Guild Wars 2

TLDR : Group questing doesn’t align with the ideals of the rest of the game to promote cooperative play.

This aspect has confused me for a while. It seems to go against the ideals ANet has put forth that helping other players achieve goals is a good thing.

I basically see no advantage to partying up, other than party chat, when I’m out and about because I cannot cooperatively complete hearts.

This mechanic makes questing together more difficult as I’m usually more worried about tagging every mob I can and making sure everyone tags them as well rather than actually killing them because if one person is a bit slower than the others and misses mobs every once in a while it’ll take longer for us to move on to the next heart.

That’s the other issue this brings up: It’s harder to move as a group from one area to the next. If I’m slower than my party at completing the quest they might decide it’s taking too much time for me to complete it and simply move on, where I get further an further behind.

Everything about this game promotes group play and a group mentality towards completing bigger goals, except the party system.

Why?

You make it sound as if creating an actual group is somehow detrimental to the cooperative experience. It isn’t. It can only enhance it by making communication easier with a private chat channel and allowing you to see each other on the map.

Everything about the game (PvE side) promotes cooperative play and nothing in the group mechanics inhibits this. The fact that you don’t need to form that group to accomplish your goals means that no one has to kitten around LFG to do hearts, events or any other open-world content — but the option is there.

Not grokking your point.

It does deter, at least for me, from wanting to form a group with a friend. Example:

Before I learned how the questing worked with parties I was excited to party up and run around the map with friends.

Now if I see a friend log on I second guess if I want to message them to do quests. Usually because I’m in a different zone and going to them and helping them quest doesn’t seem all that helpful, I’m basically a warm body helping them to dps mobs down. I can’t run around gathering resources for them or activating devices, they have to do that by themselves. I can’t really offer any meaningful assistance other than damage on mobs they tag.

I often find myself saying “Ehh I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing”. This just seems inconsistent with ANet’s overarching philosophy and I’m wondering why this is.

Grouping does let you keep track of everyone. Try running with Guildies or friends w/out grouping. Its pretty easy to lose each other in this game.

Raf.1078:

Grouping does let you keep track of everyone. Try running with Guildies or friends w/out grouping. Its pretty easy to lose each other in this game.

Sure, and that is helpful no doubt. I do like that you can track the progression of other people in your party. But I still don’t understand why you don’t get group credit for completing objectives. It’s not like the mechanic is something new and they simply don’t have the resources it’s being intentionally left out and I really want to know: Why? It just doesn’t seem to fit with everything else in the game.

Pandabro.8743:

Raf.1078:

Grouping does let you keep track of everyone. Try running with Guildies or friends w/out grouping. Its pretty easy to lose each other in this game.

Sure, and that is helpful no doubt. I do like that you can track the progression of other people in your party. But I still don’t understand why you don’t get group credit for completing objectives. It’s not like the mechanic is something new and they simply don’t have the resources it’s being intentionally left out and I really want to know: Why? It just doesn’t seem to fit with everything else in the game.

If you allow heart completion without actually participating in the task (for example, gaining some credit for a mob kill without even tagging the mob) you allow people to be get AFK completion without actually playing the game. It could also allow people to farm via multiple accounts and gain five times the renown heart gold reward than your typical player.
If you inflict some sort of penalty on group members for ‘sharing’ their progression, then you allow accidental leeching whenever someone fails to tag a mob in time. (Or purposeful leeching, which is even worse)

Those are the problems I can see, anyways.

I agree with Softspoken. If everyone in a party got credit for 1 players actions it’d just lead to groups of 4 afk bots linked to 1 active bot getting 5 times the rewards.

Not to mention people “running” each other through events (aka doing it all for them in return for gold) and if GW1 is anything to go by Anet really don’t like that, the whole world design in the expansions was designed to try and reduce people running each other past/through content.

I don’t see any problem. I party for the following reasons:

1) Playing with a group of RL friends and I want to track their location in the world and chat to them easily.
2) WvW: creating a group of strangers to unify attempts at large WvW goals.
3) Dungeons: necessary.
4) Partying with random people in the world who share a common goal, making it easier to complete said goal.

