Category Archives: Guild Wars 2
Cynical Dynamism
No, really, I was not going to bring it up again. Through a series of coincidences though, I read this post by Bhagpuss (referring to GW2’s upcoming Sea of Sorrows event):
The press release is fascinating, showing, I think, just how extraordinarily difficult it is going to be to balance a genuinely “dynamic” virtual world with customer expectations of a commercial product. Taking ANet’s description of the event at face value, there’s an intrinsic and apparently insoluble problem and in just three-paragraphs they hammer home relentlessly precisely what it is :
“we want to make sure that you are not missing out”
“an Event in Lion’s Arch that you don’t want to miss”
“make sure you will not miss it”
“this will only run once, so make sure you will be there!”
Whether the event will live up to the hype, whether it will be truly world-changing, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is the insistence that this is something all Guild Wars 2 players must not miss. That raises expectations that simply cannot be met in full. A lot of people aren’t going to be there, no matter how much they’d like to be. The balancing act between building excitement and fostering resentment is a high wire to walk, that’s for sure, and the fall is steep on either side.
Then I received an email notification about this comment from João Carlos:
I am sure Azuriel will go crazy bitching mode when she knows about the one time events at 16-18th…
But I am sure GW2 at XFire will go up that weekend.
As an aside, if I were not actually a dude, I think I might have been offended by the “crazy bitching mode” characterization.
Anyway, mere minutes later, I browse down to NoizyGamer’s latest Digital Dozen post:
Event Aftermath – Another trend is that following in-game events interest in a game tends to decline. Two games that held in-game events on 28 October saw the Xfire community spend over 20% less time playing those games on Sunday. Vindictus fell out of The Digital Dozen after a nine-week run with a 22.1% decline following the celebration of the Nexon game’s second anniversary 27-28 October. The second game, Guild Wars 2, experienced a 21.2% decline with the end of its Halloween event.
So, I would respond to Senor Carlos by saying: I would hope GW2’s XFire numbers go up the weekend of the 16th. Because, ultimately, I think that is sort of the entire point of having these Dynamic Events By Appointment, vis-a-vis to drive engagement and capitalize on gaming news-cycles.
Even if they really are being earnest when they say it is all about making the world feel alive, it begs the question of “what is the world missing, that it needs one-time events to feel alive?”
In any case, this is not an ArenaNet-only thing – every seasonal event in MMOs basically amounts to the same deal – and I am not even saying developers spicing things up is necessarily bad. These sort of events simply hold zero interest to me, even if they were not starting at 3pm EST (are they timing it for the schoolchildren?). I never considered showing up for a raid at 9pm on a Tuesday evening particularly dynamic, and I have to wonder how many scheduled one-time events someone can consume before the suspension on their disbelief finally gives out.
If you made it past 1, you are doing better than me.
Every Moment is a One-Time Event
Is something you never experience special to you?
Is something you experience only special when few other people experience it?
I have seen a lot of praise for ArenaNet’s one-time Halloween event. I cannot be sure whether said praise is coming from the same individuals that lament the obsolescence of last year’s raids, but nevermind. ArenaNet’s tortured logic is pretty well deconstructed elsewhere, so let us set that aside as well. What I am curious about is this fanciful notion that it is a good use of designer manpower to specifically construct one-off events.
To me, it’s redundant.
When I think about one-off content, I remember back to the plague event that lead into Wrath’s release. Players could get infected, eventually turn into zombies, and the go infect other players. The griefing in Shat was immense. As paladins, a friend and I decided to roleplay/grief the players actually trying to infect themselves and/or start those zombie raids against Stormwind. Never before has someone raged so hard at being targeted with Cleanse. “The power of the Light compels you!” Turn Evil was also liberally applied. Around this same time, there was a special boss in Kara that dropped the Arcanite Ripper, and I believe there was only the one reset where it was available. In any case, I was the only person to get it in my guild. I busted it out pretty regularly all the way up until I unsubbed.
Here’s the thing though: how different was any of that from, say, completing Ulduar when it was current?
The Wrath lead-up event was fun because it was fun, not because it was never going to happen again. Similarly, it would not bother me one iota if the Arcanite Ripper was mailed to every player that logged in once in the last four years – nor, incidentally, does it bother me that the Arcanite Ripper is now on the Black Market AH. In many ways, I consider Ulduar (or any raid) to be more “rare,” because while these places still exist, it will never been the same as when it was newly released. Even if Ulduar was still relevant to current endgame progression somehow, it would not be the same as it was when it was new.
It is not the item or the event that matters, it is the zeitgeist. And the people. ArenaNet could have looped the Mad King event like they loop everything else and it still would have been exactly as meaningful for those first players as it is now. Every moment is a one-time event. Ergo, I see little reason to layer artificial scarcity on top of temporal scarcity. The devs could have safely shared their work with a wider audience with no lack of impact to anyone worth caring about.
But, whatever. If you consider content you never see as content, then GW2 has enough content to keep you busy for quite some time.
Low-Information Gaming
Logged onto Guild Wars 2 today after about 2+ weeks of not playing. Decided to be lazy authentic and not read anything, to better simulate the Joe Q Casual experience.
After a 500mb download, I appeared to be on an island near Mount Something-or-Other, five feet from a Personal Story portal. What was I doing again? Oh, right. I had spent a number of missions getting extra-special explosives to destroy one of those bone ships. I guess no one can be bothered to bring a cannon or trebuchet up in here? It worked last time. Whatever. All I need to do is… swim underwater… past a whole bunch of mines… with Risen all over the place… as an Elementalist.
