Guild Wars 2

Hi Devs,

This is really a letter to you. I wanted to offer up an idea which has largely dropped out of the MMO world in the past-decade: Camps.

I’ve thought about MMOs in recent months. Particularly on the subject: “Why did I love them and why don’t I play them so much now?”

This lead to the answer: “The social experience is dead.”

Originally MMOs were group-oriented experiences. Many classes were pigeon-holed such that players had to work together to progress through the game. This was sometimes THE " experience " that made the game thrive and sometimes the reason so many people (including myself) never saw the MMO as anything more than a way to keep in touch with distant friends and family.

Everquest in the year 1999 probably defines this experience of the early MMO for being simply TOO group-oriented. It was nearly impossible to progress with a group. Without a group players could spend months unable to advance.

Next came Dark Age of Camelot, which removed the need for characters to group 100% of the time to level, while still maintaining the social atmosphere.

Thinking about these years I have always found the games to have been ‘better’ and more ‘loved’ than have come since, but why?

I’ve decided it was not the ‘group’ atmosphere itself, but what " experience " actually was in the game. I’m not talking about the experience bar. I’m talking about what we actually " experienced " playing the game.

Unlike MMOs post World of Warcraft, older MMOs had level 20 areas interspersed with level 50 zones: all games capped at 50 before Warcraft. This was wonderful as it meant some areas of the game were always threatening and mysterious no matter what map you were on. WoW and the games to follow largely killed this part of the experience, but slowly.
Guild Wars 1 masked this issue by having maps be instanced. Only towns were actual places to meet up. This created some of that earlier experience of bonding and having a real and (most especially) unique " experience " in coming back to the game. And there was risk. Failing to succeed at a map too often meant your moral could raise as much as 60%. By that point it might prove impossible to beat the map.

But all of the Post-2004 MMOs have failed to live up to the " experience " of earlier games.

Here’s Why:
- Old Games were Social-games.
- Old Games encouraged players to meet up at a static location.
- Old Games encouraged players to fight from that static location against mobs just beyond it.
- Old games used these static locations to make the LOCATION a place of " experience ": both in raising the experience bar and place to talk about. “Remember the forest of Bears outside Cornwall? Haha, Jeremy never could his pulls down to three or less.”
- Old games required people to ‘pull’ creatures (agro them) from a camp (where the creatures were) to a safe spot (where the players were).
- Old games used the pull-and-camp method to ENSURE unique experiences.
- Old Games had you “bind” yourself in a town on a map, then travel out into the map. If you died you returned to town: this created a sense of risk.
- Old Games mingled low level content with high level content across gigantic maps. This created the sense that ALL of the game was taking place right where you were, whether you were in the most “newbie” area imaginable or just over the hill "where some of the trees in the forest are ents and crush you unless you are Level-N.

In summary, Guild Wars 2 and all other MMOs post-2004 are just husks of better developed games: the early alpha-models of Pre-2003 MMOs.

Bring this sort of content back please?

This is the stuff that makes a game “dynamic”. Not Dynamic Events. Old MMOs had those just as much as Guild Wars 1 and they were more exciting. Failing to kill a single bandit mob titled “scout” might see it return with the camp just on the other side of the plain. Killing a dragon might spawn an army of elves at xyz location for several weeks or months. Time in was equivalent to time out.

If you’re going to do an expansion bring back what actually makes a living world ALIVE. Bring back maps without waypoints, using bind points instead. Bring back static locations for people to gather and help each other toward leveling up. Stop making the MMO experience “this is a level 80 map and you will play it solo, because why would we have you play with others CO-OPERATIVELY in an MMO!? That’s absurd.”

Why focus on old ideologies? It’s 2015. Let them do something new and different. You might have nostalgia for a bunch of old games, but following in the ways of the past is the surest way to get left behind.

Also, are you claiming GW2 is not conducive to cooperation? Because I fail to see how that’s a valid assertion.

This older model of game design meant that players could go out and " experience " the world, not farm it to its ever replenishing limits. Yes, that’s a contradiction and you made it.

Players sought out the ‘best’ gear, by how it made them look and toward a function within whatever kind of static-camp or dungeon-“experience” they were most interested in. If they were hardcore-soloists (formerly a point of accomplishment) they made their gear toward that.

