TowerTalk - Martin Kerstein Interview (German)

Might I point out that the information in the original Guild Wars 2 announcement included a statement about having less skills available as well as less professions. And, while I don't expect all the doomsayers to disappear (they will just switch from predicting the death of GW to predicting the death of GW2), I, personally, and I think a large part of the fanbase expect to be very happy with GW2.

Nothing less then the truth. A rough estimate would be that 20% of the current players won't buy GW2, but there will be a big group of new players never played GW before that will show interest in the game making that 20% dissapear into there shade.

none thereless I will be part of that 20% but continue on in GW 1 whenever I feel like gaming.

Yes, the most important word in Martin's statement is feedback. Not to be confused with negative statements and negative opinions.

Negative feedback: Shadow Form sucks because it makes an Assassin invulnerable!

This is negative, obviously. But it's also feedback, because there is something that is actionable. "Ah, if Shadow Form didn't make the Assassin invulnerable, maybe it wouldn't suck...? Hey, let's think about changing Shadow Form..."

Negative statement: Shadow Form sucks!

This is negative, obviously. But what can they do with this information? Nothing...

Negative feedback is still feedback!

The difficulty of getting into pugs in HA nowadays isn't because there are so few players who are able to get into Ha, but rather that there isn't a large playerbase there.

You don't need to unlock every skill or equipment piece to be a competent pvp player. One or two skillbars and two equipment are enough to get started with.

Let's look at the requirements to get to get into HA (before they dumbed it down)
10 consec wins in RA
5 wins in TA

That's it, getting into the high-end/competitive pvp areas wasn't too hard and only took an afternoon. Now you need, what, 5 consec wins?

The reason that the lower areas are more populated than the higher ones is because they require much less organization and coordination in a group. Removing the competitive areas of GW2 is just going to dumb the game down for people and shift the aspect of the game towards pve.

oh look, a troll.


Good interview. I don't see how you can take anything said in the interview negatively but ok.

It would seem I've touched a nerve. Please note that I never said Anet was milking you dry. I said they were beginning to milk you at regular intervals. Let's consider what you got when you purchased Guild Wars: Nightfall "new" shall we? I forget what the MSRP for the game was when it first came out, but let's be generous and call it $50.00 USD. That came with several sets of armor(with different models for each class), new skills, new enemies, new missions, great content, etc., etc. The specifics don't matter much, let's just suffice to say that it was a great purchase. Now let's consider these costume micro-transactions. You're paying $9.99 to get one set of "armor". I'm not blaming ArenaNet for milking you, I'm blaming people like you for allowing it to happen. On the contrary, ArenaNet is just doing what a good business does - make money.

Your comparison to WoW has no ground. This game is not WoW, and I don't play WoW for the reasons you listed.

Firstly, See Above. Secondly, if their previous business model was working, then why not develop another chapter to fuel a 2012 release of Guild Wars 2. I'll tell you why - because it doesn't make good business sense to put that kind of work into a BMP when people will willingly buy an overpriced costume. Again, it's not ArenaNet's fault you people are suckers. It's yours. I will continue to not purchase these overpriced wastes of resources. I merely suggest you all do the same.

My peace is said, and I won't derail this topic any further on this matter.

actually, that was a juge steaming heap of sarcasm aimed a you.

He recognized the sarcasm and raised a valid point. As long as you show Anet you're willing to drop the extra money for something you can hardly call "content," they'll keep doing it.

If Anet needs the extra revenue, then its only indicative of their shortcommings. And specifically I mean that they ended GW1 before its time to go or that the whole free2play model was doomed from the start. Lastly, its indicative of the level of "content" done for GW1 since GW2 production. And please note that this is sarcasm, as an armor purchasable with real money is hardly content.

In regards to difficulty of entry to PvP:

- Sure, everybody can easily create a PvP character.
- If new PvP players get ROFLstomped over and over again because they are not aware of synergies between skills on their bar and synergies between classes in a build - they will stop playing.
- Because of that complexity, there is a high barrier of entry.