Heavy sigh.
I am downed almost immediately, surrounded by the most banal MMO mobs ever created, and oscillating rapidly between my ineffectual real attacks, ineffectual downed abilities, and having no abilities being so close to the surface.
By the way, has anyone actually used Water Ability #5 as an Elementalist in anything approaching a useful manner? Even if you aim correctly, it always seems like you hit them 1-2 times and pass through them, dealing less damage overall than you would have just auto-attacking. Oh, good, that Water #5 launched me into a mine. Christ, this gameplay is worse than I remember.
Next step: clear the area of undead.
Err… looks clear to me.
I am not trying to be cute with the picture – there is literally zero mobs of any sort within the green circle. After trying fruitlessly to climb aboard the bone ship and then determine if there are mobs underneath the weird coral formation, I eventually encounter a Risen shark on my way back to the island. Apparently satisfied that a stationary shark 1000 meters from the boat was killed, Tonn decided to plant the bomb. We swam back without much incident.
At this point, the detonator does not appear to be working, and the murlocs naga krait are attacking. Tonn says he will repair the connections, give us the signal, and then says to push the button when the detonator goes green. Now, I am no explosive expert, but won’t the detonator go green the instant the connections are repaired? Nevermind. I kill some extremely small waves of mobs with the help of four other NPCs. “That’s the signal, hit the detonator now!” After a lame explosion, the following happens:
It’s not a spoiler if it’s dumb.
Did my game bug out, or did they literally just show me a bunch of water and haphazardly say that the dude died? No body? No explanation of how or why? I get that the “impact” was probably lessened by the time between I last played GW2 and today, but come on. This is exactly like when What’s-His-Face died at the Place “defending” the Thing (if you played GW2, you know what I’m talking about). There is simply no sense in it. I do not find pointless, off-screen deaths particularly compelling.
Enough of that nonsense.
I use the HotM Express to get to Lion’s Arch to check out the Halloween stuff. There are decorations and… an orange circle. I go there. I click on some NPCs, and suddenly I am a bird. I click on some people and get “points.” Okay. I finally find the NPC that gives you an item that runs on Candy Corn. As far as I can tell, I am supposed to find six people/things that can correspond to the four different buttons on my new hotbar. I talk to the first ghost nearby like I am instructed to. The dialog is pretty incoherent, but maybe that is the point? I keep getting feared away from the NPC by what I imagine to be another player still doing the costume brawl thing. Am I still “flagged?” I dunno.
I successfully talk to the ghost by clicking really fast before I get feared away. Not sure if I “completed” this step so I use the device to see if it marks anything in the quest area. Oops, out of Candy Corn. I watch the player grief people at the ghost for a solid three minutes before I head to a strange icon labeled Commander So-n-So, thinking perhaps this is some new NPC to explain what exactly the fuck is going on.
Talk to a Pumpkin-Carving NPC that says I need to carve an unspecified number of pumpkins before I can get a title or join his order, or possibly both. On my way to the Commander icon I see a toilet paper roll go flying through the air. After clicking on a table, it looks like a Candy Corn monster appears, but I keep walking. Ah, okay. The Commander is simply one of those players who bought the Commander book for 100g; this person is simply AFK at the bank, in somewhat cool gear. I right-click them trying to Inspect and… that’s right. ArenaNet built a game with a Vanity-based economy, and included no way to Inspect other players.
About to log off, then decide to take a screenshot with some random person nearby:
The end (?)
Funny story about that armor I’m wearing. You see, I actually got to level 67 and went the rest of the way to 80 by crafting in town. Afterwards, I sort of arbitrarily chose a set of gear off the AH based on stats that might potentially be good for a support character in dungeon runs. As I equipped everything, I noticed that the color was off; this happens occasionally when you equip gear that has three color zones when you had been using gear with only two up to that point. I was having a surprisingly hard time figuring out which zone was not colored right though, so I changed everything to the same color to figure it out.
Not a bug, but a feature! Well… maybe not so much.
The silver bit that refused to be colored correctly ended up being… the boob window. Or underboob window, I suppose. Or just “window,” on Asura.
In any event, pretty sure I am done with Guild Wars 2. It was probably not fair to make a half-hearted attempt to jump back in to check out the Halloween event while so acutely aware of how much fun I could be having with Borderlands 2 instead. Then again, maybe that is a perfectly fair scenario given the realities of gaming today: it is not enough to be a good game, you have better than every other game someone could be playing at that moment.
Reinventing the Wheel
Other games have pretty much killed my attempt to slog through Guild War 2’s storyline, but I still rubberneck around the forums and dev posts with a sick sort of fascination. Some of their decisions make you wonder if they have been living under a rock for the last fifteen years of game design.
Hey everyone.
We are looking into an additional reward system to add to bosses so that killing a single boss feels a lot more rewarding than it does right now. We are gathering data internally on it and will release information on it as it gets closer to being implemented.
Being stuck at the last boss and unable to finish the dungeon thus receiving now reward is a terrible feeling for any player, hardcore or casual. We are looking to remedy this.
Iteration is the name of the game
(source)
Hello, William Fairfield, Game Designer. Maybe bosses should, I dunno, have some loot associated with them instead of a chest filled with vendor trash to complement the same vendor trash we have been collecting from the hundred mobs we slaughtered on the way in? I think that worked in every MMO prior to this one.
