If you look at the “endgame” of titles such as Minecraft and Terraria, you have games which heavily lean into expression and creativity. The player is building something, which happens pretty much at the expense of everything else.
If you look at procedurally generated games such as Elite and NoMan’s Sky, you see that they heavily lean into exploration. Which again, is one sided and can cause players to dislike the games for not having enough other gameplay systems.
GW2 is no different from those specialist games. GW2 leans heavily into completing progression bars and achievement systems. After you did everything once, the game hopes it can motivate you to do some things 100 or even 1000 times. GW2 is specialized in that way.
All three types of games can be the right game for you, if their specialization is what you want over everything else. If you like a good farm zerg or WvW zerg, you do not need procedurally generated maps or create housing brick by brick.
From the looks of it, future content will play to the strengths of current systems of GW2. Bit of exploration, bit of story, map meta event to grind out some 50h unlock. Depending on how many times you repeated this cycle by now, the level of reward you feel might have gone down when it comes to those long term goals. I do not expect any expansion to have the tools to dig my own fortress into a mountain, or feature a procedurally generated area of a 1000 square miles built to scale.
The game is the game for what it is and it is fun for as long as you can play it having fun. It is not 1000h of GW2 fun and then you unlock the hidden mode where you play Tetris all of a sudden while calling it the endgame. Video games are specialized these days. If a game is distinct enough to be “an endgame” for some game, then it will probably be released on its own.
To be honest, the gameplay itself does not need that much fixing. Whether regular patches were absent or present, the game roughly performed the same, even in financial quarters, where little to no content was offered.
If you want to make it a problem that people quit playing GW2, then the issue is not the fact that they are quitting, but the average emotional state they are in when doing so.
You can quit a game happily and most $60 games that take 20h to complete have trained you to quit a game while being happy. “Congratulations, you have seen most of the content, the aliens are defeated, see you for the sequel in 2-3 years.” That is a normal thing for a consumer to experience. To a degree, the game throws the player out in a happy state in hopes, the customer will return for a sequel.
Judging from a lot of forum threads and posts, this is not a stunt GW2 pulls off well. Sure, you could just play the campaign and call it a day, but we know that MMOs do not work that way. GW2 does not try to kick you out happy in order to re-monetize you later. GW2 wants to be played now and it wants to monetize you now. GW2 does not want to be that annual big $60 experience you have, it wants to hook you on systems attempting to lock down GW2 as the only game you will ever have time for or feel like investing in.
If people quit while still being happy, you can retain your brand and re-monetize them. If people leave due to being angry and frustrated, the brand dies little by little. This idea has gained popularity to a degree that companies such as EA and Ubisoft consider moving away from season passes and paid DLC. Happy quitters monetize better in the long run is the new mantra.
Look no further than the biggest MMO of them all. It established its brand in a huge way, when the game was a novel experience for the average gamer. It had its long period of struggle when it hovered around 10 million subscribers, but only because it was able to replace its player base as fast as it was dwindling. Even this game has 9 inactive players for each active one. All the billions of Dollars in revenue aside, this game decided to shift its groundwork psychology. Increase the chances of players quitting whilst being happy. Do not optimize every angle to draw people into year long grinds. Most off all, do big annual releases aimed not just at the current player base, but even more angled at the happy quitters.
This is what Heart of Thorns has shown us. The active players will certainly buy the game, but there is not a big pool of happy quitters. The revenue was nowhere near the numbers of the original launch. Worse still, Heart of Thorns itself did not produce happy quitters, it mentally broke a lot of people who rather decided to quit than submit to the game. Sure, a lot of grinds were significantly scaled down later, but by then players were happily quitting the next game and not looking back. Regardless of that, GW2 has a fighting chance, since it still has enough loyalist who are dialed into the GW2 way of things, that ArenaNet can stay in operation.
More than meaningless changes to numbers on sub-menus the next expansion has to be fun to play and the moments where you can call it quits need to be positive ones. You need to have reach something and decide to quit on the next big thing, instead of quitting in anger due to a series of unattainable goals you went after because they were cleverly interlaced and you did not notice when things got out of hand.
Personally, I completed the open world Mordremoth event and noticed the moment. I knew, if I break now, I quit happy, because that was an awesome bossfight. But had I played on, there would have been nothing but the misery of completing mastery after mastery and grinding the map to unlock more elite specs. That move kept my perspective on GW2 intact for another sequel. A lot of people I played with called me nuts, played on until they quit out of frustration and now claim they would never consider buying the next expansion, nor buy GW2 in the first place if they traveled back in time to 2012. This is where a fix is in need, the gameplay is fine by comparison. You can improve on that after the reasons for quitting are addressed.
There was a time GW2 was Casual Friendly
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: FourthVariety.5463
HoT problems are more than just people being casuals, or grinds taking too much time.
My simplest example is this:
You get on a random HoT map and decide to click on a mastery/skill point. Your player agency in that moment is personal progression. But do you get a piece of personal progression content? No! You get a group event for 5+ players. GW2’s strength was 1-3 players roaming and HoT has a nasty habit of shutting that down.
That is something not just hurting casuals, that is hurting anybody playing outside of the map zerg. You just cannot unlock your Elite-Specs in the same way you could before. It is not a matter of WHAT you are supposed to do. It is not a matter of HOW MUCH you need to do. It all boils down to the encounters being designed for 5+ players. GW2 has arguably one of the best event scaling and yet it is hamstringing itself.
The amount it takes to get multiple stat combinations for multiple characters and multiple builds in GW2 is one of the game’s biggest weaknesses. In most loot-grinding games, the process of gearing a character for the endgame takes a fraction of the time.
You’re meant to have a set before you get to that point, the rest is for gearing alts.
I do not remember anybody from ArenaNet ever saying that. It could be considered rude to ask people to enter a specific (and good) content only for the purposes of equipping secondary characters and ask players to leave, if they are on their first character; or simply on their main.
