The majority of the community sucks (or does it?)

Your statement only applies to PvE... but even in PvE, there's major guilds. The thing with lots of small guilds is that people want to be leaders, which is a waste unless they're truly dedicated.

You can still do that in pvp.

Let me just say I agree with basically 100% of all your posts, but I am not so sure about it being completely the players' faults. It is the players' faults if they don't have a play to win mindset, but I place a large amount of blame on Anet in another sense. They don't need players to not leave, they need players to continue coming (that is buying). They had the potential to be one of those games that has financial success while maintaining the complex challenge and they didn't do that. I'm not convinced that complex challenge and financial success are inversely correlated because there are plenty of examples that go against the theory, but I agree with your assessment of the culture at large.

Guru "community" isn't the "GW Community", it's a bunch of elitists who think they know the "community" in general. Ever notice that the people saying that all GW players are "bad" also say that they refuse to play with people they don't know? How do they know who's bad or not? They say that people who like to/want to join PUGs need to be bad...but that's not the case. I've joined many a PUG and while yes, there are scores of people out there who really don't have a clue, there are also scores of people who do have a clue, who have done all of this before and know the ins and outs, and just want someone to team up with. It's not that bad. If you team up with someone with skill, oftentimes things go much smoother, as heroes and a good player always beat out a henchman. I joined a PUG doing HM missions for guardian, and one of the players stuck with me through all three campaigns, each of us helping the other with missions we needed, even if one of us already had some. We each gladly used our consets without asking for repayment, pretty much taking turns.

Moral of the story: there are bad players, but there are also good players. The players who think everyone is bad are usually bad themselves and don't want to admit that they're one of the reasons their PUG groups fail. They rely on heroes and henchman AI to carry them through their tasks. Someone in one of my old guilds posted up a picture on the guild forum of him with no skills, no armor, and no weapon set with nothing in inventory vanquish Grenth's footprint in HM with 10% morale boost(yes, could have used a powerstone after it was finished but w/e) on all characters. The player doesn't make the team, it's the team build that makes the team do well. If a bad player goes out and gets a team build and loads the builds on his heroes, and chooses the henchmen that he's told to choose, he can effectively c-space through PVE hard mode, call himself a good player because he can H+H it, and talk trash on other people who choose to make their own hero builds and have a slightly harder time of it. It's all subjective who is good and who isn't.

he could've just deleted his 1k armor and collector weapons xD


In all seriousness, the players being called bad are actually the good pug players. Players on guru being referred to as good are usually top 10.

A bit on Burst Cancel's and Fril's arguments.

I had a girlfriend who couldn't swim.
I can swim. So she asked me: can you teach me to swim?
Well, sure.... you do this with your legs and this with your feet and you swim... right?

I know the mechanics of swimming. pressure applied in a fluid causing a reaction. I know the movements, various of them. But I can't explain someone how to swim.

I think this can also be applied to swimming.
First of all, we have this nice shallow part of water. You can stand there easily. Who cares if someone can swim or not? Just have fun.
Now we have this deeper part of water. People depend on another when they can't swim. And become a burden. So we should teach them how to swim, right? Well, yes and no. We should help them survive and rescue their own life. Doesn't have to be swimming, putting on a life-jacket also works.

Now we get to the real part. We have a team of swimmers competing against others. They want to win. Fame and glory. But it's a team, each and every member should be as good as possible. Here is were swimming skills start to matter.

And now there is an interesting thing. Many people know how to swim. But few can teach others. Partly because swimming is an experience. It's the combination of teacher and student that learns someone swim (when learning to swim at later age this is even more true).
But there is another problem. I know 4 or 5 ways to swim. At least. But I've seen many who know only one. And if that one isn't allowed for the match, they can't swim....


Teaching skills are rare in general. When still at school, look at the number of students who can explain math to others.
When at work, try to find someone who can tell you the details of his work without you losing track at some point.

