Guild Wars 2

Lol, where is my standard issue Picard facepalm….

No wonder everyone is panicking, it does sound like they want thieves to “stand out a little bit more”… XD

Ah well, we will see if their actual balancing decisions are better than their PR talks. I am still hoping that they realize most of their classes are based around AoE. The only class I can think of that is almost exclusively single target is Thief. Everyone else… elementalists, engineers, necros, mesmers with their shatters, even guardian skills are over 50% AoE. Warriors have AoE too.

So they better know what they’re doing or the forum rage will truly be of epic proportions.

While you’re at it, why don’t you tell us what Jormag thinks as well, since you are so sure what Pale Tree would do.

Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it must be done. So you proved nothing.

She said she will not make another Caladbolg. Why? Who knows. Doesn’t matter. Caladbolg is unique. And good luck making the Pale Tree do something she doesn’t want to do.

While all you need to do with big guns is get your paws on them blueprints, get yourself a labor force and resources and off you go, no questions asked no permission needed.

And of course, delivering the killing blow with Caladbolg couldn’t possibly be the result of a team effort?

That’s not a transcript. That’s just a bunch of bullet points someone unofficial wrote. I wouldn’t be surprised if the “single target classes stand out more” was just added on top of what was actually said.

Well, they can’t dominate a zerg, because a zerg will instagib them. I’m not talking about those zombie zergs, they’re basically point farms and will be regardless of any changes.

But the problem with AoE is that you can:

a) create killing fields
b) focus fire without actually focusing

For example, in EvE Online, a game famous for its zergs, one common tactic is to focus fire targets. Basically you have 50-100 people on teamspeak and the commander calls out primary and secondary targets one by one until they’re all gone. It requires cooperation, tactics and good understanding on what is important and what isn’t on the part of the commander.

The only true AoE in that game are bombs, PBAoE devices and doomsday devices. Bombs can be delivered only by ships made of soggy tissue paper, PBAoE have a really, really crappy range and doomsday devices make your wallet cry.
EVERYTHING else is single target. Why? Because if most weapons were AoE, like in GW2, then zerg fights would quickly be reduced to who has the most people and is faster on setting up their killing fields.

AoE, as others have said, is not a problem, the problem is AoE + multiple players. You can’t do anything about that sort of thing, people will stack up whenever they can. So the only thing you can do is make that stacking up be costly or situation-specific enough not to warrant its use in every single fight.

@Caffynated, I have been here, and seen the wailing, and lo and behold, despite that bug fix we elementalists still managed to dominate the bunker field with D/D just as before. And staff ended up being used as a support weapon, as it should be (not sure what will it end up as after the next patch, we’ll see when we get the notes).

@ThiBash, players do come up wuth good ideas, which is why ANet has another set of employees going over the suggestions forums. But I can pretty much guarantee you that 99% of forum crying and complaining is completely ignored by ANet simply because it is not an objectives source of information.
People who enjoy the game, play it. Most of the playerbase never even visits the forums.

But metrics report it all, and do it with solid numbers! That’s what a balance team needs, solid numbers, not “it feels too weak” or “kitten thief wtfpwned me AGAIN!”

So yeah. We’ll see. Patch is in ten days, so not too long to wait. Until then, relax and have some faith, this is a big change, chances are they won’t be just “winging it” on this one. Or else the amount of forum rage will probably reach critical levels and create a massive rage-fueled black hole which will swallow the balance team whole – in any case fun to watch. :p

Thunderbrew.7034:

The more I think about this, the less it makes sense. For two reasons:

1) AOE deters zergs in WvW from clumping up, which happens allot

2) I run GC staff ele, and have around 10500 HP and I can honestly say
I dont think I have ever died to AOE damage, outside of siege. Which
says allot considering how squishy I am. How? Easy. Map awareness
and not standing in AOE.

If people dont have the sense to avoid or dodge out of AOE, that shouldnt
mean a nerf on AOE needs to happen. If anything, nerf the siege AOE not
the professions.

1. NOTHING deters zergs. People like to zerg. The only way to prevent the zerg from forming is to give each player an indiscriminate damage aura so that they kill anyone coming too close to them.
And even then you’ll just end up with a lower density zerg. We humans like to do it and have been doing it ever since one tribe of smart monkeys zerged another.

