Are achievements the right tool for whatever it is they're supposed to do?

Guild Wars 2 uses achievements for a few things. They track the story of the moment. They act as a daily/monthly reward system. They shuffle us randomly around the map to go kill that one NPC type of which we've killed 497. They make Syl mad. Maybe they do other stuff as well, stuff that I am not awesome enough to know.

For all these things they do, I wonder, is this the best way to do it? I'm going to set aside whether the game should do this in the first place; that's for another day.

The story of the moment tracking is terrible. I don't know where I am in the story based on it. It gives no context to the story. It's just a check box and a number. This is a time when a quest system would function better.

The daily/monthly reward system works more effectively, perhaps because the thing to track is so much simpler. Achievement systems are well-suited to tracking numbers or basic actions. The WoW method of daily quests is more cumbersome, requiring travel to pick up the quest to do what you did yesterday and will do tomorrow.

The random shuffling of almost-complete kill achievements may be intended to promote exploration, though since it would send you to where you've already been it isn't adding anything new. Still, it does send you somewhere different, sometimes. The system isn't pretty, but it does work, at whatever it is supposed to do.

WoW has achievements too, but that's for another day, by which I mean that when I tried to write about it all my words turned into stupid.

Maybe the problem is that Explorer types don't like whatever it is that achievements are trying to do. But that's for an upcoming post titled "Explorers are an elitist waste of money."

After everything else, appearance is everything

One of my greatest instance runs ever was back during Burning Crusade. I was headed to Shadow Labyrinth, tanking on my paladin. I don't recall the class of the healer, but I do remember the DPS: three warlocks. It was an extraordinarily pretty run. The warlocks would shoot out some seeds of corruption and my AoE tanking would trigger them, and then they'd trigger the next round, and the end result was that every pull was an explosion of shiny graphics.

I don't know how effective SoC was compared to other attacks. Maybe destruction with rain of fire or a cleaving, whirlwinding warrior would have done the job better. But would they have looked cooler? Would they have sounded cooler? No! When all the game mechanics have been nullified by gear and practice only one thing remains: looking awesome while you do it.

This is why transmog in WoW was so awesome. This is why my greatest dangerous temptation in GW2 is the many amazing-looking guns on the trading post. Better gear is nice to have, but cooler gear is a necessity. In fact, I blame this for my first time quitting GW2. I'd gotten a new back slot that replaced my purely cosmetic starting item. It was better, but it didn't look cool. I was nothing without my backpack filled with comically dangerously unstable jars of potions and explosives. When I tried GW2 again my first priority was to go to my bank and switch the items. Game saved.

So let us ask, why is Prayer of Mending the best spell ever, as Liore asserts? In fact, it is not. Seed of Corruption was, though PoM was pretty great. I wasn't a good healer, so I can't comment much on its effectiveness. But I can comment on it sounding cool. Hearing that ping ping ping and seeing it dart around like a crazed healing Tinkerbell was a delightful thing. It was the music to go with the flashing radiance of a raid's worth of spell effects. It said that things were working, at least to some extent. Someone, somewhere, had more health every time I heard that sound. It also meant they were taking damage, but I was rarely concerned with such things as people getting hurt. I was busy getting hurt even more, so having that reassuring ding sound meant that someone else was concerned and I loved them and their bells for that.

Downed vs. Dead, consider them in context

The topic of GW2's universal rezzing came up. Of course someone has to claim that this convenient mechanic is, in fact, the death of challenge and the harbinger of the trivialization of all things. I disagree.

First off, being able to rez people out in the world is a bonus. The defeated player can feel as if someone cared enough to help. And they can refrain from being angry because they were a few steps from the next waypoint and all the ones nearby are contested. The helping player can feel like they helped someone, which is a pretty nice feeling. This mechanic is essentially a kitten-dispenser. Or puppies if you're allergic to cats. Or a Portuguese Water Puppy if you're allergic to dogs and live in the White House.

Second, this mechanic should be considered in the full context. The first bit of context is that I'm not considering the difference with underwater fighting because I hate underwater combat so much that I don't care about the balance. It can go burn in sodium.

A downed player can recover on their own, but the circumstances tend to be rather specific. An enemy must be very near death or they must not take any damage while they bandage themselves. The first is essentially a market-killer for the keyboard manufacturers, who have long relied on the destruction caused by mobs at 1% health. The second is unlikely when soloing and hardly a guarantee in groups.

Other players can help, but at a snail's pace and at the cost of being unable to move, dodge, attack, heal, or buff. Effectively a second player or more are temporarily made useless to bring back the currently useless player. Compare this to in-combat resurrection spells, such as in WoW where players can simply pop back up with something between no effort from other players and a single spell cast. Those do have lengthy cooldowns, but again, they are much quicker and less risky than GW2 recovery.

Then there is the big question: is it easier to be downed in GW2 or dead in another game? GW2 doesn't have a lot of get out of jail free cards such as invincibility bubbles or preventative damage absorbs. If you don't dodge, you take the damage. Dodging has a very short cooldown, but usually, so do the horribly damaging things you need to avoid. Dodging isn't a bonus; it's a requirement, so to consider it as such would be as absurd and claiming that healing in another game makes players invincible and immortal. In my experience it is a lot easier to get knocked into a downed state in GW2 than it is to die in WoW.

Taking into account the wider context, the downed state should be considered, not as equivalent to death in other games, but rather as an intermediate state with no clear parallels. Furthermore, because of the potential recovery, even the fallen state cannot be considered equivalent to death.

