This Week In MMO: Arrow To The MMO

Mike Johnson

Details were leaked

It’s a WoW clone

F2P by the end of 2013

QSatu

From the leaked screen environments really looked like SWTOR. I looked nothing like ES game.
- Jado Cast
  
  It’s the same Hero Engine.
  - Lycronis
    
    Really? If that’s true then this game already has an uphill battle before it even starts. People familiar with the ES series is going to expect that same kind of look (referring to Oblivion and Skyrim.) I’m not sure the Hero Engine can achieve that. It’s something to keep an eye of for sure, though.
    - Jado Cast
      
      It’s true, and confirmed by the studio. :-( Very disappointing.
http://www.facebook.com/fredrik.gardsio Fredrik Fronken Gardsiö

Where did you find these screenshots?, i’m not disputing what you are claiming, i’m simply curious to see them myself.
- http://quintlyn.com/ QuintLyn Bowers
  
  Please do not post leaked screenshots to Gamebreaker.tv.
- http://twitter.com/aidshbe hemmer
  
  That claim is based on the engine they are using, which is almost certainly the Hero Engine they licensed back when they started development on the game.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_PG4DRLIEDYPSF3YKJW6ZW7UVYM aj

It really does like SWTOR and most of the details sound like an updated WoW with DAoC zone. The screens are out there and pretty easy to find. Son, I am disappoint.

http://twitter.com/ookamiwing Phillip Rushing

Maybe it will be like old school MYST

http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr

Wow, the MYST MMO is still out there. Or atleast the web site is, not sure if the free to play version is still working or the open source versions. This game should have been Minecraft.

http://www.facebook.com/daniel.beverly Daniel Beverly

I liked the mail system too. No having to find a mailbox. Yay!

http://irljasmine.com Jasmine Hruschak

YES! I *loved* that feature. So convenient.
- Old Ben
  
  I wish they’d render the carrier pigeon trying to lift a huge box when you send mail with big attachments.
  - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
    
    lol, I like the idea of a delivery boy showing up with your mail and carrying off your packages. Watching him path through a dynamic event.
    - Old Ben
      
      They already show a pigeon flying past very quickly when you receive mail, there’s just no “explanation” for the attachments.

http://twitter.com/kiki261191 Kris aka Boneflesh

Yaaay! Jasmine <3

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=724962502 Joakim Dalle Dahlin

Memento is really awesome, my stepmom showed it to me years ago ^^

Jado Cast

Sometimes, Mike doesn’t get J.W.’s sarcasm. Awkward Pause. :-)

http://www.facebook.com/people/Melissa-Cartun/662259376 Melissa Cartun

I found that I spent more time dying (unexpected and from apparently unidentifiable sources) than playing. The good thing is that I kept wanting to come back for more. The cost of dying was discouraging though.

Old Ben

Yes, a lot of events seemed to be scaling strangely and 1-shotting people, which turned some fights (especially with melee weapons) into serial suicides.

If you just kept running in a big circle around the enemies and using ranged weapons, though, you could get through most fights without taking any damage at all (especially if you had some way to cripple them, so they never reached you).
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  I found the tell for an AOE range attack was a large white circle on the ground. Couldn’t tell if you cant see the circles do to a large number of players, or if the attack speed scaling was off.
  - Old Ben
    
    Enemy AoE should show up as a red circle, not white. But to anticipate non-AoE attacks you need to watch the creature’s animation, and that can easily be obscured by the spell effects.
    - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
      
      Ah, thin red circles, the bain of the red-green colorblind.
      
      The real question is can Arenanet fix the boss tells for large groups, without nerfing the crap out of them.
      
      Do they need more vivid AOE tell effects?
      
      Arenanet needs better tells for single melee and range target attack. While boss animations is fine for simple encounters with a small number of players, animations dont seem to be cutting it for large groups and I dont want to see bosses reduced to being facerolled by large groups. But, one-shotting players without warning is not good gameplay.
    - Old Ben
      
      > Ah, thin red circles, the bain of the red-green colorblind.
      
      Well, not when there are no green circles. It was incredibly stupid of them to have red, blue and green teams in WvW though, when they could have had red, yellow and blue instead. Not only would they make the game more accessible to red-green color blind people (the most common type of color blindness), but they would have made it easier for everyone else, because most of the environment is green (trees, grass), and yellow would stand out more.
      
      > Do they need more vivid AOE tell effects?
      
      Not really. If anything, I find the red circles a bit too obvious. I would prefer more “natural” warnings like cracks in the ground, smoke, shaking, etc..
      
      > Arenanet needs better tells for single melee and range target attack.
      
      Well, either that or just make bosses hit for less each time (even if they hit a bit more often), so that people don’t get one-shotted. If you stand still for 3 hits in a row, it’s kind of your fault (even if you can’t see the hits very well, you’ll see your health going down, so you’ll know that you need to move away). One-shot kills just make the fights feel random.
    - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
      
      I like the idea of cracks and smoke for AOE tells. Something with height would be wonderful.
      
      I’m not so concerned about the one shot kill for very large groups, as long as the tell clearly indicates the devastating hit. I would love to see a fight with 10+ players dodging out of a killer aoe attack. But, maybe I’m old school trinity player and believe if dps dies its their own fault.
      
      But whatever solution Arenanet comes up with, I just don’t want to see bosses that can be facerolled by very large groups or boss fights that take forever because of a very large number of players.
    - Old Ben
      
      I’m fine with dungeon bosses or end-of-event-chain bosses having one attack that kills instantly. The problem is that, during the beta, a lot of low-level event bosses were one-shotting people with every attack. If that was deliberate design, it’s just stupid and “cheap”. I’m pretty sure it was just a glitch with event scaling.
      
