Guild Wars 2

To start this off, I was reading some articles and this one really caught my attention.

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/8021/page/1

The TL;DR of this is that more and more MMOs are focusing less on the “Group” and more on the “Me.”

Back in the Everquest days, there were entire zones that you could not get through alone. These situations forced players to rally together in parties just to explore the world.

While the needs of a solo-player are important and should not be shunned, what Ms. Gonzales states in her article is that too much independence can be bad for the community.

After all, the entire reason we play an MMO is to play with other people and not just ourselves. We have Skyrim for that.

I feel as if this article directly applies to Guildwars 2 the most. At its heart, Guildwars 2 has all of its systems completely built on independence. You don’t need anyone else to heal you, you can heal yourself. You have your own personal story. You don’t need to group up and interact with people to take part in large zerg events.

The only times that you are REALLY forced to group are dungeons, SPVP team matches, and guild missions.

As we have seen in the dungeon forums, dungeon running groups have been dominated by speed run groups that stack their groups with classes that offer the best individual performance (as in, what class can perform the most roles at once independent of another player).

There is no reason to play with other people. I don’t need someone to heal me, I can dodge attacks on my own. I can deal my own damage. I can do my own personal story and never interact with another player to finish it. I can craft all my gear across all the professions on my own without help from someone else. When I run dungeons I don’t expect people to heal me or do anything for me but carry THEIR OWN weight.

So this mentality has led to a very selfish community bent on personal performance, individual achievements, how much one can get out of solo play.

I can see that Anet has been trying to release content that forces players to work together. Tequatl, the uninstanced toxic tower, greatly increased pvp rewards for team queue…

But the problem is, Guildwars 2’s core mechanics are completely based on player independence.

I look back now at roles, at dedicated healers, at players that contributed something that no one else could, at the times that I had to go to a jeweler in WoW to upgrade my gear and exchange I would make him armor.

Those little nuances that force people together, that help people make friends, that build communities are just not there.

So how do you fix it? How do you promote people to do what they should be doing in an MMO: playing together and not just thinking about themselves and their own individual performance?

Sometimes I look back at some of those roles, those forced dependencies, those times you couldn’t do something without bringing that one guy that has a particular skill set. And you know, maybe those systems are not bad. Maybe being forced to play with other people in a massive multiplayer online game is a good thing!

Maybe ANET gave us too much, made us capable of too much as players, and as a result they have destroyed the founding cinderblocks that allow tightly knit communities to foster. Because I can do anything I need to without YOUR help. So why should I party? Why should I do anything that involves another person when I can do it faster myself?

I mean look at all the solo lupicus players that are glorified. Where are the videos of the TEAMs that did well? Where are the moments where we pointed out that, wow that one guy performed his one job really well to support the group?

More importantly how to we fix it and help people play together and break away from this selfish mentality?

I dont miss the dedicated roles. In the previous mmo i played i always hated that i had to party with other people in order to lvl up, so if i played a dps i needed to find a tank to help me or a healer, in that mmo the groups were made up to 7 players and you got double xp if you had the full group, but usually most of then were just afk auto-following while 2 or 3 were really doing the hard work.

And your comment about the dungeons, every class bring different utilities to the group if played well, but the problem is that the game lacks challenging enough content that can be completed without just stacking and dpsing. But i prefer the stacking tactics that we have here than the old “stacking behind the boss while the tank is facing it” or stay hidden in the botton of the room if you were a healer.

So, to make team work more relevant in this game we need more challenging content and more competition, maybe some kind of gvg with leaderboards, where every sunday we had a competition and the best ranked guilds of each server get rewards, maybe some kind of hall of monuments rewards that can be unlocked for the week if your guild does well in gvg.

Casmurro.9046:

I dont miss the dedicated roles. In the previous mmo i played i always hated that i had to party with other people in order to lvl up, so if i played a dps i needed to find a tank to help me or a healer, in that mmo the groups were made up to 7 players and you got double xp if you had the full group, but usually most of then were just afk auto-following while 2 or 3 were really doing the hard work.

And your comment about the dungeons, every class bring diferente utilities to the group if played well, but the problem is that the game lacks challenging enough content that can be completed without just stacking and dpsing. But i prefer the stacking tactics that we have here than the old “stacking behind the boss while the tank is facing it” or stay hidden in the botton of the room if you were a healer.

So, to team work more relevant in this game we need more challenging content and more competition, maybe some kind of gvg with leaderboards, where every sunday we had a competition and the best ranked guilds of each server get rewards, maybe some kind of hall of monuments rewards that can be unlocked for the week if your guild does well in gvg.

The problem is the moment Arena.net tries to introduce greater challenge, the forums alight with complaints that it’s “too hard” and “not fun.”

At the end of the day, the issues can be traced nigh entirely to player-side problems. People who are entirely reward driven above anything else, and feel that other players are merely hindrances to those rewards they deserve.

I think this game is too “friendly” and encourages too much cooperation among players. You dont have to compete for loot or kill or nodes, this game lacks grief.

I think to solve that we need to add grief to the game, maybe add a new open world pvp map with tier 7 nodes like dragonite and stuff, and make then not shareable, so if you want to craft you ascended you need to compete for it. Stop with that cooperative nonsense that is the world events and stuff, we need more grief!

^ You do that and there will be even LESS incentive to group up. Why bother grouping up with someone to fight your way to a node if you know that only one of you will get to harvest from the node or collect the reward? Do you really want to go back to the days of boss camping?

You also said earlier that the problem is that the game is too easy because dungeons etc. can be easily completed by stacking and DPSing. In my opinion, that’s a symptom of the problem, but in the OPPOSITE direction. It’s BECAUSE things are too hard to complete with normal builds that players are moving towards the “DPS is king” mentality. When the safest, simplest method is just to kill the enemy before he has a chance to really do anything, that’s exactly what people will do. Even the new Tequatl encounter suffers from this; people will make use of Embers and other summoned monsters to deal extra damage to Tequatl during his burn phases, and often this is the only thing that tips the battle in the player’s favour.

If content were even EASIER, that you could just round up random strangers from LFG, don’t give a skritt about what builds they’re running or class combinations, and still know you have a decent shot at completing the dungeon, you’d see a lot more people willing to experiment.

The ideal solution here would be to have content that is challenging, but not heavily tilted in favour towards one particular gear-style. I would like to see various bosses with unusual mechanics that would foil the traditional Zerk builds; bosses that are immune to normal damage and can only be damaged the more different types of conditions they have on them, for example, or bosses that are just survival challenges – the boss deals a ton of damage, has a constantly renewing debuff while you’re in his room, and cannot be harmed at all, but he will die in 5 mins. The goal is simply to see if you can survive against his onslaught long enough.

Perhaps the initial focus could be on providing incentives, like increased XP/loot/gold drop rate if you’re in a party. Improvements to the guild interface/system along with implementing guild halls and alliances would also help. These sorts of changes could pave the way for new and challenging content.