GW2 /whine

Yeah watched both those a while back! SO EXCITED!!!!
This game is the only thing out there to push the mmo genre forward. TERA is a big pretty grind fest. Boring....SWTOR is a big pile of the same ol same ol with a little better lore/story. Yawn @ WoW in space...
 
john3610 said:
I am not often given to fits of girlish squealing.... but..... GW2!!! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Click to expand...

Dang it Bill! And right after we get flame out of his hole... (stupid gnomes...) you had to go scare him off again!
 
I first met Quantum in Guild Wars in like 2005, it is only right that we rejoin for another stop of Tyria
 
WOW....just....wow....I might have to find some way to buy this...I can see this giving Blizzard some serious competition.
 
It looks very cool.

I'm still wrapping my head around the notion of all classes being self-sufficient (e.g. no tank/healer/dps). Will be interesting to see how that plays out ... either they will have pulled off the most exquisite class balancing exercise in history OR the class differentiation will be sorta meh. Or (more likely) in practice people will end up falling into one of the roles, it just won't be as pronounced as in WoW.

The look of the game is incredible. Not just 2011 vs. 1994 graphics engine ... but it feels more steampunk than pure fantasy to me. It looks like a world (and cities) I'd like to explore.

My biggest concern is the (lack of) cost, specifically their no-monthly-fee model. The monthly fee model, at scale, provides a huge river of cash to fund content patches (or, to bank huge corporate profits). While Acti-Bliz is certainly banking healthy profits ... their MMO cost structure is roughly 50% operating income, so half is being reinvested in one way or another. So across a year ... $15 x 12 = $180 of fees. Add in a $60 x-pac box every other year or so and that's roughly $200 per user per year. $100 is profit, $100 goes back into the game.

So thought exercise translating this to GW2: first, let's assume NCsoft is ok with only 25% margins. So that means $133 revenue per user year to get to the same $100 reinvestment that Blizz has. With zero monthly fees ... that would mean two $60 boxes per year (expansions?), or three $40 boxes, or six $20 "episodes". In a 2-year span GW only got out 3 episodes and one expansion ... so i don't see how they get anywhere close to the pace they'd need to have as much development dollars available. And second, it's just so much more of a logistics hassle to manage it as boxes rather than fees. Lastly, the funding is backwards ... rather than fees "paying ahead" future development, you become dependent on box sales to pay off the development you're working on. At the crudest level, you're forced to hit deadlines to make payroll ... which isn't good for anyone.

No matter what they'll have less continuous development dollars to play with regardless of what user base scale they achieve, and so I think they'll likely get the boom-splat user curve that most other MMOs see ... rather than the steady build to a long-held plateau like WoW has done. For MMOs to keep users captive, it just requires pouring money into it. And I just don't see how GW2 will have enough money to keep it up ... whether they have a 1m, 5m, or 10m user base.
 
Guild wars 1 is still seeing new content every 6 months or so. They have managed to be very successful with cosmetic microtransactions. Things that don't make you more powerful, but make you look different. Guild wars 2 will have a store like that.

But yeah, they won't have near the revenue of a game like WoW.
 
They pull off the healing by making combat much more involved like a FPS. Every class requires dodging and weaving and positioning. If any class is taking too much damage that they would need a heal, they are not playing right, they need to dodge more. This is not your typical stand and auto attack, this is active like a shooter.
 
Besides the cosmetics in GW they sell bank tabs, character slots, mini missions, Unlocks of all PvP skills, Unlocks of pets, and other stuff that can be unlocked in game with time or in the store with money. I am not sure if they will have this in gw2 but they certainly have a robust in-game store in the 6 year old GW.
 
1) When did I say I wasn't smitten?

2) Yeah, I don't have a good appreciation for what kind of overall payment volume microtransactions can generate. It's a great model for targeting people who can pay, I like that part. I just don't see how, on average, you can get the equivalent of $10-15 per account every month out of it. But if it's $5, in combination with a reliable ever-6-months-box-release schedule ... maybe it works.

3) Calling it an MMOFPS rather than an MMORPG is probably a decent way of looking at it. Granted, it's also an RPG ... but yeah, player control is clearly a much bigger deal. The interface is much more streamlined than WoW. Like the video points out, doesn't mean that it's oversimplistic ... but there's more emphasis on how buttons are mashed in combination than just picking the right button to mash at any given time. I would most likely be terriblad at GW2. But as I understand it NCSoft is at least investigationg putting GW2 on consoles ... while WoW on consoles is a clear nonstarter. Different types of skills for sure. Still feels like getting class balance and variety both in place will be hard, though. I mean, TF2 has lots of classes ... but clearly every class has a specific role. It's not 8 different flavors of generalist. Would love to see GW2 pull it off, just seems super hard.

I never played GW1. I heard lots of good things about it, and yet it seemed stuck in Tier 2 MMO land ... I see some stuff saying that hey 5m subscribers (2nd only to WoW) but mmodata.com doesn't seem to list GW on any charts. Did it succeed or fail? Why or why not?
 
I still like the first guild wars. The free to play model is great. The story and graphics are fun. There is a lot to do snd lots of achievements and the classes/builds have a lot of variations. The skills/builds are probably the most fun.

You can build combos that allow you to do amazing things. For example a popular build used to be a 55 monk. You wore gear that lowered your health to 55 and kept buffs ip that gave you +4 health regen and an enchantment spell that made it so you don't take more than 10% of your health in a single hit. It was fun to be able to fight mobs you shouldn't have been able to kill without that ingenuity. There are lots of really cool builds.

Each class has hundreds of skills, but you have to choose 8 to go on your bar. There are almost endless possibilities of cool builds. Also, you can cross class combos. For instance, you get a secondary class. So warrior/monk or elementalist/paragon. There are so many possibilities.

Also, it's a huge world. Really gigantic.

Check out the free trial and I'll play with you! :)
 
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I agree that balance will be a never ending battle for them, one way it worked in GW that was nice was the PvP version of each skill was balanced independent of the PvE version of the same skill. They had 2 teams working on them and could balance each skill without worrying if a chance to balance for a dungeon messed up PvP.

When you were in a PvP match your tool tips reflected the PvP side of the skill and vice versa. Really neat setup and it makes a lot of sense to do it that way.
 
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