Guild Wars 2

Greetings,

I appreciate that GW2 got out of the “orc versus human” mold. I think it’s a positive theme that different races are (loosely) working together for a greater good. But the common enemy (dredge, orr folk, etc) are all NPCs and a little dry/boring.

When my wife and I toured Europe a few years back, we were introduced to an MMO that is very popular over there, and now about 10 years old. I won’t go into the details, but increasingly bad lag with overseas servers and lack of support towards english-speaking players made it harder to enjoy that game.

Having played GW2 for over a year now, I wanted to make some suggestions (based on experience in the other MMO) that developers might consider.

I’m sure GW2 has big plans in evolving the “guild” aspect of the game, with their own body of very talented people! And anything a developer does always needs a lot of consideration, for how it will fit and balance with the established expectations of a game. But I hope review of these might spawn some ideas; I’m not looking for verbatim matching implementation, but just spawning ideas to make GW2 even more immersive.

Cheers!
(posting the ideas soon)

- SEEKING status. While players were looking for a party, there was a big “SEEKING” notice on top of their characters names in-game; the seeking status also showed the level of that player. Maybe in GW2 it would make more sense to show the players AP instead. It’s just becoming irritating to see map chats just consisting of “LFG” spammed over and over. With a SEEKING signal, you can quickly see who around you needs (and wants) a party since they’ve enabled their SEEKING status. It gets your attention, and makes people less annoying while trying to find a party. The LFG system we have in GW2 now is pretty good, but this other approach is a little more immersive (IMO). If there are people standing right next to you that need a party, why not interact with them? If only you knew they were seeking. i.e. this is a lone person looking for a casual boss running group or something, versus the current LFG approach of really “groups looking for 1 or 2 more individuals for some specific dungeon.” And they had an interface to search for these SEEKING people within your current map, which was nice if you were working on a particular quest.

- Guild leaders had a line under their names. The guild had to be of a certain rank I think, but it made the leaders stand out a bit more (it was also a disadvantage, since in massive WVW you could also see the leaders lines from further away; it was a graphic glitch more than intentional, but it made the game more fun also since it was harder for a leader to be sneaky; they could inadvertantly give their position away due to their “leader line”).

- Guilds had custom symbols, and those symbols appeared next to the players names in the open world. Yes, guild leaders actually uploaded content to the game servers (16×16 TGA icon symbol files with transparency). GW2 shows the whole abbreviation of the guild, which is a nice start. But, it’s kind of boring. Being able to actually upload a file and have your art manifested in the game was way cool. Obviously some people abused that and had to be moderated (like hate symbols, or messages like “ANET STINKS”, or pot-flower symbols, as mild examples; mostly offensive symbols would get reported and dealt with quickly). But guilds could be defined by their symbol. Guilds of certain ranks could also get capes with the same (but larger version) symbols on their cape. I know GW2 has guild items (weapons, shields, backpacks). But having a custom cape gave a little more meaning to being in one guild or another (since members of the guild had to contribute a certain thing in order to “earn” the cape; with the guild leader usually contributing the most, but not always). NOTE: in the other game, there was also a big penalty for leaving a guild, which made loyalty more meaningful; but I know GW2 is more casual than this

- Instead of 24/7 WVW mayhem, they had set “war schedules.” So 3 times a day, for 2 days a week, “war” were active and how to win the war varied by map. Sometimes it was purely by number of kills, sometimes it was by territory held, or sometimes by the number of points accumulated over time (with different parts of the map having different point values). The winner of the war got the ability to invade! And Invasions were awesome: you entered the opposing nations territory and ravaged their NPCs, or their noob players who didn’t know what was going on. BUT, there was also resistance: the losers of the war could defend their nation, to protect their NPC or noob players. This basically forced everyone into PVP (within PVE areas) for the hour after a war. And since it wasn’t 24/7, people could rest and get “prepared” for the war. WVW in GW2 is kind of flat because, after you and your “krew” go to sleep, everything changes and nothing you did really matters. Or it’s like having ice cream all the time: it’s great, but eventually you get sick of it. How cool would it be to be some level 25 noob killing Spiders, and some crazy war party rushes in controlled by live players. You can flee, or hide, or fight back if some of your defenders come by. That was the real beauty of this war/invasion system: the cost for losing was that live PVP opened up into your normal PVE areas.

