[MUD-Dev2] Player Choice - How Much is Too Much?

[Miroslav Silovic]

Christopher Lloyd wrote:
> I do like this approach. If you're going to be spammed with players
> wishing each other Happy Halloweeen, then it's not a bad idea to listen
> to what they're interested in and meet (surpass?) their wishes.
>
> Then there are other more in-game events. Discworld MUD has a (roughly)
> annual Witching Trial, where players compete to appear to be the best
> witch (a game of psychology rather than anything else).
>
> Whilst I haven't played Guild Wars, I do appreciate a game with a
> proper plot. Does anyone happen to know the ratio of competitive team
> players vs co-operative team players? I'd be interested in knowing. As
> I understand it, playing co-operatively is akin to playing a
> single-player game, with several players (c.f. Baldur's Gate).
>  

ArenaNet doesn't publish the statistics, but forum polls suggest
relatively even split among the forum readers. However, this is heavily
biased, as competitive gameplay used to be the main endgame for Guild
Wars, so it's played by more experienced players, and those are much
more likely to visit and vote on the forums. Also, there is a
significant overlap between the communities, due to the existence of a
VERY casual-friendly PvP mode (namely, Alliance Battles).

I tend to use Baldur's Gate for comparison when people ask me what Guild
Wars is like, actually. You run 1 main character but can take a number
of NPCs which you can also partially control. AI is surprisingly
competent if you don't feel like doing any micromanagement, and this
makes the game mostly soloable - but Hard Mode is way more difficult to
play this way, as Hard Mode monster AI also becomes surprisingly
competent in wiping your party. Obviously, you can also play with full
human parties. Also, duo mode is quite popular among friends - 2 humans,
with 3 NPCs each (I've seen some family groups playing this way,
including husband/wife and even father/son).

> How important is background plot to players? One interesting
> side-effect of worlds with smaller player bases (MUDs generally) is the
> chance to get your own name in the history books. Unlike WoW, The
> Matrix Online and Guild Wars, if the player base is only ~10,000, and
> the number of truly active, involved players is ~500, there's actually
> a very good chance that you'll be able to take part (or even lead) a
> portion of the world's plotline. Even more so if you're a
> guild/city/clan leader, or at the top of the ladder for your class.
>  

Since Guild Wars doesn't have level grind, the plot -is- the game.
Except in the first campaign, you level up to 20 (max level) and max
your gear as soon as you leave the tutorial area, and the entire
non-tutorial game is max level, max gear progression through the
storyline, with side quests. Grind is done for prestige items and
titles. Both primary quests/missions and side quests tend to be
surprisingly well written; for a game driven by the plot, this is a
must. Quote from a developer:

| The other dictum we carried with us into the development of GW:EN
| was that quests should be varied and fun. We wanted to avoid 
| designing any delivery (or ?fedex?) quests at all. In fact, we put
| a sign on the door to the quest design area that said: ?Every time 
| you make a fedex quest, Abaddon will feast on puppy eyes.? We want
| the quests in Eye  of the North to present players with new goals,
| new challenges, and new ways to play | the game.

Note that GW:EN is the last release of Guild Wars (they're now doing
Guild Wars 2), and note that the quests in the older Guild Wars aren't
far from this standard, either; they (usually) tend to have multiple
stages and variety of goals to complete.

On the downside, most players don't even try to roleplay, which is
actually not to far from how single-player Baldur's Gate is played.
Still, there is a small, tight community of game lore collectors and
roleplaying guilds. There were a small number of player-ran events, and
ArenaNet provided coding support for some of them (each time this was a
welcome surprise to the community). Also, a number of NPCs were named
after active posters on the Lore forums. So I'd say that GW falls
halfway between a grind MMORPG and a MUD in this respect, for the people
who choose to RP.

The main weakness of GW is the endgame. After getting through the plots
and quests of all the chapters, you have a very definite What Now?
moment. PvP is the obvious answer. Originally, the plan was to also push
out a new campaign every 6-9 months, but that didn't quite work as
planned (hence, move to Guild Wars 2) - the important (but not the only)
stumbling point was that they decided to add new classes and a bunch of
new skills for each campaign; this caused HUGE issues for the PvP
balance, as it takes longer than 6 months to balance all the new stuff
that the -previous- chapter introduced. Since balanced PvP that demands
HUGE level of strategy and skill was one of the stated goals of GW, Anet
seems to be searching for the new model of expanding the content and
selling chapters.

Other endgame options, such as Hard Mode and prestige title grind do
exist, but they were added over time and are not really the part of the
original game. Still, they seem to keep most of the playerbase
interested enough to wait out GW1-GW2 gap; even though they were
originally added only to help people tide out chapter-to-chapter gap.

Considering that one of the stated goals of GW design was to break as
many cliches that Everquest set as canon as possible, I'd say that the
above does set a new game design, with well-defined rules and
principles; ArenaNet followed this design (mostly) successfully. But for
now I'll refrain from trying to formalise the rules they set.

Miro