In Diessa Plateau, there is the Flame Legion Battles meta-event, which are a chain of capture objectives between the allied charr and enemy Flame Legion. If players can push the Flame Legion all the way back, the Flame Legion actually open up a mini-dungeon called the Font of Rhand. Players can all enter this puzzle and trap-filled dungeon en masse. The open-world dungeon is closed unless the meta-event is beaten. I died a stupid death in the Font of Rhand, alone and stupid, and when I finally warped back near the dungeon entrance the Flame Legion had closed off the dungeon portal as they had reclaimed a part of the meta-event.
That's awesome! PvE is going to be so much better than my wildest dreams.
In Diessa Plateau, there is the Flame Legion Battles meta-event, which are a chain of capture objectives between the allied charr and enemy Flame Legion. If players can push the Flame Legion all the way back, the Flame Legion actually open up a mini-dungeon called the Font of Rhand. Players can all enter this puzzle and trap-filled dungeon en masse. The open-world dungeon is closed unless the meta-event is beaten. I died a stupid death in the Font of Rhand, alone and stupid, and when I finally warped back near the dungeon entrance the Flame Legion had closed off the dungeon portal as they had reclaimed a part of the meta-event.
That's awesome! PvE is going to be so much better than my wildest dreams.
Yeah, that sounds really neat. Wanna hear about more of those.
Well the "unskilled players" topic does have a pretty negative connotation to it in general, even if it is a legitimate concern (to a small degree). I can't see it leading to very positive discussion. Some people have noted that GW2 will encourage skill in its players beyond that of a typical repetitious MMO. So there is reason to be optimistic.
Dude, I really need to improve my princessfairy's DPS. Could you link me to that site?
And I think there will be plenty of us in the PA guild who are fun and easygoing folks. I like to improve my gameplay skill, but I also strongly dislike the rush to min/max everything about an MMO from the moment it launches. I'd really rather be exploring, experimenting with the gameplay systems, and working together with other sociable players to conquer challenges whether we've got "optimal" character configurations or not. I'd rather hang out with somebody who is fun to talk to and willing to take risks than somebody who wants to be totally srs bizness and do everything by the book any day.
Want to find me on a gaming service? I'm SwashbucklerXX everywhere.
Really enjoyed the Kill Ten Rats article for the meta-events and other PvE goodness. I wonder how "pockets [sub-areas of a region that down-level you]" work in terms of size, and how frequent they are in the world?
Isn't all of this the exact reason we have What A Nice Guild?
Yes. And it's pretty much been decided by our somewhat obtuse consensus that it's going to be our nexus guild at launch and probably in beta. Everyone wants to be in a nice guild, right?
We can all have WANG next to our names as we journey through Tyria.
I thought the tag was going to be NICE, due to the fact that WANG would probably fall afoul of code of conduct rules.
Watching a video previously posted, I noticed that they incorporated a chat censor for profanity. (Right around 7:52, need to fullscreen the video to see it better)
Well, it's possible that it can be turned off. I don't see why it should restrict the higher age audiences.
The only reason I found it odd is because not only did the first one lack a censor, but (assumptions) the dialogue will more than likely feature profanity as well. Why this has become a thing all of a sudden I have no idea.
I'm pretty sure we already knew better than to make WANG the guild tag (if there even are guild tags?). People were saying we should make it PA instead. Anybody in the know will understand what What A Nice Guild stands for, anyway.
Want to find me on a gaming service? I'm SwashbucklerXX everywhere.
I'm pretty sure we already knew better than to make WANG the guild tag (if there even are guild tags?). People were saying we should make it PA instead. Anybody in the know will understand what What A Nice Guild stands for, anyway.
There are tags. Most of the press were in the same guild and had it in brackets next to their names.
Yeah, I think PA as the guild tag would be the best one to have personally.
0
lu tzeSweeping the monestary steps.Registered Userregular
edited March 2012
Wang may be a colloquialism for penis in the minds of you filthy bastards, but its primary meaning isn't genitally related at all!
