Interesting article up at GWOnline

Renih, one of the columnists at GWOnline, gives a bit of a review of the past BWE, and attempts to explain just why he wasn't having as much fun. Basically, he's unhappy with all the "preparing" to have fun that seems to have creeped into the game, especially as Guild Wars was billed as being not a game about getting ready to have fun but a game about having fun.

Renih makes some very valid points in his article. As much as ANet says that you can jump right in a play, it's not as easy as that. There is at least 15 levels you need to climb and a certain level of armor you need to be competitve no matter what your skill level. And in a sense the people that spend more time online will ahve a slight advantage, but only for a while. It isn't that hard to get items and skill in GW. I found all the skills I needed (had to go through the charm vendor for a couple, didn't gamble at all) and didn't bother upgrading my armor (although I would have liked to).

The main problem I have with this article is that Renih is basing this on one weekend on playing. One weekend is enough time to outfit a character if you farm lots, but after April 28th, we won't be restricted to one weekend a month and can build up permanent characters. My point? Within a month everyone who wants to be competive will have outfitted at least one character completely. There is a fair amount of farming, but once our characters are permanent the farming won't be so tedious since we have as long as we want to build up our chars, and can do it onyl a couple hours a day if we want.

One thing I would like to see changed is bumping the number of refund points from 10 to 12 to allow for a complete switch in one attribute (like Renih's example of their Mesmer needing to switch from Dominatoin to Illusion).

i personally think he is acting like a whining little child

they worked harder and longer getting things than we did and now we lost our whining streak because we didnt have what they had

we lost its no longer fun good night we quit to slam the game for being UNFAIR

grow up child as there is always going to be someone better equiped than you are

EDIT

talk about the instant gratification people

right up there with the if i cant have a level 20 with all the best equipment in a weekend it is level grinding

Loviatar,

You are missing the whole point of the article. He wrote the article because the fact that the promise Guildwars made to us (about those FARMING FIENDS won't have a noticable advantage over those that just want to play the game) has been broken. I for one agree with him. But the matter to the fact is this being under a MMORPG style, and trying to appease those from both sides of MMORPG population of PvP'ers and PvE'ers, Guildwars will fail in fulfilling this promise. But I am ready to be wrong and that I hope I am wrong.

since this is beta and we have seen only a:
tiny portion of pvp areas
they mentioned more of pvp would be shown in the march BWE
and things could change before release

i say wait until it is final before screaming they had FOUR HOURS MORE PREP THAN WE DID to excuse their loss

they are blaming their loss completely on equipment advantage instead of they came at us with a build we werent prepared to counter and we couldnt fix it IN THE REMAINING FEW HOURS OF THE BETA

they said competitive not guaranteed equal

broken promises?

WAIT TIL ITS OUT

I have never played Guild Wars as of yet, but I also don't like the idea of farming at all. I like that I can get to 20, and get good equipment, and stuff like that, though. I like the feeling that I always can get better than what I am at the moment (Although, I don't think it should be in levels, which is why I am happy about the 20 cap).

Although, PvP isn't even at the top of my list for the reason I want to play this game, at the moment -- and PvP seems to be what this article is mostly about.

You should be able to farm if you want to, but I don't think that you should be able to have way too big of an advantage over those who just want to have fun without farming. But there should be a bit of one, if you're willing to put forth the effort to do it.

I don't know whether this is really breaking any promises, but I don't see a problem with it.

But this is just speculation; I'll have to try it out for myself on March 18th to see for myself if it's as bad as the author of the article claims it is. However, there is still plenty of time to change things, and I am sure it will get better before launch, and after.

GUILD WARS makes a big point of having to prepare your character with the right skill set and strategy

the writer states that their lineup was flawed but nobody wanted to spend a few hours doing the things needed to make their lineup more competitive

they state they did not even do the minimum of upgrading with minor runes not to consider secondary or major runes

all the oposition brought to the table were the common fruits of a few hours of scavenging for basic upgrades which the complainers couldnt be bothered with

quote

Why should we be forced to spend hours of time we don’t enjoy preparing our characters, not even to initially assemble our characters but to continually refine them and adapt our strategy, just to enjoy the very same competitive gaming that made us fall in love with that game in the first place? quote

they fell in love with the initial offering of pre rolled pre equipped pvp characters and expected nothing to change

his ideal is static instant gratification instant jump in im equal without any work to achieve it glory

FLASH

i have more of a mindset that is happy to work a short bit to make my character mine and equip it without compaining

he is total pvp and any pve seems to be anathama to him as getting in the way of his fun

BTW
i dont pvp and will be happy to do missions and explore every nitch and corner of the land to see if someone has put an easter egg view or something as a reward for poking their nose in that spot

to each his own and you can always buy something else

i hope it will be worth your while to enjoy it

i tend to agree that there is too much pve in this game as it is. the collector quest in pre-searing ascalon in particular left a bad taste in my mouth.

i can handle perhaps 2-3 weeks for lvl up and getting all the items and skills i need to be competitive in PvP. any more than that and you are gonna have to add me to your list of whiners.

