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

Sorry, but you're never testing all of your skills to the best of your abilities. If giving yourself more options lets you test more skills "to the best of your abilities", then PvE skills would increase challenge, not decrease it. How do you think you'd play if your attacks did only half of their normal damage? Or if you only had half of your normal armor? Putting limitations on yourself forces you to use your remaining resources more efficiently. That's the entire reason that things like PvE skills supposedly "destroy challenge": they provide you with additional resources, allowing you to ignore or underplay others.

You're grasping at straws; now not only are you trying to differentiate between challenge and no challenge, but different types of challenge (i.e., user-created vs. developer-created). I've been down that line of reasoning before, and unless you can argue that developer-created challenge is somehow more valid or meaningful than user-created challenge, it's a logical dead end. The problem is that games are ultimately just a set of arbitrary rules - it doesn't make any difference where those rules originated. If I decide to play some GW without PvE skills, it is identical to Anet having disabled PvE skills for the duration of my play.

I put PvE skills on the same level as cheat codes because they serve an identical function: allowing a user to make the game easier for themselves. Being a "normal" means of play doesn't matter except in the player's head. The fact is that cheat codes are available, and it's up to the player whether to use them or not - just like every other tool the game gives you. If there was another version of Starcraft where you needed a code to access Siege Tanks, would it be functionally any different from the original Starcraft?

Yeah, I know. I've already covered your group in my previous posts - the group of people who don't actually care about challenge, but rather rewards and recognition for being skilled. Remember what else I said in those posts? Something along the lines of, "that's why you can't cater to everyone", and "money-driven decision-making"?

I think its more because it is a team game (and a large one at that). Most of the successful e-sport games are 1vs1.

Does WoW have punishment skills and the like that hurt you if you do X action? If not, well, maybe people slam through Empathy, SS, et al because they're just not expecting that they have to change how they mash their skills depending on what opponent they're facing.

I think that spending the amount of money they did, they would have preferred to make a PvE (or PvE/PvP) MMO if they thought it would have a good chance against WoW, but realized that would be completely futile. Instead, they had no choice but to fight for the scraps and carve out a PvP niche -- which to be fair seemed like a potentially decent market, given that something like half of WoW's servers are PvP servers, and battlegrounds there were popular. That's also an area they already have prior expertise in. So my opinion of it is their making a PvP MMO was more out of necessity, than any sort of integrity to game design.

That does make me wonder who Guild Wars 2 is going to be targeted at. I strongly suspect they really do intend to steal a lot of customers from WoW (although you will never hear them say this), most likely by making the game even more solo- or player+buddy friendly than WoW is, and without any large raids whatsoever. It would need to be spectacular enough to rip people apart, and have a bunch of novel features so that it isn't "yet another MMO".

Not especially, the game is pretty lacking on that front, although there's a couple of things; if you dispel Unstable Affliction you take a lot of damage and are silenced.

One of the more interesting spells is Shadow Word: Death, which damages you for an equal amount done to the target if it doesn't land a killing blow on the target. The interesting use of that spell in PvP is to preemptively break crowd control on yourself, as the damage bounceback takes 0.5s to happen. So if someone is casting Sheep on you, you SW: D them right at the end of their cast bar, and then the reflected damage pops you out half a second later. So there's a mini game between priests and mages of mages trying to cast-cancel their Sheep to juke the SW: D.

On the juking front, so many classes have interrupts in that game. In Guild Wars you pay the cost of a spell when you press the button. In WoW you pay it when it actually goes off, so you can cast and then cancel it to try to juke out the counterspell (mage counterspell is nasty, and does what Power Block does if he catches you in the middle of a spell).

WoW is seriously missing the entire concept of effective pre-prot skills, which is one of the things that makes Guild Wars healing so interesting. Energy is also a much better mechanic than a large mana pool.

It is different in two ways. The first is that players perceive player-made and developer-made difficulty differently. If the game company tells a player, "Ok, go ahead and use any skill/class combination you can come up with, clever guy, and try to beat our game", then he'll feel pretty damn happy with himself when he succeeds, because he'll feel the game was balanced around going all-out. If you instead tell him "Well there's a special Cheat Mode version of the game you can use to do the same thing", the sense of euphoria will be far less, and he will feel slightly robbed. Rightly or wrongly, players do not view player-created limitations as a legitimate difficulty increase, and this directly affects their satisfaction with the game.

The second way is how it affects other players, as this is a multi-player game. Much as they deny it, people do check each other out, and don't like to see others getting the same rewards with less effort, even if it doesn't affect them directly. This feeling provides an incentive against making things more difficult for themselves without getting any benefit from it. It doesn't mean they are opposed to more challenge in principle -- as long as everyone else also has to step up to the same challenge.