2. I have seen videos of ele teams absolutely melting entire groups of people with Flash + Dagger Earth #5 synced up. I have seen concentrated AoE used as killing fields when defending gates or when enemy players are ressing mates, making it impossible for players to actually do anything about it. Good luck dodging when your actual goal is in the killing field and you don’t have invuln. skills to rely on.

Just because YOU don’t have any bad experiences with AoE, doesn’t mean anything. Statistics say otherwise. And also, AoE requires far less skill and player coordination than single target skills. AoE is a shotgun. Just point in the general direction and squeeze the trigger. You’ll hit someone. You don’t have to think about who you are attacking, who is the greatest priority… just drop an AoE on them all and pray for the best.

Obviously ANet doesn’t want a “spray and pray” game. The only dumb thing on their part is why they designed so many classes to use nothing BUT AoE.

I am not optimistic, I am realistic. Do you actually think that devs base their decisions on forum QQ and because they “play thieves”?

No, first every MMO has a set of developer tools called metrics, which gather statistical data on a very large sample (five people whining on a forum is not even a sample, it’s nothing) and present the developers with the data they need to assess how the game is doing. THAT is what they base their decisions on. Which is also why they don’t read forums that much – player opinion on class balance doesn’t mean anything when put up against hard statistical data.

And for the second… they would get FIRED so fast, they’d probably break the speed of light on their way out. Balance team doesn’t own ANet, they’re just employees. Anyone caught fixing the game just so they could OP their characters is fired immediately because it really, really, really messes up the PR of the company.

So realistically speaking if they are talking about reducing AoE effectiveness, they are talking about exactly that – NOT damage reduction, but usability reduction. And if they have AoE heavy classes, this more than likely means those classes will receive a gameplay change which will push them more towards single target damage.

Whether this means changing AoE skills, replacing some AoE skills with single target, high damage ones, or buffing more single target oriented builds remains to be seen. As I said, there is a TON of ways to reduce the effectiveness of AoE and just blanket damage nerf is pretty much the stupidest way to do it. And the devs have nowhere said it will be that.

So let us just wait and see. I’ll rage with the rest of the ele community if they pick the dumbest option, but I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to such major changes before I start yanking my hair out.

“Too expensive” never was anything but an artificial, non-existent limitation. The only limitation is resources. So unless that airship is made of diamonds and there simply physically isn’t enough of them to build another one, stating money as a problem is like saying there is no problem at all.

When you’re up to your neck in world-destroying dragons, finance tends to take a back seat to survival.

And last but not least, Caladbolg might be underused in the story, but killing a dragon with a magical sword is not unique. Killing a dragon with a giant freaking laser mounted on an airship, I certainly never heard that before.

Yeah, because it’s boring. What, you think nobody thought of something like that before. They did but correctly concluded that killing a world destroying creature with oversized conventional weapons can be summarized with one word: “meh”.

Besides, Zhaitan wans’t even killed by the laser, he got his appendages trimmed by it. Then he was killed by the dozen or so side cannons.

So they already have a dozen of those elder dragon killing cannons. Why not make a ton more, mount them on appropriated Dredge sonic burrowing things and go Primordious hunting? Hey, we could also mount those shells or energy charges or whatever is flying out of those cannons on Pact submarines for Bubbles?

So that we can just shoot the big boys because that is so much fun and doesn’t completely destroy their image as a world threat in the slightest!

The ele community must really be traumatized, the amount of preemptive tears here is amazing.

I mean, nobody here doesn’t even know what they plan to do with AoE. “Reduced effectiveness” – how does that translate directly to reduced damage? It means only that they think (correctly, btw) that AoE in this game is too abundant and that it reduces gameplay to AoE spammage, which it does.

Since there are many classes which have AoE skills, this more than likely means that they will change those skills in such a way that:

a) some of the AoE skills will be now more geared towards single target damage with reduced AoE effects
b) AoE skills will have requirements making them unpractical to use in every encounter (which probably means longer setup times, or preconditions requirements and so on)

Just reducing AoE damage is the single worst way to do it, and they haven’t mentioned such a move anywhere. I doubt they are so dumb to blanket nerf AoE damage when they have classes which are practically all AoE and other classes which would hardly get touched by the nerf at all.

