Guild Tracks

Last night ArenaNet posted a letter from Mike O’Brien, their head honcho, concerning all the rumors swirling around about Guild Wars 2.  This subsequently has spawned even more discussion, with many people posting about being mad at ArenaNet for the delay and how Guild Wars 2 was doomed to failure, and others just plain saying nothing was cleared up by the letter at all.  Here is my perspective, which I also posted and wanted to also expand on here.

From start to finish it takes around 5 years to put together a game on the scale of Guild Wars, and from what I have personally heard, Guild Wars 2 is looking to have 10 times the depth that Guild Wars did at launch. ArenaNet set the bar very high and were basically given the go ahead by NCSoft to aim high with a new product rather than merely a sequel. They are reworking the game engine underlying the game, which I expect will be optimized for multi-core processors given the types of machines they purchased at the start of GW2 development. They have been on a constant hiring campaign for the past two years, and have nearly doubled the size of the headquarters during that same time period. This is much more that merely a large expansion to Guild Wars - it’s a whole new game.

As I said nearly 2 years ago now, Guild Wars was a proof of concept test for a new business model for MMO-type games. It has proven very successful while running pretty much on a shoe string. A lot more resources are being brought to bear for Guild Wars 2, and it should be accompanied by a very large launch - unlike Guild Wars saw.

So while ArenaNet is concerned about the current community, they fully expect a whole lot of new players will be coming along and trying out the game (after all a lot of the current community might be expected to have grown out of the genre anyway). In additon though, Guild Wars has very strong brand recognition worldwide. Old players will doubtlessly at least consider checking it out, and a new generation of Guild Wars players will probably be around to kick start it.

Given the big launches that Age of Conan and Warhammer Online had last year, I expect Guild Wars 2 to be huge. But ArenaNet also has to make sure not to make the same mistakes those games made - trying to compete head to head with WoW and not having polished end game content at release. If you want to blame the delay on anything, blame AoC and WAR for crashing and burning. ArenaNet is investing some 30+ Million Dollars in the development of Guild Wars 2, if delaying it a year is going to help ensure success instead of failure, it just makes good economic sense.

If you want to see what ArenaNet’s philosophy for Guild Wars 2 is, take a look at the speech Jeff Strain gave at the 2007 Game Developers Conference. I think he correctly foreshadowed what would happen to Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. Also from that speech you can see why ArenaNet has had so much direct and indirect interaction with the community concerning the development and updating of the game. These are things that many other developers are just now trying to do themselves, and for some it fails when the company doesn’t carefully weight what the players want with their own design ideas. The thing is, ArenaNet has had people communicating with the community for so long that this quiet concerning Guild Wars 2 seems to be unsettling.

Personally, once Guild Wars 2 is released I am going to feel some very mixed emotions.  I have played Guild Wars for a very long time, nearly non-stop.  Whenever I go to a new game it takes me some time to get the lay of the land, and this will undoubtably be the same with Guild Wars 2.  All the time and effort I put into Guild Wars won’t mean anything in Guild Wars 2.  So while I am anxious to see the sequel, I am also in no hurry to do so as I know I will undoubtably get sucked in for an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out the mechanics, gameplay, and such.  Guild Wars itself has been so immersing for me that it’s only been recently that I have been able to get balance in my life - Guild Wars 2 will just cause even more upheaval I am sure!

Today NCSoft released their quarterly earnings report, and I was quite frankly surprised by some of the numbers for Guild Wars.  For the quarter ending Decemeber 2008, Guild Wars had 5,803,000 activated accounts.  This number itself was not so surprising as I recall ArenaNet publicizing passing 5 million units sold. What surprised me though was the rate of growth of new accounts over the past year.  Here are the numbers from the report for the past 2 years:

QTR              Active Accounts
Sep 2006                 2,447,000
Dec 2006                 3,122,000
Mar 2007                 3,555,000
Jun 2007                  3,917,000
Sep 2007                 4,500,000
Dec 2007                 4,878,000
Mar 2008                 5,159,000
Jun 2008                  5,377,000
Sep 2008                  5,589,000
Dec 2008                  5,803,000

A lot of people lament that Guild Wars is a dead game and that no one is playing, yet the number of newly activated accounts is still growing at a rate of over 200,000 a quarter even after nearly 4 years since being released.  Also this week NCSoft also announced layoffs and reorganization in order to streamline operations, with two of the founders of ArenaNet taking charge of the new NCSoft West facilities. Today we see NCSoft stock soar to a 16 month high based on their projected profit outlook.  This is especially impressive given the general downturn in the global economy.

