Guild Wars 2

[keith.lamothe]

This is where I've been for the past several weeks. In case anyone was wondering why I completely dropped off the forums.

I thought maybe you'd found that a gelatinous cube requires more than a mop to clean up

Glad you're enjoying GW2!  It does seem pretty successful at delivering a good experience.  And yea, no-sub-fee is a good thing.

[Wingflier]

Gotta say I disagree with Bob that there's no grind whatsoever, but then again my "standards" are extremely high when it comes to what I consider grinding.  What I will say (which I touched on in my last post) is that they temper the grind with discovering the world and doing cool new things, so it definitely takes the emphasis away from it; even if you're still doing it.  You may not FEEL like you're doing it, and that's what matters.

Took some screenshots in game:

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These are all taken in the human starting city, Divinity's Reach.  I believe the woman in the third picture is the Goddess Melandru.

[BobTheJanitor]

How do you define 'grind'? Before I attempt a rebuttal. 

[Wingflier]

I would define "grind" in a RPG the same way I would define "filler" in an anime or TV show.  In other words, content put there simply to make the experience (or series) last longer than it would otherwise, but which doesn't realistically progress the plot nor need to exist.

GW2 makes this super easy to define because of the personal storyline.  You know that your ultimate objective, regardless of what you choose, is to kill this huge ass dragon that's threatening the entire world.  Everything aside from that is tertiary, though maybe necessary in developing your skills as a fighter and/or person to be able to take on such a tremendous task. 

If you simply follow the personal story quests, there is no way you can possibly keep up with the level requirements because you aren't awarded that much for doing parts of your own story.  In-between elements of your personal story, you're expected to go out into the wild, discover new things, and help people at random.  This is mildly related to your personal story, but is not necessary for your personal story to exist; and sometimes blatantly contradicts it.

For example, in my own personal story I found out that a very high-ranking officer was a traitor who betrayed his own legion, and my next task was to report this IMMEDIATELY to my supervisor.  Well the level requirement of that quest was so high that I probably spent 3 or 4 days doing other things (including playing on other characters because I still wasn't sure I wanted to be that class [the story for her is absolutely boring and terrible]), but when I finally got around to the right level, I continued the story.

This is very inconsistent and makes no sense lore-wise.  Why would I wait days to tell my superior officer about this crucial piece of information while I frolicked around the countryside helping poor farmers and laypeople?  That's filler content, no doubt about it.  Yet I couldn't continue the quest immediately either because I wasn't high enough level.

Grinding is part of the accepted norms of the MMO experience.  People WANT to level their character, because it gives them (the player) a feeling of personal progression, even though you haven't really improved at all as a person.  I could write my Psychological Dissertation on a subject like this, but there's many other more interesting psychological phenomena which I find much more important and pertinent to society unfortunately (such as religion).

Because I consider myself an intellectually and emotionally mature person, I receive little "pleasure" out of leveling.  I do not feel like I've grown as a person in any meaningful way; if anything it reinforces the notion in my mind that I'm wasting my freaking time.  However, I continue to play because I'm mildly interested in the overall story, the lore of the game, and the eventual challenges that await me at higher levels (I've heard the dungeons in GW2 are extremely difficult, which I'm anticipating with much excitement).

If it were up to me, I'd start out at the highest level and just do the story content, but I realize I'm part of the vast minority in this respect, and not the target person for an MMO.  The grind is a necessary aspect to make people feel as though they are improving in a meaningful way; if there were no filler content, it would be hard to have an extensive and relevant leveling system, so this is the nature of the beast.

[keith.lamothe]

If the personal story thing were entirely removed, would the other stuff you did between those two story missions still be filler?

[Wingflier]

Well I like to think that I would explore the world and help people of my own volition, but it's very different when you're being FORCED to do these things in order to progress, especially when you have something more important to attend to.

As I said, starting out at the max level would make the game quite different for me.

[BobTheJanitor]

Yeah that's an odd definition. What you call 'grind' I would call 'playing the game'. The exploring and crafting and killing monsters and finding dynamic events and completing renown hearts and so on... that's not filler. That's it, that's the game. The personal story is spaced out to give you a new story mission every level or two, and completing it does usually give you a nice chunk of XP towards the next level. But that's not the whole game, that's just part of the fun. Now you may not enjoy anything else except that, in which case I feel bad for you. But I'm having a blast with each and every part of the game.

