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Equipment damage?
nomss
Member UncommonPosts: 1,468
in Guild Wars 2
Is there equipment damage and you have to repair it? As you are figiting, would you eventually have to go back to town and get it repaired? Like how WoW, Rift, FFXIV have it?
Guild Wars 2's 50 minutes game play video:
http://n4g.com/news/592585/guild-wars-2-50-minutes-of-pure-gameplay
Everything We Know about GW2:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/page/1
Comments
Nope.
hmmm i coulda sworn i read somewhere they armor would need repairs. something about wanting another way to keep money circulating. i don't have the link, but just saying i think i remember reading that.
Was in a long time ago. Got scrapped soon after.
Durability damage is rather useless when it's really inexpensive to repair your equipment such as in WoW.
A good system for this would be nice. A kinda thing where for instance your swords shatters in the midst of a battle if you havent repaired it for a while and youd have to reforge the sword. Durability should be displayed in the hero panel for instance. Without such a system, and a wow kinda like system where it dosent cost anything i dont realy see the point in adding something that's just plain anoying.
My son. The day you were born the very staff of Blizzard whispered the name, profit.
We need a new term for features like those. You know the sort, the kind of thing that's designed to keep you playing longer. But timesinks doesn't just cut it.
Anyway, durability is fine in a subscription game, where the point is to keep you paying for another month, but in a game like Guild Wars 2, which is buy to play, it's so useless. All it really does is:
Takes you away from having fun.
Interrupts your tasks.
introduces mindless busy-work (yay, second job!).
Siphons away your money, meaning it takes longer to save for something.
Introduces pointless trips, to...
- At a lower level of the game, keep you moving slowly back and forth, interrupting as mentioned above.
- Makes you want to save for a 'mount' to move faster, so you can do your monotonous, repetitive tasks faster.
In a game that's more about having fun, actually enjoying yourself, and not just having a second task, a... thing like durability is actually detrimental to the experience. It fits subscription games, sure, but I've stated the obvious reasons as to why. Just keep in mind that Guild Wars 2 is not a subscription game.
I'm very much a fan of this idea of not having gear degradation. I do think money sinks are important to an MMO but I think they're better implemented elsewhere.
Coming from a WoW perspective, I guess I'm jaded. It seems mostly there just so people can roll their eyes at the guy who forgets to repair. Or it inconveniences the entire raid when everybody needs to run out and to the blacksmith. Or they give you field repair bots to do it and turn it into a minor inconvenience. Why have it at all? I suppose it's more realistic but that's never been a big concern of mine.
It occurs to me just now that the whole idea can streamlined by just automatically subtracting money everytime somebody dies. Then it also just occurred to me that this is exactly what GW2 is doing.
"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 am not saying durability is a good idea for GW2, because it is not; it does not fit with the mentality of the game. But it can and sometimes does serve a real purpose, beyond being a money sink. In some worlds, mostly sandbox simulation type games, it can be used as a form of realism. Things simply do not last forever, and can never be repaired to 100% of new. It might not be particularly fun, but it is realistic (I mean, if it doesn't happen very quickly, and things can be repaired a few times before they become unusabile).
But, even though that could serve a purpose, more and more I like the idea behind GW2, which is basically "if it isn't fun, let's not do it."
"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
WTF? No subscription fee?
In more hardcore games with a lot of minimanagement, repairing should require a PC crafter instead of an NPC...
But i agree that i see no reason to add weapon or armor devaluation to GW2........
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Item breaking is not only about fluff and realism, and about time sink and unpleasant aspect, even it can definitly be that too, but it also bring a necessary renew for an healthy economy and crafting. Its not a problem in games where those aspect are not up front like GW2 maybe (to be honest i know nothing about both economy and crafting in this game), but for the game where those aspect are important, you absolutly need a way to renew the crafted stuff. Now is it breaking, wear and tear or other system, it doesn't matter really, if it purpose is to maintain the economy.
