Guild Wars 2

Individual character progression should have a stop-point.

When you’ve progressed your character far enough it should be more about the accumulation of wealth in order to bolster skill and power. This way, alts can be made across the board without having to have to progress just one character infinitely and be stuck with it (which is vertical progression).

The one way to go about doing this, would be to introduce a stopping gap wherein after awhile all said items would play on horizontal progression rather than infinitely build bulk or power on only one character, power will therefore transfer over to skill or application of content.

The key thing to make this all work is to have all or at least many items after a certain point be account-bound rather than soul-bound.

You would also have to have solved vertical progression first.
see this post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Solving-the-issue-of-vertical-progression/first#post977704

The way to make a character still have progression, but have a stopping point would be to stress the issue of power development as a means not to increase power for the sake of power but to balance the game ultimately. This acts like a slope, early on you play more, you get more increases you become more OP than the other guy who plays less, later on it gets more and more slight but you still get power but it serves not to throw the game out of balance but to balance it. Also this slope mixes well with skill because by then you’d have a lot of practice. Adding dynamic skills to balance out the game while intentionally making some things early on imbalanced, serves as a process to not only balance out the game for the future, but to make it so that character progression can serve to enhance the power of said character and also to progress it. But these would be slight changes that favor balance rather than strictly for adding power, the power is fixed, but the idea is to intentionally put in some imbalance early on, to allow for character progression later on which ultimately serves to balance the game through slighter and slighter changes with dynamic loot.

Umm… I misunderstood you, right?

Or do you really want the characters to stop developing at some point, which is happening already…
Get level 80, get full exotics. There, there’s the stop point. (Since legendaries don’t give more power, just skins)

Or, I misunderstood you, right?
How is that different? (Can you explain, since I am having hard time understanding the suggestion?)

The idea is that character progression serves to balance and perfect the game. This has to be planned out somehow though I don’t know how it’s going to be done honestly, but I have a feeling this is the way to do it.

You’d have to plan out some sort of initial imbalance, so that in-between this and the final balance point, you’re constantly improving the balance by tweaking it. The balance changes would go from being major to minor over the course of a long period of time. Thus a person who comes back into this game say 10 years later still can play it but only have a moderate disadvantage compared to his opponents because they’ve collected wealth for PvP (not minor or major, but moderate which is bad enough). This is essentially also the process for character progression and power improvement (sense of power based on small changes rather than OP ones). Of course, in the beginning the changes would be a lot bigger.

For example, a dynamic skill called flamesword, allows you to swing a particular enchanted sword initially at a preset level of 150 radius without actually making melee contact which is different from a projectile or a nova because it would be instantaneous and it would also be different from mere increased range of said weapon which would still require a swing (the radius is already initially balanced), with the first major “meta-depth” balance and power improvement process change it would swing to 155 (i’m saying 155 to show the slight change, but in reality it’d be more like 200) radius. Someone who hasn’t played a long time thus has to catch up. But here’s the awesome thing: people who have played equally long as the character with the new and improved flamesword 155 would be able to loot a stat called reduction of flame-sword 155 radius to 150. Thus that would be the counter-play and you wouldn’t have to increase the power of the guy trying to counter the flamesword 155 as well which would be vertical progression and throw things out the roof eventually since he’d have to increase his range as well and eventually everything would be blown out of proportion. Instead you simply keep the #’s fixed once again.

But for the person who hasn’t played in a long time and comes back and sees the veteran who’s accumulated the flamesword 155, it is still only a slight shift in OPness for the veteran, and it really wouldn’t be breaking any balance, since the balance could be corrected by playing a bit more and accumulating the “reduce flame-sword 155 radius to 150”. The radius is small enough to provide a small advantage but still not make the person want to drop the game because he can’t catch up. Of course, you could make the radius eventually as large as 300, or shift it to any # down the line, and it wouldn’t matter because eventually you could acquire a stat drop to “minus” or “subtract” that advantage.

Edit: correction, a melee weapon that insta hits from a distance isn’t correct, how about just a regular nova. That way 1v1, there wouldn’t be as OP of an imbalance, but in a group it might for instance do very minor splash damage in a large radius. I think this is a better example of freedom of allocation.

