I asked ArenaNet if they wanted to talk on this new leap of faith and gameplay within this post, and they came through big time. Eric Flannum, sixth god of Sacrifice and Lead Designer for Guild wars 2, comments below:
This blog post comes at an interesting time.
You see, we’ve been running some brand new players through Guild Wars 2 in some very targeted focus tests lately to see how they’ll react to the world we’ve created. Some of these players have been strongly conditioned by years of MMO playing to look specifically for quest bangs over the heads of NPCs and ignore everything else. We have found that at first, they tend to ignore the events going on in the world. They might run right past a fisherman imploring passersby to kill a marauding Drake Broodmother and they might even run by a wheat field being burned to ground by bandits.
Eventually it will start dawning on them that something different is going on in this game. One of our testers, upon seeing a huddle of sick villagers standing around a poisoned well, made the comment, “I feel like someone is trying to tell me something.” She ran down into the valley and noticed that the irrigation towers that water the fields were pumping out a green noxious liquid and that the fields were being overrun with grubs living off of the poisoned water. When she reached a giant water reservoir brimming over with noxious poison, she said, “Ah, this is where my peeps are being poisoned.” She immediately looked around the area for some solution to the crisis, found a waterworks worker who knew how to remedy the solution, and helped him do it. Once the reservoir had been cleansed, the villagers got better, the irrigators stopped spewing poison, and the grubs started to die. She received a nice reward of XP, gold, and karma for helping out.
All of this occurred without her accepting a single quest, and our tester got a nice heroic story about how her character helped save an entire village. Of course, she arrived somewhere in the middle of the event chain—she didn’t even find out what caused the poisoning in the first place. This particular tester was satisfied that she had helped the poisoned villagers, and didn’t go looking deeper for what had caused the poison in the first place. However, if she had wanted to look deeper, she could talk to some of the inhabitants of the area and learn that they’ve been having problems with bandits who inhabit a nearby cave system. She might even have learned that these bandits poisoned the water reservoir. Now it would be up to her to decide whether or not she wanted to go into the bandit caves and try to stop them further or even stick around and defend the reservoir in case the bandits tried anything else.
She could also choose to ignore the problem entirely and look for other things going on in the world. Setting up these kinds of choices and opportunities for adventure are what the event system is all about, and it has proven to be highly satisfying to players with a strong “explorer” play style. These players get to go out into the world, draw conclusions by looking at the evidence around them, and then discover things to do. The event system is so much more than simply running around until you stumble across something to do (although that is also possible and sometimes very fun).
On May 22 2010 10:47 Kraz.Del wrote: This game doesn't look anything compared to WoW. Years of gameplay additions and a great community are what make WoW great.
lol? If anything years of gameplay additions and really bad communities are what made WoW worst and worst, espcially after wrath..
On May 22 2010 10:47 Kraz.Del wrote: This game doesn't look anything compared to WoW. Years of gameplay additions and a great community are what make WoW great.
the opposite is true, lmao it used to a good game (not a great one ever really) and turned to shit slowly as more and more nerfs and expansions keep being added
Prophecies and Factions made for what was imo the best competitive online team experience I've ever had, there was a decent community, reasonable support from Anet and pretty OK balance.
Nightfall and EotN brutally murdered the game and the only reason anyone still plays it is because they have to turn up to a monthly AT to get a cape trim.
The PVE was always piss poor, but who cares. GVG was amazing in its prime. I miss it.
With the way that GW1 is being maintained and updated right now the PvE side makes me somewhat want to buy GW2 but for me the real game is in the PvP and with the massive "negligence" for the updates recently in GW1 not to mention the handling, or lack there of, the botting issue in GW1 right now I probably will not be buying GW2. I spent alot of money on all three sections of GW1 and the expansion and bought a few character slots and a couple PvP only accounts. Pretty much spent most of my free time playing it and as the updates churned out and the bots came it i /uninstalled. I loved the game and i still watch every update hoping it will bring some of the pre nightfall/EotN PvP back but each update it gets a little worse.
