4681

There are a lot of games that would be massive failures if they were subscription based, because there are pretty key elements to the design of such games that keep people paying.

GW2 wasn’t designed to be a subscription game. It never was going to be a subscription game. You can see this in all aspects of the design of the game. It sure as fuck would have failed as a subscription game because it doesn’t have the usual MMO bullshit psychological hooks built in to keep you constantly playing and paying to chase carrots for months and years on end.

Commenting that the game wouldn’t work as a subscription game, like that’s some meaningful, relevant point, is fucking retarded for a game that isn’t designed from the ground up to be subscription-based. Hell, Diablo 3 probably would stand a better chance of supporting a subscription, but I don’t think it provides a large enough illusion of diverse content as would be needed to convince people it’d be a constant value for their money.

4682

I called out the Engy one specifically because in addition to the AE rez it also is an AE cleanse, stun breaker, gives you 100% endurance refill, and with traits can additionally cleanse even more. So it’s all-around a great dungeon ability that does just about everything utility you could want for one slot.

The warrior rez-banner I called out because I think it’s more useful than the other elite skill options, provides a group buff, and can be used to trigger blast combos, but that might depend on if your race has a solid racial elite that fills in that skill slot better. That’s honestly most of my experience with rez skills, but I’ve found them to be handy. I’m not advocating the use of skills that ONLY rez and do nothing else useful, because I’d agree that’d be a wasted slot most of the time.

4683

Yep, you are right, now that I looked at all classes revives - these two do look like great all around abilities and in case of the warrior it seems like a better elite alternative.

The rest of the classes have more “specialized” revival skills - they are either signets that provide a pretty insignificant buff that obviously goes away for a long time after revival (Guardian, Necro), straight revives (Ranger, Elementalist, although ele’s revive can be looked at as a single target full heal with a prerequisite, still not that useful in dungeons IMO) or a completely stupid straight revive with a caveat (Mesmer).

My main two classes are Guardian and Mesmer hence my initial complete dismissal. :)

4684

Gedd, I just realized that my posts above, while spawned (indirectly) by your question, they don’t really help you in any way. So I’ll try to give some generic points that you might find useful. As you said earlier, it’s hard to give any specific advises without looking at your group fighting but maybe these generic ones will help you somewhat.

  1. Well, obviously, voice communication helps but I think you already have that.

  2. Have one person to be a dedicated target caller and make sure everyone else also knows how to do that in case the main goes down and has to run back. To call a target either “ctrl-click” the mob or select a mob and then press “ctrl-T” (that’s assuming you haven’t changed the default keybinding). The rest of the group just needs to press T to select the target.

  3. Make sure everyone concentrates majority of their dps on the called target (with some exceptions we’ll discuss later).

  4. As a general rule, in a multi-mob pull, target and kill the ranged mobs first - you can kite/cripple/avoid melee mobs, can’t do that with ranged. Also, of course, kill first the mobs with not much health but strong attacks. Leave “non-elite” mobs alone, they usually die from all the AOE.

  5. Look at what your enemies are doing. Lots of shooters? Make your group equip reflection skills, like Mesmer’s Feedback, Guardian’s Reflective Wall, Thief’s Smoke Screen, etc. Lots of condition damage? Stock on condition removal skills. Lots of direct damage? Stock on Protection skills.

  6. Consider your group’s CC options, the more you have, the merrier. In a multi-mob pull, everyone in a group should use whatever CC they have all the imte. (And this is the exception to rule 3 - people should dps the main target but they also should switch to adds, CC them, then switch back to the main target.) Generally, the goal is to have all CC skills to be always on cooldown but try and not apply 2 different CCs at the same time - it’s not very useful to knockdown a crippled enemy that can’t catch up to anyone anyway.

  7. At the same time, remember that no one can straight tank a dungeon mob and no one can heal through the damage those mobs do. Survival is the entire group’s concern. Every class has skills that help them to survive and/or help other people to survive. Any single heal or buff might sound insignificant or too short in duration when applied once by one person but when everyone is applying them, they end up being VERY significant. The same goes for debuffs.

  8. During hard multi-mob pulls, your group needs to find a balance between CC’ing adds and CC’ing the main target. Often mobs have AoE attacks as well and you really don’t want a couple of them to get together, keep them apart. Sometimes, you’ll need to have a dedicated “kiter” to keep an add busy, pretty much any class can do that depending on the build and personal skill, just pick someone who seems to know how to survive and has lots of sill to avoid damage or CC the mob.

  9. Everyone in a group should also take care of himself. Use skills, dodge, see where the mobs are, break LOS if you get shot at, etc. Or hide behind a groupmate if shot at, if he has full health and you are about to die. I noticed that a group can usually do ok if they’ve got one “sloppy” member. Two “sloppy” members can be a problem - the remaining three should REALLY be at their best.

  10. You mentioned dog packs in CM. We usually target dogs first, the guy usually stays back and shoots. We AoE the dogs and pull them back further while creating reflective walls between us and the dude. Between the walls and him having to adjust his position all the time and his target(s) hiding around corner from him sometimes, his dps REALLY goes down and he is not that much of a threat really. We even had a warrior straight tank him once while we dealt with dogs.