When I look at the GW community, a huge part is just having fun in shallow water. There is no need to invest in teaching. One step up, we find people in challenging environments. Main investment here is converting them from burden to somewhat of an asset. Stop them from drowning, throw a life-vest. It's not efficient, but it works. This is relatively easy to teach.
Then there is some leisure swimming. People enjoy that they can swim, don't drown and can do fun things when they want. No need to teach them how to swim better I'd say. They don't drown and have fun.
One more step up, we get towards the competitive edge.
Main problem here is people knowing one build and when that's nerfed, they don't know anything. However, when comparing this with swimming it's like teaching someone why certain techniques are better than others. It's not worth the investment except for a select few who are willing to invest.
And it's hard to teach them. It's a lot of small things. Placement of hands, feet, head, breathing. How to make the most efficient turns.
The combination makes someone excell at swimming and only if he's also in physical good shape.

A non-swimming example for a moment.
A colleague of mine met a top-squash player once (top 20 world). That guy was practicing one single shot, 1000 times after each other. At a single spot on the wall. When failing, start over agian. That's the kind of dedication it takes to play at a certain level.


Now let's talk about sucking players again.
From what point of view are we determining that they suck?
Top-20? So everyone who can't swim on competitive level sucks?
Swimming? So all those having fun in shallow water but can't swim suck?


The one thing the 'good players' should do has nothing to do with teaching others how to become better players. The best they can do is learning the 'bad' players how to survive. Teaching others how to become better players should be done on request of those players. Else it's a waste of time. For both.

the_jos: if there was an award for winning this thread, I'll give it to you right now. You've said really good stuff, but now I'm going to expand your analogy one step further:

just imagine you lived 150 years ago, people wouldn't swin as we do now (of course they didn't need to, but let's forget that because that's the limit of the analogy) and a few people started improving the average swimming practice by "teaching", mostly word of mouth, but then guides, books, schools. Nowadays, we're spoiled on so many things that we fail to understand how "bad" we are (I could talk about Mathematics and its 2000 years of experience ridiculed in many ways nowadays, it's like drowning and still believing you're ok).

My point being: yes, "improving" removes one bit of the "fun", in the sense of the "old fun" that the player was aiming at (nothing wrong here, I'm not the one who's going to tell anyone how to play the game). But a "new kind of fun" can be achieved, where you'd be able to do stuff like DoA or hard dungeons (or HM but it's the same content/story/mish, mostly) without being -60%DP in a matter of minutes, or unable to use any skills, or etc.

You can't change everyone, but you can improve the average. Yes, I know it's a game, but improving the average potentially creates new great opportunities for fun, hatever you put behind that.

I'm not sure if I'm clear, there's no black&white on this issue, contrarily to what some posters believe here. I'm still willing to write such a guide (especially after the great AB week-end I had, with few of the best AB games I've ever played), but people will continue to swim without vests anyway...

Yea the_jos basically just won the thread, but I'd like to expand as well. You talk about improving the average, but my theory is that the average in Guild Wars has no reason to improve. Having little reason means they will be much less open to doing so and teachers will be much less likely to teach. Using the previous example, it is like Anet changed their pool to where there is only one tiny deep end and a massive shallow end. There is plenty to do while not knowing how to swim, and only one tiny reason to learn how to swim.

I know you're refering to average as the mean. I'm using a different definition of average, but teachers prefer to teach people of average ability. Above average ability, they become smarter than you and you lose the capacity to teach them any more. At below average ability, you have lost the ability to talk to them about concepts you know that might be too far advanced. When they are below average, you have to relearn how to be at that level again just to teach it.

To teach bad players here's what you have to do. You have to learn how to be bad, and you have to learn how to solve your own problems that come from being bad. If you've never been bad, you can't teach how to improve from there. But from observations I've made, I'm completely sold on the idea of bringing the worst up a notch over teaching anyone else. That way no one has to relearn how to be that bad ever again. I believe any and all teaching would be most effective by being able to bring the bottom up a level.

Practically, however, this issue is very complex because you won't find good players who can learn how to be bad, and figuring out the specific problems the bad players are having. Bad players need to be documenting their improvement more often. Good players have to be willing to talk about the times when they were bad without letting pride get in the way.

Getting into the finances is tricky because we don't have any of the hard data to analyze. But let's do some forum handwaving anyway. In the first place, in order to get players to keep spending, you have to keep a vibrant playerbase; new players don't join dead MMOs. We also don't know how much of GW's income comes from microtransactions (e.g., character slots), which would be direct income from existing players. You also need to keep players interested if you want to sell them on later campaigns/content packs/GW2.

