Learning From Other MMOs the good and bad

they are bringing back oldschool iway for gw2?

Because that's not how it works. In fact it's the exact opposite: it removes all challenge. Any area you enter is always pre-chewed just for you, for what you can easily handle.
Not only that, but it encourages "tactical levelling", ie avoiding levelling before killing certain enemies which would otherwise be difficult.

Also, a dungeon is not actually new & fresh when you return to it just because you're now a level 20 fighting level 20 goblins instead of a level 2 fighting levle 2 goblins. You don't get more content by adjusting mob level to the player.

Two games illustrate this beautifully: Oblivion, which adjusts mobs to the player (so you can hop on your horse and ride anywhere in the world without having to face anything worse than lvl 1 goblins), and on the other extreme we have Gothic, which does not adjust mobs (and where wandering off into the wilderness while at low level will quickly make you very dead).

I love the idea of having monsters scale to the level of the character - in conjunction with the sidekicking system, this would solve so many problems that other games run into.

Having a monster higher leveled than you doesn't make it challenging - it makes it so your numbers lose to its numbers. Challenge comes from designed the encounter to be a challenge: The monsters use their skills well, are part of a balanced group which has a good cooperative AI, and have tactically challenging abilities.

Things to learn from:

WAR's PvP zone design - if you're going to do world PvP, you must study places like Praag in WAR. The zone design allows for so much flavor and tactical complexity in an activity (25 vs 25 zergfests) that could very well feel bland and skilless.

WAR's PQs - A great idea hamstrung by grindy implementation. Make them more like PQs in Tier 1 and less like the 'kill 300 mobs' BS in later tiers. I stopped doing these in T2 because of the horrible grind that they turned into. Such a shame.

Lastly, things that should be ignored in other games and kept from GW1:

Active, skillful abilities. I've quit every other MMO I've tried and come back to GW eventually because of how much more interesting and challenging the skills and combat are. From the energy system (High energy sets, E denial, Energy hiding sets, energy deficits...) to the powerful prot-based healing, active and skillful interrupts, and amazing conditional skills like Bull's, RoF, Frenzy, Blackout, Backfire, etc. There is nothing else on the market that matches GW's skill design, or even comes close.

The principle of PvP characters - I should be able to switch classes to keep up with the meta and not have to grind for hundreds of hours just to try another character in real competitive play.

Tactically useful and modifiable items: The item creation system for PvP is, bar none, the best item system for RPG PvP out there. Having to make strategic choice of which mods to put on your gear makes gearing a joy and an intellectual challenge, rather than the mindless chore it is in other games.

Frankly I don't see much in terms of design philosophy that GW can learn from other games. There are specifics of design that can be good to riff on such as WoW's great old-world instance layouts, and WAR's PvP zones and PQs. CoH's sidekicking system has already been brought in, add to that WAR's open party system and Oblivion's scaling mobs and population issues should be minimal.

Particularly if the Party search/open party system allows map travel and works globally - imagine the ability to log in and say "I want to do some monking in a big instance run" - click open party search, and you can choose to join a group doing a level 25 epic instance, a level 50 epic intance, or a level 70 instance. Map travel there, and get right to playing.

The less people are railroaded into doing just 4-5 levels of content at a time, the less population gets thinned out and walled off from each other.

The opposite method is no better. Guild Wars demonstrates this perfectly: In every campaign, every person's character progression follows the exact same route. Sure you may pick up an additional sidequest here and there, but overall you have to follow the exact same path in your adventure. It's entirely linear and gets old quickly. It's also shown pretty decently in Morrowind, where I can be punished for my curiosity by sticking my nose in a higher level Daedric ruin.

Now if the mobs were scaled to level, I could progress in any direction I choose (this is of course assuming that the "story road blocks" aren't in effect): How about instead of continuing my adventure in the Shiverpeaks after I'm done with Ascalon, I instead decide to quest in the Crystal Desert? Or what about instead of starting low in Ascalon I instead decide to start my character off in Kryta?

If you want to see scaling to level in a similar fashion, check out Hard Mode: The whole world becomes a challenge for my level 20 guy instead of only being able to benefit from the higher level areas. Imagine if WoW did this, being able to farm and benefit at lvl 70 in Teldrassil or Elwynn forest.

