Discussing the Multiplayer Aspect of Guildwars

Why would you need a poll? You really think most casual players wait around putting together a team instead of just grabbing heroes/henchies and go? Using common sense you'd figure a casual player with little time will just grab NPCs.

A better grouping system, along with an improved system for chat, trade, and guild recruitment would go a long way.

When I get a good PuG, the game is 10x more fun than if I played with henchies. Sadly, it can take 30 minutes to an hour to form a full group in most missions, and often closer to 2 hours for HA or high end areas. When I log in for an hour or two at a time, I usually play with heroes and henchies, just because I hate going through the hassle of finding a group.

You might say the guilds and friends lists are the answer to this, but do you remember what it was like when you first started? Recruitment in town is reduced to shouting through trade spam. Finding a guild with interests similar to your own can be near impossible, and expecting players to stand in towns and wade through a flood of chat just to find a solid group is ridiculous.

Why do so many PuGs suck? It's hard to find 8 players of roughly the right balance, and several orders of magnitude harder to devise any kind of team build or strategy. Me, I'd rather live with the healing hands wammo rather than spend a bunch of time teaching him what a dragon slasher is. Every second you spend standing in town is a chance for someone in your group to leave, and a second you could be spending actually playing the game.

So what are the solutions to this?

1. Some sort of trade fix, hopefully in the form of an auction house.
-This would clean up the chat in towns, make trade accesible for the casual player, and foster actual conversations in town.

2. Ingame guild recruitment
-Perhaps in the form of billboards or a message center. Anything is better than chat spam.

3. Improved group formation system
-Put up a list of all the groups in all the districts, what people they have, and what they still need. This is also critical for bringing HA back to life.

We need a way to identify PvE players as experienced or inexperienced. We all know that a henchman is 100 times better than an inexperienced, or unintelligent player. Personally, I don't pick up anyone unless I absolutely have to. I have my guild to help me through tough spots.

I was in Prophecies just a couple of days ago. I hadn't beat it for the bonus with my Ranger out of pure laziness. There were three or four people there crying for an interrupt ranger to go with them.

I want to note: I felt horrible but I stacked Jin, Magrid, and the General with 2 monks and scrubs, then took off without them. I didn't have much time, and to be honest I didn't want to risk wasting 30 minutes. I knew what I needed to beat it, and I did. Went ahead and beat the game again, just to see if I could. No sweat.

I dunno what happened to the PUG. But I felt really bad.

I don't think this can be helped, since we can't determine the skill lvl of PvE players.

Sad, but true. You can practically do most missions/bonses with NPCs now. Hell, I figured out how to do 3/4 Titan Quests with NPCs just because, for days, not a soul wanted to join.

I have to say the issue are the people. Whoever said it's because it's free has a point. It doesn't cost money, just the initial buy. So if you buy it and hate it, eh, why not just mess around with people. Half the time I PvP you get sweared at, called a "noob, n00b, n00bzorz, n00blet", yelled at for not healing, bringing a resurrection signet, or whatever...Heaven forbid we mess up, we're human...we're not perfect, but people expect you to do everything how they see it and will get in your face if you don't. I now know some bizzare racist jokes all thanks to Alliance Battles.

Out of any MMO or MMORPG I have to say Guild Wars' community sticks up in the top three of the most hostile and unforgiving.

What irony that a game that fiercly discourages elitism has such an elitist community....

Guild Wars has always been about one thing:

Optimizing the game to your, the player's, style of play - and no one elses.
It's great.

A community isn't created nor destroyed by the company - it's the players, aka the Community, that creates and destroys. Blaming ANet for a lousy community? That's like blaming the local representaive of your county/city/district because you can't get along with your neighbor.
YOU can't get along with your neighbor.

ANet created the hero system for many reasons, one being so players wouldn't have to sit in empty outposts waiting for 7 other players. The game is huge now, do you want people standing around waiting for just the right group nowdays? It's near impossible. Hence, heros.
The one thing the heros system did NOT do was destroy any community or cooperative aspect to the game. It changed it, and as always, Guild Wars shines when it comes to adjusting, adapting, and more often than not, giving players what they always want in any 'role-playing' game: choices.

Find the players you want, group with them, and enjoy yourself.
Your choice.
I'll look for a group for a bit, give up, grab my heros, and enjoy myself.
My choice.

And it's great

First I would like to state that I consider this whole thing Alesia's fault. If she wasn't such a bad monk, people wouldn't have started demanding controlable(sp?) henchmen.

I am guilty of henching most quests, but for missions I like live people. I like the chat, the chance of winning against the odds and the odd builds.