I am however excited for GW2 and watch the updates as intently still probably wont buy it but nothing is impossible
On May 22 2010 16:25 RecYouGood wrote: With the way that GW1 is being maintained and updated right now the PvE side makes me somewhat want to buy GW2 but for me the real game is in the PvP and with the massive "negligence" for the updates recently in GW1 not to mention the handling, or lack there of, the botting issue in GW1 right now I probably will not be buying GW2. I spent alot of money on all three sections of GW1 and the expansion and bought a few character slots and a couple PvP only accounts. Pretty much spent most of my free time playing it and as the updates churned out and the bots came it i /uninstalled. I loved the game and i still watch every update hoping it will bring some of the pre nightfall/EotN PvP back but each update it gets a little worse.
I am however excited for GW2 and watch the updates as intently still probably wont buy it but nothing is impossible
Can you please go deeper into that, in the thread or in pm? I've never gotten around to pvp in GW, i was expanding my knowledge (and elite skill and green weapon lists lolol amirite) in PvE first. I'd like to know what pvp was like before, and what its like now? what ruined it, exactly?
On May 22 2010 15:28 yesitsrob wrote: Prophecies and Factions made for what was imo the best competitive online team experience I've ever had, there was a decent community, reasonable support from Anet and pretty OK balance.
Nightfall and EotN brutally murdered the game and the only reason anyone still plays it is because they have to turn up to a monthly AT to get a cape trim.
The PVE was always piss poor, but who cares. GVG was amazing in its prime. I miss it.
Don't hate on nightfall, after they settled the lolparagon and lolgrenth issues it was basically as if they brought macro into GW. It turned into a team game and not just a quarterknock sheneanigans, as a mesmer I'd have to keep 2 to 3 timers rolling in my mind for stuff i'd have to interrupt, lod infusers were a piece of game design art.
LoD was nice, but last I checked they completely obliterated that (and the only reason LoD was so nice is because you pretty much NEEDED to have it since HP was also slaughtered and the pressure teams could put out at the time was sick), quite some time ago, even after lolgrenth was changed the game still suffered horrible imbalances, it became block wars for god knows how long, as a mesmer it must have been hell, I agree, because it's not really possible to interrupt aegis chains with gole abbuse, defensive anthems galore oh and can't forget b surge.
I'd take Gale warriors and quarterknock shenanigans any day over any of the metas or crap that nightfall introduced, eurospike, shadow prison sins, triple dervs, rao thumpers - a lot was fixed, to be replaced by other scrub trash.
Last i checked of the recent mATs it's just a bunch of terribads getting gold off lolele split or some 4 monk garbage.
edit: cannot remember who made this image, whatever the case it's amazing and reminds me of how bad GW became.
LoD was nice, but last I checked they completely obliterated that (and the only reason LoD was so nice is because you pretty much NEEDED to have it since HP was also slaughtered and the pressure teams could put out at the time was sick), quite some time ago, even after lolgrenth was changed the game still suffered horrible imbalances, it became block wars for god knows how long, as a mesmer it must have been hell, I agree, because it's not really possible to interrupt aegis chains with gole abbuse, defensive anthems galore oh and can't forget b surge.
I'd take Gale warriors and quarterknock shenanigans any day over any of the metas or crap that nightfall introduced, eurospike, shadow prison sins, triple dervs, rao thumpers - a lot was fixed, to be replaced by other scrub trash.
Last i checked of the recent mATs it's just a bunch of terribads getting gold off lolele split or some 4 monk garbage.
edit: cannot remember who made this image, whatever the case it's amazing and reminds me of how bad GW became.
EotN is what officially fucked everything up, because it brought back single player kills but it wasn't just warriors and sins who could kill stuff but eles joined the crew aswell. And blind is on 6 or 8 secs CD with massive damage and a cover condition.
