Guild Wars: Sealed Play

PAX is coming up soon and as some of my guildmates are in the Seattle area they're planning to attend. And they're especially interested in playing the latest installment of Sealed Play. Which, incidentally, is I think how I first heard about pal Clamatius so, you konw, there's that. Anyway, it's something I've long been interested in but I'm probably never going to have the opportunity to play since I avoid conventions like the plague, even if there were such an event in my immediate area which featured some Guild Wars support (which, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't), and Sealed Play is a con only event. It doesn't have to be but there's no real in-game system for pulling it off.

In talking with my guildies about it, though, I finally heard a good reason for why such a system has never been put in place: it would suck unless they spent a lot of time and effort on it. You'd need a lot of programmer hours to iron out the kinks, polish the interface beyond something hideous, to say nothing of how you deal with people who try to game the system. It's just not high priority enough to warrant the investment. So, unless, like disconnects, somebody puts in the effort off the clock, so to speak, it's just not going to happen. It's times like this where I decry the lack of an active mod community. It just never sprang up around Guild Wars, for obvious reasons, I think but if it had it wouldn't be too hard for some bright hobbyists to hack together a program that would automate the process. It could be ugly as sin but as long as it lead to some fun gameplay, I'd use it, and if it was given the unofficially official ANet stamp of approval (Didn't have keyloggers, malicious coding, didn't affect competitive gameplay, etc.) then others would too. So, basically, unless some ambitious developer or fan steps up, which isn't likely to happen, I'm never going to get to try Sealed Play.

Which is a shame because while I don't think Sealed Play could replace traditional GvG, say, and the joy of picking from the full toolbox if there's one thing the game is lacking it's casual formats. There's the Arenas but once you get past that there's very little where you don't have to spend a lot of time just to set things up. Sealed Play where you have a limited amount of time to pick from limited options could be a nice diversion. There's an expansion upcoming and, if I were in charge of the game, I'd work at adding something like that which helps new and old players alike.

My old idea of user created tournaments - which could support Sealed Play (By allowing whomever's setting up the tournament to restrict skill options, maybe even randomizing them) among other things like league play - is no doubt right out because it would take correspondingly more effort to create.

However, I think one of the most interesting things from the now infamous Team Quitter iQ thread was how the Idiots managed to breathe some life into the game by coming up with their own way of playing it. It's not surprising that with all the old M:TG players involved they came up with something a lot like Sealed Play - my experiences with that card game were very brief, when it first came out, basically, so I have no idea what a "picker pack" means but I imagine the concept isn't that much different. Basically, if I understand it right, they're assigned random elites and have only so long to build a bar around that skill (Their way of dividing the game's roles into frontline, midline, and healer is also interesting and, if applied to the Guild Wars Sealed Play format could solve a lot of the problems of random distribution which leaves a team without damage or healing. You might not get the good stuff but, if there was an attempt made to balance the rarity by each skill's role rather than by it's power level, I think you'd at least always be able to put something together.).

Now, a system like that wouldn't be too hard to put into place would it? The mechanisms for slotting in a new skill when you gain it or for changing around your skill bar are already in place. Imagine if you could zone into some Arena and speak with an NPC to be randomly assigned an elite based on your profession (probably the primary one just to keep things simple). You get a little box that pops up and you can replace whatever elite is on your bar with the new one and then you can open up your skills tab and tweak your attributes and the rest of your bar to your liking. But you wouldn't be able to enter matches until you accepted whatever random elite it was you'd been handed. Could be a random Arena, could be arranged teams in 4v4 GvG, could even have some new maps. But, to create such a format, what you'd need to do is come up with some flavor text and ways of dealing with people who are going to try and abuse the system to get the "playable" elites (A format like this or, say, Dodgeball works only because everyone involved follows the implicit rules. Which, in this case, is that no matter what you're given you're going to make a good faith effort to play around with it. Once you put something like this into the game where any player can use it then there are, inevitably, going to be people who try to game the system to their advantage. So, a few steps at the beginning and you can head off stuff like the leavers and laggers that pester other formats. Here, I think the biggest problem would be getting someone to use the lame elite they got and not just head to a different zone or quit out to roll the dice again. If it were me, I'd put each elite on a timer. No matter how many times you zoned or relogged, until that timer ran out you'd be offered the same elite. For, say, fifteen minutes. If you wanted to just get going then you have to suck it up and take Defy Pain or Unyielding Aura or whatever it is. But if you want to wait it out to try to get something better, you can. Maybe make the timer increase each time you refuse an elite to encourage people to accept the format's premise.). The basics of everything else are already there.

Something like that, I think, would be a much better addition to the game than, say, Hero Battles.