Anet - Good job, but maybe it's time to change strategy!

A big NO to that
This may lead to even more unfinished chapters and selling things they miss for extra $. Selling small pieces of content would make it much more expensive for the players, unavailable to those that can't buy in the online store, and the effect would be similar to having a monthly fee.
Prophecies actually have some end-game areas - Sorrows Furnace and Tombs
Only Nightfall doesn't, but there will be one added as soon as its finished. And for free.

I'm so glad there is no more faction farming (remember you needed 10,000 faction points for either Luxon or Kurzick) in order to move on to the next mission area.

While I would love to see this happen - the problem is there is no profit in it for Anet - its all expense work. Fans would love it but the business model would not.

Maybe if it were sold as an add on - where they could fix that stuff and maybe fill in more regions on the map, ad quests, maybe even missions and what not they could swing something.

I have a feeling that the next Chapter is going to be something very different... something that we may not even call a Chapter, but a sequel to the trilogy. Guild Wars 2.

Why do I think this? Because I can't see any more links in the current game world to major lands outside of our maps that could be used for new PvE campaigns. Cantha was a fairly obvious one and was predicted early on. After that people quickly looked to the Elonians and the Margonites who had come to the Crystal Desert as the next link - that we'd visit their homeland to the south/east of the desert. And now we have it.

There are things such as the druids of the jungle, the Charr homelands, and the Mursaat 'city'... and even unknown invaders who came across the sea to the Watchtower Coast long ago. But these cannot form a whole new stand-alone chapter in my mind.

The next Chapter is a new beginning after the end of this trilogy and so I believe we may return to the old continents, some years on in game time. There may be new foes invading, or a new destructive force bringing its foot down on Tyria, Cantha and Elona. We may return to see things such as a green, revived Ascalon, Deldrimor victorious in the Shiverpeaks, the White Mantle crushed in Kryta and the old monarchy restored, a new safe path between the Crystal Desert and Elona, new god realms (Dwayna, Lyssa, Melandru) opened up, and the Charr being driven back to the northern lands they came from. And of course in Cantha there may be new trouble afoot between the Luxons and the Kurzicks, or a rebellion against the emperor driven by some evil force. All of these are speculations but there is so much in the old continents that can be refreshed, changed, expanded upon and added to. There are plenty of gaps in Cantha and Tyria that could be filled with new explorable areas and missions against new enemies.

And you never know - with all this they could even refresh the battered old PvP realm, not just with things like new Guild Halls and skills. Plus they haven't given us an improved trading system or better storage or... nah I'll stop there

What I'm saying to the OP is, if one of the teams goes back and reforms the old continents - better to do it all together and make a shining new chapter filled with new content and features. In fact, they may already be doing so.

but why???

I don't want to pay to play some more factions content,

I want to pay for new content....

Prophecies was a finishd project (with tweaking etc...)
Factions is a finishd project (if its good or not thats an oppinion not a fact)
And Nightfall will be a finishd project when chapter 4 comes out

There is nothing interesting in it for them of creating more content for the other chapters.

if anet is doing something new they need to make it as option, not the major chuck on the game.

little risk is good, but the hole thing???

Actually you have to farm 2500 Sunspear points to advance in the storyline. Fortunately this goes somewhat smoothly along with normal questing. Unfortunately its character specific unlike in Factions where you could just get 10k faction and advance all your characters in one pop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
It has happened! ;s

So think Chapter 4 will become what will be known as Guild Wars 2?

Lol at Godwin's Law.



anyways.....................................

I think Anet needs to make a REAL expansion. A Expansion trilogy!! Expand the CORE only.

more realms of the gods.

MORE PvP maps/modes/guild halls.

MORE repeatable high end quests thats accessable from any of the UW/FoW outposts (so all 3 chapters can use it)

MORE armors

Additional CORE skills.

Additional "Dungeons" like Sorrows furnace.

*rambles on*

I resent that

Well please do blame me if this thead will be closed by Wehrmacht

they can sell special minipet,special dance and special skin armors with the same sta as the in game ones for extra bucks. I think that can bring anet some extra money without unbalance the game.