We’re very aware our LFG system is lacking, an it’s high on our list of things to rework. We have some other very pressing issues to handle first, but as someone who built/runs dungeons, and often PUG them, I dislike our current obscure and non-informative system, and re-building it is high on my list of things-to-flail-my-arms-about-to-talented-people-who-can-do-something-about-it, so that they do something about it. (source)
Thank you, Robert Hrouda, Content Designer. You get 50 points for honesty. And lose 50 points for letting the game go Live with a LFG tool actually worse than the one WoW had six years ago.
[Nobody running Story modes anymore] is absolutely an issue as the game matures and we are working on ways to make running story mode with someone worthwhile even if you have already run it so players just reaching these dungeons can more easily find groups to play with. It will probably take some experimentation before we find the right motivator.
Jon (source)
Hello, Jon Peters, Game Designer. Perhaps if you did not nerf subsequent Story mode runs into the fucking ground, more people would do them? Your anti-botting protocols should already handle multiple playthroughs back-to-back, so… what was the point in such a huge reduction?
That last one really gets me. Think about it for a second. The pool of available players who have not yet ran the Story mode for a dungeon is always decreasing. That is a fact even if GW2 has increasing sales because, even ignoring server differentiation, the magnitude of new players coming in is unlikely to be higher than it was immediately after launch. The pool is always getting more shallow.
“No big deal,” I hear you say. “WoW dungeons have planned obsolescence the same way.” “Nein!” I say to you. GW2 auto-levels you down to match the dungeon mobs, which means you’ll always need a group; the longer you wait to start doing dungeons the less likely any such run will actually take place. Conversely, if I have some morbid curiosity about the story of Auchindoun Crypts in WoW after all these years, I could stroll in there with a max-level character and solo the place (barring any weird mechanics). And even if you manage to guilt four guild-mates into running a GW2 Story-mode for a second time, they are getting absolutely hosed for no goddamn reason.
Seriously, why? Oh, that’s right, there is some ridiculous fear about “farming.”
For the longest time, I could not understand why all the posts on the GW2 forums were talking about farming, diminishing returns, botting, anti-farm code, and so on. Why is this such a uniquely critical problem to GW2? Then it hit me. “You have entered too many instances lately.” Blizzard has instance caps and lockouts. PROBLEM SOLVED. Maybe I should be giving ArenaNet some credit for letting people run the same Farmable Explorable Mode as many times as they want in a day… but honestly? All this backhanded DR and anti-farm mechanics cheapens the lipstick on the pig.
I have never truly appreciated Blizzard’s methodology of instance design until seeing the alternative. People can complain about Reputation and daily quests as chores, but it is better than the wink-n-nod alternative of “we KNOW you are going to grind your face off, so let’s treat you like the little farming bots you are.” The equivalent would be for Blizzard to have removed the 25 daily quest cap (like they already did) but mathed out a decreasing reward slope to “enforce” a 25-daily limit. I do not feel that is actually any more humane, and it comes across as patronizing as well. It is the Skinner Box without the box; just some dude in a lab coat fondling your nucleus accumbens until you collapse.
If limits are necessary – and there are good arguments that limits are indeed necessary to save us from ourselves – then just give us the goddamn limits and call it a day. You can do A once per day, and B once per week. Done. This whole “do whatever you want… except that, and that too, and maybe you should go outside for a while, eh?” is just dumb. It all ends up making more rules, not less.
OTOH: GW2, Part 2
A few days after logging out last time, I crack my knuckles and get ready to head back into… Tyria? Whatever the Guild Wars 2 world is called.
I am feeling so spunky, in fact, that I take a Waypoint directly from the Asura Borg Cube I use as a home-base back to Sparkfly Fen. Nearly two whole silver? I am living on the edge, man. Can’t stop me now. I spot a large blank area on the map, and decide to tackle that first.
YEAH, I SAID “YOU CAN’T STOP ME NOW.”
Nightmare Court mobs in a dark tunnel? I can eat these guys for breakfast. /attack
Pictured: Getting stopped.
I am not going to lie: I almost logged off right then.
In the four minutes between zoning and death, I killed two of packs of two Nightmare mobs. The next group was three linked together, which did not seem insurmountable at first. Unfortunately, one of them was a Necromancer who proceeded to ramp up ranged damage to some ludicrous degree before I noticed. Perhaps I could have squeaked out a victory had I blown ALL the cooldowns, but the certain knowledge that I died within 20 feet of the entrance, the down-leveling mechanic ensuring that trying to explore this tunnel solo would lead to inevitable death, and getting double death taxed¹ on top of it all – within four minutes of logging on – punched through the paper-job I have hitherto made over the cavernous enthusiasm gap that is GW2 combat.
That was a long sentence. Let’s take a breath together.
Last week, I made a somewhat controversial remark that GW2’s combat was not as responsive as WoW’s. “Responsive” was not the right adjective to use, and my follow-up explanation in the comments felt unsatisfying even to myself. The mobility does feel fun. There is a sort of sponginess to the button-presses –> attack result, but even that is not the precise issue. And while my next instinct was to say it feels shallow, it is pretty clear that there is a lot that can go on simultaneously (especially in PvP).
The combat simply feels… insubstantial.
I fully admit this could just be an Elementalist problem. I do not actually enjoy the Attunement swapping mechanic in general, even though I engage in it quite a bit. But I do not think it is just an issue with the class I am playing; I got the same general feeling from my level ~20 alts as well. I can quite literally run circles around most of the mobs I face, avoiding 100% of their attacks without even needing to Dodge. Then you start facing Risen, who comically run around at 300% speed and basically make your mobility moot – I stand and cast in their faces, lest my directional-attacks miss while they continuously readjust. With the ranged Risen and the Nightmare Necromancer that sealed my fate earlier, often it feels like my HP pool just fills or empties randomly with little input or feedback from me.
