Verdict on Guild Wars 2's innovations

[LilSaihah]

I don't think I've actually posted in this thread point-for-point. It ultimately boils down to two things; just about everything in the game ultimately requires either more meat, more polish, or both. They're too lean to really enjoy.

-Dynamic Events
Dynamic events are pretty dang neat in theory. The more players you get into an event, the bigger the mob packs are and the higher level the mobs you fight. Doing other events in the general area changes how the events operate. Centaurs are using dogs in their attacks? Go smash their kennels and they won't be using dogs anymore.

Buuuut... A huge amount of these dynamic events end up feeling inconsequential. There are some great examples of dynamic events done right in the game, like the Northern/Central/Southern invasions of Orr culminating in the Temple of Balthazar, but they're in the minority. There are huge amounts of DEs or DE chains that aren't affected by nearby DEs. Also, scaling seems quite off; the game should be a bit more eager to cycle out vanilla NPCs with vets and vets with champs.

-No holy trinity
Seems to be mistaken a lot for NO TRINITY AT ALL NOPE NOTHING EVER. There's a trinity in the game; it's more like a rock/paper/scissors(raw damage/counterboon/support) PvP exchange rather than a self-sustaining circle like healer/dps/tank.

It needs polish in PvP, and in PvE, you could be mistaken for not even realising this trinity exists because bossfights don't really operate under those rules. The game really shines when in a fight with several opponents which each require different methods of handling them(the Hold event in CoF3 is a great example), and single-target bossfights end up being really boring because single bosses really just aren't handled as well as they are in WoW.

-Dodge system
It's pretty neat and satisfying when you dodge a big dangerous effect regardless of whether it's PvE or PvP and it's a pretty central point in PvP. Good for the game, don't know if it'd work elsewhere.

-Downleveling
Good idea unfortunately weighed down by other aspects of the game, namely that the DE system doesn't really capitalise on its strengths. Could also use some extension; voluntarily dropping your level lower than the game auto-downlevels for better loot+more difficulty seems like an obvious move.

-Skills defined by Weapons
-Skill and Build system
I am going to glue these two together because your trait, utility and weapon choices are all pretty well intertwined. For the most part, they compliment each other well and some classes have some great variety in their options when it comes to builds, but all three chunks could use polish and more meat. A lot of utility skills are very situational, a lot of weapons just don't bring the numbers or utility that they need to compete in their role, and a lot of traits just don't bring much to the table compared to better alternatives.

-Combo Fields
This kinda sums up pretty well in "not all combo fields are equal". Some combo fields, you don't really care about (hi there poison). Other combo fields are insanely useful(what up fire/water). Some effort to equalise the cost and reward of exploiting these fields would be nice but fundamentally I think they're pretty cool.

-Downed State (probably connected to "no holy trinity")
Downed state is fine in small scale combat but becomes ridiculously powerful in combat against large numbers of opponents. It's fine on its own, but the Rally system needs adjustments.

-Multi-Guild system
it's cool but not worth trading with custom channels

-GW2s take on RvR
Most of wuvwuv's problems aren't really based in wuvwuv. Conceptually, it's fine(a bit skinny, so more stuff in it would be dandy, but fundamentally it's fine), but some things create really counterintuitive mechanics, like stacking up to reduce AoE damage by exploiting the aoe cap.

Also, all three borderlands are the same. Kinda boring.

-sPvP "Lobby"
It's fine for me, I don't really have a problem with it. Hopefully custom arenas and spectator mode will assuage some of the stuff that more competitive players are worried about.

-Cosmetic progression
There's two main points behind this; no gear treadmill and ascended gear.

No gear treadmill is a good idea. If you never get caught into the trap of escalating power, you can keep all of your content relevant for the game's entire lifespan, which is obviously incredibly nice from a development standpoint, and it fits into the payment model pretty easily. People don't pop in to grind out the newest gear, people pop in to explore new content and actually play the game.

Ascended gear, I have two opinions about. On the one hand, getting full Exotics was, and probably is, a bit too easy. At release, people hadn't quite worked out the tricks, but now with CoF1, getting a character to full power is a walk in the park, and getting to the highest possible power level gear-wise doesn't really feel like much of an achievement.
On the other hand, the way they're going about implementing the Ascended gear is just wrong.com. Forcing players into very specific avenues to get ascended pieces is not really commendable. Getting full Ascended gear should feel like an accomplishment, and it should take a lot of effort, but as it stands, it doesn't- you have to do easy weekly guild runs, you have to do dailies for a month, and you have to do Fractals. The first two are some of the most heinous examples of timegating there are, and while fractals are fun, you should be able to get this stuff with exemplary play in any field, not just gimmick-dungeons.

I'm going to take a liberty to talk about how they're handling adding new content to the game.

They're doing it wrong. The game is too young and too lean to be putting in temporary content. They should be spending their time packing the game full with more events, livening up the world and refining their DE system, forever- not dicking around for a little while with this Molten Alliance crap which will eventually go away. What does the game have added to it permanently so far? A terrible island that nobody cares about, FotM, guild missions, and systems. There's next to no permanent content for players in the future to enjoy. In a year, will people be saying "gee, it's sure great they spent four patches creating this Molten Alliance and then deleting it"?

