It's quite apparent that you're looking at this from a wrong angle. GW2 isn't Rift. It's not WoW. It's GW2. How a game develops on the social aspects all depends on how WE play the game. ArenaNet is giving us EVERYTHING we need to make this game a social experience. But it's up to us to do it. ArenaNet is not going to force us to play one way. So if most of the community likes just playing together and not really socializing, then that's how it's going to be. Because that's how the community approaches the game. As the social aspect develops while we play, most of the questions about it will be answered.
I don't think anyone is calling Gw2 Rift or WoW.Rifts rift events are a good example of a dynamic event.You can show up at any given stage,do your part,collect your reward and leave,rinse repeat like a mindless robot.whether GW2's DE will be like that remains to be seen,but to me,it looks like it's leaning in that direction.
Its WvW feature however,will bring the community closer I think.
Eh, not really an old quest mentality at all, you can either pass or fail a dynamic event, if you win you get a better reward than when you lose. It doesn't matter if the centaurs take the town, if they do... you lost, simple as that. Win/lose, Pass/Fail, theres nothing else, no crazy third thing. If you want the best reward you have to win.
With this system, people can come in to make something tougher and thereby make you fail an event, thereby costing you a reward. Simple as that.
ArenaNet has stated you get Karma, gold, and XP from doing dynamic events and this reward you get is based on your participation. So you can get a gold, silver, or bronze reward based on what you do during the event and that will determine how much XP, gold, and Karma you get. And they have said you get less of a reward if you fail the event, but they have never said how much less, just that they want to have that incentive for people to want to succeed. But there are no item rewards tied to any Dynamic Events, so at the most if you fail you will lose a little Karma, XP, and gold.
You are making it sound as if other people might make you lose something that will harm your game play and make it so you do not want to see them. OH my God I lost some Karma because we did not win, I am going to go cry in the corner now. For the love of all that is good and holy there is over 1500 dynamic events in the game, I think you will win when you try some of them with other people, and get your precious life confirming max karma award.
Will loot category be related to the event? For example, depending on how an event goes, a peasant/prince may or may not give out valuable loot?
Colin: Loot will never be directly given as a reward for an event. The idea here is you should never feel like you need to participate in a specific event, or feel let down that you missed an event because it had a reward you really wanted.
All events reward you with experience, gold, and karma, which you can spend at merchants and vendors in the game to purchase rewards. This way, we’re rewarding you for participating in any event equally, so you can play in the events you discover, or the event types you really enjoy. We’ll never force you to wait around for an event to begin so you can get a specific drop or make you want to cause an event to fail because some other event in the chain gives you something you need. In Guild Wars 2, our princes and peasants are benevolent; they all reward you for participating in events, and then you can choose what to purchase with the rewards you have been given. Eric Flannum will talk a little more about this tomorrow.
Is there a clear-cut “end” to an event when loot is distributed?
Colin: Each event has a clear-cut end point of reward distribution, in which event success or failure is determined and the players who participated are rewarded. The event will then branch based on the outcome and cascade out to change various parts of the world, kicking off other events in the zone.
It’s worth noting that players are rewarded for participation if an event succeeds or fails – you simply get less reward if the event fails. This gives you an incentive to want to succeed, but makes it so you don’t feel your time is wasted by participating in an event that could or does potentially fail. Players don’t receive loot based on event participation; loot is dropped by monsters you kill during events, and everyone who helps kill a particular monster will receive rewards for doing so. Loot is the immediate reward you receive from the monsters, but at the end of the event everyone who participated receives their event reward.
This is one of the reasons I have to stay so polar on GW2, so many people think this game is offering something its not. Dynamic events aren't some amazing new way about doing everything. They are simply chains of regular quests with two simple outcomes, and rewards based on those outcomes. Its a casual game, so it allows for scaling and rewards for everyone, but thats not to say players want to lose all the time just to "experience" it.
Oh yes Dynamic Events are just regular quests, that is why so many other game have done GW2 dynamic events because they are so simple right? I am so glad you are here to help clear this up for us simple minded GW2 fans that cannot possible understand what a dynamic event is! After all making a sword is the same as making a chisel, right?
It's quite apparent that you're looking at this from a wrong angle. GW2 isn't Rift. It's not WoW. It's GW2. How a game develops on the social aspects all depends on how WE play the game. ArenaNet is giving us EVERYTHING we need to make this game a social experience. But it's up to us to do it. ArenaNet is not going to force us to play one way. So if most of the community likes just playing together and not really socializing, then that's how it's going to be. Because that's how the community approaches the game.
As the social aspect develops while we play, most of the questions about it will be answered.
I don't think anyone is calling Gw2 Rift or WoW.Rifts rift events are a good example of a dynamic event.You can show up at any given stage,do your part,collect your reward and leave,rinse repeat like a mindless robot.whether GW2's DE will be like that remains to be seen,but to me,it looks like it's leaning in that direction. Its WvW feature however,will bring the community closer I think.
You can't really compare the two. Rifts are very one dimensional. DE's really aren't.
Anyway, to some of the people talking about "winning" an event. Winning isn't the object of the events. The story and participation is.
Well, the only thing I could think of is, the more players, the tougher it is, and the tougher it is, the less chance there is of completing it.
If you have a group of people doing an event and they are winning, and then you have 3 guys who have no idea what they are doing that essentially just make the quest tougher, it could be the difference by getting a winners award or a losers award.
This is the old quest mentality. Where the only way to tackle a quest is to 'succeed'. Otherwise, you keep trying again and again until you win and get the reward.
In Dynamic Events, whether you win or lose, the next chain will occur. Of course, the next chain will depend on whether you win or lose, but either way, there's no 'retrying'. If you and your group fail to push back the attackers, then a different set of chain events will be set off.
This is what makes Dynamic Events interesting and vastly superior to quests IMO.
Eh, not really an old quest mentality at all, you can either pass or fail a dynamic event, if you win you get a better reward than when you lose. It doesn't matter if the centaurs take the town, if they do... you lost, simple as that. Win/lose, Pass/Fail, theres nothing else, no crazy third thing. If you want the best reward you have to win.
With this system, people can come in to make something tougher and thereby make you fail an event, thereby costing you a reward. Simple as that.
If people come in then nothing happens.
If people come in and start helping out then the even gets harder. But the even only gets harder when people are helping out.
They cancel each other out. The event isn't harder for you, it's harder for you and the people that started helping you. If the people leave then the event scales back down.
Simple as that.
Bad players "helping" won't make anything easier. I guess if you want to pretend all players are equal thats fine, but if you've ever played an MMO before you'd know players aren't equal at all.
Then again, if events are simply whack a mole then you might be right, it won't matter how bad a player is that joins.
1. Scaling is done relative to the amount of players. So yes from the perspective of 1 person outside the event, the event would appear to get harder. However, it's all relative. To the people participating, it's not appearing to get harder. It's just more content appearing to match the amount of people participating.
2. What's with this "elitist" attitude. You can't help these "bad players" out and guide them? Rather than bitching about "bad players" help them. I guarantee you will have even considered yourself a craptastic player when you first started a few months down the road, if you are still playing. People have said that Guild Wars 2 is a bit of a learning curve when coming from other MMOs. Only after hours of play time have people begun to figure out how to play, and even then still far off from getting everything down.
Now back to the OP. I'll state what I've stated so many other times. It's up to the players to socialize. ArenaNet has given you every tool they could think off to communicated and socialize with your fellow players. It's up to the players. ArenaNet can't force you to actually socialize. They can force you to group and attempt to communicate, but it won't necessarily be socializing. They've even allowed you to communicate with your guild (possibly friends, not sure) outside the game. ArenaNet can't change the player's mindset on socializing.
Eh, not really an old quest mentality at all, you can either pass or fail a dynamic event, if you win you get a better reward than when you lose. It doesn't matter if the centaurs take the town, if they do... you lost, simple as that. Win/lose, Pass/Fail, theres nothing else, no crazy third thing. If you want the best reward you have to win.
With this system, people can come in to make something tougher and thereby make you fail an event, thereby costing you a reward. Simple as that.
ArenaNet has stated you get Karma, gold, and XP from doing dynamic events and this reward you get is based on your participation. So you can get a gold, silver, or bronze reward based on what you do during the event and that will determine how much XP, gold, and Karma you get. And they have said you get less of a reward if you fail the event, but they have never said how much less, just that they want to have that incentive for people to want to succeed. But there are no item rewards tied to any Dynamic Events, so at the most if you fail you will lose a little Karma, XP, and gold.
You are making it sound as if other people might make you lose something that will harm your game play and make it so you do not want to see them. OH my God I lost some Karma because we did not win, I am going to go cry in the corner now. For the love of all that is good and holy there is over 1500 dynamic events in the game, I think you will win when you try some of them with other people, and get your precious life confirming max karma award.
Will loot category be related to the event? For example, depending on how an event goes, a peasant/prince may or may not give out valuable loot?
Colin: Loot will never be directly given as a reward for an event. The idea here is you should never feel like you need to participate in a specific event, or feel let down that you missed an event because it had a reward you really wanted.
All events reward you with experience, gold, and karma, which you can spend at merchants and vendors in the game to purchase rewards. This way, we’re rewarding you for participating in any event equally, so you can play in the events you discover, or the event types you really enjoy. We’ll never force you to wait around for an event to begin so you can get a specific drop or make you want to cause an event to fail because some other event in the chain gives you something you need. In Guild Wars 2, our princes and peasants are benevolent; they all reward you for participating in events, and then you can choose what to purchase with the rewards you have been given. Eric Flannum will talk a little more about this tomorrow.
Is there a clear-cut “end” to an event when loot is distributed?
Colin: Each event has a clear-cut end point of reward distribution, in which event success or failure is determined and the players who participated are rewarded. The event will then branch based on the outcome and cascade out to change various parts of the world, kicking off other events in the zone.