A tenuous argument in the face of draconian "play it safe" censorship perhaps, and I'm not suggesting we draw any lines in the sand over it, but technically WANG shouldn't be a problem.
Wang may be a colloquialism for penis in the minds of you filthy bastards, but its primary meaning isn't genitally related at all!
A tenuous argument in the face of draconian "play it safe" censorship perhaps, and I'm not suggesting we draw any lines in the sand over it, but technically WANG shouldn't be a problem.
Wang may be a colloquialism for penis in the minds of you filthy bastards, but its primary meaning isn't genitally related at all!
A tenuous argument in the face of draconian "play it safe" censorship perhaps, and I'm not suggesting we draw any lines in the sand over it, but technically WANG shouldn't be a problem.
Wang may be a colloquialism for penis in the minds of you filthy bastards, but its primary meaning isn't genitally related at all!
A tenuous argument in the face of draconian "play it safe" censorship perhaps, and I'm not suggesting we draw any lines in the sand over it, but technically WANG shouldn't be a problem.
My biggest concern to the longevity of a diverse and robust guild wars 2 community isn't the difficulty level, its how well the game eases you into it. I mean in the course of play, how well of a job does it do introducing the concepts of dodging and whatnot.
WOW Cataclysm completely broke the average dungeon runner's experience over its knee with its out of the gate difficulty level. Basically you can level from level 1 to 85 knowing only the most cursory of your class mechanics (target an enemy, press the 2 button, repeat), and all the sudden you're expected to know the intricacies of agro swapping, line of sighting enemies, coordinated interrupts (without voice chat), crowd control, etc, etc.
I mean for old hats it wasn't an issue, but for all my casual friends it completely took the game out back and shot it in the head for them. It also made pugging a nightmarish experience, I think I spent more time in pugs wiping on the first boss of shadowfang keep than I did wiping on any cutting edge content raid boss.
This. The reason we have problems with the average player "not getting it" is because there's no introduction. It's as true for GW2 as it is for WOW, RIFT and TOR. The concern isn't that "the sucky players ruin our experience", it's that the long term viability of a game relies on it being able to make a casual player feel like a badass. WOW fixed this by making a majority of combat and content very simple, apparently until the last expansion.
My fear isn't that bad players ruin the experience, but that every bad player deserves the same chance to learn the mechanics through gameplay as the guys who read every article, tactica and strategy guide.
My biggest concern to the longevity of a diverse and robust guild wars 2 community isn't the difficulty level, its how well the game eases you into it. I mean in the course of play, how well of a job does it do introducing the concepts of dodging and whatnot.
WOW Cataclysm completely broke the average dungeon runner's experience over its knee with its out of the gate difficulty level. Basically you can level from level 1 to 85 knowing only the most cursory of your class mechanics (target an enemy, press the 2 button, repeat), and all the sudden you're expected to know the intricacies of agro swapping, line of sighting enemies, coordinated interrupts (without voice chat), crowd control, etc, etc.
I mean for old hats it wasn't an issue, but for all my casual friends it completely took the game out back and shot it in the head for them. It also made pugging a nightmarish experience, I think I spent more time in pugs wiping on the first boss of shadowfang keep than I did wiping on any cutting edge content raid boss.
This. The reason we have problems with the average player "not getting it" is because there's no introduction. It's as true for GW2 as it is for WOW, RIFT and TOR. The concern isn't that "the sucky players ruin our experience", it's that the long term viability of a game relies on it being able to make a casual player feel like a badass. WOW fixed this by making a majority of combat and content very simple, apparently until the last expansion.
My fear isn't that bad players ruin the experience, but that every bad player deserves the same chance to learn the mechanics through gameplay as the guys who read every article, tactica and strategy guide.
Well the thing was before the Cataclysm expansion in world of warcraft, dungeons were quite a bit easier and then heroic versions of them were much more difficult, but you could acclamate yourself to the mechanics in the easier version with much more margin for error (where failing to get out of a hazard would simply hurt your tank instead of instantly kill him). The forums complained it was too easy so they made the normal dungeons as hard as the heroics and the heroics as hard as some of the raid heroics (honestly that one forge blackrock boss on heroic is harder than almost all of the previous expansion's raid content, assuming you have just normal instance gear).