Granted there are some issues with this. Sometimes enemies don't scale too well in difficulty and become either too easy or too hard. In Mass Effect, the most challenging fights can only be found at a low level with not best-tier gears and a limited amount of abilities. But considering how much more awesomeness the system provides - not to mention these things can be corrected with thought - it becomes a *very* sexy tradeoff.

Also, Oblivion doesn't only scale monsters to player level, it also scales encounters to player level. How many minotaurs and goblin warchiefs do you run into at level 2 as opposed to level 20?

Well, you can simply throw concept of levels away with this mindset and just have areas with different difficulty settings (and have some "endgame" areas have higher difficulty than average area). And nothing is lost.

You can have is something like KOTOR II. Where, you can visit the various planets and do their storyline in any order and the enemies scale, but you gain levels which allow you access to more abilities. So you could do Ascalon's plotline at the end or the beginning of the game, you might have only flare at the beginning and the enemies only stone daggers. If you came back at lvl 100 you'd have a bar of 15 skills, giving you much more utility but the mobs would summon guards, have interrupts and heal themselves.

I hope the sidekicking system is complete automatic and seamless, so you don't have to manually raise players up to your level, or lower yourself down, like in CoH.

I disagree here, because having a number that tells you your level is a massive motivator for carrying on playing. With levels (especially if they go with their exponentially harder to gain but limitless levels idea) you clearly strive upwards to get higher levels. All MMOs have this carrot on a stick effect, they need to give you a sense of a achievement every now and again, to make you feel you're getting somewhere, and to make you carry on playing.
That's why things like tiered dungeons in WoW work. You get a piece of T4, and although compared to the end-game stuff it's nothing, it feels so good. It's named, it says something about what you've experienced, it's personal to your spec, it's a reward for all the time you've put in. If WoW was simply like, you do this one dungeon 1000 times the you win the game many people would give up on the way, because they felt like that weren't achieving anything.
So, levels are important to create a sense of progression and achieving something, and are essential to any MMO/RPG.

That exact system was used in Neverwinter Nights. Sucked there too.
No, it makes you adapt.
When I at level 2 killed the level 8 orc outside the town in Gothic2 I was PROUD of my feat. As running in, sword swinging, was certain suicide I had to be low and crafty to do it: I snuck around the cave he lived in, pelted him with arrows, and when it looked like he was going to get me I ran like the wind back to the town and hid behind the city guards, who helped finish him off.

In Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights and every game which adjusts enemy level to player level I've ever played, from the original Bards Tale on, you simply rush the enemy, swords swinging, because the game is adjusted to you. There are no challenges you're not supposed to handle with simple rusher wammot tactics, no enemies out of your league, because it's all been adjusted so that an average gamer should have no problem killing them. And you can't increase the difficulty by going to a more difficult area, because there are none.

Now, I realize that a lot of people actually don't WANT challenge from their game. They don't WANT to have to use their brain to win in fight. They want to simply <target nearest> + <autocombat> and then pick up the loot.
I just don't agree.

Unless you're proposing to do away with levels altogether, which incidentally I would agree with, you're now talking about a completely different issue.

Neither scaling nor not scaling monsters to level is the correct answer. The ideal game has no levels at all and instead implements difficulty/reward slider that lets the player choose what level they want to play at.

The negative to that was you could go into any dungeon in Oblivion and beat nearly everything there at level 1. That kind of takes the fun away from the game. There should be static leveled monsters and/or bosses in numerous places. Morrowind handled that part correctly. There should be leveled monster spawns and static monster spawns. Not entirely 1 or the other.

Auction house or some other form of selling besides spamming.

Well I have read through these posts and I like alot of the ideas that have been expressed. However there is one idea that I have the say, I am not in favor of. This idea being World(Open) PvP. If you want to add something that will single-handedly cause this game to fail then that would be the thing to add. I realize that many of the members on here enjoy their pvp and more power to them I say, but a large majority of your GW players are "Casual" players. With World(Open) Pvp these players will have to be concerned with entering and leaving zones without falling victim to the inevitabel "ganker" who does nothing but wait for low levels to wander into his sights. Anyone ever play Archlord ? I am sure that I am not the only GW player who wont be playing GW2 if it has the wrong type of World(open) PvP.

