Guild Wars 2

[Stormwaltz]

On documentation, GW has (two) giant well-detailed wikis:

If I have to alt-tab out of a game and search a wiki to find out how to play, the designers have failed. STO failed pretty badly. GW, so far, is only failing slightly less.

Sorry. Pet peeve. If you don't give me a really good manual, you damn well better explain things in the game.

[pxib]

Sorry. Pet peeve. If you don't give me a really good manual, you damn well better explain things in the game.

A thousand times this, even if I think Guild Wars is a less-than-ideal example. MMOs have yet to implement a great tutorial, but GW has one of the best I've seen.

To get a good map of how your skills work and what their vocabulary means, as well as an idea of the specifics of each condition, go to the tutorial area off of the PvP hub island. It's west of the area with the trophies where you first appear after teleporting there from any of the PvE contients. It was included with Factions -- though it's now part of the core world -- and its range rings, demonstration conditions, and target dummies (moving and stationary) are fantastic at explaining the game's basics. Explore them at your leisure.

The wikis are worthwhile not because the game is unplayable without them, but because the game is complicatred and the interactions between skills are deep. And because there's no in-game source for "where do I find skill X via PvE".

[Lantyssa]

If I have to alt-tab out of a game and search a wiki to find out how to play, the designers have failed. STO failed pretty badly. GW, so far, is only failing slightly less.

Sorry. Pet peeve. If you don't give me a really good manual, you damn well better explain things in the game.

I generally agree, and I played GW for years before really looking at the wiki.

However, the GW wiki is integrated into the game (F10) and is an unbeatable in-depth manual which is constantly updated.  You don't need it for anything but the most obscure things or if you just absolutely need to know where to get a suit of armor or obtain a specific skill.  It's the exception to my "I don't like wikis" rule.

[Ingmar]

On documentation, GW has (two) giant well-detailed wikis:

If I have to alt-tab out of a game and search a wiki to find out how to play, the designers have failed. STO failed pretty badly. GW, so far, is only failing slightly less.

Sorry. Pet peeve. If you don't give me a really good manual, you damn well better explain things in the game.

And yet you play Paradox games. 

[Stormwaltz]

However, the GW wiki is integrated into the game (F10)

They never told me that in the game. I had no idea you can access the wiki in-game until reading your post.

[Stormwaltz]

And yet you play Paradox games.  

I gaze pointedly at the 145 page manual for EU3.  

EDIT: Okay, my point was poorly articulated. I consider a manual a barely-acceptable substitute. If your game is complex, you should either explain the features in-game (preferred), or include a decent manual I can reference while I have the game up on my screen, or read when I'm not playing.

[Engels]

You mofos are spoiled. I remember having to print out so much stuff from Allakazam's back in the day I had a friggin' trapper keeper to play EQ with.

[Stormwaltz]

You mofos are spoiled. I remember having to print out so much stuff from Allakazam's back in the day I had a friggin' trapper keeper to play EQ with.

I don't have a problem with obscure content. I have a problem with obscure core mechanics.

As a crude analogy, imagine if Doom never told the player how to switch weapons.

[Strazos]

What is the game not explaining? I don't honestly remember being confused about the mechanics of the game at all - just looked up locations for drops/spells.

[Stormwaltz]

Things that I recall finding through trial and error:

How to adjust chat channel settings.
How to salvage items (components and materials).
How and why to identify items.
How to craft (I bet people wondered why I was still wearing newbie armor at level 10).
How to follow the main plot (jump to he glowing shields and enter mission).

For that matter, I don't recall if they say explorable areas are all private/party instances, or that you can use the map to teleport from one hub to another.

[Fordel]

I had no issues with any of those things.



I had issues with figuring out the exact effect of armor outside of the basic "more is better". I swear to christ I don't understand why games make armor and damage reduction so god damn retarded. It's like designers have contests on who can make the most obtuse armor system imaginable.

[Sheepherder]

Which one is the obvious choice then?

1. Decreases damage taken by [armour value].
2. Decreases damage taken by [armour value] %.
3. Bonuses versus attack rolls made against you (d20 system).

