User:Outpost/rants

Grind Redux!

And thus, the whining has begun. In my personal opinion, the grind is GW:EN is exactly what I thought it would be. Insignificant, unrequired, and short to get armor. Yet everyone seems to be whining and complaining about, ready to jump on the 'OMG ANET IS TEH SUX" boat.

Get over it already! You can reach rank 3 or 4 playing the game normally, if you want armor you only need to gain at most 16,000 reputation on average. That is nothing. This is not hours upon hours of boring farm. This is having fun doing dungeons for that race, completing the quests and mini-games, and moving yourself as close as you can. And you can *repeat* this stuff too if you find that fun. Otherwise, you can take the ultra efficient route of clearing out areas a few times. Yes, it's boring, yes it's dull. But frankly, there's no point in having prestige armor if everyone can get it work free. GW:EN is an expansion, and you have your armor already, it's all optional. And in my experience? The grind takes but a few hours to get. You can clear an area once a day, and have it before the end of the week.

It is not that bad! Look at any other game on the market that *requires* you to grind, or the massively popular free korean MMO that are pure grind. I can understand that yes, it is boring, but it will most likely change later on. There may be more quests added, more methods of getting reputation, and when Hard Mode comes, farming it will be even faster then it already is. But please people... it isn't bad enough that you can go on a forum and shout out "Anet is trying to kill us!"

As for the "But you have to grind for the PvE skills.. they are giving abilities you need and help discrimination", I have yet to see this. The PvE skills are already incredibly good and abusable at even rank 0. And they increase in power very slowly, not to mention they are optional. I've bested GW:EN using an entirely PvP-Skill bar, you can do it too. GW:EN may be more difficult then other campaigns (if you knock out PvE skills that is...), but it is still a game against a computer. It is not difficult to the point you require it.

Modern Glasses?! We're all going to die!

Just a quick comment on this. Having modern-looking glasses doesn't kill the atmosphere of Guild Wars, it won't kill your roleplaying experience, and it won't cause your eyes to bleed. Glasses have existed for centuries now, and Guild Wars tends to be ahead of itself in all areas of style when it comes to their player looks. Ultimately though, the majority would NOT want to buy primitive looking spectacles for characters, and the modern looking glasses are immensely popular. Get over it, it'll be the end of the world as much as Candy Cane Men and Snowmen Elementals will be.

And as a roleplayer myself, who hangs out with many hardcore GW roleplayers (they do exist!), no one has complained about glasses, in fact, they love them.

Hero Armors! Anet is cheap!

Heroes have better armors for ONE reason, they're infinitely easier to make than player armors. This is why they are varied and better looking. The amount of work that goes into an hero armor is at most to my knowledge, basic clipping checking, and design. The work that goes into player armor however is much more. Remember, player armor can be mixed and matched, thusly for EVERY PIECE they add they have to check every other piece of armor to be sure that graphical glitches don't occur (and these *do* occur at times, but are usually fixed), so a piece of player armor is limited to what the other pieces are, you can't have something incredibly different from players without a fair amount of work to ensure that it works as best as possible with every other armor in the game. Also note that hero armors cannot be mixed and matched, they are one basic model, so this allows them even more variety, even easier.

Anet did not "waste time making heroes more pretty then us!", it's just simply easier to develop and design their armor to be a fair bit unique. It will also be easier to do that for NPCs.

July 2nd, 07

Grind?!

I'm reading the forums and I realize in 'every' single damn post involving Guild Wars, there's some whiner complaining that he's going to boycott GW:EN because of "Guild War's massive grind"! Wake up call buddy, look at ANY OTHER MMORPG on the market. In fact, look at some single player RPGs as well. They all have just as much (and for the majority), MORE Grind than Guild Wars has. Listen, if you want grind, go play WoW, or Ragnarok Online, or FFXII, Runescape, FFXI, Maple Story. Even Diablo 2, the unholy grail of gaming, had massive amounts of required grind and farming for high level and nightmare mode. Grind is a part of games in general.

Now if you're going to whine and boycott GW:EN because of grind, then do me a favor, and go whine in private, no one wants to hear it! Guild Wars has, in my experience, some of the least amount of grind I've ever seen in an online RPG, especially a free one (most free ones are nothing *BUT* grind, I'm looking at you Runescape and Maple Story). I understand that Guild Wars was designed to be 'grind free', but this changes, and even then, for the minimal you need to get max armor, max equipment, and complete the game, you need to grind at *most* an hour for Faction in Factions. That's all, Sunspear grinding has been eliminated, and prophecies has none. Max armor and max equipment can easily be attained by regular playing and intelligent salvaging and using collector items, and heroes don't even need new equipment to be useful. Everything past this can be considered 'luxury' in my eyes.