Honestly, if they (just shooting of the hip here) were to buff, dunno, Fire #1 and nerf Fire #5 (make it a constant channel or a root), so that players are encouraged to use #5 only when there really is a case that warrants carpet bombing, I’d be fine with that.

There are lots of ways to reduce dependency on AoE. I just hope they pick a good one.

The driving force is probably that overabundant AoE skills that do comparable single target damage as single target skills push the game into spammage territory.

The ONLY problem is that some classes currently are too dependent on AoE skills and just doing a blanket damage reduction would ruin them utterly, while leaving other classes that much more powerful in comparison.

This does not mean that the upcoming change will be a blanket damage nerf. It more than likely means that skills will be reshuffled so that there are fewer AoE ones. I expect upping of main target damage, reduction in splash and area radius and individual buffs of single target damage skills depending on class.

They never said “nerf”, they said the AoE in the game will receive an update to how it works.

They could go a dozen different ways about this, and yet people assume they will just lower AoE damage?

What if they replace some AoE skills with single target high damage ones? Would that be a nerf?
What if they reduce the AoE radius, but keep the damage? What if they reduce splash damage only but keep or buff target damage? Is that a nerf?

This game is too AoE centric. It needs to be addressed. Doesn’t automatically mean that they will do it so that some classes are pummeled into the ground… elementalists ARE AoE class. Just doing a blanket nerf on AoE damage is not a nerf, it would be a class murder, and I think the devs are not that dumb.

BuddhaKeks.4857:

Not wanting to start a religious debate here, but how do you know he couldn’t if he wanted to? How can you know the Pale Tree can’t make more magic swords or other artifacts?

I don’t. However, I do now for sure that once you make one machine you can make a ton of copies. Because it is a machine. It has a blueprint, it has resource requirements, and that’s it.

Mystical artifacts are mystical. They are unique. They are all about a special set of circumstances, alignment of stars, fate, what have you. You can’t mass produce Excaliburs, even though obviously someone had to make the one.

And Pale Tree herself says she will never make another Caladbolg. So there’s that.

And finally, mystical artifacts are powerful symbols. Huge laser cannons are not.

Son of Elias.5420:

What confuses me is that your main issue with the laser cannon is that it makes killing dragons too easy – once you have a gun, you can make more guns, that sort of thing.

But then you want to use Caladbolg, a sword made by the Pale Tree. How’s that any different? You could just as well assume we’ll have everyone armed with Caladbolg’s by next week – it’s the same argument as having lasers off an assembly line, as Konig pointed out.

That’s the same as assuming Jesus could mass-produce Holy Grails.

Mitch.4781:

Gaudrath.6725:

Has it occurred to anyone that AoE is actually too dominant in this game? That virtually every class is full of AoE skills?

And that maybe the devs would like combat to look less like carpet bombing?
Dunno. If they nerf AoE but buff single target damage or survivability where needed, it could actually be a good thing.

I would really like you to provide crystal clear examples where AOE is too dominant..and actually of much use for that matter.

Simple. Wherever and whenever there is a target. I play an elementalist and I absolutely love the class (can’t play anything else for that matter), but I do recognize that AoE is of course my #1 solution to every situation (that I have so few single target skills doesn’t help with that either). Even when there is just a single target, AoE is easier to use since it is harder to miss with and also, why not?

So it all depends on what they will do. Just reducing AoE damage won’t be enough since there are so many AoE skills it would make certain classes unplayable (nevermind builds). But if they reduce, say, AoE radius and splash damage but up main target damage, or if they even straight up replace certain AoE skills with single target high damage ones, then the change will be ok in my opinion.

It would force players to coordinate more in large events and PvP, it would force players to consider such stuff as target calling more, target priorities and order etc. instead of just blanketing the entire area in AoE spells, hoping for the best.

As for zergs, it works both ways. Main argument against zergs is that AoE is the best counter against them. This is false. AoE encourages zerging and blind fire. Just point and click, you don’t have to worry about who you are actually hitting. So the more AoE you can land on the enemy the better, and if the enemy has fewer people it simply won’t do them any good because they can’t even come close to the zerg without melting.

So bottom line, it depends how they will do it. There are good ways to do it, like shifting focus on being able to focus fire something (and in PvE it doesn’t matter if you can hit 5 targets for 50 damage each or one at a time for 250, imagine the PvP implications), and bad ways like simply nerfing AoE damage or radius, which would put classes which already specialize in single target damage at an unfair advantage over the rest.

