Guilded: Guild Wars 2 - The On Again, Off Again MMO

One of Guild Wars 2's greatest advantages over any other MMO is that it's easier to quit playing. Which isn't how it's supposed to work. Unlike normal games, MMOs are based on keeping you involved at all costs. There must always be something just beyond your grasp, some reward at your fingertips, some reason to keep playing a little longer. Many games work like this, of course, but MMOs in particular have a financial incentive to work like this. MMOs are based entirely on the premise that you should never, ever stop playing. It's like episodic TV, except that there's no next week. There is only and always now. Guild Wars 2 bucks this trend. It's easier to quit playing because, ironically, it's easier to start playing again.

Now Where Was I?

Someone like Rilke or Dr. Phil once said if you love something, you should set it free and be able to come back a month later without feeling like you've been dumped into the cockpit of a 747. Such is the lot of anyone returning to an MMO after a prolonged absence. Jump back into World or Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online and you're confronted with a bewildering array of quickslot buttons, tooltips, inventory items, and bits of gear, and no idea where you left off. The best way to avoid this sense of being lost and overwhelmed is to not stop playing in the first place.


Some MMOs are built around a limited number of slots for your skills. A game like Guild Wars or Rift, for instance, is all about looking at a whole mess of skills and choosing which few you're going to use. So you can go away for a year and when you come back, you only ever have to worry about a few skills at a time. These games don't hog up a bunch of brainspace where you remember which of the 30 skills you'll use during any given encounter. That's the first step for an MMO not punishing you for leaving. It's the first step in a healthy relationship between you and your game. It's the first step in avoiding a co-dependency whereby you probably shouldn't play other games. But it's not the last step.

Open World with an Open Schedule

It's easier to quit playing Guild Wars 2 because you never really have to be anywhere. You range freely throughout the world. Because it adjusts your base stats to the area you're visiting, and because the various areas are peppered with meaningful collectibles and challenges, and because there are so many different places to go at any point in the your character's leveling career, and because you're not being strung along by a string of quests chained together by bread crumbs, you can jump back into Guild Wars 2 and basically go wherever you feel like going. Plenty of MMOs have open worlds in terms of geography, but Guild Wars 2 has an open world in terms of gameplay. If I leave for a year and come back, when I look at the map, I won't need to know where I was supposed to go next. There is no such place. There is only wherever I want to go next.


It's easier to quit playing Guild Wars 2 because you don't have to keep up with your friends. How many people play MMOs out of a sense of peer pressure? Isn't "clan" just another word for "herd?" Yet one of the fundamentally broken aspects of MMOs is that for supposedly social games, they throw up barriers between friends who want to play with each other. Friends often have to advance their characters in lockstep.

But Guild Wars 2 adjusts a character's level based on where that character is playing at any given time. Your 80th level character isn't pointlessly whacking greys when he groups with your friend just out of the starting city. Instead, your stats are dialed down to adjust the challenge accordingly. This not only keeps all areas relevant long after you've "outleveled" them, but it also evens players out based on where they are. You and your friend will always have meaningful places to play together. Guild Wars 2 refuses to compromise the social element of an MMO. If you only play two hours a week, and your friend plays two hours a day, you can still play together. If you step away for a month, and your friend keeps playing all month, you can still play together when you come back.

Another Day, Another Dollar

Another irony is that it's easier to quit playing Guild Wars 2 because there's no subscription fee. You can't overstate the pull of playing a game because, well, you're paying for it this month anyway. You've still got X days left on your tab, so you might as well use them. Besides, it's just $15 dollars. And it's saving you money you would have spent on other games.


The psychology of a monthly fee is a terrible thing. It puts the business model of a game out in front of the design as surely as any free-to-play boondoggle. It means the developers have to make a game without end not because that's the best way to make a game, but because that's the best way to forestall a cancelled account. A subscription creates expectations that a game is a service, that you need to do whatever it takes to make it worth your while, that you need to play to get ongoing value from your ongoing investment. A subscription fee shackles you in insidious and powerful ways. Ask any skeezy gym membership program. Ask your cable company. Ask Netflix. Ask Blizzard.

No Obligations

But once you're playing Guild Wars, you're done paying money. There is no financial difference between playing this month or not playing this month. It's your game entirely. There is no drive to get your money's worth any more than you would if you were playing any single-player game. You never have to manage your account, or update your credit card info, or check to be sure you weren't double-billed. You are never challenged with squeezing value out of the game. And yet here you are playing a full-featured MMO that doesn't resort to the design-wrenching standards of free-to-play games. This sense of ownership and persistence means you can put it down more easily.

These facts about Guild Wars 2 -- that it doesn't create a sense of co-dependency -- are among its greatest advantages over other MMOs. Guild Wars 2 plays at my convenience. Not the other way around.