With this feature to allow for mudflation:

1. Nothing.
2. Downgrading based on gear level vs. player level.
3. An arbitrary rating system analogous to #2.

And this to prevent players from becoming immune to physical damage:

1. Nothing
2. Diminishing returns.
3. Hard caps.
4. #2 and #3.

 

There's a reason that pen and paper games are so ridiculously easy to game, and a well designed computer game takes spreadsheets and simulators.

[Fordel]

Which one is the opposite of http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Armor_rating 



Obvious armor/reduction to me is what they do in 4e and SC2.

[Sheepherder]

SC2 isn't so obvious, since what it does is entirely dependent upon the attacking unit, it utterly horsefucks any character using fast / low damage weapons unless the amount of damage a player can do is utterly disproportional to the amount that armour can soak, and because the damage reduction isn't percentile based it would utterly destroy any hopes of a lowbie touching a higher level player unless you did some level-scaling-fu.

4e armour has increasing returns up until the only damaging attack result is a natural 20.  It would also need level scaling unless you like the D&D paradigm of high level characters wrecking low level ones.

[Fordel]

Why do we give a shit about lowbies touching high level players, at least in terms of our armor system.

Ensuring low levels don't get farmed by high levels is a world design issue, not something addressed through armor. Doubly so in a game like GuildWars, where the level cap is 20 and you reach it in an weekend, assuming you just didn't just make a auto-20 to pvp with.

[Sheepherder]

Why do we give a shit about lowbies touching high level players, at least in terms of our armor system.

You don't.  It's a fringe benefit of using a percentile based system, which goes along nicely with real numbers, which lets you use diminishing returns.  The reason you use the latter is for the same reason that Blizzard added diminishing returns to avoidance in WoW: at some point, nothing can hit you, approaching that point your survivability is exponentially greater than someone without those levels of avoidance.

Starcraft isn't even really in the scope of this argument.  It's purposefully built unbalanced so that the rapid fire tier 1 units get phased out due to massively diminishing DPS versus armored targets.  That's not the kind of system you want in an MMO unless you intend your rogue archetypes to be at a significant to insurmountable disadvantage in melee combat versus armoured targets.  It would be a great mechanic for wargames, tabletop games, or roleplaying games attempting to approximate reality.

[Margalis]

1. Decreases damage taken by [armour value].
2. Decreases damage taken by [armour value] %.

This is like the hardest question in game design.

Both are terrible in their own way. Percentage reduction doesn't accomplish what you want or feel right, flat reduction is nearly impossible to make actually work.

Ideally I want a system where a high rate of fire, low damage weapon wrecks targets with no armor but fail against hardened targets, which are then owned by low rate of fire, high damage weapons. Percentage based reduction does not accomplish this as DPS becomes the universal single stat that matters, and flat reduction is a numbers nightmare.

[Lantyssa]

If only computers were capable of doing complex mathematics quickly.  Then we could have a system which doesn't use a linear curve and maybe even adjusts on the fly!

Imagine an armor curve that provides rapidly diminishing returns as it nears a set amount of reduction, or has armor resistant to different types of damage, or has dozens of skills that shift these armor values up and down!  That would be a marvel to behold.

[Ingmar]

If only computers were capable of doing complex mathematics quickly.  Then we could have a system which doesn't use a linear curve and maybe even adjusts on the fly!

Imagine an armor curve that provides rapidly diminishing returns as it nears a set amount of reduction, or has armor resistant to different types of damage, or has dozens of skills that shift these armor values up and down!  That would be a marvel to behold.

I see what you're doing here, but the GW armor system really does suck, because it is so mathy that it is really hard to get a handle on just how good a +armor skill or armor mod is. It is very hard to know "should I put on this +20 against elemental damage rune on my armor instead of a +energy one" when you don't know how much it will even help you. Seeing an actual percentage value is much, much more understandable for people.

Remember how DAOC weapon styles used to say things like "high damage" or "very high damage" and you had to guess at what it meant? The math involved in GW's armor puts the decisions into "guess" territory for most people, and that really kind of sucks.