After 2-3 weeks of the game running 24/7 for everyone, the farming will be significantly lessened for those that don't want to be involved in it much. They won't have to go farming for the items they want because they will be out there for trade. This cuts the farming to just acquiring enough gold to purchase them.

IMHO, a well rounded guild that is heavy into competition will have a good mix of player types, PvPers, PvEers, Farmers, and mixed players. Through those PvE and Farmers, the guild will easily outfit itself for the heavy PvP group. It shouldn't be up to individuals entirely to outfit themselves when in a guild. If that's the case, find a new guild that doesn't have such selfish players... and stop whining.

Oh ya, and I tend to agree with Loviatar's evaluation for the most part.

Any PvE is too much, from the point of view of a pure PvP'er. While GW makes a point of trying to appease both crowds to an extent, it's still not simply a competitive action game. It's also an RPG. An action RPG, with a heavy competitive streak and a serious effort to cut the crap and skip a lot of the tedium, but it still isn't simply an online arena game. If that's what ArenaNet was going for, they wouldn't have gone to so much trouble for the other aspects. The game is not broken simply because it doesn't focus entirely on your preferred style of play. Whenever ArenaNet has mentioned being able to jump right in and have fun, they've always included PvE as part of that equation.

In addition, there are the pre-made characters. They've said they'll still be in the game at release, right? I keep seeing "yes" and "no" and "maybe" but I thought I remembered reading somewhere that they were so popular that they'd probably remain in at release. No, they don't have the diversity and customizability of a full role-playing character, but they'll probably continue to add new ones as popular player builds emerge, and they do allow you to jump right in and start competing. If you consider PvE part of the preparation to have fun, rather than part of having fun, the option to get around it will, hopefully, remain in the game. If it doesn't, you just have to keep in mind that not everyone shares your view of what fun is.

I very much agree with you Lunar, excellent points.

GW is most definately a little of both, requiring both. You need the gold and the salvage from PvE which fuels your PvP desires. And the game will always be there, so you have time to just go up to 20. It's only about a 40 hour grind or something up there, and if you're being helped and are in a competent group, you could do it in less. My record from the BWEs is 40 hours or so. So just relax, get up to 20, outfit well, and get into the strategy in the PvP arenas.

I'm no grind monkey, but I think a tiny bit of preperation is okay. I mean, we're somewhere in the cross between an MMORPG, a FPS, and an RTS... I think that little bit of preperation and the control over one character is what we get from the MMORPG, the fast paced rated battles from an FPS, and the strategy and thought process of an RTS. And something none of them have as much as GW is the sense of teamwork and team builds being an important factor. Yes, a bit of grind is creeping slowly into Guild Wars. But I think that's just because they did the whole "Ye Olde Ascalone" thing and when they add stuff to later missions it will not have this effect.

He should stick to First Person Shooters and stay away from betas period. I think he is just blowing off some steam after losing when he thought he was the best thing since sliced bread.

To his aside that fixing your strategy for PvP will take forever...

I personally don't feel its that bad it gives the people at the top their 48 hours or whatever before you have rerolled a character which is the worst case scenario because it may not even be that drastic a change. Which if it was then you may have had a big flaw in your strategy going in and don’t deserve to be on top for those 48 hours anyway. It could be far less and will be far less in retail because people will have an array of characters already made and will just have to go and pickup some skills to fix the new problem.

I think a good point this article makes inadvertently is that guilds should be diverse in their characters. So they can adapt quickly to meet new strategies and this is going to be part of the overall game strategy if you want to be competitive. The fact that they didn’t have an elementalists at all... i mean its not like they are useless...

