Guild Wars: Why I Like the Costume Brawl

Do I like heading to the masked ball to enter the Costume Arena? Put it this way, I rolled up a PVP character to start off the weekend and I've played enough, by now, to have leveled. I'll let you do the math for how long that takes when you only earn 10XP (or less) a kill. Ton of Balthazar tokens, too, because it's not like I have anything better to do with my faction. But since I'm no longer grinding for the next level in my gamer track, it does beg the question of whether or not I actually enjoy it enough to continue playing.

And the answer is, yeah, as far as these mini-game formats go, Costume Arena is pretty good. I think I'd prefer the Dragon Arena or my first mini-love, the Snowball Fights, though, because I'm still not entirely sold on the whole point capture mechanism. It seems to discourage people from fighting, instead pushing them to run around the map avoiding one another and, then, to stand still for a while while they capture a point. Instead of, you know, bashing on one another until someone wins. It just seems like there should be a better way of discouraging the scrum and allowing for swings in gameplay or, at the very least, more active ways of going about it. Although, there's no denying it's pretty newbie friend. And that influx of inexperienced players who have no idea what they're doing is what lets me have any measure of success at all.

But, although now that I've gotten my title I suspect I'm going to slow down some, I'll happily be playing the Costume Brawl for as long as it lasts. Because it's the kind of fun, simple mini-game that the game really needs. It's like you had an Arena and the only builds you could run were pre-mades. What it does is turn Guild Wars into Team Fortress. Taking away all the dilemmas and decisions about which secondary to bring or which skills to slot and, instead, handing you a menu and telling you to pick which flavor suits you best. You get ten characters to pick from and, with each one, a distinct twist on the basic gameplay. It's a great format for someone who wants to learn the PvP game or to hone their abilities at one of a few different archetypes.

Because the builds that are provided with your costume aren't exactly awful. Most are based on existing, tried and tested PvP builds. There are some quirks since the format is balanced for individual not team play (Sync teams notwithstanding). And for fast-paced action without a lot of interrupting, blocking, or healing going on. Everything's tilted towards the offensive and that's a good way for novice players to learn the attacker's mindset and how to avoid damage without relying on a healer to save you. If the RA had a subbasement in the supposed hierarchy of PvP progression, it would look a lot like the Costume Brawl. A place where people can load in and just pick up and go without minimal preparation before hand. Not a complete lack of thought because you're still picking out which class to run. And not a complete abandonment of the game's rules since, once you're in game, you're using the same skills in the same way you would in AB or RA or anywhere else, just in a unique environment that makes some skill you wouldn't expect (Like Steam. I'd rather have Gale but, then, I have a signed a top secret document which commits me to loving and supporting the best skill ever put in the game for the rest of my natural life. Forget you just read that. But there's no denying that Steam's conditional hate promotes some skillful play, a lot more than simple B-Flash spamming, and it's also a decent enough nuke. Probably the best skill they put on the Ele's bar. I'm as surprised as anyone.) shine.

That's okay because if you want to learn to play GvG, go play GvG. The point of a format like this is to act as a gateway. A lure for players who've only ever touched the PvE side of things. That NPC sitting there in the Halloween towns is a temptation. A promise that there's something new, something different, something fun. With big money and prizes for them to win. When this kind of thing works right, some of them, enough of them to make it worthwhile, will be hooked. Will look around, dazed, when the holiday event is over wanting more. To keep that rush, that excitement of competition going.

It's what worked for me, after all. I only tried PvP in Guild Wars because I ran out of things to do during the E34E demo. Ran all the missions, farmed all the dye, explored all the maps, and although I'd been avoiding that little red Arena pip, I gave it a whirl - out of curiosity if nothing else. And I was hooked.

