On a similar topic: Now that HoT is out, is there any update to be had regarding Season 1 being made permanent content?
Not at the moment.
Well do you mind if I speculate?
I’m assuming a permanent Season 1 will be largely new content using old assets. Some of the later content could be ported in verbatim, but there’s large chunks that would have to be built within an instance and built to scale to one player.
If you’re rebuilding Season 1, it might also make sense to take a mulligan on some aspects of the story that weren’t well-received; bridge the gap between the personal story and Season 2 better, by having Traherne, the Pact and the Orders visibly recede in importance, and backfill some of the earlier chapters so that Scarlet looks smarter in hindsight. (This’d also allow for removing some of the visible anxiety from the first go around, where introducing Scarlet was rushed forwards to respond to players who felt the storylines weren’t going anywhere.)
The trick here is that for pacing reasons you want a big finish halfway through, and Tower of Nightmares fits that better than anything else – you’ve got the Scarlet cutscene setting the stakes, and you’ve got that great cutscene of the Tower blowing up as one hell of a show-stopper.
So: Tower of Nightmares on episode 4 (assuming 8 episodes). That means Flame and Frost is episode 1, Dragon Bash/Sky Pirates of Tyria is episode 2, and Queen’s Jubilee/Clockwork Chaos is episode 3. That means Bazaar of the Four Winds get pushed back, and this is where you start retconning a little, by having your character do a deal with Ellen Kiel to use the fractal research to dig into Thaumanova. The Southsun arc gets a little disconnected here – the only really important thing is that Secret of Southsun happens after Flame and Frost, it’s not when Lord Faren and Kasmeer have places to be, and that Canach’s billet is purchased by Episode 7.
I’d fill in some of the gaps with new material where Traherne and the player part ways (also an opportunity to mulligan the perception that Traherne doesn’t acknowledge the player’s work), the Orders are increasingly out-foxed by Scarlet (thus justifying bringing together a new guild), and a sequence where players dig through Scarlet’s history as Ceara and the history of the Bazaar. (If I had my druthers, I’d also add special content for asura who designed the infinity ball – and bring back the original tragic ending just for those characters, as an alternate history they undo. Maybe also other races closely affected by Ceara.)
Thankfully I don’t have to make time to do any of this.
In Heart of Thorns areas, it takes several minutes for models for NPCs (including mobs) to load. This largely means I can’t see enemies, which makes the game basically unplayable. This isn’t a problem in Central Tyria areas, with the exception of parts of Lion’s Arch.
I’m running GW2 on a hard drive, but this shouldn’t be preventing enemies from loading, surely.
A booster item that, when active, upscales characters to max level in PvE maps, like they are in WvW. This’d only last for an hour or so, and after that would persist until map change so players don’t suddenly find themselves in an area surrounded by enemies that have 50 levels on them. (There might be some issues with rewards that aren’t designed to scale down, and with the map reward system coming in HoT.)
Two target audiences: friends of existing players, so they can explore places like Orr, the Silverwastes and the Maguuma Jungle together, and alts of established players, so they can do things like guild events. They won’t be able to entirely subvert the levelling process (can’t get masteries, will be weaker thanks to scaling, it runs out after an hour), but it’ll let new and old players play together across most of the game instead of just in the starting zones.
Perhaps achieving some of the new titles should unlock a repeatable achievement, in the same way that long-term PvE achievements like dungeons and salvaging have repeatable achievements. The people with 25k yaks killed can wake up on HoT release day and have a ton of shiny new achievement points to show for their dedication, which will also help the imbalance between PvP/PvE and WvW in terms of opportunities to earn achievement points. (I’d suggest making the cap on the repeatable achievement equivalent to the current Yakslapper, but I doubt the game supports more than 255 repetitions of an achievement and you wouldn’t want to make the criteria for the repeatable achievement more than about 100 as it is. Unless you made two repeatable achievements: one that counts only yaks killed since Heart of Thorns, and a historical one with a higher cap as an attaboy for people who seriously went for launch’s Yakslapper.
Although the lack of practice mode is a worry. What will you do about leavers in unranked?
How will first timers know to do hotjoin instead?
Well if they turn on the leaving penalty again I imagine they’ll address that problem.
Honestly, I think the advice for first-timers to play hotjoin is part of the problem PvP has had. Hotjoin is almost always a terrible experience – it’s usually thoroughly unbalanced with lots of ganking players looking to carve their way through fresh meat.
Stronghold will probably work better as a game for players new to PvP to work out what they’re doing, because Stronghold has far less emphasis on team fights. Less to learn at once.
When I said ‘minus’ I literally meant a subtraction. We assume players with ‘unsure’ ratings are probably on the less-skill side. As mmr becomes more accurate, that difference becomes very small.
So, hang on. If you have a high rating and start winning over 50% of your games, your deviation will increase because you’re winning. So does that mean, if your deviation increases by more than your rating changed, your MMR effectively goes down?
the change should make client implementation a bit easier — instead of registering an app and going through the OAuth2 code flow, users simply create and copy-paste an API key into your client.
If I’m reading this right, it sounds like authentication on mobile devices is going to be enough of a pain in the kitten that no GW2 mobile apps will have a smooth authentication path. If authentication is no longer a supported use-case, I’m struggling to see what use-cases are left where API keys tied to specific users are involved.
