That's When My Patience Went Away : GW2

Following my return to work I had the shell of a plan prepared for what I wanted to write about today. I was thinking along the lines of a meditation on the different entertainment needs brought on by enforced leisure and enforced labor, how one requires stimulation and the other just the opposite.

It was all percolating quite nicely. And then I saw this. 

The headline Massively:OP went with was

"Guild Wars 2 delays End of Dragons to 2022, brings Colin Johanson and Josh Davis back."

That's enough to put the fear into anyone. Reading through the official press release, it gets worse. Much worse:

"Alliances When?

This year."

That about puts the cap on it for me. Along with the rest of the handful of people still playing World vs World, I'd allowed myself to get comfortable. I thought this insane idea had died of neglect long ago and we could all just carry on as if the whole ludicrous farrago had never been suggested. Sadly, it seems I was mistaken.

If that wasn't sufficiently disheartening, there's this:

"In the past, development priorities shifted away from WvW, and unfortunately both World Restructuring and our players suffered as a result. Our new leadership team views WvW as a cornerstone mode of Guild Wars 2, and it will be a focus of ours going forward."

It's that sickening moment, when the door opens to your nice, quiet office on the ninth floor, where no-one ever goes and most people don't even know anyone works, and in come three suits from corporate with a checklist and an appraising look. Sometimes benign neglect is the best you can hope for.

In this case, it's not just simple fear of the unknown. There's the plain fact that every single iteration on WvW since 2012 that pretended towards anything more than a basic bug fix has been at best a downgrade and frequently a disaster. Every. Single. One.

Desert borderlands even killed EBG.

 

Naturally, the plan comes with promises and safeguards. Most of the section in the press release relating to Alliances is made up of apologies for previous errors and promises not to repeat them. All of which we heard last time and the time before that and the time before that again.

There's a touching naivete in the promise of a collaborative process based around a beta:

"World Restructuring features will be released in a multiphase beta. What this means is that we’ll release a part of the World Restructuring system, test it with you in the live game, gather your feedback, and then iterate on it for a future release. ... Once we’ve worked with you to lock down the design and implementation, we’ll polish it up and take it out of beta."

It sounds reassuring until you realize the despised revision that removed all of the alpine battlegrounds and replaced them with their desert counterparts was the result of a similar collaborative beta, albeit a closed one.  That was the update that drove maybe half of all WvW players to stop playing, most of them for good. Several badly-received revamps led to open rebellion that was only quelled by a public poll on what should be done, a poll that resulted in a humiliating defeat for ANet and the removal of all of the new content to which they'd tied their banner. So that went well.

I'm less disturbed about this than I might be. Two or three years ago Alliances seemed like a terrifyingly bad idea but that was when the game mode still retained a vestige of the camaraderie it once had. There's none of that any more. All that remains is some knockabout fun, something very similar to an oversized, hot-join, never-ending game of capture the flag in which no-one really cares where the flag is or who's got it. It's hard to see how Alliances can make it actively worse but I have faith that if there's a way, ArenaNet will find it.

We had fun, once.

 

Going back to MassivelyOP's headline, there are more bad things. First and worst is the postponement of the third expansion, End of Dragons. This is embarrassing. Guild Wars 2 has had two expansions to date, Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire. The first took three years to arrive, the second pegged that back to two. So far, so good. Not great, really very not great, but at least heading in the right direction.

When (I guess I should say "if") it launches, EoD will have been four and a half years in the making. The original game only took six months longer than that to build from scratch. At this point I'm certain the better plan would have been to start on GW3 right after the second expansion. If you're going to take the time you might as well make the damn game.

The given reason is, of course, quality. It's always quality. 

"...we need a little more time to deliver our creative vision for Cantha...We appreciate your patience as we take the time to give the expansion the attention it deserves"

Seriously, screw your "creative vision". And screw the self-congratulatory tone. Just get a damn expansion out in something close to the timescale every other major manages. 

The problem doesn't just lie with the development team, unfortunately. There's a glib, knowing wink in that "we appreciate your patience".  You can start a conversation about expansions in game any time you like and half the people talking will be saying they don't want one at all or they don't want one yet. It's not patience, it's apathy and antagonism. A lot of GW2 players will be cheering today because they won't have to suffer another expansion until next year.

I am not one of those players. The game is stale. It's been stale for much of its ten year run. The only time it freshens up is when we get a new expansion and so far that's been twice. And I only liked one of those.

Straight up, if there was a good alternative to GW2 I would be done with it now. I was done with it after Path of Fire. I keep logging in because it's there and it's familiar and it's easy and because it's the game Mrs Bhagpuss plays but mostly I'm still playing GW2 because not one of the alternatives I'm waiting on has made it to market yet. 

Mrs Bhagpuss, who only plays GW2 and, unlike me, rarely goes back to older mmorpgs she once enjoyed after she moves on to new ones, has been asking more and more often when the next good game is likely to appear. I can only hope it's soon but sadly I know it won't be before the delayed End of Dragons expansion so I guess we will indeed end up being "patient". But only because we have literally no choice.

So much for the expansion. How about those two guys coming back, eh? 

Heart of Thorns introduces a hitherto unknown problem to the game: too much loot.

