Guild Wars 2

I recall WoW has a system for quest items where the odds a quest item will drop depends on how many times since they last got a quest item that the player has been eligible for a quest drop and not gotten one. I can imagine something like this working for items that players are supposed to get semi-randomly as rewards for participation, like unidentified fossils in Dry Top.

But my absolute favourite drop system is in the JRPG The World Ends With You. Each enemy drops one item depending on difficulty level, with a percentage chance of either dropping the item, or rolling for an item on the next level down. (Players are shown the drop table for every enemy.) The genius is that you could increase the odds by handicapping your characters, by using very expensive high-level consumables, and by chaining battles together without healing in between (which would also up damage from attacks). So a particular currency material might drop at a 0.6% rate from a boss, but if you handicapped yourself 40 levels and launched into the fight at the end of a 16x chain, that’s a 38% drop chance. You could push further to secure even better odds, but you’d run the risk of making the fight unwinnable. Of course, that material could then be traded in for better equipment which would allow you to push your luck further. It made rare drops into progression in a really interesting way. On top of that, sometimes the item you wanted was a rare drop on a lower difficulty level, and on a higher difficulty level you had a high chance of getting something you no longer need. You had reason to dial the difficulty down and handicap your characters to ensure that rare drop happened.

I think about The World Ends With You a lot in fractals.

Just to develop the server idea further:

Given that we now have megaservers in PvE, servers only matter in WvW, where they’re teams that play off against each other and have a history and character. What if WvW servers were explicitly teams? Specifically, like soccer teams, which generally form through grassroots efforts and have to play their way up the ladder. Players don’t have a world when they create a character; it’s only when they start playing WvW that they have to pick a world, and the better performing worlds are invite-only.

We’d then be able to use existing solutions for balancing teams, like ‘salary caps’ depending on a world’s rank. New players can only be invited into a high-ranked world through spending some kind of population currency, and if they leave a world that’s over the cap, they earn some kind of personal reward, maybe gold or gems or an account-bound currency.

However, I broadly agree with other posters that the core problem is that population and coverage is the biggest factor in scoring well, and that encourages population imbalance.

The thing I really like about the new system is the level range between when you’ve just unlocked a trait tier, and when you get enough points to get a major trait. When I levelled, I never looked at the minor traits, because I was focusing on the stats I got. In the new system, you get a minor trait at level 30, so they end up being a big part of your. That’s great! It’s pretty difficult to unlock major traits, so sometimes you want to put points in a line for the stats and not the major trait slot. I like that! I like that it’s not all about the major traits. I liked that as you get into the 50s and 60s that new adept options open up, because adept traits should always be relevant. With my playstyle, unlocking traits influences where I’m going, particularly after level 40 or so where the zones start to flow a little less well.

Most of the suggestions to fix the system break what I like about it.

Incidentally, I’d love to see some map completion rewards for the two new zones.

Hearts:

I think they largely fail at directing players to events, because it’s rare for an event to be running while players are there, so players end up doing filler activities to complete the heart, then move on. This gives entirely the wrong impression about the game, that the hearts are the backbone of levelling and that most of the actions of the game are kill-ten-rat style quests but gussied up with not having to pick up the quest first. I think players should mostly be filling hearts through events.

Occasionally, an event pops half-way through, and players complete the heart during the event, but it seems strange that the additional help doesn’t seem to matter to the NPCs very much. It looks like people have brought up earning karma from repeating hearts; perhaps this could be done via a second ‘overhelp’ meter, which has diminishing returns (based on how full the meter is).

A related issue is when you’ve gone through an area and done most of what the heart vendor wanted, but to get full credit you have to hang back and wait for respawns so you can kill a few mobs. If the heart vendor wants you to deal with all the enemies in the cave, for instance, what should matter to the heart vendor is not how many enemies you killed, but how empty the cave is. (Maybe the contribution points you get can fluctuate based on external factors.) If the cave’s empty, maybe the heart vendor cares about something else as well, and directs players based on how pressing their needs are at the time.

It’s pretty easy to complete a heart before you manage to make it to the heart vendor to find out what the story of the area is. Most heart vendors, when they go into their ‘congratulations’ dialogue, don’t give you the option to ask ‘what was all that about?’ and get their explanation of what’s going on in the area that they give when the heart’s not complete.

I like to compare hearts to the achievements in Dry Top; they’re both goals trying to influence player behaviour, but unlike hearts, achievements can be awarded for completing a specific task. There are a few hearts that might benefit from being awarded for a single accomplishment, like the stealth training heart in north Blazeridge Steppes.

Many hearts act, essentially, as kill quests. These are kind of boring, but it always struck me as strange that they couldn’t be extended over half a zone, overlapping with other hearts. The framing of some hearts is that any action across most of the zone would suit the NPC, like killing centaurs in west Kessex Hills; honestly, though, there probably should be events tied to these hearts to make them more than just a generic kill quest. A better example are the hearts leading to the Font of Rhand in Diessa Plateau; you can ‘help’ around Bloodsaw Mill in a pretty generic way, but if there’s an Flame Legion attack or the Iron Legion’s gearing up for a reply, there’s more to do – but then they get out of range and suddenly you’re not helping Bloodsaw Mill any more. But the heart up here is about defeating Flame Legion! You just took care of their invasion!

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

• Karma may be an underwhelming common event currency. Many people would like to see it applied towards a greater variety of personal reward goals such as crafting materials, more skins, etc. People seem favorable to region specific rewards, but at some point we have to reconcile the notion that it would probably further devaluate karma. I would also like to submit that karma has another issue which is that whenever you purchase something you are setting back your progress towards other purchases. Of course, that’s a fundamental aspect of currency and yet, it’s less intrinsically rewarding than gold because you can use gold to make more gold (gear upgrades, crafting, trading, etc). At the level 80 end especially, big karma sinks are largely cosmetic and will not help you earn more karma. Personally, I feel that effective reward systems regularly disperse rewards along the path to a longer term goal. (If you haven’t checked out PvP Reward Tracks, you should!)

Karma is a big part of the issue; generally when levelling, heart vendor rewards are competing against buying items from the trading post and crafting upgrades, and anything that could potentially become available down the line. Rewards like food aren’t particularly attractive to new players, because while they’d use it, that’s karma that could spend on something potentially cooler.

For level 80s, karma has three uses: cooking materials, getting your first exotics from the Orr temple vendors, and obsidian shards. Neither is particularly exciting – the temple vendors you really only need to see once, and the other two you buy in bulk so you never get that feeling of finally reaching a goal amount for karma. Players generally don’t have the opportunity to buy something worth a sizable amount of karma that serves as a goal – for the most part, that’s restricted to gold purchases (that fluctuate on the TP) or regional currency.

I wonder if karma might be more valuable if it could be lost, like how you lose a small amount of gold when you die and have to revive at a waypoint. Just spitballing here, but what would happen if players lost a small amount of karma if an event failed?

Alternatively, what if you could buy grab-bags, one-per-character or one-per-day items off karma vendors? Or spend karma to trigger a special event or dungeon mode? This might also allow players to buy karma items that buff their karma gain under specific or unusual playstyles, or for instance a karma killstreak buff.

The level of communication we’re seeing from Chris Cleary, Steve Fowler and Ryan Diederich is about the right level of communication for areas of the game where trust hasn’t completely eroded, I think. Ryan in particular was good; gave a reason, had a look, might be able to do a little more to help out.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi Merus,

Don’t worry I won’t.

Chris

Well played.

ColinJohanson.2394:

I think that’d be an interesting discussion, you’ll probably be surprised to find the “big” lists aren’t that different, it’s just that since we can’t share the projects we’re working on to solve them – it’s not clear we’re actually working on, or even aware of or worried about the issue. Worse, when people see work being done in other areas shipping rather than what seems like a core area, they assume no work is being done and no one is even aware of the other issue.

One of the problems you have is that you’re not able to go back to players to ask them about a specific point of contention that’s come up. For instance, let’s say someone’s developing more sophisticated commanding tools, and there’s an interface for people to click on a commander on the side and join their squad, and it’s easy to draw that list from all the commanders on all copies of that map, so people don’t have to do taxiing any more. Great! Except now TTS have no way of keeping out people who aren’t willing to get on TeamSpeak or follow instructions, so they have to turn off their commander tags to ensure people can’t taxi in and ruin things for them. What do TTS need to ensure that this is an upgrade for them? You could just ask them, but now you’re sharing implementation information about features in development and implicitly promising this functionality. The commander colour blowup, for instance, would have been easily prevented if the developer responsible could have put up a poll with various options for unlocking the functionality.

