Guild Wars 2

How different would the game be if you had to run from city to city vs teleporting? Let’s say you can only waypoint/teleport to your race home city. Would the player base venture out or stay in one area? What would happen to LA? If you died you would be forced back to your city. Would it encourage team play? Think WvW. What if PvE played like WvW.

What do you guys think would happen to the game?

I Can see it in the NPE 2.0 WP’s are confusing to new players, so they are being removed… Don’t give Anet any Bad Ideas, they come up with plenty themselves.

As it stands, such a change wouldn’t do anything other perturb players. The game was designed to eliminate such “inconveniences” and has done so in big ways…making a WP change as you describe would signify nothing and only spawn (rightful) complaints.

ANet has a bad habit of reversing established game design elements, while some may consider this bold, I see it as a bad thing because you are breaking a covenant with your players and essentially admitting game design elements were not adequately developed and planned out.

Someone who I have grown to respect over the years, since my days of playing DAoC, touched upon the issue:

Foundational Principle #3 – You should always hold the hands of your little children while crossing busy intersections but…

…our players are not children and this is not an intersection crossing. Over the years many MMORPG designers, me included, have employed various devices and mechanics in order to increase our games’ subscription base.

We removed points of frustration (I termed them “quit points” at Mythic), sped up the leveling curve (the argument being that games should not be harder to level than WoW), highlighted evolutionary or revolutionary new features to differentiate our games from our competition (extremely guilty as charged your honor!) and others too numerous to describe here.

While this has brought about some very good innovations, it also resulted in the vast majority of MMORPGs becoming easier to player, simpler to master and more “hand-holding” than their earlier brethren.

These mechanics include:

• speeding up of travel time (Players: “I don’t want to have to walk 20 minutes to get into the action because it feels like we are moving through mud”),

• lack of meaningful and/or punishing death penalties (Players: “OMG, I died because your random number generator is broken! It’s not my fault!”),

• fast leveling systems (Players: “I don’t want to max my character 12 months from now; I only play once a week”),

• auction houses (Players: “Don’t force me to interact with other players to sell/buy stuff. I have to do that in RL, I don’t want to do that in a game.”),

• easy to follow quest directions with full signage included (Players: “I don’t want to explore the world to find this NPC. I don’t have that much time to waste!”), etc.

Players of course, relayed those “Player” statements to us back in my Dark Age of Camelot days on forums and through feedback/chat/Q&As/etc.

Now, none of these techniques is morally or ethically bad (since what is challenging for one gamer can be total frustration for another) nor are many players’ desires for an easier and faster playing game; and as a designer/developer/player, I absolutely agreed with some of them.

However, with the implementation of some of these techniques, much of what made earlier MMORPGs and RPGs unique and challenging was lost.

Many developers/publishers were and are so afraid to let the players lose, make mistakes, suffer any inconvenience, etc., that we have created a feedback loop whereby many players expect spoon fed content that goes down real easy, shown how to do everything, directed so they can’t make serious mistakes, etc.

This has in turn caused many players and designers to lose touch with what made success in earlier MMOs really mean something.