 

This one's a bit more nuanced. From a company's point of view, can it ever be a good thing to have to announce you re-hired people you said goodbye to years ago? I guess it depends on why they left in the first place but at best it is, by definition, a backward-looking move. 

Colin Johanson was a very controversial figure in much of his time at GW2. He was the figurehead of a direction of which a vocal majority of players strongly disapproved. Whether it was true or not, he was labelled as the guy who wanted to make GW2 harder for casuals. 

He was the showrunner for Heart of Thorns, the expansion many players found daunting and difficult. The sales of the expansion were reportedly underwhelming and the aftermath confused and chaotic. Johansen posted an emotional and upbeat farewell when he left but my summary of his tenure, written at the time, was less than complimentary:

"Under his direction the game has felt increasingly rudderless, surging from each new idea to the next with barely any time to reflect on the failures or consolidate the successes.

He failed to hold the line on free, bi-weekly content updates or on not producing paid expansions. Worse, when forced to change direction on these and other key, structural positions, he failed to make a success of the imposed alternatives. It seems the relative failure of Heart of Thorns was the final straw."

Given the history, it's hard to see why his return should be greeted like the prodigal son. Or indeed, like Scott Hartsman riding in on his white charger to save EverQuest II, a comparison I am absolutely certain Colin wouldn't want anyone to make.(I imagine he'd prefer us to cast him as Yoshi P riding to the rescue of his own personal FFXIV, but then what dev wouldn't?).

I never had carried much affection for Colin Johanson's style or approach. Nevertheless, I do have to admit that the direction the game took under his tenure, up to and including the release of the first expansion, made it by some margin my favorite era. 

I liked Heart of Thorns. I liked it a lot. It would quite possibly make the list of my top ten favorite expansions for any game. I've played through it start to finish twice and partially several more. I still go there most weeks and goof around just because I enjoy being there.

The adventure begins!

Conversely I dislike, maybe even detest, the second expansion, Path of Fire, which attempted to be all the things HoT was not: accessible, steeped in Guild Wars lore, commercial. I found PoF smug, irritating and, by far the worst of all video game crimes, stultifyingly dull. I forced myself to complete the main storyline on one character. Never, never again.

That does give me some hope for Colin Johanson's return. He did once do stuff I really liked and, let's be brutally honest, he can hardly make things worse. Except, of course, he can. It's amazing how often that happens. Still, we can hope. 

That just leaves the return of Josh Davis, about whom I have to say "Who?". I vaguely remember his name. I have no idea who he is or what he did. The only GW2 writer I remember is that one who got canned for fighting with players on social media and I don't even remember what their name was.

The writing in GW2 has been all over the place for years. It has some standout moments and a vast amount of ho-hum filler. Storylines blow up then blow away like dust on the wind. Who was Mr E.? Anyone know? Anyone care? How's Zojja doing? Is she dead or alive? Is Taimi still ill or did her incurable condition cure itself? Marjorie and Kasmeer, are they still a thing? 

Gliding. 100% more fun than mounts. Official!

 

It's soap opera and melodrama. Most people probably just click through it to get to the fights anyway. I'm sure Josh Davis coming back means something to someone but not to me.

And there we must leave them, Colin and Josh, setting out their desks, going down the hall to have their photographs taken for their security passes. We'll have to judge them by their works, I guess, although precedent suggests we'll be lucky if we have the least clue who's actually responsible for what.

I'll spend my summer dreading the onset of the Alliance beta although at least it's going to give me something to rant write about . I'd far rather have had an unpolished expansion in August than a supposedly tarted up version of the same six months later but no-one's asking my opinion because the people who actually matter have already decided what my reaction's going to be: I'm going to be patient. I've been thanked for it so it must have happened.

Ashes of Creation and Pantheon need to get a bloody shift on. There's an open door here waiting to be pushed. At this stage I'd even take Camelot Unchained as a stepping-stone to something I actually want. I know Mrs. Bhagpuss will try it. I wonder if she'd give New World a look... she does have that new mouse now...

How We Live Now: GW2

Unlike most MMO developers, GW2 doesn't do Producer Letters. (Edit: Oh, wait, now they do!) Officially, that is. There is, nevertheless, someone in charge, an individual who sets the tone and announces the direction for the game.

For a long while that was Colin Johanson. He fell on his sword after Heart of Thorns failed to perform as well as expected. His replacement, who was supposed to be taking on the role only for as long as it took to find someone to do it permanently, was Colin's "boss" Mike O'Brien, one of the three people who created ArenaNet back in 2000 and the only co-founder still working there.

As each episode of The Living World arrives, ANet host an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. Since Mike's been in charge he's tended to open the proceedings with a statement that can be read as his Producer's Letter.

They don't tend to be very revealing or even interesting, unlike some of Colin's more explosive statements. The current one from a day ago doesn't divulge a whole lot of facts or plans but tonally it says a lot about where the game is now and where it's likely to go in the next year or two.

I found it to be both a reassuring and a depressing read. Also annoying and frustrating. There's an unmistakable tone of satisfaction that borders on smugness. Here are some quotes that should give an idea of what I mean:

"I want to take a moment to celebrate the journey we’ve been on together this year.

