Three Things That Would Have Me Playing Guild Wars Right This Instant

I’ve been thinking a bit about Guild Wars lately. I know that I should really let the game go because it’s never going to be what I want. I’ve tried, I’ve tried long and hard to get it to change its ways but it’s just not worth it at this point. And, yes, the fact that I just sounded like I’m describing a bad relationship is no small part of the problem. I’m invested in the game, you see. For a long time I followed and watched and studied and cared about not just the game, not just the people making it, but the people playing it too. Because I was one of them and they were all my fellow travelers in some, small way on a fantastic voyage. We were heading into the future when the game would actually be released and it would be played not just by us but by hopefully millions. You see, I was involved in the testing phase of the game. Back when it was still in development and a lot of things were still up in the air. And before then I was on the outside of that test looking in. The game was already great, mind, but in my mind and in potential it was so much better yet. And I wanted so much for it to be the game I knew it could. Even though I never wrote a word of code (For the game, anyways, I did a lot of writing on fansites and forums and the like. Again, if you remember me from then, I’m sorry.) or created an art asset or recorded a sound file or anything else to create the game I still felt – and to this day feel, I suppose – a sense of ownership. I mean, I’m not completely insane about it (No more than I am about anything else) as I realize I’m just one among the masses. And that my opinions are no more valid than anyone else’s. Of course, I also know that my views are no less valid than anyone else’s either. I’m just one and while we don’t vote you’d have to do some very fancy talking to convince me that a fanbase doesn’t influence the production of a game like Guild Wars, somehow. I know, I’ve seen it happen. So, if you don’t mind I’d like to talk for a bit about changes to a game I’m not even playing at the moment. But it’s a game that’s got a hold on my heart and could have me back in a second. If only it would change its ways a bit.

Anyhow, since I was involved with the test and with people in the test from way back when I remember a lot of the different paths the designers took before they settled on thins for release. Things that were in game but were removed at some point later on. One I particularly remember was that Guild Wars at one point had a rudimentary e-mail system built right into the interface. You’d open up your buddy list and you could whisper to anyone (Literally. Anyone playing the game at all. That’s the beauty of a game that doesn’t have any sort of shards or server splits. You’re playing with everyone all at once just in your own little corner. That’s a big problem too but I’ll get to that.) with a click of a mouse or two. But if they weren’t online you could leave them a brief message that would be there the next time they logged in. It was e-mail. And you could use it to schedule a meeting or let someone know you’d found something they wanted to trade for or to taunt them that you’d gotten to some remote area or finished some quest before they had, you know, whatever you could use e-mail for. I imagine it was all part of the proposed in-game support for guilds that never materialized. Did you know that at one point ANet was going to offer any guild that formed their own forums and other things all of which would be integrated into the game itself? Yeah, I wouldn’t think so. Because that all vanished into a cloud of smoke somewhere along the line taking the message system with it. Probably someone realized the costs involved in maintaining such a system (not to mention the liability spread across a dozen or more countries) for the numbers they expected to buy the game – which was growing ever more popular from the small thing it had started out as (And, yeah, I’d like to think I had some small part in that growth) – not when people would go off and make their own boards and sites and everything else all on their own. It wasn’t the only feature to be shelved nor the only mechanic that sorta worked but was yanked in favor of something else. I just thought I’d mention it because I don’t really know why such a promising device got left out of the game. I suppose I could have asked but at the time I didn’t think it was important and, well, I’ve always regretted that I didn’t try and speak with the developers more. I was just one of many, after all, and I didn’t want to bother them too much while they went about their work even though they made clear they were open to such things. What can I say? I was younger back then.

Anyhow, the game was released and the masses started to play and I wasn’t really happy with things. Over time things began to change towards the way I’d always been pointing (If not the exact details. But on a few things I was startlingly prescient. On others I was completely misguided but, eh, I hit the bullseye a few time and I’ll take that.) which hardly gave me any satisfaction because I was gone by that point. Stopped playing. Oh, I’ve gone back a few times under one name or another. But I’ve never stopped caring that the game wasn’t living up to its potential. Like anyone else who ever cared so deeply about the game I came up with my suggestions for how it should be improved. New skills, new classes (I mean, here’s the thing. I never really told anyone about my ideas so I don’t have any proof. New classes were a dime a dozen and sloppy and ill-informed posts cluttered every board that allowed them with half-baked ideas for new ways of playing. After a while I stopped involving myself in those sorts of things. Not just because I was a tester and, really, couldn’t but even after release it was just something I didn’t do. But, well, looking at the new professions from the latest expansion pack, that’s almost note perfect where I would have gone from the state of the previous expansion pack. There’s the Dervisher, a magic-based melee character with AoE capabilities, and the Paragon, a ranged attacker with a lot of party supporting buffs. I wouldn’t have done them the same way, personally, as I’m not even capable of the sort of detail work involved. I concentrated on the design document, so to speak, of what each class should and would contain, exact damage ranges and the like could be slotted in later, it was the elements that made up each class that were important. But I had those elements – and in even greater specificity than the brief overview here – involved in the Dervisher and Paragon in what I would have wanted. A little bit mixed up but they were all there. Like I said, frightening because I’m usually not at all that smart. Remind me to post them later if I get the time to work them up past my notes which no one would understand.), new monsters, new weapons, new lands, new quests, you name it and the people following the game have probably thought of something that could be added to make the game better. I’m still no different, so here it goes. There are three things I would love to see in game (And, yes, these are all in my literary game ClotH):

