Category: Guild Wars

Guild Wars – Those Meddling Players

Many players are getting used to the new dailies in Guild Wars, especially the PvP-based daily.  With the two PvE-based dailies, they cannot go on insta-farm mode because of the need to have the mission or explorable area unlocked.  Players cannot just create new characters and attack the mission or boss.  The PvP-based daily allows for insta-farming because players can create new PvP characters in order to redo the quest as many times as they want.

Now the balance lies in the fact that with PvE-based quests, players can complete the daily Zaishen Challenge by using heroes and henchmen and normally PvP-based quests require grouping up with active players, which would feasibly slow down the farming of the PvP-based daily.  The outlier is Hero Battles, which pits one player and three AI-controlled Heroes against another player and three more Heroes, because the only other player needed is the competition.  In a game that touts skill over time played as a banner (and in a perfect world) this would not be a problem… except when devs create “long term” goals that require players to do a lot of dailies, player-driven efficiency kicks in.  (Whether you want to call repeating the varied and different Zaishen Challenges “grind” is too subjective for this post, but the argument is noted.)

Continue reading Guild Wars – Those Meddling Players

Smarter, Not Harder (Guild Wars)

I have been very impressed with 3 of the 4 major updates that came out very recently.  Darren over at The Common Sense Gamer discusses the new wormhole system in EVE a little bit.  Zubon has been seen discussing City of Heroes/Villians new Mission Architect, and even created and shared a mission he made for it.  And last night ArenaNet just dropped their huge April Update for Guild Wars, which I will explain in this post, to kick off their 4th Anniversary celebration and 6,000,000 sale.  The linking idea between these three big updates is that the devs created a lot of sticky content – content that makes players want to keep playing – by developing smarter, not harder (not to denounce the amount of time they did work).  (World of Warcraft’s latest update seems neat, but for reasons already explained does not really impress me as much.)

The April Update for Guild Wars is the first of ArenaNet’s new plan for the Guild Wars Live Team to get out a large chunk every 3-4 months.  Their first one sets the bar fairly high.  I touched on a few things earlier, but for the best run down check out the patch notes.  What I do want to focus on is the way they created “new content.”

Continue reading Smarter, Not Harder (Guild Wars)

Guild Wars, On Death

I see comments here and on the general Guild Wars forums about the MMO being “dead.”  The game will, as far as we know, have no further commercial updates, such as their three campaigns and one expansion.  However, with ArenaNet still selling units (over 200,00 between 9/08 and 12/08), heading towards a whopping 6,000,000 units sold likely sometime this year, and the Guild Wars Live Team feverishly adding updates and content to the game.  It is far from being proclaimed “dead.”

Continue reading Guild Wars, On Death

We Don’t Get Fooled Again

After perusing a few Book 7 threads on the Lord of the Rings Online forums, I hit an interesting node.  It seemed that people were thankful of the fact that Turbine added content to their subscription game.  Now, I am a thankful customer whenever I get my product or service without a hitch, but these posts were more in line with getting a free bottle of wine at a restaurant.  I was really confused that these people believe that this content update was not part of the subscription fee they had been paying all along.  As more and more games (and game playing) becomes a service, rather than a product, consumers should be aware of the service they are paying for and the norms with similar services.

Continue reading We Don’t Get Fooled Again

Guild Wars 2 – Ripples from Friday

After the shareholder’s report released Friday, there were many interesting things that happened through the Guild Wars community and news sites.

The first thing I found really interesting was the disregard for Aion.  The report gave us a fairly tight window for a U.S. release of the MMO.  Massively left Aion out of the subject line but mentioned Guild Wars 2 in the subject line and used the Guild Wars 2 logo in the post.  Ten Ton Hammer also overlooked Aion’s release window and focused on the Guild Wars 2 “delay.”  I think this should be pretty telling about NCSoft’s 2009 offering.  Aion marketing has their work cut out for the western world.

The second thing of interest was the an open letter from Mike O’Brien, Guild Wars 2 overlord, in direct response to the community reaction caused by the released report.  He stated that Guild Wars 2 would be released “when it’s done.”