Gotta go, sorry, but this post got too big anyway. :) Shoot questions or describe particular situations if you need more info!

4685

I said the point was debatable. If your only recourse is to stomp your foot and keep repeating that Phred’s comment was fucking retarded, then why have a discussion?

The more interesting question is that for a game like GW2 how do we as gamers measure its relative success? Box sales, active players, some other criteria? JM offered that GW2 is an example of great design. Is it? I found parts of the game to be well done, while others less far less polished and incomplete. Depending upon where and how you spend your time in game, GW2 can be hit or miss.

4686

On the whole, I would argue that GW2 is great design. It’s not perfect, but you can tell that a lot of thought went into the game. They didn’t just copy a proven formula. Instead they broke that formula down, examined its parts, tossed out what they thought was bad, added what they thought was good, and then rebuilt it from the ground up.

I still love it. While I don’t play the ridiculous numbers of hours I was playing for the first six weeks, I still probably average an hour or two a day. I’ve got four 80s and three other characters I’m working on getting to 80 (I’ll eventually get around to mesmer as well).

To be fair, a part of it is that the game is firmly in my wheelhouse. While I’ve enjoyed the loot chase in games in the past, I no longer have much interest in that, so GW2’s lack of a gear grind appeals to me. I vastly prefer the more open-ended exploration style of PvE available in GW2 over the more rigid quest structure of games like WoW, LotRO, and SW:ToR. The epic story is pretty rigid, but I usually start neglecting it around level 50 where the different storypaths converge.

I would say the game was a success. That’s just my opinion though. Arenanet is the only one who can truly say, and they haven’t said (as far as I know).

4687

It’s a premium MMO without a subscription. I would think to measure a game like that would be a combination of box sales, retention and retention to additional sales. I am not sure what Anet has decided is a good number turning box sales into additional sales. The percentage, I think, wouldn’t be huge, but having the other players stick around is a benefit, especially in this game, to those who are paying more. I am trying to decide when and what to do with my ten bucks.

4688

Polish isn’t design. I’m not sure where you’re going with this.

4689

Thinking more in terms of the larger picture of how the parts of the game are integrated, and if the sum is more or less than its parts. Reading through the official forums and chatting with folks in game, most give high marks for the early to mid-zones of PvE. End zone PvE, tradeskills, trading post, WvW, receive the bulk of the criticism. Some of this is missing features. But other components, for example WvW, seem to lack a compelling design that will retain the interest of players.

A couple of examples. To Anet’s credit, they removed the orbs from WvW last week because of problems with hacking and the fact that orbs actually buffed the winning server with stat and hit point bonuses. This lead to a snowball situation where servers that controlled the orbs (legitmately or not) became even more powerful. Several of the WvW tiers turned into ghost towns as the losing servers stopped competing in WvW. Losing servers, which lacked players, received the outmanned buff, which instead of helping in WvW, gave bonuses more appropriate for PvE. These were design choices.

Another example is the role of commander. For 100g, any player can obtain the blue commander icon. The current design of WvW encourages players to follow the blue icon around the map, which leads to more zerging. Players are free to not follow the commander, and pursue other goals, but most do not. Time and again, players abandon the map if no commander icon is visible in the field. They have been trained in WvW to look for the blue icon and rely on the commander.

There is a lot more about the WvW experience worth discussion if folks are interested, but perhaps the basic design question is this: Is WvW intended to be more of a deathmatch experience with shallow game play that will appeal to particular players, or does the current design of WvW offer something more?

4690

Design also needs polishing, if some parts of the design are not well polished, it pretty much means those parts are not that well designed. I think this is what Seneca means. We can look at the recently removed WvW orbs as an example.

No game can be perfect and no game can be awesome for everyone. I think Derbain said it best a few posts up and from that point of view GW2 was an achievement, it already earned its place in gaming history and overall moved the MMO genre forward.

Measuring it success in any objective way is going to be a challenge. It’s not a subscription game, so ANet or NCSoft are not obligated to disclose the number of active players.

No subscription also means that people feel perfectly fine putting GW2 aside for awhile, playing some other game and coming back to it a month later to have a look at the new content/event ANet came up with. IMO this kind of model is fine (and certainly works GREAT for me) but it might hurt the WvW side of the game, I have a feeling their server vs server version of PvP is not best suited for a no-sub game.

Speaking of new content, have you guys seen the Lost Shore announcement?
Sounds great and I wonder if ANet will be able to sustain this kind of aggressive post-launch content production. But so far so good, releasing events of this kind of scale on a monthly schedule is pretty much unprecedented.

4691

Hehe, funny how Seneca and I posted at pretty much the same time and brought up pretty much the same things. :)

I think you are putting too much undeserved emphasis on little design pieces. Look at orbs. Sure, they weren’t exactly an example of perfectly designed system but did they cause what you say they did? Definitely not, look for yourself, the orbs are now removed but most people still stop fighting once some server gets a significant lead. It’s just people’s nature. Orbs were a nice convenient excuse but now that they are gone, people will come up with new one(s).

