Guild Wars 2

and the rest…

I think the Lost Shores weekend getaway to Klendathu could and should have been better. But, there were some epic moments, I enjoyed it and was happy with the rewards (no big money, no whammies, no precursors) for participating. The most disappointing thing to me has been the reaction of the people who seem to think that somebody’s good fortune from the RNG tilt-a-whirl somehow diminishes the rest of us.

One of the nice things about the game is that it appears that the economy was intended to be abundance oriented, rather than arbitrarily resource constrained. I’d love to get a fabulous drop that solves all of my in-game financial needs… but I’m satisfied that the possibility that it could happen exists.

I worry that GW2 will be pulled in the direction of some mystical candy-land where carebears and rainbow unicorns fire consolation prizes out of their sparkly, glitter-encrusted cloacae into the laps of the self-entitled masses. Or perhaps worse, a game where the possibility of a gee-whiz drop is eliminated in order to ensure that the only people who end up with nice gear are part of the “deemed worthy, cool kids” crowd.

I don’t know about other folks, but my experience with teh interwebs is that one can almost immediately discount the opinions of people who present their subjective beliefs as if they were incontrovertible facts. To me, absolute certainty implies a failure to consider one’s blind spots and completely fails to account for my post-positivist proclivities. So, what follows is primarily opinion, salted with examples.

This isn’t a credential, but I have spent a few years around software development and have some observations about observations…

I find it doubtful that the folks who assert that some thing within the game would be easy to implement by relying on a fallacious premise or three have actually had a tour of the GW2 architecture. Maybe some of these ideas would be easy to integrate within the game, but most of us aren’t in a position to know. Software applications haven’t reached the state of being infinitely configurable imagination engines – every design decision results in some sort of “law” of operation – which in effect becomes part of the environmental canon. My experience is that people tend to hand-wave the really difficult bits and attach too much significance to the easy things. Some people who have worked in software development tend to see technical problems through the lens of that one program they wrote “back in the day”, which can have the effect of causing someone to look an issue through a filter which may not provide a truthy view of what is actually going on.

Sometimes, when interviewing developers, we should ask a question like:

“How would you go about designing a bathroom for a disabled person?”

Unfortunately, this regularly elicits a response that is basically “a wide doorway and low counters” or some variation – which is the wrong answer from my perspective. This indicates things to me about self-appointed IT experts and their opinions… but, to be fair, I don’t presume that others shouldn’t have a similar perception of my opinions.

Another example of this would be the questions surrounding the data storage architecture and how that may influence the ease of reporting related to who was where and what they might have been doing at some specific time. Despite the fact that hardware is relatively cheap, it isn’t actually free. At certain points when adding hardware, additional supporting software licensing is generally required. This means that a system designer has to balance costs associated with provisioning the storage architecture and the cost of processing for every data-centric transaction. If I had to guess, I would say that the larger cost is probably time-related in terms of an effect on gameplay QoS as a result of balancing the size and quantity of the database transactions. In the end, we may decide that some data is more important than other data and design our systems accordingly.

I assume that the GW2 architecture allows for monitoring of the number of characters in a specific region at any given time – logically, you’d need something in place so that the system would know when to spool up an overflow instance. My guess is that chat logs are probably stored for a enough time that complaints related to poor behavior can be investigated. Some significant amount of character state data is probably necessary – but do we need to know about DEs that weren’t completed after the fact? How will the system determine whether someone logged out intentionally versus someone who was inadvertently DC’d? Remember, there’s an overhead cost for every data element that we choose to store and in some cases, we can’t determine player intent from character state information. And ultimately, we can only report on data that we have chosen to collect.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that every interesting bit of data is in fact being stored within the system. Our next question relates to what sort of bias did we reflect when we designed our databases? Did we optimize for efficient transactions (OLTP) or did we optimize for efficient reporting (OLAP)? I’m betting that if we’re designing an MMO, we bias heavily towards OLTP. That doesn’t mean that we can’t report on our data, but complex insights and nuggets related to player statefulness may not just wash up on the beach.

Again, not a credential, but I played GW1 – slogging through Post-Searing Ascalon and Kryta, Cantha, Elona, and the Shiverpeaks. My experience with ArenaNet as a software company is that they really care about what they’re doing. My guess is that their tech team was coding their little fingers to the bone up to and through the Lost Shores event. At the moment, they may be sifting through all sorts of data trying to figure out what can and should be done for the folks who tried to participate but couldn’t.

I slogged through the event. I enjoyed aspects of it very much. I got the exotic box and earring at the end, but the rest of my loot was worth about 2 gold after the TP got their vig.

I’m unclear about the notion of inequality that seems to have everybody so riled up.

If someone did get a precursor weapon and chose to sell it, the money would have logically come from somewhere – the buyer would have had to “earn” the purchase price. So, the lucky winner of the RNG tilt-a-whirl is actually the recipient of a wealth transfer. Because the money is just moving between characters, this would not be inflationary per se.

On the other hand, more supply than demand could create a deflationary affect within the precursor market – in this case, the people who would really be “out” would be the folks who had lucked into finding a precursor before the “worst thing that has ever happened in a MMO” happened. It would seem that they may have lost unrealized market equity. Of course, that is sort of the nature of markets…

If there was some promise of rewards being purely related to time spent playing or that I was entitled to loot-related spoilers before choosing how to spend my time in-game, I must have missed it.