So don’t panic until you see what they will do, that’s what I am saying.

Has it occurred to anyone that AoE is actually too dominant in this game? That virtually every class is full of AoE skills?

And that maybe the devs would like combat to look less like carpet bombing?
Dunno. If they nerf AoE but buff single target damage or survivability where needed, it could actually be a good thing.

Now that is a true Norn.

The really funny thing is that only ONE type of humanoid Risen has a pull they use as a opening move. One type. Most of them don’t even have any knockdowns, roots and other forms of CC.
But I see how people just beeline it through Orr… of course you’re going to get a train going real quick that way (and dump it on me). Look where you’re going and 99% of the time you won’t have to stop or be stopped.

To make it really obvious when you are about to stomp someone.

Doesn’t matter. Races are clearly not designed to be equals in GW2.

Never, ever give guild bank access to everyone, especially not new players. That’s what ranks are for. Giving access to everyone is just asking for trouble.

Elementalist bar none for scholar professions. But you will have to play the keyboard like a piano if you want to get 100% out of the class.
And after you master an elementalist, you won’t be able to play anything else. :p

Well, we will see. Although the Pact cannons used to bring down the Claw are the same as ones we can see all over Orr.
And I wasn’t suggesting that Caladbolg should be used to stab all elder dragons to death, just Zhaitan… that sword is way underused in the story, it looks cool and has a cool background and then is basically used for something you really don’t need a sword for, which is a shame.

A prototype is always far more expensive than later iterations – simply because there is a lot of problems when building something from scratch. Everything else is a matter of refining the design, which is why I find magitech elder dragon killing weaponry problematic – I don’t find magitech as such a problem, and yes it is refreshing, just not as means to kill an elder dragon.

Why? Because once you got yourself a gun that can do that, there is no stopping you really. It doesn’t matter how expensive it is, unless it uses some weird resource like, dunno, captive souls or somesuch. If it is only a matter of common resources, well – when the need is dire, battleships are built in matter of weeks and tanks in matter of hours. And the more you build something, the easier it gets.

Elder Dragons are unique. Means of killing them should be unique. They could be technomagic, but it must not be just about a machine, no matter how expensive it is. It must be personal, something that is created once and can never be created again. Machines just do not fit that requirement by their very definition.

Ah hell, just build a huge Asura megacannon, shove Trahearne in it, strap a Charr-made protective helmet on him and fire him at Jormag, that should do the trick.

What people really want when it comes to skills, is the same as with gear – cosmetic variety. You want to feel you’re using different skills, even though the stats and effects are pretty much the same.

So there really is no real reason why ANet shouldn’t just release a truckload of skill “skins” you can get from various places such as dungeons, open world encounters, bosses etc. – the skills would basically be the same, but the visuals and animations wouldn’t and you could swap and mix and match these skill “skins” on your 1-5 bar at will.
There. Variety without a balancing nightmare.

As opposed to Asura who have teleportation, golem armies and huge, elder dragon melting superlasers? Yeah, I totally see why we need other races here.

The problem with killing Zhaitan with a, basically, a really big gun, is that it turns the elder dragons into pests to be exterminated.
Using Caladbolg, on the other hand, or any other magical or mystical artifact, keeps the aforementioned magic and mystery in the whole ordeal and what is more important is far more tailored for Zhaitan than generic weaponry (and superlasers are generic weaponry no matter how much you “modify” them).

Caladbolg is, like Zhaitan, unique.
Superlaser is something you get from an assembly line.

I am paying attention, which is why I bother to comment on this forum. The story sucks. It is just bad.
Sylvari were brought into the world with a very specific mission – to fight the Elder Dragons, as the Pale Tree herself puts it. Whether they are the world’s answer to the dragon threat, sort of like an immune system producing white cells, or whether the Pale Tree is just another Elder Dragon who wants to do the others in (Elder Dragons hate each others guts) and is taking subtlety to epic levels, doesn’t matter.

The Pale Tree is immensely powerful and its self-professed mission is to fight the elder dragons. Nobody knows how powerful exactly, but I would be willing to bet it is more powerful than a kitten mechanical contraption. One would also think a being so powerful would have some means of actually accomplishing its goals and is not in fact full of hot air.
Caladbolg is a leaf from its very boughs. Caladbolg is part the Pale Tree, same as your fist is part of you. All we know about it is that it is also immensely powerful.

