User:Quizzical/Bye

It's been a great run, but I think it's about time for me to quit Guild Wars. I may still post here at times, though without seeing what's going on in-game, I can't really make constructive mainspace edits. Indeed, I do still post pretty regularly on forums for two games that I quit long ago.

For a brief stretch in April-June 2007, Guild Wars was the greatest game ever made. The Sunspear and Kurzick/Luxon skills were the beginning of the end of that, and the release of GWEN ended any hope of undoing the damage that PvE-only skills have inflicted. Understand that I'm not one to declare every new game that comes along as the greatest ever; my previous choice for that designation was Tecmo Super Bowl.

I like to say that a great game is one that you'll play again five years after you played it the first time. For a former greatest game ever, there's hope that I'll be back someday. It's unlikely to be before the release of Guild Wars 2, and it's also unlikely that I'll ever play Guild Wars 2.

In addition to digging around through the official site, I probably spent about ten hours or so reading this wiki before making the decision to buy the game. There were, at the time, two game design things I found that I really didn't like. One was the PvE only skills, which at the time was only Sunspear Rebirth Signet and the Lightbringer skills. I figured if that was all the real grinding in the game, it probably wouldn't be that bad. In retrospect, it was a far more ominous sign than I realized, with the other Sunspear skills and the Kurzick/Luxon skills soon to come. Far worse would be the cataclysm known as GWEN.

Since the release of GWEN, it seemed that ArenaNet had scarcely paid attention to PvE, as though they were unaware that some of their PvE-only skills were so ridiculously overpowered. They know how to nerf, as they've demonstrated in balancing things for PvP, but they seemed oddly reluctant to do so with PvE-only skills. Today they made it official that it wasn't benign neglect. It was actively seeking the destruction of PvE play balance.

I make that sound like a bad thing because I think it is a bad thing. But I'm well aware that that's a personal preference, and that there are many players who think otherwise. There are many players who have more free time than skill. People usually want to win at the games they play, and thus prefer games designed such that they'll win. For such players, there are games where winning is based mostly on free time, and not much on skill. Indeed, I came here trying to get away from the excruciatingly painful level grinding of such games.

To that end, ArenaNet pushes grinding on players far less than many other MMORPGs. You can do any content in the game merely by having done the previous content once, without having to grind for levels, which is actually fairly unusual. While the independence from grinding has been weakened by linking so many skills to title tracks, it remains one of the game's strong points.

The other thing I found objectionable before picking up the game was secondary professions. I guess that secondary professions weren't really as bad as I expected, given that players could do just fine using only a primary profession. But I like to see classes rigidly kept separate, so that there can be canonical different ways to play the game.

I really like to play a game in different ways, and compare how effective they are. I realize that that is a bizarre personality quirk, and there isn't much money to be made catering to it. For example, if you've been playing video games long enough, you may have played Super Mario Bros. 2. But you probably didn't pull out a stopwatch and run time trials with the various characaters to see which characters could beat which levels the fastest. I did. Incidentally, the verdict was that Princess is on average the fastest, and while other characters could be faster here and there, Princess was reliably pretty fast everywhere.

To me, the GWEN PvE-only skills were offensive on grounds of not being linked to classes more so than being overpowered. This was problematic in ways that the Sunspear and Kurzick/Luxon skills could never be. If you play a mission as an elementalist, and then play it again as a monk, it ought to provide a substantially different experience. But if you go ursan both times, it didn't. Even if you don't use one of the blessings, but use the same other set of three PvE-only skills on both occasions, that leaves far too little distinction between the classes.

This could perhaps be forgiven if the PvE-only skills weren't that powerful, so that they were only to fill in a glaring deficiency. But that's hardly the case. If you can find a PvE-only skill and a PvP-useable skill that seems pretty analogous to it, the former will probably be a stronger version of the latter. ArenaNet worsened this problem today, and extinguished all hope that they'd ever do something about it. If builds are meant to primarily be a few PvE-only skills, with the skills unique to classes just a minor complement, what's the point of having separate classes?

This really isn't just about Ursan. Even if Ursan Blessing had been given the heavy nerf it so desperately needed, with the strengthening of other PvE-only skills, I wouldn't be much happier about the patch than I am now.

The game does still have some very strong points, though. Map travel to skip the nuisance of spending half your time running around as in some other games was a great idea. Mobs smart enough to attack your weaker characters just because they're weaker is another advantage over so many other games. I always thought it was stupid when Bob the Really Big Dragon spends 10 minutes attacking a heavily armored warrior (or other games' equivalent) and ignoring the monks (or other games' equivalent) heailng them, even though Bob could kill the monks in about 2 hits, because the warrior has some super aggro-grabbing skills.

Another great innovation was allowing only eight skills on your bar, and then giving them long enough recharges to make you truly need several. This one seemed risky in theory, but has worked brilliantly in practice.

Perhaps the best new idea that the Guild Wars game designers had was hard mode. One glaring problem for so many other MMORPGs is, once you hit the level cap, what do you do? The game may push you to some tiny subset of the content, as though you're supposed to just repeatedly do that forever. The answer that ArenaNet came up with is, well, everything. Just switch it to hard mode and even the low level newbie areas are now of a suitable level for you. Indeed, the release of hard mode is why I put the starting date of Guild Wars' run as the greatest game ever at that point.

I'm also a very big fan of henchmen and heroes. Rather than needing to spend a long time trying to get a group together as in so many other games, if the people aren't there, you can just grab AI characters and go. Even if you get some other players, rather than spending half an hour with a group at 7/8 and furiously searching for another monk, you can just fill in a hero and go.

Yet another cool game design point is the short time interval commitment. I don't like spending 2 hours running through content with a group. I have other real-life responsibilities to attend to. In other games, if you're going to take half an hour to get a group together, to then have the group only stay together for half an hour would seem like a waste, which is why some make content so long. But here, the only (non-elite, cooperative) mission that is difficult to do in hard mode in under an hour (well, assuming you can do the mission at all) is Riverside Province, and that one doesn't go far over an hour.

So all of those great points and I'm quitting anyway? After about nine months on Legendary Guardian, upon finishing, the question became, well, what now? Vanquishing was one option, but now I've tried it a bit and it seemed kind of dumb. It also obliterates the short time interval commitment that I was fond of. There's a fair bit of stuff in GWEN that I haven't tried, but much of what I have seen of GWEN wasn't that great. Content built around assuming you're going to use the despised PvE-only skills isn't that appealing, anyway. Pure title-grinding doing stupid things that no one would ever seriously consider doing except to get a title has no appeal to me whatsoever.

So in the absence of anything that I particularly care to do, the rational option is to quit and go play some other game. There are many other games that have many things that I haven't done.