It’s worth noting that players are rewarded for participation if an event succeeds or fails – you simply get less reward if the event fails. This gives you an incentive to want to succeed, but makes it so you don’t feel your time is wasted by participating in an event that could or does potentially fail. Players don’t receive loot based on event participation; loot is dropped by monsters you kill during events, and everyone who helps kill a particular monster will receive rewards for doing so. Loot is the immediate reward you receive from the monsters, but at the end of the event everyone who participated receives their event reward.
This is one of the reasons I have to stay so polar on GW2, so many people think this game is offering something its not. Dynamic events aren't some amazing new way about doing everything. They are simply chains of regular quests with two simple outcomes, and rewards based on those outcomes. Its a casual game, so it allows for scaling and rewards for everyone, but thats not to say players want to lose all the time just to "experience" it.
Oh yes Dynamic Events are just regular quests, that is why so many other game have done GW2 dynamic events because they are so simple right? I am so glad you are here to help clear this up for us simple minded GW2 fans that cannot possible understand what a dynamic event is! After all making a sword is the same as making a chisel, right?
This is where I don't think you understand the ramifications of dynamic event outcomes. It isn't just, oh, fail to repel bandit guild, they take over town, or push bandits back and the town remains safe.
Each one of those outcomes will spawn a new chain of events. For example, let's say you repel the bandits. Now a day later, the bandits will come back with double their original force. That's the next chain in the event. Repel that, now they come back with siege weapons. Finally, you find out that one of the captured bandits gives up their base location, setting off the final event to destroy their base once and for all. The base can be a randomly generated location based on each iteration of the dynamic event chain. Of course, players could find out where their base is located beforehand, and thus destroy it even before reaching the end of the dynamic event chain. This whole series of events would take days to cycle through.
The above chain is if the player succeeds. Now, if the player fails to defend the bandits from town, the bandits occupy the town. Now, this starts off a set of events to recapture the town. The first event could be something like rescue town elders from the prison and sneak them out of the town to form a resistance. Say there's 10 or so town elders, and the quest then involves a sneaking mission where players try to get the town elders out successfully. This could be done a number of ways, such as disguising yourself as a bandit, or having other players create a commotion to draw the main bandit force outside while other players rescue the town elders. Of course, things can screw up, but everyone basically can keep trying until they rescue 10. You get a reward for each town elder you rescue, and once you get 10, it goes to the next part of the chain. The next part of the chain could involve getting supplies to build up an npc army to retake the town. Or even assassinate the bandit leader in town. Finally, you end up at the same quest chain where you locate and destroy the bandit base.
Now, to make things even more interesting, the 2 chains can cross over into each other at any time. So say you repel the first 2 bandit attack waves but fail the third. Now you essentially end up in the town captured chain. Or if you're in the town captured chain you can try direct assaulting and killing all the bandits in town, which could put you into any part of the first chain (bandits send more attackers). To take things a step further, each of these events can spawn their own unique chains. ANet can add new scenarios in updates that make these older chains even more interesting.
This is of course, completely theoretical, but it's all based on what ANet has said about their design philosophy behind DEs. Whether or not the actual implementation would be this interesting is up in the air, but this is the reason why people are so excited for dynamic events.
This is one of the reasons I have to stay so polar on GW2, so many people think this game is offering something its not. Dynamic events aren't some amazing new way about doing everything. They are simply chains of regular quests with two simple outcomes, and rewards based on those outcomes. Its a casual game, so it allows for scaling and rewards for everyone, but thats not to say players want to lose all the time just to "experience" it.
I believe they are. I've posted a lot about this. DEs are strictly better than quests in every way when it comes to doing the kind of leveling quests in a traditional MMO. About the only way they aren't better is for epic, solo questlines, which is why GW2 will also have a personal story.
Unfortunately, to list all the reasons why they're better takes about an entire page. I don't want everybody's eyes to glaze over, but here is probably my best attempt at explaining their advantages.
If you don't want to read the wall of text, I strongly urge you (and everybody) to watch this video, which explains the evolution from hunting to quests to PQs to DEs. I already posted a link to it once in this thread, but I don't think it can be too often repeated.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it."-Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
This is one of the reasons I have to stay so polar on GW2, so many people think this game is offering something its not. Dynamic events aren't some amazing new way about doing everything. They are simply chains of regular quests with two simple outcomes, and rewards based on those outcomes. Its a casual game, so it allows for scaling and rewards for everyone, but thats not to say players want to lose all the time just to "experience" it.
Dynamic events are special, here is why.
Dynamic events will fail if no player causes them to succeed.
Dynamic events have effects on the world, and these effects differ depending on whether the players passed or failed.
Dynamic events are more immersive than normal quests because they allow players to join in at any point in the progression of the event.
You do not need to talk to anyone to "accept" the event to be able to start it.
You do not need to talk to anyone to pick up the reward for the event.
Players are able to play together without any hassle, not even a public grouping system.
Dynamic events' outcomes are logical in their progression when you pass/fail the event. The next thing to happen is what you might expect to happen, given the results of what happened in the event.
Dynamic events allow completionist players to be released from their chains. Those players will now be the ones who explore in search for those hidden dynamic events.
Dynamic events aren't just repeatable quests.
Dynamic events shouldn't have to be some amazing new way of doing everything, but they are because no game has done questing like this before.
Dynamic events promote group play, socialization, exploration, and helps immerse players into the environment of Tyria.
Lastly, dynamic events aren't quest, as quests have been done in the past. They are the world, the story, the lore, and all the environmental factors that play into your gaming experience. Your personal storyline, which is customized to fit your biography choices, and branches further based on the decisions you make after character creation, is what really replaces the classic quest.
In many MMOs, questing, dungeons, and other things (such as rifts), are all things that allow you to level, but you never need to do all of these to level your character. In GW2, your main goal isn't leveling, and reaching max level isn't supposed to be the be all and end all of your character advancement (niether is armor). With this in mind, dynamic events aren't just one way to level your character, they are a way to experience The World, and I think a lot of people out there are tired of games where the world isn't really present behind the game mechanics and levels and skills and combat and UI and all the other things that are more appearant than The World.
More importanly, when you participate in these dynamic eventss with other people, especially when things just naturally come together, that makes other people part of your gaming experience and part of the game world as well.
Edit: I used the quote to demonstrate a veiwpoint that I think too many people have.
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
Well, the only thing I could think of is, the more players, the tougher it is, and the tougher it is, the less chance there is of completing it.
If you have a group of people doing an event and they are winning, and then you have 3 guys who have no idea what they are doing that essentially just make the quest tougher, it could be the difference by getting a winners award or a losers award.
This is the old quest mentality. Where the only way to tackle a quest is to 'succeed'. Otherwise, you keep trying again and again until you win and get the reward.
In Dynamic Events, whether you win or lose, the next chain will occur. Of course, the next chain will depend on whether you win or lose, but either way, there's no 'retrying'. If you and your group fail to push back the attackers, then a different set of chain events will be set off.
This is what makes Dynamic Events interesting and vastly superior to quests IMO.
Eh, not really an old quest mentality at all, you can either pass or fail a dynamic event, if you win you get a better reward than when you lose. It doesn't matter if the centaurs take the town, if they do... you lost, simple as that. Win/lose, Pass/Fail, theres nothing else, no crazy third thing. If you want the best reward you have to win.
With this system, people can come in to make something tougher and thereby make you fail an event, thereby costing you a reward. Simple as that.
Thats because everything ingame needs to give you a reward or else it is complete junk right?
Dynamic events are there to create EVENTS in the world, if you succeed in repelling centaurs, one chain happens, if you fail, another chain happens. I wouldn't care less if there isn't reward, as long as the events are fun to play out, regarding cooperations to succeed.
If anyone ever realise, reward ares for 3 types of people
Materialistic people, "if there ain't a reward, I ain't doing it"
People with no sense of progression of direction, "if I get a reward, I should be doing something right.....right?"
The only way to play a game is to beat the bad guys, get their loot, and move on. "I have to win.....at all cost.....for the gear that is going to drop"
You are basing your impression of Dynamic events on Rift, where rifts are one off event that will only reward you once you seal the rift, its different in GW2, one example the devs talked about is the ascalong ghost city. Humans have built defences around the city, but now the vengeful ghost are destroying them, your goal is to protect the defences so that, the defences can help with your fight against the ghost. If you fail, you simply going to have to combat the ghost without the defences. One major event spawns off multiple smaller chain of events, failing does NOT break the chain, it simply splits off into another direction.
A game is about having fun, not about the virtual reward it gives you.
LOL no I'm basing these events on what they are. You pass or fail the event. Right? You get rewards based on this, right?
If you like losing, great, more power to you, but when I play games I measure my skill on success. If you want to play games to lose thats great, as long as there are winners there needs to be losers, but I don't get to the end of a game, or win at PvP because I'm looking to lose.
Not everything has to be a reward, if you just want to see the event chain then you can do that, if seeing the chain is in some way a reward. Not everyone wants to do something to lose at it though. I like to play games for fun... like Global Agenda, where my skill and winning doesn't really net me any kind of progression, loot, or reward other than my stats for winning. I don't like to lose matches, I like to win them. Even when I do lose its alright if I at least show promising stats. In a DE playing for fun is one thing, but losing a DE due to incompetence instead of completing it successfully because you are strong enough and able is another.
This is one of the reasons I have to stay so polar on GW2, so many people think this game is offering something its not. Dynamic events aren't some amazing new way about doing everything. They are simply chains of regular quests with two simple outcomes, and rewards based on those outcomes. Its a casual game, so it allows for scaling and rewards for everyone, but thats not to say players want to lose all the time just to "experience" it.
All I'm saying is that you are not going to pass every single event in the world, don't need to treat it as if its the end of the world.
Also on your note about "incompetence", lets hope you are not one of those people who screams whenever a teammate did something silly or new players, its call sportsmanship, whenever you lose in something, its because you weren't good enough to overcome that situation, don't blame others. In the end, it is only a game, surely I hope no one is going to lose on purpose, but don't need to take winning and losing so seriously.
Guild Wars and possibly Guild Wars 2 are one of those games that have better desgin so that you have chance to overturn dire situations, unlike in normal MMO, where one accidental pull can almost mean certain death. So more skillful players can make a difference, it isn't a game thats all about the latest and greatest gear. or best stats.
