Category: Guild Wars 2

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Differing Dailies: Reliable, Rotating, and Random

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

[GW2] With Beta’d Breath

A more open beta weekend is coming. Of course it appears that this is not the first beta event, but it appears to be the first one that can be discussed by the players. Or rather press, only select press are “in general” being let talk about their beta experience. While Martin Kerstein did say that invitations were only getting started late last week, I have not [yet] received a “press beta pass.” I have, graciously, received one in the past from NC Soft, so you never know.

Regardless, the more I think about this, the more excited I get. Yet I feel like I am walking down a path of no return. It is becoming clearer to me that playing the game in my head is no longer an option. I love all the developer interviews, like the latest PvP roundtable because the passion of the developers is still overwhelming. Yet, I feel that there are relatively no more slots to fill in my brain. Continue reading [GW2] With Beta’d Breath

Rubi Heading To Higher Ground

Just a short note, but longtime friend of Kill Ten Rats, Rubi Bayerm headmistress of Massively, has headed off to ArenaNet! We here at our humble blog are extremely proud of Rubi, and I can honestly think of no one else in the community better suited for heading to the excellent ArenaNet team. Martin Kerstein, ubermenschgemeindemeister of the ArenaNet community team hinted that she might be leading the charge on some social networking, namely Facebook. Good luck to Rubi, and her family!

–Ravious

[GW] Turtle Power

The Luxon are a nomadic people in Guild Wars who use giant turtles. When I first saw one, I immediately wanted to tame it as a pet. Then I noticed that it was being used as a beast of burden. And Dungeon Siege thought it was so fancy with its pack mules. Guild Wars 2 needs this: no bags, packs, etc., just a giant turtle that follows you around and stores your stuff.

Then you enter the first Luxon town, and the buildings are on even bigger tortoises. They have ambulatory, turtle-based homes. Guild Wars 2 needs this: player housing should include a tortoise option. The Asura can use box turtles.

: Zubon

[GW] Your Thanks Are Enough

Today I found the quest Too High a Price. There is a loan shark involved, and “I tried to return the money, but he is demanding that I pay him a fee of 250 gold! We do not have that kind of money.” The quest reward is 175 gold. Maybe it takes NPCs a long time to make 75 gold. The player, of course, takes the money from someone who needed a loan shark to afford life-saving medicine, in a setting where a plague is transforming people into monsters and potentially devouring their souls.

One notion I like about GW2 karma is that the rewards make more sense and you should feel less like a jerk for taking things from the poor people you are supposed to be helping. The farmer has some spare vegetables, or will give you a good deal on buying sheep.

: Zubon

[GW2] The Jotun, That Which Was Lost

There’s a nice new lore article detailing one of the non-player character (NPC) races that appeared in the Guild Wars expansion, The Eye of the North. The jotun are a giant-race, cousins to the ogres. It appears that the giant-races prefer mountains, the ogres getting the Blazeridge Mountains east of Ascalon, while the jotun once held court all throughout the Shiverpeaks. While the story of the ogres is still unknown, the jotun fell in power because of interracial conflict.

Behind the scenes, ArenaNet’s loresmith Ree Soesbee writes that the jotun lore was expanded to show something great that was taken because the jotun race cannibalized itself. They were legendary and possessed the magic and the ability to create huge monuments, possibly before the time of the gods and Bloodstones that brought magic to the races. This leads one to wonder whether the jotun had a hand in the Eye of the North superstructure. Regardless, all that’s left is a mongrel scrap of a race among massive stone monuments without meaning. Continue reading [GW2] The Jotun, That Which Was Lost

[GW2] Year of the Dragon

To rock in the Chinese New Year, ArenaNet has announced that Guild Wars 2 will be released this year. There was much dancing and celebration in the streets. Even though most revelers were celebrating the announcement, they didn’t mind the company of the other Chinese New Year party-goers.

