Guild Wars Insider put up an editorial about ArenaNet's Guild Wars 2 and how it will help foster the best community. Our Staff here at Guild Wars 2 Stratics completely agree with Guild Wars Insider assessment.
Guild Wars 2 Stratics is all about the GW2 community. In our staff discussion , you the players are our first priority. That’s how we feel and our devotion is for you and the community. We may not be the first and the fastest site up with the GW2 information, but we are here to keep our readers and fans informed as soon as any news is out.
We believe all sites related to any Guild Wars 2 information, no matter if it is a fan site, you tube videos, and player forums, and ArenaNet's site, are all important. That is why you will see us directing you the player to their sites. We believe in sharing and redirecting all information across all sites.
The best part of all this, is you the fans of Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2. The GW2 community is what inspires Guild Wars 2 Stratics and all GW2 related sites to do what we do. From all of our staff, we thank you and appreciate what you the players and fans do for the gaming community of GW1 and GW2.
Please check out this link to Guild Wars Insider and enjoy the editorial. We at GW2 Stratics want to thank you GWI for the excellent editorial!
Editorial: How Arenanet’s Story and Game Design will help foster the best community | Guild Wars 2 News Source - Guild Wars Insider
For the click link impaired
Editorial: How Arenanet’s Story and Game Design will help foster the best community
Added Jan 30, 2012, Under: Editorial
Guild Wars 2 Stratics is all about the GW2 community. In our staff discussion , you the players are our first priority. That’s how we feel and our devotion is for you and the community. We may not be the first and the fastest site up with the GW2 information, but we are here to keep our readers and fans informed as soon as any news is out.
We believe all sites related to any Guild Wars 2 information, no matter if it is a fan site, you tube videos, and player forums, and ArenaNet's site, are all important. That is why you will see us directing you the player to their sites. We believe in sharing and redirecting all information across all sites.
The best part of all this, is you the fans of Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2. The GW2 community is what inspires Guild Wars 2 Stratics and all GW2 related sites to do what we do. From all of our staff, we thank you and appreciate what you the players and fans do for the gaming community of GW1 and GW2.
Please check out this link to Guild Wars Insider and enjoy the editorial. We at GW2 Stratics want to thank you GWI for the excellent editorial!
Editorial: How Arenanet’s Story and Game Design will help foster the best community | Guild Wars 2 News Source - Guild Wars Insider
For the click link impaired
Editorial: How Arenanet’s Story and Game Design will help foster the best community
Added Jan 30, 2012, Under: Editorial
When we play video games, most people play them to have fun or to relax. Whatever the case may be, most (if not, all) games have a story or lesson they want to teach us. It can be difficult at times to find such lessons and morals but rest assured, they are there if you look hard enough.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Guild Wars 2 and the lesson it may be trying to teach us. Arenanet’s design philosophy for the game is simple: Play with your friends or strangers, work together, achieve great things that will affect the world. Our actions will determine what happens to the world and how things will progress through dynamic events and even our individual character’s personal stories which can be drastically different from everyone else’s. This will be a new beginning for MMO’s if Arenanet hits their goal for this game, but there is something more to this design philosophy that I’ve been stumbling upon in the last few days.
The story thus far from reading the books and reading the lore that Arenanet has published is so intertwined that it’s unreal. Let me explain.
For those that know Destiny’s Edge, this will be a good reminder. Destiny’s Edge is a group of the five playable races that worked together to defeat the Dragon Champions. Human, Norn, Charr, Asura and Sylvari were all represented in this group with their own individual goals and views on life but all united under a common purpose: Destroy the Elder Dragons that were destroying their world.
We've got bigger problems than our petty quarrels.
Most people would look at this story and think ‘Well, that seems common when a group of diverse individuals come together and solve a problem” and that’s true. We see it in books, movies and games all the time, but something about this is different to me. These five races that couldn’t be further apart coming together to stop a threat that would destroy them all. I believe this to be the underlying theme and can be expanding on in our game play and even the community at large. There is more to this though as you can see by Arenanet’s most recent blog post about the Jotun.
A Magnificent race of giants that destroyed themselves because of internal rivalry and greed. Now a shadow of their former selves, they’ve degenerated into thugs that will quite honestly kill you just by looking at them. A strange lesson, but a lesson regardless.
I believe Arenanet is doing something incredible. I believe that their design philosophy is integrated into the story they are creating and vice-versa. This is huge to me because I can’t think of a single game to date that has something so provocative as this concept. Imagine playing a game where everything they’ve built content wise: Dynamic events, WvWvW, PvP, One-button server changes, Multi-Guild Systems, the removal of the trinity, Cross-Class Combo’s, etc. is for the singular purpose of getting the player-base to work and help each other while also providing this lesson through the story as a whole. There are so many things in the story that pertain to actual game mechanics and player behavior that it keeps boggling my mind. I want to ask Arenanet if they knew that their design philosophy and their game design are so close to each other. There are just too many instances of this train of thought to believe this is just a coincidence and I’d love to hear something from them about this.
If this is true, the vision of Arenanet is so far beyond what any of us could possibly imagine. Arenanet is already trying to foster the community into a new era, but I believe that they have bigger plans for us that we may be well on our way to achieving.
The Guild Wars community is probably one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. Playing Guild Wars to get 30 points in the Hall of Monuments took about 200 hours for me, not bad considering I’ve heard how long it has taken others. In that time I had joined an alliance and got to meet some pretty cool people as well as some of the most generous people I’ve ever met. I’d ask to buy something from people and they’d just GIVE me the items, I had even done this in towns and people would just give me stuff if I asked (I sometimes begged to pay people for their services.) This is incredible and I hope the community can keep this love for each other going into Guild Wars 2.
I had posted a blog a couple months ago with an open challenge to the community and I had heard alot of good feedback from it. Granted, I did get quite abit of negative feedback (in the sense that I lacked grammar and therefore my point was null) but that’s fine. People have their views on how things should be and won’t budge and I’ll accept that.
Much like everyone else should do. Like Destiny’s Edge, we should come together as a community and welcome all the new-comers and ideas. There are still alot of gamers out there that haven’t heard of Guild Wars 2 yet and when they do they will probably be quick to ask about alot of things, one for sure will be the community. MMORPG’S live and die by the players. If the players are horrible, the game gets a bad rep and people don’t want to play. We must work hard to prevent this vicious cycle, much like Arenanet’s story is trying to tell us and to a further extent, their content.
People will be coming from all over the world, all different experiences from all walks of life. Just because someone thinks differently than you doesn’t mean their thoughts are invalid. Remember this as we’re bombarded with comparisons to every game under the sun, especially the big MMO’s that are thriving today. Let them talk (I repeat, LET THEM TALK) JOIN IN on the discussion, odds are you know about the game, just don’t be hostile about it. We’re people and just because we’re playing Guild Wars 2 in a few months doesn’t mean we can’t talk about the games of the past that we may or may not be fond of, Just be respectful. I still talk about a game from the NES days even though not a single person I talk to knows about it (except from some rare exceptions).
With this idea in mind, lets work together. Let us make Guild Wars 2 known for having the best community any game has ever seen. The first step is for everyone to truly want a community worth praising about for many years to come and be an active part of it.
