Alone Together Or...? : GW2

There's been much post-launch discussion of the GW2 dynamic event system and how it might scale once the population bubble floats up out of the lower levels. SynCaine thinks it will fail; Zubon thinks the design is smarter than that.

I have two questions:

• Is it true that the low-level zones will be mostly empty most of the time once the launch frenzy dies down?

•  Are GW2 events fun to do alone?

The model that keeps getting quoted for comparison is Warhammer Online. Public Quests there worked well in beta and for a while after launch, when there were plenty of people around but soon there weren't enough players to keep the plates spinning and it all fell down.

How fair a comparison is this? Warhammer remains for many the very model of failed design. Mythic sold 1.2 million boxes and had 750,000 subscribers a month after launch. Two months on, more than half of those had left and the game has been in steady decline ever since. Four years after launch Warhammer is down to one U.S. and two Euopean servers.

Warhammer, like GW2, received glowing reviews at launch but a variety of poor design choices and  unfinished, rushed, content were soon exposed in actual play. Crucially, Warhammer Online required, as it still does, a subscription to play. An MMO that acquires a reputation as one that players are leaving in droves and which requires both an upfront purchase and a monthly fee to play will always struggle to attract new players.

An MMO that I know a lot more about than Warhammer is Everquest 2. EQ2 has done much better than Warhammer over the years but it too was struggling to attract new blood in the face of strong competition. The solution was first a walled-off Freemium offer and following the success of that experiment, the roll-out of the same model for all servers.

Low-level zones on Freeport, the original EQ2X "F2P" server, are never deserted. Not for the entire two years the server has been up have I ever seen fewer than two instances of the main starting zones and at peak times it runs to four or five even now. Moreover, the gameworld is well-populated at all levels, not just at the low and high ends. You can go into pretty much any zone on Freeport and expect to find it reasonably well-attended.

Taking away both the box and the subscription cost has resulted in a continual stream of new players to EQ2. Once through the doors, enough people seem to find enough to interest them to stay for a while. GW2 has one bump more than that - the box purchase from which ArenaNet presumably make most of their money - but they've proved adept at leveraging that model for eight years with Guild Wars. Pay Once - Play Forever seems to be a sufficiently attractive offer when you can put up something people might imagine they'd want to play forever.

So, I'm not convinced that the low and mid levels in GW2 will be deserted in a few months. The blogging focus on the scaling mechanic and what will motivate max level characters to return ignores the business model, which is to keep selling new boxes (or downloads) to new people. Having high-levels spend more time playing lower down, which the scaling world design will inarguably encourage to some degree, is icing on the cake.

Let's say the cake sinks and the icing slides off. Let's say there is no stream of new players keeping the low and mid levels hopping with events. Let's imagine you're there on your own as a newish player, wandering through Diessa Plateau or Snowden Drifts, seeing, if your lucky, the odd player run past in the other direction once every ten minutes or so. Will you still be able to have fun?

That's going to depend on what you call "fun", isn't it? Here we enter the perennial battleground, where your fun is my boredom is her "I hate this game!" I can only speak for my own fun, and for me GW2 is wonderful when no-one else is around.

On the comments thread over at Kill Ten Rats, Azuriel says "My experience has been Events suck by yourself, worse than leveling alone". That couldn't be farther from my own experience. I absolutely love the huge "all pile on" events, when dozens of players buzz around the map like wasps in a beer garden, but I equally love coming across an event that no-one's doing and trying it alone.

In beta I was often in sparsely populated areas on my own, particularly Diessa Plateau and Snowden Drifts, both designated 15 - 25 maps. I ran across many events where I was the only player there at first. Some, like the Champion giant attack on Nageling are utterly impossible for one player to affect in any way, but most that I came across, even the ones with multiple waves, can be chipped away at by a motivated player.


I made good progress alone dismantling the seige-weapons attacking Redreave, for example, and on the wave attack on Bloodsaw Mill. After a while other players did arrive, in small numbers and sometimes we won and sometimes we lost. Yesterday I had a marvelously entertaining twenty minutes trying to complete an event in the Drifts alone by pet-pulling, kiting, training to NPCs, reviving NPCs and generally rummaging through my old box of soloing tricks. I would have done it, too, if it hadn't have been for those pesky players who turned up right at the end and jumped in to help!