In the blog post, Mike O’Brien then goes on to discuss ArenaNet’s plans for the ongoing beta:

We recently finished our first closed beta test, and we’re now ready to hold progressively larger events. In February we’ll invite select press to participate in beta testing, and in March and April we’ll aggressively ramp up the size of our beta test events so that many of you will have a chance to participate. And of course, this all leads to the release of Guild Wars 2 later this year.

Don’t worry, faithful readers. My firstborn is already shipped well on her way to the ArenaNet studios.

There are a couple of interesting points, though. Press are usually involved in MMO betas at some point, but usually this is one of the last phases of beta. What does ArenaNet intend with having awesome, dedicated bloggers and some real journalists in the beta? Normally, I would assume they would be under a non-disclosure agreement, but it would be really cool if ArenaNet kind of said “we’re so amazing, just come play and tell the world.” It could also be that ArenaNet wants possible “reviewers” to have more time to play so the Metacritic crushing reviews happen all the fast upon release.

Which of course leads to the question, when is release? Certainly nothing would be more epic than it launching on the Guild Wars 7th Anniversary. Yet, many times in the past it seems a good idea for MMOs to shut down beta and give the company a couple weeks to add that last bit of polish. This would lead the launch on the edge of summer, during exam time for students, near vacations, etc. Most MMOs will not launch during summer. Then there is this bit of Nostradamus-ish evidence of ArenaNet soccer jerseys possibly signifying June 28, 2012. My personal best guess is September with a wild card bet of April.

–Ravious

[GW2] Just Play, Quests as Hearts

There’s a pretty good thread over at MMORPG.com about The Tao of ArenaNet. It’s a nicely done, if a bit wordy, fan-made response to what the heck ArenaNet is doing. They are doing things different. No more quests is a huge one, yet their essence remains. Walk this way.

Since I am still waiting to play Guild Wars 2 (still, ArenaNet, still), I’ve been playing around my with my old flame, Lord of the Rings Online. It’s a good ol’ vanilla MMO with its own twists like World of Warcraft or Rift (possibly the new Star Wars MMO, which I haven’t played enough to include here). Like a good ol’ MMO, it has quest hubs which branch out to get players exploring the sub-zones. It’s a tried and true formula. Fill a sub-zone with enemies and problems, and then get players a reason to get out there. It’s fun, there’s constant activity, and it’s comfortable. Continue reading [GW2] Just Play, Quests as Hearts

[GW2] Ree: Focus on the Enemy

I admit I was a little concerned with the story of Guild Wars 2 within the game. Of the three starting zones we’ve seen, there seems to be absolutely no mention of Zhaitan, the Elder Dragon of Death. This seems very much unlike ArenaNet’s Guild Wars mode of storytelling where the crisis is told early on, such as the dragon-forged destroyers chasing players towards an asura gate. It really wasn’t until late last year at the big conventions did ArenaNet show us “the Enemy” with Sparkfly Fen and the Tequatl the Sunless zone boss. How would our character stories progress from racial issues to Big Bad Zhaitan? How much focus would there be on the villain that had the first Guild Wars 2 trailer dedicated to it?

Continue reading [GW2] Ree: Focus on the Enemy

[GW2] Queued Up

A big thing right now in the ‘sphere are the SWTOR queues. Even with their staggered launch, BioWare is being hit with some hefty queues. Yet, nothing is really new. Voodoo equations prognosticating things like server health, player retention, and herd leveling speed are part of the design, and they usually seem to say “queues now are better in the long run.” One trick I loved with Rift was joining the hour-long queue a little after 7. Taking the remainder of the hour to put the kids to bed, and once they were down, voila! the queue was just about done. It really helped to just walk away. Even sitting there and reading a book or watching TV while you queue in front of your computer will likely have an effect on your mental and physical well-being.

Because the ArenaNet Community Managers are now on vacation, let’s do a little logic exercise. First, we must assume! We must assume that Guild Wars 2 will have queues. We know they are going to have servers (“worlds“) more like current MMOs than the original Guild Wars, where players get to fight for their world in World vs. World PvP combat and fight evil in their world with other worldly citizens. It’s a safe assumption given almost every MMO’s launch. Continue reading [GW2] Queued Up