You’re also missing out on one of the core benefits of an agile methodology, that you can quickly change direction in response to stakeholder feedback. Adopting an agile methodology and then never talking to your stakeholders past the initial requirements gathering seems like a lot of wasted effort.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I don’t actually care that much about solutions in development as much as what problems are the most pressing. A list of ‘top problems’ or very general ideas of where attention is – “Orr”, for instance, would be fine – although you couldn’t put exploits on that list for obvious reasons. I think this’d work better if it varied between very general – i.e. new PvP mode – and very small – i.e. terrain exploits in dungeons, so that developers can move things around based on the sprint and so players can at least see that the developers haven’t been spinning their wheels instead of solving their pet problems.

I think also there’d be value on ‘cutting room floor’ posts where the people involved talk about projects that have been abandoned, and why they didn’t work out, as a kind of behind-the-scenes look. The disappointment of this cool thing that might have been coming would be offset by a better understanding of the design philosophy behind the game. that_shaman’s posts digging into cut content like unused voicework for Living Story sequences seem fairly popular. (Then again, I know Blizzard have struggled with announced features that were cut, and even explaining why they were cut didn’t help much.)

There is also the possibility of having a player-elected advisory council, similar to some other MMOs, that would be under an NDA. These players might be helpful focusing discussion for CDIs – or even running them, which they could probably do if they know what the priorities are and how far along certain features are. This might save valuable manpower, because the various player advisers can have their own ideas about how to run CDIs and the best approach will fall out of how the most effective CDIs are run.

I’m someone who’s thoroughly fed up with ArenaNet’s communication, and is largely on the way out, so hopefully my perspective is useful. I’m going to try to be constructive.

It doesn’t feel like ArenaNet acknowledges or is aware of the problems with their game, leading people like me to believe that they’re largely not going to be fixed. It doesn’t feel like they recognise the strengths of their game, or intend to build on them. Communication is a part of this, but so is a lack of trust, and that cannot be fixed with any number of CDIs.

Most of the things that have blown up over the past week have been long-standing sore points amongst the community. In each case, people got snippets of information and extrapolated wildly from there. I’ve been on the other side of this: the problem is not ‘people got inaccurate information’ (because the same thing happens if they do get accurate information) but that people have been looking for any information at all, without the context to make sense of it. A good example is the radio silence after the poorly-received changes to fractals, and the trait system. This wasn’t future content. What was needed there was a dev to explain the design choices they made, discuss expectations and intentions, and because it was absent, that bred resentment. Josh Foreman did this excellently during SAB2, and the players who are still around from then remember that he engaged, understood, and learned from the negative feedback. I know it was particularly kitten him, but ANet had gone through a big period of radio silence so Josh unfairly got the brunt of that.

If devs are scared of toxic feedback, look at how John Smith handles it – even his insults show he is paying attention, because he is responding to toxic comments as if they’re toxic and not “good points that we will take into consideration”. There’s a sense that John won’t bullkitten us.

You don’t even talk about how the game’s going now – any other company would be putting together a press release every time they got another 500,000 players. Talk about upcoming MMOs don’t even mention GW2 as a game that’s current, and it’s certainly not the new hotness any more.

Because we don’t have that kind of visibility into the game as it exists, all we have is wild speculation. We don’t know what ArenaNet’s priorities are, or what they even consider as problems. (I know it came as a surprise to me to find out that increasing demand for cloth way above supply was intentional.) Which means that for every big and little problem that we can think of, whether it’s the frustrating way loot works or engineer hobo backpacks or PPT or dungeon story-mode rewards or or or or or or, the only way to get some closure is to bring it up at even wildly inappropriate opportunities.

Part of that is your unwillingness as a studio to discuss what you’re working on – which would be fine if we trusted that you were working on something exciting, but that trust is long gone.

It started to fray during Living World Season 1, which was probably not the plan – Guild Wars has always valued a certain amount of consonance between the lore and game mechanics, and the idea of making updates part of a story was a fascinating idea. The PvE players loved the idea that there’d be a surprise every two weeks – a new dungeon? a holiday? new bosses? new events? – but every update grated on WvW and PvP players because they’d constantly get their hopes dashed. The Feature Pack model was supposed to fix this, but the problem there is that because they’re much further apart, WvW and PvP players are encouraged to believe that each Feature Pack will contain ‘major updates’, and in the absence of information, that will inevitably mean ‘the thing that players have been wanting most’.

PvE players are also feeling like ArenaNet haven’t made good on their promises – you’re hearing a lot about precursor crafting, but there’s a certain amount of disappointment with Season 2 as well. It’s more consistent, but as a result it’s also a lot less surprising, and that feels like we’re getting less.

Do you see how, even though you never intend to make promises, that they happen anyway? There’s been a huge erosion of trust, and that colours everything. There’s a lot of skepticism over yet another CDI because it feels like they’re trotted out for disingenuous reasons. (They started just after a previous big PR disaster when an ArenaNet employee had choice words for GvG players in WvW.)

I don’t know how you rebuild that trust without making commitments, because as far as I’m concerned you don’t do what you say you’re going to do, so why should I believe you when you say you want things to be different. And you don’t seem willing to make commitments.

This came out sounding more like a breakup letter than I had intended.

(Don’t you dare respond to this with ‘all good points’, Chris.)

I’m curious about the intention behind building tiers of materials where there’s a big imbalance in the desirability of material in that tier. I had a strong suspicion that this design was intentional given that we’ve seen it with charged lodestones, and then blood vials, and now silk. It’s an irritating design, but reward and drop design isn’t really a question John can answer.

So I have two questions: firstly, what does the market look like for things like lodestones that aren’t charged, where the drops are fairly rare but the biggest outputs are superior runes? What is the volatility and velocity in this market like, and is this profile – rare but kinda useless – the kind of thing that gets looked at when designing new sinks?

Secondly, are conversions within a tier something that’s desirable from an economic standpoint? Like, if you fed some totems and, say, bloodstone dust and skill points into the mystic forge, and got out blood vials, would that on balance make things better or worse?

I suspect that eventually the tools team will work out a way that instances can overwrite parts of the heightmap and terrain texture so that instances can preserve towns as they’re supposed to be (or have maps that look different during instances, for instance the attack on Lion’s Arch at the start of the Orr invasion). That’s a non-trivial technical challenge, though, although it’s clear that someone has thought about how to solve it.

I appreciate that it’s a recap, but that doesn’t materially change the problems. Think about long-form shows that regularly use recaps: they show characters, motivations, and conflict. Who is this character? Why should we care about them? What do they want? What’s stopping them? As soon as those four questions are established, we go immediately into the show itself.

A good recap of Season One might look something like this: a little from Marjory’s intro trailer, and Logan hiring her to investigate the councillor’s death. (All of this from existing voice.) A little voicework of either Rox, or Rytlock, saying that Rox wants to join (the Stone warband; what’s important is to get across that she’s looking for inclusion, but the warband itself is detail). Braham saying that he wants to prove himself/protect his family. Maybe Ellen Kiel as well. Scarlet turning up in Divinity’s Reach, as well as V/O and footage from her cutscene in the Tower of Nightmares (particularly good because it shows the characters we’ve just seen fighting seemingly separate threats). V/O from the Edge of the Mists release where they put the pieces together, and footage of Scarlet’s hideout and (with simulated player zergs) Lion’s Arch as a player hub, and the Battle of Lion’s Arch, including footage of boss fights and players using abilities and defending objectives. Then our season two plot hooks from the Aftermath and the Festival.

Characters, motivations, and conflict. It also makes the next conflict clear.

At this point, it’s pretty clear: the Living World trailers are not very good. They’re not exciting for existing players, and they’re not intriguing for new players. I don’t know what ArenaNet are trying to achieve with these trailers, but it’s just not working. They need to either drastically improve their approach, or change their approach to one they can execute on.