As for mesmers there were 6 or 7 ppl in total who could cope with the timers, the names i have in mind are Spank, Anita and the other guy from vD, Yen and myself, although I mostly smurfed and had my most successful runs with the finns as a replacement.
Block wars came in 2 waves, at first it was because of SoD monks paired with LoDs (although i preferred them a LOT compared to SoR monks) and then (late eotn up until now i think) stance monks, a couple months ago i logged to check a few reps and it was full of paragon teams.
Eurospike, sinsplit (which i honestly liked, they would radically change how a few matchups were played and i actually got to play Boxer...), raos and dervs were little more than the consequence of poorly balanced skills as soon as Nightfall came out, everything got fixed later and stayed fine for about 6-8 months up until eotn.
If we carefully analyze the key points of each of these builds it's easy to just find a way to make them fit into a balanced metagame, but the GW community was extremely pressing on the developers, I remember the game regularly being patched once to five times a month often unexpectedly, to change the metagame Anet would completely annihilate a key skill and enforce the change to something else. One night we were about to GvG, logged in after a surprise patch and pleak would burn 1...4 energy instead of 13...18 lol
What ruined it was the realization that: 1) if you turtled well enough untill VoD and kept enough of your NPC's the buffed damage during VoD meant you could 321spike everything down. 2) once this was realized and VoD was removed they brought in an idea that I initially thought would work. The aggressiveness towards the guildlord. It quite ultimately sucked ducks and for awhile made the game even worse when you had teams running 8 monks bonding up their lord and sending 2-3 players to constantly do damage on your lord just to win at 25. 3) Nightfalls beastly power creep with such overpowered easily spammable skills. Dont get me wrong i hated the turtling and enjoyed the ability to have some sense of a split in a regular build the guilds i were a part of often enjoyed spliting as most american guilds with "american honor" did. it was really the only way of over coming the rock paper scissors of which server you would be on during a match if facing Euro's. A split build carried us into the single elims in one AT. 4) AT's i thought these would be great having missed out on PvP for the GWC and the GWFC and not being able to form a consistent team for the others i enjoyed the thought of competing every month for a chance at getting some trim. The match making and the point system were greatly flawed and often times the lag and drop rate made a few AT's impossible. There are a few guilds out there that have won their trim on drop or ridiculous lag that eliminated the rest of the competition. 5) Bots....
Point 1) was requested by (it really was, i cried a little inside too) the pve retards at GWguru, because they "wanted NPCs to have larger importance on the game".
In a PvP context they wanted NPCs to decide the game.
nuff said.
Point 2 is a direct consequence of that, a company can't simply 100% revert a change and admit they messed up, even if they don't really get monthly subscriptions and have nothing to lose directly.
Point 3 is something that people often don't consider, and i like that you brought it up. One skill sums up everything IMO, and it is divine boon.
Before Nightfall which nerfed it on release and after the Blessed Light nerf which would leave monks some room for decision on their playstyle boon was a must-have. And frankly I considered it lame. One random heal, life pops back up (another key point, RoF was BUGGED up until mid to late nightfall, in that it negated ALL dmg from the next hit and then healed instead of negating as much damage as it said on the tooltip. But that was fine with me, monks with good timings could sneak a RoF in the middle of a poorly coordinated spike to negate the hardest hitting skill).
With Nightfall Anet obviously wanted to mix things up and gave monks LoD which was on the healing prayers instead of divine favor attribute, to finally split monks into healers and prots.
Eurospike was lame, I admit it. But you wouldn't realize it when everyone was playing it unless you played warrior. And it is a shame that lots of honorable warriors had to switch to playing lame melandru dervs (not so lame when wearying strike would hit aoe for 100 dmg and up, especially at the time when ppl found out about E/Rt flaggers before the Rt healing nerf, scythe+splinter weapon=fu).