...or that they don't have the coders to work full-time on a brand new game while still pumping out chapters for GW1 in any reasonable length of time?

I don't see any indication that they "need" the extra revenue. Have you seen Regina say anything along the lines of, "Please buy these costumes or we'll never finish GW2"? Why encourage people who, believe it or not, are willingly paying for costumes and storage upgrades and the like to stop buying said things? Do you think that ANet is going to slap their collective foreheads and realize that we want to buy content, as if they don't know that already? Do you really think there is the slightest possibility that they think we'd actually prefer costumes over, say, a new god realm? Of COURSE they know we want content, we've been saying it for almost 2 years now, and they do give us some on occasion - Dhuum is pretty much the coolest boss in GW, regardless of how his addition rubbed people the wrong way - but telling them to stop giving us fluffy extras like costumes is not going to magically make them put out a new expansion pack.

Costumes literally have no impact on you if you don't see the value in them. They're not preventing them from making new content, they're just there for those who want them. Telling people to wake up and stop being "suckers"...what exactly do you hope to accomplish? Whatever it is, I assure you, it's not going to happen like that. "Oh, if people would only stop buying costumes, GW would be saved!"

Because with every MMORPG/CORPG/RPG you can just blindly enter PvP without actually understanding the game.

Seriously Martin, that statement is fail. As with almost every game you need to learn at least the basics before entering PvP. If you're too stupid to realize that you shouldn't even bother to play a game.

In all honesty, Enon is spot on the money. I'm ex-Neverwinter Nights, well over 4 straight years of high echelon PvP. I can tell you straight up that the entry barrier in GW PvP is a pisshole in the snow by comparison.

GW-8 skill slots. Daydream, might be using all 8, still only 8.
NwN-36 Skill slots. Using all tyvm.
GW-2 class system, level cap 20.
NwN-3 class system, level cap 40.
GW-Fail Build? Re-roll in town or outpost.
NwN-Fail Build? No worries! De-level to whre u need to fix from, EARN the levels back. The hard way. Fail again? Do it again.

Whilst there is a Wiki for both, and also build repositories, NwN being a private server game, is subjective to equipment that differs realm by realm. Same goes for skills and spells.

In NwN, KD is a skill, endlessly spammable, they fail the roll, they end up on their ass, knocklocks, blind, etc, in GW have nothing on some of the things you can do to an opponent when under the influence of a truly deep and well thought out ruleset, i.e. ad&d 3.5. In NwN if you get blinded, you don't get some lame little circling effect and miss a lot, your entire screen except for your toon goes pitch black, and you miss everything. If it's a recurring effect spell or skill, keep failing rolls, stay that way indefinately. GW players have it easy enough already.

Regardless, I play GW now, exhausted myself in NwN. Point is this: GW PvP is laughably easy to get into, and whilst attaining the upper echelons is difficult, you don't see any of the sort of total domination in PvP here that you do there. Ever remove 9996 of 10k hp with one touch skill in GW? Thought not.

And it's still laughably easy to get into. For the love of God, maintain your standards. PvP has always been for the hardcore, in any game. Keep it that way.

You PvP players need to start playing awful or Anet will make PvP in Guild Wars 2 simple and easy.

Read Martin's post again. What you're referring to is a different discussion. Martin is only mentioning the basics of GW skills/classes as a high barrier.

So that ^ basically says there will be NOTHING NEW in GW2 and that it will actually be more DUMBED DOWN than the previous version. lmao Why would anybody want to buy into the same crap we've been playing for nearly 5 years? Milk Money? Donkey Milking? lmao. Well I hope to a god they at least add one more skill slot because I've always needed just one more slot to make the perfect synergy build "I" wanted. ) Why am I saying this? I'm not buying GW2 just so it's easier to get to PVP!! lmao I want LOOT and LOTS of it and I want more SLOTS in LOOT so I can make my things MORE POWERFUL. I want a HASTE inscription +10=15% attack speed and it MUST be a RARE drop and non-tradeable. ) I want ALL GIMMICK BUILDS eliminated from the get go. No more 55 monks, no more SF nerds, no more Obsidian can't touch dis and no more 600 smackers.