I, for one, loved Factions, I liked the new professions and the looks of the characters, most of ll I loved the theme and feeling of the game, so I would be sad seeing this chapter fade away.

I don't think the game needs a major overhaul, just slowly bring the convenience of each chapter into the previous chapters, such as the storage upgrades were given to Prophecies, albeit a bit later.

I don't want to see playing, in my opinion, a good chapter as a chore, so bring the heroes to the other chapters.

But of course every chapter needs its own content, so leave Factions in Factions and leave Sunspears/Lightbringers in Nightfall, just bring over the stuff that make the game convenient.

And as for revenue, if there was an update disc or something similar, just to make the games generally more enjoyable, better cut-scenes and such, I would buy it as soon as it came out, so I can continue to enjoy a already great expansion.

In other words... don't leave those that enjoyed the older chapters in the dark, please?

[edit]
Please excuse my ignorance, I do not own Nightfall yet and did not know that there are heroes in the older games, if you own Nightfall, if there are any other inaccuracies, well sorry.

That's a bit unfair. You have to consider both Prophecies and Factions as "first efforts" from both development teams. Factions was under development at a time where it was still too early to learn from the experiences of the GW community. Nightfall is the first to do that. The "Factions" team should now have the learned experience to create a better product in the upcoming Chapter 4.

I'm curious to know how many more chapters they will churn out before they decide to do a complete overhaul and begin developing a real sequel - Guild Wars 2. That would entail a new game/graphics engine, completely separate servers and possibly an entirely different world.

Realistically, Anet has about 2 more chapters left to squeeze the life out of the existing GW technology before the general fanbase begins clamoring for something "New". When that happens, it'd be hard to beleive they still maintain active servers for the old GW chapters. Perhaps release a final update that allows players to play the old game offline then repurpose their servers to running the bonafide GW sequel?

They have upgraded DX8 with no 3dsound to DX 9 with advanced effects and implemented DirectSound3d & EAX.

I can see "GuildWars 2" where they change fundamentally game mechanics. I would love a final "offline" mod if there going to move own or end the series.

Yes, because they certainly haven't added any new effects to the graphics engine, right? They certainly didn't implement DX9 support etc after release, why that would be impossible! Wait a second, they did update it, and they will continue to do so.

That's the beauty of Guild Wars, they can expand and upgrade the existing product as much as they want to, they'll continue making chapters as long as we keep buying them

Chapter 5 might have radical changes if Anet decides the ball needs to change in response to Nightfall, but don't forget that Chapter 4 is already halfway done. It's halfway to release date. Chances are they have already written and coded out most of it and are just moving into 'internal alpha testing.'

That means it will probably be reflective of concerns these communities raised a few months ago about Factions and Prophesies, and less so over the broad acceptance of Nightfall.

In the next six months, they will be able to bootstrap on a few ideas gained from our feedback over nightfall, but most changes chapter 4 will have put in from what came in Nightfall; will have already been put in there by now, based on what they 'guessed' would work out good.

It may very well be that around this 'time' last chapter - when Factions first came out, Nightfall had code for alliance battles. Certainly the fact that Nightfall exists in the backdrop of a war indicates that it -could- have been coded to have a super-sized version of alliance battles. But in the last six months they had an opportunity to strip that out when it failed in the community.

However, other Factions features are present in Nightfall - such as skill trainers rather than quests - despite being generally unpopular... Probably because by the time Factions came out it would have been too much an overhaul to rewrite all of Nightfall to include for skill quests...

So... my guess is that the bulk of chapter 4 is going to resemble what we were asking about and ranting about a month ago and on back, and everything from here on out will be reflected in a minor portion of the changes.

The development cycle has half the time for each chapter finished by the time the chapter before it comes out, and that somewhat slows the pace of change.

Hi Trin! Yea, I agree. The idea of having it as an add-on might work, but I doubt ANet will go for it, for the reasons you mentioned.