Instead of comparing individual mechanics and pretending that such comparisons are meaningful, the logical thing to do is to compare the chance of the group being defeated. At this point, all things are equal. There is no recovery and the instant-rez mechanics are nullified by the enemy resetting. Do groups fail more often or at a higher percentage of groups or attempts in GW2 than in other games?

Using this context does not mean that recovery mechanics are to be ignored. They could still be too easy or tough, but directly comparing individual pieces of group success or failure will only yield nonsense.

Free money doesn't work so well

Why is karma the most useless currency ever? Syp has several reasons, some personal to him, such as the fact that he isn't doing much crafting or legendaries. Yet the real problem isn't that the currency isn't used for buying a lot of stuff, but rather, because it is free money.

Most games don't give the AI an adaptive economy. Prices aren't based on supply or demand, but are instead based on what the devs thought would be balanced, so they end up either fixed or rising with the player's level. The usual result is that players become richer and richer, yet they will have fewer and fewer items to purchase. Maybe that first Greatstaff of Greatness drains their account, but after a few more money spiders they're ready to go again, with nothing left to buy.

In part this is due to the lack of costs. You don't need to buy many potions or boxes of ammunition to shoot spiders. In fact, if you did, you wouldn't go. Players aren't going to spend more on an adventure than they'd get from it unless there is some non-monetary reward. However even that case is similar to buying the Greatstaff of Greatness, a one-time cost that doesn't affect the overall trajectory. Y=X-10 has the exact same trend as Y=X. If costs were higher, but not quite higher than rewards, then it would slow the trend, not stop it.

I generally like having more money, whether virtual or real. It's a habit of sorts, to scavenge and not let perfectly good assault rifles go to waste just laying around on the trail of corpses. Or in real life I try not to throw away food.

Games reinforce this by making money rather tight early on, and often necessary. Your armor needs upgrading, your weapons are weak, and you're homeless. So you scrape and scrounge, learning to save every last bottle cap and credit. You develop the habit of calculating the value/weight ratio of everything, shuffling items in and out of inventory to maximize your haul, regretting every extra pound you carried into the dungeon.

Next thing you know you're rich, yet still in the habit of gaining wealth, despite it being of no use any more.

Adding in other players can help or even fix the problem. They want things too and are willing to pay for them. Developers can stick a tax on the transactions to gradually destroy excess currency. This does require that players have a reason to trade currency, meaning the addition of commodities (trade materials) or services (help with content). Having players also makes it easier to add sinks, because with one player a sink either works or doesn't, whereas with many players it only needs to work for some players, who will then attempt to draw currency to themselves.

Arguably karma fits into this, since it can be used to purchase items that can eventually be traded with players. However karma only goes one way, into gold or materials; players cannot trade to increase their karma. The karma sinks then need to be effective for every player, since there won't be any ability to use other individuals as sinks/magnets.

There's my quick fix: make karma tradeable on the trading post.

It's not the knowing, but the knowing how to know, and I don't know that

Something spoiled me rotten during my years of WoW. I memorized a lot, but beyond that, I learned how to find information. With such a large and long-running community, WoW has exceptionally good resources for learning about the game. Wowhead would have all the dungeon loot tables, quest chains, you name it. Everything was in there and I got good at finding it. Comments would add tangential, but useful, details. If I wasn't sure of a bit of lore, wowwiki and now wowpedia could help me out. Worst case scenario I could google for some class and crafting guides.

I miss that.

Of course there is something great about the early dungeon runs when all the rewards are a surprise. Then you start to get the hang of it and you've run the places a dozen times. The surprise isn't there anymore. You've moved onto another stage of the game and another stage of fun. Now it's useful to know where things are so you can pursue them. I've grabbed what I could from the random draw, now I'm after something specific. What dungeon or raid? What faction? Is it BoE and readily, if obnoxiously expensively available of the auction house?

Sometimes I think I had more find finding out how to find items than actually finding them. The former has a better payoff too. I'll ditch the item and have no more use for it. The information, that I can keep forever, and maybe use again for another character, or another player. I like showing off what I know, not so much for gear.

In GW2 I'm back in square one. I don't know much and I don't even know how to know much of it. The community is smaller and much newer, so inevitable the resources aren't going to be as plentiful. As a result I do a lot more stumbling around. I don't mind doing things in a less-efficient manner. What I do mind is that I may not know if I'm even getting anywhere. Can I get to that zone from here, or am I running into a strong current? Is that a jumping puzzle or will I hit an invisible wall?

This is not the quest that turns the tide of the war; it never is

When you get down to it, the GW2 hearts are quests. They're a lot more flexible than WoW quests, but they are ultimately quests. At this place, do this or these things. Yet there is a key difference that I think makes GW2 quests superior. It's in the quest text.

It's not the lack of quest text. They have that too, if you hover over the heart. They even send you letters, which is better than needing to trek back to the quest giver through the bandits that you supposedly wiped out but have since respawned. But that's not the big improvement.

Quests in WoW were almost always about advancing. Complete this quest and you'll have changed the world. You assassinated the enemy leader, smashed their army, and saved the day. This then looks ridiculous when everything has respawned. WoW dealt with this with a mix of phasing and ignoring it.

Quests in GW2 are almost always about maintenance. Sometimes they are literally that, including fixing broken equipment (which I suppose are repairs rather than maintenance and the accounting department is going to be on my case). Often times they're more generalized: thin the herd, keep spiders away from our apple trees, help downed patrols. All of these are things that need to be done, but none of them are the single thing that breaks through and wins the war. It's all keeping the world from collapsing, rather than raising it up. While that sounds less fun, it also makes a lot more sense in the context of a game where everything respawns. WoW dailies have this same feel, but they are dailies and therefore get no praise.