Obviously there are some problems with this premise: you can’t satisfy every timezone when you have an event held at limit times. One could have a rotating schedule, but ultimately no scheme would satisfy everyone. The other problem is how this fits into GW2 lore: we don’t really have nations. We do have servers. In the orc/human standard convention, it makes sense when Orcs won the war and suddenly in the human PVE areas you see orc appearing. Note: they also have banner updates reporting the status of the war every 10 minutes, so PVE players who didn’t want to be bothered would have a heads up and could leave to safer or neutral areas if their nation seemed to be losing the war.

IDK, just the basic “problem” to me is that 24/7 access to WVW just feels flat. It might be more exciting to build up anticipation by having a more limited schedule. Right now, I can “go to wvw anytime” and it doesn’t matter much what I do. I don’t know who I’m killing, and don’t much care. On other games, they spam the whole map when people die: “Eliza defeated Alexander!” That in itself is a motivation not to die, to avoid that shame! It also reveals intentional repeated dying, where people are farming drops from each other. And yea, when a lot of people die in a big zerg, you see a lot of names. It created lots of real-life rivalry, and made the game a lot more fun. And when the community knows that Eliza is some defensive heal oriented build with basically no damage, it’s a big LOL when they manage to get a kill. Or if a normally docile player now starts making a lot of kills, it’s a “oh snap, they changed builds” moment! Great stuff.

- GM wars: GMs could occationally take on the role of some uber-powerful character. The entire server community would be challenged to defeat this GM. The GM always had modified stats; so in our case, not just typical top-tier items. They would usually be of a player race (like Norn) with padded stats (think: 9000 armor, 900% critical damage; etc). But imagine a GM controlling a monster, like a dragon. The GM had some work to do, using the skill of their character to survive as long as possible against the entire server. The player that made the striking blow would get some reward (which is a bit unfair, but that’s just how it was — players with bad lag or slow PCs often couldn’t even get close enough to touch the GM). Having these once in awhile was just a big morale booster. For GW2, perhaps this could happen in PVE and WVW areas.

- Monthly elections: each month, a player (in that game it was a player from each faction, in our case it could be from each race perhaps) is elected. Only the top 10 guilds were available to be nominated as kings for that month. Every ingame transaction was taxed, which went to the kings bank. Selfish kings could pocket that money (and likely never get elected again! or share it with guild members), or good kings could use the money for public events (like 25% more EXP from kills for a certain time). Some kings could also reduce the tax rate, reducing prices for everyone. GW2 doesn’t have to follow this model exactly, but the idea does two things: it encourages “good guilds” to exist (as they compete for whatever metric is required to make them eligible to be nominated for king the next month), and gives meaning to NPC transaction fees (like the TP postage fees). Instead of just evaporating, the money goes somewhere that the community could get back. And yes, the live player community elected who got king, so it was very much of a vote, with the result ending in a server-wide announcement “Bob is elected King by 34% of the votes”, etc. Glorious screenshots for that!

The issue with having a schedule for WvW is that there are tons of players who only do WvW. If you add in a schedule, the result is that you’re taking away the playtime of these people.

And by adding a schedule, you will run into issues with handling different timezones. Should the wars take place in the “primetime” of the servertime? Should it take place evenly across every 24 hours? The former means that players who are from a different timezone get shafted. The latter means that the players who are on the timezone get shafted.

Didn’t we used to have a ‘looking for’ symbol on our characters? I guess it didn’t go over too well.

Not really interested in any PvP outside PvP areas. Nor elections for special players.

Good luck on your suggestions, even though none seem appealing to me. =)

Yep, in the other game we reached the endgame and only played for the wars. And it worked out, because outside of the war schedules, you’re free to do other things: like paint a picture or read a book, or help train new players (they still had other 24/7 PVP areas). The main thing about a “war” was just the concept of a time-limited invasion afterwards for the nation defeated. But indeed, with international audience, there is no perfect timezone schedule. Some servers had a different schedule, but with megaserver there is no consistency, which even ruins many guild events. Megaserver is still a big flop in my book, but I respect the concept and technical work to pull it off.

