User:Quizzical/Never

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. (As someone on the talk page points out, engineering prowess would be a different matter entirely.)

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 Pain Inverter 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.

And make no mistake about it: they are cheats. If something is so absurdly overpowered that it would completely break PvP, then ArenaNet recognizes this and disables it for PvP. Does this make the same PvE-only skills and consumables magically no longer overpowered for PvE?

Some people insist that if it's part of the game, it can't be a cheat. But this betrays an absurd lack of understanding of video game history. For example, if one enters the famous Konami code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A) at the title screen to Contra, he begins the game with 30 lives, instead of the usual three. It was intentionally programmed into the game by Konami; does that mean it isn't a cheat? Of course not!

Contra is hardly the only such game with such cheat codes intentionally programmed into the game. Indeed, the Konami code is so named because it (or variants of it) can be used to enable cheats in a number of games made by Konami. Many other games have their own such codes. They are so common in video games as to earn the traditional name of "cheat codes", and a quick Google search can verify their ubiquity.

Please understand, I'm not necessarily against the use of cheats. I'll use them in some games and not others, or sometimes selectively use some cheats in a game while eschewing others. It's hardly random; the question is whether the cheats make the game more interesting or less. I'm strongly of the view that making a game trivial makes it less interesting. But some players disagree, prefering instead to take the quickest, easiest route to bypass content.

Suppose that Guild Wars were designed such that if you typed "iwin" in chat, it would instantly kill all mobs in the zone. For many missions, that would mean instantaneous mission completion. It would instantly finish any vanquish, or the current floor of most dungeons. Would you do it?

I wouldn't. Skipping all of the content in the game does not make it interesting to play. I could understand using it once in a great while, when you're really stuck on something. Not being able to even try half of a campaign because you're stuck on one particular mission can be frustrating.

But some players would use it on everything. Missions, vanquishes, quests, dungeons, everything. I can understand wanting to skip some small portion of the game that you dislike. But to skip everything? Why bother to play the game at all? Worse, they'd insist that it's a normal part of the game, and not a cheat, because ArenaNet put it in. And they'd insist that everyone ought to do so, because it was so effective, and that declining was artifically crippling yourself, and stupid. They'd make precisely the same arguments that they used to use to defend Ursanway and perma-shadow form, and still use to defend heavy reliance on the various PvE-only skills and consumables.

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.

Part of the problem is that once you're accustomed to using cheats, you can never go back. Playing the game for real, without the cheats, just isn't the same anymore. While perhaps justifiable for some, it's a pill that shouldn't be taken lightly, without understanding what is going on and what the consequences are. If you want to use cheats, then go ahead. I do selectively use a handful of the Sunspear skills myself. But don't deny what you're doing.

It's a crying shame that players who are new to the game are immediately told to load up on the various cheats and use them everywhere. Those who have already made the decision not to play the game for real act as though they must prevent anyone else from doing so, either. What makes this such a shame is that the game really is quite good. But so many of the people who have logged a lot of time don't know it and will never find out, because they've never tried it, and been discouraged from doing so.

And for what? For more gold? More titles? To give up on playing the game for real, in order to obtain rewards that don't exist outside of the game? And rewards that scarcely matter even in the game, no less!

There are many bad games on the market in which grinding for experience and farming for gold or various loot is about all that there is to do in the game. A lot of players who pick up Guild Wars likely come from such games, and may try to play Guild Wars like some other game, without really understanding the differences. That isn't really unreasonable, as there are enough similarities between a lot of online games that understanding one game often takes you halfway or more to understanding another.

One of the glorious things about Guild Wars is that, while you can farm if you like, there's no need to. ArenaNet will let you get off the hamster wheel and just play the game if you like, without being crippled for lack of having spent enough hours grinding for experience or farming for this or that loot. Just the normal course of playing through the game will get you all of the gold that you need, plus a lot that you don't.

A full clear of Factions in easy mode nets a character around 50k. In Nightfall, it's closer to 100k. Prophecies will give you less, but also gives a lot of free skills as quest rewards. That right there is enough for a character to buy all of the skills of his class, a few perfect weapons, a few full sets of armor, a full complement of runes and insigias (albeit some lesser vigor rune and not superior) for all of the sets of armor, and runes and insignias for your most commonly used heroes. That's all that you really need to have a viable character. That's without spending a minute on farming, without ever entering hard mode, and without ever even setting foot in GWEN.

I'm not against buying fancy weapon skins or elite armor sets, buying minis, or doing the title tracks whose only real purpose is to serve as a money sink. Once you've got everything that you really need to play the game and have a bunch of gold, why not spend it on something frivolous like that? But farming is wholly unnecessary even for these. A character that has never done hard mode or GWEN has a lot of content left in front of him, and that content will yield huge amounts of gold. The nifty but unnecessary frills can be had without farming.

That is why I really don't get farming. Certainly, I realize that methods optimized to gain the maximum amount of gold per unit time will tend to yield more gold per unit time than merely doing whatever seems interesting at the time without regards to the loot. And I understand that using the various PvE-only cheats in the game will allow players to get more gold per unit time. But what I don't get is why people seem to think that matters.

What is the point of playing an online game in the first place? Is it not for fun? Why do people go out of their way to focus on a very narrow subset of the content, play it in a peculiar manner designed to make it trivial, and then repeat it endlessly? Do they find that fun? If so, then good for them, and they can spend all of their time farming if they like. I find that absolutely bizarre. But if they don't find farming fun, then why do they do it? As discussed above, it's thoroughly unnecessary.

If people wish to make themselves miserable, that's fine with me. But what I object to is trying to inflict that same misery on new players who just want to learn how to play the game. Teaching them to load up on PvE-only cheats and skip real content whenever possible, as if you're afraid that they may play the game for real and have fun, is unseemly. Pushing them to spend large amounts of time farming is despicable. At minimum, someone who comes from games where farming is necessary and asks how to do the same here should be notified that there's no need for it whatsoever.

Guild Wars is a great game. There's a lot of fun things to do, and a lot of well-designed content. New players should be encouraged to try it out. It's a shame that so many manage to become jaded veterans without ever actually playing the real game.