So it makes sense. Plus, the megalaser isn’t technology, it is technomancy. Asura tech is part magic, part technology. Charr tech is pure technology, but is still in the steam/gunpowder age. If you want to stick to “magic only makes them stronger”, then that megalaser should have been a real treat for Zhaitan. But of course, they “modified it”.

So who is to say that Caladbolg isn’t “modified” to work against an elder dragon? And why does Trahearne get that sword in the first place? They just sort of forget about it. He hardly even uses the kitten thing!

Swords, lasers, same thing. Weapons. Brute force. It does make the elder dragons look quite limited. I mean, these things ended entire civilizations. Maybe even the gods fled before them, who knows.

And then we just blow one up? Come on.

P.S. I would have even preferred it if Zhaitan was stabbity-stabbed with Caladbolg, at least that’s sort of a legendary-legendary weapon with the power of the Pale Tree behind it. A megalaser is just a gizmo with the power of really big batteries behind it. Bleh.

That depends. Sometimes certain things that look great on a concept render look awful when put on a game model. So then the artist has to change certain stuff into something similar that works.
You can’t just put a flat texture onto a model, that looks terrible, depending on what you’re going for your texture has to approximate the finer detail as much as possible… there are many techniques for that, from normal maps to global illumination baking but they all have one problem – the finer the detail, the larger the texture has to be.
So with the concept art such as it is (lots of crevices and fine detail) that might have required textures that were too large and some detail was dropped.

It is also a question of design… a still render can show off a lot of detail, but a moving ingame model might not simply because players do not look at it standing still for any amount of time – any detail beyond a certain threshold is just lost to the players.
So resources that would have to be used to draw that thing onscreen can be instead better used for something else.

In any case, looking at the ingame model and concept art, it’s the same thing, trust me.

Or any effects at all. I hate it when people just pop in and out of existence, add some special effects to that ANet!

Eh, if you look at each totem spirit, they could be called an “essence” of that animal or natural phenomenon. That is because all animals of the same species behave in the same way. So it is easy to distill those virtues into a totem spirit.

Not so with sentient races. So far nobody has really managed to come up with a true definition of a human being (NOT human as in biological species!), even though there have been many attempts. When you come down to it, humans as entities are too diverse and varied to be encompassed by a simple set of virtues which could be distilled in a Spirit of Humans.
Same for other sentient species, storytelling cliches aside. You see one bear, you have pretty much seen them all. See one human, or one Asura, and you definitely still have no idea about what humans or Asura are like.

Closest you could get to definitions of human aspects are their Gods. Which Norn already recognize as Spirits.

Konig, as someone who does game art on a professional level, I can tell you that the ingame Zhaitan model is definitely made according to the concept art.
It’s just that it is not as complex and detailed since you have polygon counts and texture sizes to take into account… concept art renders are usually much more detailed than the stuff you actually get ingame. But the most important features used in the concept art are there, so it is quite safe to assume that Zhaitan is composed of multiple dragons, regardless of visual discrepancies.

Something occurred to me – isn’t asura tech actually technomancy, as in magical technology?
Is that anti-Zhaitan superlaser actually a proper laser or a technomagic weapon?

And Trahearne leading the fight against all the dragons? Please no. For Jormag we need someone with a manly beard.

They are called Spirits of the Wild – pretty much any animal can and does have its own spirit, although some Spirits are more powerful and more revered in Norn society than others.
In addition to that, Norn recognize certain aspects of the natural world as Spirits, such as Mountain, Darkness etc. but do not ascribe them the same sentient attributes as they do to the totem spirits.

As for sentient races, no, there are no Spirits of Human, Asura, Charr, Jotun and so on. Closest you could get are the human Gods, who are just Spirits to Norn.

Basically think of the Spirits as personifications of certain attributes of animals and the natural world. Sentient races are far too diverse to be so easily characterized as to have a totem spirit of their own.

Nike.2631:

Wow, that’s the first time I’ve watched some go and write a wiki article to back their argument in real time.

Have any in-game references? charater dialogue? Interactive objects?

