f13.net

Judging by this forum, interest in Guild Wars has come and gone like a flash in the pan. 
What went wrong?
Why doesn't it hold your interest?

Well, I ended up in a pretty decent guild but quickly found myself on the outside.  Even those I was one of the earliest members of the guild, soon I wasn't experienced enough to join the guild's Tombs groups.  When I went out of my way to unlock builds the group used, they wanted me to spend forever in pickup group hell before joining them.  Since I can't stand pickup groups, and since the 4v4 arena PvP is fun in short doses but not fun all day and not really good practice for the 8v8 fights, I found myself getting discouraged.  Then Issue 5 for City of Heroes came out and I went back to play there and got readdicted in a big way.

I don't know that it has to hold people's interest for very long in order to be called "successful," since they're not charging a subscription anyway, and my cabinet is full of fun games that I haven't played in ages.  Personally, I feel much more satisfied with my purchase of Guild Wars than I do with my purchase of World of Warcraft, for example, even though I don't play it much anymore.  Guild Wars is a game that cuts out a lot of the mechanics which are designed specifically to lengthen subscriptions (long levelling times, rare item drops, raids).  Axing those roadblocks, in my opinion, is a good thing for making a fun game, but it's obviously a bad thing if you're expecting people to hang around two, three years from launch.

One thing that I think might have been done better is the PvP.  It's among the best balanced, most interesting PvP systems I've seen in an MMORPG, and I like it far better than World of Warcraft's.  However, it's basically the only real pull to keep playing Guild Wars, and while it's better than any of the other PvP RPGs I've seen, it's still weaker than most other competitive online games. 

Aside from that, the game was kind of middle of the road.  The controls were a pain at times, the graphics were often fairly lousy, items and crafting were screwed up, and most of the maps were EXTREMELY badly done.  But, on the plus side, I loved the game balance (the way the skills were all PvP based, so there wasn't the huge break between PvE and PvP that is present in Warcraft, for instance), the pacing of the fights (fast), the ability to choose a subclass (so that you don't have to be a defenseless wuss to be a healer), and a HUGE plus is the ability to take bots along rather than spend an hour LFG.

I think the reason people aren't still around is probably that the "Time /played > skill" people are better served by other games (like World of Warcraft, or Dungeon Siege, or what have you), while "Skill > time /played" players are likewise going to find games like Unreal Tournament and Battlefield to be more up their alley.  For me, personally, there are times I like each of those mechanics, and so there are times I play each of those types of games, but I've yet to find something that Guild Wars does THE ABSOLUTE BEST to prompt me to reinstall it.

It was free. The loot system wasn't as good as diablo.

In closing:
1. I wasn't compelled to play by my own wallet.
2. I wasn't compelled to play by the one thing I expected to compel me.

Frankly, I don't want something to hold my interest like it was a crack pipe. If I did I'd probably play WoW. Or slot machines.


I still load GW up maybe once a week for some random 4v4 (but only because I win most of the time).


The problem I have (and it isn't really a problem -- more of an uncorrectable flaw) is that there are no unique happenings in Guild Wars. And by unique I mean the "sail your boat around in UO and be a pirate" kind of unique. All of the PvP battles in GW were mindless fun but that is all they were. I don't remember any of them. Which makes it like every other FPS frag game out there.

It isn't a "bad" thing because I don't remember every game of checkers or poker I've played either but there aren't any memories to take away from it.

Bad thing? All that PVE levelling (though it was short) was still too much. The fun part was the PVP, and in order to really get all there was to get out of that, you had to PVE too much. The PVE was only fun for a little while, and if you didn't have lots of people to PVE with, the AI on the bots was fucking awful.

Invisible walls are stupid. REALLY REALLY STUPID. Why bother making a 3d game if I'm only going to be put on rails and can't jump or walk over a 3 degree incline?