The elected people don’t have to be particularly special players Actually in the other game, you could rotate guild leadership, which was a nice feature. If a leader was on military leave for some number of months (or in some countries, mandatory for some years), they could hand leadership to someone else. In any case, like any political thing, if you worked the community by pure personality attributes, even “weak players” could get elected. Or like many politicians, kings could make false promises, like giving certain guilds kickbacks from the the accumulated tax bank. It made for an interesting twist in things. Most months, the community voted for the noble good player and got a good king, but sometimes there was a conspiracy and jerks got elected. Or sometimes a king had to hoard money, for a greater good later in the year (also I think in that game, if the king didn’t use the money in the bank, it all got erased at the start of the next election). In any case, just being nominated had to be earned by some criteria; it wasn’t open ended that anyone in the entire game could get elected.

At the very least, LFG feature should be renamed to Group Looking for Players

Ironhide.2875:

Yep, in the other game we reached the endgame and only played for the wars. And it worked out, because outside of the war schedules, you’re free to do other things: like paint a picture or read a book, or help train new players (they still had other 24/7 PVP areas). The main thing about a “war” was just the concept of a time-limited invasion afterwards for the nation defeated. But indeed, with international audience, there is no perfect timezone schedule. Some servers had a different schedule, but with megaserver there is no consistency, which even ruins many guild events. Megaserver is still a big flop in my book, but I respect the concept and technical work to pull it off.

The Megaservers have nothing to do with WvW though.

Adding a schedule would probably end up killing WvW. Currently, the top servers are at the top because they got guilds that can play at off-hours. Adding a schedule takes that away, which would even the playing field, but it would also end up with all of the off-hours players being shafted. And while sometimes the off-hours play is a bit shady (US players on EU specifically to take advantage of the time difference), there are also players that are located outside of the EU and US in a far away time zone, such as Australia.

For many players, the fact that you can come and go from WvW as you please is one of its strongest aspects. And while you might be willing to “do something else” during a downtime, there are people who simply do nothing but WvW. There’s a reason why they made it possible to get Ascended gear in WvW. And those people would be left with massive amounts of downtime, which would probably end up with them quitting the game.

The elected people don’t have to be particularly special players Actually in the other game, you could rotate guild leadership, which was a nice feature. If a leader was on military leave for some number of months (or in some countries, mandatory for some years), they could hand leadership to someone else. In any case, like any political thing, if you worked the community by pure personality attributes, even “weak players” could get elected. Or like many politicians, kings could make false promises, like giving certain guilds kickbacks from the the accumulated tax bank. It made for an interesting twist in things. Most months, the community voted for the noble good player and got a good king, but sometimes there was a conspiracy and jerks got elected. Or sometimes a king had to hoard money, for a greater good later in the year (also I think in that game, if the king didn’t use the money in the bank, it all got erased at the start of the next election). In any case, just being nominated had to be earned by some criteria; it wasn’t open ended that anyone in the entire game could get elected.

I don’t think we need this kind of system. I don’t see any way how a system like this would not be a breeding ground for a toxic atmosphere. We already have shady practices like buying guilds from other servers or WvW servers teaming up against a third enemy. The last thing we need is an official popularity contest that comes with a monetary benefit.

At the very least, LFG feature should be renamed to Group Looking for Players

The LFG used to work the way you described earlier. It was just a status and you would see nearby players who had put themselves up as “Looking for Group”. Not many people knew it existed or even used it.

The suggestions part of the forums was removed for a reason.

http://aprildavila.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/fingers-in-ears3.jpeg

So .. finally a new “giff Open PvP” thread.

No thanks .. never ever.

If you want Lineage 2 play Lineage 2. And i also don’t know why that game should be especially popular in Europe, the only western Server were in the US when i played it 9 years ago.

And also .. the Siege times were a big problem for players from Europe.

