Kill Ten Rats

This is the Halloween unlimited harvesting tool in GW2. It is a jack-in-the-box clown with a scythe. I picked one up just after they became available and equipped it on the latest character I have been leveling. I didn’t think that one through. I don’t think I even watched a video of the animation.

A week later I had a nightmare involving a seven-foot-tall Joker with a scythe. Reading about New 52 Joker couldn’t have helped that.

Fast-forward to the latest Living World content, released while that scythe is for sale. Groups of 4-5 toxic seedling harvest nodes appear together. They tend to sprout up near the Living World events, so picture the 40-person zergs that swarm those the first night. 5 or 6 people in the event zerg have the jack-in-the-box. In less than a minute, thirty scythe clowns pop out of nowhere to harvest. Listen to that wheezing laugh again, and imagine dozens of them, slightly offset and overlapping, repeating the whole time.

Emergent behavior: creating quality Halloween creepiness.

: Zubon

I should be about done commenting on GW2 WvW Season One. I have been wondering all weekend why I can’t just give up, but I may be getting there. Like all seven weeks of Season One, my server of Isle of Janthir has no chance of winning this week, but this is the first week we have been up against either of the two servers that have a chance to win NA Silver. It is a ridiculous mismatch; during times when I play, Stormbluff Isle outnumbers us on every map including our borderlands, usually to the point of having the official Outnumbered buff. One night, I went to try a bit of yakslappiong in SBI BL, and there were full groups parked at all the exits from our spawn in case anyone came out to play. It’s not like they have anything better to do in WvW when they already control most of the map.

I think the weight class discussion summarizes the week-to-week matchup problems. You can argue about the fine details, but you know who the top servers are in each league, so you can pick who is going to win most weeks. The first and seventh weeks look potentially interesting, but most of the weeks for most of the servers you can pick out the winners in advance. I had said that in the abstract, but I had not taken the schedule and plotted it out. Merus told us, and folks plotted out Gold, and right now there is a very narrow range at the top of the NA leagues.
Continue reading [GW2] Predetermined Outcomes

Scarlet is at it again. Apparently not happy with her other three armies, she bribed the krait with ancient relics to team up with Nightmare Court. A toxic alliance, which may portend ultimately another failure for Scarlet’s Doofenschmirtzian ability to craft coalitions. Then she destroyed half of Kessex Hills. It could have been worse if the Lady Kasmeer hadn’t cracked the gigantic mesmer illusion. Now, the free peoples of Tyria are on the attack. Only this is more of a containment phase since the tower is too poisonous to breach.

This is an interesting update because it completely changes a huge portion of a fairly well-traveled zone. ArenaNet further hints that there are more changes to come. It’s also an interesting update because the content is kind of light. There is plenty of activity in Kessex Hills now, but after a good hour of play most of the update’s content is apparent. Continue reading [GW2] Free Hit of Hallucinogen

I play on a losing server, and I am at 14/15 less than two weeks into Season One, so the meta-achievement is pretty clearly doable. Not all the achievements are reasonable doable for all the servers, but I would guess most for most. The popularity of the Eternal Battlegrounds can be a barrier: players in some servers have long queues, servers without queues may not have much chance to take Stonemist Castle during hours you play (depending on opponents, say opponents who have a queue and are therefore at max pop in EB at most times).

When guildmates talk about the achievements, the main question is “225?!” You need to be either a regular WvWer or have big binges or both to get some of these. Pondering them, the numbers are individually reasonable, but then they are multiplied and added together in a way that makes the whole daunting. Some of us can knock it out in a week or two; others are too put off to bother even when they would certainly get it over 7 weeks.
Continue reading [GW2] WvW Season One Achievements – By the Numbers

Judging decisions based on their foreseeable consequences, I presume the intent of the WvW seasons is to discourage players from fighting each other in WvW. The structure is stacked to reward players for fighting NPCs and creates punitive disincentives for fighting other players.

Of the 19 achievements, you get 2 from killing other players, one of which is set trivially low as a freebie. All the others are more efficiently achieved by avoiding players: play during the off-hours, ninja supply camps, but avoid fights because those will slow you down except for the couple of achievements you are certainly going to get just from the PvP fights you cannot avoid. There are no rewards for defending and 1 for repairing, which again is a one week (or one long night) achievement.

More so, you are trained to avoid other players because of the crushing population differences. When you have the “outnumbered” buff in your own borderlands, you can work out your odds of fighting the enemy head-on. After pre-season transfers, our server has one of the lowest WvW populations in the league, so we are continuously outnumbered even after concentrating our WvW forces on one map. It took less than a week for most of our WvWers to adapt and most of our PvEers to just give up on WvW, further exacerbating the downward spiral in WvW population. They have not given up on WvW entirely, but they should be able to get the meta-achievement around the halfway point of the season, and our Saturday morning “EB zerg” was already 9 players by the time I logged off. On the plus side, the remaining people we have are getting really good at siege placement while the big teams are getting sloppy.

To strengthen my previous whining, if the goal is to turn WvW into PvE, where small teams are trying to fight undefended towers and large teams are just hoping to find the small teams, pitting the #7 team against the #15 team is a great plan. This is also great for gaining WvW ranks and achievements, because you have a constant stream of mostly undefended towers and camps flipping.

As someone who thinks of himself as primarily a PvE player, this should be an unmitigated win for me, but it presently feels more like one part of the game has just been ruined.

: Zubon

Again, the picture will differ where the weight range is smaller.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

The realization that our server has no chance to win the NA Silver league and few chances for even winning a week is remarkably freeing. Doing well, playing competitively, winning? These are not reasonable goals and can be laid aside. The only sense in which those ideas matter is at the individual fight level, and even then only until the zerg arrives to swat the gnats.

This is like the PvE situation, where (no matter what the personal story says) you have no hope of changing the world or reclaiming Orr. All that matters is what you do during the minutes you are logged on, which will be wiped away immediately afterwards except for a few motes of character advancement. We take it one supply camp at a time and live in the moment, because the larger situation is entirely beyond our control or even ability to meaningfully influence.

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

Also, we can expect to have the Outnumbered buff a lot, so all we risk is time and the silver pieces we spent on siege equipment.

: Zubon

At least that’s the theory. So far, I’m still really annoyed by bad play, being vastly outnumbered, and both servers attack us instead of having both of us attack the leading server.