The Dev's are tossers!

[lamaros]

Via Gamespy

When asked about the feeling of exclusion expressed by casual players in regards to much of the content in Guild Wars: Factions, co-founder Mike O'Brien was quick to assure us that "(ArenaNet) didn't do it with an intent to alienate casual players." In his mind, the disconnect occurred when players had specific pieces of content blocked to them. "In Factions, (the process of acquiring unique armors) wasn't fundamentally different from Prophecies. The perception that the way you got those armors was through certain content that you couldn't play unless you were in an elite guild is what created a lot of problems for casual players."

It seems ArenaNet has taken that feedback to heart. "We've learned some lessons from that, and going forward, we want to be designing things so that they're much more friendly for the casual players. We don't want to make certain areas of the world off-limits," said O'Brien.

You learn lessons by completely ignoring the vocal compaints raised in beta on the very issue and implement it anyway, then hear the same complaints again? So you have to deliberatly ignore people and fuck things up before you ever learn? That's some slow learning process.

Pisses me off.

[Dren]

Hell, I'm so casual I didn't even make it far enough to even know what this is about.  I assume if I play long enough I'll hit a cockblock and basically get bored and quit.  That is really the standard expectation I have of any MMOG or in this case, near-MMOG anymore.

I have to hand it to WoW.  I seem to be able to continue my fun by starting new alts, etc.  I just started up again from a 1.5 month hiatus.

I still like GW, but mainly because I can pick it up and drop it whenever I choose.  I suspect I'll play it again to experience this latest block to my fun soon.

[Modern Angel]

The biggest block in GW is the fucking playerbase. NOTHING that I've ever played has a more brutal combination of sheer ineptness and subliterate ranting. I've been sitting at a mission with my Assassin for three months now, unable to do it with AI henchmen because of difficulty and unable to get a group that won't die literally two pulls in.

[lamaros]

I'm tempted to install again, I havn't played in a while. But I'd just be doing to for the PvE.

[Modern Angel]

I think I might be their ideal customer. I buy the expansion and play the fuck out of it with my Arcane Echo/Spiteful Spirit Necro/Mesmer (insanely broken PvE class), do a little PvP while I beat it, get frustrated with the people as I have to actually group with my second class, put it away until the next one. Money AND lower server usage!

[tazelbain]

You learn lessons by completely ignoring the vocal compaints raised in beta on the very issue and implement it anyway, then hear the same complaints again? So you have to deliberatly ignore people and fuck things up before you ever learn? That's some slow learning process.

Pisses me off.

I don't think its one of the issues that has been around since beta.  This is a new one created by the elite missions.  The elite guilds they are talking about are the elite faction farmers not the elite guild pvp'ers. Not to worry most of those are still around. Less smurf guilds though, that's pretty good.

Since factions came out, I beat the game with my monk and have been playing Fort Aspenwood over and over.  I'd like to play with other classes, but I loathe going through the pve to get to them and pvp character can't get to them. Quitters and Leechers are the bane of my existence.

I have rant else where about what they could do to make things better.  But A.net is so obsessed the Championship and farming, I have no hope of substantial change.

[Llava]

I don't get it.  It's not like the fancier armors are any better than the basic high tier you can buy in town.  Just prettier.  Who cares?

Unless that's changed, and I don't know it.

[pxib]

I'd like to see this turn into a generalized "What went wrong?" thread. The Nightfall weekend brought me back from a self-imposed break I'd been taking since I was so spectacularly disappointed with Factions. I wasn't too impressed with Dervishes and Paragons (though I continue to be impressed with how capable the devs are at finding new ways to expand the game's simple framework), but I've been casually working my way further into the Factions campaign for the past few weeks and finally got to the two Competative missions.

Yikes.

The part of the game I enjoyed most was the random arena. Throwing together crazy builds and seeing what happens is a lot of fun. The introduction of the Assassin and Ritualist was a big downer to me because both of them have skills which create fewer interactions with other class skills. They seemed to have been designed specifically to prevent the sort of synergy that made build-making fun. Plus ritualists slow down battles in a way that even monks and tanks couldn't manage. It got tedious to play so I tried some GvG and HoH only to discover they were one-sided monsters: Rock/Paper/Scissors where some teams are incapable of forming a fist and are stuck losing to an endless string of scissors.

So I started to play through the Factions campaign, hoping I'd unlock enough assassin or ritualist skills to find some interesting build designs, and gave up once I remembered the self-righteous idiocy that had driven me away from Guildwars PvE in the first place.

The Jade Quarry and Fort Ashenwood are the worst of both worlds.


I was very impressed with Factions gameplay introduction. Like a good single player game it goes out of its way to explain the basic mechanics of play and to give some solid hints as to how a player might improve. Obviously it has disappeared into the vacuum between deaf ears. There isn't a strong enough community to turn that education into knowledge. Missions require large enough groups that even if you have a few capable friends you may not be able to find enough folks to work through a particularly demanding task. Most of your time, in PvP and PvE, will be spent dealing with idiots you do not know.