Yeah, the invisible barriers really, really annoyed me.  I am getting old and grumpy, anyway.  I can see how GW could be really good fun if you had a huge, active guild for PvP.  Unfortunately, we didn't and I couldn't find enough people to group with that I could sanely tolerate.  Geez, there were a lot of Yaaarrrsholes in that game!  Like Schild said... nothing compelled me.

It's possible that my game experience was an anomaly since I played a smite monk. I don't think I spent more than 40 hours total on the PvE and there were only 4-5 missions that had to be tried over and over which required human help (a major pain in the ass). I hate PvE and levels but PvE in GW was acceptable to me since I played it as a single player game. I prefer minion based games as well.

For me it wasn't better or worse than Diablo 1/2, Dungeon Siege, Balder's Gate: Dark Alliance, Bard's Tale (the new one), and other similar games. 40 hours is probably around the same amount of time that I spent beating similar games (i.e. Dungeon Siege in 25 hours). The other 200 hours were spent FPS style PvPing.

The paladin and healer PvP templates were golden out of the box. The only problem I recall I had with the minions was a few times when they got stuck on signs and I had to go back and find them. I can see how you would get fucked if you were relying on their healing capabilities however.

The random PvP sucks ass unless you win most of the time (by being a healer). I've tried other classes in it and while some work acceptably none of them come close to guarenteeing a win like being a healer yourself. Again, the random PvP arena is unfun real quick when you get your ass beat 5 times in a row with 5 different random teams.

As for the rails, it didn't bother me because I wasn't trying to play it like an MMORPG. I played it like BG: Dark Alliance (which is a :nintendo: game). I knew there was pretty much no reason to go exploring (just follow the quest dot on the mini map). Most similar games are rail based (and random Diablo maps don't count as non-rail based to me). The swampy(?) area with the pygmies in Diablo 2 comes to mind as a rail example.

Was it deep or memorable? No. Was it mindless fun (for me)? Yes. Will I now go back and play the PvE "Sorrows Furnace" thing they just added? No, because in my mind I've beat the game and I'm done.

YMMV.

CRPG PvP doesn't really interest me so I was playing Guild Wars for the PvE experience and I really dislike the PvE design. The whole thing with instanced areas is interesting on paper and does lead to some interesting quest designs but in practice to me it felt like I was playing an old console game that had limited save points. Everytime I would leave an town/gathering place to travel somewhere closeby I would have to kill the same fricking mobs over and over and over and over and over again. Yes eventually you'll find another "town" or whatever and then you can click travel but everything in between is just a PITFA. The next big problem I had with the game is the whole rock/scissors/paper style of combat. If you didn't have the right combination of skills loaded it was very possible you couldn't kill a mob no matter how long you spent fighting it, and this was a particular problem with many of the "boss" mobs. Maybe you didn't have enough "interrupts" to keep it from constantly healing itself or maybe you didn't have enough healing for yourself or whatever. So you had to go back to the town to rearrange your skills because of course you can't do it while "outside" and maybe pick up some extra NPCs for the extra damage or healing which of course drastically cuts into your exp and loot and then you have to fight your fricking way back through all the mobs you've already killed many times before to give it another shot. All that repetition was just too painful for me so I gave up.

I go in phases with the game, after taking a few months off I started playing a couple nights a week just before sorrows furnace went live.  I skipped all the FPS games over the years so for me that style PVP is a new thing.  No monthly fee means I don't have to remember to cancel my account when I decide to take a break.  The one thing that I really like is that patch day is smooth and pretty much unobtrusive.  You log in, the patcher updates and the patch is downloaded.  No server unavailable, no board drama (no Official boards at all thank god), no server coming down for emergency maintenance, at most you get the occasional "Please log out and log back in to load an important update" message.  As far as I can tell the GW folks are doing a better job running a service than the people who charge a monthly fee.  But all that said, in the end it's still a game that rewards time played and if you can't put in the time you just can't be competitive.  So I don't expect to uninstall it any time soon but I don't know if I will buy an expansion either.

