It is absolutely awesome. A very reasonable way to do something that many games with a similar business model don’t do at all, and others do terribly.
I truly admire GW2’s development team for maintaining a model that seems to give them enough funds to keep the game under active development without allowing microtransactions to disrupt play in a meaningful way. It’s the first game I’ve seen truly strike that balance and I literally don’t even have a suggestion for it. IMO it is the best in any MMO I’ve yet seen, period, and I’m saying that out of a genuine love for the genre, not loyalty.
It’s more than just the fight. I loved the idea of a personal story, and this one was implemented way better than others I’ve seen in mmo’s. Overall the PS was really fun.
But the last fight, the Arah one, bugged the heck out of me for three reasons:
1. It was a proxy battle fought with airships, devaluing the theme of accumulating personal power to complement the alliance. Fixable by making Zhaitan much larger and making the fight a run to his heart inside him, with a finishing blow delivered by the character.
2. It was the only point in the entire personal story that required a group. Fixable by either requiring the other dungeons as earlier story steps or (best option) leaving a group dungeon out of the PS equation entirely.
3. The big one for me: the final step wasn’t customized for the character unless you happen to be the one in the dialogue. It was jarring and made you feel like suddenly you were a dialogue-free henchman instead of the protagonist. Fixable by either customizing dialogue for every player or (as above) just keeping dungeons out of the PS, acknowledging that it’s a different kind of content appealing to many players without interest in 5 person content.
To be fair, I do get why development priorities have moved beyond any refinement to the PS, of course. Frankly the marionette battle alone justified that decision to me. But it would have been nice to capstone the solo part of the game more consistently.
It’s missing feedback, dev communication and new permanent content.
If you’ve been here since launch and haven’t fallen for the fractal illusion “permanent changing dungeon!..oh, same levels on rotation though” theres frankly nothing left to-do that you haven’t already done 500+ times.
It was amazing for a year, then you hit the wall and its game done.
Unless you have a high tolerance for repetition that is.
I’ll give you new permanent content, maybe (although other mmo’s can go a pretty long time between major content additions too – even with high monthly fees and expansion pack costs).
But I gotta say, I’ve actually been pretty impressed with dev communication and responsiveness. They may not share the same priorities as you (or me, or any given player) of course. Can’t please us all, all of the time. But I’d say this dev team is actually really well engaged compared to other experiences I’ve had. And those weren’t even bad experiences.
In my experience the WoW devs were largely silent early on except in early development and then spoke almost entirely to (and hired) guild leaders of the top EQ guilds. (Possibly a reason they’ve had to increase the accessibility and causalness of their game in every expansion.) In their later development (I played pretty hardcore up through LK) they had class mods that talked a fair amount and took feedback officially, but almost all broader communication was through big interviews and Twitter and such. Not much depth, in my experience. From those friends that still play I’ve heard it’s continued in that direction. I have nothing but respect for that company and those developers in every way, but they’re running a small country with $70mil+ in monthly rent paid, and it shows a little.
I also played a ton of FFXI prior to that, and there not only devs but even customer service reps were as gods on a lofty mountain. Sightings of either publicly were the stuff of legend. (GM’S literally wore suits of golden armor when they appeared in very rare situations, I kid you not.) I originally thought it might be language and time zone barriers, but I think it was actually just a decision.
Compared to FFXI I was amazed at how open the WoW team was. And compared to WoW frankly I’ve been nothing but impressed by how responsive the GW2 team is. About the only game I’ve seen with more engaged dev-to-player connection was (oddly) the ill-fated but highly innovative EQOA.
Running an MMO is a kitten impressive job for a team. I’m fascinated by the industry and the people who run it, and I love the games so maybe I’m a soft judge. But I gotta say that as far as pure engagement goes, all specifics of design decisions aside, the GW2 team is great.
Your mileage may vary of course. Maybe I’ve just been lucky and come in at the right times to see what I’m looking for. And maybe my expectations were different from the beginning given GW2’s unconventional business model. But, while of course there are all sorts of things I’d personally have done differently given the chance, I’ve been impressed by the team doing the work. Just my personal experience.