I’ve never played Lineage. But just to ask, if some “great” server camps my servers keep for 36 hours, why would I care? It’s not like I needed that keep (other than for 100% world complete aspects perhaps), and it all resets at the end of the week anyway. Kudos to the other server for being more coordinated to hold something across that many timezones. Is it just a pride thing? It seems “better” to take an object, like a keep. Then intentionally “let it go” and just take it back, and just keep flipping it over and over. It’s a win-win for both sides, in terms of drops.

WvW would still exist 24/7 as it is, just at times there would be extra actual meaningful wars (in different maps) with actual consequence: open pvp in the losing nation (and not in all areas, as there are still neutral or safe areas to do gathering, crafting, certain quests, all the usual things except perhaps certain world bosses). And it’s time limited (1 hour). Since it goes both ways: defenders could push the invaders back. In this other game, the ultimate goal of the invaders was to overtake a capital city to effectively gain a kind of “participation points” used for other things.

But right, the premise only works when live players control another faction. For example, of liver players controlled Orr characters. Imagine a war flared up in or near Orr, and if nobody bothers to show up and fight the war and we lose, then Orr-folk start appearing in Queesdale (for a limited time), as an example.

Which reminds me of another suggestion we had that I forgot to list:

- Live video streams from monsters perspectives. Kind of a gimmick. But imagine a youtube stream or something, played from the perspective of a suspicious rat. The feed could be automated to switch to monsters with more players in the area, just to keep it more interesting. It’s act as sort of a commerical for the game, showing activity. Or players could also use it to see what going on in an area (especially if the feeds were from wvw maps). A next step might be if GMs could get control of the monster (or we imagined a scenario where players somehow get temporary control of a monster), so now players are facing a much more interesting opponent (one that might actually heal or flee, rather than just stand there and take a beating). Or note: imagine a class with a skill to “mind control” certain monsters, maybe they can’t attack with the monster but they could use it as a scout.

Ironhide.2875:

I’ve never played Lineage.

Upload your own Guild Icon .. Castle Sieges at fixed hours .. that simply sounds like Lineage 2, at least i don’t know another game that had that stuff. And since you wont name it …

However .. PvP and PvE is strictly seperated here. And most people play this game because its seperated and they hate beeing ganked when leveling. So if you want your open pvp .. please play any of the 1000s of asia MMOs out there, but leave this game alone.

And no to open world PvP of it is tied to losing in wvw. Open world PvP if it is ever addedshould be something that all players can choose to do or not. Winners in wvw shouldn’t be prohibited from it, losers in wvw shouldn’t be forced to do it.

Especially when a high number of players on all servers just don’t wvw. So their experience becomes tied to what happens in an aspect of the game that do not play. How is that fair?

One other suggestion on our list that we forgot…

- Guild Memo’s. This is where each member of a guild can leave a short memo that is shown on the guild roster. We’ve used this memo in other games to note our timezone, or our real name (or the name we’d like to be associated with in TS, etc), or maybe a note like “on vacation 2 weeks”. It was just a convenient way for members of a guild to express a brief message about themselves, that other people can view later when they get online. Something like 20-40 characters.

A “War Map” could be separate from WVW, and the resulting invasion as well; so it doesn’t effect current PVE casual play style. And in any case, it’s time limited, not forever. But yes, dealing with an actual live player rather than a scripted NPC can be quite intense.

Just pointing out that WvW NEEDS to be 24/7.
This is a worldwide game and the time of day that players in the US are able to play is completely different to the times of day that people in New Zealand or Australia are able to play etc. WvW makes sense the way it is.

I have to give a massive NO to guild symbols being shown next to player names. It is horrifically messy when that happens, especially if players can upload their own symbols which from a consistent design perspective is a nightmare.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Didn’t we used to have a ‘looking for’ symbol on our characters? I guess it didn’t go over too well.

Not really interested in any PvP outside PvP areas. Nor elections for special players.

Good luck on your suggestions, even though none seem appealing to me. =)

Don’t you still get the symbol by typing /lfg in chat ?

No idea. I’m sure I haven’t seen the symbol in more than a year. Way before the LFG tool came out.