Have you? And by the way, the Wurm could be a totem spirit, in which case a Norn follower of Wurm could shapeshift into something truly ugly. Not call a wurm to battle just like they can’t call wild bears to just drop on someone’s head. Norn can also call an owl to attack, and Owl is dead. It is just a Norn thing. It doesn’t have a special significance.

I agree. I think I have pretty much said all I wanted on the subject.

And Konig – oooh. You got me there. You got me good.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Congratulations, you just contradicted yourself.

Really? Do explain.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Gaudrath.6725:

I am not arguing if people find it agreeable. The initial question of this thread was “How does Arah exploration make sense” and my answer is a short and sweet “it doesn’t, roll with it.”

However, it does.

By your argument, what doesn’t make sense is the interaction between Arah story and everything preceeding such.

Arah explorable does make sense – Zhaitan is treated as dead, and the Risen are in limited supply although still numerous, even if the risen say otherwise (they’re known for lying, you know).

Yes, correct. The discussion quickly took off to include open world inconsistencies, and I think that’s where I stepped in. Arah explorable makes sense and is explained.

But Orr and the rest of the world as sure as hell aren’t.

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

The bosses in WoW never die? Really? I wouldn’t know, I played it very briefly on a free trial.

I’m not sure what you mean by “emergent”, but as for player-driven, I can see where you’re coming from. I’d like the events to be more dynamic, more varied, etc— that’s very much the direction I want them to go.

What I don’t want is a never-ending cycle of war-events to replace personal progression in a linear story altogether. That would be the death of meaningful storytelling.

Which is why I mentioned a really, really long personal story arc running in parallel with the open world, but not interfering with it.
What I would love to see, in addition to an even more dynamic open world experience, is a personal storyline that helps players get a solid feel for the world of GW2. It really is a shame, there is so much lore and detail in the world, and it all just gets sidestepped in order for a rushed dragon killing, cliche-ridden storyline to take the spotlight. Personal character progression never was about finding the biggest, baddest monster in the world and killing it. That’s just so much wasted potential.

By emergent I mean non-scripted as in, “it just happened”, spontaneous or otherwise. Usually sandbox MMOs have completely emergent gameplay since most of it is player driven.

Konig, do not bring repeatable events into this. We are specifically discussing your idea that geographical zones in GW2 are situated at different points in time.

If that is indeed what you claim, then yes man, you are claiming there is time travel in GW2 and, by the way, that each zone is frozen in time as well.
If Queensdale takes place before Cursed Shore, then the ONLY way I can go back to Queensdale after visiting Cursed Shore is to travel back in time! Which is a ridiculous way to explain inconsistencies in causality when developers try to fuse open world gameplay with closed linear storytelling.

Your explanation requires more suspension of disbelief than if players just friggin’ shrugged at why everything is the same after Zhaitan and simply played on.

But I think I know what’s the problem. You are talking about the story. I am talking about the virtual world. For you, the world is a collection of stories which take place one after another, and to revisit “old” areas is same as to reread an old chapter in a book.

I am, on the other hand, talking about the virtual world. The consistency and believability of this virtual world is the #1 requirement for player immersion, which is a big reason why people keep playing the game. They can “get into it”. That is why I harp on and on about paradoxes in the open world and why they should be avoided… if you look at the game purely as a linear story, sure, there are none.

But open world MMOs are not linear stories. They are hugely interactive experiences which aim to simulate a fantastical version of reality. Players must feel that. If they don’t then they simply don’t get hooked. And your MMO fails at worst or bleeds players at best.
So no, you can’t treat a MMO the same as a book or a movie. It doesn’t work that way. Look at SW: TOR. That game is a prime example of what happens when you treat an MMO as a movie. It flops harder than Zhaitan.

I am not arguing if people find it agreeable. The initial question of this thread was “How does Arah exploration make sense” and my answer is a short and sweet “it doesn’t, roll with it.”

You seem to think that it does, and thus we went of to discuss the finer points on why I believe that is not the case.

As for the rest, that is your opinion, but the difference between us is that I favor emergent, player-driven gaming experience, while you seem to favor a scripted one. However, I think your estimate that most players would hate a game world where they cannot bury a endgame boss forever is very wrong.

If that was the case, WoW wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is. I merely suggested creating a far better wrapping for the standard MMO treadmill (which is very much present in GW2 as well, in case you think it is any different).

