Guild Wars 2

Good news everyone. I’m here to talk your ear off on yet another big issue in GW2. tl;dr conveyance sucks. Now, where did I put my darn soap box…

Table of contents!

Post 1: The table of contents
Post 2: more stuff on the table of contents
Post 3: random trailing thoughts.
Post 4: reserved for paranoia and counter-arguments.
Post 5: yay I found my soap box.

Now that I have my soap box, enough stalling. I free write these things, so I don’t know how long each section will be.

The REAL table of contents:

Post 1
Section 1: The problem
Section 2: Anets solution
Post 2
Section 3: Why this solution fails: conveyance
Post 3
Section 4: Why this solution fails: Other MMOs
Section 5: Why this solution fails: principles
Post 4
Section 6: Solutions, suggestions, and other ideas
Post 5
Reserved for paranoia

THE PROBLEM!

There is a very strange phenomena I encounter a lot while playing this game: people don’t know how to play this game. This isn’t some egotistical massaging or another version of class/build/role warfare, but a statement of fact. I get these questions all the time, especially while on my engineer:

*How do you give everyone stealth?
*How do you give everyone might?
*What is a combo field?
*What is a blast finisher?
*What? Engineers have reflects?
*Why are you wearing clerics? (Note, I wear full zerker in PVE. This person doesn’t know that I"ll blast water fields in emergencies)
*How you alive? (said when I engage boss at melee range)
*How do I stop attacking?
*Ooh sexy, wanna cyber?

These players legitimately don’t know. You’ll see it on the forums, too. “Everyone stacks, but the stack will randomly fail”. “Everyone says to dodge, but you can’t dodge everything”. Hell, in one of Wooden Potatoes’ podcasts, he had to learn the hard way that the condition duration cap is at 100%.

I know. Of course, I remember how I learned, too. After seeing previews in the Yogscast, I latched on and researched as much possible, imagining the epicness of each and every individual skill, and how I would use unique tricks to beat everyone. I would go and experiment throughout all of PVP with different classes and different skills, learning how to use them and practicing rotations on golems in the mists. I’d watch videos debating the merits of different design choices, and I’d learn through them.

So, keeping in mind how I learned, I noticed something: In no way did the game teach me to do anything. All the information I had learned I had to seek out and teach myself, and that wasn’t even a bit of all the info there was about anything in the game. For every scrap of info for self improvement, I had to fight for it.

Guild Wars 2 is the only MMO I’ve ever played that didn’t have a tutorial. No, there’s a story intro stage that teaches players absolutely nothing but how to use 1, and that red circles are bad. From there, players are put into the wide open world, where we can do amazing things like learn about norn totems or help out on various farms with menial tasks. Players are left on their own, and if they aren’t theorycrafters like the top 5% of us, they aren’t going to know squat about how to play the game.

So, with no basic tutorial, or in-game manual, is it any wonder that players don’t know how combo fields work? Is it any mystery that players don’t know about the condition cap? Is it any quandary that players are clueless about the exact mechanics behind cleanses, crits, condition duration, procs, blocks and unblockable attacks, defiance, leveling, stat scaling, event scaling, and experience gain? For goodness sakes, the sheath weapon key is unbound when you start the game!

This is far more than just tooltips. The lack of knowledge comes with an even greater burden: the lack of knowledge about a lack of knowledge. As far as a bearbow ranger considers things, he knows plenty enough about the game, and there is nothing around to tell him otherwise. The way overworld events are handled, everything is just a random series of overlaying information, so the experience this ranger has with combo fields is just a few pings of “cleansing bolt” that have no apparent use or function. He’ll bearbow right up until he gets to dungeons, where he’ll be anonymously kicked for something other players won’t even bother to explain. How is he supposed to know that bearbow suddenly isn’t good enough, where for the entirety of the game it has been?

ANETS SOLUTION!

Anets solution can be considered a social darwinism, where the selective pressure is boredom. That is, “take away things early game to make players experiment on their own, then slowly release temporary content that demands more from the player as time goes on”. They do this with the hope that failure of a particular event will spur players to improve themselves and get better at the game. To rise to the challenge, if you will.

WHY IT FAILS: CONVEYANCE! or WHY I CAN’T SEE CRAP!!!

This is probably the second post now, and you may have noticed the uploaded screenshots of gameplay below, with absolutely no indication what is going on.

Well… that’s the point. In these screenshots, you have no idea what is going on. You can’t see the individual contributions or clutch plays. You can’t see the tells, or even the enemies, you can’t see the animations for their attacks. You have no idea when you’re getting hit, and who’kittenting you. This creates an unintelligible blob of numbers and flashy effects. Worst part is, this affects classes differently: My ele has it so much worse than my necro (which, even then, gets drowned out by other players).

That doesn’t even show the worst of it. In that entire HotW fight I was constantly fighting with my camera, which would get hung up on decorations in that tiny, slanted room. Also, the boss did 8k damage per hit in a poorly telegraphed 360 degrees attack that looked like it was only in front of him, so even on my defensive d/d build, I am constantly one or two hits from death. All these screenshots had maximum culling and LoD reduction on.

Conveyance is the act of making something known to someone, and for action games it is really important. This is done through telegraphs, cast meters, AoE indicators, or a recognizable pattern. These only work if it is possible to see the kitten enemy, and currently you can’t. It is of the utmost importance that, should a player die, they can say “I should’ve stunned him there” or “I should use X utility to stop Y enemy”, or “Wait 2 seconds, then dodge, then get close again”.

