Kill Ten Rats

In a moment of clarity, the obviousness of the connection apparent for years to most, I saw that Guild Wars 2 vistas must have been a nod to Assassin’s Creed’s viewpoints. In both games there is a player-initiated cutscene to showcase the environment. Cue panoramic music. Cue widescreen format. Except… there’s a difference, and it actually took me until Assassin’s Creed 3 to notice.

In Assassin’s Creed 3 the viewpoint scene gets a little more dramatic with a quick-pan/slow-pan combo angling around Connor (the player) who is standing dramatically above the earth, defiantly against the landscape. In Guild Wars 2, I was lucky to find my player in most of the vistas. I remember one of my favorites that I did a doubletake on to get a proper screenshot was where my character was clearly in small view on a fort in Fields of Ruin. Looking back, I am surprised to find that this was such a rare occurrence.

In 2014, I want Guild Wars 2 to have a little more player-oriented focus. I want my characters to have more screen time, and I want other players to have more screen time. Continue reading [GW2] 2014 Focus Wish – Eye’s On Me

I admit that I don’t have much of a competitive bone, so I need someone else to help me understand the meaning of this elusive term, “good fights.” Exactly what would be defined as one?
—Jeromai

I characterize “a good fight” as one with roughly balanced forces, where “balance” mixes quality and quantity. This applies to the two levels at which WvW takes place.

WvW competition happens at two levels: individual fights and overall score (“PPT,” points per turn). Individual players are rewarded according to individual fights, where you get points for kills and captures. (There are rewards for defending, but the system is weighted towards rewarding offense over defense. More on the virtues of defending below.) Servers are rewarded according to how many objectives they control over time (plus points for stomps). This post addresses the server level (“a good matchup”), and tomorrow we discuss the individual fights (“a good fight”).
Continue reading [GW2] “A Good Fight” Part 1

This week, the dice came down differently, and Isle of Janthir is the top seed in NA Bronze. This still leads to poor WvW, this time with us as the big guy. It is not as horrid a mismatch as Season One intentionally created, but IoJ took an early 20,000 point lead and has the second-highest score in NA. It is not “hold almost every keep on every map” unbalanced, but it is “flee before the larger zerg or die” unbalanced.

I had not seen a WvW queue on IoJ for over a month, so this week we get the bandwagon. This is a major factor in degrading the WvW experience. The winning team grows while the losing team shrinks as fairweather warriors follow the wind. The players in that swollen zerg have less experience, which nullifies the lone benefit we saw in the Season: developing a skilled core who could strategically fight against larger numbers. The average player is shaky on how to deal with opposing siege, and my limited time in WvW this weekend has not brought me into contact with our better commanders. Perhaps the ones who are on now are better militia coordinators and therefore better for the population we have on now, as opposed to precise folks who will not put up with ill-disciplined rabble.

Because the weight classes are closer, I did find good fights. In the Saturday night queue, guild members reported a stirring zerg vs. zerg vs. zerg fight on the order of 40-60 people from each server. Thumbs up! In off-hours fights, I had trouble finding relatively even numbers. We found some enemy zergs, but it was easier to tell we had more people once the bodies started falling. It wasn’t the instant faceroll 80 vs. 20 fights we have been the “20” of recently, but 50 vs. 30 is still a roll unless the 30 are much better. You cannot be just a bit better when zergbusting, because one person killed on your side can rally a half-dozen downed on their side, so it is hard to chip away at that 50.

I expected Crystal Desert to be carrying its matchup away, but they’re only about 10,000 points up as I type this. It is looking like our WvW weight class would be best suited by IoJ, North Shiverpeaks, and Henge of Denravi, but that is an unlikely trio given that tiers are trios. The dividing points round some servers up and others down in a way that is unfortunate given a spread that does not quite work out to trios.

: Zubon

Props to Fort Aspenwood for rocking tier 2.

A few turns of the moon ago I wrote about Guild Wars 2 having structured PvP (“sPvP”) as an insulated game separate from the first game. This last update has made one slight (from a gamer’s perspective) change that I feel is going to start felling that wall of insulation separating the first game (PvE et al.) from the second game (sPvP). The change is that sPvP is now part of the Guild Wars 2 economy.

This morning I did a very brief test. I played two rounds of sPvP on a random server (8v8). I lost one round and won the second round along with getting a bunch of top player points (more Glory). I made about 25 silver and around 300 Glory and change. (I meant to do more, I apologize, but a Scarlet Invasion and then Toypocalypse stole most of my time last night.)

Getting a dozen or so silver each match is a new thing. It does not compare to PvE champ farming or dungeon speed-running, but it is also a non-negligible amount. The most important thing is that the umbrella currency of gold does not become stagnant simply because one wants to play sPvP. Continue reading [GW2] Insulation-Breaking Gold in sPvP

It’s funny that I knew what Jeromai meant the second I saw his recent post title “A Very Merry Leisurely Wintersday”. It had already been mulling over the exact same thoughts. It’s the combination of Colin’s announcement that this recent Wintersday/Aftermath update was it until January 21, 2014 and the ease of the update that makes it feel leisurely. In one sense it feels like Guild Wars 2 is over for 2013.

However, I felt more like Jeromai in that I all of the sudden became a master of my time again. I wasn’t worried about WvW or getting up that dang tower one more time. The world was opened up before me. I am still mulling over whether this is a good or bad thing, and my gut check is that the roller coaster of Guild Wars 2 is better than not. Continue reading [GW2] Wintersday End

Can someone who knows WvW math better explain to me what is going on here? Continue reading [GW2] Post-Season

Hypothesis: the GW2 WvW Season One design for matching servers in large groups was horrible game design that turned WvW into PvE for most servers, but it may have been commercially successful in that it gave lots of easy wins to players who never wanted balanced matchups anyway.
Continue reading [GW2] WvW Seasons and Commercial Success