Just my 2 cents guys.

Great point/idea. I don't like levels myself, but I understand that they are simply too popular and will likely need to be included in some form or another. Riffing off the above idea, you could have the slider and it would determine what level the mobs (those that are scaled, I also agree with Gareth's post above that some mobs should be static) are relative to you. So +1 on the slider would make everything one level higher than you, +2 would be 2 levels, +3 would bring in adds and upgrade their bars with an elite, etc.

Perhaps this is unrealistic to expect, however. At this point, I simply don't know what A.net is intending to do with GW2, or what they can do technologically and balance-wise. I mostly care about things that will affect PvP, frankly - don't oversimplify skills, don't move the direction of the horrible PvE only skills, don't dumb down or add 'stats' to armor, etc.

(Traditional MMOS however, also have breaking moment when next X is too far away to be really motivated to go fo it ("screw this, ill log off"). After this moment addiction takes over as gameplay drive instead of having fun/achieving something.)

That's assuming that everywhere rewards are the same as well as difficulty. If we will talk in terms of guildwars, what if max damage weapons only dropped in elite areas?

Also, "Beating" area/dungeon is just different form of progression. "Number" next to your character name could as well mean number of zones completed.

Character progression is lost entirely - and for me, that's the whole point of RPGs. Not to level up enough to get to the next area, but to see my character grow. Having everything grow around me just provides me with more game to play, and I am not held down in a linear progression. I can choose to progress through the game in any way I see fit, and that's quite awesome.

I don't want everything the same and simple, I just don't want everything to go in a straight line. I don't want things to be like "this area is only for level 10s, this one for level 20s, and this one strictly for level 30s". When the game is scaled according to how you play, things becomes much more massively interesting. I'm not set to a track, I create my own.

I also want to emphasize that making enemies scale exactly like you is bad. Having enemies scale according to you but ahead of you (say you're level 16, they're now 20) is what's good. Keeping everything the same scale is boring, having the enemies scale ahead is what's interesting.

This is true. There definitely needs to be some rules set in place to prevent players from simply walking to the endgame areas and hitting stuff.

I have to agree on this one. Regardless how nice GW2 is done, if they implement world open PvP I will stay away from it as far as possible. It is just a jerk magnet.

Regarding leveling monsters. I liked the way it was done in Sacred. The enemies had a bandwidth of levels they spawned with. So wandering in some areas with lvl 25 and you met lvl 5 or 6 (maximum for the monsters there) but in some other ones you had monsters at lvl45 (minimum there). And a bandwidth for some was about 30-40 lvls. So at the same time you had your enemies (their numbers and lvls) adjusted to yours but taking into consideration some maximum and minimum levels which had to maintained. Therefore you would need to level a lot before going to the endgame area and you do not have to worry before going back to an early stage.

This.

If I want to explore, I can, but I shouldn't be able to enter in every cave/dungeon/castle/whatever, and rush every mob inside.

I enjoy exploring, and if I enter in some place that is too hard for me, I remember where it was, and I come back when my character grows.

Maybe a level progression is not the best method... Maybe an "interactive" progression (the more you use a weapon, the better you are with it), but no as "UO", where you have to do the same over, and over, and over, to increase 1 point in Weapon Mastery.

MY GOD i couldn't agree more, i played through NF, got primeval gear (which is the coolest) and then all material motivator for pve dissapeared. there was nothing better to aim for and nothing better looking, and the 'mission's between the different campaigns get similar after awhile so I lost motivation in playing them through. Furthermore, while WoW had a grind at end game pve at least it was a reasonably fun grind (but was solid fun for ages) that had you working with heaps of people in a real fight against the environment, guild wars only has you go out by yourself to grind out titles, so you essentialy become a hermit while you attempt to travers all the map or open x number of chests. theres nothing in guild wars end game PvE to keep you playing it, you basicaly have to convert to PvP to get any fun out of the game.

so my suggestions:
1)
add some real end game material for PvE, and have missions/instances/dungeons with a higher cap for participants, the most fun you'll get in PvE is going against a 'dungeon' full of tough bosses etc with a big group of people, and have them giving increasingly better gear, giving you something substantial to aim for.
2)
get rid of the instanced maps, yes it reduces lag and minimizes the instances of KSing which is good (though KSing is really pretty infrequent) but it destroys the corner stone of mmo's in my opinion, being part of a world of other people.