So what grind is there? Sunspear and Kurzick/Luxon skills, both are completely optional, neither have become the 'discriminating' factor in PvE so many people complain about (You're still using PUGs? Shame on you, get a guild or alliance as best you can, or henchway it!) Anyhow, besides that, you also need to grind for unlocking everything (optional), capturing everything (optional), getting 15k armor (optional), maxing your heroes (optional), getting green weapons (optional, are we noting a pattern here?)... ect.. ect...

So what does this whine "I'm boycotting 'cause of grind" say to me? It says "I want everything just handed to me in a completely normal playthough, including all the perfect and luxury items I can ever want!" I see no valid reason for disliking and boycotting the game over 'grind', other than "Anet at one point and time, a long time ago, said we don't ever have to grind, because things don't ever change."

Grind is a necessary evil for ANY online game that's designed to last longer than an hour or two play. (Read as: Any MMORPG) Why? To keep it alive. If you could get everything you wanted in a single playerhtough, then you play through.. and you're done. You'd only go back to play with friends, and grind or not, people who would do this are going to do that 'anyway'. So grind is introduced, optional things that confer none or little bonus to your gameplay for the sake of letting hardcore, long lasting players, have a reason to keep on player. These are the luxury items. Once you add in your grind for luxury goods, you just kept another good majority of your players hanging on. Anet has no reason to keep players hanging on for longer than the next expansions (after buying the game, you're just costing them money for play as there's no fee, until you buy another chapter/expansion). HOWEVER, on other games, such as WoW, where a monthly fee is required, grind is a must have. It keeps your players from making progress too fast, and can keep them hooked trying to get the best stuff from the Guild Wars average of 1-2 months, to a year or more. Without any grind, any MMORPG would falter and ultimately fail. Guild Wars is friendly enough that grind is only really needed to get luxury items, with everything else have a very cheap, easily accessible equivalent.

So you shouldn't be whining and complaining that Anet has a tiny bit of grind, you should be thankful that they have as little as they do. As for GW:EN? We have no idea how the game or title tracks will work, so do keep the whining to a minimum. It's fine to say "I'm afraid of the massive grind it may introduce, and I hope they won't do it as my purchase may hinge on it.", but it's another to go "OMG! You need to grind all the factions for the required PvE optional skills! I'm boycotting! YAAAAARGH!" - it just ain't cool.

June 24th, 07

Charr Kits

Now don't get me wrong, I love GW Online[1] and I love the guys who run it, but some of the members there completely baffle me. I've not seen such horribly supported, badly drawn out flame-fests posing as arguements carried by some members.

Heck, in one such post a member is complaining against the addition of Charr Kits (Pre-Searing Salvage Kit Equivalents) for no other discernable reason from his post except for the fact that it's unfair to those who brought the Expert Salvage Kits there for horribly inflated prices.

A word on background for a minute, these Expert Kits were brought over by an EXPLOIT, and if I didn't know better about how some systems work, I'd have said "delete em' all!". Of course I don't know how Guild War's item databasing works, but I doubt they have a "Is this item being held by a character in Pre-Sear" flag. I also doubt a roll-back would've been well recieved at the time. So I don't see a quick, easy fix for this. However the fact remains, these kits should NOT exist. Period.

So why does this guy seems to think that the only reason why such a thing as a Charr Kit should not be added is so that people who were dumb enough to buy these kits (I hear they went for almost 50-100k, cannot support this though.). Well tough luck buddy, you buy into an exploit, you pay the price. You go into something like this *knowing* that such a thing could happen. The only possible support I see to this is his Henge of Denravi sword arguement (This was a sword avaible ages ago that offered +5 Energy, it was removed, and thus prices spiked, months later, they added substitutes), and even that is flawed in the fact that one is a Salvage Kit, not conferring any real bonus to all but the hardcore, and another is actually a rather good caster weapon.

Trade-Spam

Why in the name of all that is holy are people actually COMPLAINING about this change. It's a simple as someone in one post put it. Trade Spam belongs in the Trade Channel, Local Spam in the Local Channel. That's it, that is the change. Why is that bad? I understand that a lot of idiots are going to start flaming up the local chats, but surprise surprise, they've 'always' been there! You just didn't notice before.