Challenge is a tricky thing to sell, and I'll concede that "inversely correlated" is an over-generalization. At the same time, inverse correlation is almost certainly the dominant mechanism above a certain difficulty threshold; people don't like to fail, and if they're failing the same task tens or hundreds of times, they're going to quit. Furthermore, high difficulty is usually considered a con in both casual and professional reviews. Finally, people complain - loudly and frequently - about difficulty. Games like Homeworld 2 develop a reputation for being "too difficult"; I've recommended this game to people only to be told, "I heard it was really hard, why would I want to play that?" It was bad enough that the devs actually released a patch to tone down the single-player campaign.

The entire concept of "too hard" is a big clue to the majority mentality here. People rarely say, "It's too hard for me", they say instead, "it's too hard." This difference implies that they consider the problem to be the game instead of the player: the developer made it too hard, so it's not worth playing. Classic shifting of blame. It's not their fault they suck, right?

The pertinent questions for game designers is: where is the challenge threshold, and how do we manipulate it? A full discussion on these questions is beyond the scope of this thread, but there are a lot of case studies: "Bullet Hell" shooters (e.g., Touhou), puzzle games, action games (notably, DMC 1 and 3), certain JRPGs (e.g., Valkyrie Profile 2), and all tournament-level competitive games. All of these have a reputation for being "difficult". Some of them really are (e.g., competitive games, some bullet hell games), whereas others are quite easy (e.g., DMC, VP2, most puzzle games). Further, some games are loved for being difficult (e.g., bullet hell), others are hated for being difficult (e.g., VP2). Where are the differences and similarities?

This is the wrong metric from a teaching perspective. Before you actually begin teaching anyone, you have to determine who can be taught and who can't. The pertinent difference isn't how good you are, but how you approach the game: are you swimming "for fun", or are you swimming to get better at swimming?

I agree with your point about life vests and teaching being a waste of everyone's time - this is the point I've reiterated throughout this discussion. What some people don't notice here, however, is that Anet is the one providing the life vests - they're called PvE skills and consumables. As I said before, there are good reasons for Anet to do this: their players were drowning en masse, and nobody else was in any position to save them.

And Fril, you're still not addressing the real problem: getting people to care. It should be self-evident that teaching would be largely unnecessary if people cared to begin with. There is an incredible breadth of tools for self-learning for those who are motivated enough to do it, and no amount of teaching is going to help people that don't care to be taught. If you really agreed with the_jos, take his final statement to heart:

Public school systems are run the way you mentioned, trying to force people to care. Even with all the pressures and stigmas on students, people still don't care and still drop out. Private schools are different, they only admit people who care, so the success rate is wonderful. The reason why most people care is because they have a shared agenda, not because anyone has convinced them to care.

People do this every day in the real world, teach someone who doesn't care about the subject. There are already solutions being put into effect; in schools and in particular, inner city programs. There is no learning disability aside from complete blindness, deafness, muteness, and being paralyzed below the neck that makes a person unteachable; it just requires more work and a different method. Most teaching failures are because of the teacher not caring; the teacher didn't care about the same things the student did.

If you approach it from the perspective of trying to force people to care about what you want them to care about, you are going to have a success rate inferior to that of the worst public school system. A human being might never care about the subject (getting better at the game), but that person usually cares about something. So you take that thing people care about, and you insert the lessons into it. You could probably teach them how to play by making a tutorial have the most valuable drops, or put the most valuable drops into an area that allow people to develop particular skills. That's what teaching is about, tricking students into thinking something is fun when it's really a lesson.

In case you missed it, my position is that you can't get any significant number of people to care; ergo, trying to improve the GW playerbase is a fool's errand. Anet's already taken care of the fundamental problem anyway - all of the casual gamers have their life vests, so nobody needs any saving.

Public schooling is a bad analogy, because education matters; some kids actually understand this - that's why they succeed. GW will never matter. You can absolutely suck shit at GW and it won't affect your quality of life at all. There's also the fact that public schooling can't be fixed in a vacuum; the problems start in the community, so the fixes need to start there as well. How do you apply that to GW?

This thread is NOT about a "need", everyone knows it. I, you and noone can force people to care. I'm not planning to change what "fun" should be (serious PvPers are also very careless towards a lot of the features of GW, like its world history and deep storyline, landscapes, ... it's only about "skills"). Only discussing how much WE can do, there are other threads for discussing what Anet should do. And I'm not saying the two are not related, but so far I haven't seen this discussion happen.

