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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.
Badass
I have been playing Borderlands 2 quite a bit lately.
At one point, I had a mission to rescue a dude at the top of this dam. I fought my way through several rooms, saw some interesting stuff, solved some pseudo-puzzles, killed all the things. As I bust out of the final door onto the dam proper, everything goes to hell: the orbiting space station starts launching artillery shells, armed robots start landing, bullets start flying everywhere in this now-three-way battle royale. I take down a few more enemies with my corrosive sniper rifle, and then crouch behind some cover while I reload.
Then this music started playing.
I emerge from cover while tossing a holographic decoy out, stealthing to the first robot and meleeing it in the goddamn face. As robotic limbs fly everywhere, I switch to a ridiculously large shotgun, aim, and fire at a second robot. The shotgun shoots 17 pellets that each individually explode on contact, and firing it sounds like God slamming a car door shut.
Whump. Chik-Chik. Whump. Chik-Chik.
As I stroll down the middle of the ramparts like I own the place (and I do), I am suffused with a feeling of Badass. This whole sequence is staged, minus the explosive shotgun; the designers specifically put this music, with these enemies, in this order. It is the definition of themepark content, as single-player games are wont to be. But that doesn’t matter. I had been having fun before, but this was on its own elevated level. And after the sequence is over and I move on to the next (decidedly less cool) quest it occurs to me to ask: when was the last time I felt this way while playing a game?
I had to go back, waaaay back to my guild’s first Mimiron kill¹ in WoW. Like I said, I have had fun in plenty of games in the past three years. I have done some crazy moves in Deus Ex, there are some epic moments in the Mass Effect trilogy, and double-dagger Elementalist in GW2 was great fun originally. But the specific feeling I had owning faces up on Bloodshot Ramparts? Very fleeting, very rare, but much appreciated.
If you guys have experienced something similar in a game lately, feel free to share below.
¹ Please excuse the editing and the decidedly non-epic music accompaniment. 2009 was a long time ago.
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 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.
Zombie Guilds
Have you ever found yourself stuck in a zombie guild?
When I started playing GW2, I joined the 5-6 remaining members of my ex-WoW guild. Saying “5-6” is a bit charitable consider only three of us were still playing by the time I turned off the sub last year. In any case, we started a GW2 guild and… one month later it is back to 3-4 “active” members. “Active” in quotation marks because we have different schedules most of the time, different levels¹, and different goals.
We have not recruited any more people because… why would we? It is a guild of friends! Just like with relationships, it also seems rather irresponsible getting other people involved if we don’t have a clear idea what we want. After being a guild leader for 3+ years, I just don’t have the stomach for recruitment or the trappings of obligation anymore. And as is the usual case, if I don’t do it myself, it doesn’t get done.
We have been discussing joining a zerg guild or at least an active one. But how? How would I know what guilds exist on my server, what the social environment consists of, what kind of people they are looking for? Should we just keep joining one randomly? I got into Invictus 4+ years ago by pure happenstance: I tanked a Scarlet Monastery run back in TBC. It was a leveling guild that beat the odds and turned into a raiding guild under my benevolent dictatorship. I never handled recruitment, leaving that to the members with the proven ability to somehow be at the right place at the right time picking up the right people.
So… I feel trapped in a zombie guild. If I didn’t know my friends, chances are I would have let myself get absorbed into whatever guild blob I ran into first. But since I do know them, I care about getting absorbed into a hypothetical guild I’m fine with but they dislike. Or vice versa. There is also a residual social guilt knowing that we would be joining as a premade clique, something I hated with a passion when I was a guildmaster.
Maybe in the zerg, none of it will matter. Maybe once I take the initial plunge back into the “social pool,” so to speak, the water will feel fine. I just know the status quo is unsustainable, but it can be worse.
Ugh. I’m going to play some Steam games.
¹ I will talk more about this in the 1-month GW2 post, but suffice it to say, running low-level content with my main character actually feels worse than the traditional system of you just one-shotting everything for them. I had been under the impression that XP/Karma/rewards would be scaled up to your own level, but obviously that is not the case. So you exist in a pseudo-OP mode where you are powerful enough to make mobs trivial until they suddenly aren’t, all the while earning less than you could be. Nevermind if you have already completed those same zones.
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.
(Un)Foreseen Consequences
I want to start off with a quote from Ravious of Kill Ten Rats:
“Players are simply wrong when they say Guild Wars 2 has a “failed” economy. Players that claim failure have a misconception of the economy they believe the MMO should have. It isn’t failed because supply and demand are working, just not in final products. The supply of a final product far outweighs demand, even with the trash compacting Mystic Forge. Still I’ve seen plenty of profit that can be made with small amounts of market inefficiency or player laziness. A failed economy would not provide such opportunities.”
My very first reaction was the following mental image:
Has it really been just four years? Yikes.
To be fair, yes, it matters what kind of economy one thinks is appropriate for an MMO. Personally, I am a fan of the whole “labor + resource = increased value.”
The week of Ravious’ post, we got a slew of Guild Wars 2 ping-ponging hotfixes. One of them was a sudden removal of Cooking materials from vendors; prior to this, the game’s only “Advanced Profession” could be leveled 1-400 for roughly 80 silver and a few thousand Karma. Some of the removed items, like the notorious Stick of Butter, suddenly started showing up in copious amounts in the bags of goodies that humanoid mobs drop. While there was an initial panic going from vendor to drop, Butter was quickly selling for 1c because it dropped in 5-8 stick increments and seemed to replace actually good drops 50% of the time. Then you had other crafting mats in the Tier 2 level going for vendor+1c even as their Tier 1 variants were still making bank. At one point there were 8 million Soft Wood Logs on the AH, for example.