It would be kind of nice if, after playing through Old Ascalon with one character, you'd have the option to skip it with every future character you create. I myself love it and would probably never skip it, but it really is little more than a very pretty tutorial. Everyone should have to play through it once, so that they aren't completely ignorant of the story, and I always want to have the option of starting my new characters there. After that, though, I don't see why we shouldn't be allowed to pick two professions and start at level three in post-searing Ascalon with future characters. The only reason I can see for forcing people to play it is to ensure that there are always people there for newbies to team up with. Even if there weren't, though, it's perfectly possible to breeze through Old Ascalon solo. You wouldn't be able to get your res signet right away, but that could be changed.

The way I see it is, items do matter, not as much as other games of course, but they still do. Hey my major vigore rune has saved my ass roughly 56,232 times, normally I'd have died, but infact on those 56,232 occasions I lived. So items do matter.

But the main factor people sometimes forget is, these weekend benchmarks somewhat give an illusion of how GW will not be like. In a BWE, the winning guild will most likely be the one who farmed the most. You start out with mediocre equipment, skills, 0 gold, and a basic lower damage weapon. On an individual level, this doesn't make you a whole lot weaker, but if your whole team has mediocre equipment it's going to show.

In retail, where there are no wipes, and you'll have more then 48 hours to play, the whole item thing wont matter. After a week of average gameplay you and everyone in your guild should be loaded up on top of the line stuff. Then for the next 6 years you play GW, you'll never really have to worry about items.

Skill Vendor is easy, take 10 guild members, go farm for 50 minutes, each will have rougly 500 gold. Take that gold to the vendor and each gambles for 10-20 skills. Now in about 60 minutes, your guild will have seen 400-800 exotic skills, and quite frankly atleast some of them will be rare. Doesn't sound to hard when you know how to do it properly. Then just give whatever skills to whoever's that class and be happy.

Guilds that don't want to do their homework (very small compared to other MMORPGs) and lose a will to fight after a first loss aren't a competitive guilds.

If a guild is heavy on a competition, then it can't allow PvE and Farmer players to participate in GvG. Not even once. So i doubt that PvE players will be happy to play in that guild.

In BWE, an alpha guild will be a winning guild. PvP experience, PvE experience, template building experience.

I've been complaining about this for months. Yes we're going to see more pvp maps, but it's not going to fix this problem. Trust me, what he says is true, I've been arguing this point for months.

We were promised that this would be a game won by skill, not by how much time you have to play. This just isn't true. This game does require some skill and that's more than can be said for many mmo's, but the promise of farming being irrelevant just isn't true.

This game was billed as the casual player friendly game as well as the person who has tons of time, that at no point would having more play time give you an advantage over someone who didn't have as much, and the truth is, that's just not true anymore. It's still a great game, but it's not what we were promised.

Let me get this straight. The author's team, without farming and without runes, 'managed' to run a 15-0 win streak. The next match was against an 'all out farming' team, that 'had better equipment'. The author then goes on to tell us his team won the match against the farmers. hmmm... What is the point he is trying to make? He claims that the teams that spend the time farming are better because they have better equipment. Yet, the 'better team' lost the battle. How does that prove "the promise of farming being irrelevant just isn't true"?

Moreover, the author is complaining that the time needed to tweak his team (4+ hours) was too tedious. His team wanted to change up builds as they had weaknesses to overcome. That was poor build planning. You have a weakness, correct it. You don't want to take the action needed to correct it, fine. Just don't complain that game is not balanced because you made the build mistake. Learn from you error, and go from there.

Lastly, if you want instant gratification this game offers that. If you want to be competative, this game offers that with minimal effort. Yes, 4 hours is minimal for a competative team. If you want to be the best guild of all time, work for it, and farming will be needed. As Rex often points out, this may not be the game we want, but it is the game we have.

i think this part of the whiners article sums it up and others are similar

it wasnt equipment it was flawed planing and not being willing to correct it

we lose its no longer fun we quit mommmmmyyyyy
quote
Those flaws in our team were painfully obvious as we battled back and forth against them. We were all feeling a little down after that match and not nearly as motivated as when the day began, but we still really just wanted to play and have fun. Of course, to us the idea of going back and spending several more hours “preparing” our characters so that we could compete wasn’t fun. Fundamental flaws we frustratingly couldn’t fix without spending hours more preparation time aside, we decided to press on.
quote
they knew they had serious flaws and didnt fix them( LOSERS)

I have to agree with most of you guys, I find the complaining simply unjustified. First he seems to forget the obvious, this was a beta weekend, so expecting to have a fully equipped and armored character is slightly on the *I want instant gratification side* IMO.

