Archive for the 'Guild Wars' Category

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[GW] HoM Check: 25/50

Posted by Zubon on April 7, 2012 in Guild Wars. 24 Comments

The Hall of Monuments provides a convenient way of summarizing how much “stuff” you’ve done in Guild Wars, at least to completion. I am at 25 points. I have done almost everything there is to do in-game at least once. I still have two Eye of the North dungeons I have not visited, a few Factions challenge missions I have never run, and I have only tried the solo-queue PvP options. I also have not run every quest, but the only one left that seems strongly recommended is the titan-clearing chain at the end of Prophecies. I have repeated some but not all on hard mode.

Touring Hall of Monuments categories: Continue reading ‘[GW] HoM Check: 25/50′

[GW] Dialogues on Efficiency

Posted by Zubon on April 2, 2012 in Guild Wars. 9 Comments

From guild chat:

“I’ll just use Discordway.”
“Discord isn’t the solution to everything.”
“Discord is the solution to everything.”
“She kinda has a point.”

: Zubon

[GW] Artifical Intelligence and Natural Stupidity

Posted by Zubon on March 24, 2012 in General and Guild Wars. 4 Comments

Computer-controlled characters do some things better than humans can. They have complete battlefield awareness, so they can see someone start a spell with a 0.5s casting time, switch targets, and interrupt with a 0.25s casting time spell. (Of course, a human can occasionally interrupt a 0.25s spell with a 0.25s spell by just firing at random, “I’ve got a hunch he’s about to cast…”) NPC healers never whine about needing to be the healer, and they never get tired of staring at hit point bars.

The hard part can be making it so you want anything other than NPC companions. There is a narrow space between “completely useless” and “good AI,” and then between “good AI” and “better than the player.” In a FPS, the only limits on how aware and accurate an NPC is are computer-defined. One balancing factor is that NPCs exhibit perfect tactics but absolutely no strategy. Another is that you can just stop trying to improve the AI at some point; if it is already competitive with the humans, you don’t need to improve it, and you may have gone too far. GW also PVE-only skills, which are overpowered and not available to heroes and henchmen.

Another is letting the computer do completely stupid things that humans do. This also adds a sense of verisimilitude when playing with them. I used to joke that my heroes needed advanced “don’t stand in the fire” lessons. Then I watched a hero run past me into a sandstorm to start casting his spells, and it stopped being funny.

: Zubon

[GW] Diminishing Marginal Utility

Posted by Zubon on March 22, 2012 in Guild Wars. 11 Comments

Man, that’s a great spawn you’ve put together. I bet our players will want to fight it 15-20 times in one sitting.
— GW1 design meeting minutes

I am open to the argument that Prophecies PvE content was good when it came out. Maybe if you start in Prophecies and play through, this seems fine. If I grant you that, I need you to grant me that whoever put together Prophecies hard mode did what could very charitably be described as “the best s/he could, given the circumstances.”

I would love to help you VQ Eastern Frontier, but I promised my mom I’d quit cutting myself for Lent.
– guildmate

It is not just that the content is poor and not much fun. It comes in huge doses that the game encourages you to choke down. Guild Wars encourages its players to go kill all 300 enemies on that map. There are only 4 or 5 different spawns on that map, and you get a small team size, so go have fun killing those 4 or 5 groups for an hour or two. It is a bad sign when the wiki recommends starting 6+ zones away as a time-saver because it you can run a large team from a distant zone faster than you can vanquish a zone with a 4-person group.

Vanquisher runs of this area without active quests requires defeating around 350 foes. Including quest influences, it has been reported to range from 271 to 393.
– Guild Wars wiki

I’ll discuss sometime soon why balancing Prophecies hard mode is nigh impossible.
: Zubon

[GW2] Demand More

Posted by Ravious on March 15, 2012 in Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. 29 Comments

What feels like another world ago, I was finding ways to become a blogournalist, especially with ArenaNet. I dutifully followed Regina Buenaobra’s personal Twitter account because at that time I saw digging for any and every crumb of Guild Wars 2 I could find… when few else were. She used to link a lot of personal stuff, mostly feminist blogs, and since I wasn’t finding any Guild Wars 2 info, I usually read what she linked.

