JM1
1721
Actually, yes. It’s still very easy to miss out on dynamic events - which are very cool - because the detection radius for them is still pretty small. So players might not see many of them if they travel between the bits they know will provide ‘questing’, i.e. the hearts.
If players are more aware of the system, then it’s not a problem. Just like the fact that you can trigger dynamic events just from talking to NPCs.
That’s my point. It isn’t about leveling up as fast as possible, it’s about educating players that this isn’t WoW and encouraging them to explore the landscape around them.
Many people don’t understand this and instead resort to complaining about level gain when the emphasis shouldn’t be on level gain to begin with but simply playing the game. You’d be surprised just how much of a foreign concept this is to people, particularly in the MMO genre.
That’s, I think, kind of a point. Dynamic events are supposed to provide you with that “adventure feeling”, when you are going somewhere minding your own business, see something happening and decide (or not) to participate. Some events happen just on top of the hearts, some - in between and some - in the remote hidden areas. You are supposed to bump into them, find them, not be guided towards them with a blinking arrow on your GUI.
I really don’t want tons of players beelining to an event as soon as it starts, similarly to what happened in Rift. It is very cool when the “player’s side” is undermanned and the event gets really hard or even fails and goes into completely different “sub-events”. That’s the whole point of the system.
That’s ok to miss some events, the world does not revolve around you as a player in this game. Maybe you’ll miss that centaur attack on some village, maybe centaurs will take over that village, that’s ok. Next time you are in that area, maybe you will take part in kicking them out of there. Or maybe not, maybe you will be kicking some skrit butt in another area.
It’s supposed to be a dynamic and surprising world, you are not supposed to run from one blip on the map to the next one hoping that the zerg of players won’t finish the event before you get there.
Yeah, I see what you mean. Many people got used to be spoon fed their “entertainment” and if something is not working as THEY imagine it should be, they go on forums and complain instead of trying to find solution to their issues in-game.
Lol and then a few years later they start complaining that WoW became mind numbingly easy and boring due to all the hand-handling. :)
On the other hand, it’s gotta be hard to “teach” people that they are supposed to play the game instead of jumping from one “place where they give exp” to another.
JM1
1725
We’re talking in the context of some players finding themselves underlevelled and not having seen many dynamic events, but having done all the hearts. I appreciate the intent behind the system but there’s a balance between “everyone zergs the events” and “complete entire zone of hearts and see 5% of events”.
The events are the best bit about GW2’s PVE.
Yeah, and I hope they find that balance. I just really don’t want them to start broadcasting the events.
BTW, I thought about one thing. Skill points are pretty nice to have and IMO always in demand. When leveling through your race’s zones, you get enough skill points to get the skills you need if you know exactly what you need. If you want to experiment a bit or want to have different skills for different situations, you will want to go and visit other zones sooner or later.
Therefore, if you are ever in a situation where you feel you are a bit underleveled, might as well go and grab those skill points from other zones. You will want to do it sooner or later anyway and doing it when you are still fairly low level will provide with quite a nice exp bump. You don’t even need to “quest” there, just beeline to the skill challenges. And you will get lots of exploration exp naturally too.
JM1
1727
Yeah, especially with the tier system meaning your skills get more expensive. You’ll want to grab points as much as possible. I made sure I went to some other racial areas just to get skill points.
yep that write up pushed me over the edge… I just pre-ordeded it from GMGfor $50.
:p
Really? As much as I love ArenaNet, I found that writeup to be pretty cheesy and marketing oriented. “Using fun as our main metric”, come on, it sounds stupid even in a marketing piece. :)
JM1
1731
Except he’s talking about a game genre where user experience often comes a distant second to anything that might maximise subscription revenue.
KevinC
1732
Right. Behold, Exhibit A, all the unnecessary and pointless time sinks in SWTOR. Also, the discussion about how their QA works was interesting to me.
I’d say it’s just marketing except for the fact that the game is obviously designed this way. I don’t think it’s empty marketing speak, you can see it in everything about the game. No raids. You get boosted to L80 in PVP. You can start a max level character in SPVP. Fast travel. It’s something my friends and I have discussed (read: moaned and complained) for a long time. If MMOs just tried to be a FUN game we would continue to play it, but somehow that doesn’t happen. Instead you get pointless timesinks and grinds. Once you get past the initial wow factor (no pun intended) of a MMO experience, it’s pretty easy to see behind the curtains. Then you take a game like SWTOR and they don’t even try to candy-coat it anymore.
Quest:
- You’re on Planet H. Please walk all the way back to your ship (sorry, we forgot to put a taxi node near the spaceport… again!).
- Fly your ship back to the Planet B, Drommond Kaas (or whatever it was called).
- Walk to the furthest point possible on the map, buried in caves so you can’t use a mount.
- Talk to NPC.
- Walk all the way back to the spaceport (oops, we did it again!) and fly back to planet H where you started to continue the quest.
Is that fun? That took me like 20 fucking minutes and it was sheer tedium. One quest that I had similar to that was to leave the planet I was on, fly all the way to the fleet, talk to an NPC, and then fly back to the planet I was originally on. To make it was, the NPC didn’t even have dialog. I just right-clicked on him and the quest updated to go back to where I started.
Anyway, MMO-rage aside, I quit in disgust over that. It’s why I’ve quit every other MMO out there as well. The games aren’t about fun, they’re about milking a subscription as long as they can. This blog post isn’t the first talk ArenaNet has talked about this (it’s in their MMO manifesto) but I was beyond excited to see from my experience in the BWEs that they’re actually following through on it.
It sounds stupid, but it’s been a long ass time I’ve seen an MMO focus on trying to be a fun game first rather than an income stream to manage with the unfortunate game bits required to be built around it.
Well, when you think about it, there’s no incentive to milk a subscription fee when there’s no subscription fee.
Yup it is a bit cheesy but ArenaNet is making all the right noises. Their game is built from the ground up to remove annoying gameplay decisions that plague other MMO’s.
KevinC
1735
Yep, exactly. And it makes a huge difference in how you approach the game design. Designing around the subscription feels like putting the horse in front of the cart, for me, but sadly the MMO landscape over the past 6+ years is littered with the wreckage of MMOs who made the same mistakes over and over. It’s like they expect if they just mimic WoW and slap a $15/mo price tag on it people will continue to pay for that in perpetuity while ignoring the fact that WoW was a bit of a paradigm shift in how a Diku MMO was crafted (quest hub vs static monster camps).
OMG OMG OMG, stress test on the 27th! :D :D :D
Edit: Told you Anet was up to something. :)
Perfect time for the unemployed Guild Wars 2 fans out there!
Gedd
1738
Hah yeah. I saw the announcement popup in my RSS reader, and then I saw the times. Have fun school kids and night shift workers!
walTer
1739
So that means it won’t be over-stressful and the game will be released on July 4th?
/back to twiddling thumbs but happier now
So, here are some interesting facts:
BWE 1 was: April 27th to April 29th.
Stress Test #1 was: May 14th. (15 days after BWE1)
BWE 2 was: June 8th to June 10th. (25 days after Stress Test #1, 40 days after BWE #1)
Stress Test #2 is: June 27th. (17 days after BWE #2)
With that information in mind, it’s probable that BWE 2 will happen at least 15 days after the second stress test. Keep in mind that Memorial’s Day likely had an impact in delaying BWE 2.
So, BWE 3’s likely date is: July 13th to July 15th.
EDIT: After some more thought, BWE 3 makes more sense July 20th to July 22nd. There’s just too little time between the stress test and BWE 3 for a date announcement on BWE 3.