But of course it doesn't matter whether you win or lose an event in GW2 - it's the taking part that counts. You can get a Gold contribution award if you lose as well as if you win, and a "losing state" can result in a fork in the event chain that produces content that's new to you. It's only the NPCs who really "lose" - the player always wins.

I doubt many commentators feel that GW2 will fail hard, like Warhammer or, arguably, SW:ToR. Whether ArenaNet have baked their cake well enough to survive being left out in the rain we will only find out if the rain ever comes. It may just stay fine.

Of course, then the cake would go stale. A cake metaphor can take you only so far...

No Invitation Required: TSW

Back in the mists of time, when Allizewsaurs walked the earth and Everquest was the game that set the rules, a certain standard of behavior was expected. If you pulled a mob it was yours and yours alone. You pulled him, you kill him.

Strangers passing by would be loathe to jump in and help even when it was obvious you were looking at the short end of a long corpse run. No-one wanted to wear the Kill Stealer hat and who knew if a random act of kindness would end up in a /tell war and the eventual arbitration of a GM?

Separated at birth?

The underlying cause of all this was an all-or-nothing game mechanic that allocated xp and loot according to some inflexible and often poorly-understood rule. Whole etiquettes evolved that relied on knowing the intricacies of ownership: first damage, highest damage, killing blow? Which spells could safely be used outside of a group without leeching or stealing experience? Direct heals? Damage shields? Buffs?

Even if you safely negotiated this arcane palimpsest and did no harm, the mere fact of your intervention might not be welcomed. Your intentions might come into doubt, especially if you didn't move swiftly on. No, the only respectable way to share a kill was in a formally constituted group.

This was the way of things and there could be no other. When Blizzard built their better mousetrap they made sharing much more enticing and practical but the proper place to share remained inside the party. The team responsible for EQ2 went to such extraordinary lengths in formalizing and automating the "play nice" policy, the enforcement of which took up so much of an Everquest GM's time, that they strangled the life out of their new game almost before it was born.

Enter the iconoclast. In building Warhammer Online Mythic took one small step away from the hardline group-or-die mechanic they'd taken and run with in Dark Age of Camelot. They invented the Public Quest and in doing so pressed the MMO reset button.

I'll go left...

Sadly, the prophet is without honor in his own country. Warhammer withered but the idea it seeded grew. In what passes for short order in the deep time of MMO development along came Rift with its seamless autogrouping. Any time you came anywhere near another player fighting anything up popped a little window inviting you to group. How strange that seemed, for about ten minutes. And then how obvious.

Why wasn't it always that way? Were the designers of the early MMOs all Austenites? Did they deem it improper for us to do anything together before we'd been formally introduced?

Well, whatever lay behind those design decisions (and I imagine the reasons were largely technical rather than moral), it's all changed now. We're on the cusp of Guild Wars 2, which largely dispenses with the group itself. Even autogrouping is too formal there. All you need to do is hang around the general area and whatever rewards there are will be yours.

Which brings me at last to what I sat down to write about - The Secret World. The Secret World has no widely-advertised open grouping mechanic. When you pass someone killing a ghoul no invitation to join in pops up on your screen. There are no Public Quests, Dynamic Events or any kind of area where the game shares out xp and loot even-handedly just because you're there.

You and me and Amir makes three

And yet everyone behaves as though there is. From Kingsmouth to Carpathian Teeth, whatever you're trying to kill, any and all passers-by will gleefully pump a few rounds of automatic fire into it as they pass or whirl around and around slashing at it with a flashing blade. What's more, no-one complains. Everyone reacts as if this is perfectly normal behavior and of course it is. Actions that would have resulted in a blazing argument and demands for the name of your Guild leader in 2002 pass entirely uncommented in 2012.

It goes further. Last night I did an entire four-stage Main Mission with another player. It involved moving through a temple following a trail of glowing sigils, completing or preventing several rituals using both puzzle-solving and violence. There were a number of passably challenging mini-boss fights. We met by happenstance almost at the start, realized we had the same goals and co-operated successfully at every stage to complete them.

Need a scorecard to tell the players sometimes

At any point we could have spoken in tells to co-ordinate our actions and discuss tactics. Either of us could have offered an invitation to group. We did neither. These possibilities still exist but they aren't needed. Each of us could infer everything necessary from the visible actions of the other. It was apparent we could work together for mutual benefit and so we did.

