Guild Wars 2: Parallel Play, Not Multi-Player

I've been meaning to put some thoughts down about Guild Wars 2 for some time, and I wasn't too sure how to frame it to begin with. I liked GW2 when I bought it, even though I had my misgivings. I never played the first Guild Wars, and when previews/press started coming out for the second one, I wasn't really engrossed. This isn't to say I thought the game was crap or anything, I just didn't find myself interested with what I was seeing. I had previously played WoW, SW:TOR, City of Heroes, and even the old SW: Galaxies as well as other MMOs for short stints. Seeing GW2 just made me think it was another fantasy MMO with not much going on that was new or intriguing. But as someone who played WoW for so many years, I was in absolutely no position to judge folks for playing the same ol' thing over and over.

After it was released, some local friends picked it up. Watching some of them play and talk about it, I decided to go for it. Not because their tremendous salesmanship had turned my head, but because I frankly missed playing some sort of multiplayer game with them. My friends in Austin, for the most part, all have a shared interest in vidja games, so the fact we weren't doing this as a community just kinda... bugged me. Can't really explain it. So anyway, the game looked interesting enough and would let me do something online with the folks, so I picked it up.

From the get go, something about the game bothered me. The combat was interesting and a bit of a change from typical MMOs (but not so radically different that it required learning from Step 1), and the class system was interesting. I picked up a Mesmer with the idea of playing an Engineer and probably a Guardian in turn. I didn't do a whole lot of actual group play to begin with, but the game more than compensated for that - most people who are vaguely familiar with MMOs and GW2 have probably heard the comments about the geniusly simple "world group" system. There's no "tagging" mobs, and players can all sort've complete the same quests together even if they're not grouped. Add in that quests are handed to you when you move into the area the quests should be done in (and require no "turn in") plus the world events that people would flock to, and it came out pretty well. Taking out the competition of tagging mobs or fighting over quest kills or racing to resource nodes turned what is typically an adversarial experience on an open server into something else. Everyone had this feeling that the players were all in it together, and there was nothing to fight over. MMO socialism, really, if socialism involved a total lack of mundane concerns.

After awhile, though, the cracks began to appear. The great strength of this system began to bother me and I was more able to figure out what it was. Unlike other MMOs, which relied on what people call "the holy trinity" or the tank/healer/dps roles, GW2 had these features as noted above plus a specific effort to avoid splitting players into these roles. Additionally, so that players didn't feel like they HAD to bring certain classes or builds, most buffs and debuffs were widely available to any given class and were low-impact. Instead of a buff that made a HUGE difference in your damage output, there was one that was just noticeable but not critical. Players could combo their abilities together for neat effects, but these effects were either similarly low-power or relatively infrequent to pull off (or both).

The reality came to the fore, for me - in a great effort not to force people to group together or punish people for not grouping, Guild Wars 2 barely rewarded people who did. Groups were only slightly greater than the sum of their parts. In PvP, of course, group tactics and planning were king, but that had little to do with the actual mechanics and more to do with the players themselves choosing what/where/how to do things. In PvE, dungeons and group challenges always seemed to hinge on fights that were slow and repetitive and presented challenges that were just full of large numbers rather than real challenge so that players had to group up for them so they could overcome the large numbers through their own large numbers.

This is not to say that there were no such challenges or interplay to be had. Group events, raids, group PvP and all of that stuff is definitely there. It's just that the difference between playing in actual coordination with people and playing solo nearby them is not vast.

I couldn't really figure out these things and define how they bothered me until I was talking about Magic: The Gathering with a friend and I remembered my high school Chemistry teacher once remarking that she thought the whole game just looked like "parallel play" to her, not actual interplay. She didn't understand the game that well, of course, and as someone who valued logic lessons in all their forms she revised her opinion once she understood it better. But the point she made stuck with me - from the outset, MTG looked like two people on opposite sides of the table just fiddling with their own stuff. And that's how GW2 really boiled down to me - lots of players just playing their own game together, but not with each other. Just around each other.

It's a good game, don't get me wrong. And I'm not one to say that people shouldn't or can't enjoy something. But I think a definite lesson GW2 teaches is that it's entirely possible to go too far in the other direction.

Definite Definition

Pictured: Drunks and idiots carefully infiltrating adult society.

So, Christmas and New Year's have come and gone. I try to avoid the wrongheaded idea that we can mark our lives in chapters that easily line up with certain regular events like the end of the year or a birthday or whatever. However, these things are a good time to sit and reflect to see what has changed and is still changing (or remains the same) since the last time we stopped to take a moment and survey our lives. We ended 2012 with a small dinner party at the house, largely orchestrated and supplied by Kim, with me cleaning and acting like all the help I could be while not getting in the way. Everything I needed to ever learn about teamwork was taught by some person shooing me out of a kitchen and then telling me to come back in and help at alternating times.

