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[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

Quote of the Day

…I often play female characters in MMOs: not because I want to look at a cute bottom, but because I enjoy the juxtaposition of taking such an incarnation of loveliness, wrapping her in a hulking suit of armour, and having her kick the ten living arse bells out of a muscleheap of ogres.
— Melmoth

[GW2] WuvWuv Combat

I came back from vacation just in time for a rise and shiny blog post from ArenaNet discussing the particulars of their World vs. World vs. World system (a.k.a. WvW pronounced WuvWuv [says my cold-addled brain]) in Guild Wars 2. To recap: three servers are pitted against each other to fight over objectives on 3 Borderlands maps spoked out from a central Eternal Battlegrounds map. Points accumulate for your server to create server-wide bonuses. Every two-weeks servers are re-ranked and pitted against servers of like rank. So yes, all the RP servers will have the chance to /emote battle since they will all be ranked together. The whole article is great, and really in-depth. It is a must read for any RvR, or the like, fan.

There are a few interesting points. The first is that the WvW holds some “absolutely gigantic” maps capable of holding over 300 players each. It appears that over 400 players can fight for their same server at a time, which gives a hint to possible server sizes. Between all the ways to play in Guild Wars 2, such as PvE, PvP, and WvW, it will be interesting to see what a “healthy” server size will be. Continue reading [GW2] WuvWuv Combat

[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.

[Rift] Soul Train

This sounds like a really good idea, and it sounds like it is being implemented well. Kudos.

I wondering about crossing this (or the Guild Wars skill templates) with a standard mod sharing interface. You would open up a menu of builds in use, possibly player-built but why not just automatically pull the data on what is in use? Is there some sane way to show the central tendency of other players? You would not want specially named builds, and perhaps souls provide too much granularity for an effective display. Perhaps something like X is the most popular skill/soul/whatever, 30% of players choose combination ABC as three of their GW2 warrior skills, etc. I would also want some index beyond popularity, say xp earned or kills using that build, to keep people from intentionally messing with stats by, say, making Uber Warrior Build as a main then filling every slot on every other server with a level 1 using a crap build. I don’t know if enough people would do that to seriously throw off stats, but I can see the effort being made to break any game system.

: Zubon