Thus, the initial balance was there, and the balance will forever be there no matter how much depth and how much expand you put into the game through horizontal progression development 10 years down the line.

This is the metric of true horizontal progression, without vertical progression, while still adding depth, power, character progression and even improving the balance in a slope and eventually perfecting the game.

It is paradoxical, but it is possible, to progress vertically without vertical progression. It is up to the devs to assign the timeframe in which it takes to “catch” up to veterans 10 years down the line. And it’s really up to their freedom of choice what to set it at. The way it works is to once again make it so that the time it takes to loot something the veteran has that the guy who wants to catch up doesn’t eventually goes from taking a long time (lvl 1-80), then eventually less and less in a downwards slope so that he can still catch up and not feel sad (lvl 80 fixed meta-game). So this works for loot tables too. This way the catching up process becomes more moderate.

Once again, there’s no limit as to which the radius can expand to, it can expand all the way to 1,000 radius and hit people half way across the map for all the devs care. That is to give the said player who’s played 10 years longer the wealth advantage to someone who dropped the game 10 years ago.

This is because you can just subtract that radius to balance things out once again.

But there probably would be a limit, because you don’t want the guy being blasted away halfway across the map.

Of course, this would all have to be done in a downwards slope, so that eventually the person who dropped the game 10 years ago, can come back and still play for awhile and eventually catch up significantly with only slight disadvantages remaining.

This linear-diagonal downward slope ( and not a flat linear one) is the correct metric for horizontal planning instead of vertical linear progression.

Subtraction to keep #’s fixed and level (or in other words moderate) is also key instead of adding power to match/balance power.

Of course, the lvling process from 1-80 would still be just like ANet has it now, flat and moderate and linear using simple #‘s in order to make people have to complete a character and spend time on it and also feel a sense of achievement (This flat lvling process is the perfection of previous lvling models, wherein for some reason they preferred to make it so that the higher levels took exponentially longer to lvl up to. I could probably figure out why but I’m done.)

Ohhh, so you basically want to add more Horizonal progression, so veterans can keep buffing their power seemingly indefinately, with progression made easier for the jumbo catching up?

Fred Fargone.3127:

Get level 80, get full exotics. There, there’s the stop point. (Since legendaries don’t give more power, just skins)

And then comes ascended and who knows after that they might introduce something else too like Divine or something like that, and on and on we go

Yes Fred, you can buff power, while also balancing the game at the same time.

Subtraction is key to keep the power buffs able to be done, while still not really doing it at the same time and keeping the #’s always fixed at the cap which is what people want.

Generally it’s not good design practice to abstract away your core gameplay once the game is out. A range/radius factor is already done through traits in a more balanced way. Expectation has been met already and remodeling base gameplay in a more awkward imbalance way hopefully isn’t a developer’s design goal. So your idea isn’t really a suggestion for GW2 but more of an idealistic approach for a game you would want to play and I respect that.

You don’t think they can incorporate this, in the near future? I don’t think it’s unfeasible.

They set out planning to do this anyway, and now I’ve given them the formula, so have at you.

They already have the linear lvling process for regular lvl 1-80 cap, that is to apply moderate lvling. After that it is about applying the necessary metrics for what they are at the current stage of trying to evolve into, which is horizontal progression.

So at this stage, they need this.

This isn’t considered abstraction, it is more like applying correct metrics. Which most people consider to be a genuine practice and starting point nowadays in mathematics.

They have the initial metrics perfected, now they need the new metrics for horizontal progression, and I think this is a good start.

There is no way to progress vertically anymore, that path has been beaten down to the ground, if they were to revisit that path, they would fail.

This isn’t about what’s risky, vertical progression fails period and it aims to destroy all balance.

They have three choices: either just do nothing and keep their game as it is right now, play it safe somehow and just introduce minor vertical progression so that their game decays at a slower rate, or carefully try and progress in the new direction themselves. It’s up to them.

It should not be in the nature of human beings also to simply “settle for less”, they should always give it their all to try their best.

So gwcharr, I understand where you’re coming from, but never should a company strive for less, nor should they even settle for a safe amount (past examples have shown this to be very detrimental as well), they should try their best.

