Category: Guild Wars

[GW] Elegant Data Display on the Map

The Guild Wars world map is subtle and powerful.

The map is the primary means of travel: click on a town and you are there. This means that almost every zone is immediately accessible once visited, and reaching a new town is also a unit of character progress. This gives extra weight to the few places that require crossing multiple explorable zones to reach.

The map also shows progress on multiple tracks. Blurry terrain indicates Cartographer points to find, although you need a mod to get great precision. Each mission is tied to a town, so the town’s icon changes to indicate mission completion and whether you completed the mission bonus. Missions yet to be done flash gently. You can switch the map overlay to hard mode to see mission and Vanquisher completion there. All of this provides a trail of breadcrumbs for when you lose your place.

As is now common, you can track a quest and have its location appear on the map.

The weakest point is leaving a map. There are three maps for the three campaigns, and Eye of the North shares space with Prophecies. You switch maps by clicking on a boat, which makes sense in that you are sailing between continents. There is one major harbor per continent, and only Factions allows a team of eight in that town, so you need to re-select your heroes with most campaign switches. (You can get around that via Embark Beach or visiting Prophecies through the EotN portal.) Underground and hidden areas are not on the main map at all, so you need to go through portals or remember which explorable areas are caves that are not part of the world map.Part of Nightfall happens in another dimension, with an off-map mini-map. Dungeons are off-map, but their entrances are helpfully marked. I do not know what was supposed to indicate a secret portal from the Chantry of Secrets, but the wiki helped me when I was using reverse induction to find my way to a goal.

Of course, all of these are weaknesses within the context of the virtues. Most games use maps as maps with no interactive elements apart from fogging out unvisited areas.

: Zubon

[GW] Features That Probably Do Not Exist

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

Of Checklists

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

[GW] Hall of Monuments Time

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

[GW] Status Check

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

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

Responding to Incentives

I have repeatedly said that Guild Wars expects you to play with the wiki open. I have bowed to that and done what I should have a long time ago: set up a second monitor. Now I don’t need to alt-tab nearly as much. I am thinking about getting a USB video adapter for my wife’s laptop so that she can have Hulu on one screen and internet/documents on the other. She seems to listen to shows half the time.

: Zubon

[GW] Voice Acting

One significant improvement between the Guild Wars campaigns was the voice acting.

I haven’t heard much of Prophecies yet, but what I have suggests a need for better direction. It was as if they gave the voice actors individual lines to read without telling them what is going on, their motivation, etc. Maybe it improves; I am hitting Prophecies last. Factions was painful, and the subtitles were necessary. The voices themselves were not great, the voice acting and direction were random (not even following the emphasis listed in the subtitles), and then they added effects to the spirits’ voices to make them half-incomprehensible. Maybe there are some tropes of Asian cinema that they are faithfully reproducing, but after starting with how my character sounded in Nightfall, Factions just hurt every time … anyone came on screen.

But Nightfall is good, rather good. I enjoy both the voices and the acting. They are well-fitted to their parts, and not just because General Morgahn comes off as Morgan Freeman. Contrast the effects on the demons in Nightfall with the spirit envoys in Factions to show how to have the effect enhance the voice, not destroy it. Then we get to Eye of the North, and we have a range of good characters (not just Vekk). The quality of the lines in Nightfall was probably higher, but you must love Ogden (voice and lines) during the Norn arc. One simple bit I really liked was Jora, “Blood washes blood.” She says it three times in a short cutscene, but it has a different intonation each time. With the last one, she manages to imply hope, fatalism, and a suggestion that the wisdom of a thousand generations lies behind a three-word phrase.

Also, don’t you just love that scene between General Bayel and The Hunger in Nightfall?

: Zubon

It is much easier to find voice actor lists for shows than games.

[GW] In the Eddies of the Wind

While I have been thoroughly enjoying Zubon’s adventures through Guild Wars, I had hung up my spurs some time ago. I had vowed to return to the game when the Winds of Change portion of Guild Wars: Beyond was completed. Today marks that day. I wrote yesterday about the long journey to Guild Wars 2, where I suggested we all glance up to the horizon one more time. In that moment there is a peace as the sun and the wind meet at the top of the mountain. The sun warms the soul, but the wind is different. The brings smells and touch. It brings memories.

I have not played any of the Winds of Change except for the small bit I saw at Fan Day, but I am excited to do so. The Live Team seriously makes blood from stones. The love and energy they have for Guild Wars is simply amazing when the rest of the studio is so embedded in the upcoming Guild Wars 2. I hope, too, that they have helped teach ArenaNet how to run a Live Team so that the one for Guild Wars 2 will set off to a furious pace. John Stumme, head of the Live Team, writes a memoir of the main protagonist of Winds of Change, Miku, at the official blog. Continue reading [GW] In the Eddies of the Wind

Newb Boon

You do not need a comparative advantage to be the best at something [FTFY] to enjoy the benefits of trade, nor does your trading partner. Even if you can do absolutely everything better and more efficiently than I can, it will still benefit you to trade with me because you do not have the option of doing everything at once. I may shovel well, but if I am also a pretty good obstetrician, it will probably be more productive for me to pay someone with fewer high-value options to dig.

If you were to start playing World of Warcraft right now, you could make decent money farming copper. The enemies are not gray to you, so you would not be the most efficient farmer, but people who earn lots of gold per hour are happy to give you a bit of it on the auction house. On a non-trade example, when I went back to Asheron’s Call with a fresh account, I financed several dozen levels by hopping a portal to a high-level hunting zone and scavenging a pack of trash loot that players left in their wake. If I had thought of it, I could have made a service of being the town-visiting pet from Torchlight, if anyone would trust a new character with their stuff/money.

The past weekend was Canthan New Year in Guild Wars. This is an amazing source of money for a new player. Offering to sell Lunar Tokens for 200g and Fortunes for 600g, I was deluged with buyers. There were quests that rewarded 25 Tokens, and the established players had run them in previous years; they were effectively level 5 quests that awarded 5 platinum. I financed my first set of prestige armor off those. If you could get your newb to Lion’s Arch, you could convert Tokens to Fortunes profitably (if slowly) playing Rock-Paper-Scissors.

An economy that is orders of magnitude above where you are can be daunting, but if you can get involved in it at all, the profits to be reaped are huge.

: Zubon