Guild Wars 2

Hello,

I’m writing this in order to express my current feelings about the design philosophy of GuildWars 2. There’ll be a TL;DR at the end of this post, for those who don’t want to read the “why” and “how” but the “what”.

First, let me introduce myself as an experienced player who has about 1800 hours played so far (way more in GuildWars 1), aswell as having a bit of experience on strategic game design after release in terms of marketing and quality. This doesn’t mean my opinion counts more than anybody else’s, but i could be finding core issues others dont immediatly see. I’ll try to keep this as simple and objective as possible though. Oh, and i’m no native speaker, so please bear me.

Let’s get it going.
As much as i appreciate the terms “living world” and “living story”, i dislike the way it was implemented. Since forming a living, changing world through various, quick updates is currently a major selling point of GuildWars 2, it’s obvious to spend ressources in it in order to keep it working. Yet, it could be a mistake to put so much weigth on this pillar, since its stability is dependant on user acceptance and each player’s personal flavour.
In my opinion there’s flaw in how this living world is beeing realized, as result of a possible misinterpretation of the players desires. What sounds like a “cool idea”, is in fact a world that has a chance to keep people fascinated as long as they’re following and liking the story, read: as long as they don’t miss anything and enjoy it, they will keep playing. The downside: Everyone who doesn’t enjoy a single chapter, misses something, gets bored, or for whatever reason decides to not participate, is beeing excluded from not only this particular content, but from all of the content normally would be existing in that area.
The misinterpretation of players desires shows as follows: Given the player likes new content, that means updates at all, he would likely prefer the enhancement of either quality or quantity of whatever he bought the game for, for example “i like open world, i wish to play more areas”. or “i like events, i want more world bosses”. The word “more” here means the player wants to have access to more choice to do. this is a very important point in my opinion. Removing content, temporary or forever, means removing choice. this is especially dangerous for whatever is popular, but also for the less popular.

As a result, the idea of achieving a real living changing world through removal of exisiting, popular or non-popular leads to bad feedback among the players. Worst of all, they accuse the living world – the major pillar of GW2.
As more and more people get unsatisfied, reputation of updates in general sinks and every politician will know – a bad reputation is difficult to lose. A bad reputation on advance is fatal for updates.

Let me draw you an image (keep in mind it’s an image, and never 100% accurate)
You and your guys go to your favourite restaurant in the lunch break, just like everyday. Some of you love the pizza, some others love pasta, you yourself are a bit different and like the risotto most. That day is different though. The waitress arrives, you order, and for some reason the waitress tells you there’s no more risotto on the menu. Instead, you can have some fish. You really love risotto, but since there’s no, you’re okay with the fish. Your friends order the usual. Once the pizza arrives, there’s fish on it. And in the pasta. Well, okay. Some of them don’t like it, leave it. You really enjoyed your fish. So much, you come back the next day and order it again. “Nope”, says the waitress. “but you can have our random fractal-box with a chance of fish in it.”

Another issue with the current update system is the clearly missing focus on severe, major problems the game has. Some of them are currently beeing adressed, as a “feature pack”. There are problems i’m sure of having been reported thousands of times, that still were not adressed to this date. Since I’m not certain of what actually will be in the upcoming 4/15 patch, and do certainly not like to repeat what other people already posted, i’m just going to post two examples in different areas of what are major issues :

• You’re playing a ranger. Your axe auto attack bounces off a yellow mob, causing it to attack you. It also bounces of dead bodies on the floor instead of your enemies.
• You log in the first time. You create a character, chose your race, class, your storylines, so on. Enter game, fine. Sooner or later you’ll ask yourself: “how did those choices affect my character? Did i spend enough attention on my personal story?” Or even: “Should i have chosen fire element and balthazar to deal more damage?”

So basically it seems the focus of updates seems to be alot on quantity instead of quality. Since the game released, many bugs were fixed, many improvements were made, that’s right. Not going to be unfair here. Yet, for a game as big as GuildWars 2 it’s not remotely ACCEPTABLE that, after almost two years, there are really basic bugs and missing announced features that might not be breaking the game like the ones in the example, but show blatantly that there are flaws in the game. As a merchant, i’d especially keep an eye on the tidyness of the entrance of my store, not only the quantity of items, or the amount of banners on the sidewalk.
The less flaws you show ingame, the less people will be leaving because of irritation.

One major reason seems to be the lack of perspective in the game design. Without having attended to any design meeting at ArenaNet, I tend to think many design decisions on game release were written in stone, like if they were a ne plus ultra and could not be improved ever. This especially contradicts to the quality method of iteration.