In general terms, WoW quests are written for a non-static world, while GW2 quests are written for the static world. Given that both worlds are essentially static, set pieces placed there to entertain, rather than to be remade by players, it makes a lot more sense to write the quests to fit the static world. In effect, by accepting that it is a theme park they make it look less like a theme park.

Even the dynamic events fit into this. Something shows up to go on a rampage and we stop it or don't. If we don't, then there is an event to clean up or retake lost ground. Alternatively, if we capture something, we then get an event to defend it. The enemies actually fight back and can do so successfully. If events simply reset, then we'd have the illusion of progress. Instead, we can actually make progress, taking and holding ground, but if we heroes wander away for too long it falls apart. It is temporary, but it is not illusionary.

[edited for a bit of grammar]

GW2: It's all connected! Events, Hearts, Dailies, and Trains

As the title and highly-detailed and complex diagram indicate, GW2 has a wonderful way of making everything interconnected.

Dynamic events often take place in the same area as the quest hearts, with qualifying enemies often spawning with it or being the expected filler between the boss fight. The result is that you either kill two birds with one stone, or two kill birds with two stones, but the second one doesn't fly away and make it hard to hit it.

The daily achievements tend to include a large dose of killing in a particular zone or mob types, both of which are the inevitable results of hearts and orange circles.

I tend to like the champion trains, though in a sense they're all I know, since I wasn't around for the clearly better thing that happened before them (I've been there before, I know that change is always for the worse). They feed into the dailies, giving some of the trickier things such as veteran kills, and an abundance of junk to salvage.

While we're on the subject, I rather like the daily system. The gathering one is a natural part of any movement outside the cities. At least until I've finished my hearts the zone kills are a freebie. Salvaging flows from killing. That leaves two more, and those can be as easy as reviving player or NPCs or doing a couple events, both of which you're probably going to run across during hearts or gathering. There are WvW ones as well, but I've not yet needed them. Given the sometimes slow pace of WvW I can see how those could be tricky for someone who wants to hop in for a quick completion. Of course I dislike the aquatic slayer one because I get disoriented underwater, but I've never felt like I needed it, so I see no major problem.

Finally, there is a missing link in the diagram. Players eagerly work together on chained dynamic events. Maybe chains aren't trains, but they rhyme, and that's what really matters when you're drawing diagrams on a chalkboard.

Being a dungeon noob is stressful

I finally did my first dungeon in Guild Wars 2. Not a year late, for I took about a year off, but surely it shouldn't have taken me this long. The first was available at 20 or so. I didn't even consider doing one until I was near 80. Even once I'd decided that I would do a dungeon it took days to actually do it. It's time to round up the reasons why, and maybe see if there is anything to do about that.

 Guild Wars 2 is not nice to new people. It is particularly unkind to WoW people. In fact, I attribute my ability to have played it again and not wandered away confused to my having not played much WoW in months. Instead I played shooters, and Civilization, but the latter is not relevant. I spent a lot of time aiming while moving, shooting things while not letting them touch me, and generally working out the notion that I should run like a chicken with its head cut off, but like it still has its head and is carefully avoiding the guy with the axe.

WoW has movement, but outside of PvP it doesn't have much quick movement. Get out of the fire, but what's the rush, really? Boss drags you in, you run out. Outside of the choreographed dances the movement is comparatively leisurely. Add to that years of muscle memory of exactly how fast your character is, and probably every single boss fight too, and there's very little pressure. Guild Wars 2 likes to do devastating things very quickly, and you cannot simply move, but must instead dodge, because in this magical world rolling on the floor makes you temporarily invulnerable to most attacks.

Some mobs I could fight a half-dozen at a time and maybe have room for one more. Other mobs will seriously tax my survival with just one. It's something to do with evading attacks. Some hurt more, but more importantly, some are broadcasted more clearly. Maybe the animation is longer, maybe it's bigger and more dramatic. Compare dodging a centaur's knockdown with a bunch of little tiny spiders shooting poison.

Scale this up to a boss level and maybe you'll understand my reluctance. I could die at any moment and I would very likely have no idea why. Was there a constant AoE? How much did that condition hurt? When exactly do I dodge? This was exactly what happened on the first boss. I died and died, not in any of the red circle spam, but dead anyway. Maybe I should get a couple pistols so I can do more than auto-attack when at long range.

Generally people have been pretty nice in Guild Wars 2. Not sunshine and flowers nice, but rarely are they blatantly rude. Yet there are just enough mean people to keep me on edge, wondering if I'm going to find myself back in trade chat, or worse, a random PUG. It's not fun being on the losing end of a boss fight, or a group fight, and with my almost total lack of experience, the odds of the former, and therefore the latter, were daunting.

There is no LFG tool. I don't mean an automatic random cross-server group generator. I mean that it has nothing. There isn't even a way to list yourself as looking for a group, putting Guild Wars 2 instancing at the same level of sophistication as pre-Burning Crusade WoW. On the plus side, the waypoint system means that once you've found the entrance there's little travel time to worry about.

Thankfully, players have made their own lfg website. That's great. It's how I found my group. But it sure would be nice to not need to tab out to check it. I wonder how many people even know it exists. I didn't until very recently. Though given that it's about 50-50 that anyone saying lfg in a channel is told about it, I suppose many people have some notion that it exists.

So far my dungeon experience probably doesn't sound so great. The first fight was admittedly awful. Before and after that I died running past trash (since mobs leash in instances this seems to be the way to go). I was a blantantly noobish noob who was somehow level 80 and didn't even know to switch to group-oriented tools before the boss. Yet no one was mean about it. They gave some basic directions and a few bits of advice. At least one bit could have been appropriately followed with " , dumbass", yet it was not.

