Various short thoughts on game (re)design

Hey,

One thought occured to me earlier today:

HM was introduced as a mode where monsters are more difficult to kill, in particular via faster skill cast and recharge (and skillbar improvement with elites etc.), higher attributes/health/level and keeping aggro.

It was later made easier with consumables which increase your stats, such as cast and recharge times, attributes, immunity.

1) It seems that the consumable features are the ones that were originally applied to the monsters. So, was the "redesign" of HM simply giving access to players to the features that HM monsters had by default?

2) Furthermore, what DP-removing items may show is that accumulation of DP may have been one of the biggest obstacle for progressing through HM. So did Anet simply monitor the amount of failure on players' part and provided tools for them to overcome their difficulties?

Lastly, when doing Slaver's NM, I noted how much pulling was required not to end up dead in seconds. Then I thought of the initial vision of GW, where PvE was here to prepare you to PvP, and wondered how pulling was applied in PvP. Obviously, there are the NPCs but you don't have mobs of them. Are there "luring" techniques that PvPers use to ambush players?

Sorry that it's not a consistent set of thoughts, but I'm sure it can provide the basis for an interesting discussion (I can already read Bryant Again and Abedeus )

no it was just more grind so players would wait around for that mythical unicorn that farts rainbows, gw2

I use pulling in JQ and AB when necessary. It's always funny to see someone chase you into your base and get smoked by the base defenders.

And also, DP removing items where implemented before hard mode was introduced. we had Peppermint Candycanes during the first Wintersday event.

Slaver's Exile is a strange "Elite" area. If you wipe in the Fissure, the UW, the Hall of Heores (PvE), the Deep, Urgoz' Warren and the Domain of Anguish, then it's over. Eye of the North has no such area. That is one very obvious design change.

Another massive design change were the PvE skills. They rewarded people having more time to put into their titles with even more power. Although from a pugging perspective, those players are the ones requiring that extra power the least.

I'm not a guy buying into the old legend of how "PvE is supposed to prepare you for PvP". Some PvP players might required that myth to help legitimize their higher calling, but no single PvE mission really tries to train you for PvP, not even the ones with "capture the base" modes. GW-PvP and GW-PvE might as well be two separate games. That's how it is with every fps, why should it be different for RPGs.

Oh come on. I agree with your statement, but you have to admit that the Desert missions in Prophecies were totally PvP-influenced. That's the first thing I thought when I played through them, and personally, they're some of the better missions in GW.

1) So you implay that "conset" was meant to put players on equal footing with monsters and to equalize them?

You correct - consumables basically erase HM advantages and give players tool to "outlevel" mobs. Not unlike typical MMO where players are given taste of powerfull mobs along with tools to raise to their level and "equalize" them.

We have seen similar setup used several times already (Mursaat Spectral Agony -> Imunity; Shiros Army outleveling/moster only skills -> Dragon Skills; Torment creatures -> Lightbringer title).

Notice how those were specific to challenge presented, now if conset was usable only in HM and requires some HM-time to obtain, you would be 100% correct.

Basically, armsraces. Instead of Levels, you have special buffs/antibuffs.

2) DP removing items were added to game long before HM. Mostly because DP meant little in PvE and this DP removal was nice, desirable, effect that did not cheapen game or throw it off ballance. We are talking about times when anet was actually interested in ballancing PvE and introduced likes of minion cap and AoE mob reaction.

But, after HM came, there is suddenly abundace of those items. And they are very easy to obtain: Presearing Nicholas drops lots of honeycombs and it takes about week of work to obtain stack for someone who has three accounts.

Again, you are onto something. Maybe they did see people loose vanquishes becuase of DP accumulation. Maybe they saw qq threads somewhere. Maybe they realized that HM is mostly grindy and they can as well give everyone stack of DP removers and let em grind throught areas painlessly.

It's not "allowing to overcome challenge", it is to "allow mindlessly grind through it" purely because people who were able to use skill to beat HM did it already. Motivated people who were able to patiently grind throught it even while they struggled. People who had guild to support em got it done.

That leaves casual, average players. Those people do not want to spend their X-hours gameplay time budget on failure. You need to give them goal (hm) and tool (grind consets and dp removers). Time they would spend failing and getting pissed is spent gaining consets, which is much more positive.

3) Pulling teaches patience (strike at opportune moments; let enemy team make mistake and split), harassment (if two teams stare at each other if helps to "enrage" oposition and whip em to premature action) and baiting ("overextended misbehaving warior" ... ups, nope, he just made YOU overextend)

Sure, one mission has a Team Arena vibe, but collecting crystals in Elona Reach or defending a platform against attacking enemies is hardly preparing anybody for PvP. All those missions really do is use the "Ghostly Hero" asset, which is a central element of PvP, but the desert missions themselves are just plain PvE missions. Weirdly balanced ones at that. No such thing as "own yourself" PvP mode. If anything, the Glint mission layed the foundation of how future PvE missions would handle random negative conditions.

