Guild Wars 2

Those are great moments!

I had one in a jumping puzzle too! The one in Lion’s Arch with the secret pirate cave with the ghost? (I forgot the name of it) Anyway, it had a corridor with spears that shot out of the sides and roof. So me, being a bit too ambitious, I get downed by one of these and i’m trying to bandage myself but the spears keep knocking my health back down. I try not to die for maybe 5 minutes because it took soooo long to get that far and I didn’t wanna teleport back to the beginning!

Then another traveler just happens along. Not only does he revive me, he takes me all the way through to the end. Then he shows me the other two secret jumping puzzles in Lion’s Arch. He spent a lot of time there, maybe 2 hours, just helping me out and I totally appreciate it!

Great community out there

This little game incident made me realize how fun GW2 is to play…

So I’m making my way across Queensdale towards a story quest when I see a dynamic quest pop up at Ojon’s Lumbermill. A couple NPC’s were there who wanted to bomb a nearby skritt cave and needed us to protect them. So I hang out a bit as a couple people gather waiting to start it up and…the quest won’t start! Don’t know why (ANet, you might wanna look at that quest cause it looked like the NPC’s legs were stuck in some logs).

Meanwhile, I’m chatting with the other players trying to figure out what’s up. We end up doing all the silly stuff like /dance and dodge rolling through each other, etc. while waiting.

Finally, though, we forget about the NPC’s and just raid the cave together ourselves! There was no loot other than drops, no credit for quest completion, low XP.

But it didn’t matter cause we were having FUN! I literally forgot about my story quest for a while and enjoyed teaming up and just playing!

The fact that we could take even a broken quest and get a good time out of it shows the brilliance of GW2’s quest system. By simply drawing everyone around to the quest location, even when it didn’t happen, by that time everyone had met and we were off and running! That spirit of cooperation is what sets this game apart and makes the experience memorable.

So what’s a fun moment you had in this game? Something where the mechanics and the stats and everything faded away and you were just enjoying yourself? I’m curious to know…

God bless!

@FourthVariety – Very well put!

And what is it that people want to get “done” so they can move on to something else? Chores! And what in the game feels like a chore? Dailies, Monthlies and any activity that ruins your immersion. Or are we not supposed pay attention to that man behind the curtain?

The point I was trying to get at with the counting down thing is this: if you’re gonna introduce a historically grindy thing like a Daily into a game that supposedly has none, think outside the box a little and see if you can’t remove some of it’s grindiness. Shift the focus. Make it exciting! Do SOMETHING other than the same ol’ same ol’.

The counting down idea I thought might be good because it’d be dead simple to implement. Just switch the numbers around (and for the full effect, remove the “of 10” from “9 of 10” for example). For the people who like crunching the numbers, they’re still there. But for the people that don’t, it might make the whole exercise more palatable simply by changing the psychology behind them.

But don’t stop there! The other posters came up with other good ideas like making Dailies into Heart Quests. That’s a great idea! I’d love to see it happen. And they don’t have to be easy! Challenging is fun! My complaint is not that a Daily is hard or time consuming but that I find them boring and, worst of all, POINTLESS!

In the end, I’m glad that the Daily is an optional thing cause I personally won’t bother looking at it anymore. No laurels for me I guess hahaha. Still, in a game as good and fun as GW2, which has successfully removed grind from so much of the rest of the experience, it shouldn’t settle for second best.

God bless!

I like that! DING! Done! hahahaha

Yeah this game is sooo close to really changing the whole genre for the better but it doesn’t go quite far enough. We’ll see what they do in the future.

In the past, I never lasted long playing MMO’s. The reason, of course, is the grind. The Guild Wars 2 people, on the other hand, have made it their mission to eliminate grind from their game. And, so far, it’s been the most enjoyable MMO I’ve ever played. However, it hasn’t eliminated grind because it still relies too much on one game mechanic: counting your activities.

The most obvious counter is the Daily. I opened up the Daily recently and the list had things like “Kill 5 veteran monsters”, “Dodge 10 attacks”, “Gather 30 items”, etc. Easy enough to do. Problem was I had no intention of crafting that particular day. I literally started dozing off trying to get enough green logs and onions and whatnot. I didn’t care what I was gathering. Yet I felt compelled to do it because there’s a counter on the right promising me some loot if I just keep going.

The Flame and Frost prelude content is better at hiding the counter, but it still has one. At first I thought I was helping a bunch of refugees. Then I found the counter in the Achievements panel that said I needed to complete 75 refugee-related things to finish the quest. Now I’m chasing a number again.

By counting activities, the game is making the player aware of repetition. By setting a specific number of times to do something and then putting a big carrot at the end of it, the game is encouraging you to grind. The consequence is that it breaks the illusion that you’re playing a role in an actual world.

So what’s the solution? The obvious and best answer is to design quests that complete based on context, not amount. You complete the quest by “killing ALL the bandits” as opposed to “killing 10 bandits”, for example. Contextualizing every event into the overall pastiche of the game world is the most difficult thing to do and, frankly, is something the Guild Wars 2 staff do amazingly well! But they still rely on a counter or a progress bar to define “progress.”

How can you define progression without making it seem pointless and repetitive? It’s tough! A game where you’re meant to play for hundreds of hours can’t practically avoid repetition. So how do you make it less boring?

So how about this? Instead of counting UP, why not count DOWN?

Think about it. What’s more exciting, counting DOWN the seconds to New Years Day or counting UP to 100 push ups? Instead of saying “Kill 10 underwater creatures”, say “3 more underwater creatures left”. The player doesn’t have to worry about if he did X amount of anything. He only has to worry about if he’s on the last one. By doing this simple flip, you place the emphasis on the GOAL, not the amount!

This is a fundamental change in how we look at MMO game progress. Though technically it’s still a counter, people respond to countdowns totally differently. In my opinion, this would alleviate a lot of the tedium associated with completing tasks.

It’s not a complete solution, mind you. The actual solution would be to eliminate counters altogether but that is a much harder proposition. At least with this idea, what you have left to do, not what you’ve done, is placed at the forefront. That’s huge!

Still, the overall goal is context. So long as there’s a purpose to your actions, you won’t mind the doing it, even repeatedly. Does anyone complain about pressing W over and over to go forward? But aything that breaks the illusion must be eliminated or at least hidden away. The trick I’m proposing here is just another way to keep our eyes on the prize and not on the grind. It still won’t fix the exhorbitant amount of time necessary to obtain Ascended gear but that’s another issue…hahahaha!

Whatcha think?

God bless!