I think ANet should come up with something like "heroes or henchmen," with at limit on the number of henchmen, so that you cannot fill up your party without at least one other live person. If they don't have heroes, then henchmen are your only choice.

Of course, this would cause endless hate threads directed at ANet. Most posters want to complete the game with non-live people, so they can brag that they've completed the game on their own.
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As to the in-town chat, I don't turn off the local. As the problem is usually pre- & early teens acting out their fantasies. I just go to another district if they become overly offensive. I wish there was a Town Group option so they could take it private. As this age group are the most numerous in the game, there is no getting rid of them. You can only hope they will soon get bored with GW and go to another game.

Local chat is important to me, not just for finding a PuG, but I watch for people asking for help and respond if I know the answer. I warn people whose posts are in violation of the EULA, so they won't get banned through ignorance. I use it to time my WTS or WTB posts so I am not spamming them.

Gah. It has nothing to do with bragging, thanks for that ridiculous piece of speculation.

And you know what I hate? People trying to force other people to play how they play. Some people don't want to have to group with others. Or being forced to play with complete strangers from a horrible community. And what about those areas where there simply isnt a lot of people to group with? Horrible horrible idea of forcing people to group up.

I agree with Ernada. Thats why I kinda am starting to dislike Anet too.

I think the problem is that people are getting sucked away from PUGing into going into, often superior, guild teams. Once they have played in a few guild teams they realise that PUGs are often too disorganised and so on and choose to go henchway if no guildies are available.

Personally in my 3 months of play I have observed a decline in the quality of PUGs, which is probably the product of the above, which then amplifies the above problem. When I first started I went through the first two chapters PUGing relatively easily. With Nightfall it got harder to find a good PUG and had to go hero/henchway for quite alot of the game. Now on some of my newer characters I have been trying to PUG quite alot, but to be honest they tend to be absolute crap. Barely anyone seems to know what they are doing, are silent and do not help eachother in anyway, and once in every 2 or 3 games someone will rage quit. This isn't helped when you get party leaders who, all too often, don't listen to the party members and make some of the worst team builds ever, such as filling a team almost completely with people only of their profession in a place where it just won't work... most places then.

But I dont dislike Anet.

Ohh, im sorry, I thought since you dislike people trying to force other people to play how they play (as do I) that it kinda correlated with how Anet is designing these new chapters. Bad assumption on my part.

oh man i so love the heros when my regular buddies arent online. and in the meantime to escape the random insanity, immaturity and fubar reasoning of 95% of the gw community....



oh anet i love you so for the heros and ai placement commands.

I'm going to say it - I have the set-up you mentioned because the towns are full of idiots.

Everyone is pointing at the players for being anti-social... I think the game design has a lot to do with it, too.

The game is split up across what, 300 different areas now? It's amazing that we have some odd 90 outposts to meet up with other players in, but even among those outposts trying to find people with similar goals is nearly impossible. This is what makes grouping even with guildies incredibly difficult. You can group with a guildie, but only one person is going to get any real reward from the whole endeavor, as the other one probably has no business to be done in the same area.

well put,right on

I miss PuGs. I realize I'm probably gonna get a lot of "PuGs sux u n00b" and "OMFG u use teh PuG lol learn2play" from a statement like that... But it's sincerely the truth.

I miss going into a party of random people, starting a mission, and by the end patting everyone on the back saying, "Well done! We did it."

Now I just go to a mission. I say, "Healing Monk lfg..."

After 30 minutes of reiterating that, I succumb to using my heroes and a group of 4 heanchies. The mission goes good, bad, doesn't matter... But when all is said and done, there's no one there I can say "We did it." I can't say that at all... Because I did it.

A.Net should not be blamed for this. They are just trying to make it so that those of us who have no one to help us can use NPCs to at least play the game.

I doubt there's any way to fix this, however. I miss PuGs and the community when it came to the game, but now it feels like Guild Wars really is just a single player game.

It doesn't matter, though. I'll still keep shouting in towns and outposts, just before I click the mission button, "Healer lfg..."

Just be glad the GW community don't all also play games like UT or other multiplayer games. They'd probably end up helping turn those into single player games too... honestly if I made a multiplayer game I'd pray this hench loving human hating crowd didn't end up at my game, for fear of them helping to turning it into a single player experience.

Anyway undeniably Herohench has had an adverse impact on co-op. I can't be bothered to go into the details right now. Also I do wish people would stop comments like this

Try this on for size:

Try find the players you want, wait around a while watching people come and go in groups of 8 (1 human + Herohench), hit the Logout/Quit button.
Not much of a choice.
Look for a group, give up, grab heroes, feel like you've been pushed into that path.
Also not much of a choice.

I bet co-op minded players have encountered that a fair bit. Now compare to Prophecies and it was a completely different story, everyone was teaming up far more.