Jeff actually said the NF is the last in a trilogy? That's interesting. I wonder what the next chapter will bring!

I think Anet should take it as a compliment that so many players would like to see the previous chapters "spruced up" with some new content, and other ideas the OP has. This to me says that you are involved enough in the Guild Wars world that you would hate to see it fall into disuse.

I see it as you loved Tyria and loved/hated Cantha enough that you WANT a reason to go back and re-visit these lands. But as it is now, once you finish everything there is to do, there really is no reason to hang around when new chapters with new lands are released. I feel this way about Tyria, it will always be my ele's home, I just need a good reason to go back there. besides redoing all the missions.

I think Factions has so much hate because it just doesn't feel like some things in the game were used to their full potential. Well, take the whole idea of gainging faction...what did it really get you? Not much. Jade or amber for armor. Controlling a town? netted you a very slim discount at the merchant, big whoop. Give us a REAL reason to work hard for faction to control a town. And the most pointless thing in Factions to me was the moving of the line on the map? What did it get you if you were on the winning side? Jack and sqwat. If I am wrong please correct me but it only gain a side control of that town in the whirlpool. Big whoop. They could have made the line move so that a side could capture the others CAPTIAL! That would have made Alliance battles worth playing for. Just seems like Factions was a lot of ideas that never were fully fleshed out to their full potential. I could go on about Factions but thats all I am saying here.

So back on target. I would LOVE to see some attention given to Tyria and Cantha but I seriously doubt Anet will for financial reason, which is a crying shame

Didnt Jeff once said, in a friday feature back in 2004 or something that the GW engine is very scaleable?

I heard it was something like this: the gw rendering engine actually treats objects, players and so on as boxes that are tied to a big plane. this is why there is no Y-axis and why we cant jump.

so its like that our characters and everything in the world is squares with their own skins.

because of this there apparently is no stopping them for making the game looking as good as they want to in 10 years, even though, maybe then there technology will be old if they do not want to upgrade it.


Personally I dont want to see a GW2. I can't imagine that. I hope Anet will do something else. I hope they will look at GW as a child... as something that can not be surpassed, but as something they will continue to support as long as they want to, and then start working on other things unrelated to GW.



I think the game could really benefit from a new paint of coat. perhaps a new loot rarity system, or better running animations, or better enviorment pathing, or improving the many "invisible walls" in GWP!...

Maybe do some things to add reason to do small side quests? perhaps adding some more social structures, or trade skills?

there are so many things that can be done with the game. I feel like the amount of classes is perfect right now. The only thing I miss is a shapeshifter class, and perhaps a stealth based class, but besides that, GW seems to have everything covered.


perhaps it is time to add two-handed swords and axes, and 1 handed hammers? maybe dual wielding swords/axes/hammers for assassins? maybe halberds and two handed spears for deverish? or crossbow for ranger?

or pet armor?


or spirit/minion/pet customization?



there are alot of great stuff and ideas from many players. I hope Anet will want to improve their past games to keep interest. they might fight for getting as many accounts as possible, but they should also worry about getting so many campaigns per account as possible, for their added revenue?

^^ wholeheartedly agreed with everything typed. All of these ideas. Amazing.


Lol- before my scythe skin fully loaded, it showed up as a character-sized huge box. It was hilarious.

While I agree with most of your ideas (except that ANet should STOP GW), I personally think that these changes should be gradually rolled in with new campaigns.

This time around we got skill templates and a whole other slew of features we've been requesting. By chapter 4, I'm strongly hoping that an auction house will be in place.

What is all this talk about starting over with a GW2. I think that the idea of creating a world to explore and being able to take the charter you created in the first game all the way through to the last game is a really great concept. As I see it Anet is creating a world with each new game release. As of now we have three parts to a huge puzzle. After they have finished creating the world via chapters every 6 months they can work on creating new up dates for each chapter that use some of the ideas from this post. Like creating quest that cross chapters and adding more content to each chapter like Sorrows Furnace.