I think with Season 3 we’ve hit a really good balance.

I think and hope that this year’s releases have been the best work we’ve ever done.

I think we’re finishing this year in a good position."

From that I take it that Mike has the business in the shape he wants it and we are likely to see things carry on much as they have been for the foreseeable future. That's good to hear, in terms of the health and longevity of the game, but somewhat unnerving if, like me, you feel GW2 has largely been spinning its wheels since Colin left.

Not that you'd know it from this AMA. For all Reddit's reputation as a bear pit, it's obvious why ANet prefer to host discussions there rather than on the forums. The AMA is stuffed with easy set-ups, soft questions and fawning. To read it you'd think the game had nothing but happy, docile fans.

The official forums tell a very different story. Comments on the feedback thread for the current LS episode are more nuanced. Many people are happy but by no means all of them. The praises and pans run about 50-50, with the negative comments mostly focusing on the gameplay and the narrative:

"Probably the weakest episode to date, in fact of all the Seasons.

I’m sorry, but if I had wanted to play a puzzle game, I would have bought a puzzle game instead of this game.

Surprisingly disappointing. I feel like the trailer tricked me.  

This episode left me saying why? why? why? Do you switch writers literally every episode? I felt like none of them made a coherent story and that reveal was not shocking but left a feeling of " this was dumb waste of time"

The real problem for me, though, comes not from Mike's - arguably complacent - satisfaction in a job well done or his understandable preference for chatting with a friendly audience rather than taking on a hostile one. No, it's some of the structural changes that have been made under his watch that concern me:

"We’ve always been good at shipping things, but with our renewed focus on quality above everything, we’ve had to get better at not shipping things. We now develop new content and features with a default assumption that they won’t ship, and then if they turn out great, we proactively decide to ship them".

Pre-launch, the mantra was Iteration. Everything had to be done and done again until it was done right. That ran completely counter to what has become the prevailing mode of the industry, the "bash it out now and tart it up later" ethos of Early Access and it inevitably slowed the whole process to a crawl.

If Iteration seemed to take forever, imagine how much more delay "not shipping" must add. GW2 already feels like one of the slowest-to-react MMOs I've played and it's infamously one of the most tight-lipped. Now we can just imagine them all, hunched over keyboards in their double-locked security cells, working on projects we'll never see, while problems in the game that have persisted for months and years go unaddressed.

Not an encouraging picture and one with which I have little affinity. I hugely prefer to get my hands on something rough but functional now, the chance to play around with it while it gets smoothed and polished, rather than wait months and months to get something that's supposedly "the best work we’ve ever done" and yet which turns out to be, as one comment in the official thread ironically puts it, "a solid 3/10".

When it comes to World vs World, considered by most aficionados to have been in free-fall for at least a couple of years, the following assertion raises a very hollow laugh:

"With PvP and WvW...the community owns the game modes and chooses what we work on...our goal this year was to develop more incrementally, test with the community on Live, and take feedback every step of the way". 

I can't speak for PvP players but WvW regulars, as they express their feelings on the forum and in the various chat channels in game, mostly feel ignored, not listened to and sometimes actively trolled by the developers. It would probably be not too far from the truth to say that WvW fans play the game mode despite the development attention it gets not because of it.

For all that, GW2 is clearly a stable, successful MMO. It's about to launch its second expansion and we'd better hope its a good one because the guy who's been in charge of development there, Mike Zadorojny, is about to take over the direction of the core game. If, reading between the lines, the new Xpack doesn't do a HoT:

"You’ll see a lot of him in the lead-up to the expansion, and then he’ll join the Live side too, and I expect he’ll eventually take these reins". 

At this stage I'm sanguine both about where things are and where they're headed. This is not the GW2 we were promised before launch, nothing like it. The Manifesto was torn up and burned long ago. This isn't even the GW2 of Living Story 1, an era when, as Mike O'Brien now claims to regret,

"Guild Wars 2’s content model [was] all about exciting events happening in the world" and "we went for the literal version, constantly shipping changes to the existing world".

Yes, we complained about it then but be careful what you wish for, as they say. Instead of something approximating a "Living World" we got a series of Unliving Tableaux, each "a slice in time" in which every map is zip-locked, a museum exhibit that never changes and never will change.

The original GW2 project was to create an ever-changing world, a dynamic environment in which no two players would have the same experience and no two sessions would play the same way. The current orthodoxy is

"It’s a game, after all...a game that doesn’t need reinvention but mostly needs a steady stream of great content, so we can focus on delivering great content."

I get it. It's just a game. I won't take it any more seriously than it deserves.

Now entertain me.

The New ANet : GW2

Since the departure of Colin Johanson as Game Director, ArenaNet feels almost like a different company. Both the tone and content of communication have changed almost out of recognition, along with the delivery of substantive and meaningful improvements to the game itself.

Following the successful and generally well-received systems overhaul of the Spring Update last week's regular bi-weekly patch added a neat teaser event for the return of what may or may not end up being called Living Story 3. It was only a small addition, flagged up with a single line in the patch notes, but it bodes well for the future.