Now if you want to talk about a real grind, I can think of a few from my WoW days that would make your eyes bleed. Grinding reputation with certain factions by doing a quest that involved running across the zone, killing 10 things, then running back and turning it in for 250 rep, then getting the quest again and repeating it over and over and over and over and over. THAT was a grind. But I wanted my pretty purple tiger mount. And I can't complain too much about that one, because it was my choice to do it. The real grind in WoW was just doing the same dungeons every week for months and months hoping for some piece of gear to drop for you, so you would have stats high enough to do the next tier of dungeon and start the cycle again. That's the real bad one.

There are a few things in GW2 that might amount to an optional grind though. All cosmetic, mind you. But the top level armor and weapons can take quite a lot of play time to get. However, they are the definition of cosmetic upgrades. Yes your sword may be on fire and leave rainbow trails behind you, but stat-wise it's a carbon copy of this top tier sword I bought off the trading post for 20 silver. That's a grind I have no problem with, because it's purely optional.

Edit: I get what you're saying, when the story has weird breaks in it, it can be jarring. "The monsters are coming, we've got to warn the town! Go, now, there's no time!" (Recommended level, 2 levels above you) But that doesn't make the other stuff between it filler, it just means that games are games and game mechanics never map on to our expectation of reality exactly the way we'd like them to.

[Wingflier]

Now if you want to talk about a real grind, I can think of a few from my WoW days that would make your eyes bleed.

Most likely.  Pretty much every MMO I've ever tried besides GW1 and 2 have elicited such an immediately negative and vile response from me that the acrid smell of hatred emanating from my twitching body was probably almost palpable.

Edit: I get what you're saying, when the story has weird breaks in it, it can be jarring. "The monsters are coming, we've got to warn the town! Go, now, there's no time!" (Recommended level, 2 levels above you) But that doesn't make the other stuff between it filler, it just means that games are games and game mechanics never map on to our expectation of reality exactly the way we'd like them to.

Actually, I'd make the argument that the current design mechanics of an MMO (including most of the content of GW2) don't reflect reality at all.

You asked before how I would define "grinding", and I'll respond now to that directly:  If there's no chance of me losing or dying, it's grinding.  What on Earth is the point of doing something in which there is no chance of failure?

Even in our real lives, everything which we assign value to has a high or at least lingering chance of failure, and typically a massively negative implication if it does.  When we go to work, if we don't work hard, we risk getting fired.  If in our relationships, we aren't loving, nurturing, and thoughtful, the other person might leave us.  Hell, even during what society perceives as some of the most enjoyable events, such as having sex, there's still a massive pressure to "perform" well, that can sometimes be so intense that it prevents you from even enjoying the sex.  In short, everything worth doing in life has stakes attached to it; if it didn't have stakes attached to it, we wouldn't do it!

Why would you work hard if you're just getting paid as much as everybody else, including the people who aren't working?  Why would you study for a test that you know you're going to get an A on anyway?  Why would you emotionally invest yourself into a relationship that has no chance of failing?  In fact, the things in our lives which have the HIGHEST stakes are the things which are typically the most important to us!

Look at religion, look at how it tries to make the stakes astronomically high just so people will pay attention to it:  Conform to our ideals, spend eternity in paradise.  Reject our ideals, spend eternity being tortured.  The stakes don't get any higher folks!  Yes, it's ridiculous to think that anybody believes this, but it just goes to show that humans are stake-driven creatures (and vampires too, but that's a different type of stake  ).  If a video game does not reflect that, then the video game does not reflect reality - PERIOD.  Hence my hatred for the typical MMO formula and my negative theories about it.

One contradiction you may point out about my spiel here is that I've already said I enjoy the story mode, and that watching movies or reading books are an activity that people partake in that have no stakes.  This is true, however recognize that in any good movie, book, or other form of entertainment, you're connecting to the stakes of the characters!  A story wouldn't be any good if there wasn't anything at stake would it?  Of course not.  In fact, what separates a good writer/director from a bad one is convincing you that the stakes are really high, and that you should care about the conclusion.

