Did you ruin the experience for other players?

I was reading though PC Gamer this month about GW2 and this paragraph stuck out.

MMO communities are notorious for mapping out and documenting every inch of the games they play: a task that won’t be easy with Guild Wars 2, according to Flannum. “We never underestimate the ability of players to do things we don’t expect, but they can’t ruin the experience for other players and they don’t have to do that in order to get rewards

Whole article:
http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/guild-wars-2-preview-4/

If someone is asking for help with a quest or something and we help or direct them to a walkthrough/wiki did we just ruin the experience for other players?

I realize he is saying that the MMO community will not be able to ruin the GW2 experience, even though he states "we do not underestimate the players to do things we do not expect"(sounds like he is underestimating them already) The flip side of that statement is that GW1 was ruined by the notorious MMO communities who have mapped out and documented every inch of the game.

Also, what experience can I ruin to get a reward from?

So what do you all think...Did we ruin the experience for other players?

I once wanted to ruin an experience for rest of the GW community by using bots and getting shitload of ekto stackz... but then I took an arrow to the knee ... banhammer to the face!!!

No, because the choice to utilize those resources exists. You could choose to insulate yourself from those sources of information if you really wanted to.

The devs come across as very, very naive in that article you linked.

Its sounds like his argument can be applied to wikis, people ruin their own experience by giving up and accepting the easy way of doing things.... if that is how u define ruining..

And if thinks there wont be people with nothing better to do than sit at home all day and try to be the first one to document every corner of the game... he doesn't know MMORPG players very well does he...

So your only fault was you were just too darn awesome for the rest of us.

Tough break I guess

Sometimes i should have kept my mouth shut.

Or actually: My fingers from the keyboard.

EDIT: Shouldnt have read the quote then posted

Its always going to happen soon after the MMO is released. Gamers rush through the entire game to be first and in doing so everything is mapped out. IMHO its the gamers asking for help that ruin the experience themselves. Some buy strategy guides or use the wiki from day one.

There was one incident that ruined prophecies for many people though...

... Vizier Khilbron Is The[Lich]

That was just a dick move.

Not true, when participating in coop in GW players are expected to know and use these resources, just as they were expected to skip through cut-scenes.

Naïvety is in the idea that players are independent from other players in MMO's

H/H

Yes, that's endemic throughout the PC Gamer article...but not in my post.

Well, actually, it was in your post, it is naive to believe that people have a choice to use these resources or not, when in fact they are expected to use them. The days that one could just 'enter mission' unprepared with a ragtag bunch of pc's are long gone.

It's also reflected by a main theme of the forum, btw, use search, and PvX. People are expected to use wiki's.

It is self-evident that people have a choice. This game was designed to be playable by a single player, although that didn't work too well until they gave the henchies infused armor. Insulating yourself from community resources and other players is a rather early-1990s way of doing things, but you can do it.

Sure, that choice may come with a high opportunity cost (the social aspects of the game), but it is there and has been from the beginning. If you didn't like being dictated to, you could always take your toys and go play in the solo sandbox. Ditto if you didn't want people spoiling the plot or techniques for completing the missions, with the added possibility of using in-game and community resources to play the missions with a group of like-minded people the first time.

His comment was not directed towards MMO players but the devs for saying players wont ruin the experience for other players in GW2.

This idea of not ruining the game experience of other players is flawed with GW1 because of what me and Martin talked about in the Jan 5th update thread. His comment against my argument was that Guild Wars combat was a knife edge system where everybody is walking on the line between life and death. This is true about PvE to some extent and finally manifested itself even more with the introduction of HM, where you can get 2-3 shotted as a heavy armor wearer. After GW HM was introduced people were expected to be prepared because walking right into HM will get you killed fast. Thus you must know the details of a dungeon/elite area if you intend to go with pugs.

Now about the devs... I don't think they are completely naive. GW2 is more MMO than GW1 and its combat system seems more comfortable than GW1. What I mean is your ass wont be clenched 100% of the time with the fear of death knocking on the door the whole fight. You should feel that rush in the instant it might occur when your health bar is at 5% hp. To say not one person will have their game experience ruined is too confident. Its going to happen to someone. I just hope the odds are good enough for new players to have a chance after the game has been out for a while and I think GW2 will give them that chance.

TBH the introduction of heroes is what kept this game going. No one would put up with the ass-hattery of people in this state of the game today. I had a monk in today's ZB raging that the dungeon wasn't going fast enough. He started to agro because the tank wasn't going fast enough for him. Talk about someones experienced ruined because he didn't do the dungeon before.