ArenaNet simply worked with everything they got to create PvE missions, even with PvP mechanics, assets and ideas.

i cant work out if your serious.

all the desert mission strategies are pretty much similar to those of HA. infact each mission mimics the play style of a HA map. even down to the doppledanger where you used to be taught how to overcome a player with the exact same skill bar. it probably doesnt apply so much now, as you can just take in ursan and smash his face in until you feel satisfied, but when the game was released, i'm pretty sure all the desert missions were there as a stepping stone to get you used to the HA pvp play style.

Good point, that reinforces my point 1) : PvE skills are like some of the "monster skills" that big bosses get to make our gaming life harder. It's a bit "artificial" because it's about numbers, yet it seems to me that it was a push from designers to mimic what they did with monsters&HM, but now to the player's benefit.

I don't want to derailt the thread (I know you don't either) but it's not a legend. Although I didn't really believed it 2 years ago when I started becoming more vocal on Guru, I now have been convinced by the PvPers on Guru. But their vision changed so much that, as you said, it's now difficult to believe it.

(I was waiting for your post )
Good observation: titles have also been designed around the difficulties, thus limiting the choice and diversity. I remember vividly the EotN quests where you use the Ursan-like skills, not only for blowing doors or detecting the nornbear.

I stand corrected, but my comment remains: was it a reaction from Anet following an observation of how players perform? More generally, I have the feeling they monitor (or used to) that and adapt their updates accordingly.

Indeed, is it a means to give players "with average skills" the ability to survive a HM (or EotN dungeons) that they would otherwise stop attempting to do?

I didn't think of that, but I doubt Gaile could have monitored that alone, I suspect there's some kind of statistical tool on the server.

That's right (I wasn't so lucky, finishing Forgewight at 60DP was painful ). I wonder whether at one point GW designers admitted to the necessity of "letting the grind into the game" and redesigning stuff around it. For GWAMMers, add more titles (with some account wide like we've seen recently), including ztitle with XTH. For farmers, speed clears. Etc.

Yep, but side-effect: farmers have super-tools, people don't learn "playing skills" anymore. Was the first one intended? And the second one an admission that the transition between PvE and PvP was as difficult as ever?

This is also what some PvPers told me on IRC#guildwarsguru (you should come if you can), about overextending. So it's like an ambush? (I haven't seen any in obs)

Awesome observation! I agree about the stuff with teh monsters and hm.

Fril, if your theory is correct then the devs forgot the first principle of game design in the age of the internet:

If you don't make it really, really hard, the community of gamers will quickly find an efficient solution through sheer volume of iterations. Players will then breeze through tasks that were intended to be difficult, get bored and leave.

Rather than create "cheats", the devs would have been better served (in the long run) to sit back and let the community deduce consistent means of overcoming difficult tasks, because it was bound to happen.

I'd advance a related theory here - ANet knew about this effect and didn't care. A large share of the gaming audience has been ruined by FAQs; they don't want to use their brains to solve problems, and want to breeze through the game without ever being challenged.

Sadly, ANet maximizes short-term revenue by pandering to that lowest common denominator. Their business model provides no incentives for customer retention, so the best way for management to get promoted is to deliver results now by dumbing down the game.

The only "Pulling" or aggro awareness as PvE People may recognize it used in PvP is used on the GvG npc's known as footmenand knights. While they are not particularly powerful NPC's thy can ad added pressure for or against your team as such you want to avoid agroing your opponents footmen or allow your opponent to aggro you npc's if your monks are under pressure.

Knights are a tad bit stronger and can Ruin a good push or split. Pulling tactics are therefor used to try to only grab and dispatch one knight at a time.

Look at question one, at the top, and at the first question at the bottom: Have the players changed behaviors, and then has A-net given them the tools to continue that behavior? Yes, and yes.

How do players perform? Well, that varies. The DP removers before EotN were individual, in the case of Wintergreen and Peppermint CCs, or group, in the form of Rainbow CCs and clovers. So, these made a nice gift for adventurers in higher-end areas, where DPs would make quite the difference in success (FoW, UW, Urgoz, etc...), or for people who struggled even with midgame content (Southern Shiverpeak Missions, Late-game Factions). However, these are...inefficient, to say the least, over long periods of time, or for large groups. It takes a lot of Clovers to wipe out 45% DP in the whole group.

However, the game was posing challenges that players were struggling to adapt to, and people were chewing through stacks of these removers. And anecdotally, we can all tell of people who really did bang their heads against failure without adapting tactics and builds, without learning the cues that the game's built in (as people point out: pulling, protting, defending, etc...). So with the penalty of Hard Mode kicking you back to your outpost, groups were going to blast through DP removers even more.

I'm sure the devs were aware of this dynamic--of people not adapting their builds--as they implememted these: they've OFTEN claimed that PvE balance is aimed at encouraging a variety of playstyles, knowing full well that THEY (the devs) need to encourage that variety; that people WILL play one build in every area, for every quest and mission.