Once release comes around, this difference in total number of hours farming will be significantly less important as time farming and making a character will be spread out on an everyday basis. Yet there will be still a gap between hardcore competitive guild and casual ones, practice, team work, strategy and execution of all this will always be related to hours played. This is simply how the world revolves in any situation and expecting to stay on top without putting the efforts towards that is unrealistic.

15-0, first lost and they stop having fun because they don’t feel competitive anymore!

Please…

Loviatar, I disagree. I think that the main thing to take away from the article is not that they refused to change/re-equip the builds, but rather after going at least 15-0, they felt they were not competative.

What is the definition of competative? You mean winning all your battles is not competative? Did I miss a day at school somewhere?

That doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever...

my opinion would be that they had been very competitive and were beaten by a group that did better planning and made it work

instead of quitting and saying they had better equipment (skill) i would have said nice trick i will have to remember that for next time

i would not simply quit after my winning streak was broken

and post an article yelling it is an unbalanced game

a BWE doesnt have time to get very unbalanced in the first place

Here is my train of thought. The quotes are taken directly out of the article written by Renhi.
Ok, so Renhi's team now stands at 15-0 for the weekend. I would call that competative. Also, it sets the stage that War Machine has spent 48 hours farming.
Ok, so now the battle has started, and Renhi's team is under fire, and it is difficult. However, the skill gained by his team after playing gvg in the past (15-0) paid off.
Yeah! Renhi's team won a hard fought battle. Good job! Now, let's recap. Renhi was worried about the 'farming' team. Which team prevailed? The one with 'better' items or the team with game skill? Hmm. Also, Anet has stated time and again that better game skill is the key. So far, Rehni supports that claim.

Oh my. This team that has racked up 15 straight victories has a flaw. Other teams can easily exploit this flaw. Really? If the flaw is easily noticable, and easily exploitable, how has this team managed to gain such a win streak?

Hmm. That is good, as anyone can see that you were competing, and obviously extremely well at that!

Ah, so the streak ends. And what team beat them? KOR! Wow, you lost to KOR. Go figure.

Have to agree with Loviatar here. It shows that a team used to winning is unprepared to be beaten. Now they are down. Now they are unmotivated? Renhi's team is at worst 15-1 at this point. Yeah, that is reason to be down on yourself.

Ok, the author has finally gotten around to making an arguement for this article. Now I can see that a farming heavy team did in fact beat him. However, he knew going in that his team was flawed and choose not to make changes. Fine. Now, Renhi is at worst 15-2 for the weekend, and quits. At this point, I throw my hat into Loviatar's ring. You quit cause a BiP team beat your flawed team? To steal a line from Tombstone "Well...Bye."

The author ends with
Forced? When did they force you? Competative gaming? You mean to tell us, that your team's record of (at worst) 15-2 for the weekend, and you feel you were not competative? By that arguement, the Patriots lost 2 games in the regular season...they were non-competative? You beat at worst 88% of the teams you met. That is not competative?

Relazil that is my point, and I hope that it makes a little more sence to you now. The author continually made referance to how he felt 'uncompetative' with a 15-2 record. What world is that? I suppose that only teams that are 17-0 are competative?

If you ask me, Renhi sounds far too competitive. Sure its fun to win, but if you lose, try and make it fun. Us in the District Nudists really tend to try and have fun NO MATTER WHAT. I've been in a few GvG matches where it is quite obvious we are going to lose. Someone from our side will usually pipe up with a comment like "We will still accept your surrender you know" or some other funny witty comment. Maybe we will even live up to our name and all start dancing Nude.

All in all, if you take the game too seriously, it can be hard to have fun. Just play the game KNOWING you are bound to lose, and you'll have a lot more fun. Even if you spent hours and hours farming, you are still bound to lose.

FireMarshal

you have it in a nutshell

it is a game

to have fun

he sounds like a person i knew back in the 60`s who wanted the fastest baddest car on the street but was not willing to get his hands dirty doing the necessary things to make it go from fast to very fast

he wanted a turnkey setup and never knew why a nova would blow the doors off his corvette

well they said that it would be preaty equal. it said in one of the ff Q-if a lvl 20 with lvl 20 starting armour is fighting a lvl 20 withthe best armour, wont the second one win? (not exact word) and i loved theyre answer here it is in shortest form A- it depends if the first one is better skilled. so its like in a soccer game you lose you blame it on the refs even tho you know they were better. and if someone has allready said this i am very sorry, i couldnt read all that, i hate reading :/ im lazy what can i say

No, they aren't competitive. I think i know what happened.

