Community

I was going to respond within the thread where I found this, but it would have been off-topic there, and I think it deserves some independent philosophical attention.

"Community" is about like-minded individuals mutually sharing experiences. The important part is "like-minded".

Nightfall (Guild Wars) is now mostly a game where solitary individuals play the game with their hero/hench entourage and can easily play without so much as speaking with another human being. This is not community.

My guess is that many, many of the people running from merchant to merchant, portal to portal, within towns in Guild Wars would prefer to play missions and explore the game with a "friend" or two.

But they don't even bother with it because of the fear/perception that they'll end up teaming up with someone who's above/below their experience level or is too immature/serious.

So, many go through the game alone.

It sounds like I'm talking about real life... and I am, because the social aspect of an online game is in many ways "real life".

Someone who is 10-14 years old is at a different social maturity level than someone who is 30+. Someone who wants to "farm" is looking for a different experience than someone who is preparing for competitive PvP, or someone who wants a deep role-playing experience. Some people want to play with strangers, some people want to play with a single close friend, some people simply want to be left alone.

None of these approaches to Guild Wars, or to life, are wrong. All are valid, and all provide a measure of fun to the player appropriate to their style of play.

For people who want to play with other human beings, the problem is that it's very hard to find "partners".

...

When the "Guild Wars community" is spoken of, it's spoken of as the whole monolithic collection of every player that plays Guild Wars.

This is where the mistake is made. Is the United States a like-minded community? In light of recent elections, of course not. The only real commonality is that we all "play" in the same country.

I think attention should be focused on creating in-game mechanisms to enable people to find, establish, foster, and support their "community" within the Guild Wars universe.

There is an attempt at supporting player-managed communities in the form of "guilds". However, there's no in-game mechanism for finding the right guild for you, advertising guilds, finding friends, etc. The chat channel is simply not enough, and it tends to be a blur of immature nonsense.

An auction house isn't going to fix it. A universal trading post is neat, but doesn't foster community any more than eBay does.

Being able to vote kick isn't going to fix it. That would just be a mechanism to address a symptom, but would likely worsen the problem.

"Aw, crap. We let you in because you were a Monk, but you suck. <Kick>"

In this case, you can't really fault the group for being jerks, nor the monk player for being a n00b. It was simply a bad match-up. The player styles are of a different community mindset.

The players looking for an experienced monk need the ability to find (and join) like-minded experienced players at the same maturity level. The inexperienced players need to find safe haven with other players at the same maturity level learning the ropes.

So, though it might sound funny to say that a game needs a "dating service". I think the quoted poster above is onto something. Guild Wars needs more than a "LFG" window so you can find a monk. It needs a way to bring like-minded players together to form meaningful communities so that people of different maturity, mentality, and motivation can enjoy the game... in their own ways... to the fullest.

aren't exactly these the guilds?

I think the new use for Alliances system's is a huge step towards this (and was when it was 1st implemented in factions).

It easily allows like minded guilds to be a community. I like NF a lot. It is different but Hero's had to be implemented. Mainly for dwindling populations in older chapters where finding a party would be much worse.

I do think NF has / will change a lot of the gw community / play style but it was a pro-active change vs a reactive change, and I think if they acted too late.. they would lose more people in the long run.

I personally look for human players before I go the hero/henchmen route but I have the option to do it in case I can't find a human players or a group that can't find the illusive monk they need.

At guildwars launch, everyone was explore this new and different game, non-goal exploring parties were easy to find. As people became good at the game, change in culture, before Factions came out, the culture shifted to goal oriented pug's. This was true with factions but alliances of guilds helped foster bigger communities, still closed communities, but an increase over original gw.

The other thing to consider since each chapter has it own "think". Hero's may be an NF only thing and not seen in Chp 4. Just like town control was a factions exclusive. Has anet stated hero's are here to stay?

I too would like some in game system that promotes more interaction but I admit at a loss of ideas of what could be that would work. Only things that come to mind is in-game advertisement system / board for guild / alliances. And an "search / party / join" system that works across districts that finds people that want to party. Similar to FFXI system.

One thing that hero's does that I've not heard mentioned is how it makes you be a better player. The reason for this is hmm I now have a (insert class you never play hero) how in the world can I make x usefull. It forces you to learn other jobs, you may still not like to play them but you find out really quick popular builds, how they work, and understand more of how they interact within a team or if there fighting you with the generic guild styles, how to combat it.

this would help - especially with missions (if you are not at mission outpost)

EverQuest, DAOC, WoW and many other online games have this too

Why should ANet have to do everything for you? Personally, I'd rather they spent their time developing new content. I'm sorry you have trouble finding "partners", but we all do. Either in life or in GW it is always hard finding quality friends. Who do you complain to in real life when you can't find any good friends?

Try going to guild universe, they have pages and pages of information on guilds, it gives you some idea who and what they are about. Then maybe ask to join them.

If you are set on only playing with people you don't know, then it's gonna take you a while to find groups. And if that is the case then how is that helping the guild wars community if you only want to play with random people? If you don't wish to wait to find those random groups, play with your heroes. If you want to find some in-game friends, troll some message boards, get yourself out there, ask to join up with people.

Here's a million dollar idea for you...why don't you create some sort of "dating" service to be used in association with GW?

Good insights to the OP. I agree with the problems you see.
How these issues are addressed is the question. I then agree with the responders in that, Anet creating a guild matching serves with the care eharmony would put in a dating serves is above and beyond all expectancy. (in todays gaming market)

Ideas about getting strangers to group up have been in discussion for a long time and some really good ideas have come out of it, in fact these improvements are as frequently requested as an auction system these days.
Even an ingame Guild search and recruit system would be dandy.
So yeah, a lot can be done to facilitate players into playing with a group.