One particular bright spot is the res mechanic. With all the defeated NPCs that give experience and sometimes quest credit, it's a habit to res things. Run over and click on them. In combat, out of combat, doesn't matter, though it is a lot faster out of combat. In group events you'll see a few people helping up the dead person. I'm not even sure it's an altruistic gesture as much as it is a habit. The result is that I didn't have to deal with an angry rezzer who refused to do so. People just pick you up and go back to shooting nightmare vines.

In the end I got some shinies and the idea that maybe I could run some more in the future.

Why we do want to read your MMO stories

I stand by my previous post: I don't care what you're doing in your MMO.

The key is in the word your. The stories in the game, we have those covered. Those aren't your stories; they are the game's. Listing them as what you will do or just did doesn't make them your story, unless you're using the old "put the entire chapter in quotations and pretend I wrote the paper" trick from high school. Note that I never did that because I never learned to type and therefore, given my laziness, was unwilling to copy someone's book chapter.

Let's stick with the word your and get rid of your guild's stories too. We're not in your guild, applying for your guild, or friends with anyone in your guild besides you (we like you, though).

But your stories? Those are, for lack of a better word, good. Your stories work. Properly written, of course. The story that you create and experience matters. It is everything.

That story is feedback for the developers. It says that you hate something, even if you feel stuck running it every day (that's why you quit the next month). It says that you love something, even if you don't get to run it as often as you'd like (but it's worth the entire sub by itself). It says something that the player statistics cannot: it says intention, motivation, and feeling.

That story is a review for other players. It tells them what other players have experienced. They can learn from it, knowing what to expect. Guides sterilize the experience. Posts can bring it to life. That life may be good or bad and to write about either is to help players know what is coming. It helps players pursue that which they enjoy and avoid that which they do not. If I say that World vs. World reminds me of old Alterac Valley, despite being void of facts or analysis, that will clearly tell some people to rush toward it, and others to avoid it at all costs.

The feelings that come with a relaying of an experience can help other players with their perspective. It's easy to fall into one's own perspective and fail to see any other. It's not a lack of empathy, but of imagination. A post can nudge us out, show us a different way to see it. Dull may be relaxing; frantic, exciting; rushed, efficient. Maybe we'll see both at once. For example, during a round of champion farming I found myself feeling two feelings. I was in awe of the efficiency of it all as the zerg went from spot to spot, with pinatas popping with showers of whatever that yellowish shade is that is better than green. I was also annoyed at the pace of it, as a bit of loading lag meant a missed kill. What an awfully stupid place! Yet, how wonderful to see players working together for mutual benefit, calling out where to go if someone was lost or new (I was both). Worst case scenario I skipped ahead to the next spot and waited a few minutes.

Sadly, that last bit was not from a post that someone wrote. Rather, I thought of it myself but couldn't post it. How could I? I'd said that no one cares about those stupid sorts of posts. Thankfully, my terrible writing left me a wonderful loophole, or perhaps merely refinement of meaning, to explain that we play more than what is scripted, and that's the whole fun of it all.

Violence is not the answer; it is the only answer

Guild Wars 2 quests, lets call them what they are, are a fun break from the usual system. Being geographically-based, rather than log-based there's less to track and no need to worry that you've wandered off out of the appropriate area, because it is clearly indicated, always (even when WoW started labeling the mobs I still ran into a few problems). The variety is great. No more ignoring everything else to only focus on one particular problem. Bear attack? Too bad, wolves are the ones that give credit.

There's often even a non-violent path. Maybe it's fixing up a place rather than killing bandits. Maybe it's harvesting plants and scaring birds rather than killing bandits.

And yet, is violence ever truly not the answer?

Consider these scenarios:

You have a town in a series of caves. There have been some minor cave-ins, but the overall structure seems solid. But having debris around isn't attractive or safe. So you hire someone to clear it. Rather than using shovels, they pull out a rifle and napalm and blow up the debris.

You have a nice apple orchard. You need someone to harvest apples. Rather than hiring someone to climb the trees, you instead opt for the nearest adventurers who need a bit of karma. Why you'd hire someone who is primarily focused on treating karma like a bank account, I do not know. But you get what you pay for, which is a crazed, wandering killer. They pick the apples, not by climbing the tree, but by shooting it until apples fall out.

These take place in the Nightguard Beach (Harathi Hinterlands) and Shaemoor Fields (Queensdale), respectively.

Solo raiding: Jumping puzzles

I hate phase one.

It was fine at first. There was some learning and some challenge. I learned from the challenge. It was even fun.

But I hate phase one.

I suppose I could blame phase two. It was phase two that made me do phase one over again. Phase one never asked for anything but itself. Phase two asked for phase one as well, every time, even if I didn't get phase two complete.

I hate phase two.

And yet really, can I blame phase two? It needed phase one and it couldn't help that. It only ever asked for itself and phase one, and phase one already asked for itself, so what's so bad about phase two?

But I hate phase two.

Phase three really made me angry. It asked for itself and phases one and two. Sure, they already asked, but phase one only asked on its own. Phase two was the greedy one. And phase three? Well phase three topped them all.

I learned phase one. As I learned phase two, I learned to hate phase one. I learned phase two. As I learned phase three, I learned to hate phase two. Learning phase three won't fix phases one or two. It will demand them, but it will give nothing in return.

They are, altogether, a punishment mechanic. They do not merely demand time, for that I could bear. They demand repetition, and all for its own sake. We write that we will not fail phase one a hundred times on the blackboard, not because we failed phase one, but because we failed phase two.