      If a boss can be fought and defeated by a group of 5 players, it doesn’t make any sense to make him harder if the group is bigger. Scaling should try to preserve the difficulty (or make it decrease slowly), never actually increase it. It makes perfect sense that a group of 40 players should be able to faceroll a level 4 shaman. He should probably scale between 3 and 10 players, but there should be limits to how hard or how easy he gets (and it certainly shouldn’t feel reversed, where he’s easier to defeat with less people).
      
      Other bosses should be designed to scale between 10 and 30 players, for example (i.e., almost impossible to do with less than 10, hard but doable with with 20, medium difficulty with 30, and after that they stop scaling). Other bosses would scale between 25 and 50, and so on.
      
      Also, instead of scaling a single enemy they could add more abilities or “minions”; that would make the fight feel a lot more natural. For example, if you have 1-5 players, you get only the boss. If you have 5-10, the boss gains a new AoE attack (instead of increasing the damage of his normal attacks). If you have more than 10 players, the boss summons X number of minions (where X is the number of players minus 7 divided by three, for example). That would avoid 1-shot kills (or bosses with ridiculously scaled health pools, leading for 20-minute fights) and make events feels slightly different depending on group size.
    - http://profile.yahoo.com/ITHF7XKYGVXFAPCDMDJTKHLBBU Lian Wan
      
      That might actually just be an incomplete implementation, they’ve mention the ‘additional skills from scaling’ thing multiple times in the blogs/interviews/etc.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Jason-Lauritzen/100000133706955 Jason Lauritzen

Ran in to the GW2 pacing problems, but then I solved the problem I was having with a story quest by just circle strafing, rather then the usual mmo methods.

http://irljasmine.com Jasmine Hruschak

Honestly I feel like one of the things that makes it so easy for me to accept GW2′s different leveling system, the non-linear pacing (is that a thing? that’s a thing now), and general not-how-this-worked-in-other-games-ness is the lack of a sub fee. I’m shocked at how much the lack of a sub fee is impacting my feelings.

Where I would usually wonder “what if I don’t like this as much when release time comes? what if it’s not going to keep me captivated past the first month?” I find myself thinking “well, if I miss traditional MMO questing then I’ll log off for a little while and go do some of that” since I don’t have to weigh which MMO subs to keep going.

So far I’ve absolutely loved my time in Guild Wars 2, and would be picking the game up even if it came with a $15/mo sub fee, but I feel like the lack of a fee takes the pressure off making a decision about “is this worth paying money for every month” and just lets me enjoy the game for exactly what it is.
- MMO_Doubter
  
  Will you feel that way when the cash shop starts to infringe on your enjoyment?
  - http://irljasmine.com Jasmine Hruschak
    
    That depends on if it would actually infringe on my enjoyment. :p
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  For me the pacing problem was more about the jarring effect on the personal story.
  
  I was having a great time working through the Charr story of rebuilding my Warband, but at level 13, I couldn’t progress to the level 17 story. While I had completed a large number of Dynamic Events, this gave me the feeling of having to grind 4 levels before I could continue with the personal story.
  
  The typical reply to this post is you playing the game wrong, don’t understand GW2 or just plain stupid.
  - http://irljasmine.com Jasmine Hruschak
    
    Oh well I can understand that completely. You’re really enjoying one aspect of the game, the personal story, and then you had to go do content you didn’t want to do at that particular time in order to progress with what you’re interested in.
    
    My play-style differed from yours (I wasn’t especially interested in my Norn story – didn’t hate it but I was far more interested in exploring than playing through it) so I didn’t encounter those issues.
    
    You aren’t playing the game *wrong* imo. XD You just like an aspect of GW2 that the game doesn’t happen to have as an option to exclusively focus on while you level up.
    
    I had the same issue (although not as bad) when I played SWTOR. I hit a few points where my personal story quests were higher level than I was and I had to go grind out exp on quests I couldn’t care less about in order to progress in the content I wanted. Obviously one game is a biiiiit more story intensive and has more content centered around that but I see where you’re coming from. :p
    - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
      
      Agreed. With SWTOR is was much easier to follow the main story line and complete all the questlines found through the quest hubs. The SWTOR PVP dailies were also helpful for filling in any leveling gaps.
      
      With WoW, the Cataclysm 1-60 was a nicely designed story, with nice re-telling of the history of Azaroth. Now getting through 61 to 80 is just a mess.
      
      With Rift, I lost interest in the story about level 20.
      
      Next GW2 BWE, going to ignoring the personal story and workthrough the Dynamic Events and fill all the hearts. Maybe go back and knock out the story once all the hearts are done.
http://profile.yahoo.com/ITHF7XKYGVXFAPCDMDJTKHLBBU Lian Wan

At first I was thinking “I don’t envy the person that has to balance this with …” but then I remembered they can actually crank up the leveling speed in the starting area without much worry since the game will lower your effective level to meet the area anyway.