Both of these are things that exist entirely in the player's head, but since it affects his enjoyment of the game, that makes them no less real.

cheat codes would obviously be banned in any kind of competitive or tournament play...
think of someone using steroids in professional sports

although that example is more subtle...
a better sports example would be imagine covering up ur team's net with a plastic wall



slightly agree...i think its the nature of the word's definition
not people trying to askew the definition to apply it to their genre more suitably
i think it works much like the definition of "smarts"
u can be smart in math, but ur not smart in history
u can be skilled in swimming, but ur not skilled in running

my defintion of "skill" is the act of doing
how well u can perform in the game, physically
u can be knowledgeable in a game, but not have that physicality to perform well
or u can be the best strategist, but not be able to put those plans into action


the chess quote is very good
because the game does not appear to have any sort of appearance of physical challenge
so then it doesnt take skill?
yes it does...through the use of the clock
i dun follow tourney chess at all, but i believe that most (if not all) will be timed games
the skill comes from being able to use ur knowledge and strategy very quickly and changing and adapting on the fly
making it more akin to a real-time-strategy game, rather than a turn-based one

let me tell u
if starcraft was a tbs-strategy game...most of the skill would be non-existent as well
but because its a rts game, it involves lots of skill
and this skill level is measured (partially and somewhat inaccurately) by actions-per-minute
generally the higher u r apm, the higher ur skill level
(it doesnt measure any other factors like ur strategy/tactics or knowledge, etc...so jus because someone has a higher apm, doesnt mean they're a better player)


now whether or not street fighter requires more skill level than rts games...
i would be inclined to say yes
aside from the the very strict timing on certain moves (1-frame windows of opportunity @ 60fps)
there also comes into play ur reaction times (or reflexes)


fps games also require a lot of skill
its hard to judge overall tho because fps has a wide span of different types of games
some r more driven by skill, some more driven by tactics


edit: and while skill level may be a -huge- factor in determing how good a player is (especially when it comes to competitive games/sports)
it is not the -only- factor

edit #2: i also think its important to note that it doesnt take great skill to teach/coach a game/sport (tho it does help)
but it does take great knowledge and a deep understanding of the game/sport

This comment struck me because the last part (bolded) is very close to the document I've just started to design (let's call it "30 things you should know about Guild Wars"): at the most basic level, I'm not even sure if people know about this kind of stuff (hex, pips, compass, spell animation and sound, etc.), i.e. they haven't understood the depth of the User Interface (UI), which itself reflects the complexity of the game mechanics. I hope to be able to finish this not too late (not easy), it'd be something that'd start with a big picture of a GW screenshot and describe each and every aspect of the UI, as an excuse to describe the basics of the game mechanics. Not an in-depth look at the game (which is required if you want to know more than the basics), something rather short with quite a few links to other articles, but just enough to, maybe, make the n00b a little less n00b, give the newbie the right tool to start learning, and the casual player new information s/he may have missed.

GW lacks documentation. As holymasamune says, there are indeed plenty of stuff floating around, but it requires reading quite a lot, see for example wiki guides. But there's nothing that goes from the initial point (see the guide in the box!) to the point where people begin to think in terms of game mechanics (instead of "it's fun to spam this or slash that", or "this cookie cutter build works great!" without understanding why).

Tbh I'm not sure the "n00bs", "newbies" and "casuals" will read such a guide, given that they may not read stuff and may simply be playing the game. This is the part of the discussion about "motivation" of players, and the fact that the game is supposed to be "fun" (which is backed up by one piece of information: Guru is only a tiny part of the GW community, which in average makes a little or a lot of effort to try to understand the game, rather than simply play it). But yet I'd like to try that and maybe, just maybe, if it's good and people spread the word it can improve slightly the player skills at the grassroot level. (my belief is that such a basic guide can only be effective via word of mouth and as a starting point for learning, not an ultimate goal to become a "skilled player", which requires a lot of experience as pointed out here)

What do you think? Could "basic" players be interested in a such a "visual guide to swimming"? Could such a "30 things to know about Guild Wars" guide work and effectively improve player skill?

I feel that if a player lacks the motivation to research, find the answers, and better themselves on their own, they aren't going to suddenly board the become-good train from reading a one time how-to guide.

Generally I feel that if I encounter a player and he's a bad player, the odds are that he's always been bad and always will be bad. This is because "good players", even if they are brand new to a game, self-improve rapidly and don't stay bad for very long, so the odds of encountering them in their "currently bad" state are slim.

You would then probably label me as a bad player because it took me a long while to become "not bad" (not to say "good"), and I've seen a few people expressing the same viewpoint on Guru. And I doubt that "rapid improvement" is part of the definition of "good player".

(I've seen this while teaching, the students that started at the lowest level in September and slowly worked their way through the Maths teachings are now probably "better" than the average ones which believe that the knowledge they had in September from their A-levels is enough and haven't made much progress; teaching is NOT about the destination but about the journey)

By the way, this discussion is not supposed to be about good and bad as I said in the OP (I think). It's rather about how to collectively address the problem rather than point fingers (if they're good they're good, if not they're bad and they'll stay that way). But my feeling is that if I advertise such a guide on Guru, no one will appreciate it and even less people will share it, thus leading to it being totally uneffective. But not because it's a bad guide, but because 1) people don't really care about "teaching" (again, notice the double quotes); 2) even if they do care, they prefer that others self-improve; 3) they feel it's a waste of time and not "fun".