I'm with Haemish.  Too much required subpar PvE for a PvP game.  I won't get the next expansion unless they fix that, which they won't.

The new faction system actually does allow you to unlock skills at a reasonable rate solely through PvP.

As a result I find myself willing to kill the occaisonal hour in GW.

But there is a real shortage of content, PvE or PvP.

I liked it but I like Gunz-online better.  The pvp is more fun and no pve is required, I wont be back any time soon because I dont even own CS:S and some cool sounding mods are starting to come out (I'm sorry I already played terrorists vrs counter terrorist since beta4 -this game is StarCraft all over again) so I think I'm going to buy that soon and hope steam isn't as lame as I've heard.

I will go back and play it again.  Right now I'm playing CoH instead, but have no plans of uninstalling or not playing GW anymore.  Will likely buy an expansion when it comes out.

Haven't pvped much in it at all though.  Pickup groups are frustrating, and my playtimes were sporatic and short.

I bought the game for the PvP; I fell in love with the PvE.  After the PvE was over I realized the PvP was not all that (balanced but blew).  I did a couple of the new missions and it is the same thing all over again.

I am sticking with hookers from now on.

Uh oh.  Cheddar has ginger hair and a funny look in his eyes. 

..and apparently likes sticky hookers. 

Or something.

Oh look.. a million units sold...

http://www.guildwars.com/press/pr11-22-09-05.html

One wonders how profitable they would have been had they charged a subscription. But then, it's pretty obvious that had they charged a subscription, they'd not have 1 million subscribers today.

If you called an account thats been active in the last month as "subcribed", I think you'd find that GW is still behind EQ2 which is pretty sad for a free MMOG of Guild War's calibar.

Source?

Not even close.  I wouldn't have bought it if it had a fee coming off of Beta.

The short answer of my lost interest is that I expected Diablo 3 but I got Diablo 1/3.

The PVP might have been awesome, but I just couldn't choke down the PVE grind to get there.

I have a friend at work who loves lan games. He's currently playing GW's every Wednesday with some friends. I asked if he ever tried WOW or EQ2. "One of those pay games? No way!" I just wonder how much of that sentiment there is.

I really figured GW's would be doing the EQ2 thing of an "adventure pack every two months" as the way to make money.

Sorrow's Furnace seemed like a practice run for their model. It'll take them a few expansions to get up to speed, assuming it all works out and people buy.

I actually had a ton of fun trying to play GW over lan w/ two friends while really fucking stoned (first time I smoked in a long long while) and realized this is not Diablo when it comes to lan gaming.  I've actually logged on 3 times since then to try to take a pve character to 20 (I stopped at 14 lol).  So there is some hope on that end but not as much as one might like.

It was odd, somehow I really enjoyed GW in beta but couldn't get beyond around level 15 when it went live.  I think a key factor was the massive immaturity of the players.  As a monk, a couple of times I dropped groups in the middle of a mission when they yelled at me in nasty ways.  All the kiddies want to play the damage dealer and bitch at the healer.  Screw that.  Plus, the wife really never got excited about it, and she convinced me to play DAOC again.

Good god, man.  I mean, I can understand if Guild Wars didn't do it for you, but to then go back to DAoC?  Jesus.

But..  but..  Armsmen can shoot fireballs now!

No, I'd never touch DAoC again either.

Hey, pregnant women have strange taste, and it was worth $30/month to keep her happy!  Now that the baby has actually arrived, it's looking very close to cancellation time.

Mmmm pregnant sex.  Good times!

I get it.  So this was like a "I want a peanut butter and pickel sandwich! And I wanna play DAoC!" kinda thing.

Interestingly, I didn't lose interest at all until both of the builds I helped to found (zealot healer, frag mesmer) which then became "FOTM" got nerfed did I lose interest.

I'm not trying to claim responsibility for the builds or anything, but I did play both before they became uber-common and therefore in need of nerf (although neither was actually, people finally came up with strong counters to both that weren't TOO limited against other builds), but after spending a ton of time polishing both builds for success in pug pvp, and then logging in to find them both nerfed to hell, I haven't logged in since.

