Sign up for the Guild Wars 2Â beta for only 48 hours! At this moment it seems the site has been slashdotted beyond the beyond. Still it seems the whole ArenaNet krewe was very excited to see this as the devs were watching possible beta testers slam the site (thanks, Mr. Fries!). Good luck to all! Now back to writing more press beta PvE in Guild Wars 2.
–Ravious
What is Guild Wars 2 without wars. The Closed Beta had two ways to PvP, random arena PvP up to 10v10 with auto-balanced teams, and World v. World (WvW) where we were assigned to a server to fight for it against two other servers. There were two maps in arena PvP and WvW was fully available with the three identical Borderlands maps and the one central map. This is my story.
Arena-Type PvP
PvP is very accessible in Guild Wars 2. Click on the small icon, while in PvE, and players are instantly whisked away. Leaving the Mists, where PvP takes place, sends players back to the real world (PvE). It was a siren song all beta weekend long. It was so easy to just get in to a ten-minute random arena match, but then there was always activity in PvE too. The dilemma! Continue reading [GW2 Closed Beta] War Stories
One whole weekend of Guild Wars 2Â was not enough. Last night I had dinner with my mom, and she asked me about my trip to Disney World. How could I explain to her all the fantastic memories from my 5-day trip? I emphatically said it was great. Then we talked about how we could all go down next time. This is how I feel about sharing my Guild Wars 2 weekend. Where do I even start? I didn’t take a terabyte of vids to let it speak for itself.
This is the beginning of a few posts on Guild Wars 2Â weekend, and this is the one where I will answer any questions you, valiant reader, have. Ask away below in the comments section. If you want to overdose on information, head to GuildMag’s constantly updated news aggregation page linking to every bit of press impressions and video they can grab. I have many more posts to write, but these are some quick impressions. Continue reading [GW2] Closed Beta Bookends and Quick Impressions
I have figured out using and loading templates on heroes/myself. Handy, that. There is not a way to combine that with choosing heroes, I presume? I frequently pass through solo missions or four-hero zones, to say nothing of changes for missions, and it can be tedious to re-select my heroes from what is now a long list. I would love to be able to click a few times and reload my default hero/build setup.
If that is not available, I hereby nominate it for a future update. Also, other games? If you give the player the option of choosing seven heroes from a list of twenty-seven, then giving each of them eight skills from a list of 1,235, that would be a good feature for you to have, too.
: Zubon
One reason I like achievements is because they give you a checklist of things to do. I like seeing the entire game, and large, complex games have facets I would not even think to look for. There are many ways to direct players to that content, but an easy one is just listing, “Hey, have you tried X?” In Guild Wars, the Hall of Monuments and the wiki are helping me find all the things I can do.
Honestly all I can think of when I start reading this kind of stuff is… work. For some reason, it just all seems like too much effort for not enough reward. To me, when I feel like I need to read a guide about how to make something happen, it feels like the game designers really messed up. I have like 3 points and I guess that is about all I’m going to get.
Bah.
— Ethic
I obviously differ, but let me point out that, if you have played through Guild Wars and have Eye of the North, you already have more points than you may know. If you have completed any campaign, you have at least 5 points available (3 for linking, 2 for first Honor monument). A level 20 Ranger pet is another 2. Any miniature is another 1, 2 if rare or unique, 3 if you have both. Any fancy armor or weapon is another 1-4. If you already ran through the campaigns and have your Monumental Tapestries up in Eye of the North, you just need a few minutes to figure out how to cash in your checklist. And from there, you can see if there is anything else interesting you forgot to try. Getting a lot of points is work, but you can get a dozen on accident.
: Zubon
I had a big Saturday in-game. I ran my first challenge mission and I joined some guildmates for my first visit to the Underworld. The guild leader was recently traumatized by my still being on the easy Hall of Monuments points, since the veteran players are mostly at the point where getting another HoM point requires maxing five titles. After we cleared the Underworld, he asked, “So, Zubon, did you get five points today?” He was gobsmacked when the answer was “Actually, yeah.” That challenge mission filled my Fellowship monument, and Underworld was my fifth title.
As I recall people saying of the Hall of Monuments, 15 is where it stops being easy, 30 is where it stops being sane, and 50 is where it just stops. Steam says it took 215 hours to reach 16 points, so there is your barometer if you want to know what is possible/convenient for getting HoM points for GW2. I started with absolutely nothing, and some of that time has been spent on longer-term goals like my pre-Searing character that is level 13.5 (halfway to Legendary Defender) or about a day AFK during the festival. A casual, 10 hour/week player can probably get to 15 points before GW2 launches, and a really hardcore player could do it before open beta.
Added: HoM guide. You’ll get most of the way there just running the campaigns and playing normally. Getting later points takes work and grinding, but I haven’t ground anything yet.
: Zubon
…I often play female characters in MMOs: not because I want to look at a cute bottom, but because I enjoy the juxtaposition of taking such an incarnation of loveliness, wrapping her in a hulking suit of armour, and having her kick the ten living arse bells out of a muscleheap of ogres.
— Melmoth
I came back from vacation just in time for a rise and shiny blog post from ArenaNet discussing the particulars of their World vs. World vs. World system (a.k.a. WvW pronounced WuvWuv [says my cold-addled brain]) in Guild Wars 2. To recap: three servers are pitted against each other to fight over objectives on 3 Borderlands maps spoked out from a central Eternal Battlegrounds map. Points accumulate for your server to create server-wide bonuses. Every two-weeks servers are re-ranked and pitted against servers of like rank. So yes, all the RP servers will have the chance to /emote battle since they will all be ranked together. The whole article is great, and really in-depth. It is a must read for any RvR, or the like, fan.
