Guild Wars 2 Dev Dishes On How To Do Fun Right

Everybody knows they will, though. Some people just “gotta catch ‘em all”.

But hey, if someone wants to do that, let them.

> I would argue not one of those old MMO players
> found that gameplay fun but rather it was the online
> **community** in those MMOs

I can prove that you’re wrong. The evidence? Me. When I started playing WoW, I joined a new server that was practically empty, and played almost alone for the first two months. And I had fun exploring the world, trying out different characters (of different classes, different races, with different starting zones, etc.). 

Yes, many quests were extremely annoying (basically just walking back and forth between two places again and again), but there was enough stuff to see to make the game interesting, as long as you were willing to explore. I spent whole days without doing a single quest, just exploring, fighting and running away (practically every creature I met had a skull on its portrait, because I wasn’t going to let no stinkin’ level get in the way of my travels).

Blizzard knows a lot of people like to play solo, and WoW can be played just like a single-player game, all the way from 1 to 85.

> The tragic thing is that those same communities could have formed
> just as easily in MMOs that weren’t based on a subscription model 

The problem isn’t the subscription model. In fact, the subscription model makes perfect sense, since you’re (supposedly) buying a product that is constantly being updated. It’s like a subscription to an ISP or to Netflix (or to a library, or a club, etc.). 

The problem with WoW (and its clones) is the grind + reward approach that becomes the fundamental gameplay mechanic at maximum level. By defining something as an explicit “reward” (and by getting players to accept that model), they excuse themselves from having to make the actual gameplay fun. In fact, for some people, the more painful the gameplay is, the more they value the reward (as if that proves something about their character and about what they’ve achieved in life – IMO it just proves they have a bit of a masochistic streak, and have lost any sense of real achievement).

It’s perfectly possible to make a good game with a subscription, just as it’s perfectly possible to make horrible games without a subscription. But I don’t think it’s possible to make a good game when you detach the reward from the gameplay itself. That’s not a game; that’s a (bad) job. But the “reward” of a bad job (money) can be used outside that job, while the rewards from these games can’t.

> They could have formed in MMOs with mechanics that
> were designed to create communities rather than pitting
> players against each other in competition for XP/resources

I’m all for realism. For example, I think the way WoW gives XP for a kill to a single player (even when two or more participated in the fight) makes no sense, but I also think that Guild Wars 2′s instanced gathering nodes make no sense. Yes, competing for resources gives players an opportunity to be jerks, but I find that an important part of building a community. It lets you know who you’re playing with and helps you decide who your friends should be. One of the problems with WoW was the way the Dungeon Finder made players’ reputation irrelevant. You are free to be a jerk because you know there will be no consequences. You can just press the button and be presented with four new “automatic friends”. The only way that kind of dungeon finder could work was if it also included a “rating” system (think eBay) with real consequences. 

Anyway, that’s another subject.

My point is that attachment to the community (or to one’s own characters) can keep some people in the game after a few months or years, but what got people interested in WoW at the _start_ (what convinced them to start paying the subscription fee) wasn’t “the community” (because there wasn’t one), it was the game world itself. You know, that thing that players now blaze through in a couple of weeks before settling into their endless grind cycle at max level.

> Your only example of a sub-based 
> MMO that “works” ends up being as
> flawed as the rest.  

Not sure what that means. My point is that the problem with WoW is not the payment model. WoW worked fine at the start, and people were glad to pay the subscription because it was fun, and because they could see new and interesting content being added.

But the path WoW followed (especially after the release of WotLK) turned it from a technically limited but cohesive and interesting world into a collection of disconnected mini-games that really boil down to a gold treadmill and an ilevel treadmill (simplistic, short-term mechanics, that don’t require any vision on the part of the designers).

In its current state, I wouldn’t play WoW even if it was free. 

There are plenty of F2P browser games just as grindy as WoW, and you can’t blame their payment model for it.

Time sink gameplay isn’t implemented “because of the subscription fee”. It’s implemented because it’s cheaper and easier to produce and (in the case of WoW) because the current designers simply don’t have the vision to build a cohesive world.

Every publisher wants people to play for as long as possible. It means a bigger chance that people will buy stuff from the cash shop, or more time with that browser window open, watching ads. 

The difference is _how_ they keep people playing. If the designers are creative and ambitious, they’ll try to create a complex game world. If they’re not, they’ll just stick to a couple of simplistic gameplay mechanics and make people go through them again and again. 

Arena Net doesn’t want people to “finish” GW2 any more than Blizzard wants people to “finish” WoW. If people feel they have “finished” GW2, that means they won’t feel inclined to buy more stuff from the cash shop, which means Arena Net stops profiting from them, just as Blizzard would stop profiting from players who cancel their subscription.

The difference is how they go about it. Blizzard currently funnels everyone into an ilevel treadmill, forcing them to repeat a handful of max-level instances and raids again and again.

Arena Net chose to make the entire game world viable at max level, thus reducing repetition and letting people set their own goals (which is much closer to the essence of a RPG). 

Of course, some people’s goal will still be to “get the best gear”, and those will get bored with GW2 a lot faster than they would have with WoW, but personally I find the more horizontal approach a lot more appealing, and would gladly pay a subscription for GW2 (while still refusing to play WoW in its current form, even for free).

> The blog is saying they
> couldn’t have *made*
> Guild Wars 2 [...]
> if they used the
> subscription business
> model.  

Of course they could. Don’t just repeat talking points, think a bit (and realize that developer “blog posts” are primarily a marketing tool). 