It's really hard for those of us who are hardcore to look at a game through the eyes of someone who is completely inexperienced with the genre. I'm not asking for a game to hold your hand, but there are tons of ways to introduce players to concepts instead of just dropping them in a room and expecting them to know that to avoid getting instantly killed you need to stand in a triangle on the colored platforms and rotate colors every 45 seconds, or hell even something less esoteric like "this boss heals, you guys need to take turns interrupting heals". I'm not aware of any mmo that teaches that concept to the players inside the game itself.
ANet have already said that events will get progressively more difficult/complicated at higher levels. To me this implies a steady increase in difficulty from forgiving 1-15, to come-on-you-need-to-try 15-25, to the first dungeon at 30 where you will have to play relatively well and cooperate with a team, and so on into the more dangerous areas.
I have always felt that GW1 was more demanding of skill than WoW,etc. It seems they have the steady ramp up of difficulty more or less in place in GW2 (possibly even more gradual than GW1). Presumably at release they will have a beginner tutorial also.
Wang may be a colloquialism for penis in the minds of you filthy bastards, but its primary meaning isn't genitally related at all!
A tenuous argument in the face of draconian "play it safe" censorship perhaps, and I'm not suggesting we draw any lines in the sand over it, but technically WANG shouldn't be a problem.
You do realize that in GW2 you literally cannot stop someone from standing next to you and scaling the event you are doing, right? That's why it's such an issue.
What's missing from this discussion is this: in GW2 you can also just walk away from that dude and do something else for a while. Catastrophically bad players can prevent you from doing a specific thing you feel like doing right now, by for example acting like pillocks in DEs because they're too busy looking at their flash new hats to fight properly, but most of the time you aren't going to be stuck with them, and their pillockery can't altogether prevent you from accessing new content. In traditional MMOs the quest structure tends to have bottlenecks in it (the final conversation with the major quest-giving NPC before she sends you off to the next area, and so on) that can be temporarily blocked off by sufficient levels of player incompetence or griefing, but in GW2 these scenarios are tucked away safely in your personal story instances.
Walking away from a DE because it's infested with distractable idiots with extremely good fashion sense and looking for something else to do might not be ideal, but it's more fun than griping about it.
My biggest concern to the longevity of a diverse and robust guild wars 2 community isn't the difficulty level, its how well the game eases you into it. I mean in the course of play, how well of a job does it do introducing the concepts of dodging and whatnot.
WOW Cataclysm completely broke the average dungeon runner's experience over its knee with its out of the gate difficulty level. Basically you can level from level 1 to 85 knowing only the most cursory of your class mechanics (target an enemy, press the 2 button, repeat), and all the sudden you're expected to know the intricacies of agro swapping, line of sighting enemies, coordinated interrupts (without voice chat), crowd control, etc, etc.
I mean for old hats it wasn't an issue, but for all my casual friends it completely took the game out back and shot it in the head for them. It also made pugging a nightmarish experience, I think I spent more time in pugs wiping on the first boss of shadowfang keep than I did wiping on any cutting edge content raid boss.
This. The reason we have problems with the average player "not getting it" is because there's no introduction. It's as true for GW2 as it is for WOW, RIFT and TOR. The concern isn't that "the sucky players ruin our experience", it's that the long term viability of a game relies on it being able to make a casual player feel like a badass. WOW fixed this by making a majority of combat and content very simple, apparently until the last expansion.
My fear isn't that bad players ruin the experience, but that every bad player deserves the same chance to learn the mechanics through gameplay as the guys who read every article, tactica and strategy guide.