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Explorable zones are mechanics. Time progression via individual zones are mechanics.

Nope. If you want an example of a game which plays with time as a game mechanic, check out “Braid”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgTL_kVPq0Q

GW2 does not do that. There is no time travel in GW2. You cannot undo choices you made. Therefore all zones exist at the same time and the only linear time progression is that of your character moving through time, and that is fixed and one way only, just like in real life.

Son of Elias.5420:

Gaudrath.6725:

Son of Elias.5420:

Europe is after Australia. Timezones and whatnot.

I really, really hope you’re joking.

What? It is. Australia hits 6am, for example, long before Europe does. By the time it’s 6am in Europe, it’s like 1-2pm in Australia.

That’s time zones. Used for local time measurement and syncing of clocks, but those zones are completely artifical and tied to the rotation of the Earth relative to the Sun.
There used to be an island in the Pacific with the international date line cutting it right in half. You could actually make one step from, say, Tuesday to Wednesday – but come on, in reality that didn’t mean you went to the future (or back to past if you took a step back).

It is NOW everywhere. It is now where you live as well as in another galaxy. It is now on Mars and on the Moon, in Europe and Australia. Time is universal. Travelling through space does not equate travelling through time, especially not backwards through time. You can only ever go forward through time.

Son of Elias.5420:

Gaudrath.6725:

WoW didn’t start doing the kill-the-unique-boss-with-a-story gimmick until relatively recently. Before that they had their endgame bosses more or less immortal. Players could kinda slay them, but only temporarily.

Onyxia was relatively recent? You mounted her head on a pike. Literally.

Ah well, my lack of knowledge about WoW endgame shines through. I never did get to Onyxia. Welp, more bad storytelling, what can you do.
However, Onyxia could be killed plenty of times, that fight was repeatable, so technically she can’t be permakilled even though you can do the quest only once.
They just didn’t bother to mask the game with a clever story, much like GW2 only from the other end.

But then the story could never progress. And what sort of story would you have?

“We need to form the Pact to kill Zhaitan! Now, he’ll only stay dead for about a week. Then he’ll be back. And we can never actually kill him for good, so we’ll need to do this every week forever. And about a hundred of us die every time, so, uh… bollocks.”

And what sort of story do you have now? You kill Zhaitan and… nothing happens.

No, I explained earlier how you could craft a story around unkillable bosses. You essentially make the whole PvE experience more similar to WvW, only with NPC instead of player enemies. Basically the entire game is one big continuous struggle to push back and contain this great evil. Success is not measured in mere killing of a dragon, but in defeating dragon armies across the world in dynamic zone-wide event chains.

And all dictated by players. Players would decide when to storm forts, and when to defend them. There could be multiple fronts, especially when other dragons jump into the fray. There could be neutral NPC factions to ally with (before Zhaitan does) to help the war effort. There could be solo or group assassination quests. Supply lines to break or maintain. Commando style raids deep behind enemy lines (where there are no working gates).

Ultimately the players could push all the way to Arrah by themselves with NPC support (right now it is the other way around), whereupon you could have a big battle against Zhaitan, with good rewards but extremely, and I mean extremely difficult to win. If defeated, Zhaitan would not be killed but would flee into his innermost lair and seal himself up to recover. Some time later he would again explode forward and try to regain lost territory and push the players all the way to nearest major city, which could then be put under siege (assuming the players do not counter and push back the dragon invasion).

In the background, you could have a separate, years long personal story detailing the quest to find a permanent solution to the elder dragon problem. The personal story would also be much more focused on the player’s character and their culture and background.

So that’s one way you could have fun, repeatable endgame bosses that make sense, as well as an interesting personal story that helps you immerse yourself in the game world.

WoW didn’t start doing the kill-the-unique-boss-with-a-story gimmick until relatively recently. Before that they had their endgame bosses more or less immortal. Players could kinda slay them, but only temporarily.

Also there is no need to alter the entire game. Simply do not allow players to really end the final boss. Have the players subdue the boss, or drive the boss back or have the boss reform itself or what have you. Then that boss comes back after a while, ready for another round.

Players wouldn’t hate that, on the contrary, if it is done well. One thing that players love more than an amazing raid is an amazing raid they can do more than once. There are also a host of programming and design tricks you can employ to shake things up a bit so that no two final raids are quite the same.