All in all I think that NCSoft West and ArenaNet are playing a smart game with their Guild Wars franchise.  Yes it looks like Guild Wars 2 won’t be out until 2010 at the earliest, but Guild Wars is still alive and kicking, and more importantly still growing.  So even though old players do quit the game and move on, there are still new people interested in checking out the game and willing to buy new accounts.  This should help tremendously with the launch of Guild Wars 2 when it finally does get released.  The key though will be having a polished game, with involving gameplay and content.  Hopefully AreaNet has learned lessons from Age of Conan and Warhammer Online about releasing games without sufficiently polished endgame content.

Regina posted the final ruling on her wiki as well as over on the Guild Wars Guru forums. Basically both guilds lose the special trim that is normally awarded for placing, gold for placing first in the case of [rawr], and silver for placing in the top 16 in the case of [zero].  I was told that there were some at ArenaNet that viewed this as such an egregious violation of the rules that both guilds and all their members should be severely punished, perhaps even being permanently banned.  Some in the community also felt this way - myself not included.  The powers that be at ArenaNet though tried to ensure that this was not an emotional  or arbitrary decision based on a kneejerk reaction to events.  Information was collected in game to confirm what exactly took place and when, and how ArenaNet dealt with similar prior situations in the past I am sure was considered. In addition, ArenaNet stated that leniency is being exercised because this is the first offense - and that future offenses will be dealt with more severely.  I for one appreciate ArenaNet taking some time deciding on appropriate action, and getting input from various sources in making that decision.  I think this bodes very well for how such things will be decided down the road in Guild Wars 2.

To those asking for more severe punishment, all I can say is what would that truly accomplish?  As it stands Guild Wars PvP is some of the best available for MMOs, and one of the things that makes it work is having an active and vibrant PvP community.  With the game approaching 4 years post release, the PvP community is continuing to dwindle.  To remove two very active, and for the most part positively contributing guilds from this PvP community for causing an intentional draw would do much more harm than good.  Yes it would give other guilds a chance to rise to the top perhaps, but I personally think it would have cost the community much more than it would be worth.

Well it seems that ArenaNet has determined that this was indeed a violation of the rules and plan on taking action.  The question of which rules though is up in the air, since technically the mAT rules only cover through December 2008. I am very concerned by the fact that the decision was arrived at pretty quickly once the powers that be were informed, and that perhaps indeed there was not consensus about it.  I fully agree that the intentional draw in the Swiss rounds is an issue, but I don’t personally see where it clearly violates the letter or even the spirit of any rule currently in effect. What’s more, in prior tournaments ArenaNet cast a blind eye on both technical violations as well as exploitation of bugs in the game by teams. Suddenly making what appears to be an arbitrary decision and then handing down punishment for it does not seem to bode well for how administration of tournaments will occur in the future. But rather it appears to me that ArenaNet is seeking to cover a mistake on their part - inclusion of a new tie-breaking mechanism without suitably updating their rules for it - by punishing players who executed a reasonable and common strategy in many, many other competitive areas - both video and otherwise. One of the purposes behind the design of the Automatic Tournaments was to remove such subjective judgments.

I am very interested in the final outcome of this issue as I think it likely will, and should, make news above and beyond the normal Guild Wars community. For a long time Guild Wars has been touted for its exceptional PvP design and play. An arbitrary decision made on the part of ArenaNet that severely punishes players and guilds for what many will see as reasonable behavior will indeed send a message as ArenaNet might desire - but the message could very likely be not the one ArenaNet intends or wants.

This past weekend Rebel Rising [rawr] won an unprecedented 9th Guild Wars GvG tournament.  However, many people are complaining that they broke the tournament rules with an intentional draw versus [zero] at the end of the Swiss rounds.  As you can see below, there were several guilds that could have gotten into the single elimination rounds had [rawr] or [zero] lost in the final Swiss round:

Last night I played with Awowa from [rawr] and asked a little about what happened.  Apparently a lot of guilds were having connection issues throughout the mAT. In a previous match versus [vibe], [rawr]’s Ranger disconnected early in the match and could not return.  Even so, [rawr] was still able to win the match playing most of the way 7 on 8.  Against [stp] though their Ranger failed to load altogether and [rawr] lost.  In the final Swiss round versus Survival Rate [zero], both teams managed to have everyone load in and they fought 10+ minutes to a virtual standstill - neither team was able to gain entrance to the others base.  Basically the match turned into both teams sitting opposite each other in the middle, keeping an eye on the other to counter any movements toward the entrance of their base.  Tommy, from [zero] joked that he was drawing a line in the sand that nobody can cross.  Other players started talking how the tiebreaker (whomever puts the most damage on the opposing Guild Lord before 28 minutes) was stupid; winning based on a diceroll was stupid, etc.  Eventually the teams decided sitting on two lines waiting for the tiebreaker was boring (often times teams would stalemate until just before 28 minutes and then make a mad dash to damage the opposing Guild Lord), so they decided to do a Conga Line instead:

