One of my earliest memories of WoW, probably from around Fall 2005, is buff envy. I had rolled a warlock, and I was trotting down a pathway in fairly low level zone, when I heard a sound and noticed a new item had appeared above my action bar. Coincidently, I had just run past a mage running the other way, who had raised his arms as he approached me. Turns out what he did was buff me. He cast a beneficial enchantment on me. I thought that was so cool. He just did it, unasked. I searched my spells for something I could buff people with and found nothing. As a warlock all I'd ever have would be underwater breathing, a great spell... if you're underwater.
Ever since then I've always looked for and highly regarded the ability to buff/bless other players. When you work within a guild or on a dungeon run in a party made of many other players, you buff each other. It's not just the cultural norm or the etiquette of play, it actually helps the likelihood of a successful encounter. But, I have to say it feels even better when you're buffing strangers. It's a true, free, random act of kindness then.
I've encountered such gifts in every MMO I've played, and I'm pleased to report they exist in Guild Wars 2, too. However, the reach of the gift is even greater, and it's clearly both a game norm and a status element. Rather than buff other players, which you can do but which tends to arise passively as a consequence of a skill point you've spec'd into, in GW2 your guild can create small iconic banners which bear the crest of the guild and dispense buffs of various kinds. To be able to fashion these banners, a guild needs to accumulate points from activity and achievements. Once they create a banner, and place it, it lasts for about 30 minutes and will dispense a buff to anyone who touches it. Popular buffs are summarized in this description of the ultimate banner, which bundles them all:
spawns a guild banner that will give +10% karma, +15% magic find, +10% experience from kills, +10% gold from kills, +10% increased movement speed, and +15% gathering chance to any ally that touches it for 30 minutes.
As with most MMOs, there are places where people gather in great numbers. Often, this is in the plaza of a central city, usually near the bank and auction house, which are typically in proximity to one another for obvious reasons. In the good old days of WoW, Iron Forge was one such city, and so great was the gathering of people there that it was typically referred to as Lag Forge because of the server lag created by the huge number of people moving about in the area.
In GW2 there are four main cities: three capitals, one for each race, and a worldwide capital. The action is mostly in Lion's Arch, the worldwide capital. This week, our guild, the Most Popular Girls in School, unleashed its first public banner in front of the bank. It offers a 5% buff to karma. (Click to enlarge). It sports our guild logo, the friendly beaver (um, yeah, we did that), and it announces to the world that our guild has arrived. This sort of incentivizes a guild to reach the level where it can offer such banners, not just for the benefit of the guild players, but as an act of kindness for the MMO world.
So what do I mean "no one ever talks about?" We hear a lot about killing and violence in video games; we hear about them as isolating and full of angry, hostile, young male players. That may be true for games like Call of Duty, Gears of War, Modern Warfare, or other XBox live networked game play. But most MMOs are actually inviting, friendly, worlds. It may be because the average age of MMO players tends to be 32ish, and hopefully the trash talking and misogyny is lessened, but I think it's because of the world-ness factor. CoD and similar games rely on temporary player vs player team play. You and your buddies might usually play together but you're usually not part of a larger guild, and you're not involved in a larger, enduring world of other players. I think virtual worlds scaffold social culture better because there's more to the game play than fighting. In fact, there's a lot of time spent not fighting, e.g., in captial cities. This, and the fairly traditional, omnipresent buffing/blessing concept that is part of a world culture, tend to cultivate a self-reinforcing, pro-social, play space.