The most striking example of the changed attitude, though, has been the arrival on the WvW Team and on the official forums of a developer who appears both to understand how world vs world is played and to be able to discuss it coolly, clearly and rationally. That is something the game has needed and lacked for the best part of four years.

With Tyler Bearce now fronting the discussion and the revitalized ANet seemingly committed at long last to a full revamp of what was at one time, supposedly, its flagship feature, the future for large-scale PvPvE competition in GW2 looks brighter than it has for years. We have already seen a very fast response to the opinion expressed by the great majority of interested players with the return of the original, "Alpine" borderland maps.

Before that the widely disliked and frequently shunned Desert Borderlands received a successful and largely well-received sense-check that made them much more fun to play. The plan is to bring both sets of maps into some as-yet unspecified rotation and my feeling is that it will come to be seen as a good and acceptable solution.

No sooner was that done than we had a poll on what we'd like ANet to do to improve WvW next. This is unprecedented. Unlike SOE/DBG, who will run in-game polls on what color hats they should put in the store (not an actual poll example - or is it?) ANet never poll anyone on anything. What ANet like to do is start interminable opinion-gathering threads on the forum, let them run on for weeks or even months, cherry-pick a few of the least relevant comments to reply to, generally stir up a huge amount of noise and then do absolutely nothing about it.

I should say, that's what the old ANet liked to do. New ANet is different. This time we got a poll with two choices and a third "I don't care what you do" option and about a week later we got a result. The choices were between a rag-bag of "Quality of Life" improvements and a revamp to the WvW scoring system. A do-over for scoring won and presto, another week later, up pops Tyler Bearce with a full, coherent, well-presented proposal for exactly what those changes might look like.

The Deserted Borderlands

I'm not going to go into the detail. I'll just say that if all those changes were made to the game today I'd be delighted. There are things I'd do differently but there's not one thing in the list that I dislike and almost all of it looks as likely to improve the overall experience of WvW as not.

The general response in the lengthy thread is very positive. Mirroring ANet's own change of approach player reaction is undergoing a sea-change. Astonishingly, when game-developers express themselves clearly and lucidly and talk to their customers as though they were self-aware, intelligent adults the response from the players becomes less defensive, more co-operative.

There's only one genuinely controversial element in the proposed changes: an adjustment to the scoring system that attempts to compensate for "night-capping". Night-capping isn't what our guild-leader was doing yesterday when he had one shot of whiskey too many and had to go and have a lie down (true story). It's when players in one time-zone hit their prime-time, all log in at once and find the players in another time-zone, who spent the last six hours taking and fortifying structures, have logged off and gone to bed.

"They say you can't go home again/Don't believe it" Quoting my own three-decade old song lyrics ftw!

GW2 is a globally-available game but it only has three data centers. You can discount the Chinese operation as a separate game. That leaves the rest of the world playing either on servers that are nominally either European or North American. Europe, by and large, manages to stay relatively coherent so the real problems are on NA servers.

There are by convention, four time-zones for WvW: EU, NA, SEA and OCX. You can sub-divide further but that's the baseline. This reddit thread explains it simply. The problem comes when a match takes place between servers whose major populations don't align. Players tend to cluster by culture or language or simply when they happen to be awake, so certain servers have far more players in one time zone than another.

In our current match, for example, Yaks Bend has a very strong NA, a moderate EU/OCX and almost no SEA at all. Jade Quarry is almost the reverse. In NA prime JQ lose everything; in SEA they take it all back and take our stuff as well. Most of that is large blobs taking undefended structures.

The problem is that you can't tell people where to play. There have been various incentives to get people to move about but nothing has really worked. As a massive believer in server loyalty I don't even admit to there being an option: I chose my server four years ago and I will play there until the server is de-listed.

Remember when we were excited for ranks? Thought not.

Recognizing the impossibility of moving the players ANet has decided to move the goalposts instead. Under the new proposals there will be a "Victory Point Multiplier" that attempts to compensate for map populations at various times of day.

Tyler Bearce describes this as potentially controversial in his opening post and he is not wrong. Much of the ensuing discussion focuses around this single change, with strong arguments for and against. Some "off-hours" players see it as a slap in the face. One even calls it "racist".

As someone who has literally never played a full session during Yak's Bend's prime-time, which starts just as I'm going to bed and ends just before I get up, I have no qualms about the proposed changes whatsoever. I don't feel for a moment that anything I do in my server's "off hours" will be less valuable or less valued than if I was doing it in prime time.

It's an emotional issue, though, and one that no-one at ANet has dared to address until now. Even if this doesn't turn out to be the best solution it's very good that the issue is out in the open being discussed and, at last, addressed.

Everything considered, this is a very exciting time to be playing World vs World. If we can just get this bedded down we should be able to move on to the return of Seasons. Season gameplay was the most exciting and involving competitive gaming I have experienced in a decade and a half and I'd love to have it back.

If this is the New ANet I have to say I heartily approve.

Hard Choices : GW2, Daybreak Games

As game director I have to make tough trade-offs. One thing I believe is that we have to focus on the core game first before taking on additional responsibilities. I wrote in the Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto in 2010 that our vision was to create a living, dynamic world, where there’s always something to do. Let’s ensure we succeed on that front.

