Monthly Archives: March 2010

They see a troll with nothing else to recommend her but a pair of thighs and choice hunkers.

While war raged in the South and the Rangers of the North were absent, brigands and ruffians took an opportunity to steal control of Bree….

So says the Galadriel impersonating voice-over lady at the start of the skirmish Thievery & Mischief in Lord of the Rings Online. “Brigands and ruffians?” I thought, “Not a problem for a hero of the ages like myself!” and so off I charged from the marshalling point where I had gathered to prepare for battle, and headed toward the gates of Bree.

Whereupon this happened

A brigand. Or ruffian. Apparently.


Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hang on now, exactly what class of brigand or ruffian is that? I began to wonder what the conversations were like in the makeshift Brigand & Ruffian HQ inside the walls of Bree…

Brigand: “Holy Christ! Troll! TROLL! To arms men! Protect the women and children!”

Ruffian: “TROLL?! WHERE?”

Brigand: “Right THERE!”

Ruffian: “Where? Over by Kenneth?”

Brigand: “Who’s Kenneth?”

Ruffian: “Big green chap standing over by the gate.”

Brigand: “That’s a bloody troll you numbwit.”

Ruffian: “Nah, that’s not a troll, that’s Kenneth. Alright Ken!”

Troll: “I WILL TEAR YOUR MAN HIDE AND FEAST ON YOUR FLESH.”

Ruffian: “Ha, ha, ha! Ok mate, whatever you say. He’s a kidder, eh?”

Brigand: “Kenneth? KENNETH?! Friend, I know a troll when I see one. And that huge green lump of muscle and teeth is a TROLL.”

Ruffian: “Shhhh, keep it down, you’ll hurt his feelings. Sure he’s no looker, but that’s just being mean.”

Brigand: “Keep it down?! KEEP IT DOW… look here mate, he’s just eaten one of our horses!”

Ruffian: “Hey look, so he’s a little eccentric…”

Brigand: “Eccentric?! HE ATE OUR LIVESTOCK!”

Ruffian: “No, no, no. I’m telling you: that’s Kenneth. I went to school with him for crying out loud. He played fly half for the Combe second XV when I was at full back. I dated his sister! Big girl, if you know what I mean.”

Brigand: “Uh, yeah, I can imagine.”

Kenneth: “Alright, Frank. Alright, Ted. Any sign of trouble from the Rangers today?”

Ruffian: “Alright Ken… wait… Ken, if you’re over here, who’s that over there?”

Troll: “I WILL SOIL MYSELF WITH YOUR DIGESTED REMAINS!”

Kenneth: <peering towards the troll> “That’s Nigel isn’t it? Alright Nigel!”

An interface is worth a thousand pictures.

The major observable difference between Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online is with the pace and flow of combat. That and the largely instanced world of Eberron versus the more traditional open world of Middle Earth. And, of course, one is free to play with a Store of Pixelated Delights (Will save DC 30 to resist), where the other is subscription based.

I’ll start again.

The major observable similarity between Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online is that they both have dwarves. And rubbish beard options.

I play a Monk in DDO, and the primary mechanic of the class is a combo system that is very similar to that of the Warden in LotRO, where the player has a number of abilities to choose from that will perform combat manoeuvres, and at the same time the order in which these abilities are performed will also activate a more powerful ‘finishing’ manoeuvre. The Monk has a limited set of finishing manoeuvres compared to the Warden, and where the Warden has numerous effects both personal and group wide, the majority of the Monk’s finishers consist of one minute duration group buffs or targeted debuffs. The interesting difference, however, is the pace at which combat takes place in each game, and I think that it’s because of this that the Warden works as a class where the Monk feels a lot more awkward and, to some extent, frustrating to play.

I use pace to describe the difference in the combat between the two games, but it’s not really the whole story, although DDO definitely feels faster, with mobs dropping quickly – sometimes going down in one almighty burst of a critical attack roll – the flow of the game is also more dynamic, with caster mobs dropping back out of melee range to cast, melee mobs running past the melee front line to get to the PC casters, the combat feels more… fluid.

