Guild Wars 2

Hyper.6374:

tolunart.2095:

Hyper.6374:

TLDR:- is anet manipulating the trading post that’s supposed to be player driven?

No.

Awesome and your source?

No.

Hi, everyone. Just wanted to pass on some comments from Angel herself:

Angel McCoy, Narrative Designer

Hi, everybody!
I thought I’d drop in under a flag of sincerity and respond to some of the comments I’m seeing here. You all are so passionate about both Guild Wars and GW2 lore: it does my heart good. Thanks for being so completely awesome and for putting so much of yourselves into your discussions of the lore.

To better frame my comments and because many of you aren’t familiar with me: I’ve been working on GW2 for 5 years and 9 months. Prior to my employment, I was a GW player for several years. I did some freelance at that time for ArenaNet to help write a GW atlas that never actually got published, but it meant that I spent a lot of time learning the world. My point is that I love Tyria every bit as much as you do, and I’ve dedicated almost as much time as many of you have to it.

I completely understand the outrage some of you feel, thinking that I’ve retconned things in a vacuum. I’d like to give you some peace of mind. Prior to my sending it off, the interview you read received a thumbs up from Bobby Stein, Ree Soesbee, Jeff Grubb, and Scott McGough. I do not work in a bubble, and if I’m releasing that much lore, then I’m going to do my best to ensure I’m getting it right. And it definitely feels like I’m sticking my neck out in the effort. No pressure. Hehe.

When you are working in a world that is as huge as Tyria and that has had as many lore creators as Tyria has, it can be difficult to make all the pieces fit perfectly together. And yet, we do the best we can.

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So, let me explain where some of these lore decisions came from. They and many others are based on the following needs:

1. The fact that GW2 takes place 250 years in the future after GW.

2. The added complications that come with GW2 being non-human-centric. We’re no longer telling a human story, but a multiracial story, and that means only one of five races have the “gods” as part of their world construct. The lore needs to not only make sense for all races, but actually be relevant to them.

3. We want to evolve the lore, not rewrite it, but not just recycle what was already there either. We want to reveal new layers in the onion and expose secrets that even GW players didn’t know.

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When you think of the history of Tyria from a non-human standpoint or, broader still, from a pan-racial standpoint, you begin to realize that not everything the people of Tyria believed 250 years ago is actually the whole truth. Just like I was taught in grade school (not quite 250 years ago—hehe) that Christopher Columbus discovered America and Thanksgiving was all about the Pilgrims having turkey dinner with the Native Americans. Just like that, the people of Tyria may have had only a partial or biased view of historic events. Some Tyrian historians might have gotten it wrong. Others might have recorded things in a manner that suited their agenda. Thus, when you quote a scholar from that era, it’s not unlike quoting pre-Socratic scholars in the real world who believed the Earth was flat. At some point, a Durmand Priory scholar or an asuran researcher questioned whether these historians were right or not. Sometimes they were; sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes, they only knew part of the story. We want to give you more of the story.

There is a stream of truth that runs through all previous GW lore, and that stream is what we hope to tap. We are not going to throw away huge bundles of GW lore. Events happened. What you may find evolving, however, are the explanations for why and what exactly did happen. We will NOT handle the lore with cavalier carelessness, I promise you. On the contrary, we spend a great deal of time studying old lore so we can base our expanded lore on it.

Now, let me give you a few confirmations on some of the things you’ve been saying:

> The Seers created the first Bloodstone to set some magic aside during the last rise of the Elder Dragons. They didn’t want to see it all consumed.

> Magic existed long before the first Bloodstone. It has always been a force in the Eternal Alchemy. It was not created by the humans’ gods, no matter what priest or priestess preaches thakittenwas. How you choose to roleplay your character’s beliefs is entirely up to you.

