Originally Posted by Sausaletus Rex

Why not? PvE character can get everything they want without having to bother with PvP? Of course, that's a fallacy because, as you say, we're playing one single game not a bunch of mini-games connected by a graphical UI. It all has to hang together or the whole is weakened. That's partly the reason that an "unlock all skills/item" button would be just as detrimental as what we have now. It devalues and detracts from the idea that you can et better through work and through progression. And relegates a RP character in PvP to second-class status. When, in fact, they should be equivalent. If I've taken the time and effort to level up my character and find the best items and skills I should be able to head to PvP adn stand alongside someone who's taken the PvP shortcut. Not be better than them. Not be worse. But to be able to be confident that our playing field is level and we'll have a good time because the matches are going to be decided not by some external force but by the people at the keyboards.

Part of the problem we have now is that there's little reason to PvP. The rewards are too shallow to attract people and worthless to those who've already become "competitive". Take the Sigil for example. You can win one in the Hall of Heros and that lets you get a guild hall for more PvP options or you can sell it so you can avoid farming for money and loot and the rest. But a PvE focused guild can just farm the money to buy it, too. They never have to touch PvP if they don't want to. While to field a team capable of taking the Hall you're going to have to spend a lot of time in PvE finding the skills and unlocking the things you'll want to have. PvP is optional, PvE is mandatory. That's not the way an organic, cohesive game experience should be working. What's optional should be secondary and forgettable but to those of us who enjoy the combat PvP play is anything but while it's the PvE you want to ignore as much as possible. What does doing well at PvP get your character? GvG gets you ladder position which doesn't do anything for you. Tombs will get you fame and with fame you'll earn skill points (And a fancy emote which is meaningless. That's a PvE type reward not a reward for people who don't care about the looks, they care about the effectiveness.) but to earn that fame you'll have already been leveling and earning far more from PvE than you ever would in PvP. Skill points earned through fame are also limited to the character that earns that fame so you can't earn them with PvP characters. And holding that hall will get you a chance at a sigil and a rare item. And you get XP for fighting in PvP, too, which can lead to more skill points but that's inconsequential unless you're using your RP character and the amount of XP you get isn't enough to level a high-end character all that frequently.. That's it, the rest is bragging rights. There's no meaningful reward for playing in PvP that you can't earn through PvE while the opposite is far from true.




Yes, it's choices that are the important thing. And not just anyone's choices, player choices. What should be the most important thing when playing a game based on skill and strategy? The gray matter between your ears. It's your choices and your decisions that should have the greatest impact on your outcome. What we have now is limited choice, arbitrary decisions. Our skill lists are selected by the developers and as we go along and progress we can unlock more and more of them. But it's like a quest reward. Do you care what skills you unlock? No, you just do the quest and unlock the skills because they're free and won't cost you a point. Maybe a quest has a skill you want and that's great but most of the time it's just, "Well, that's one less skill to unlock with a skill point, I guess. Don't see how I'm ever going to use that one." You rush through them and you skill list fills up. Or you go to a website like this one and find out which ones are the one you want to do. Or you rush to the trainers. It's mostly out of your hands. There's no control, there's no choice, and so you just have to plug along and hope the random roll goes your way or that the next trainer has what you need.

But power, in Guild Wars, does not come down to having "better", it comes down to having options. To choice. The more options you have, the better off you'll be. You're limited in what you can have from all those options, though, so someone who's smart enough to take better advantage of possibilities has a fighting chance even if they don't have your options. Advantages can be made and overcome, that's how the game stays based on player skill and strategic play.




That's true. And there is something to be said for providing people with skills they'd never have considered, with options they hadn't explored. By leaving everyone to their own devices there's always a danger that things will blow up in their own faces. Say you have your pick of Mesmer skills. Someone could pick up Signet of Midnight, Cry of Frustration, and Mantra of Earth or something along those lines an have a very hard time of it. While someone else could buy Power Leak, Shame, and Migraine because they *know*. Populating skill lists with pre-determined skills means that there's less of a chance of people coming up with a bad build and that they'll have an introduction and some familiarity with what's been decided on as good things for them to have and know. So the current system can be very well used for holding someone's hand and slowly but surely introducing them to the idea of deciding for themselves, for sampling and experimenting with their options, and for the very concept of strategic flexibility that comes with being able to respec a character on a whim. And some of that would be lost by expanding skill availability in earlier areas.

However, I'm willing to live with that. Yes, people can come up with lousy stuff. They can come up with lousy stuff when you hand them things, too. Part of the game is learning how to think for yourself, how to make your own build, your own plan, and, for me, the sooner people are thrown into those waters the better. I'm much more comfortable letting people decide for themselves how they want to play and letting them recover from the inevitable mistakes quickly and easily than I am with having someone somewhere sit in judgement and manage their experience for them by deciding this skill is a starter skill and that skill is too advanced for new players so you need to reach the end game to get it. Let *us* decide because chance are we know what we want a lot better than anyone else. Structure things so that it's easy, that it's comfortable, and that mistakes and misassumptions aren't deadly, but if this is to be a game where the players are going to churn through strategy and plans and builds then we have to be trusted enough to be allowed to do so.