The Arena of E34E was a random one. Full of broken skills and misguided mechanics. I played a Warrior or, as they were known at the time, a Lightning Rod, because they had a huge armor penalty against electrical damage so an Ele could turn them into a grease strain with a Lightning Orb or two. You'd get hit for 240+ damage in a single shot - and if that doesn't sound too bad, you have to understand that this was before health and damage figures topped out, before Fortitude mods and the like you had only 290 health to start with - and even if you could dodge that death ball you'd get Galed and kept out of range. Elementalists had their own problems, of course, since Dazed was Silence and Rangers could bite their tongues into ineffectiveness. And the best thing you could do for healing was hide in a corner and spam Heal Party - which had no range limitation - while someone BiPed you. It was awful, is what I'm trying to say. There was no such thing as toggle stances or adrenal spiking, people struggled to just figure out which skills were best to run. We had no idea what we were doing and the game was still stuck in this idea of class-based RPS to be anything like balanced while a lot of key skills were missing or only rough sketches of what they'd become.

But it didn't matter because it was such a thrill ride, for me. Flying by the seat of my pants, risking getting smacked down by a mage as I bore down on them. But, oh, when I caught them? I learned, I loved, to take them out. How to bait them, work them, shut them down and kill them off even when they were supposed to beat me hands down. It meant I had to think about things like positioning and terrain, concepts I'd never bother with in PvE play, along with what skills were going to work, which ones weren't. I became an Arena Rat, spending every free moment playing match after match. When I wasn't out farming for the iron for better armor or the crystals (don't ask) for better skills. And when the demo was over, I was left blinking, rubbing my eyes, as if someone had just turned out the lights and it's wanting to keep that feeling going, to continue to explore the game's mechanics and how to take advantage of them, that drew me into the fan community and everything that entailed.

Three, no, four years later, the Arena is a much different place. It's not like it was during that demo or the BWEs or even after release. People know too much now. The basics of builds have been mapped out. Warriors, good Warriors, know to bring HealSig and IAS and a run buff, and how to spike in ways that I'd never have dreamed up while trying to block out a rough knocklock chain back in the old days. To say nothing of how good Monks and Eles and Necs and Sins and everything else have gotten. Or the leavers and folks trying to farm those glad points. Someone new to the game, someone just starting out, is going to get mauled. If they don't know the basics, if they don't have some grounding in how builds start or the someone to tell them that I lacked, they're in for a lot of frustrating losing. Those are players driven out of the PvP scene because of the rising tide of quality.

But players who might be drawn back in with formats like the Costume Brawl. Places where the stakes are low and the rules are rigged to help out the uninitiated. Oh, sure, you have sharks like me and other experienced PvP players running around but that's a good thing. Because we're going to teach those newbs about things like kiting and canceling. The smart ones, the ones we actually care about getting to play PvP they're going to watch. And they're going to learn how it's done. When the format is painless, when it makes losing quick and easy for you to get off the mat, that works. Because I might have caused more than a few rage quits with my snare string or with preventing someone from casting with a hail of interrupts but I'm only serving to make those players better. Even if I win, it takes something like five minutes to play out a match and get right back in after you've lost. Little waiting, little consequence, and they'll be right back. Banging at the same wall but, hopefully, a little more wise the next time around.

That's why I like the Costume Brawl. Why I like all the mini-games, really. Because they're not just fun to play. They're training grounds. Places where players - newb and pro alike - can go to get better in a way you really can't anymore in the Arenas. And at the ball, by boiling things down to those ten simple choices, you're training at one of a few solid archetypes. Ones that are optimized, custom-made to be competitive and viable in the environment. But if you can learn to use them there, you can take them elsewhere. You could switch almost all of these builds over to the RA with only a few changes and not feel out of place (Well, maybe not the Monks.) so they not only give players a useful tutorial they also give them a guide to what works and what they can use to continue to delve into PvP. Where it's a short step from being handed a build to opening it up and tweaking with it.

Okay, so I really just like pwning down srubs with my invici-Ranger. But maybe if I can justify that well enough the devs will keep putting things like this into the game so I can keep having fun.