The real story behind GW2: Extra extra read all about it...Anet adds a 2 to GW to rake in more dough from simple**** who buy it. You'll get less and it will be even easier and more dumbed down than GW1 which means less content for the same amount of money!!
Skill died with Prophecies when they found out more simple**** will buy the game when it's so easy a caveman can play it. )

Interesting.

Players should know synergies between skills on their bars and classes, they need that to be some what sucessful in PvE, Elite areas and Hard Mode. If they have that in PvE then they should do well in PvP, right?

The problem is not necessaryily that Martin, the problem is that these new players do not know the maps or the meta, how to play the meta (from what they use in PvE) and experience in PvP. Not all but some PvE players who come to HA think its fine to have a couple of superior runes, no sheild sets, no 40/40 sets and play what they think works in PvE. They get 'ROFLstomped'. Same happened in PvE until they learnt how to overcome the challenge. In PvP they get ROFLstomped for being dumb and importantly clueless, unless you want to reward that?

The highest barrier to PvP is actually knowledge, dumb it down enough and all can play, all can get bored with limited selection of skills and builds in a few months, it becomes a stale game. Where actual skill becomes irrelevant..... and buttom smashing wins through.

Silver

Your comparison is completely missing the point of Martin's post.

Guild Wars PvP has always had a competitive, e-sports focus. For a game like that you want the lowest possible bar of entry. The comparison for that bar is against other e-sports games, not some ridiculously gear/grind oriented sham.

Bingo.

Some ppl here dont know that theres something between black and white. Reducing skills dont mean that you are going to have 20 and thats it ..... maybe they reduce skills per class about a 20% and is not a big deal. Maybe they use armor , weapon and atts like agi , str or whatever to add some variations ..... its too soon to go bitching or trolling about a game system that does not exist , chill .

I think what he is saying is... The difference in results from an "expert" pvper and "novice" pvper is too much now, under the current format you get a good team v. a bad team you will get the good team winning 99 out of the 100 matches, ... If you lessen the effect of "good" play you will get the good team winning 90 out of the 100 matches. This does not mean "good" play will not be relevant, just means it wont be as dominating.

I have to agree that this kind of tweak would be a good thing to get more people in PvP play, especially if you are trying attract a new crowd. Losing 99 out of a 100 would turn anyone off lol. Accomplishing this by lessening synergies or reducing skills, i do not think is a good idea. Introducing luck or some sort of other equalizing feature would be better. Don't dumb down the game but just introduce some randomizing feature of the result.

you pve mesmers need to stop being awful so you can stop begging for buffs.

In an ideal world you wouldn't play against anyone of a much higher or lower skill level anyway. A robust matchmaking system and a large playerbase will take care of that.

In the real world, people still resent what the most perfect matchmaking does to your win/loss ratio. If the fun was in playing, then yes, equal strength opponents are fine. But once people are just in it for the winning, or the rewards winning carries with it, losing half the time is not appealing anymore; no matter how fun the game once was. Player then switch to a game that is new, not more fair or better balanced.

Your logic is contrary to everything I've learned in eight years of being involved in competitive gaming.

- Good players get bored playing against bad players, because it's a waste of time. There is no challenge, they aren't testing their abilities or improving, and they will just have to queue back up for another match a few minutes later.

- Bad players get frustrated, because they are continually thrown into matches where they get rolled too quickly to enjoy the experience, or appreciate why they are losing and improve.

If you are into a competitive game because you want to roll your way through easy matches, then you are simply playing the entirely the wrong game. The absolute ideal for a competitive gamer would be consistently facing guilds that are on the same skill level or slightly better. Occasionally playing a worse opponent to score an easy win can be a boost to morale, but it's just a fleeting moment of fun with no long term benefit.