There's another player behavior that your posts get at: The getting of loot. The farming. The buying of sparkly PvE weapon skins. Glass house disclosure: I have an expensive collection. I like rare skins and low reqs.
So despite the assurance that every max wep will do the same stuff, people go for skins. The skins create the incentive for farming, for saving money, and for exploiting AI and skill combos. This incentive to farm, and the farming that came along, altered in perhaps unexpected ways, parts of the economy. The Game Devs have tried in many cases to limit this, and to nerf both the skill, and in some cases, the behaviors of players. We can see them reacting to players in the addition of Nightmares in UW, the touch skills by Charged Blacknesses, the traps in various places, the need for multi-person farms, and so on.

YET....Devs have said publicly that farming is a legitimate playstyle. Desiring the pretty weapons, either to use or to sell, is a legitimate motive to play and to farm. And to support that playstyle, we have some of the PvE skills, which, let's face it, solve some of the problems that farmers had. They are, as you say, tools.

Whether you want to call this "not learning playing skills" is an argument up to you. Devs and farmers claim they're playing just fine. What use does sliver armor see outside of farming builds? (I know people could toss up their one build for fighting in groups that uses it...but really now.)

So the game developers, in my opinion, have been active from the start, realizing that some behaviors WOULDN'T change without interventions, and we've seen those interventions come in a number of ways: DP removers, nerfs, and even (overpowered?) skills to help players continue to enjoy a game that's arguably creaking along into geriatric territory.

HM doesn't make the mobs harder to kill - get a tank in front of them, spam nukes and they are death. They are stupid as before.

HM basically GIMPS THE PLAYERS - you attack comparatively slower, cast comparatively slower, do less damage, take more damage, use your skills comparatively fewer times, etc.

Consumables and PvE skills are the bad answer for a bad implementation of challenges for veteran players.

Most RPG games are based on -> mob Z is at x level, you need to be at level x or higher and have x level or higher gear to beat them. Once you out level mob Z you go kill mob ZZ, which is higher level than mob Z.

The proper way to increase difficulty in GW was to give mobs better builds/balanced professions or improve AI.

Improving AI is hard. Better MOBs can also be annoying to make.

So, instead, they increased level of mobs and gimped players. But AI is still bad, so tank+nuke (first build to beat DoA mind you) still beats AI. Tank+nuke can be a bit boring, so Anet gave the players PvE-only skills and consumables to reach or out level mobs.

1. My feeling is that the primary goal behind consumables was to provide a goldsink. Since storage is so painfully limited, goldsinks like prestige armor have steadily been losing effectiveness. Consumables are a way to get players to flush gold down the toilet indefinitely.

Making HM more palatable to more people was probably just an afterthought.

2. Outside of missions and protect-the-NPC quests, DP is al;ways going to be the biggest obstacle to success. Assuming a wipe doesn't mean failure, the ability to kill one single monster paired with enough DP removal eventually yields success.

3. While pulling may not have a clear analog in PvP, not pulling does: overextending. I suppose the lesson pulling was supposed to teach (back when PvE design decisions were meant to teach lessons) was thinking ahead to avoid a shit-I'm-badly-outnumbered situation.

Aside from that, maybe the closest thing to pulling I've seen in PvP was a guy in RA who would taunt the other team with some pretty rude smack-talk. We made it 15 wins or so, due in no small part to the fact that he'd inevitably get someone ticked enough to charge headlong into our team without any backup for an easy kill.

The worst thing about PvE in guild wars has been the ill thought out builds run by monsters. Good builds and AI could make non-buffed level 20 mobs a good challenge, rather than having to overbuff level 28-30's to create an illusion of challenge.

For this best way I can compare it is as trying to lure in them into pulling further than they should like when you try to see if the Opposing team will over extend themselves so that they can kill said target easier and more safely. After all like in pvp if you can lure 1-2 people into over extending or in the case of PvE a group instead of 3 you can in a more safe manner kill them rather than a larger confrontation. PvE in this manner can be like the PvP are similar only main difference is numbers 1 group of like 3-5 vs 1-2 people.

If I am wrong feel free to correct me.

Anet's initial design decision: Low level cap, static weapon stats.
Ways to increase pve difficulty: Better AI and/or handicap players more.

Anet obviously chose to handicap players rather than improving AI to give a challenge. Giving monsters higher levels, better damage resistance, shorter hex durations, double damage, unfair monster only skills, <insert missed player handicaps here>, it was only natural that eventually they would have to balance out this handicap, cause unlike other mmos, GW has static weapons. While it is possible to just grind for a better weapon in other mmos to even out the power difference between monster vs player, GW has no way of doing that, your character is static and doesn't really grow in power once you are maxed and have a maxed weapon.

There is a fine thin line between something being a challenge and being just plain frustrating. Continually buffing monsters to increase difficulty would eventually lead to a point where a "challenge" becomes a "frustration" instead. Using every trick your team has and coordinating flawlessly to beat a hard boss monster is challenging. Doing the same but this time with a boss that one-hit kills you no matter what you do would just be frustrating, not challenging.