I love fighting against the odds in WvW, you have to pick your fights as a Guild, Roaming or even as a Zerg against the best Guilds.
Defending a Keep or tower while outnumbered is not impossible if you Siege up properly – I know many people dislike defensive Siege, but it’s the only way we can defend our own Structures without a Zerg and it does feel rewarding.
I think you’ve got it dead on, and it actually compliments zerg play. They’re not opposites, they’re a matched set.
Some of the most exciting moments in WvW are when a small group of people are defending against a big zerg in a well fortified position, and a well commanded friendly zerg is desperately trying to get there in time to reinforce them.
Note that you don’t get ANY of that excitement without good commanders and good communication though… I missed out on all of it the first couple times I played not knowing how to get on my server’s mumble and listen to what the hell was actually going on. As soon as I started listening to commanders and roamers talking everything changed and WvW become infinitely more fun.
I got stuck behind a bus on my way to work today. Thanks Anet.
Thread complete.
so basically if you went to a shop and bought an item for a $100 dollar, and then the next day the shop offer the item for $50, you’re entitled for a refund ?
Everyone seems angry. Must be an internet thing – we should all go play a game or something. If only there was some kind of massively multiplayer online game we could all play together to relax.
The only problem with runes is that they’re not balanced. Rune of strength is so out of whack with the rest that it must skyrocket. It’s an underlying design issue, not a creation issue.
Yep. Otherwise this just turns all runes into a de facto currency used to buy/gamble the handful that are preferred. If this was the option you might as well just do away with them as drops and make them all purchased with a wallet currency.
Not necessarily bad to go that route I suppose – but it’s a bit dull compared to having a smoother gradient of usefulness. There will ALWAYS be one best (or two with violent arguments) and most expensive. But you could have more options in between awesome and meh.
Yeah I understand what you are saying, sorry for being a bit pedantic before.
Nah, no worries. It’s important to be precise about this stuff – financial markets can be a heated subJect. Heck from what I’ve seen around here even more so in game than out…
There is no HFT syle activity going on in this game and there is also no real market making in the sense of “specialists”. So adding in regularization seems a bit pointless.
The pure flippers in the game are pretty much just plain old intraday spread scalpers using limit orders.
Fair point on the HFT – that’s the algorithmic and computer controlled stuff. I utterly misused the term. I was thinking of the regulated status anyone can end up hitting, pattern day trader. I hadn’t had my coffee yet…
I do think there is some market making going on though. It’s not formalized, but even in real markets without official market makers there are liquidity providers that serve the same function. Maybe I’m being charitable though.
Anyway, not a real suggestion. I just get fascinated by how virtual markets evolve, and particularly in how rules and systems change them- or don’t.
I’m also only assuming that some of the really huge bid and offer numbers in GW2 represent traders that take both sides simultaneously. For all I know that might not be what’s happening at all.
It might be interesting to note here that the GW2 market has evolved a lot like the real securities markets of the world, especially the US. Market makers (also called specialists and a few other terms) exist that do nothing other than to buy and sell in a narrow gap, making a relatively small amount per transaction but with a huge number of transactions. These are heavily regulated, and then increasingly less regulated are the high frequency (“day”) traders followed by pure speculators.
If you ask someone in the finance industry what purpose these all serve they’ll usually answer “to create liquidity and mitigate risk.” And it’s arguably true in a lot of cases.
GW2 has evolved just like that. If you’re willing to sacrifice speed and safety a little you can increase your profits by avoiding some of those middle men, at least to an extent, and in the most active markets you take on the least risk. The only big differences are that there is no real regulation of either high frequency trading or market making in GW2 and there is a much higher transactional cost. This probably serves to give the middle men a bit more control in GW2, while also making it an even better idea to avoid them when the risk and lower liquidity is acceptable.
It would be interesting if the developers introduced some form of regulation of the high frequency and high volume traders. For example if they licensed them (by imposing limits to the non licensed), flagged their bids and offers as a different color, and put a limit on the maximum spread between their buy and sell offers in cases where they have both running.
I’m not suggesting it… but given the parallels to the real markets it’s an interesting thought.