Having people quickly level out can also have some benefits.
1) people will be more spread out therefore lowering the occurrence of overflow
2) helps claim that people can go back to an area to experience thing they didn’t the first time around. if you are speeding through an area you’ll be more likely to miss things

The only drawback I can think of is that they would have slow down the rate they introduce new mechanics to avoid forcing people to have to learn even more at once.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Joe-Parsons/100003263410462 Joe Parsons

it say sorry were unable to play this episode

http://twitter.com/crusadernero Crusadernero

whats that rather annoying dunking on the show?? Mikes hand on the table?

http://www.facebook.com/kayla.roese Kayla Roese

Wow… you guys really irritated me when you were talking about the dynamic events and saying that they were constantly the same thing. You understand why that was happening right?? It’s because if you DON’T defend an area from say.. a harpy attack, they will KEEP coming until you do. The next part of the dynamic event won’t happen until people work together to get through the first part. It’s frustrating when you make something about the game look bad when it’s really that you don’t understand it and aren’t explaining it right. ARGH!

http://irljasmine.com Jasmine Hruschak

For me personally this really wasn’t a negative point at all – it didn’t take away from my enjoyment of GW2 one bit. XD Honestly I did work through several events that completed, went to the next section of the event, completed that, and then restarted from the beginning. I don’t think this was an issue with the game at all and just came from the fact that there were an incredible number of people playing at once in each starting zone which caused a large number of events to constantly spawn. I can’t imagine we’ll see these conditions a month after launch. Not because GW2 won’t be popular but just because everyone will be a lot more spread out throughout the world instead of everyone ever in the starting zones on day 1.
There’s also the possibility that the repeating events weren’t intended, which I should have mentioned on the show. All indications showed me that we were progressing through the events successfully so if there’s supposed to be a mechanic that keeps the same event from repeating within a certain amount of time it’s possible that beta weekends are just doing their job and helping ArenaNet squash bugs before release.

I was *really* excited when I heard that events won’t stop until they’re actually completed. Like the example you gave, I love that if an area isn’t defended the creatures will keep attacking. The whole “real impact on the world” mechanic is awesome to me. I experienced it over and over again during my first beta weekend and loved it each time.
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  Yep, posting the slightest negative impression and the GW2 community goes on the attack.
  
  Read the comments on the Jesse Cox’s mixed review of GW2, he was meh on PVE but loved WvW. The amount of hate posted to his first impression was incredible.
  - Timothy Eng
    
    Too much hate. Its hard to give a serious criticism on objective issues when the entirely community goes nuts and starts ad hominem attacks.
http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr

I played for about 30 hours during the BWE and saw a bunch of dynamic events on a endless loop. But to be fair, I think alot of this was due to the high population of the overflow server. When we had a large number of players, we would faceroll some of the simpler dynamics events, in one example a group of 20 Charr quickly destroying the ghosts, roadblocks and catapults.  The dynamic event difficulty could not keep up with the larger number of players.

Later, I re-triggered the event with only one other player nearby.   It was so much more challenging and enjoyable. We had to kite the ghosts and fight our way to the roadblock and catapults. Also rezing a fallen comrade in arms was much more satisfying when you could see the tell of the catapult attack, so you could dodge away and jump back in to finish rescuing the other player.

I also find the jumping from the main zone instance, to your personal story instance and then having to return to a overflow server, really threw off the dynamic event progressions. Any chance of persistence world was throw off by periodically changing overflow servers.

With all that said, I think this will be self correct after the game is out for a month or two. Players will be more spread out and the need for overflow servers should go away.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_PG4DRLIEDYPSF3YKJW6ZW7UVYM aj

Schaff: I don’t see how GW2 heart system is confusing. If you read what it says in the upper right corner then you would understand them. Maybe it is because you might not have known much about the game before hand though but I think the way Renown Hearts are pretty self explanatory.

The XP thing is because you were playing a Beta and this stuff needs to be adjusted.

Old Ben

The overflow servers basically work as instanced regions. If there are more than X people in a certain map region, a new instance of that region is created on another server, and people teleporting into that region (through waypoints or world portals) are sent to the new instance instead.

This is probably one of the reasons why the game world is divided into regions (and you have to cross portals and loading screens between them), unlike WoW, for example, where each continent is basically a continuous area, and new terrain gets loaded in the background.

I’m not crazy about the world portals and loading screens, but it does make it easier to deal with over-populated areas, decreasing server load and improving everyone’s performance by splitting them across multiple instances of each area.

If you’ve ever played Eve Online and been to Jita you know the alternative.

The issues people were having seems to have been caused by a design problem: the overflow servers were being generated dynamically, for all servers, and, as a result, “the overlow was overflowing”, so to speak. This helps balance the load more evenly across overflow servers, but it means that people from a specific main server could end up on any overflow server (instead of having, for example, one overflow server assigned to each two main servers, so people from M1 and M2 would always end up on O1).

That in itself wouldn’t have been a problem if the game was able to keep groups together, but that was failing for some reason (probably also some design issue, otherwise they would have patched it quickly). I suspect they were just trying to keep players with the party leader, but in some cases other players were going into overflowing zones before the leader, so the party leader’s overflow server hadn’t been assigned yet.

Ideally, I think the game should follow these rules when sending people to overflow:

1. Is the player in a party? If so, pick an overflow server for the party and remember it for all players (even if the leader is still in a non-overflowing area). This just means adding a data field to the “party” entity, listing one overflow server per zone.

2. If the player isn’t in a party, check if any players on his friends list are currently in overflow servers for the area he’s entering. If so, try to put him on the overflow server where most of those friends are. This should only need a couple of quick database lookups.

This way, even if you’re not actually in a party, the game will avoid separating you from your friends.

http://profile.yahoo.com/7MPGC5FCQJZGFKICKCMALR3AYY Eric

“I’m not crazy about the world portals and loading screens, but it does make it easier to deal with over-populated areas, decreasing server load and improving everyone’s performance by splitting them across multiple instances of each area.
If you’ve ever played Eve Online and been to Jita you know the alternative.”

