Kill Ten Rats

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

The Guild Wars 2 Black Lion Trading Company is an amazing feat in MMOs. Every time I play I am amazed at how intuitive and powerful it is. There is room for improvement for sure, with the biggest improvement simply being the ability not to get crushed by hundreds of thousands of players. Yet, this is possibly my favorite trading place in an MMO yet.

Magnitudes and Multitudes

I wish I could be John “The Merovingian” Smith for one day. The amount of data that hundreds of thousands of players are providing within the gem exchange and trading post has got to be wonderfully suffocating. Money is finally moving in Guild Wars 2 with the trading post being up more than not, and the ability to see all the streams has got to give Mr. Smith something of a god complex. Continue reading [GW2] Black Lion Boiler Room

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

If you find that you’ve been caught red-handed with an exploit in Guild Wars 2, here is some good data on the success rate of various appeal inquiries:

Players who wrote, “I’ll delete the items,” are getting their appeals approved. Players who wrote, “f— off, I’ll see you in hell before I delete these items,” are not getting their appeals approved.

~ MO (via Reddit)

It might also help more if you learned to say sorry.

In other news, be sure to check out this truly fantastic jumping puzzle guide at Hunter’s Insight. The fact that he tries to keep it puzzle spoiler free and just wants to get players to the beginning is a really good idea.

–Ravious

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

Going through the PvE zones at a calmer, realer pace is an eye opener compared to the brief periods of play I had before launch. The questless design is simply a different animal than a quest-based MMO. I wouldn’t say that one has victory of the other, but I do know that I am having more fun in Guild Wars 2 than I’ve had knocking out all the quests in a hub and then moving on.

The biggest side effect is the “who cares” effect. I am not fighting for resources or time against other players anymore. We are not racing to the shiny moss or seeing who can tag the respawn first. I am just about to kill a centaur and Joe Bob Ranger runs up and hits it for a few shots. I know he will get experience and loot, and who cares. Some people still do, it seems, as I’ve seen a few chat occasions where players whine about leeching.

For the most part open world PvE can be played “solo”. Ignore downed players. Don’t join events. Play how you want to. The game, I feel, is a lot more fun when my actions do respond to the nearby players. If I see a player taking down a normal mob, I will help out. I may have only saved that player a second or two of their time, but I also get an easier pass at experience and loot. Not a bad tradeoff. Continue reading [GW2] Questless Side-Effects