JusticeRetroHunter.7684

I don't understand why people equate deserts to = there's nothing there Deserts are usually depicted, as places that hide ancient secrets. This is because of the way the most of popular culture uses Egypt as the poster child for depicting ancient societies in general. 1) Ancient gods, that are older than the current paradigm in languages you don't understand...so they appear alien and mysterious. 2) Rare Treasures that have magical powers because they use magic from ancient societies 3) Deep and dark labyrinths and mazes that hold said treasures at their center and other deep and dark knowledge that nobody knows about...all hidden beneath the sand. On the surface, the desert is barren, and inhospitable...almost as if a test in survival for an adventurer to persevere through in order to find that place that holds that ancient knowledge. Now, Gw1 deserts knew about this kind of theme for deserts, and that's why a lot of gw1's desert themes were surrounded by ascension, and links to divine places...also served as the burial of dark events of the past (like the events of Orr and entrance to the Underworld) Now gw2's desert focused on something else entirely. What that is I can't really say because nothing exactly stuck out to me to indicate it is representative of any theme...But I believe it was more trying to emulate current Saharan Africa, which was what original culture of Elona is based on, and just tried to come up with an advancement in the political drama that was there from the first game... So in conclusion if you ask me, Gw2, kind of paid no attention to what makes deserts so cool in the first place...and that's maybe why some people feel like "deserts don't mean nothin" When in my opinion deserts are one of the cooler places to visit in a fantasy game.

> @"kharmin.7683" said: > Clearly? There aren't MMOs out there without waypoints or similar methods for rapid travel? You, yourself, probably wouldn't use waypoints based on your previous thread. Does that mean that you would actively choose a less optimal path? Me playing this game without choosing to use waypoints means I am purposefully playing the game in the least optimal way...which isn't a logical way to play a game with such an option. Every rational agent would do the same. If waypoints are there, they will be used because they are optimal. > I'm not sure what it is you're getting at here. Meta does not equal unhealthy. I've been playing GW2 for over 7 years (and GW1 for a few before) and have never used a meta build. I enjoy playing just fine. Other players who choose to follow meta builds or not do not impact my playing GW2 at all. Then you are choosing to catch 20 fish a day rather than a thousand fish a day, which is illogical. The point is that because waypoints are there existing and providing optimal strategy, logical/rational people will use them, and they will use them more often than not because it's optimal strategy. Maybe a better analogy...It's like giving a starving prisoner the choice to eat a single Hershey's kiss or a Buffet full of fresh food and drink...Why would said prisoner choose to starve when given the option. Anyway, I'm not going to respond any further. I don't like being reported and banned over completely benign posts because folks can't deal with someone else's differing opinion.

> @"kharmin.7683" said: > The option ought to be available, though. If a player wants to zip across the map using waypoints or mounts, then they should have that option. If a player prefers to not use those items, then that player should have that option. Let's not get back on the topic of forcing interactions again. Except, giving an option that is the most optimal way to do something, is like giving a fisherman the option to learn a strategy to catch 20 fish a day, or the option to learn a strategy to catch a thousand fish a day. Clearly it's less optimal to play a game without waypoints, so people will chose the most optimal path if given the option because it's optimal, even logical way to play a game... But just because something is logical and optimal, does not mean it's not bad and unhealthy for the game...Think about how metagames are bad for the community...having the most optimal choices of builds to play the game kills off all the other off-meta builds even if they are even remotely less optimal...would you say that's healthy? Or do you think that elitist raiding mentality is healthy...Encouraging the use of waypoints is like supporting that mentality.

> @"TheGrimm.5624" said: > There needs to be some form of fast travel. Players should not have to spend have their playtime just getting to where they are looking to game for that night. You, and many others may want fast travel but I don't. Been in this franchise for 15 years, and some of us can see how waypoints dilute the experience of actually meeting other people and having meaningful expierences. You know what they call games with waypoints like this? A Theme park MMO. Going from one carnival ride to the next.

> @"Astralporing.1957" said: > Sure, but the existence of _Discord_ (and other third-party channels) as well as in-game private channels of communications is not a matter of belief - it's a provable fact. Nobody said anything about belief... it's about measurement. like I said again if you can not measure it in theory OR in practice, it is unfalsifiable. We obviously know there are people out there that use discord...but we can not to within any accuracy show how many that number of people is. It's that simple. I'm not explaining this any further go look it up...again not my words.