95% of Guild Wars players are bad at Guild Wars.

The 5% that aren't bad are composed of the utmost top PvP'rs and Koreans.

Also, 4% out of the 5% that are good have quit the game.

It's difficult to write a guide to GW in general. You'll either cover so much that the reader will be overwhelmed, and/or you'd miss vital info and create a bad player instead. It's hard enough to write a guide on a single profession that covers everything thoroughly yet could be read by a new player easily; a guide on GW in general would be chaotic.

Even if you wrote a guide, it wouldn't be more effective than current methods of learning. What group of players would be better suited to learning from a manual than from just playing the game?

See why so many are pissed? No longer is actually coming up with proper builds and other important skills effective, they are now a self-enforced limitation. It's no longer "I went against the game", it's "I went against myself". It also becomes annoying to improve yourself while you're gimped because you're always knowing what to do to not be having such a more difficult time: not gimp yourself.

Even if you're successful while gimped, is that newly earned player skill going to matter? What's the point of mastering the double-barreled shotgun in Doom if id Software added a patch that provided an unlimited ammo BFG at the start of every level? For fun, sure, but it can also be fun figuring out how to really use a different weapon for one the situation calls for it and it's largely disappointing when there's no use for it (like what we have now, being complained about on both PvE *and* PvP sides).

I want to take a brief moment to look at what Epic did: When people were saying that Gears of War was too hard, what did they do? They didn't lower the difficulty of Insanity in the sequel, they provided a new and easier level than Normal: Casual.

What ANet did was what could be considered the "wrong" way: instead of providing easier points of access or ways to further progress your skill, they provided tools that could be used anywhere in the game and flat out made *all* of it easier. This made it so that those who didn't want to become better didn't have to, and those who are newer to the game will spend less time in the game.

No, you can't cater to everyone. You're never going to cater to everyone. Epic knew this. They also knew that if they did appeal to those who wanted an easier time in Insanity (easier to gain achievement bragging rights, equivilent to e-peen) they would be making those who wanted to sustain the game pissed off.

Then it comes down to, as you said, "dah moniez" - in which case, Epic did the right thing. In providing an easier difficulty level they were able to make it easier for those both new to the game and who were having an already hard time. If they did the "other thing", however, it would lessen the skill threshold, piss off a portion of the community who were largely experienced/knowledgeable about the game, and can generally raise some eyebrows in the developer's direction.

Given that logic, though, why did LOTR:O go ahead and make a centrally PvE-focused game - and still see success?

Largely, the thing that's backing numerous MMO's these days is the IP, and that's one thing that WoW, LOTR:O and WAR all share in common: a very large, old, and supported history. Because of that WAR really could've gone in any direction they chose.

PvP servers =/= PvP, btw, unless you consider continually preventing people from summoning PvP. Instantaneous duels can be interesting at times, though.

i agree wit savio that reading a guide isnt the most effective way to get better at a game
but it does help on a basic level

i can say wit about 99% certainty that most ppl get the best improvement at multiplayer games through player interaction and communication

but gw's community at this point is far too spread apart and disconnected from one another for this to occur at a large scale

pve, ever since heroes, theres usually no incentive to actually play with another person
and because there r 3 continents...even if u wanted to play wit another person, its hard to get nuff ppl to do so since the population is too far spread apart

pvp, theres a lot of division of players moreso than other games
theres many elitists in gw of all skill levels
(yes there r bad players wit elitist attitudes)
i blame this on the "pvp farming" aspect of gw
no one wants to communicate...they dun have time to help...they must focus on farming


personally i really dun think very much can be done at this point .___.

It is indeed good idea. I myself wanted to write something like that after I read book from head-first series.

They are very funny, very well written and full of facts. Pleasure to read even if you are already well versed in subject just because its writing style.

However, it is very costly in terms of time and it would have to involve several smart people with good writing skills who "know how to play" to ensure good quality. Not something you do in afternoon.

I doubt most players bother to read a guide from beginning to the end.

What I find disturbing is even the in-game knowledge of this guru community seems to be degenerating as good players quit and disappear. Certain game facts that were well known 2 years ago are almost unheard of right now and people are making the same mistakes all over again but this time without the guidance of those wiser players that have already quit.

Why people specifically play games is much less important here than why the game attracts players. I'm not convinced you can't cater to everyone, because we have seen it done. It is still the best way to make money. More on that later.

CS? But yes it is true that most successful games are 1v1....although GW has HB but I wouldn't even put that into the equation whatsoever.

It doesn't come close?? I'd argue that at a time it was more intense! I'm not saying it was specifically better, but the tactical decisions and team based play at the height of Guild Wars were unmatched. What other 8v8 esport require the sheer amount of teamwork, tactical, and individual decisions? I don't consider it so great anymore though, mostly due to the balance of the game. What happened to Guild Wars is the equivalent of Blizzard balancing SC regularly to make each of the races broken for certain periods of time. SC wouldn't be the game it is today if that happened.