Well the thing was before the Cataclysm expansion in world of warcraft, dungeons were quite a bit easier and then heroic versions of them were much more difficult, but you could acclamate yourself to the mechanics in the easier version with much more margin for error (where failing to get out of a hazard would simply hurt your tank instead of instantly kill him). The forums complained it was too easy so they made the normal dungeons as hard as the heroics and the heroics as hard as some of the raid heroics (honestly that one forge blackrock boss on heroic is harder than almost all of the previous expansion's raid content, assuming you have just normal instance gear).
It's really hard for those of us who are hardcore to look at a game through the eyes of someone who is completely inexperienced with the genre. I'm not asking for a game to hold your hand, but there are tons of ways to introduce players to concepts instead of just dropping them in a room and expecting them to know that to avoid getting instantly killed you need to stand in a triangle on the colored platforms and rotate colors every 45 seconds, or hell even something less esoteric like "this boss heals, you guys need to take turns interrupting heals". I'm not aware of any mmo that teaches that concept to the players inside the game itself.
This. The reason we have problems with the average player "not getting it" is because there's no introduction. It's as true for GW2 as it is for WOW, RIFT and TOR. The concern isn't that "the sucky players ruin our experience", it's that the long term viability of a game relies on it being able to make a casual player feel like a badass. WOW fixed this by making a majority of combat and content very simple, apparently until the last expansion.
My fear isn't that bad players ruin the experience, but that every bad player deserves the same chance to learn the mechanics through gameplay as the guys who read every article, tactica and strategy guide.
Few things.
1. A lot of game companies (and gaming culture—you did it right here, for example) tends to equate "casual player" with "incapable of playing well." This isn't true at all. "Casual player" is a loaded phrase. Examples: I played WoW very "casually" (couple hours a night, couple nights a week), but I raided and performed very well... or you have people who play WoW a lot (40 hours/week+), never raid or even do dungeons, but dedicate all of their time to collecting mounts and minipets.
2. Pandering towards the lowest common denominator of player in terms of skill is a bad idea. If you make a game that encompasses all skill levels, then you should take the lesser-skilled players and help them get better. I'm confident that's what GW2 will be doing.
3. I very much disagree with your assessment of "the long term viability" of GW2 relying on making "casual players" feel like a badass. There's no sub fee, so "long-term viability" is a whole different thing here, and GW2 isn't about making people feel like badasses: It's about allowing players to experience the story they want to experience, or do whatever the hell it is they want to do. Sure, feeling "badass" might be part of it if someone wants, but that's not the focus of this game.
You do realize that in GW2 you literally cannot stop someone from standing next to you and scaling the event you are doing, right? That's why it's such an issue.
What's missing from this discussion is this: in GW2 you can also just walk away from that dude and do something else for a while. Catastrophically bad players can prevent you from doing a specific thing you feel like doing right now, by for example acting like pillocks in DEs because they're too busy looking at their flash new hats to fight properly, but most of the time you aren't going to be stuck with them, and their pillockery can't altogether prevent you from accessing new content. In traditional MMOs the quest structure tends to have bottlenecks in it (the final conversation with the major quest-giving NPC before she sends you off to the next area, and so on) that can be temporarily blocked off by sufficient levels of player incompetence or griefing, but in GW2 these scenarios are tucked away safely in your personal story instances.
Walking away from a DE because it's infested with distractable idiots with extremely good fashion sense and looking for something else to do might not be ideal, but it's more fun than griping about it.
Plus, for the event to scale (as has been said) those people actually have to be active. I think it will be rare that you get multiple people in an event who are actually participating but doing so very poorly. If just one or two people are doing that, as is more likely, it is probably manageable.
You do realize that in GW2 you literally cannot stop someone from standing next to you and scaling the event you are doing, right? That's why it's such an issue.
You do realize that GW2 as is specially tooled to stop people just being near an event from making it scale right? They built it so that a minimum of action is actually needed to scale the event.
Especially when a lot of the time it can realistically be broken up into unemployed/has a job. Being hardcore doesn't make you good, just means you dedicate a lot of time to the game.
Especially when a lot of the time it can realistically be broken up into unemployed/has a job. Being hardcore doesn't make you good, just means you dedicate a lot of time to the game.