If you think about it, the 2 frontliners would complain about not being able to do shit, the ranger would mostly do his thing and often solo split out of frustration when the water ele would camp him, and the rest of the team would be fine with the metagame, so it was 5/6 ppl vs 2 in favour of leaving "american honor" back at home.
4) I had the feeling ATs would be the death of GW since they first unveiled them, I mean, a tournament in such a variable game with no support from the developers?
5) Bots were luckily only a scourge to the american and international server, at least the chatspammers would regularly get banned on the euro servers, and since it was an instanced world i wouldn't give a crap about farmbots. P.S. with eotn players became farmbots themselves, but that was pve and i wouldn't give a crap about it...
As you may have understood i could go on forever aswell LOL
I still don't believe at all that they "fixed" things so fast with Nightfall, I gave things a lot of times and patches but the game had just gotten really bad. As a front liner, having situations where playing a Mels Derv would have been better freaking pained me, as it was SO freaking dull to play.
Maybe there was a period during NF when it improved, but to me it most certainly wasn't before eotn as I was still playing then, and it was shit. I logged on about 1 month ago and was welcomed with the ele split shit I was referring to winning the mATs, twice in a row now, completely shameful.
The peak of it for me was when guilds like EvIL were active, playing during what was the quaterknock galefests but it's not something they abbused themselves and were able to win proper. FotM was beaten by quality play, Now FotM wins gold trims. Which has a lot to do with the really quality guilds quitting. it was a sign it was going down hill when rawr won something (and a lot more later)
vD were fucking boring when they were running that eurosplit bollocks. Eurosplit was godawful for the game too.
It's a matter of personal preference. Beating Eurospike (which all over europe is known as "balanced") took a concerted effort from the whole team, and by team I mean frontline/ranger/mesmer to safely disable/put something on recharge, while until nightfall every game was decided solely by the frontliners.
Whenever we played vD we'd know that we would have to work hard and stay focused all the 28 minutes, mental pressure is a key factor that only rangers, mesmers and monks would feel and play with, faking low/high energy was key to prevent the opposing team from pushing when you were actually choking and could have got wiped, and after LoD infusers got nerfed forcing warriors into overextending was stupidly hard as well as pointless.
EotN simply fucked up monks. WoH heals for 80% as much as infuse while costing half as much and taking as much to cast, since most monks nowadays use weapon switch macros (which is fucking retarded, this is not wow, if the macro function isn't implemented and you have to use external binds you are cheating in my eyes) they will have the 40/40 HSR HCT. And there is no risk whatsoever with WoH.
The only time where eotn felt fun for me was the triple frontline meta, it really stirred things up for a while, but to complement that maps were radically changed (both the rotation and a few map features, see the moving of the npcs on isle of the dead after the sinfire stint) and it was impossible to play classic casters. [Glad] also tried to make the game fun but it was just fun to watch, [FFS] american honor players tried to do something like that themselves but neither of them got above poop trim iirc.
Just like during the 2nd iteration of sinsplit new talents popped up, I have personally met a few illusion mesmers who sucked ass as dom. I myself played BA ranger in the top 20s and was incapable of not looking retarded whenever I'd be forced to play cripshot.
I wouldn't even get into discussing more recent metagame balance, last time I checked warriors had permafrenzy with a movement speed increase or had a tanking elite which made them unspikable, WoWarding has been retardedly imbalanced (66% block my ass, it's been confirmed to have been lowered to 66% just a couple months ago, before that it was 80-90% unremovable block chance) and eles have always been the retarded cookie cutter class.
On May 23 2010 08:44 yesitsrob wrote: I still don't believe at all that they "fixed" things so fast with Nightfall, I gave things a lot of times and patches but the game had just gotten really bad. As a front liner, having situations where playing a Mels Derv would have been better freaking pained me, as it was SO freaking dull to play.
