I’m writing in response to a post made in another thread:
Zeldain.5710
That’s assuming players enojoy the activities involved in playing the game. Most do not.
There’s a LOT of talk of and from people who have stopped playing GW2. Few people seem to accept that this is OK!. Those people have learned all they personally need to learn from it. Let me explain what I am trying to say here.
When I talk about “learning” here I don’t mean “great big life-relevant axioms”, and I don’t exclude it. I also don’t mean “employable skills”, “encyclopaedic facts”, or even “fine motor skills”, but it means these, too. By learning I mean all of these, any of them, or just one of them; learning is whatever is acquired by the person.
So it’s not a shame for either the players or the designers when a player stops playing a game as it generally symbolises that the player has reached their own personal fill on what they can acquire. In fact, for designers this can be a source of pride that players have made gains from their creation (though some might lament that the player didn’t see all the content). It is really only for each player themselves to answer the question “Did I learn this game too soon/late?”.
Or really, “How long did I hope to take to learn this game?”.
I believe there is a large amount of angst in the game community targeted at game makers because players are learning games faster than before. But really, when players honestly acknowledge for themselves all that they have learned about games, MMOs, RPGs, etc up until now there is little surprise that players have much higher expectations (read, very different things to learn) than they used to in years gone by.
I may be wrong in assuming that many players, especially those posting on the forums, have over 5 years experience and learning under their belts already. That’s really quite significant mastery for the player-base, and the game industry is struggling (in my view) to design games or “learning” that matches their mastery. How many other things have you actively pursued in your life as long as this? Most of us would probably count the number these persistent pursuits on one hand.
So now we have large numbers of players moving periodically from MMO to MMO looking for a game that teaches something they haven’t mastered yet.
GW2 has attracted and retained many players who are still learning and having fun from the content.
It has also gone through the roll-over of players who feel they have already mastered these skills and are still seeking a new lesson. Those players will have drifted on as they were likely doing before this game was released.
Some players are holding on to GW2 because they hoped to be learning as much new lessons as they first did when playing GW1 (or <favourite MMO here>), and they want this game to replicate that previous learning journey. Unfortunately it can’t do that because the player is forever changed from what they learned from GW1 and other games.
Most people are probably moving between these three states as times change, new content and hopes are created, and the player still tries to find either content within a game or an entire game that matches their own stage and make-up of skills, knowledge, and desires.
Arenanet made some great gains in learning from the experiences of players as players and designers went through the “infancy” of MMORPGs. They have designed a game around players that have already learned what other MMOs taught them and tried to see how to mould some content around some things these “adolescent MMO players” hadn’t learned yet. They have also used a lot of devices and methods that are already familiar to many of us.
If GW2 leapt too far from what we were capable of it would lose many of us down the crevasse between skill acquired and skill required (i.e., not be too hard for most). But it also has redesigned some of the fundamentals of GW1 and MMOs generally so that it gives many players something new to learn and understand (i.e., not too easy for most).
As players and adults we are responsible for our own learning journeys. If we find we have learned all we need from a source then it falls to ourselves to make the decisions and pathways towards teachers and experiences that match our own position and place in that journey.