... I guess I'm 'hardcore' then ...
Like, see, that's the thing: Not even that can fit "hardcore". People wouldn't hesitate to call a lot of the super high-end raiding guilds "hardcore", but a lot of those people play a lot less than people who just collect minipets, or who run dungeons and fart around with their friends.
It's like... does "hardcore" mean people who play a ton of WoW? Or is it people who do a lot of stuff that's difficult? Conversely, what would "casual" be?
In reality, "hardcore" is just a label that people apply to themselves so that they can look down on other people who play differently than they do, and call those people "casual". It's stupid.
EDIT: Weird, the smilies are mixing up again. NO, :winky: DON'T LEAVE ME AGAIN
Caedere on
0
CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
Alot of us would be considered hardcore and casual at different times based on how much time we invest in a game, the fact that we post on this board, and the types of games we like, etc. It's a bunch of blanket stereotypes.
In reality, "hardcore" is just a label that people apply to themselves so that they can look down on other people who play differently than they do, and call those people "casual". It's stupid.
Um...I've considered myself a hardcore player from time to time, but I've never called people "casual" as an insult. I've been on both sides and those two terms just represent different commitments to the game. Ignorant hardcore gamers might look down on casual players, but not all hardcore gamers do. Squares and rectangles.
Steam: The_Zeta
LOL NA: Rednaz
Currently Playing: Dark Forces
Posts
That's awesome! PvE is going to be so much better than my wildest dreams.
Yeah, that sounds really neat. Wanna hear about more of those.
Steam (Ansatz) || GW2 officer (Ansatz.6498)
And I think there will be plenty of us in the PA guild who are fun and easygoing folks. I like to improve my gameplay skill, but I also strongly dislike the rush to min/max everything about an MMO from the moment it launches. I'd really rather be exploring, experimenting with the gameplay systems, and working together with other sociable players to conquer challenges whether we've got "optimal" character configurations or not. I'd rather hang out with somebody who is fun to talk to and willing to take risks than somebody who wants to be totally srs bizness and do everything by the book any day.
http://www.pixlglass.com/2012/02/web-team-lead-kate-welch-guild-wars-2.html
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
I think I had Aion in mind when I said that.
I'm going to have the fluffiest tail.
Chances are we're going to have to substitute WANG for a different tag if profanity is something Anet doesn't want to see ingame.
Hope they have an option to turn that off.
The only reason I found it odd is because not only did the first one lack a censor, but (assumptions) the dialogue will more than likely feature profanity as well. Why this has become a thing all of a sudden I have no idea.
There are tags. Most of the press were in the same guild and had it in brackets next to their names.
It's pretty neat.
A tenuous argument in the face of draconian "play it safe" censorship perhaps, and I'm not suggesting we draw any lines in the sand over it, but technically WANG shouldn't be a problem.
... well.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wang
You're actually wrong.
You can get away with initially, but if anyone reports the guild name then you'll have problems.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wang
Don't argue semantics, in the english language it is a dirty word xP.
This. The reason we have problems with the average player "not getting it" is because there's no introduction. It's as true for GW2 as it is for WOW, RIFT and TOR. The concern isn't that "the sucky players ruin our experience", it's that the long term viability of a game relies on it being able to make a casual player feel like a badass. WOW fixed this by making a majority of combat and content very simple, apparently until the last expansion.
My fear isn't that bad players ruin the experience, but that every bad player deserves the same chance to learn the mechanics through gameplay as the guys who read every article, tactica and strategy guide.
Well the thing was before the Cataclysm expansion in world of warcraft, dungeons were quite a bit easier and then heroic versions of them were much more difficult, but you could acclamate yourself to the mechanics in the easier version with much more margin for error (where failing to get out of a hazard would simply hurt your tank instead of instantly kill him). The forums complained it was too easy so they made the normal dungeons as hard as the heroics and the heroics as hard as some of the raid heroics (honestly that one forge blackrock boss on heroic is harder than almost all of the previous expansion's raid content, assuming you have just normal instance gear).