Will most probably get back into things once work slows down, but right now I'm at the "meh, I'll play internet backgammon instead" stage.

Try Sudoku?

Spot on  :-P  She stopped eating all ethnic food other than Mexican, and I swear we're lucky the baby didn't pop out wearing a sombrero.

Hey, I did that with my first too.  Couldn't get enough Mexican food.  Couldn't stand sweet food at all - not even mildly sweet.  No Chinese, no Thai, not even Japanese food.

Then with my second, it was the opposite.  Couldn't stand Mexican food.  Felt compelled to eat jelly beans of all things.  Sweet sweet food, more more more.  Ice cream.  Cookies.  Chinese food.

Odd because my first child is a boy who has no sweettooth at all (although he also doesn't like Mexican food).  Won't eat cookies, cake, icecream or candy.  Nothing sweet.

Child #2 is a girl who loves chocolate (is there a female who doesn't?), candy, ice cream, cookies - although she also is an adventurous eater who will try most anything.

Maybe there's something to that "snips and snails and puppy dog tails" and "sugar and spice and everything nice" thing.  Probably not.

Anyway, long way of saying, don't expect it to be the same way next time.  Next time it'll be "Pizza and latte and CoH!"

GW was heavily marketed to MMORPG and FPS +PVP audiences. That drove good sales and good word of mouth the first 2-3 months. But by now the PVP community for GW is practically dead. What is left over there pretty much amounts to the community being 95% throw together type guilds, little to no community coordination, etc. Almost all the good guilds have moved on or left in disgust.

So if you take a lot of the +PVP people out of any expansion equation, I doubt GW sequels will sell as well as the original box. That doesn't mark it as a failure, but I think they're stupid if they think expansions are going to sell a million copies each. GW Chapter 2 will probably do around 5-600,000 without a real PVP community this time.

I think your going to slowly see people drift back to it..  I have been playing twice a week or so just working my way through the missions so I can get to the gooey pvp content only center.  Will the true pvp guilds ever come back?  I would say yes, because pvp in the current crop of MMO's sucks monkey balls, just as meaningless and non-world changing as GW but witout the depth of strategy and balance.

The real question is, will they add enough to the pvp gametypes, objectives, experience in the first xpack to impress or will it just be a "Look new classes, items and skills!  Now with some power creep!".

I guess this is Half-Full versus Half-Empty Debate.

I read somewhere that the expansion will focus on guilds which sucks for me since I am permanently guildless. I hated all the downtime associated will putting together a Build. It just was not fun but absolutely needed.

People keep forming new guilds because its fun to wtfpwn the the low rank guilds.

My long-term problem with GW is, to me, the arena is the most fun( even when the newbie fuck it up), but they think its a training ground and aren't going to put many resources into it.  I think they are going to pull a Mythic and ignore how I want to play and try to force me into playing how Mythic thinks I should play.

If A.net really wants to sell expansions, they should put stealthers in the next expansion.

To be completely honest, I can't play Guild Wars because all my characters (Male) look gay. That, and having entire zones instanced makes me feel more lonely than I should. I don't know one online game where I made friends/etc. except by being "outside" hunting, and randomly grouping. Putting the center of social activity in "lobbies" is stupid, I think.

I know nothing of how shitty the PvP plays out later on.

I have some fairly qualified perspectives on the subject.

My gaming group got our first taste of this one during the "E3 for Everyone" event, and it immediately grabbed our interest as primarily PvP players. We followed the game pretty religiously from then until the next chance to play the game during the various weekend events that were hosted. By "followed the game religiously", I mean we took everything incredibly seriously. We were examining any posts we could find, and even assembled a very crude skill list and planned some PvP team builds for the next event.