What you said is largely true... however I think 4thVariety makes a good point:

Too many people may no longer be the ideal "competitive" players you described. They may instead be farmers... doing it for titles, faction rewards, whatever... rather than for the sport.

It all comes down to what you think the relative populations are, "competitive" players vs farmers.

The farmers are simply a side effect of decline; not really a relevant factor.

Farmers will only crop up in relevant numbers once the competitive aspects start dying away.
If PvP is kept healthy with a decent matchmaking system then you really shouldn't have a problem.


Competitive people won't bother trying to stomp over newbies and only the competitive people become really good PvPers. If someone is trying to compete then they should realise that they have nothing to gain from slaughtering those much less inexperienced than themselves and it would be a waste of their time doing so.
Anyone obsessing over a Win/Loss ratio doesn't have the right mindset to be truly competitive - they don't want to take the risks to improve, they just want to push one number as high as it will go to caress and soothe their insecure ego.

If you want a competitive PvP setting then you cater to those who want to improve, those who want to compete. You don't cater to those who's interest lies e-peen stroking.

While I have no doubt this being the truth for you, it is not the truth for the mainstream gamer causing millions in sales. Try to wipe that whole competitive idea from your mind for a second. Try to remove that personal perspective for a second.

What really happens in GvG, is 16 people being thrown into one map, they are two teams and the match ends with one team winning. The game tries not to find a way to entertain all 16 player. It does its best to be in a state wherein no team is favored by the game itself. The game hopes that the options available to the 16 players on their common map are enough to keep them interested in revisiting this place. The rules of HA, GvG, etc, limit those options into different directions and mold them into Game-Modes. After that, the gamer is basically abandoned. This does not make GvG into a competitive mode, it is a set of rules, nothing more.

What happens now is a compatibility check. Each player needs to answer for himself what interaction would entertain him being thrown into such battles. Does GvG, this set of rules, allow gamestates which I define as entertaining? The answer for J.R is Yes, GvG is compatible to my competitive points of view on 16 players interaction. But only a small fraction of all players will be competitive for the sake of the competition. You are one of them J.R., but you are not necessarily grouped with persons of the same psychological makeup. You are paired with other groups exploring the GvG ruleset in the pursuit of fun. Most player just want to have fun playing a game, having a close match against another human being can be one sort of fun, but it does not have to be the only sort of fun existing within a set of rules. If some other fun is suddenly more readily available than GvG, with its convoluted preconditions to having fun through competitiveness, players will go for that. Doing something dirt cheap and see you rage is fun as well. ArenaNet perceives that as violation of their ruleset for GvG and then fixes it. Not because you have the righteous competitive anger, but because the ruleset became unstable.

Most players you sit down in front of a board game and question after they played the board game will tell you that they played the board "together". Even if they played against each other from the perspective of the rules. This is not a linguistic slip-up, this is really their perception. This is also bad news for all people betting on a natural competitiveness arising in social environments. It won't. If your board game does not focus test right in this "together" department and is perceived as purely "we played against each other", then it is halfway up the chopping block.

Board games had this forced evolution during the 90ies. Now people even play on the same team (Pandemic), or they play against each other while pretending not to (Shadows over Camelot, Junta!). The overall focus of the design is on the shared experience. If an event happens in the game, all players are expected to be "wowed" and not just the one person smiting another. This is the very reason Settler of Catan is distributing resources the way it does. It could easily have made each player roll his resources privately at the beginning of his turn while retaining the same balance. But it did not, this 1vs1 competitiveness had to be removed because it hurt the game.

