Will nerfing SF really help anything to do with the game?

Bryant, I think at the heart of the argument we agree, but with slight differences:

Some people do not have the time in GW to go in-depth. On what principle would you ban design decisions that allows them to go there? (or rather: design decisions whose consequences are to allow them, i.e. uber modes).

You know as much as I do that comparisons between GW and WoW are quite limited. WoW appeals to the masses indeed in a very different manner. I do appreciate as an "average" player the ability to have completed Slavers NM because of some game mechanics loopholes, and I certainly won't feel bad if designers were to indeed create a smoother curve towards skill, which (as you know) requires that teams work, and I think Anet realised that somewhat the community as a whole doesn't work exactly like that (well it works great if you're in a non-dead guild).

You can argue on principles, but we're way beyond that. GW is trying to be a fantastic/awesome game despite a community that has changed so much that it's difficult to argue that "skill over time" should be the dominant model for the whole game, and not only for PvP. I'm NOT arguing in favor of that (I'm a PvEr who wants to PvP, so I'm working on getting better, baby steps after baby steps), but I tend to look at their decision from a very practical angle, i.e. given their limited resources and the existing constraints (updated game code, history of their updates, state of the community).

Correct. I bet Linsey would LOVE to do something like that, but can't because of lack of resources, or the game code itself would need to be rewritten (...GW2! but you know that).

I DO know the feeling. And in GW you quit only for a while (well not all do as we know) to come back later. When you only have, say, 2h a week to play the game, you don't want that to become a "work", which is an activity which is already taking 90% of your 50h+ week. The "smooth learning curve" you mentioned (and I agree on the fact it should be there, but I think the community hasn't done enough for bad/average players to learn, e.g. guides, training guilds, etc.) may well take players several dozen hours of gameplay, so it could be 1 or 2 months of GW. You need to be a seriously motivated casual player to do that. (or, as some PvPers suggest, spend several dozen hours being pwned gloriously in RA, CB, HA or GvG...)

Hey, don't take away my Rollerbeetle race! ;PPPPPP
I'm with you, bro, hoping that GW2 will be this game!

My major disagreement with you is here: no "WE", the community, can still do something about it, but "WE" don't, pushing completely this problem onto Anet and the Live Team (which do have some responsibility ofc). People preferred to leave the game. I'd say to those who asked bad/average players to get better at the game that they, themselves, should get better at helping them go through this learning experience. (as I said before, some people still do that!)

There's a host of aboslutely brilliant GW players here on Guru, who've mastered so many aspects of the game that it almost becomes funny. But I think there's an ingredient of genius missing here: that knowledge is in their hands and their head, they sprinkle it here from time to time by answering questions or sharing an opinion, very often insightful into game design and play. But it stops here, this knowledge doesn't flow. You want SF to "naturally" disappear? Show people how a coordinated group (I love the idea of "GvE" I discovered on TGH) can consistently kill anything in GW (apart from the gimmicky part) and how much fun you can get from that. So many players haven't had the chance to experience a great PUG. I know I did and after that day you never see the word "balance" the same!

But what if you don't want a free ride? If you don't care about the achievements, just care about beating a difficult challenge (as in, you know, actually playing a game)? If you don't care about the achievements, or about the ecto that you can farm, but you do care about beating the one of the hardest areas in Guild Wars?

There was once a free ride to anything in GW, but they saw that it was a bad thing, and they nerfed it. They should show some god damn spine and do so again, if they do that I might be inclined to think about buying GW2.

Because Shadow Farm is a free ride to a lot of things, running dungeons or missions, screw that. There should be no free rides because if you don't want to play, then you should not do so. But if you do want, then you have to deal with that playing means that you can win or lose.

Yeah fine, with those new skeletons there won't be any more SF perma sins speedclearing UW. That doesn't solve the actual problem.

P.S. Rock Band/Guitar Hero are very fun games, I love to play such, but in the end they are gimmicky party games, so yeah it makes sense to have a no-lose mode in those.