Take it back. PLEASE take it back! I pray to God GW2 doesn't listen to this mentality.

Aside from PvP, GW greatest strength was that it was instanced enough to be ONE WORLD, not broken into millions of servers. A little open-world is fine, but GW2 NEEDS to instance enough to be able to support a single world with current technology.

There are SO many advantages:

1. I can actually hook up with different groups of friends and play with them. Wow!

2. I am not restricted to prime-time hours to play anything involving a group. I can actually play with other people whenever I want!

3. Guilds actually mean something. Who cares if you are the number-one ranked guild on server #452655. Who cares if your guild has a wacky reputation for doing fun things on server #963445. No one else knows who you are...

4. Issues like population imbalances that plague virtually every other game magically go away. (Population issues are almost singlehandedly destroying Warhammer as we speak ... they were fully prepared for issue, talked about it extensively before release, and it's still driving people away in droves and killing the game).

The uniqueness of skills in GW is something they got right! Unlike WoW, where basically you get the same 10 skills or so over and over again, just at a "higher level". ("Oh, now my Flare is a Fireball! It does the same thing, only 3x damage!" Boring!!) In GW, each skill is pretty much unique - although, with expansions, you got: duplications (same skill, different name); or modifications of an existing skill.

Level of mobs vs. scaling level: I think it wouldn't be that difficult to scale mobs based on character level, and also have some that are set to be +/- character level. Certain dungeons can be set for a variable > or = character level if it is meant to be a challenging dungeon, while others are set to be static. If the latter proves too difficult, you go back when you're higher level and better prepared.

AI: mob AI can be more complex in a lot of games. That would also add to the desire to group up because it becomes much harder to take on smart, unpredictable AI than "oh, X monster always does this followed by that." The mixed mobs in GW makes the game a lot of fun. It would be nice if the spawns were more random, though. (Getting a spawn with 2 healers can be a bitch, and requires a change in tactics. Things like that.)

I don't know what is the best compromise between Persistent vs. Instanced. Both have drawbacks and advantages, and largely depends on the style of gameplay for an individual.

Frank just want to give an FYI that I read that there won't be different servers other than how they are now (by country sort of). So you won't have to worry about that really. Persistence might speed up some things (slow it down too of course, depending on how Anet handles things).

I think many people are missing the important difference between world pvp and pvp everywhere all the time in the world. I can understand that you don't want to everywhere all the time pvp. This is never going to make the majority of players happy. I played on unrestricted PvP servers for AOC as I love PvP, but even I was annoyed half the time. I still had fun with it, but its obvious that this will make a lot of the player base unhappy.

World PvP, as its done on WAR core servers is not PvP everywhere all the time. On large maps, there are small areas on those maps that are PvP zones. You enter the zone and are warned and have 10 seconds to leave before you become a legal target. If you never wanted to go anywhere near these zones you wouldn't have to.

These zones are not just a place to gank random people. They have strategic points to capture, keeps to take (both guarded by NPCs and those enemy players who happen to be around if any) and rewards to gain from accomplishing these tasks. In my experience random ganking is pretty rare.

Having these zones in the world and not instanced - as it seems 'the mists' would be - keep players running around in the actual game world instead of pulling them out of it. Which is what you want if you plan on having an persistent world. It would also make PvP more accessible and familiar to most players rather than something unfamiliar.

There is no reasonable drawback to world PvP of this sort. You don't have to worry about being ganked while questing. You don't have to pass through the zones if you dead set against it. But for those who are on the fence about pvp or intrigued but unsure about how to get started its a great venue to get some experience. Assuming GW2 will have world PvP - which we know it will - the only question is the best way to implement it. This in my opinion is a better way to introduce a casual form of PvP to masses.

Very nicely said, totally agreed, and quoted for the truth.
I along with many others would prefer the distance traveling over map traveling IF the sceneries are breath taking and if we had the ability to jump, mount, have traveling abilities such as speed boost/shadowstep foward for the Assassin, or ability to jump over massive distance for the barbarian/warrior, etc.