So, in closing, I'm of the mind that if you're not challenging yourself, or involved in a story about somebody else challenging themselves, you're wasting your time, and you're certainly not participating in anything resembling a reflection of reality.

There are some things in life which we enjoy doing which don't really have stakes, such as going on a nature hike (though this can be somewhat dangerous depending), but usually those aren't the types of things that we work towards and obsess over, those are just a break from the things we really care about.

All of these grindy places between story mode quests, there is absolutely no chance of you losing.  Even if you die you just resurrect at the nearest waypoint and keep doing; that's not fun for me.  It's not realistic and I can't break the 4th barrier to enjoy it as much as I wish I could.

[BobTheJanitor]

Well there's an achievement for making it to 80 without dying. You could try for that, I guess. The rest of that contains too many interesting philosophical points for me to attempt to respond to it between calls at work, though...

[Bossman]

Would you rather play a game where you had to spend hours upon hours of killing mobs just to gain a single level, and dying gives you an XP debt? That is a classic definition of "grinding", and I can name a number of MUDs and MMOs that do that. The thing is, most players in that type of game tend to go after the weakest mob that will still give them XP because, while humans like getting rewarded for what they do, they are also risk-adverse. Why go after a golem at your level that can potentially kill you and set back your progress when the mushrooms four levels lower can be slaughtered by the dozens before you need to stop and refill your HP, and they give XP at a faster rate?

Also, there are other penalties that MMOs use to punish dying. Item durability loss is a gold penalty, weak at early levels, but painful at high levels. Corpse running is a time penalty, time you could have spent towards advancement. Worse, a party wipe in a dungeon means you have to do much of it all over again. EVE Online is one of the biggest punishers: lose your ship, its equipment, its cargo, all the costly implants you stuck in your character's head and have to buy a new clone to avoid skill loss.

There are some things in life which we enjoy doing which don't really have stakes, such as going on a nature hike (though this can be somewhat dangerous depending), but usually those aren't the types of things that we work towards and obsess over, those are just a break from the things we really care about.

Unless you're one of the few who has gone into e-sports, video games fall squarely into this. People don't play them to put food on the table or a roof over their heads. They fulfil the esteem needs of Maslow's hierarchy: you feel great when you beat a hard boss, solve a challenging puzzle or go up a level. But there are other ways of fulfilling those needs. Obsessing over a game can be dangerous, as seen in those gamers who have died by ignoring their physiological needs. Was the potential reward worth dying for? I doubt it.

[Wingflier]

Would you rather play a game where you had to spend hours upon hours of killing mobs just to gain a single level, and dying gives you an XP debt? That is a classic definition of "grinding", and I can name a number of MUDs and MMOs that do that. The thing is, most players in that type of game tend to go after the weakest mob that will still give them XP because, while humans like getting rewarded for what they do, they are also risk-adverse. Why go after a golem at your level that can potentially kill you and set back your progress when the mushrooms four levels lower can be slaughtered by the dozens before you need to stop and refill your HP, and they give XP at a faster rate?

False Choice Fallacy -  A type of logical fallacy that involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

I never said that this was a better solution.  The fact that I'm playing Guild Wars at all, when I normally hate MMOs with a fiery passion, means that their system is a bit better than what has come before, but still leaves a lot to be desired.

Also, there are other penalties that MMOs use to punish dying. Item durability loss is a gold penalty, weak at early levels, but painful at high levels. Corpse running is a time penalty, time you could have spent towards advancement. Worse, a party wipe in a dungeon means you have to do much of it all over again. EVE Online is one of the biggest punishers: lose your ship, its equipment, its cargo, all the costly implants you stuck in your character's head and have to buy a new clone to avoid skill loss.

I think corpse running is definitely a little silly, and really only acts as a time tax for messing up, but for example having to reset the dungeon after so many deaths seems fair to me.  The alternative, which is just being able to respawn over and over until you blunt force the dungeon trivalizes the importance of it.  Whatever happened to the gamers that loved a challenge?  When we were young we played all kinds of games that made you restart a whole level when you lost, and we loved them.  I think games have become much the worse for straying away from that.