I was stunned and somewhat frustrated in LotRO the first time I entered the Barrow Downs in a group, coming fresh faced and level capped from World of Warcraft I was used to the power of predictable and consistent aggro generation that the tanks in that MMO provided; compared to WoW, LotRO at that time was a different world entirely. WoW’s tanks were giant electromagnets, so powerful that they could draw mobs to them from half way across the dungeon and hold them there indefinitely, and as long as an enemy caster had a few buttons on their robe that were made out of metal, they too would be drawn inexorably in. So a WoW instance run generally consisted of a giant ball bristling with angry and somewhat compacted mobs, around which several melee PCs would stab periodically while the ranged types stood back and lobbed spells at it. After a minute or so of this regimented attack formation a tank would appear from out of the resultant debris, brush off a few extraneous bits of metal that were still stuck to their armour, then trundle their way into the next pack of mobs until they looked like a hamster in a rollerball made from orcs, before rolling back and bumping to a halt on the skirting board of melee DPS. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that tanking was easy in WoW but, given an accomplished player, the level of control afforded tanks in WoW was an order of magnitude greater than that of LotRO, where every care had to be taken by the DPS not to over-nuke and for the healer to carefully balance their healing output in order not to draw aggro. Even so, mobs in LotRO would run around a fair bit compared to WoW, and most fights were hectic; picture the resultant chaos from releasing a couple of agitated bats into your average teenage girls’ midnight slumber party and sealing the doors, and you have an idea of the high-pitched screaming flailing combat that occurred.

Now take that same scenario and replace the bats with a pack of terminally-rabid Fox Terriers, and you have combat in DDO.

As such you can’t rely on standing still for a moment in DDO and just punching the abilities on your hotbar, you need to be on the go all the time. There is also no auto-attack, you either have to constantly mash, or simply hold down, the left mouse button to attack, and this ‘basic’ attack in DDO constitutes the majority of damage for most classes. For those of us with only two hands, this makes hotbar activation a little trickier. Even with my key-binds set up to place the abilities I need within easy reach of my ESDF-movement hand, it’s somewhat tricky to be on the move almost non-stop and at the same time activate other abilities. I may have to look into making more use of my extra mouse buttons perhaps, but even so there’s also another limiting factor which causes a clash in combat, an area where I feel a lot of MMO developers fail to innovate when they have evolved some core part of the MMO design – the UI.

DDO sticks to the traditional ‘hotbars with cool downs’ UI design, where ability icons are greyed-out if they can’t be used, be it because they are on cool-down, the target is out of range for the ability, the PC doesn’t have enough spellpower/endurance/ki to activate the ability, or any number of other reasons. The problem I find is that, given that the combat in DDO has been changed from the traditional electromagnetic-hamster-rollerball of WoW to a more rabid-Fox-Terrier-in-a-room-full-of-hysterical-teenagers design, it seems that the traditional UI design of WoW, with its hotbars and party frames and various elements that require your concentration to be away from your character for split seconds at a time, should have been eschewed for a more Head-Up Display sort of design.

Being that my primary area of work is the software for Head-Up Displays of various types, I can quite happily relate to the need for information to be available at all times in an unobtrusive manner, so that split-second decisions can be made without having to rely on the human body’s ponderously slow response to changing focus between various display items. I’m not saying the timing requirements in DDO are nearly so stringent or critical as those we have to deal with in aviation, but at the same time it seems obvious that in a game where a mob can have moved out of attack range in the time it takes you to check to see if an ability is off of cool-down, the need for a change in the fundamental philosophy behind the UI and why it exists is evident. This problem is exacerbated when playing the Monk because they have numerous moves, all with independent cool-downs, the order of activation for which is important to get a valid combination to trigger a finishing move, and on top of which they have to have generated enough Ki to power each of these moves. That’s a lot of looking at hotbars and not looking at your character.