FFXI, Lower Jeuno AH. you did a /sea all and you might find 5k people on the server, 2k of them were in Lower Jeuno. Worst lag ever
- http://irljasmine.com Jasmine Hruschak
  
  FFFFUUUU. Jeuno lag flashbacks. I played FFXI through dial-up on my PS2. There should be some kind of support group.
  - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
    
    woot, woot, flashing back to my 1200 baud modem.
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  Loading screens, flashing back to Gary gushing over the lack of loading screens in the personal instances in SWTOR. Wonder if Gary ever made it to Tatooine, now that’s a painful loading screen.
St_Draco

ANet said that there was a bug that was not keeping parties together. It is already designed for parties to stay together across overflow servers. If you have access check out the beta forums. It a sticky post in the “Bug” section.
- Old Ben
  
  Yes, I know what they said. I also know they didn’t manage to fix it despite patching the servers a couple of times. And that (coupled with a few tests I did, and reported) leads me to think it wasn’t a “bug” in the sense of “a typo in the code”, but rather in the sense of “we didn’t consider how the system would behave when there were so many players in one place that a single overflow server wouldn’t be enough”. In other words, it’s a “design bug”, which can take a bit longer to fix properly.
  - http://profile.yahoo.com/ITHF7XKYGVXFAPCDMDJTKHLBBU Lian Wan
    
    They actually have a copy of working code that does this correctly in their GW1 code.

Sharuko

I can’t stand it when people call it “dynamic” events. There is nothing “dynamic” about it. The events repeat on loop over and over and over again. I was watching that one quest with the wolves and you had to accompany them and it kept repeating for hours. The other quest watering plants and getting corn just kept repeating in a loop.

Those are not dynamic, those are static. Rift had dynamic events in which random events would spawn in random locations. Giving a fancy name to public questing doesn’t make it “dynamic”.

But overall the sentiment seems to be a lot of people are getting out of the hype train on reality stop.

pandora005

You clearly didnt play as a human and experienced “us” pushing back those damned centaurs from outpost after outpost until they were banished from queensvale. Eventually they tried to take back one or the other outpost and failed. Just compare the outpost situation between the regular and an overflow server and you will see the difference.

Obviously not all of these events can have huge chains and especially the first few have to be repetitive for the new chars.
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_PG4DRLIEDYPSF3YKJW6ZW7UVYM aj
  
  He is not talking about Dynamic Events at all though but describing a renown heart and calling it a Dynamic Event. It is obvious that he has NO idea what he is talking about and it sucks to see him here giving criticism that is not even based on reality.
  - Sharuko
    
    Seems like no one understands. Feels like bad game design.
    - http://pulse.yahoo.com/_PG4DRLIEDYPSF3YKJW6ZW7UVYM aj
      
      And yet you are the type of person that when he doesn’t understand something you feel the need to talk about it anyways.
- snikendelarveføtter
  
  He wont reply to you because you made a valid point and gave an example of how event chains plays out, when they are not overrun by a horde of people the instant they pop up. He thinks that the starting zones will always have the entire server population, and he never got to experience higher level zones, with a more normal population, where you actually see the effects these DE chains have on the surroundings.
  I promised Sharuko not to ever reply to him again, and i intend to keep that promise, because he has wasted enough of my time. One thing you will notice is that when he cant use his rotation of 3-4 nonsense remarks about gw2 to counter a response he gets, then he will just simply avoid replying.
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  But theses events are not dynamic. A dynamic event would be content generated in real time.
  
  These are scalable triggered events, when “x” happens, “y” occurs and “y” is scaled to the number of players in the area. If no one triggers the next event, the game eventually resets.
St_Draco

Says the guy who played 2 hours of the game.
Tell us again how you paid $80 to hate.
Bro just make it to level 20 it’s where all the fun is bro.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_PG4DRLIEDYPSF3YKJW6ZW7UVYM aj

Guy, the wolf quest was part of a Renown Heart and was repeatable for a reason. Seriously, you are not even describing frigging DEs but renown hearts which are SUPPOSED to be more static like regular questing. If you do not know the difference then shut up. You look stupid.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=506895941 Chad Korfel

They aren’t dynamic in the random sense but the fact that the quest can change depending on how you finish them makes it dynamic.

http://www.facebook.com/people/LeoeRe-HD/100003329080073 LeoeRe HD

If you havent played GW2 , dont believe the hype , i wish i could get a refund so i could buy Tera instead…..

pandora005

And GW2 is bad, because … ?
And TERA is awesome, because … ?
Alfredo Vasquez

Fail Troll, is Fail Troll
Eaker82

Switch Tera and GW2 and thats what Tera players say. I’m good i’d rather have neither. But might pick up Gw2 later to play with friends because its basically F2P but im waiting on other games.
Jay

If you havent played Tera, dont believe the hype, i wish i could get a refund so i could buy GW2 instead…..

See, I can do it too. ;3

Avan Gore

Play it smart and use a password safe. All you ever have to remember is one single password.

http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr

Problem is if the password for one of the compromised web sites is the same as your primary email address password, the stolen email with password is the gateway to all your financial and personal information.

Timothy Eng

I disagree with Jaz about how it felt not grindy.

It was definitely grindy, it was just cleverly veiled. Sure you can not kill the 10 boars, but youll be watering plants or whatever. Go from one heart to the next otherwise your levels too low for the next heart. And when theres a mob of guys killing everything before you can get to it, the priorities are this: “GET IN ONE HIT SO YOU CAN GET CREDIT!”