I guess the irony in anet introducing consumables and pve skills which had the effect of balancing out the power difference, is that it showed just how shallow GW's pve was. Without the unfair handicaps against the player, the AI in GW is laughable and players have proven that by just waltzing over everything once the handicaps are neutralized. I hope Anet is working on better AI in GW2, else it will just be history repeating itself again.

The Classic MMO Fight:
Two 3D models standing in front of each other, running their battle animation with no interaction whatsoever. Numbers appear over heads, players click small icons, yet the battle is decided by an invisible Excel sheet in the background.

The Classic MMO expansion model:
More numbers, higher numbers.

The GW difference:
While numbers do play a role in GW, the emphasis is more on selection of skills and execution of your build. In GW, numbers are a constant early on, the only way to be better is to make use of the variable, which is the skills you select and how well you can play them. Other MMOs do not let you choose your build. The selection of skills is a constant in other MMOs. Their emphasis is also not on execution of skills, so the variable here are the numbers which directly influence the player's power. Hence player grind their level instead of trying to be better players.

Difficulty in GW:
Usually MMOs are easier the more you grind up the values of your character. Obstacles can be overcome with numerical advantages linked to time investments. Why time investments? Because people are charged money based on the amount of time they play.

Guild Wars tries to be difficult by forcing the player to be better at the execution of his build; rather than to rely on its inherent strength. In that regard HardMode increased the difficulty by opening the one gap the player can't close in GW: the numerical advantage of the monsters. Sure giving them better builds would have been a smarter way to increase difficulty, but it seems the AI has it's limits and only mobs in elite areas have a natural mixture of professions.

The GW Expansion model:
Even if GW chapters do not increase your level with the usual +10 model, each Chapter saw an increase in power to the skills. That lead to the numerical advantage of the monsters fade away. The "difficulty" faded away. That was countered by level design. More monsters in Factions, added envirmental effects towards the end of Nightfall. But at the very high end, most of the community countered that increased difficulty in a very unelegant, game breaking way. Do you have a permasin? Do you have a r10 Ursan? Do you have a gear/book.

What then?
Once the game can create challenges for the player, it will once again default back to its roots of players requiring to outperfom the monsters. But for that to happen, mere conset nerfs or balance changes won't suffice. PvP players are always talking about sealed deck play. But the same mode might also be a good idea for PvE. Adding more levels and introduce Superhardmode is futile, it is going to be Permasin exploited anyway.

A regular MMO has to change its variable, its numbers, so that players get challenged. GW's variable are the skills and their selection, that's what has to be changed. Changing numerical values in a game not based on numbers is nonsensical.

People keep saying this but really, eotn offered pretty good bars on most teams, given the AI limitations and the expectation that you aren't going to spend 10-15 minutes per group like you might in HA. That doesn't make normal mode slavers all that challenging even when you take away the pve skills. Unless you're going to just give them tainted, smite builds, and heavy interrupts, they aren't going to get significantly more threatening without a huge AI overhaul.

Re AI, it seems from dev updates throughout the last few years that they developped it in an inefficient way which lead to many things not working as intended. I am always annoyed by henchmen scattering while heroes don't, or Olias wanting to spam SS even if it means overaggroing.

But to be fair with Anet, there's so much they can do to make a "good AI", it'll always remain an average AI in an MMO because of resource constraints, even more in a F2P. But obvious improvements like scatering on AoE is the least they could do.

But you can find some really good balanced teams, I remember some Stone Summit groups being really good. And res signet puts them definitely on par with a player group.

Anyway, many are true to say that the design focus should have been on this part of the game, rather than the "numerical part" where you nerf, buff, prot, boost, degen, etc as 4thVariety explains. I was amazed at how easy Rotscale was to kill (in NM) with BHA, Winter and Spinal Shivers, whereas other "tactics" (I'm not sure it's the right word) would fail (more or less miserably) due to monster skills.

Re monster skills, I don't think you can avoid them, because if you put monsters on par with players by using normal skills only, players will find a "numerical" workaround and abuse it. I remember Shiro being a very interesting uberBoss which required carefull organisation until I played with a PUG which removed his stance, and then boom.

One wonders if a grain of randomness would have helped here, but once more is this conscious design so that, as trialist said, GW gameplay doesn't become alienating for the player with "average skills"? Is the fundamental "tension" between "good" players wanting a difficult challenge and "average" players not wanting to adapt/change their gamestyle the reason why GW design fails to satisfy the first category while the second one gets a (possibly) more acceptable game experience? This sort of relates to what Martin Alvito said about players being spoilt by FAQs/wikis.

By reading posts in this thread, I realised this is a collective attempt at "reverse design" and attempting to find some sense in some of the game features.

GW doesn't fail to satisfy the first category. It provides everything it has to to give any challenge you want, but you actually have to do it yourself. But the "good" players don't want to "adapt/change their gamestyle" and instead cry/whine to the designers.

If you want GW to be harder there is a LOT that players can do themselves! Why do the "good" players want the designers to gimp the players and not do it yourself? The latter case gives much more control over the result.