Sorry, but an I missing something here? If you'd rather play by yourself, why are you playing a ONLINE multilayer game? Save yourself some bandwidth and buy a single player role playing game if you prefer to play alone, because Guild Wars is an online game for a reason, for the interaction of other players, so please don't bring the solo play requests to GW2. GW1 is already screwed up with all the hero/henchman crap...

Sometimes people can be stressed out having to be around other players 100% of the time. Besides that, for personal choice. Seeing as how GW2 is going to be entirely soloable save for the endgame raids, it seems like a choice that would have very little affect on everyone else.

And hey, maybe he's playing an online game because it's frequently updated as opposed to those that are offline and left alone. Not everyone sees "online only" correlating with "multiplayer only".

Also, the "hero and henchmen crap" were a byproduct of GW's horrible requirement of needing to play with other plays for every single portion of the game.

Still strongly strongly disagree

I accept that you have to run through zones at least once to get from outpost to outpost. Also there is nothing wrong with making it possible to spend the time running through zones for whatever reasons you have be it smelling the flowers, seeing what random encounters you run into and so on.

There is something wrong with forcing people in all circumstances to waste time doing this. You might like the view, but not everyone will, and not everyone will like it the 300th time that have to get from A to B. This is why map travel is important. If I want to join my guildmates at some distant point in the game forcing me waste my time and their time to get there is unacceptable.

Map travel is there as an option not a requirement. In general no one is forcing you to map travel if you don't want to - though angry guild members might provide motivation. A persistent world that is alive and active with lots of things to provides should provide the motivation for people to be in it (another reason I like world PvP in the world) - add to this the desire to simply explore and there are many reasons the world will be full and will not be undermined by map travel.

This is just another one of those cases where giving players options is just much smarter game design then forcing their hand.

I too, was one of those who tried WAR out, and I've stopped playing. I pretty much agree with every one of the OP's points, and in my humble opinion, the best update in the history of Guild Wars was when they allowed players to respec their characters without cost and instantly.

With all respect to WAR as being the first to introduce the Public Quest system, I think GW2 has something similar in the works as well, announced quite some time back before WAR was released.

Someone posted about PQs being boring because of the kill X mobs sequence. PQs get much better in WAR's final tiers, where you can see the play of alternate-ending scenarios. For instance, if you fail to complete a certain set of objectives by a certain time, some other NPCs spawn, and you have to finish the quest in a certain way. In short, late game PQs allow for different ways in which to complete the quest, and this choice would be good if implemented well.

I strongly agree with the no-segregation theory. Dividing the MMO playerbase always is a bad thing: - see luxon/kurzicks. Factions was good in theory, bad in implementation, but ultimately when players have to be forced to pick a side, it results in the perceived population being diminished.

Different racial starting areas is perfectly fine. WAR did that quite well; although your race started in one area, other players of a different race could group up with you as long as they travelled to your starting zone. If GW2 implements race-themed starting zones, this is crucial.

In reply to Chocobo1:-
Bumping into people randomly? That was pretty much impossible due to instanced zones. There were so many outposts in the game that most of them were empty anyway. The only way to "bump" into people would be going to something like ToA, Lions or Kamadan and that would be usually just to trade or UW. My definition of bumping into people would be finding people doing something while you are doing something else and are completely unaware of there presence. This didn't happen at all in GW.

- It all depends on how the instancing is implemented. As many people were turned off by it as attracted to it. We know that GW2 will have both. At the end of the day, it depends on how they work it out. I know for a fact that PvE dungeon-crawling is a pain if you get wiped and all your efforts are gone because the mobs respawned, and you have a DP facing you. Chances are, you'll not try again for some time.


Large ammounts of skills are good? If anything, GW has proven that this is terrible. 3/4 of the skills in the game aren't usable outside a joke build, the others are overused by everyone to get maximum effect from the class. This isn't a bad thing, but the cookie cutter builds always dominated over the hundreds of skills that were unable to be brought up to scratch.

- This is true, but what we hear in the works is that skills will be fewer but more complex in the way they are used. We dont know the details, but I'm sure the GW2 design team is going to implement it well. GW1's skills are already unique, both in their conceptual sense and the fact that some of them are already situational which gels with the idea of builds/team builds.