I’m not sure what the blocking issue is. I wonder if provisional keys might not be a good compromise – hand out initially non-working keys via the API that have to be approved by the user while securely logged in.
See, I would have thought having three grandmaster traits instead of one or maybe two would promote more diverse builds because your build can do more than one thing at once. Instead of cobbling together a build that only works thanks to crazy synergy, you’re dropping in chunks of build that are all individually viable, but this crazy thing happens when you combine this trait with that trait.
Take flamethrower engineers, for instance: they absolutely have to have Juggernaut to even be worth running. Imagine if, just by taking one specialisation, flamethrower was viable. Imagine how many more build choices would open up if every specialisation made a chunk of skills viable.
Anyway! Question for Ready Up: skill points will no longer be earned from level ups and earning XP. Does this mean that the open-ended levelling system is going away entirely? What happens to XP when you’ve filled out all your masteries?
OAuth2 is a bad standard, to the point where one of the lead authors withdrew their name from the specification. If implemented poorly, it’ll be insecure, and it’s very, very easy to implement it poorly because it’s far too complex.
The amount of work ANet would have to do to securely support OAuth 2.0 could be spent on building a simpler authentication system, then doing some of the myriad other things people would like from them.
I was thrown by this as well, but I’m guessing what it means is that gold buyers will now be treated as harshly as gold sellers have since beta. ANet have always taken a dim view of gold sellers, while tolerating gold buyers. After all, gold buyers probably could be persuaded to use the Black Lion Exchange. (I’m surprised that the gold purchased by gold buyers wasn’t previously removed.)
Apparently, the potential of converting them to customers is no longer worth the damage they do by paying gold sellers.
How much does the system take into account the skill of a premade group when working out how much to up their MMR? If I get into a group of 5, I’m not going to be much more effective than I am solo.
It feels like it’d be more useful if it were smarter at working out why I died. It would be very helpful if, instead of showing me just a list of damage numbers, it made some intelligent guesses as to which ability really did me in – if they stunned me and burst me down during the stun, I care much more about the stun than about the burst. Did I take way more condition damage than I should have?
Also, to steal an idea from other games, show something good I managed to do before I died. Am I leading on captures? Did I kill that one enemy? Takes the sting out a bit.
I want to point out that bees communicate primarily by dancing, and so that’d be a fine thing to collect to demonstrate your commitment to partying.
I am also hoping for some consultancy from Andrew W.K., the world’s foremost expert on partying hard.
After careful consideration, I’m not touching the rest of this trainwreck of a thread.
This is still happening, even after the UI patch. It started happening in a PvP game, which made it basically unplayable.
It seems like no-one knows what’s going on, so I might raise a ticket.
It might be too early to judge the story but don’t those lines need to be recorded? I’d be surprised if you brought in voice actors just for the demo and weren’t planning on using those lines in the final product, and I’d be surprised if this was a scenario that didn’t exist at all in the final product (specifically, ‘Braham does something dumb as a pretext to get the player to follow’).
Personal story in the core game didn’t change a whole lot from beta to release, either.
Recently, I’ve developed an issue where, at some point while playing, movement skills (other than dodging, mapped to the mouse), skill activation, hotkey-based UI activation and double clicks on inventory items all stop functioning reliably. They’ll activate 50% of the time or so, while double clicks in the inventory never do.
I’ve eliminated the keyboard (it’s fine outside GW2) and the mouse (likewise) as the source of the issue. I tend to run GW2 through Steam, but it still happens running the launcher from the desktop (Steam consumes certain key presses, which leaves GW2 thinking I’ve been holding down the Shift key for a minute).
What’s going on?
Ugh. The MMR system is an Elo system – specifically, it’s Glicko2, which is a version based on Elo that can adjust based on the size of the win, which Elo doesn’t.
Here’s the problem with an MMR-based leaderboard: you’re trying to put the top players up on the leaderboard, but you need those players to be keeping their hand in. Ranking systems like Glicko rank active players, and are only meaningful when compared against the pool of active players. A ranking of 1800, say, doesn’t mean much on its own. If the people at the top of the leaderboard stop playing, everyone else has to win much harder to get the same score as the current top players. That’s fine when matchmaking because you’re comparing active players to each other, but not for a leaderboard. The decay system was an attempt to fix this, but it’s fundamentally flawed because active and historical players can’t be meaningfully compared.
Going off W/L is a bad idea as well, because it’s trivially gamed: trash your MMR, or start a new account, before the season starts. You’ll be matched up against bad players over and over again, until the MMR system works out you should be higher.
What you want to show is who is the best player, as in the player that plays the best right now. Showing MMR ranking doesn’t work, because active and historical players can’t be meaningfully compared, but what we can do is adjust how many points you get for a win based on the team’s average MMR. This adjustment can’t be a linear function, to ensure that a player with an 80% W/L ranking down in the bush leagues can’t reach the top of the leaderboards over a ToL player with a 50% W/L rating who’s being matched against other top players.
68 for me, Synka Dynmerus, US.
I think you probably could make the timegate on damasks 2 instead of 1, but then I feel like the timegate on damask is primarily there so that damask can be sold at a profit. There’s a reason it’s tradeable: there’s an expectation that you’ll buy at least some of it.
I’d also be happy with using a little more elonian leather in the armor components instead of damask – reduce the damask used in the chest and leg panels by 2, add 2-3 leather.