It's really hard for those of us who are hardcore to look at a game through the eyes of someone who is completely inexperienced with the genre. I'm not asking for a game to hold your hand, but there are tons of ways to introduce players to concepts instead of just dropping them in a room and expecting them to know that to avoid getting instantly killed you need to stand in a triangle on the colored platforms and rotate colors every 45 seconds, or hell even something less esoteric like "this boss heals, you guys need to take turns interrupting heals". I'm not aware of any mmo that teaches that concept to the players inside the game itself.
I have always felt that GW1 was more demanding of skill than WoW,etc. It seems they have the steady ramp up of difficulty more or less in place in GW2 (possibly even more gradual than GW1). Presumably at release they will have a beginner tutorial also.
Steam (Ansatz) || GW2 officer (Ansatz.6498)
PA is fine. WANG is a very mild dirty word in English, but I won't run afoul of the people responsible for making such a fantastic game by using it.
What's missing from this discussion is this: in GW2 you can also just walk away from that dude and do something else for a while. Catastrophically bad players can prevent you from doing a specific thing you feel like doing right now, by for example acting like pillocks in DEs because they're too busy looking at their flash new hats to fight properly, but most of the time you aren't going to be stuck with them, and their pillockery can't altogether prevent you from accessing new content. In traditional MMOs the quest structure tends to have bottlenecks in it (the final conversation with the major quest-giving NPC before she sends you off to the next area, and so on) that can be temporarily blocked off by sufficient levels of player incompetence or griefing, but in GW2 these scenarios are tucked away safely in your personal story instances.
Walking away from a DE because it's infested with distractable idiots with extremely good fashion sense and looking for something else to do might not be ideal, but it's more fun than griping about it.
That's everything I'm saying and more.
Few things.
1. A lot of game companies (and gaming culture—you did it right here, for example) tends to equate "casual player" with "incapable of playing well." This isn't true at all. "Casual player" is a loaded phrase. Examples: I played WoW very "casually" (couple hours a night, couple nights a week), but I raided and performed very well... or you have people who play WoW a lot (40 hours/week+), never raid or even do dungeons, but dedicate all of their time to collecting mounts and minipets.
2. Pandering towards the lowest common denominator of player in terms of skill is a bad idea. If you make a game that encompasses all skill levels, then you should take the lesser-skilled players and help them get better. I'm confident that's what GW2 will be doing.
3. I very much disagree with your assessment of "the long term viability" of GW2 relying on making "casual players" feel like a badass. There's no sub fee, so "long-term viability" is a whole different thing here, and GW2 isn't about making people feel like badasses: It's about allowing players to experience the story they want to experience, or do whatever the hell it is they want to do. Sure, feeling "badass" might be part of it if someone wants, but that's not the focus of this game.
Plus, for the event to scale (as has been said) those people actually have to be active. I think it will be rare that you get multiple people in an event who are actually participating but doing so very poorly. If just one or two people are doing that, as is more likely, it is probably manageable.
Steam (Ansatz) || GW2 officer (Ansatz.6498)
You do realize that GW2 as is specially tooled to stop people just being near an event from making it scale right? They built it so that a minimum of action is actually needed to scale the event.
... I guess I'm 'hardcore' then
It's like... does "hardcore" mean people who play a ton of WoW? Or is it people who do a lot of stuff that's difficult? Conversely, what would "casual" be?
In reality, "hardcore" is just a label that people apply to themselves so that they can look down on other people who play differently than they do, and call those people "casual". It's stupid.
EDIT: Weird, the smilies are mixing up again. NO, :winky: DON'T LEAVE ME AGAIN
Um...I've considered myself a hardcore player from time to time, but I've never called people "casual" as an insult. I've been on both sides and those two terms just represent different commitments to the game. Ignorant hardcore gamers might look down on casual players, but not all hardcore gamers do. Squares and rectangles.
LOL NA: Rednaz
Currently Playing: Dark Forces