When I reached Borlis Pass for the first time, a friend told me on accident that

When I reached Bloostone Fen for the first time, someone who was bored with the game said

When I reached Thunderhead Keep for the first time, a party member told our group, who were also first timers then, that

I have now created a rule what I call Gamer Rule N-2: When you start a game for the first time, be as ignorant of people as possible.

To be clear: the argument is that balance in GW PvP is a knife-edge condition. The problem isn't that players are frail, but that PvP requires players' fragility to exist within a very precise range.

That's a potential plus. The problem in the article is that the devs don't seem to realize the likely end results of the mechanics changes. What they're doing isn't going to end build discriminiation. It's just going to cause players to organize more broadly.

From http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_Wiki:About

Why would ArenaNet offer to host a wiki? What's in it for ArenaNet?

The wiki is a fantastic resource for Guild Wars players. It's often more complete and useful than the documentation that ArenaNet generates internally. Wiki documentation is featured prominently in Guild Wars through the help menu.
Because the wiki is featured in game there are a few factors ArenaNet needed to take into consideration. First, the game's wiki documentation needed to be hosted on a site that could scale to handle the potentially huge volume and huge bandwidth that comes with game integration. Second, it needed to be hosted on a site that they could guarantee would always be available. Third, the wiki needed to be hosted under a license that permits integration with the game. For these reasons, ArenaNet decided to start providing free hosting for a wiki site on their servers, and started working with the community to document Guild Wars.
--------------------------

Now I wonder if ArenaNet ruined its own game by hosting this wiki and making the wiki available directly from the game. According to this FAQ ArenaNet started working with the notorious MMO community to document Guild Wars.

That may be true if they fail to balance the skills per weapon set or if the game itself enforces build discrimination(ex. destroyers are strong vs fire damage and weak vs. cold). The truth is we don't really know how GW2 will turn out in terms of build discrimination. Chances are that the game will enforce it but hopefully in a more balanced manner than just making many end game creatures resistant against fire and none of the other elements, I certainly hope they learned that mistake. Players tend to discriminate if one build is highly effective over the other, therefore if the game doesn't favor one damage type over another and one mechanic over the other then the majority of players will ease off on other players and allow them to run what they want. The trick is to not do it too much or too little.

Its an interesting question. IIRC the wiki was officially endorsed by Arena Net much later after the game was released. I like to think they did it for security purposes along with many others. Mostly because GW players, once hacked, were shit outta luck and I wouldn't trust the non official wikis at all. Other reasons may include the lack of a helpful community. Try asking for help in LA(I dare you), ask for help in Ascalon(crickets), guilds are pretty much dead and getting deader(if that was possible >.>) and tumbleweeds roll through almost every mission outpost. They endorsed the wiki because they knew the game was going to end up like this. It was to help their newer players because the old players were too busy doing speed clears.

I would say yes, absolutely.
But most of it is purely inadvertant, so the person "helping" isn't nessecaly to blame.

Reason I say this is because when I first bought Guildwars, and was in presearing, I needed to adventure with an ally to get the ressurection signet.

Unbeknownst to me, since I've only been playing this game for about 20 minutes, is that the guy who helped me was a level12, who had his dialouges with gwen.

I was screwed out of the full experience and dialouges with Gwen, and so by extension couldn't get the cape/flute, whatever the end item was, and so I couldn't get the quest much later in EotN.

The same is with ALOT of NPC speeches/interactions in Explorable Areas that are triggered because a player is far more advanced. This screws up the storyline for me, because you know what, I play the game for the story, not to grind for titles.

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I lol'ed! (alot more characters)

Reminds me of this comic

On a more serious note I'm not sure what to think. I kinds see his point but on the other hand I'm not sure if accessible information really ruins experience for players. Take War in Kryta quests for example: search for Keiran clues is plain abysmal - no clues, no hints, no anything. I was thankful for wiki at that point

I would never have beaten the game without the wiki. Without the help of others I would never have known that you could add heroes and henchmen to your party. I would never have figured out what runes to add to the armor, or that you could add them to heroes also. I probably never would have left the starter island in NF ( where I started)
So thank you MMO community for still keeping me in the game !

I would say that my husband 'ruined' it for me since he got me playing the game---I first saw him at perdition rock playing (I had just come home from working overseas).....so I had seen the end game stuff --knew about rurik and the lich et al....but I still bought the game and for the past 6+ years have been playing it (too much)....so even though I saw the spoilers so to speak, it didnt 'ruin' the personal experience of playing it myself.