My impression is that at least initially there was no specific intention to force a draw between the teams. Eight of the final 16 teams that moved on to the Single Elimination Rounds had a record of 4 and 2, so there is a possibility that both [rawr] and [zero] could have moved on even had one of them lost.  As it was, a draw ensured that both would be able to move on.  For [zero] it really didn’t matter though, as Ensign failed to load into their next match and they lost right away.  For [rawr] though, it enabled them to again make it all the way to the finals and win yet again.

The question at hand though is did [zero] and [rawr] collude in violation of the tournament rules, and if so what actions should ArenaNet take against them?  Many PvP players seem to think that indeed [rawr] violated the rules and based on the precedent set when ArenaNet punished Team Quitter [QQ] in the past, [rawr] should also be punished.  Most players though also think nothing will happen, as other violations by [rawr] in the past (an employee of ArenaNet was a member of the guild, as was someone living with an employee during the tournament - both of which should have made [rawr] ineligible to participate according to the rules), were pretty much ignored.

So while most people would agree that [rawr] has earned their success, many feel that ArenaNet tends to look the other way when it comes to violations of the tournament rules.  It will be interesting to see what, if anything comes from this latest tournament issue.  Already other guilds are copying this behavior, some in jest and some in protest of ArenaNet’s inaction:

First of all - Happy New Year!  I wanted to get writing yesterday, but ended up watching too much football and playing too much Rock Band 2 with my kids to get anything done.  Today though, back to work!  And I just thought of a topic too that I wanted to write about.

Between Christmas and New Years we stayed with my wife’s sister’s family up in Washington, as we usually do.  What was different though is that my brother-in-law had recently started playing Guild Wars.  He only had the Prophecies campaign so I bought him Factions and Nightfall as an after Christmas gift.  This was partially selfish on my part since I figured with heroes he wouldn’t need to pester me for help with missions and such down the road!  Talking him through things and helping him out really got me thinking about things from a new perspective though.  Since the introduction of heroes, it is very hard to find pick up groups (pugs) to complete missions.  And since many people have been playing for a while, it’s really hard to find even guildies who are still working on missions instead of title grinding.  Anyway I played with him some, but since I mostly PvP I wanted to make sure he could get some heroes himself to help progress through the game more easily on his own after I left.  He had already beaten Prophecies and tried some hard mode missions with no success himself.  After we got him some heroes, equipped and leveled them up, he was just blowing through things with no problem!  Of course I also helped him set up a decent skill bar for himself and his heroes.  Even though I am pretty much a novice PvE player, after 3 and a half years I guess I picked up enough to get by!  That plus the Guild Wars Wiki has a lot of good suggestions.

One of his big questions was about earning money.  While I gave him a bunch of perfect weapons along with 100k in gold, he still wanted to become self sufficient.  This is one area where I really don’t have much of an idea anymore.  I used to farm with a 55 monk, but it seems that most farming areas have been nerfed over the years.  Plus as a PvP player, I get a lot from selling Zaishen Keys I earn, both from GvGing and from making predictions about the monthly Automatic Tournaments.  Between these two I seem to earn 100+ keys a month, which is more than I really know what to do with.  I suggested he start farming the Zaishen for Balthazar Faction every day, which he could then either use to unlock skills for his heroes or could turn in for keys to sell for gold.  I also told him to make sure to pick up every little thing that drops for selling it later.  I’ll remind him to do the mAT predictions as well.  Other than these, I really didn’t have much good advice for a new person trying to earn money in the game.

I also had him download Ventrilo and helped him configure it.  He was interested in trying out PvP beyond Random Arenas, but I told him the learning curve was really steep for someone just starting with the game now.  Perhaps once he beats all of the campaigns I might work with him more on PvP, but right now he is still figuring out the basic mechanics of the game.

