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.

Four Point Oh Point... Whu?

I am going to amuse myself now. You're welcom to come along with me, but you are warned - it is amusing to me to complain about things that probably don't matter to people who don't live in my head. Blizzard finally patched in the anticipated Pre-Cataclysm patch last week. The patch that promised to re-vamp the talent system, making leveling more engaging, create less fuss and muss between talents and buffs, rebalance characters around a level that is currently unobtainable, destroy PvP, further trivialize content, make Inscribers filthy rich, break all your mods, and probably introduce several game-crashing bugs. Thankfully, they managed all of this and more.

I've been playing off and on in the past week and a half (the patch went in last Tuesday and the servers were even playable that same day!), which is unusual for me of late. My WoW playtime went from "arguably an addiction on paper" to "about as often as I wash my car". However, Cataclysm and it's pre-patch promised a few things that were of interest to me. The new spec system, where you get several abilities/modifiers at level 10 that make you more "fully" your chosen spec seemed brilliant to me. As I have said several times, only Warrior really felt like they were suddenly given the tools to do their "role" at a low level all at once... if you wanted to tank. Being handed shield block, taunt, and sunder in rapid succession made you feel like a fundamental shift had taken place. No other spec had that, but now they possibly all would.

Second was the concept that "hey perhaps healers should be effective at damage, too, but not overly so." Now, this was promise in the TBC -> Wrath switch, and it was met to a degree. Healers were given some tools to more properly DPS, but really it was all in the "healing and spell damage are no longer separate stats, it's all spellpower now" change. With the exception of a few wonky outliers due to bugs and patch hilarity, leveling as a healer remained Godawful, but just slightly less so. The changes proposed this time around actually meant to give synergy between dps and healing talents, to actually encourage healers to shoot things and given them the tools to do so even in groups. My God, I thought - the power of the Sun. In the palm of my hand.

Above: Tuesday night ICC run.

So, after downloading everything and spending about three days figuring out what Glyphs to use, what new talents did what, and wondering why I got a sick, unnamed sense of dread after I put my Druid's offspec back to Feral, I decided a few things:

- Shadow spec for Priest was completely over the top, and would get severely nerfed. In order to save my heart the inevitable pain, I went from Holy/Shadow to Holy/Disc. I didn't notice (and more about this later), but apparently my body was at that time suffused with a bright glow and my hair went yellow and spiked straight up.

- Retribution on my Paladin felt kinda... dumb. I had piddled on the PTR with it some, and while I don't miss the BOP-EM!!! style of play chasing random cooldowns, going from that to hitting a button every 2-3 seconds felt... weird. Also the loss of magic removal from Cleanse pissed me off exactly as much as I thought it might. However, my Paladin has been Ret or Prot (or both) since December of 2005, which meant I only chose my spec by figuring out which was the most damn annoying. Thusly, I spec'd Ret. Also, I heard the damage overall was horrible, only fueling my desire.

- Holy, on the other hand, was hi-lar-i-ous. No cooldown on Exo? Shocks hitting much harder and more frequently? 

- Balance was pretty much the exact same thing it was, with a couple of tweaks to the rotation. I was a bit underwhelmed since I do enjoy my Moonkin a great deal. She was the only character I had that went through extensive ICC25 experience, and the spec has all the right mix of aoe, dots, and direct damage that make it interesting to me. But given how wildly Paladin and Priest shifted, finding out that Balance's changes were "now just keep ALL your DoTs up, Starsurge when it's up, also your Nieblung is now even less good" on top of the same ol same ol.

- My Warrior will likely gather dust now since Ret/Prot Paladin and Arms/Prot Warrior feel way, way too similar. 

- My Resto Shaman pretty much just got a straight upgrade of awesome. 

- My 77 Demo Warlock is now extremely complicated, which... I dunno. On one hand I enjoyed that Warlock had a bigger toolbox to play from than Mage, but on the other I just son of a bitch fucking seriously how many buttons do you want from me, Blizzard. HOW MANY.

After taking some time to read various information sources - blogs, official forums, crying men on the corner near Best Buy - I decided that I was probably gonna try and focus on just a few of my characters - the Paladin, Priest, and somewhat on the Shaman. My Shaman was really there because I wanted to test out his current power level, but mostly he seemed unchanged like Balance. So after this past week and then this weekend, I'm gonna see how it all plays out.

Getting into TF2 a bit...

... yes, I know: Welcome to 2007, Seth.

I played TF Classic many, many moons ago when it was new and exciting and everyone thought the ol' spray-and-pray in your spawn room with pipe bombs was the single most offensive act a man could execute. When TF2 was announced, I was such a busy person I thought to myself, "There is no way I can buy this game and still have a healthy social/work life." Eventually, my friend Jon bought it for me on Steam, I downloaded it, and I proceeded to have a moment of bright, terrible clarity regarding what I had just done. I put the siren's game back in its box, tucked it under the bed, and tried my best not to think of it as I endured the shakes and hallucinations brought on from the forced separation.

So anyway a few weeks back, I decided to reinstall and try it. Things have slowed down at work, other games are rapidly losing my attention, and I wanted something visceral and violent to enjoy in chunks like I had with Borderlands. I think this time, with less of a frantic need to escape my 60-hour-work-week reality, I was able to approach the game at a measured, reasonable.... oh fuck it's 3am on a Wednesday morning.

The game is comfortable and familiar, like an old denim jacket that has somehow undergone an amazing alchemy to make it no longer musty, dated, and unfashionable. Valve has done a pretty solid job of edging that line between gore and cartoon humor, as well as encouraging serious antipathy to anyone not wearing your colors while not taking itself too seriously. So far, what I've learned -

- A pyro's flamethrower actually has a range of X - 1, where X is the amount of feet away that fucking guy is who would die if you could just get one more hit on.

- Spies have a button where they are able to simultaneously sap all of your buildings, even if they're 400 yards apart, and backstab you from the front in one smooth motion. I don't know where this button is, sadly. All I can find is the "when attempting to kill things, fumble nervously like a boy undoing his first girlfriend's bra."

- I am still pretty good at arcing pipe bombs just perfectly so that I completely miss unmoving targets.

- Speaking of: Soldiers and Demomen, when played by other players, have a 100% accuracy rate on the rockets/bombs they are wildly spamming at random directions. That is to say, the less thought you seem to put into these weapons and merely trust in the Force, the more likely you will catch someone (read: me) as they round a corner at 50 HP.

- There is nothing more amusing to me than the amount of unassisted kills I have racked up on my Medic. When I switch to an actual weapon and attack, there is a 50/50 chance the other guy will simply stop moving, as the player has fallen over his desk in confusion.

While it's been pretty frustrating at points (it's often way too easy to simply die in one second without having any reasonable chance to react or defend yourself), it's been a good time waster overall. Also, there's something to be said for getting messages like "You have been killed by: the assmachine."