Of course, we are all free to make up our own excuses for the structure of specific content and rewards. ArenaNet will hardly ever deny nor confirm speculation that is in their favor.
Before you get to the point in Fractals where you might receive an ascended weapon/armor as a reward, you must already have way more ascended equipment than the Fractals provide. That is not how carrot on a stick works.
It is not about gold, or XP, or anything. It should be about a good progression. Right now, you bring the ascended stuff you have, Fractals can add two rings in a reasonable amount of time, and then you just progress Fractals by progressing your equipment playing stuff outside Fractals. There is no strategy for an AR progression from just within the fractals because for no reason AR is linked to ascended equipment.
That means that even a very good player will progress to the point, where Fractals kill him for even a small mistake, which is fun once, maybe twice. Then you look at the time scale you need to solve this hurdle by just adding another 5 or 10 AR and the timescale gets rather crazy. For what? That you run in the same problem five Fractals higher?
Does the player then stop because it was fun and he had his fill? Does the player stop because it was frustration? Which player is more likely to return? All players might quit eventually, but it is up to ArenaNet to influence the mood in which they quit. Not necessarily the entire game, but just one game mode. One way to influence them is build better walls to run into.
I like exploration, I like the playing the story, I like experimenting with the Elite-Specs, I like doing events with other people.
The problem being that the structure of Hearth of Thorns regards one thing as core activity and all the others as rewards you get in small increments after doing the core activity for quite a while. There is no balance between the things you do and there is no player choice when to do them. I feel like having little to no player agency and feel confronted with rather steep time gating. And if I do go off-rails, so to speak, there is no shortage of raptor mobs insisting on you turning around and rejoin the zerg.
I bought the game, I brought my time, but this world, which looks incredibly open, still funnels me down a path that is more akin to homework than anything else.
I believe the main culprit here is the lack of real knowledge about various aspects of Heart of Thorns.
The price complaint comes mostly from fans. They have the game, they know the value of the game. If these fans complain now, then because the game still ahs a high value to them. These fans then see “the bundle” and attribute most of its value to the base game. Players know lots about the base game, next to nothing about the expansion. So if the bundle costs $50, then what does that tell you about the size of the expansion? Past comments about Living World basically being the same as an expansion have not helped here.
Then all the questions rush in. If you are eager to play the new class, but have no empty slots, then is that an attempt to upsell you right away? If you are an explorer, will the map be big enough? If you want new class experiences, will they differ enough? What about new coordinated small team PvE, such as instances? Why does the PR center on a free feature trait upgrade at the same time the expansion is sold? Shouldn’t the PR focus on something that projects more value on the expansion rather than the base game?
I could pick this apart for pages without end and while I do not agree with most of the complaints, I can understand from where they are coming. It is amazing how many different player demographics are confused right now and express their uncertainty in the forums. This being the Internet, most of the comments are hardly high quality.
The goal is clear, sell people on the coming game, do not upsell them an a $100 edition. Personally, I like that newbies are getting the base game fro free. But I can also see how Heart of Thorns does not exactly stack up to the base game right now. GW2 is a victim of its own world size in that regard.
The big boys of esports, be it Dota clones, or CS, or Starcraft all had 10-15 years to fine tune their core gameplay. Shooters had 20 years of getting it sorted which game modes work and which are less popular. Most of the innovation associated with those games happens with the business model and the promotion efforts that go along with these titles. The gameplay of those games is a wheel that does not require reinventing. GW2 is essentially a new game and tries control points, which has been a rather unpopular mode.
In my opinion, GW2 needs to take that step converting PvP into a f2p experience. Because with each expansion, the cost of getting into PvP is going up, while the costs of getting into every other competitive game is a race to the bottom.
Quite the shopping list we have here in the meantime.
(1) Players who want to know ArenaNet’s stance on every feature, game mode and even disabled content (such as adventure box or kite city)
(2) Players who want to know concrete examples which type of content is to be expected medium to long term.
(3) Players who want ArenaNet to change the game according to their suggestion.
Meanwhile in another department, Guild Wars made $93 million in the past 12 months (July13-June14) according to quarterly reports filed by NCSOFT.
It appears more and more as if there was a huge chasm between two types of customers.
(1) People trained in the ways of the old business models, who expect to know details that are relevant for the old business model to work. Because the old model requires a groundswell of better informed people evangelizing future updates.
(2) The players who are monetized. The ladder group hardly ever asking for stuff to buy in any of these threads. Doesn’t anybody find that strange? So many things get asked for, but hardly anything connected to monetization.
Shouldn’t one of the question ArenaNet asking its customers be what they would like to spend their money on? Living World gets torn apart quite a bit, but the most powerful statement you can practically can make in this forum is not just saying that you want something, but that you would even be willing to pay for it.
The longer this thread goes on, the clearer one can see that the problem is extending into multiple dimensions.
(1) What are developers allowed to talk about.
(2) By which means do developers talk to the community and how can their range be maximized. Clearly, out of context red posts do not cut it.
(3) Which space of time is covered, since players organize their goals short middle and long term, while not fully adopting all short middle and long term goals presently in the game. Thus asking more more in specific game categories the like best.
(4) Which are details of gameplay the players want to have addressed more than others. A total scattershot topic.
(5) How is the initial reinforcement of the validity of existing company policies a step forward? It was not assertive and it is getting dismantled quite a bit.
Such a list would be a help for the community.
(1) It fulfills an important role to let the players know an issue is acknowledged. That makes a difference perception wise. And let’s not forget that those are often issues coming up after hundreds hours of having played the game, so they are not as all encompassing problematic as they might sound. (Except stuff in the vein of first time PvP viewers wondering what the hell is going on, but developers worry about that more than the players).
(2) They allow the community to discuss whether the right topics are on the list and without the pressure of a CDI having to produce results by a certain date, there is a framework for reasonable discussion and ArenaNet to simply observe it. Even if the topic presenting the list is closed, make no mistake, there will be a lot of talking about it, back and forth, day and night. Armchair development is the one entertaining feature every MMO has, but never lists on the box.