1)graphics (1-bad…10-amazing) – ⁸
2)sound(1-bad…10-amazing) – ⁷
3)story concept/originality (1-boring…10-captivating) – ⁸
4)loot/reward (1-lost all my money…10-gained amazing items) – ⁷
5)stability (1-extremly buggy…10-no bugs) – ⁵
6)network connection/speed (1-laggy,disconnections, 10 – perfect connection) – ⁶
7)mini events length (1-to long/short…10-just right) – ⁸
8)overall event length (1-to long/short…10-just right) – ⁷
9)overall Satisfaction (1-worst experience ever,10-best experience ever) – ⁸

I was able to take some time off from work on Friday to be online for the start of the event. Taking time off from work has an opportunity cost, but I wanted to be there for the kickoff, so I made a choice…

The opening of the event was so laggy for me that I was basically unable to contribute anything other than my auto-attack. Like everyone else, I went stampeding off to participate in the scavenger hunts. Called it a day after a few hours of not being able to finish the third step of either scavenger hunt (explains my low scores for stability and network QoS).

Logged in while drinking my coffee on Saturday morning and was able to finish up the scavenger hunts – despite the Largos still being buggy. I tried the new dungeon with a pick-up group – we didn’t do well, but I wouldn’t hesitate to run with any of those guys (in the non-gender specific, all-inclusive sense) again. Ran some errands and was back on line in time for the opening of phase two. Again, the opening of the phase was fairly laggy and it was difficult to understand what was going on around me. This part was basically a lag tempest in a teacup.

Then, like everyone else, I joined the armada and sailed for Klendathu. My frame rate was OK once we hit the beach. I participated in the adventurer-wave attacks and patrols that secured several footholds on the island. After the attack stopped for the day, I joined a DE event to kill a champion shark. My entire reward consisted of a virtual gold medal, some exps, some karma, and a few coins. I saw nothing like a chest in the area afterwards (and believe me, I looked).

Leading up to phase three, I did some exploring. The drop rate for loot on Klandathu was – as noted elsewhere – abysmal. I chose to be online and in the battle area for phase three. We got a dispatch directing us to Canach’s Folly and left Camp Karka to begin a ~2 1/2 hour running battle. During phase three, I didn’t have any special graphics-related difficulties – while there were some momentary laggy bits, overall, about half of my deaths during phase three came while trying to raise other folks who were downed too close to the forward battle lines and there were cases where someone else died trying to raise me.

There were some epics moments where it seemed like a majority of our wave was downed and a handful of survivors were basically forced to retreat to some defensible landmark in order to regroup and make a stand before working back towards the killing fields and raising our dead as we clawed our way forward again. Sometimes I was one of the bodies strewn across the battlefield, waiting for the handful of survivors to come get me.

Over the course of the battle I was barrel-rolled, doused in acid, pounded by ranged attacks, and finally, rolled over by a wave of hatchlings on the ramp literally within sight of where the grand chest spawned. I sincerely appreciate that a couple of nice folks came back and raised me so I could loot the chest too.

I ended up spending about 50 silver over the weekend on repairs and waypoint travel. My loot haul from the final chest was worth a little over 2 gold (leaving me up ~ 1.5 gold for the weekend) beyond the 20 slot box (nice) and the spiffy event earring (also nice). I’m satisfied with the rewards – not giddy, but not complaining either. I added ~125 to my combat medic count – and there were many times that I tried, but there were already too many folks working to raise the downed person.

There were obviously things that A-Net could have been done better in terms of general QoS. But, even with the problems, I enjoyed the event and would do it again.

Dig this, my little porkchops…

Prior to this event (and the last) I noted some debate about timing of bits and how that affected the ability of players from certain regions to participate.

If we assume that A-Net has a reason (which could be architecture or procedural) for using a single time for event kickoffs, then we might stop and consider the various ways that they can decide on the kickoff time and how we as a community might look at that.

Choosing a start time based on concurrency is both market-based and Utilitarian (needs of the many and all that… thank you Spock). It may be that as a business, ArenaNet has a clear and overarching interest in making sure that “the market” is satisfied.

But, as Jefferson noted in his first inaugural address, the minority must possess equal rights – anything else creates inequity (I know, he used the word “oppression”, don’t hurt me, Hammer).

Rawls advanced the idea of a “veil of ignorance”, which asks that people consider questions related to the societal contract from a position that has no awareness of its particulars – e.g. that as we advocate for one approach or another, we have no idea which group we’re in or who else might be in or out of the group that is advantaged or disadvantaged.

The benefit to this approach is that it quickly strips away a few of the more specious “might makes right” arguments.

Frankly, I understand that folks on the other side of the planet feel a bit disenfranchised when they perceive a timing bias within the game. As a North American player, I’d be willing to suffer through a rotation of starting times that ensured that our friends in other parts of the world got some prime start times as well.

/ducks for cover

It seems to me that if we’re going to have a community of interest portal for GW2, we ought to be able to come here and get the latest without having to go spelunking through somebody’s Twitter feed or Facebook hooha.

Would it be that difficult to include a widget to show the live and dev team tweets within the forum architecture?