The problem here is that the only answer is pointing fingers. The other poster said it perfectly...if somebody wants to be good in Guild Wars they can get good. Maybe not the best, but definately in the "good" category. It is all a matter of want...I don't buy that the game is too complicated or that people can be taught to want. While your guide is a cool idea, I don't think it would solve either of those problems.

I think one of Burst's points is that if the codes exist in a game, you are ALREADY self imposing (gimping) yourself if you don't use them. Technically not using the codes is not a game imposed challenge, but self imposed. Although I think the GW situation is much different (and I said why in a previous post), I think there is a good point there.

I'd argue that the only way to have a perfect challenge setting without any self imposing involved is playing against other players....but that would probably go off topic. To me this thread has gone way too philosopical and not too practical.

Why did you cave in on that? How many examples can we name that "cater to everyone" and still make loads of money? A lot...

The thing is, at least for most games, those "cheat codes" aren't readily accessible. If they're in there they must be intended for use from the devs, right? But if that were so why aren't they just listed easily in the options menu?

The devs may be wanting to keep you on the rail of "this is how the game is meant to be played, but those cheat codes? Just shits and giggles". That could be part of the reason they call them "cheat codes", since it's going against the "preferred method of play". Or it could be a reward for actually figuring it out, in which case, ehhh k?

What?

All that that passage said was that you're never going to make 100% of all players happy...not that this is a bad thing, since I'd classify those players as crazy.

Example: There was one person I knew after they took out attribute refund points who was actually pissed at ANet for it...Yeah, I wish I was joking, too. The point is that these "wackos" aren't really a loss.

This answer is so wrong on many points, sorry but I'm short on time and will only let you ponder on this thought:

just imagine what our RL would be with this philosophy (where pointing fingers really is important because it's just not about "fun"), a society with only personal responsibility and duty? No room for collaboration, I'll do something so that it can help the others, rather than telling them "go grab a book and learn" (an answer I'm sometimes tempted to say to my students...btw I do tell them to read books, but I tell them specifics, with topic, page numbers, and precise exercise, not just "go read a book").

No wonder that this community is not healthy (I don't blame you personally, I blame this mentality). How do you think our community would be if, instead of lengthily discussing theoretical topics on gaming you'd spend it on teaching new or inexperienced players? (I'm not asking you to do it, just ponder on what difference it'd make)

The quality of the players in Guild Wars that don't try to engage in competitive PvP (GvG) has severely degraded over time, the reasons being manifold.

For PvE, I blame the lack of a proper tutorial, a gentle learning curve, skills being handled out little by little, and missions that require teamwork. Prophecies had all that, subsequent chapters didn't; as a result, players became close-minded and more prone to farming and AI exploiting, things I wouldn't consider "skill".

For PvP, it may be the degradation of all the formats due to unmantainable balance and the lack of a proper entry point. The skillset introduced by subsequent chapters made it so there are stronger, less subtle tools to achieve several things and thus it is easier to "win". Also, the removal of build templates (albeit outdated) was a terrible choice in my opinion: newbies don't have a starting point for their character, a general idea that tells them what their role is, and end up rolling a lolsin from the wiki thinking they're owning shit because they're pressing buttons in the right order.

Concerning GvG, there simply isn't a way to get into it besides GvG itself, which can be quite brutal and discouraging and first. Random Arena is blighted by sins and hex spam and seldom involves teamplay; Team Arena is gimmick land; Heroes' Ascent is a joke (when Tombs was still somewhat meaningful, players met and guilds formed in ToPK); Hero Battles is a steaming pile of donkey crap. Alliance Battles is a fun format which can help one develop some degree of movement strategy, but most people seem to care about nuking shrines with arcane echo RoJ or MS so it's not exactly a place where you can develop much skill either.

Then there's those people that have been playing for 3+ years and still haven't made it at least into the top500. I honestly have no explanation for such cases.

This is a good point actually. Many cheat codes aren't even accessible until well after the game has already been released as a way to boost sales. I don't think they are meant to be used immediately the first time you play the game.

First you were saying the best games are for everyone, then you said no game can cater to everyone. Perhaps I misunderstood. There is a difference between catering to everyone and making everyone happy. I think games can do the former but not the latter.

I don't mind people teaching or others wanting to learn (in fact I advocate both)...but I'm talking about "want" here. In society if people don't want to do something they simply won't do it. This is especially true when the risk for not doing is low and the reward for doing is not enough (like we have in GW). If a person doesn't want to go to school he/she won't go. If a person doesn't want to read a book they won't. I personally think this extends all the way to if a person doesn't want to succeed they probably won't. If a person wanted to succeed, they would attempt to do the things required to do so. Hiding behind "the game is too hard" or anything else is just excuses that really nobody is going to care about in the end. You simply can't teach people to do things they don't want to do.

It would not work, this kind of information is already in the tutorial quests. I can't help it if people skip those, their responsibility.

