Fansite Friday/Denmark

Fansite:  Guild Wars Denmark (site no longer operating)

Date:  9 September 2005

Number:  58

Q&A
Question: People who leave during cooperative missions and PvP battles are very common in Guild Wars. Will there be any penalties for this behavior, like loosing a certain amount of XP or fame?

Answer: The idea of penalizing “leavers” in some way, whether it’s XP or Fame or Faction points, has been suggested from time to time. As a player (and non-leaver) I personally wouldn’t mind seeing some sort of small penalty in place. The penalty wouldn’t really hurt a player if he left just once in a while, but it would have an impact if he was a chronic leaver.

But then I remember back years ago, when I played every night with a really deadly combination: A horrible ISP (which timed me out for “idling” when I was in the middle of 4v4!) and an overclocked processor. I ended up getting disconnected many times a night. When I recall that, it seems that it might be sort of unfair for someone to rack up penalties when it’s uncertain if his reasons for leaving are legitimate or not.

We’ve all run into the occasional player who takes off for silly reasons, like not caring for the party configuration, not having res when a team member dies, not liking someone’s level of skill, etc. But as long as emergencies arise, doorbells and telephones ring, babies cry, or someone’s connection is interrupted, then penalties will need to be viewed very critically before being put in place. I’m sure we’ll be looking at this closely now and in the future.

Question: Will it be possible to switch Characters without having to log out and in again?

Answer: Having you log out and log back in again is actually a good thing. I asked Patrick Wyatt about it at lunch the other day, and he said that Guild Wars could be configured so that a log-in was not required, but that the log-in process was put in intentionally as a security measure, a way of keeping each player’s account safe. Say you accidentally leave your account active when you finish up a session at the gaming café. Or perhaps you forget to log out when you head to school. With a log-in required to change characters, anyone who tried to do damage to your account – to steal your items, delete your characters, etc. – would not be able to switch to the other characters. So the majority of your items and characters would be safe. I guess we should all consider those few seconds of log-in as an investment in account security.

Question: I have a guildbased character and a group based character. I would love to be able to not be in the guild with the group based one.

Answer: Guild affiliation is a matter that we have considered very thoughtfully. There are two ways to go: A player can have affiliations that are set per character or per account. There are merits to each, but in the end, we chose to make it so that one guild affiliation applies to all characters on an account. This helps reduce the potential for abuse that can occur when various characters on a single account have affiliations with different guilds. We receive a few support tickets about disruptive behavior, such as spoof guild memberships and other problems, and it seems fairly certain that the number of such incidents would increase if players were able to have characters in multiple guilds.

You cannot explicitly have non-guild characters on your account, at present. All characters on a player account show on the guild roster, view guild chat (when enabled), and so forth. But you may have an option in the future to explicitly disconnect some characters from guild affiliation. For the reasons stated above, though, I don’t foresee that you’ll be able to have characters actually join separate guilds.

Bonus Question: In dance sessions the cape is often inconvenient, will players be able to take off cape?

Answer: I think that the question of guild affiliations above may actually be at least somewhat related to this question, because guild associations are directly tied to cape wearing at the present time. Some players want to belong to a guild but do not want any of their characters to wear a cape. Others want only specific characters to wear one. So you should know that in the future you will be able to display a guild cape or not, as you desire. Naturally, in PvP combat, your cape must be displayed for strategic reasons. But outside of PvP venues, displaying a cape will be optional.

Thanks, GuildWarsDK and you many forum visitors who contributed questions to this Fansite Friday!