Eve Online is actually a very popular and successful MMO BECAUSE of how much it emulates reality.  Literally the entire Universe it is built on is completely run by the players.  Every quest, story, and situation is only based on the Universe of the game, and the players almost completely dictate that.  Even the entire economy of the game is run by players.  This kind of player-driven realism is unheard of in any other MMO, and I think it makes Eve Online a wonderful and unique game to add to the genre.

Unless you're one of the few who has gone into e-sports, video games fall squarely into this. People don't play them to put food on the table or a roof over their heads. They fulfil the esteem needs of Maslow's hierarchy: you feel great when you beat a hard boss, solve a challenging puzzle or go up a level. But there are other ways of fulfilling those needs. Obsessing over a game can be dangerous, as seen in those gamers who have died by ignoring their physiological needs. Was the potential reward worth dying for? I doubt it.

Once again you're committing a logical fallacy by making a Straw Man Argument.

It is actually taking your position that most people become obsessed with a game and die from it.  Professional gamers who take their job very seriously (hence huge stakes) typically do not commit suicide.  They play and become successful, or quit and find something else to do.  These are driven people with goals, and I don't think you can call using video games as your profession an unhealthy thing to do.

The people who are using video games as an escape from reality are the people you'll find committing suicide; but video games that are used to escape from reality are typically games that don't emulate reality.  There's a reason why the stereotypical World of Warcraft player is an 800 pound virgin with acne and and no social life.  Is he using World of Warcraft as a healthy source of entertainment, or an escape from reality?

It's ironic we're having this discussion in this forum because in AI War, the stakes are extremely high.  Once the player dies (unless you're playing with a friend), it's OVER.  And even if you are playing with a friend, you take a heavy penalty for losing your home base in the cost of AIP.  This is the kind of healthy game which (in my opinion) emulates the stakes of reality, and which challenges the player to push themselves and improve.  There are no levels for your character, there's no exp for your ships (that's changing with Champions but for the last 3 years there hasn't been), there's no hot girls shaking their breasts at you for killing an AI Command Station (hopefully that's in the next expansion); the value you get out of the game comes from your own sense of personal achievement.

As I said before, levels in an RPG create an illusion of achievement.  Deep down inside we all know we haven't achieved anything.  A 3 year old kid could level up in an RPG; I'm not exaggerating.  My cousin was successfully playing Counter-Strike at the age of 2, I watched him do it, and games like Counter-Strike require much more personal skill than an MMORPG.  If a 3 year old can do what you're doing, then you aren't achieving anything, I'm sorry.  It's the illusion of achievement.

Using a game to escape from reality, typically by removing the stakes of the game, is, in my opinion, a very unhealthy thing to do.  At least when you take a nature walk you're intimately connected with the trees, the forest, the lakes, the rivers, and natural places of the world.  The things people do to ESCAPE reality, such as chemically altering their brain by drinking excessive alcohol, partaking in drugs, having promiscuous sex, and playing mindless video games - these are all ways of chemically altering your brain to escape reality.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html - Here's an article about how MMORPGs put you in a Skinner Box.  They literally use the same formula we use on rats to dictate their behavior.

In my view, an emotionally and intellectually healthy person will not receive enjoyment from these arbitrary cues, and would much rather spend their time playing something which is fun but which actually challenges them as a person at the same time.

[keith.lamothe]

One thing to bear in mind when pegging the psychological niche of a game, is that "game" has a wider (colloquial, if not denotational) meaning than "challenge". 

Sometimes what I'm looking for is basically an interactive novel.  Granted, that can have its own form of challenge (more in the way of correctly predicting what results a given conversation response will have, etc), but often it's no more challenging than turning a page while reading.  And that's fine, in the same sense that reading a novel is fine.

Of course, if someone goes into a game like that expecting a challenge... well, not gonna be giving it 5 stars, probably.

[Bossman]

I never said that this was a better solution.

Nor did I posit it as a solution, mearly an alternative. I didn't say it was the only one, though you think I implied that. It was more to illustrate the point that as stakes rise, people become risk adverse and pick lazier courses of action.