Because after they have finished with there chapters what then? What will they do to keep making money and keep the game alive will they start charging a monthly fee or will they start digging into the older versions and tuning them up via expansion packs?

I have played a lot of role playing type games and this one is by far my favorite one. I have to say great job to all the guys and galls at Anet. There is so much to do and so many different things to do I don’t see this games popularity trailing off anytime soon. Like a lot of people have said Diablo II is still going strong. I loved that game but after you beat it what more is there to do? After I got the armor and weapons I liked I was throwing piles of gold on the ground and just letting it all go to waste because there was nothing to do with it. In this game I’ll never have enough gold to do everything I want to do or buy every thing I want to have. Maybe after a while but right now trying to keep 11 characters armed and armored is extremely expensive. Not to mention that after all of the chapters are released I’ll have up to 20 something characters to keep up. So back to the point what will Anet do to keep making money and keep the game alive after they have finished with the last chapter?

In one of the radio interviews (the VGM Daily radio pods) right before/around Factions release, he mentioned something about jumping.. as in a future feature if I remember correctly.

I'm not looking for GW2 myself, I'm looking at C4 for new worlds, npc's, maybe new gods/realms?

Agreed. I think that Tyria and Cantha have a lot of room for additions, tweaks, improvements and maybe new areas like Sorrow's Furnace (even though I think I read that Jeff said they would no longer do this type of addition).

I think Guild Wars is still too 'new' to be already be thinking about its next generation. I never played EQ, but did EQ2 do as well as the original? Just saying that sometimes, when a company hits upon a good formula, like Guild Wars, well, why mess with a good thing? Its still way to early in the game to go and change everything and change how we play the game

the big question is weither there will be a Campaign 4 or will it go straight to Guild Wars 2, this would allow them to add alot of missing features in without messing things up. They could then return there attention to more actual Guild wars cause as it is story wise its had very very little to do with warring of guilds otehr than the mentions of the "guild Wars" in Tryia, set before all teh current games. Dont get my wrong the saga so far has been very good and NF is def a step in the right direction gameplay wise but story wise i think they need to look back a bit there, leaving huge great big gaps in the places theve already made

Well, I have several ideas regarding most of the topics I have read here, and some that I have not seen brought up just yet (although I did skip a significant portion of the posts, so sorry if I repeat something that has already been said).

First, would be the problem with updating the older chapters. My solution to this would be to create another team, although smaller than those for the game production's themselves, that will work solely on updating previous chapters and adding new content to keep the fanbase from feeling that everything is loosing its flavor and/or getting far to repetitive/old.

Their job would be to add new features, such as the god realms, new item skins, and perhapse explorable areas, to the older chapters, to cover skill updates/balances, and to take new features from more recent chapters, that are currently chapter-exclusive, and implement them into the older chapters (inscriptions, for example).

Second, would be the concern about having a chapter every 6 months. Some people think this is fine, others think the time should be 1 year, for various reasons. I say that the time between chapters should in fact be increased, but NOT to 1 year per chapter. This ammount of time will, for even casual players, begin to feal dragged out. My ideal time-frame for chapter release would have to be 8-9 months.

Reasons - this gives people time to fully experiance the game without it being dragged out for to long of a time, and give the developers more time to place finishing touches on new (and preferbly more in-depth, although Nightfall is exelent) releases, while hopefully not loosing revenue.

Third would be my idea for a solution to the problem of having to many classes by adding additional chapters (I do NOT believe they should create a new trilogy/series for Guild Wars - keep it all one massive world please), would be to re-use already existing classes in future chapters. Example would be for chapter 5, instead of adding yet 2 more new classes, or not adding any classes, would be to have, say, assassin and dervish available.

Unfortuantly, that does not solve the problem with additional skills becoming repetitive and overwhelming, but it at least gets through part of the problem of connecting every future chapter to Prophecies.

Fourth and last, some of my ideas for improving gameplay, and additional ideas for future chapters.