There are lots of F2P games that follow the same treadmill design as WoW, and WoW originally did not play like a treadmill, despite having a subscription right from the start.

It doesn’t matter if you’re charging a subscription or trying to make people buy from a cash shop; it’s always in the publisher’s interest to keep people playing as long as possible.

If WoW’s current designers were able to make the game more interesting, they would (and maybe Wrath and Cataclysm would have pushed WoW to 13 million subscribers instead of bringing it down to 10).

Don’t blame the financial department for the incompetence of WoW’s designers. 

Subscription-based models work fine (clubs, ISPs, Netflix, etc.), and make perfect sense for games with frequent updates. 

Do you really think Arena Net’s artists, writers and designers worry about the financial details of the game’s distribution? Of course they don’t. They would make best game they could regardless of the payment model. 

The decision to not charge a subscription fee is purely a financial one (to increase the initial player base). Arena Net prefers (wisely, IMO) to have 3 million players spending around $5 a month on the cash shop than having just 1 million spending $15 a month on a subscription.

I think they have the right business model (for the present) and I think they have a good approach to game design. But I wasn’t born yesterday and I know marketing spin when I see it. It would be just as easy to spin things the other way and say that having a cash shop leads to deliberate crippling of the game to force people to spend money, and that a subscription ensures the publisher will put out a steady stream of high-quality content, since their profits depend on being able to keep players satisfied.

But it’s all BS.

The payment model is the payment model and game design is game design. They’re decided by different people and have very little influence over each other, especially during the game’s initial development.

If Arena Net gets into financial trouble, I expect there will be some pressure on the game designers and artists to make the cash shop items “more appealing” (even if that means crippling the base game slightly), but for now they’ve been given the freedom to make the game they wanted to make, and the payment model was the last thing on their minds.

The only reflection it had on the game was the presence of the gem shop, and you can play GW2 for months without going anywhere near it.

Arena Net has stated that NCsoft let them develop the game they wanted to develop. And it’s NCsoft that handles the financial aspects of GW2, not Arena Net. So, if you believe everything that Arena Net says, you’re kind of contradicting yourself there.

I _don’t_ believe everything they say (I’ve worked in the gaming industry, I know a bit about how it works…), but I don’t think NCsoft picked this funding model (B2P + cash shop) because of its influence on game design (which was the responsibility of Arena Net). I think they picked it because they looked at the market and realized (correctly, IMO) that it was the most profitable model.

And once they decided on that, they told Arena Net to start working on a cash shop. That was the extent of the payment model’s influence on the game design: Adding a cash shop and moving some items into it. Everything else (number of levels, story, skills, world design, events, etc.) would have been exactly the same regardless of the payment model, and was determined by the developers’ vision for the game. 

The “developer blog” post is just marketing; it’s a stab at WoW, suggesting that “games with subscriptions can never be fun” (ignoring games like Eve Online or Rift). It’s also not a coincidence that that post appears as the game nears its release date, and not during the actual game design phase.

If NCsoft had decided to use a subscription model for GW2, the same developer would be posting about how a subscription is “the logical payment model for a game under continuous development” and how it “ensures the developer has the resources and the incentive to produce a steady stream of high-quality content”. 

And perhaps you’d be posting here in support of that, instead (or at least you wouldn’t be posting against it, because, as long as the game was fun, you’d be fine with paying 25 or 50 cents a day to play it – while getting your mystic keys and golem butlers “for free”).

> You really think Richard Garriott wasn’t thinking about profits
> when he introduced the sub-based model in the first place?

He was thinking about “how can we fund a game that is under continuous development, and doesn’t ever ‘end’ ?” And the way most similar services are funded is through a subscription. 

The alternatives would be something like a cash shop (which leads to crippling of the base game, to make the cash items desirable – if there was no cash shop, those items would be available for free) or the frequent release of paid expansions (which tends to fragment the player base). 

Every model can be spun as an advantage or disadvantage. It’s Marketing 101. Even a game that is 100% free can be attacked because “since it’s free, the publisher has no incentive to improve it, to fix its bugs or to release new content – are you really going to invest your time playing a game that might be gone tomorrow…?”.

There’s _nothing_ in GW2′s design that would be incompatible with a monthly subscription. The reason why it doesn’t have one is purely commercial (because the MMO market is saturated, and lowering the barrier to entry is the only way to grab a big player base at the start). It’s not to make the game “more fun” (the cash shop doesn’t make it “more fun” in any way), it’s to make the game more _profitable_.

> they have delivered on everything they have
> posted starting from their Design Manifesto

I see. So dyes are going to be unlocked once for the entire account, are they? 

Actually that is one change that can be directly attributed to the decision to sell dyes at the cash shop. If the game had a subscription and no cash shop, dyes probably would have been account-wide, as originally stated.

Not that I care about it either way, but it’s funny that the most obvious contradiction between what they posted on their blog and what they’re actually doing is related to the payment model.

> I do know people in the industry who are managers and
> entrepreneurs and I should thank you for the amusement
> your posts provided them when I forwarded some of
> your ideas. 

Of course you do, and of course they did…

> Guild Wars 2 is not a sub-based game.
> The developers have explained why.

You’re free to have faith in the purity of corporate blogs, but I know how the sausages are made (and how they’re advertised). Regardless of the payment model, it would have been spun as an advantage. Really, it boils down to this:

Can you name _one_ element of GW2′s design that would be incompatible with a subscription…? Just one? Imagine NCsoft decided to switch to a subscription-based model. How would they need to change the game?