I felt the Primary/Secondary idea was only good in theory. In the game all it did is take roles away from the primary class and make them useless. Mesmers shouldn't outperform Elementalists at their role, Necromancers shouldn't be able to outdo a ritualist and Sins shouldn't be able to tank better than any Warrior can (PvE shadowform before you talk about PvP wise). I feel if they had just kept primarys without secondarys, the game would have more options in using different classes. Ele's would be needed to snare, Warriors would still be good at tanking etc etc.

- True, in that niche areas were intruded in; I think the worst examples are the touch rangers and thumpers running around. But keeping primaries without secondaries is not the solution. This is so unique because it allows flexibility. Sure a ranger should ideally not be able to do so many other things, but hey, thats what player creativity is for right? There are so many other benefits to having dual professions that your argument is moot. See monks with secondaries for energy purposes (once, a long time ago, the meta) for instance.

Also going on to talk about DP. It's one thing that really bugged me about GW for it's lack of thought. Sure, it puts you off dying and doesn't let you have free goes but it's punishing someone who is already having trouble completing whatever they are trying to do? So now they get to go back and have an even tougher time?

- Partly agree. But at the very end, DP is temporal. You can always try again another time. Dying should be punished - but can you think of any other way to do so without turning a player off? Getting DP-ed once or twice is not bad; you can still complete the mission/area without problems. Dying 4 times is a sure sign that - forgive the expression - "u r doing it wrong".

This i agree with. You always have had the option of seeing the world in your own way; no one ever forced you to map zone. If you map travel, you used it because of its convenience. Not all of us have the patience to run through a map hundreds of times, avoiding the mobs in the area and killing them again and again just to reach the places we want to get to.

This of course raises the question of mounts; and whether we could learn from generic MMO #314502 by implementing them. Sure - as long as map travel is never taken out; sitting on your pretty horse is fine by me, i'll take the instant travel any day.

I think if the monster spawn distribution is the same as it was in GW1, then mounts won't be that useful. The reason they seem to work in WAR anyway and AOC is that there are generally safe paths on which you can travel relatively uninterrupted - roads and such. In GW1 most zones were dense enough with monsters and pop ups that you would often be dismounted to fight anyway. So you're not really gaining anything by having them.

Of course this might change. There are lots of reasons to have mounts even with map travel. If you running around in a certain zone - which can be relatively large- its nice to be able to move quickly when you need to.

I have played some MMO's that require you to walk every where it was the most boring and annoying thing to do.

Basically they should just impliment a scenic quick travel method and a outpost/map travel so that everyone is happy. Overall if Anet imlpements both in some manner I think everyone would be happy enough in what they like best, not to shun GW 2 due to a lack of a specific feature. I don't see it being overly difficult for them to impliment.

The only other interesting thing I saw which "service" type runers would kill to have, was in RF online a high level type caster class got access to a teleport type spell to take a whole party from one seperate area to another. That type of travel was from like the high end (seperate areas) which saved both time and Lots of Money to travel back and forth to the normal areas. Which I'd like to see but I'm not sure it has a place in GW setting.

This is quite true.

In any case, I believe that the issue underlying the idea for no-map travel has probably more to do with the fact that players want an excuse to explore areas and feel that they are a part of a larger world. On the flip side, some players do not want to be punished by being forced to waste time seeing scenery for the millionth time.

Perhaps the middle ground solution would be to have vast areas irrelevant to the main storyline/missions, and uniquely different (unlike dungeons/special instances) which players can choose to visit (without being forced to).

A case in point - we have numerous areas in GW where players will never see unless they choose to pursue the cartographer title. What we essentially need are persistent (non-instanced) areas players will want to visit, far away from the main towns, where those who choose to travel there on mounts can do so.

WAR solves that idea of unexplored regions by putting Public Quests in many corners of the map so that there will be a reason to BE there. They sure aren't mandatory; but players will go there all the same. This way we do not punish the map-travel lovers, because the PQs are entirely optional, and we do not alienate those who like to explore areas which are normally not instantly accessible by map travel.

One other thing I just remembered to steal from WAR:

Timed content, or otherwise content that you can fail. I know GW has some stuff like this already (in terms of hard mode vanquishing before you get DP'd out, etc.), but I think idea that you actually need to do something well, instead of just being able to grind through slowly over weeks, is important to maintain a level of difficulty for certain activities.