An instant solution to the problem would be to drag the hotbars up towards my character on the screen so that they are always within my field of view, but who wants to play a game through a viewport of hotbars and party frames? Well, some people it seems: just look at the many raid UIs in evidence on various WoW AddOn websites, where the actual game world is hidden beneath what essentially amounts to a dynamically updating Excel spreadsheet with heavy Visual Basic graph scripting. Yet on the same sites we can also find some of the neatest innovations in MMO UI design; indeed, there are even popular Head-Up Display-a-likes, with health bars, mana bars and other information presented around the character in a way that is designed to interfere as little as possible with the player’s view of the game world, after all, what’s the point in having these three dimensional DirectX 11 marvels of graphical splendour if all we’re going to do is cover them up with bar graphs and slide rules?

I think Heavy Rain has recently shown the way that UI design can be taken. It’s a splendid example of thought and attention to the user interface experience because it does the basic thing right and doesn’t get in the way, and it may be that many players will hardly even notice the clever nuanced feedback that it provides to them as they play, which is as it should be. The very best user interfaces are like the steady and dependable butler from Jeeves and Wooster: never fully appreciated by the user, they’re the ones that don’t frustrate or confuse or obstruct, while at the same time providing more information than the user might have otherwise expected to receive. They’re also the ones most likely to slip under the radar of others, because nobody notices the silent stalwart butler subtly guiding his master to victory from out of the shadows of servitude.

Despite the frustration, however, I’m not going to stop playing DDO any time soon, there’s something compelling about running around a room, leaping on to furniture and heaving ineffectually at locked windows along with a bunch of other screaming teenagers in their pyjamas, while small frothing yappy-type dogs with blood-shot eyes try to bite your ankles off.

What a senseless waste of human life

While Dungeons and Dragons Online continues most splendidly, one mildly irritating feature is the collection of weapons I’ve accumulated which are brutally effective in quite specific circumstances, leading to pauses in combat while rooting through the inventory to try and find the most appropriate implement for the current fight…

The Scene: a dungeon which carries the sign ‘Ye Olde Tombe of Peril’. MOUSEBENDER, an adventurer, enters and confronts an AXIOMATIC HORROR.

MOUSEBENDER:
    Good morning, foul spirit.
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Good morning, sir. Welcome to the Tomb of Peril. What can I do for you?
MOUSEBENDER:
    Well, I was rather hoping to purge the dungeon of the foul spirits that infest it, and perhaps perform a spot of light ransacking for a little financial renumeration in the process.
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Oh, I see. I suppose you’ll be wanting to kill me to death, then?
MOUSEBENDER:
    I’m afraid so. Nothing personal!

MOUSEBENDER stabs the abomination with a rapier.

AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    I’m afraid you won’t get very far with that, sir, I have damage reduction from piercing weapons.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Oh never mind, how about a +2 mace?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    I’m afraid it’ll need more than +2, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Tish tish. No matter. Well, fiendish creature, I have an acidic greatsword here!
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Ah. Acid immunity, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    It’s not my lucky day, is it? Er, Gwylan’s Blade with sonic damage?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Sorry, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    +1 Light Hammer of Pure Good?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Normally, sir, yes. Today I’ve got a special resistance.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Ah. Giant Stalker’s Knife?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Sorry.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Weapons of Kobold Bane, Muck Bane, Goblinoid Bane, Elf Bane?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    No.

MOUSEBENDER throws another four useless swords from his backpack to the growing pile on the floor

MOUSEBENDER:
    +1 Ghost Touch short sword, per chance?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    No.
MOUSEBENDER:
    You can be harmed, can’t you?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Of course, sir. If you …
MOUSEBENDER:
    No, no, don’t tell me. No spoilers, I haven’t looked this up on the wiki.
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Fair enough.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Er, something Axiomatic?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Yes?
MOUSEBENDER:
    Ah, splendid, good job I found this in an earlier chest!