Some might call CoD killstreaks cheap, but it is never about absolute competitive balance, it is about precisely hitting that "we played together and a Nuke killed us all" moment. Prepackaged togetherness. I reckon some people will still be all about the narrow wins and narrow losses, but this is not what is going on in games by a longshot. It is no longer about the winning team having fun, it is all about the losing team ALSO having fun. Or nobody perceiving to have lost at all. Which ironically is the definition of an ideal GvG session J.R. pulls out of his pocket. Winning and loosing dissolved in a cloud of shared competitive experience that draws more from its narrowness than its result or potentially even fairness. From that perspective, the GvG ruleset serves only a very particular taste and those people only have more demands to what should happen before "fun" pops into existence. You cannot toss everybody into that ruleset.

The single-minded focus on competitiveness and execution of player skill, never fails to kill a game. It has to branch out as much as it cans, not by offering iterations of game-modes favoring the same players, but by trying to entertain as many different people as possible. Even if that mean some sorts of "PvP" will be resented by GvG-Pros and vice versa. A process GW stopped after Factions for no reason.

Thanks for the response, there's a lot of nuance and insight there. Particularly enjoyed your points on the importance of a sense of togetherness, and your rather abstract way of looking at game design. Great post.

In response I'd present the following points:

- You say it is the community and not the rule set that makes a game competitive. I'd agree entirely, and simply add that the community is influenced by the rule set.

- There are games that demonstrate a purely competitive focus can be successful. People who draw their fun from balanced, challenging opposition aren't as much a minority as you imply.

- There are games that demonstrate casual minded players having fun within a strict competitive rule set. Indeed there are games demonstrating competitive minded players having fun within a very open and non-competitive rule set.

That all said, I think we are arguing from slightly different positions. My perspective is one of preserving ArenNet's goals for competitive play, because it was well executed and successful. You are coming from the other side of the same issue, not necessarily looking at how good what they had was, but the weaknesses implied by what they didn't have.

Simply, I think our posts simply demonstrate the importance of inclusive design in games. Trying to create formats or environments to suit everyone will always compromise on benefits as much as it does on negatives. Your last paragraph particularly reminds me of a great post I read on GW2G a couple of weeks ago:

Being too tired to throw out big words (Had to clean the intire house today ), and not understanding many of the points being made by both JR and 4ThVariety in this thread, I have a couple of questions:

-Wasn't it already established the day competitive gaming became a reality, that competitive gaming and casual gaming don't fair together well, simply because they have different goals as an objective.

I know you guys know this already, but I'm going to throw what I believe are the definitions of the last 2 out there for easier comparison:

-Casual Caming: The gaming here is nothing more than a pass-time. You win, you loose, but you don't care. The focus here purely is on the entertainment value you get from said game. Though, winning all the time (because you're good at the game) can be an outcome of casual gaming, but is not the goal.

-Competitive Gaming: The gaming here is more of a hobby than it is a pass-time. It's something you (have to) do daily, where you want to improve in and eventually match your skills with others. (Just like skateboarding, bmx, football, etc) The focus here purely is on improving at the game, with as goal obviously winning. Though, the entertainment value obviously still is important, I don't think anyone would disagree that the game no longer is way of "relaxing", but rather something people get very emotional (and even stress) about. When you see 2 top teams (Be it in GW tournaments, Shooters, etc) duking it out, noone of them want to enjoy the game, they all want to win. (Because the victory = enjoyment)

*Though do note that with competitive gaming, competitive is a keyword. Meeting people of the same skill level is a basic given.

So then I see both of you guys arguing that GW is/should be competitive or not competitive, whereas the truth is that it's both.

A good point forcing my theory on GW everything to adjust for contradictions.

Essentially those games cannot target the "casualness" of people then, can they? There has to be something more. But is wasn't until Kille U Man's post that I tried to crunch it and got an idea. The polydimensional player. Just like any object has three dimensions independent from each other, competitive and casualness are independent dimensions. They are not +5-5=0, they are more like coordinates in two dimensions (+5/-5). So even if I am more casual, I can still play with people of the same competitiveness, because our "player coordinates share one value". But I cannot play with people who have a different competitiveness, since that coordinate would not be equal with mine and we'd have nothing in common. Save only for those people who are equally casual about their difference in competitiveness and can agree based on that. Sounds complicated? There is more.