As for making it use less silk: I think this is really dangerous, to a level I think most players don’t recognise. For crafting materials, GW2 has a highly efficient economy: it’s hard to corner, and when demand or supply changes, the prices change fairly quickly. Most characters don’t need all the resources they earn, and some will never be particularly exciting. A heavy armour user isn’t going to be excited about leather, while a medium armour user will find that very interesting, but won’t be so thrilled about metal. It’s quicker for them to trade than to farm it up themselves, which leaves us with several sticky wickets, particularly around how you make drops that are actually exciting if earning mats is going to be slower than liquidating everything and buying them.
ArenaNet’s solution appears to be to give one crafting mat in a tier much greater value. Charged lodestones are used for several legendaries and unique skins, so ArenaNet can make a guaranteed rare crafting mat drop and sometimes it’s going to be really exciting. Blood vials quickly turned into the same thing – crafting mats are cool, but blood vials are a big-ticket item. It looks like they decided to give the loot system a shot in the arm by giving light armor the same status: instead of all loot being junk (two blues and a green), now most loot is junk except light armor. If the price of silk normalises, and drops go back to being equitable, loot will go back to being homogenous, which means ArenaNet needs to come up with another way to give loot variability in value that can’t be circumvented by trading while still being tradeable.
(edited by Merus.9475)
It bothers me that some players with limited co-ordination aren’t able to get all the vistas, and thus world completion, because they’re behind jumping puzzles. Most of them involve climbing, and that can be done by anyone with time and patience, but a few of them involve making long leaps that not everyone has the motor control to pull off.
Anyway has Josh thought about a jumping puzzle that involves sliding down slopes to land jumps
Does a character’s stats influence the strength of the control granted on a defiant enemy? Presumably an ability that is traited to do a 1.5 second stun will be more effective than the base 1 second stun, but does, say, condition duration influence this? Could toughness?
I ask because this’d be a quick and dirty way to make certain stats more useful in dungeon running.
Q: Which ended up have a greater effect on leather consumption – the spinal blades during Scarlet’s invasion or the Mawdrey chain? Did either have a bigger effect on leather than you anticipated?
I think I’m falling in the camp that would prefer there to be at least some choice in the utility skills. It probably doesn’t need to be much – each legend would only need 4-5 skills – but locking it to 3 is going to force what’s seen as the ‘best’ revenant build, and takes away one of the key fun parts of building characters in GW2: working out which of the 4 or 5 utility skills that work with your build you have to drop.
John, did it ever happen that a new feature or game mechanic that was proposed internally by the dev team was vetoed by you because it would have too big of an impact on the economy?
50 Times a week, I am the destroyer of the designers intention to make people happy.
So that’s why precursor crafting’s been delayed so long
To be honest, I don’t think they would actually fix the Zhaitan fight itself but rather restore the story chapters to what it once was.
I should clarify; I meant the campaign in Orr, not the Zhaitan fight itself. Sadly, I don’t think we’ll ever see that fight polished.
Obviously there’s huge issues with Traherne, where his loyalty’s not earned, but I never cared for how the PC’s command comes out of the blue, either. Defeating Zhaitan always seemed inevitable, despite some of the dialogue, because we never get a good sense of how futile it is to go up against Zhaitan and how the rest of Tyria – or even the Pact – feel about trying to kill an Elder Dragon. We mostly get it from Traherne, and so he sounds like a wet blanket instead of a pragmatist saying what everyone else is thinking. It cheapens one of the best things about the Elder Dragon characterisation, that they’re less like dragons and more like forces of nature.
I want to hear muttered dissent in the ranks. I want to hear skeptical civilians. I want people to make analogies about punching thunderstorms. I want the Captain’s Council to assume Risen attacks are just the new normal now. I want to hear the mentors in the racial storylines hope that one day future generations may work out how to resist the elder dragon’s forces for good. I want to join the Pact as captain and get promoted up to commander. I want to get to know Traherne before we’re assumed to be partners. I want the Pact to stumble and falter and believe that they’re going to their deaths, and then it starts working and they start to get minor victories and the PC is getting things done and the Pact starts to believe that they might actually be able to pull this off – not just push the Risen back, not just win some fights in Orr, but do the impossible and take out an Elder Dragon for good.
Honestly though I reckon making the Zhaitan fight exciting will happen before all that.
The potential for improved writing in the back end of the campaign is very appealing. The fight against Zhaitan feels surprisingly weightless, something I hope the writing team are itching to fix.
Hopefully alongside this there’ll be some changes to Traherne’s AI – I think players would be more favourably disposed to him as a character if he was capable of reviving players, for instance. Currently, what players see is a ‘companion’ character who doesn’t care if they die.
I don’t think there’s a conflict here – game design has long since moved on from pass/fail mechanics towards something that’s more accommodating to different skill levels. Having leaderboards and multiple levels of success is an excellent way for a player like Monika to have fun with her little one and complete a bite-sized challenge, while testing a player like Marcus to do the same thing optimally. Forcing players like Monika to step through graduated levels of challenge isn’t going to be satisfying for either her, as she’s said, or for players like Marcus, who can’t just get straight to the good stuff.
