Guild Wars 2 has created a somewhat less tedious crafting system than the average MMO, but it still faces the standard problem that it is not very interesting. It is adequately useful, but given the time investment and payoff, the average player is better served using the auction house.
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The reigning villain in Guild Wars 2 is Scarlet Briar, a cross between Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy with killer robots tossed in. And in her Playhouse, she gets a giant hammer, in case you did not think she was enough like Harley Quinn. And they case one of the Harley Quinns to voice her. I am rather fond of the character, and Tara Strong can only make things better.
After the Queen’s Pavilion put everyone in a huge zerg, that approach fails consistently in Clockwork Chaos. Players need to spread out to complete more events. Players tend to congeal into large groups and farm champions. Large groups spawn multiple Aetherblade champions, and champions’ survivability scales up with participation, so portals that should take a few minutes to clear take much longer. Invasion events rarely see Scarlet if:
I joked in chat that the last update was to remove champions. Two minutes later, patch notes said that champion spawns were being toned down. They still spawn enough to congeal zergs. Map chat gets fun and dramatic.
: Zubon
Remember our buddy Tesh’s Kickstarter for metal gearpunk dice? It has gone ridiculously well, now past 2000% of its goal, so well that Tesh started making up new stretch goals and adding more tiers of dice to accommodate the need to have one of everything. You can still kick in $10 for the original idea, but some people went all the way up to $145 because they wanted one of everything, and for all I know some of those people paid even more to have more than one. There are now multiple shapes and colors and designs and…
You have a day (probably less by the time you read this) to join or increase your pledge. I’m figuring out if I need to add a few dice to play with finish options. I must not spend $145 on very fancy dice.
: Zubon
For gamers, scaling seems easy. You know when we just ask for features like “why can’t you just add this feature?” And the developer hears “why can’t you sleep under your desk so you can spend every waking hour coding and rewriting tools?” Scaling is one of those things.
It’s just not the tech required, but the actual design. How much scaling? What about players that suck, and equally what about players with perfect stats/builds? The amount of variables can be mind-boggling. Most importantly, where is that sweet scaling spot to keep things fun?
Scaling has been one of Guild Wars 2 jewels since launch, but I feel that at launch it was a gem not well cut. The amount of moving variables seemed to be smaller than what one would dream for scaling. In Orr, events would simply add more undead balloons to pop instead of actually making it harder for a zerg of farmers. My eyes would glaze over as 20 bandits per wave would attack a windmill in the level 2-3 human area.
Throughout their first year ArenaNet has been adding more ways to scale. The most obvious change is scaling upwards to veteran and champion status enemies. With this latest update though, I feel ArenaNet’s scaling jewel is now very well cut. Guild Wars 2 has achieved mastery in scaling their content. Continue reading →
A whole zone upended on the hour, every hour. That is what the latest content patch in Guild Wars 2 brings in Clockwork Chaos. The mad genius Scarlet Briar is attacking Tyria, and at the beginning of the hour a zone becomes her violent playground. Any zone above level 25 except Orr (locked in time) and Southsun (locked in… karka?) is fair game for her madness.
Mechanically, it works like this. For 15 minutes there is calm in Tyria as many players are emptying their bags of loot from the last invasion. Right on the hourly dot, the Living World UI will say there’s a new invasion in a zone, let’s say Harathi Hinterlands. Interested players teleport to a random place in Harathi Hinterlands at that moment. Once there it will be apparent where the events are. There are 3 waves of twisted clockwork creatures and the latter 2 waves are supplemented by either a Molten Core invasion or an Aetherblade invasion, which also have to be dealt with. If all waves are defeated players can fight the boss, Scarlet. If the players can’t work down all the waves in 45 minutes, the meta-event still rewards players pretty well for progress made. Continue reading →
I know I’m a day late, but I find that sleeping on touchier subjects usually results in a better post. When I read the news that WildStar was going to be a subscription-based MMO, I too had pursed lips. Like Syp, I pretty much expected a subscription option, but since it was hinted it would be hybrid, I was thinking more along the lines of The Secret World or Lord of the Rings Online.
WildStar’s “hybridization” isn’t really one at all. It is a subscription-based MMO with various ways to pay for the subscription, including CREDD, which is available for purchase via in-game gold. EVE Online does this with PLEX, and I’ve heard mention TERA does as well. A CREDD however costs $5 more to turn it in to a tradable month.
While I personally would have preferred a true hybrid business model, such as The Secret World’s, this decision by Carbine is not one made in default. MMORPG talked with head honcho Jeremy Gaffney (who is one of the most insightful, open devs I’ve ever met) on this very subject. Continue reading →
The “collectibles” tab in the Guild Wars 2 bank seemed like a neat idea at launch, but it has become apparent that it is essential to the crafting design and that crafting as implemented would be completely untenable without the storage component. Alternately, one can take the lesson that storage problems are a feature, not a bug, and potentially see merits in competing designs.
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Mithril Ore – Buy order: 34c. Sell order: 37c.
Carrot – Buy order: 1s21c. Sell order: 1s50c.
: Zubon
A friend in college had an unusual day in dance class: “run slowly,” his instructor said. He realized that, while he could run, he knew it as a single activity and had great trouble analyzing it to a series of individual steps and motions. He did it unthinkingly. Programmers and industrial/organizational psychologists will be familiar with the epiphany that writing an explicit process or algorithm is really rather difficult.
I think of this every time I see a routine where someone has clearly learned the individual motions and trained him/herself to perform them forward and backwards or in unexpected combinations. Contrarily reference celebrity judges on TV talent shows, some of whom are exceedingly talented performers with almost no ability to articulate why or how, as opposed to say Ben Folds and his self-consciously technical analysis on The Sing Off.
Which brings me to the question of when games train you to do something and then punish you for doing it. Do we like that? On the one hand, it creates interesting content with unusual mechanics like killing by healing or requiring you not to DPS too quickly. On the other hand, it seems perverse and just plain mean to reward something throughout the game then punish you for following that training. On the gripping hand, that seems like taking the “game as learning” experience to its highest level, where you not only know the techniques but know when not to use them and when and why to swap parts in and out.
I want to go with that as the final answer, but not everyone wants to get that deeply into their gaming, and it is still the case that you can almost always look up when you need to change tactics rather than learning something. That does not make the advanced learning a bad idea for the intended audience, but it may make it mostly pointless given the actual audience. If I could get a fourth hand, I might note that many games already design a lot of content for the top 5%, and the rest of the playerbase can participate in the intended spirit if it feels up to it.
: Zubon
Just to make me look silly, between the time that I wrote about meta-achievements and the time that I posted, the new GW2 update went live and did something different with a Living Story meta-achievement. There are 13 achievements, and you need to complete 16 to get the meta-achievement.
Someone in guild chat wondered if they were hiding achievements for later parts of the story, rather than showing them all in advance like in earlier Living Story updates. This is possible, but the explicit answer is that there are now Living Story daily achievements that count towards the meta-achievement. If the event is live for two weeks, with a Living Story achievement each day, you now need 16 of 27, and some things you do will count for two or more achievements.
What does this do to players’ incentives? Continue reading →