In what world is it a financial failure? Didn’t they just make an asset flip and potentially made millions of dollars based on player figures? Hard to imagine 100% of people refunded…
Sort of, but it has so many things that make it what it is. The deck building skill system, the instanced open world with social hubs to form parties in, the way the combat so heavily emphasizes countering and interrupting your opponents… There’s a lot of small details that make the whole I think.
I don’t really know what to call it, but to my knowledge there has never been another game like guild wars 1 (yes, including 2). I think that undefined genre is actually quite fun and unique and I would love to see more attempts at it.
I can’t speak for FFXIV, but if you want pvp in an MMO you might give guild wars 2 a try. It’s got 5v5 pvp matches where everyone is on an even playing field. It’s available in the free to play version, and you can go into it right after the tutorial if you want, don’t even have to do leveling.
There’s also a large scale pvp mode called world vs world where you have three teams of hundreds of players fighting over territory. That one uses non-equalized stats so it’s an end game thing, but it’s a lot of fun!
I wonder if you could use a bot and AI to write fake information and post that instead. Seems like fandom wouldn’t have enough game specific info to judge the accuracy, especially if it happened over time.
Seems like on that last one someone could go through and change all the content in every page to a link to the new wiki. A PIA? Certainly, but at least it would get the ball rolling and use the built up SEO from fandom to help your new site get views.
Like it or not it does have an effect, which is to raise the stakes. If everything is instant gratification there are less lows, but also less highs. You may prefer games that are less punishing, and that’s fine, most people do. It does have an impact on the experience that creates value for people who like a more punishing experience, though. It doesn’t create that value in the moment you’re waiting, it creates it when you’re debating whether a risk is worth it somewhere else in the game. If there was no punishment for a mistake, there’s no reason to debate the risks, and that removes the high of taking a risk and having it pay off.
Optimization is extremely complex and the game engine, while factoring into the equation, doesn’t determine if something is optimized or not inherently.