Author: Zubon

Where do the horns go?
: Zubon

As of yesterday, you can craft with materials from the vault and ten cooking items have been added to world drops instead of karma merchants. When the former is complete (discovery still requires items in inventory, and cooking is all about discovery), that will be awesome and the logical next step from having that huge crafting vault, although the present dis-economies of crafting are broadly known.

The latter we stumbled upon because sticks of butter have been added to the tier 1 drop bags. Some enemies, you see, will sometimes drop a bag o’ stuff as loot. You build up a bunch of these while fighting bandits or centaurs, then double click them to see what is inside. They usually have crafting items and/or a bit of coin. Last night, we found that a great many ettins had four to seven sticks of butter in their pockets. Naturally, we wiped off the lint and put butter in the vault, where it belongs, next to the vials of blood.

It is very nice to get the occasional bit of cinnamon while taking wood from trees. The drop rates on the cooking materials feels a bit high, as I would not want these to displace the rarer, more needed blue crafting drops (like all that blood I am taking from enemies with my field medical kit). Still, anything that gives ettins better access to butter is an improvement in civil society.

: Zubon

It has been said before, but it bears repeating: non-exclusive nodes for crafting materials are a great design decision for cooperative play. We can both harvest from the same tree, rock, or carrot. It takes away racing, avoids enmity between players, and keeps goldfarmers from timing respawns and monopolizing spawns.

If xp per monster is non-rivalrous, why should materials per node be?

: Zubon

In The Essential 55, Ron Clark says to err on the side of over-celebration. Cheering something only marginally worthy is less bad than not cheering something that deserves it.

Guild Wars 2 rewards everything and goes on to reward everyone for everything. Guild Wars 2 does not care if you level too quickly. It believes that it is better to reward your minimal participation. Arriving at the tail end of an event? Pitch in anyway, get some karma. You contribute one attack to someone’s fight? Full rewards!

Every other MMO I know works on the principle that xp is a scarce, rivalrous resource. Higher leveling speed could mean fewer months subscribed. Keeping people from receiving the unearned (and exploiting) is a greater concern. With xp as a limited resource per enemy, ensuring that you do not take more than your share is an issue of fairness. Most games limit unfairness through tagging and limit exploitation through additional penalties for outside help.

Tagging does prevent rogue solo DPS from exploiting tanks. For those who did not play in that era, there have been xp systems under which a tank could engage and take aggro, only to have someone with more damage swoop in and take most or all of the xp at no personal risk, and back in the day death penalties meant meaningful risk. Xp systems might reward whoever gets the first hit, the last hit, or does the most damage (or some more complex calculation).

Guild Wars 2 takes a different approach: everyone gets full xp. If you have done 90% of the work and see someone get equal rewards for tossing in one attack, that can grate. The leech has not taken anything from you, and even contributed a little, but still, unfair! That is an attitude we will need to get past. The current system encourages everyone to help everyone, even for very small values of “help.” Encouraging help only trivially useful is less bad than not encouraging help that could make a difference.

I have noted for years that, in MMOs, the polite reaction to seeing someone in a life-or-death battle with three trolls is to ignore him/her unless s/he explicitly asks for help. That is weird. I would much rather establish a norm of “everyone helps everyone,” whether you are nice or just greedy. It is pro-social design. We just need to develop a new concept with positive connotations in place of “leech,” with bonus points if it can incorporate “drive by.”

: Zubon

The game’s problems will shift over the next few months. Some things will be fixed with further development, like the trading post. The grouping issues that so annoyed me seem better, at least as I type this. What more interests me are the problems caused simply by the size of the Day One population lump: some will go away and some will transition into related endgame problems.

For example, take the human-centaur war. For the next month, the centaurs are screwed. They are just going to be completely and utterly oppressed with a few little wins and a small chance for a tiny bit of glory at server reset if states are not saved. Beetletun is utterly safe. There are too many players in that level range for the good guys not to win that war. But if you are at the front of the leveling wave, you can see areas where the players are not dominating the meta-events, and that will become more spread over time as the population lump moves.

The next question is how much better it will work out at level 80. I have yet to see the highest level zones. We have a problem if they replicate the same situation when we get a lump of level 80 players, although without the leveling incentive, you might have fewer people just hanging around those zones. With increasing levels, the meta-events seem to be getting slightly more complex, so there will be multiple fronts and a larger area covered. Players learn as a zerg, and they still join into a massive wave for a frontal assault, but you will see multiple events going at once as part of the meta-event. This could work. There will also be so many events available that the players will likely be losing some because they are happening unseen. You see this on a small scale all the time: you come upon an event where the bad guys are 80% of the way there; it fails within a few minutes; you move to the next step, fixing whatever just went wrong. I have yet to see that “fix it” step fail in a way that leads to an even worse state, but I have seen the grawl complete human sacrifices and the bandits successfully poison the water supply.

Place your claims now: which current problems are transitory because of development, transitory because of population, or permanent because the same design will fail at level 80? This is your chance to lock in “I told you so.” Please include a specific “I was right” condition, including a “the bet’s off if the devs…” Beware of untrue Scotsmen.

: Zubon

Pro-tip to people at events: while you are fighting the boss, normal enemies continue to spawn, and sometimes the event even spawns more. You should kill those, too.

This weekend, there were forty to fifty people piling on a champion centaur boss (one of those fights that takes 5-10 minutes because its hit points have scaled up for forty to fifty people), and perhaps two of us were watching the outer edges for respawns. Melee respawns were no problem; they ran into a cloud of AE and fell down without anyone noticing them. Meanwhile, the Harathi Sharpshooters were forming a line. Fun math: assume 1/3 chance of getting a ranged attacker each spawn; assume death within 5 seconds if melee and respawn 15 seconds later; assume 12 spawns; how long until you have a solid line of 12 “Sharpshooters” casually standing 4 meters behind a horde of oblivious, unmoving PCs and just picking them off? Identifying where the damage is coming from can be a problem in games, and it can be loud with 40 to 50 people attacking constantly, but at some point you need to look around.

: Zubon

In a change from earlier stated plans, GW2 dyes are unlocked per-character rather than per-account. Boo.

Once you use the dye interface, all future armor you acquire will be automatically dyed with the same color scheme when you equip it. Auto-dyeing is a nice, intuitive quality of life improvement..

: Zubon

That the trading post is nigh perpetually “down for maintenance” is annoying but ignorable. I’m sick of trade spam in every zone, but I’m sick of guild recruitment spam in every zone, too.

What is really bothering our guild is that the grouping interface is not working properly. I think players can get to the same overflow/layer of the world/whatever. It can be hard to tell because, unless you are within sight distance of each other, the avatars are blanked out and you get a “join” button they way you would if you were not in the same instance of the world. Speaking of instances, joining each other there can be spotty. We have had people unable to join each other in personal stories and in dungeons.

Some of the pain is ameliorated by the game’s mechanics that make formal grouping less necessary, and this is less bad than Asheron’s Call 2’s lack of functional chat around launch, but one of the basic things you should be able to demand from a multi-player game is being able to form groups with your friends. Well, we can form groups, but they don’t work right, which is just inviting us to try it and hate the experience.

: Zubon

Finding family members at grocery stores and real theme parks would be so much easier with dots on a mini-map.