Mike O' Brien - President - ANet

With a primary, near-term focus on growing the newest Daybreak franchise, H1Z1, I look forward to pushing the boundaries of emergent gameplay and expanding on the competitive experience.

Larry LaPierre - Senior Vice President of Games - Daybreak Games

Chinese companies will scoop up 1-2 western publishers a month from here on. The lesson to be drawn from Chinese mining company Shandong Hongda in talks to buy RuneScape developer Jagex for $300 million is that it will happen again.

Superdata (via MassivelyOP)

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear

Buffalo Springfield

My outlook on the ever-changing MMORPG landscape tends to be relatively optimistic, some might say Pollyannaish. For all the never-ending wailing and teeth-gnashing that goes on and for all the predictions of the genre's impending crash and burn, nothing much seems to change from one year to the next. Since I've long been happy with what I'm being offered, that's a situation that suits me just fine.

MMOs tend to persist. As Wilhelm observed recently, EverQuest just turned seventeen. RuneScape, currently on the table for $300m, is fifteen. WoW will be twelve this year. For a long while it's been arguable that the biggest problem the MMORPG genre isn't change but stasis.

Behind the scenes, though, something is moving that can. as yet, be only dimly seen. The one thing that is emerging from the mists is this; the days when MMORPGs could simply drift along on a whim and a prayer may be coming to an end.

It's not, necessarily, all about resources. DBG, having been streamlined (some would say gutted) by its new owners, still seems, somehow, to be able to come up with solid, new content at a very reasonable pace. A dip into the current, rather frenzied scrabble toward launch for Landmark does test that proposition somewhat, but even there a decisiveness and determination to get the blasted thing finished and out the door at last seems preferable to an eternity in early access development hell.

If DBG seems able to do more than expected with less than it needs, then by contrast, ArenaNet somehow manages the opposite. There's a very big team working on GW2. Mike O'Brien laid out the numbers in a recent Reddit AMA : "We have about 120 devs working on the live game, 70 devs on Expac2, and 30 devs on core teams that support both." And yet, even with those resources, few would argue the game has been well-served over the past twelve months.

The Heart of Thorns expansion, much though I was pleasantly surprised by its quality and accessibility, enjoyed, at best, a lukewarm reception. It seems sales were under-cooked, much like the expansion itself in the opinion of many, while retention of those who did buy in has been more disappointing yet.

The bulk of development in the last six months has been directed at Raids, which, while they have apparently been better-attended than similar content in other MMOs, surely remain a minority interest for the playerbase as a whole. At least the Raid team has completed its work in a timely and efficient manner, though, unlike the team working on adding the rest of the now "indefinitely postponed" Legendary weapons. Those, of course, much like raids, are also of direct interest only to a minority of players. A hardcore, you might even say.

The Spring Quarterly Update, due some time in April, far from bringing the new content many feel is desperately needed, is mostly focused either on fixing things that the expansion broke (World vs World) or fixing the expansion itself. Heart of Thorns, which has now officially been deemed too difficult, too exclusive and insufficiently casual-friendly, is going to get nerfed.

Whether the players who have wandered off elsewhere in search of the kind of meaningful realm vs realm warfare or entertaining, inclusive, casual gameplay upon which GW2 originally sought to build its brand will return to see if things have been tuned better to their tastes this time remains to be seen. Certainly the decision to abandon development of the Legendary weapons has not been received with universal approval, as the ever-growing threadnaught on the forums demonstrates, but for my money it signifies a long-overdue recognition of reality.

Just as the cancellation of EQNext suggests someone finally popping the hatch on the bunker and blinking at the harsh light of external reality, so Mike O'Brien's open acknowledgement that things have gone badly wrong recognizes a painful but unavoidable truth: things just can't go on like this. Someone needed to say it. Someone needed to do it.

Despite Colin Johanson's upbeat exit it now seems quite clear that the rumors of his taking the opportunity to resign before it was taken out of his hands could have substance. Under his direction the game has felt increasingly rudderless, surging from each new idea to the next with barely any time to reflect on the failures or consolidate the successes.

He failed to hold the line on free, bi-weekly content updates or on not producing paid expansions. Worse, when forced to change direction on these and other key, structural positions, he failed to make a success of the imposed alternatives. It seems the relative failure of Heart of Thorns was the final straw.

It's a bit rich of Mike O'Brien to arrive as some kind of white knight, driving away the darkness, waving the banner of that infamous, thrice-denied "Manifesto". He was, after all, Colin Johanson's boss for the last three and a half years. Still, let's not complain too much about the presentation. Let's just hold him to this:

I will work to make you happy, and I’ll do it by making you happy with what we ship, not with what we promise to ship.

It looks as if quite a few MMO developers may need to make some hard decisions in the coming months. We live in interesting times, as I'm sure they're saying in the boardrooms of the great steel-producing corporations of China, every time someone stands up to make a presentation on why they should buy a bunch of digital orc assets.

I'd kind of prefer those decisions were made by people who at least know the names of the games in question as something more than lines on a spreadsheet.