Adventures using specific bundle weapons seems like an obvious start, or even a couple of bundle weapons that we have to juggle. An obstacle course using bundles we have to carry through might be interesting – a jumping puzzle built with the Experimental Rifle in mind. Having a pretty traditional event – clear through an enemy village – might be interesting as an adventure.
It seems like the criteria for an adventure should be that it should interesting to do the first time through – i.e. not a straight kill quest – but it also needs to be interesting to optimise, and something that players aren’t likely to be able to do perfectly. What players are trying to optimise might not be time – what about skill usages? Damage taken? Time spent visible to an enemy? Highest from start? (Oh man, an adventure where you start at a particular point and have to climb as high as possible as quickly as possible without going too far from the start point.)
But I kind of wanted to go on a different tack – there are some hearts in the core map that’d be better as adventures, like the Ash Legion stealth training in Blazeridge Steppes, and some where there are a few events but if the event isn’t running, the heart is very tedious to perform. I’d hope, with this expansion, you take a look at existing hearts.
I’d be surprised if 2v2 or 3v3 arenas are satisfying for players in practice, given how disappointed some players were with team deathmatch in this battle system. It’s built for area control and intentional application of boons and conditions. The counterplay works better when it’s a fight over an area or feature than if it’s trying to get the other player down, particularly due to how downing players works in this game compared to WoW. I expect many of those players that are supposed to be attracted by the addition of arenas will leave again when they discover that killing your enemy isn’t actually about killing your enemy.
I guess what I’m saying is 2v2 king of the hill.
You may not want to “fragment” your low population but the truth is by providing a poor experience that people don’t enjoy you’re just lowering that population anyway. Don’t “fragment”. Expand.
This argument makes no sense, and I love it.
(edited by Merus.9475)
For Australia it’s in the small hours of the morning. I don’t think there’s much you can do about this this close to the panel, you’d have to have a fleet of boats already tugging Australia and New Zealand to the east Pacific to make it in time.
So if we’re discussing systems: part of the problem with RNG is clamping down on the outliers. People are threatened by uncertainty, even though they do respond to random rewards.
So here’s an idea for a ‘buffet’ reward system, that’s probably not technically feasible but let’s look at it anyway. When a player receives something from a specific source, the game rolls, say, 7 times on a table, and then presents the items from those rolls for the player to choose from. The player picks one, and they get that item while the other six stay on the buffet, for the next time the player receives something from that source. The buffet is rerolled when it gets down to about two or three items, and probably also at some specific reset time.
This could be modified further:
- the most valuable item on the buffet is taken off and put as a final reward, only available once four or five lesser items have been taken off the buffet. This stops players seeing that they don’t have anything particularly exciting coming up and electing to do something else.
- some kind of universal currency is always available instead of an item on the table. This might be either a consumable like karma, or a random roll like a Bag of Coins. This’d probably be pitched so it’s a bad deal on average, but it’s there to anchor the other choices. Players frustrated by bad rolls can at least get something they expected.
- if there’s more than one of the most and least valuable tier of items, reroll them, to try and curb outliers.
- Remove duplicate items – this works better when there’s a strong chance of getting duplicates.
The advantage is that you still get the thrill of seeing what’s on the buffet the first time (and UI sizzle can sell that better, having them appear one at a time) but after that you get certainty. From an economic perspective, there’s a slight uptick in the value of drops, but that’s mitigated by some of the modifications that shave off the outliers.
and I’ll say it again. sylvari being dragon minions is incredibly stupid, and I’m kind of surprised mccoys work was taken seriously.
Your comment is going to get removed, but before that happens. I agree. As far as compelling plot ideas go, this is not one.
Piece of advice to the writers. Not everything needs to revolve around the dragons. Your world begins to look very two dimensional when almost every single piece of lore we have in game in some ways ties back to the elder dragons (The Mursaat, The Seers, The Dwarves, Scarlet, The Gods…). We get that they are the big bad and are super important, but too much of one thing gets very old. You’re also tampering with lore that a lot of people love and making it seem rather trivial because you know what ‘dragons did it’.
I’m not aware of any ties between the Mursaat, the Seers and the Elder Dragons, but since the start of the series there’s been these six very clear and obvious domains that don’t appear to mix or cross over nearly as much as they should do, especially seeing as they don’t correspond at all to elemental planes. There is something about Tyria where these six domains are fundamental forces. It looks like that’s how the Antikythera is built, which means that these forces would end up expressing themselves over and over again in different contexts. The human gods aren’t “tied” to the Elder Dragons so much as the human gods will naturally slot into each domain, just like the dragons. That’s how Tyria is.
The trick is telling interesting stories in and around the existing world, and it’s useful that the Elder Dragons are characterised more like natural disasters or fundamental forces than as characters with motivations. The villains of the show are always going to have their reasons for doing things, and those reasons probably should be coming from the world as it exists. In Tyria, the Elder Dragons are a big deal – in the same way, in the real world 9/11 casts a very long shadow that darkens a lot of things you’d think would be irrelevant.
Those complications don’t happen to involve any of the issues talked about in this blog post, do they?
I understand that Steam is decommissioning its OAuth2 implementation, but then who know why Valve does anything.
I think asking the ArenaNet writers to be capable of working on Vince Gilligan’s level is asking a lot. There’s approximately one person capable of operating on Vince Gilligan’s level.
Writing a story where you don’t have control of the main character, or the camera, or the gestures of the characters, is significantly tougher than a linear story like a television program.