It was a little weird having this very adult moment - people sitting around drinking nice wine out of expensive crystal while eating carefully prepared food. Of course, the moment was not exactly as it seemed. In between asking about where the wine was from or what spice or cooking method was used in what way, there was a lot of talk about dicks. So much dick talk. Probably asses, too, but who can keep it all straight anymore? I'm in no great hurry to brand myself an upstanding, responsible adult, but I think this is probably the apex of ascent to adulthood for myself and most of my friends. They're having children, which is alarming, because they're still doing things like wondering what would happen if one was to pee on particular things. God only knows they might even encourage their children to do it, since that's slightly more acceptable by society. So that's us, as adults - being mature enough to not piss on things ourselves.

2012 itself opened in the middle of difficulty for me and several people in my life. Thought it had been months since Kim and I had broken up, it still felt very fresh and raw. Navigating that through the year could be called "difficult", which is a ridiculous understatement. It's in the same vein as saying a blast furnace is somewhat uncomfortable to sit in. We both did our best to come through this still friends, but it was not easy at any given time.

A lot of my year really seemed to revolve around me getting my feet back under me and deciding what kind of life I was going to have in the aftermath. I put a lot of work into my job at Cornerstone, and I picked up a lot more work with AEG for the purpose of just getting back into the grind of writing constantly. I may have gone too far in that direction, as I realize looking back I shed a lot of my recreational pursuits so that I could work on various projects almost nonstop. Although I enjoy the work I do most of the time (at both jobs), it gets to be a little stressful when everything is an endless series of tasks you handle one at a time while looking at the infinite row beyond the current one.

I think it helped, though. Sometimes you just have to try things and see if they fit, and in this case I don't think it did. But by doing so, I learned to be a lot more confident in what I do and confident about who I am. 2012 was, for the most part, an unsteady walk through unmarked territory. Not a fight, but just an ongoing moment where I kept wondering if I should just turn back.

Overall, it felt like a long year for a lot of people. Not necessarily a bad one, but one where things just kept going on. Change, loss, gain, new directions, new information, different choices, and so on. The year just constantly slapped you in the face, saying, "Nothing sticks around forever, and apparently few things stick around for very long at all, buddy."

One of my most annoying habits - my inability to detach myself from particular moments in time or memories - seemed to come full circle. The feeling that I was always just a short step from going back to any given point in my life, any given friendship, or any given period of opportunity... that seemed to fade pretty quickly this year. Maybe it was when I went back to KC and it felt like I just didn't have the chance to see people. When I went to Jake's wedding and realized some people do just fade out of your life. Maybe it was kicking and fighting most of the year to help keep the office open.

I do have a few goals for the year. I need to get back in the habit of journaling more. I'm going to want to look back and remember things one day, and I'd hate to have so little context for my own life. I need to make sure I make the most of my time but I stop running full speed all the time. I want to really fight to get certain goals accomplished this year, but I need to remember how to just relax and actually catch a damn break more often. I sit around too much thinking "what should I be doing what should I be doing what should I be doing..." and it just brings too much stress. I went ahead and opened up several of my MMO accounts and got a shit ton of Steam games to try and get back to it, but we'll see. Whenever a show says they're "getting back to basics", it's like a death knell, because all they're saying is "we have nothing new to offer, nothing creative, so we're just going to try and retread old shit everyone seemed to like." So hopefully I'm not just getting back to basics, but pushing forward, too. I never really figured out what I was going to do with my life, and I think that's starting to be a problem since I'm still living it.

Or maybe I'm just rambling and no one else will get this.

I think I'll go home and mull this over, before I cram it down my throat
At long last it's crashed, its colossal mass has broken up into bits in my moat.

Lift the mattress off the floor, walk the cramps off, go meander in the cold.
Hail to your dark skin, hiding the fact you're dead again.
Underneath the power lines seeking shade.
Far above our heads are the icy heights that contain all reason

It's a luscious mix of words and tricks that let us bet when you know we should fold
On rocks I dreamt of where we'd stepped, and of the whole mess of roads we're now on.

Hold your glass up, hold it in
Never betray the way you've always known it is
One day I'll be wondering how I got so old just wondering how.
I never got cold wearing nothing in the snow.

This is way beyond my remote concern of being condescending

All these squawking birds won't quit building nothing, laying bricks.