I was having a fun time in Guild Wars 2. Deciding that I could not live on Civilization alone, nor a small set of FPS maps, I set off into Tyria again. I was having a blast. I died more than I should have, and at times I was frustrated with things, but I had fun. And then I did something stupid: I looked at a vista and thought, "yea, I can get that one this time."

Phase one and phase two and phase three, demanding all that came before, again and again. I stopped, recognizing that it was not fun. I went off to do my story quest (by which I mean, our story quest, for there are so many the same). I saved the queen, or started to, but overflow kept me away from what I needed.

I found myself near a jumping puzzle again. I went through some of it. Then some more. The launching gears were interesting. I laughed at people who didn't see the value of tangents. I wandered off course, for the puzzles aren't quite laid out, and when there are hostile mobs in the way, it is easy to feel nudged in another direction. I found the path. I found more. I jumped and jumped, mastering my jumping, at least on that phase. And then I fell. I got up again and jumped and jumped. And then I fell. A few more rounds of this and I felt a familiar feeling, the feeling that I was repeating what I already knew how to do because of something that I did not. It was a strange sort of anti-learning, repeating that which did not need repeating.

Maybe tomorrow I will return to it. Or maybe I will go do the quests and events, leaving the absurd mechanics behind, longing for the day when we can fly, and then all will be ruined, except one small stupid thing that will instead be abolished.

The person who made, and broke, WoW for me

Scandal!  My first WoW account was shared and after it was taken away I was lost.  Not merely lost, undone.  My level 60 shaman and warlock, gone!  I wasn't particularly close to my guild, not close enough that I could see much hope of getting help with leveling back up to 60.  Besides, the name Klepsacovic was taken on that server.  I could have bought the account, but the price was high (thanks to me) and that's hardly secure.

That could have been the end of WoW for me.

I opened a new account and was ready to start again.  But how?  I was lost and alone.  On a whim I went off to Wildhammer (or so I remember) and did some whoing.  My hope was to find a few friends I had from the paladin forums.  Despite being a shaman or sometimes warlock, I had ended up on the paladin forums.  Thankfully, they were there.  I talked to them about the problem.  My first attempt was a human warrior.  But that was a joke (literally, it was a joke).  Second was a warlock, which was also a joke, but at level 1 she beat a level 3 mage, so I had a good feeling about it.  Incidentally, I won by using melee rather than spells, which might explain my distress at the removal of firestones (a conjured offhand which boosted spell power and added fire damage to melee attacks).

I stuck with that warlock for a good bit of time.  Later we went to Horde and Klepsacovic was reborn.  Though I think I got his hair color slightly wrong.  With the release of Burning Crusade a protection paladin engineer was created.  In a raid with two of the forum friends (the third had wandered off into the nether by then) Kelpsacovic became my main and remained so for years.  They were good times, with only brief upsets related to guild merging.

Wrath of the Lich King brought more of the same, though with a plethora of things to care about, yet nothing to kill WoW.  Perhaps Cataclysm brought the same as well.

But something else changed.  One of the friends, or maybe both, convinced me to do something stupid and expensive: transfer servers.  The plan was to transfer and start a new guild.  We had been in a guild at that point.  Not a great guild, but I had some friends in it and I didn't think anyone was complete garbage (though some were not so great), so in retrospect, it was probably the best I could have asked for.

For $50 I took my main away from the guild I'd known and the friends in it and went off nearly alone.  One friend wandered off and eventually betrayed the other (but that's another story for me to not tell you) and before long I was more or less alone.

I can't say whether Cataclysm would have kept me entertained the entire time and I still don't think it was as good as BC or LK.  But I do think that if I had been with my guild I'd not have quit after only a couple months.  Not even quit; it wasn't a rage-quit, just I didn't care.  I had no friends, no one to talk to or share with, no one to group with, and I wasn't going to stumble across anyone in a cross-server random system (as I had in the past).  Ultimately it was not any particular change in WoW that killed it for me, but a change in my social interaction with it.

I have a second data point for this theory: Guild Wars 2.  My two friends from college (different people) started playing, and then wandered back to WoW.  I am alone (though not without offers from Syl, who is unfortunately, foreign).  Consequently, I have wandered away from GW2.  It's a neat place, but it's a bit too big to be in alone.

New games should learn from this, not my story in particular, but the importance of social ties.  Maybe offer group discounts on the box prices, to encourage people to move to the new game, not as individuals trying a new game, but as friends and guilds.

The Importance of a Base (home) in Games

The other day, in response to Syl, I wrote about the concept of homes in games, places where you can sleep and retain your sanity and perhaps even comfort.  At the time I thought it was merely a pointless concept that is fun to talk about but has no relevance to the actual game or its design.  As so often happens, I was wrong, as proven by the fact that I disagreed.  Homes, or as I will call them, bases, are important in shaping how we play.

I'll use the term bases rather than homes because the concepts are different.  Homes make us feel warm and fuzzy.  Bases are resting points, hopefully safe, where we can refill, restock, and empty our bags.  Stalker has no homes, but it does have bases and those are very important to how I play.

As I depart from Skadovsk, the rusting ice-breaker in a swamp, I save my game.  As I leave I am transitioning between the safe area and the unsafe.  Within there are no stray bullets, anomalies, or mutants.  Outside, there are.  Having a base creates this transition area, perfect for saving the game.  It's also perfect for quitting the game.  As I return or leave there is a clear change in mental state, from the alert outside to the relaxed and more thoughtful inside.  For me, that makes it a good time to quit.  It is a break in the game.

