Learning From Other MMOs the good and bad

they are bringing back oldschool iway for gw2?

Because that's not how it works. In fact it's the exact opposite: it removes all challenge. Any area you enter is always pre-chewed just for you, for what you can easily handle.
Not only that, but it encourages "tactical levelling", ie avoiding levelling before killing certain enemies which would otherwise be difficult.

Also, a dungeon is not actually new & fresh when you return to it just because you're now a level 20 fighting level 20 goblins instead of a level 2 fighting levle 2 goblins. You don't get more content by adjusting mob level to the player.

Two games illustrate this beautifully: Oblivion, which adjusts mobs to the player (so you can hop on your horse and ride anywhere in the world without having to face anything worse than lvl 1 goblins), and on the other extreme we have Gothic, which does not adjust mobs (and where wandering off into the wilderness while at low level will quickly make you very dead).

I love the idea of having monsters scale to the level of the character - in conjunction with the sidekicking system, this would solve so many problems that other games run into.

Having a monster higher leveled than you doesn't make it challenging - it makes it so your numbers lose to its numbers. Challenge comes from designed the encounter to be a challenge: The monsters use their skills well, are part of a balanced group which has a good cooperative AI, and have tactically challenging abilities.

Things to learn from:

WAR's PvP zone design - if you're going to do world PvP, you must study places like Praag in WAR. The zone design allows for so much flavor and tactical complexity in an activity (25 vs 25 zergfests) that could very well feel bland and skilless.

WAR's PQs - A great idea hamstrung by grindy implementation. Make them more like PQs in Tier 1 and less like the 'kill 300 mobs' BS in later tiers. I stopped doing these in T2 because of the horrible grind that they turned into. Such a shame.

Lastly, things that should be ignored in other games and kept from GW1:

Active, skillful abilities. I've quit every other MMO I've tried and come back to GW eventually because of how much more interesting and challenging the skills and combat are. From the energy system (High energy sets, E denial, Energy hiding sets, energy deficits...) to the powerful prot-based healing, active and skillful interrupts, and amazing conditional skills like Bull's, RoF, Frenzy, Blackout, Backfire, etc. There is nothing else on the market that matches GW's skill design, or even comes close.

The principle of PvP characters - I should be able to switch classes to keep up with the meta and not have to grind for hundreds of hours just to try another character in real competitive play.

Tactically useful and modifiable items: The item creation system for PvP is, bar none, the best item system for RPG PvP out there. Having to make strategic choice of which mods to put on your gear makes gearing a joy and an intellectual challenge, rather than the mindless chore it is in other games.

Frankly I don't see much in terms of design philosophy that GW can learn from other games. There are specifics of design that can be good to riff on such as WoW's great old-world instance layouts, and WAR's PvP zones and PQs. CoH's sidekicking system has already been brought in, add to that WAR's open party system and Oblivion's scaling mobs and population issues should be minimal.

Particularly if the Party search/open party system allows map travel and works globally - imagine the ability to log in and say "I want to do some monking in a big instance run" - click open party search, and you can choose to join a group doing a level 25 epic instance, a level 50 epic intance, or a level 70 instance. Map travel there, and get right to playing.

The less people are railroaded into doing just 4-5 levels of content at a time, the less population gets thinned out and walled off from each other.

The opposite method is no better. Guild Wars demonstrates this perfectly: In every campaign, every person's character progression follows the exact same route. Sure you may pick up an additional sidequest here and there, but overall you have to follow the exact same path in your adventure. It's entirely linear and gets old quickly. It's also shown pretty decently in Morrowind, where I can be punished for my curiosity by sticking my nose in a higher level Daedric ruin.

Now if the mobs were scaled to level, I could progress in any direction I choose (this is of course assuming that the "story road blocks" aren't in effect): How about instead of continuing my adventure in the Shiverpeaks after I'm done with Ascalon, I instead decide to quest in the Crystal Desert? Or what about instead of starting low in Ascalon I instead decide to start my character off in Kryta?

If you want to see scaling to level in a similar fashion, check out Hard Mode: The whole world becomes a challenge for my level 20 guy instead of only being able to benefit from the higher level areas. Imagine if WoW did this, being able to farm and benefit at lvl 70 in Teldrassil or Elwynn forest.

Granted there are some issues with this. Sometimes enemies don't scale too well in difficulty and become either too easy or too hard. In Mass Effect, the most challenging fights can only be found at a low level with not best-tier gears and a limited amount of abilities. But considering how much more awesomeness the system provides - not to mention these things can be corrected with thought - it becomes a *very* sexy tradeoff.

Also, Oblivion doesn't only scale monsters to player level, it also scales encounters to player level. How many minotaurs and goblin warchiefs do you run into at level 2 as opposed to level 20?

Well, you can simply throw concept of levels away with this mindset and just have areas with different difficulty settings (and have some "endgame" areas have higher difficulty than average area). And nothing is lost.