Change Hall of Heroes back to 8-player, and more importantly, although not by much, allow ONLY ONE HERO PER PLAYER, and only in PvP arena's where henchmen are allowed.

Remove town-control from Factions entirely. This feature sevearly hampers access to areas of the game for the casual player, and greatly promotes "grinding" for faction. This (in my oppinion, and I am shure that of many others) was a horrible idea. In its place, add some other benefit for increasing faction for your guild/aliance. Perhaps something such as a greater ability to customise your character.

To promote GvG even further (this is what the game was made for, was it not), offer a new reward to those guilds that reach the top16 (or maby top32) to design a guild emblem, if they wish, that is exclusive for their guild. Of course, it would probably have to follow the same rules as all the other "design-an-emblem" contests that have been hosted. The details would be for NCSoft/ArenaNet to work out.

Remove locked gates, and instead implement something similar to the story/exploration used in Nightfall to both Factions and Prophecies. Make the Prophecies mission maps explorable areas as well, similar to Nightfall, and populate the explorable aspect of Factions mission maps with creatures.



Possable skill and class ideas for future chapters:

Shapeshifter: the design for this class should be obvious - the ability to change into other creatures, and use skills associated with what you shift into.

Rogue: the assassin was an exelent class in my oppinion, but does not promote stealth the way many people wished it would. Create a class that uses stealth-orrented skills to accomplish their goal. Perhaps even include an ability to locate ranger traps, disarm traps, and use traps themselves.

Summoner: this class would be similar to a beastmaster ranger, exept that they would have all their attribute's orrented around their "pets". These creatures should work similar to a ranger's pet in attack skills, and that they are always there when the skill is equipped. They should, however, work similar to a necromancer's minions to determine the level of the creature possessed by using the attribute levels. The primary difference between the necromancer or ranger, however, would be the limit on how many creatures you can have - one creature per skill.

Example: it would be possable to have 8 creatures helping you at all times, but you will have no other skills available to improve them, so their relative power would be based solely off your atribute levels, or alternativly, you could possess 1-2 creatures, with several support/attack skills for them, and effectivly have them all much more powerful than if you were using 8.

Sacrafice skills: a new idea for sacrafice-skills of the necromancer, is to have skills that require the health sacrafice WITHOUT costing energy in addition. Also, it should be possable to implement sacrafice skills with a fixed health cost, instead of a percentage (similar to Illusion of Weakness)

Hexes: perhaps include "maintained hexes" - hexes, that once cast, reduce the pips of energy regeneration while in effect, and remain in effect untill the caster dismisses, are removed, or the target leaves range, working similar to maintained enchantments. Such maintained skills could also possably include shouts and stances as well.

Maintained spells: Spells that are maintained currently always reduce your energy regeneration by 1pip for each one you maintain. Why not broaden this by including more powerful maintained spells that "cost" 2pips of energy regeneration, or even 3? Also, it could be expanded to loosing a fixed amount of energy, such as "while this spell is maintained, you loose x energy each second", or maby even include spells that are maintained through health degeneration or exaustion (1 energy point becomes exausted each second you maintain it). I am quite shure there are many more possabilities I have not listed here.

Edit Also perhapse include a hex that, while in effect, causes the target to maintain all the enchantments they have in effect.

Storage: the material storage was an exelent idea. This should be taken farther. Rune storage, dye storage, ect. Also, why not increase the cap on how much materials of a given type you can store as another gold sink? [for (previous cost + 50) gold, increase the max amount of materials you can store by 50 (150 (50+100) gold for 300 storage, 300 (50+100+150) gold for 350 storage, ect.]

And Finaly
Commonly asked for additions:
-Increased storage space
-Guild storage
-Auction system
-all others I cannot think of currently for some reason...


For those of you who acualy read through my long-a** post, I would like to see if you like these suggestions or not, and if not, WHY. Please do not respond declaring me or my ideas as retarded, noob, ect. without explaining why.

And yes, there are many more ideas where that came from, I'm just tired at the moment and cannot think of them.

NO! NO! AND NO!