The list is no substitute for:
(1) Being highly reclusive about anything not in the final stages of development. Nobody wants ArenaNet to fake assertiveness, just show some more and don’t panic about negative outcomes. As was said, other thread.
My suggestion for a really interesting list:
You want my money, I know you do. Make that list. High level design goals don’t pay the bills and there is definitely stuff people would pay for. Not every monetization method needs to be a guilty pleasure you rather not talk about.
Consider the impact of this company policy on the perception a customer has of your product.
(1) A customer knows next to nothing about anything further than a week out.
(2) It appears is if projects are not worth announcing because the percentage of projects which get canceled is way too high.
(3) At worst, a customer might even get the impression that there is no plan or organization in the first place and everything told is lip service.
(4) There is a constant tug of war between developer spin and player cynicism.
(5) There is a strategy to give players a run-around for roughly six months after which nothing changed and the same suggestions get collected that were collected in 2012.
Regina’s quote in the beginning is the perfect example. It somehow covers all game types, it vaguely announces things further out than one week, but it has zero impact, because it packs no punching power.
If you are a 1000h player, then ask yourself.
What is it that kept you going for that long and does ArenaNet add hours of fun faster to the game than you can invest them? Otherwise, you are going to hit a wall. You may be able to find new hours of fun at an aspect of the game you ignored before, e.g. sPvP. Or you may come to not like other parts of a very broadly set up game and be frustrated about it. GW2 is not a magically self-reconfiguring game with auto-created content in every corner. There are limits.
What is ArenaNet supposed to do about this? Ask 10 people what ArenaNet should do, you will end up with 20 answers ranging from new maps, to PvP modes, to classes, to new races, to Super Adventure Box, to anything really. ArenaNet can try its best to “group” interests together and spread out projects in hopes of pleasing the most people, but the fundamental nature of the argument is not going to change. People having to come to terms with the fact of a game which provided them unprecedented amounts of fun, not adding new fun faster than the player can consume it. This is especially a problem, since LW2 is focusing on creating a type of content where the ratio between development time and consumption time is not in ArenaNet’s favor. Even if there are mechanisms trying to offer replay value, those mechanisms, in reality, are an entirely different type of game. For all intents and purposes, the story missions and open world missions which are part of LW2 might belong to two different games, they are two entirely different types of gameplay experiences. They just happen to be in the same patch and a good average of players like that mixture, while other like only one part, and some players like neither part, hoping for the next WvW content patch.
When it comes to talking about the future, ArenaNet is cursed if they do and cursed if they don’t. If they don’t, then you end up with a situation such as this one, over and over and over again. A systemic error, if you will. The upshot being that at least for the present everybody might fool themselves into thinking the next update was exactly what they wanted, because everything told about the future is deliberately vague. Even with the best intentions, this can result in looking malicious. What we see now, is the backlash of that. If ArenaNet do communicate, then we must realize that resources are limited, so there is a good chance that something will get made that some players will never have an interest in. Every announcement then carries the risk of scaring players away. Even if something some players should like is announced right now, the time until it might happen could undermine the fun they have right now and discourage them from playing a game they would have still enjoyed, otherwise. ArenaNet would heve been better off shutting their mouth then and we are back to square one.
What is the choice then? Constantly over-deliver, constantly crunch, constantly run people in the ground to make content? And btw, everything has to be part of the so called Living Story and ongoing narrative which rivals cinematic experiences on HBO! Sorry, please, no. There is another word for cinematic → non interactive, which is bad for a game. There is another word for A Game of Thrones which is: “A tale of consecutive clips featuring sex, violence, misery, and an occasional reaction shot of a shocked person to remind the audience to throw up an emotion.” At least that stuff is only on once a week, for some reasons the antics of Handsome Jack are far better in high dosage.
There isn’t even a reason to drown everything in story. Look at Minecraft, never before has an audience accepted games that just tried to be games, not loosely connected cinematics with the legal minimum of gameplay in order to receive a tax bonus. ArenaNet might be ahead in the story game, but it does not need to be the altar everything is sacrificed at.
and finally, when everybody can recite the roadmap for Sony, Microsoft, EA, Blizzard and whomnot in their sleep, but non of your fans can excite other fans for anything that is further away than next week, then there is a problem. It is the second birthday of GW2 this week for crying out loud: there should be angry CMs because somebody leaked the birthday minipet, not vacant positions.
What was said at gamescom came up a few times. Having been to all but two gamescom events since 2002 with a press badge, here is my take on the event.
But first remember what Mike O Brien said, after all, he is the boss at ArenaNet:
If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.
gamescom is all about optimistic promises. Closed room sessions of games which later get canceled, even public demos of games which get canceled (Prey 2, anyone?). Not to speak of the graveyard of promised features. I can understand Mike O Brien’s reluctance to join this illustrious club, but hardly any publisher ever really suffered. Bethesda is still Bethesda, EA has an entire morgue of dead games in their basement and those failures are the least of those companies’ problems. Sooner or later the good companies learned not to overshoot the amount of expectation created, or their claims were auto-corrected when somebody paraphrased them in a journalistic capacity. Turns out, if you fail the right way, no fan will ever hate you for it. Questionable publishers and developers will come and go regardless.
ArenaNet is still in the business of including the player’s alleged reaction in their long term announcements (Check Mike O Briens post for some). Which is a layer of portrayal the press will always cut and replace with their own opinion. The fan will want to do the same, that is what commenting sections thrive on. But there is a reason, the press cuts the suggested reaction from the report. When a company, such as Microsoft, heads into gamescom not being brutally honest about the exact nature of the Tomb Raider exclusivity deal and is using suggestive language, they get curb stomped. Because fans of Tomb Raider actually do not want to buy the Xbox One and if Microsoft tries to speak for those Tomb Raider fans claiming otherwise, fans will give feedback on that topic. When Microsoft suggests, the exclusivity is good for the Tomb Raider brand, they get laughed at in every forum. Vagueness combined with pretending to know the customer’s reaction are two deadly sins, not cutting edge Seattle style PR. You get more sympathy by telling the story of a miserably failure encountered during development. Check Tim Schafer on Youtube, he is a force of nature in that regard.