> @"Astralporing.1957" said: > Specifically, when you make a theory based on observed data, that theory applies only to the part you can observe - you can't automatically assume it will hold true when you include the parts you couldn't observe. You'd need to make a reasonable explanation why the unobserved data would not impact you results first - and you didn't do that. You claimed that this unobserved data is irrelevant, _without_ explaining why it is so. That's highly unscientific. Ehh...i think you need to go back and understand how scientific method works. Sorry not trying to be rude. Firstly, you never hold ANYTHING in a science to be 100% true ever because there will always be a margin of error in experiments (Experiments are done via orders of accuracy, where the only way of getting 100% accuracy is by doing an experiment an infinite number of times) . Secondly, you do not need to explain away things you can not measure. In science you don't explain away the theory of the bearded man in the sky everytime we talk about protons and neutrons. The theories are based on what you can measure...and that's as far as the theory will go to address a phenomenon Things you can not measure in theory or in practicality is what's called unfalsifiable...and can't be USED to prove or disprove a theory...its inconclusive information. This is not my words here...this is something you go on to google and nod your head and accept that this is the reality of scientific approach. > > > No it's not reasonable. Again you can't measure it to within any accuracy. > Actually, no. Discord does exist, and conversations do happen there. That's a fact, not a belief. Sure, you can't measure them easily (which, by the way, doesn't mean you _can't_ measure them - it just means _you_, personally, don't have easy access to the right tools for that), but they _do_ exist, and you can't simply ignore them. At least not when you're talking about social interactions. > > > > We can estimate forum/reddit users to active players because there have been enough companies who have released active player data to base those calculations off of. I've yet to see any official data for number of public vs private chats and they would always be lower on private since they wouldn't be able to account for third party chat systems. > > > You can actually figure out the proportionality by averaging out how often you see say chats in proportion to map chats, in proportion to guild chats in proportion to whisper chats etc. > You could do that, if you had access to that kind of data - but you _don't_ have that for anyone that is not yourself. > > Those proportions will be different for each player, though - you can't "average" that data based only on your personal experience. Well, you can, but it will apply only to you, it won't be something you could extrapolate on the entire playerbase. > Not exactly true. Because you can go looking at a streamer's chat logs can give you data to reference. But, in general the only person you have to make a reliable measurement is yourself, ...one can think of clever ways to get non-bias data , and or you of course can collaborate with others to get that number, which realistically you can do. (Send picture of your chat box, send over for analysis. Done.) Since you're only finding a universal proportionality, you don't have to interview complete strangers, you can go about and ask your friends for snaps. Anyway, the scientific methods on measurement are very precise and clear for a reason. Reliable measurement means you are supposed to do an experiment over and over again, and what this does is confirm accuracy of the measurement. You can take data that is just yourself, but you have to include a margin of error due to the fact that it's just one experiment and not 5 sigma's of experiments. Here in gw2 we don't need 5 sigma's of accuracy to talk about a forum post...you just include margins of error based on how rigorous the experiment was.

> @"Tommo Chocolate.5870" said: > These are not networks in the mathematical sense. They look more like heat maps – that is, plots of 2-variable functions Good post. I explain at some point in this thread to address what you said in this comment. It's true, that it's not a traditional network map, it basically a contour map. The reason it's like this is because of lousy paint skills. It is a 2 variable, but each variable is a density which requires 2 parameters (mass x area), rather than a scaler like an actual heat or contour map, in order to define clearly which is why it's not particularly easy to draw in paint. There is the Density of Population (The number of people within a certain radius) and the Density of Interaction (The number of Interactions that occur between people, within a radius). The easiest way to make an illustration of the above in my opinion at the time and, given my skills with paint was a heat map. And was just meant to illustrate the differences of one behavior to another behavior. In hindsight I should have spent more time making something that takes that information to make it easier to understand based on experimental data to support the hypothesis better...but it's just a forum post that explains the behaviour... I'm not trying to write a thesis. Anyway, the math's is somewhat trivial and what I probably mistakenly did was trying to dumb down in order to make it into a forum post... For example, if I'm talking about densities that should suggest both a volume and and a mass, which so long as those things are defined I shouldn't have to draw anything for someone to understand the numerical differences between the two densities of the images in the OP. In conclusion, I'm not trying to give people a thesis paper in this thread...nor am I really required to in order to present an idea (which is essentially what it is as I said earlier, a hypothesis since it's based on observation not experiment) Would my post have been better if it were a thesis backed by experiment? Of course it would. I'm inclined to actually do the experiments because of how painfully stark the observational data appears to support the above...but this is a forum post that uses a more scientific approach to a problem (it's actually more of a logical analysis) to present an idea... it's not any more complicated than that as an answer to your comment.