In our ranks were several former competitive Magic: the Gathering players, and to them, speccing out a build for a full 8man team wasn't too different from building a deck. It was a lot of fun for all of us, we came up with some really good ideas, and when the weekend preview events actually rolled around, we kicked ass. One night, we faced off against one of the top guilds from the closed Alpha test. We managed to beat them down, and it turned out that one of the developers was playing with them that night. They were impressed that a non-alpha guild had successfully planned out a team build, and offered us an invite to the closed alpha test. Things were good for quite some time.

As mentioned above, the game was marketed heavily to the PvP+ and competitive FPS/RTS crowds as being a team-based game that required very little effort to raise yourself up to competition status. For a good while, this was true. However, at some point along the line, there was what is best described as a takeover by an internal PvE faction of Arenanet. Development and continuation of PvP seemed to pretty much stop, except for the dev who was in charge of balancing all the skills. This is the reason why you're still playing the same handful of PvP maps and gametypes that were available 2 years ago during the E3 for Everyone event. It seemed moronic to a great deal of us in the test, and a pretty massive rift was created between the PvP testers and the PvE testers. For reasons unknown, it seems that Arenanet chose to cater mostly to the PvE crowd, despite the PvP testers repeatedly pointing out that the game had always been marketed to a completely different crowd, and that to attempt to compete with WoW/EQ2 head-on (i.e. on PvE content) was complete suicide. We repeatedly told them that PvP and rapid character development was the only thing to separate them from the competition, but they didn't seem to listen.

One by one, the competitive PvP guilds in the closed Alpha test started to voice serious concerns over the future of the game, and were pretty much ignored. The final insult was when they implemented a completely overhauled method of gaining skills and items (the unlock method) literally one month before release. For the unknowing public, their last exposure to the game was in the final two beta weekend events, in which all skills were unlocked for all characters. Even now, those two final beta weekends were regarded as the best PvP fun ever experienced in the game. Some of the former evangelist top-tier PvP guilds from alpha announced flat out that they were not going to purchase the game due to this change in the skill mechanism. The rest chose to stick it out in hopes that things would be corrected soon after release.

One of the biggest problems GW faced from the very beginning was that the PvP experience was really pretty mediocre unless you were playing with an organized, pre-planned group of players. If you were playing with a pickup group or a random smattering of friends, it was akin to playing a game of Magic: the Gathering where you only chose 8 out of 60 cards in your deck, and the rest were randomly assigned. The game requires an organized team if you want to have any inkling of what the game is really capable of. We had told them for quite a while that assembling a full team of 8 players and having them log on at the same time was a fairly difficult logistical feat, and that offering some form of smaller ranked arranged-team combat was hugely important. This suggestion was also largely ignored. The sudden change to the skill acquisition system was the straw that broke the camel's back. Not only did you need to have 8 people online to actually enjoy the game, but everybody needed to have grinded through the lackluster PvE portion of the game for class X, Y, and Z and unlocked skills 40-60 or whatever was called for by your planned PvP build. If you couldn't meet either of those criteria, it was pretty much a waste of time to even play.

I saw a few people in this thread post messages saying that the PvP fights were mindless and forgettable. That's exactly what I mean about the problem of basically requiring players to play with such a tight unit. I have some fantastic stories, I could recite play-by-play happenings of some fights from the Alpha test - but whenever I couldn't play with my team, I completely agree with the mindless and forgettable assessment. IMO, it could have been a fantastic PvP game, but they chose to spend the last ~2 years of development working on a decidedly mediocre portion of the game rather than playing to their strengths. While a part of me hopes that some day they can fix their mistakes, I think I'd rather see them crash and burn for being so foolish.

I agree with your history lesson, the sucky pve grind made me quit at lvl14 shortly after getting to kryta and realizing I still only had shitty skills with 0 elites and no ability to even attempt any kind of synergistic pvp build.

My friend got me to play again because apparently with the new changes, once you get a character to the end of the pve you never have to do it again.  Also he says he almost always does pickup groups, but where everyone is on vent and they do pre-plan skill builds at least roughly.  I'll post back on whether this is actually true once I've gotten a character to the end of the missions and done whatever I need to do, give me a week or two at my current rate.