Onwards And Upwards : GW2

In much the way a new year finds players making a flurry of resolutions, predictions and goals, so this is the time of year when road maps to the future begin to roll out of MMO developers offices. This week ArenaNet published some general notes towards both their Profession Balance Goals and their wider plans..

The former is easily dismissed. Every MMO I've ever played has trudged joylessly around Escher's eternal spiral of "balance" The more classes there are the wearier the trudge becomes. Developers and elite players find themselves locked in a desperate dance of nerfs and builds, each seeking to obviate the excesses of the other.

Patch notes increasingly resemble medieval disquisitions on the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. Most players tune out entirely, while those who try to decipher the hieroglyphs find their eyes glazing over around the third bullet point.

Whatever the actual changes, once the emergency patches and server restarts required to fix the most egregious errors are done, we all settle back and wait for the grognards to codify the new meta, which we then religiously adopt (with amendments because we all know better). A few weeks later the developers shake the bag and pull out new tiles and the whole miserable process begins over again.

So, forget about that. The broader picture outlined in Colin Johanson's pretentiously titled (yes, I know, I can talk...) State of the Game Update is much more interesting, especially the part where he says

2016 will also be a turning point in the type of development we do for Guild Wars 2

Spin it how you will, this is an admission of defeat. Go back and read the mission statements on cadence and Living Story. Or just read this quote from Colin back in 2013:

Our goal is to make Guild Wars 2 the most frequently updated and best supported game experience you can find, and to that end, every two weeks there will be a release with brand new playable content and a mix of supporting features and updates across the entire game.

How did that work out for you then? Probably about as well as this:

Expansions are definitely something that we’ll potentially look at in the future," he explained. "We don’t have a timetable on it. We’re open to it, but I think our major focus as a studio is making the living world concept as strong as possibly can for the players that we’ve got.

All of which is why any road map that talks about content or changes further ahead than, say, a couple of months needs to be taken with an economy sized bag of salt.

We should at least be able to rely on the frontlisted changes coming in the first of the new Quarterly Updates. It's happening in two weeks, after all. Quarterly also sounds like a much more manageable cadence, doesn't it? Maybe it's one they'll be able to handle this time.

The big ticket announcement for Winter 2016 is Gliding In Central Tyria. We're calling it "Central Tyria" now, then? Not Core Tyria? Not Pact Tyria? Oh, wait, that's not the "big" part of the announcement, is it?

This is quite a surprise. When other MMOs have introduced free flight to older zones it's generally required a deal of background work and preparation. While many GW2 players probably hoped, even expected, this day would come, I imagine most thought they'd have a longer wait than a mere three months on from the launch of the first glider over Magus Falls.

Of course, gliding isn't flight. Gliders can only go downwards, unless there's a handy updraft nearby. Merely by declining to add those mysterious swirls of rising air developers can presumably avoid much of the heavy work required to reshape old zones for flight.

As someone pointed out in a conversation on Dulfy (or was it Reddit?) after Rubi Bayer's initial teaser, most jumping puzzles go up. To preserve the notional integrity of JPs and vistas all that's really needed is an updraft exclusion zone in the immediate area.

Somewhat to my surprise I really, really enjoy gliding in Heart of Thorns. I've spent more time than I like to admit simply gliding around Verdant Brink for the sheer, exhilarating fun of it, trying to see how high I can get. Much like flying in Vanguard, gliding in GW2 doesn't need much of a purpose beyond wheeeeeeeeee!

That's a plus, then. And if they add it to WvW as well, where the new maps seem to have been made specifically with gliding in mind, we could have a whole new game. Imagine dropping shells on keeps or zergs the way we bomb Mordremoth in the final battle for Dragon's Stand.

Next on Colin's tick list is a revamp of The Shatterer. For those not in the know, The Shatterer is the lieutenant of Elder Dragon Kralkatorrik. Shat's main claim to fame, apart from being the instigator of a thousand scatological puns, is his deep and abiding inability to turn his head to the right.

Every three hours or so a huge gang of players gathers on a small hillock just to the lee of his right shoulder. As he stands helplessly, roaring and rearing and breathing his crystalline breath directly ahead, the zerg indulges in fatuous, excrement-based banter as they batter away at his exposed flank. Then he dies and we take his stuff.

Presumably the plan is to re-tool the "fight" into something at least on a par with Jormag, which has two phases, takes about fifteen to twenty minutes, and at a bare minimum requires players to move about occasionally. More likely it will get an upgrade to match Tequaatl, for which a modicum of both organization and attention are required.

While it's been handy to have Shat as a punching bag all these years, even I wouldn't claim the event has ever been fun. I used to enjoy the original Tequaatl battle and even now I'd have it back in preference to the current version but I won't be sorry to see The Shatterer get a makeover.

Colin's batting two for two. Keep it up. What's next? Ah, Fractal of the Mist updates. Pass.

Okay, I do have one thing to say about that, but it comes from much later in the notes, towards the end, when Colin's moved away from the Winter Update to cover plans going through the year. At this point he confirms there will be some new fractals.

Given that fractals were first introduced, what, three years ago, and we've had the same nine ever since, you'd have to say it's about time. Oh, wait, there was that one we voted for at Kiel's election, wasn't there? Did that ever happen? I lost interest when Evon was robbed of his rightful victory.

