Guild Wars 2

I think it’s safe to say almost every single person who has ever purchased this game has realized it’s potential which means every time a big release is announced, players flock back.

When they do return, one of the biggest hurdles is maintaining player retention.

We currently have a system which is to help promote the game by allowing a select few to live stream the top matches, this is known as the ASP:

“The Authorized Shoutcaster Program is a program in which community shoutcasters are notified of high ranking matches and are invited to enter a match as a live spectator.”

Guild Wars 1 had a system similar in nature but open to the public. Top matches were actually recorded and you could watch them as soon as they finished (From memory).

This meant that new or returning players actually had a chance to watch some top end game play and learn, rotation, meta builds, team play etc before jumping into a hot join and being slaughtered by experienced players. This ‘in theory’ should ease that player back into the game and therefore keeping them around longer.

Obviously the limitation applies to the amount of spectators into a match at the moment but how much resources does it take to record something like this? Is it something that we could possibly see in the future?

& to the players, from your Guild Wars 1 experience did observing matches teach you anything?

ASP Wiki Link: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Authorized_Shoutcaster_Program

GW1 had “Observe”. What it was, was a recording and replaying of game information, displayed in the game client. It recorded the positions of all players, their movements and actions, etc. This data could then be transmitted to players to view in their game clients, allowing dynamic viewing angles as if the player was actually there. It was a fundamental game engine consideration (afaik) from its inception, and used for development/debugging purposes (source: Patrick Wyatt blog http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/scaling-guild-wars-for-massive-concurrency). GW2 doesn’t have this system at all. Some devs have mentioned this is due to technical limitations with the 3D nature of the game (GW1 was effectively 2D) and physics/gravity/whatever. The GW2 spectator functions by simply adding viewers as inactive participants to the game server as the game is active. This means the game state information must be transferred in real-time to all participants/viewers, and this is where the bottleneck occurs.

There has been no indication anet has the ability/resources/intent to implement a game state recording feature, in the near future or ever.

Great reply, thank you!

But even with the 5/10 spectators limit it would be an awesome feature if it was open for everyone.

I would love to see something like this. While it’s great that we have the ability to watch PvP matches, it’s really a shame to see this feature squandered on hot join.

Putting in something like this so that we could watch high end PvP matches would really help get the community engaged in PvP.