As some of you may recall, I made an analogy of GW2 to communism in Podcast #21. Humor and alcohol aside, there's actually a legitimate basis to that comparison. Both are idealistic, were well intended, and may have worked out great on paper, but don't pan out that great once you get actual humans involved. Solving a problem is rarely as simple as pivoting to an opposing extreme.
In GW2's case, by removing the "holy trinity" and normalizing class roles SO well, I think they unintentionally removed a critical factor in player identity. I agree that the solo play experience of a "holy trinity" game can be sub-ideal, but I don't think complete despecialization is the answer. There's a lot you give up when you grant everyone the ability to be indistinguishably fully function solo and the game doesn't really give any reason or ability to deviate gameplay style much when in a group vs. not. The game also offers little or no tangible measure of impact that an individual has had on a group. Not in terms of performance, nor more subtle forms such as the simple feeling of satisfaction from knowing you successfully fulfilled your role and were a NECESSARY PART of a larger effort to accomplish a shared goal. People want to know that they mattered. They want to know if they should feel shitty or effin awesome based on whether or not they just f'd up, spaced out, or kicked major ass.
For the sake of contrast, in WoW your role and what you were expected to do and what you did in a raid, dungeon, battleground, or in the world were fundamentally different based on not just YOUR class and spec, but those of the people around you. That's not to say certain dungeons in GW2 go a LOT smoother with a portal-popping mesmer, but I doubt anyone here will argue that the depth and complexity of impact is far from comparable. Even winding up in a "bad pug" in GW2 doesn't have nearly the type of consequence as it does in other games (generally badness in GW2 translates to annoyance, not hard blockers). The interplay of role identity -> responsibility -> accountability -> accomplishment -> mastery is simple yet oh so powerful. And there really is simplicity in knowing you're responsible for X in an encounter (let's assume X is crowd control for this example). Yes, allowing for these sorts of additional degrees of variance does add hefty complexity to gameplay in a holistic view, but it also breaks down expectations/tasks and evaluations at the micro level (as for instance a hunter who is on CC duty; it provides obvious measures for success and failure, and I have a clear well-defined goal to strive for, along with straight-forward feedback to inform how I should feel about how I'm doing along the way, and how much value I should ascribe to my goal once I accomplish it), and adds a TON of opportunity in distinctive gameplay experiences and deeper levels of aspirational mastery and specialization. (Speaking of CC, anyone else remember when they got rid of needing it for a while in the first half of Wrath or so? Those were sad, boring, boring, BORING times...) Anywho...
In a social game, it logically follows that a fair part of a person's sense of purpose, and hence personal value, comes in some way from their interactions with and impact on the people they encounter in-game. Yet somehow GW2 managed to accidentally take the cooperation out of social.
So you know what? You kind of ARE alone. Even if you're in a dungeon with four other people, everything you're doing is still central to YOU--monitoring YOUR health, YOUR DPS, YOUR aggro--you're literally doing EXACTLY the same things as you would when playing alone. Having an encounter be N times harder because you have N people who can all be smashing buttons in parallel does not constitute a truly social or cooperative experience. You may share the common goal of "make stuff die, get loot" but it really doesn't feel different because you aren't really DOING anything different. /whyyouno
Throwing in a few (albeit creative) gymnastic-like mechanic hurdles and jacking up a mob's health and damage output to scale with the number of people in an encounter doesn't make it a cooperative, socially engaging, or meaningful experience. You basically have five people all playing the same mini-game, separately, together. Fun? Sure. More fun than having meaningful roles with well-defined tasks and expectations, interdependence that fosters positive personal value, identity, significance, and purpose? Hell no!
The irony is that by fighting so hard to avoid imbalance and grinding in GW2, the game feels grindy in places it otherwise wouldn't; its gameplay is prematurely plagued by a staleness born out of unintentional yet nevertheless overbearing normativity.
I guess the big question is "can a MMO provide equality without loss of specialization?" and I really do believe it can. That said, know I have a LOT of respect for how difficult designing a system with that sort of equilibrium would be. But only time will tell. Come on, ArenaNet! We haven't given up on you yet!
(Okay, way past bedtime...rants page is dangerous territory at night x_x)