Anyway being a Guild Wars veteran who only dabbles in PvE now, working with my brother-in-law really gave me a new perspective on the game.  First of all, there are a lot of relatively simple things that once you learn them, they really help you figure out the game and have fun.  In addition though, how the game is played now by new players is light years different than when I first started - due in large part to what most veteran players are doing in game now and the lack of new people.  Because of these difference I think it is pretty much essential for a new player to have access to heroes right off the bat in order to have enough success to want to stick with the game long enough to get better at it and have fun.

I just received the coolest card in the mail from ArenaNet, developers of Guild Wars.  Here is a scan of the outside:

Here is a scan of the inside:

My scanner really doesn’t do these justice as the art was very high quality, and inside these were all handwritten, original signatures from various staff members at ArenaNet.

Anyway this was a complete surprise to me and I am so appreciative of the effort that the folks at ArenaNet when through to send out this card.

I hope everyone has a safe and wonderful holiday and New Year!

One year ago today the guild Team Love [kiSu] was formed.  The concept for the guild was borne out of an idea by Axiom at Team Quitter concerning starting a Big Brother Program in order to help grow PvP players for Guild Wars.  I suggested to Axiom that it would be good to have a place where less experienced and lesser known players could network with and be mentored by time players in the game.  He thought it was a great idea, and since I had previous experience with training literally hundreds of new PvP players in Xen of Onslaught [XoO], he of course thought I would the person best suited for making it happen.

I had recently stepped down from leading XoO and was pretty content just to join another guild and be just a regular player again, but the idea and the opportunity intrigued me.  What’s more, with Axiom’s backing it became possible to rally other top players in support of the program.  One of the keys I thought was to get the new (and still unnamed) guild into a very active PvP alliance.  For this I turned to Yue from Delta Formation [DF] and let him know of my idea.  DF was leading a very active guild with other top American PvP guilds such as Dark Alley [dR].  He thought it was a great idea, and quickly moved to form a new guild and give it a place in the alliance.  Yue was the person who coined Team Love [kiSu], based on a name that he had been wanting to use for a guild for a long time.

Team Love started recruiting anchor members who provided a core group in the guild, mentors from top guilds who would guest, and less experienced “mentee” members who wanted a chance to learn and get better known in the PvP community.  Originally Team Love used Hapa’s Ventrilo server and hosted forums on the Team Quitter website, but as the guild grew and expanded it purchased it’s own 100 person Ventrilo server as well as a dedicated website and forums.  In addition to the main Team Love guild, several other [kiSu] guilds were created due to high levels of interest in PvP mentoring.  These included Casual Love -  originally a practice guild for Team Love and now a core guild in it’s own right, Virtual Love - a guild designed to orient players new to PvP, Eternus Love - a Europe based core guild, and Random Love - a BYOB guild.  Of these guilds Casual, Virtual, and to some extent Random are still active, with Team Love reforming a core this month.

Literally hundreds of players have been through and assisted with the Team Love PvP mentoring program.  The goal of the program has always been to aid PvP players in helping themselves to learn and improve.  [kiSu] guilds have been some of the most active in North American GvG over the past year, completing nearly 3000 matches across all the [kiSu] guilds.  In addition, Team Love has also created a new Sealed Deck Generator to facilitate Limited Play GvG matches, as well as helped sponsor the Guild Wars Guru GvG Challenge 2008 PvP tournament.

Team Love continues to carry out it’s PvP mentoring mission, and hopes to play a role in Guild Wars 2 once that game is released.

Lately I have been observing some interesting trends concerning a couple of the PvP guilds I help manage and mentor as part of the Team Love [kiSu] project.  Just a few months ago it seemed that any time our guilds were looking to participate in Guild vs Guild (GvG) battles, we’d see the same teams over and over again, and on any given night there would be a long wait before getting matched up with an opponent, especially as we played later into the night West Coast time.  While things are not a good as they were in the heyday of Guild Wars back in 2005-2006, it at least seems better than it earlier this year.  I think this was due in part to the release of Age of Conan and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.  Both of these games seemed to draw Guild Wars PvP players away - at least temporarily.  Over the months though I have seen a lot of old players slowly trickle back into the PvP scene, and things seem somewhat improved because of that.  Left 4 Dead is again drawing some players away now from Guild Wars PvP, but many seem to be play L4D in addition to GW rather than instead of, which is similar to the effect that Team Fortress 2 had in the past.