All that may not even be an adequate explanation of the feeling GW2 combat evokes, but there it is.
Instead of calling it quits, I rez at a Waypoint way the hell away from there.
Largest Heart description ever?
Heading North along the West side of the map, the Shadowform tooltip most verbose Renown description I have ever seen pops up. Apparently another frog-dude (Costi Atl) wants me to feed him, this time by shooting termite mounds with a cannon, grabbing the grub by the tail, killing it in normal combat, picking up the shiny thing it leaves behind, aiming that at the campfire, and then clicking on the fire afterwards. Or you can talk to and then fight with the frog-dudes. Or, I think, kill spiders.
A bit north of there was an Event-camp overrun by Risen.
I don’t know why they even bother having Wooden Planks lying around as weapons past level 10.
This little Event really drove home the insubstantialness feeling I had earlier. Those Speedy Risen may as well be DoTs and my attacks against them a Recount DPS meter. The perma-snared tough ones are more like normal enemies, but again, fighting and killing them brought no satisfaction. While clearing the camp, I starting thinking back to all the skelks, spiders, fireflies, Nightmare Court/Inquest/Bandits/etc etc etc I have killed in the past 65 levels, and how much of a pain in the ass the Kill 15 Enemy Types daily is. Most games have recycled and color-swapped mobs, of course. But, Jesus, it feels like there isn’t a lot of variety in mob types/abilities, and I am heading into even deeper into Risen territory.
Oh. Looks like I died at some point.
After rezzing and coming back and clearing the camp, I switch from Dagger/Dagger to Scepter/Dagger. I leveled 1-20 with staff, 20-40 with S/D, and 40 onward as D/D, so I am pretty familiar with all of them. It is my hope that getting back to a more combo-oriented and sort of wind-up gameplay will make things more interesting again.
The camp Event turns into an escort Event, followed by another escort Event. Two people show up near the start of the 2nd Escort, and it’s nice. Then the Event turns into a Champion fight, and then the two strangers leave without even attempting to engage the Champion. I do likewise. There is never really a sense for how strong a Champion is versus another Champion – some can probably be 2-manned, while others usually need a full zerg. The risk simply isn’t worth the ~2s reward most of the time, especially when so many don’t have chests at the end. Considering this entire Event chain revolved around blowing up this Lich’s tower and then killing him, simply leaving felt incredibly anti-climatic.
I do some more Renown Hearts, fight some more dumb Risen, then log off.
Day 3
At this point, I have read the comments to Part 1, and realize that a lot of people are suggesting that the zones/enemies/storylines get dumber the farther South you go. Good to know. But then I realize I am two Hearts and a handful of other things away from 100% map completion. We get a warning that the servers will be down for maintenance in 60 minutes, but I figure I will be done by then anyway. I zone back into Sparkfly Fen, and head SW.
Pictured: Chekhov’s Bigass Gun
This area looks promising.
In the comments to Part 1’s post, I mentioned the reason why I dislike the concept of timed Events. Inevitably, timed Events break down as follows:
- You arrive just in time.
- You wait around for it to start.
- You miss it entirely.
In this specific instance, I landed squarely into A). No sooner than I talked to Kamma and picked up my quest gun to kill Risen with, an Event popped up to… kill Risen. I do so, completing the Heart in the process. Before I even have a chance to finish looking over the Karma rewards, Tequatl the Sunless shows up without preamble. I do my civic duty in letting Map Chat know the dragon is up.
At first, I head over to the turrets and try shooting a few times. I do not see very many people, and begin to get worried. A bunch of Risen show up and kill the turret and nearly me along with it. I see only a few people at other turrets, and then I see no one at all. A mob of Veteran Risen surround every turret, and then I get one-shot by an exploding Risen while trying to rez some of the NPCs near the big Asura cannon thing.
I rez at a nearby Waypoint, look at the dragon and… wait. Was that a Fireball? There are people down there? I run past all the Risen mobs and destroyed turrets and Asura superweapons and… see a bunch of people whacking on dragon feet. Okay, then. Let’s roll.
At some point, I see extra-large Risen spawn, and I mouse-over – apparently they explode, and also explode on death. Good to know. DPSDPSDPS. I notice someone 20 feet away eat an explosion and go to the downed state. Immediately afterwards, a pile of poison gas settles over them and they die. I run over and try to rez from the edge of the poison cloud. I get a 1-2 seconds of rezzing in before I start taking 2k damage per second from the poison. I back away and start attacking the dragon again, knowing that this person can rez themselves at the Waypoint and be back in half the time anyway. Then this exchange happens:
/facepalm
Do you know when you encounter those people who say things like “Get the government out of my MediCare?” Words fail me to describe how stupid this exchange was. Which was perhaps appropriate for this dragon encounter, as it felt about as difficult as those Prologue events were in the Beta Weekends, back when bosses could 1-shot you.
A minute or so later, dragon dies.
I hardly knew ya.
Somehow, 1.53 silver and 8k XP don’t seem to cut it. There was a big treasure chest, of course, filled with 4-5 blues too… about half as many items as I got in the Risen Event immediately before this one. But perhaps it is an appropriate reward for killing a dragon I never knew existed, nor know what role it played in anything up to this point. Surely, the dragons were talked about somewhere, right?