Auction House: Guild Wars, at present, has no auction house. Which is just wonderfully stupid. Some form of in-game streamlining of the trading process is just a given in this day and age. Now, I know, I know, the developers have been promising to put one in eventually but, well, I’ve been following the game for a long time and they’ve been promising for nearly as long as people have been asking for it – which is before I even heard about the game. What’s happened without an auction house is that people are forced to rely on other means. Out of game services exist to trade things – not even e-bay and other RMT but auction sites run by players for players for in-game materials only - but the actual exchange still has to be carried off in game. Otherwise people just sit in the biggest city they can find and scream their heads off in the chat or trade channel until they find a buyer. Or a seller. It’s a mess and all that shouting just drowns out every other conversation. Which is a shame because it’s in the social aspects that Guild Wars is really lacking. All those people play but it’s hard to connect with any one individual because of how easy it is for them to slip back into the crowd. When I play I’d like to be talking – asking and answering questions is a favorite – but in town I shut off the chat because I just can’t be bothered and I’m fairly certain I’m not alone. If I even bother to go into town, which I don’t usually, because I don’t have forever to play and I want to get things done not sit around and hawk my wares – I’ve got five active characters plus a mule at the moment and their inventories are loaded with things that could (or should have, once upon a time) been worth a lot but I just don’t move them because the merchants won’t give me anything like their real value and finding a customer is too damn frustrating (Not to mention I haven’t got any clue what things should really cost, not unless I want to spend even more of my precious time following the market and figuring it out). I could do it, sure, but I’ve opted out of the whole system. I’m of the mind that I’m not alone. An auction house or some other way of trading everything in game makes that economic game much more accessible for the beginner. And it makes the elder game much more profitable for those who really enjoy it. I could go into a lot of detail on just why but the simple economic fact is that the more people you have in a market the fairer it tends to be for everyone. And the best way to get more people into the market is to lower the barriers to getting there. Let people put up their items for sale and get back to doing whatever and then get them the proceeds or the item they bought when the auction’s over.

Player run and operated tournaments: In short, I’d like a player – perhaps at some cost, the way setting up a guild costs some money to discourage spamming and other mischief – to be able to create their own PvP tournament and all the rules about how it should be played. Then, for any other player interested to easily sign up and then participate. This is a little difficult because of the way Guild Wars tracks its players – which I don’t even really understand all that well – because, basically, once in an instance the game more or less loses track of exactly which instance you’re in, as far as I understand it. It’s part of why it would be very difficult to implement a rejoining feature if you happen to get dropped from the game. As things stand, if your connection dies for whatever reason you have to start over from the lobby. Which is annoying in the middle of a quest or a mission but crippling in the middle of PvP. A lot of PvPers would like such an option but one reason why it’ll never happen (and there are many including the possibility of cheating) is that the infrastructure for doing it isn’t there. It would have to be built, from scratch, and that would take a lot of time and money and effort to do so. But, well, I don’t care because I don’t have to do it. You see, the last time I quit playing the big thing going around (in PvP circles) was a little game we made up for ourselves. In Guild Wars there are items that will actually lower your health (It’s a weird game that way) and if you get enough of them you’ll lower your health incredibly low even at max level. Let’s say you’ll have 105 hit points when you should have 480 or more. Now, that turns out to be almost exactly the damage you’ll do when using a particular skill against a particular class of armor (which is, conveniently worn by the class that can use this skill, called Lightning Orb) when you set your attributes to the maximum. And this skill unlike some that automatically hit a target actually creates a projectile which can, with some deft footwork, actually be avoided by a skilled player. And, remember, in Guild Wars you can create a maximum level character with a selection of any kind of armor that can use any skill you’ve already earned at any time. Get some people together with characters rolled up like that and you’ll have a bunch of people who can kill each other in one hit. It’s insta-gib mode. We called it “Dodge Ball”. You’d set some arbitrary line and run around trying not to get hit and trying to put someone “out”. It was amazingly fun for those of us who’d gotten every last skill and every last item and tried everything the game had to offer and just wanted to just have some fun. We even tried to set up our own tournaments and competitions, argued about the rules (Was it okay to buff your speed? Could you use snares?) but we had to do it all by ourselves and it wasn’t easy. If the game had some way of doing it for us not only could we have had a much easier time then lots of other people could have come up with their own mini-games. So, what I’d imagine is a system where someone could set up a tournament or even just a single round of combat. They’d get to decide what classes and skills and everything else couldn’t be used (Want to fight with no Monks? Done. Nobody can use any healing skills? Check. Only 3 people a side? Check. No melee combat involved? We can do that. Look, pal, it’s whatever you want, just start clicking boxes or dragging stuff around, we’ve got people waiting) with a large degree of customizability. It’d be like limited draw play in a Magic tournament. Maybe you could even have it so they could set up prize pools or entry fees, schedule times and the like. These tournaments could be small or they could be used. It’s entirely player driven. Players would stand around in the lobby and create their own instance (or series thereof) to post on a message board, of sorts, where other players could check out the available options even check out what was happening inside of the current game. Imagine what could be done with a tool like that and a playerbase who want to come up with the next “Dodge Ball”.