The chief problem with all the trailers, but especially with the recap trailers, is that they don’t mean anything to an audience who isn’t familiar with the game. The recap trailers are very exposition-heavy, in the way that bad fantasy is, where the author explains who begat whom and the houses and the various kingdoms and you have no context for any of it and no reason to care about any of these relationships. The choice to use a disconnected narrator who breathlessly intones lore emphasises the effect. It does not help that the narrator’s scripts use bizarre word choices, like describing Scarlet’s campaign as a ‘journey’, and is packed with cliches. Focusing on the story in trailers to such an extent suggests that a) the story is the focus, over gameplay, and b) it’s not very good.

If you’re advertising a story, you need to show the basic elements of a story: character, and conflict. Compare either of these two trailers to sister studio Carbine’s open beta trailer for WildStar. It’s the closest in tone of all their trailers, so it’s a good base for comparison. Notice how quickly character and conflict come into play: character from the guy in his spaceship going ‘wow’ at a planet, who is having a human emotion we can empathise with, we get motivation for about twenty seconds as the tension builds, and then we see conflict nearly half-way through, leaving a full minute to show all the various ways exciting problems will happen. We could just as easily compare ArenaNet’s trailers to Hollywood’s output; the same problems apply, although Hollywood is generally better at obscuring structure, which makes it less useful as a case study.

For instance, the Alien trailer appears not to start off with characters at all, but even then the trailer makes clear why we should care: the tension of the opening titles slowly fading in keeps us invested until we realise we’re looking at an alien egg, which starts to dramatically hatch – and then there’s Sigourney Weaver running down a corridor, and very bad things will happen. Once we see the character, we get the motivation and conflict in one hit. Anyway, you have to crawl before you walk; no-one’s cutting a trailer like the Alien trailer if they can’t get the basics right.

For existing players, though, the Living World trailers don’t really work either. I’m thinking specifically about the four update preview trailers that were used instead of update pages. These trailers are focused on existing players, and it’s assumed that third-party sites will fill in the context for new players. You don’t need to explain to existing players where the story is up to; the purpose of these trailers is to tease and excite. Usually, in film, this means quick cuts, fast action, high-tempo music. What we see instead is very slow music, sweeping shots, and a lack of action. It’s very hard, from these trailers, to understand what players will actually be doing, and so it doesn’t work to build anticipation.

What’s particularly disappointing is that we’ve seen much, much better from ArenaNet. The Wintersday trailer sells the mood of the holiday wonderfully, in part because it avoids character in favour of a mood-appropriate bit of poetry, and it’s clear to existing players how things have changed. The Super Adventure Box trailer is a pitch-perfect parody that apes a real 80s ad, so character and context are clear to non-players, and it shows gameplay so existing players can understand what it is they’ll actually do.

Who is putting together these new trailers? Is it the marketing department? (Can you borrow Carbine’s marketing department?) Whoever it is, they’re not helping.

phys.7689:

I think john is either on the rewards team or works closely with them, i remember multiple developers talking about having to run reward ideas by john to tell if would break the game.

Well let me correct myself: John doesn’t design the rewards systems in-game. He is consulted on the flow of items and clearly provides advice on what things appear to be over supplied.

Bombsaway.7198:

John:

Let me respectfully call you out on your answer as being well intentioned but IMHO misguided. Without getting into a credentialing match, I think both of us have had our share of economics, analytics and theoretical modeling. I am shall we say amazed by your answer.

I struggle with your answers as if somehow an MMO can be looked at as an economy when there are no actual limitations (you can simply change them on a moment’s notice by whatever delta of change your choose). Hence, the economy is less economic and more of a loyalty tool (a sophisticated CRM if you will).

Indeed, CRM/loyalty is the only purpose of that “economy”.

This is why I find your posts utterly frustrating, because they warp the economics of a real resource constrained system with a game that has no such restrictions. In doing so, you focus on somewhat senseless charts versus gamer expectation, perception and ultimately interest which is a far better measure of if the “economy” is working.

In short, this quest for “efficiency” is meaningless despite its “correlation” to economic theory IF it doesn’t accomplish the goal of loyalty/fun/name it what you will. The only thing the economic model can do (if well marketed) is create a “sense” of fairness.

The perception of inflation is more important than the reality in an MMO. The segmentation of that perception of inflation if it leads to a frustration or a “I can’t progress” attitude won’t change because your charts say it is wrong. The net result is the same.

If the goal is to create a sense or perception of fairness, but increasingly there is a trouble or “sense” that the “economy” is “off” even if only to one or more key customer segmentations, the mission is a failure despite pie charts and line graphs.

You keep trying to prove things are not as they seem to the customer. I wish you would quit telling posters to “learn economics”. Trust someone who clearly has, you are chasing the wrong issue. You are using an unfamiliar language to most of your consumers of the game to mask a very simple consumer issue:

To many it simply feels, right or wrong, that the economy is “boxing them out”. “Proof” is not going to replace the need to fix the perception. I dare say the customer and OP is far more “right” than you are. In an MMO, it matters not if you are economically disenfranchised, it only matters if you feel disenfranchised.

In short, I would be very hesitant to jump in and alter the conversation that the OP had. The value is the discussion over whether the “economy” “feels fair or different” rather than overwhelming the poor OP telling him to learn economics which may truly stifle the very conversation as a consumerologist I would suggest ANET would definitely want.

You mean well. I hope you realize I do too with this post.

I think you’re largely right about the perception of the economy as being unfair and out of control, but I think you’re misdiagnosing the problem. John is correct in that the economy is largely fine; gold is easier to get than it used to be but we’ve had no real inflation shocks on a Stone of Jordan kind of level, despite much wilder fluctuations in the availability of resources. It looks like the worse it got was the first Crown Pavillion, but it feels like things are more stable this year. While I question why silk and charged lodestones seem to get over-utilised in crafting and why T2-4 mats aren’t more widely available, these things are easily fixed and we’ve seen temporary resource drains correct these kinds of problems with great success.

The perception is real, but I think it stems from a rewards problem, not an economy problem, and John is not part of the rewards team. At the moment almost everything that players want drops rarely and unpredictably, from T6 mats, to lodestones, to attractive crafting blueprints, to precursors. The rest drops at a slow trickle, requiring large amounts of repetition of content that’s not particularly challenging or variable. The guiding principle of the rewards system is that players should be able to do what they want, and gold will fill in the gaps, but what actually happens is that just grinding gold and buying everything you want is far more effective, and the TP is not as exciting to buy from as an NPC vendor with predictable pricing is.

TP prices move around, because it is an economy and not an NPC vendor. Saving up for a thing you want becomes far less satisfying if the price is constantly moving because you keep noticing it when it spikes, even though it will come back down again. This is a fine model for some things (having rich players fight over who can drain the most gold out of the economy , as they did for the Lyssa backpiece, does wonders for inflation), but if players have to do it for even simple things, they come to the conclusion that it’s the market that’s making things hard.

The thing that stands out to me from the OP is the talk about melodrama. Most of the good dialogue is comedic, and a lot of the ‘emotional’ moments come off like a soap opera, like Kasmeer’s freakout in Scarlet’s End. I think part of it is that while most of the characters we spend time are pleasant company, we only know the broadest strokes about their personality, and the attempts at dimensionality (like Marjory’s relationship with Kasmeer) feel like they’re conflicting with rather than deepening what’s already established.

Bellyboomer.3048:

Btw, I’m glad I’m not always the hero. There are millions of characters in the gw2 universe, it would seem rather crappy that they would all be the awesome hero who saved the universe from doom. I like being among the ranks: a commander in the pact, a faceless wanderer who joins up with some others and become the heroes of LA… It’s just a personal taste, I like being a not-so-extrordinary character who the steps up to the plate when he’s needed to.

It really bothered me in the personal story that after only a few away missions I was already promoted to the highest rank in the centuries-old Order of Whispers and the natural choice to be second-in-command of the Pact. I think I’d have preferred it if advancing in the order had been an end-game thing, and you work your way up the ranks of the Pact as part of the story, eventually becoming Commander for the final assault.

