Blaugust Day 13: Packrat Problems (GW2)

I always had the impression that I was a hopeless pack rat when it came to all things MMO – or really, anything that has an inventory and allows you to collect stuff (including Diablo-style ARPGs and real life.)

Today, I was logging into my GW2 characters at random, wincing at the messes I was looking at – bags half to three quarters full on actively played characters, filled to the brim on storage alts, an account bank stuffed with account-bound souvenirs of nothing but sentimental value mixed with items that might conceivably be worth something later (maybe), two guild banks full of non-account-bound tradeable commodities that were being kept for the dual reasons of “it might be worth more later” and “what if Anet tweaks something that makes this super-expensive and I want to craft something super-desirable that suddenly requires it?”

As usual, I was telling myself, “you hopeless packrat, you, I don’t even know where to begin…” when it suddenly hit me.

Maybe I’ve got it all wrong.

It’s not really a -hoarding- problem, is it?

Folks define hoarding as the accumulation of stuff (mostly seen as worthless by other people) to the extent that it starts to impede someone’s quality and standard of living, possibly posing a health hazard, yadda yadda.

Even though I have a lot of GW2 stuff – admittedly, some of it sentimental, in the sense that they were one-off souvenirs:

a) many of the other items are not seen as worthless by other people, and has the potential to go up in value over time

b) and/or I will -really- regret it if I throw them away or sell them now, given Anet’s proven track record of suddenly making valueless items valuable (and vice versa)

c) it’s not that I have run out of virtual space to keep all the stuff – I have two empty character slots, and two of my lowbies are new, have completely empty bags and aren’t presently being used to store anything

No, I don’t have a -packrat- (as in collecting or hoarding) problem per se.

What I have is a severe lack of any organization system, or a good way to find and retrieve any desired item among the amorphous piles of unsorted stuff.

In GTD terms, I’ve only collected, but I’ve barely processed any of it, nor thought about any way to systematically organize the things I want to keep, and certainly I don’t regularly -review- my inventory AT ALL.

Sadly, better defining the problem or seeing it from a new perspective doesn’t immediately lead to any magic solutions.

I did drool a little after Googling up a third party add-on for LOTRO that apparently allowed the player to look at the inventories of all their alts in-game, and search them by keyword, listing how many quantities were on which character. Wrong game, alas.

GW2 apparently has an inventory API out, but bleh, frankly, the thought of letting a third party website have an authorization token to look at my account inventory makes me more than a little nervous, so that’s not a great solution either.

It may end up being a case of old-fashioned Excel to keep track of the 17 of 19 character slots… (yeah, I’m not sure how that happened either. What can I say, I’m an altholic, and it’s nearly been three years) though I’ve also been browsing some home inventory programs for general ideas on how I’m going to handle this.

I also bit the bullet and logged in every one of them, to take a screenshot of their inventories and do an initial “obvious junk” cleanup.

Hopefully, it will sort of provide me with a brief overview of the entire scope of the task that lies before me… Maybe.

I suspect part of the problem is that it’s very difficult to sort anything if my account bank is completely stuffed and thus posing a bottleneck to transfer items from one character to another.

So that’s something that needs to be addressed too. *sighs*

I have this feeling that I will need to print out everything onto sheets of paper to draw little arrows and circles to group “like” items togther, before I can even begin to grasp how I can best get this organized…

… that or cut and pasting in a paint program or something.

Somehow.

Here, this kind of encapsulates the problem. One thing’s pretty obvious. Too much dragonite. Need to get Princess chomping more of those.

This post was brought to you by the letters B for Belghast and Blaugust, P for Perplexed, S for Stumped, and the number 13.

GW2: World, not Levels

I’ve hit level 40 now.

Do I feel like I’m halfway through the game?

Hahahahahahahaha.

No.

Not in the slightest.

One thing I think all of us will have to remember in the coming days as more and more folks hit level 80 in under a month is that this is a Guild Wars game.

The original capped you at level 20 and you could probably hit that in under a week of normal play (or a day or two of more intense play, probably a couple hours if you were really trying, no doubt.)

Hitting the level cap does not signify the end of the game. Nor does it signify the beginning of the ‘real’ game.