Unfortunately, for every good, or at least decently fleshed out villainess like Sniper Wolf or Sarah Kerrigan you get a hastily/poorly written one like Edea Kramer, Varesh Ossa, or Scarlet.
Careful. we shouldn’t define female villains by their gender whether as a writer or a reader/viewer/player. For every Loki there is a Darth Maul too.
For that matter, for every Bruce Timm Mr. Freeze there is a Joel Schumacher Mr. Freeze.
The challenge doesn’t change much by gender. It’s largely about motivation. Modern villains are, for whatever reason, rarely allowed to be “just nuts” anymore. (Or even mostly just driven nuts, like Scarlet.) Modern audiences tend to demand thoroughly self justified villains. We have come to expect Joseph Campbell villains: heroes of their own stories.
There are a few exceptions – the most recent Joker and Borderlands’s Handsome Jack come to mind. But they have to be at that level of gleeful evil, and even then it’s hard to say why they still resonated. Maybe you just have to be truly terrifying if you aren’t sympathetic.
That’s my theory about the Scarlet complaints. In my opinion she was a visually great character, voiced by one of the finest voice actors performing today, and I actually found her actions exciting to fight back against. She had a twisted kind of logic and villains that execute plans with discipline are the most frightening. But her story didn’t focus much on her motivation, and the parts that did left a lot of questions unanswered that might have made her more sympathetic. I can see how some might find that unsatisfying.
(edited by Silalus.8760)
The notion of a giant Norn pulling his greatsword out of his speedo and proceeding to wield it against me is certainly terrifying…
This statement made the entire thread worthwhile to me.
Just a quick public “Thank you!” to the support team and specifically GM Vagrant.
I won’t go into the details of the issue here, but I want to say this to other players lurking about: based on my recent experience you’re in the hands of a good support team that takes the time to research individual cases and take appropriate action. I especially hope that’s some comfort if you’re waiting (im)patiently for a concern to be reviewed!
Sometimes it can take a little time to do things the right way, and it looks like that’s exactly how they do it- thanks again. I know it can be a kitten tough job and I hope you folks get appropriate credit for making your company look good!
It’s easy to see how sysreqs and the limitations of the engine probably gave them reason to scale down Zhaitan.
But I’m glad they did, because the early concepts were absurdly colossal. The thing was the size of a mountain range. It could have gone on a leisurely stroll and ended civilization in Tyria. If it sneezed it would alter the planet’s rotation. There is no way of making a fight against that believable since nothing short of a meteor impact would likely do more than tickle it.
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It’d be quite reasonable to fight something the size of a mountain range: you’d have to do it from the inside.
(Marcus Fenix and gang would take it out in 30 minutes or less. Pity the Asura haven’t yet invented the chainsaw bayonet.)
In fact on that scale it would barely even be capable of noticing a small army heading to it’s heart- it would have to rely on it’s horrible minions to defend it just like we rely on our immune system and symbiotic organisms.
The final battle might actually be a lot more playable. No need for airships and cannons fighting a proxy battle for the player. Instead we could personally take whatever ancient artifact is necessary and drive it into the innermost corrupted core of the beast’s heart.
It’d make a great motivation for it to extinguish all intelligent life in the first place too. We try to make dangerous microorganisms go extinct all the time. If you woke up and found out your house was filled with horrible, disease-causing black mold wouldn’t you do something about it? And by do something, I mean kill every last tiny, revolting spore?
Dang, now I gotta write this story…
(edited by Silalus.8760)
Well, a little update to the rant. I went ahead and did the dungeon this morning and…
Wow, that left a bad taste in my mouth. It was a much worse capstone to the story than I’d expected it would be. In fact, it basically wasn’t part of my personal story at all.
The one thing I didn’t expect was that all the dialogue was delivered by a different character in the party. Talk about jarring. It was like my character wasn’t even there, or was just a faceless, nameless henchman. I get how 5-man content works, but I’d expect at least the story mode of this one, pivotal dungeon to customize the dialogue to each player, instead of just the party leader.