Therein lay the problem, anet essentially designed themselves into a corner with their low level cap and static weapon stats premise. Those are fine ideas for a pvp game, however, those same ideas are contradictory to a pve game, especially one where you are raising the numbers in pve to get more difficulty.

Part of the problem with raising numbers, especially monster damage, is that you force players to play a certain way. No longer are all builds able to be used because first and foremost, you need to neutralize that damage the buffed monsters are throwing at you (you can't really do anything if you are continuously kissing the ground can you?), that means damage prevention/reduction builds becomes predominant.

The likes of imbagon, permsin, pre-nerf ursan, all became popular because of this. You can't really expect to just slap on a "fun" build and expect to not get smacked down, hard, by the buffed monsters. Which is why build diversity in GW pve gradually lessened with each expansion as the monsters hit harder and were harder to kill. Had anet concentrated on developing better AI, and hence more varified monster skill bars, instead of just raising numbers, more builds would have been playable in pve, instead of this emphasis on damage prevention/reduction.

Sure, Guild Wars PvE is pretty difficult if I balance a cat on my head while eating dinner and juggling at the same time as moderating Guru and punching myself in the testicles, but that doesn't mean GW succeeds in 'proving everything it has to do to give any challenge you want'.

It's the job of the competition, not the competitor, to provide the setting. Perhaps I should slam my head into a wall until I'm qualified to find the Special Olympics a challenge? From what I dredge out of your post, that's the equivalent of what you suggest good players do in order to try to find challenge in GW. How exactly is this the better option than implementing challenging areas intelligently?

Or perhaps you should stop trying to speak for the 'good players'. Not wanting ridiculously overpowered nonsense in the game is not 'gimp[ing] the players', and not finding DoA-style statpumping an interesting challenge is good taste.

I would agree that GW's major limitation is its inability to improve AI. But with the way the game was designed I'm not really sure how much better they could do. Mobs always pull in groups no matter how far one particular member of that group may be when you aggro them, and they always ALWAYS use the same skill set. Movement and position has for me always been preferably to button mashing. Larger numbers and mobs is only 1/2 the equation. Movement, position, and strategics make for a far more interesting game.

Playing Rainbow 6 Vegas: 2 I've experienced some semi decent AI. The terrorist you go around trying to exterminate will try to pull off maneuvers on you. They will try to flank you, rappel off the roofs of buildings, use cover effectively, etc. While these are two entirely different games and playstyles the point is the AI does exist to do these things and actually add the challenge of players having to out-think the machine. I don't, however, see the game mechanics of GW allowing for the implementation of such AI.

As I said there is no variation to how mobs react and what skills they use. Once you've tried something once on hardmode, you know exactly how it will go the next time and you can adjust accordingly. You may think having access to hundreds of skills means there is strategy and skill involved, but how much player skill is there in swapping out skills until something works? And even if you can't figure it out, its as simple as coming here to guru or going to gw-wiki to look up how to do it.

Come on Avarre, I know you can post better stuff than that (very funny though ). I don't think that Kashrlyyk's post was very reasonable, "good" players bought the game the same way the others did and can expect Anet to give them something for their money (I mean via updates).

trialist: you're right, the "numerical" part of the game led them to this corner where they can't design a game like WoW. There's a "ceiling" where numbers are not supposed to go above for players (while monsters go above it for their challenging part), yet they've moved this limit via pve-skills and consumables.

AI can be improved, and it has been improved indeed, but the fact that the "intelligence" of the game is on the server means smart AI is going to cripple the servers (it's well known that AI is the computationally expensive stuff in games, even worse when a server has to run it for thousands of servers...). Together with skills finally doing what they're supposed to do (you can't blame the "average" player to have a "good" build which doesn't work due to, say, winter not converting damage to cold and not knowing it because he doesn't read Guru or the wiki). I guess the Live Team is simply too small to do something significant here (I was thinking this morning that re-programming a game like GW1 must be a painful job and very unrewarding since the devs can't talk about their hard work of fixing things, putting new pipes, etc.)

IMPORTANT NOTE: this is not a "how would we redesign GW1?" thread, although it's very interesting, but rather a "what was the design intention?" thread.

Are some things "good" players don´t get that the "average" players do get?? Some files missing in your version of the game? No? Then no you can not expect anything from ANet. You already got everything you paid for.

And crying to ANet like a little baby that doesn`t get its way is "reasonable" compared to making it challenging yourself? People do it every single second of the day (Party games finished with a single character, speedruns, making specific very hard enemies( which would be the equivalent to not using max equipment and certain skills), etc), but in GW that is just too much brain activity for the "good" players?? Of course they are exhausted from all the whining! And THAT is reasonable????????????????? No, you are just lazy and whiny!

If the game is too easy, stop playing it OR make it more interesting for yourself. You know, try something new.

Can you please stop derailing the thread? You've made your point clear I think and we'll have to agree to disagree I guess. Ty.