I honestly believe this is the way of the future, as it seems to be how the players in GW generally seem to play PvE so I'm not sure if any constructive ideas how to encourage co-op will get taken on board. It seems to be the way the wind is blowing if you observe how things have changed since Prophecies.

What you are looking for is a LFG system. That was suggested(and rumored to be a feature coming).

AND The game doesn't exactly make people anti-social.

People make people anti-social.

Examples:

- When you sit in general chat, you see "WhERz the hot Gurlz" and they spout every racist statement you can think of. The first step is to ignore it and look past it. But eventually you get tired of it and turn off the channel. That's one channel down.

- Trade Channel, when you don't want to buy anything you turn it off to bypass the spam. But then THOSE EXACT SAME PEOPLE know that you aren't looking at that channel and spam BLEEDS into General Chat. Which gave you ANOTHER reason to turn off. So that is another channel off. You just have successfully bypassed 90% of the community right there. An Auction House could help somewhat, but THOSE SAME PEOPLE will STILL use the chat channels. (SEE World Of Warcraft for reference)

- Creating a team, you sit there waiting for people to join. This can take anywhere from 2 minutes to an hour. Once you get in, those SAME people WHINE about who's build is more effective while being killed from lack of preparation prior to the quest/mission. They blame YOU for not single handedly killing everything in their path and blaming other players for their fault. The team falls apart. This happens multiple times. In frustration You discover Guilds and Guildmates who are usually the nicest and most coordinated people in the game period. From then on, you vow to you guild loyalty and respect well earned by maturity and abilities.

Congratulations, you just bypassed 99.999% of the community. IS that a bad thing. Not really. Those people made you take actions that you didn't really need to take. Therefore making you anti-social to the general Guild Wars public.

From then on, you use Henchies when Guildies can't play with you. IF you can't do it with Henches, then you wait instead of playing with people who will constantly waste your time and energies trying to make things work. Because you've been down that road and never want to travel it again.

Sure a LFG system can help, sure an auction house can help. But it never really changes the attitude of people playing the game. ITs gonna be the same thing all over again. Sure the team aspect of the game might affect the stress level of the members, but it isn't the only online game that uses teams to accomplish things.

What they have been trying to do is make the game somewhat easier for people to get into it. But by now, most experienced players don't care much for PuGs by now. And the atmosphere of the game changes somewhere in the middle which leaves a lot of new people stranded because the PvP type of missions has kicked in. New players will find it incredibly hard and veterans will claim that its too easy.

IT was long winded but it had to be said..

Also what I've been seeing the community cope with this however is the Ally Effect. People who create guilds with people of the same interests/goals/maturity and then pair up with an Alliance with like rules and regulations. They create their own suburbs within the game to play with people that won't destroy their experience with the game. The Alliance Channel effectively becomes the new General Chat.


What I suggest is that:

1. ArenaNET gets some in-game GMs to curtail bad behavior. Or make an in-game solution to easily report it. Having to leave the game and report it separately discourages reporters to do it. Anonymity creates some terrible monsters, but showing them that they can't just do what they want and not face the consequences in the game either will kill that.

2. Create a better Tutorial area that teaches players about teamwork, roles with professions and how to create builds. Those small introduction areas at the beginning of the game doesn't cut it. IT teaches nothing about how to play in a team, and it teaches nothing about picking the right skills.

3. An LFG System and an Auction House to cut down on spam. It won't remove it but it might help.

4. Gameplay has to be changed to allow people to move at their own pace. That way, the veterans can play a challenging game and the new people can get through the story without worrying about messing up or showing people how bad their current playing level is.

Anonymity is the problem. If someone is an ass and gets a horrible reputation, all they need to do is make another character. Unlike other games, leveling in GW is quick, so a new character and a new name don't take long. Just seconds, in fact, if it's a pvp character. And no, hiring a billion GMs is not the solution, it won't happen, ArenaNet will not increase their costs that way, so forget about it.

For the most part guilds are similarly anonymous. A bazillion random guilds running around, whose tags you'll never recognise if you see them a second time. Compare this with a typical mmorpg, which has many separate server worlds (shards) with a much smaller population on each server -- the community is small enough that guild names are well known, and guilds take more in who they invite, to avoid getting a bad name in the server's small community. As a WoW comparison, when someone ninja loots, practically everyone on the server finds out about it (through the in game rumor mill, or the forums), then that person finds he can't get into groups any more, and weeks of playtime on that character are down the drain. It's also a big deal if guilds are known for harboring ninja looters. So as it turns out, ninja looters are quite rare, because there are serious repercussions for these actions. In Guild Wars there are none whatsoever.