MOUSEBENDER sets about the abomination with a +1 Axiomatic Bastard Sword of Backstabbing, despite lacking the weapon proficiency.

AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Oh, I thought you were talking to me, sir. I’m an Axiomatic Horror, that’s my name, and if you’d succeeded in doing any damage up to this point that would have healed me.

(pause)

MOUSEBENDER:
    +2 Metalline scimitar?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Ah, not as such.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Er, Flametouched cudgel?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    No.
MOUSEBENDER:
    That figures. Predictable really, I suppose. It was an act of purest optimism to have tried the weapon in the first place. Tell me:
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Yes, sir?
MOUSEBENDER:
    Have you in fact got any weakness at all?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    Yes, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    Now I’m going to ask you that question once more, and if you say ‘no’ I’m going to shoot you through the head. Now, do you have any weakness all?
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    No.
MOUSEBENDER:
    (shoots him through the head)
AXIOMATIC HORROR:
    You’ll need to use Holy Bolts for that to work, sir.
MOUSEBENDER:
    (logs out)

How much nun would a nunchuck chuck if a nunchuck could chuck nun?

So Sony have unveiled their “Move” motion controller. A cynic might say “It took them four years to paint a Wiimote black? Even Nintendo managed that last year.” That would, of course, be quite, quite wrong. Just look at the crucial differences:
1) The Move, like a Wizard’s Staff, has a knob on the end. This offers far greater ribald song opportunity than the Wiimote.
2) The Move has “a sub-controller (basically a nunchuck)”. Unless the pictures are terribly misleading, though, there’s no wired connection between the two Move controllers, so it’s actually a set of wireless nunchucks. Or “two sticks” as they’re sometimes known.
3) The Move released “Flowers in the Rain” in 1967, the first record played on Radio 1. Or maybe that was The Move.

Let’s hope the launch titles continue to show this same innovation; I’m hoping for “PlayStation Move Sports” including Skittles, Badminton, Wiffleball, Karate (But With Punching Only, No Kicking) and Something That’s Really Similar To Golf Except I Can’t Think Of A Good Example Just At The Moment (With A Knob On The End).

US Gamers Spend $3.8 Billion Per Year On MMOs.

Reports so far indicate that they are all delighted with their two extra inventory slots in Allods Online.

In a statement for Oh MMO Emo News, the US gaming community expressed its continued commitment to extra storage capacity within the Russian developed MMO, and as such their target for next year is to get extra slots for everyone, rather than having to share those two slots among the entire US population.

Reporting live for Oh MMO Emo News, I’m Melmoth Melmothson.

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.

I really like the fact that DDO includes various puzzle games as part of the dungeon running experience. The primary puzzle that I’ve encountered is a tile-based test where each tile has one of a number of pipe shapes drawn upon it and where you rotate the tiles in place to align the various pipe shapes, thus forming a path between two objectives and allowing a glowing blue power source to light said path. It’s basically the strange love child of Pipemania and a slide puzzle, but it works well enough within the Eberron setting at representing the game’s equivalent of a magical lock.

Turbine doesn’t abuse the device either because although I’ve run quite a few dungeons in DDO now, I would say that I’ve encountered the tile puzzle in less than a quarter of them. It’s certainly ripe for abuse however, one could see it surreptitiously slipping its way into daily life, where poor adventurers are forced, in cross-legged desperation, to rotate ceramic floor tiles between themselves and the toilet in order to unlock the lid and be able to relieve themselves, and where many a divorce proceeding in Stormreach was begun after a toilet seat was discovered locked in the up position.