> @"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said: > In a very broad sense, all of the obstacles and challenges you have to overcome in a videogame are inconveniences. The story is locked behind a boss, the treasure chest is at the top of a treacherous mountain, limited build points forces you to pick one ability over another, etc. If there wasn't some kind of problem to solve, then it wouldn't be much of a game. I can understand simplifying things like tedious inventory management or UI elements, but it is possible to make things too convenient. The waypoint system is one of those conveniences that has a negative trade-off. While it relieves you of the burden of having to fight through enemies and trudge through jungle to get to your destination, those lost things are gameplay elements. All of the interaction with the environment is sacrificed. No more plotting paths, getting caught up in unexpected events, learning to navigate dangerous terrain, carving economic niches from the environment, or striking up unlikely friendships. Instead, you just warp from big shiny-giving event to next big shiny-giving event, which have their rewards balanced assuming they'll be zerged in mass. Well said.

> @"Linken.6345" said: > Wouldent the 80/20 rule mean that 10 is the 20 you can observe, it would then be 40 the 80 you cant? > > Why is it 10 and 10 in this post? The 80/20 rule would imply that the number of people interacting is representative of the population as a whole via a power law. If 100 people are in a map, if such a thing obeys an 80/20 power law, than 20 people on average should be chatting out of those 100 people. This is why i said 10 and10. Of course we don't know if it obeys a 80/20 power law, we simply can't acquire that data. What we can say, is that we can count how many people are interacting via what we can see via say chats, map chats, emoting, being in a party or whatever interactions we can recognize, and use that as a proportion to the total population size we are sampling which will obey some kind of proportionality. The proportionality I'm presenting is one where it treats hidden interactions as an average of the other interactions (weighting them as equally likely to happen) which also gives you a 10 and 10 in that example.

> @"Seera.5916" said: > You can't have it both ways. You can't use unfalsifiable data to prove your hypothesis is correct if you're saying we can't use it to say that it's wrong. Counting the actual number of interactions you can actually measure is not unfalsifiable. It's empirical... because you can actually measure it. This is scientific method 101... It's like saying that because we can't see [the bearded man in the clouds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God#:~:text=God%2C%20in%20monotheistic%20thought%2C%20is,an%20eternal%20and%20necessary%20existence.), means that god exists we just can't observe it therefor everything we know about science is wrong. The correct conclusion is that because you can't measure it, you have to exclude it, and if you wanted to be generous, assume what it would be if you could measure it if it were there (they don't even do this in scientific method either...it's just being generous to such a position) In the scientific method, things you can't measure in theory or practice is considered unfalsifiable and essentially useless. > Example: It's reasonable to expect that Discord is where a large number of conversations happen. No it's not reasonable. Again you can't measure it to within any accuracy. > We can estimate forum/reddit users to active players because there have been enough companies who have released active player data to base those calculations off of. I've yet to see any official data for number of public vs private chats and they would always be lower on private since they wouldn't be able to account for third party chat systems. You can actually figure out the proportionality by averaging out how often you see say chats in proportion to map chats, in proportion to guild chats in proportion to whisper chats etc. If in a 24 hour time period, observe 500 map chat entries, 100 say chat entries, 50 guild chat entries and 10 whisper chat entries, you can with ever increasing accuracy show that as a common proportionality between the different mediums and as a proportion of all entries as a whole...That's not something that only a company with dev controls can do...anyone anywhere can figure that one out...in fact I'm inclined to do it myself.