I am not talking about that, I am talking about Fril Estelins assumption that GW doesn´t provide "a difficult challenge" for "good" players. I don´t like the stat pumping too.

I do not think there was a single design intention. If there was, it got destroyed. When we played Prophecies the stats grew very very slowly and the game is most reminiscent of traditional RPGs. Prophecies was also difficult because the skills were scattered around the world and you had to find them. Your build changed with each new outpost.

With each expansion that trend changed. Factions had to introduce more powerful skills so players kept changing the only variable in their game. Searching for them on sidequests was also gone. Nightfall did the same, at the time the skills were ludicrously powerful. EotN had to introduce high power PvE skills for player builds to change at all. Just like WoW added its +10 levels, GW added new skills which were more powerful. Both games raised the impact of their variable on the game. A level 20 mission for Prophecies is just as easy for a fully skill-geared GW character as a Lvl25 raid is for a bunch of Lvl80 dudes.

The ability to always import your main at full power proved to be a liability for the design. Newbies thought Nightfall was simply too hard, while owners of older chapters were already so strong it broke Normal Mode. Characters even grew so strong, it broke HM as well.

It's the classic basic state of any RPG . Progression leads to the overall difficulty being easier, because the variable of RPGs is player power; which is constantly added. Non-RPG games limit the power of the player early on, the players effectively grow weaker over time and more reaction time, strategy and joystick coordination are demanded. Those three aspects are absent in GW. You never really have to react, playing Mesmer is merely an option and meaningful IR in HM is near impossible. Strategies are depleted, since the player is allowed to use any means anywhere. So it all boiled down to Sabway, SF-Tank&Spank and Imbagon Coletrain. We are able to throw anything at any mob anytime, that is a big no, if you want strategy. ArenaNet should remember the days they created Starcraft. When many missions were all about making due with what the developers gave you and not about unleashing the same old Turtle-Rush.

If there was the wish to maintain the design intention of Prophecies, then each new chapter should have wiped the character back to Lvl1 with no skills. Only then would the pacing of Prophecies been maintainable. After completing the new chapter, the character can have all his old power back to tackle HM and use cross chapter builds. But how would you explain that to people? Right, you don't, you announce GW2. Done, there is your hard cut. There is your wait out from implementing a steady power increase breaking the game more and more with each addition. The problem is being solved as we speak.

I was at work and lazy, plus I can't be bothered.

If Kashrlyyk considers my posts 'crying', then continuing to reason is pointless. It's not like I've made extensive analytical posts on the topic or anything, after all.

Food for thought: the SS/LB/EotN title were in fact additional "attributes" for the new PvE skills.

(looking at Mindbenber yesterday, I realised that at rank 9-10 it's IAS 75% of the time with 50% increased casting time, pretty OP)

EDIT: interesting read: http://www.guildwars.com/events/trad...7/gcspeech.php
Pay close attention to complexity creep. Don't assume that most of your players are reading your website and consuming information about your game. Most of your players will never read your website, never visit fansites, and never participate in forum discussions. We are often immersed in the community forums and rants and raves posted to game fansites, and it is easy to lose perspective about the knowledge level of most of our players. Players who participate in fansites and send six-page emails to your community team are experts at your game – they probably know more about it than you do – so it's important to realize that they do not represent the average player. The vast majority of your players are not digging into every detail of every spell or creating lists of animations so that they can react when they see the basilisk twitch its nose. They want to play, not study, so take care to create a game that allows them to do so.

For a game in which it is that important to have learned game, the "teaching materials" are still very underdeveloped. So it's no surprise people insult each other as newbies. There is no place to turn to. One can cope with that in PvE, but for PvP it's the end, trial & error not really an option.

Prophecies and Factions had accompanying Prima Guides. Those were considered the best shot at "educating" the normal user. Too bad those guides mainly offered story spoilers and pretty pictures. Opening such a guide for help was a disaster, you just wiped not knowing what to do and all the guide offered was the succession of spawns and bits of Lore. Nothing in that guide was really trying to pitch you an idea which skill might be useful. One of my favorite "anti-strategies", pulled from a section with the title: "Tips and Strategies": Eventually, your shenanigans awaken Zhu Hanuku, whom you dispatch in the second phase to ultimately end the mission. It all reads as if some testers simply dragged the writers through the game and they wrote about the scenery.

Not surprisingly Nightfall never got a guide. An easy to use option to trade builds was introduced and the Wiki project marched forward. But still the original flaw remained. If a player needs help on a mission, most wiki guides are written in a a way that they describe what is happening in more detail, than to explain how the actual hurdles are best overcome. Only some short bullet points, that are easily missed really give the sort of hints people might need. On top of that if you tell people just to push F10 and search the wiki, they believe you are trying to trick them into quitting the game or something.

At the high end, though, the PvX Wiki especially rules supreme. Once more, the devices that are in place help those the most that need help the least. One more thing for GW2 to address.

