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[GW2] Conditioning The Precious

As part of the pre-PAX week, ArenaNet has posted an article on their blog about Attributes and Iteration. It’s a great read for anybody interested in the nuts, bolts, and granular advancement of their future Guild Wars 2 characters. I definitely appreciate the newly updated attribute system because truth be told, I really did not care for the one I saw last year. The simpler the better, I say, but I do agree that there has to be enough attributes to cause a choice. This choice is compounded by itemization, where Izzy writes:

With our current implementation of the item system, items raise single attributes higher than when they raise a pair. However, the total number of points will be higher for a two-attribute item than for an item affecting a single attribute. For example, a Rare Ruby Ring gives +40 power; an equal level Gold Topaz Ring gives +33 power and +25 vitality; and a Pearl Ring gives +25 power, +25 vitality, and +25 toughness. This item system enhances another choice: do you max out one attribute or raise the total effectiveness of all your attributes? The character who deals the highest raw damage is someone who has maximized the offensive attributes, but the character who diversifies becomes a jack-of-all-trades while mastering none.

Except that rarity could already affecting the choice. I am making a decent assumption here that we have a gleaming Rare Ruby Ring, a notable Gold Topaz Ring, and a Pearl Ring likely caked with oyster byproduct gnarling the hands of wearers and passersby. I am not going to go so far as to say that this itemization example is definitive for the whole Guild Wars 2 system, but it is interesting to examine.

Continue reading [GW2] Conditioning The Precious

[GW2] Art and Stealing

Over at GuildWars2Guru, Actionjack is still going strong with the Can I Play GW2? webcomic. He’s created about 80 strips, but that doesn’t include all the variants and asides as well. They are simply fantastic, and rightfully we’ve plugged them before. My favorite thing is the effect Actionjack is having on this one Guild Wars 2 community. Creative people are rallying around his comic, making their own versions to thank him, and Actionjack is running a weekly Art Challenge with a simple Guild Wars 2 subject as the concept. This week it’s a norn thief. So, if you are artistically inclined definitely check out those threads. Finally, I wanted to republish an Actionjack-inspired piece drawn by Husky detailing one of the newly revealed thief mechanics: stealing. It amuses me every time, and it really hits home exactly what the stealing mechanic does. The thief takes something from an enemy then uses it against them. Perhaps the two would want to band together and draw tutorial strips for all the profession mechanics? (wink, wink)

–Ravious

Different Directions

Tobold ponders the directions of WoW and Rift. WoW, he says, is pushing raiding towards high selectivity based on gear and/or skill (I find the former more annoying in a game). Rift, he says, merrily invites everyone by having easier content and not limiting numbers. Players, he suggests, seem to be preferring the latter; I might append that vocal players of Rift seem to be expressing that preference, while subscriber numbers make it premature to ponder anything as a WoW-killer.

The day before, a LotRO developer diary lovingly described the design philosophy behind the new raid: higher difficulty, perfect execution, learning via wiping repeatedly. It explicitly contrasts skirmish Tier II (higher numbers) with the new raid Tier II (different abilities), although I might again append that I would be surprised if higher numbers (i.e. gear dependency) were not a factor.

My long-running game was City of Heroes, so I enter with an expectation that you can bring a full group of almost anything and beat almost anything. A few fights all but demand something from a small set of options, but those are notable because they are rare rather than the norm. Add to this the City of Heroes assumption that you will be able to play with your friends now rather than waiting two months for them to hit the level cap, and you have a very different philosophy than gear-gated tiers of raids.

I refer back to Tobold’s excellent discussion: does this encounter test the worst, best, or average player? The most restrictive content will test the worst player. Raids demanding synchronized dance and perfect execution wipe if you add one new or slightly undergeared guy. (See Spinks on the different effects of this philosophy in single- and multi-player games, or try a LotRO PUG Durchest raid in which one of your three tanks is not geared above the boss’s potential one-shot damage range.) Not restricting encounters by player count gives you a fourth option: testing the sum, so you can beat the Rift by bringing more people. Combining unrestricted attendance with testing the worst player would be apocalyptically horrible.

I cannot tell you what the mass market wants, because I am obviously an outlier, but I will favor a design that makes it easier to join with my friends, all of them, whatever level they are. Lowering the minimum difficulty threshold tends to do that.