You can have is something like KOTOR II. Where, you can visit the various planets and do their storyline in any order and the enemies scale, but you gain levels which allow you access to more abilities. So you could do Ascalon's plotline at the end or the beginning of the game, you might have only flare at the beginning and the enemies only stone daggers. If you came back at lvl 100 you'd have a bar of 15 skills, giving you much more utility but the mobs would summon guards, have interrupts and heal themselves.

I hope the sidekicking system is complete automatic and seamless, so you don't have to manually raise players up to your level, or lower yourself down, like in CoH.

I disagree here, because having a number that tells you your level is a massive motivator for carrying on playing. With levels (especially if they go with their exponentially harder to gain but limitless levels idea) you clearly strive upwards to get higher levels. All MMOs have this carrot on a stick effect, they need to give you a sense of a achievement every now and again, to make you feel you're getting somewhere, and to make you carry on playing.
That's why things like tiered dungeons in WoW work. You get a piece of T4, and although compared to the end-game stuff it's nothing, it feels so good. It's named, it says something about what you've experienced, it's personal to your spec, it's a reward for all the time you've put in. If WoW was simply like, you do this one dungeon 1000 times the you win the game many people would give up on the way, because they felt like that weren't achieving anything.
So, levels are important to create a sense of progression and achieving something, and are essential to any MMO/RPG.

That exact system was used in Neverwinter Nights. Sucked there too.
No, it makes you adapt.
When I at level 2 killed the level 8 orc outside the town in Gothic2 I was PROUD of my feat. As running in, sword swinging, was certain suicide I had to be low and crafty to do it: I snuck around the cave he lived in, pelted him with arrows, and when it looked like he was going to get me I ran like the wind back to the town and hid behind the city guards, who helped finish him off.

In Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights and every game which adjusts enemy level to player level I've ever played, from the original Bards Tale on, you simply rush the enemy, swords swinging, because the game is adjusted to you. There are no challenges you're not supposed to handle with simple rusher wammot tactics, no enemies out of your league, because it's all been adjusted so that an average gamer should have no problem killing them. And you can't increase the difficulty by going to a more difficult area, because there are none.

Now, I realize that a lot of people actually don't WANT challenge from their game. They don't WANT to have to use their brain to win in fight. They want to simply <target nearest> + <autocombat> and then pick up the loot.
I just don't agree.

Unless you're proposing to do away with levels altogether, which incidentally I would agree with, you're now talking about a completely different issue.

Neither scaling nor not scaling monsters to level is the correct answer. The ideal game has no levels at all and instead implements difficulty/reward slider that lets the player choose what level they want to play at.

The negative to that was you could go into any dungeon in Oblivion and beat nearly everything there at level 1. That kind of takes the fun away from the game. There should be static leveled monsters and/or bosses in numerous places. Morrowind handled that part correctly. There should be leveled monster spawns and static monster spawns. Not entirely 1 or the other.

Auction house or some other form of selling besides spamming.

Well I have read through these posts and I like alot of the ideas that have been expressed. However there is one idea that I have the say, I am not in favor of. This idea being World(Open) PvP. If you want to add something that will single-handedly cause this game to fail then that would be the thing to add. I realize that many of the members on here enjoy their pvp and more power to them I say, but a large majority of your GW players are "Casual" players. With World(Open) Pvp these players will have to be concerned with entering and leaving zones without falling victim to the inevitabel "ganker" who does nothing but wait for low levels to wander into his sights. Anyone ever play Archlord ? I am sure that I am not the only GW player who wont be playing GW2 if it has the wrong type of World(open) PvP.

Just my 2 cents guys.

Great point/idea. I don't like levels myself, but I understand that they are simply too popular and will likely need to be included in some form or another. Riffing off the above idea, you could have the slider and it would determine what level the mobs (those that are scaled, I also agree with Gareth's post above that some mobs should be static) are relative to you. So +1 on the slider would make everything one level higher than you, +2 would be 2 levels, +3 would bring in adds and upgrade their bars with an elite, etc.

Perhaps this is unrealistic to expect, however. At this point, I simply don't know what A.net is intending to do with GW2, or what they can do technologically and balance-wise. I mostly care about things that will affect PvP, frankly - don't oversimplify skills, don't move the direction of the horrible PvE only skills, don't dumb down or add 'stats' to armor, etc.

(Traditional MMOS however, also have breaking moment when next X is too far away to be really motivated to go fo it ("screw this, ill log off"). After this moment addiction takes over as gameplay drive instead of having fun/achieving something.)

That's assuming that everywhere rewards are the same as well as difficulty. If we will talk in terms of guildwars, what if max damage weapons only dropped in elite areas?

Also, "Beating" area/dungeon is just different form of progression. "Number" next to your character name could as well mean number of zones completed.

Character progression is lost entirely - and for me, that's the whole point of RPGs. Not to level up enough to get to the next area, but to see my character grow. Having everything grow around me just provides me with more game to play, and I am not held down in a linear progression. I can choose to progress through the game in any way I see fit, and that's quite awesome.