I think your quote answered most of the questions you've posed here: the operating assumption is that the average player has a limited understanding of the game and its mechanics; that the average player may not understand the synthesis of skills across several players; that the average player may not understand the strengths and limitations of the monsters and mobs s/he faces; that the average player barely understands aggro, DP, pulling, the mission designs (durrrh, I just go in and hit stuff), the side quests, the lore; that the average player is not participating in this or any other discussion of the game; but is instead looking to "Play the Game--" a phrase itself clearly loaded with potential conflict.

So the game HAD to evolve: The small percentage of people who claim to like a challenge, who are engaged in ongoing discussions about deep parts of the game and its experience; the people who do have an understanding of mobs, monsters, HM, DP, whatever--they needed an evolution of the game that looked like Nightfall, Urgoz, the Deep, DoA, Sorrow's, and Hard Mode. They needed an evolution of the game that posed challenges to which they could react in ways that allowed them to "Play the Game'" meaning, learn, adapt, vary builds and strategies, and experiment their ways to success.

But as those parts of the game came out, the game had to address the needs of the mass of people who DON'T play that way--for whatever reasons. So we get consets and PvE skills.

One thing worth recognizing about PvE skills, especially, as they relate to the evolution of the game: as people spread out more across the continents and modes of the game, fewer people are available to fill a party. PvE skills essentially allow a player to add another class to their bars--a class that their heroes and hench may not include, or may not use well. All the Ebon Standards are pretty much PvE paragon skills for players who may not understand or carry in party a paragon. Norn Skills are warrior skills for casters to throw down with. Radiation field is a strong necro well. Cry of Pain is a strong non-elite Energy Surge for any caster to max--or the mesmer version of a Searing flames.

So these skills are a reaction to the growing complexity of the game and its classes--the wide spread of skills across 10 classes, 4 regions--that's a lot to learn and keep track of. PvE skills simplify the learning process: they REDUCE complexity, they REDUCE what a player needs to learn to build a good team.

And I'm not sure that they're an awful idea. If the quote you cite is accurate in its description of wide swaths of the playerbase--and if the conclusions it leads us to draw are correct--even close to correct--then A-Net has done, as an entertainment entity, what it needs to: allowed the largest possible number of people to access in some way all its content. Is that bad? Should "average" players NOT be able to access all the game somehow? Or is this adjustment on their part ... smart?

I hear you, but given that this "average player" does not read fansites or wiki, how is he going to know about consumables for example? And even if he does, since he doesn't understand the game mechanics, how is he going to think "I should use more of this stuff to enable me to play better"? Obviously he'll get most PvE skills by doing the quests, but then how is he going to realise how powefull they are?

Excellent observation. And case in point: the Asura summon skill, to get an extra team member.

This points follows the comment made by many that Ursan was to allow all classes to get accepted in groups, to avoid class discrimination. It puts all clases on the same level of melee chars with high AL.

I think the core issue is not to allow access to most content (HM means you already have accessed all content in NM!), it's the way it's done. By reducing GW to a game where you have to pick the PvE skills, consumables and OP skills, you limit the diversity and thus the potential for people to do a bit of everything, including PvP. Yes, yes, not everyone wants that, and it's fine, but that's also because of the incredibly high learning curve which is made worse by this design approach of giving you the key to getting bigger numbers, instead of giving you the one to understand the numbers themselves.

In fact, this last part of your post points to something interesting: Guru and its discussions are pointless. Most people don't read or benefit from them, (it's almost as if the only reason to be here is the pleasure of discussing ), many of the smart great posts proposing game redesigns would not match this vision that the "average player" gets something completely different from the game from the average Guru-er.

Another side-effect of Anet allowing all "average players" to access everything: they'll play the game solo, team playing disappears, if it wasn't for zquests. It's a bit sad isn't it?

Quite the paradox. And come on...isn't this the problem most vaguely educated players have, when they see what appears to be an obvious question: "duhhh, wiki is yer friend!1!!"

Well, it's evident that a number of posters have found US to ask questions of...but not found the wiki, with whom they should make friends.

I think the game has done an adequate job by itself of teaching players AT LEAST to use the stuff that the devs have put in: the quests using the Norn Elites, for example. The basic understanding that "Oh, those are NPCs who sell stuff. Hey, I wonder what consumeables are?" *Reads descriptions of Cons.* "Nice!" And EotN PvE skills follow the logic that Prophecies develops: Do a quest, get a skill. Practice the skill. Maybe fail at it for a while. Maybe always use it wrong. But you get the skill the way Prophecies taught us.

What has happened, of course, is "educated" players...those part of the extra-curricular, I guess, community, like Guru, talk, goof, analyze...and find the (over)power of the skills and use them...and then publicize them, and then criticize them, and then rail against everyone ELSE'S use of that skill while quietly downplaying their own use of it.

So the game teaches SOME of this, I think...but it doesn't teach what most people think separates the average from the good from the great from the pvp: adaptability, curiosity, flexibility, analysis.