That was easy to say when Quake 3 was the pinnacle of competitive gaming and there were no other motives to enter an arena other than to shoot everything that moves. At that time you went to a Lanparty and most people were on the same page about why they played Q3. This created this sense of a community. You wanted other people to play against you.

But in an MMO environment (GW in particular), your reasons to enter a PvP arena are wildly different from player to player. This strains their relationships quite a lot. Some players might still enter PvP simply to compete against another team and draw their fun from that. Others want to farm Faction because it's the fastest way or something. Others want to earn Z-Keys and get rich. Some want the status of being high on the ladder. Some what their name acknowledge by the game after winning the hall. (These would be different values in one of the coordinate's dimensions) All those players are competitive but in wildly different fields, they are no longer on the same page as the Q3 community once was (The Q3 community's coordinates where basically the same in one dimension, which resulted in "togetherness").

All those players enter the GW arenas with and hate on each other because suddenly Team B does not add to the enjoyment of Team A by being an opponent. Team B becomes an agent of denying them the very thing they were seeking in this PvP place (Z-Keys, Fame, Titles, E-peen). This marks the shift from a welcome opponent to a resented enemy. Game-modes do not recover from that. Random Arena flourishes mainly because the people there are all on the same page although being on wildly different skill levels. One coordinate is the same, this common denominator makes them stick together. Which you cannot say for the players in HA, they stopped enjoying each other and only enjoy the reward. The more ArenaNet drowned PvP modes in rewards to pull players in from all angles, the more they tore each other apart. Once you play with people who agree with you, the game-mode itself becomes secondary and unimportant. But with different skill levels, different definitions of fun and different definitions of fair play (i.e. street rules imposed on top of the hard-coded rules; also see Battlefield Grenade Spam rules), the game evaporated because people were not adding to each other's fun, they were subtracting from it.

Everybody who turns on a specific game, already made a series of conscious decisions to optimize the entertainment value of his spare time. If he was 100% whatever all the time, then he might as well have turned on the TV or hit some "Random Game Now" Button on Steam. But if you turn on a specific game, select a character and then move to a PvP area, you already decided to be in the pursuit of one specific form of entertainment. The problem is then if the game randomly groups you with people who have come for other motives than your own. Players might hate the single-mindedness of Team-Deathmatch + Grind of CoD4, but at least the players are all there for the same reason, that's why they feel togetherness and come back. Which is why so far everybody has failed by trying to copy that and add on top of it. Because Infinity Ward's competition has not understood yet that it is not about the rewards and not about the number of game-modes and weapons. It is about shaping the minds of the players to a homogeneous mass that enjoys each other's company and agrees on why they play this game. This is also why CS players are fine with playing Dust, Office and Dust2 until kingdom come. We look at them from the outside willing to generalize them, but the game itself is popular because it exposes its players to similar other players, not random pricks, not odd couples.

Most clever games manage to package "victory" into very tiny single-serving portions and have them ready at all times. You do not have to be super-competitive and aim for the super reward. There is also the micro-reward scratching the tiniest of competitive itches in every person. When your mother-in-law suddenly start to tell you about what she reaped in Farmville, then it is not because she is casual, but because something addressed her level of competitiveness right.

Needless to say, that GW attracts few micro-competitive players and a lot of "I want it all players" for whom there is no shortage of large rewards after highly ambitious goals and grinds. This whole micro-rewards thing has not yet penetrated all levels of play. GW is very top heavy with some things at the bottom and no middle-ground rewards.

As weird as it sounds, but to draw in more players, GW has to do a better job at preventing you being exposed to "incompatible players". This sounds like it violates the first rule of social gaming, but as I believe that this move can help make the game more attractive to more people. Imagine you doing what you enjoy doing in the game. There is no gain to being grouped with a person who is doing it for a different reason than you. Because as soon as this other reason fizzles, he might just quit your group because he expected faster run-times, or more aggressive builds, or, or, or.