Surgestions to make people better (and not covered in tutorial quests) have to do with two, maybe three things.
First of all, team building. Learn how to make a balanced team.
And more important, the individual build should benefit the team, not only the ego of the player.
Second, position on the field.
Get those two two right and you've gained a lot.

Third, don't use the user interface, use all information you get. Shut down the user interface and look around. What animations do certain hexes have when being cast, both on caster and target. Same with enchantments. Which sounds are associated with the casts (I really hate the sound of Diversion when I know I'm too late to cancel my skill).
What do conditions like daze and blind look like on a target.
Don't try to learn them, just look at the information presented to you.
The only thing I would keep open (and kinda huge on the screen) is the compass. It tells you the relative position of your team and foes.

Only after that you can start talking about the various skills and how they effect gameplay. The number of skills makes it very hard for a new player to learn each of them. Who cares about Empathy or IP or SS? As long as the healers can heal up, it's not a problem. Same with Backfire. I don't care ~125 damage when I can kill or disable a foe and am not in any danger.
My (human) monks could also know they don't have to react, since my position on the field would indicate no danger.
More important is to look for damage sources (do I get hit or do I hurt myself) and the amount of healing applied.


@Akaraxle on "For PvE, I blame the lack of a proper tutorial...."
Yesterday I created a new monk in both Factions and Nightfall and the tutorials are there. And they ain't that bad, but one should follow them all to actually learn as new player. And who wants to play and read those when the world is at risk?

You're not actually comparing Factions' and Nightfall's "noob islands" to Pre-Searing, are you? They're night and day.
Also, this is a game, the world is not actually at risk. As long as the "tutorial" is cunningly slipstreamed into the plot, and plays and feels just like the actual game (if you think about it, Prophecies' learning curve is spread out until the Crystal Desert), no one will skip it.

Adding to the list of "things that made PvErs worse", I could talk about the WoW-style tank/nuke/heal template that was made evident with Factions elite missions, and became dominant - to the amazingly dumb point where people were prohibited from doing anything but spam nukes on command - in the DoA.

The game mechanics should integrate the teaching and increase of player skill over time while demanding a progressive increase in skill level in order to proceed further into the game.

That's what good games do.

Any guide is really compensation for bad game design, besides which you have to make a player actually want to increase or improve their skill level first.

After that it takes care of itself as it's a requirement to progress and achieve.

GW is about finishing and then repeating content as efficiently and quickly as possible.No guide will change that core mechanic and as a result a guide would have negligible effect imo.

Efficiency > Skill when it should be Skill = Efficiency.

this is what fanboys actually believe.

I'm completely leaving this out of the equation here because:
1) it's advanced stuff when you start from (very) low;
2) it's already covered on a few guides in different PvP forums and Guru article;
3) I don't have the time for now, and I'd like to try to devise a first document anyway.

Well, I was alreayd thinking of showing skill acvitation on a screen (have to be fast at ss ), their effects, but: 1) I can't show sounds (or maybe I'll try on 2 or 3 obvious ones); 2) this guide will be an entry point, surely not a complete guide on the UI or GW's game mechanics. If people find this guide interesting, maybe they'll be more willing to read more stuff (e.g. wiki).

Of course at this point I've got no control over the "maybe" and, despite people saying here that it's not going to work, I'll try anyway.

Just had a Maths lecture this morning, if you were there you would probably have been bored to death (let's formulate this plain English problem in Maths...). My point being: it's going to be a much more grassroots level guide, what you're talking about is too advanced (and too much work). I'll start small and, possibly (time permits), get to bigger topics.

Good point . (I may use that in the introduction of the guide, something along the lines of "Would you like to play in such a way that you'll understand why Shiro is so strong and beat him more easily? Or why the Margonites are easily killing you while the Vabbian guards were easy to kill?" )

First, my apologies to fireflyry if this rant is in no way sticking to your view, but this comment struck me as a good jumping off point. Second, I'm sure this will be largely ignored just like most of my comments (after all, what could a 38 y.o. lifelong gamer who was playing PnP wargames long before there were computer games worth a damn know about GW and gaming if he had the "unfortunate" luck to start GW in the early fall of 2007 ), but I'd like to throw in a bit of perspective:

GW is not about repeating anything efficiently or well or much of anything else. There is a storyline, there is a finale, and that's pretty much it. There really is a finite game from the overall design POV. And, yes, it is true that you can finish this defined, finite game without a whole lot of (meta)skill; me and my friends finished Prophecies the first time mostly with the stock henchmen and barely a decent skillbar between us. The thing is, that was the game that was actually designed by Anet. EVERYTHING else in PVE, be it getting a fancy piece of gear, vanquishing, maxing some title, unlocking extra heroes, capping skills, etc., etc. are purely optional diversions. Nobody wins real life prizes, nobody gets any better at PVP, and with the exception of armor and minipets, nobody even gets bragging rights in the public areas of the game.