Major video company reps at gamescom have also forever stuck to “the plan”. The plan is to tell you what will be in stores next week (although chances are you do have the review copy already), then you shall be told what will be in stores for the holidays and then you shall be told what comes early next year. After that, there is E3 and the cycle begins anew. You want to fight the plan? Stick it to the man? Ask Sega about that 1995 E3 press conference and the Sega Saturn. Reaffirming the customer and binding him to the brand over the next nine months by using concrete examples and planned projects has become the core business of gamescom. ArenaNet can fight it, but this is not a war they can win by announcements which do not go beyond one month after gamescom, or are the vaguest of statements for an unknown point in time.
It boils down to minor adjustments on how to phrase announcements. Don’t promise a new PvP mode that will excite even the PvE players. That puts pressure on everybody. ArenaNet has to make it, I have to like it, it has to be done by some date. Suddenly people hate it, but internally everybody believed their own PR and things get messy close to release. Put all promises on hold, just stick to communicating what you want to do. “We are working on a new xyz map that still might go nowhere because this is how game development works”
The second adjustment needs to be the known timeframe. How far players can look ahead with relative certainty about what is to come. LW2, more of that, check, that is one corner of a very big game, what else? That includes having a plan on how to deal with potential catastrophic failure of something announced. Early access games should not be able to run circles around ArenaNet in this regard. It will not be the end of the world, but definitely a step out of your current comfort zone and into something which is hardly hell. After all, this is the ugly stick the competition is using, trying to prey customers away from GW2. It is not just new game releases.
The ten ton elephant in the room being that nothing the community discusses in terms of features they want currently relates to stuff which is being monetized. I hate to be the cynic, but bottom line first.
(edited by FourthVariety.5463)
The method employed by ArenaNet:
Imply everything, confirm nothing
How does it work?
You say something such as this “All of us at ArenaNet […] work on the things that we think will most delight and entertain you.”
See? Nothig said, but you can take any of your wishes, ranging from new PvP to new classes and an expansion, and apply it to this statement. You may feel excited about the future now.
This is a typical video games industry method, but one which is a bit too old for today. It comes from the background of late 90ies where PR always assumed they were talking to children (or to the inner children of adults).
If anything, players seemed to be fed of being talked to like children, which is understandable, since ArenaNet’s direct competition abandoned this stance a while ago. Just yesterday, I saw a Diablo 3 developer jump into the middle of the biggest community controversy live on Twitch and come out on top. How? he treated his audience like adults. He provided a reason for why he designed a reward scheme in a specific way. He acknowledged the suggestions of the community and explained why he wasn’t gunning for that solution again and instead chose something different. He also talked about long term goals and admitted that he had no idea how to do this and that it might go horribly wrong.
In one word, he was a real human being, in contrast to ArenaNet which tries going for the infallible god image. God required some iterations maybe, but now he is god nonetheless.
There is hope yet, Point of Interest is important for ArenaNet to reach that same level of talking to adults instead of trying to talk to children. They might not be the media trained mean machines other developers on Twitch are, but they need ArenaNet’s support to go out there and talk more candidly.
How you talk to people can be more important than what you say. Sure, we all want to know more, more, more, more. But adult ways of communications need to come first.
If you asked me, then personal story arcs for each process of learning a sub-class are certainly the most interesting option. Who says they need to go online all at once? Ship them like a permanent season two of the living story. The hunt for your secondary classes, with a crazy piece of content at the end in which you have to proof that you mastered them all.
New tricks for your character, new missions to test for those tricks. Content stays in the game and you next character will have more to do until content is depleted.
Player housing ultimately comes down to a few questions:
Is the game made better by a GW2 flavored and simplified version of the Sims?
Is this GW-Sims game meant to be played on its own, or are its resources tied to prolonging other gameplay and enforcing repetition elsewhere?
At which point is player housing not a new exciting fantasy, but just the projection of real world desires of estate ownership and extension to gameplay loops centered around greed?
If ownership is such a big draw, can it be expressed better in the public space and by using public space customizations?
I’m also a bit against counting the mentioning of individual terms, as their context varies greatly. While reacting to the term which gets mentioned the most might seem the most democratic, the resulting desired quality might not be found by simply going that route. You can put in a thing with the right name and yet attach all the wrong things to it.
Take the elite skills. Once they were part of a horizontal progression which had you track down specific bosses in specific corners to unlock. This not only made them a progression of your power, but also part of a journey of character progression which only exists in your head. The game had no narrative for that process, the player provided it. Once they were the defining characteristic of your build. As it stands, we do have elite skills in the game, but their role has now been give to weaponsets, which currently are the center of build attention. Minus the dimension of having to go explore for an unlock of said weapons. But by simply looking at elite skills and weapon sets, GW2 implemented the right things, but left out the narrative gaps for the player to fill out.
In a similar way, we can look at the core combat loop of GW2 being "observe → decide → implement reaction. As I said earlier, when playing defense, the implementation of the “right” reaction can be very one sided and downright monotonous. Basically, you are never wrong dodging and hardly ever wrong stepping aside from red areas on the ground.
This being my main grief with core combat loop, I naturally see sub-classes as a new mode of complexity adding depth to the types of choices the game is forcing me to implement during combat. From attacks that cannot we walked out of (rather many), to attacks that cannot be dodges (rather few) to attacks that forcibly require skill activations (currently, rather none)
A classic trope of boss fights, is the boss shifting modes. In its most basic implementation of a Japanese action game, you either dodge or you attack. You do one, until the boss shifts mode and you can do the other. GW2 has plenty of gameplay reasoning why you can attack all the time pushing skills. GW2 has few to none gameplay reasons why you can push buttons to keep alive. Sub Classes are a new way to provide more. Gameplay deepens because instead of exploring 30s attack chains, you can now look into 30s of defense play with button presses other than wasd + roll.