More and more, I begin to think that levels are just a familiar crutch that gives players used to other MMOs the feeling that they are making progress, and serves as more or less a periodic jackpot style intermittent reward “ding” to tell the player  “Good job, have a cookie!”

I am given to understand, though I might be mistaken, that even after you hit the level cap of 80, you will still continue to get your level ding and earn skill points to eventually buy stuff that costs an exorbitant amount of skill points. Or something along those lines, so there’s always a goal to strive toward.

(Perhaps we will hit the point just like in Guild Wars 1 where I know my main character has gotten lots of levels and has plenty of skill points to buy stuff with, but I really couldn’t care less about them. The only thing some players kept asking for then in GW1 was an overall count for the sake of e-peen comparison, sort of a /played of 9000 hours over your 1932 hours, but a “ha, I’m total level 574 versus your total level 232,” I think.)

Anyway, Levels 32-38 flew by while messing around with World vs World vs World stuff, and after catching up with my personal story that I paused at level 30, I was level 40 in an eyeblink.

And also thrown into some confusion because the neat chain of hearts I was dutifully completing (and point of interest visiting and vista viewing) is now broken. I left off somewhere in Gendarran Fields doing level 30ish stuff and where the heck should I be going now?

This distance away from obediently following along like a WoW sheep from appropriately leveled zone to zone doing appropriately leveled quests has suddenly made things rather clear.

Guild Wars 2 is a world, and I can actually wander in it like one.

I don’t have to feel compelled to 100% complete every zone until I feel like it, because frankly, I’m 80% done with the Gendarran Fields zone and while OCD is screaming at me to just finish it up, the personal story in the level 20-40 range has pretty much flung me out of my comfort zone following one linear path and into way more zones than I can fathom 100% completing on my way to level 80.

I went to a snowy Norn zone, passing Hoelbrak along the way (Two zones to explore, count ’em, two!) I was sent for a stopover in the Gendarran Fields, where I already had a convenient waypoint. (10-20% left, not counting the crypt that I explored in beta but haven’t found folks to do it yet on live. Nor have I done the Loreclaw jumping puzzle in Plains of Ashford yet.) Then went to Divinity’s Reach via Lion’s Arch and ended up in the Fields of Ruin. (Three more zones, aieeeee.)

That’s three cities and two entire zones, both of which I have already sheepishly “outleveled” though of course, I can still wander in and play without bothering because of the unnoticeable downleveling.

If I try to complete each zone I was exposed to in order, I fear I’ll hit level 80 while still messing about in a level 40 zone…

I think it’s very smart and cunning design of the personal story. It starts out all linear and comfortable to hold your “used to traditional MMO” hand, then come the branching choices and before you know it, you’re traveling across half the countryside, flung into Lion’s Arch and other races’ cities and the world has broadened immensely to the point where one just stands stunned in Lion’s Arch wondering, what the heck I should do now? I could do… anything! Should I go here or there first? Should I just stay here and craft? Or go WvWvWing?

The Fields of Ruin and the city or town of Ebonhawke are particularly interesting for proactive NPCs that flag you down and ask for your help. Or maybe I’ve just started taking notice of them. (There was at least one such NPC in the Plains of Ashford too.) It’s too easy to run by, focused on what you’re doing in traditional MMO style and ignore all NPCs as unimportant background chatter. Then a “hey, over here, I need your help!” and an emoted beckon finally catches your attention, and if you deign to go up and talk to the NPC, you’ll trigger a Dynamic Event or find out where to go to find one. If you ran right by, well, yeah, no Dynamic Event for you.

It looks like ArenaNet is on to something here. The road to level 80 for any of your characters is not going to be the exact same thing twice – not unless you choose to repeat it. We’re all going to have at least a slightly different experience as we go through the game. Yes, there will still be commonalities and the same hearts and the more common DEs on repeat loop, and you can repeat the same DEs and visit the same reward chests daily if that floats your boat, but if you don’t want to, then well, don’t.

Go somewhere different. Wander. Gather. Craft. PvP. WvW. Do a dungeon. Follow your personal story. You’ll still get to level 80 in the end.

Personally, I am so spoiled for choice that I am almost paralyzed with indecision and end up playing inventory tetris trying to figure out what next.