I don’t really see why this is necessary. It makes the hardcore player more powerful and the casual player will stay weak. Yes, they will…. I think it would segregate players too.
I also don’t think the way the game works should change as soon as you hit 80. That kinda goes against their design philosophy, as demonstrated by big fights at level 1, linearish leveling etc. They wanted the game to start at level 1, not 80.

If I understand it correctly (which I don’t think I do), this suggestion also makes skills behave in a somewhat arbitrary manner. “Skill #1 does THIS …but it could also do this, this or change to this if you’re level 80 and if you play long enough…” What this does is eliminate consistency and obfuscates things. I recall reading an article somewhere that they wanted players to not worry about crunching numbers too much (yes I know it still happens but look at WoW and a few other MMO’s), they wanted to keep it simple than what us regular MMO-ers were used to.

Not sure what else to say, I see that a great deal of thought has gone into this idea and while it’s probably not unfeasible in terms of being able to be done, I think it’s unfeasible in regard to the game’s original design and would just overpower the hardcore players.

I understand people want to progress at level 80 but I think it could be done in ways that wouldn’t be wildly exploited.

the idea that the game starts at lvl 80 (but honestly i think it should be capped off at lvl 100, round #’s are always slightly better), is the correct idea, the lvling process is just a means to get out to that branch-off, which ends up in a slope direction. The hardcore players will get more wealth, but it goes down in a linear slope (think diagonally). Eventually after some time, the wealth accumulation will be miniscule.

This makes it take a short amount of time, to get things the hardcore player has gotten within the span of say 1 year, within 2 years it would take linearly longer, but the gains for the hardcore player would also be equivalently shorter (due to this diagonal line). Within 5 years, it would be even more miniscule (but the key word here is moderate), within 10 years the gains by the hardcore player would be miniscule enough so that only small power changes would make him slightly more OP (but the key words here are perfecting the game’s balance). This also ties in very well with player-skill level which as a result of 10 years will have been practiced upon and trained very well (by then).

Also, this means eventually number-crunching will be reduced to next to nothing. It’s a process of solving, the player solves the bigger # issues, then he works down in a slope, and it’s satisfactory that way.

Lets break down their design fundamentals.

- horizontal leveling – time to cap decreased compared to older games
- level scaling – able to keep content challenging for all levels
- vertical progression – from level 1 to cap their is a progression slowly over time
- rewarding challenging content at cap – FoTM currently
- rewards – a constant push of better items through leveling by hearts, drops, and trade
- new abilities – rewarding character progression in smaller increments of time instead of long gaps
- small power gaps – power gains in smaller increments

What has been introduced to relieve the idea of being left behind?
Horizontal leveling, level scaling, rewards, new abilities, and small power gaps.

Now lets look at vertical progression from level 1 to cap.

- obtaining new abilities and gear – gaining more power
- constant changing content from leveling – the illusion of no grind, grind is in every game but content creates an illusion of it not being there.

What can we deduce from their concepts and player perception?
The game was never truly horizontal to begin with.
There’s nothing really wrong with vertical progression but there can be problems in the way it’s handled. Rewards for going back to older content isn’t satisfying enough, people usually want the best rewards for their time. This is something I hope will change eventually. The game teaches progression as people play but doesn’t provide the same experience at end game. So it’s possible Anet can add more outlets for people to progress their characters that they have plans for.

Interesting enough people are fine with the vertical progression to level cap and its grind. End game content just needs to be adjusted to account for the way people are comfortable playing the game. They just need to provide more opportunities for acquiring items at endgame that have a better illusion than grinding the same content like FoTM.

The illusion problem can be solved, the horizontal leveling as you put it, is just a mindset thing. I wouldn’t call it an illusion, people should find it fun to have to level a new character to max in order to break-off into horizontal content. Therefore they can max all characters, and still have a diagonal slope progression with each character. And in the end once they’ve progressed enough, they won’t feel obligated to progress an individual character even further because the gains in power would be miniscule, they’d be able to work on other characters. It might even be possible to get a character to the end of the diagonal slope directly and skip the in-betweens, but they’d have to figure out a solution for that (which involves a third element, degree, angle, indirect approach whatever you’d like to call it). It might not be possible, but I’m just providing a fundamental design here, and then I’m out. Got better things to do such as play the actual game.