LOL! I know what you mean. You have no idea how hard it is to try to make that sound natural when we can’t use the PC’s name in voiced content. I could write a whole dissertation on it. Believe me, I wish we had that technology. It’s not an easy thing to create though. Quite complex, and very unlikely to ever sound natural. I think it would end up being more immersion breaking than the nicknames we use for your character now.

I think the nickname approach is probably the most effective way to handle this, but I’ve seen some games deviate slightly between the written script and the voice acting. Usually they handle it in a way where the written script gets cut off after the player’s name, and before where the player’s name would be in the voice acting. I’m sure you’ve examined that approach, though.

I feel like Living World Season 2 would be a great time to do a expansion-type marketing push. Lots of the end-game and the feel of the game has changed; you’ll have new characters and concept art to show, and a very clear call to action. Also an explicit Season 2 trailer serves much the same as an expansion trailer – the game is healthy, investments are being made.

Just please, make an appealing trailer. Most of the trailers the game has had after launch have been pretty terrible, and the formula for a decent trailer for this kind of material is so simple: 30 seconds to show the premise (that’s compelling to an outsider – e.g. don’t show Lion’s Arch destroyed, show a character concerned about an elder dragon preparing to attack); 30 seconds to show an escalation; 30 seconds to a minute of stuff players will see – combat, concept art of new areas, lots of quick cuts to make it look like it’s very exciting and there’s lots to see and do.

Obviously you’re not going to make a great trailer, but the droning voice and out-of-context camera sweeps through bits of the map aren’t anywhere close to great so let’s walk before we run.

What seems to have been forgotten in this discussion is that most of the money made in the TP is earned in inefficient markets. It’s not easy to make money in the thick leather or mithril market, because it’s relatively efficient at this point – most players have a pretty good idea of what the range of prices should be, and they know when to pounce when it’s out of whack. Players making money on the TP are making it from players who run dungeons or farm or convert gems but aren’t interested in learning much about what other people value.

The thing with precursors is that lots more people want them than there are precursors to go around. It’s a major status symbol. That’s what’s holding up the price – even if wealth disparity was much smaller, the precursor price would come down to be still completely out of reach of most players. Any lower, and they wouldn’t even be on the market.

It’s somewhat unfortunate that legendaries more or less boil down into gold + badges + obsidian shards + map completion, but when the legendary recipes were designed, bloodstone dust, empyreal shards and dragonite ore didn’t exist. The legendary recipe format allows for variations in the recipe; hopefully we’ll see a way to use some of the newer resources as alternatives. (The Gift of Light in particular could do with an alternative recipe.)

With the big megaserver changes coming down the pipe, chat trolls are going to become a much bigger problem. Right now, many servers generally only have to deal with one or two, but given the general quality of the community compared to other games, I think GW2 players, in aggregate, should be trusted to moderate their own playing space.

Silence mutes a player for everyone for a short period of time. A silenced player can’t talk in either map or team chat, and cannot use /say, but can still talk in private channels. The goal is to provide a ‘nuclear option’ for players, for when a player is persistently disruptive to everyone else, and reasoning with them, or ignoring them, has failed.

Players can start a vote to silence another player in the map at any time, but they can only use it once per account per day. Someone to second the silence may be required. The game will then poll a random selection of people in the map, and if there is a strong majority, the target player will be silenced. All silencing attempts are logged for review by support. Players who are silenced multiple times will be silenced for increasingly longer periods, and may be flagged for review by support. Penalties may be levied against players who use silence without a strong majority; players should ensure that the vote will succeed if they intend to use it.

Sharing this idea by Carighan on the GW2 subreddit:

What if every zone slowly shifted from ‘dark phase’ to ‘light phase’ and back over the course of, say, a month? A few zones would be at the peak of the phase at any one time. Zones in a dark phase would be more dangerous, but with more champions and better chances for loot, it’d be the place to be to run trains. Zones in a light phase would be fairly gentle, with few champions spawning, but maybe it’d be a great place to gather crafting materials. For zones like Kessex Hills, where there’s a constant war between humans and centaurs, during dark phases the centaur attacks are stronger and more frequent, and during the light phase they’re much less frequent and there are more rebuilding and gathering events.

This’d be a great way to make the world feel more like a living world, with an ebb and flow to it.

Did Scarlet have to offer them anything other than an opportunity to cause some chaos? The Nightmare Court are willing, but resource-starved.

The hazard with one-shot fractals is that players will start kicking players who don’t know how to do the one-shot. If they make a mistake, the entire party is dragged down.

If a one-shot fractal worked more like the dolphin run, where one competent player could carry a team, it’d be far less hazardous, but that might mean there’s little chance of failure, so not drawing a one-shot is wasting your time.

(Again, part of the problem is that players are rewarded equally for each fractal, no matter how difficult it is.)

Caveth.3268:

……………………….New Fractal Ideas – The Guild Wars……………………….
One great idea for (likely a few different fractals) would be to tell stories of The Guild Wars (the actual Guild Wars that the game is named after).

Oh man how did we not think of this. Yes, fractals set during the Guild Wars please.

hendo.1940:

You anger the Fractal community by resetting their personal reward level, nerf rewards given in fractals, make no effort to fix a particularly obnoxious fractal (dredge) and by introducing fractals with constant time gating (Mai Trin + cannon phases, molten facility + weapons testing area).

And then what? That’s what’s missing here – after the obvious problems are fixed, where do fractals need to evolve to.

Re: agony discussion – as far as I’m concerned, agony is a way to have players improve their gear without introducing power creep. It’s supposed to serve as a resource sink and a long-term goal for advanced players. There are problems with this approach:

• if you have ‘enough’ agony, more agony doesn’t help you at all, whereas too little agony is a big problem. This is in contrast to magic find, where beginning players aren’t disadvantaged but players who invest resources into improving their magic find benefit more. Advanced players are more capable of gathering agony but it’s intermediate players who benefit the most from gathering it.
• the most effective way of gathering agony is with infused rings and back pieces. Earning an infusion slot is expensive, particularly for back pieces – but once you have one, it’s not especially expensive to get ‘enough’ agony. The fine-level offensive and defensive infusions use resources that intermediate players can provide, and are one of the most attractive uses for Southsun crafting materials, but are comparatively a waste of time.
• advanced players can (and should) avoid most agony attacks, except for the ones that gate boss fractals. This makes agony particularly unattractive to advanced players; they mostly don’t need it.

I’d fix this in the following ways:

• change agony resistance to provide a shield rather than a base reduction of damage. Agony ticks reduce this shield instead of dealing damage, and when the shield is reduced to 0, agony deals full damage to the player. In part, this means agony can be much more abundant without requiring a balance pass on each boss. Agony damage would have two components: a strength (how much it reduces the shield by) and a damage (how many percentage points of damage it deals). Boss agony would be very strong but do only a small amount of damage; obstacles would not be strong, but would deal much more damage.
• rebalance agony infusion recipes so that they require crafting materials instead of Thermocatalytic Reagents. Introduce a recipe to make offensive, defensive and utility infusions using agony infusions, so they contribute to the economy a little.
• introduce obstacles and AoEs that deal agony damage that can fire independent of a boss, and become more common at higher fractal scales. The idea is that players should be always feeling agony pressure even if they can dodge the boss. Some of these could be used chiefly for flavour, if agony doesn’t deal damage until players are over their threshold; things like Colossus seals or Searing crystals in the Urban Battlegrounds might deal small amounts of agony damage.
• A previous suggestion was to remove the agony check in boss fractals in favour of an enrage timer. This would also carry over here, but the design would be much simpler. Agony timer ticks would be more frequent, and not very strong, but the damage component would rise during the fight.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Suffice to say this post emphasizes why this CDI has been pretty good and not great.

I think I agree, to be honest; this was a perfect opportunity to see what kind of people play fractals and what they want out of content like this. Instead there was a lot of repetitive complaining about dredge and about ‘rewards’, with very little insight into whether the problem would be better solved by nerfing champ bags. I don’t think we really came up with any kind of solid design principles for fractals.

Anyway, encounters! I’d very much like to see fractals that take advantage of the existing setup, that these are crystallised echoes of history. I’d enjoy seeing fractals where the fractal starts turning unstable while we’re in it; fractals where two moments in history have mixed together, and fractals that reconfigure themselves while we’re inside.

I’d also like to see a fractal where we spend the majority of the fractal falling, or in the air.