There are a few interesting points. The first is that the WvW holds some “absolutely gigantic” maps capable of holding over 300 players each. It appears that over 400 players can fight for their same server at a time, which gives a hint to possible server sizes. Between all the ways to play in Guild Wars 2, such as PvE, PvP, and WvW, it will be interesting to see what a “healthy” server size will be. Continue reading [GW2] WuvWuv Combat
I have had Guild Wars for two months now, as you may have guessed by the sudden change in posting topics. So where is Zubon?
I have completed Nightfall and Factions. I am a few missions from the end of Eye of the North and a few into Prophecies. I have a couple dozen elite skills, a set of prestige armor and a maxed bow on my Ranger, and all but one of the heroes that do not require the completion of post-campaign content. (I will not be trying Winds of Change until I vanquish Cantha. I can read the story on the wiki.) While I have a full set of runes and insignia (maybe not the best, but it’s something), my heroes do not, and the new heroes from finishing Nightfall are still below level 20.
I have 10 Hall of Monuments points. You can check “Zubon Ganaimad” if you’re curious. I have several potential statues on the cusp, like an un-leveled phoenix and Protector of Cantha nearly done, but I am not going to worry about cleaning those titles up right now.
My next priorities are adding a little more strength to my hero options and starting to participate in guild events (now that I have two campaign hard modes available). I want to finish leveling the Nightfall rangers so that I can use them as touch rangers. I want to push into Prophecies to pick up some elite skills that most people seem to take for granted (Offering of Blood, Panic, Unyielding Aura). I want to finish the campaigns to open up all my options. I want to drop a bit of money on runes and insignia to finish decorating my heroes.
Then I can just mess around doing whatever I want, because I will be a full participant in the endgame. :) Since I have been doing a lot of “whatever I want” along the way, this will not be a huge change. I also have some alts to try, but they are all in the single digits (except the gradual Legendary Defender of Ascalon character, at level 13 right now).
: Zubon
In our world of quest-based PvE MMOs, repeatable content is a necessity for extending longevity. If there is nothing to do, players go elsewhere. The most popular approach to this is daily (or occasionally weekly, twice weekly, etc.) quests, and that is our compare-and-contrast essay of the day. (Do not steal it for high school English class unless you define many of the terms we are taking for granted.)
More specifically, the topic is how you structure those daily quests. I call some “reliable” in that they are unvarying. The same daily quests are available every day. “Random” dailies will have a pool from which some unknown ones are pulled each day. “Rotating” is the halfway point: a pool that moves in a consistent manner, so what is available is reliably known but not constant.
World of Warcraft is the trope codifier for dailies. When I played (late WotLK), they limited you to 25/day, and everything was always available. That is one of the great merits of reliable dailies: everything is available. There is no artificial scarcity. If you want it, it is there. If you like X, X will be there for you every day. You can set up a routine, and as a developer, you want to promote having your players log in consistently. Consistency is a kind of virtue. WoW also included some randomness, like the daily fishing and cooking quests. Didn’t they extend that with the Cataclysm solo endgame, with so many of the daily quests available per day?
I find randomness good for mixing it up, breaking up routines that lead to doldrums, but it is frustrating when you want something to come up and it does not. If you are randomly picking one of four quests, there is a 53% chance that one of them will not appear in a given week. When instant gratification takes too long, this can be bad. It forces on the player what is probably a good plan (not doing the same thing every day), but players resist being forced into anything.
The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ is another “always everything” game. Skirmishes extended this by giving a daily bonus to a menu of instances you could pull up. That content was usually available at all times, but the quest bonus was 1/day. (I say, “was,” but I presume this continues in Isengard.)
The daily or weekly bonus seems to be the easiest approach. You can get a bonus for doing each piece of content over each time period X. The numerically equivalent but less friendly-sounding version is to have diminishing returns for repeating content.
Guild Wars goes for pure “rotating.” The wiki has a list of when everything is coming up for the 7 dailies. This contains some of the merits of the other two approaches, in that what is available is known in advance and can be planned around but is not a constant each day. Embark Beach is a Schelling point; hundreds of options would spread the players everywhere, while a small set of daily options focuses grouping. Of course, as with random, if you do not like the daily option (any of the 7?), you are out of luck, and everyone with whom you might want to group is being channeled away from you. You do not even get the hope that your choice will randomly come up tomorrow; you can see on the calendar that it will be up in mid-March, that day you will be on a business trip. Guild Wars has the additional interesting bit that you can pick up but not complete the Zaishen missions and get to them tomorrow. I am a new player still going through the campaigns, so if the mission of the day is one I expect to get to later this week, I can store that bonus.
League of Legends has a generic “first win of the day” bonus. You get it for any map, PvE or PvP. That seems to be just a “come back every day!” incentive, as it cannot channel the players anywhere, although there are few enough options that channeling seems unnecessary.
Because I have not played every MMO, the door is wide open for reader commentary on how game X did it. The hard part on doing the comparison is that daily content is usually at the level cap, and how many MMOs have you played at the level cap for any meaningful length of time? Oh wait, you read MMO blogs.
I know which site I am writing for, but please resist the urge to say, “Guild Wars 2 events will solve this” unless you can tie it back to the daily-specific focus. You know how much it pains me to have skipped City of Heroes because their repeatable content has (had?) no time limits on repeatability, although there is a task force of the week bonus.
: Zubon