That way your open world is consistent, and your players are happy. Win-win. Or you can do this “story-is-king” and try to force definitive endings and chapters onto a medium which doesn’t really support that kind of thing by its very nature.

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

Gaudrath.6725:

Causality is linear, the flow of time is one directional, past->present->future. You cannot go back in time, you can only go forward. Time is also universal in space (for all intents and purposes).

All of these things are true, and all hold precisely no influence over this discussion of game mechanics.

I’m not going to reply with long blocks of text anymore, because I’ve said all I can say on the matter more than once.

You can roleplay what you like. Nothing is stopping you, least of all the game. It just so happens that some events (not many) have a particular time and place in-lore, and also happen to be replayable. The impact of this replay mechanic on the lore is none. If you happen to be in the area, and you happen to be a roleplayer who absolutely cannot accept replaying old events, then don’t take part—- that’s you not making use of the mechanic, which is your right.

But to complain because the mechanic exists?

You confuse mechanics with story consistency. A damage formula is a game mechanic. A loot system is a game mechanic.

Shoddy storytelling creating impossible and contradictory situations is bad storytelling, not game mechanics.

Son of Elias.5420:

Europe is after Australia. Timezones and whatnot.

I really, really hope you’re joking.

And this discussion isn’t about RP, RP is used to illustrate things. It’s about poorly constructed story which creates paradoxical situations.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Gaudrath.6725:

In fact, with such a ridiculous premise of spatial travel equating temporal travel you should be leaving infinite copies of yourself for every smallest possible section of space-time in your existence, like a really weird mouse trail.

At this point, what’s ridiculous is you and your argument. Too ridiculous to even bother arguing against.

Ad hominem won’t help you.

And that weak and inexperienced warrior exists at the same time as your strong and experienced warrior, using your desired world set up.

Not at all, and please do quote me where I said everything has to happen at the same time. You are confusing temporal progression, which is linear, with the notion of time being universal.

If you have difficulty, just look at how the physical world works. Everything happens at the same time. Note the present tense. This excludes things that have happened and are not happening right now as well as things that will happen in the future.

This does NOT mean that yesterday is happening at the same time as today. Causality is linear, the flow of time is one directional, past→present→future. You cannot go back in time, you can only go forward. Time is also universal in space (for all intents and purposes).

So your breakfast happens before your lunch, but Europe certainly doesn’t happen before Australia. You kill spiders before Zhaitan and then again spiders after Zhaitan, but Caledon and Orr exist at the same moment in time.

Do you get it now?

Konig Des Todes.2086:

You know what Gaudrath, I’m tired of your relentless “it’s inconsistent! It’s paradoxical!”

If you hate GW2 so much, that’s fine. But do you really have to repeat yourself like a kitten broken record every post? You don’t. It’s not paradoxical nor inconsistent as EVERYONE ELSE has told you.

If by everyone else you mean you and Neilos, then no, that’s not enough and it wouldn’t matter if the whole kitten board disagreed with me.
You have to counter my arguments. I have presented them, they are valid and you have not successfully countered them. I am sorry if that annoys you.
I repeat myself only in an effort to explain myself better since it seems you do not understand what I am saying.

And I don’t hate GW2, I love it. I had and still have tons of fun in the game. But that doesn’t mean I can’t criticize parts of it which I think were poorly done.

And as everyone will say: Zhaitan was defeated, but not necessarily killed. Like what ArenaNet does for everything, they left the door for Zhaitan open. They can later say “he’s dead” or they can say “that was only part of Zhaitan!” or they can say “Zhaitan was simply put back to sleep for this cycle of awakening.”

If that is the case, then I effectively have no problem with the story and there are no paradoxes. If Pact erroneously believes Zhaitan to be dead and ANet is only playing with us a little, then everything makes sense. As I said numerous times, I am hoping this to be the case.

As for impersonal – I disagree, but this is a matter of opinion, just as slashing at a 1,000 foot dragon with a 3-5 foot sword is. This argument won’t end, so why do you keep it going by repeating yourself? This’ll be the second attempt to end it, and if you just repeat yourself, I’m not going to bother responding.

Sure, we don’t have to discuss literary techniques and their qualities. I find such discussion interesting, but hey, you don’t want to talk about it, fine.

From here on out, I’m calling you Broken Gaudrath Record.

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