So all the advantages of the game, its fast paced combat, gameplay variety, and near flawless network performance are hampered by... a giant, amorphus world of players you will never meet and who could care less whether you ever learn to play because they'll probably never see you again.

At least, that's what's frustrating me. Your mileage may vary.

[tazelbain]

Dervish and Paragons seems like they will intergrate better.

>The Jade Quarry and Fort Ashenwood are the worst of both worlds.

lol,  IMHO, guild wars would unplayable without them.  RA, JQ, FA, AB are the only places a casual player can jump in, pvp and win.  RA and AB are too simplestic.  JQ is hardly ever active.  Turn off chat, you don't need it.  But I know exactly you mean. I see these assholes who jump in having no clue what they are doing.  They start ordering people to fight a certain way and screaming at everyone when we don't.  It'd be funny but they drag the whole team down.

[Modern Angel]

Man.... alright, a short list.

1) The amorphous world, like you said. No matter what, everything in the game is disposable. Everything. Guilds? Who the fuck has EVER remembered a guild tag on someone else; I was formerly in a top 50 guild from the first few months before gimmick builds took over and I remember fuck all about who I fought. PvP? Means less to the "world" than WoW's does and it's the supposed point of the game.

2) The community. See my first post.

3) Gimmick builds. Every month a build will come along that's so dastardly it's nigh impossible to beat. Oh, they'll tell you it can be beaten and it can... if you gimp your team build against everythng BUT the gimmick build. So it's just a cyclical mish mash of countering a build only to be destroyed by a balanced build only to be destroyed by the next gimmick build. It got old.

4) Only 8 people. So you have to recruit enough people to do the 8v8 but not over recruit since you don't want to be running more than one GvG battle. It was impossible for us to do.

5) What sort of game do they want? I don't know. In Beta it was awesome. PvE just good enough to interest you, wide open and fun pvP (if pointless)... so what do they do? Put in a grind for the PvP players instead of just giving them their skills, nerfed all the drops to oblivion in PvE so you'd have to grind ad nauseum for stuff that was prettier than what you had but not better. Why? There's no subscription here. There don't have to be time sinks. I really don't think A.Net knows what sort of game they want to make. There were rumors amongst the Alpha testers that the devs split into two camps, PvP and PvE very close to release. The PvE guys won and the game's been grindy ever since.

Not to say it's a bad game. In small snippets, it's great and the environments are absolutely gorgeous. I can't think of another game that I play sometime just to listen to the music and wander around looking at stuff. That doesn't get me going day in and day out, though.

[pxib]

RA, JQ, FA, AB are the only places a casual player can jump in, pvp and win.

In more than a dozen games I have literally never won in FA (Maybe it's because I've only played as Kurzick...), and I have played exactly one game of JQ (which we won) because, as you point out, nobody is there. In Ashenwood there are often at least two people just sitting on the start point auto-rejoining and trying to gain faction while idle. I used to win about one fight in three in the Random and Teams arena, but nowadays it's closer to one in seven. Capable players have become so rare in 4v4 (I imagine they've moved to gimmick vs. gimmick) that the one in seven tends to go ten or fifteen fights before paper covers rock... because there is absolutely no competition against a good team.

They built a game that depends on cooperation. No single build can survive on its own. Then they made a world which does everything it can to discourage community. Yeah, I love the music and the visuals too... and the sheer mass of unrealized potential in the gameplay gives me hope that some day some other, better directed company will do this sort of thing right. Until then I just want to scream and pull hair.

[Llava]

They built a game that depends on cooperation. No single build can survive on its own. Then they made a world which does everything it can to discourage community.

That pretty much nails it for me.  I hadn't realized it was the combination of both that made it so bad until I just read it here.

[Modern Angel]

Yep. brilliant summation.

[lamaros]

5) What sort of game do they want? I don't know. In Beta it was awesome. PvE just good enough to interest you, wide open and fun pvP (if pointless)... so what do they do? Put in a grind for the PvP players instead of just giving them their skills, nerfed all the drops to oblivion in PvE so you'd have to grind ad nauseum for stuff that was prettier than what you had but not better. Why? There's no subscription here. There don't have to be time sinks. I really don't think A.Net knows what sort of game they want to make. There were rumors amongst the Alpha testers that the devs split into two camps, PvP and PvE very close to release. The PvE guys won and the game's been grindy ever since.

I remember in late beta when they started putting in all the extra shit about having to unlock skills and weapons I was one of the vocal crowd who said "don't turn this game into a grind at the VERY LAST MOMENT BEFORE RELEASE because everyone who has been loving it so far sees no need for it." But they ignored us and put in half assed fixes to that problem later down the line.
Then they tested out the PvP faction type bit (which they only fully intorduced in Factions add-on) and we all said "Don't add in PvE elements that are dependant on PvP and once again CHANGE THE WHOLE GAME STYLE AT THE LAST MINIUTE because no one wants that." And they listened for a little while it seems, but not long enough.

