shouldnt they drop the price of the old chapters?

Think of it this way:

The core program is free.

You are paying for the world content (quests, locations, armors, music, weapons, etc.) and skills.

Prophecies and Factions are not "older" games. They might be "older" content, but they are hardly inferior content. Not only that but I find them to be quite nicely filled with other players. And, if you hero/hench the game, the number of players is irrelevant anyway.

With regards to the fact that Prophecies only includes 6 professions instead of 8; this is a good argument for making Prophecies a bit cheaper (which it is at most retailers), but Prophecies also has a huge amount of game content. It remains the largest Guild Wars chapter by far with regards to missions, explorable areas, etc.

The design of Guild Wars was influenced by trading card games like Magic: The Gathering. Generally, Magic sets don't get cheaper with time. The "old" cards you buy are just as valuable for gameplay as newer cards.

So, I don't think it's that likely that you'll find older Guild Wars chapters in the "bargain bin" unless the store managers are just ignorant. You can also expect that NCSoft will not charge less than $49 for online keys regardless of the age of the chapter.

There's little incentive to charge less for older chapters. If you like Guild Wars enough to buy an older chapter, that's great. If you want to wait and buy a newer chapter, that's great, too... as long as you keep on buying

Anet wouldn't put out more copies than their servers can support. If the copies are just sitting in the store, its not doing anyone any good. I'm saying that if they lowered the price, it'd be more incentive for people to buy the game. One big problem with Prophecies is that the n00b area is way too long after people have already played through Factions/Nightfall. The introduction areas are not that exciting once you've already been through it once (or 3 times actually for me). Not to mention, its probably a pain in the butt to get groups now for Prophecies, making it not nearly as fun to play.

EDIT: Just realized they're selling the old chapters for 39.99, If that's the price they set, then its probably their profit maximizing price, so I guess I can't say much about that.

Hmm, I would have to disagree since I'm getting lagged out & several people are getting the error 7 & getting kicked from the game or have problems when loading.

My friend just picked up NF Friday & we were playing that night & when he would zone, it would take forever or he would be kicked from the game. He had trouble with it all weekend. It wasn't his connection though because he ended up playing City of Heros the rest of the weekend instead due to the problems playing NF.

Before NF, I rarely ever experienced any form of lag. Mind you I have Roadrunner & in my area we have VERY fast connections & on my circut, I always get great bandwidth, even in peak hours.

Every time the servers feel stress, I am sure they make changes to eliminate those issues in relation to the amount of stress... Nightfall plus Halloween is the reason we all had some weird connection issues over that weekend... You can bet they will compensate for that from now on...