Just reacting to the term sub-classes because it seems popular and populate the attack options with even more attack option is implementing the popular thing for the wrong reasons. Other terms, similarly often mentioned also carry quite different intentions.
Subclass Placement:
Defensive Combat Options:
(1) Walking out of red circles, which is at 100% availability and sometimes stretched to the limit. No need for a subclass
(2) Dodge rolling, which is available once every 5s, allowing for monsters to make player reaction check for rolling. No subclass required as well. So far, all classes are equal.
(3) Utility Skill based damage avoidance/mitigation. Always attached to high recharge, game can make very seldom reaction tests against those skills. Problem of skillful play and skill activation being somewhat connected by merit of the words themself. Due to high recharge, players are trained by the game to make running and dodging work so often, until there is no longer a need for a defensive skill activation, which takes away from the game in my opinion. Sub-Classes combined with lower recharge times can raise availability of defensive skill activations, thereby allow the monster AI to make reaction checks for players more often. Most notably in the utility skill category. Added upside of classes retaining flavor, while players being able to broaden personal options by mixing flavors. Absolute defensive skills such as mist form should be avoided. In PvP, this allows for players to counter a defensive move with an offensive counter of their own, while in PvE, players can still resort to types of counters a monster cannot come back from. This also raises the thread of special bosses, who seemingly have an answer to everything. (Without red circle galore)
Offensive Option:
Offense is mainly tied to choice of weapon. Giving each weapon skill to every class was counterbalanced by primary attribute in GW1. Without a similar counter-weight a subclass should not mean access to full weapon configurations. Switching out one skill here and there might still be not that bad. At the same time, of the weapons you can use, the ability to switch freely at all times is desirable. Nothing worse than knowing you should continue a fight with another weaponset, but having to wait, or to wipe to adjust. (e.g. Ele) No gameplay flow there.
Traiting:
Use this the way GW1 handled attribute. One trait line is the primary trait, only your prime class has access to. This can handle class specific mechanics and provide class specific flavors to everything. Non-primary traits are available to all sub-classes. Traits usually affect groups of utility skills, which are suggested to be available to sub-class anyway. Or they affect main hand weapons, in which case they might stack, might not stack. Or they provide utility in which case sub-classes ight add to each other. Traits and additional points therein (read, additional progression) are certainly the most interesting, but also probably requiring a complete disassembly, reassembly of what gets placed where and which limits are put in place and how.
Armor:
Primary class armor, nothing else.
Controls handling:
In terms of skillbar, the player will configure skills 6-10 twice. Once for his primary class, once for his secondary class. He then attunes between primary focus and sub-class focus on the fly during battle at low recharge. If skills 1-5 are subject to change, they shift accordingly.
Further down the road, you could even allow for more than one subclass, making on the fly decisions and changes to your character setup even more of a focus of coordinated play.
GW1 was a trinity type combat system. However, there were different ways to go about tanking, healing and dps. The secondary class of GW1 made it feasible that the specific role was never tied to one class. It allowed classes to perform in multiple roles. The game even expanded the three classic archtypes into more archtype which in combination were able to perform meta level gameplay. (Protter, Minion Swarmer, Shouter, Bonder, etc.)
Certainly, amongst the hardest of the hardcore, all that mattered was that one dungeon with that one class running that one task using that one build.
But beyond that, among the more mainstream guilds consisting of friends, the secondary class system was quite refreshing in how it allowed you to approach group play. GW2 is missing a lot of that. But not because of missing secondary classes, but mainly because of missing distinctive roles in group play. Each player has to provide for himself. You do not concentrate on providing either defensive or offensive shenanigans for the group, you need to be a complete package. The hammer protection spam guardian with all the reflections being somewhat of the exception to this rule, which is why people want him. Now imagine this situation in a GW1 context. You would not have to need to wait for the guardian to come and spam, any other class could go secondary guardian, pick up the hammer and provide that role.
This is what mainstream group play in GW1 was all about as opposed to group play in GW2.
That whole armor debate surrounding sub-classes, take it and toss it out the window.
What good are more skill options, if the game is unable to punish choice?
Right now, we are in a situation in which any given class has plenty of options how to configure runes, armor bonuses and traits. Problem is, there aren’t any situations where this choice really really matters in PvE. Technically, a player is able to compensate even the worst build with movement skills and his main weapon. Worst case is you dragging the team down.
The skills which matter, i.e. weapon skills and utilities, can always be changed on the fly. This changing of the weapon needs to be leveraged more. To the point where any class can hotswap to any weapon in the middle of combat. Then we have choice in the middle of the action and we can have enemies demanding from us to make choices. That’s what makes a good game, it asks you do make interesting decisions.
Simply adding more of everything (skills, runes, traits) to such a system, without changing the terms on which choices are enforced in combat, is not a reasonable improvement. More out of combat tinkering and equally irrelevant choices, not good. Ultimately, not just the players have to change, the monsters have to change. They need to gain the ability to punish players for making bad weapon choices. With players then being again able to switch on the fly, there will be a moment of player empowerment rewarding player choice.
If you look top down on the battle, then each skill has an area it controls and affects. Some weapons are highly compressed in which area they affect, some weapons have skills which seem to reach any spot or area. Those are the things bosses and mobs must ask the player to do. Be knowledgeable about the area you control, how you control it and how to punish an enemy for stepping into it. With enemies reacting to that and being able to prevent the blind unloading of skills we have now.
This reasoning should not just apply to offensive skills, but also to defensive skills, which currently suffer from high recharge times, forcing the game way too much in the “navigate circles on the ground” direction, because that is the only pressure the game can constantly throw at the player, because the game knows movement is the only permanently available resource to the player. If a boss does one of his big communicated attacks, we always dodge. We need more aggressive ways to block + counterattack. GW2 already shifted much of its focus to more action based combat. I needs to pick up more tropes of that genre. Because ultimately, that is how horizontal progression works in action games; combat intricacy. DMC anyone?