Lastly, from what I've understand from devs description, failing an event doesn't usually mean ending the chain altogether, it could simply mean the next phase of events will be harder, without some npc support or what not.
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW? As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
Just a thought. What if events are a good way to gain XP, money, and karma? What if players who compete in these events are given every reason to participate in them even if its impossible for them to finish them at the state they are in, such as maybe the timer is really low when they show up and the event is about to fail? What if this rewarded XP, gold and karma isn't about success or failure and is really about getting people to play together and broaden their own gaming experience? I think that would mean that they are giving players EVER REASON POSSIBLE to play together. players will see an even area and flock there, and that means that they will play with other people more often, and when people play together they have more fun because of how the combat system works.
in short, its not about rewarding competence. It is about rewarding participation, and I think that this is one of the reasons that there aren't actual loot rewards for individual events (i mean, other than the official reason of not giving people a reason to pas or fail an event).
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
As far as being griefed by players intentionally contributing but playing badly, or just being around players who aren't very good, I don't know that we should worry about it.
First, if this is the only way that players can possibly grief you, it's still way better than the current system. The DE system might not be perfect (what is?), but it's definitely a big step in the right direction.
Mobs are going to be tougher than in the demos. If people are playing badly, they'll probably die. If you think it's happening on purpose, don't rez them. The event will be slightly harder while they're there, but then it will scale back down.
If someone is bad, but still keeping themselves alive, they're at least helping a little, perhaps even drawing aggro on a mob that they need to keep dodging.
I guess a sizeable group could contribute just periodically shooting a boss mob in order to force another player to die trying to "solo" it when its buffed, but what can you do? It would still take a more concerted effort than to train a huge mob to a town in some other game.
Also, with almost no penalty for death, cheap instant teleportation anywhere you've been, and no particular reason to have to do any one DE, you could just leave. I'm sure part of the allure of griefing people is getting a reaction out of them. If you don't give it to them, people probably will stop bothering.
The other thing too is that you might just be good enough to win anyway. Best way to grief the griefers right there.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it."-Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
If i get rezzed in a battle, especially if someone went out of their way or broke a spell cast to rez me, ill say a quick thanks in chat. after that ill feel more friendly with the strangers im with and type a little more. and it's not just rezzing that will get me talking. theres other things like helping me take down someone i couldn't or blocking a deadly spell cast at me.
the -jump right in someone elses fight- idea that arenanet is working towards most likely will open up a lot of socializing opportunities for me.
Socailizing and DE's. Will it occur, or just be soloing together? Here's my thoughts on this topic.
1. The player base is not going to be a fluidly changing group of people. All players on one server will run across each other or their representative guilds again and again. With only a few thousand players available per server (sounds like alot, but really it isn't...think about it, small college campuses have similar numbers and everyone knows everyone there)
2. DE's, due to their chaining nature will allow for people to stay togther longer than in quest based games. As players progress through the chain, ad hoc grouping during these events will provide the OPPORTUNITY to chat, observe actions, and morals of other players. This alone is all I need to decide who to talk to or not. All my friends in online situations have arisen from this type of interaction. If you're playing well or badly doesn't matter, as long as you are being mature and civil during the play.
3. Whether socializing occurs in the game will be on us, as players. We have been given a system that SHOULD provide reason and context to talk to one another, if not for strategizing (not my favorite way to meet people, particularly if they are "You suck! and aren't worthy to be on this server"), but also for tall tale telling after the event!
So to conclude yes, this game SHOULD be heads and shoulders above most for providing the opportunity, context, and reasons to socialize. Whether we as players take advantage of this game for these reasons will entirely be up to us.
A particular player catches your eye. You like his/her style. In the middle of the DE, you actively work alongside eachother to elminate the baddies. The two of you even issue some basic commands to help cooridinate attacks more effectively. Just as the battle ends, you are about to click on him and send him a message when...he vanishes in thin air! Where did he go? Oh yeah, you can teleport all over the place in GW2 when nothing's going on in your current area...
A particular player catches your eye. You like his/her style. In the middle of the DE, you actively work alongside eachother to elminate the baddies. The two of you even issue some basic commands to help cooridinate attacks more effectively. Just as the battle ends, you are about to click on him and send him a message when...he vanishes in thin air! Where did he go? Oh yeah, you can teleport all over the place in GW2 when nothing's going on in your current area...
Send them a tell? I'm sure you don't have to click on them to do it. Unless they have some screwed up name that you can't remember, in which case they probably don't want any friends. Chances are you will see them again either way.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
A particular player catches your eye. You like his/her style. In the middle of the DE, you actively work alongside eachother to elminate the baddies. The two of you even issue some basic commands to help cooridinate attacks more effectively. Just as the battle ends, you are about to click on him and send him a message when...he vanishes in thin air! Where did he go? Oh yeah, you can teleport all over the place in GW2 when nothing's going on in your current area...
Or, as in other MMOs, he hits "recall" and teleports to his last bind spot, which you have no way of knowing what it is!
Or, he gets on his mount that happens to be faster than the mount you have, so you have no way of catching up with him!
Eh, not really an old quest mentality at all, you can either pass or fail a dynamic event, if you win you get a better reward than when you lose. It doesn't matter if the centaurs take the town, if they do... you lost, simple as that. Win/lose, Pass/Fail, theres nothing else, no crazy third thing. If you want the best reward you have to win.
With this system, people can come in to make something tougher and thereby make you fail an event, thereby costing you a reward. Simple as that.
ArenaNet has stated you get Karma, gold, and XP from doing dynamic events and this reward you get is based on your participation. So you can get a gold, silver, or bronze reward based on what you do during the event and that will determine how much XP, gold, and Karma you get. And they have said you get less of a reward if you fail the event, but they have never said how much less, just that they want to have that incentive for people to want to succeed. But there are no item rewards tied to any Dynamic Events, so at the most if you fail you will lose a little Karma, XP, and gold.
You are making it sound as if other people might make you lose something that will harm your game play and make it so you do not want to see them. OH my God I lost some Karma because we did not win, I am going to go cry in the corner now. For the love of all that is good and holy there is over 1500 dynamic events in the game, I think you will win when you try some of them with other people, and get your precious life confirming max karma award.
Will loot category be related to the event? For example, depending on how an event goes, a peasant/prince may or may not give out valuable loot?
Colin: Loot will never be directly given as a reward for an event. The idea here is you should never feel like you need to participate in a specific event, or feel let down that you missed an event because it had a reward you really wanted.
All events reward you with experience, gold, and karma, which you can spend at merchants and vendors in the game to purchase rewards. This way, we’re rewarding you for participating in any event equally, so you can play in the events you discover, or the event types you really enjoy. We’ll never force you to wait around for an event to begin so you can get a specific drop or make you want to cause an event to fail because some other event in the chain gives you something you need. In Guild Wars 2, our princes and peasants are benevolent; they all reward you for participating in events, and then you can choose what to purchase with the rewards you have been given. Eric Flannum will talk a little more about this tomorrow.
Is there a clear-cut “end” to an event when loot is distributed?
Colin: Each event has a clear-cut end point of reward distribution, in which event success or failure is determined and the players who participated are rewarded. The event will then branch based on the outcome and cascade out to change various parts of the world, kicking off other events in the zone.
It’s worth noting that players are rewarded for participation if an event succeeds or fails – you simply get less reward if the event fails. This gives you an incentive to want to succeed, but makes it so you don’t feel your time is wasted by participating in an event that could or does potentially fail. Players don’t receive loot based on event participation; loot is dropped by monsters you kill during events, and everyone who helps kill a particular monster will receive rewards for doing so. Loot is the immediate reward you receive from the monsters, but at the end of the event everyone who participated receives their event reward.
This is one of the reasons I have to stay so polar on GW2, so many people think this game is offering something its not. Dynamic events aren't some amazing new way about doing everything. They are simply chains of regular quests with two simple outcomes, and rewards based on those outcomes. Its a casual game, so it allows for scaling and rewards for everyone, but thats not to say players want to lose all the time just to "experience" it.
Oh yes Dynamic Events are just regular quests, that is why so many other game have done GW2 dynamic events because they are so simple right? I am so glad you are here to help clear this up for us simple minded GW2 fans that cannot possible understand what a dynamic event is! After all making a sword is the same as making a chisel, right?
On your first point, you just basically regurgitated what I said, you just provided proof on what I said. You get rewards either way, but you get more rewards when you win. If you have a group of players planning on winning an event, but others come in and force you to lose, you get less rewards. I think you grasp that, I just think you're being obstinate.
And yes, Dynamic events are regular quests, they just chain. You will still be doing kill and collect quests all day long, you'll still be doing "clicky" quests and things of that nature, and when you pass an event, you'll move on to the next chain of events that revolves around killing, collecting, clicking, protecting, fedexing.. what have you. On top of that, you'll have a certain amount of each to do, as always. Have you watched the videos of the game? Have you seen the event chains?
People want to pretend the normal MMO conventions will change drastically because now you have chaining events with outcomes... but the core gameplay will be extremely similar. I'm cool with being excited about it, but lets be honest with ourselves here.
And yes, Dynamic events are regular quests, they just chain. You will still be doing kill and collect quests all day long, you'll still be doing "clicky" quests and things of that nature, and when you pass an event, you'll move on to the next chain of events that revolves around killing, collecting, clicking, protecting, fedexing.. what have you. On top of that, you'll have a certain amount of each to do, as always. Have you watched the videos of the game? Have you seen the event chains?
People want to pretend the normal MMO conventions will change drastically because now you have chaining events with outcomes... but the core gameplay will be extremely similar. I'm cool with being excited about it, but lets be honest with ourselves here.
I feel very strongly about this, and I've gone so far as to say on several occassions that if a person does not think dynamic events are truly revolutionary, then they simply don't understand them.
