Guild Wars: Templates (Again)

I'm going to be banging a familiar drum here. But why aren't there pre-mades anymore? Be nice to have with the upcoming PvP fixes. Actually, it's just be nice to have those PvP fixes to the Arena and other basic areas that seem to be taking forever. But that's an entirely different post; one laced through with rather more profanity. The drum I'm trying to pound right now is pre-mades and my old, familiar topic of lowering the barriers of entry.

If you'll recall, the state of someone trying to get into PvP is a sad one. The game needs to help those novice players out more. And just one of the ways it could be doing so is by including ready made builds that they could slap on and run with. It's even easier than ever thanks to the template system. And I don't think there's anyone out there who's seriously into the PvP side of things who'd think it's a bad idea. All the PvPers I've talked to, all the ones I've listened to, from Izzy on down, seem to agree that it's a nice idea who's time has come. That the PvP side of things is on bad footing and it couldn't make it worse to try and make life easier for those people earning the ropes.

And, from my viewpoint, it's not exactly hard to implement. You work up a bunch of builds, slap them into hex code in text files, and stream them to everyone's template folder in the next update. Boom, everyone has templates ready to go. Guidelines for what to play, at the very least. Some small assurance that they're not going to be completely horrid when they step into the RA or AB or wherever else.

Where resistance comes from is from those who remember the old templates. Which were awful, of course. I mean, the Abominable Snowman? Please. And attempt to fix it with contests and additions were slow and bulky, meeting with little favor from the eligible. And they resulted in things like the Fiana Healer. Let me get this straight. You have Divine Boon, the most awesome Monk skill in the game at the time and you use it with...Healing?!? I have to go punch little kittens now in order to stop the world from being filled with flames and demonic laughing. Punch them right in their cute, mocking faces.

Better now. These failed attempts pointed out just how hard it was to keep up with the metagame with such lag time in the game's infancy. And would seem to argue against an attempt to dredge pre-mades out of the discard pile and tap them again. But, I think, the game is much more mature now, and only the details of what works and what doesn't are in flux. People have figured out the sort of basic archetypes that you need for these templates. Because, knowing the mistakes of the past, we can do better now.

The biggest misstep of the previous pre-mades was that they tried to be good. It's a losing battle as the meta shifts and skill choices swirl. Instead, they need to be serviceable. Resilient. Chassis from which players can build newer and better things. The initial batch of pre-mades - and, remember, I was there when they went in - was too concerned with gimmicks and showing off the clever tricks that you could pull with skill combinations. That's why you had things like PBAoE based Warriors trying to spam Elementalist skills on a two-pip bar or melee Mesmers who weren't even using IW. Dammit, I need my kitten box again.

Don't know why I don't just keep the thing by the computer. Anyway, instead of trying to create super-awesome builds that show off just how awesome the game is and how big your personal theory-crafting e-peen is, what players actually need from pre-mades are the basic building blocks that teams are made up with. They need archetypes. Not quite as simple as the holy trinity of tank, healer, nuker that forms the cornerstone of PvE. But you need your basic Axe Warrior, your Prot Monk, a shutdown Mesmer and more. The specifics vary based on the metagame and the latest rebalancing but the starting points for those base party roles that you want to assemble a team from don't vary much. They're constant enough that you don't have to worry overmuch about them becoming outdated down the line.

But even that doesn't matter much. Do you realize how small template files are? Just keep throwing them out there. Have fifty or sixty of seventy, it doesn't matter, you're talking about a sliver of someone's harddrive and only a little bit of work. In that pile at least a few are going to hit. And that's all you need. All pre-mades have to do is be just good enough to get someone's foot in the door.