coming and prices are no doubt rising in response already. I rationalized it by my supposition that prices will rise and stay high for at least the next month once the legendary launches and everyone realizes they need the stuff I also need for legendary armor, so I may as well get what I need now for peace of mind, and any extras I earn I can sell at the presumably more inflated price later.

The last step is T5 and T6 trophies. They’re in sync because there’s two major ways I figure I’ll get them.

One is mystic forge promotion. I buy the T5 and then convert them on my own penny crystalline dust and spirit shard-wise for T6. That economy is generally sensitive enough that it should always be somewhat cheaper to do so than buy the T6 outright, barring a sudden glut of T6 drops from some event or another.

The second is volatile magic converted into trophy shipments. The return seems to be fairly decent. So I’ve been all over the LS4 maps harvesting nodes, killing stuff, doing hearts, buying daily stuff off vendors, collecting glowy magic objects on mounts, doing dailies, doing metas and trying to figure out if anything gives a decent return and is hopefully more personally interesting to me than doing a million Great Hall/Palawadan meta cycles.

It’s still pretty grindy though.

In that I’m repetitively doing a whole lot of things mostly to get the end result. I’m not not enjoying it (if you can parse that.)

As in, it’s not something I would just do for fun (it takes a bit more focus than relaxation), and it’s not something I outright hate either (those I wouldn’t do. I decided to buy the fractal stuff I needed off the TP, all 140g of it, because I still loathe that game mode and the dislike deepens further with every new fractal I’ve never tried and ever-divided PUG scene. What’s gold for if not to trade with, right?)

It’s more a focused reason/excuse to repeat some things I might not repeat otherwise in order to get to a final goal.

In the repetition, I have a reason/excuse to actually be playing the game, and you know, it’s not half bad an activity to be doing.

…Hmm… Maybe I still sorta like this game after all.

It’s a strange kind of convoluted thinking that I haven’t quite got my head around yet, but it’s an improvement from -not liking- for sure.

We’ll see how things go from there.

What Do I Have to Gain, And What Do I Stand to Lose?

With so many goals on my mind lately, it probably comes as no surprise that one of the books I’ve recently been reading is a pop psychology one by Heidi Grant Halvorson, pithily entitled “Succeed – How We Can Reach Our Goals.”

What I do like about it is that it’s an easy reading, almost-conversational-blog sprinkled-with-humor style summary of what appear to be fairly crunchy concepts in research, just distilled without having to wade through pages of jargon down to a level where a layperson can grasp the surface and make use of.

One of the more interesting summarized concepts was that a person can have a promotion or a prevention focus when it comes down to chasing goals.

Promotion-focused goals are thought about in terms of achievement and accomplishment. They are about doing something you would ideally like to do. In the language of economics, they are about maximizing gains (and avoiding missed opportunities).

Prevention-focused goals are thought about in terms of safety and danger. They are about fulfilling responsibilities, doing the things you feel you ought to do. In economic terms, they are about minimizing losses, trying to hang on to what you’ve got.

This goes a long way towards explaining my puzzlement at the odd sense of relief I get when successfully completing a raid boss, as contrasted by the elation I see other people experience.

When you set a goal for yourself and reach it, you feel good. That much is obvious. But what does “good” feel like?

When your goal is an achievement, a gain, you feel happy—joyful, cheerful, excited, or, in the vernacular of a typical teenager, totally stoked. It’s a high-energy kind of good feeling to reach a promotion goal.

It’s a very different kind of good to reach a prevention goal. When you are trying to be safe and secure, to avoid losing something, and you succeed, you feel relaxed—calm, at ease, peaceful. You breathe the sweet sigh of relief. This is a much more low-energy kind of good feeling, but not any less rewarding.

When I read the above paragraphs, I was amazed at just how right on the money it sounded.

Some of this subconscious choice of focus might be due to personality, or culture, or upbringing, but evidently I skew a lot more towards prevention where this is concerned.

(East Asians are enmeshed in a culture that revolves around saving face, it rubs off, even if you’d like to be optimistic and gain-focused. Singaporeans have the terms “kiasu” and “kiasi” – the Hokkien root word “kia” literally means “fear” or “afraid.”)

We could share the same goal of wanting to down the raid boss, but where someone else might be focused on the -gain-, on the prize and rewards and prestige and glory and satisfaction of a successful kill, my focus tends to end up on:

• “I hope I’m not screwing up too badly, to the point that they kick me, cos that will mean more difficulty and obstacles in the path of Legendary armor collection” or;

• “This group is not doing so well, we’re missing something, what are we missing, where is the flaw in the team that stands in our path of success, how can this flaw be fixed, either by the person responsible -is it possible to communicate this flaw without a drama blowout- or by me covering what’s missing.”