First, they're winning 15-0 and feel uber. From my experience, almost all players think that they're the best of the best after a winning streak like that. And for most of them it's fun to feel that uberness. In reality, that means that they're just decent. Any decent clan should win against a random tombs group, and for now most of the clans in a clan ladder aren't any better than a random tombs group.
After they got some ladder score, they're starting to face other decent (or better) clans that also have a good ladder score (that's how ladder works). And they immediately starting to see that they're not as uber as they thought and it becomes less and less fun for them to play.
They're losing and they decide that it's no longer fun when they can't easily own newbies. They definately see that they have a big chances to lose again, and they can't live with one more hit on their ego that will happen if they'll lose.
So, they just stop playing instead of competing with other decent clans and write an article to save their egos where they blame a game.

That's a loser's attidue (besides, only losers don't like to lose, winners frequently want to lose from time to time because it will make them better and it's more fun to play when you have a good competition). They faced with the fact that they have a big chances to lose and they fleed from a competition. They didn't wanted to make efforts to become more competitive. With that attitude they have no chances to compete. No, owning some noname random newbies to get a good-looking score doesn't make a guild competitive.

agreed

the way i learned to play chess (and get better) was to lose every game for several months straight but i tended to lose by a smaller margin as time passed

the first time i won she was having a bad day and was not quite up to par but it felt very good as i knew she didnt just let me win

being a punching bag for the time i was losing wasnt really fun but the reward was enormous

I think it was very distracting for the argument to whine about how they were winning until they came up against a more dedicated group.

That being said I agree with the general conclusion that there are fun-reducing factors in the game that don't need to be there, like attribute refunds (make an npc gold sink out of it?), and ultra-rare uber items.

I'd also like to add that BiP is unavailable in the exotic skill charm vendor and was obtained by exploiting the premade characters.

How do you know this? I was under the impression that all exoctic charms were at the exotic skill charm vendor.

Ok, then read that article.
The Ladder System - Too Competitive?
Sounds familiar heh?
The problem with these articles that they were written to whine. They have some good thoughts and some stupid ones, but it's hard to comment a whining part with only intelligent arguments without a whine

Yes, there are some good thoughts in their article. But they say that 4 hours preparation time is too much and it's not fun? What they'll say when they'll discover that they need to roll new characters to stay competitive (new PvP chars, farm chars etc)? It will take even more time. IMHO 4 hours is very fast.
Also, they obviously don't even know about uber-rares we discussed on this forum because they're saying about 4 hours of preparation, not about 1000+ hours.

the simplist way they can protest the ruining of their perfect game is to not buy it

if enough people do not buy it they will change it to please the majority of potential buyers

i think the presales and eagerness for more says they are doing something right that a lot of people like

you will always have complainers

unless they can make constructive reasonable suggestions they should either not buy it or if it is worth buying shut up

Then again; there is one thing everybody keeps overlooking in their statements. GW is trying to appease both kinds of players. When bending the branch in two different directions it isn't always going to spring back. It will break sometimes. Certain concessions have to be made to allow for the PARTIAL appeasement of both parties. I do agree that a pure PvP player will not like this game in the long run. In order to get the most out of your GvG character there WILL be some farming involved to acquire what it is you want most. This should be naturally expected. No where do they say you have to do ALL the quests to get what you want.
I, personally am more of a PvE player. I enjoy finding those neat little peep holes in the gaming world nobody ever considered looking for (something I can appreciate as well loviator). But by the same token, I found the limited chances I had in PvP during the last BWE to be quite exhillarating.
At an almost concrete 90% of the time, the one thing that will do the most unexpected thing against you in any battle is another actual player apposing you. I found that the unexpected always gives you a keen awareness of just where your skills are going. Besides, if I spend my time running PvE and do an occassional PvP to "test" them out while i build them; I am, in the end, garuanteed way better returns on my build than if I went cookie-cutter and got fuddled by its inflexability.
Simply put, I am more than willing to sow the fields to get the better harvest than I am to expect a perfect return without planting the seed. Actually taking the time to care for the crop gives you much less chance to have a bad harvest and much more chance to prevent it from turning bad on you.



And nope.......a strick 1st person shooter player isnt going to like this gaming experience....but neither is a hard line adventure seeker. You either learn to appreciate the duality of its concept or you get lost in the singular nature you mistake it for.

Maybe I have so much fun in the game no matter what because the only games I really played were Counterstrike/DoD, and Diablo 2.

Ah, then that is exactly how I feel. I was reading what you wrote before wierd, and it didn't make any sense to me. Thanks for clearing that up!