PvP is fun, so let is stay fun and ungrindy. I remember arguing for total unlocks off the bat for PvP classes, because who fucking cares, we're not paying a subsciption and grinding in PvP is stupid.
PvE is fun so let it stay like it is. A little level system is fun for feeling like you're advancing, so keep that, and so are the advances in weapon drops, beause we like us some shiny, but don't try and force PvEers to play PvP, or the other way around.
Especially don't make any content exclusive to power PvPers or power PvEers.


All common sense, all which would retain the fun of the game and keep people playing.. Because expansions add new classes, skills, missions, and arenas, which we all want. No need at all to fuck up game mechanics with some kind of retarded grinds or the like AT ALL.

And we knew all this in BETA. Yet what do they do?

Hence, the Devs are tossers.

[Modern Angel]

The change to the Factions battles infuriated me. It was like random arenas turned up to speed freak levels. It was as if the great mass of retardation you would expect to find in 12 vs 12 somehow created a space-time paradox and suddenly people knew what they were doing. Then they added shit so it was three self contained teams instead of 12 man insanity and that sucked.

[tazelbain]

They built a game that depends on cooperation. No single build can survive on its own. Then they made a world which does everything it can to discourage community.

That pretty much nails it for me.  I hadn't realized it was the combination of both that made it so bad until I just read it here.

I thought you guys said earlier that it was the community that made you not want to be in the world.

Anyway, Kurzik side of Fort Aspenwood has a steep learning curve which conflicts random teams.  When the kurzik team knows what is going on its actually pretty fair.  Slowly they are figuring out. And Luxons lwho enjoy a challenge, like me, have been crossing over to help.  Why not, faction ain't worth a damn to me.  Quitters and Leechers happen to both sides equally.  Why A.net does nothing about these assholes is beyond me. 

[Llava]

Any levels of retarded community can always be ignored.  Trouble is, so much of Guild Wars revolves around being involved in said community that you either have to become retarded or just accept that a vast amount of content is essentially sealed off from you.

Or hope you find the 0.05% of the community that isn't retarded and form a guild with them.

[pxib]

I thought you guys said earlier that it was the community that made you not want to be in the world.

That's not a community, that's a population. A mob. To turn a population into a community requires a level of common purpose and personal introduction. You have to know names, and care. Walking down an avenue in New York does not make me a member of the New York community. At best I'm a tourist, at worst I'm a suspicious person. I'd be hard pressed to assemble a worthwhile team from folks I'd just met on the street.

[tazelbain]

Starting this friday (and beyond) PvP chars will be allowed in FA and JQ.

I noticed some guilds have been using voicechat to join the competitive missions together (every hits the join button at the same time) in small groups.  Maybe some us could do that. Look me up.  I play mainly as Tazelbain The Rogue.

[waylander]

PvP Unlock Packs Now Available 31 August 2006
Guild Wars players now have the opportunity to purchase PVP Unlock Packs for all Prophecies skills! For $9.99 USD (€8.99, £5.99), you can unlock all of the 70+ Prophecies skills for a single profession. For $39.99 USD (€35.99, £23.99) you can unlock all 450+ Prophecies skills for the 6 professions. Once unlocked, skills can be used by any of your PvP characters. Head to the Guild Wars Official Store to take advantage of this much-requested opportunity .

On the flip side this doesn't include item unlocks (which is for min/maxer's anyway), and they don't plan to let people buy skills for new xpansion packs until the expansion has been out a while (I'm guessing 6 months).

This is sort of funny because now its "Time and Money Spent over skill". This is a declaration that they know they've mostly killed off the quality PVP community, and that outside the top 100 there's nothing but a bunch of scrub guilds that are hardly competitive.  I'm sure some folks who already have time invested in GW and who really want to compete within the top 500 will probably have members who'll buy this, but I'm not sure that this feature will help lure new PVP players to their game.  While GW has been a big PVE success, its been a PVP joke in the established PVP community ever since they renegged on their initial retail promise of skill over time spent.

Oh yeah, they confirmed that you have to own the expansion for the skills you buy too so that sorta adds up in costs over time as they keep introducing new classes and skills.

[Modern Angel]

Pretty much. I don't get ANet at all. The execution from a technical standpoint is there but they're fucking schizophrenic.

[tazelbain]

At a million xp, a rpg character should be able to access all unlocked skills.

[Modern Angel]

Fuck no. All skills should be unlocked for PvP characters. Hell, even if it were only the non-elite skills it would be awesome. The hardcore PvPers are into competition a la a fps anyway. Don't make them grind.

[tazelbain]

I don't have a problem with that. I just have a couple of PvE charaters who have been around since the beginning and have ended up buying the same skill serveral times.  If I could +PvP a rpg character that'd speed up skill gaining across all my characters.