This isn't some Nazi Regime as one poster quoted Anet to be (Godwin's Law ftw?), it's basic rule enforcement. And you know what, I hope the idiots who are spamming some more X-Rated stuff over local chat get banned as well! You agreed to a ToS, you follow the ToS, no matter how totalitarian you think it is.

I can see why people are complaining that this would never need to be done if they added an auction house, and I would 'love' to have an auction house, but the fact is, Anet has blatently state "No, there will not be an auction house" in one of the Gaile Chats (don't ask me which one, I rarely read them, anyone can find it give it to me!). I don't remember ever reading however a chat where an auction house was promised, as so many people seem so fit to point out. I've see improvements wished at, but nothing promised. Honestly, Auction Houses take a fair amount of work to put out, and it seems to be a low priority thing as well. You have to realize, Anet's item system may not even be properly set up for an easily addable Auction house, there could be, due to some lack-of-foresight, some rather rough item code that doesn't merit an auction house without some major revamps. Mind you Guild Wars seems to work a lot more like Diablo II in terms of gameplay in my mind (mission outposts fulfilling the role of a chat-room, minus the all-mysterious Chat Gem), and that game (which could've totally use an Auction House system on Open B.Net!) survived almost a decade now without one. (And mind you they get less patches than we do, with less additions and changes to the game, I still remember the long half-year of waiting for.. what was it.. 1.09.. or 1.10.)

In the meantime, both GWGuru, and GWOnline have auction systems that honestly, do not see the use that they should be seeing. Perhaps it'd be best to advertise them more? Or perhaps Anet could make a similar web-based Auction System, rather than an in-game one.

For the record, I want to be able to link my items in chat/party search, A-Net! It'd make the world a much easier place, I'm sure you can attach data to it, ala the templete system -> Chat.

Alliance Battles Change

I could see where this was coming, a way to discourge leechers, and encourage real players, while "increasing" gained faction. Unfortunatly, ANet forgot one thing. Leechers don't care about how much they gain, only that they do gain. So this update has resulted in the same amount of leechers, but due to a decrease in faction gained from losing, a increase in "leavers" as well.

I can see how one would think this was a good idea, especially someone that's idealistic about the way people act, but as a game designer, a sad, but unfortunate truth, is the fact that players generally aren't good-hearted and well-behaved. They're raunchy, exploitative, cheating individuals, and you have to cater to the lower-denominator. If you leave a small exploit, no matter how hard to find, do, or unlikely, someone will find it, and abuse it. It's garunteed.

So what *should've* been done? Most people would say "add an AFK timer!", but this approach is ALSO wrong. Why? Bots. You add an AFK timer and suddenly leechers have bots that cause them to run headfirst into battle and die, scoring points for the ENEMY. The problem has suddenly become.. much.. much worse. And what's the difference between a suicidal bot and a really horrible player? Not much.

So what could be done? First off, the faction gain for losing should be increased (and for winning!), so that players are not penalized for losing as harshly, thus leavers will be less tempted ("I may lose, but at least I can get xxx faction, instead of 0."). The faction for losing must be worth the time invested in the act of losing, and alliance battles are somewhat lengthy compared to say.. a Random Arena match. That is the first thing that should be done.

A second thing is would be to award active, and successful playing styles and strategies. It's fine that during a death EVERYONE receives 1 faction bonus. However, perhaps the living players who've dealt damage, or healed damage, in 2x aggro radius of the death should recieve 2. Perhaps the guy who dealt the killing blow should get 3 instead? This increases faction gain, and encourages more active playing. You'll get much more faction playing, dealing damage, and NOT suiciding, than you will leeching. Encouragement by reward.

It's unfortunate the only direct way to stop leeching is to post GMs to patrol the battles, and this can be costly money wise, GMs don't come cheap you know, and their time is valuable. Any other fixes can easily be solved by adding a simple bot or macro.

Another issue though is leavers and ragequitters, one idea would be if someone in your team was to leave, an Elite *Faction* *Class* NPC would spawn at the base and can be asked to follow another player, like the exist Elite Kurzicks Warrior NPCs or what have you. This can help even lost odds. Another idea, though *much* harder than one thinks, would be replace the lost player with henchmen AI set to be 'owned' by that team. A third idea is to simply penalize the leaving player faction, however this can penalize legitimate reasons to leave as well, and no one wants to hurt the innocent to stab at the guilty unless they must.