This entire thread is people who know next to nothing about gaming as far as I'm concerned arguing about angels dancing on the head of a pin. You have deluded yourself into thinking a bunch of optional metagoals that we, the gamers set for ourselves and that have been repeatedly accentuated with the very generous outlay of time, money, and effort on the part of Anet are somehow The Game (TM) or, for the other viewpoint The Scourge of The Game (TM). They aren't either one, and that's why your kevetching will never be addressed by Anet to anything close to your satisfaction. They're quite simply just additional timesinks to add value to an already decent value in games.

I'm reasonably sure there are a lot of things Anet did wrong in regards to supporting PvP - the single domain where all this hand wringing about skill or lack of skill belongs - in GW, but consumables, PVE skills, titles, HOM, rare minipets, heroes, PUGs, lack of PUGs, missions that force teamwork, missions that don't force teamwork, <insert your favorite excuse for why this game sucks so much> are not it. They have nothing to do with it and as far as I'm concerned the GW community would be magnitudes better if there weren't people filled with so much angst over nothing at all. Fortunately for me, my friends, and other tens of thousands of gamers actually enjoying the game, the game is brilliant in its design because your so-called success or failure has nothing do with ours.

You have to volunteer to have someone else's gameplay affect your game experience. There's no griefing in explorable areas, there's max gear available for, almost literally, peanuts, and the most expensive runes in the game aren't even close to necessary for PVE. So, when you decide to set some 100% optional and 100% pointless metagoal for your playtime, don't come whining to me about how some other guy chose to meet the same 100% optional and pointless metagoal the "easy way", because it sounds to me just like the whining from my kids.

From a other 38+,

Channum, you hit the nail on his head.

Welldone

This should be obligatory reading for the people in Sardelac.

Anyway I think Fril has a point. I do not think there is not much knowledge passing between vets and newbies. Me for example. Now after 3 years I am getting sick of explaining some thing for the n-th time and most of my friends as well. That is why there are so many "high end guilds" out there which do not want to recruit fresh players. People just got tired of explaining, they prefer to spent time achieving their goals. Maybe after a longer break in gw I would get some enthusiasm to do it but for now I have none at all. It requires too much dedication. Not mentioning all kinds of reactions you get when you are trying to help.

Indeed improved manual would be handy. I remember so many so called obvious things which were absolutely not clear when I was running through pre searing. As it was stated here. Pre-searing is so much better than all other tutorials in other campaigns.

I am comparing the very first part of the noob islands to Pre.
In Factions I've played only the main quests, tried all secondary professions, played the first mission and have chosen my secondary.
That's about what you do in pre (except the mission). I think Factions is better at this.
Next step up are a few quests in the secondary line, the ones given by Instructor Ng. Advanced Defence, Condition Removal, Hex counter, Disenchantment, Disruption, Skill chains, snares.
Those are not found anywere in Prophecies. I've yet to start those but I know they are there from the past.
I'm about half as far in the game in NF and got a somewhat decent skillbar that provides basic needs (though some skills are unusable, same with factions).


Y, when playing with a first character. But learning another profession would require doing all those again. And another profession yet again. Many people start skipping at that time. And at that time the world is at risk, they know about Lich, Shiro and Abaddon.
And what many people tend to forget is that playing a different role in a team does make a difference. It took me a long time to get from back-/midline to decent frontline. And that's not because I'm a bad player.


@Fril Estelin

The problem is that many players say team balance and positioning are advanced while in fact they are not.
Sure, it's a lot of work to explain in depth, but it's not rocket science.
And it's what makes a lot of the difference between 'good' and 'bad' players.

Let me give an example.
Ages ago I liked monking for PUGs in THK. When the team was forming it already started to get clear if it had a chance of success or not.
Why? Because it became fast if there was balance in the team or not.
Next when into the mission (or upfront) strategies would be discussed.
A decent leader would point out where to walk, where to wait and even spot if someone was drawing unintentional aggro.
That's basic team positioning.

Sure, we can go to the PvP side where a slightly bad position could result death or disadvantage, but that's not what I'm talking about here.
It's more about making sure that the entire team stays around each other (except when intended to split), people don't draw aggro to the group when someone is tanking (when a tank is used) or by pop-ups and how the group positions itself on the battlefield (not in the line of patrols, take advantage of a certain position like behind a wall).

That's not so hard to understand, even for a new player.

But then, maybe I should place myself in the brains of the 14yr old son of one of my guildies. Don't think he'd want to do all this, he just wants to pwn I guess. And after countless fails he'd still not understand why, even when told.

The whole game is optional; there is no need to ever finish the story. Thinking that the game is just the storyline is just as bad a view as thinking the game is all about farming. There are some players that will play for just the storyline and others that will play for the phat loot; some will actually play for both. Developers specifically put "optional" goals in a game because they want to cater to that type of player; it's hard to think of any game nowadays that does not have content of that sort.

Yeah I get this feeling too on this thread, but not from the target audience . (I know some people may think I'm wasting my time but I think the exercise is interesting, even if it fails)

You may have experience in gaming, but I'm not sure you're a wise person. Your comment was rude, because directed at the "entire thread", and it even was off-topic. It's not about what being "good" means, but about making the n00b a little less n00b, giving the newbie the right tool to start learning, and presenting the casual player with information s/he may have missed.