Also, a simple file check of your install files during any given patch rollout should correct alot of this.
Nah, because that file check’ll also be hacked. Anything on the client side must be assumed to be in enemy hands – hopefully ArenaNet can start doing server-side validation for some of more more common hack types, because that’s the only way to be sure that people aren’t sending invalid information to the servers.
Sorry. It’s being looked into right now, but I’m not a part of that process and there really isn’t anything to talk about yet.
I think folks just want an inside look on the current stance, not what’s being looked into. Though knowing it’s “being looked into” is nice.
I didn’t even want that, I basically wanted one of the UI designers to come over and tell us what it’s like being a UI designer for GW2.
Can you describe the limitations on text displays in game? Does this limit the availability of lorebooks in game that include long chapters for those interested in such things? Is it more complex than simply making a string file? This has always bugged me. I know that with the dynamic event system, Anet has striven to go away from quests with walls of text; but Im curious why this simple solution isnt added in?
There currently isn’t UI implemented in the game to display something like a lore book. We have some places that we can display longer text strings, like those summaries in our recently-added Story Journal UI, but conversational text strings have to be kept within a certain length to account for things like German localization.
There’s not a lot that’s “simple” to implement in a game as complicated as an MMO like ours, unfortunately.
Lore books are something we’d like to see happen, but I can’t promise they are on the way soon or anything.
Can you grab a UI designer and find out more about the challenge of doing this? I’m curious to know what the hidden complexities are about displaying a long text string as part of a ‘lore book’ style interface in Guild Wars 2, given that on paper it sounds like it’d be as easy as opening a window and drawing a string of text on it. Obviously it’s more complicated than that, but it’d be great to have a look ‘behind the scenes’ of GW2’s UI, as it were.
I have noticed very few “how’re you holding up?”s, which I’ve been seeing everywhere once one of the writers on Telltale’s The Walking Dead pointed out how much of a cliche it had become. So, well done to the writing staff for that.
You don’t have to please us, you have to be honest with us. No need to spill the beans and tell us about what you are working on, but something along the lines of “we’re excited about what we’re working on”
I think part of it is that, judging from the forum and from the subreddit, ArenaNet has a bit of a credibility problem at the moment. They don’t have a particularly good history of delivering on promises because they don’t make promises, but unfortunately you don’t build credibility from scrupulously not promising to do things. (A lot of the discontent from scheduling breaks comes from the same place – one of the few promises was a new release with new content every two weeks, and they stuck to that. Having it ‘broken’ now, even if for a good reason like the holiday season, stings.) As a result, even relatively innocuous statements like “we think you’ll enjoy what we’re working on” from an ArenaNet employee who’s only started posting recently seem disingenuous.
Season 2 is still suffering from the problem that plagued Season 1 that the episodes aren’t telling complete stories, and frequently they’re skipping out on a conclusion by setting up another story thread. A lot of the frustration with Season 1 is that Guild Wars has a lot of story threads already, so setting up more with the promise that they’ll be paid off ‘some day’ is hard to believe.
The constant drive west is giving the season structure that season 1 didn’t have, but that’s been squandered by also building narrative hooks into the story so each episode is a prologue for the next. This is super clumsy – the callbacks we’re seeing, and the drive west towards Mordemoth, is enough – and it hurts the individual episodes by denying most of them closure. Even Game of Thrones structures its episodes so the episode is ‘about’ something, thematically related to everything else you’re seeing, and the final minutes of the episode resolve the theme and provide closure, even if it’s the kind of closure that immediately opens a new question. The shocking ends to some GoT episodes usually come at the end of an episode that ties a bow on the character who dies. Most of the ‘cliffhanger’ endings of this season aren’t shocking swerves, they’re the story finishing before we have all the pieces.
Of the episodes, I think Entanglement is the strongest. It’s got the clearest story – we have to follow in Ceara’s footsteps before Mordremoth becomes too powerful. In doing so, we find Omadd’s device, but Mordremoth’s power is growing too strong. Taimi, emulating her role model Ceara, goes too far, and so we sacrifice ourselves to save Taimi, and in doing so go beyond reality. There’s beats there that don’t quite work – Fort Salma and Concordia show Mordremoth’s power growing too strong, but that doesn’t really inform the actions of the protagonists, and Taimi doesn’t appear to have learned anything – but we have a nice emotional story and our character gets some character development.
You’re hamstrung a bit by the idea that this is supposed to be our story, because the Season 2 format doesn’t really give you any flexibility to give our characters an arc. It’s hard to really have a satisfying storyline if our PCs don’t grow or change other than more loot. There’s also an irritating tendency to drop details about the biconics as teasers instead of building them more fully into the storyline as the emotional side of the storyline. For instance, the hunt for the Master of Peace could have been an opportunity to also tell a story about Kasmeer’s scrying powers, with her coming to terms with it, maybe causing conflict with Marjory. The Dragon’s Reach uses the relationships the characters have with their home as a plot point, but we don’t really see how they feel about home and losing it even if they don’t care for it (and our PC, of course, doesn’t report home, and doesn’t have opinions about home). We spend most of Glint’s Lair hearing about Glint’s history from Marjory and Kasmeer, when they have literally been swept up into a legend. Are they nervous? Are they excited? Are they soulless automatons?