All designs are 3rd-dimensional, it’s not as simple as 2-dimensional functions. Metrics are far more complicated than that and can even solve the 3rd dimension. The 3rd element is also the hardest to discern. And sometimes it can appear quite paradoxical, but in fact can be solved.

Any small drip of vertical progression just means it’s slowing down the tear, doesn’t solve the fundamental issue.

The grind can also be solved therefore by this downwards slope, it would be applied to loot such that the power changes would become smaller and smaller in a sense, there might be a 3rd element that can be applied here also such as the implementation of an off-chance that a low-level mob would instantaneously drop a legendary for example. But I don’t feel like thinking anymore, because this is frankly giving me a headache. They’ll have to think for themselves.

I already answered your question about the rewards for going back to older content not being equivalent to higher-mob drops in my Solving Vertical Progression Post, if you scan or use the find search thing. I’ll repost it here.

From this quote:

By the way, I made a post on the WoW forums a long time ago, concerning level scaling. I’m glad that ANet has incorporated this into their game thus far. But I believe it can be stretched even further than just an enjoyability factor for older content. Older content can give renewed loot and purpose. The higher level you are the more it scales to give you better chances to kill easy mobs to get higher-end loot matching your level. This plays on dynamics very well.

Furthering the abilities of the lvl-scaling innovation:

In order to renew and provide continued interest in older/lower-lvl mob areas permanently:

For instance, the drop rates would be modified so that they would be extremely low, however if a character is able to chain dynamic skills very well he could take advantage of those low lvl areas as a lvl 80 and gain more than the steady rate of drops offered by regular lvl 80 mobs. This is a generic play on dynamics. And it is also quite balanced. Skillful players will be rewarded accordingly, and less-skilled players will suffer a bit more, but this is generally how it is. As with any design work, the devs will balance such skill discrepancies out themselves so as to prevent balance from going through the roof. This is the concept of depth-design. The idea presented with “evening the playing field” as found in some previous game designs such as Starcraft 2 was incorrect because it eventually didn’t allow for skill progression at all. The way you even the playing field for more skilled and less skilled players is essentially just an ordinary balance problem, if highly skilled players are rewarded too much and it generates too large of a gap, that is just a mere balance problem. This is not really an issue.

As for the game not being horizontal to begin with, the moderate flat linear lvling approach is the horizontal starting point. As for their philosophy, I believe they made a post on that in the dev tracker, hopefully they’ll stay true to their word. They said that they planned on not doing the gear treadmill at all. But it seems they couldn’t find a solution, and now they’ve sneakily gone back on their word. That’s what it appears based on certain “character progression” threads they’ve made recently. They already have the underlying components down, if they wanted to change their perception and start working on a proper formula, I believe they can do it.

But as for it never being truly horizontal to begin with, I think you’re wrong on that point. They just need to erase the mistakes they’ve dealt themselves, and keep the cap fixed and then work on a proper formula to horizontally progress.

Once i’m done posting all this i’m outta here, because this is boring and it’s giving me tedium. I hope they read all this, the reason I posted all this was because I found GW2 devs to be competent, and they had the ability to carry it out directly. If anything they needed an uplifting boost in the right direction, but they have the ability to do what I can’t which is to carry out the details themselves. I know about the general direction in which to take things, but I’m not too clear on the details. So once again, I hope they read this if they don’t want to end up like Blizzard did, and eventually play way too greedy, and not appeal to their conscience.

Personally i think , the Ascended gear was a bad desicion. The game i thought, would be alot more like GW1 and alot less like any other MMO with non-stop progress/grind every 2-3months.

I like the addition of Dungeons, because of the way they are. I dont like the new gear grind though.

In a way , i agree with the OP that the character should stop progressing equip-wise and enjoy the world without the need to reequip a good balanced setup.

@Seithan
1 – the game has only 3 months, how can you really affirm that they will put more things on game every 2-3 months? You can´t, simply. They already told in reddity that ascended was a inicital concept idea withou time to implement in the launch of the game, not mora of the same but better.
2 – Any game has any form of grind, or else just give players everything they want anytime and get bored beacuse you have nothing to work for in the game. If you don´t want to work for something there are a lot of F2P and pirate game servers.
3 – When people stop wasting more time kittening about vertical progression and give more intelligent approachs on how to solve problems already in the game like annoying high life bosses without brains cells, unpopulated areas, dungeons bugs, unattractive dungeons, etc… in some time no one will ever remember this VP…

Fred Fargone.3127:

Umm… I misunderstood you, right?