> @"Julischka Bean.7491" said: > One question though. How do you know people are in complete silence at banks and such? They might be engaging in guild chat, or whispering to the person next to them. So i wrote this as a response to someone I'm currently messaging whom I'm having a more in depth discussion on the topic, so I'll just paraphrase what i said over there, over here - ----Unfortunately, these hidden interactions can't be realistically tested to any reliable accuracy. The assumption is that anything that could be considered outlier behavior (Extremely chatty guilds, to extremely dead guilds.../extremely chatty players in hidden channels, to extremely silent players in hidden channels) are treated as outliers, and thus the frequency of guild chats, whispers or other 3rd party communication services lay somewhere in between, which we would expect to be distributed as a bell curve with some average frequency. The reasoning behind just observing interactions we can see, and using that as data we could use, is that it should be representative of interactions as whole by a similar proportionality, which is again based on how we aren't treating interactions we can't measure as outliers, but instead as an average. This is the same tactic that's used in statistics, where for example, [we can measure measuring Gw2's total population by looking at the amount of gw2reddit subscribers]( ), (based on the 80/20 rule). In other words, the people that use reddit or forums will be some proportion of the population. We are using this tactic but in reverse, taking the total population and using measurable interactions to determine proportionality of hidden interactions. So in a general sense, the amount of interactions you can measure in chats you can actually observe, is assumed to be some proportion of all chats that you can't observe. So if there are 100 people in Lions Arch, and you have 10 Interactions per hour, than it implies that may also have on average 10 interactions per hour that you can't observe. Again, because you can't reliably measure these hidden interactions, you can't make a case for it because it could be anything, ranging from 0 to 100 to a thousand. It's unfalsifiable.

> @"Obtena.7952" said: > > @"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" said: > > > @"Pockethole.5031" said: > > What i'm saying here is that if you choose to play alone, then your lack of interaction with other people, means those people also lose an interaction with you. If everyone was like you, then everyone would lose interaction with everyone else. That's the macroscopic picture of such a behavior. Interaction leads to growth of a society, while no interaction leads to degradation of a society. > > > Hey that's fair ... But that has nothing to do with convenience. Targeting convenience features is a bad strategy if you want to push the social interaction aspect of an MMO ... at least in my opinion. > The idea behind the attack on having too much conveniences is that it causes individuals to be self-sufficient. Self Sufficiency is an isolationist behavior, and the thing about convenience is that it is an optimal strategy for accomplishing goals...so despite it being bad for the overall growth of a society, a convenience is often the most optimal choice to have on an individual level. For example, If the path between point A and point B is dangerous, so much so that it requires individuals that want to go from point A to Point B to band together in order to get there, Introducing a mount that allows individuals to bypass this danger means that these individuals no longer need to rely on each other to get from Point A to Point B. This means that the introduction of said mount allows the individual to be more self-sufficient. Additionally In this case, using a mount to bypass this dangerous path is the most optimal strategy to get from Point A to Point B, so this self-sufficiency behavior is further re-enforced. This mechanism is also true for waypoints and other travel enhancing conveniences.

> @"Pockethole.5031" said: > Why are you keen on manipulating everyone into interacting with each other? Because interaction, both good and bad is required to maintain a growing/healthy population. Competition and Cooperation are cut from the same cloth, and they both live in consort with one another in order to get things to happen in society. You can choose to be alone, which is perfectly okay, but when you consider that, your knowledge doesn't pass down to anyone because you're alone, then you are a final link in a chain. It's okay for a few to be the final link in the chain, but if everyone is the final link in the chain, then that is the end of it as a whole. What i'm saying here is that if you choose to play alone, then your lack of interaction with other people, means those people also lose an interaction with you. If everyone was like you, then everyone would lose interaction with everyone else. That's the macroscopic picture of such a behavior. Interaction leads to growth of a society, while no interaction leads to degradation of a society.

Even if the game isn't dead or dying, you will feel like it is. Many systems in place in this game alienate players from each other, and I would say a significant number of players on the PVE forums actually prefer this alienation (Wanting to play a solo-game in an MMORPG) The responses you will hear is that "It's not dead or dying, just go make friends teehee" But you will eventually notice how devoid of life the game has. People say they want more content...Yet we get new maps every 3 months, new expansions every couple years...i think this is the most "content" I've ever seen a game give out for free and people still want more. Thing is that they can never satiate the desire for meaningful experiences with artificial ones. Those meaningful experiences come from other people. So you'll hardly ever find these meaningful experiences. Just giving you my own personal and honest opinion on my outlook on the game. Other's will feel free to disagree.