It's a gold sink though. So it can benefit the economy. I'm guessing ANet has that covered enough, however (Asura gates, skill trainers, item vendors etc...).
I also wish they would get rid of skill trainers and/or skill ranks. They seem unnecessary too. Even WoW has done away with the latter.
GW2 has a (minor) monetary penalty for being defeated. I was saying in my post on the last page that this occurs to me as being exactly like having to pay for getting your gear repaired, but without having to get your gear repaired. Win for the economy, win for us.
I actually liked skill ranks in WoW and was mildly annoyed at doing away with downranking. If you're a healer you don't want to waste mana on full rank of a stun, interrupt or snare when rank 1 works just fine. You also don't want the damage for fear of drawing aggro. Then again, GW2 has no dedicated healers...
I don't know. People like leveling so they give people 80 levels. Maybe people love buying new skills.
"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
There won't be downranking in GW2. So that's not really an issue.
The big problem with skill ranks is that it offsets the balance between skills at certain levels. Take WoW for example, a mage at level 10 has Rank 3 Fireball and Rank 3 Frostbolt. At level 12, that mage can learn Rank 4 Fireball and at level 14, can learn Rank 4 Frostbolt.
See the problem now? At levels 12 & 13, Fireball is going to be a stronger spell because it's at Rank 4 and Frostbolt is still at Rank 3. This was a problem that used to occur so many times in WoW. But then they changed it so all skills scale with the characters level, which also meant they scaled correctly with eachother, meaning that no skill was better than another at any one time.
I fear the same thing will happen in GW2. If a certain utility skill has ranked up recently in favor of another, then it may be more useful since it's currently scaled better for the level you're at. I hope this doesn't happen.
Good points. TOR should be following this...
Guild Wars 2's 50 minutes game play video:
http://n4g.com/news/592585/guild-wars-2-50-minutes-of-pure-gameplay
Everything We Know about GW2:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/page/1
It's just a matter of personal preference, but I see that as potentially a good thing. If they scale equally with each other then there's no incentive to change your initial choice. If you've made up your mind that Fireball is more damaging, then it will take running into a mob you can't handle with Fireball in order to maybe reevaluate and try Frostbolt. The guy who is good enough to survive everything with Fireball might never get past his initial impression.
If they scale at different rates, then you're more likely to try them out and see the different effects firsthand. That guy is maybe more likely to realize the Frostbolt snare is pretty cool and realize it's not just about the damage but each having situational strengths.
"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
There's already plenty of money sinks with the fast travel and you have to pay to be ressurected as well. I don't know what else will cost money but, if the original Guild Wars was any indication, the less gold sinks the better. You can honestly never have enough money in Guild Wars 1. You can be swimming in hundreds and hundreds of platinum, spend it in minutes and still not have even half of what you need. The compensated for making these things mostly cosmetic/fun, so you didn't NEED to have the money. It was more for prestige (pets, high tier hero armor, obsidian, black dye, etc).
Also, while it was only a demo (and I was a lowbie) I really didn't get much money from the things I killed. I popped on a higher level Charr very briefly and, while the monetary amount was higher (2 digits, sometimes 3 for harder things, as opposed to 1) it wasn't a huge amount of cash. And the money didn't drop 100% of the time either. IMO, it's far FAR too early to worry about moneysinks when most people have no clue how much disposable income they'll actually have.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
If Fireball is dealing so much more damage than Frostbolt due to the Rank Difference, then there is a problem. When both are Rank 4, Fireball still causes more damage, but yes, the snare more or less makes up for it. That's where the balance and player choice comes in. When Frostbolt is still Rank 3, the damage loss then becomes far too significant for the snare to be worth it.
Of course, this wasn't so much of an issue when downranking actually existed in WoW. Mana costs allowed lower rank spells to be more efficient. This was very apparent when it came to healing also. But then they changed it so mana costs scaled with level, but the rank of the skill did not. That meant that the highest rank of each skill were the only thing that mattered.
