User:Quizzical/Never

(Note: the "you" may or may not mean you personally, though it does include a large fraction of the playerbase, and in particular, a large fraction of the players who think of themselves as PvE players.)

Suppose that there were a game where you could group with other players to go kill mobs as is pretty typical of MMORPGs. Unlike so many other online games, however, there was no need to spend time grinding for level or reputation, and no need to farm for gold. You get as powerful as you ever will be pretty quickly, and then the focus is just on doing the content.

And oh yes, the quality of the content matters. Let's suppose that our game had quite a lot of content, with considerable variety in it. The class composition of a decent group would necessarily have to change quite a bit from one mission to another. Even within a single class, the builds that a player of that class could use effectively would vary by mission. If a player wanted to be useful to his group, he'd necessarily have to change his build a lot from one mission to the next.

The difficulty matters, of course. So let's make our game hard enough that someone who just charges around recklessly will probably fail. But let's make it easy enough that a competent player who knows what to do and has a group with reasonable classes and builds can probably win.

No game can supply infinite content, so the replay value of doing a mission again after you've already done it once matters. So let's make it so that the player can switch to an entirely different set of skills, essentially disjoint from what he had available before. More than that, let's make it so that the player can switch to a character with fundamentally different playing styles, to get a completely new take on a given mission. There's a huge difference between melee combat, ranged combat, casting damage spells, and healing, for example. And there are further differences within each of those categories.

Sound like a fun game? As you have likely guessed by now, I'm talking about Guild Wars Prophecies, Factions, and Nightfall (but not GWEN; it's not of the same caliber). Play them in hard mode, as they were meant to be played--and without the usual crutches for incompetent players.

There's a great game out there to be played. But a lot of people haven't played it, because they've been so obsessed with finding the fastest, most efficient way to get gold and items. Rely on ursanway and consumables and you can win by dumb brute force, with no more than a vague idea of what you're supposed to do. They might beat missions that way, but that says about as much about one's (PvE) skill as taking a helicopter to the top of Mt. Everest would say about one's mountaineering prowess.

And while those are the most extreme cases, they're hardly the only ones. A heavy reliance on pve-only skills of any sort destroys the replay value. If you're using Finish Him on one character, then switch to another character and use it again, it probably plays out about the same the second time as the first. For that matter, the same applies if you're heavily relying on even a pvp-useable skill on several characters: secondary professions do much to spoil the variety in playing through a mission repeatedly.

What I think happened is that once the game was essentially complete, some players who had never bothered to learn how to play properly couldn't beat a lot of missions because they were just incompetent. They got upset about this, so ArenaNet added the disaster known as GWEN to let them grind for ranks and use the various cheats to get through missions.

That one can use various cheats to skip most of the game does not mean that one must do so. That is one key factor that separates Guild Wars from so many other online games: those who don't want to grind can play the game just fine without it. Let the rank grinders show off their trophies that signify nothing more than having a lot of free time. Those don't matter, anyway. And they certainly mean less than the challenge that is available to those who play the authentic game.

Now, playing the game as it was meant to be played certainly isn't for everyone. Neither is any other hobby. Still, I think it is rather sad to see people log hundreds of hours ostensibly playing the PvE side of the game without ever trying the real game. As those who have played much of it know, it really is quite good.