Last Friday, ArenaNet’s generically-named in-house economist, John Smith, came out with a similarly generic post on GW2’s economy. The entirety of the relevant bits were the following:
We’ve noticed several markets that are clearly out of sync in terms of supply and demand. It isn’t interesting or fun to have a market flooded with items that contain very little value, so we’re making adjustments to the game every day. Players can expect to see these markets even out over time.
While adjusting the supply and demand will bring markets closer to non-vendor based equilibrium, there is still the matter of massive surplus of some items. To address the surplus, we’ve created some new, limited-time Mystic Forge recipes that use these items. These recipes create boxes that give chances for gold and some cool items.
The “adjustments” they made were recipes that called for 500 Sticks of Butter (Soft Green Logs, etc) + two other items to create a chest that could have up to a 2g vendor item plus some other cosmetic items. As should come to no surprise, the price of Butter (etc) skyrocketed. No doubt a large quantity of these over-supplied items left the economy permanently as people gambled their money away. And I have to hand it to ArenaNet, insofar as utilizing the Mystic Forge as both a hole to throw items into and a money sink simultaneously.
But I have no real confidence that John Smith knows what he is talking about.
Pondering over this whole economic episode has led me to think about the interactivity between all these moving parts and the unforeseen consequences. For example, I am a huge fan of individual loot and resource nodes; in fact, I think they are one of the best “innovations” of multiplayer games since… well, possibly ever. But if two players tap the same mob/node and get 2x more loot than they would in other games, that means games with individual loot/shared nodes will (potentially) have twice as many items dropping. You cannot just “solve” the issue by cutting drop-rates in half though, or making crafting professions require twice as many resources, because that leads to a dissatisfying single-player experience.
Then you build your game around Dynamic Events with huge, scaled mob encounters with AoE all over the place. Provided you have the chance to deal enough damage, it is not uncommon to go from zero to full bags of gear from just 1-2 of these Events. You are selling bag space in the cash shop, so you have an incentive to keep bag space tight. But being able to sell to the AH from anywhere – itself a supremely good-feeling feature – means players would rather list all this excess gear for vendor+1c despite it being at a loss, simply because a loss is better than destroying the gear entirely.
Nevermind the crafters dumping gear on the AH in 5-level increments, competing not just with each other but with all the generic item drops too. Considering you can get +10 levels worth of XP per crafting profession, and the cost of switching inbetween them is fairly trivial (compared to losing all your progress) there is always an incentive to at least start one or more professions on all of your characters.
This preponderance of vendor+1c gear means the average player can “Lease” upgrades throughout their adventuring career – buy the level 30 sword for 80c, use it until level 35, sell it for 79c, then buy the level 35 sword for 90c, and so on. This leads to the Diablo 3-ification of gear upgrades, making drops/Karma/quest rewards simply vendor-fodder for the 24/7 AH pellet machine. The entire concept of character progression breaks down, generally at the same time you unlock your level 30 Elite Skill and otherwise experience no further change to your PvE play-style.
I do believe Guild Wars 2 brings some extremely nice innovations to the MMO formula. However, I am getting the distinct impression that other MMOs do not have these features precisely because of all the unintended consequences they bring down the line. It is clear ArenaNet believes the Mystic Forge Will Fix It™ but I simply do not see how. Limited Time recipes eliminate surplus stock, but the fire hose of drops (and the roundabout incentives to post them all) continues unabated.
If John Smith can economy his way out of this, without ArenaNet dialing back all the player-friendly features, I will be hugely impressed. Otherwise, their best hope is probably fewer people playing the game.
In An Age 
Counter-Intuitive Insights
Oct 24
Posted by Azuriel
At first, I could not help but laugh. There is context for the quote, sure, but it struck me as funny regardless to take what would normally be a negative quality (few people are playing your game) and spin it as a positive. Especially when it is an MMO one is talking about, where the whole idea is the “a lot of people” part.
But… hmm.
It is undoubtedly true that an MMO “community,” such as it is, has an impact on one’s enjoyment of a game. I read threads like these on the Guild Wars 2 forums, and the sort of hyper-competitiveness inherent to the dungeon-running culture presented there makes me not want to bother at all. The people running these dungeons are getting them done in 20 minutes, whereas it will take me hours to get a similar level of competency all while I slow them down (assuming I am not kicked to begin with).
Incidentally, this is why you have LFD tools: there will always be abrasive social encounters when grouping with strangers, but at least with LFD you are not dependent on their goodwill to zone in at all. As long as you have reasonable expectations (i.e. not expect four strangers to wait while you soak up the atmosphere), you will be fine.
I believe that Keen is probably correct that Rift’s smaller community is a positive, assuming you are into that sort of thing. Fewer people means less of an audience for trolling, more reliance on social contacts to get things done, which probably all contributes to a Cheers-esque atmosphere. Or at least a “we’re in this foxhole together” atmosphere. So… yeah. The fewer people that like your MMO, the more you will like it. And the converse – the more popular your MMO gets, the less you enjoy it – is probably true for many as well.
All of which means you can never say bad things about hipsters ever again.
Posted in Commentary
12 Comments
Tags: Community, Counter-Intuitive, Guild Wars 2, Keen, LFD