I was a little disappointed when the Jade Sea fractal seemed to take a lot of its inspiration from the jade quarries, because my favourite part of the Jade Sea was the jewelled sea foam. It’s just such a striking image that it’s a shame it didn’t carry over. (And it probably could; there’s a big curved area in the Jade Sea fractal that could easily be turned into a wave.)

I notice players get a buff whenever they hit a hologram without the appropriate attunement. Does the In Tune achievement check that this buff is never applied? If so, this would be an easy way for players to check if they’re qualifying for the achievement.

I would guess that players not getting loot from Knights are falling foul of the check that they did enough damage to the boss to receive loot. If this is the case, I’d appeal to leave it as it is: if players who zerg are aware that it means they might not get anything, it will be significantly more effective at splitting the zerg than any amount of mechanics changes.

Aack, I lost my post.

One thing I don’t think I’ve seen discussed in rewards is that it’s not about what players get. It’s an economic concept, really: it’s about incentives, and what exactly players are being encouraged to do. I was a little dismayed at the prospect of introducing random events and having players get frustrated at them because it gets in the way of their daily.

So, what are players being incentivised to do? There’s killing enemies, which provides small amounts of money, loot, blue and green weapons, champ bags and mist essence; chests at the end of fractals, which provides a small amount of gold and karma, some blues and greens and a +1 agony infusion, and the daily chest provided at the end of the boss fractal, which provides a very slowly increasing amount of fractal relics, empyreal shards and 1g.

What do we want to incentivise players to do? I can’t speak for all of you, but I want them to stick through a fractal to the end; I want them to challenge the harder content. I want them to go back to earlier levels so that newer players have people to play with; I want them to mentor newer players and pass on their experience. I want them to go off the beaten path, to explore the full possibility space.

If we know what behaviours we want to acknowledge, then building a reward system to suit is much easier. I think the current reward system is doing maybe one of those?

One possibility: take the current roll for rings/fractal weapons in the daily chest and put it into a tiered bag. Maybe some gold as well. You get one bag for the boss fractal, and some of the trickier fractals also award one or even two bags once you get to the daily chest.

Another possibility: as you increase the fractal scale, you activate random conditions, where if you fulfil some optional criteria, you can loot a mist essence.

I’d like to see a discussion on what very high-end fractal play should look like, because as it is it isn’t very clear what people are actually looking for. Apparently speedruns aren’t sufficient.

I see two possibilities:

• a very high cap – by combining two of the existing instabilities you’d be easily able to get up to a cap of 400 or so. The trick is agony; players shouldn’t be able to neuter agony as a progression mechanic, which most of the players who got higher than 50 pre-Fractured were doing, but neither should players be required to stack agony to even attempt content.
• fractal hard paths – alternate paths in each fractal players at the cap can choose to do for guaranteed rewards. The risk here is that eventually even the hard modes will become stale.

Thinking about the agony problem a little more, here’s an idea:

Proposal: Replace the agony check at the start of a boss fractal fight with a periodic enraging agony pulse that rises in intensity over the course of the fight.

Goal: Make agony less of a gear check. Make fractal play viable with insufficient agony resistance (e.g. high-level play, new players). Provide an interesting restriction on boss fights that players have the ability to overcome.

Functionality: During fractal boss fights, players are hit with a enraging agony pulse on a timer, perhaps every 30 seconds. Players can see the time until the next agony pulse on the event HUD. This agony pulse is weaker than normal, doing 1/4 of the usual damage, and starts at a lower resistance than the fractal scale, but its strength (and thus the resistance needed to negate it) increases each pulse. This would be tuned for each fight.

The maths: The agony strength of the fractal scale for the purposes of this discussion is 0. Each point of enraging agony strength does an additional 0.3% damage; this makes the point at which things start getting dicey for players around 50, with essentially a hard cap at 100. We have a few levers – where we start the strength of enraging agony, which determines how long players have before they start feeling the effect (which is basically our minimum time); how much strength goes up per pulse, which determines our maximum time; and how often pulses happen, which is also how often players get damaged (it’s probably best to set this at 30 seconds at a minimum; players need to be able to heal through it towards the end of the fight). For a relatively easy fight like Jade Maw, we could determine that we want the fight to go for about 10 minutes. If we set the starting strength at -20, and have it increase by 4 every pulse, players will start to feel it after about 3 minutes, and things will start getting tricky after 9 minutes. For a fight like the Molten Leaders, where there’s lots of damage at the start of the fight, we might determine it should only take 8 minutes, but we want players to only start feeling it after 5. So we’d set the starting strength low, say -100, and have it increase by 10 per tick.

Risks: Mostly in getting the numbers wrong. This does also change the balance of the fight, because more damage is being dealt during the fight; some bosses might need to be tuned down a little to compensate.

Taking some ideas from the discussion. I think it’s okay in speedruns if everyone in a party wears zerker; if they can survive, then more power (and precision and ferocity) to them. Hopefully ‘if’ can become an important question.

Proposal: A fractal speedrun mode, complete with leaderboards.

Proposal Goal: to provide a way for intermediate to world-class PvE players to prove their mastery over fractal content.

Proposal Implementation: In Dessa’s Lab in fractal scale 30 or higher, players can speak to a speedrun NPC. They may pick any fractal to speedrun, and will zone into a speedrun holding pen. When all players have loaded and are ready, the holding pen disappears and the timer starts. During a speed run, no loot drops, and chests do not spawn. At certain locations in each fractal (and during certain fights, such as during the Molten Weapons test, the burn phase of the final boss of Volcanic, etc.), special targets spawn that subtract time from the clock when killed or destroyed. Once players complete the fractal, the timer stops, and they automatically exit thirty seconds later. Players cannot increase their fractal scale or reward level from a speedrun.

Each combination of fractal and instability has a bronze, silver and gold time, ideally drawn from leaderboard results. Players earn rewards based on the rank they earned; a bronze time earns only a small amount of silver, while a gold time may earn more money and possibly items. They should be pitched so that the top 90% of attempts earn the bronze time, the top 50% earn the silver and the top 20% earn the gold time. Players are told the target times, what percentile their time falls in, and the time for a nearby percentile to give players an achievable target to shoot for next time. If they are in the top 1% of players, they are instead told what rank their time earned. If players beat the record in any fractal, they unlock a cosmetic reward, such as a title and unique skin.

If a group attempts a speedrun that they’ve already attempted, their best time is displayed, and if they beat their best time, their previous time is replaced by their new time. A group of players attempting a speedrun are considered to be identical to a previous attempt already on the leaderboard if:

• three players from the previous attempt are in the new attempt;
• two players from the previous attempt are in the new attempt, and two players not in the previous attempt are in the same guild as two players in the previous attempt;
• one player from the previous attempt is in the new attempt, and all players in both the previous and new attempt are in the same guild.

Leaderboards are also available on the web and through an API.

Risks: Integrating the leaderboard with game servers to provide real-time feedback may be computationally prohibitive. Players may use the speedrun to complete the Daily Fractal Runner achievement instead of using LFG to run a full fractal. It may be difficult to make some fractals interesting to speedrun, even with time subtraction targets. Talented players may work out a way to circumvent the identical player check and fill the top slots on the leaderboard with their guild.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Absolutely we can discuss rewards.

Chris

So my thoughts about rewards is that just increasing the amount of gold people get from fractals is a mug’s game. Players playing for rewards are going to try to optimise for the best reward per time spent; players won’t really be satisfied unless fractals give better gold than dungeons, and then they won’t run dungeons because fractals have better rewards. Any kind of discussion about the reward for fractals needs to take into account the rest of the PvE reward structure, to ensure we’re not just proposing to introduce a new problem down the line.

I think the solution to this might be to introduce multiple axes for rewards, so that if players optimise for one particular type of reward they’re going to miss out on the other types. We saw how well this worked with the ascended crafting materials – you could get them from lots of places, but you couldn’t get all of them from the same place. The game already has something very close to this in gold and karma, and fractals are a great source for karma already. Problem is, players mostly just want gold because it’s a more fungible currency; karma’s only really useful for a few things that only specific players want, and you never lose karma as a penalty the way you lose gold. Dealing with that is well beyond the scope of this CDI.

