Post Mortem

[Xanthippe]

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!"

[waylander]

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?

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.

[Hoax]

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!".

[tazelbain]

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.

[stray]

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.

[Gong]

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.

[Hoax]

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.

[Llava]

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.

[Wasted]

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.

[waylander]

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, 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.

[HaemishM]

What exactly is a smurf guild?

[waylander]

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.

[HaemishM]

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

[waylander]

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

[Krakrok]

There were 187 Lions Arch instances last night.

Just sayin.