• “What else can I be doing to ensure success? Am I making mistakes that I need to avoid or not do so much of? Am I fulfilling my roles and responsibilities in a raid without slipping up?”

Little wonder by the time a group I’m in first successfully downs a boss, I’m exhausted and relieved.

As for the opposite feeling, Halvorson had this to say:

The focus of your goal also determines the particular kind of bad you feel when things go wrong. In fact, Higgins first discovered the difference between promotion and prevention when he was trying to explain why some people reacted to their failures with anxiety, while others reacted by sinking into depression.

When you are going for gain, trying to accomplish something important to you, and you fail, you tend to feel sadness—dejected, depressed, despondent. As a teen might put it, totally bummed. It’s the low-energy kind of bad feeling—the kind that makes you want to lay on the couch all day with a bag of chips.

But failing to reach a prevention goal means danger, so in response you feel the high-energy kinds of bad feeling—anxiety, panic, nervousness, and fear. You freak out. Both kinds of feelings are awful, but very differently so.

Suddenly I understand why I ended up keyed up in a ball of nervous thwarted frustration in the early days, without the safety of a static group to fall back on.

I needed that safety, that ego defence of:

a) you have successfully killed all the bosses, ergo you do not suck,

b) you have a static group that can successfully kill all the bosses weekly, ergo your achievement plans are not threatened,

c) you have a respectable amount of face-saving legendary insights, sufficient to make Legendary Armor even if your raid group crumbles overnight (notice the urge to catastrophize)

From afar, it’s a little bit sad that my initial motivation seemed to stem more from a place of fear, of danger avoidance, rather than “fun” or gain-seeking.

It does help to explain why other people seem to get a lot more positive kicks out of raiding than me, though.

(That’s not to say I’m incapable of promotion-focused goals. I find I’m more able to focus on that kind of stuff -now-, after the “safety”/”avoid danger” bits are already resolved.

I’m more able to relax and look for gains and “fun” now that a lot less is “at stake” – even if the stakes only really existed in my head.)

The silver lining to this ever-so-slightly neurotic cloud is that prevention-minded pessimists like me are apparently very good at self-monitoring and future improvement. We can’t help but keep thinking of “what can be done better next time” and picking apart our mistakes like it’s the end of the world to commit one.

Optimists, on the other hand, are more liable to say, “well, it could have been worse if I had done this, or if that happened…” in order to make themselves feel better, which according to Halvorson, means they tend to blind themselves more to their own faults to protect their ego, and thus improve at a slower pace than worry-wart pessimists, if at all.

True, all the above is a simplification and a generalization. Optimists vs Pessismists or Promotion vs Prevention dichotomies don’t exist only in black or white terms.

In reality, a person can vary between being pessimistic and optimistic from one moment to another, or choose to be promotion-focused for goal A and prevention-focused for goal B, and it’s probably useful to be aware and consciously decide to do so.

But as a high-level concept, I thought it was fairly interesting to be able to categorize our tendencies to think along two major paths that way.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back & The New Year’s Direction

In my zeal for New Year’s spring cleaning and re-ordering my life for the better, I opened a window that hasn’t been opened for the last ten years of living in this house.

The idea was to air out the place, improved ventilation and all that.

Also, I was proud of my herculean efforts cleaning out the window ledge, previously a location for accumulating convenient dusty junk piles, and removing chunks of grime from said window and wanted to keep looking out of it to celebrate.

Then it started raining.

The initial drizzle lulled me into complacency. A couple small drops on the ledge, nothing more, so I shrugged and went to enjoy my lunch.

I walked back into the room with a bunch of stuff in my arms, planning to have a good time sorting and arranging, only to discover an Olympic-sized swimming pool had now taken up residence on said window ledge.

Happily wading inside it, was a table lamp and my $800 Fujitsu Scansnap scanner.

*sigh*

I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say there was a great unloading of stuff in my arms on the floor, quick scrambling to shut off all electrical plugs, much rummaging for absorbent rags and dehydration effort implementation on various fronts.

The long and short of it is that my best laid plans for spending the weekend decluttering have now got to be pushed back at least 24 hours (and probably 48 hours would be safer) before I get to find out if I now have to buy myself a belated Christmas present of a newer model of Fujitsu Scansnap.

The shelving that I was -hoping- to sort things out on is now half-soaked and has been carted out to somewhat drier surroundings in the hope that it’ll dry out before mold decides it’s an optimal home.

The PC, thankfully, seems to have been shielded from the brunt of it by the valiant shelving’s sacrifice, but since there was a random scattering of raindrops across all the electrical plugs and wiring and the metal casing, I’m thinking it’ll be safer to give it at least a few hours of drying time.