So maybe put some of the things players try and buy with gold into fractals? It’d make the drops a lot more diverse, but honestly we’re smashing through time and space here. The big risk with that is that when the supply goes up, the price goes down so you get more for your dungeon farming than you would have; hopefully it settles into an equilibrium, but if it doesn’t then you’ve ruined the value of an item for no gain.

Nike.2631:

What I would do is create a leaderboard that tracks “Time to Clear” from instance created to End-boss down. It tracks best clear time for every fractal separately, at every single difficulty level from 30 to 50. When looking at it you could sort by fractal (e.g. see all Cliffside clear times from 30 to 50 on one page) or by difficulty (e.g. see clear times for all possible fractals at difficulty 44 on one page).

This gives you a competitive landscape with almost 250 separate arenas. And rather than first is first forever, there is ALWAYS the possibility enticing you with the prospect of “You know? Our guys could shave a second or two off of the current title holder’s time if we really try…”

Then I’d sit back and giggle as slayer potion prices ticked up a point because if you’re going for a focused accomplishment like that, tactical selection of consumables is a MUST.

I like the idea of having a leaderboard per fractal level, but I see two problems:

1) as someone mentioned earlier, you can’t prepare for any individual fractal, so if you’re trying to set a record time you may need to run several fractals to get the one you want. Any solution to this, making it more predictable, would also take away from the chaotic aspect of fractals.

2) some fractals, like the Molten fractal, don’t lend themselves well to speed runs as they’re mostly on rails. You’d need to use a more meaningful criteria. ‘Least damage taken’ for Molten is appealing, but the leaderboard is over once a party gets through it with no damage. Perhaps damage dealt minus damage taken as percentage of party health or something – but then it’s starting to get maybe too complex.

Actually, if there’s reward discussion…

Proposal Overview: Introduce a wider variety of items into fractal loot tables, biasing it in favour of karma, crafting materials, and items with high resale value.

Proposal Goal: Make fractal drops weirder, differentiate fractal rewards from dungeons and the open world, and create a source of T6 materials that is more efficient than farming gold from dungeons and buying them on the TP.

Functionality: Instead of the normal, blue and green weapon-heavy loot tables, fractal enemies would be more likely to drop retired living world items (e.g. ballot papers, molten scrap), Set 1 miniatures, karma and luck items, and consumables that can be bought for karma (e.g. rocks, Ogre Pet Whistles). They would also drop Mist-Infused Bags, which would contain T6 (and sometimes T5) crafting materials (including inscriptions), living world materials (quartz, sprockets, spores) and ectoplasms. They would never contain rare crafting materials (i.e. lodestones).

A player’s fractal reward scale would determine how likely they are to get the more unusual drops, and how likely they are to find a Mist-Infused Bag instead of the bag that enemy type normally drops.

Sub Proposal: In addition, very rarely, players may find a Mist Crystal of Valor, which when consumed awards a repeatable achievement worth 1 point.

Risks: Increasing the variety of dropped items may make bag space much more of an issue. Introducing a source for some items (Set 1 miniatures) may cause the price to plummet, making them unrewarding as drops. Increasing the supply of T6 mats also increases the efficiency of farming up gold and then buying them on the TP. The algorithm that decides drops may, in practice, prevent many of the drops unique to fractals from appearing.

Re: fractal lore: I think there’s an opportunity to contextualise fractal scale.

Proposal Overview: Introduce lore events into fractals that activate randomly, to tell a story players piece together over multiple runs

Proposal Goal: To give background to each fractal in a non-scheduled, non-intrusive way, and to provide meaning to fractal scaling beyond rewards.

Proposal Functionality: Each fractal has several (at least 6) events – announcements from Dessa, announcements/PA broadcasts from within the fractal, NPC and enemy dialogue, renamed bosses and NPCs, NPC animations – that provide details of the history of each fractal location. They are triggered randomly based on fractal scale, with the intention that players should start hearing them around mid-level (so 10+) and that at high levels players should see two or three per run. Each is written to make sense, or at least a kind of sense, independent of the others – they are clues being unearthed, not story beats. All events should happen without interrupting players, even at risk of players missing the event. Events presented inside fractals should be presented as distortions, to imply that what players see normally in each fractal is fabricated.

Risks: Players may not be able to remember details already uncovered in each fractal, so despite repetition, they may not ever understand the history. Some fractal stories may not lend themselves to a forensic approach. Players may come to find certain events annoying. Too many events may trigger per run when higher scales are introduced.

I never read this as fixing the berserker meta – this change seemed clearly focused at normalising crit damage on different slots and on different tiers of gear. Much like the OP, I believe that the berserker meta is driven by content, especially because in PvP, WvW and now with Triple Trouble, berserker is not nearly as strong. I also believe that ArenaNet are aware of the problem, again because we see in Triple Trouble a fight that explicitly involves mechanics for builds other than berserker, and if ArenaNet intended to fix the problem, they’d announce changes to dungeon content as well.

Regarding the form of the content specifically, I know many players enjoy the active mitigation style of play, so clearly breaking that in favour of biggest stat wins is hardly a good solution. The problem appears to be that damage is always more important than support or control, so building fights where damage is not important would shift the meta in a more diverse direction.

Throwing this out there:

The personal story goes through three different ‘phases’, all of which are quite different from each other, but it’s also a bit janky and there’s been a question mark over whether it’ll be supported or expanded in the future. Nevertheless, the tech for a storyline with linked instances is there and available.

What if we added a new branch, a fourth ‘phase’, and had a personal story adaptation of the living story, once it completes? To extend the TV analogy, it would serve as kind of a ‘box set’, allowing players who started playing recently to see a previous, complete storyline. It’d likely be more engaging than a text summary, and could serve as an alternative to the cleansing of Orr.

I see this as branching off from after the Order storylines, with single-player recreations of the living world events that Scarlet was involved in, and reusing the assets already created. These would be abbreviated, to give the sense of how the event went without trying to recreate it faithfully. For instance, a Clockwork Chaos instance might still have waves of minions, but in a smaller instanced area, with NPCs ‘fighting’ groups until the player runs in and assists. The connective tissue would be order-specific, and presented in the context of the orders investigating the disturbances (maybe also giving the writers a bit of a mulligan, allowing them to insert information not properly presented in-game the first time around). It would be more focused, so events like Tequatl and the election probably wouldn’t feature, and events like Dragon Bash and the Arena that featured Scarlet’s work would focus on the attacks.

Players wouldn’t be able to earn previous rewards or achievements from this; like watching Breaking Bad now, you missed the zeitgeist but at least you can see what happened.

1) I think the user stories idea is great. I’d suggest that, when players describe themselves, they also describe their experience/inclination, eg. a beginner PvP player, an experienced PvE player, a player who’s a rabid explorer. It gives us more information and lets us ensure we’re getting a full spectrum of experiences. I’d hope that people will, on the whole, be mature enough not to discount people’s opinions just because they self-identify as inexperienced in a particular game mode.

I think other software design practices might be helpful, as well. I would love to get some personas involved – they’re detailed descriptions of a character that represents a player type the designers are trying to design for. If you follow Magic the Gathering at all, you might have heard of Timmy, Johnny and Spike, the Magic the Gathering personas. It’s much easier to imagine how ‘Alicia’ will feel about an idea than ‘WvW players’. If ArenaNet have personas internally, it’d be great if we could have access to them.

2) I’m happy for ArenaNet to suggest topics they’d like to talk about, and I think this initiative will have the most credibility when ArenaNet are comfortable with taking problems they’re kicking around internally and getting the CDI to assist with the initial brainstorming. Still, I think there are lots of issues that I think players want to get off their chest still, so maybe it’d be best if we do another round of voting. I can imagine a call for votes giving a few suggestions that ArenaNet think would be valuable, and then saying ‘or your choice!’ so that if there’s still something burning players up then they’ll suggest that.

If you’re anything like me, you would have looked up at Scarlet’s giant metal portal, complete with giant metal marionette, and wondered: where in the heck is Scarlet getting all her metal from? Surely the Molten Alliance is not so effective at mining that they can easily hand over rings of metal the size of buildings, given the skritt usually have more metal in their homes than the dredge do.

