Guild Wars 2

This is just a post to highlight some of the problems or balance issues that the current game-play results in for the casual gamer. Before anything else I want to state that I do not want to see GW2 turn into WOW, but I might use it as an example or counter point to hopefully make things a bit more clear. WOW does do some things well.

A lot of these things are actually interrelated, so I won’t really push the relationships between the ideas much, but I’ll probably at least make mention of them.

This is all partly personal observation and opinion being a somewhat casual player, but also reflects forum posts and in game conversation and chatter. If you have further or alternate suggestions or new things that might need addressed, feel free to add.

It was mentioned when this was posted before that casual and lower-skill are used somewhat interchangeably. To an extent that is true, casual players are simply more likely to be of lower skill.

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     1     Solo vs. Group
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There is no question about it at all, playing with a group is much easier and vastly more efficient than playing solo. In many games there is a trade off made if you want to group. Faster group kills means sharing loot and maybe experience. In GW2 this is obviously not the case, which is a good thing. I hope it doesn’t change.

The problem is that there is no adjustment or balance involved. A lot of casual players will play solo or be in casual guilds that tend to group a lot less often. The result is that not only do casual players have a more drawn out game experience that feels more grindy, but the more hardcore players can get an experience that feels laughably trivial and easy (just watch some videos to see large groups steam roll areas with 0 challenge or slow down). This is bad in both cases.

One possible solution would be "tag" adjustments. At its simplest this would be adjusting mob stats according the number of players that have it tagged. The result would be solo players capable of a playing at a brisker pace because they are given a bit of a break and don’t need to contend with even trash mobs that can take a not insignificant amount of work to take down. And larger groups would get a more balanced and challenging experience because the mobs get more difficult for each person that tags it. (This doesn’t mean 1:1 scaling, meaning 1 tag is three times easier than 3 tags, but at least some difference)

There could be limits put in place, and exceptions made to keep things from resulting in always feeling exactly the same. For example some mobs might have a limited range of (2-7) tag scaling, so soloing will still feel slightly tougher, but not as bad as now, and large groups can still feel more powerful, but not as overpowered as now. I think the result would be improved game-play overall and a slightly more consistent difficulty for any given mob. Other exception would be things like big event bosses or whatever that either have their own scaling or simply don’t scale at all.

I am not entirely sure how mobs are balanced (the general consensus is time-to-kill vs loot/exp gained is balanced for around 3 player groups), but this would be a help even to normal players that are in the "middle zones" (or at odd hours) where players are a lot more scarce and just coming across other players and making ad hoc teams to kill mobs is much much less likely to happen than in the beginning or end zones.

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     2     Level Adjustment
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As a concept, this is a great idea and works pretty well. In practice there are some issues that could be addressed.

The first issue is strongly related to #1. In games like WOW, a casual player that wants a bit of a break from game-play that requires a lot of attention or challenge can simply drop down the zone or mob levels a bit. And in fact if they are less skilled, they may just play in areas below their level to avoid dying so much (even it results in slower leveling or fewer good drops).

In GW2 this is just not possible. While in theory a player is supposed be slightly over the power/level of the mobs when scaled, the actual difference in challenge (especially for less skilled or casual players) is completely unnoticeable and even sometimes HARDER because of how the scaling works. (see posts about low level players doing better in dungeons than scaled down players) In fact a large majority of the people I see running around in areas are scaled down, suggesting that for players who don’t power level or whatever, it is already necessary to play in one of those scaled down areas even if it only helps a tiny amount. Of course a lot of those people may just be farming or completing a zone.

I realize changes in this would probably complicate the feature significantly and require a lot of code, nevertheless it seems that a majority of the vocal players have an issue of some kind with the feature. How exactly that reflects the overall player base is anyone’s guess.

One possible solution would be to make this more variable or optional and have scaled loot/exp/etc reflect that. At it’s most basic this would mean the more scaled to a zone you are, the more scaled the loot/exp is to your actual level. So scaling as it is now would work much as it does now (let’s call it 100% scaled) but you could “turn it down” or even off, and suffer the consequences in return for less challenge. An example (totally made up and inaccurate):
100% (current): 90% exp equivalency for mobs and harvesting, 70% level appropriate loot
50%: 50% exp equivalency mobs, 30% harvest, 40% loot drops
10%: 10% exp mobs, 5% harvest, 3% loot
off: 0 exp scaling, no level scaled loot

The big problem with that would be high levels helping out low levels, but you could do as WOW does then, and just make mobs killed by high level players give no exp to low level players. For events, this might mean that you can’t even damage related mobs unless in the 70-100% scaled range or something. Again, complicated I know, but that is a rough idea and likely can be simplified or explained much more clearly.