: Zubon

Apologists

The population distribution on forums has very long tails, but I still find myself curious about some of these people. There is a substrain of fanboyism that I call apologetics: some fans cheer their games or boo the others, but these folks are devoted to defending the game against complaints, right or wrong, and seemingly most loudly when least defensibly.

The stages of denial seem to be denying that something happens, denying that it is a problem, and denying its importance. This is the politest case, assuming it does not collapse into personal attacks during step one. To take last week’s example (now solved), this was an obvious and acknowledged problem including a customer effort to track it, and here we have players announcing that they play on four lag-free servers and maybe you should stop buying K-Mart blue light special computers. When Qaddafi says there are no problems in Libya, I get the motives and delusions in play, but is there some sort of e-peen value to defending the honor of a corporation’s servers?

A recent favorite is a highly rated comment on a flash game that paraphrased to: “Okay, this game isn’t very good, but you should not badmouth it because the guy makes a lot of flash games and many of them are better.”

Some people troll, but you get the sense that some really see themselves as the company’s defenders. They think they are helping. Maybe they believe their own propaganda and think their games are perfectly balanced, lag- and exploit-free utopias, undermined only by an impossible to please playerbase. They at least think you should believe it. They are rude and abusive to people with (potentially legitimate) issues. Do they really think the Alpha Nerd approach works? Maybe that the problems will go away if they can drive away dissenting players? I can almost hear Sanya saying, “Stop telling my customers to go back to WoW!”

: Zubon

[GW2] Front Loaded

The thief profession is starting to get pieced together as fans act like archaeologists piecing together what was once whole from fragments offered by GDC ’11 videos. The thief seems pretty well understood being a very mobile, very dangerous, and very squishy class in Guild Wars 2. It can steal skills from enemies, go into a Predator-mode stealth, shadow-step (warp), and so on. It’s a pretty cool profession that seems a little more complex than the other 5 released professions. It has one mechanic though that breaks the rules. It’s weapon skills have the costs front-loaded, which amplifies the risk for each weapon skill activation. But, that seems to be what the thief is all about, the Master of Risk.

Continue reading [GW2] Front Loaded

I Feel Safer

guarding This is not a guard on patrol about to turn around. He does not move. The sentry is staring into a corner while a poorly designed outhouse sneaks up on him.

He is guarding the secret camp of the rangers, which I found unaided on my first time in the zone because there is a giant horse head marking the spot, to say nothing of the road leading there.

: Zubon

[GW] Embark to a Mega Update

Today is the day Guild Wars will move on. It’s not a swan song per se, but I just can’t imagine Guild Wars having any further update bigger than the one for today. This update will change the game to such a degree that it might as well be Guild Wars 1.5 now. This is not to belittle the upcoming story content updates, which I am anticipating heavily, but just to paint a brief notion of the magnitude of this thing. First, here’s a WarTower interview with Live Team head, John Stumme:


Continue reading [GW] Embark to a Mega Update

[GW2] No. 6, The Thief

EDIT: And we’re back. Changed all links to fav site, Massively.

So much Guild Wars news today, but first I will start with the unexpected bomb so I can spend more time working on a post for the Guild Wars update later today. It seems that Massively received a pretty good demo at GDC, where they filmed it entirely. We know about the first part being the norn starting area, which was expected for the new demo coming out. And then at Massively’s demo the presenter casually drops that “oh yeah, the sixth profession is the thief. Play it.” I have to say I was not expecting another profession reveal before PAX, and I definitely was not expecting it in the updated demo/presentation.

Continue reading [GW2] No. 6, The Thief

[GW2] The Thief Unrung

It appears that megasite GameTrailers did ignore an NDA/embargo on the release of the sixth Guild Wars 2 profession, which I was unaware of when I wrote the thief post here. Out of respect for ArenaNet, and more importantly the people that worked on and were excited about releasing the thief, I am taking down my post until official release. Comments and the post are preserved behind Door #43.

It’s a tough decision between sticking it to the man, information must be free, we know anyway, and respect. I feel better inside taking it down, and I hope no one is offended. I expect that the post with modifications from official news will go back up in a week.

Thanks.

–Ravious