A real life friend once maladroitly called me an Inverse Darth Vader. She meant I acted with a heart of gold, but my thoughts were always on the Dark Side. In keeping with this aspect, I read the feminist blogs, and I didn’t understand any of it. I have a wife, mom, and a sister who I respect and treat in kind, and each seemed to want different things from my respect. This all just confused me about woman more. One thing Regina linked did stick, severely.

I wish I could find it now, but one blog entry was a retort to all the negativity against feminist action. Every answer was basically “I demand more.” For example, if the question was “What do you expect with the way television portrays woman?” The answer would be “I demand more.” It really wasn’t an answer so much as a philosophy. The writer didn’t have all the answers, but she had a will and a belief that things could become better. Continue reading ‘[GW2] Demand More’

[GW] Contagiousness

Posted by Zubon on March 15, 2012 in Guild Wars. 3 Comments

This Van Hemlock post inspired my ranger’s use of conditions. Fleshy foes are fun targets for Apply Poison-Hunter’s Shot-Epidemic. Oh look, that entire clump of enemies is poisoned and bleeding. (As I have mentioned, I really hated non-fleshy foes when I was using that build.) Broadhead Arrow-Epidemic-Volley is a fun way to oppress groups of casters. I have grown fond of spreading conditions, so I love having heroes that spread them further. “You move like a dwarf!”

I’ve read Saramago. Blindness is totally contagious. I don’t see why cut hamstrings should be any less so.

: Zubon

[GW] Poor Balance in Exploration, Achievement, and Grind

Posted by Zubon on March 14, 2012 in Guild Wars. 3 Comments

Each Guild Wars campaign has a title for various 100%s. Completing the campaign nets you a Hall of Monuments trophy but no title. Completing all campaign missions with all bonuses is the Protector title, then Guardian if you do so in hard mode. Kill every monster in every zone in hard mode to get Vanquisher, and uncover the entire map to get Cartographer. Capturing every elite skill is another.

Then there are meta-titles. There are titles for getting all the Vanquisher titles, all the Cartography, all the elite skills, and for combined Protector and Guardian. The real meta-title is “Kind of a Big Deal” through “God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals,” based on your number of maxed titles. Maxed titles plug into the Honor monument, points for your Guild Wars 2 rewards. All of these are good and fine, to the extent that they are sane.

Add Eye of the North to that. Do you need to conquer this new campaign in all ways to complete the meta-titles? What happens if you already have one? And how do dungeons factor in? The developers handled all that with a combined Master of the North title. Missions, dungeons, vanquishing, and cartography add points.

This is poor because of the effort to reward ratio for Eye of the North versus other campaigns. I can take Factions to 100% complete and get six Honor statues in the Hall of Monuments (plus progress on meta-titles), or I can do the same in Eye of the North (with dungeons instead of skill-capping) and get one. Eye of the North has multiple reputation titles, but those are less readily available for the Hall of Monuments than the Factions or Nightfall titles. On the other hand, Eye of the North is rather shorter than, say, Prophecies’ 25 missions and 54 zones.

It is good content, which is intrinsically rewarding, but the extrinsic rewards for 100% completion are lacking relative to the base campaigns. Most of the extrinsic rewards come from the new PvE skills, which make it easier to gain those base campaign rewards.

: Zubon

[GW] Balancing Exploration, Achievement, and Grind

Posted by Zubon on March 13, 2012 in Guild Wars. 2 Comments

Rewards for the “Wanted by the Shining Blade” daily quests are a model of elegant design. If you complete the full cycle of quests in hard mode, you receive 255 war supplies. You need 250 for an oppressor weapon, which leaves you room to skip a day, not run them all in hard mode, save/sell them, or add them to the confessor’s orders you collect to get a royal gift.

