Aren’t scenarios in Warhammer brilliant? Yes, I went there. I believe the correct response now is for you to say “oh you didn’t”, and then I say “don’t go getting all up in my face”, and then there’s a vague attempt at a fight involving some slapping and hair pulling, and then security get involved, so let’s just take that as given and presume we’ve moved on to the point of glowering at each other while being restrained by burly individuals.

Anyway. Yes. Scenarios. What with fake plastic rocking, rugby watching, comedy gigs and other more tiresome not-playing-WAR bits of Real Life going on, I haven’t had much time to be Bright Wizardly. In the odd half-hour here and there, though, I have been logging in, been *wanting* to log in, and why? If you said “scenarios”, well done, take a cookie. If you said “because of banjo-playing pigs in trees”, no cookie for you, honestly, the clue was in the first sentence. And post title.

They’re not perfect, of course. Individual scenarios can be awful depending on the respective team levels and compositions, and some of the maps and game types aren’t great (evenly matched teams frequently end up in a points-from-kills-only stalemate of a mass scrum). If scenarios were the only thing on offer in WAR it wouldn’t be much cop, just playing a few scenarios here and there is more akin to playing a few rounds of an online FPS (especially now so many FPSs have some persistent unlock type features), so if that’s all I was going to do, I might as well be playing an FPS. Nothing but scenarios, bad. However, UND THIS IST A BIG HOWEVER, I really don’t think heavily devaluing or removing scenarios, as suggested in many other places, would be good for WAR long term. The usual argument, grossly oversimplified, is that scenarios take people away from open world RvR, open world RvR is good, ergo scenarios are bad. My counter-argument is that open world RvR *can* certainly be very good, but can also be very bad, or very dull. As p0tsh0t points out (in an interesting post worthy of pondering more deeply sometime), there’s an imperial stackload of variables to deal with, and while we seem to be pretty lucky on our server in having a good number of players in Tier 4, roughly balanced between Order and Destruction, and fairly frequent RvR battles, there’s no guarantee that something will be happening at any given time, much less something I’ll be able to get to and actually participate in within half an hour (what is going on with zones like Dragonwake and Black Crag? Big zones, with irritating cliffs and plummeting drops such that if you’ve never been there before it’s a right faff just getting from a warcamp to a keep, so you fall off somewhere and die from the drop, and then come back at a camp, start running again from there, find a frikkin’ horde of level 39 mobs wandering around in the middle of the road that you can’t really avoid, and you can’t really kill ‘cos you’re level 32 which is fine for the RvR stuff once you’re bolstered but this is outside the lake, so you try and avoid them and the gitting things chase and kill you dumping you back at the camp and… anyway).

In half an hour, I can log in, hit the “queue all” button for scenarios, then have a crack at a quest or two, or sort out mail and the inventory, maybe do a spot of crafting, check out what’s on auction; a scenario pops up (usually Serpent’s bleedin’ Passage, but I gather they’re working that), play that, then repeat the process if I have more time, otherwise log out. This is a Good Thing. I’d love to be spending more time in game, doing a variety of activities, hooking up with the guild more (unfortunately I’m not getting the time for much past “Hello!” and “Goodbye!” in guild chat), tackling dungeons, taking keeps, but failing that at least scenarios give a quick hit of PvP, some XP and renown, even a bit of cash and loot, everything a growing Bright Wizard needs, and once I get some free time again I can get more involved in the rest of the game. Without scenarios I’d be far less inclined to fire up the client for those odd half hours, lose momentum, maybe be less inclined to log in at all.