Between the impending server shutdown and that run-in with the dumbass, I lose all motivation to continue onward and log off.
_____
As you might infer from the tone, I feel the experiment is at its logical end. While I cannot discount the possibility that my enthusiasm was hamstrung from the start (due to endgame concerns), these play-sessions very clearly brought out the perhaps hitherto repressed feelings of… blah when it comes to the combat system. I might enjoy the game more with the Warrior or Thief, or maybe even the Necromancer, but I find myself unwilling to throw away 40+ levels of progress.
My current plan is to simply level up the rest of the way to 80 via Crafting, knock out the all the Story missions, and maybe try to hit all the dungeons. Indeed, dungeons were the one bright spot when it came to enjoying playing my character, even if the specific dungeons I have played thus far have been fairly bad; Caudecus’s Manor in particular is the worst designed dungeon in any MMO I have ever played.
Once complete, I’ll set GW2 aside and move on to other things. I am trying to imagine what would bring me back after that point, but am kinda drawing a blank. Maybe an Elementalist class redesign, or if ArenaNet fixes a majority of those 100+ Necromancer bugs. I dunno.
We’ll see.
¹ The double-death tax being your gear taking damage plus the cost of reviving at a Waypoint.
OTOH: GW2, Part 1
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
–T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The experiment start at 7:48pm on Saturday. I zone into Sparkfly Fen, a level 55-65 area for the first time. During the loading screen, I let out a heavy sigh. Okay, here we go.
Starting strong.
I may have mentioned it before, but it bears repeating again: Guild Wars 2 looks amazing.
I can see the sort of watercolor schtick being an artistic preference, but more than the looks, the game does make you feel like you are moving in 3D space. I could (and did) climb that little rock wall thing on the left, for example. Skyrim still has GW2 beat, but they both share that sense of space and scope that encourages a “let me go over there… because I can!” feeling.
So far, so impressed.
After talking with a scout, I head over to the NW. A Heart icon and unfilled meter appears – the game face comes back on. I start clicking on the shiny things, filling up the meter 20% of the way before catching myself. Part of the experiment is to read ALL the things, because the head writer is not an accountant like I alleged. I talk to Jezza, and he/she wants me to help clean up undead by clicking on things, killing Risen, or picking up a flamethrower and using it on the bushes. I pan the camera around to case the area, then say “Yeah… flamethrower.”
Halfway through the meter, I hear a WHOOSH and glance over:
I cannot pretend this wasn’t a cool moment.
Clearly, someone at ArenaNet reads the blog and is following me around after complaining about the lack of Events. I drop my flamethrower and move to the cannons on the beach. We apparently have 15 minutes to kill the ship before… things happen. As I shoot a cannonball every 5-6 seconds, I see some other players running around near me. It is hard to see what they are doing, although I know the ship is launching things at the beach. None of them ever hit me, so I just keep firing.
After about the first two full minutes of said firing, it gets a bit tiring. Eventually, the ship goes down.
Boom
I briefly wonder when I started getting 1.33s for Events, as I go looking for my flamethrower. Oh… the Heart completed too. I talk to Jezza, browse the wares, and look around. Okay, there is a Skill Point just North of here. There is a crumbling stone building at the Skill Point location, and it appears to have several different levels. I walk in, start killing some things, and realize that I might have to commit some serious time to this place because it isn’t immediately clear A) where the Skill Point is, and B) how I would get back out. But… science!
I hop down to the bottom floor, and see some other players engaged with the Skill Point “guardian.” I land one blow before it dies, getting the Skill Point. I do talk with the NPC afterwards, as it appears to be a ghost. Interesting. It is apparently a “good” ghost that is also fighting the Risen in the area. Ghosts fighting undead is an interesting premise, and one I hope gets expanded on at some point. Indeed, I remember going through the Charr beginning zones thinking “if ghosts are this absurd of a weapon, why aren’t they used more offensively?” Anyway, getting out of the fort ends up being pretty easy.
I grab a Waypoint or two, and then pause for a photo op:
I didn’t choose the Asura life, the Asura life chose me.
I get to a… frog-people village at the tail-end of a king-of-the-hill-ish Event and get credit for basically 40 seconds of standing there. While so doing, I kept an eye on the unfolding drama in Map Chat regarding a Champion Shark spawn:
A legitimate chuckle was had.
By contrast, Qoetl was not particularly interesting to talk to. Fix signs, kill Risen, or squirt guards with a water gun. As I get started on these tasks, I hear a giant WHOOSH.
Long time, no see.
In case you did not want to check the timestamps yourself, it has been exactly 20 minutes. Dynamic, indeed. As I squirt a frog with a water gun, I muse on how it could have been possible for me to have missed the boat at the fort. Then again, as I eventually came to realize, you can hear the boat surfacing from anywhere in the entire zone.
All frogs hydrated, I head South. There are two Event notifications, but they are on an island with Hearts two levels higher than my current level. I get to another frog village, this time headed by Potatlan. I am linking all these characters so you can read their “quest text” yourself.
Having no interest in killing Risen, I get perfumed in the stench of death to attract the flies away from Risen corpses (both redundant and contradictory!) and bring them back to the frog so he can eat them. Okay… what is he going to do 4 hours from now when he’s hungry again? I guess it is a silly question, either because I may solve the undead problem entirely later on, or he could just eat the flies by cutting out the undead juice perfume middleman. I mean, it was not like I was preventing the flies from eating the corpses – I was merely bringing them to the frog so he wouldn’t have to move.