To re-use your argument: I'm trying to make "good players" care about raising the level of skills, as Master Fuhon very rightfully said, if you improve just a little epsilon the skill at the lowest level, the game suddenly starts to make more sense and become more enjoyable for everyone.

I've been dealing with this problem for Mathematics (how easy could it be for me to point fingers at everyone here and say "you suck, learn more"?), it's a tough one but a necessary one. As Master Fuhon said, it does require "skills at teaching", but I'm arguing this is not so difficult and most "good players" can change a bit their mindset to reach that goal (it doesn't require you to change your playstyle or lifestyle for that).

"Education matters"? I believe it does, but my experience as a Higher Education lecturer in the UK suggests most people (students and parents) don't, quite a lot care about the degree, the key to getting a good job. They don't care (very much) about knowledge, learning, etc. Some sincerely do, but they're so overloaded with work that they're barely able to have the time to "care".

And GW can matter, bring some positive learning skills (e.g., reverse engineer the game mechanics can teach you how to logically break a complex problem into smaller, easily manageable tasks, then there's problem-solving when you're devising a buildset to tackle a mission/quest/map), in addition to the fun you may want in life (I'm not saying kids should get this kind of "virtual fun", RL is much more important) and the self-confidence building (this is very important in each and every teaching process, and what makes the difference between a good and a bad teacher).

Again, I direct you to re-read the_jos, with whom you so cordially agreed:

We know this isn't about need - so why do you think I brought it up? You're trying to toss people life jackets when they already have one on, and yours is an outdated model that's complicated and failure-prone. If you haven't noticed already, Anet is making your job harder by protecting their bottom line (this is not to be construed as criticism). The easier the game is, the less incentive anyone has to get better - they can farm l33t lewt and fumble their way through missions all without wiping the drool from their faces. It's fast, it's easy, and it's state-sanctioned. Soma might make people happy, but the point is to make them apathetic; your solution simply isn't competitive with instant gratification.

Your education argument is a strawman, but that's partially my fault for not defining my terms. Considering my generally cynical outlook, you probably could have guessed that when I say that "education matters", I'm talking about the game that our children play to get the right numbers and letters on the right pieces of paper so that someday they can sell their lives for a bit more money than their peers. Again, successful students (and usually their parents) are successful because they understand how the game is played - and they understand because they care. You probably know better than I do that it has little to do with learning - it's how to pick the right classes to minimize risk of lowering your GPA, it's how to pick the right extracurricular activities to pad your college application or resume, it's how to pick the right school districts based on college entrance rates and competition, it's how to make friends with the right teachers to get the best recommendation letters, etc.

Are you seeing a parallel? To GW? To adult life? Nobody cares about how the system is supposed to work - they care about how it actually works, and what they have to do to maximize their benefit with minimum effort. Educators have a hard time getting students to care about actual learning because the students recognize (correctly) that learning, while necessary to a degree, is neither sufficient nor efficient. And that's just the students that have the kind of foresight that is so tragically rare in the young; the kids without this foresight don't give a shit about school, learning, or the consequences of doing poorly in the education game. So you've got the group that only gives a shit about things that produce tangible gain, and the rest of them don't give a shit period. What makes you think GW will be any different?

As for "GW can matter", I suspect that there are better ways to develop positive learning skills and self-confidence than overdosing on MMOs. I realize that there's a fad amongst educators and researchers who fashion themselves as "forward-looking" to try and justify modern youths' obsessions with YouTube, MySpace, and the idiot box as some kind of "new media learning"; I happen to be in the camp that doesn't buy it.

In any case, I'm done rehashing the same arguments. Ultimately, of course, it's your time, your choice. And the best way to convince someone of something is to let them find out for themselves, right?

Although I teach in the UK, I've studied and taught in France where I learned a totally different approach (which is more fair IMHO, but it's a different discussion): learning is a right that everyone should have (entry to university isn't conditionned by particular rules, not even money, anyone can go to Uni if s/he has her Baccalaureat). And about Grade Point Average/GPA, this is only one of the selection tools in countries like UK and the USA, it's usually used to triage the thousands of applications to get to a first round of interviews or more careful reviews (another job that teacher have to do).