Got to lvl 15 and said, wow I think i’ll just pvp for the rest of this weekend.

http://irljasmine.com Jasmine Hruschak

I agree 100% with your veiled grind comment. For me personally it didn’t *feel* grindy but that’s just because, like you said, it was cleverly veiled. MMOs by nature are grinds, it just depends on how fun the grind is to you.

I did a lot of events that weren’t part of my renown hearts so I didn’t honestly have much of an issue with levels. But I also didn’t get as much time to play that weekend as I would have liked. I might change my mind about how the grind feels to me after another several days in the game.

The world was gorgeous to me and it felt like I was rewarded for exploring it. The way I played personally was to explore (going in the general direction of hearts and points of interest) and do any events I found on my way. For me this was far enough removed from, say, WoW or RIFT’s more traditional MMORPG questing system that I didn’t get the *same* grind feeling I get from most MMORPGs. Adding onto that the fact that I could do max level PvP whenever and the “grindy” feeling I’m used to just wasn’t there for me. I could absolutely see the grind that I was doing, I just didn’t feel it. XD
- St_Draco
  
  The question is, was it really a grind? We throw that word around a lot, but I think now we are using it to describe everything we do in a game. If we reduce our gaming experience to “just pushing buttons” then we grind in every game. Every game is then a “thinly veiled disguise” for pushing buttons.
  We’ve gotten away from what grind means. Grind is a mindless task that we do to get somewhere we would rather be. In GW2 I didn’t have a moment where I felt I needed to do something so I could be somewhere else. It engaged me. The game play, the quests, the world, the pvp. It was all engaging. If it didn’t engage you, then I would say it isn’t the game for you.Will that hold up? Only time will tell.
  - http://irljasmine.com Jasmine Hruschak
    
    “In GW2 I didn’t have a moment where I felt I needed to do something so I could be somewhere else.” This. Well said.
    I don’t view “grind” as an inherently bad thing to begin with. Leveling up is part of the fun in an MMORPG. One could argue that no matter how you reach these levels you’re “grinding” since you’re completing the same action over and over, which is leveling up, even if each quest or event that gives experience is 100% unique.
    
    The “grind” in GW2 was different enough from a traditional MMORPG questing system to feel refreshing to me personally. But I can see how, especially if a player is focused on hitting the next level, the “grind” might not be nearly as well masked for them. It was weird at first to not be staring at my exp bar and focusing on how many quests I’ve completed but after a little while I started to really enjoy the different pace. Obviously you still have to see what level you are before you go barreling into a mob four levels higher than you but the way GW2 masked their leveling grind changed my gameplay approach to an explorer and I was shocked at how much I liked that. :p
    - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
      
      For me GW2 got grindy at level 13. I had to go back to a previous zone, so I could grind Dynamic Events from 13 to 17, so I could continue the story. Is it good game design for the personal story to send a player to a zone 4 levels higher?
      
      Whenever I see someone write, “You are not playing it right”, that says to me it’s not a well designed zone or game. When a game requires you to read a guild or watch videos, so you can “explore” correctly, that is questionable design.
      
      When I was told “end game” was exploration and you could play this game like you want, that’s misinformation. Should have been told, you have to complete the map and all the Dynamic Events before you attempt the personal story in the zone. Instead I followed the personal story and completed all the dynamic events along the way, clearly the “incorrect” way to play the game.
      
      If you want to wander around and explore, that great. But when you force players to go back to a previous zone to explore or repeat Dynamic Events that is a grind.
      
      Love the GW2 profession design, hot key combat, PVP and beautiful landscape, but the questing/leveling is meh. You are just going around triggering dynamic events, with stories that are virtually impossible to follow.
pandora005

How do you want to create a fantasy MMO with levels without having to do stuff repeatedly? Repetition of things is kinda what you have to do. The improvement of GW2 is that the classes arent as rigid as in other MMOs and the dynamic events will be different due to this all the time, just like a dungeon will handle differently depending on the class setup. You dont even have to run back to a quest giver in GW2 …
Old Ben

> It was definitely grindy

If you have multiple activities that you can perform to achieve the same goal, how is it “grindy” ? Isn’t the definition of “grind” a single repetitive action? Most “heart” events in GW2 have at least two, generally three or more ways to gain reputation with the heart NPC.

How many different options would you need to have to feel that it wasn’t “grindy” ? Ten? Twenty? Can you even think of ten different activities that would fell like “logical” ways of helping a farmer, and which wouldn’t interfere with other players? It seems to me that killing worms, watering plants, feeding cattle, putting out fires or driving out raiders is quite a wide choice.

> Sure you can not kill the 10 boars, but youll
> be watering plants or whatever.

So you’re basically complaining that you “have to do something” instead of … I don’t know, just stand still and watch your level / reputation increase?

You might as well say that PvP is “grindy” because you keep having to kill enemy players and they keep respawning and you have to keep killing them again.

> And when theres a mob of guys killing everything before you can get
> to it, the priorities are this: “GET IN ONE HIT SO YOU CAN GET CREDIT!”

If you get in only one hit, you won’t get much credit. And I’m not sure what kind of alternative you suggest. Get “credit” without helping the NPC (and the other players) at all? What would you be getting “credit” for?

If you’re playing the game just to see some numbers increase, you’re doing it wrong.
- Timothy Eng
  
  Multiple activities to fulfill a goal can still be grindy. If i give you to the option to fill up a bar with either with filling my unlimited spawning shirts, scrubbing my unlimited spawning pans or making my unlimited spawning beds, it would still be grindy right?
  In the end, a grind can only be mitigated by the quality of the those individual operations. Although system is dynamic, the mobs for example are not. Just for you Old Ben, PVP is NOT grindy because although the system is not dynamic, the players and situations and this every fight is different. Grinding instances that have the same mechanics and difficulty is grindy. Fighting 2 -3 different people for control of a node with varying number of allies is not.
  