For fansites the situation is less about loosing money, it is about loosing the advertisement monopoly those fansites often sold to their hosts.
Who cares what ArenaNet rules say. The more immediate contract is with the hoster who expects that in exchange for hosting and funding a fansite, the advertisement revenue goes into his direction. Not in the pockets of fansite individuals placing additional banners on the website or Youtube videos and certainly not to third parties. Even if they own the assets the content is based upon.
If PlayNC disables all the monetization, they can claim what they want on a fansite channel without bothering anybody. If PlayNC keeps monetization turned on, fansites are forced to turn videos private and remove them from the site.
For people earning their money by only monetizing on Youtube, the situation is more dire. They are driven out of business, they do not have a partner backing them. They just got stabbed in the back by Google.
ArenaNet needs to acknowledge the different needs of those tow groups and act differently for both. Fansites can be happy with no ads being on the site, professional Youtube channel operators require the money to still go to them.
(edited by FourthVariety.5463)
We talk a lot about progression, yet all we do in the game remains the same.
We started on day one, with Foreman Flammum’s loyalty bar slowly growing as we killed monsters. We are now at day 475 and we watch achievement bars slowly growing as we kill living story monsters. Bars must fill up, it’s the law; then and now!
It is not a question of hitting the sweet spot of how to apply easily produced reward progressions. How to drop loot, how long it takes to get it, how long to unlock this and that. The core game has to progress, not the cheap motivational tricks surrounding it.
mass-kage-facepalm-no-jutsu
Infinite Continue Coin != pay to win
in Super Adventure Box: Back to School
Posted by: FourthVariety.5463
Tribulation mode is similar to a type of game which usually is based around the assumption of the player having infinite lives. By not going that route, ArenaNet made itself prone to attack to some degree.
When you try to buy the infinite coin for gold, it will set you back 20G tops. Compare that to the costs of that other thing they introduced with this patch. What did that costs? 150G+ for leveling and then another 70G for the weapon parts? Compared to that, the infinity coin is a real bargain.
The current dungeon meta of GW2 is heavily leaning into what GW1 players would have called a healing ball. Currently, combos are so terrifyingly efficient when five players stack that all you need is a corner to stand in so knockbacks are canceled by the geometry.
Maybe some players will find that more orderly than the headless chicken battle royale, in the end it is just the same.
if ArenaNet thinks it is getting out of hand, they could always reverse the process, ask the players present for their character’s name and sent an account bound minipet by mail. Problem solved.
If you think the $600 minipet is the weirdest thing to come out of the gamescom event, then think again. Ask Martin Kerstein about a toaster, a shirt and an RNG called the cakefairy.
Is it too hard? Respect the awesome work
in Super Adventure Box: Back to School
Posted by: FourthVariety.5463
I can’t tell how much time I spend falling into the river, being knocked down, getting knocked back and having to wait for the game to either glitch me to a safe sport or finally reset me at the start of the sequence.
To that end, the game would improve if touching rapids was an instakill. You reset faster to the point where you can try again. Trying and failing -> no problem. Failing and having to wait on the game to execute weird scripts until it finally resets you -> problem.
No problem with the infinite continue coin. Ask yourself: Would you buy this, if this was a kickstarter game with Steam early access?
It’s an exploration of the furthest reaches of the aesthetic form of negative feedback loop.
I do not agree on negative feedback loops being the product here.
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room here, which is Super Meatboy.
I maintain, that in a game such as Super Meatboy, the positive feedback loop is not primarily tied to completion of a level but to execution of moves while playing. Death as an obstacle has been removed, since the player is instantly reset with infinite lives; for the most part. Progress is not just tied to playing more levels, but also to unlocking new characters and interactions.
Super Meatboy is therefore a series of tiny successes which does not get ruined by occasional death. Or dying 200 times in one level even. The positive loop of having mastered half the level weighs more than the fast occurring slip ups and resets. It is not a game about exploring negative feedback loops, it is a game about the exact opposite. Also compare: Super Hexagon.
The hardmode of Super Adventure Box is not something to be judged by the number of deaths you die. Just making a player die 500 times is not going to make the game the same thing as ‘I want to be the guy’. SAB cannot be judged by how hard it slams your face into the ground, but in which frequency it allows you to do it. Imo that is the reason for Meatboy being more mainstream than Amiga games of the 80ies.
The high speed of resets allows the player to push his ability to learn the level and execute the moves correctly. You push your learning curve to the limit. In my opinion, that is the product, that is a positive feedback loop. Build on 1000 corpses, I give you that.
Look at how this old version of the same idea limits your learning speed and idles too much on repetition of learned and going to previous areas too often.
http://rickdangerousflash.free.fr/
Then play some Super Meatboy and see how it removes all the limits. Hedging that one positive feedbackloop Rick Dangerous got in all the right ways.
(edited by FourthVariety.5463)
Money is not just earned to keep the team running and be able to pay them, but also important to keep investors/owners happy. This can best be seen in the case of Activision/Blizzard whose giant profits had to keep the mother company Vivendi afloat. Deciding which business model you take depends on what you promised your investors.
This is how you can earn money currently
(1) Sell a box, or digital copy
(2) Have people subscribe
(3) Feature paywall
(4) Microtransactions
(5) Targeted Ads
Any developer can use any combination at any time. The Xbox notoriously puts a paywall between the player and multiplayer, meaning Microsoft earns money from the average developer programming something for their users and never gets to see a dime. Ads formerly were a way to either pre-finance a game in part or whole and/or sell ads after release (e.g. Quakewars, Burnout Paradise), but currently Google is developing technology to sell Youtube-Style ads that can be implemented in games. (This Jormag battle was brought to you by…).
In my opinion, the gem shop gets the most hate, when a feature is put behind a paywall (transmuting, uncomplicated mining), or when Microtransactions are effectively lottery tickets. Those are two areas where ArenaNet could improve. Although I cannot say how that impacts their bottom line, one only needs to read the forums for a while to see how it negatively impacts the reputation.