Hmm. Looking at Colin's post I can see that if I carry on picking over it section by section this is going to overrun. By a lot. Let's skip all the WvW stuff, save to say that almost everyone I've seen or heard comment on it, who actually plays WvW regularly, thinks the upcoming changes are positive. That's a first!

The real changes for WvW, the ones that will effectively relaunch the entire game mode in a format barely recognizable, are still out there in the long grass somewhere. Until then everyone's just marking time.

What else is there? Oh yes, event credit for Healers and Support Builds. This is something that should have been an integral part of the game from launch. How is it even still a thing three and a half years on? File under "Better Late Than Never" and let's hope it actually works.

The remaining odds and ends - tweaks to squads, a new "Mist Champion" for the new sPvP map, some new key binding options - deserve a line or two in a patch note, not a paragraph each in a PR post. There is one intriguing little squib, though: The Eldvin Monastery Brew of the Month Club.

Apparently "Once a month, when visiting a major city, club members will receive a package in the mail containing that month’s finely crafted brew. After collecting all twelve brews, club members will receive a title, a brewer’s backpack skin, and a guild decoration in recognition of their devotion to the craft." So that's a Monthly Log In Reward, then, is it? See you in January 2017 with my backpack and a hangover!

All in all it's encouraging. A lot of it I'll believe when I see it, like Living Story 3 and the WvW re-envisioning but at least, on paper, it looks good. It's very nice to see the first acknowledgment that there will indeed be a second expansion, too, even if it is thrown away in a couple of passing remarks. I wonder where we'll go next?

Until then, let's enjoy the holidays. Next up: Lunar New Year. Dragonball!

Talking A Good Game: GW2

I spent much of this morning reading the transcripts of a massive interview with Colin Johanson and another, much shorter, interview with Mike Ferguson. The Johansen interview is a few days old and has been much discussed elsewhere. The Egg Baron focused on the information on the new Guild events and Healing The Masses has a detailed analysis of the WvW material.

Colin Johanson's previous interviews and pronouncements have tended to rub me up the wrong way somehow and this long series of ambling, amiable replies to some rather soft questions is no exception. Filter out the fluff, though, and it's very revealing in what it lets slip about the underlying mechanics and state of the game.

The Mike Ferguson interview is much shorter and very much more focused, but the same points keep coming through: GW2 is poorly-constructed and under-resourced. Here are some quotes:

"Population limits are an unfortunate fact of life with the current wvw design" (MF)

"...bigger we can’t do currently with our existing tech, those are the biggest maps we can make. It’s actually just an engine limitation which means fixing that is gonna be a nightmare." (CJ)

"It’s very difficult to increase the size of the maps due to technical limitations" (MF)

"It’s a fixable problem, but we need some time from a very specialized type of programmer for that job and they’re all currently busy with other tasks." (MF)

Does anyone know the way out of this mess?

"Right now there’s really not very much at all that we can do with the UI, like resizable elements or anything...it would take huge engineering [...] to pull off." (CJ)

"the same couple of people who are required to do a lot of the guild features, are the same couple of people who need to do all the server back-end... anything that involves large amounts of server messaging or things, those are always bottle necked by the very very best programmers we have who can work on that extremely difficult set." (CJ)

"Matchmaking has the same problem as everything else I just said, which is basically the same couple who have to fix that also".  (CJ)

"We’re always leveraged by how many engineers we have, that’s our biggest issue at any given time. It is “how many programmers do we have that can actually code anything?” (CJ)

And so it goes on. Read the whole thing for many more examples. It's always surprising to discover that something that has had so much money spent on it, took so many years to be ready and has been so successful can still have so much structurally wrong with it and have such limited resources to make improvements.

What we need here is some Blue Sky Thinking

At one point Colin Johanson happily latches onto a gushing assertion that, unlike most other MMO studios, ANet are "open with the process".

"You have to be able to get out there and be like “hey, you know we really blew it on this, we are responding to that and we are gonna change our plans because of that” (CJ)

Later, while addressing a question about the Karka event, he says

"You know for five years, we spent five years saying “If it’s not ready doesn’t matter, just wait and then we’ll put it out when it gets ready”. And then we got into the live space it was “we have to keep free updates going, we have to have this fun stuff going on”. It really didn’t give us an opportunity to stop and catch our breath, say like “is this the right thing to be doing, is this the stuff we should be putting in the game?” (CJ)

Which is all very well, only aren't all these deep infrastructure problems you keep bringing up as the reason so many things can't be done the very same things you were building during those five pressure-free years? If it was "ready" when you put it out, why does so much of it not work?

And relax...

The takeaway from this seems to be that due to a lot of less than optimal design decisions made before launch, most of the first year of GW2's life is going to be taken up with trying to rebuild the house from the foundations up while we're all still trying to live in it. We shouldn't expect much, if anything, in the way of real new content, by which I mean new explorable landmass, this side of an expansion (the development of which is probably where a lot of the effort is allocated right now although no-one's being very "open" about that).