… Which leads me over to iteration. It’s a powerful, yet time consuming tool to use to achieve maximum quality. You’ve proven it works for a game like GuildWars 2. Yet the use could in my opinion be improved by increasing the speed of changes. I see your two-week updates and ask myself how much was changed in iteration-heavy areas like character and skill balance, and mostly i fail to detect a single change. In reality, effective changes are made too rarely to even notice a break of habits due to any change. I’m not going to point anything out but again a few examples that will make my point:

• Ranger pets got their love in about 829 patches. None had an effect on meta.
• Turrets are most commonly used as blast finishers instead of turrets you deploy. No patch renamed them to “deployable TNT”.
• Guardian weapons – not used since the army of the dead in TA 3021.
  (I’m sorry for the hyperboles, the text was getting annoyingly objective.)

Too few patches changed the meta significantly. I think i dont need to point out why a change of the meta is good for the economy and therefore the gem selling revenue, if that is an argument for you.
Yet, there’s some hope arising when I see what’s coming up with the update of 4/15. I think most of us players hope so.

… Nevertheless, this upcoming “feature update” feels like a beautyful, empty box. It happens to have major game fixes rather than active features. Mostly either things that should have been in since release, or were major issues since release, or just arguable changes that do not provide addtional features.

I’d like to point out some examples again:

• The reduction of clumsyness in PvP, especially buildmaking features. this should be in since lauch, along with a still missing GW1 build saving system. Hard to believe you needed years after release to develop this.
• The megaserver system announcement was well promoted, but failed to answer major questions that arises: How will the increased loading time for each map be adressed? Does the server management profit from it? Why are we players not allowed to decide which kind of people we want to play with? (looking at megabosses which people killed only on some servers regularly.) In the end, this led to people be thinking they’re treated like idiots. Bad reputation for updates!

The things I’d really be calling big features would be the wardrobe, the new traits and the pvp reward tracks. they’re enhancement for the existing system. Changes like balance changes, runes&sigils, accont bound WXP and similar are needed chanegs, but not features.

I’m not saying it’s bad to have the major flaws of the game fixed. They just shouldn’t be called features. Even on a marketing point of view it’s not good to disappoint your customers. Especially when user satisfaction is such an important factor, which directly increases revenue of gem selling. As for that i hope for as much revenue for ArenaNet as possible, since they’re providing me a great world to spend my spare time in.

Kind regards

TL;DR:

• Removing existing content is usually bad
• Game has major design flaws that need to be adressed since launch. This decreases player, read: customer satisfaction.
• Too few updates, too few iteration.
• Flaws in 4/15 update.
  _

edit: typo.

I agree, other mmos have single updates that are as large as all the updates in guild wars 2 up to this point. The living story has had a lot of updates but very few of them have had any features, fixes, or lasting content other than skins. I do like the idea of a lot of the changes but overall the features update feels to me like a way to make gems more valuable. By increasing scarcity in more items and reducing the amount of gold players can earn, which in turn makes it more grindy to attain things. This makes me think anet will not spend time on anything unless they think it will some how make them money no matter how good the change would be for the game.

I agree, certainly with the “no change of meta” part.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I think your post would be more appropriate if you spoke more for yourself, than the whole playerbase. I don’t feel the same way you do.

i only generalized where i actually KNOW it’s like this. This means i didnt express anything but facts.

Some of the things you stated as fact, I have never come across. For instance, ‘The downside: Everyone who doesn’t enjoy a single chapter, misses something, gets bored, or for whatever reason decides to not participate, is beeing excluded from not only this particular content, but from all of the content normally would be existing in that area.’ If I didn’t want to partake in the Scarlet Invasions, I certainly wasn’t excluded from the map. Same with most of the other updates. Only a few used a whole map, such as the destruction of LA.

‘Area’ doesn’t necessarily mean whole map. I’ll use the krait tower as example. Whoever liked the area for its events did in fact lose access to them, and I’m not speaking of other people, but from a logic standpoint. Same goes for the lvl 80 etherblade dungeon in Twilight Arbor, which got implemented in exchange for path 3. forward up, afair.

Regardless, everyone has their own opinion, and should express it. But, never speak for others without express permission, don’t you agree?

As I said, I’m not only speaking for myself but from a objective perspective with logic arguments. I don’t see any reason not to do so. It’s not a personal belief that one plus one equals two.