I wonder why we don’t see more of these sorts of puzzles in MMOs, is it simply a case that they’re too cumbersome and time consuming to implement with respect to the amount of content that they provide, or is it more the fact that the generic MMO player is not really interested in such distractions and would prefer to just get on with grinding away at various NPCs, unimpeded by the need for any real cognitive exercise beyond that which muscle memory alone can quite happily provide? Judging from the general reaction to the mini-games present in Mass Effect 2, which I thought were harmless entertainment where many others seemed to perceive them as the fiery soiled undergarments of Satan, these basic mini-games are seen by a great many players as being vapid at best. I can’t help but feel that there’s something to them though, that perhaps more puzzles can be incorporated into MMO games in order to tax the player in more ways than the, admittedly tried and tested, option of pressing hot bar keys in response to various external triggers during combat; in fact I feel that MMOs, with their ponderous and often drawn-out style of play, lend themselves quite well to the incorporation of such diversions.

I expect part of the problem is the fact that the puzzles need to be kept simple so that the maximum number of players will stand a chance of being able to complete them, but perhaps a shift in how the puzzles are used to ‘block’ content could be undertaken such that more complex and advanced puzzles could be used without unduly punishing those players who don’t care for them. For example, a locked door to an optional treasure room could be pickable by a Rogue, but the same door could also be opened by solving a complex puzzle game. A basic example, of course, but it also opens up some interesting lines of thought, such as the fact that the player’s presence in the game would then be represented not only by a set of numbers that define various abilities, but also by the abilities of the player, where a player’s character within the game would then be an amalgam of both their in-game skills and those of their real-world self. There’s also the fact that puzzles are often used in team building exercises because they are a good way to foster communication and cooperation between strangers, so having group based puzzles within an MMO might be one way in which to encourage people to play as a team, rather than the more usual social phenomenon found in MMOs where they play together as individuals.

Anyway, I’ll have to leave you with those thoughts as I’m rather desperate for a wee and there’s a bugger of a Pipemania puzzle to complete before I can get into the men’s restroom; I’d claim that they’re taking the piss, but more accurately they’re diverting it through a network of interconnected rotatable tiles.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

I’ve been pondering World of Warcraft’s quest hub design, in which many NPCs are clumped together in a location such that a player can roll around and gather a huge katamari of quests, undertake the quests in the local area, before handing them all in for that rush of experience, the digital equivalent of juicing your pituitary gland in a blender with milk and ice and then injecting the resultant smoothie directly into the head for a buzz and a brain freeze all in one. It’s the perception of progress that interests me, where a player may be earning no more experience per hour than if they had to perform quests in a singular manner whilst running around all over the landscape, but the fact that the experience bar noticeably jumps in a very short period of time when handing in a bunch of quests often results in a greater feeling of progress and satisfaction than a gradual unobserved progression. That’s not to say that there’s no pleasure to be had from noticing that you’re only a smidgen away from the next level without having realised you were even close, there’s definitely satisfaction to be had from simply playing the game as its own reward and with the experience gained being an added bonus, but I think there’s a heightened rush when it comes to seeing that experience bar fill faster than a mercury thermometer in a boiling kettle.

The cause for my thinking upon this was the fact that Lord of the Rings Online now seems to have two independent systems of experience gain that run in parallel, one that gives this burst of experience, with the other giving the more traditional steady and reserved progress, where playing the game is more the focus of things. LotRO’s skirmishes give really quite generous experience the first time you run them each day due to their having an automatic daily quest associated with them that boosts experience and token gains; running the four skirmishes open to my character at the moment can net the best part of half a level for little more than an hour’s play, something that is much harder to do with standard questing due to the travelling involved in getting from the quest givers to their objectives and back again. The fact that I can get this boost of experience from the skirmishes means that when it comes to the standard questing I don’t feel as though I’m stuck in some sort of Travelling Salesman Problem, where I need to optimise routes such that I don’t waste precious time retreading old ground, I can sit back and relax and enjoy the questing and exploration of the land knowing that I’ve made a significant amount of progress in getting to the next level already.