I only mentioned this so that you can better understand my viewpoint, while I accept yours and the_jos's (and mostly everyone here).

(on the topic of learning, I love the movie "Good Wil Hunting")

FYI I'm a researcher that has a much critical view on these "e-phenomenons", and am working on this topic with a Canadian colleague of mine. The net can also lead to good stuff, if its power is harnessed and people are "guided". Part of the problem is how desillusioned people have become on the net, leading to a strong mental resistance to change due to overwhelming prejudices (you're anonymous, hence you're a dick, see Penny Arcade's theory). /end of off-topic

Indeed. But I'm not trying to convince anyone. If I succeed at writing this "GW guide", people will simply use it or not. End of story.

One thing that bothers me is how people like to show off with "expensive" things, even if they don't like them, and how they tend to think that a wealthy player is necessarily a good one.

I'm a bit tired of all those black fow + ninja mask + chaos gloves + random expensive mini players thinking they're so much better than anyone else.

Being able to spend days powertrading or grinding farming zones doesn't make you good at the game.

Too much e-peen showoff...

Kids understand that education matters? Not at 4 and 5 years old when they start school. You can't make blanket statements about what goes into the school system (kids who want to play, nap, chat, activities) when you look at what comes out. Educations doesn't matter for everyone who gets through; you would hope people at least treat it like a means to an end instead of a waste of time. Education isn't failing because of communities; education is failing because people are applying business and pseudo-logical models on human beings. The higher-ups don't care about students, no surprise students do not care about being there. If the communities are so bad, educators should be teaching them things to deal with those communities, not giving them fairy tales about how a degree earned four years from now will put food on the table now or help solve neighborhood crime problems.

Caring initially matters little in the first place. I didn't know certain things existed when I was born, yet now I care about them. I sat through lessons and heard stories about how education matters and certain subjects matter; I care about learning on my own, not the education that happens in a school building. I had to learn material I did not care about. I know material I still do not care about. I'd seek to reform the entire school system if I had power to, and I'd center it on life skills instead of only job skills. I do not care for how the school system is run, but I learn about how it is run.

There are millions of people doing the same thing right now; they care about grades and future jobs. They do not care directly about what they are doing. This is just like the game; people who play the game care about grades, jobs, family and friends. If you care about anything in the game, you will learn things you don't care about to get what you want. If you don't care about anything in the game, you won't play it. When a 5 year old enters a school building, you have to get them to learn whether they are going to care or not. Teachers don't get to retain/fail people without discussing it with their bosses at level (if they do, that’s proof people don’t care about students in that area). Calling someone unteachable in the profession is an indictment on your own ability to teach.

Whether you think this is a worthless analogy or not doesn't matter. People get results from this analogy, so you should at least look at how and why they get results. If you just choose to discard the advice someone who is getting success with uses, let me give you this information on what bad players do:

They don't listen and they don't observe (caring doesn't really matter); then they set off to invent something that does not need to be reinvented, it only needs to be built upon. Bad players first decide to make playing the game about what they want. And when someone comes by giving advice, it goes in one ear and out the other, because it's not what the bad player wanted to hear. It involves them being wrong and it involves them putting the work into reflecting on why they were wrong. Bad players are like this because they have a greater negative association with being wrong, so they don't adapt when they are. Because when you are bad and you observe and listen, the warning signs are all there and glaringly obvious. So to be bad, you have to be able to tune things out. Good players adapt when they are wrong, because they have a greater negative association with staying wrong, and because they don't tune things out.

As far as non-theoretical advice goes, I've played with some players who made mistakes. But I usually tell them they made a mistake by telling them a game mechanic they didn't know instead of talking about what they did wrong. Instead of 'you messed up that pull', you can talk about the mechanic that causes mobs to aggro onto someone else after they die. I would settle for the minor victory that is not fixing all the mistakes at one time, but it works when they don't think of you as the person who wants to force them to be good at the game. I'm sure there are others who have gotten improvement this way, so this proves the idea is not impossible. However, when I'm pressed for time I do not do things perfectly. I might give a big list that can't be ignored and hope something finally sinks in.

I suck at GW lol, so I'll provide some points that haven't been said (though I haven't read all 7 pages so this may be a repeat of some things).