  While MMOs is almost based on repetitive actions, as pandora005 points out, Jaz is right in that sometimes its all about how good the illusion the MMO creates in veiling the grind.
  
  Back in the day, when leveling in Everquest is just killing mobs, it was fine until Wow showed up with this revolutionary ‘quest’ system that didn’t feel grindy. The then revolutionary quest system is now grindy to us veterans of Wow. so games moved to improve the quality of those quests, and added in new incentives. The evolution within Wow lead to better quests than vanilla wow to veil the grind. (Goblin, Worgen, DK starter quests). TOR was special in that for many people, the grind was forgotten and thus veiled very well because you really wanted to happen next in the story (I am among these people that played my Imperial Agent to death just to find out what happens).
  
  Conclusion: GW2′s renown heart system does little innovation for the veiling and mitigating of the grind. It only serves as convenience for not needing to talk to and return to a quest giver. If I took all of say, Goblin starter zone separate it into 5 renown hearts and give it almost no story to veil the grind, but each renown heart has about 40 mobs or crate pick ups would it be better?
  
  Most arguments I’ve seen were “theres no other way to do it”, but my message is really a call for improvement of just the most basic things. One way is the variety of mobs and abilities. Mikeb talked about this as an idea for TERA starting zone. The grind is not the system, but killing the same tree over and over again. In GW2 they just give you no turn in walk and the option to channel something instead. My view is, killing mobs has to kinda take some tactical planning in your head. A game like Dark Souls was never grindy because even killing 3 mobs was a huge victory. In most MMOs, 3 mobs is just a vehicle of exp, and a slow subtle use classical conditioning to seek rewards like random drops. Variety or actual thought when it comes to fighting mobs. Take your pick.
  
  But hey, maybe the veil DID work, because I’ve got some detractors. It just didn’t work for me.
  - Old Ben
    
    TD;DR: If you’re playing GW2 the way you played WoW or SWTOR, you’re doing it wrong, and your boredom is self-inflicted.
    
    > If i give you to the option to fill up a bar with either with filling my
    > unlimited spawning shirts, scrubbing my unlimited spawning
    > pans or making my unlimited spawning beds, it would still be
    > grindy right?
    
    The fact that your shirts spawn infinitely (which I assume is what you mean by “unlimited”) is irrelevant; what matters is how many you need to make the NPC in question like you (i.e., to fill up the bar). And obviously that can’t be “infinite”, or the bar would never actually fill up.
    
    It can be “too many”, of course, but I didn’t find any activity in GW2 where I had to perform the same action more than 5 or 6 times, except possibly when it came to fighting creatures, but, by your own definition above, that is “not grindy” because each fight can be slightly different (depending on how many enemies you pull, which type of weapon you use, what tactics you adopt, how other players and nearby creatures interfere, etc.). Even then, I don’t think I ever had to kill more than 8 or 10 identical creatures for a renown heart event. I have no idea where you were playing if you had to do “40 crate pick-ups”.
    
    There’s no “veiling of the grind”. Watering plants is a repetitive task. They don’t try to pretend that each plant you water is an exciting and unique experience. They just design the event so that a) you can pick between multiple actions and b) you only need to perform those actions a handful of times.
    
    There’s nothing wrong with repetitive tasks per se; a lot of tasks in real life are repetitive and an RPG is, up to a point, a “world simulator”. It would feel extremely weird and unrealistic if a farmer asked you to help by watering a single plant. And it would feel extremely boring if the game required you to water 500 before letting you move on. But in fact there is only a dozen or so “waterable” plants at the farm, and if you position yourself well before using the bucket you can water two (maybe three) with each click. It takes about ten seconds to water all of them (and you don’t have to do it at all if you don’t want to).
    
    > killing mobs has to kinda take some
    > tactical planning in your head.
    
    You can’t really expect level 3 zones to require advanced tactics when players don’t even have all their abilities unlocked (let alone an understanding of how to use them) yet.
    
    > GW2′s renown heart system does little innovation [...]
    > It only serves as convenience for not needing to talk to
    > and return to a quest giver.
    
    The heart events are not meant to be particularly innovative; they’re basically a cross between traditional questing and reputation turn-ins, where you unlock a vendor by helping with some “logical” task (get apples for a pie maker, help a farmer feed cattle and water plants, etc.). Many of them do have turn-ins, and you do have to return to the “quest giver” if you want to buy from him / her. They’re there to give players used to other MMOs a familiar (though streamlined) mechanic.
    
    The (somewhat) innovative part are the dynamic events and the way they chain into each other.
    
    > It just didn’t work for me.
    
    If something feels “grindy” (or just uninteresting) to you, you can simply skip it. You can get several levels just by walking around the main cities unlocking waypoints and visiting points of interest. If you continue to perform some repetitive action that you don’t enjoy, well, that’s kind of self-inflicted pain.
    
    Just because you can repeat a task five, ten, or a thousand times, that doesn’t mean you have to. GW2 is very much not SWTOR. It’s designed to let you decide what to do next. If you just can’t think in those terms (and feel that you must perform each action to exhaustion before moving to the next, and so on) then you probably won’t enjoy it.
    
    The only part of GW2 similar to SWTOR would be the personal story, but SWTOR does that a lot better (better writing, better script, better voice acting). Personally I don’t really see the point of following a “personal story” in an MMO (single-player games can do that a lot better), so GW2 has a much bigger (and more long-term) appeal for me.
    