We couldn't have done it had the mechanics of the game not supported us. Funcom haven't made any show of it but the Mission structure supports ungrouped co-operative gameplay. Everything we did, every ritual completed, every boss downed, updated both of us regardless of who contributed what, even though we were not formally connected in any observable fashion.

Thanks for the group..oh, wait, there wasn't one!

This, I believe, is the future of true massively multiple online gameplay. It's not "playing alone together". It's not "massively solo online". It's removing all the barriers that previously prevented players behaving naturally in a shared imaginary space. Verbal conversation, be it by typing or talking, simply isn't necessary for many of these interactions and has little to add to them. Being social is not predicated on chatter.

To me, the most interesting aspect of all of this is the rapidly-developing expectations of the audience. It's clear that players now want these systems, prefer them over formal grouping, at least out in the open world. It would be an unwise developer who failed to recognize this sea-change. I anticipate better and better MMOs in consequence.

A Rat's A Rat For All That

Rats. What is it about rats and MMORPGs? I can't say that I thought about rats one day in a hundred before I took up this hobby and now a day never passes. A dozen years ago, when I stepped out into Norrath, what's the first thing I remember? Well, alright, falling off Kelethin, losing my corpse and logging out in a strop but let's forget that, my own fault for making an elf. Cut me some slack, I was new and I knew nothing. We've all been there.

So then, forgetting that that the way I conveniently forget the first record I bought with my own money was a Gerry Anderson E.P. not, as I choose to tell people who ask (and it's surprising how often the subject comes up) "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by Joan Baez, my first MMO memory is... well it's chasing bats outside North Freeport. But the second! The second is rats. Big rats.

Roekillik au naturel

Rats get not one but two entries on GiantBomb. Kill Ten Rats is an MMO trope (and an excellent blog). At least one MMO has tried to define itself with a bold claim that it didn't have any rats at all. (It was Horizons and it had maggots instead, which really wasn't an improvement). Boars may get the "everywhere" hate but it's rats who have ubiquity down.

It's not just plain vanilla rats, either (and there's an ice-cream flavor to ponder. Or not). Giant rats and plague rats are all very well but as Orwell said, four legs good, two legs better and what's better than a very large, infectious rodent? An even bigger one walking upright wearing pants of course!

I believe I first encountered ratmen when I bought the Warhammer RPG. What a great book that was and what an excellent campaign. I must dig it out. Pen and paper gaming is the new black around here apparently, what with Tobold, Ardwulf and Tipa all getting their D20 on all over again. I can't recall exactly what part the Skaven had in the plot but I'm pretty sure they were in it up to their elbows. Assuming rats have elbows. Plotting is what ratmen do best.

Smoking jackets are in this season

Mythic inexplicably decided to leave the Skaven out of Warhammer Online. Hamlet without the prince. Everquest had ratmen, though. Had them from way back in Velious. Safely tucked away in Dragon Necropolis, where there was little chance of me tripping over them back at the turn of the millennium. It's hard enough to get there even now, as I may have mentioned.

What's that rumbling sound ?

It must have been somewhere in around 2003 that I finally encountered the Chetari. Ultra-aggressive, tall enough to look a dwarf in the eye, a race of white lab rats gone feral. They favor Donald rather than Mickey, dressing only from the waist up, but short of that idiosyncrasy they're all rat. There was much complaint, when EQ2 announced the ratonga, that Norrath already had ratpeople. I just hope when Dragon Necropolis comes to EQ2 as surely it must, we get a showdown. Forget the Roekillik and their incomprehensible plans for world domination, the Chetari are the real bad rats here.

Norrath may have the most upright rat races and Warhammer the archetype but love the Ratonga and Skaven as I do I'd still have to hand the crown to the Ksaravi. Are they the most fully-realized of all the ratfolk in MMOs? Not really. Sure, the Skaven have them beat paws down, offline. Sure, you can actually play a Ratonga. But did any of those rats build Ksaravi Gulch? No they did not!

Ksaravi Gulch is a work of art. Actually the whole of Telon is a work of art and should be preserved in some kind of online Gallery if and when the sad day comes but I digress. Even by the exceptionally high standards of Telon, Ksaravi Gulch is astonishing. Rats built it and it shows. From the scavenged materials to the treadmill wheels to the cages on stalks it's the rodent Fallingwater. I can't begin to do it justice with words and screenshots. It's worth downloading Vanguard just to see it.

I'm a cat person, really I am. But there's something about a rat in an MMO.

Does Guild Wars 2 have rats?