Guild Wars 2

Well, we aren’t. So why build your game using dry, dead, soulless metrics? Metrics aren’t fun. Metrics don’t laugh when an NPC says something funny, or cry when a favorite NPC dies. Metrics don’t take screenshots of other metrics so they can try to figure out what the heck armor the other metrics are wearing. They don’t (virtually or otherwise) high five their team mates at the end of a fun gaming session, or curse those fool devs and their dev-ilish ways when a feature pack turns out bad.

Metrics, if anything, are remains. Old bones. Dead bugs trapped in amber, footprints in the exposed stone of a dry creek bed. Fossils. You can use metrics to tell you where someone was, maybe what he was doing there, but they can’t tell you with any degree of certainty why that person was there, or what he was thinking, or feeling, or whether he was having a good time or a bad time. You can expend profound quantities of time and energy trying to wrest these things from forensic reconstructions of fossilized bone fragments…

…or you can just open up your (metaphorical) window and look out.

At us.

We’re right here. Living, breathing, flesh and blood, brawn and sinew, guts and glory.

/e wave Hi, there!

We’re here because we’re gamers, and we want to play your game. Forget the metrics for a while. They’re dead and they’re not going anywhere. We, on the other hand, are still alive. Still here. Still playing. Even though it seems that more and more of us are on the endangered species list, losing that struggle to adapt to conditions which no longer suit us, conditions that increasingly seem to be devised for people long since gone. Hint: they probably aren’t coming back.

So, here’s a thing: instead of building game based on old bones and footprints in dead stone, why not try building it for us?

Ya know, I really like her mane.

Well, like most charr she likes apples, see, she likes them a lot, and she likes having apples even when they are not in season. When Kralkatorrik flew over she was down in her secret root cellar happily storing some nice red delicious apples for the coming winter.

During the subsequent debriefing, she realized if she told the truth, Rytlock Brimstone would learn of her cache of winter apples, and would very likely confiscate them to >ahem< help feed the troops. So she made up the whole story about seeing the dragon fly over and how she was somehow miraculously immune to that whole Branding thing. She knew Rytlock was suspicious, though, probably because he kept asking, ‘Do you smell… apples?’ so she promptly left the Blood Legion and formed the Vigil, the true (and secret) purpose of which is to preserve her apples from dragons and anything else that might try to eat them. Forever!

And she got away with it! And she kept all those sweet, nummy apples, all for herself! And she’d be getting away with it even now if not for those meddling forum guys.

TL;DR – beats me. Diet? Clean living? Special glasses? Maybe she’s a mutant…

This game is about giving us something to talk about on the forums.

What big eyes she has…

Mainly, though, I am sitting here laughing at myself for reading “We’ve been infiltrated!” as “We’ve been infracted!”