Vent pickup groups suck just as bad as regular pickup groups, don't fool yourself.  Been there, done that.

The best option is to find a guild group that needs a couple replacement pickup players.  The problem with that is that you have to be able to play what they need.

I will say this, though- I loved the majority of the PvP in Guild Wars.  Unfortunately, competitive PvP required so much unfun crap to enter into (mainly trying to form a cohesive group of 8 players, getting them all to agree on a strategy and work together) that I just burned out.

I was actually in a guild (House Redfalls, don't know how notorious they ended up being, but people were starting to recognize us as a good guild when I left) but to play with them required that I alter my personal schedule, and I found that most of our builds were reactive rather than proactive (we'd have brainstorming sessions, "Okay, smite groups are popular now- how do we take them out?"  Worked well, but the problem was that we often ended up playing stuff we HAD to play as opposed to stuff we wanted to play).

So I guess the problem is that Guild Wars' design is actually too tight.  Because ideal teams mesh so well together, there's a high bar for entry.  For a game like this, it's absolutely required that they have the instant max level system that they do.  Entire professions will go through months of feeling useless (except monks, heh).

I really don't know how I'd fix it.  I don't think it can be fixed.  It was very elegantly designed and balanced, and that's what drew me into it for so long, but it's that very thing that eventually drove me away.

Even dropping significant into PvP into more diverse settings and smaller team environments wouldn't fix it, as the same behavior would occur there.  Though it would be faster to form the teams, there would be even greater restrictions on what you could play.  With every lost team member, every existing team member becomes that much more valuable, and with them every skill that they bring.

I guess the players drove me away.  They were too quick to master the system.  Maybe the system was too simple to master.

Poor community, boring as wet grass pve balanced for groups or annoyingly stupid henchmen.

Liked the pvp but by the time I got into an ok guild I couldnt stomach the necessary unlocking.

Been said to death but having to unlock stuff killed the game for many people.  I sincerely doubt I'll have the interest to spend any money on expansions.

Yeah 6-700 hours to unlock one dual class toon was annoying. PVPx didn't speed it up by much (400 hours), and just resulted in spamming the ladder with a bunch of smurf guilds.  In season two these same issues are stagnating the ladder, and the PVP community that's left is bitching about smurf guilds again.

Anyway every season there's probably going to be more and more quality folks leaving. They have guilds like "Bathroom Boyz and Erotic Cowboyz" starting to flood the scene.

Out of the early top guilds lists (http://www.lotd.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=18), few of them are still around or 98% of their guilds are raw recruits picked up off the street to replace the folks who have left.

Basically all that's left over there are the scrubs who inherit the earth after the quality folks move away. That, and the lack of commitment by arena.net for a truly competitive game will ensure they don't get my dollars ever again.

What exactly is a smurf guild?

Its a duplicate guild of a real guild already on the ladder. What happens is that after you get so high up on the ladder, you stagnate and have to wait 30-45 minutes for matches.  So what people do is have other accounts with a mule GM that everyone joins, and then you get about 2-3 weeks of regular matches.  When that guild gets too high up, they go make another one and repeat.  What happens is that the same guild essentially holds several top ladder spots, and most of them become inactive placeholders.  As the top of the ladder gets more smurf guilds, it becomes harder for lower ranked guilds to actually move up.  You get far less points for beating lower ranked opponents than higher ones. Smurf guilds are also used for GvsG practice so that the main guild's rating isn't on the line when testing an experimental build.

Anyway smurfs are pretty prevalent on the ladder in the top 300.

Once again the PVP grinding catass community gives me the shits.

Yeah. They are used as "filler" to preserve ladder spots for the real guild, etc.

Here is one of the more recent discussions on it.

http://www.guild-hall.net/forum/showthread.php?t=30955

There were 187 Lions Arch instances last night.

Just sayin.