Contrast that with Civilization which doesn't have as clear breaks.  There is the end of turn pause, but that is merely a button press waiting to happen.  And besides, that pause is time for checking on production, making sure nothing was missed.  It is a pause, at most, and definitely not a break.  This is part of what drives the "one more turn" phenomenon, that despite being turn-based and presumably disjointed, it is actually quite smooth, with one action flowing into the next, with no logical point to start.  There is the start of the turn, right after the AI has gone, but that is an even worse time, when you've just seen all the consequences of decisions and have that information fresh in your mind.  To quit then is to discard all you've seen and all you plan to do, in hopes of remembering it later.

I found this in WoW as well.  When I return to a town there are the mailbox and vendor, inviting me to empty my bags and free myself of the worry of those.  There is the inn, inviting me to log out for a while.  The town is safe and there are usually no quests within the town itself.  Maybe there is a quest giver, but the exclamation point will be there tomorrow.  Unlike Civilization there is not a memory loss from logging out for a while.  However, bag space, despite seemingly to be a stopping point "bags are full, gotta go now", is instead a starting point to another task: empty the bags, knowing where to mail items, what to sell, perhaps what to go to the AH for, or if a bank alt handles the AH, then the bank alt has mail to open and bags to empty and auction to post.  Eventually there is a stopping point, when mail and bags are settled and auctions are up.  It may add another half hour or more, but it is eventually there and will nudge you off to dreams of epics.

Guild Wars 2 is different in its break points.  The anywhere AH sale and ability to deposit crafting materials means that I've not gotten into the habit of using bank alts, so I don't have that pull to jump around to clean up everything.  But this also means that cities do not stop me.  A city is just a waypoint away from more questing, so it's more of an inconvenient loss of silver than a note to stop.  Similarly, the heart system means that I won't return to a town to turn in a dozen quests and have that sense of completion and therefore of stopping.  However, since I am unaware of the existence of rested xp, wouldn't want it anyway, and there is no logout timer in the wild, I have little problem logging out wherever I am.  In that regard it is easier to log out, but there is no nudge toward doing so.  There is even a nudge to stay on: since the marketplace is global, there are always buyers and sellers, so odds are, someone is just about to buy your auction if you wait just a few more seconds and maybe you'll get some of your orders filled so you can craft with that and post it which will sell and in a little bit you'll post more buys and pick up those and why does my clock lie to me and claim that hours have passes when all I was doing was picking up my auctions?

I like having break points.  Call it paternalism if you like, but I think gaming would benefit from design bits such as break points which encourage more moderate play.  They don't at all force it, but they help.

Looking forward to GW2 authenticators more than ever

I woke up to an email about a login attempt from the city of Hefei in China.  Good job, ArenaNet, for blocking that.  Of course now I'm annoyed though.  I don't actually trust security emails.  I don't like to click links, especially links for things that are going to ask for my password.  So rather than click the account/guildwars2/account/login-attempt?[unintelligible garbage] link, I instead went to my account using the ArenaNet site.  Except I can't seem to find the link for managing unauthorized login attempts.  That's bad.

To add to the worry I wondered if that meant they also had my email, or more accurately, my email and password.  So then I changed my email password too.  Now it's a very strong password, though not hard to remember.  It is, however, annoying to type.  Maybe that will stop the hackers.  While I was there I figured I'd check out the two-step authorization feature, but that appears to rely on phone calls or texts, neither of which are free for me, so I'd bankrupt myself as fast as if I gave you all my ATM PIN.

And to think, I'd started off the day so well.  Well-rested, cold almost gone, with some shiny clean dishes waiting to be put away.  And then the internets betrayed me.  Though ultimately, as with all things, it is the fault of China.  I will have to yell at some classmates about this today.  They'll only be feigning complete confusion.

[edit] I also have an email from Blizzard about suspicious account activity.  Thankfully that has an authenticator.  But now I'm very worried.  GW2 could have been random, but two accounts makes me think I need to run a t-test.

A world to live in, a world to sleep in

Syl asked an intresting question: Where would you build your house?

Where indeed?  We can set aside scenery and ask something more important: sleep.  Homes aren't where we live, but also where we sleep.

This is where I think my MMO and single-player experiences diverge.  In single player games I tend to be in worlds I could live in.  Stalker, Fallout, Half Life; these are all worlds where I could live.  I could scavenge and scrape by and have some fun doing it.

I could never sleep in those places.  Like in I Am Legend, I imagine myself trying to huddle in the bathtub while scary things shriek around me.  Normally I'd go shoot them, but it's been a long day and I just want to sleep.

For me, sleeping means huddled under blankets from the cold.  I don't like summer much because of that: too hot.  But winter, winter is wonderful.  I can open a window and be nice and cold, or I would be if not for my pile of blankets and quilts.  So if I need a world to sleep it, it better be cold.  World of Waarcraft had some cold at first: Winterspring and Dun Morogh.  Then came Nothrend and snow, snow everywhere.  Glorious.  Welcome to the endless winter!

Unfortunately, Northrend was also filled with Scourge and was therefore not much a sleeping spot.  Thankfully, Guild Wars 2 has a nice collection of zones with a lot of snow and nary an animated corpse in sight.  Wolves and owls don't worry me.

Beside the necessity of snow, there must be peacefulness at night.  Indeed, there is peacefulness there.  Not like those awful post-apocalyptic zones filled with bloodsuckers and zombies making noise all the time.

What worlds can you sleep in?

I heart hearts

Are hearts just quests?  Yes.  On the other hand, no.

Quests and hearts tend to do similar things: tell you want to kill, fiddle with, or retrieve from a designated area.  In this regard, quests and hearts are the same.  However hearts have advantages in terms of presentation.