More importantly: what are Scarlet’s supply lines? The Aetherblades in the Sea of Sorrows are presumably getting gold, and she can get some metal from Molten and wood and toxins from the Toxic Alliance, but how then does she ship that? Where are her workshops? Where’s she getting the food from to feed her armies?

Yoh.8469:

Thou in either case, my point stands. The game would benefit quite a great deal from having body blocking exist, provided there aren’t any major technical hurdles.
Which I imagine there are.

The biggest problem with body blocking is how easy it is for players bent on inconveniencing others to exploit it. A team of ten or so could stand on the stairs leading up to the battlements of Stonemist Castle, for instance, and make it very, very difficult for anyone else to get up. I’m not sure how games that do have body blocking solve this issue, but there’s more than one way to skin a kitten. For instance, one of my favourite boss attacks from WoW hit everyone in an area, putting a stacking debuff on them that made the attack do more damage, and then hit everyone nearby, applying the same debuff. If you clustered together, it would do enough damage to kill you, but if you spread out, it was negligible. There may be technical reasons why this can’t be done in the GW2 engine, but there are several abilities that spawn AoE fields that spawn other AoE fields. Alternatively, it might go the simpler route of taking the damage dealt, multiplying it by how many friendly targets are nearby, and doing that much damage, which would not get around the ten target limit but would make ten people extremely unhappy.

I think any kind of Grail Quest system would need a quest log – this would, essentially, be a UI element which shows their progress through the Grail Quest, with reminders of what has happened and probably a reminder of where to go. I like the idea of having one page per chain, instead of the standard solution where you have a list of current quests and no context around them about what you’ve done.

I’d love to see the proposed Grail Quest system get repurposed for legendaries – instead of the existing ‘combine everything in the mystic forge’, have a quest where you put those same resources into trying to find and acquire the legendary weapon. Level 80 players could acquire a quest log for the legendary they want to acquire, which would list the resources needed (and in what order) and where they’re up to on the trail. For instance, the Flameseeker Prophecies might task you with following in the footsteps of the legendary human hero, from their beginnings in Ascalon, across the mountains to the Henge of Denravi, to ascension (but because you can’t get to the Crystal Desert, you’d have to head into Fractals to find some mist essence) and finally defeat an echo of the undead lich the human hero defeated long ago. Each step would require you to provide some of the components of the current recipe – maybe to begin, you’d need to run Ascalonian Catacombs to know that you need to follow the trail over the Shiverpeaks to where the Prince died, where you’d need some Icy Runestones and a Gift of Magic to head to the Ascalon Settlement, where a Gift of Ascalon and a Bloodstone Shard would be needed to lead you to the Henge of Denravi, and so on. In between, you’d have little events or challenges – maybe you have to run from the Black Citadel to where the Prince died without using waypoints in only a few minutes, or you need to talk to ghosts at the Ascalon Settlement in the right order.

The big advantage is that it’d give the legendaries a place in the world, would fit in well with the other grail quests that provide customisation options, and would break up the monotony of building a legendary a little bit by giving new things to do after each goal. You would absolutely need to provide players with a list of what to get ahead of time, and it’d need to be structured so that the more time-consuming elements come later, so players don’t try and grind up the one thing they need to advance, then start grinding the next thing. Otherwise, it’d make the legendary grind even more tedious.

I also want to get this down: if we’re going to have some kind of personalised quests, I definitely think one type should be ‘here is a picture of a location, go there’. GW2 has so many gorgeous locations, and a system that presents, essentially, screenshots and challenges players to find where a picture was taken from would highlight the great work already done. I was initially thinking this would be like a treasure hunt – you’d find treasure maps as a rare drop, and they’d ask you to find a specific view and dig for buried treasure there – but it works for basically any task that asks one player to head to a specific point.

Shakkara.2641:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi Shakkara,

I just want to point out that this is not a particularly collaborative or useful post. Please however don’t take this personally.

The whole point of CDI is to discuss, brainstorm and then ‘reduce’ ideas as a group until they reach their pure essence.

Making assumptions about what ‘everyone’ wants just does not work in this kind of collaborative environment and not lead to progression within ideation.

Finally the purpose of the CDI is not for the developer to be told what ‘Everyone’ wants. It is to work together to evolve our design philosophies and experience in game leading toward synergy in problem solving and ideation.

I hope this makes sense.

Chris

P.S: Go Hawks!

Perhaps you should address the points I made with my post instead of the way I wrote it.

You’re still not really reading that feedback, are you. This is not a forum for telling other people how wrong they are for disagreeing with your vision of the game, and it’s not a forum for addressing the developers specifically. You had the germ of a good argument in the previous post – that having a set of shared skills that every profession has access to is better than having lots of different subclasses – and instead of railing against other people’s ideas, you should have developed your own and shown how it solves problems that other approaches have.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Zaoda.1653:

@ColinJohanson,

In regards to new weapon skills/unlocks, I think the way it worked in GW1 in terms of obtaining both normal and elite skills using the Signet of Capture was so unique and amazing. It was something I had never seen done before in any other game I had played, whereby you go around the world looking for specific bosses that have the elite that you want, and that boss had a particular glow depending on what profession it was – gold/yellow for warrior, cyan for ritualist, green for necromancer etc. you slayed that boss, and captured its elite when standing near its corpse. I felt like I had truly earnt that skill, and that to me is what it’s all about – true progression.

So something like a Signet of Capture concept where you can purchase, or get via a reward, and go around and collect weapon skills from bosses would be ideal – and would make you feel as though you truly earnt it.

Hi Zaoda,

Absolutely, this is a simple and excellent system. Very elegant, and rewarding with a great sense of discovery.

Chris

It’s also a poor fit for Guild Wars 2, if brought across straight. (It’s also not unique; the Final Fantasy series usually has Blue Mages who learn enemy skills.)

GW1 was, essentially, a single-player game with a lobby. Players had access to every boss at all times, and most skills were available to every character. Skills were the core of character customisation, and players were able to build semi-viable characters without being able to capture, so this wasn’t too bad.

GW2 is an MMO; it’s a different genre. Character customisation is in gear and traits as well as skills. In addition, it’s an MMO built around the idea that players should share in everyone’s success and they shouldn’t resent the presence of others. Having players capture skills conflicts with the rest of the design: do we want players complaining that others finished the skill capture event? Do we want different professions to have to split up to go skill capturing? Traits used to be acquired like this, during development; having content only relevant to one profession divided players, so they were repurposed into skill challenges.

Instead, let’s drill down into what’s fun about skill capture and see if we can’t create a system that fits with GW2 and still scratches that itch. Part of the fun, in both GW2 and FF games, is hunting an opponent who has what you need. You get to see the skill in combat as it’s used on you. You have to hobble yourself a little to ensure you capture the skill (in GW1, you fight with the signet, thus one fewer slot; in FF games, the blue mage often has to be hit by the skill, or use a specific ability while the target is as close as possible to 0 HP).

Here’s one possibility: skill crafting. At level 80, trainers offer skill recipes for new skills. Each skill is made up of special skill components that can only be acquired using Signets of Capture. For instance, AED, the engineer healing skill which greatly heals the engineer if they’re downed, might have a engineer component (i.e. Blueprint), a healing component (i.e. Dwayna’s Blessing), a down component (i.e. Grenth’s Blessing), and a time component (i.e. Orrian Signet). Signets of Capture are inventory items bought for skill points, and can be used on champion enemies or higher, as well as opponents in PvP, to cause them to drop a component when killed. Players would choose which component they wanted to receive, but they need to find a boss that uses the right kind of skills – condition components come from condition bosses. Easier opponents and low rank or hotjoin players may drop only profession components, but more challenging targets may drop rarer types (maybe ranked matches?). When they use the signet, opponents becomes more challenging – either it becomes more challenging for everyone, where they get a buff or extra attacks (and when they die everyone gets more/better loot or bonus points), or the player who used the signet is disadvantaged in some way, perhaps they have to fight with a custom weapon related to whichever component they want. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach; I like the idea of giving expert players a way to kick it up a notch for extra loot, but I also like the idea of having to use a specific weapon set. I dislike that the group approach makes it difficult for the extra wrinkle to fit thematically with the skill component; I dislike that the individual approach gimps one player at the expense of their teammates, which was the problem with MF on gear.