While I like stories in games, honestly right now I feel the writing team’s better used filling out towns and cities and making the world vibrant and full of character. Their dialogue-focused instances and and towns have been getting better and better while the story hasn’t really improved, and I think ArenaNet are so far behind when it comes to story delivery in an MMO that the resources they need to spend to catch up would be better spent on making sure the world is even more beautiful, the places inside it are even more full of character, and the combat is even more exciting.
So the way it appears to work based on my observations:
When a drop happens, there’s a roll to determine whether you get an item, and then a roll to determine its quality, from grey to orange. Exotic’d be about 0.1%, rare maybe 1%. Once the quality is determined, there’s a roll for what kind of drop it is (crafting material, weapon), which tells it what table to roll on.
Magic find is multiplied to the roll to determine what quality something is. If you have 10% MF, that’s a multiplier of 1.1. 1.1 × 0.1% is only 0.11%, absolutely tiny.
Part of the problem with magic find is that green items (which appear to almost always be equipment) and blue items (which are often equipment) tend to blur together, particularly at L80 where a portion of all your loot rolls is on the one, particularly tedious “level 80 equipment” table. You don’t really notice you’re getting more green drops because who cares about green drops.
What, you guys have never seen combined zero-based alternating length encoded binary optimized for ascii text?
It doesn’t look like any of the formats I learned during ten minute’s research, assuming the word ‘alternating’ is modifying ‘length encoded’. There’s 00s in the length encoding, so it’s not alternating per character, and it’s not alternating per group because there’s some enormous groups. There’s characters other than ‘0’ and ‘1’ in both the first and last part of each group, and a group ‘520’ which I’m kitten ed sure isn’t 52 ’0’s, so that rules out marking the runs with the appropriate substitution. It seems unlikely it’s in octal. I’m assuming the optimization for ascii text involves dropping the highest bit in the byte.
Now seriously.
I am having a problem with my connection. The problem is with the login server.
First of all my client doesn’t autostart anymore. Launcher always forces me to click LOGIN button, after that game starts in 5 seconds. In past just by running the launcher, game checked itself and opened automatically in full screen.
Secondly, client often loses connection to LOGIN SERVER while playing. Out of nowhere I get this error, sometimes during arena games, sometimes just while standing and chatting. Your login servers are ****** **. I am connecting from Poland via stable internet connection. Many times client was frozen on character selection menu, because of lost connection to the login server and I couldn’t click the “Play” button on any of my chars. Sometimes restarting client helps to establish the connection but there is no guaranty that it will get over after some time.
If the problem was genuinely with the login server, no-one would be able to get in, so support would have heard about it. The problem has to be between your end and theirs, so call your ISP.
I think Tobias has the right of it, here, despite dropping trope names as if that’s the only thing that’s important about a story. GW1’s storytelling style is fairly perfunctory, and only towards Nightfall does it get to a point where characters are sympathetic and have personality, and a story that you can follow over a long period.
I’m personally puzzled over ArenaNet’s push to put story first in the live game because the area design, art direction and exploration-focused gameplay appeared to be the game’s strong suits, much more than the story. Even in the living story, what the audience seems to respond to is big reveals and lore moments over characters or their interactions being done especially well. This isn’t to knock the writing team, in the same way that I don’t intend to knock the theatre company putting on a neat musical in my town when I point out they’re not in the running for a Tony while putting on shows here, but I think the focus is odd.
The reason I bring this up is that, in the interview, Leah mentions the possibilities of storytelling in games, and it doesn’t seem like she’s thinking much about the potential of telling stories through gameplay. One of the problems MMO developers have with storytelling is that they struggle with making their main characters relevant to the story, because they’re never allowed to take into account what the PC does or who they are. I’ve never played an MMO where the fact that I’m a, warlock, say, ever has a large bearing on the plot – imagine how unsatisfying the TV show Phineas and Ferb would be if the title characters never had problems that their hyper-competent engineering didn’t cause, or couldn’t fix. Single-player games handle this much better. The Quest for Glory series was famous for providing four paths through the game. Failbetter’s games demonstrate a way of dealing with the combinatorial explosion, by assembling stories out of a series of carefully written vignettes, which can be swapped out as necessary and branch only very occasionally. I would love it if the fact that I can apply poison, or reflect attacks, ended up being the reason why I was able to do the thing and save Tyria, rather than me being in the right place at the right time and being capable of doing enough damage per second.
But there’s real potential in using the mechanics themselves as a storytelling tool, which ArenaNet is in a surprisingly strong place to take advantage of thanks to the writing team’s obsession with coming up with justifications for the game mechanics. Games like Papers, Please show the strength of creatively using a small toolbox of mechanics to communicate the emotion of a system in a way that’s harder to do in narrative-driven media, and a game like Thomas Was Alone and Bastion demonstrates how fairly conventional tools like narration can be used in concert with game mechanics to communicate tone, character and emotion. I don’t know if Leah has looked into these games, but if ArenaNet are serious about being great at storytelling, and not merely competent, they’re going to need to master the medium they’re working in. (I can imagine, for instance, the way events flow being used to communicate the hostility of a desert environment – players only have one event active close to town, and as things stabilise events gets further and further out, but when one fails everything scales up harder and harder as the environment pushes back, until there’s a cascade of failures and they’re back to hiding in a small patch of cover, hoping the water will last.)