World of Warcraft provides this sense of progress by creating islands of experience, those small self contained areas of questing, never more obvious than in the Burning Crusade expansion where each experience island slams jarringly into the next with little feeling of worldliness about the place, as though each zone were a floor of a department store; and just as you could have the department store’s elevator doors close on a view of cheese counters and meat selections, only to open on the jarringly contrasting sight of women’s lace underwear and silk nightgowns, the zones of the Outlands similarly contrasted with one another in a curious and unworldly manner. It’s possible that it’s this partitioning of progress into pockets with such obvious delineations that caused the theme park feeling, which in turn caused people to ignore any pretence that there was a story or adventure to be had, and realise that the whole questing game was really just paddling through waves of highs and lows in order to be able to catch the ultimate endorphin rush and ride the raiding wave back to shore.

Lord of the Rings Online has always attempted to focus on story, it being based on an IP that constantly lurks in the background angrily waving a placard with “Keep Including Story, Stupid!”. The various ‘book’ content that progresses the player character’s own tale in LotRO is intertwined with the main LoTR story and offers strong plot-based game-play which is entirely independent and optional to the progress-based levelling content. As such the levelling content was still a harried hurtle of heedlessly running around trying to make progress quickly, a goal often obstructed by zones such as the North Downs and the Lone Lands (prior to its recent revamp) which required the player to run back and forth across the zones for little experience gain, thus causing a noticeable trough in the progress curve of a character and resulting in more than one player quitting the game in despondent frustration. Now LotRO has an alternative option, a player can turn to skirmishes to satiate their desire for progress, which is often left unfulfilled by the lengthy roaming nature of questing within the game. This also means, however, that players can now relax and enjoy the many meandering paths that they must follow while questing, and can thus take the time to revel in the incredible atmosphere of the beautiful world that Turbine has created.

I think that variety, in addition to quality, is a path that developers could definitely take further in MMOs in order to smooth out the frightening pace at which players consume the current design of MMO content. Offering alternative paths to quick but daily-capped experience gain within the context of the game, such as LotRO’s skirmishes, is a good way to keep players invested in the levelling system without feeling the need to blitzkrieg their way through the quest-based game-play that makes up the majority of the content.

Next World of Warcraft instance to be Wards of Infinity.

Rumour has it that World of Warcraft’s next raid encounter is going to be with Kobby Botick, a monstrous tyrannical boss mob who, at the start of the encounter, summons a couple of adds that will teleport the tank and healer out of the instance before KB beats the rest of the raid into weeping, hand-wringing submission.

On top of that, the remaining players will be forced to remain in the raid dungeon with KB for two years before getting a chance of any loot dropping.

Sounds like another example of nightmarish raid design, thank goodness real life isn’t anything at all like that.

Ia ia Ctharsis fhtagn!

I posted a while back about a particular quest series that drove me away from DDO not long after launch (about four years ago, Happy Birthday DDO!) I’d blotted out the precise details, just remembered it was in one of the Houses off the marketplace, and that it involved running through an outdoor area to get to a dungeon, then going in and out of that dungeon six or seven times, delving slightly further in with each iteration.

In the now-Unlimited DDO I’ve been keeping an eye on “Today’s Deals” in the DDO store, and bought several discounted adventure packs of roughly the right level when they popped up. One of these was Tangleroot Gorge, which experienced DDOists will instantly recognise as the aforementioned hokey-cokey-esque in-and-out dungeon, but it hadn’t sounded any alarm bells when I bought it, so when Melmoth and I were looking for a bit of an adventure I casually said “oh, I’ve got this pack called Tangleroot Gorge I haven’t tried yet…” Turned out he’d run it a few times but was game for another, so we trotted along, got out of the Inn into the jungle, and…

… when I came back around I was lying in the hotel room, hands bleeding, the mirror was smashed, I could just remember something about napalm and “The End” by The Doors playing. Serious flashback, man. I almost hit the “unsubscribe” button as a reflex action, though not being subscribed in the first place made that a bit tricky. I needn’t have worried, though, the Return to Tangleroot Gorge was a textbook example of several areas of DDO’s improvements over the years.