But you’re taking it to a deeper level. The kinds of questions a player would have to answer could lead them to a group of nearly identically like minded players and that’s a powerful assistance.
If anet wants to go there ... more power to them, it should help out. But if they don’t no big deal, because no online game does this. (to my knowledge) And if not done with the finest professionalism Anet will receive criticism for their efforts while any jabrony could halfass it and get props.
I don’t build webpages but Id help put one together as it does sound like a solid idea for a third party support.

People join guilds to lightly. They should take the time to find the right guild that matches them.
I first joined a guild to lightly, it was a bad decision by me. The second was better informed decision, but still I joined to lightly, the people were ok, but wrong timezone.
Third time I got it right. I've been over a year with the same guild now. Not everything is sunshine and roses of course, but overal I'm quite happy.

My first guild... I joined too lightly... actually i didn't even know i joined untill there were green messages coming all the time from people i didn't know on the char window ( rofl )... and honestly for some reason it was the best guild i ever had.... friendly people, we used to spend time together, do missions, farm, pvp, or just dance naked in the water... i had so much fun with them those 7 months i spend there till it all went to hell, due to some arguments the leader and officers had... anyway, i doubt there will be such a guild ever again, i could join lol:P

Perhaps if the game had a concept of "classifieds". So at the account level, you would answer a series of questions. Maybe 10 or so about your play frequency, style of play (PvP/PvE/Both), times that you are online, age, casual/hardcore, motivation, and other relevant questions.

The creator of a guild would do the same for the guild. Then a player could "look up" guilds that match their profile and proceed to contact the guild that they are interested in joining.

The idea is that you are looking for a maturity/mentality/motivation/experience match. It's not about what professions you have and such.

I suppose such a matchmaking service could be created outside of the game via someone's personal web page or in one of these community forums. But I don't think I agree that you should have to look outside of a game to find and become part of a community within the game.

But, you are right, ANet doesn't have to do everything for us, but the easier they make it to help players match up, the better for everyone, and the game.

Thats what im doing to!

.....Its been over a year now and i am still guildless.

I decided to set up a guild after remaining Guild-less for a long time after my brother decided to play Guild Wars. Ahortly after I for my fiancée interested in it so now we have an incredible size of three members. As leaer of the guild I decided long ago not to allow anyone in one of us did not know in person. My brother had, as of yet, not managed to convince any of his friends to play GW and mine started playing GW before me and so are all in separate guilds.

We did find another good guild around and are now in an alliance with them...I think we have 5 guilds in the alliance and we all seem to get on pretty well.

Interesting topic and one I struggle with everyday, do I continue my own PvE progress
thru the game or do I go help other guildies catchup and then maybe we could do
some quests and missions together ???
Problem is, we all play at different times of the day and night and our progress
will always be at different levels, so this won't work, I live in the USA and our guild
is USA ppl, but I have one of my accounts in the Europe districts, why ??, easy
Europe has favor most of the time, so I moved over there.

Time for lame idea :

Get rid of all the America, Europe, Japan, Korea areas, and the favor system, make it
for anyone can go there anytime, and have districts setup by language, then we would
have more ppl in each town at all times of the day.

I have not finished the game yet, taking my sweet time with this one, but I personally
feel we are going to end up with missions towns like Factions, ghost-towns, like
the last couple of missions in Factions were very empty of ppl.

Well.. Hero's are a good add on, very very, very good add-on but, I agree, I do like to travel with at least one friend when doing something. Like when chest running, i usually enjoy 2-3 people, especially now that all people have to open. But when doing average PvE, I like having another person with there heroes making it deadly combo for the enemy.

I like to place the majority of the responsibility on the community developers in how the community is developed too. Why I would cut them a break here is for three reasons:
1) It’s a brand new idea and there is risk in reward vs. cost of development
2) If the reward was only gratitude, the players have proven themselves hard to impress. This product would have to be full-blown professionally developed (in which case it would probably kickass) or don’t even bother expecting a thank you.
3) Anet has proven themselves in taxing the patience of their players; it gets assumed that they have a lot of other things to do

If it weren’t for these obstacles I would say they have no excuse. But given them I say it’s ok to not go all out. (but at least help strangers find others outside of chat spam)
What the players could do to put this together, free of cost, could prove to be valuable in gathering information. If proven to be most resourceful, anet, blizzard and sony would probably start considering these things as a standard community tool for community based games. But until the system is proven it’s just a novel idea and a potential risk.
I personally have faith in it. That’s why I said Id help.

I could imagine the kinds of questions that needed to be answered to make this work:
Personal – age, language, pve characters, etc.
Purchases – prophesies, factions, pvp packs, etc
Time – time zone, number of total hours, hours you play during the week, etc
Play style – play for gear, play for titles, play for ladder, favorite profession, etc

Example question:
Answer the following questions by ranking 5 for highly agree to 0 for absolutely disagree.
Why do you play?
a) play to win 5 - 4 -3 -2 -1 -0
b) play to have fun 5 - 4 -3 -2 -1 -0
c) play to work with guildmates 5 - 4 -3 -2 -1 -0
d) play to relax (escape job, spouse, etc) 5 - 4 -3 -2 -1 -0

The system could match you up with a guild or just match you up with players with whom you could start a guild or something.


Im sure if you look around you can find suggestions for ingame guild recruiting services, but they would be sub par to the kind of thing you’re bring up.
As far as a grab and go mentality for players to get into the game, play and then step out with a team of human players - these ideas are, imo, are some of the most well suited.

http://www.guild-hall.net/forum/showthread.php?t=37339
http://www.guild-hall.net/forum/showthread.php?t=43472

Just like to say that this rings a bell for me. I know a lot more about monking now than just "Man we sure do seem to be dying a lot I think this monk sucks".