A simpler solution would be to have acquired geodes/crests, etc… enter the wallet anyway, but have an “item acquired” thing on the right side of the screen just like when you acquire coin or items now. If it works with gold already, that means they already have the system in place to do it with other currencies. Also, if all currencies went to a single place – the wallet – people would know to look there for them. If they add a new one, just put a tooltip in when the player acquires their first new token, saying “hey! you just got one of ______! Use these to purchase items at special vendors located here and here.”
Considering we do already get that for karma, I don’t think this’d be much work to set up. However, I don’t think a time-limited item popup is a good way to introduce a new item, especially at times where players are concentrating on the event in front of them. A tooltip that comes up when players open their inventory introducing the new currency is better, but if they dismiss it because they need something from their pockets quickly and don’t have time to look at the wallet, and that tooltip is gone for good. Hopefully they read it (they totally didn’t).
Ideally you’d have something that lets players look at what they’ve found during downtime. There’s a few ways this could be done – a glow on the wallet status bar in the inventory, a marker on the hero panel much like heroes get for available trait points, have currencies drop into the inventory until players consume them and move them into the wallet.
It’s worth thinking about rewards that don’t fit the mould of a currency that still clog up the inventory. like shovels in the Silverwastes, keys and key fragments in the Maguuma Jungle and Wastes, reward buffs, and even things like the vote tokens and badges we saw during the election in Season 1. The wallet isn’t a good solution for these kinds of reward structures because they’re situational, you need to interact with them and see them coming into the inventory, and the wallet metaphor breaks down when you’re putting things that aren’t currencies in them.
One of the problems with the wallet is that items that go into it aren’t visible when people are looking at their loot. This isn’t really a problem for gold, as it’s not really relevant how many gems or gold people have when out in the field, but it’s a big deal for geodes, because if you have enough geodes you want to buy something before the vendor resets. It’s also a big deal when there’s a new release, because players don’t necessarily know that bandit crests, say, are available, or important.
Here’s one idea: an Explorer’s Kit. It’s a consumable that unlocks a very situational material storage/wallet focused around a particular zone or playstyle. Each Explorer’s Kit has a slot for specific items/currencies that go in it – no more than about 8 slots in total. The UI appears in the inventory in its own section, and you can only see one Kit at a time. You can send items to it, and you can use items in it, but what you can do with it outside of that is limited, and you might not be able to get them out of the kit once they’ve been put in.
For instance, the Dry Top Explorer’s Kit would appear in Dry Top and have a space for keys and fossils and a count for geodes; the Fractal Explorer’s Kit would have a space for the mist essences and pristine fractal relics, and the WvW Explorer’s Kit would have spaces for WvW Boosts and basic siege blueprints alongside badges of honor. You might have an Ascended Explorer’s Kit that holds ascended material currencies like dust and empyreal fragments which is accessible near crafting stations. The Wallet would show your universal currencies, as well as all the Explorer Kits you have and what’s inside them.
This has the advantage of wallet-type solutions – namely, a higher stack size than 250 without taking up inventory space – without items just disappearing into the black box of the wallet. Items go into your inventory when first entering an area, but when you get the kit, you see a prominent hole for items not yet acquired. Kits can be acquired through different means, whether it’s by buying them from a vendor, completing a meta achievement, or by spending gems to pay for the data storage.
Obviously this is criticism, and I largely enjoyed being able to poke around a large Tyrian library.
Another thing to do: Make the Durmand Priory Basement (access to Ogden’s secret room pending) accessible to everyone via The Durmand Priory instance with a new set of books.
It is supposed to be at least moderately a secret – possibly make it available to Priory characters when they join, but characters of other orders only get regular access when they complete S2E5? That way Priory characters get something distinctive to them (similar to how Whispers characters can use their code on various NPC Whispers agents spread across the open world) even if it does open up to other characters later.
I agree with this – it felt odd enough that a high-ranking Order of Whispers member was being let into the secret archives of the Durmand Priory, and given the security involved, being able to wander in there whenever we wanted feels… odd. At the very least, if I’m not a Durmand Priory member, I should have to negotiate access through my Order – I’m going there for lore, not for gameplay, so making it have a little friction helps with the flavour.
I wasn’t thrilled with some of the writing of the lore books – it felt as if it had the same voice despite being written in wildly different time periods, by different authors. Some of the poetry and free verse suffered particularly from this. (Along similar lines, I’d like to see some of Tyria’s art represented in-game – we have a lot of history, not a lot of philosophy or mythology.)
It also bothered me that the hidden archives seemed to have the same mix of books as elsewhere in Tyria. Why are children’s stories in a secure facility?
I agree with other posters that a book window would be much appreciated.
(edited by Merus.9475)
So I raided in WoW during Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, and I don’t know if anyone’s topped Ulduar as a raid dungeon. Wasn’t ever top-tier on the server, but we progressed fine.
I think these are the design principles that are relevant to me:
- As others have mentioned, the end-game starts at level 1. Allowing players to join a guild and go to a raid while levelling is a huge boost to player retention – they won’t necessarily be useful, but they’ll be able to experience it, and they’ll able to play with their friends.