• The time you started the game does really matter. I just started this year and it's an information overload. For example, skills. For now I really don't care about others builds or pings because does anybody actually remember everything for each profession? Too much to take in at once.
• Some of you talk about bad players as if it's voluntarily, which it's not. If everybody could be proficient, who would choose otherwise? Also people can unmotivated when they try but there's no payoff after long periods of time. Unpredictable learning pace = no incentive.
• Difference between knowing and doing. Many players probably know a lot about GW but aren't very good at teamwork or timing. Something indrect. Plus knowledge and dedication doesn't equal being a good player automatically.
• Unbalanced skills. What if every skill was somehow balanced? I know that's impossible but at least it would give leeway to those who use only what they have.
• Powerleveling/runners: I did this for a little while and actually it was the worst thing possible. Things die and move too fast to think. I know new players sometimes get guild help or strangers (like I did) but it actually makes things much harder since you never learn anything. I was lost in one mission once and the other person ran off and was like going to complete the whole thing without me or tell me where to find him... I just quit and whispered him after.
• Too many AI? I really despise having henchmen and heros at times... they're not human. People learn best from others even if it's small things so when you're alone 24/7 that doesn't' help since you have only yourself to rely on. Also less AI would force PUGs. They really need a huge wall or list that shows what mission/quest everybody is on (not tied to location)... that would encourage more PUGs.

lol y'd this thread turn into one bout education?

imo most kids dun care bout education because they r not taught to

learning is a skill
jus as much as swimming is a skill

the prob is...when learning, many ppl simply "monkey-see-monkey-do"
they jus do wut they're told to do, without understanding why they're doin it

some ppl go that extra step to fully understand the system...but most do not
to some, this can be considered "not necessary"...and to an extent, i can agree
but to me...learning a skill jus to pay bills and put food on the table (and makin ur mom proud aka epeen lol) doesnt provide me wit a worthwhile experience


now back to gw...
there are many problems wit the game itself that will lead bad players

im gonna focus one aspect for this post:
skills

usually in gw, u can indicate a bad player by his bad build

for 1 thing... there are way to many
for a newcomer, it is not worth it to try and understand the skills system
how can one expect a new player to pick?

2nd... wit all the many skills...it would be nice if even half of them were any good
many of them serve absolutely no purpose
they r useless, and a complete waste

3...gw is advertised as a diverse cross-class system
live out ur dreams and become an dagger wielding healer!!!
or a sword/shield battlemage who can rain fires down from the sky!!
yeeeaaaaa.....no

4...wiki/guru/pvxwiki
this point is actually gonna argue the opposite
imo, wiki has improved player's skill levels
u can tell me the jos "life-vest" analogy...
but telling ppl good builds, is nowhere on the level of anet giving us ursan blessing and consets

wiki is good! but u have to make it good!
like i said earlier, u cant jus do monkey-see-monkey-do
u have to try to understand these builds
there r ppl on guru who can recognize a good build from a bad build jus by lookin at it
nubs, take this chance and use wiki to develop this (and many other) skill(s)!


anyways...the list goes on and on
but im gonna stop here, because this post is way too long o__o

In Guild Wars, the problem was that ANet listened to those who didn't care about the game's integrity. They essentially put all modes on the same level of effort (or lack thereof) via Ursan, and even still today with PvE skills and consumables. The problem in doing this? It makes inexperienced players *stay* inexperienced. It further kills the incentive to improve at the game. It's totally fine if you don't want to improve, but you shouldn't be as rewarded and recognized for someone who does.

For the record, this snip of Burst's quote isn't in direct response to him but as an opportunity to bring up some conversation:

This is where difficulty settings come into light.

Difficulty settings work in the sense that the player is made fully aware that they're playing the game in a much more toned down fashion. They know that they're on "I'm Too Young To Die" (Doom's easiest mode for those wondering), they know it's not the normal difficultly, and they certainly know it's not the hardest.

Then the tough question arises: how would you implement a difficulty setting system into an online RPG (for the record, "you" isn't used here as specific)? Would you make it a bit more global, having easy/normal/hard variants of a dungeon/area/whatever? Would you make it personal, much akin to what's seen in Oblivion and Fallout where your character's progression is slowed the easier it is (and likewise hastened in a harder difficulty)? Or would you pull something totally different?