Easily solved: if you have completed the campaign with at least 1 character, you can skip the tutorial, you get all the skills you should, and are leveled to ~7. Wasn't done, but could've been.

Just have to add some comment to this part.
I don't think many of the players here ain't enjoying the game.

But let's get this one in perspective.
I'm in a guild that has a focus on high-end PvE content of GW for a very long time, starting about December 2005 I'd say. We were not serious enough for PvP, couldn't get a core team together because of different playing times.
However, for me and the other guildies, the quality of new players does matter.
At a certain time players of my guild refused to play with alliance members except one or two guilds because of 'bad quality'. Meaning they would enter an area with them and were unable to finish it. Not once, not twice but many times. Now this influences their fun and their gameplay.

I've seen the same with several less experienced players who were recruited in our guild.
There would be some initial mistrust till they had proven themselfs.
Again because the fun of players is doing stuff and succeeding doing it.
No farming teams and fixed builds, so people always know there is a risk of failure, but it shouldn't be because of lack of basic game knowledge. And that happens once in a while.

Now let's step up one level in gameplay. Organised PvP.
Something the game was build for.
You either are willing to improve or you are a burden to your team.
And being a burden to your team means you are out.

Sure, if you like to live in your little sandbox there is no reason to improve. No-one to care about. Because it's only you vs some AI foes. Do whatever you like. For me you don't exist, I will never interact with you.
But this is not my kind of game. I play with a lot of people. Meet good and bad players. They are part of my fun and that's my choice.
And if I would team up with slightly better players every day it would make things more fun for me. Not because I could finish things faster, I've done everything on the PvE side I wanted and am not sure about a PvP swich yet.
But it's fun to see people achieving their goals and be happy about it. And with better players there is more chance of that.

From this perspective improving the skill of less experienced players matters a lot, even if it's PvE.

Your first answer is an over-generalization. There are people who view player-created limitations as "legitimate" difficulty increases. Ever tried beating DMC with Force Edge and E&I? There are many people who try these kinds of challenges and love them. At the same time, I know people who use cheat codes pretty much whenever they play any game. Now, I (and probably many of you) can't understand what's fun about playing a game when you can't die, can't run out of ammo, and have access to all technology from the beginning, but that's how these people have fun. Is their "cheating" fun any less than my "challenge" fun? Ultimately, the game is what you make it - and if you can't make it fun, you don't play it.

That ties us right into your second point, which is the same answer I came up with - many of the people that are after "challenge" are really after rewards and recognition for their efforts. As I said, that makes them impossible to reconcile with the people who want rewards even if they're not as good. The question then boils down to: which group results in more money if I cater to them?

Re: Dream,
This isn't philosophical. Your stance is that you can cater to everyone. Arguing this requires you to know what everyone actually wants. Therefore, I've argued a position dealing with what people actually want. Prior to this, people were just speaking in terms of "hardcore", "casual", "challenge", etc. These terms are smokescreens; remove the terms and you expose the flaw in the argument: challenge isn't what's lacking - it's rewards and recognition, stuff that makes the challenge "matter". Once you know that, it becomes clear that certain groups will always be fundamentally opposed: some people want challenge to "matter", and others don't.

Whether cheat codes are available at a game's release doesn't make a difference. After all, PvE skills and consumables weren't added until much later in the GW product cycle, but somehow GW is allegedly worse for it even though you aren't playing it for the first time. And again, consider the case of Starcraft. Does a game suddenly become bad once you know there are cheat codes?

You're on the right track. Keep going.

Re: Bryant,
While every level in Doom might not have a BFG with infinite ammo, you are allowed to use cheat codes on every level. By your reasoning, what's the point of learning how to play Doom without cheat codes when you can just use cheat codes? If you're going to argue that learning how to play GW without PvE skills and consumables is pointless just because you could use PvE skills and consumables, then there's never any point in learning any game without cheat codes, right? Someone brought up the fact that cheat codes in Starcraft can't be used in competitive play, but PvE skills and consumables can't be used in GW PvP either. That's not the salient difference.

Actually, mastering the shotgun is learning a new skill "to the best of your ability". That's what you were originally concerned with, right? Would you ever bother to master the shotgun if you could use a different weapon? Does learning the shotgun not teach you anything that is applicable to other weapons? Going back to DMC, why do people bother to beat the whole game with Force Edge or without guns? Where's the point? For one, it's incredibly fun to them, and for another, it makes them better players. After all, if you can beat the game with the worst weapon in the game, it ought to be a complete walk in the park when you can use better weapons right?

It's impossible for us to say if Epic did the right thing with Gears of War, because we simply don't have the relevant data. It's possible (likely, even) that they'd have gotten more players if they'd toned down the hardest difficulty level. Sure, you and I might think that makes the game "worse", but that's not what concerns a company.