I don't want everything the same and simple, I just don't want everything to go in a straight line. I don't want things to be like "this area is only for level 10s, this one for level 20s, and this one strictly for level 30s". When the game is scaled according to how you play, things becomes much more massively interesting. I'm not set to a track, I create my own.

I also want to emphasize that making enemies scale exactly like you is bad. Having enemies scale according to you but ahead of you (say you're level 16, they're now 20) is what's good. Keeping everything the same scale is boring, having the enemies scale ahead is what's interesting.

This is true. There definitely needs to be some rules set in place to prevent players from simply walking to the endgame areas and hitting stuff.

I have to agree on this one. Regardless how nice GW2 is done, if they implement world open PvP I will stay away from it as far as possible. It is just a jerk magnet.

Regarding leveling monsters. I liked the way it was done in Sacred. The enemies had a bandwidth of levels they spawned with. So wandering in some areas with lvl 25 and you met lvl 5 or 6 (maximum for the monsters there) but in some other ones you had monsters at lvl45 (minimum there). And a bandwidth for some was about 30-40 lvls. So at the same time you had your enemies (their numbers and lvls) adjusted to yours but taking into consideration some maximum and minimum levels which had to maintained. Therefore you would need to level a lot before going to the endgame area and you do not have to worry before going back to an early stage.

This.

If I want to explore, I can, but I shouldn't be able to enter in every cave/dungeon/castle/whatever, and rush every mob inside.

I enjoy exploring, and if I enter in some place that is too hard for me, I remember where it was, and I come back when my character grows.

Maybe a level progression is not the best method... Maybe an "interactive" progression (the more you use a weapon, the better you are with it), but no as "UO", where you have to do the same over, and over, and over, to increase 1 point in Weapon Mastery.

MY GOD i couldn't agree more, i played through NF, got primeval gear (which is the coolest) and then all material motivator for pve dissapeared. there was nothing better to aim for and nothing better looking, and the 'mission's between the different campaigns get similar after awhile so I lost motivation in playing them through. Furthermore, while WoW had a grind at end game pve at least it was a reasonably fun grind (but was solid fun for ages) that had you working with heaps of people in a real fight against the environment, guild wars only has you go out by yourself to grind out titles, so you essentialy become a hermit while you attempt to travers all the map or open x number of chests. theres nothing in guild wars end game PvE to keep you playing it, you basicaly have to convert to PvP to get any fun out of the game.

so my suggestions:
1)
add some real end game material for PvE, and have missions/instances/dungeons with a higher cap for participants, the most fun you'll get in PvE is going against a 'dungeon' full of tough bosses etc with a big group of people, and have them giving increasingly better gear, giving you something substantial to aim for.
2)
get rid of the instanced maps, yes it reduces lag and minimizes the instances of KSing which is good (though KSing is really pretty infrequent) but it destroys the corner stone of mmo's in my opinion, being part of a world of other people.

Take it back. PLEASE take it back! I pray to God GW2 doesn't listen to this mentality.

Aside from PvP, GW greatest strength was that it was instanced enough to be ONE WORLD, not broken into millions of servers. A little open-world is fine, but GW2 NEEDS to instance enough to be able to support a single world with current technology.

There are SO many advantages:

1. I can actually hook up with different groups of friends and play with them. Wow!

2. I am not restricted to prime-time hours to play anything involving a group. I can actually play with other people whenever I want!

3. Guilds actually mean something. Who cares if you are the number-one ranked guild on server #452655. Who cares if your guild has a wacky reputation for doing fun things on server #963445. No one else knows who you are...

4. Issues like population imbalances that plague virtually every other game magically go away. (Population issues are almost singlehandedly destroying Warhammer as we speak ... they were fully prepared for issue, talked about it extensively before release, and it's still driving people away in droves and killing the game).

The uniqueness of skills in GW is something they got right! Unlike WoW, where basically you get the same 10 skills or so over and over again, just at a "higher level". ("Oh, now my Flare is a Fireball! It does the same thing, only 3x damage!" Boring!!) In GW, each skill is pretty much unique - although, with expansions, you got: duplications (same skill, different name); or modifications of an existing skill.

Level of mobs vs. scaling level: I think it wouldn't be that difficult to scale mobs based on character level, and also have some that are set to be +/- character level. Certain dungeons can be set for a variable > or = character level if it is meant to be a challenging dungeon, while others are set to be static. If the latter proves too difficult, you go back when you're higher level and better prepared.

AI: mob AI can be more complex in a lot of games. That would also add to the desire to group up because it becomes much harder to take on smart, unpredictable AI than "oh, X monster always does this followed by that." The mixed mobs in GW makes the game a lot of fun. It would be nice if the spawns were more random, though. (Getting a spawn with 2 healers can be a bitch, and requires a change in tactics. Things like that.)

I don't know what is the best compromise between Persistent vs. Instanced. Both have drawbacks and advantages, and largely depends on the style of gameplay for an individual.

Frank just want to give an FYI that I read that there won't be different servers other than how they are now (by country sort of). So you won't have to worry about that really. Persistence might speed up some things (slow it down too of course, depending on how Anet handles things).