    P.S. – I found the goblin and worgen starting areas in WoW painful. There was no choice involved and not even a way to skip it. It was like being stuck on rails but having to pedal all the way. Just the thought of having to go through all that again was enough to make me never want to roll another character of those races. Games are about freedom of choice (and multiple outcomes); if I just want to be “told a story” I’ll watch a movie or read a book.
    - loki4687
      
      I have such a problem with this reply.
      1. You used TL;DR, why bother replying if youre not going to make an issue.
      2. How can you go TL;DR and then write something longer than the reply.
      3. You’re not answering anything setforth to warrant a reply
    - Old Ben
      
      Seriously? Is it that hard to understand?
      
      “TL;DR” in this instance means “if THIS post is too long for you to read, here’s the short version”.
  - snikendelarveføtter
    
    Why do you even discuss hearts/renowned quests. They are not DE’s, and was never intended to be. My guess is that AN put those in there so people at least had something looking like “normal” quests. You might have 5 hearts in an area, but you’ll have 20-30 DE’s and that is the major difference from other mmo’s.
- http://profile.yahoo.com/ITHF7XKYGVXFAPCDMDJTKHLBBU Lian Wan
  
  Heh actually you *can* get in one hit for credit if no one else is doing the event. I actually got gold for an event where I fought one centaur, died in the process then went off somewhere else. Could have been a bug.
  - Old Ben
    
    Maybe you discovered the secret event “hit a centaur and go off somewhere else”.
    
    Actually, I got that a couple of times, too (credit for some event that I didn’t even have listed on my screen, and was nowhere near me). Probably a bug.
    - http://profile.yahoo.com/ITHF7XKYGVXFAPCDMDJTKHLBBU Lian Wan
      
      Well if no one else did the event I would have been the top (and only) contributor.
    - Old Ben
      
      If no one else did the event, then it shouldn’t have succeeded. And you don’t get credit for events that fail.
      
      So either the game was just resetting the event (and giving you credit was a bug) or the event isn’t properly balanced (and the NPCs manage to succeed even without help from players), which is also indicative of a bug.
snikendelarveføtter

What Old Ben said + you need to take into consideration that the starting zones had a much larger population than they normally will have after launch, so you will see a much larger variety of dynamic events then, because DE’s will be given the opportunity to evolve and not be zerged the instant they pop up. If you went to the higher zones during the beta, you would have seen that.
My advice to you is to just run out in the world and explore and take part in whatever you feel like along the way. That approach got me more than enough exp to move on to the next zone.

PS! they still are’nt done tweeking the exp gain, so you might see changes there as well.

pandora005

Skyrim is just crap for the stupid console-UI and the fact many NPCs had only one line and didnt react to changes in the world … like the court mage sending me to the wizard academy when I was archmage already.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_7UCDEUKEHKZZCEGBRAQAKTOFOY The Undeniable Truth

Really can’t wait until the Netflix advertising blitz is over. I have to skip a few minutes every episode.

Sklys

It seems to me that you folks (game breaker and other) are missing the point of hearts/evemts.
In the starting areas, yes they repeat of the same thing a lot but in the higher areas they change each time threw. ie: kill the bad guys before they take the town but next time threw they will have the town etc. As expained by your folks/A-net it works on a slid up or down scale. At least seem to as I went along.

Jay

They also give Karma rewards, which became my main reason for completing all of them. IDC about a 100% completion score, but I do care about having access to top gear for my level.
- http://profile.yahoo.com/ITHF7XKYGVXFAPCDMDJTKHLBBU Lian Wan
  
  I only found out after the weekend but apparently they also provide recipes for crafting green items. Although the only recipe I saw was for apple pie but I sorta stopped checking the heart NPCs after that one.

ArcherAvatar

Tera = Wall o’ text grind-style quests w/ action combat that is actually NOT action combat (have to stop and stay in place to use skills.)
^This is why it’s not as popular on the site…

pc11

High level skills in Tera no longer root you. Stop commenting on games you only beta tested tio lvl 5…
- ArcherAvatar
  
  Really? Well, that makes it all better then right? Now all you have to worry about is the wall o’text repetitive grindtastic questing, and the constant subliminal annoyance of kill steals, node competition, etc that makes you dread whenever another player shows up in a F***ing MMO!
  TERA = old paradigm / flawed design at it’s core.
  
  Hey, if you’re still enjoying the restrictions of trinity-based class systems, and the constant antagonism of flawed design mechanics, don’t let me stop you… I enjoyed them for roughly a decade…
  Personally, I tired of that crap, and so are a LOT of other folks. MikeS was casually questioning why opinion on the site was against TERA, and in favor of GW2… these are the reasons. You don’t have to like them… you don’t have to agree with them… but they are still the facts, and you’re self-delusional denial does not change them.
  - pc11
    
    lol so just because you prefer GW2 gamestyle over Tera that means GW2 is the superior. Yes because you are the one defining the current paradigm of MMOs LOL
    
    Get off your fanboy high horse.
    
    My comment adressed the fact that you were making a negative comment over something you know nothing about (opinion based on 10-20min of gameplay), and your reply did not adress that. Instead you went on a fanboy rant.
    
    Go learn some argumentation skills.

Sklys

BTW game breaker folks good talk and views on the mmos of the week

Krzysztof Kotarba

1st person combat in games is not natural… Depth perception doesn’t exist, because screen only simulate 3D world but you still looking at 2D plane. In real life you use both eyes so you can “see” depth.