First off, hearts are active the moment you're able to participate.  If I am shooting wasps it means that I'm shooting wasps for the heart.  Contrast that with a quest where you might kill a dozen bears on your way in, only to be told to go kill a dozen bears.  I'd not mind that if they actually wanted two dozen, which is really just a matter of presentation: count number of bears killed before quest, add that number to the total required, thereby creating the illusion that the player got credit for them.  However they don't do that.  The overall effect of the hearts in this regard is to reduce the sense that I am killing mobs pointlessly.  Neither system deals with post-quest/heart slaughter.

Second, hearts are simultaneous and comprehensive.  I'm helping Farmer John with his farm, which includes everything from killing wasps to digging up large and aggressive grubs.  Maybe all I did was kill wasps, but if I killed a ton of wasps, that's helpful, even if I ignored the grubs and leaky pipes.  This even helps with the problem that a dozen other people are already there killing wasps.  Since we're rendering a sort of general help, rather than heroically saving a very tiny part of the world, it makes sense that more than one person would be involved.  Furthermore, having many people helps average things out, so I can imagine that despite my obsession with shooting wasps, someone did eventually get around to fixing the pipes.  Quests can use the trick of stacking, having a few quests that relate to the same area, but this doesn't give the flexibility of wasp-killing vs. pipe-patching.  When the quests come from multiple NPCs, particularly NPCs who aren't standing right next to each other and presumably overhearing what the other ones told me to do, then it can feel artificial, excessively planned that everyone just so happens to want me to kill a dozen bears, harvest a dozen bear asses, and kill a dozen angry stalks of grass which feed on bear corpses.

Hearts don't fill my bags with terrible vendor trash 'rewards'.  Instead, the heart-giver is a karma vendor who might sell me something neat.  Or at worst, helps me empty my bags of whatever trash I got off the wasps.

A deflationary economy with a price floor

I find game economies interesting because they can be little experiments.  Imperfect experiments, but experiments nonetheless.  In the case of Guild Wars 2, we can look at how people act in an economy experiencing deflation, but with a price floor.

To start off, I tend to use deflation in the sense of price deflation, which is not necessarily linked to the money supply.  We can see this in the current economy where the money supply has grown more quickly than prices.  In the long term the two will tend to match up, but we tend to die and stop caring over the long term.  However in this post I am going to use deflation to describe both the money supply and the price level, as the two are more easily linked in a game.  Why is that?  Because in a game there are not contracts, so prices can vary much more readily with the money supply.

Rather than calling it a deflating economy, you might try to call it a heavily-taxed economy.  This seems logical: any trading post activity results in me the seller getting 15% less than what the buyer paid, much like taxes.  However taxes actually go somewhere, to someone, rather than vanishing into thin air.  This isn't to suggest that taxes do not change the economy, but merely to show that taxes are not the same as burning a pile of currency.  We could still look at how the taxes change behavior, possibly reducing activity or fueling a 'black market' of avoiding taxes by using chat and mail.

The reason I call it deflationary is that the money supply is being reduced, as well as the price level.  Normally in times of deflation we expect to see a recession.  Consumers, anticipating lower prices, will hold off on spending and instead save.  That savings can become investment and loans, and loans become very desirable since deflation essentially causes the currency to have a built-in interest rate on top of the nominal interest rate.  If I give you $10 today and you give me $10 tomorrow, even if you paid no interest, for me the $10 is worth more and if you had to work to get the $10 to repay me, you had to work more to get it.  In that way, deflation discourages borrowing even as it encourages lending.

Prices cannot drop forever because there is a price floor.  In real life we'd see this in the form of government subsidies.  For example, in the US there are price guarantees on farm products such as milk.  If market prices fall below the guarantee, then the government will refund the difference.  The reasons for this are varied, but in part it can act as an insurance policy, ensuring that farmers do not react to price drops by excessively reducing production, triggering a price spike, and so on.  It soothes the markets, though at the cost of overproduction at times and the subsidy cost.

The price floor in GW2 takes the form of vendors who will always buy items.  This means that copper ore is never worth less than 3c.  Nothing can ever become completely worthless.  Obviously if the market price is higher then the items will go there rather than to vendors.

This creates a ping-pong effect.  Market activity destroys a large amount of currency, driving down prices.  But if prices get too low, vendors will stop the decline.  For a while we will see items being vendored until the money supply is large enough to drive up prices.  And then gold is destroyed until vendors become a factor again.  Note that personal activity will deviate from the overall market, so I'm not suggesting that the market overall is going to go into constant, repeated recessions (at least not for this reason; I'm not ruling them out), but rather that individuals will tend to go through cycles.

I expect that this pong-pong will stabilize as the markets mature, and importantly, as the rush to level crafting wears off.  Eventually some items will be obvious vendor trash and others will go to the market.  Though even this will not be perfectly stable.  Imagine a simple world in which the only drops are Chest of the Trash and Copper Ore.  The chest is useless and does not salvage into anything useful, so it is permanently vendor trash. Copper ore is valuable and will go to the market.  Stable prices require a particular ratio of dropping between the chest and the ore.  If too few chests drop, then the ore trading will destroy too much gold, driving down the price, until eventually copper is vendored, until the currency is restored and prices can rise again.  Note that copper is a stand-in for a variety of trade goods and the chests cover not just vendor trash but also events and quests, since those generate gold and do so at a particular average rate relative to resource gathering.  Of course activity can change to alter these effective drop ratios, such as spending more time at events that give gold and less time farming materials.