Honestly, I think your argument basically amounts to a Straw Man. It is a predominantly combat oriented game, there is only so much you can do with the game mechanics (killing, collecting, clicking, etc). Eric Flannum himself concedes this in his explanation about the zombies in the swamp. The problem with your argument is that you're implying that these (and chaining) are the only aspects of DEs, and then concluding that they're basically quests.
Dynamic events completely change how you view other players. When you're doing a traditional MMO's solo quest leveling, other players are either irrelevant, a nuisance, or outright griefing you. In GW2, they're doing away with griefing completely. With the way dynamic events scale up and become more chaotic and have bosses gain more abilities, you'll want to see other players. Other players will make the game more fun. Can you possibly say the same about quests?
In addition to that, they just get rid of the barriers to community in general. You don't have to pick up the quest first or have to redo something so your friend can catch up to where you are in the quest chain. Events cycle so you can repeat one and get rewarded for it instead of just assisting someone else. They scale you down so you can group with that guy from your friends list who is much lower level than you.
There's one more big fundamental difference between quests as well, and that is that they let you do things that you can't easily do with traditional quests. With quests, everything has to be triggered. Bandits can only attack once you've talked to the guy who then spawns them. It's clunky to say the least. Not only can events make mobs start an assault on their own, you can also have failure conditions that would be hard to reproduce in quests. We've probably all done quests where you fail if the guy you're protecting dies. Have you ever done one where you fail if bandits burn those dozen hay bales?
I could go on a little more about some of their other cool features, but I won't. I don't even consider chaining to be the big deal about them. The real reason I think to love them is that they're bringing community back to MMOs that have been dominated by solo leveling experiences. That to me is an MMO convention changer right there.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it."-Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Eh, not really an old quest mentality at all, you can either pass or fail a dynamic event, if you win you get a better reward than when you lose. It doesn't matter if the centaurs take the town, if they do... you lost, simple as that. Win/lose, Pass/Fail, theres nothing else, no crazy third thing. If you want the best reward you have to win.
With this system, people can come in to make something tougher and thereby make you fail an event, thereby costing you a reward. Simple as that.
ArenaNet has stated you get Karma, gold, and XP from doing dynamic events and this reward you get is based on your participation. So you can get a gold, silver, or bronze reward based on what you do during the event and that will determine how much XP, gold, and Karma you get. And they have said you get less of a reward if you fail the event, but they have never said how much less, just that they want to have that incentive for people to want to succeed. But there are no item rewards tied to any Dynamic Events, so at the most if you fail you will lose a little Karma, XP, and gold.
You are making it sound as if other people might make you lose something that will harm your game play and make it so you do not want to see them. OH my God I lost some Karma because we did not win, I am going to go cry in the corner now. For the love of all that is good and holy there is over 1500 dynamic events in the game, I think you will win when you try some of them with other people, and get your precious life confirming max karma award.
Will loot category be related to the event? For example, depending on how an event goes, a peasant/prince may or may not give out valuable loot?
Colin: Loot will never be directly given as a reward for an event. The idea here is you should never feel like you need to participate in a specific event, or feel let down that you missed an event because it had a reward you really wanted.
All events reward you with experience, gold, and karma, which you can spend at merchants and vendors in the game to purchase rewards. This way, we’re rewarding you for participating in any event equally, so you can play in the events you discover, or the event types you really enjoy. We’ll never force you to wait around for an event to begin so you can get a specific drop or make you want to cause an event to fail because some other event in the chain gives you something you need. In Guild Wars 2, our princes and peasants are benevolent; they all reward you for participating in events, and then you can choose what to purchase with the rewards you have been given. Eric Flannum will talk a little more about this tomorrow.
Is there a clear-cut “end” to an event when loot is distributed?
Colin: Each event has a clear-cut end point of reward distribution, in which event success or failure is determined and the players who participated are rewarded. The event will then branch based on the outcome and cascade out to change various parts of the world, kicking off other events in the zone.
It’s worth noting that players are rewarded for participation if an event succeeds or fails – you simply get less reward if the event fails. This gives you an incentive to want to succeed, but makes it so you don’t feel your time is wasted by participating in an event that could or does potentially fail. Players don’t receive loot based on event participation; loot is dropped by monsters you kill during events, and everyone who helps kill a particular monster will receive rewards for doing so. Loot is the immediate reward you receive from the monsters, but at the end of the event everyone who participated receives their event reward.
This is one of the reasons I have to stay so polar on GW2, so many people think this game is offering something its not. Dynamic events aren't some amazing new way about doing everything. They are simply chains of regular quests with two simple outcomes, and rewards based on those outcomes. Its a casual game, so it allows for scaling and rewards for everyone, but thats not to say players want to lose all the time just to "experience" it.
Oh yes Dynamic Events are just regular quests, that is why so many other game have done GW2 dynamic events because they are so simple right? I am so glad you are here to help clear this up for us simple minded GW2 fans that cannot possible understand what a dynamic event is! After all making a sword is the same as making a chisel, right?
And yes, Dynamic events are regular quests, they just chain. You will still be doing kill and collect quests all day long, you'll still be doing "clicky" quests and things of that nature, and when you pass an event, you'll move on to the next chain of events that revolves around killing, collecting, clicking, protecting, fedexing.. what have you. On top of that, you'll have a certain amount of each to do, as always. Have you watched the videos of the game? Have you seen the event chains?
And yet you do not seem to understand ONE big difference between quests and Dynamic Events: you can take a quest at anytime whereas a Dynamic EVENT simply occurs.
On your first point, you just basically regurgitated what I said, you just provided proof on what I said. You get rewards either way, but you get more rewards when you win. If you have a group of players planning on winning an event, but others come in and force you to lose, you get less rewards. I think you grasp that, I just think you're being obstinate.
And yes, Dynamic events are regular quests, they just chain. You will still be doing kill and collect quests all day long, you'll still be doing "clicky" quests and things of that nature, and when you pass an event, you'll move on to the next chain of events that revolves around killing, collecting, clicking, protecting, fedexing.. what have you. On top of that, you'll have a certain amount of each to do, as always. Have you watched the videos of the game? Have you seen the event chains?
People want to pretend the normal MMO conventions will change drastically because now you have chaining events with outcomes... but the core gameplay will be extremely similar. I'm cool with being excited about it, but lets be honest with ourselves here.
For the first point, you really do not get sarcasm do you! Dude we do not even know how much less Karma you will get if you lost, it could be 10%,20%, 30% or whatever. Are you really telling me that losing 20% karma every once in a while, is going to break your heart and ruin your GW2 experience? After all there is over 1500 DE in GW2 you are bound to win some and lose some, so what the hell is your point. That winning max karma is life affirming and without it people are going to go jump off bridges, because it is so depressing to lose and we must get max karma for ever event. I can see it now "Oh man this person came into this Dynamic Event tonight and sucked and we ended up losing instead of 100 karma I got 80 karma, I am going to go cry myself to sleep."
For the love of all that is good and holy failing is part of life if you cannot accept the possibility of failure then I would suggest stop playing video games. Or GW2 could reduce the difficulty so you only lose if you pass out and hit your head on the keyboard. Would that make you happy so you do not get a little less Karma?
God guys we are just talking about losing a little XP, gold, and Karma here it is not the end of the world. You are not going to lose that uber sword of awesomeness because someone screwed up a DE, since there is no Items tied to DE. I am sorry for ranting on about this, but are we really that pathetic that we cannot stand the thought of losing a percentage of karma, a in game currency that so far has only been shown to purchase consumable items? If we really as gamers have become that pathetic then this genre is doomed!
For your second point, oh yes you are so right I remember ever quest I have ever done scaling so it becomes more difficult when I am in a group. Oh yes and all quests in every other game I played progressed logically along a path depending on my inaction or interaction. Yep you are so right and we GW2 fans are so delusional how we could not have seen that DEs are exactly like ever quest in every other MMO. Yep just like your comment about DEs being about protecting and killing stuff just like every other game quest mechanic, it does not matter the context that those are presented, it just matters that they are the same. Thanks for clearing that up for us stupid GW2 fans that cannot possible understand what makes a quest in WoW a quest and what makes a DE in GW2 a DE.
Dude you can have your opinion on what a DE is, but do dare to tell me I am stupid when I have watched ever video I could find and read ever interview about DEs. I know what makes them interesting to me in ways that I have not seen before in any MMO, and if you have a problem with that, I do not give a crap. So do not lecture me that I am making DEs into something they are not! /have a nice day
And since so many people on this site do not understand context here you go.
Originally posted by AKASlaphappy
Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric Flannum
Thought this would be a good time to take advantage of this thread coming back. I wanted to explain something that may not be clear since the topic of kill X quests came up here earlier. This is going to be a bit of a long post so bear with me .
It is true that we do want to get away from the standard kill X MMO quest. One thing that’s important to realize is that while we desire to get rid of this sort of thing there are a finite number of actions one can undertake in a combat focused game and there are a finite number of ways to express to a player what they should be doing. I think too often we get caught up in semantics when the root of the problem is that the standard kill X quest is bad because it is unexciting and has no context or consequence.
For example let’s pretend we have a situation where a group of undead creatures is gathering in a swamp to attack a local fortress.
In a typical kill X quest I would walk up to the commander of the fortress and he’d have an exclamation mark over his head. I’d click on him and he would present me with text describing how evil and foul the undead in the swamp are and how if they are not dealt with they will overrun his fortress. I accept this task and head to the swamp. It is likely that I now have “Kill 10 zombies” as a quest objective. I enter the swamp, see zombies and start killing them. After killing 10 I decide to head back to the fortress and turn in my quest. If I hadn’t done the quest what would have happened? Would the zombies have attacked? Are they still going to attack? I killed 10 of them but there are still more of them out there, doesn’t that matter? This is the experience provided by the typical kill X quest.