As for underused skills or skills people wouldn't have considered, well, that's why I'd like to see some way - any way - of testing skills before you have to spend a point on them. Or, failing that a way of refunding skills, relocking them, perhaps as there is with attributes. Skills are one of the few irrevocable decisions you'll make in the game and thee's no way of telling what you're getting unless you delve into a site like this one or otherwise have a lot of knowledge about the game. Just seeing a skill's description isn't enough, you need to be able to use it in a fight, to see what the range is, what the effect is, how it's timed and everything else. This is something that the gem and skill ring systems did but that we've lost (They also let players trade skills which is another absence in the current system. If established PvP guilds could quickly deceminate a critical elite, even temporarily, then a lot of their concerns about grinding vanish. And if someone could take a shortcut to tracking down a skill by buying it a lot of other grinding concerns similarly evaporate) and it's of detriment to the game. But for now I'll settle for just having some sanity brought back to skill acquisition and leave the problem of testing out skills to the future. Sure, if you give everyone more choice and less guidance some skills are going to be overused and some underutilized. So be it. If the skills are in balance then the ones overly popular or ignored need to be looked at to see if they're imbalanced in some way. Why are people flocking to this skill or that skill? Why's this one gathering dust? From a developer's standpoint allowing greater choice gives better feedback on their design. And, as well, part of the game is discovering a gem in the middle of a heap of trash. A skill might be overlooked and you could figure out a way of using it that makes it the Flavor of the Moment. That's all part of the meta-game, the constantly swirling and shifting overarching strategy that's driven by the player base. Giving people more choices to play with means more strategies and more skills will inevitably be thrown into that cruicible and the meta-game will be better off for it as threats and answers arise and are dealt with.




Well, you're already going to be getting that 124th skill point as things stand, if you want to unlock things. And what placing the emphasis on skill points does is to move the point of "Yay! New skill!" from completing that quest to when you actually select your skill. It's not your 124th skill point. It's, say, Doylak Signet. Or Peace and Harmony. Or whatever skill you want to find next. It's the difference between someone giving you a gift and a gift certificate. If they know you, a gift's going ot be nice because it's something you really want and they know that. If they'd don't then you're getting a box of socks or something else you're going to have to smile and pretend you're thrilled with. But if they give you a certificate or just a wad of cash then you can go out and get your own gift. And that's my point. It's you that's important and it's you that needs to make the choices.

What I would do, and I'll admit this needs some tweaking and adjusting to see what's optimal, would be to have the initial flurry of skill points come quick and easy, just as it is with leveling. But as you go along it becomes more of an accomplishment. Not so much of a struggle that it's easier to just start up a new character and blitz through things for more skill points to unlock more but enough of one that skill points have some meaning. There's a curve there but by making the initial runnup fast and providing options at the lower points someone can ride it just as far as they want. If you're going to be PvEing to your heart's content then you don't care because you'll eventually unlock everything anyway. But if you see PvE as an annoyance standing in the way of the real fun then you're going to get just what you need out of it and move on. And if you ever need more you can dip back into things. It allows the completists the time to advance and rewards them for sticking to things but it also allows those who think they know what they want to just get their feet wet and move on. PvE becomes not mandatory but necessecary but it's up to the player to decide when they've had enough. It moves the point at which diversity explodes and overwhelms rarity from somewhere near the end-game of PvE to near the beginning but by limiting things it still preserves rarity as a whole. If it's borring to you to find that 124th skill point, you don't have to. You can live with 123 or 100 or 50 or whatever it is you think you need.




That's not a bad idea. I'd rather see 10~20 new premades and a wide variety of skills between them (None of this, "Every Ele gets GLE", or "the reason you take Mes is for Energy Drain" stuff) including a unique assortment of elites and a representative of every profession combination so that you could tweak and twist things as you want. But including a "sideboard" of skills for premades has some merit, too.




I agree with you that most collectors are junk. However, I'd like to see them serve the same purpose that a skill trainer might serve for skills. Have them sell upgrade components and/or runes rather than that five thousandth protective icon. Then you can, as with skills, find them randomly (SoC versus IDing), obtain them through a set sequence (questing), and pay a premium to acquire them in a known location (trainers versus collectors). The more ways of obtaining something the easier it will be for everyone to find it and the less random and difficult it will be seen to be. So, if you need, say, a Major Healing Rune you'd know you needed, say, 5 Minotaur Horns and you could travel to Ventari's Refugee to get one. Maybe it would unlock, maybe it wouldn't, I'm not sure, but the point being you have a place where you *know* you're going to find it.

Lastly the game NEEDS grinds and highbie money sinks (not crappy lowbie money sinks such as kits/bags). Quite a lot of people are happy grinders, enjoying 'it3m runz for the ubb3r l00t. There is already a solution to this PvP/PvE conflictual situation: dragon swords and black dye. Mostly identical to regular items, they are sought after and valuable. Why? Because people think they look cool, and you can show off those. That's where item grind can be used to its full extent. Make more items like these and people will have something to grind for. Useless in PvP but stylish enough to make players happy with a lucky find.




Right. It's the ascetic rewards that are the best sort of PvE rewards. Like the 15k a piece armor. It doesn't offer anything over the 1.5k sets to someone just interested in stats and finding that last little edge. But it looks different and it's special because not everyone has it so it's an accomplishment to be proud of. It's just optional. You don't *need* it to be competitive or to survive, it's just a nice little bonus. Items that are scare are valuable simply by dint of being hard to find. If there was a sword that only 1 out of every 100 people in game could have, that sword would be a hot commodity because it was rare (And we have such a sword already, the dragon sword). It doesn't matter what that sword is or does exactly, as long as it's not trash, because just because I can have it and you can't that makes it important, that makes it valuable, and that makes it desirable. It doesn't imbalance things because it's not more powerful than anything else. It doesn't degenerate things because although a lot of people want it, not everyone can have it. And such ascetic bonuses are the right way of going about rewarding those who want to spend their time "grinding" away.

So, black dye, the dragon sword, the etherial weapons, the 60k sets of armor, those are all excellent ways of serving those who want to acquire loot. Things like elite skills, runes, and hard to find skills, though, are not, because rather than simply being ascetic they offer significant amounts of power to those who can find them. It's better to have them easy to find (although not brainless) for the purposes of having a diverse and balanced environment.