This is only one suggestion, but I think it hits the main requirements: track down a specific enemy. Fight it in a different way that fits the skill. Let everyone share in the success. It’ll also work in PvP, giving a reason for experienced players to get into hotjoin.

It’s very odd that a big part of the levelling content is explorer-focused, and a lot of the more distinctive features like jumping puzzles, yet we haven’t seen anything really juicy for explorers since the Bazaar six months ago. Even something as simple as a few quest items scattered around the world that combine into a flavourful artifact would be welcome, but it’s mostly been achiever-focused content and revamps of existing areas.

Ithir Darkleaf.7923:

DevonCarver.5370:

We never said we couldn’t do it. We said we weren’t going to do it. There is a large difference between things that we decide to do for design reasons and thing that are technical constraints. This was the former and was never stated to be the latter.

Finally we get accound-bound WXP, thank you so much!

Anyway, I wonder now why do you change your mind now about this topic. We’ve been told several times that you were never going to change character-bound to account-bound and now, without any previous notice we get it :O

Read the announcement: because the game’s getting a new system to diversify characters of the same profession, WvW no longer needs its own system. Diversity within professions is more important in WvW than in other modes because of how likely it is that you’ll be running with multiples of your profession. If it’s account-bound, it’s far easier to make homogenous builds – but that doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

Oh man, this thread.

Devon must have been grimacing pretty hard reading this thread when he had the draft of the announcement ready to go.

I am suspicious of this “krait”. They haven’t once tried to get people to build obelisks to their gods, and they’ve shown an uncharacteristic amount of empathy and humility.

I think this is a Forgotten, guys. Forgotten do love their little tests.

BobbyStein.2315:

Melliarc.5870:

Subject : Pacing of the Living Story using the latest two patches as examples of what I think should and shouldn’t be done.

My biggest gripe I think with the story in the Living Story is the pacing of it. As many discussed before, me included, we’re getting too few tidbits of story per patch to make it worthwhile story-wise. So it feels like there isn’t any progress at all. The back to back releases of Tower of Nightmares and Nightmare Within are a prime example of this.

So you’re saying that the contents of each release are too light, and that you’d rather the two thematically related releases be part of a single build?

I think if that happened you’d lose the story beat we had where we couldn’t get into the tower and had to tool around outside trying to contain the infection.

I think the complaint is more that the Tower of Nightmare story’s not enough on its own; either you’d want it to fire all at once, which I think is a bad idea, or you want some side-stories developing at the same time.

To extend the TV show analogy, plenty of TV shows have B-plots where characters not involved in the main storyline have their own little adventure. This’d be a good way to advance some of the existing storylines in the world without having to devote a release to it, and it can be much simpler – a few events using the existing toolset, or reskinned events.

I think a big problem with DEs in the world is discoverability. It’s much easier to do the champ farm because the next step is always obvious, and you know exactly when you’ll get a reward. With events in other parts of the world, you don’t really know where they are at any given time, and if it’s a place you’ve already explored the prospects for advancing your goals (whatever they are) are far less reliable.

Obviously there are some players who don’t enjoy exploration and doing things just because they’re new, and it’s futile to encourage them to move off the optimal events. Probably these guys should be powering Orr’s events.

On the other hand, everyone’s been saying they needed a good way to catch up on the Living Story, and having Scarlet randomly send them a bomb works pretty well for that!

I’m very much for the fortnightly cycles, as I could see very clearly that people found the monthly updates too long and started to become very restless about week three.

I think there’s a perception that the fortnightly cycle is detrimental to quality. This isn’t necessarily true – many teams finish when they finish, and lord knows that being able to release when they want hasn’t stopped plenty of other games from being poor quality. Still, this is a very new thing to the industry, and few players really see how it works. I think a ‘behind the scenes’ series following a living world update from conception to release would give both players, and the wider industry (who I’m sure are all very keen to hear how the hell you’re doing it), a more complete picture.

I think some more thorough post-mortems on content that’s come out would also help. We don’t have a lot of visibility on why certain bits of content didn’t work out, and how the game’s design direction has evolved since the manifesto, and that discontent is really at the heart of why this initiative’s necessary.

Good: I loved loved loved the Bazaar. It’s a striking area, with new abilities, and lots of exploration with little nooks and crannies to find. The hints to existing lore were great, as well, and I quite enjoy the Sanctum Sprint.

I liked the balloon events in the Queen’s Jubilee – having three different kinds of events, that took advantage of the existing world, made visiting each balloon feel fresh. I also liked the Queen’s Gauntlet – although I didn’t finish it, and I found a couple of the fights really frustrating, I liked having to work out how to defeat each boss, put together a strategy, and really explore my abilities.

I liked the invasion events at the beginning, when people were splitting up and trying to coordinate, before farmers worked out how lucrative the Aetherblades were.

I like achievements that take you back to existing content and events that have been given a little festive twist, like the baskets and caches in jumping puzzles and minidungeons. I would have liked to see some minor changes to the jumping puzzles during the event.

Lunatic Inqusition continues to be my favourite activity.

Bad: I don’t really care for zergs – stand here, press 1, get loot. I found the Pavillion insufferable, and while I did farm aetherblades for the achievement, I didn’t want to.

I didn’t find the election particularly compelling, and it’s had no real effect on the world given neither Ellen Kiel or Evon Gnashblade have done anything since. It feels like a fob-off.

Many of the achievements have been of the ‘kill/gather 250’ variety. It’s very easy for this to be the only reason for playing in the content, and while this has been getting better, it poisons any of the fun I had. When there are multiple things to run around the world getting 250 of, I start getting pretty tired of the whole thing. Dragon Bash in particular felt fatiguing.

I didn’t participate much in SAB v2, Tequatl or Twilight Assault: SAB v2 had quality issues (which Josh is now well aware of and I’m looking forward to SAB v3), Tequatl requires organisation, which requires me to navigate guild politics, and TA I didn’t even try because I’m intimidated by explorables and the expectation that you should be wearing zerker gear. I’m an engineer! I have conditions!

There’s a few issues going on with pop imbalance that I can see – having higher pop causes a snowball effect, where servers are able to secure and defend their properties because they can win the field fights. There’s also the timezone issue, where having high-pop in a timezone where other servers are low-pop (Oceanic, for instance) makes it easy to cap targets and earn points.

What we’d want is a system that scores objectives only when there’s a risk of losing them. This could even be done directly, by tying scoring to defence events (with a minimum threshhold to prevent scoring by lone agents or spies). As for the field fights, a way for small groups to prevail against zergs they know are coming would be ideal – the arrow cart was supposed to do that, but large zergs can deploy arrow carts even quicker. Possibly something that deals exponential damage based on how many people are in range of the target, or deals damage to people hit and then spreads to nearby targets. Only hazard here is that it might discourage people from playing together.

But that’s sort of the problem, isn’kitten It’s so much safer to be in a zerg that there’s no reason to try and split forces, and anything to encourage small groups to stick around and try and deal with the zerg (and they will have to) will either discourage small groups from merging or discourage players from co-operating.

The Mad King content in GW2 seems a lot darker than GW1’s Halloween celebrations were, and the Bloody Prince was darker still. (In particular I’m reminded of a conversation in the Mad King’s realm where Edrick accuses his father of murdering a childhood friend, and his father reminds him that no-one liked her and Edrick killed her himself.)

This is kind of weirdly juxtaposed with the plastic spiders.

How are you managing the tone of this storyline to ensure that the horror side doesn’t clash with the goofy side? It’s easy to imagine it becoming weird having researchers and kids enthusiastic about the return of an evil, vengeful spirit, and similarly with murderous tyrants from Tyria’s past building candy corn golems instead of something… sharper.

1) Karma – currently it’s a grind for points to buy exotics, RNG boxes or obsidian shards, there’s little of value on heart vendors (and heart vendors would have been my #4) and it doesn’t feel particularly rewarding.
2) Legendaries – engineers don’t have any good legendaries (the one that seems made for us, The Predator, we shoot from the hip, so it looks ridiculous). Moreover, getting a legendary doesn’t feel legendary. They’re skins, when they should feel like they have a history.
3) Personal story – it’s pretty disjointed and does a poor job of introducing the world and leading players through the world.