The name is completely lame, uninspired and is condescending to the game, the lore and everything the franchise stands for.
You realize that Mr. Sparkles is the Golem of Zojja and existed before?
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mr._Sparkles
If you did know before, don’t mind me, just checking.
In a fit of translation rage, Mr. Sparkles got promoted to “Master” Sparkles in German. The only time that happened before was when Mr. Clean became a “Master” Proper upon the name being translated into German. Both times, it makes not linguistic sense whatsoever.
On the plus side, the translation of Sparkels into the German “Funkel” actually makes it a real German name. A rather mundane one, so any attempts Zojja had of naming her creature on the wild side, are totally lost in translation. Which might explain the promotion from mister to master, even though that causes Zojja to address her robot as if it was her superior. A problem easily avoided if the translation of sparkles to funkel had been a bit more creative.
There you have it, one reason why it is part of the lore and two reasons for you to hate him even more. Personally, I say it could be worse, could be a ranger pet.
Contents of Traditional Expansions:
(correct me if I am wrong)
(-) New PvE Maps and events (exploration dimension)
(-) New character levels / gear levels
(-) New races
(-) New classes
(-) New weapons for existing classes
(-) New skills for existing classes
(-) New PvP content (e.g. game modes)
(-) New WvW content
(-) New event types/structures
(-) New plotline the player has full access to whenever he wants to complete it at his own pace
(-) New content for coordinated PvE groups (endgame for lack of a better word)
(-) New types of endgame activities (not including asking the player to transfer to another mode of playing, such as PvP or WvW).
(-) New visual stylings
After one year of GW2, you can see that while the traditional expansion statement still stands, the expectation it creates is not met; creating threads such as this one.
Looking at what the living story does, I get the impression, it is mainly filler material, with experimental stuff thrown in. You could not sell this, if you wanted. The living story is certainly a welcome addition and far from being as negative as some make it out to be. But it does have a mission, which is player retention at economic costs and not handing out a free expansion. Living story will never stand up to any expansion, it does not even stand up to DLC from games such as Borderlands 2. Because living story is free and there isn’t pressure on the developer for it to be good enough to sell. Sometimes a living story update adds something which was promised before release, or tries to bring something to the game that did not work out that well, e.g Fractals trying to fix dungeons.
Particularly the lack of new areas, races, classes, weapons, skills, and traits shows that the living story is not to be mistaken for an expansion. We might find the things we find in the living story be part of an expansion, but only a little part and not the part that makes us fork over $50.
(edited by FourthVariety.5463)
There was a community event during gamescom (on Thursday evening). Many fansites were invited to meet at a Cologne tourist trap, where they had a chance to talk among themselves and to some of the developers.
Interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DDWMBKWCDWk
There was a gift bag for the people who attended and a raffle.
The contents of the bag were:
1x Mini-Pet Mr. Sparkles (card is printed in German, no English text)
1x Black Sweat Armband with GW2 logo in white stitching
1x Grey T-Shirt with white GW2 dragon logo
1x A5 Paper Notepad, no lining, grey logo on each side.
1x Steelseries mousepad Jora design
1x NCSOFT ball-pen
1x Destiny Edge poster
There were roughly 60 people from all over Europe (!) attending the event. I do not know, if they were given out on the show floor as well.
That’s all I can tell you about the card. As was the case in GW1, it will probably not be the first, nor the last minipet which is linked to some real-life event, or is simply unobtainable by playing the game, e.g. try trading Gaile Grey for one of her frogs.
It has always been this way. The engine has a fixed light source. By day it is the sun, by night the moon, they are always in the same spot, shadows are always cast in the same direction.
All shadows from world objects are still calculated with little draw distance, although with a fixed light source, they might as well be textures.
Once the sun and moon start moving, there is a second practical problem, which is the level design. All zones end with either an open ocean, or a cliff you cannot climb. Basically, the entire map is pressed down in a piece of foam. You will therefore never see the sun rise and set on the horizon, because of the shoe box nature of most maps. At best you see the sun come up and go down over objects which are much nearer than the horizon could be. As a result, you get the same effect you get living in a valley. Often the sun will just vanish behind the hillside, the town will be in the shade and it will get dark without orange glowy magical hour sunsets.
Fixing one fake, gives rise to having to make new fakes.
If loot and gold are seen as a reward the game offer players for playing, then the gap between high income activities and low income activities is just too big.
If you can find having fun in earning money for its own sake, (ignoring how silly the farming method) then the game will reward you handsomely with crazy opportunities. It starts with champion farm runs, extends to speedrushing half the dungeons for crazy amounts of money and includes having websites directing you towards lucrative events in real time.
If you just do what you want to do, when you do it, then loot is not part of the reward mechanism.
So far, Jennah was little more than a damsel in distress and a plotpoint for the player to start interacting with things by using numbered keys. Look no further than the human personal story, caudecus story mission and openeing ceremony.
I’d be surprised, if she actually comes off as anything resembling a leader.
Your comment makes no sense. The content seems to function exactly like adulthood. You go to work so you can have the money to do other things.
However games should not be an extension of life under the same ruleset. Or do you want ArenaNet to patch it in so you do not only have to repair your armor, but also to wakitten, dry it and then iron it? I suppose not.
As an adult, you already worked once to have spare time, the luxury of doing what you want. If a game then puts in another layer of pre-requisites, it comes off as unnecessary. It is not a problem when the entire point is to grind out some reward. But the 1vs1 arena is a new type of player interaction with a game mechanic. Walling that off behind a layer of rather boring gameplay is less than desirable.
Just look at how PR is structured, they say “play the new thing”. They do not say “play the old thing some more and maybe you get to play a bit of the new thing”. To that end, bag farming needs to be nerfed into the ground and entry tickets removed.
