Guild Wars: Drama!

You know, against all odds, I've been enjoying the State of the Game series on the official site. It strikes a good balance between crucial entry level PvP information and high-end theory and practice. Along with the other series on the site, it serves a very useful purpose for the overall game. Not everyone will read it or even care if they've read it but that's not the point. ANet's customer relations have always been good about this sort of thing – it's not the power of the megaphone but the power of the microphone. Each voice is given a platform, a venue, to speak and that official stamp of approval means it gets carried far and wide. Much wider than, say, a lone blogger typing away into the darkness (And, you know, insert poster or website or IRC or whatever else you want there. This isn't a pity part – just a recognition that in the Guild Wars Arena, the developer's word carries weight.). And getting people not just interesting in trying PvP but capable of staying around past those initial forays is vital for the game's continued health. So, the company – really, the community – has many different ways of communicating that message. From the lowbrow to the highbrow, each has their place and their own distinct flavor.

Of course, as Adam says in this week's installment I'm one of those few players who do devote significant energy to both PvP and PvE. I appreciate that they're different flavors of the same underlying tone. And I like them both in their own way. I'm apparently in the minority because as Adam also says the playerbase tends to be deeply divided along the lines of PvP and PvE (This isn't a new development, by the way, or a shocking relevation I'm sure. But I've been around the community since the golden days of yore and while there were always different focuses – when aren't there when several people are involved? - it didn't seem so entrenched. Of course, way back when I always tried to bridge that gulf and encourage the different groups and opinions to talk together so what do I know?).

And, perhaps it's the fact that Adam is someone I have a deep respect for and some personal experience with skewing my perspective but, man, did he ever stamp on that dividing line with this week's column. I first heard about it in local chat where someone was, of course, complaining about it. As I've written a lot about Guild Wars in the past and had no small amount of feedback about it, that's not so surprising. It's the people who are upset who are most likely to voice that opinion. The people who think everything's going fine are much more likely to stay quiet. So, the negative comments tend to outnumber the “way to go”s (And, you know, when you're trying to be comprehensive there's probably not so much for people to comment on except for the negative stuff. The work stands on its own, and all.). But pretty soon it was cropping up in Alliance chat, in whispers, and even on the various boards. And this is far from your garden variety carping people seem genuinely upset. I mean, there's a reason I stopped hanging around the message boards but the viciousness on display – some go so far as to suggest Adam be fired from his job, of all things, simply for voicing an opinion – seems more than the usual cyber-waggling of undersized members (I hear that the worst of it is over at GWO but to confirm this would mean, you know, actually stepping foot in that place, so...). It's even gone so far as to prompt an apology/correction from the developers.

And, you know, perhaps this is a good thing. In the same vein as “there's no such thing as bad publicity” it's never a bad thing to have people talking about the game. To stir up their passions. To get them involved and motivated and, above all, thinking. But while that adage makes for snappy copy, it's always bothered me. It represents a point of view, after all, that your customers opinions and concerns don't, in fact, matter. And all you need to do is to get them whipped into a frenzy. And while that might have an element of truth to it I think that, eventually, all that hype dies a sad and lonely death as you drive people not to pay attention but to stop caring – it's a short term tactic, not a long term strategy. I'd like, then, to believe this was simply a matter of Adam staring at a deadline and letting some internal thoughts get a little too far away rather than anything deliberate.

The touchstone, after all, was Mending. Which is just one of those skills that every loves to hate. For me, it'll always be Unnatural Signet. Not that one. I'm talking old school – the 15second casting time version. Yeah, that's about a good a joke as Energy Storage being energy management. But for people who only learned the game's system after release, Mending's about as close as they could get. Because, honestly, Adam didn't say anything that any hardcore PvPer hasn't thought or heard before – Mending sucks and it's only those scrub PvErs who'd be caught dead using it. Which, you know, is arrogant and condescending but they're PvPers, they like to fight about everything. There's Mending, there's Echo Mending, and there's the mythic five Mending bar (I can get to four, of course, by using Arcane Mimicry to copy Echo off the another teammate and then do the Echo->Arcane Echo chain.) Thing is, while he phrased it about as poorly as you can imagine, Adam's point is a very valid one. There are many skills you'll use in PvE which you'd never touch in PvP (It doesn't work quite in reverse *cough*frenzy*cough* because PvE is a lot more forgiving of your mistakes. But there are skills you'll use in the Deep, say, that you'd never consider for PvP. They're different facets of the same game. And the beautiful thing is that you can easily erase those mistakes by reslotting. And, of course, learning.). As the saying goes, only 10% of the skills in the game are viable at any given moment. Everyone knows 9%, the trick is to find the 1% that gives you an edge. As the game shifts and changes, those skills change. One of the ones Adam mentions, for example, Illusionary Weaponry used to be an excellent skill. IW Mesmers were something like the Burst Sins of today – just fast spiking DPS machines with glass jaws. But that was back when Distortion was actually good and Hundred Blades wasn't elite. A few skill balances, though, and that template's a relic of the past.

And, that, I think, is Adam's lesson – to pay careful attention to the skills in that search for that ever elusive 1%. You can get a good idea of what the majority of skills to use are just by watching and paying attention (Um, just not in RA, please. Not because it puts an emphasis on the scrimmage and being self-reliant that isn't always wise in other formats. But people run anything there. Because it's a good place to go hunting for that final percent.) but for that last skill that no one else has clued into yet, you have to pay attention to what the skills actually do and how they interact with the rest of those commonly used skills. The first step in that is learning which skills are the ones to avoid. But the next is learning just why to avoid them. And that's what's been obscured in all this carping.

As for Mending, well, I could write a book on the subject and, you know, one of these days I plan to. But, in short, it's one of those skills that's, I think, intentionally bad. Like Power Attack or Power Shot or Flare, it's a baseline skill. There to provide an answer to one of the basic questions. For something like Flare it's “how much energy should I need to spend to deal spell damage?” (Turns out the answer is a fuck ton but that's neither here nor there.). And Mending's purpose is to set the cost of a pip of regeneration/degeneration. As long as it hits that mark, everything else using that mechanic can be balanced off of it. If it's below it's trash and doesn't matter. But if it's above that mark then all those other skills become imbalanced.