It wasn’t *just* repeated runs through Tangleroot that made me give up back at launch, that was just the final frying pan that made the plastic donkey buck. A more significant problem was the need for a group to do anything, with the attendant overhead of forming or finding a group, then constructing an elaborate single transferable voting system with weighted alternatives to decide what to do. With variable difficulty levels in the dungeons now and hirelings to pad out your party it’s now far more flexible; being DPS types, Melmoth and I packed a couple of Cleric contracts for mobile Cure Serious Wounds dispensers and set out.

The first part of the adventure is a fairly large (for DDO) open jungle zone, big enough that a couple of wrong turns could land a laggard in a big enough pile of hobgoblins to cause trouble, and with sufficient canyons and ravines for people to poke their noses over the edge exclaiming “I wonder what’s down thaaaaaaAAAAARGH”. On the plus side, an excellent opportunity to exclaim “He’s fallen in the water!” in the river below, but a trifle annoying, especially if you land on a pointy rock at the bottom without the benefit of feather fall. So far as I can make out this bit hasn’t changed at all, but having a guide with uncanny navigational memory (to the point of being able to talk a guildmate through entirely by memory on voice chat: “you should be seeing a ruined temple coming up on the right, you’ll want to hang a left just before reaching it or the hobgoblins will get cross; if you get to the petrol station on the roundabout you’ve gone too far”) saved a good half hour or more of blundering that dragged things out the first time around, especially on top of the half hour of forming a group up.

At one point inside the dungeon itself, my Spot Sense tingled, indicating a nearby trap, and I got another flashback. The traps around launch seemed to be geared towards a pure rogue of the level of the adventure (if not higher) who hadn’t skimped on Int, put all available skill points into Spot, Search and Disable Traps, taken feats and enhancements to further boost those skills, was wearing Goggles Of Searching and Gloves Of Trap Disabling, had drunk a potion of trap detecting, and never rolled less than 15 on a 20 sided dice. The first run through the place back around launch was carnage, blades flying everywhere, flames shooting down corridors, an occasional cry in party chat of…
“Wait! I sense a…”
*CLICK* *fwooooooosh* STABSTABBURN
“… trap”

One of the advantages of revisiting the same dungeon seven times in a row was that the traps were in the same place each time. You would’ve thought that would make things easier for the rogue, as everyone halted, remembering previous spiky death, expectantly waiting for the trap to be disarmed. I’d boldly stride up to take my place in the spotlight, put on a deerstalker, pull out a magnifying glass and begin the elaborate pantomime triggered by activating the Search skill, to discover… nothing. Strange. Maybe there wasn’t a trap there on this iteration after…
*CLICK* *fwooooooosh* STABSTABBURN
… all. Or maybe I’d just missed it. Oops. Take three, and after the initial search didn’t turn anything up, I activated my limited use Skill Boost ability to perform a more thorough search, and eureka! I managed to find the control panel for the trap! Out with the thieves tools, I’d soon have this thing disarmed and made…
*CLICK* Critical disarm failure *fwoooooosh* STABSTABBURN
… safe. Oh dear.

I swear I only managed to disarm about one trap per twenty attempts, the others resulting in a fairly even mix of plain old failure and pointy-death critical failure. I’ve only got a couple of levels of Rogue this time around (though I’ve been dutifully keeping up Spot, Search, Open Lock and Disable Traps on the Ranger levels as well), and Turbine seem to have ratcheted things back to a rather more sensible level so there’s a very occasional critical failure, but by and large I’ve been able to detect and remove traps without divine intervention.

Anyway; over the course of a couple of nights, with various Waifs coming and going (quite easily, thanks to the flexibility of party composition and guest passes) we looped through Tangleroot Gorge two or three times, and rather than the hideous slog of years back it was a crazy romp. A couple of more experienced players have been bringing a dangerous hint of competency to the Friday night group; most of us can now hold the blunt wooden end of a weapon and stab the enemy with the pointy metal end with only gentle reminders, and we wound up clearing the entire chain on Elite.

Ctharsis: it’s like catharsis, but with more tentacles. (c) Melmoth