I think it was a good letter, and is smoothing over the reality that Guild Wars 2 is not really on the horizon yet.  It is on Valve-time.  I am really happy that ArenaNet is in a position to seemingly afford such a luxury.  Guild Wars Factions, Nightfall, and especially Eye of the North were on very tight development schedules, and the feeling of a rushed schedule came through sometimes (even though some were outright delayed).  What would the series have been like if ArenaNet was on Valve-time from the start? I digress…

However, this was not what we were led to expect with Guild Wars 2.  Somewhere ArenaNet shifted gears into a long development time, and they forgot to make sure their community was on board.  All we knew was that the originally stated plan was out the window.  I think what Chris Chung said in the conference call and Mike O’Brien’s letter are definitely smoothing out that gear shift.

–Ravious
not everything is a trap

Guild Wars – Not Really An Article

Gaile Gray, ArenaNet employee extraordinaire, stole a soapbox to stand on at the Guild Wars Wiki in order to explain why they ban 1000 (!) Guild Wars accounts per week for real money transactions (RMT).

Say the RMTer talks to 10 or 20 people in a day, and waves 100K gold or XX Ectos or a rare miniature in front of them. Some of those people “take the bait,” and then the RMTer tells the player some song and dance about how, to prevent them getting caught for the transaction, the company will “place the gold directly on the player’s account.” Most people reading this will say, “Yeah, sure they will!” and laugh, but surprisingly enough, some players believe it, and they turn over their account credentials. 

While I personally believe that most MMO blog readers (especially the highly intelligent Kill Ten Rats readers) “wouldn’t fall for that trick,”  it is amazing that this problem is so widespread.  Gaile has a great point that I usually forget to take in to consideration when thinking about the gold farming business: the phisher is doing this all day long.  Statistically, they will find that one born every minute.  Anyway, in the hopes of helping a little public service announcement I thought I might pass that on.

In other news, it seems the that the ArenaNet Community Team had a two week break for the holidays.  Could this be because they won’t be getting another long break for awhile due to upcoming projects?  Hopefully that flood wall breaks soon enough.

–Ravious
…and his Desert Eagle .50

Guild Wars 2 Crumbs Follow-Up

Regina Buenaobra, one of ArenaNet’s Community Managers, took some time to clarify an ethereal post I wrote about the crumbs of Guild Wars 2 information found in the stockholder’s conference call.

The Kill Ten Rats / Massively posts make it appear as if NCsoft has a lot of direction over our marketing strategy, when this isn’t the case at all. The GW2 marketing strategy is determined by ArenaNet, not by NCsoft. The formation of NCsoft West ensures that all studios owned by NCsoft have the freedom to determine their own marketing strategies, in fitting with what they think is best for the games that they develop. NCsoft developed Aion, therefore NCsoft is determining Aion’s marketing strategy. What ArenaNet decides to do with GW2 is independent of what NCsoft wants to do with Aion.

I find the clarification heartening, but for a different reason than the obvious.  To be honest, I have lost a lot of faith in NCSoft.  After Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa makes strike two, but my problem is not the death of the games.  Rather, it is how they lived and died.  I do not think either should have been a part of the $15 flatline from the start, and I definitely think that there were other options than shutdown.  Options that may have retained more consumer confidence, perhaps.

So, I remain in this fearful dichotomy of my favorite developer being corrupted by its Korean overlord.  Regina brings a kind of salve to this fear.   Especially if ArenaNet is further layered away from shareholders by NCWest.  Now, back to writing more so-called articles.

–Ravious
…a reasonable amount of trouble.

Guild Wars 2 Crumbs: NCSoft Conference Call

This is not recent news (the NCSoft conference call was held on, I believe, November 12, 2008), but I had not seen this on the ‘sphere or Guild Wars fansite forums.  Thanks to Sente for the tip on the Guild Wars 2 tidbits in the conference call. Continue reading Guild Wars 2 Crumbs: NCSoft Conference Call

Guild Wars Wintersday 2008

Second, in my humble opinion, only to the Guild Wars Halloween event is Guild Wars Wintersday.   It starts this year on December 19th, and it ends next year on January 5th.  It’s a great event with new items, Wintersday quests, and of course, Dwayna Vs Grenth snowball PvP.

The Guild Wars Live Team has been pumping out content and updates and a terrific speed, but even after their megalithic updates from November, they continue to impress with all the new goodies coming to Wintersday 2008.  This year the Eye of the North will be decorated in Wintersday tradition, and one of the Ebon Vanguard’s soliders will have a new quest line to participate in.

Hopefully Guild Wars 2 news is just around the corner, but for now, ArenaNet keeps giving plenty of good reasons to return to the original Guild Wars.

–Ravious
You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.