No postponing, I want my chapter IV now if I could have it, but all i want to weight is six months and it has ALREADY been in development for six months since the release of factions, so shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Don't ruin it for the rest of us.

as many people say.

If you don't like it then make like a tree and get out of here O.o

The solution to "too much too fast" is a simple shift in personal thinking; if you are not ready for Chapter IV, V, VI... then do not buy it on release day. Wait till you are ready, then buy it.
Everyone in GW seems to oddly think (myself prior to NF) that "gotta have now and first" is the way to play the game.
Like I said, shifting my thinking in the game to slowing down has actually increased my enjoyment of it ten fold.

There is also the option of buying the new chapters and going back and forth between them at your leisure.

The point here is keeping options rather than limiting them. Anet's release on 6 months keeps options available to players while keeping their money coming in.

My only gripe with their release schedule is when it is use as an excuse for missing "standard" features*... standard in that every other online game has the feature, yet GW is missing said feature... or when a feature is renamed or mislabeled as content (when anyone with half a brain can tell the difference) and spun into some marketing crud to sell a weak chapter /coughFactionsMaterialStoragecough

*The excuse of "with a 6 month turn around, resources are thin"... blah blah blah - If you can't meet the demand, hire more workers or as this post says "change strategy".

There doing great as is, they have a year to work in it, its not like there building the game engine every chapter. They do a great job, but I do like the new team idea, to revisit older chapters. Enough new classes IMO, rather have more new PvE.

I've always wanted all those fogged areas in the map to be explored.
Same as they added Surrows furnace and opened that part of the map.
There are huge areas in each map that can benefit from that.

I love this suggestion. Honestly, just add a little more things to keep us busy and slow down. How about for one thing, give us a reason to do all the quests besides experience.

How about, make recruiting and finding a guild easier. I quit GW he first time because a lot of things required a guild of atleast 6-8 people who wanted to cooperate with you in a mission or in PvP.

Catacombs?
Gwen mystery?

The ability to fight Shiro in UW?
A quest to take out the Am Fah or Jade Brotherhood leader? (Kinda like Ruby/Sapphire in Pokemon)

I think there are some good suggestions for improvements and valid points brought up here. The one thing I haven't seem alot of is input on how to implement these improvements aside from the OP saying drop a chapter or go to 1 year cycles. I have a more radical approach: MOD. Have a very small team that is responsible for maintaining the code (which they already have) and allow users to mod the game. This is really scary on a MMO because then you have users changing things that other users liked/hate now in addition to the whole piracy issue.

I think that given a group that is responsible for dissemination and incorperation of the modders content a software house can get a ton of free work off the modding community so why not put it to use improving guild wars? I'm not suggesting that this would be an easy solution to roll out as the integration of a project of this size would be a TON. Also it would give users even more access to improve the game than the already impressive amount granted now.

You do realize that anet needs to make money, correct? You also realize that your one time purchase of $50 doesnt entitle you to constant, free upgrades, forever, when the company could be say....making a new chapter, so they can actually...earn income?

Yes I love free upgrades to old chapters as much as the next guy, but waiting a year between releases, while keeping up the work on already released material, cuts their yearly revenue in HALF.

Guild wars needs to make money, otherwise, you wont be able to play any chapter after awhile, because they wont be making enough money to justify keeping the servers running.

They do update the game with bug fixes/skill updates/holiday events, which apply to older chapters, this is great, and all that I think can realistically be expected. They also added specific heros for older chapters. They do little things. But taking half a year off, and cutting their revenue in half to focus on it? be realistic.

I love GW and want it to last for many many years, and in order to do that, and keep their no fee buisness model, they need to make money, and to make money means they sell new chapters

it has already been confirmed that chapter 4 was started on the release of Factions and is well on its way for release at the end of April 07.

as Alex Weekes posted some time ago chapter 4 is already under way and is well in development.

there will not be a GW 2 as they would have to start over losing about 5 years of work

Honestly, I tend to care more about the story development, new environments, and such than about the new features (however, the Heroes are my favorite new feature so far). The PvP is fun, but I don't play it quite as much as PvE. To me, I enjoy a persistant online world where I can jump in with friends and run around killing stuff - simple as that. The cooler that experience, the happier I am.