> Humans (including Canthan humans) were brought to Tyria (from…no spoilers!). They are not native to Tyria and did not come with much magic of their own. From a human perspective and oral tradition (that can get warped over time), they say the gods were giving them magic, but the reality was that the dragons had gone back to sleep, and the gods felt it was safe to begin returning magic stored in the Bloodstone to Tyria. The gods (not only Abaddon) “unsealed” the Bloodstone and magic flowed back into the world. Humans and other sentient races of the time began using it.

> Over the course of hundreds of years, wars broke out. King Doric begged the gods to slow the flow of magic back into Tyria and the gods granted his wish by shattering the Bloodstone into pieces and limiting their use. Abaddon was annoyed by this.

For many of us players, it’s only been a couple years since Abaddon’s tantrum, but for Tyrians, it’s been much longer. The gods have been gone. Generations have lived and died. The world’s understanding and control of magic has grown and improved. The understanding of the cosmos (the Eternal Alchemy) has improved. And yet, there’s still so much the people of Tyria don’t know.

250 years ago in our real world, it was 1763. It would be another 12 years before the American Revolution even started. Compare the scientific/medical knowledge and industrial level of the time with how it is today, and you’ll see just how much progress can be made in 250 years. Of course, Tyria hasn’t advanced as quickly as we have. They don’t have cars or Internet or Post-It™ notes. But, their cultures have evolved. They have a greater understanding of how the world works. And, they have better means of communication and travel across long distances. Thus, we can now write more intricate and bigger stories for them.

I wish I could answer each of your questions and concerns, but the reality is that I need to work on the next GW2 Living World release. We’re cruising at 200mph on these releases (to quote Stephen Clarke-Willson). I hope this explanation of our lore philosophy and where our thinking is will help you when you go back and review the pieces of your discussion. Thank you again for your passion! Know that we do pay attention, even if we can’t always take the time to respond to forum discussions like this.

The 3 different game types and splitting skills. Splitting skills between all 3 of our game types (PvE, PvP, WvW) is very costly – it takes more time to split the skills, and then upkeep the split skills. Instead of upkeeping 1 version of a skill, whenever you make future changes, you now have to make sure all 3 are appropriately balanced for their respective game types. This is very powerful, and something we did in GW1 when we felt we needed it. We just need to be careful not to do it too much, or it means the balance team is literally balancing 3 entire games. As Freamon (from “The Wire”, btw if you haven’t seen “The Wire”, stop whatever it is you’re doing and go watch it. Unless you’re giving birth. In that case…wait until you’re done, then watch it immediately afterwards. Oh, and get your new son/daughter to watch it when they’re old enough.) usually reminded the other members of the cast, “All the pieces matter.” The different pieces of GW2 all impact the other pieces, and it’s something we must always bear in mind.

Chap’s woefully ill-conceived attempt at a metaphor on why we don’t spilt all skills off the bat: Imagine you’re in school, and in order to make sure you learn languages at an even pace, you have to split everything you do into 3 languages. For me, let’s say it’s English, Japanese and Latin (No, Greek, I liked learning Greek more than Latin). You start off answering a question on a test in 3 different languages. You rock. But then you do it more and more often. For every note you take in a lecture, you have to write it in 3 different languages. For every paper you write, you have to write it in 3 languages. For all homework, you have to do it in 3 languages. Every test. Every quiz. It may seem small at first, but if you’re not careful, you’re doing three times the work as normal.

Game types
So a lot of you want new game types. We’ve heard you. We’re prototyping more of them right now. But, as Colin said at the panel, we have to be careful. We learned a lot from GW1. We learned that having too many game types can split up the player base. But, if you’re not careful, just having 1 game type may not be enough variety. You’ve got to find that perfect spot.