Softspoken.2410:

If you allow heart completion without actually participating in the task (for example, gaining some credit for a mob kill without even tagging the mob) you allow people to be get AFK completion without actually playing the game. It could also allow people to farm via multiple accounts and gain five times the renown heart gold reward than your typical player.
If you inflict some sort of penalty on group members for ‘sharing’ their progression, then you allow accidental leeching whenever someone fails to tag a mob in time. (Or purposeful leeching, which is even worse)

Those are the problems I can see, anyways.

Yeah I can understand that, but I also think those are extreme examples. In past MMO’s this has rarely been a problem (Partying with someone just to leech or AFK complete a quest with someone).

You could say the exact same thing about mob tagging in this game: Theoretically a player can just run around hitting mobs once and letting someone else kill them and “leech” from that. That’s the reason mobs have had “ownership” in past MMO’s to prevent people from leeching. ANet decided this wasn’t in the spirit of cooperative gameplay which is why they did away with that, but it doesn’t make sense to do away with the cooperative questing mechanic in the same stroke.

Extreme examples can always be made about how fringe players will abuse and manipulate the system but I believe the bigger question is will a change to the mechanic encourage players to group together more? And is that a positive thing?

Pandabro.8743:

Raf.1078:

Grouping does let you keep track of everyone. Try running with Guildies or friends w/out grouping. Its pretty easy to lose each other in this game.

Sure, and that is helpful no doubt. I do like that you can track the progression of other people in your party. But I still don’t understand why you don’t get group credit for completing objectives. It’s not like the mechanic is something new and they simply don’t have the resources it’s being intentionally left out and I really want to know: Why? It just doesn’t seem to fit with everything else in the game.

imo the answer to this pretty straightforward: it’s to combat botting and powerleveling. if people could get credit for stuff by being grouped without actually contributing (by tagging/doing damage/etc) then powerleveling bot groups would be rampant, like they are in other games.

aside from that, the one HUGE reason to group is for loot credit. credit for loot seems to be based on the whole party’s damage contribution, so in a dynamic event zerg, you really can’t get any loot solo even though you can contribute enough to get event credit. by grouping, you get credit for every mob you tag based on the total damage of your group to that mob.

in other words, grouping is essential in Orr if you want more than just karma.

Actual TLDR: The OP isn’t forced to group by game mechanics so he doesn’t group, even though there are some benefits and no downside to grouping. For some unexplained reason he sees this as a problem.

Inspired.6730:

Actual TLDR: The OP isn’t forced to group by game mechanics so he doesn’t group, even though there are some benefits and no downside to grouping. For some unexplained reason he sees this as a problem.

No, it’s more like: I find group questing to be slightly more tedious than in other games and I’m trying to understand why this specific mechanic was intentionally left out when it seems, to me, to go against the game’s manifest.

Do I see it as a problem? Sure. Is it a game breaking problem? Not really but I never said it was so don’t make it sound like I’m whining, because I’m not, I’m simply trying to understand the rational behind this design decision.

Turn the question on its head: why should you need to formally create a group in order to work together? If some other players are doing the same things as you, but in an ad hoc group instead of an official party, why should you make progress faster than them?

It seems to me that the current mechanics are designed to reward everyone who contributes, whether they’re grouped or not. You’re effectively asking for non-contributors to be rewarded, too, but only if they’re in a party.

I think issues with bots and powerleveling are probably much more significant than you seem to think they are, but even if they weren’t, what you’re asking for still strikes me as pretty weird.

What you say OP simply isn’t true.
Teaming cannot possibly slow down questing, if you tag stuff you need you will get credit and teaming will kill faster.
Having people kill stuff for you and give you credit isn’t only unrealistic but it would be pretty lazy design imo.
Also, if your team leaves you behind it’s not a game’s issue, it’s how questing team in every single MMO work; they rush and rush and rush.
Anet cannot possibly force people to play for fun, a lot of people play in a selfish way because all they want is rushing to lvl 80, as MMOs of the past taught them to completely ignore all of the non-cap content.