The reason I brought up WoW is because of it's current direction. In the past, way back in vanilla, all of the endgame content required a lot of effort, and because of that some of the best the game had to offer was shut out to a huge amount of players.

With the way it's going right now, it's attempting to remedy that. It's making the regular variants of dungeons and raids on a less stressful setting and making the gear progression a bit more in reach. This allows those who aren't largely experienced and without the larger time investment to see the most polished areas in the game.

At the same time, they're fine tuning the "hard modes" of the dungeons for those who want the better gear, who have more experience, and are able to spare more time to do so. They're catering to both the hardcore and the far less so.

While it's still pretty rough, it's a solid philosophy that all MMO's should be taking. It's good to see that Blizzard is taking the direction of WoW that numerous games have set before them: paying attention to the fact that everyone has different skill levels, and overall level of performance.

Guild Wars attempted to do the same thing, but the time it took to reach effectiveness as a player was still greatly reduced. Reaching that peak of performance is not a difficult task. It's kind of like making a game with a normal and expert mode, but for some reason when you start the game on expert you're given the best weapon in the game at the start with infinite ammo.

It's a bit interesting to do, that's for sure, and for some it is indeed quite gratifying. But some feel that a true challenge should be something that requires all of the best tools available in the game and it *still* remains difficult. If you have to limit your own abilities than the challenge itself isn't much of a challenge, is it?

That is exactly my point. What I'm saying is that stuff like UW or other so-called elite areas should not have shortcuts. The challenge should come from the game, not from seeing how much you can cripple yourself.

The main problem, I think, is that GW players have gotten used to winning everything, and doing so easily.

Careful where you're going with this (skill segregation FTL, look at my shiny emote or my gold cape or my guild rank). Some people just don't have the time to be "seen" as good players/simply play PvP at a good level. It's true that there's an inherent ability to play, in general and in GW, but it also has a lot to do with how much you practice. Again, not everyone has the amount of time for that.

And I'm sure some people do have the ability, the time, but not the wilingness, maybe due to other factors like the fun.

Anyway, it doesn't change the point you were trying to make, except it's not about "skill" per se (but something else I can put a name on it), but there are indeed "tiers" of gameplay (not "difficulty" per se, we could talk about lore knowledge also).

Excuse me if this has already been answered because I just browsed the last page of this thread, but I have a question. You say people preferred to leave the game. Fine...but WHY they preferred to leave the game? Perhaps it was something beyond community control?

Many of the good players realized that the learning experience was no longer worth it, as the benefits of knowing was no longer worth the effort put into teaching.

There is not much point in taking the road less traveled when the road most traveled is more efficient.

Then those players simply will not reach their potential, and in all likelihood will never be put into the "good" category. Just facts of life.

This is all pretty off topic though. I could post more, but I think Bryant has been making some quality posts that I mostly agree with. To simplify...SF and its inbalanced partners in crime are bad for the game in every possible way. This isn't even an opinion to me...I consider it fact. We only now realize that it is too late to go back in time (even though I realized this as soon as Nightfall was released). We can only hope for better design in the future.

I don't see what's wrong with those things. Stat recording is a highly coveted feature these days, and was a pretty decent thing to have with GW1, although it could've been a lot better.

Haha, you got the wrong date. It's not april 1.

Rank/titles/cape have only led to people farming (c.f. laming) for so-called "prestige" rather than playing because the game is supposed to be fun. It's the biggest hoax in all of gaming history.

There's always going to be farmers. But in Guild Wars the system/s were poorly maintained, simply put.

I thought "the greatest hoax in all of gaming history" was Duke Nukem Forever. But I digress.

It's hardly a "hoax". I've said it before: you're a dinosaur that's out in the tail of the preference distribution these days. Your strategy of gimping yourself to show off your skill was "content" in another era of gaming when alternatives didn't exist. Once games permit you to measure yourself against others directly, you don't need to gimp yourself to artificially create sufficient difficulty to get valid cross-comparisons.