I guess what I meant about "game mechanics" includes all of the things that go into planning a HM mission or vanquish, or that go into a serious (or even not so serious) pvp match, or that go into an elite area: things like attributes, conditions and effects, ranges of spells (adjacent, in the area, in earshot, in spirit range), attack speeds and movement speeds, ways to do damage (and armor-ignoring damage), strengths and weaknesses of classes and armors, buffs and enchantments and strips and debuffs and shouts and chants and echoes and weapon spells and item spells and bundles and hexes and spells and skills and preparations and interrupts and degen and disables and lions and tigers and bears oh my!

Just the stuff after the last comma there: I think plenty of people forget plenty of that: that there are all these combinations of classes and skills that react and interact with one another: and that an enchantment-heavy healer/protter is not always the best monk for a certain area (looks at Mallyx). These are some of the "game mechanics" I mean (and if I misuse the term a little, I apologize)...

So, do y'all think that A-Net's basic premise about complexity is correct? That much of the playerbase is...uneducated? Is playing the game with far less thought than many posters here?

And yeah, Guru is ... a talkfest of a small, concerned group who may have no bearing on the game a'tall.

You guys gotta stop using bold letters in your posts, it's all I read.

Before there were heroes I beat Glint with henchies. <smile> Now my 3 heroes and henchies can beat her without even me helping. gah this game has gotten too easy.

There is a group of players that retires satisfaction from a game like GW by comparison to other players achievements.

I would believe that a group of players that fall in that category would play PvP, but alas, they compete in PvE.

That is why you can sometimes find threads that degenerate in insult wars between guilds/alliances/players and start like "We did DoA HM in 57 min" and go as "we did it in 56, nini you suck so much".

Try to kill those mobs without PvE only skills, consumables, tank builds, titles, builds that abuse soul reaping, spirit spamming and avoid abusing AI downfalls.

Yes, you can do them, but those charrs and those dwarfs in slavers are a bit more challenging now.

Of course, once you beat them, you will beat them always, since they never change and improve, opposed to human teams.

Now try to get a PuG to do that (well you won't be able to convince them in the first place). I bet the average group would have difficulties if not outright fail.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've recently bought another account, factions collector edition was really cheap.

So I'm playing it with my regular mate (she bought a faction CE too). We didn't transfer any weapons, money, materials, etc. We not asking any help just playing the 2 with henchmen.

It is quite enjoyable.

Still, if we didn't know how to play it would be quite hard do some stuff there. And we just did Tahnnakai Temple, masters, and we still on 45/65 armor (I'm warrior, she's mesmer) and max weapons/insignias/runes, lol, where where?

The skills we have access to, didn't change that much from what they used to be. Main change though, was the nerf to Watch yourself - for those that don't remember, this skill used to give +20 armor for 5s at tactics 0!

If a new player would start like that, I bet he would feel that GW was one of the most challenging and complex games he/she ever played.

And that is what I think most veteran players suffer from - they remember a game where everything was new and challenging, mostly because they didn't knew the game the way they know now.

Remove the consumables, remove the PvE-only skills, remove the heroes - veteran players will juggernaut nm even if the things they say killed the challenge aren't there.

And again, previously, there was also no scatter in nm.

Yes, consumables, shadow form, pve-only skills made areas like UW, urgoz, doa, HM a laugh!

BUT THOSE AREAS DIDN'T EXIST IN THE "GOOD OLD DAYS"! (or most of them, although UW could be 55'ed, so that was a laugh).

The things some veteran players insist killed the game, only killed areas that didn't exist in the times those same players remember.

What killed that game was experience and time.

That attitude is the problem. You don't want to pander to the masses. You want a game that is simple to pick up but remains complex to master. That was the original point of this game.

Adding optional complexity to PvE was the whole idea behind adding endgame content, right? It wasn't THAT hard to complete Prophecies. THK ate people early on, and the last three missions took a few attempts to get right, but decent players got through it all and probably didn't fail much before Aurora Glade, or often until THK. The point of UW/FoW was to give the hardcore PvE crowd a goal that required teamwork.

Of course, that got broken within a couple of months by Prot Bond. But the devs did a much better job with Urgoz, the Deep and DoA. The trouble is, as noted, the problem of iterations over time revealing superior strategies.

Still, things didn't get out of hand in Hard Mode until the PvE skills and the SF buff. Why? Well, these things slaked envy in the player base in the way that ANet wanted - by compelling players to buy EotN, and later ALL of the expansions during the SF era, in order to convert that which previously required skill to something that required time.

Now, there are ways to address the problem without pandering to the masses. The trick is to limit the envy. One wonders why the Bonus Mission Pack paradigm wasn't used earlier. If the endgame content is customized, you can't get rich doing it, but you need to do it on every character for every item that you want.

Later on as players find new and better tactics, you can introduce new items that require the players to complete the endgame content while completing additional objectives (time, keep NPCs alive, HM, etc.) yet remain non-transferable in order to avoid blowing up the economy and creating envy.

However, you have to start with that approach, or you end up merely creating a new economic problem - the sale of services rather than goods. Of course, we have had that problem anyway in GW. Players have figured out ways to sell just about every title there is.