As for real life comparisons, if I go to the cinema, I pay the price and enter and watch the movie I want. I do not need to pour coke behind a counter in addition to that.
(edited by FourthVariety.5463)
Farming for tickets to play content you are interested in is like mowing the lawn to earn money for movie tickets back when you were 14.
Not every adult appreciates the throwback he is subjected to playing GW2. The game should treat adults like adults and even though you waste time playing the game no matter what you do, the game should try to avoid situations where the waste of time becomes too obvious.
Being forced to do X before you can do Y is one such thing. Especially when Y is being promoted by PR, especially when X and Y have no game mechanical connection and simply happen to be part of the same content update.
Ask yourself a simple question: which game has had good 1vs100 real time combat in the past?
You cannot add 100 players to a level, then give them a single point of interest in a tiny space (i.e. boss) and expect things to go well from a combat simulation standpoint.
But for the people who missed release, zerging down bosses is fun. It is something they never experience. I may might make the designers cringe, but who cares, fun first. If you want precision combat, 1on1 and dungeons still work. if you are just playing for the rewards while expecting entertainment, you have my pitty.
First you read 20g/h and think “wow, where?”
Then you see it is a 30s farm done over and over and think “there has got to be better entertainment to be found in this game than doing this run for gold”.
Please list your machine and try to recreate some of the screenshots you have seen.
You say you do not have problems “in PvE”, but that is a rather broad description. Most players have problems specifically in Queens Pavilion due to the high number of players and monsters.
Super Staff from Super Adventure Box is an awesome staff. As punishment, ArenaNet removed it from the game
I see myself
I see my party members
I see 30 names floating off the ground
I see 10 enemy names and health bars floating off the ground
I see some effects
I do not necessarily see every red circle
I definitely do not see any animation announcing a boss special move
Sometimes I do not even see their picture in the HUD.
Not to mention the framerate
Not to mention how often I get packets from the server updating enemy positions etc., causing the floating health bars to ‘teleport’
In the end, it is dumb, but manageable. It totally destroys atmosphere, but you are doing that for the money anyway I assume.
The real painful thing happens in the 1vs1 arenas, because they suffer from framerate destruction as well. Having 12 frames per second when you spam a guardian’s staff auto-attack is fine. In a 1on1 it is not. Those champion fights need an instance desperately.
Fractals should be about good coordinated teamplay, not story. There is enough content where story is in the foreground. In fractals, story should take a step back and make way for dungeon mechanics.
As someone who played an excessive amount of fractals I have to say that I rather have good gameplay in fractals and no story at all.
Fractals are not improved by giving them fan-favorite story. They are improved by making small areas for well coordinated group play.
During GW1 times, I once found myself defending a build called Ursan for being very friendly towards casually doing something without encountering much of a challenge. Not that anything was wrong with GW1 combat, it was complicated and there was fun to be had. To that end, having a very simple Ursan build was a nice counter-weight to enjoy the game in a less stressful way.
Today we have GW2 and by GW1 measures, every build now is an Ursan build. Mash your primary attack buttons upon cooldown and use the self-heal. It works for a broader demographic in the same way Ursan worked, however, GW1 players might want more.
In PvP you have the added pleasure of useful utility skills, since other players will put you into situations where they become useful. For normal PvE, most criteria of utility skills (and traits for that matter) are too outrageous, or too much of a fringe case. On top of that, the pacing in PvE is such that if you make do five minutes without using your elite, you might as well go without it altogether.
Utility skills in dungeons and fractals can be useful, but by that time you are either too bad a player to get it, or so good at auto-attacking and dodge rolling, that you never require them. Ironically, this makes CoF speedruns almost a masterful art of using all skills for the sake of speed. Something which is nowhere else to be found to that degree. Needless to say, the incentive will be patched away by next Tuesday and no matter how entertaining something might be, it can rarely overcome the lack of an incentive.
A player who is into “skillful” play regards a click on a button as an answer to a problem posed by the game. A moment where the player can feel smart because he provided an answer. GW2 does not ask that many questions to be honest.
You can now either blame GW2, or your schoolboy attitude.
I find your lack of belief that this will backfire spectacularly quite disturbing.
ArenaNet Idea:
the world appears to be living because there is changing content within the confines of the world.
Limitation
the areas affected are rather limited and the change to the area itself is limited. There is no change such as the passing of seasons that could be done by creating multiple versions of permanent fixtures. There is little change by adding permanent fixtures or changing them.
Player perception:
the world is not “alive”, players feel rather boxed in and monthly updates do not expand the world fast enough. The fact of content phasing in and out increases the ‘problem’.
Fundamental Issue
ArenaNet idolizes the idea of the world “living”. It is heavily leveraged by marketing at every turn. One gets the impression that there is a core belief that any other problem the game might have will be gone in a seconds, if only the world starts to be perceived as being alive by the audience. We all know games where graphics gloss over other shortcomings. Living world/story is Arenanet’s version of that. Probably it focus tested well and I don’t want to call it being something fundamentally bad. I look at it as being neutral. But it cannot gloss over everything. Especially not the wish for a growing world. Because that is what other MMOs trained you to like about them: a world getting larger.
Gold isn’t necessarily the best measure. After all, Gold is just a commodity in the same way Mithril and Logs of Green Wood are a commodity. Sure, it is the one commodity used to trade, but it is still not good enough a currency to determine how complicated something is to get.
Realistically, we should measure a precursor in playing time. How many hours of playing the game directly in pursuit of the precursor do you need to get it.
Maybe you can earn 500g faster today than you could earn 300g a few month back. Then a precursor is easier to get now, even if you pay more gold for it.
in the same way the stable prices are meaningless, because the ability to farm X gold per hour was definitely not a constant over the past months.
In the end, it does not matter if John Smith says an increased drop rate would increase price. It does not matter to look at spidy graphs. There is only one question: is the current precursor system an efficient tool of player motivation? After reading forums since release, it is pretty clear to me that while it can motivate some player, a majority seems to be rather turned off by it. Hence a change to the system is already announced.