Guild Wars 2: The End Game

Right after creating a character and taking your first steps into Guild Wars 2 you’ll be able to participate in what’s essentially end game content. Player versus player arenas can be accessed at any time to hop into short-duration battles between two teams. Or you could drop into the World versus World system, a large, persistent battlefield where armies from three different servers compete for supremacy. You’ll fight for control of numerous types of structures, from lowly supply camps to heavily defended forts, build siege equipment and take part in battles with huge groups of players.

To solve the problem of power imbalance between low level and high level players all in the same combat space, ArenaNet bumps your character to 80 as soon as you enter into WvW. “If you come in at level two we basically adjust you up to what a level eighty would be like stat-wise,” said Mike Ferguson, systems designer at ArenaNet. “It’s not like most games that have PvP is across wide levels where it’s like ‘Oh, I’m five levels above you, I’m just going to smash you and kill you in one hit.’ We’ve tried to make it so that everyone can feel competitive at the same time but still have that kind of on-going progression. We don’t want is for people to feel like you have to be in level eighty for the real game to start.”

Making this experience comprehensible to a new player has also been a challenge for ArenaNet. “We’ve added some things like instructors right when you get into the World versus World maps,” said Ferguson. “As you load in there’s a guy there with a little chalkboard over his head that you can talk to and he explains how the game works. What we’ve seen is people will just hop in and someone will notice they have a commander mark over their head and everyone will go to it like a moth to a flame. Then they’ll start running around with a group there and people will start learning the tactics. And after a couple of hours, people just kind of understand how to play naturally.”

Though there’s a lot of complexity to the skill system, its intricacies might be drowned out by the chaos of huge groups swarming into each other and using superior numbers overwhelm all else. ArenaNet hopes to curb the effectiveness of this ‘zerging’ tactic through a variety of objectives and methods to alter the tide of battle.  “We have so many objectives on every map,” said Ferguson. “Starting out with the supply camps, they can get flipped with one or two people if they’re really good. Or two or three people if you need a little extra help at lower levels. So sure, you can take sixty people and just run across the map like a mindless horde, but you’re only going to be able to take one point at a time. A team that actually coordinates is going to be able to set up siege weapons at choke points and be like ‘Okay, they’re at that keep, let’s just go take everything around that keep’. So zerging is effective but what we’ve seen is zerging is generally the first step of acceptance into the game. It’s the easiest thing for people to understand. You’re just in a big group, you’re running around, don’t really know what’s going on but [you’re] doing stuff. And then you start picking it up.”

According to ArenaNet, setting up things like siege weapons can have a huge effect on battles, so paying attention to the details of WvW play can really pay off. “One of the things we saw coming out of the [beta weekend events] is we were watching all the videos pop up on YouTube and you would see these guys, they would set up two ballistas on top of a wall or on top of like a ledge looking over a big fight and nobody on the ground was actually paying any attention,” said Ferguson. “These guys were up there just cackling and destroying people. A ballista will two-shot somebody in most cases. So within four or five seconds you’re taking down people and if they don’t come after you, you’re just going to sit there and tear them apart. Siege weapons are our equalizer.”

These weapons can also be effective while trying to break into enemy-controlled structures. “You’ve got flame rams, which set up right on the doors. You can stack a couple of those to bring the doors down really quickly, and they also have a secondary skill of a flame burst. The flame burst applies burning to anyone that hits it and it also gives you fear. So if you set the flame ram up, you can hit that flame burst so the fear chases them away and gives you a better chance to kill them and keep them from reinforcing the location. Trebuchets are kind of the opposite. They’re way far away but they can do a lot of damage to walls and gates so you can set two or three up on a ledge and just keep pounding away at a keep. And eventually [the enemy team is] going to run out of supply to keep repairing stuff so you’re going to knock the wall down.”

On the WvW map you won’t fight only players, but also computer-controlled enemies, which ArenaNet feels could be a good way for newcomers terrified by the idea of purchasing and operating siege equipment to get accustomed to the map and flow of gameplay. “The PvE events act as a little bit of a bridge between the normal PvE game and PvP,” said Ferguson. “There are some ambient creatures running around that you can use to level up or gain loot. And there are also mercenary camps. There’s, say, a camp of ogres and you need to help protect them against the harpies, which involves killing the harpies, destroying their nests and things like that. Once you actually befriend them then they’ll send out NPCs, like ogres, to go to the nearby locations so that they can help attack like supply camps or towers and give you extra reinforcement. So if you’re a single player you can go in there and kind of take that camp over and all of a sudden you’ve got like four or five ogre buddies running with and you can go in and take that camp that’s right next to the ogre camp.”

