User:Morgaine/GW2 Worries

Perhaps it's premature to be worried about something you have never seen, and know very little about. However, when it's something that you have been looking forward to for many years, and when it's related to a game which you regard as the best ever and you don't wish to see a regression, then perhaps worrying is not all that unusual, or unexpected.

Here is my list of worries.

GW2 will be a lonely place

• My heroes in GW are my friends, and even the henchies were my friends back when I needed them. I am happy to make new AI friends, but apparently GW2 is not going to provide them, other than ranger pets and necromancer minions which are extremely inferior to heroes. It seems then that GW2 is being designed to be a lonely experience. After the colossal success of henchmen and heroes in GW1, I can't begin to imagine why anyone would throw away such an appealing feature as friendly AI sidekicks. This could be extremely bad for the success of GW2, and it's certain to be a lonely experience compared to GW1.
• No, other players are not friends. Another player may on occasion become a genuine friend, after many years of being together online, but that is an extremely rare occurrence. Even when it does happen, that friend would have his or her own agenda and not be available to play with you whenever you want, use the skills you desire, be flagged like H/H, and so on. Heroes are very superior friends in this regard, tied to you by a much stronger bond than other players. They are the friends that you want and need, not the second-rate ones that are forced upon you when you team with others.
• It's worth remembering that GW1 didn't have heroes until the Nightfall campaign, although it did of course have henchmen from the beginning. It is possible therefore that Anet intends to introduce something like heroes in a subsequent GW2 campaign. That would be great, but in the interim, it seems that this aspect of the game is going to be a regression with respect to GW1.

Other players in shared zones will be extremely annoying

• I played other MMOs which feature shared zones for many years before I discovered GW. In those MMOs, the contribution made by non-team players was roughly 1% interesting, 1% helpful, 3% funny, and 95% a total disaster.
• GW1 was a revelation in escaping from the loss of fun caused by other players.
• Anet claims that they have found a way to make other people an asset instead of a liability in GW2. I'll believe it when I experience it, but meanwhile I am seriously worried because I have experienced for far too long the numerous downsides of shared zones.

Persistent zones will be inflexible compared to GW1

• Cast your mind back to Winds of Change (WoC), and recall how inflexible and annoying it is for zone changes to be persistent and not resettable to their original state on demand. You've started WoC, finished one set of WoC quests, and now you're waiting for Anet to deliver the next set. While you wait, you would like to do some secondary Canthan quests that you missed before, or Cartography, or vanquish something, but you discover that you can't because the normal foes have been replaced by overpowered WoC foes, and it's either become immensely harder or impossible. Persistence without opt-out can negatively affect the gameplay and the fun.
• I worry that the above will happen in GW2 as well, and that the difficulties that persistence causes will be on a much larger scale than in GW1 because the entire design of GW2 is based on persistence. GW1's instance-based technology was immensely more flexible and player-friendly than global persistence can ever be. Throwing it away for GW2 was a great risk, and it may turn out to have been a very severe and costly mistake.

Dumbed down skill sets in GW2

• During the GW2 design stage, Anet mentioned that the complexity of skills in GW1 (and in particular the huge number of skills in GW1) was something that they were aiming to reduce in GW2. Well, this worries me too, because the greatest pleasure in GW1 for me has always been the design of skill bars to suit appropriate situations.

• For example, recently I hugely enjoyed creating optimum skill bars specifically for the challenge of doing the reputedly hard Shards of Orr EotN dungeon on another character, and I must have spent a couple of happy days making builds as opposed to the hour that I then spent slicing through the dungeon like a knife through butter.

• If a dumbed-down skills set does not provide us with the depth to allow many interesting and diverse builds to be created to suit the different situations, then it will have lost something with respect to GW1. It's a worry, and not only a worry for me. It should also be a worry for ArenaNet, because it's the depth of skills that has given GW1 its extreme longevity while waiting for GW2. Without the huge variety of skills and the never-ending challenge of making new builds, I (and many others, I am sure) would have got bored long ago and tried some other game instead of waiting.

@above poster: Just because a skill bar has been simplified does not mean it's worse. GW1 has far more skills but at the same time far more useless builds and more ways to not tell the player why a build is bad. In GW2 there will be more USEFUL builds and a better system to tell a player why their action didn't work as well compared to another. Maybe they should have stayed long range instead of rushing into melee. That's the difference between gw1 and 2 and there's a video on this exact "worry." The person covers the aspects well.

Throwing away the crown jewels

• This is a hard worry to describe. I'll try to approach it historically. (It's related to previous points 1 and 2, but focuses more on core design goals.)

• In the early days of GW design and release, leading members of ArenaNet like the visionary Jeff Strain would frequently give interviews and podcasts on gaming sites, and GW was regularly portrayed as the game that overcame the many problems inherent in the MMOs of that time. Most of those inherent problems stemmed from sharing a zone with people who are not part of your team. This inevitably resulted in those other people being in competition with you for mobs and drops, which regularly ruined your gaming pleasure.

• The standard problems of MMOs became so bad that they were given names: kill-stealing, camping, and training mobs onto other people. To make matters worse, shared zones were overrun with anti-social verbal abuse as well, as your gaming pleasure was shared with everyone from the socially insensitive to outright sociopaths. The typical 11 year old devout follower of Beavis and Butthead may have some kind of excuse for being a total pain to other players (the blame largely rests with his parents), but knowing this doesn't make your own gaming experience any more pleasurable.

• I personally played two MMOs based on shared zones, EverQuest and Anarchy Online, from start to finish and for many years each, and repeated them on many characters. As a result, I knew just how bad such MMOs can be. When I discovered GW and heard Jeff Strain's recognition of those traditional social problems, I knew I'd found someone who understood the disaster that was at that time considered to be "normal". GW turned out to be every bit as effective a solution as Jeff had promised, full marks. Instancing of battle zones became a major crown jewel for ArenaNet, eliminating by good technical design the social problems and loss of fun caused by being forced to play alongside random people.

• And now we hear that GW2 is going to be using shared zones. What? Has Jeff's message been forgotten totally by the rest of the company? Maybe not, maybe GW2 has secret sauce which will keep Beavis and Butthead out of our hair, but I haven't heard anything along those lines and so my worries about this keep recurring. I fear that in the headlong rush to grab players from WoW, GW2 will turn into yet another shared-zone MMO suffering the same problems.

• I've already mentioned GW2 having thrown the baby of heroes/henchmen out with the bathwater, but this unfortunate decision is yet another example of forgetting the crown jewels of the game. If you discard the elements that made GW1 unique at release (instanced zones and AI helpers), you can end up having lost what made GW1 great. It's not enough just to have more modern graphics than WoW, or bosses 5 times as large, and it's not even enough just to have novel features like dynamic events. It also needs good technical design to keep the standard problems of normal MMOs from ruining our gaming pleasure. GW1 offered this, and it delivered on the promise.

• I am of course aware that GW2 designers believe that removing competition for foes and for rewards in GW2's shared zones will prevent the traditional problems of MMOs from ruining the game. The trouble is, it's not as simple as that. Griefers do not need to earn in-game rewards in order to grief other players, they do so because griefing and annoying others is a reward in itself. (It's common to find this happening in virtual worlds like Second Life for example, in which there is no competition for gaming rewards like foes and drops and yet griefing occurs regularly. By removing that competition between players in GW2's shared zones, ArenaNet is not tackling the full extent of the problem. GW1 did, very effectively.

• Summary: I will be looking for new features in GW2 to replace the terrible loss of the H/H crown jewels, and I will be looking for secret sauce to address the social problems of normal MMOs. GW1 had both. Will GW2?