One reason for the deflation is obvious: having little spare gold encourages gem-buying which means profits from the gem shop.  This would encourage not just heavy gold sinks, but few gold sources as well.  But not everyone would buy gems and having too little gold would ruin the economy (this is why a real-life gold standard is exceptionally stupid).  To compensate, there are gold sources beside the gem-buying.  Together, these create a deflationary economy with a price floor.  It won't be stable and it certainly won't be the most efficient set of regulations, but it sure is interesting to watch.

A million competitors and a million customers

People are expressing worry over the effects of the globalized market.  With so much competition prices end up extremely low, to the point that most crafting is unprofitable.  I could have taken the last part of that statement, "most crafting is unprofitable" and pointed it at WoW, where indeed, most crafted items are not profitable and you often are better off sending items to the vendor.  In those cases where they are profitable, it often seems to be due to the presence of enchanting, not because the leveling items are particularly useful on their own.  From this perspective it could seem that the global market isn't actually doing the supposed harm to crafters, but is instead just the easy thing to aim at.

Think back to your intro econ class with your supply and demand curves (which back then are straight lines).  Push supply out and there you go, quantity goes up and price goes down.  Now push out demand and suddenly price is back up where it was and quantity is even higher.

Competitors and undercutters are not the problem of the globalized market.  Time is.  With so many people, someone is online crafting when you are, which means that you don't get to be the one single person who is making copper wizzbangs.

On the plus side, this means customers.  Not only are there more customers, presumably in direct proportion to the increased crafters, but they will be more even than on a single-time zone server.  No longer is there the guessing game of posting and hoping that a buyer arrives before another seller.  It might happen, but with so many people from so many time zones in the market, you'll get enough buyers at more times, despite the sellers.

The constant stream of buyers means that a seller can do a constant stream of business.  Flooding the market is a much smaller problem, since the market is that much bigger and able to handle that many more goods over a given time.  Tap into a stream and you can get a lot of gold.  But if you fail to do so, if you cannot find a stream of your own, then you're going to have a hard to getting in.  You'll be competing with people who know their marker, how to efficiently get supplies and create their product with as little effort as possible, and who know exactly how low they can go on their prices while you're fumbling in the dark.  In this way, the global market may have little effect on the average seller, but will concentrate the rewards among fewer sellers.  That could cause problems.

A money-fired power plant

I found a niche in the Guild Wars 2 economy where I can get a bit of gold.  I'm not rolling in piles of gold coins (that emote hasn't been added yet), but I no longer feel poor and I think I can get fairly steady income from this.

But it involves the trading post.  That creates a strange problem, or at least what is in my mind a strange situation.  These are rough estimates, but depending on the product, I destroy the 15% on my sale, baseline, plus more on top of that for merchant materials, with the result being that I estimate that  20-30% of the gold I touch is destroyed in the process of me getting it.  That doesn't include the fact that whoever I buy from also had 15% of their sale destroyed.

This isn't part of some convoluted scheme of buying and reselling and rebuying to distort markets.  It's little different than how I got gold in WoW: buy gems off market, cut gems, sell gems.  Some gold is lost to failed sales and auction house cuts, but that's just the inevitable result of the system.  Buy-craft-sell.  Nothing fancy, and yet, it burns piles of gold.

What disturbs me about it is the inefficiency and the implications for other players.  If for every gold I get, 20 silver are destroyed, that suggests that for every gold I have someone had to farm 1.2g through events (which in the mid 40s are giving around 2 silver) and vendoring.  I shudder to imagine what happens if I'm not selling to consumers but instead my product is bought and recrafted or simply reposted, destroying even more gold.

I'm not opposed to gold sinks, but GW2 does seem to be rather excessive.  If I were looking for a single crude fix, I'd remove the trading post's cut.  Leave the posting fee, but don't take a further cut at the time of sale.  That takes the baseline burned gold from 15% to only 5%.

A few fixes for GW2

Save auto-attack states for weapon switches.  It is irritating that when I switch to my flamethrower or elixir gun I lose the auto-attack on the primary spammable and have to turn it back on, every switch.

Longer leashes on mobs, particularly if you are actively attacking them.  I have to kite a lot and it doesn't help when just barely out of shooting range the mob is running back.  Thankfully, resetting mobs are not invulnerable and do not regenerate quite as fast as in WoW.  However this also means that they don't seem to reset their aggro if you shoot on the way back, so a fully-healed mob may return to chase after you again, while you've been in combat the entire time and not healed up similarly.

Restricting map markers to current map as some sort of toggle.  It's frustrating to try to figure out how to get to a skill or vista only to realize, eventually, that it's in the next zone over.

Slightly shorter bounce range on my engineer's electric shot which likes to jump halfway across the map to aggro neutral mobs.

Rather than merely displaying total profits, give a list of sales, including the TP cut.  This can be found in the "My Transactions" tab.

Add "Usable" as a filter option or add armor type as an option.

Bulk vendor chef items come out of bags of 25 while others come out in stacks of 10.  Cut the bags to 20 and reduce the karma cost proportionately.

Add a bank tab for intermediate crafting materials.  This is especially problematic for my chef, which seems to be an order or two of magnitude more complex than leatherworking or huntsman.

Allow crafting to draw materials directly from the collectables tab. As of a couple days ago, crafting can be done using materials in the collectibles.

Please tell the woman near the crafting waypoint in Hoelbrak that we all agree that she has not taken leave of her senses and we have gone off to fight the creatures of metal and stone so please stop yelling every two seconds.  Also, please tell the NPCs that we all know that the spirits of the wild rarely answer their prayers and we're really sorry to hear that, particularly the part where we have to hear that.

[edit for new fixes]
Preserve searches in the trading post when switching tabs.