Feedback talk:Ryan Scott

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[edit] PvP Questionaire and Feedback / Aellur's Answers

I'm uncertain how much you are willing--or even have the time--to suffer, so I apologize in advance for the wall of text. I can only hope you're still open to reading this.

1) What are your favorite GW1 skills? Why?

This is a difficult question for me to answer at the moment. I primarily play as an Elementalist and so have recently been looking at skills from other professions with ever more jealous eyes.

2) What types (new or existing) prestige rewards drive you personally as a player? Prestige rewards are any reward that does not effect your power or ability. Examples would be PvP skins, titles, or rank emotes.

I must be a rare sort of gamer, caught somewhere between and outside the most convenient definitions, oddly familiar with all of the marked trails yet still on a wholly different path. As I write this, I couldn't quite call myself a hardcore gamer, at least not anymore, but neither am I a casual gamer by any strict definition. I wouldn't normally be interested in prestige rewards, not for their own sake, but of them all, I'd probably be most likely to pursue unique skins. Customization is a major part of modern gaming, found even among the expectations of the most casual gamers, because 'looking cool' and having fun go pretty much hand-in-hand. For example, even though a prestige armor set is functionally identical to standard max armor for any given class, I did manage to drop the extra platinum for a set. As for titles, the ones I do have are the result of playing the game in line with how I had already expected to play. I would not pursue a title that I had to grind for, either directly or indirectly, as I would gladly go without than make a masochist of myself.

3) PvE players: What has drawn you into PvP in the past? What factors deter you from PvP?

I could write a book about this that is both longer than A Dance to the Music of Time and as tangentially arching as Gravity's Rainbow. Put simply, the answer to both parts is the heart of my inability to answer question #1. First, let me say that I can count the number of weeks I have played PvP on one hand. The fact that it was more than once is testament to my desire to play competitively, but as I mentioned earlier, I am a PvE player and would only play PvP part-time at most. Given the disparity I have seen between the two pursuits, though, it has become clear that each is its own distinct game. From a game design perspective, the most telling symptom of this was the necessity to split skills into two separate (but equal?) halves. In a more general sense, the object and rules are so different from each other that they could not be crammed into the same model. Because of this, I am glad to hear that PvP in Guild Wars 2 will be more open to a casual play style and more closely integrated with the PvE world. With this in mind, my initial interpretation of PvP in GW was perhaps a bit naïve. At the center of my expectation was much better sportsmanship on behalf of the players at the entry level of play. I imagined the mechanics themselves would instill in players a structure of fairness on which to compete. I was honestly surprised how openly (and sometimes needlessly) critical players have been toward ArenaNet and each other over a game that was robust enough to ultimately spawn the inventive skillbar metagame from the prevalence of gimmick builds; an interesting twist that I likewise did not predict prior to entry (though, as a paper-and-pencil RPG veteran, I should have seen coming a mile away).

When thinking of PvP, it is the economically complete nature of the game that brings out the kinks in the mechanics and the necessity for constant re-balancing in a way that PvE couldn't. This isn't a problem when viewed with the equity of Solomon, but the more complex a system becomes, the harder it is to gauge the accumulated effects of the beating of a butterfly's wings and so the system is either allowed to tip at the fulcrum or is forced into an infinite power creep to compensate. Regardless of the approach, the unfortunate casualties of this are the skills themselves. Which brings me back to question #1.

Because the success of a profession in PvE is tied to that of its role in a completely different game (PvP), I feel at times that the Elementalist has lost the focus needed for the integrity of the profession in PvE, especially in Hard Mode. It would be nice to find a warm snugly place in PvP and live there for a while to clear the palate. Not that the PvE Elementalist is unplayable, just that the role changed from straightforward to abstract slowly while the Elementalist boiled like a frog on a hotplate unaware. In time, I might convince myself otherwise...or I might give in to those pessimistic whispers and just roll up a Mesmer.

P.S. Sorry that it turned out such a twisting mess. It all made sense in the larger context I had echoing in my head, I swear. [Edit: Forgot to log in to sign] Aellur 09:29, 11 September 2009 (UTC)