Crafters and crafting was the end-all-be-all.

Dragons, Dungeons, and ‘loot’, as a whole, was entirely sought as a point of pride and accomplishment. To see someone wearing “Robes of the Bonecaster” in Everquest 1 was something people took notice. Just the same as wearing Magitech and Aetherized stuff is in Guild Wars 2. The supreme difference was you did this by PLAYING the game, not PAYING for it via RL money while begging you developers to do Expansions.

While we’re on the point, I’m not sure three maps with “biospheres” count as an expansion. More like more time-wasting mechanics before getting back to having an “experience” happens.

In Dark Age of Camelot it was getting your class’s epic-armor or epic-weapon. There was just one. Guild Wars 1 seems to have done this, but not so that it is tied in with the lore at all. For instance, Incinerator and Predator are very Charr-like. Quipp is very Krytan. The Flameseeker Prophecies looks like a Charr ripped just that off a pedestal somewhere, dunked it in gold leaf and said good; etc, etc. The issue? None of this is built into the lore. It just is. This games the whole developer angle of Guild Wars 2 appear half-hearted at best.

Surface detail stuff in Guild Wars 2 is about as deep as most content gets because of this kind of stuff. Work past this. Tie your content into the game. Don’t simply manifest it. Manifestation is a child scribbling, something you put on your refrigerator and is later forgotten. Really immersive content is more like what your content art suggests: coordinated ecologies of symbols and meaning that we can interact with.

Here’s Immersion:
https://d3b4yo2b5lbfy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/guildwars2-081.jpg
Imagine that as an open-world dungeon rather than a plastic ‘wall’ climbed over in 2 minutes time which we have no " experience " with unless a two minutes’ climb counts here or there for no reason.

https://celestialkitsune.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/guild-wars-2-concept-art_00025.jpg
What’s this? Where is this lake? Who lived at that ruin? What was it? Why’s the boat there? How does that lead to story?

You have some incredibly artists on your team, but whoever is directing your map production needs clubbed over the head and provided a history lesson in MMOs. That’s not snark, this is an attempt to give some of that history and what’s been dropped.
The advantage of getting this content back into your game is you’d be the ONLY MMO with any of it right now.

Read Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols. Play Dragon Age Inquisition. Note the similarities.
If you don’t have time for Dragon Age, try reading Philip K. kitten, Galactic Pot Healer after having read Jung.

This is the tradition you are hailing from. Live the standard’s that have allowed you to make this game. Be them again. You were in Guild Wars 1. What’s happened to you?

Galactic Pot Healer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Pot-Healer

Dragon Age Inquisition, in its lore, is a discussion of the Lore in the previous games from the " experience " of the player as they try to understand their present situation.

SPOILER ALERT ~ SPOILER ALERT ~ SPOILER ALERT
Dragon Age Inquisition tries to take the player from the position of a person living the life of someone inside the Dragon Age universe to someone who is confronted by the false-mythos surrounding the ‘living-lore’ up to that point.
You find out things like the Dalish Elves were Slaves even before the Humans enslaved the Immortal Elves, though Humanity was the cause of the decline of the Elves’ Immortality.
- You see the Elves left ruins that constitute built-and-lived Jungian Archetypes all across the Elven territories. How the same built-and-lived Archetypes were used all across the Dwarven, Human, and Qun territories as well.
- You can see how the Qun attempted to tear down the use of archetypes resulting in two-dimensional understanding of the cosmos.
- You witness your character (depending on the choices you make) or others realize each of the religions and fundamental ideologies of the world are built on much kittened (abstracted) myths and ideas.
- etc, etc.
~ SPOILERS END

It is the navigation of a Jungian Crisis where players may or may not realize, though samples of textual lore that eventually compose a huge codex, that much of what they would aspire to ‘be’ may actually end up being a destructive-false-path.

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The same idea is explored in the Philip K. kitten novel as the character accepts attempting to integrate the idea of Archetypes (symbols with meaning) into a holistic system of non-contradictory meanings, only to make a disastrous error.

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Guild Wars 2 suffers from throwing out very tiny pieces of Symbols and Archetypes, but not coordinating toward any actual meaning.
Example: Predator is a very Charr looking Weapon. The Archetype of the Charr in Guild Wars 2 could be argued as Industry, Fire, and Iron. All of these things compose the Predator, but nothing exists in-game nor in any wiki to talk about the origins of the Predator. So, the game just feels in an alpha-state with its lore. Flat and disinteresting.