Obviously leave some things that you can just grind through at your own pace, but let some things require a certain amount of skill or performance.

I totally agree with this one. Probably the worst thing that could happen. Please Anet, do not do this!

ok couple things
1) I can actually hook up with different groups of friends and play with them. Wow!

how does having a non-instanced world prevent you from grouping with different groups of friends? most friends i know plan which server they are going to go on, so you and all your friends are on the same server. if new 'friends' decide to play tell them before hand which server you are all on. if anything a non-instanced world would be better for this in that you can still group with your friends but you can meet others (randoms) who are in the same area and can group with them as well, helping you meet new people and form new 'groups of friends' etc etc.

2) I am not restricted to prime-time hours to play anything involving a group. I can actually play with other people whenever I want!

if you play an international server there is allways people on at any given time, but furthermore if you play a server for your time zone (oceanic for me) then the majority of people on that server will be running by the same clock you are, meaning there will be a MUCH larger number of guilds running raids/dungeons at a time convenient to you and it will be easier to get into such guilds.

3) Guilds actually mean something. Who cares if you are the number-one ranked guild on server #452655. No one else knows who you are...

guilds are still in competition with eachother regardless of the number of servers. raiding guilds compete with eachother based on how difficult a raid they can finish, they dont ever face eachother in person so it doesnt matter if they are on different servers or the same servers, forums will allways boast raiding accomplishments which spreads through the community so people will become aware of the names of the 'best' raiding guilds. interms of PvP its simple, link all the servers, WoW did it. this means that any of those PvP specific guilds out there can compete against eachother regardless of what server they are on.

4) Issues like population imbalances that plague virtually every other game magically go away.

ok granted this is much tougher to solve without a huge population base (like WoW has). i think the best solution would be to start with fewer servers, say 3 proper ones, to help handle the grunt and have a solid population at the same time. Then as the population increases add mroe server accordingly, this would keep the population evenly spread (theoreticaly). however thats not an amazing solution, but its all i could think of lol.

People also have to consider the economic value of map travel. The main reason why I think teleporting doesn't exist in World of Warcraft is because of its economic base. Essentially, if you were able to teleport to an auction house that has naturally cheaper prices for an item, people will make no hesitation to teleport to that destination to buy it from there, no competition is achieved within the other auction houses and no one would try to buy or sell a product for less or more than what is at that auction house. However with physical map travel, people have to consider this, "Do I really want to travel for 1 hour in order to get the best price possible on this item?"

Generally speaking, within a MMO-PvE centric game, time playing the game = how well off you are. This is because in these mmo's you need to pay to play. So the more that you pay to play, the better off you'll be. That is not an example that Guild Wars should follow. It creates a distortion of actual skill of each individual, it also creates grind.

So essentially, they can have an incredible storyline and incredible vanity items in order for it to live a long life. For example, a constant changing world (public quests was an example) is a good way to establish this. For example, while traveling with a group, you notice a bridge is out. Well thank god Joe knows how to build a ford. A way to immerse yourself in a massive living world that you feel you can have an impact in, that's what they should be aiming for; not epic gear.

The best structure of an MMO game I have ever played was EVE (however, it's also pay to play). Too bad it's pretty boring.

Agreed 100% with the combat mechanics. It's nice to have something deeper than Slash/Nuke/Heal.

Also agree with Numa, although my ideal example goes back a bit further than Gothic. Back in the old days of Dragon Warrior, you cross a bridge too early, you're either dead or, if you're damned clever, one or two fights give you huge boosts.

I have to vote nay on the way GW guild system works, though. I like the idea of Per character builds, and here is why... Whenever a game has been around for awhile, guilds start to specialize. Happens in GW too. You have your PvP guilds (even more specialized into faction-farming AB guilds, HA guilds, GvG guilds...), PvE title hunter guilds, PvE farming guilds, PvE Elite area guilds... Sure, the specialized guilds might occasionally dabble in the other areas, it doesn't happen often, and it's usually done on a lark. It feels to me like you lose some of the options that way.

perhaps im wrong, though im almost certain im not, but in WoW all the auction houses are linked and thus the same, so there was difference between them and what they had (except between horde and alliance). it didnt matter if you were in stormwind, iron forge etc. For instance Darnassus typicaly had all of 5 people occupying it at one time, yet it allways had an up to date auction house. if what your saying was right then iron forge and storm wind would have very 'complete' auction houses due to their huge population and darnassus would have all of 3 items on it (exagerationt here but you get the point) because of its miniscule population. yet that wasn't the case, ergo the auction houses are exactly the same, so theres no point going from darnassus to iron forge as you wont get a better deal there.