[Lorelei]

The problem is that it's far more expensive (and time-consuming) to create new MMO content than to write a new book. If you do it, you're making a very small percentage of players happy at the cost of making those unhappy who enjoy downleveling plus planned obsolescence. Not only is the benefit/cost ratio low, it's not even clear that the benefit/cost ratio isn't negative.

Not every game uses (or should use) the same business model. You don't have to downscale content in order to give players a reason to replay it. Nor do you have to ensure that everything in the game is replay/downscale-compatible either, even if you do use those systems. Finally, developing an MMO is expensive, but that doesn't mean that content that was planned to be outgrown was the expensive part. There's a world of difference between saying that you want players to replay your game (every game wants that), and saying that anything in a game that isn't replayable on the same character is a complete waste of resources.

You want players to stick with your game and invest time/money into it. You don't need them to stick with every zone/npc/quest/whatever to make them want to do that. It works for some games, and that's great, but it doesn't work for others -- or rather, it doesn't appeal to every player.

[Sylvanie]

Not every game uses (or should use) the same business model. You don't have to downscale content in order to give players a reason to replay it. Nor do you have to ensure that everything in the game is replay/downscale-compatible either, even if you do use those systems. Finally, developing an MMO is expensive, but that doesn't mean that content that was planned to be outgrown was the expensive part. There's a world of difference between saying that you want players to replay your game (every game wants that), and saying that anything in a game that isn't replayable on the same character is a complete waste of resources.

I didn't say it was a complete waste of resources. I said it was a waste of resources, i.e.: You're voluntarily cutting into your profit margin. There may be business reasons to do that, even. E.g., if you haven't built your game to support level scaling, then adding it after the fact can be more expensive in the short term than your cash flow and the demand on your developers and artists to produce new content allows (i.e., if you've painted yourself in a corner).

You want players to stick with your game and invest time/money into it. You don't need them to stick with every zone/npc/quest/whatever to make them want to do that. It works for some games, and that's great, but it doesn't work for others -- or rather, it doesn't appeal to every player.

I'm not saying to have everyone stick with every zone constantly, forever. My point is that no MMO in history has ever been able to outpace player demand for and consumption of new content; you will need replayable filler content even in a progression-oriented MMO, which means either writing all that filler content entirely from scratch each time or being able to reuse all or some of the existing content.

No, it won't appeal to every player, but the number of players for whom the ability to one-shot wolves in Elwynn Forest is an important part of the game experience is pretty low. Note that games with level scaling (CoH, EQ2, Rift, GW2) still are designed to still make you feel more powerful than you were when you were at that level, so you're really only appealing to a very small slice of the playerbase; literally only the ones for whom being more powerful is not enough, but being overwhelmingly powerful is important. And even fewer for whom that is an actual deal breaker.

[Karizee]

I'm going to take a liberty to talk about how they're handling adding new content to the game.

They're doing it wrong. The game is too young and too lean to be putting in temporary content. They should be spending their time packing the game full with more events, livening up the world and refining their DE system, forever- not dicking around for a little while with this Molten Alliance crap which will eventually go away. What does the game have added to it permanently so far? A terrible island that nobody cares about, FotM, guild missions, and systems. There's next to no permanent content for players in the future to enjoy. In a year, will people be saying "gee, it's sure great they spent four patches creating this Molten Alliance and then deleting it"?

I see what you're saying but I think the Living Story is the answer to the disparity between one off events and the cycle of dynamic events.
(not everyone could attend one-off events, DE's are not permanent changes to the world since they cycle)

For the whole "living breathing world" concept to work, we need to see one time events that actually change the world, yet they need to be in a long enough time frame so that everyone can experience them.

I think the rollout for this chapter of the story has been a bit slow (4 months?) but I'm expecting a spectacular ending. So that these assets don't go to waste (and future players can experience a taste of what they missed) they could take a slice of the new dungeon and make it a fractal.

[Sylvanie]

I think the rollout for this chapter of the story has been a bit slow (4 months?) but I'm expecting a spectacular ending.

I have been wondering how many resources the development of the Chinese version has actually been sucking up and whether that's related to the relative paucity of content since Wintersday.

So that these assets don't go to waste (and future players can experience a taste of what they missed) they could take a slice of the new dungeon and make it a fractal.

I don't think the dungeon (or even part of it) as a fractal would work; from what they've described, the design is too fundamentally different from fractals (i.e., much longer, with more of a ramp-up). However, I could imagine a variant of the fractal concept, similar to what City of Heroes did (where you could access removed content through a time travel device).

---------- Post added 2013-04-27 at 06:05 PM ----------

-Downed State (probably connected to "no holy trinity")
Downed state is fine in small scale combat but becomes ridiculously powerful in combat against large numbers of opponents. It's fine on its own, but the Rally system needs adjustments.

I'm not sure how powerful that actually is. The downed penalty can make things pretty dicey if you get downed more than a couple of times within a minute. I don't think I'd disagree with seeing the downed penalty increasing in stages of 33.333...% instead of 25%, though.