From what we can see, the option to downrank in GW2 is not avaliable, and energy costs are minimal as it is when using abilities, except for dodging and healing. So it can potentially have the exact same issue.
Player choice is the most important thing. If abilities are blatently superior to others at certain levels, then that goes against your argument that it's a matter of personal preference; as it's actually the opposite. When I leveled a mage in WotLK, this stood out like a sore thumb. From what I can remember, the biggest offender was Arcane Missiles. You get the first rank at level 8. and the second rank at level 16. The second rank was double the damage of the first. So at level 15, the spell was useless, but at level 16, it was by far the most useful spell I had. That felt wrong. It was somehow both underpowered and overpowered at the same time. I'm not saying GW2 will have a problem as extreme as that, but it's a possibility.
Skill ranks shouldn't be necessary. Players should be able to use which skills and abilities they want, without penalising themselves.
I'm with DLuna on this. I think that skill ranks are one of the most outright ridiculous ideas to ever grace a gaming system. As a tabletop gamer, I've known about this since Dungeons & Dragons, and everyone thought it was fairly ridiculous there, too. That's why people tend to move on to better systems, there are better D20 systems out there than D&D, ultimately more clever systems.
The problem with ranks is that it can only work in a game where you're basing your increases in power on manual upgrades that happen at a level increase instead of doing things algorithmically, but this highlights the problem that DLuna mentioned. I'll explain. In D&D and WoW alike, the game is designed to have 'skill sinks,' (I hate sinks) which basically make you choose between having something new or upgrading something you have. But this invites numerous problems, like a skill being underpowered at level X, but overpowered at level Y.
The algorithmic approach is a more intelligent, intuitive, and organic one, because what happens there is that an ability, technique, spell, or what have you that you obtain at level 1 is just as powerful as one you gain at level "Oh look at me I have a big number now." and there's nothing wrong with that. New stuff shouldn't be about being more powerful, it should be about diversification and new applications. And Guild Wars was partially about this.
To understand an algorithmic approach you have to understand that (the last paragraph). Essentially, there are no sinks, so when you pick something new you're actually picking something new, and then you have X (the original things you had already) and Y. Y will apply itself to the law of diversification and have a different application to any of the entries in X whilst maintaining the amount of power. And we've already seen examples of this, quite a few of them, and we were shown by what's currently my most beloved profession: The Engineer.
Let's say that the Engineer starts off with a basic frag grenade. That's fun! Woo, frag grenade! I can do AoE damage, yeah! But let's say that they get a flashbang at level X, and a liquid nitrogen grenade (I friggin' love that grenade) at level Y. Now you have three grenades: Frag, stun, nad slow. Frag is pure damage, out and out, because everyone loves a bit of damage dealing. Stun is mild damage, and it disorients your foes, interrupting their attacks - this is balanced to make the interupt worthwhile and keeping the damage there enough so you don't use frag all the time. The freeze grenade is purely a powerful slowing effect, if you need to get away then you toss a freeze grenade and get yourself some distance.
This is how diversification can occur without making any other skills redundant. Player choice is important. But do you know what else is important? Not overwhelming the player with asinine and pedantic micro-management. The choice should be between things that have actual differences, not between something that does a little less damage whilst taking a little less power. If the game is balanced like that then it becomes this tedious process of having to micromanage a massive library of spells tht you've gathered. And as Blizzard (finally!) figured out, most players don't want that. It's a headache.
I'd say that it's fair to assume that the vast majority of players don't want irksome micro-management that goes down to the molecular level (that's for strategy fans, and there are MMO strategy games out tehre and on the horizon), they want meaningful tactical choices. Now, by keeping the mana cost generally low for all skills and balancing things that way, you remove the need for skill sinks, ranks, and pointless micro-management. What it comes down to then is meaningful tactical choices. I'm sorry but I don't see using rank 1 over rank 3 as a meaningful tactical choice, that's just doing micro-management that the game should be handling for you. I see when to use a turret, or an elixir, or the correct sort of grenade as a meaningful tactical choice.