So now the air conditioner is running, during an already fairly cold day (for the tropics, anyway,) in the hopes that it’ll speed up the dehumidifying process, and I’ve beaten a hasty retreat to the living room, sneezing frightfully with a nose that is fitfully protesting the sequential abuse of dust, mold spores and shivering cold temperatures, typing out this blog post on a laptop, for lack of anything better to do.

Well, it’s one way to get me back to blogging again, I suppose.

On a brighter note, I’ve discovered that serious full-fledged decluttering involving moving books, technological objects and shelving from room to room is pretty good beginner movement exercise for an overweight sedentary person, in that it provokes movement out of me and more importantly, feels more productive than engaging in repetitive motions for the sake of moving.

(If we liked moving to begin with, chances are we wouldn’t be overweight, so it does take a bit of mental gymnastics to find movement activities for a sedentary person that we like and can see ourselves doing repeatedly as a lifestyle change.)

Plans for the year ahead are pretty simple.

I won’t call them new year resolutions, as those seem traditionally broken or forgotten by April or so, but more of guiding principles to skew my life towards in 2016:

1. Pay more mindful attention towards health and exercise.

This cover things like trying to choose healthier foods when possible and enjoy indulgences in smaller proportions. Practice more mindful portion control, we know roughly how much we should be eating, it’s just ridiculously easy to over-eat because the bag of chips is there and we want the sensation of crunch while watching a show or whatever. Make an effort to move more, whenever the opportunity arises, just to get in the habit of -moving-.

2. Actively seek out a variety and novelty of experiences.

I’ve been noticing that I get depressed (or at least slow down, get apathetic or negative) every time I get into a rut and end up feeling like there’s nothing more to life than waking, going to work, eating, sleeping, rinse and repeat, with maybe some gaming in there from time to time.

To combat this, I think the first few words are important, I may need to be proactively looking to switch things up and keep myself focused on experiencing a whole bunch of different things. We’ll see how this works out in the year ahead.

3. Hoard less, use more.

It may be an odd slogan to coin, but I just finished a library book the other day (part of my branching-out-to-do-other-things-than-just-GW2 campaign) by Randy Frost, titled “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.”

It was a nice read and a bit of an eye-opener. I mean, sure, we’ve all seen the hoarding TV shows, gawked at the spectacle of extreme hoarding and probably gave thanks that our own homes have not quite descended to -that- level.

But I liked how the book explained that forced intervention usually don’t solve the underlying problem – something within the person that causes them to feel obliged to hoard, and elaborated on various reasons while not being judgmental (one interesting twist of perspective is that some hoarders are very adept at creating connections and imbuing meaning and uses to objects that most people would consider junk, and thus find it hard to throw anything away; or that some hoarders rely on objects to build up an almost encyclopedic memory of stories about each thing, a sort of tangible memory palace to fuel prodigious feats of memory, so asking them to throw stuff away is like asking them to discard their memories or parts of themselves…)

Hoarding, it seems, may also have a genetic basis. Which does jibe when I look around at my life and realize that one of my family members is likely to have at least a moderate hoarding problem (which makes discarding old furniture and bulky household items quite a challenge) and that I probably have a subclinical to mild hoarding one as well. (See the Clutter Image Ratings on the Amazon page, or the full PDF.)

Most of the house hovers around the 2 mark, with one or two rooms (a storeroom and the room inhabited by the family hoarder) at 5.

It’s unlikely said family hoarder is going to change, but at least said family hoarder respects room boundaries.

In the meantime, I have my eye on the rest of the rooms, the bulk of which is either my stuff or family-owned stuff and am motivated to change up some things about myself, if only to eliminate dust allergies, make future cleaning easier, and have rooms that look easier on the eye and -pleasant- to look at and enjoy.

The good news is that I haven’t been really acquiring new clutter for the past decade, having moved much of my life (and my hoarding tendencies) to the digital realm. Yeah, I have somewhat crazy MMO and Steam game collections. But hey, they don’t take up as large amounts of space!

(The “hoard less, use more” slogan also applies in a figurative sense to the digital hoard. I intend to play more of my Steam games and branch out this year. It’s time to use and enjoy what I’ve been stockpiling.)

The bulk of the clutter that has yet to be dealt with is old stuff and once gotten rid of, unlikely to ever come back in such volume. Definitely something to work on this year. Hopefully it doesn’t take up the whole year and I can spend more of the time -enjoying- the freed up space and actually -using- the things that I choose to value and keep.

The latter is a big motivator for me. While decluttering this month, I keep encountering stuff I’ve wanted to do, but “kept for later” (be it books to read, hobbies to take up, games to play, whatever.)

That stuff ends up buried under piles of other stuff, forgotten until unearthed.

It’s way past time to unearth it and enjoy it, before it rots or I pass on and end up leaving it for some other poor bastard to clean up.

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.)