The issue I feel is that we can’t ever go back to those days. With the advent of the internet it’s far too easy to bypass them with guides. It’s really noticable in GW2. There is a fair amount of story there, and there are some puzzles. But I get the feeling that any content that is based on this now will last no time at all, due to the fact people will log onto Dulfy, and just follow the step by step guide.
I don’t think we will see a return to it until AI gets high enough that quality content (not just sprawling Diablo style random dungeons) can be generated on the fly to the extent that making Guides is nigh on impossible.
Very good points on people using spoilers to blow through content, and that ultimately the fix to that is AI which does not allow rote or practiced responses.
But there’s another point which is important to me as a customer (player):
I buy an MMO to adventure, sometimes solo and sometimes with friends, in an immersive world. I commit time to learning not just a particular world, but to learning and advancing my character, my presence in that world.
In the next room over, I have both a Playstation 3 and a Nintendo Wii. Their power cords are not connected to the wall. After trying both, I prefer an immersive MMO world, thank you.
The MMO has both a server somewhere across the internet and a client, which are exchanging protocol to stay reasonably in sync on where I am and what I am doing. The representations of the world in client and server are mostly congruent, but they do deviate and there are artifacts in game play which result. Roughly speaking, it’s good enough for the client and server to update each other every second or so. And if my screen shows me 5 feet away from where the server thinks I am at any instant, it doesn’t make a lot of difference.
The Playstation or Nintendo has a single piece of software, only one view of the world, and can be precise to within a pixel and is quite capable of updating my position at frame rate (sub millisecond response and tens or hundreds of updates per second). Position is as precise as the ground coordinate system.
This means the Playstation or Nintendo is fundamentally much more fit for twitch content, and for the kind of precise movement or positioning one sees in a jump puzzle, than an MMO engine is.
Just as an FPS, with a much smaller world that does much more frequent updates of the position, direction, and action of each player than an MMO does.
Likewise, an MMO (like GW2) uses the same engine to support open world adventuring, close combat around bosses and in WvW, twitch response like sPvP, jump puzzles, Nintendo-like content like SAB and other recent events, and the like. Because it’s massive and they’re paying by the megabyte for data movement, communication with the server has to be short and infrequent, hence we get culling and other effects.
So, I’ve chosen a game whose base content is what I came here to play, and whose engine is not just fit but tuned for what I came here to play.
And I play at a rate that has not exhausted the content of the game yet, and will use maps but use spoilers only infrequently.
So why is it that the existence of a set of people who blow through content and move on to another game — really an un-servable population in an MMO because you can never create enough content — even relevant? ArenaNet should accept that the revenue from such customers is sporadic and they are not a source of profitable and stable revenue over multiple years, and go focus somewhere else where it’s possible to make money.
Using GW2 to host content for which the engine is only marginally fit has short term novelty value, but shifting direction to deliver a hybrid MMO / Nintendo game seems like something which would neither satisfy the customer who wanted an MMO (me) nor the customer who wanted a Nintendo game, because it is doing neither well.
Doing neither well is a recipe for failure.
Hence the concern over the long term consequences to GW2 of its apparent direction.