Old Ben

> 1st person combat in games is not natural…

Yeah, that’s why FPS is such a forgotten genre…

> Depth perception doesn’t exist, because screen only
> simulate 3D world but you still looking at 2D plane. In
> real life you use both eyes so you can “see” depth.

Depth perception doesn’t depend exclusively on stereo vision; lots of people with a single working eye are able to function perfectly. We can judge distances just fine as long as we have some reference (ex., the ground) with depth “hints” (perspective). The place where the lack of stereo vision becomes a problem is when you’re fighting underwater (or in the air) and there’s no way to distinguish something “slightly smaller” from something “slightly further away”. But those issues affect both 1st person and 3rd person view.

1st person combat in Skyrim works fine (in fact, a lot better than 3rd person combat, because you don’t have your own character blocking the view), although 3rd person is nice to be able to look around corners and spot enemies coming from behind (unrealistic, but practical).

One thing I liked about GW2 was that (unlike WoW), the sound seems to be rendered based on the position of the camera, rather than the position of the character. This feels a lot more natural. In WoW, if your character is facing the camera, sounds coming from the right of your screen are actually played through your left speaker / headphone, because the game is basing the sound position on the character’s orientation.
- Jay
  
  Yes, the sound detail in GW2 is fantastic. It’s one of those background features that truly make the game special.

http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr

Hi Mike Schaffnit, I don’t remember seeing more than five minutes of the movie Memento. But I do have this tattoo on my arm that says, “Don’t trust MikeS.” What do you think that means? jk

With that said, I thought the movie ran backwards in 5 min chunks, with standard movie flashback to what he could remember. Guess I’ll need to re-watch the movie with my new gamebreaker Netflix account.

snikendelarveføtter

@Mike S. Conserning your thoughts about dynamic events, you have to keep in mind, that the event cycles where sped up for the beta. Another importent aspect is that the amount of people in the starting zone, is not gonna be the norm after launch, so you wont have zergs running around completing every single event that pops up. This prevents the dynamic event chains to go either way and that is why we didnt see the variety in events that are available in that zone.
Once i got to higher level zones with a more normal population, I got to experience the DE chains going more back and forth and that added alot more variation to them.

Grant Butler

Oh not this cunt again!

http://www.facebook.com/kayla.roese Kayla Roese

Moderators.. please delete this dude^

Grant Butler

ROFL someone from DAOC is working on every new MMO these days and it hasn’t made PVP good in any of them. It takes more than one person to make a game and all these companies are public traded so they listen to their stocks.

MMOs are just fucking shit now, accept that there hasn’t been a good MMO since WoW, we’ve all played every MMO under the sun and that’s why there is this massive hype for each MMO as people are waiting for something good and then are disappointed.

This genre is made up by sub par developers the AAA ones don’t touch it but Blizzard and even then their B team works on WoW now.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_R35J5EUERGS3E6JRIQMBCDTRRY Nathan I

mike s needs to watch guildcast and listen to scott’s comments, you see one event in the chain, then you leave, then the next part of that chain fails, so it goes back to the original event that you saw etc.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_R35J5EUERGS3E6JRIQMBCDTRRY Nathan I

also, should point out, circle strafing only works against low level mobs and only in 1v1. In the higher levels mobs have a lot more abilities beyond “punch you in the face”

integerx

Elder Scrolls MMO:
-No action combat
-WoW-like combat
-Third person
-Race alliances that make no sense
-Elder Scrolls only in name

FAIL

http://twitter.com/Shiandi_85 Helen Pomfret

Mike S I see what you did there with the Netflix thing….sneaky sneaky

Bluecewe

Yeah, actually made me think a movie and/or TV show might be a somewhat interesting endeavour for GBTV.

ceewolf

the adverts are becoming more interesting than the show

http://www.facebook.com/people/John-Alvino/1094406295 John Alvino

jas is back? JAS IS BACK? JAS IS BACK!!!!!

SiderFace

“People will find something to B*t*h about” ~J.Winter

so accurate.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Joao-Vicente/100000881627920 João Vicente

Didnt watch the whole show but i wanted to comment on this before i forget.

About ES MMO.. they didn’t anounce it on consoles maybe because PS3 and X360 are at the end of their life spawn and ps4 and new xbox are on the way? So if hey make this MMO it will take a while and when they finish it maybe those consoles are out.

It might be that. It may go to ps4/new xbox. Who knows.

pc11

The game is already announced for 2013. There will not be any new gen console released by then, and even if there as the game would not have been developed with that technology in mind.

Also it is “life span” not “spawn” :p

http://twitter.com/SakuyaFM Saku-chwan~ | さくちゅあん

When a big site fucks up a meme, something’s wrong.

IN THE KNEE, DAMMIT. IN. THE. KNEE. NOT TO THE KNEE.

http://www.facebook.com/tony.golightly Tony Golightly

WTF IS UP WITH THESE ADS… i just saw 5 minutes of a SC2 match before i finally said “screw this” and clicked skip…

http://www.facebook.com/people/Ryan-Watkins/1182414346 Ryan Watkins

People haven’t seen Memento???
Kids these days…

http://www.facebook.com/jason.horton2 Jason Horton

I got out of bed to say this im just so annoyed at how stupid mike is, i cant stand the dribble coming out of his mouth, especially when talking about GW2. – buddy, just dont talk about it at all please.

and jasmine, i love you to bits welcome back to TWIMMO!

This Week In MMO: Arrow To The MMO

The Republic Ep142:
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Unicorn Duck Shadow Puppet Ep4:
WildStar For The Holidays?

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Affliction Warlock

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