Professional gamers who take their job very seriously (hence huge stakes) typically do not commit suicide.  They play and become successful, or quit and find something else to do.  These are driven people with goals, and I don't think you can call using video games as your profession an unhealthy thing to do.

That's why I said they are the exception, not the rule. The average gamer isn't earning money by playing video games. So why are they playing? I think it's most likely to have fun. And you don't need high stakes to have fun. Sure, they enhance that feeling of accomplishment, but sometimes you don't want the extra challenge that comes with them. If I come home from work frustrated, I'm not reaching for AI War, I'm going for Minesweeper. Two minutes for an advanced round means I'm sacrificing very little time for a small boost when I've cracked the puzzle.

As I said before, levels in an RPG create an illusion of achievement.  Deep down inside we all know we haven't achieved anything.

The same could be said for playing any game where you don't get a tangible benefit in the real world. Yet here we are, on a forum for playing with Skinner boxes. There is a small emotional benefit from them that is variable on both the type of box and the personality of the user. But nobody is arguing that any one or even all of the boxes will fill all your needs.

[Wingflier]

Ewwwww, looking back at my own comments from several years ago is nothing short of cringeworthy.

Anyway, I wanted to bring up Guild Wars 2 and the changes thereof as part of the developing meta-narrative we've been discussing about gaming company business decisions.

Arenanet (the company behind both Guild Wars games) realized that their initial launch was less than stellar. The game was loaded with bugs, grinding, and some very serious design problems, many of which were discussed in this thread.

Given that the game's model was not subscription-based, and relied purely on initial purchases and microtransactions, this was an unfortunate turn of events for ANET. So about a year ago, they decided to address the problem by creating a standalone expansion to Guild Wars 2 called "Heart of Thorns". This expansion fixed many of the problems with the main game, including many of the issues that had been present at launch, and also adds a lot more lategame content (something which was severely lacking), masteries, profession options, PVP modes, and even an entirely new class. Needless to say, it's a pretty huge expansion, and given that it fundamentally changes how the game is played, is considered by most players to be a required purchase to enjoy everything the game has to offer.

Here's the issue: The base game is included in the expansion, and the expansion costs no less for those who already own the game. In other words, a player who already bought the original game (such as myself), could spend up to another $100 purchasing the expansion (Ultimate edition) with no kind of benefit whatsoever for already having owned the game.

As someone who spent $200+ on the original game to pre-order the Collector's Edition back in 2011, this is very disappointing to say the least. I feel like they should reward their loyal players in some way.

Well anyway, this seems like more shady business practices to me, unless I somehow missed something (but I don't think I have). I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.

edit: It looks as though the "core" accounts (those who bought the original game) do have some benefits over the Free to Play accounts, but they're mostly pretty trivial, and there is no benefit to those who owned the base game before buying the expansion.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Yea, I really tried to like Guild Wars 2 when I played it late last year. I mean, really tried. I don't do that with MMOs. I got up to level 60? 70? I think before I decided I had enough. Did World V World, PVP, dungeons in a group and all sorts of things. But the grind is so mind-numbing that I basically have to run YouTube/Netflix/Hulu on the other monitor to keep interested in the game. I know for some on here, *cough* Managarmr *cough* that's nothing special but I don't do that. Maybe I'll run a podcast in the background if I'm playing something like Euro Truck Sim but otherwise I prefer focusing and enjoying the game in front of me. I think the biggest problem I had was that the combat never clicked with me. Just something about it...felt wrong. I've never been able to put my finger on why.

Anyway, to answer your question. I don't particularly have an issue with the expansion not being discounted for long-time players, especially when you haven't paid a subscription. Although the fact that you spent over $200 to pre-order the collector's edition is O_O. I mean, buying the expansion is going to require the base game to run anyway and trying to double dip on new players to require them to buy both the base-game and expansion as separate purchases won't win you any fans. Especially when you're running a Freemium system at the same time. Presumably the people who bought the original game got their money's worth by this point and time and Arenanet feels that paying for the expansion is worth the cost. If not, well, then you don't have to pay for it, that's their assumption anyway.

As for me, I definitely regret buying that expansion because I only lasted another month before quitting for a while. I never should have bought it but I thought some friends were going to keep playing. When they didn't, I lost the last bit of interest I had in it.