What a dick. I vow to let him die next time an Event rolls around.
Finishing up, the next Heart I see is to the South, but I see an Event notification to the North, near a Heart I already completed. Backtrack or press on? It has been about an hour, so I decide the Events can wait.
I barely get time to talk to Cuadinti before another survive-the-waves Event starts in the same area. I start to notice Risen frog-people are spawning, and they just sit back dealing 10% of your HP in attacks and stacking poison on you. Since you do not regenerate HP after combat until all debuffs fall off, this poses a particularly strong danger; at one point, I had a poison debuff that would have lasted 35 second. I spec’d my Elementalist as mostly Arcane/Water, so I could cleanse it pretty quickly when I pay attention, but it perhaps might have been an issue for some classes.
I cannot quest any farther South, as I am below level and have no interest in fighting Risen even in those rare times when I manage to get placed 1-2 levels above them. I move West and start working my way back up North. I run into the Champion Shark along the way:
Fair and balanced.
I have 7425 HP in this area, and as the combat log shows, the shark dealt 9,174 damage in, for all intents and purposes, a single attack (probably a “charge,” but I saw no warning for it). This was the first situation in which I experienced the underwater downed mechanic in a setting where I could actually get to the surface quickly.
As it turns out… it is fairly ludicrous. Just getting to the surface auto-heals you for an amount that is akin to 2-3 people rezzing you, making things fairly trivial. I could probably still auto-die after getting downed multiple times, but there were several other people around to act as additional targets so it was fine. The shark eventually died, and I got a grey vendor-trash fin, plus whatever the Event normally gives.
Talked with Ayomichi, who wants me to pop bloated fish corpses and kill infected wildlife to stop spread of corruption, just like all the other frog-people so far this map. I begin to wonder if that Vigil outpost at the beginning is all of civilization I am going to see.
I am immediately distracted by a waterfall/jumping puzzle.
*unconsciously leans forward in chair*
After solving the puzzle and harvesting a cauliflower “farm,” I check the AH prices. Hmm, vendor+1c for the vegetable. Makes sense.
I complete the Heart offered by Admiral Clarinda Demard, who is apparently a pirate that looks like a Seraph and willing to turn me into a Chocobo to peck open treasure chests. I swim into the water as the bird, to see what happens. You can do it, but you lose all your abilities, including the ability to untransform. I get out of the water, untransform, and get back in. After the first Risen mob I pull, I remember why I never A) fight Risen if I can help it, B) fight underwater. Elementalist underwater combat is awful, aside from the 10 seconds or so when you can turn into the Vortex with your Elite Skill and deal ~1500 damage per second.
Final Heart of the night is offered by Leemoola. I complete it as fast as humanly possible. Whoa, Aquabreathers! I upgrade my level 40 aquabreather with a level 60 version.
Believe it or not, I am actually missing Events and Enemy Types for the daily. Apparently the daily achievement resets between 8pm-9pm EST, because that isn’t prime time or anything. I open the map and see no orange circles, and am too tired to desire playing for much longer. I Waypoint myself over to the beginning Charr area, and roll the dice for Chili Peppers on the herb nodes (selling for 1 silver apiece!) and get my last few Events/Enemy Types filled.
Log off at 10:12pm.
OTOH Experiment
Everyone knows the importance of first impressions, and how they can color every experience thereafter. The situation is a bit more dire when it comes to blogging (or at least it feels that way), because once we nail something down with words, it not only helps cement the first impressions in our own minds, but it also becomes baggage that gets checked any time we say something contrary in the future. You would not see Wolfshead or Syncaine posting about how much they enjoy Mists of Pandaria, for example, even if they were genuinely impressed; so much of their identity and “e-cred” is wrapped up in historical posts about hating WoW that everyone would assume they are trolling at best, or hypocritical at worse.
I was thinking about all that this weekend, as I mused over the sort of feedback and counter-arguments I have been getting about my Guild Wars 2 posts. Do they have a point? Am I letting my first impressions and foreknowledge about the “endgame” color my moment-to-moment enjoyment? Am I not talking about the fun/interesting things because I subconsciously fear “contradicting” myself?
To answer these questions, I decided to try an experiment I am calling: On The Other Hand. The idea is to carve out a space between playing Devil’s Advocate and cleaning the slate as much as possible for a second impression. The experiment does not involve me being relentlessly positive or pretending to like things I do not – it merely gives me mental room to acknowledge that I may have been unfair in the past.
I’m wrapping this all up in a fancy “experiment” instead of just coming out and admitting possible wrongs, because… well, it is easier. Hey, I never pretended to be a humble guy.
In any case, the first night of the experiment actually happened on Saturday when I strolled into a zone I had never been to before; took some screenshots, jotted down some notes. Since I spent all day Sunday playing FTL (ominous foreshadowing?) I am going to try and run the experiment for another day or two. The end result may be in one big post, or several smaller ones. I especially want to try to get back into a third dungeon.
So look forward to that, or dread it, as is your predilection.
GW2 Checkpoint: Month 1
One of the best 1-month reviews I have read is Julian’s over on KTR. Not so much for the content of the review, but rather for evoking that sort of hollow feeling that I find Guild Wars 2 gives off.
Guild Wars 2 is like bungee-jumping without the cord. It is all fun and excitement on the way down, but there isn’t anything that snaps back and keeps you in the experience.