In Guild Wars 2, let’s take the same set up and apply it to a dynamic event. As I approach the fortress the commander runs up to me and says out loud for everyone in the area to hear that there are zombies in the local swamp, they are building up to attack his fort and someone had better do something. I head to the swamp and notice that the usual wildlife is gone, having been slain by the zombie horde (you actually get to see this happen as the event starts) when I enter the event radius I have the objective of “Cull the Zombie Horde” followed by a percentage indicating how much of the horde remains and a timer. I start killing zombies as the timer counts down. If I and any other adventurers in the area can cull the horde down to 0% before time expires then the remaining zombies will flee and disaster has been averted. I’ll automatically receive a reward, the fortress remains safe and the original wildlife will return to the swamp. If I fail to cull the horde and the timer reaches zero then the zombies will all shamble out of the swamp and attack the fortress. I have failed the event but now a new event presents itself where I can defend the fortress from the horde. If the fortress is overrun it will remain occupied by zombies until cleared, a valuable travel point will be lost, merchants and other NPC’s will be unavailable. My act of killing the zombies actually protected the fortress with the consequence of possibly losing the fortress when I failed the event.
In each case I was killing zombies. In each case I had a goal up on screen that communicated very similar things. However, the experience that I had during and after each type of content was very different due to context and consequences. Hope that clears things up a bit.
And yes, Dynamic events are regular quests, they just chain. You will still be doing kill and collect quests all day long, you'll still be doing "clicky" quests and things of that nature, and when you pass an event, you'll move on to the next chain of events that revolves around killing, collecting, clicking, protecting, fedexing.. what have you. On top of that, you'll have a certain amount of each to do, as always. Have you watched the videos of the game? Have you seen the event chains?
People want to pretend the normal MMO conventions will change drastically because now you have chaining events with outcomes... but the core gameplay will be extremely similar. I'm cool with being excited about it, but lets be honest with ourselves here.
IF you meant dynamic event still require you to kill other stuff, yea they are just quest. But the different is that, you don't 'collect' events, they are there happening, its your choice to do them or not, sometimes events are there so that you will have to finish it in order to move onto the next area. Normal quest is reactive, you have to go there in order to have that objective, don't you ever wonder "are the inected wolves not a problem to your farm if I don't talk to you?" Dynamic Events requires you to be proactive, the objective, all the time, as long as the event is active in that region, the 'quest' is there, enemies are spawn in that region so it seems as if the problem is really there, killing them always complete an objective, not only when you 'have the quest'
One more difference is that these objectives are shared between players, they are there for players to complete together, not compete against each other, you don't have to race and aggro that centaur in order to 'get the kill', you can just go up to a mob and start helping others, one is antisocial, one is social.
Sure the overlaying mechanics make quest and event to have the same objective, but the underlaying design principles makes them so different, proactive against reactive, antisocial and social. Its like saying rice and noodles are the same thing, both made from flour, both are edible, both can be served with other dishes, but yet, they are very different.
If you can't see the difference between dynamic events and quest, well then, I'm not sure why you are "cool with being excited about it", cause I won't, it will just be another game with better designed combat, dungeons for story progression, nice graphics, but nothing genre breaking.
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW? As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
I love arguing with GW2 fans, I really do. They try and tell me I'm a fool, or prove me wrong on so many different things when I'm not wrong, and I'm using the exact same information they have access too. You guys are taking yourselves way too seriously.
I never said that dynamic events didn't have differences, but at the end of the day, you walk into an area, and you do a set of objectives just like regular quests, very similar to PQs, group quests in CO, or regular world quests in DCUO, and so on. In these games you walked into an area with something going on, other players were around that would help you, or not. You ran through a set of objectives. Kill, Collect, Protect, etc. Over and over again. These are dynamic events to a T. The differences are.
Everybody gets a reward, even when you lose.
It scales so you can do it by yourself.
They chain to different parts of the map, but require user interaction in most cases before they recycle.
And lastly, of course, you just run into them and cannot choose what you want to do and when.
Thats nott o say other questing structures don't have differences, like SWTOR, RIFT, or PQs in other games. But once you've started playing them, you'll realise they are very similar to regular quests, with objectives that you have to fulfill with a little ding box, and a clear cut ending. If you miss 2 centaurs in GW2, but only had to kill 15 to repel the invasion, and meet that quota, the event will be over. If you can't kill all 15 mages in the time limit for a PQ, you don't pass the chain and fail it.
So sure, there are differences in presentation and reward, but PQs were redone in presentation and reward too. Eventually the novelty will wear off. I know, fans will say they'll play the game forever, thats fine, some of you probably will, but really... read some of the player reviews, even the one here on MMORPG.com, watch the videos of events and not random world encounters. You complete objectives just like every other game in regular questing fashion. Everything else is just topical, but it won't mask that you're doing a kill or collect quest.
I didn't even say that was a bad thing, I'm just telling you how the game plays right now. It could change before launch, but rigt now, thats exactly how events play out. Sorry if you don't like it.
As for slaphappy.... Go back and read each of my posts in the thread to understand the context of what I actually said and the reasons I said it. Perhaps then you'll get it. You seem to think I have a problem with the reward structure, or something along those lines.
I feel very strongly about this, and I've gone so far as to say on several occassions that if a person does not think dynamic events are truly revolutionary, then they simply don't understand them.
Honestly, I think your argument basically amounts to a Straw Man. It is a predominantly combat oriented game, there is only so much you can do with the game mechanics (killing, collecting, clicking, etc). Eric Flannum himself concedes this in his explanation about the zombies in the swamp. The problem with your argument is that you're implying that these (and chaining) are the only aspects of DEs, and then concluding that they're basically quests.
Dynamic events completely change how you view other players. When you're doing a traditional MMO's solo quest leveling, other players are either irrelevant, a nuisance, or outright griefing you. In GW2, they're doing away with griefing completely. With the way dynamic events scale up and become more chaotic and have bosses gain more abilities, you'll want to see other players. Other players will make the game more fun. Can you possibly say the same about quests?
In addition to that, they just get rid of the barriers to community in general. You don't have to pick up the quest first or have to redo something so your friend can catch up to where you are in the quest chain. Events cycle so you can repeat one and get rewarded for it instead of just assisting someone else. They scale you down so you can group with that guy from your friends list who is much lower level than you.
There's one more big fundamental difference between quests as well, and that is that they let you do things that you can't easily do with traditional quests. With quests, everything has to be triggered. Bandits can only attack once you've talked to the guy who then spawns them. It's clunky to say the least. Not only can events make mobs start an assault on their own, you can also have failure conditions that would be hard to reproduce in quests. We've probably all done quests where you fail if the guy you're protecting dies. Have you ever done one where you fail if bandits burn those dozen hay bales?
I could go on a little more about some of their other cool features, but I won't. I don't even consider chaining to be the big deal about them. The real reason I think to love them is that they're bringing community back to MMOs that have been dominated by solo leveling experiences. That to me is an MMO convention changer right there.
I'm just going to quote myself because you obviously didn't pay attention to anything I had to say. You did expand your straw man a little bit, so maybe you did but just missed the point.
I don't know why you're getting so caught up in that there is only a finite number of things you can be doing. We all get that. It's kind of like you're arguing that two sitcoms must be basically the same because they both have male and female characters interacting in a finite number of ways (love, hate, friendship). Presentation and context are a huge part of it.
But as I've shown, it goes beyond that. Dynamic events are capable of fundamentally altering how you view other players who go from people you don't want to see to people that you do want to see and interact with. Yes, you're killing X mobs while you're doing it, but like Eric Flannum says, there's only a finite number of ways to do things. It's a combat MMO, not a dating sim.
I'm a big believer that in GW2's case, little things can make a huge difference in how the game actually plays. Like automatically equipping an underwater breathing mask. You might say, "it's like any other game except you don't have to watch the breath meter." But how it affects what you can do and what you can put down there has enormous ramifications, inspired underwater races and entire cities, and probably the weapon switching, skill changing, and Z axis play as well.
If you really can't see this, maybe we should all just agree to disagree.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it."-Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
I feel very strongly about this, and I've gone so far as to say on several occassions that if a person does not think dynamic events are truly revolutionary, then they simply don't understand them.
Honestly, I think your argument basically amounts to a Straw Man. It is a predominantly combat oriented game, there is only so much you can do with the game mechanics (killing, collecting, clicking, etc). Eric Flannum himself concedes this in his explanation about the zombies in the swamp. The problem with your argument is that you're implying that these (and chaining) are the only aspects of DEs, and then concluding that they're basically quests.
Dynamic events completely change how you view other players. When you're doing a traditional MMO's solo quest leveling, other players are either irrelevant, a nuisance, or outright griefing you. In GW2, they're doing away with griefing completely. With the way dynamic events scale up and become more chaotic and have bosses gain more abilities, you'll want to see other players. Other players will make the game more fun. Can you possibly say the same about quests?
In addition to that, they just get rid of the barriers to community in general. You don't have to pick up the quest first or have to redo something so your friend can catch up to where you are in the quest chain. Events cycle so you can repeat one and get rewarded for it instead of just assisting someone else. They scale you down so you can group with that guy from your friends list who is much lower level than you.
There's one more big fundamental difference between quests as well, and that is that they let you do things that you can't easily do with traditional quests. With quests, everything has to be triggered. Bandits can only attack once you've talked to the guy who then spawns them. It's clunky to say the least. Not only can events make mobs start an assault on their own, you can also have failure conditions that would be hard to reproduce in quests. We've probably all done quests where you fail if the guy you're protecting dies. Have you ever done one where you fail if bandits burn those dozen hay bales?
I could go on a little more about some of their other cool features, but I won't. I don't even consider chaining to be the big deal about them. The real reason I think to love them is that they're bringing community back to MMOs that have been dominated by solo leveling experiences. That to me is an MMO convention changer right there.
I'm just going to quote myself because you obviously didn't pay attention to anything I had to say. You did expand your straw man a little bit, so maybe you did but just missed the point.
I don't know why you're getting so caught up in that there is only a finite number of things you can be doing. We all get that. It's kind of like you're arguing that two sitcoms must be basically the same because they both have male and female characters interacting in a finite number of ways (love, hate, friendship). Presentation and context are a huge part of it.
But as I've shown, it goes beyond that. Dynamic events are capable of fundamentally altering how you view other players who go from people you don't want to see to people that you do want to see and interact with. Yes, you're killing X mobs while you're doing it, but like Eric Flannum says, there's only a finite number of ways to do things. It's a combat MMO, not a dating sim.