I've been following this thread off and on and thinking about it while playing. These are some of my own observations regarding quality of players. Now before I start, I do realize there are many people playing through the game for the nth time and there are some places you just don't want to play anymore but... for anyone who still plays PVE, how many outposts/towns with people in them can you go to without seeing LFR to X, what I mean is a lot of ppl don't even play the game to have a chance to improve. They make a character, find out where the "good stuff" is and then get run all the way there, once there they are horrible because they haven't played anything leading up to it to have a chance to have an idea of what to do when they get to their destination. I started GW and played a war (frontline) and did so for a long time, then my friend convinced me to make a monk(back), now I had exp in the game, kinda knew what to expect content wise, but playing through I had to learn how to play the new character, so when I got to the end I had some exp playing that role, now I just made an ele(mid) and the same thing, no runs anywhere but I now have an idea of how to play a caster. I can totally understand why people chose to play mostly H/H, I got to Gate of Madness and thought, hey it may be fun to do this with some people, I had played most of the way through NF by myself and wanted to try and play with some people as I do enjoy it. However, after my 2nd group, a couple of wasted hours, some /facepalm, and a couple epic failures, I said to hell with it, put together a H/H team and went and did the mission with masters. Now I am by no means an expert and would most certainly get my butt whipped in PvP but for me I enjoy PVE and when I am going to do a mission or play an area, I'll have a peek at wiki or something and try and be somewhat prepared for what I'm going to face. So many people I have played with don't even have an idea of what the objective is of what they are trying to do and it is just frustrating after a while. Another place it shows that people just rush through/skip large portions of content (and thus an opportunity to learn/improve) is the amount of people who complain they are broke. I don't mean broke as in "I can't afford a mini Panda" I mean broke as in all the people spamming " can anyone spare 500g/10 bolts of cloth/20wood planks, etc", for Pete's sake, dip your toe in the friggin water, go outside town, kill 10-15 monsters and get the friggin stuff yourself! Not every foe has to drop an ecto/obsi shard, VS, etc. and heck, if they did that they may even learn something about the game. /end rant Sorry, this came out way longer than I meant but I think those are some major problems in people's lack of ability/knowladge of the game.

That's a good question, when I referenced to above:

Not really. Mastering the shotgun is pointless because there's never going to be a situation that requires it when the double barreled shotgun does three times the damage at only double the reload time, and your aiming skill is far better examined through using the chaingun. The only thing it tests is your patience, which is much better done with the pistol...and which is much better done by not using any weapons at all.

Just because you spent more time doing a task often doesn't make you a better player. If I beat a game using the pistol over any other weapon, that only means that the fight encounters were simply lengthened. I'd still do everything I normally do, it would just be as though all the monster's health was quadrupled by a shit done and your ammo was increased by the same amount. It just makes the fight longer.

The fists are the only "bad" weapon that may make you a better player since being able to dodge those projectiles at close range requires some pretty tight reflexes, but that's only because you have to be next to the baddies to use it. You'd be able to practice the same skills with any weapon as long as you run up to them pointblank.

If we don't have the relevant data how come it's safer to assume they'd have gotten more players toning down the hardest difficulty level? Is it on the simple basis that most players aren't that good? How do we know that most of those players even care?

In any MMO, the amount of 'good' players will most likely hover around 10%. Sad, but true; not everyone can be good at MMO's. The idea of any MMO having a population where 25% of the players are good at the game is unrealistic. Why? Because that's saying that 1 out of every 4 players you run into have proficient knowledge of the entire game and could competitively play at a high level. That means either the game is extremely shallow and not skill based, or the player base is robots.

For reference, my definition of 'good' is being able to do something successful or well

That is all nice and good Zeff, but the point is "why does other people skill matter to you?"

If you like meat and want to have meat for lunch you not going to a vegetarian place. Likewise, you can and should choose the people you wish to play.

Like Burst Cancel is saying most are after recognition, not the challenge. In my opinion, those persons should be playing PvP and get their recognition, not wishing to FORCE challenge on other people when they can create the challenge to themselves.

Guess they aren't good enough to play GvG so need to be slightly better than the mediocre...

The point of "why does other people's skill matter to you" is that this is a multiplayer game and because of that I like to play with other people. While sometimes I can chose who I play with, friends, guildies etc, that is not always possible. And while I wouldn't expect everyone to be "good" I would expect that in a certain number of attempts one should be able to find enough (only need 7 sheesh) other people to be able to accomplish what you are tring to do instead of coming to the end of your play time and feel like it was just wasted. At that point it was not time spent having fun, which is why I play, it just feels like an exercise in frustration. I don't expect to succeed 100% of the time, that isn't fun either as there is no challenge then, I would expect though that people have some idea of what it is they are doing or trying to do. I guess what I am trying to say is that while failure happens, if you at least have an understanding of your role you can make adjustments and hopefully succeed, if you have no clue because you skipped all the basics to prepare you for your current situation, that just makes it frustrating for those playing with you.

No. You want to play with people that see the game like you.