The same about commanders. People don’t zerg because there are commanders. People zerg because it’s the best way to survive and get stuff in WvW right now. Remove commanders and people will use crossed swords to zerg up. Remove the swords, people will use chat, etc. For as long us zerging provides all the benefits and no drawbacks, people will zerg. Just like in any other game.

And again, commander system is not that well designed (why does spending 100g make you qualified to be a WvW commander?) and should be re-designed but it doesn’t really cause what you say it does. The reasons for the issues WvW is experiencing right now are much deeper. I would even say there are fundamental issues with WvW and no little features can make WvW significantly better or worse.

But than again, I also tend to be a bit over melodramatic when it comes to fundamental issues. :)

There is a lot more about the WvW experience worth discussion if folks are interested, but perhaps the basic design question is this: Is WvW intended to be more of a deathmatch experience with shallow game play that will appeal to particular players, or does the current design of WvW offer something more?

I would say the current design of WvW does not offer an outstanding long term deathmatch experience and as of now can’t offer anything more. IMO it’s stuck somewhere in between and ANet needs to decide where they want it to go and re-design it accordingly.

It’s my personal opinion though because I expected a lot more from WvW. Maybe it works great for other (most?) people, no idea.

4692

Thanks Stridergg, that is what I was trying to articulate. Your question about if server versus server pvp is best suited for a non sub game is exactly where I was headed.

4693

Stridergg, all good points and I agree with you. Zerging is not directly caused by the commander icon, but perhaps it might be fair to say that it is one of a number of design factors that facilitates the zerg.

4694

It’s nonsense, though. The orbs don’t need “polish”, they were poorly thought out to begin with, ergo not great design. Polish means the nice-to-haves, user experience, etc. Making sure that the player gets to interact with the systems you designed in the manner that you want them to, without poor coding or UI getting in the way.

And something being hacked and abused isn’t a design problem either. Abuse of game mechanics without the use of 3rd party tools or hacks? Sure.

Look, I say GW2 has great design because in so many areas of the game it’s plain that ArenaNET have taken a long look at the status quo and said “We can do this differently. We can do this better.” and then done just exactly that. It’s not a perfect game and some of it doesn’t work. Most of it does, and does it brilliantly.

Which is why the SWTOR comment was absurd. SWTOR does very little well, and it’s a tired rehash of tens of other games. It’s unoriginal, and provides an experience that has been bettered by games that have been out for years already. SWTOR nosedived because it was poorly designed and poorly implemented; GW2 has been a success because it was cleverly designed and mostly pretty well implemented.

4695

Certainly. Along with the stupid 5-person limit to AoEs, along with the human’s basic herding instinct, along with basic military common sense where numbers usually do provide advantage, etc. :)

IMO, the problem with “world PvP” in any of the games released so far is that games are trying to model a military conflict but have to simplify it a lot to keep the complexity under control. In real life, zergs have inherent disadvantages - people need food, shelter, ammo and washrooms, devices need spare parts and consumables, moving the zerg requires good roads, communications and scouting, blah blah blah. In a game, none of these limitations exist and there is no disadvantages or significant challenges in bringing gazillion of people together in one spot, therefore zerging is the best tactic.

I have no idea how to model all that stuff into a game, I am not a professional game designer. By nature, non-professionals are good at whining about issues and are bad at identifying core reasons and are even worse at coming up with feasible solutions. So that’s what I (and the rest of the community) am doing - whining. :)

I don’t want to be an armchair designer and pretend I know how to fix stuff, all I can say is that I feel there are fundamental long term issues with GW2 WvW (or any game’s open world PvP for that matter) that cannot be resolved by simple removal of orbs, commander icons or anything else simple like that.

4696

Well; Adding “mass” to players so you couldn’t run through each other as well as adding Friendly fire would make zerging a lot more challenging. And having mass would probably make the game behave even more like Warhammer in terms of performance and not being able to see any enemies due to culling.

4697

You give a pretty narrow definition of polish. Fundamentals also need polishing to make sure your systems work together they way you intended them to. Sometimes pieces of a system sound great on paper but you need to re-visit them once they all are put together, review and, well, polish, the end result.

It’s all semantics though, let’s not discuss definition of words. The bottom line is that Seneca tried to say that some parts of GW2 are not that well designed, the game is not 100% perfect and I think no one will argue with that.

At the same time, and I agree with you, IMO GW2 is a damn well designed game as a whole.

4698

I thought I made it fairly clear I was talking about the comparison to SWTOR which Seneca picked me up on. Wood for the trees and all that.

4699

Exactly, that’s a very good point. Technology by itself introduces a whole bunch of challenges.

Hehe, I don’t know what to think about friendly fire though. :) It sounds hilarious and terrifying at the same time. Oh and one more challenge - griefing.

The more I think about it, the more I don’t envy game designers. :) With all the challenges and limitations to consider, they have a damn hard job. :)

4700

JM, as we clarified upthread the intent was to have a discussion about components of the design that worked or needed re-look. It is meant to be a conversation about GW2, not an indictment. For a game that many of us have played and enjoyed, the thread was collecting dust on the third and fourth page for most of the last couple of weeks.