For me, I'm not tired of GW gameplay yet. So I guess the answer to your question is: yes, I'm happy so far. I think they'll probably have to pull out a few stops to keep me happy in future chapters, but I have a feeling we're going to see a lot of innovative things in the next few chapters. Keep in mind that this is still a young dev team still getting a handle on their own technology. I think Nightfall is more of an expression of what can be done when you are working with a more mature technological base, and have devs who really know how to squeeze the most out of it.

I think you're actually right on the money with your original idea Lawnmower, but I think you're probably about two to three chapters too early. I'm guessing somewhere around GW 5 or 6 we'll hear about some next gen development. Even if they already are thinking about their next products, they certainly wouldn't announce anything to the public, because that would draw attention away from their current products. I think this is also why we don't hear anything about the next GW game until well after the first one has been released.

Oh, and don't forget that anet has been hinting that console development on xbox 360 is looking more promising (although they've said nothing specific, of course) now that MS has loosened up some of it's business model restrictions. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that anet is working on a console game - maybe their next game will be completely multi-platform. That's complete speculation on my part of course, but it's fun to think about.

Hey Claw. Oh, I'm perfectly aware of upgrade from DX8 to 9 in NF but you have to admit that's a pretty minor change.

Anet has a pretty solid streaming/upgrade infrastructure in place already and if they can continually keep GW up-to-date through successive generations of technology, then I suppose I have seriously underestimated their game engine.

Launching a full sequel (GW2) would definitely risk dividing the player base. But if they were to introduce a slew of new, fundamental gameplay changes (going far beyond heroes, AI tweaks, etc.), then it may make marketing sense to just label it a full sequel and just distinguish it from the "old" GW.

I find it hard to believe the engine driving GW currently will last forever with continual upgrades. There comes a time when you have to start from scratch and bring something completely new to the table. Look at the generational leaps in other games... Doom 2 to Doom 3, Morrowind to Oblivion... Look, even if the gameplay remains fundamentally the same (and let's face it: most sequels do not screw with a winning formula), making a true sequel will be inevitable because to the consumer, a sequel screams "new, improved, cutting-edge".

There will come a day whe Anet makes a new announcement and a lot of people will say, "Oh please, yet another GW expansion!"

QFT - I would love to go back and finish the business with the Charr and those White Mantle bastages!

edit* I don't suppose they will overhaul the first two chapters, but it would be awesome if they did!

I'm not sure about the extent to which you are discussing modding -- I think if mods were limited to new models or textures it would be fairly simple to handle. An oversight team would naturally have to assess content for approval, but looking at new models and skins doesn't seem to me to be something that is going to be incredibly demanding on the GW team / ANet's finances. The benefits are, of course, quite high, with huge amounts of new content available for free. Other than losing the creative control of having themed armor for each campaign, I don't see a huge downfall to it. One could even have a checkbox to allow/disallow custom models/skins, and if one disallowed custom material (too much to download, etc.) a fallback option could be specified so that someone need not see your armor if they don't want to.

Having more substantial mods - Literally new items, new functionalities, new areas - Would be an order of magnitude tougher, particularly if anyone could submit their "Elementalist Farm Area #29" or "Obviously Broken Weapon" 9998-9999 dmg. I think if a real effort were made towards incorporating more substantial mod content like this you'd need a dedicated QC team and have to have some kind of reputation system whereby a modding team/individual would have to have so many quality releases under their belt before they could even submit more substantial content for review.

In any case, I agree with the general premise that producing expansion packs every 6 months is unlikely to be a serious long term strategy for Guild Wars. The core gameplay isn't changing, and the design decisions against grinding and for having a unified PvE and PvP environments limit the viable lifetime of the game. This isn't a MMORPG where buying the expansions raises your level cap and gives you access to a slew of higher powered gear to collect.