User:TLLOTS

Foreword

First a foreword about my experience. I'm neither a high level PvP'er or a hardcore PvE'er, however I do feel I have enough knowledge to contribute to discussions regarding them. However, if you believe I'm mistaken, feel free to let me know, just be prepared to back it up with well reasoned facts, not mindless conjecture. Thank you for your time.

Failings of Guild Wars (and MMORPG's in general) and how to fix them for Guild Wars 2

As the title may have implied, this is going to be a bit of a rant. Settle in if you intend to read it, I'll try to be as brief as possible, but a great deal needs to be said.

Guild Wars in many ways has been ground breaking in the MMORPG arena, not the least of which is thanks to its no subscription business model. Other things however, such as its instanced missions that took you through the story or its low level cap, have also changed the way people look at MMORPG's, or at least they did in the beginning. Now as we see the release of the fourth and last expansion to the original Guild Wars the cracks are well and truly showing, and much of what we've seen of the game and what we've heard as to what has to come in Guild Wars 2 has shown that ANet, or at least parts of it, have lost their way and are now heading down a similar path to so many other MMORPG's, a path that is fraught with countless mistakes that could so easily be avoided. In the coming paragraphs I will outline the biggest of these mistakes, and how I feel they can be fixed.

Character Investment

When Prophecies was first released, the game for all intents and purposes was small. You had one map to travel, a few hundred skills and six classes. This may sound like a bad thing, but it's not, because it being as small as it was kept character investment remarkably low compared to other MMORPG's. One could easily create a multiple characters, and take each of them through the campaign in a short period of time, easily reaching maximum level along the way, and gathering most of their classes desirable skills.

Factions changed this, but it wasn't some policy change at ANet that caused it, no it was merely an invevitibility that when you add more content, more skills and more classes, investment increases per character. Still, Factions didn't make it totally unbearable, helped somewhat by its rather short nature. It was Nightfall that really brought this home, it was Nightfall that pushed character investment to an extent that made it completely infeasible to travel down all the paths you wished (potentially as many as ten, one for each class).

Nightfall brought with it one other lovely gem that has been the subject of much debate. Titles. Not just titles however, but titles which had tangible benefits, titles which laid the groundwork for the swath of PvE skills that we possess today. The purpose of these PvE skills connected to titles is quite clear, ANet wanted to offer a way for people to grow their characters without merely increasing the level cap. The actual merits of this approach are of course up for debate, and are not particularly relevant except in so far as the drastic increase in potential character investment that it provided. Now, Guild Wars began to equal and in some cases rival other MMORPG's in the degree of investment one could make in a single character.

Guild Wars 2 may improve this situation, but given what we've heard it's likely the opposite will happen due to two things: Potentially no level cap, and the introduction of races. A higher level cap obviously increases the investment one can make in a character, however races strictly speaking don't increase character investment. What races may do, is increase the number of paths available to you, however with no change in the time you have to play the game, it means you may see less of the paths the game has to offer than ever before. The worst part of races however is that it may actually punish bad investments. No longer are you assured to be able to reach the pinnacle of your classes abilities, that honour may go to someone else for the simple difference that they clicked the right button in the character creation screen. Of course all of the issues with races are contingent upon them being implemented in a manor similar to World of Warcraft. If they're implemented in a different way, such as being a purely aesthetic component, or if each race actually corresponds to a particular class, then it won't be an issue.

However, despite all of this, character investment is not in and of itself a problem, it only becomes a problem when one must invest at the expense of the other paths you may travel, which is the case with Guild Wars, and many other MMORPG's. This investment has numerous negative effects, such as curtailing experimentation, which in turn promotes ignorance in many players, who are too set in their own path to allow themselves to see outside of it. Those players aren't the problem, it's quite natural for one to cling to ones investment, it's the game that is at fault, especially one proposing a drastically increased level cap for its sequel. The problem shows itself in other games such as World of Warcraft all too well, wherein one doesn't truly know a class until they've invested a great deal of time into it. In Guild Wars 2, when will I know if the class I chose is the one for me? Level 20? Level 30? If I decide that I want to try a different class, will the path I've travelled be so long as to make me disappear at the thought of starting over in the vain hope that I make the right choice this time? These are just a few of the problems caused by this character investment, but they clearly have a strong negative impact, one that bleeds into other areas such as balance discussions, where people who feel hard done by when their class takes a hit feel frustrated and seek to defend their investment.

The solution to all of this should be clear: Turn character investment into account investment. In Guild Wars terms it would be as if all titles were account based, that once a character had travelled to one location, all of them could, even that you would only ever need to level one character, the rest would all be level 20 and share the same skill sets, so titles like Skill Hunter wouldn't be quite as much of a waste as they are at present. Naturally there's plenty of room for variation in this, and I'm sure some will have their reservations, so I'd like to propose two separate solutions.

Solution one: Have only one character. Again in Guild Wars terms, this would be akin to having a character that could change their primary and secondary, allowing them to travel down all available paths whenever they wished. I'm personally quite fond of this one, however I recognize some may not be due to aesthetic reasons, such as being locked into one appearance for all time. While I would suggest that it should be made possible to change aspects of your appearance, the introduction of races (even purely as aesthetic components) does complicate this somewhat, as such I have my second solution.

Solution two: Allow for multiple characters, and to appease those who for whatever reason may wish to make some of their accomplishments on a per character basis, keep the characters separate at first. However, later at any time the characters may choose to 'join up' with other characters on your account, forming a small party of sorts and all accomplishments would then be credited to that party. This way not only is their plenty of room for aesthetic variation, but also those more zealous players are able to individualize their accomplishments between characters if they so wish.

Either of these solutions if implemented would have enormous positive impact upon Guild Wars 2, and I strongly hope that one of them, or a similar solution, is implemented. Thank you for your time, and check back in the future, as I may add more.

--TLLOTS 11:20, 23 September 2007 (UTC)