I'm a big believer that in GW2's case, little things can make a huge difference in how the game actually plays. Like automatically equipping an underwater breathing mask. You might say, "it's like any other game except you don't have to watch the breath meter." But how it affects what you can do and what you can put down there has enormous ramifications, inspired underwater races and entire cities, and probably the weapon switching, skill changing, and Z axis play as well.
If you really can't see this, maybe we should all just agree to disagree.
First and foremost, I pretty much spelled it out what a DE is, yes they have differences, but the core gameplay will be the same. I didn't say this was good, nor bad, I just stated what they are.
The title of this thread is DE's and socializing. I do not believe dynamic events will cater to social gameplay. I think it will cater to seemingly social single player gaming habits. Essentially you won't need to group and communicate because there is absolutely no way to not group with the people around you. That means you won't need to talk or coordinate with them, just complete the objectives and move on.
However, as for your analogy of two sitcoms, presentation is a big part of some things - yes. However, if every episode is the same formula just presented slightly differently, the quicker it grows mundane. I'm not saying that will or will not happen to everybody, for some, quest presentation is a big part of it. It changes the way side quests work in SWTOR, its how the RIFTs worked in RIFT, is similar experiences, ultimately and there isn't a way to really change that. Again, not a bad thing, but look at the way some people are arguing with me. I'm not saying its bad, or that its exactly the same as everything else, or anything like that. I'm saying it will be objective based just like other quests... you'll still be doing kill, collect, clicky, all the kinds of quests we've seen before, just with a different presentation.
Its not even misrepresenting events. Its not even me saying "I hate the presentation." its me just saying they are, what they are. People don't like me for that for some reason.
Essentially you won't need to group and communicate because there is absolutely no way to not group with the people around you.
Lolwut?
So people won't be grouping together because they are forced to? So people have never communicated with random people before?
That is essentially what you are saying. Pretty much bullshit.
If people want to communicate and be social then they will. DEs will help that because it will get people to work together unlike questing which will have people doing completely different things by themselves.
The only way to get people to socialize is to give them the tools to do it and DEs will be bringing people together so they can.
I feel very strongly about this, and I've gone so far as to say on several occassions that if a person does not think dynamic events are truly revolutionary, then they simply don't understand them.
Honestly, I think your argument basically amounts to a Straw Man. It is a predominantly combat oriented game, there is only so much you can do with the game mechanics (killing, collecting, clicking, etc). Eric Flannum himself concedes this in his explanation about the zombies in the swamp. The problem with your argument is that you're implying that these (and chaining) are the only aspects of DEs, and then concluding that they're basically quests.
Dynamic events completely change how you view other players. When you're doing a traditional MMO's solo quest leveling, other players are either irrelevant, a nuisance, or outright griefing you. In GW2, they're doing away with griefing completely. With the way dynamic events scale up and become more chaotic and have bosses gain more abilities, you'll want to see other players. Other players will make the game more fun. Can you possibly say the same about quests?
In addition to that, they just get rid of the barriers to community in general. You don't have to pick up the quest first or have to redo something so your friend can catch up to where you are in the quest chain. Events cycle so you can repeat one and get rewarded for it instead of just assisting someone else. They scale you down so you can group with that guy from your friends list who is much lower level than you.
There's one more big fundamental difference between quests as well, and that is that they let you do things that you can't easily do with traditional quests. With quests, everything has to be triggered. Bandits can only attack once you've talked to the guy who then spawns them. It's clunky to say the least. Not only can events make mobs start an assault on their own, you can also have failure conditions that would be hard to reproduce in quests. We've probably all done quests where you fail if the guy you're protecting dies. Have you ever done one where you fail if bandits burn those dozen hay bales?
I could go on a little more about some of their other cool features, but I won't. I don't even consider chaining to be the big deal about them. The real reason I think to love them is that they're bringing community back to MMOs that have been dominated by solo leveling experiences. That to me is an MMO convention changer right there.
I'm just going to quote myself because you obviously didn't pay attention to anything I had to say. You did expand your straw man a little bit, so maybe you did but just missed the point.
I don't know why you're getting so caught up in that there is only a finite number of things you can be doing. We all get that. It's kind of like you're arguing that two sitcoms must be basically the same because they both have male and female characters interacting in a finite number of ways (love, hate, friendship). Presentation and context are a huge part of it.
But as I've shown, it goes beyond that. Dynamic events are capable of fundamentally altering how you view other players who go from people you don't want to see to people that you do want to see and interact with. Yes, you're killing X mobs while you're doing it, but like Eric Flannum says, there's only a finite number of ways to do things. It's a combat MMO, not a dating sim.
I'm a big believer that in GW2's case, little things can make a huge difference in how the game actually plays. Like automatically equipping an underwater breathing mask. You might say, "it's like any other game except you don't have to watch the breath meter." But how it affects what you can do and what you can put down there has enormous ramifications, inspired underwater races and entire cities, and probably the weapon switching, skill changing, and Z axis play as well.
If you really can't see this, maybe we should all just agree to disagree.
I'm saying it will be objective based just like other quests... you'll still be doing kill, collect, clicky, all the kinds of quests we've seen before, just with a different presentation.
So? Then what's the problem? What is the alternative to objective-based gameplay? Isn't it standard in most games, not just (MMO)RPGs that the game is about objectives?
Comments
I don't think anyone is calling Gw2 Rift or WoW.Rifts rift events are a good example of a dynamic event.You can show up at any given stage,do your part,collect your reward and leave,rinse repeat like a mindless robot.whether GW2's DE will be like that remains to be seen,but to me,it looks like it's leaning in that direction.
Its WvW feature however,will bring the community closer I think.
ArenaNet has stated you get Karma, gold, and XP from doing dynamic events and this reward you get is based on your participation. So you can get a gold, silver, or bronze reward based on what you do during the event and that will determine how much XP, gold, and Karma you get. And they have said you get less of a reward if you fail the event, but they have never said how much less, just that they want to have that incentive for people to want to succeed. But there are no item rewards tied to any Dynamic Events, so at the most if you fail you will lose a little Karma, XP, and gold.
You are making it sound as if other people might make you lose something that will harm your game play and make it so you do not want to see them. OH my God I lost some Karma because we did not win, I am going to go cry in the corner now. For the love of all that is good and holy there is over 1500 dynamic events in the game, I think you will win when you try some of them with other people, and get your precious life confirming max karma award.
Will loot category be related to the event? For example, depending on how an event goes, a peasant/prince may or may not give out valuable loot?
Colin: Loot will never be directly given as a reward for an event. The idea here is you should never feel like you need to participate in a specific event, or feel let down that you missed an event because it had a reward you really wanted.
All events reward you with experience, gold, and karma, which you can spend at merchants and vendors in the game to purchase rewards. This way, we’re rewarding you for participating in any event equally, so you can play in the events you discover, or the event types you really enjoy. We’ll never force you to wait around for an event to begin so you can get a specific drop or make you want to cause an event to fail because some other event in the chain gives you something you need. In Guild Wars 2, our princes and peasants are benevolent; they all reward you for participating in events, and then you can choose what to purchase with the rewards you have been given. Eric Flannum will talk a little more about this tomorrow.
Is there a clear-cut “end” to an event when loot is distributed?
Colin: Each event has a clear-cut end point of reward distribution, in which event success or failure is determined and the players who participated are rewarded. The event will then branch based on the outcome and cascade out to change various parts of the world, kicking off other events in the zone.
It’s worth noting that players are rewarded for participation if an event succeeds or fails – you simply get less reward if the event fails. This gives you an incentive to want to succeed, but makes it so you don’t feel your time is wasted by participating in an event that could or does potentially fail. Players don’t receive loot based on event participation; loot is dropped by monsters you kill during events, and everyone who helps kill a particular monster will receive rewards for doing so. Loot is the immediate reward you receive from the monsters, but at the end of the event everyone who participated receives their event reward.
http://www.arena.net/blog/colin-johanson-answers-your-dynamic-event-questions
Oh yes Dynamic Events are just regular quests, that is why so many other game have done GW2 dynamic events because they are so simple right? I am so glad you are here to help clear this up for us simple minded GW2 fans that cannot possible understand what a dynamic event is! After all making a sword is the same as making a chisel, right?
You can't really compare the two. Rifts are very one dimensional. DE's really aren't.
Anyway, to some of the people talking about "winning" an event. Winning isn't the object of the events. The story and participation is.
1. Scaling is done relative to the amount of players. So yes from the perspective of 1 person outside the event, the event would appear to get harder. However, it's all relative. To the people participating, it's not appearing to get harder. It's just more content appearing to match the amount of people participating.
2. What's with this "elitist" attitude. You can't help these "bad players" out and guide them? Rather than bitching about "bad players" help them. I guarantee you will have even considered yourself a craptastic player when you first started a few months down the road, if you are still playing. People have said that Guild Wars 2 is a bit of a learning curve when coming from other MMOs. Only after hours of play time have people begun to figure out how to play, and even then still far off from getting everything down.
Now back to the OP. I'll state what I've stated so many other times. It's up to the players to socialize. ArenaNet has given you every tool they could think off to communicated and socialize with your fellow players. It's up to the players. ArenaNet can't force you to actually socialize. They can force you to group and attempt to communicate, but it won't necessarily be socializing. They've even allowed you to communicate with your guild (possibly friends, not sure) outside the game. ArenaNet can't change the player's mindset on socializing.
This is where I don't think you understand the ramifications of dynamic event outcomes. It isn't just, oh, fail to repel bandit guild, they take over town, or push bandits back and the town remains safe.
Each one of those outcomes will spawn a new chain of events. For example, let's say you repel the bandits. Now a day later, the bandits will come back with double their original force. That's the next chain in the event. Repel that, now they come back with siege weapons. Finally, you find out that one of the captured bandits gives up their base location, setting off the final event to destroy their base once and for all. The base can be a randomly generated location based on each iteration of the dynamic event chain. Of course, players could find out where their base is located beforehand, and thus destroy it even before reaching the end of the dynamic event chain. This whole series of events would take days to cycle through.