A lot of the reviews I have been reading (save one) do not do much in the way of differenciating between the game and the MMO aspect. From a game aspect, sure, it will give you more than a 2:1 return on hour of entertainment per dollar. If you are looking for a one-month stand, so to speak, by all means GW2 is your girl. In fact, with all the dynamic events and no-strings attached spontaneous grouping, it is practically a swinger’s paradise.
If instead you are looking for an MMO you can develop a relationship with, one that both allows investment and a perceived return for time spent, you are still basically stuck with pandas or space trolls.¹
But let me zero in on a couple of areas, including the ones I called out pre-launch.
Hearts/Questing
A lot of people talk about the freedom aspect of GW2 questing, of spontaneity. And it is true. But it is a freedom derived from walking around not giving a shit.
It still boggles my mind how little press the complete elimination of quest text has gotten. I have talked about this before, but a month in, these Hearts feel worse than the most banal of WoW’s daily quests. I do not care if you never read quest text anyway, the point is that a writer/designer still had to at least go through the motions. Where are the motions here?
Have you even tried talking to these Renown Heart guys? The dialog interface is awful, and outside of Gravedigger Dumpy, it all feels like it was written by an accountant. Has anyone actually encountered a coherant narrative in the Renown Hearts? I haven’t. And what I mean is have you actually been interested in what is going on beyond the strict gameplay elements introduced? Do you remember any of the NPC names?
This is not about “location-based” questing, this is about questing without context. And if you have filled one meter, you have filled them all.
I have not reached the conclusion of the Story quests, so I shall reserve final judgment on them. But to be honest, most of what I have seen has been phoned in. Story mission difficulty oscillates between trivial and broken, the tone of the narrative is all over the place (one minute everyone is Lawful Good Looney Toons villains, and the next we torture/kill in cold blood), and I have seen no indication that this story is any different than every “dragon terrorizes the land” story ever made. Including and especially the one presented in Cataclysm, which I suppose is unfortunate timing on ArenaNet’s part.
Dynamic Events
As I said last time around:
If anyone in-game talks about Events a month after launch, it will solely be in the context of “Where do I level now?” and “Where are all the Events?” and “I’ve been waiting for X Event to spawn for six minutes now!” and “Lame, the Waypoint I wanted to use is contested.” Events are not Guild Wars 2′s killer app. Events are fun the first time, promote spontaneous grouping in the immediate area, and technically have branching paths, I guess.
Events also scale horribly with a lot of people (melee in particular get hammered by dozens of instantly spawned +2 level mobs), are boring the 2nd/3rd/nth time around, interfere with normal questing/exploring in the area (yay, 20 kobolds just spawned in this cave again), are not easy to find or fun to wait around for, and become just plain tedious when completed alone. Regardless of how successful or not GW2 does sales-wise, it will not take but a few weeks for the playerbase to diffuse across the leveling/zone spectrum, making the outdoor-raid-esque feel of beta Events turn into the Warhammer’s “Forever Alone” Public Quest ghost towns.
At a minimum, I try to complete the Daily Achievement during my play session, which requires 5 Events. For every day of the prior week, I have had to cheese the achievement by logging onto an alt and flailing about in the rapidly reseting starting zone Events because I simply did not encounter five working Events in 2 hours of level 50-60 gameplay. When non-bugged Events do spawn, a handful of people usually appear out of the ether, but the mood is more akin of starving dogs swarming over table-scraps than “oh, hey, here’s another one of those things which the leveling system is supposedly built around.”
Which is just as well in the scheme of things, because the majority of Events are worse than the Renown Hearts under close scrutiny. Kill X waves of Y monster. Pick up Z items and return. Aaaaaaaaand that’s it. Maybe I am doing the wrong Events? If so, go ahead and tell me where I can find these good “Dynamic” Events and how long I would have to wait in that general area to trigger them.
WvWvWvWvWpppfffft
Is there anyone who is playing GW2 who feels like WvW was designed/executed properly? Anyone?
What I will grant is there are a lot more Waypoints than there was in the beta, making the graveyard slog not as bad. And it is nice that they are dropping the bags of loot from dead players at your feet now instead of asking you to drop down from the castle walls to collect your tokens. Then again… why are you asking players to furiously press F as they dodge and strafe in the press of the zerg, with people dying left and right? Is it a cynical design ploy to help throttle the volume of items generated in these encounters, since X% of legitimately earned items inadvertently go unclaimed?
Dungeons
Ho boy. I have completed two thus far, and… I am going to save my descriptions of them (and hopefully the others) for a future post.
By the way, I spent 45 minutes trying to get a party together for Twilight Arbor story-mode two days ago. As in, I was apparently incapable of getting four other random people grouped together. Is the lack of a LFG tool really a boneheaded mistake that every game designer is going to have to make from now on? Because let me tell you, limiting your LFG “tool” to self-flagged people only in that map is bullshit design that should have been laughed out of the office in 2012. Dungeons were already going to be a niche activity no matter what ArenaNet did, but to further drain the available pool down to “someone with an hour to kill, who hasn’t done the Story mode yet, who happens to be on a level 30/40/50+ character in a level 1-15 zone for some goddamn reason, who specifically replies to map chat requests” is beyond asinine.
With free server transfers, cross-server guilds, multiple guilds, and anonymous grouping, “saving the server community” is not even remotely a legitimate concern.