- Variable scaling has to work in raids. Players in difficult x player content will always try and have x players, because that’s what the content is designed for and it improves their chance of success. Because people are people, they’ll be late, or unable to come, so usually a proper raiding guild will have a few substitutes or else you have 9 people standing outside the entrance to the instance waiting for one person to turn up instead of playing with 9. This means that some people will log on to raid and then never get to go because there’s no room. This wasn’t a good system, and even WoW has abandoned it for variable scaling.
- What is fun about raiding, to me, is figuring out and executing a strategy with a relatively stable team. It takes a little while to understand all the moving parts (and sometimes even to notice them), and it can be frustrating when all but one person’s worked out the tactics. Then again, this exists now – there have been several fights where players have to notice the fight’s changed and switch target. (This also means that raid fights shouldn’t be able to scale mid-fight – they get their scaling information from the instance, which only scales when everyone is out of combat.)
- For this reason, I think it’s fine to make it specifically a guild activity. I think it’s probably fine players not in a guild or in a small guild have to join maybe a small raid-group guild – except this is a problem if you can’t hear your guildmates because you’re repping your raid-group guild.
- I think there’s a lot of merit in concerns that raid content excludes certain players; indeed, I think that’s why raiders want instancing, and one of the reasons why TTS spend so much time bouncing from map to map trying to get a map that’s under their control. While there’s a part of me that strongly objects to having to kiss kitten to be allowed to hit the loot pinata, I also understand it’s frustrating when there’s someone who’s not on voice comms and doesn’t switch to the godkitten healing turret when they’re supposed to, or people who get on Tequatl turrets and waste everyone else’s time because they’re firing their abilities with no particular goal in mind. I think there’d be a lot less frustration for PvE commanders if they could cull the poor performers, or even if the game would specifically target and eliminate poor performers. (A Dishonourable Discharge!)
- To address Chris’ concern about scaling objectives: I kept an eye on how WoW scaling was going, and they had a big problem at first with scaling objectives and targets. What they ended up doing was this: anything that was balanced for whole numbers was put on a weighted random roll. So in a 10 player environment, a boss ability would always hit two targets; in a 14 player environment, that boss ability would roll for how many targets it hits, so it would have a 40% chance to hit 3 instead of 2. This also works for objectives: you can do a weighted random roll for how many objectives spawn.
- Alternatively, you can have 2.3 objectives spawn, and ‘carry’ the .3 to a later objective spawn.
- I don’t really expect progression to be much of a problem, because usually you need more than about three raids for that, but progression should be tied to the guild, instead of players. If it’s tied to the players, what happens is that raiding guilds can’t recruit new players except for those who’ve made it through a previous raid and had their guild collapse, and players interested in raiding can’t find anyone decent to join because all the good players have already made it through. Two-dimensional progression is a great idea – you have your bosses in a dungeon, in a specific order, but each fight also has several tiers of complexity which unlock once players do something specific – but also more rewarding, if they survive.
Its been months since we’ve gotten any real content and there’s hundreds of threads that warrant anet responses that go left untouched and instead they respond to a thread like this, whoopdy do dah anet. You banned someone yay for you; focus on content now than I’ll give you a real high five.
Guys is this real irony or is this rain on your wedding day
because it sounds like this guy is complaining about ANet not doing their job in a thread where an ANet employee is doing their job
Yeah, I understand intellectually how magic find works, but I don’t feel luckier with a 3% drop rate for something worthwhile instead of a 1% drop rate. I do notice it in aggregate, but that’s in aggregate; my moment-to-moment experience is still ‘blue, green, blue, blue, green’.
I think some of the fatigue people feel with RNG is tied up in the ‘two blues and a green’ running joke the playerbase has, and I think there’s a few reasons for that:
- It seems that level 80s get a special loot table, and that loot table mostly consists of blue and green iron/soft wood weapons. The algorithm used to generate items is pretty transparent, so this equipment feels very formulaic very quickly. Level 80 characters see the same things over and over again, so it feels like characters are most likely to receive unexciting weapons – essentially, junk the game has misclassed as valuable.
- Magic find improves the item quality roll, but upgrades from blues to greens mean very little to players because green weapons mean very little. This means players don’t really feel the effects of magic find while they’re evaluating what’s changed.
- The game often disagrees with players on whether a particular item is valuable; it’s not particularly exciting to get a “rare” lodestone that sells on the TP for close to vendor price. (The signets in JP chests are a particularly egregious example.)
- It’s much more frustrating for an RNG to ‘fail’ and not give you something you are anticipating than for the RNG to deliver something you didn’t expect instead. The level 80 drop tables being the same everywhere really contributes to this, as the items that are specific to that creature are less likely to drop at level 80.
- Because players have to kill so many enemies to get rare drops, and so many drops stick around in the inventory, the rare drops don’t feel satisfying. A good rare drop feels like the player hit the jackpot, but because players can easily judge how often they’ve lost, it feels like the game took pity on them instead.
I did notice that the chests in Dry Top were guaranteed sources of cloth. This is an interesting solution to the ‘two blues and a green’ problem; providing a reward that has a predictable value and the chance for a valuable find. The other items probably shouldn’t be the same things you can get out in the world, though.
I feel that introducing blue and green quality bags and salvage items might affray some of the frustration. I don’t recall seeing a lot of talk from players who quit while levelling being dissatisfied with the loot system. (Green quality crafting materials is a trick – probably I’d make them a salvage item that breaks into a number of blue crafting materials with a chance at a level-appropriate rare mat instead.)