The existence of your community enables game designers to justify putting out poor content with bad metrics for comparing player skill. The designers wait for players to find ways to contort themselves to show off their skills, and point to the niche community as finding "innovative" ways to play the game. That is the hoax.

Progress is developing better metrics that permit cross comparison while people play the game as intended without creating the sort of destructive stat hound behaviors that metrics often encourage. Were the GW metrics bad? Absolutely. Does that mean that we should abandon the concept? Absolutely not.

The hoax is that A.net promised the game to be grind free. Lots of people were fooled by this promise, including me. And I'm willing to bet you as well, if not for just a moment. That PvP has become a grind rather than a competition is the saddest statement one can make about a game.

You're assuming far too much. Please explain the chain of logic where you conclude that I intentionally gimp myself. Or actually, don't, because it is wrong. Like you, I pride myself on doing things as efficiently as possible, so what you say is farthest from the truth.

In addition to PvP titles not being a useful metric, further, there is already a metric that is nigh ubiquitous in every competitive game, including Guild Wars. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what that is.

That probably has less to do with the prospect of a stat-recording/ranking system and more a problem with the game in general.

in a word?


Yes

Absolutely true...but in principle we should have been able to back that out on day one. The needed data was present in the mechanics. The ladder system will match good players with bad ones, fluffing up the ratings of grinders. The rank system in HA obviously favors the grinder. In the limit, any points system will favor the grinders over the skilled. In the short term (which can be a while), it favors the skilled with the willingness to grind.

There's nobody to blame but ourselves, I'm afraid. To be fair, I think ANet believed their promises, and missed the same flaws in the design that we missed. The later decision to sell out and embrace those flaws is another matter.

I apologize; I've got you and Jeydra confused here. Statement and tone were consistent with Jeydra's position, and my brain made the connection to the three-way argument a month ago without sorting out who said what.

GUTLESS lack of perma-nerf - so guess what, 7+ ASSN permas still run UW.

Clue the F* up and deal with this exploited skill already.

This is true. It goes for every single thing where you have a number going up, especially if that number can be shown to others (since it creates prestige). It's not a problem with the game, because it's in every damn game that has it. Even in the gamerpoints system on Xbox Live you can see it: It's more common than you'd think for people to buy a game, play it until they unlocked all achievements (or as many as they can), and then sell it back to the store. Playing for the points, not for the game.

Winning should be the be-all and end-all of a game, any game. No points or titles or ranks or other such bullshit needed.

This is what I really don't understand. It seems that Anet's biggest target is the UWSCs which is why they put the Skeletons of Duhm there. However, it looks like speed clears now are already down to 20 minutes even with the new skeletons. If Anet wanted to stop UWSCs, why not add a skill to HM UW monsters that can strip SF? UWSCs would then be finished.

If they put something down there that is capable of bypassing SF/OF/SB then who are you planning to have tank? Might as well throw bonds out the window too. If they gimp the UW to the point where the next closest viable alternative is 90+ minutes then why bother clearing. Your odds on an e-blade are ridiculously low so nothing justifies the run time. You could just farm the Labyrinth and get more ecto than the chest per unit of time spent. For some this is about bragging rights but for most it's about money, plain and simple.

This is what makes me think some of the biggest anti-SC drama queens have never actually cleared the UW. It's incredibly easy to fail and always has been boiling down usually to just one rookie in the team who won't listen. The fact that you have players in this game coordinated enough to do these fast runs should be applauded and not greeted with hysteria. It's one hell of an accomplishment and I think that goes completely overlooked with so many people shouting it down. The key here is that few teams are capable of these numbers. It's just convenient to always use the lowest possible to exaggerate what's really going on.

I think it would help because having 95% assassins running UW is just a *LITTLE* retarded.

I'm just going to drop a line of the subject of achievements (in the case of GW, I guess you mean titles).

In my opinion, achievements are a subtle, evil mechanism introduced in games to conceal the fact that their base ideas aren't that revolutionary and their content has scarce replay value. Have Tetris, Street Fighter or even MUDs (if we want an online example) ever needed pats in the back in order to keep people playing?