If they don’t know what went wrong, one of three things happens.

#1: They declare the content “too hard” then quit playing.
#2: They timidly hang back and range at max distance in PVT gear, terrified of the big scary attacks that’ll do way too much damage to them.
#3: They’ll get angry at other players for not supporting them properly.

Because, again, if you don’t teach players about the mechanics, then they don’t know what they’re missing. That whole “rise to the challenge” thing is extremely rare, occurring only to people who have good leadership skills, patience, problem solving skills, and drive all at the same time: 4 epic traits that almost no one on the internet has. When I say 5%, that’s an estimate so liberal that it makes Obama blush.

The inability to see other player contributions doesn’t help, either. In each of these screenshots, you probably don’t know much of what anyone is doing. Heck, you don’t know what I’m doing, other than taking a screenshot. Neither do my teammates. I mean, I can see some white lines, and one guy has his shield up… so yeah? The guy who said “the stack randomly fails” has a point: you don’t know why it is that, in one circumstance, everything gets completely facerolled, but in another you die horribly and shame your family. The only guy who does know is the one who’s keeping everyone alive.

This isn’t just flashing lights, either. Many things just aren’t told to players. Like which attacks are unblockable or not, or how scaling works. Many are from bad design, such as the red rings in the teqautl encounter not rendering properly, or how even though teqqy moves his ground targeted hit box stays stationary. The list could just go on forever… I might have to make a separate post just to contain all of the problems individually.

Hi, friday i was leading a defense team in tequalt and I want share some of my undead slayer potions, i send 2 but went i send try to send the third I got a mesage that I was spamming.

I know that you want control the spam on the game but remeber that we don’t have a player to player trade system, so mail things is the only way that we have to share/exchange items. So please ANET can you increase the message filter to 4? so we can a least maill a item to all our team members.

Thanks.

Sorry for my bad english.

First we had 25 stacks condition cap.

Then we got [Defiant].

Then we got [Condition Reflect].

Now we get [Indomitable] and

• “Some projectiles at Jungle Wurm no longer reflectable.” edit: apparently it happens with eggs at Evolved Wurm as well
• Most bosses’ projectiles in Crown Pavillion not reflectable (except for some at Pyroxis).
• Stealth fixes to bosses like Malrona whose projectiles are no longer reflectable.
• Stones and spits from generic Wurms no longer reflectable (it used to be that way in Twilight Arbour, but not so long ago all wurms behave that way as well); who did the self-knockdown hurt anyway? It was fun and good for skipping wurms!
• And let’s not forget healing turret at Boom-Boom and power regulators at Marionette – structures which do not accept conditions but are a core part of boss mechanics. edit: apparently the turret is a mob and accepts some conditions

I feel like every other thing except for direct damage is gradually rendered useless in PvE.

As far as I remember, the initial idea was that it shouldn’t matter what class you bring to the battle, it is still useful; however in practice, more and more bosses are being designed for [low skill-demanding but survivable enough] zerk warriors, with everyone else being left behind as too difficult to balance around. Feedback insta-killing Jungle Wurm? Make attacks unreflectable instead of tweaking damage. Mesmer’s Power Block shooting through Defiant and making mesmers useful in dungeons? Nerf it. Crowd-control skills cancelling one-shot mechanics? Remove CC instead of redesigning AI to allow all classes provide their own group utilities. Honestly, I’m already waiting for a patch which fixes the grub prevention “exploit” at Evolved Jungle Wurm.

So why should we be surprised by posts like “…but it doesn’t matter since we already replaced mesmer with a guardian…” and LFGs of “heavies only”? And you don’t even need reflects against generic boss ads in the first place if you can DPS those down.

Again, ANet: why design classes around utility skills and not direct damage, and then render those skills useless for anything other than brain-dead mobs which can be facerolled anyway (while also not bugfixing the core mechanics of classes)?

Please rethink your boss design philosophy. You’re making good steps in anti-zerg content, but class and build diversity in PvE still needs a lot, a lot of love.

2 years after the game’s premiere – it’d better be a portal to a new, permanent explorable map! #fingerscrossed

Well poop! I know this wasn’t one of the “big” chests, but I felt better about the Champ bag I got just a little while later. They need to stop REMOVING stuff from this game.

This has to be a joke ._.

Seriously.

You guys told us to hold unto our blade shards, so the average person is like ‘oh, must be something of value then.’

Then it turns out the vendor gives you … 1 green for 100 shards?

Just looking at how often the old ‘1 green 2 blues’ joke gets made, I think this must be a troll attempt on Anet’s part and there’s devs laughing at us right now.

Currently you cannot salvage equipment you purchased with Karma, Badges of Honor and certain other exceptions. This is a huge problem for people who have, for instance, invested in expensive runes for armor that isn’t being used anymore, but since there is no way to transmute equipment now we can’t “transfer” upgrades from equipment.

The solution to avoid exploitation is simple:

If you salvage equipment that was bought with Karma or Badges of Honor, you get NO essences of luck/globs of ectoplasm/dark matter/crafting materials, none of that. You ONLY get the chance based on your salvage kit of getting the upgrade back. This solves so many issues it’s not even funny.

Also ANet, get rid of your stupid Upgrade Extractors from the Gem Store. Those are an insult to the playerbase. Starting price of 250 gems for ONE? What… I don’t… how in the… SIGH.