[Sky]

I agree with that. Drove me nuts when I found out Rift's debuffs were basically useless because most mobs had no resistance to debuff. They don't ever tell you that. And the thing Draegan and I were on about with the soul screen, should have a summary telling you how everything you're choosing interacts with your stats.

Bah.

[Lantyssa]

I see what you're doing here, but the GW armor system really does suck, because it is so mathy that it is really hard to get a handle on just how good a +armor skill or armor mod is. It is very hard to know "should I put on this +20 against elemental damage rune on my armor instead of a +energy one" when you don't know how much it will even help you. Seeing an actual percentage value is much, much more understandable for people.

The main flaw with GW's armor system is that it doesn't show the numbers.  I'll agree with that.

But people are talking as if no one has invented a decent system when the game is about to turn six and it's got enough complexity to make the WoW number crunchers wet themselves in numerical joy.

[Kail]

But people are talking as if no one has invented a decent system when the game is about to turn six and it's got enough complexity to make the WoW number crunchers wet themselves in numerical joy.

I had issues with figuring out the exact effect of armor outside of the basic "more is better". I swear to christ I don't understand why games make armor and damage reduction so god damn retarded. It's like designers have contests on who can make the most obtuse armor system imaginable.

The original complaint was that the armor calculations are too complex, I believe, followed by "that's because simple armor systems are all exploitable".  Having a super complex algorithm with a million different skills does me no good if I can't figure out which of those skills to use when , or which armor piece is better for what I'm trying to do than the others.  There are a number of different armor systems that work fairly well, but it seems like most of them require spreadsheets in order to understand what the actual effects of any given skill are.

[Fordel]

Well since the original complaint (from me) is that the GW armor system is as transparent as a brick wall, then yes, no one has developed a decent armor system.  

[Stormwaltz]

Some John Woo shit for a Thursday morning: a dual pistol Thief shown off at GDC.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gdc-11-guild-wars-2/711234

[Hawkbit]

Wow that looks a lot more open world than GW1.  Which is a very good thing, imo. 

[Fordel]

Why are the people playing the Demos always so terrible at them?

[Nevermore]

All Hero parties went live today! 

Also, that Mercenary Hero thing is some kind of snapshot of one of your PCs that your other characters can then use as a hero.  Sadly, it's a microtrans which kind of makes me scratch my head and wonder what the point of it is.

[Ingmar]

Time to hyperfocus on GW for a couple days, that should make it easier to finally finish off EOTN.

[Nevermore]

Ironically it could make finishing off Factions harder if you take all Heroes, since they don't get celestial skills while henchmen do.

[DLRiley]

Wow that looks a lot more open world than GW1.  Which is a very good thing, imo. 

Fuck the open world, iust realized how boss weapon switching in this game will be, why the hell doesn't areanet tell me how many weapons i can have alted. if its 5 like in guild wars i would jizz.

[Sheepherder]

The original complaint was that the armor calculations are too complex, I believe, followed by "that's because simple armor systems are all exploitable".  Having a super complex algorithm with a million different skills does me no good if I can't figure out which of those skills to use when , or which armor piece is better for what I'm trying to do than the others.  There are a number of different armor systems that work fairly well, but it seems like most of them require spreadsheets in order to understand what the actual effects of any given skill are.

The people who want to understand will go out of their way to understand, the ones who won't wouldn't understand the full implications of 4e D&D rules or Starcraft rules or any of the other easy systems anyways.

[Outlawedprod]

~8 minute mark
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gdc-11-guild-wars-2/711236

Someone needs to turn on scaling for that Ice Worm =p

[PalmTrees]

Yeah, the demo'er had enough time to turn the camera toward the worm and hit once or twice before it died. Very anti-climatic. The presenter tried to spin it as enjoyable unpredictability, heh. Same with the hunt beforehand. Reminded me of how my bard felt like a fifth wheel first time I tried DDO. Hopefully at least those were other players and not npcs doing all the heavy lifting.

[Furiously]

I'm hoping there was a gear/level disparity.  The conversation part looked awkward but I'm excited for the rest. I am also poising for four pets to trade people.

[pxib]

Also the very last bit seems like a misunderstanding of why people like to explore. Ignoring a signpost is not "exploring", it's "wasting time".