World of Warcraft has frequently been described as a 'dumb game' around the Internet. Not as an insult but rather by the dictionary definition of 'dumb.' This is because it used to be overly simplified on the server/client side. Instead of having algorithms to handle micro-management, players had to do what they were used to having single-player games handle for them. It was considered lazy design, and by many it was thought of as just another layer of hateful busy-work to give people something to be occupied with just so they'd take longer not only playing but learning to play, since they'd have to learn to micro-manage a vast variety of skills.
See, having ten bars on my screen with 120 BUTTONS(!) across those ten bars, with twelve buttons each, all of which have to be watched for cooldowns isn't my idea of fun. It's my idea of monotony, eyestrain, and shitty design. Blizzard realised this at the end of the day, they figured out (in their slow, slow old minds) what players had been telling them for years. (Blizzard has always been like that, though. I remember reading about how cooking was broken for 8 months, and it was a simple fix to sort out, something that modders probing the game for events had already figured out. For most people that was a ten minute fix, for Blizzard it was 8 months. But that's Blizzard for you. They don't do anything quickly.)
All Guild Wars 2 is doing is basically following hte new trend that had been set by D20 games a long, long time ago. See, the idea of skill ranks is antiquated, it's antiquated like Dungeons & Dragons was for the longest time. Players just want to play, have fun, and engage themselves with tactics. Why do you think that many tabletop games have had their battles becoming increasingly more and more playing card or Games Workshop-like? People dig tactics. And micro-management != tactics. Guild Wars 2 is going to be about tactics. And in regards to that, there'll be plenty of player choice without the necessity for the horridness that is skill ranks.
I wasn't saying that choice of skill is a personal preference, I was saying that my liking the idea of having different skill levels and your not liking it was personal preference.
Also, I do want to say that my opinion is based on WoW where the game is a rush to the endgame. When you hit that everything will be balanced so anything that happens before that is basically irrelevant to me. I wouldn't much care if one spell was more powerful than another during a certain level range. I do need to remind myself that GW2 is more about the journey and less about the destination.
I'm not talking about a system where Fireball is too strong, then they're balanced, then Fireball is too strong, then balanced, etc. Instead I'm talking about a system where each spell has a short level range where they're slightly more powerful than the others, just as an excuse to shake up your strategy but not so overpowering that you'd never even consider using Frostbolt for the snare during a Fireball level.
I appreciate where you're coming from with the skills being constantly balanced. I think it would be an excellent system. We just value things a little differently. You look at Arcane Missiles being weak at 15 and strong at 16 as wrong. I see a potential upside. That's it.
Honestly, If GW2 is so awesome in every other area that this is what we end up debating then the game will truly be epic.
"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 dont think its a good idea at all. In any game I play I love to play the economy game. Dont know how important this will be in GW2 tho. But still, gear repair is a gold sink. Ideally you want as many as possible to share the gold sink. Trainers work ofc, everyone uses trainers. But not everyone uses pay-to-travel and stuff like that. AH cut, vendor cut things like that also work.
It doesnt have to be the old durability on every piece. Rift has something called soul vitality. Its pretty much the same thing but instead of having durability all over the place you have it all in just one place and call it soul vitality. When it reaches 0 you get a timed debuff. There are different ways to do it ofc, I'm not a developer, I'll leave it to them to figure it out. But removing gold sinks sounds like a bad idea.
So far from what we've seen, GW2 will have skill ranks.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Skill_trainer
The video they cite, which has the relevant part around 21:30 is here. http://vid.buffed.de/v/mvzjEXAUHA7/Guild-Wars-2/Wartower-Spotlight-GC-2010-Folge-7/
I'm honestly not sure why they're implementing them. Other choices they've made lead me to believe they just want people to find a weapon and use it, such as having Power affect melee, ranged, and spell damage, or not having to use a weapon to level it up. Having to run back to the trainer every level strikes me as a very minor inconvenience (there is fast travel after all) in a game seemingly designed to eliminate minor inconveniences. This goes back to something I said several posts ago, maybe people just love buying skills and look forward to unlocking things. I wouldn't dream of pretending I have a finger on the pulse of the average MMO player, but maybe GW2 does. Their system seems to have people buying things EVERY LEVEL. That's at least twice as frequently of any other game I've ever seen.