In case the concept of wide open battles bristling with ballista fire and mobs of kill-crazy players is still too intimidating, Guild Wars 2 also offers dungeons throughout the leveling experience in the level 1 – 80 world. Dungeons are playable in either Story or Explorable modes, and picking one adjusts the degree of challenge and the path from beginning to end. When you first find a dungeon, Story is the best mode to play, because with a somewhat organized you should be able to knock out the end boss and reap the rewards. Explorable mode is meant for more advanced players in more coordinated group.

“The vast majority of our fan base can go through Story if they wish to,” said ArenaNet’s Kevin Millard. “It’s easier, not trivial, but it is easier than the Explorable mode. Explorable mode is designed to be extremely difficult. We expect that a small percentage of our fan base will jump into Explorable dungeons.”

Millard explained how that difference in challenge level was designed, in terms of boss encounters in particular. “In story mode, what we’re going for is making the players think and discover a neat strategy. So for example, it might be as simple as when [the boss is] holding his sword above his head, you need to be far away from him. When he’s not holding his sword above his head you need to be close to him. That’d be a very simple boss mechanic that we would use in an early dungeon, or possible for a lesser boss. Another example is there’s the Story dungeon boss that has little wolves all around that you can’t normally fight, and the boss occasionally turns one of the characters into a cat. And you’re stuck as a cat until you hunt down one of the wolves and kill it, and when you do you transform back. So there’s strategy there, being a cat means the boss isn’t hitting you, right? So maybe this is an opportunity to heal up. So we want you to think and have strategy but we don’t want it to be overwhelmingly difficult.”

“When we move onto Explorable, we want to keep that same strategy but we want it to sort of be razor thin. If you don’t do everything in exactly the right order at exactly the right time, you’re going to die. So you need to develop a much tighter group. We expect that if you’re in Explorable you’re communicating with voice communication, you’re probably in a guild together and that you know each other, and this isn’t the first time you’ve gone through this. It is theoretically possible to pick up group through an Explorable. In fact, I assume lots of people will. But you probably need to wait until other groups have pioneered through it, you know, written strategy guides and such.”

“Our goal is when you approach especially the major boss fights in the dungeon, we want you to stop and we want you to think.”

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What Happens to Your Used Games?

Belching, huffing and heaving, an 18-wheel UPS truck pulls up at the rear-end of a gray concrete, out-of-town warehouse. The driver steps into dizzying 100 degree heat as, noisily, the warehouse’s corrugated door rolls open. Forklifts glide into action, unloading pallet upon pallet, stacking them inside a massive loading area in the shade of the warehouse’s docking bay.

Stacks of identical brown cardboard boxes totter on the pallets, each crammed with used video games, used games consoles and used cell phones. Men with clipboards scurry about checking dockets and making notes.

This is GameStop’s used-game reprocessing plant, situated on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. Up to seven of these trucks will roll in every single day, depositing the games and the gear that you take into GameStop stores in exchange for cash or credits.

Tough Trade

Around 80 percent of games traded in stores are resold in the same store. But 20 percent are sent to this Texas facility for refurbishment, usually because they are looking somewhat tattered. For personal information security reasons, 100 percent of all consoles, cell-phones and other devices come to be cleaned up and sent back out. Some 17 million games and one million hardware units pass through this plant every year.

What happens to the games when they arrive here? They are divided and distributed among small teams, each with their own name and game-related mascot (based on classics like Dig-Dug and Shinobi). Each disk goes into an unsightly machine that scrapes away the top 10 microns of cover-material, enough to ‘clean’ the disk of any superficial scratches. They are then buffed for that nice, shiny, sparkly look.

The disks are inspected by hand. Those that still show scratches are tossed into a terrifically noisy machine that breaks them up into tiny pieces, depositing the shards into a huge box that will later be taken away by a specialist recycling company.

Factory Life

This is a factory. It smells and sounds like a factory. Mercifully, there is air-conditioning. There is a sign on the wall. It says ‘Safety is no GAME. STOP and think.’ Clever, no?

Some of the games are taken away at random and run through banks of test consoles stacked upon racks, to make sure the process is working, that the disks are going to load and play when they find their way to your games machine.