Maybe there was a period during NF when it improved, but to me it most certainly wasn't before eotn as I was still playing then, and it was shit. I logged on about 1 month ago and was welcomed with the ele split shit I was referring to winning the mATs, twice in a row now, completely shameful.
The peak of it for me was when guilds like EvIL were active, playing during what was the quaterknock galefests but it's not something they abbused themselves and were able to win proper. FotM was beaten by quality play, Now FotM wins gold trims. Which has a lot to do with the really quality guilds quitting. it was a sign it was going down hill when rawr won something (and a lot more later)
vD were fucking boring when they were running that eurosplit bollocks. Eurosplit was godawful for the game too.
I'm in full agreement with this post. Nightfall killed the competitive side of the game. To this day they have not cleaned up the mess that expansion made in PvP. They had it nearly perfect in late Prophecies and late Factions. God that game was so awesome.
PvP was amazing in GW, spent 3700 on that game. Soul Wedding is my hero. Nightfall/EoTN pissed all over PvP though, GvG because this silly 4 Monk thing where the objective is just to hold out until VoD.
When I started playing WoW, even that felt more fun than GW, and it was hardly a grind, as everything was so beautifully designed, and having some friends to carry me to 80, twinking all the way, arena once in a while, amazing. Then I discovered raids, maxed out my gear, arena all the effing way, new raids came out, I realized I Blizzard was literally farming money off me, and stopped.
But yeah...I will play GW2 just because the GW really did have some revolutionary aspects about it, and hopefully they will carry it on.
To an extenet even Factions broke the game. It isnt a secret that shadow stepping while one of the coolest features became of one of the most broken features. They introduced the after cast into the shadow stepping but then that shadow step would just see less play.
Then there is the colossal fail that is Smiters Boon.
The recent updates did nothing but buff the bots out there. They reduced recharge times on mesmer interrupts and cost of the skills aswell.
vD's playstyle and was Hexes Hexes and more Hexes. Thats probably where the games is going to head back to now Hexes and edenial. Edenial was fun when everyone ran low energy sets. it introduced alot of micro into the game. But with the significant lack of hex removal that already existed and the presence of bots that can interrupt you untill the cows come home good luck with that.
the Mindblast eles were the best split when they came out for months. then came the Shatterstone eles. my guild ran into alot off success with 2 warrior 2 ele ranger/mesmer flagger and 2 monks. and that was before vR started running that i dont care what they say we introduced that build to them.
Enchant strips were what u needed to run during that time. a well placed rend or a pain of disenchant would = a kill, with out one u wasted ur time. A few guilds even got mad when we ran 2 rends in the spike build we had.
The one part of the update that i do like is the increase recharge on BSurge and BFlash. forced teams to have a dedicated player with a draw or foul feast. and then chances are ur were blurred visions anyways so it wouldnt matter.i played ranger for quite awhile be for getting fed up and running midline/flagger
the game was fun i got my silver trim and realized that at the time rawr had a lock on the gold trims so i decided that was good enough and i got out b4 the bots took over. probably the best choice i made
Some of these questions are defined by earlier choices - a character's race, class, or heritage. An asura will be asked what college they attended (Synergetics, Dynamics or Statics), while a human will be asked to define their social background (Gentry, Commoner, or Streets). Other questions might establish that your character has sympathy for a particular lesser race. A charr would have little opportunity to meet the peace-loving quaggan, as quaggan are sea-creatures and Ascalon has no coastal territory. So, while the game may have stories that focus on the quaggan, skritt, ogres, hylek, and grawl, a charr character chooses between grawl, skritt and ogres. A sylvari character, coming from the coastal Maguuma jungle, instead chooses between hylek, skritt and quaggan. In this way, we've made certain choices distinct to each race.
EPT![[image loading]](http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/3632/blindwarsyk9.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.guildwars2.com/global/includes/images/screenshots/personal-stories/gw2-personal-004.jpg)