Or do you really want the characters to stop developing at some point, which is happening already…
Get level 80, get full exotics. There, there’s the stop point. (Since legendaries don’t give more power, just skins)

Or, I misunderstood you, right?
How is that different? (Can you explain, since I am having hard time understanding the suggestion?)

Go play WOW if you want endless vertical progression. This is Guild Wars. See, in GW1 level capw as 20, and yet millions of people played that game for a long long time.

evolverzilla.2359:

@Seithan
1 – the game has only 3 months, how can you really affirm that they will put more things on game every 2-3 months? You can´t, simply. They already told in reddity that ascended was a inicital concept idea withou time to implement in the launch of the game, not mora of the same but better.
2 – Any game has any form of grind, or else just give players everything they want anytime and get bored beacuse you have nothing to work for in the game. If you don´t want to work for something there are a lot of F2P and pirate game servers.
3 – When people stop wasting more time kittening about vertical progression and give more intelligent approachs on how to solve problems already in the game like annoying high life bosses without brains cells, unpopulated areas, dungeons bugs, unattractive dungeons, etc… in some time no one will ever remember this VP…

VP is at the core of a lot of problems, including balance and economy. In fact, metrics can solve a lot of issues including artificial intelligence as well as possibly even making dungeon lay-outs more attractive (but that’s probably more of a design issue).

The thing is, VP is the fundamental problem that needs to be rectified. Don’t worry about the details yet, until you’ve rectified the fundamental issue.

The ANet manifesto believes that nothing is black or white, there is always a solution to everything. Horizontal progression might be harder to discern at first, but if you get the entrance right, everything follows.

VP is not some mystery, and evolverzilla you are thinking a bit too simply. There is a 3rd-dimension to everything, and nothing should ever be considered plainly. If things in the world were as simple as black and white, then there wouldn’t be the issue of Google having killer metrics that noone can solve. Math is far more complicated than that.

It might be true that any game has any form of grind, but there’s also a way to solve this problem at a higher level. That’s the idea.

Your idea of intelligent approach doesn’t really apply here, because you’re suggesting an intelligent approach only involves thinking on a planar level. The world has depth, the planet is 3-dimensional.

The idea is that the sciences are being carried in a new direction that revolves around an initial correct starting point. You can apply heuristics or initial search functions all you want but you’ll never arrive at the answer without correct initial metrics. Only with a correct initial start, can you develop further on an accurate basis. If you’re trying to still apply the old science method of discovery, that’s the thing, you’re only still discovering and you’d never find the answer because your starting basis is one of observation without actually having the core mechanic realized yet. This is the problem with discrete mathematics as the universe is infinite and cannot be solved by mere application of surface observation. This is where theory is more important than application. By having correct initial metrics, you already have the answer, and from there you can work outwards in correcting the errors from a correct starting basis. The errors would be much more far and few in-between, as well as having less of a negative impact, if you try to brute force it, it’s a lot harder. This is why ANet considers depth of game-play to be more of a balance issue than detailed design work.

This is essentially how game design works, and if you were to try to build the game up with no inherent direction, then you would get the situation where your development process would involve nothing but balance issues and the struggle for correcting errors endlessly. With the correct starting point ANet has already developed for itself, its future outlook is more of one of creative development, rather than bug-fixing. They’d still have to correct balance issues, but it’d be in the process of also creatively developing the game. So it’s more of a brighter and positive outlook.

(made a minor edit to one of the above post sections) Edit: correction, a melee weapon that insta hits from a distance isn’t correct, how about just a regular nova. That way 1v1, there wouldn’t be as OP of an imbalance, but in a group it might for instance do very minor splash damage in a large radius. I think this is a better example of freedom of allocation.

The general idea behind depth design is to eventually balance the game, the game starts out flat and 2-dimensional and in the process of adding more depth you’re also balancing the game by growing it. Instead of breaking balance, adding depth seeks to perfect the game while also adding layers upon layers of depth.