MMO Aspects Aside…
As a single-player game, it is probably worth your $60. Combat is nowhere near as responsive as WoW, character progression basically ends at level 30, and of course there is no endgame. But what Guild Wars 2 does succeed at is simulating an MMO without all that messy commitment. Which is kind of a shame considering how it succeeds in providing incentives for cooperation that most real MMOs curiously lack altogether, or feel necessary to induce via the threat of pain and loss.
In any case, we will just have to check in two months from now and see where things are heading into the holiday season. I am asking Santa for an actual LFG tool in GW2 and for Blizzard to tweak/remove the rather archaic-seeming mob tagging mechanic, myself.
¹ Yeah, yeah, or Tolkein, or rift chasing, or whatever else you are playing long-term.
Breaking the Magic
For the first time in almost four weeks, I played a different game. This is bad news for ArenaNet.
Okay, maybe not really.
I have mentioned before that I dislike playing multiple games: my M.O. is to spend my entire focus on one item, suck all the marrow from its bones, complete it, and then move on. Part of the reasoning behind this behavior is that I have zero expectations I will play a game again. And the reasoning behind that expectation is that much of the fun I derive from playing a game is conquering its systems/logic and experiencing its story, neither of which usually holds up past initial completion. And where am I getting all this replay time anyway?
There are exceptions of course, the Fallouts and the Skyrims and FPS games. Some games I play for the visceral joy of it too. For as much as the hotkey MMO combat style is derided, I do generally find it entertaining. In fact, I would suggest everyone has to on some level right? How else do you stomach 200+ hours in these MMOs?
Anyway, I had wanted to spend some of my gems on Character Slot expansions to give the Warrior and Necromancer another shot. Nope, the AH was down. Again. I almost logged off for the night right then. Instead, I set my jaw, and did my level best to go through the motions. The moment I got my Daily Achievement or whatever it is called, I logged off.
Slouching back in the computer chair, staring at the empty computer monitor, what I was feeling was this:
A clear sign one’s (gaming) dosage needs increased.
Then I realized: “Hey, I have plenty of other games that actually feel meaningful to play.”
Existential crisis averted.
Of course, a roguelike is perhaps not the best rebound game, especially as brutal as FTL can be. Nevertheless, sixteen hours later, I am feeling pretty good about completing Easy four times and moving back to the most misleading “Normal” difficulty ever designed with a straight face. And after that? Plenty of indie games, Battlefield 3 just released their Armored Kill mini-expansion, and hey I bought Borderland 2 for like $36 before it came out. Maybe I should get to downloading that, eh? Guild Wars 2 will merely be the background flavor at best, as I continue slogging my way to 80 and through what passes as a story so I can say I did so.
Although Mists is penciled in on the To Do list, I won’t be there on Tuesday. Probably not. No, no, definitely not. Well… ugh. We’ll see. Best time-frame I can give is: Soon™.
Can’t Stop the Tide
Sometimes I wonder why I ever took the “RMAH combats gold sellers” argument seriously.
Race you to the bottom.
In that screenshot I took over the weekend, 1600 gems would net me an auspicious 4g 6s 66c for basically $20. The gold-seller was advertising in Map chat that $19 buys 10g. Or, 20s 33c vs 52s 63c per $1. That is a 2.5x better exchange rate.
Maybe these developers are going after the middle margins: the people that might of bought gold from shady websites, but give out a sigh of relief over the legit channels. Or maybe the devs simply looked at how much money was changing hands – and how much was sitting on the table! – before deciding that getting more than a $0 piece of the pie would be profit.
As you can tell by my gem count, I am not exactly complaining here¹. That 1700 amount and the four bank slot additions I have unlocked were all procured via in-game currency. I am level 55. Just sell everything, and you will be fine, I promise.
Well, you will be fine unless you enjoy staying in similar locations or doing the same dungeons. In which case, ArenaNet has “anti-farming” protocols to dynamically (!) lower drop rates of items, and other rewards based on… well, rather opaque criteria. Near as anyone can tell, it is based on the type of enemy one is killing, which causes trouble in the endgame Dynamic Event-driven zones that features waves of all the same type of creature.
Who was this designed for again? Because the botters can simply teleport around the map, and banning them is kinda pointless considering they use hacked accounts anyway. If it is to protect the economy or protect players from themselves – which seems odd given how many tokens/Karma/etc you need for things – the snide comparison between GW2 and the “energy management” iOS/Facebook games becomes dangerously apt.
In other news, I am happy to report WvW is working correctly:
Just in time for 7-day long matches!
According to the official rankings, the bottom three realms are…
1074.472 Northern Shiverpeaks
833.028 Devona’s Rest
634.207 Kaineng
There may or may not have been intentional rank tanking going on; at launch we had some major PvP guild, then they left for two weeks, and now it looks like they have returned? I suppose this behavior will level off once the free transfers are closed and the “real” rankings return. But at some point, I almost wonder what will prevent the various realms from simply win-trading their way across the merry-go-round. The incentives are all there vis-a-vis Karma and currency. And I almost think that would be preferable to the sort of Loss Point domination the system allows along the margins.
Has it occurred to anyone else that perhaps the mythical DAoC RvR experience was a time and place thing?
Regardless of all of the above, the wire keeps on humming away. I even did a dungeon over the weekend, and it was fun! Sort of. I will need to investigate further to be sure.
¹ On some level though, I do consider cash shops a mild form of exploitation. Human beings make irrational economic decisions all the time, and I put digital goods right up there with casinos in terms of ethical business dealings. Let’s not pretend ArenaNet is doing that soccer mom dumping $200 into the cash shop any real favors here.
In An Age 