The 100+ person zergs in the lion’s arch events felt more centered around my character’s story than this Arah run did. At least then npc’s said my character’s name from time to time, and after killing scarlet they made comments directly to me when I ran past.
I don’t think it would really bother me if the entire experience to that point had been similarly disconnected, but it was a 180 degree shift from the lengthy story leading up to that epic final battle. I really felt like I was just perfunctorily finishing content to get a flag set on my character, instead of experiencing a chapter in an otherwise good story. Again, it felt like I was back in WoW, except without clearly defined party roles (which frankly I feel makes the 5-man content in GW2 weaker than most other MMO’s, even while it makes all other content much stronger).
Ah well. It was really fun leading up to it, and I’ve got no complaints about other types of GW2 content in general. I just wish it wasn’t such a massive anti-climax. Figured I’d get my 2 cents in.
It was intentional. Throughout pre-release they talked about how the story of GW2 was told through three different intertwining narratives (dungeons, personal story instances, and open world dynamic event chains), and if you play through all three Arah is obviously the end goal that ties them all together. I think you hit (one of) the problems on the head- instead of being an integration of the three, Arah is instead one doing away completely with the other two, and for casual players, it’s the one line they were least likely to follow through. It wasn’t a bait-and-switch or different developer or anything like that, though, just a design philosophy that they didn’t fully commit to.
That makes a ton of sense, thanks. (I should say for the record I didn’t mean bait-and-switch as an intentional thing, more just as how it felt to suddenly encounter that.)
I think a lot of it is that as a player from other MMO’s, I personally never even considered doing dungeons until I hit 80. That tends to be the standard in, for example, WoW (in fact lower level dungeons were empty when I played that, an expansion ago).
Plus the living world content and other open-world pve, (which I’ve also really enjoyed, particularly after hitting 80 and with the releases over the past few months) tends to overshadow the dungeons, especially for relatively casual play, so even more reason to experience very little storyline via dungeons.
Then add to that a relatively high-level player base that tends to be much more focused on grinding end-game fractal content or harder dungeon modes… Not a lot of storytelling emphasis on that element.
Thanks for explaining the initial theory behind it. Definitely makes it all much more clear.
I’m a little confused as to where to post about the personal story on the forums. There’s a board for it, but it’s archived. Ok, so I get that there isn’t active development on it, but unless GW2 registration has been closed to new players… I would think it’s still quite relevant to anyone newly joining the community, no?
Anyway, here goes for the heck of it- sorry if this is in the wrong place or the whole topic of the personal story is considered to be totally closed and uninteresting.
First, I enjoyed the overall personal story experience a ton. Seriously, really liked it- no significant negative feedback.
A boss-sized monster in the freaking tutorial chapter? Awesome. See your character live through the high fantasy assemble-the-dream-team-and-fight-an-epic-last-stand trope? Awesome. Play around with different versions of the story and dialogue on different characters? Even more awesome. And best of all, perfect for the casual player with just enough time commitment in each chapter to feel like a small accomplishment but not enough to feel like work (unlike some previous attempts at a personal story- I’m talking to you, FFXI).
But then…
It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered something as jarring as the last story mission. Out of nowhere, after a carefully scripted, npc-centric experience through countless hours of storyline building up to it, a generic mmo standard 5-man dungeon?
Really?
REALLY?!?!
It was like suddenly I got kicked out of the game and it loaded up World of Warcraft. And I was left wondering, “how the heck did I get back here?”
I’m deeply disappointed. Not because I can’t or won’t do the 5-man and finish the storyline off, but just because it feels so… utterly, weirdly random. I could see it as an epilogue, a lightly rewarded final chapter to encourage players to try dungeon content. (In fact, it’d be kinda cool if there was a final branching epilogue that took you through some light WvW, a 5-man, and a quasi living story chapter.) Heck, maybe that was the intent. But as the final chapter of the main arc, the culmination of hours invested, a totally different style of storytelling and gameplay?
It feels like a bizarre bait-and-switch that totally disrupts the sense of completion.
Did you switch directors right before you decided on the finale? Seriously, what the heck? Has any developer ever meaningfully explained what they were thinking on this?
I was genuinely stunned.