> @"Astralporing.1957" said: > > @"Feilou.7395" said: > > This is rather obvious. Other games don't have tomes of knowledge. > New players don't have access to those yet. It's something veterans use to level up their new characters - but veteran players even without those are going to play more efficiently, and skip a lot of initial content. I think you misinterpreted what he said. He said exactly what you just said, that because veteran players have access to those tomes, they will use them on alts to skip straight to the higher level endgame zones. This cuts the densities of possible interactions and the population density just as it does waypoints. Now Tomes of knowledge like he points out takes away social interaction. because again this is another mechanic in the game that amplifies convenience. Now i would have acknowledged this one more, but the phenomena i really was set out to explain was why places like Lion's Arch or other major cities, with high population densities, and mostly max level players have low interaction densities. The problem is universal among nearly every region in the game, so there must be more universal problems that exist here, not just the Tomes of Knowledge. > The main reason why new player areas aren't flooded with players is, in my opinion, much simpler - it's because this game _does not have many new players_. Wow. It's so simple why hasn't anyone thought of this yet? But aside that this is one of the few things i can agree with you on, i would at least appreciate your view on that....why exactly does the game not have new players?

> @"Seera.5916" said: > You haven't proved that the waypoints are the reason. I just said that my Post is not "proof" it is a hypothesis. >Yet others have come up with other reasons and given proof. And no, there has been no "proof" given. there have been others that disagree with the hypothesis, but an opinion or differing view on the subject is not "proof" > Or more, you haven't proven that the problem you're presenting is worse than the solution you're suggesting. I'm actually not presenting a solution. I'm posing a hypothesis. > No one's claiming more players are in Discord chat than game chat. I think a number of people have said this in the thread already so far. > Just that one reason for people not chatting while going from point a to point b is that many do use voice chat services. Because you can't say that it's not a safer way >to communicate while playing with others than using an in game keyboard chat. And since those services are much more stable and easier to set up and many are >free, a lot of communities have moved to using Discord. It wouldn't surprise me if this was a majority of players. Thing is about this solution is that you can't actually show that this is the case. In a practical sense it's impossible to measure the amount of people that use discord or guild chat rather than the in-game chat functions. That's why the discord argument, even if it COULD be true, is unfalsifiable...and can't be shown to be true. What you CAN in practice measure is the amount of interactions you observe while in an area in the game. > As for the starter map population, unlike in many games, players are free to go to whatever starter map they want to. They aren't forced to stay in their starter area for several levels. With the only exception being literal new players who haven't unlocked Lion's Arch and would have to traverse more dangerous maps to get there (not that it's not possible to do so). This part of your post is confusing because the starter zones are designed no different than WoW. You really can't go much further than your starter zone if you are at a low level....so you are forced to stay in this starter zone until you level up enough to wear the gear and defeat the enemies that are higher levels than you. I also believe that you miss constantly just like WoW against mobs that are a higher level than you (can't remember it's been ages since i've played a low level character...if someone wants to clarify that.) In addition If what you said were actually true, than other starter areas would have a similarly large number of players...again this is not the case. The human starter area on average is the most populated starter area by a "significant margin", and the human starter area itself doesn't have much people to begin with. I can go in game right now and count how many people are in each starter area's town to give you a clue as to how low this density of people are, and i can then tell you if these people are even interacting within a 10-15 minute timeframe Village of Shaemor = 9 People - 1 Interaction (conversation) Soren Draa = 1 Person - 0 Interaction Village of Smokestead = 4 Perople - 0 Interaction Gate of Horncall = 2 People - 0 Interaction Village of Astorea = 8 People - 1 Interaction (Party) > >There are even a few of us who can go several hours without participating in a conversation, I'm one of them. I'm an introvert. Conversations drain me. It has to be a >pretty good conversation going on for me to participate. I'll spend time just watching a conversation if it's interesting but not enough for me to join in. This has nothing to do with who you are personally or how you on a personal level interact with people. My post is about macroscopic societal behaviors. The entire society is not introvert like you...they aren't extroverts either. There are a plethora of different kinds of people...the study is about how these interactions in totality work together to make macroscopic behaviors.