Guild Wars Mini-Interview #38
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Q: In the last BWE we noticed the absence of the charm vendor. Now the only way to acquire a skill is to buy or capture it, there are plans of a change in the way we can learn them?
A: A significant change has taken place in how a player gains new skills, this is very true. At one point, in addition to standard methods of gaining skills, you could acquire one via a skill charm given through the generosity of a friend or guild member, or you could purchase a charm from a vendor or a willing seller in town. But we made some changes to the entire skill system that made it advisable to remove skill charms. The most principle change was the ability for you to gain skills and abilities for your PvP-only characters through the completion of missions and quests. PvP'ers are ecstatic about the opportunity, but that ability means that we have had to make some other basic changes, such as the removal of skill charms.
So why did skill charms go away? Well, I pondered that one myself, and instead of taking the time of one of our super-busy designers to ask for an in-depth explanation of the reasoning, thought I'd share my own deductions. Remember that all your PvP-only characters get the skills found by your roleplaying characters. If we left skill charms in the game, then a single player could get a bunch of skills and pass them along to others. He or she could literally fill the skill inventory for a huge number of players, and that would mean not just for one but for all of their PvP-only characters. In other words, if one player could do the missions and quests and then spin off skill charms, lots of players could completely avoid the mission-playing and questing aspects of the game. And avoiding that minimizes a really important part of the Guild Wars experience. If someone could easily purchase skill charms and then pass them to lots of characters every time, then that would be a pretty (cheesy) way to boost those characters.
One of the principles in our design of Guild Wars is the intention to never devalue those who play strictly roleplaying characters. We never want such a player to experience a negative impact from whatever skill system we have in place. In fact, knowing that after Level 20 and Ascension the Experience Point requirements to gain a new skill grows significantly, one of our efforts in the immediate future is rebalancing the skill point system. This rebalancing is necessary because of that cool new ability to re-roll your character's secondary profession. Those who have played a character a long while and who select a new secondary will be able to do so without really high XP costs, once this review and rebalancing is complete.
All of this stems from our understanding that there will be a lot of different types of gamers playing Guild Wars. We want to show equal consideration and support to all types of players. This means assuring that those players who do undertake the missions and quests are not diminished by in-game mechanics that might make skill acquisition less meaningful. And that actually has benefits for those who play PvP, too. With our skill acquisition process, we hope and expect that there will be a lot of variety between characters. That variety will mean that when you play a tournament or challenge match, you cannot simply assume that each opponent has every skill in the book. There is something extra interesting about a match where there is an element of the unknown; it makes your strategy broader and more varied, and adds excitement and complexity to the play.
Oh, and lastly, here's an additional bit of good news about skills: The majority of skills will be available as quest rewards. This does not mean to say that they will be available only as such a reward, of course; you will still be able to get skills in other ways. But if you go on a quest, you may receive a skill as your reward.