1. I'm not sure about this but - a non-instanced world has more players in one area, so it must necessarily be able to handle the load. If i'm not wrong, instancing helps to divide the server load so that you can have more players simultaneously experiencing content without overloading the server. This is why (again, correct me if i'm wrong) GW can have no server divisions. This is pure win. Warhammer online is now handling server merges because it miscalculated the amount of servers needed to handle the population, and players got spread too thin.

2. True.

3. Timezones also separate guilds. A US guild cannot be said to be in direct competition with a Korean one, for instance, because they might never get to play at the same times. You do not even need servers/shards for this problem of non-competition to happen. Regardless, it -is- true that in GW, we run into players from certain guilds all the time, and these are more instantly-recognisable. This adds to the feelng of community.

4. See point 1.

At the end of the day, GW2 I believe has already planned to keep the 1-server-no-divisions idea, if I read correctly.

@ Topic - One more thing I can think of that WAR did extremely well was the introduction of Guild Rank. The idea that a guild can gain experience just like an individual player is excellent. Players can feel like they are contributing to the growth of the guild. The guild unlocks benefits as the guildrank increases. While GW2 does not necessarily need to copy this entirely, the devs should keep in mind the idea that player-contribution to a guild-entity is very useful in building community and guild cohesion.

Additionally, guild leaders in WAR have the ability to give names to ranks within the guild itself, and allow the members of different ranks access to different guild privileges. For instance, accessing guild storage, carrying special guild-only items in battle etc.

Number one thing that must be in GW2 is a MARKET.

Number two in my opinion is an actual economy. Look at EVE, then figure out how to make something like that work in GW2.

1) i dont think what you said is really relevant to the point, not trying to be an arse but i think you got a bit off topic there.

3) the time zone problem isnt a problem for PvE raiding/dungeon guilds as they are never in face to face competition with eachother, only in competition by 'reputation' so it doesn matter when they play, only how difficult a dungeon/raid they can finish. and as said forums host guild accomplishments and bragging rights and soon knowledge of 'good' guilds spreads through the community regardless of server. Linking all the servers for pvp creates a pvp environment the same as the current set up in guild wars, if people play at different times it is going to be a problem regardless of the 'one' server. so in this the number of servers is really irrelevant.

4) dungeons/raids are the biggest drain and so if they are instanced that problem dissappears. the rest of the world being non-instanced simply makes you part of the 'world' which is the drive behind mmo's, and with proper server management it is easily possible to have a good population.

what your talking about with the guild ranking and privledges etc sounds awesome, i whole heartedly support it.

This was a cool idea, but it makes it harder for new guilds to get off the ground. Given the nature of the game, the main selling point of guilds in the recruitment process will likely revolve around guild rank. One of the nicer things about GW1 was the ease in which guilds were made and remade.I don't like the idea of guild rank granting PvP bonuses for this reason like it does in WAR. This goes against the idea of easy access fair PvP that underlies GW.

I'm somewhat torn on this, but at the very least lots of guild stats would be interesting to keep. For example for GvG, rather than just keeping track of wins and losses, if the guild menu tracked all kinds of stats like kills in GvG matches, record in tournaments, record vs certain guilds. I'm a stats junky so more stats are cool .

That said there will always be some measure people use to evaluate whether they should join a guild or not, and the biggest one for PvP is probably how well respected the indivudal players are by the larger community.

I'm too busy to think straight atm...

*off to rethink finishing HoM.

Somehow I totally forgot about those two proposed GW2 mechanics. I've tried persistant worlds...absolutely insane....everyone waiting around for a mob to spawn....so stupid. I want a world to be at least somewhat "real".

Bold = Worst idea ever. Do people really play games like this? /sarcasm