Better grouping: This one really springs out of the last one. Finding a group is a pain in Guild Wars. Just like trading, if you don’t have the connections (which cultivating is its own set of issues) then it can be incredibly difficult to find even enough people to play with you let alone people who actually know what they’re doing. Titles and fame and rank and all the rest are a nice little stopgap but those are cumulative measures rather than any real ranking of a player’s skill. And you don’t have them unless you’ve been around and playing for a while. And, again, what I’m worried about is lowering the barrier of entry across the board to invite more people into the marketplace. So, as long as there’s going to be some message board established for player created tournaments it shouldn’t be too hard to take that basic technology and use it in other areas of the game. I’d use it for grouping. When you enter an area there’d be a sign or a board or something where you could check and see if there were any groups forming. Along with who was in that group and what else they needed before they were ready. And with a click of a mouse you could invite yourself into any group you thought would be a good fit – if, of course, you met their requirements such as being the right class, or level, or having the right skill, or even being a member of their guild. Any group could always invite you if you weren’t up to code, so to speak, but that would hopefully cut down on the people who just invite themselves to any group in the area in the hope that someone will accept (You know, like me - because it works half the time, that’s why). Now, setting up a group would take a bit more effort as you’d have to fill out boxes and things but through careful use of defaults and ever-increasing branches of specificity and optionality it shouldn’t be too intimidating for people. Especially if you could shuffle around party order easily so that the first person in the group didn’t have to make the party as they do now. And, well, this could be used in PvE or in PvP or even at an auction. And, properly done, could extend not just to the one instance you’re in but across all instances of the particular area you’re in. Making it a lot easier to get picked out of the crowd by people you’d want to be with.

All of my ideas are interrelated really. As my tournament board could just as easily be turned into an auction board as it could a grouping board. That’s why, I think, it’s good design. It’s simple, effective, and it can be slotted into a lot of different areas to do necessary work. It’s a big system and it would take a lot of work to fully implement but that just means better to start as soon as possible because it’s going to take some time to get the kinks out. But once it’s done it’ll pay dividends down the road as you find new uses for a good tool.

And that’s what really kills me. They already had the rudimentary elements of such a system in place – the in-game messaging system. What you need for such a system to work is a way of easily sending information between players in unknown locations who might or might not be logged in. For that you’d need a way of locating them in the game’s databases without being able to locate them in any particular instance – they can then be transported to an instance if necessary. And if the ability for players to send e-mail – along with all the other methods of communication - had been kept around the functionality could have been increased and improved over time until it became either what I’ve proposed or something wholly different but the same, basic idea. An improved communications device that would reduce the barriers created by a truly massively multi-player game. One where any one person can get to any other person if they only know their name and location. But because the lines of communication have been so neglected and clogged what should be an amazingly social game where you can bump into almost anyone playing becomes a game that increasingly isolates those who don’t find a solid group or some friends in some other, non-designed way. The web between all of the players grows brittle and easily shattered but if it were to be strengthened with newer and better tools for speaking and interacting with each other and transmitting information then not just the social network would improve but the entire game.

Also, I could finally clear out some inventory space and not have to panic every time I get a drop. But that’s entirely my point: the micro becomes the macro which becomes the micro and on and on in a never-ending twisting cycle of human relations along the axis of information being transmitted. A small, seemingly unimportant change – one that no one notices or cares about at the time - to the game can have huge ramifications when it’s handed off to the teaming masses who’ll play the game and dive into the depths the designers will never know.