What all of these games have in common is that they involve some sort of co-op PvP play.  Looking deeper into the games, you can see that Guild Wars, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead all allow players to jump into co-op PvP right away and compete on an even playing field.  Age of Conan and WAR though require significant leveling and grinding of equipment.  In addition, Age of Conan and WAR both require players to commit to a specific server, from which they cannot easily switch.  I think it was these two aspects, in addition to a very buggy release, that led to the relatively fast demise of Age of Conan.  I also think that even though Mythic is working hard on patches and eventual expansions for WAR, it too will suffer the same demise.  The reason why I think Guild Wars PvP has remained attractive for players even as it approaches four years since release is that it doesn’t have these limitations, though there have been and will always be other issues concerning balance and such.  This is where network effects come in.

According to Metcalfe’s Law, the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users to the system.  The reason why this is the case is because the more people on the network increases the likelihood that there is someone any given individual on the network would like to communicate with.  This is one reason why cell phone companies typically offer free in-network calling while also continually adding on and growing their networks.  This relates to PvP in that the larger the pool of PvP players, the more likely PvP players will find others to play with, and quickly.  So when games like AoC and WAR spread out their PvP player base across multiple servers in order to help reduce lag caused by large scale PvP battles, the usefulness of their “PvP Network” is exponentially decreased.  This is one reason why during the early stages of each game things seems to be fun and going great - but suddenly a month or two later activity can seem to have dropped to nothing.  At game release, you are seeing exponential gains to network value with the addition of each player to a particular server.  But as the initial interest wanes, you start seeing exponential losses.  Players complain about nothing to do or lack of end game content, PvP scenarios take increasingly longer times to pop, and previously busy instances get deserted.  On top of the server separation problems, requiring players to grind for hours in order to earn levels or equipment as causes the player base to become widely dispersed within a given server, further contributing to decrease value of the PvP network on the particular server.  This secondary network effect of grinding should not be as pronounced if players can reach suitable character and equipment  levels during the initial euphoria games often experience just after launch.

These notions suggest that any new co-op game that is primarily PvP based should not restrict users to a single server, nor should it require more than say a week of grinding before players are able to participate in high end/end game PvP.  Enabling players to reach the “best” PvP aspects of the game relatively quickly will help you maximize the size of the PvP Network, and thereby the value of the network to the players.  If some players reach the higher levels but have no competition, or if they are stuck on a server that has few opponents, eventually they will see little PvP value to the game and look to move onto something new, or even back to something old that offers that value.

It has been a couple months since I have last posted.  This delay has mostly been due to the start of the Fall semester where I am teaching a couple of classes, plus some research projects I have been putting some finishing touches on.

In any event, I managed to free up some more time and decided I should start posting again.  But I realized that I was having a difficult time getting started again, mostly because I felt that I didn’t have anything “grandiose” to write about.  That is, I really didn’t have a major topic all planned out to discuss.  I thought about a couple different things, but nothing really struck me as a “perfect” topic.  Even so, I really feel it’s time to get writing again, so I’ll just meander though some relatively minor issues just to get going again.

Guild Leading

One of the things I realized this weekend is that Team Love [kiSu] will be one year old in two weeks.  It seems just like yesterday that I quit Xen of Onslaught [XoO] after two years of leading it and was all set to take a break, when the Team Love mentoring project began.  So basically I went from leading one mega-guild, to starting a brand new guild, which eventually lead to the formation of a second mega-guild.  I honestly never planned to lead a guild, much less a mega-guild or two.  But it seems that in a MMO like Guild Wars that the experience is highly dependent upon the quality of the group that you play with.  So instead of constantly shopping around for that perfect group to play with, I tend to find a decent one and then try to grow it.  Basically I look for people who share the same time of vision and values that I have, and then work to build up a strong community.  When I was in XoO I was fortunate to have had a good infrastructure in place upon which to build.  But when we started it kiSu, basically everything had to be done from scratch.  The nice thing about starting over though was that we were not bound by any previous organization culture.  As such we could shape things as we wanted and hopefully avoid many of the pitfalls we ran into with XoO.

These past months since I have not been around as much in game have provided the leadership in the various kiSu guilds with an opportunity to try new things out and grow things on their own.  Much to my surprise, after some initial struggles, things have started to take off and work really well.  It has even gotten to the point where I feel that I no longer needed to lead things for the guild, and instead can just maintain a more advisory role.  Being free from worrying about the day-to-day activities is a huge luxury that I never really felt I had before, and in fact is the one thing that I have seen burn out more than a few guild leaders.  At this point I am still looking for the best way for me to fit in with the Team Love project.  But as a minimum I feel that the guild and project will continue on whether or not I am around to guide it.  While this is a bittersweet notion, it is one that I am glad is coming about.