This is a major point for catering to low-skill players. In order for a game to be massive you have to recognize that half of the players are going to be below average skill and make sure that the game is playable for them. You don’t even necessarily need to be able to turn off scaling entirely and may get by with something like 70%-100% scaling with scaled rewards, but low skill players need to be able to feel like they are still having fun. I think of myself as slightly above average with no problem soloing, but have friends and relatives that are getting extremely frustrated with the difficulty, one older person having quite already because they felt there was no fun to be had with the difficulty. There is a reason games often offer an easy mode.

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     3     Crafting
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Put simply, it is nearly impossible to level even a single craft to be level appropriate, it just gets worse the higher your level. It is possible to reduce the gap by spending all of your money, but the fact is, casual players have less money; they die more from being less skilled or in huge groups, and don’t take the time or research ways to game or take advantage of the TP for profit.

One possible way to fix this is to change the crafting table quite a bit. Make simple items craftable at lower levels and with fewer or lower tier crafting materials, while rarer more powerful items need more skill. This is somewhat how it is now, but not quite. As it is, simple and advanced items are still in the same tier, just off by 50. The new way would break out of that and have simple items tier up on their own and advanced on their own.

Example of New tiers:
Simple:
1)0-25 (tier 1 mats)
2)25-50 (tier 2 mats)
3)50-75 (tier 3 mats)
4)75-100 (tier 4 mats)

Master:
1)50-150 (tier 1 mats)
2)150-250 (tier 2 mats)
3)250-350 (tier 3 mats)
4)350+ (tier 4 mats)

Obviously that can be changed or whatever and for simple items you could even require lower tier mats if wanted, but what it means is that you are able to at least craft basic if slightly inferior items for your class without putting a lot of focus on leveling up the craft by either grinding or buying mats.

Special recipes could fall anywhere on the spectrum to reflect their power level. I have noticed that the special recipes can be soul bound, and if that is on acquire, then a lot of the special recipes are simply worthless as is, except maybe on a much later alt that has access to a lot of money and mats to keep up craft level with toon level. Otherwise, by the time someone can craft the soulbound on acquire item, they are too high a level for it to be of any use.

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     4     Event Notification
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Notification is odd, sometimes showing up farther than expected, often showing only when almost on top of the event. For casual players who don’t look things up online, find nice long chains (or even know an event is part of chain), and figure out which ones are "good" for repeating, events can be a bit of a let down.

There are several things here. First is the notification. It would be very nice for more casual players (and maybe this goes for other people) to have much better notification of events. Make the range they show up in larger so they are easier to find, and maybe even make the more special or bigger events be zone wide notification. A few extra lines of collapsed events in the top right can’t hurt much, and would make finding events and knowing they are happening much easier.

The other thing is event chains. It might be nice to have a clear indication when an event is in an event chain so they know to stick around for what happens next, or if they don’t need to bother following npcs wherever they are running to.

The above would also help with players interested in lore and story; it would make it easier for players to follow npc conversations and know when they need to stick around or follow in order to get the storyline. If there were some way to make it more obvious an event was about to happen, or get the story behind an event chain already in progress that would help story folks as well, though I’m not sure it would be feasible, and having to look up starting actions and story on the net may be inevitable.

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     5     WvW
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This one is just a case of a very poorly introduced feature. Many of the casual players I run across completely ignore this. PvP is somewhat self explanatory, and is basically just running around fighting other people anyways, so dropping people in without a lot of explanation is not as big a deal, even the idea of holding and capturing the little zones is probably easy enough to pick up, but the same is not true of WvW.

A very easy solution to this might be inserting required WvW like events into the story-lines fairly early on. They could happen on completely scripted and separate WvW like instances, but be reflections of actual WvW. There needs to be introductions for pretty much everything. The reason and how to capture each of the different types of locations, escorting, seige building, and all the little stuff involved.

WvW is a great inclusion, but right now it is basically dropping players into a whole other game without any kind of information at all (except what they can nag out of other players already doing things) and in general is just not an easy pick up for the casual players even though they should be able to play WvW just fine without needing to be hardcore.