Deathmatch. I like DM, but I’m much more interested in objective based DM. “Go in a room and kill a dude” was fun when I was playing Doom/Quake/Unreal, but even those, as simple games, still had map control and buff/armor control. Just giving two players the same guns/armors, putting them in a room, and saying “Ok go” just isn’t as fun to play. Those other elements add a lot to the game. The most competitive/successful games in recent history all share these “secondary” objectives as well (they aren’t STRICTLY Deathmatch):

• In CS, that was the bomb/hostages. CoD (and similar games) still retain similar objectives to this day. Killing your opponent is still integral, but the secondary objectives “force” action.
• In RTS, it’s the resources (micro arena is fun, but it’s not nearly as fun to play or watch as having to also manage resources/scout/build the right tech, etc.). The resources force action.
• In Mobas, it’s all about controlling lanes, pushing towers, and controlling the jungle. It’s not just “go in a room and shoot a dude with your skills”. That’s fun, but I think the other elements add more strategy and tactics to the game, and make them more fun to play.

So for us, when we’re designing game types, we’re thinking about these things. DM is still a fun and exciting part of conquest, but I know you guys want more – we’re working on it.

Balance
So during the shoutcast, Grouch and I kept joking about the “petting zoo”. It was funny. A lot of people laughed. But in the back of my mind, I knew we already had some balance changes coming to address it (you’ll see those tomorrow). My mentality was: let’s just have fun, and make it as enjoyable as possible for the viewers. I’ve seen posts saying we like that style of play, we want to have tons of AI builds in the meta, and we don’t care at all about balance or how the game looks/plays. I’ve seen posts stating that I think the petting zoo is funny and that we want nothing but AI driven-builds to be played in the meta (or some other crazy stuff). That’s simply untrue.

So the Ranger will be seeing some changes to the spirit build. We’re being very mindful to carefully shave it so that:

1. We don’t hurt other areas of the game where the build may not be a problem, as it is in PvP, and
2. We’ve already seen counters to this build showing up (there’s a thread talking about the Warrior countering this build, and to what degree) in the meta.

So, we will be “shaving” the build a little (we don’t want to over-correct the issue) and seeing how the meta adapts.

Here are some other things we keep in mind as we’re balancing things:

Perception of balance. Perception (there’s that pesky word again) of balance is very important. The last major update saw the Warrior getting some tools that we, the balance team, perceived to be enough to warrant their inclusion in the current meta. At first, a lot of people felt they still weren’t good enough. But now, with no other balance work, people are starting to figure out that the Warrior DOES have the tools to help a team, even in a heavy condition meta. The perception of the Warrior changed. This is why we try not to “whack a mole” balance – we like to give you guys time for your perceptions to mature in any given meta, rather than over balancing the game. Are we perfect? Hell no. We try our best to predict where our changes will take the metagame, and then let you guys flow with the game as the meta evolves.

“Bad for the player, but good for the game”. Alright. Story time. The game dev community is a pretty small place, and a lot of devs know one another. We are lucky enough to have game nights with guys from WOTC (they make Magic:TG) and I got into a great conversation with one of their devs. I was talking about balancing an MMO vs a CCG, and we were swapping lessons/ideas back and forth on the things we’ve learned. I asked him about the mana system, mulligans, and how much I hated them as a player. I hate winning because my opponent mulligans, and I hate losing because of them. I asked him what he thought about that. His answer, in a word, was amazing. He said (paraphrasing), “Ya, that random sucks. Mulligans, mana floods (getting too much mana, but not enough “action” cards) and mana screws (not getting enough mana) all suck. But they add this element where anyone has a shot in any game. Basically, those things are bad for the player, but they’re good for the game.” I thought it was a great way of summing up what happens when we, as devs, have to balance various classes in an MMO. It may suck to have YOUR build and YOUR class slightly brought down in power, but, here’s the thing, it’s good for the game at large. So don’t think that we hate X class. We love all the classes. But sometimes we need to adjust a few things in order to protect the health of the overall game.

Shaving vs Whack a mole. We want to “shave” as much as possible, and not do massive improvements/reductions to classes. This means making slight tweaks to classes, rather than massive changes which can upset the balance of the game. A lot of times we use spreadsheets, generate the baselines for a given type of skill, and then bring the outliers up or down, depending on where they hit. Sometimes very slight tweaks can have massive implications.