“The player should never view other players as an obstacle.” This is the core philosophy that Arena Net has kept while developing Guild Wars 2. It has had a profound impact on the way I view game design as a whole, both when designing games and critiquing games I play. Everything about Guild Wars 2 is designed with this one simple, yet extremely important philosophy in mind. When working on any aspect of a game (and I have worked on quite a few different aspects of games), I always take a step back and think about how it impacts the player.

This may seem like an obvious thing to do but it is very easy to get caught up in your “brilliant” ideas. Every decision that you make, no matter what you do, impacts the player; and it is the job of every game developer to make sure these decisions enhance the player’s experience. Removing obstacles and barriers that impede the experience is a challenging, yet rewarding process. Despite best efforts to catch them ahead of time many obstacles aren’t found until play testing, which is one of the reasons play testing is so very important.

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Play testing is always an important part of our development process, but the most effective case was our first Facebook game, My Pet Rock. We mainly collected data on how players played the game through metrics tracking. We also got the chance to watch hundreds of people play the game live during the Artscape festival held in Baltimore, MD. At the festival, we collected incredibly valuable in-person feedback from our players, both through what they told us and by just watching them play.

The most important change we made to My Pet Rock was in the tutorial. We created the tutorial to help people learn how to play the game, but we learned that the very thing we made to help players was acting as a barrier for many. In general, our tutorial was too long and had far too many words. This last part was especially important considering My Pet Rock had just as large a following internationally as it did in the US. We dramatically increased the amount of players that finished the tutorial by removing large chunks of the tutorial, streamlining what we considered essential, and removing as much text as possible. As a result we also saw a dramatic increase in our retention.

Developing games for Facebook and mobile gives us a unique chance to roll out changes, sometimes very drastic ones, quickly in response to user feedback. Listening to the feedback of your players is one of the most important parts of development. You shouldn’t literally do everything your players ask of you, but if you pay attention you can understand the underlying message of what they’re telling you. Once you have that understanding, you can address the problems players have in a creative and efficient way.

Arena Net has done a tremendous job in listening to the feedback of their players. I was so happy to see how much effort they put into streamlining the process of providing them with feedback. Not only can players send bug reports, but they can also complete simple questionnaires at the end of quests to tell Arena Net how much fun they had, or how much impact players think they had on the game world through a particular quest. It is this level of care that makes me feel like I have a say in shaping the game, and it makes me excited to beta test Guild Wars 2.