The rest are sorted into bundles according to the game title and platform, thousands of individual product identification ‘SKUs’ (Stock Keeping Unit) sometimes going back to the 1990s. There is a large machine, as big as a row of terraced houses, that sorts the games. It looks like one of those glass-fronted, self-service cafeteria deals that you see in old movies with Doris Day and Peter Lawford. What the hell are those things called? Ah, automats.

A man or woman then inspects the box and the packaging. If the artwork is looking iffy, a generic slip is selected and slotted. GameStop has run in-store tests on used games and found that original packaging sells no better than generic packaging but, this plant being all about efficiency, leaving well alone is seen as the best policy. Most people who trade games have the good sense to take care of their currency.

Once ready for market the used games are sent back to retail outlets, according to algorithms based on buying patterns. More shooting games are sent to stores near military bases. More hockey games are sent north.

Back to Life

This is traditionally a secretive company that rarely does any kind of media, let alone guided walk-abouts of facilities. It feels slightly odd to be here, as if this were a tour of some North Korean ‘milk formula’ factory. But instead of gargoyle stiffs in olive-green tunics and peaked caps, the friendly guides are wearing short-sleeve shirts made by Polo and offering up beefy Texan hospitality by the slab.

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Everything that comes through those doors is currency, loot, scratch, gravy; lovely, lovely moolah.

GameStop’s bosses are obviously tired of hearing about how used games are killing gaming, about how unfair they are on the producers of the games who get nothing from their resale.

One astonishing stat is repeated by three different managers during presentations. 70 percent of income consumers make from trading games goes straight back into buying brand new games. GameStop argues that used games are an essential currency in supporting the games business.

The normal behavior is for guys to come into stores with their plastic bags full of old games, and trade them so that they can buy the new Call of Duty, Madden, Gears of War. GameStop says 17 percent of its sales are paid in trade credits. The implication is clear - if the games industry lost 17 percent of its sales tomorrow, that would be a bad day for the publishers and developers.

Money, Money, Money

GameStop’s reprocessing facility isn’t just a factory, it’s a mint. Everything that comes through those doors is currency, loot, scratch, gravy; lovely, lovely moolah.

High-ticket items are treated with special care. The boxes of iPods and iPhones and Xbox 360s and PS2s and Nintendo 64s go into work areas that are caged. Cameras look down over workers as they begin a process that will wipe hard drives at least three times.

Security is key here. Not just the suspicious-boss kind that prevents anyone from pocketing a couple of iPhones. But the kind that makes sure your gamer-tag records or your credit card details or your girlfriend’s phone number are wiped clean, before the machine is polished and dabbed with Q-tips and sent back out into the world.

GameStop believes there are billions of dollars worth of consoles, iPods and games just sitting in people’s homes, unused and unloved, that could be traded. The company is aching for people to bring their old crap in and turn it into money to spend on new games. They see that this stuff is just as good as greenbacks.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that in this age of alternative currencies like Diablo III’s Auction House and Xbox Live points that old games, old consoles, old cell-phones are also cash, but somehow less sexily so, less brave new world of commerce and more Sandford and Son.

Fair Deal?

This opens up the bigger question about this currency, which is, who controls the value of the trade-ins? Many consumers feel a stab of outrage at the value of their trade-ins when compared with the cost of the games when they are resold.

Paul Raines, GameStop CEO says that the margins it makes on used games are necessary to pay for the stores, the staff, the refurbishment. He doesn’t spell it out, but GameStop’s financial info shows that used games make wider margins than new games and without that business, the retail outlets might struggle to survive.

He says, “We know that people don't like selling their games if they think they're getting ripped off. So we spend a lot of time talking to consumers about that. We also spend a lot of time looking at the competition. There's lots of people in buy-sell-trade now, and we think we're pretty competitive with those guys. We have to figure out a way that we can continue to grow the business, keep this operation running, improve the quality.”

GameStop does have a lot of power over the value of your game. Probably, because of its prominence in thousands of malls and retail-strips around the country. But we live in a free market and there are alternatives out there, including online. Shopping around is always a smart way to get the most value out of your money and out of your old games.

Meanwhile, the trucks keep rolling up to the warehouse gates, disgorging yet more of those games, making them ready for people like you and me. We will happily thumb through the used games racks, will find that game some other person grew tired of playing, and we will add it to our own collection. At least until we decide to trade it in.

Colin Campbell is a British-born, Santa-Cruz based games journalist, working for IGN. You can contact me via Twitter or IGN.

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