The above chain is if the player succeeds. Now, if the player fails to defend the bandits from town, the bandits occupy the town. Now, this starts off a set of events to recapture the town. The first event could be something like rescue town elders from the prison and sneak them out of the town to form a resistance. Say there's 10 or so town elders, and the quest then involves a sneaking mission where players try to get the town elders out successfully. This could be done a number of ways, such as disguising yourself as a bandit, or having other players create a commotion to draw the main bandit force outside while other players rescue the town elders. Of course, things can screw up, but everyone basically can keep trying until they rescue 10. You get a reward for each town elder you rescue, and once you get 10, it goes to the next part of the chain. The next part of the chain could involve getting supplies to build up an npc army to retake the town. Or even assassinate the bandit leader in town. Finally, you end up at the same quest chain where you locate and destroy the bandit base.
Now, to make things even more interesting, the 2 chains can cross over into each other at any time. So say you repel the first 2 bandit attack waves but fail the third. Now you essentially end up in the town captured chain. Or if you're in the town captured chain you can try direct assaulting and killing all the bandits in town, which could put you into any part of the first chain (bandits send more attackers). To take things a step further, each of these events can spawn their own unique chains. ANet can add new scenarios in updates that make these older chains even more interesting.
This is of course, completely theoretical, but it's all based on what ANet has said about their design philosophy behind DEs. Whether or not the actual implementation would be this interesting is up in the air, but this is the reason why people are so excited for dynamic events.
I believe they are. I've posted a lot about this. DEs are strictly better than quests in every way when it comes to doing the kind of leveling quests in a traditional MMO. About the only way they aren't better is for epic, solo questlines, which is why GW2 will also have a personal story.
Unfortunately, to list all the reasons why they're better takes about an entire page. I don't want everybody's eyes to glaze over, but here is probably my best attempt at explaining their advantages.
If you don't want to read the wall of text, I strongly urge you (and everybody) to watch this video, which explains the evolution from hunting to quests to PQs to DEs. I already posted a link to it once in this thread, but I don't think it can be too often repeated.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013691/Designing-Guild-Wars-2-Dynamic
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Dynamic events are special, here is why.
Dynamic events will fail if no player causes them to succeed.
Dynamic events have effects on the world, and these effects differ depending on whether the players passed or failed.
Dynamic events are more immersive than normal quests because they allow players to join in at any point in the progression of the event.
You do not need to talk to anyone to "accept" the event to be able to start it.
You do not need to talk to anyone to pick up the reward for the event.
Players are able to play together without any hassle, not even a public grouping system.
Dynamic events' outcomes are logical in their progression when you pass/fail the event. The next thing to happen is what you might expect to happen, given the results of what happened in the event.
Dynamic events allow completionist players to be released from their chains. Those players will now be the ones who explore in search for those hidden dynamic events.
Dynamic events aren't just repeatable quests.
Dynamic events shouldn't have to be some amazing new way of doing everything, but they are because no game has done questing like this before.
Dynamic events promote group play, socialization, exploration, and helps immerse players into the environment of Tyria.
Lastly, dynamic events aren't quest, as quests have been done in the past. They are the world, the story, the lore, and all the environmental factors that play into your gaming experience. Your personal storyline, which is customized to fit your biography choices, and branches further based on the decisions you make after character creation, is what really replaces the classic quest.
In many MMOs, questing, dungeons, and other things (such as rifts), are all things that allow you to level, but you never need to do all of these to level your character. In GW2, your main goal isn't leveling, and reaching max level isn't supposed to be the be all and end all of your character advancement (niether is armor). With this in mind, dynamic events aren't just one way to level your character, they are a way to experience The World, and I think a lot of people out there are tired of games where the world isn't really present behind the game mechanics and levels and skills and combat and UI and all the other things that are more appearant than The World.
More importanly, when you participate in these dynamic eventss with other people, especially when things just naturally come together, that makes other people part of your gaming experience and part of the game world as well.
Edit: I used the quote to demonstrate a veiwpoint that I think too many people have.
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
All I'm saying is that you are not going to pass every single event in the world, don't need to treat it as if its the end of the world.
Also on your note about "incompetence", lets hope you are not one of those people who screams whenever a teammate did something silly or new players, its call sportsmanship, whenever you lose in something, its because you weren't good enough to overcome that situation, don't blame others. In the end, it is only a game, surely I hope no one is going to lose on purpose, but don't need to take winning and losing so seriously.
Guild Wars and possibly Guild Wars 2 are one of those games that have better desgin so that you have chance to overturn dire situations, unlike in normal MMO, where one accidental pull can almost mean certain death. So more skillful players can make a difference, it isn't a game thats all about the latest and greatest gear. or best stats.
Lastly, from what I've understand from devs description, failing an event doesn't usually mean ending the chain altogether, it could simply mean the next phase of events will be harder, without some npc support or what not.
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW?
As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
Just a thought. What if events are a good way to gain XP, money, and karma? What if players who compete in these events are given every reason to participate in them even if its impossible for them to finish them at the state they are in, such as maybe the timer is really low when they show up and the event is about to fail? What if this rewarded XP, gold and karma isn't about success or failure and is really about getting people to play together and broaden their own gaming experience? I think that would mean that they are giving players EVER REASON POSSIBLE to play together. players will see an even area and flock there, and that means that they will play with other people more often, and when people play together they have more fun because of how the combat system works.
in short, its not about rewarding competence. It is about rewarding participation, and I think that this is one of the reasons that there aren't actual loot rewards for individual events (i mean, other than the official reason of not giving people a reason to pas or fail an event).
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
As far as being griefed by players intentionally contributing but playing badly, or just being around players who aren't very good, I don't know that we should worry about it.
First, if this is the only way that players can possibly grief you, it's still way better than the current system. The DE system might not be perfect (what is?), but it's definitely a big step in the right direction.
Mobs are going to be tougher than in the demos. If people are playing badly, they'll probably die. If you think it's happening on purpose, don't rez them. The event will be slightly harder while they're there, but then it will scale back down.
If someone is bad, but still keeping themselves alive, they're at least helping a little, perhaps even drawing aggro on a mob that they need to keep dodging.
I guess a sizeable group could contribute just periodically shooting a boss mob in order to force another player to die trying to "solo" it when its buffed, but what can you do? It would still take a more concerted effort than to train a huge mob to a town in some other game.
Also, with almost no penalty for death, cheap instant teleportation anywhere you've been, and no particular reason to have to do any one DE, you could just leave. I'm sure part of the allure of griefing people is getting a reaction out of them. If you don't give it to them, people probably will stop bothering.
The other thing too is that you might just be good enough to win anyway. Best way to grief the griefers right there.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
If i get rezzed in a battle, especially if someone went out of their way or broke a spell cast to rez me, ill say a quick thanks in chat. after that ill feel more friendly with the strangers im with and type a little more. and it's not just rezzing that will get me talking. theres other things like helping me take down someone i couldn't or blocking a deadly spell cast at me.
the -jump right in someone elses fight- idea that arenanet is working towards most likely will open up a lot of socializing opportunities for me.
Socailizing and DE's. Will it occur, or just be soloing together? Here's my thoughts on this topic.
1. The player base is not going to be a fluidly changing group of people. All players on one server will run across each other or their representative guilds again and again. With only a few thousand players available per server (sounds like alot, but really it isn't...think about it, small college campuses have similar numbers and everyone knows everyone there)
2. DE's, due to their chaining nature will allow for people to stay togther longer than in quest based games. As players progress through the chain, ad hoc grouping during these events will provide the OPPORTUNITY to chat, observe actions, and morals of other players. This alone is all I need to decide who to talk to or not. All my friends in online situations have arisen from this type of interaction. If you're playing well or badly doesn't matter, as long as you are being mature and civil during the play.
3. Whether socializing occurs in the game will be on us, as players. We have been given a system that SHOULD provide reason and context to talk to one another, if not for strategizing (not my favorite way to meet people, particularly if they are "You suck! and aren't worthy to be on this server"), but also for tall tale telling after the event!
So to conclude yes, this game SHOULD be heads and shoulders above most for providing the opportunity, context, and reasons to socialize. Whether we as players take advantage of this game for these reasons will entirely be up to us.
A particular player catches your eye. You like his/her style. In the middle of the DE, you actively work alongside eachother to elminate the baddies. The two of you even issue some basic commands to help cooridinate attacks more effectively. Just as the battle ends, you are about to click on him and send him a message when...he vanishes in thin air! Where did he go? Oh yeah, you can teleport all over the place in GW2 when nothing's going on in your current area...
Send them a tell? I'm sure you don't have to click on them to do it. Unless they have some screwed up name that you can't remember, in which case they probably don't want any friends. Chances are you will see them again either way.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Or, as in other MMOs, he hits "recall" and teleports to his last bind spot, which you have no way of knowing what it is!
Or, he gets on his mount that happens to be faster than the mount you have, so you have no way of catching up with him!
On your first point, you just basically regurgitated what I said, you just provided proof on what I said. You get rewards either way, but you get more rewards when you win. If you have a group of players planning on winning an event, but others come in and force you to lose, you get less rewards. I think you grasp that, I just think you're being obstinate.
And yes, Dynamic events are regular quests, they just chain. You will still be doing kill and collect quests all day long, you'll still be doing "clicky" quests and things of that nature, and when you pass an event, you'll move on to the next chain of events that revolves around killing, collecting, clicking, protecting, fedexing.. what have you. On top of that, you'll have a certain amount of each to do, as always. Have you watched the videos of the game? Have you seen the event chains?
People want to pretend the normal MMO conventions will change drastically because now you have chaining events with outcomes... but the core gameplay will be extremely similar. I'm cool with being excited about it, but lets be honest with ourselves here.
I feel very strongly about this, and I've gone so far as to say on several occassions that if a person does not think dynamic events are truly revolutionary, then they simply don't understand them.
