Something weird has happened to me during the Guild Wars 2 beta weekend. Something that has not happened to me in any mmo since... gee, I don't even remember. Final Fantasy XI about a decade ago? I was happy to see other players, who were finishing the same quest that I was working on! Can you believe it?
You all know what people say about the community on WoW. How it's bad, full of jerks, everyone is a selfish prick, yada, yada, yada. When you think about it, that's the game's own fault. It teaches us to be assholes. You have all stood and watched as some other player attacked a boss or some kind of rare baddie, watched the player's health go down, stood there as he got in trouble... and you didn't help. In fact, you wanted him to get it over with and fucking die already. And when he finally did, you stood on the player's corpse and claimed the monster for yourself, showing that noob how it's done.
Why? Because you don't get any experience for helping random players, your quests won't update, you get absolutely nothing out of it. All you see is some random prick killing your fucking monster and you want him to suffer for it. Of course you could have just invited him to your group, but he had already tagged the monster and besides - come on! He's in your damn spot, fighting your damn quest mobs! There's no way in hell you wanna help that sucker!
That very same thing happens all the time, to every player in one variation or another. You're running for some glittering object on the ground, which you need to pick up to finish a quest and some asshole druid appears, shifts into travel form and outruns you, because he too needs that item. One of my friends has spent ages camping a rare baddie she wanted to tame with her hunter and some other player popped up, demanded a thousand gold and when she didn't respond, he killed the critter in the middle of the taming process.
Every other player is an enemy. Pandaria will eradicate the fight over items by moving boss loot directly into people's inventory and skipping the need and greed rolls, but all the phasing, cut-scenes and Asia-flavoured stereotypes in the world won't stop other players from going after exactly the same quest items, the same quest mobs, waiting for the same stupid respawn.
Now, let's move the whole thing to Guild Wars 2. You're watching another player, who is fighting a boss baddie. You jump in to help him and as the two of you fight, help each other, maybe even throw a heal and a buff or two, more and more people join in until eventually, with everybody's help, you have managed to defeat the bad guy, the event is finished, everybody gets experience points and loot. You don't even have to invite any of the other players - they're all free to join the fun and they all get rewarded according to their contribution. And suddenly, you don't want them to stay the hell away from your kill. In fact, you welcome them, because the whole thing is quicker and easier with more people. Quest difficulty scales up with the amount of participants, so more people usually means more action, more fighting, more experience and more loot. More people = good!
Here's another thing: Reviving other players = good. Everyone gets to resurrect fallen players and doing so will earn you titles, achievements and experience points. Go and ask for a revive in the local chat channel when you die on WoW. I dare you! Yes I know, graveyard is just around the corner and all, but when a paladin walks right past your corpse and you're politely asking for help and they tell you to fuck off, it does somewhat hurt the gaming experience. On GW2, people will give an arm and a leg just to bring you back to life. Sure - they're doing it for nothing but selfish reasons, but they're still helping.
And while I'm at it: Your character's personal story is not as moving or detailed as the story you get on The old Republic. You don't really make any decisions, you don't choose to be good or evil, it's all pretty much pre-scripted. But it's your fucking story. You get to watch your own character talk and act and come to life. When is the last time you've experienced your own story on WoW? For the past couple of years all we do is tag along with Blizzard's pre-defined heroes, watch the story of Thrall and his buddies unfold and nobody gives a fuck about our characters, their own stories, about us - the players. And while I can appreciate that lots of people love the novels and comic books and stories about these characters, I just don't care about their heroes all that much and I don't want to play a game to experience the story of someone else.
-Cat
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