The simple excellence of this design leaves little except to point at it and say, “do this.” On the Explorer side, we have a daily activity on a three-week cycle, taking you into eleven zones and revamping old content. There is a lot to see there, and this creates an Explorer bread crumb trail through the War in Kryta content. An the Achiever side, this is exactly one unit of Hall of Monuments progress. You want at least one oppressor weapon, and you can earn that through the Wanted cycle or even from repeating partial completions. I expect that someone has worked out the optimal war supplies/minute quest selection. In terms of grind, this is the level I want to see: try everything once, and you get the reward; if you like it, you can repeat it for more rewards; if not, you have other options for both this check-box and the rest of the category. This one is entirely optional anyway, because you can get an oppressor weapon or two from the story arc (or buy from other players).

Potential improvements: don’t make the number of cycling quests a multiple of 7, because each quest will always be on the same day of the week, which is a problem for some players; I have no idea if the rewards are balanced between quests, as they range from 4 to 22 war supplies.

[GW] Good Dwarf, Bad Dwarf

Posted by Zubon on March 12, 2012 in Guild Wars. 1 Comment

It is easy to pick out the good dwarves from the villains in Guild Wars: they have faces and quite often names. The Stone Summit dwarves are faceless and nameless and therefore it is okay to slaughter them in groups, while you are supposed to care about the Deldrimor dwarves with names and faces. Also, it is almost always okay to kill the red dots, while the green dots are your friends. Morality is baked into the UI.

See also the Cracked Star Wars explanation for why evil empires want closed-face helms but how that potentially hurts them when everyone turns out to be more empathic than previously suspected.

: Zubon

[GW] Poor Zone Variety

Posted by Zubon on March 11, 2012 in Guild Wars. 5 Comments

The Falls is an example of poor design in monster spawns, at least as they interact with the vanquisher game mechanic. If you were just passing through, having a zone of highly consistent and tightly themed enemies would be great. Needing to kill all 300+, I was nodding off at the 20th group of pop-up spiders.

Like Talus Chute, you get a bit of regionalization, but it is not as effective. Perhaps it is the uniformity of terrain or the low number of pathing options, but even having several different categories of enemies feels same-ish, particularly when you are killing several hundred of them. Any feeling of variety is weakened by the overlapping groups. If you mix trolls in with other enemies, there is no “troll area,” even if there is a troll-heavy or -exclusive area. The spiders do more of what I wanted the Talus Chute nightmares to do, only too much and too uniformly.

On a spawn design note, you have root behemoths with pop-up healers around them. That’s good. You have an obvious threat surrounded by hidden support, not severe enough to be a “gotcha” wipe but something to watch for, and it is consistent enough to reward basic pattern recognition. Root behemoths can spawn closely together and near other healer pop-ups so that you get many healers. That’s bad. If you approach it carefully, you can get the enemies 1 or 2 at a time and burn them down before the healers become annoying. If a pet, hero, or lag spike leads to having 5 healers clustered together, there is not enough damage there to make it threatening, just so much healing that you get bored hoping your heroes coordinate a damage spike. There is a command to focus fire on one target; sometimes you hit it and your heroes respond, “We will certainly take that suggestion under advisement, thank you.” There are direct counters to mass healing, beyond damage spikes, but you might not have brought one unless you read the wiki first. In a zone with existing tedium issues, a battle of attrition against healers in not to be encouraged.

You may or may not like the zone’s twisting paths. Vine bridges give an impression of 3-D, but remember that some things shoot through walls, and Z-axis issues mean that someone on the bridge can body-block you from crossing underneath.

Going back to the first paragraph, any annoyance you might have with the zone is compounded or alleviated by its distant location. There is one entrance to the zone, and that attached zone has no outpost, so you must zone multiple times just to reach this zone that is completely unneeded for the main quest line. Except for visiting for a few quests, this zone is just here for looking around or for vanquishing, and vanquishing highlights all its problems by forcing you through every single spawn.

: Zubon