Honestly, I think your argument basically amounts to a Straw Man. It is a predominantly combat oriented game, there is only so much you can do with the game mechanics (killing, collecting, clicking, etc). Eric Flannum himself concedes this in his explanation about the zombies in the swamp. The problem with your argument is that you're implying that these (and chaining) are the only aspects of DEs, and then concluding that they're basically quests.
Dynamic events completely change how you view other players. When you're doing a traditional MMO's solo quest leveling, other players are either irrelevant, a nuisance, or outright griefing you. In GW2, they're doing away with griefing completely. With the way dynamic events scale up and become more chaotic and have bosses gain more abilities, you'll want to see other players. Other players will make the game more fun. Can you possibly say the same about quests?
In addition to that, they just get rid of the barriers to community in general. You don't have to pick up the quest first or have to redo something so your friend can catch up to where you are in the quest chain. Events cycle so you can repeat one and get rewarded for it instead of just assisting someone else. They scale you down so you can group with that guy from your friends list who is much lower level than you.
There's one more big fundamental difference between quests as well, and that is that they let you do things that you can't easily do with traditional quests. With quests, everything has to be triggered. Bandits can only attack once you've talked to the guy who then spawns them. It's clunky to say the least. Not only can events make mobs start an assault on their own, you can also have failure conditions that would be hard to reproduce in quests. We've probably all done quests where you fail if the guy you're protecting dies. Have you ever done one where you fail if bandits burn those dozen hay bales?
I could go on a little more about some of their other cool features, but I won't. I don't even consider chaining to be the big deal about them. The real reason I think to love them is that they're bringing community back to MMOs that have been dominated by solo leveling experiences. That to me is an MMO convention changer right there.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
And yet you do not seem to understand ONE big difference between quests and Dynamic Events: you can take a quest at anytime whereas a Dynamic EVENT simply occurs.
For the first point, you really do not get sarcasm do you! Dude we do not even know how much less Karma you will get if you lost, it could be 10%,20%, 30% or whatever. Are you really telling me that losing 20% karma every once in a while, is going to break your heart and ruin your GW2 experience? After all there is over 1500 DE in GW2 you are bound to win some and lose some, so what the hell is your point. That winning max karma is life affirming and without it people are going to go jump off bridges, because it is so depressing to lose and we must get max karma for ever event. I can see it now "Oh man this person came into this Dynamic Event tonight and sucked and we ended up losing instead of 100 karma I got 80 karma, I am going to go cry myself to sleep."
For the love of all that is good and holy failing is part of life if you cannot accept the possibility of failure then I would suggest stop playing video games. Or GW2 could reduce the difficulty so you only lose if you pass out and hit your head on the keyboard. Would that make you happy so you do not get a little less Karma?
God guys we are just talking about losing a little XP, gold, and Karma here it is not the end of the world. You are not going to lose that uber sword of awesomeness because someone screwed up a DE, since there is no Items tied to DE. I am sorry for ranting on about this, but are we really that pathetic that we cannot stand the thought of losing a percentage of karma, a in game currency that so far has only been shown to purchase consumable items? If we really as gamers have become that pathetic then this genre is doomed!
For your second point, oh yes you are so right I remember ever quest I have ever done scaling so it becomes more difficult when I am in a group. Oh yes and all quests in every other game I played progressed logically along a path depending on my inaction or interaction. Yep you are so right and we GW2 fans are so delusional how we could not have seen that DEs are exactly like ever quest in every other MMO. Yep just like your comment about DEs being about protecting and killing stuff just like every other game quest mechanic, it does not matter the context that those are presented, it just matters that they are the same. Thanks for clearing that up for us stupid GW2 fans that cannot possible understand what makes a quest in WoW a quest and what makes a DE in GW2 a DE.
Dude you can have your opinion on what a DE is, but do dare to tell me I am stupid when I have watched ever video I could find and read ever interview about DEs. I know what makes them interesting to me in ways that I have not seen before in any MMO, and if you have a problem with that, I do not give a crap. So do not lecture me that I am making DEs into something they are not! /have a nice day
And since so many people on this site do not understand context here you go.
IF you meant dynamic event still require you to kill other stuff, yea they are just quest. But the different is that, you don't 'collect' events, they are there happening, its your choice to do them or not, sometimes events are there so that you will have to finish it in order to move onto the next area. Normal quest is reactive, you have to go there in order to have that objective, don't you ever wonder "are the inected wolves not a problem to your farm if I don't talk to you?" Dynamic Events requires you to be proactive, the objective, all the time, as long as the event is active in that region, the 'quest' is there, enemies are spawn in that region so it seems as if the problem is really there, killing them always complete an objective, not only when you 'have the quest'
One more difference is that these objectives are shared between players, they are there for players to complete together, not compete against each other, you don't have to race and aggro that centaur in order to 'get the kill', you can just go up to a mob and start helping others, one is antisocial, one is social.
Sure the overlaying mechanics make quest and event to have the same objective, but the underlaying design principles makes them so different, proactive against reactive, antisocial and social. Its like saying rice and noodles are the same thing, both made from flour, both are edible, both can be served with other dishes, but yet, they are very different.
If you can't see the difference between dynamic events and quest, well then, I'm not sure why you are "cool with being excited about it", cause I won't, it will just be another game with better designed combat, dungeons for story progression, nice graphics, but nothing genre breaking.
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW?
As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
I love arguing with GW2 fans, I really do. They try and tell me I'm a fool, or prove me wrong on so many different things when I'm not wrong, and I'm using the exact same information they have access too. You guys are taking yourselves way too seriously.
I never said that dynamic events didn't have differences, but at the end of the day, you walk into an area, and you do a set of objectives just like regular quests, very similar to PQs, group quests in CO, or regular world quests in DCUO, and so on. In these games you walked into an area with something going on, other players were around that would help you, or not. You ran through a set of objectives. Kill, Collect, Protect, etc. Over and over again. These are dynamic events to a T. The differences are.
Everybody gets a reward, even when you lose.
It scales so you can do it by yourself.
They chain to different parts of the map, but require user interaction in most cases before they recycle.
And lastly, of course, you just run into them and cannot choose what you want to do and when.
Thats nott o say other questing structures don't have differences, like SWTOR, RIFT, or PQs in other games. But once you've started playing them, you'll realise they are very similar to regular quests, with objectives that you have to fulfill with a little ding box, and a clear cut ending. If you miss 2 centaurs in GW2, but only had to kill 15 to repel the invasion, and meet that quota, the event will be over. If you can't kill all 15 mages in the time limit for a PQ, you don't pass the chain and fail it.
So sure, there are differences in presentation and reward, but PQs were redone in presentation and reward too. Eventually the novelty will wear off. I know, fans will say they'll play the game forever, thats fine, some of you probably will, but really... read some of the player reviews, even the one here on MMORPG.com, watch the videos of events and not random world encounters. You complete objectives just like every other game in regular questing fashion. Everything else is just topical, but it won't mask that you're doing a kill or collect quest.
I didn't even say that was a bad thing, I'm just telling you how the game plays right now. It could change before launch, but rigt now, thats exactly how events play out. Sorry if you don't like it.
As for slaphappy.... Go back and read each of my posts in the thread to understand the context of what I actually said and the reasons I said it. Perhaps then you'll get it. You seem to think I have a problem with the reward structure, or something along those lines.
I'm just going to quote myself because you obviously didn't pay attention to anything I had to say. You did expand your straw man a little bit, so maybe you did but just missed the point.
I don't know why you're getting so caught up in that there is only a finite number of things you can be doing. We all get that. It's kind of like you're arguing that two sitcoms must be basically the same because they both have male and female characters interacting in a finite number of ways (love, hate, friendship). Presentation and context are a huge part of it.
But as I've shown, it goes beyond that. Dynamic events are capable of fundamentally altering how you view other players who go from people you don't want to see to people that you do want to see and interact with. Yes, you're killing X mobs while you're doing it, but like Eric Flannum says, there's only a finite number of ways to do things. It's a combat MMO, not a dating sim.
I'm a big believer that in GW2's case, little things can make a huge difference in how the game actually plays. Like automatically equipping an underwater breathing mask. You might say, "it's like any other game except you don't have to watch the breath meter." But how it affects what you can do and what you can put down there has enormous ramifications, inspired underwater races and entire cities, and probably the weapon switching, skill changing, and Z axis play as well.
If you really can't see this, maybe we should all just agree to disagree.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
First and foremost, I pretty much spelled it out what a DE is, yes they have differences, but the core gameplay will be the same. I didn't say this was good, nor bad, I just stated what they are.
The title of this thread is DE's and socializing. I do not believe dynamic events will cater to social gameplay. I think it will cater to seemingly social single player gaming habits. Essentially you won't need to group and communicate because there is absolutely no way to not group with the people around you. That means you won't need to talk or coordinate with them, just complete the objectives and move on.
However, as for your analogy of two sitcoms, presentation is a big part of some things - yes. However, if every episode is the same formula just presented slightly differently, the quicker it grows mundane. I'm not saying that will or will not happen to everybody, for some, quest presentation is a big part of it. It changes the way side quests work in SWTOR, its how the RIFTs worked in RIFT, is similar experiences, ultimately and there isn't a way to really change that. Again, not a bad thing, but look at the way some people are arguing with me. I'm not saying its bad, or that its exactly the same as everything else, or anything like that. I'm saying it will be objective based just like other quests... you'll still be doing kill, collect, clicky, all the kinds of quests we've seen before, just with a different presentation.
Its not even misrepresenting events. Its not even me saying "I hate the presentation." its me just saying they are, what they are. People don't like me for that for some reason.
Lolwut?
So people won't be grouping together because they are forced to? So people have never communicated with random people before?
That is essentially what you are saying. Pretty much bullshit.
If people want to communicate and be social then they will. DEs will help that because it will get people to work together unlike questing which will have people doing completely different things by themselves.
The only way to get people to socialize is to give them the tools to do it and DEs will be bringing people together so they can.
So? Then what's the problem? What is the alternative to objective-based gameplay? Isn't it standard in most games, not just (MMO)RPGs that the game is about objectives?