I remain sanguine. GW2 turns out to be an MMO like any other. It wasn't finished when it launched, it will never be finished. Bits of it work, other bits don't. Every time one thing gets fixed something else will break. That's MMOs for you. I get the strong impression that there's still something of a disconnect between the developers and their audience in these open discussions, but that's always the way. MMO players are a disparate, rag-tag bunch with countless conflicting agendas and expectations and trying to communicate with them at all must be a nightmare.

As for MMO developers themselves, the concept of hubris seems to be all Greek to them. Even the Greek ones (/wave Aventurine).

Tread Carefully : GW2

Everyone who cares will have read Colin Johanson's Road Map for the first half of 2013 by now. Like most ArenaNet press releases it's long on generalities and short on detail, so I'll wait to panic when there's something definite to panic about. Which there might be.

Some of it is heading in a direction I like. We're off to a good start with "What Makes GW2 Unique and Successful", and "The Living World Game". Allowing Colin a pass on "unique", I think he sums that aspect of the game up pretty well. The things he mentions are high on my own list of reasons why I've been playing his game for the last five months:

"Through the dynamic event system, every time you log in, you can experience and share something different in the world with other players".

"Open world online games are always strongest when players are encouraged and rewarded to interact as a community". 

My problem comes in what he proposes to do to enhance and expand on this in the months to come. This bit's fine:

"we also need to build on and strengthen our existing open world and its persistent content".

Nice intention. Problem comes with how he proposes to get there:

"One of our focuses is expanding and leveraging our achievement system".

Whoa! Hold on a second...

For my money that I'm not paying the whole Achievement system could just go away. About the only good thing I have to say about it is at least it's unobtrusive and easily ignored. But not for much longer, if Colin has his way:

"We’ll add tokens for your achievements that you can turn in to select from a list of rewards"

Must...have...more...stuff...

Oh fantastic! More shopping. That really is what I come to a renaissance fantasy virtual world for - the shopping. Apparently the sense of achievement from having achieved an achievement isn't enough of an achievement any more - we need to be paid, too. Aside from the underlying philosophical and semantic weakness of this approach, the practical upshot is this: either the rewards are desirable, in which case achievements cease to become reminders of things we have done and become instead pointers to things we have to do, or they are undesirable, in which case why bother?

Nevertheless, I'm not strongly against this mechanism. I'm not incapable of enjoying an MMO in which I do certain things only in the expectation of the reward I get for doing them. It's clumsy, inorganic and artificial, but hey, stuff! What I am quite strongly against is having this mechanism bolted onto an MMO that I feel is trundling on perfectly well without it. The idea of exploring and doing events because it's fun in and of itself will struggle to compete. GW2 already suffers from a surfeit of box-ticking and this can only make it worse.

Whatever happened to natural curiosity?

Much more worrying, though, is how this thinking looks like it might affect the "Dailies". GW2 has the best Daily system I've seen. It's a short list of simple things that you'd be doing anyway. If you play a standard 2-3 hour session you'll finish your Daily without even noticing you're doing it. If you're in a hurry you can knock the whole thing off in 15-20 minutes. It's just about perfect.

It does not need to be made more coercive, directed or structured. Any proposed change to an MMO that uses the phrase "drive players to different areas of the world" should have been shot down in the discussion phase. Imagine the mindset that allows a phrase as toxic as that to appear not just in a design document but in a Press Release!

Let me make it clear. As a "player" the only place you will "drive" me is to a game made by someone who doesn't think of players as cattle.

Moving on, all the stuff about Guilds is fine and dandy but again it's the wrong emphasis for this MMO. Encouraging guilds to be the be-all and end-all of community goes directly against the open and inclusive nature of GW2 that the opening paragraphs were puffing up as the game's Unique Selling Point. By all means give guilds more bells and whistles and little tassels down the back, but "content designed specifically for the guild to accomplish" by definition takes people out of the open world. Stick with "creation of new content by a guild/s everyone in the world can experience" and we're back on track.

Buggiest MMO ever and I played Vanguard!

As for the World vs World changes, we live in fear and trepidation. So far we know about the removal of free server transfers, which is causing huge disruption in the short term but can only be good for the game going forward, and the proposed nerf to AoE abilities, which no-one asked for and few seem to want. I certainly don't want it - it could wreck my favorite WvW builds, all of which rely heavily on AoEs.

There's yet more shopping in prospect, of course:

"We’ll introduce a system of prestige and advancement specifically designed for WvW".

It seems no aspect of the game is to be spared. On the other hand:

"we’ll add a new motivation to the WvW domain that goes beyond the overall weekly score to give more short term reasons to be winning in WvW".

That does sound intriguing. Just so long as the motivation isn't yet another thing to buy.

Come on Tequaatl, jazz it up a bit, can't you?

The Press Release ends with a mom & apple pie list that includes all the usual suspects like bug fixes and bot bans, better boss fights and an lfg tool, among which this absolute gem shines out:

"Identifying existing parts of the game that can be improved and made more fun/exciting, and investing the time to ensure everything we’ve built really shines as we move forward."

That really nails it, I'd say. Just do that, then you can get started on world peace. 

Anyway, that's the menu. Some of it looks quite tasty, some of it could be hard to digest. I don't think any of it is outright poisonous but I guess we won't know until we've swallowed it and by then it'll be too late.