Going back to your post though, I don't think a manual approach excludes an algorithmic approach. For example, you have Fireball damage be (Level x 2) or something. In a purely algorithmic approach that just gets updated every level. In a game with skill ranks you might still have the same formula, but you can only buy the spell every 6 levels. In the system I was talking about, where Fireball gets bought at level 30, Frostbolt gets bought at 32, Arcane Missiles at 34, and Fireball again at 36, each spell gets a small moment in the sun where they're slightly more powerful. They do remain more or less balanced though as long as people remember to buy everything.
I don't know. Like I said, having to buy skills seems inconsistent with GW2's philosophy of not letting things get in the way of playing. Maybe during this summer's convention season we'll see updated video and know where ArenaNet currently stands on the issue.
"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
Well, I agree that a MMO needs goldsinks but equipment damage mustn't be one of them. Guildwars doesn't have it and I have never had any problem wasting my money in it.
I don't think we could say that this game got too many or too few until we played it for a while.
An solid economy means that people must waste their money on stuff instead of playinbg Scrooge McDuck, I think we all agree on that. But does it really matters what the money sinks are?
The instant teleportation is a perfect goldsink to meantion one, ANET have stated that it will cost some money. Seems to me that it or a myriad of other goldsinks would work as well to get the economy working. Sure, you can walk but we all know that there will be times when people wont, I for one would kick any member who would walk from DA to my farther Shiverpeak dungeon to save a few silverpieces.
I would need to know all goldsinks to even guess if the game needs more stuff (like this) or not.
Had to comment on this. Equipment damage can be a very important part of an MMO. I know most of you come from WoW - obviously equipment damage is merely a hassle in that game. If you had played some other MMOs, I would hope you would see some very good reasons to have equipment damage.
Obviously, there is the money sink issue. That being said, there is a much more important economic issue thats comes to mind when I think of equipment degredation. That is equipment flooding the marketplace. If GW2 does not have bind on pickup items, then equipment will get used, sold, used, and sold again. As time goes on, the marketplace will get flooded with that equipment. With equipment degredation, that equipment will be used and then replaced. This allows good items to retain their value and also gives crafters a steady business.
Personally, I hope this game is crafter friendly. I love crafting and want to have crafting be a meaningful part of the GW2 experience. Being able to build my armor, replace it, and upgrade it, is great fun for me. I hope there is equipment degredation and that items are not bind on pickup. These are things I would really like to see, because I think this system is much more interesting and dynamic than a system like WoW's. One of the most boring things about WoW is getting all the best gear, and then knowing that you can't get any better gear and that you will never need to replace what you have.
DAOC is a great example of a well-done system w/ equipment(though I do think it could have been improved). As a crafter in DAOC, you didn't make the best gear (which dropped from bosses), but you made gear that was needed. DAOC worked by min/maxing your characters stats, since every stat could only have a certain amount put into it. So str/dex/ect could have 101 in them, and resists could be 26% I think. You could get great items from bosses, but then you needed the crafter to fill in the gaps (because maybe those items only gave you con and str - so you needed a crafted item which maxed out dex). And so crafting was a meaningful part of the system. Also, since items degraded, there was need for repeat business because eventually your gear would wear out (no items were bind on pickup). Obviously, even this system could have used some work, but I thought it was a great system to have.
I want item degredation in GW2. I think it adds an edge of realism to the game and could be a very important part of making a great economy. Obviously, they could go the bind on pickup route, but lets be honest. That route should bore anyone to tears after they've played WoW for 6 months. So please, give us some item degredation.