Guild Wars 2

It’s been a long time…

I would like to begin this by saying that I do adore Gw2 and Arena Net for all their hard work and dedication into creating and maintaining this game that I escape to after hard days at work. I will attempt to keep this as compressed as possible but beware you have just stumbled onto a massive wall of text. Enjoy and excuse spelling and grammar mistakes, I don’t have 3 weeks to do these types of things.

Recently at work, I was part of a group meeting that had a specific goal to improve some processes at the site. We used a very interesting way of analyzing things and locating Issues and positives. I would like to share this process with all of you without actually posting the flow chart which I don’t believe I can do. This is mostly in the hope that it will greatly aid the CDI process and even aid the player base in formulating issues to present to the dev’s. This may even help the development team if they do not already have something similar in place.

The concept is simple but in practice is a bit more difficult to successfully pull off. It’s extremely easy to simply point a finger without searching deeper and that’s what this process attempts to prevent. We’ll begin from the top and I will use examples which may or may not contain fabricated information.

We’ll start with a basic high level concept that will help to guide and define all discussion and decisions after. A simple mission statement and a short list will suffice, so here’s an example.

*Dungeons *
Dungeons are a piece of content that will strive to challenge players with new foes and puzzles they may not encounter anywhere else. Our goal is to provide difficult content that is rewarding upon completion however we would prefer to avoid alienating too much of the player base.

What do we need to successfully create a successful Dungeon:
1. Challenge
2. Motivation
3. Depth
4. Accessibility

What we need to avoid:
1. Alienation
2. Trivialization
3. Obtuse Mechanics

This is a semi workable outline to draw from, and a goal to set future discussions upon. Later when specific ideas come into play they can be molded inside of this “box” if you will, to attain the desired result. The take away here is that a dungeon should be a challenge and rewarding to players, it should provide motivation to attempt to play this content and succeed while maintaining some level of accessibility to the player base. A dungeon should not exclude players or drive them away with overly complex puzzles or battles, nor should it be trivialized thus making the rewards and motive much less impactfull. It also should not contain anything that does not mesh with the rest of the game that would punish or frustrate players for not instantly understanding such a strange and new concept.

From the above we move to a lower level, reminding ourselves that we are not yet ready to start throwing out ideas or make suggestions on what to fix or what the core issues are. This level is somewhat like drawing out basic directions on a map. Point A leads to Point B.. We’ll continue with Dungeons just for the sake of ease. Here’s the continuation and example.

How do players interact with the dungeon?
Steps in order:
1. Player enters dungeon
2. Player experiences short narrative to guide them
3. Player Continues into dungeon and has first encounter
4. Player Continues and experiences another short narrative
5. Player picks “path” to experience
6. Player begins selected path
7. First encounter
8. Second encounter
9. First Boss encounter
10. Third encounter
11. Second boss encounter
12. First Puzzle/Task
13. Fourth encounter
14. Final Boss
15. Player receives Reward
16. Player exits.
Similar to the previous mission statement we keep things very brief and to the point. Details can lead on tangents and then to false answers as to what the real problems are. All we want is a basic map of how we think it SHOULD happen or how it was planned to happen.

From this point, with a partial map completed, its prudent to turn to those who do or partake on a regular bases, the thing that you are attempting to study. Collecting feed back, in this case from the players (both casual and hard core) is very important. The majority of the information you collect will not be added to the above list but should none the less be saved. Look for things that are inconsistent or fall under the negatives/avoids from the mission statement.
An example would be if you asked a player what they do at the first Boss in Ascalonian Catacombs (Spider Queen) and they tell you that sometimes they battle her in the open but most often they pull her to a location which makes the fight much much easier, this would be a red flag for Trivialization and should be noted to bring up later.

Returning to the process, take a step back and look at your gathered information from the user base, are you missing anything in your original map that should be added? Is there possible added steps or consequences you never considered or accounted for? Bear in mind that you still need to maintain somewhat high level and basic. So let’s return to our example and add and remove one or two things.

1. Player enters dungeon
2. Player experiences short narrative to guide them
3. Player Continues into dungeon and has first encounter
4. Player Continues and experiences another short narrative
5. Player picks “path” to experience
6. Player begins selected path
7. First encounter
8. Second encounter
9. Third encounter
10. First Boss encounter
11. Fourth encounter
12. Second boss encounter
13. First Puzzle/Task
14. Final Boss
15. Player receives Reward
16. Player exits.
Ok, so now we have a much more accurate map of what takes place in our dungeon in its current state.

The change above would say that players are going off the intended path, perhaps for more loot or to remove a section of the path to increase the speed of completion. In this example we’ll say that Players are moving off the path to Kill an extra champion for loot and then skipping a later encounter because it does not provide loot or is not fun for them. Also note that we do not list the reasons why players are doing such things, we are only keeping it basic and telling it how it is.