What this causes is players to feel like the developers are not really invested because there is this jarring and often glaring gap between Symbols in the game (Predator visual) and meaning (Why was it made at all? Who made it? Why is it so obviously Charr?)
Completing that simple thing could allow for some really fun and satisfying conclusions to the problem. “An Ebonhawke lieutenant is responsible for the creation of the Predator. In a perverse gesture of satirical malice Lietenant Bowyn Rice created what would become the legendary ‘Predator’ through Charr scrap after a siege of Ebonhawke. Rice, whose family had been killed during the siege, joined the Separatists in 1320.” Suddenly there is something beyond surface detail to what is in-game content and ‘mystery’.

Leave ‘mystery’ and then leave it alone.

If you make something a ‘mystery’ the purpose of the mystery is to let players imagine into it as deep as they will.
Your task as devs is to stay away from it once you’ve made it because NOTHING you make afterward will live up to the imaginations before hand. Nevertheless, if you never create the space for the mystery to be there in the first place this is nothing more than a 300 page junk book you pick up on your way through the airport. You read it on the page and throw it away afterward; from start to finish, forgettable.

The ‘market’ for camps is, believe it or not, people can get along, do, and want to…

Making a game some idiotic ‘rush’ around a map is just that… an idiotic rush around a map. It’s a pointless waste of your time because the moment players finish the circuit (to their satisfaction) they will look to you and say, “Now what?”

When you answer with, “That’s it.” … Well, that’s it. Bye-bye.

After that the only thing that is left is bafflement and scorn. “This is all you’ve provided?”

Most people see this kind of attitude, the bafflement and scorn, as childish and impotent. Others say it is near-sighted and ignorant. Both are wrong.

People are simply hoping to have more than one " experience " on the map. The best way to do this, just like the whole gaming industry has already discovered, is stop making the game yourself and hand it over to the players.

That sounds very ‘ideological’ and realistically ‘nonsensical’, but whoever says so is having a lazy day. The reality is this is why most of the industry is looking at multiplayer. Usually this leads to a Player vs. Player, World vs. World, Realm vs. Realm type experience. It works for a limited experience, but it quickly turns repetitive.

Where this really shines is " co-operative experience ". You set up a static ‘area’ and then encourage " co-operative " interaction against something dynamic. It could be as simple as growing crops to keep a fortress well supplied (remember Warcraft III, II, I or more recently Anno 2070. Your CEOs near their Algae by god!"
Or it could be more what you probably value: “I need more plastic from river silt to build my cellphones!” In Guild Wars 2 terms, “Go mine the quarry and clear some forest for siege defense/offense, or a road.”

But!
All of the above is ‘macro’ events.

What about the “2 to 6” or “2 to 8” content? This is the stuff that makes most PLAYERS get to know PLAYERS.
If you don’t understand this reference the Dunbar Number:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

You’ll find every military in the world takes note of it all the way back to before Rome. A person can only (usually) remember just about 150 people by face and by name. The more people you put together in one place the less loyalties they have toward one another, but the more intent they have to form communities.

A ‘community’ ranges from 150 to roughly 75 in number, by the mean average.

A ‘community’ in tribal society usually forms a second ‘village’ or ‘tribe’ at around 75 members, less in hunter-gather societies.

Guild Wars 2 is organized much like a hunter-gather system. You need yourself and maybe …sometimes … hypothetically …someone else. The design of such necessarily means that including another person in your activities is not needed and may be counter-productive to most activity.

Guild Wars 2 is also a ‘tiring’ game. In old games static camps meant you actually stayed in one place. Sometimes without moving for 15 minutes at a time. Battles were no more than 4 minutes long, on average, but what you were doing in that time was relaxing.
All you are ever doing in Guild Wars 2 is traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling… traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling… after awhile the rat has run the maze and the game is dead.

This ‘dead’ feeling is NOT the fault of its players, but this type of design and this is why I’m arguing for you to consider these older game mechanics.

An Author who makes good use of the describing how the Dunbar Number impacts people is Sebastian Junger:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Junger

I’d suggest reading his book: War.