So far so good, we’ve now got the basics covered. These are, What do we want? What is Happening Now; and the additional information gathered. Depending on the scope of the task, this may be the time to return to the subject in question yourself or with some of the users to take note of where the majority of time is being spent, how long each step takes as well as how quickly players can complete/abuse anything. It may also be necessary to take more exact notes on certain bugs or exploits as well as player base percentages that do things certain ways. Any information gathered here should be tacked into the appropriate slots or between slots to better show the pathway.

This would appear a bit like this

1. Player enters dungeon (5 players/ 4 minutes )
2. Player experiences short narrative to guide them (5 Players/ 0-5 minutes)
3. Player Continues into dungeon and has first encounter (5 Players/ 1-8 minutes)
4. If players Fail ^ 50% Exit dungeon, If players succeed See step 5.
5. Player Continues and experiences another short narrative (5 players/ 2 minutes)
6. Player picks “path” to experience (5 players 30seconds – 2 minutes)
7. If players Pick path One, see Step…

Obviously its grown a bit, and isn’t the full list, but we’re going to move on.

We’re now reaching the final stages and issues should now be much more obvious and easy to spot, many of them may have been obvious from the get go but new ones that may not have been considered may also begin to pop up. Some of those new issues may pertain or be tied to other issues. While not advised, it may be that you need to go back a step and add further information into your list/map to capture everything properly. Now, it’s time to put all of these together. This is the stage where we can point out what we feel are issues but should still refrain from Solution discussion. Things will get more detailed on our list/map now , So lets get down to the example. Still on the dungeon it may look something like this.

Step 1: Players have difficulty forming parties for current dungeon
Step 5: Players exploit boss to speed up encounter/ Players find too challenging when not exploited/ Players Skip due to high risk with little reward/

This above should note the Issue and a potential short blurb as to Why it is occurring. We look back to step one, our goals of Wants/Don’t Wants to provide the blurbs behind the actions. Player Skips is an Issue, it is currently breaking the Not Want of Trivialization as well as the want of Challenge And Motivation.

Now is the final Step, Take all of your issues and list them out. Preferably on a separate area or list. We’re going to begin Prioritizing and combining them under umbrellas with our goals that we began with. You may have a lot of duplicates or things that are happening due to the same issue types, these are the things you want to funnel together as they can often all be solved as a unit by fixing one issue which is more effective that treating them as separate things. Ultimately you should end up with something looking a little bit similar to ….

Players Skip Content:
Players Abuse Exploits:
Players cannot locate parties for content:
Players Find Content not challenging:
Players avoid Dungeon:

Now, we bring in the original goals and start asking Why? We’ll be asking Why a lot until we can find what the core issues are. It may turn out that you can further combine some of these issues are you go, for example from the above ^ “Players Cannot locate Parties” is directly linked to “Players Avoid Dungeon” and will contain a shared core issue and are not two separate issues.

Let’s continue off those two to the final product, without much thought when asking “Why cant players find parties?” you could easily say that “well, no one does it.” When asking “Why don’t players do this dungeon?” it’s easy to throw it back as say “Because they cannot find a group.” But that’s ultimately unhelpful. By searching our goals and Map, we look at the final issues and try to look at them from a different perspective. Let’s walk through the process rather quickly…

We ask “Why Do players avoid this dungeon?” we can check the consensus to see what the underlying issue is. If the dungeon is much more difficult than others, then players may avoid it. “But why would players stray away from simply difficult content?” Players may see it as too challenging and cannot complete it, or the reward for the time investment does not feel sufficient to the majority of the population. We then ask “Why does the Risk Reward not seem sufficient?” ,and may ultimately arrive at the fact that other dungeons provide much less of a challenge, but the same reward level.
This is the bottom line core issue behind players being unable to play the content which was caused by a lack of interest, caused by the lack of MOTIVATION to work harder for the same reward that others can receive with much less effort. And attention can be turned in this direction rather than in another.

A suggested fix may be to lower the rewards for the other dungeon, or to significantly raise those of the current or a combination. This can be combined with other fixes to get a dungeon back up to where it should be.

TL;DR
There isn’t one, go back to the top and learn you a book. :P

Note: I may use the above later this weekend to fully show how this can work and involve the forums and community here to get it done. Suggestions on topics would be appreciated and any questions can be posted below. I’ll do my best to answer them

Ciao, Hope this was at least informative <3

Nice read. Sounds like a methodical way of doing things. Sounds repeatable too. Yeah make a copy and rebuild those design layouts and squash those bugs fellow anet guys. And gals.

It actually is highly repeatable, for the example above on the final conclusion this process can be repeated with the Reward system or on the other dungeon / dungeons to remove a lot of guess work that goes into decisions about how or what to change.

It’s just important to remain as arbitrary as possible.