Two hypothetical questions

Let's say a few years down the road Anet decides to stop making new GW chapters. Would the current servers still stay online, so people could play? Or would they just be killing the game entirely?

If they did go bankrupt or whatever, or just decided to take down the servers, would it be possible for them to give us a download such that we could play offline? (i.e. with henchmen and heroes) or is so much of the game based off of their servers that it would be impossible? Thanks.

I've wondered that myself, I'm thinking that at that point they may just change to a monthly fee. However, I see such a fee being smaller than that of WoW or FFXI, though probably not by much. I mean right now they are getting about 50$ per 6 months a player. So the monthly fee would have to be 8.33$ a month. Now people will complain, but in all reality its what you're paying now anyways. You just sort of prepay it all at once. You might say "But I pay for a cd, and keycode" but lets face it the cd is useless, you already have all the files. Its the keycode you need, and paying for it is no different then paying for a WoW time card (which is just a keycode).

Only people who this would be a big change for would be those that haven't bought any new chapters. Just what I think might happen, but who knows maybe they'll find some other way, even making it single player like you said. As long as they add a LAN/Internet (personal servers hosting "worlds" online).

They probably won't make it a single player world. If NCSoft really goes bankrupt their first interests would be to get as much cash out of whatever intellectual property that they still have, including stuff like selling ads that are displayed over your login screen and in game for money if that's what it takes.

Making the game offline would just cost them money and completely negate the monetary value of a player base, so why the hell would they do that?!

Why would they close it? Assuming Anet stays in business, which means the will reuse their server infrastructure for future games - if GW dies out, little of that capapacity will be used.

Just look at diablo I / II. battlenet beign reused over and over (even to host wow), and no older games being removed.

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If they fail and bankrupt, it owuld be only fair to give comunity dev tools and server software so that any fans left can continue on their own.

do you not know what a hypothetical question is?

Just plugging this in...

I bought every version of GW for around 30€ so I pay less than 5€ a month to the retailer. How much of that actually goes to ANet I don't know.
But if it would ever be monthly fee then I guess the retail guys are cut out and you pay directly to ANet.

I'm going to guestimate that it would be around 3€ to 5$

I'm not an economics expert.

The original Anarchy Online, for example, is free to download and play, with access to the expansions available for a nominal monthly fee.

After awhile, games themselves become so outdated, very few would even want to play them, or even find them compatible with their current systems.

But, just because Blizzard has done things one way it doesn't automatically mean any other company like Anet would also do so.

As for what would "only be fair", oftentimes what would be fair has no relation to what happens in reality.

I don't know if i would want to play Guildwars after it has been stopped, seems like if they go bankrupt they can't keep servers opperational.

Guild Wars uses a heightmap system. You can actually see if it you walk near any cliff (you can see the triangles). At the intersection of each set of triangles, data for height, texturing, and walkability are stored. The smallest maps on Guild Wars runs an average of up to a thousand of those intersections. The biggest area probably hits ten thousand.

If you wanted to run even one chapter of GW at your own home, you would need a few supercomputers to do so. To answer your question, no, Guild Wars will never be available for offline play, unless you live where Anet's servers are stored.

I don't see how quadtree-based terrain triangulation has anything to do with being able to run the software offline. Perhaps I'm not understanding what you're trying to say here, but terrain rendering methods used in guild wars certainly don't need a supercomputer to run. Articles on terrain rendering are available lots of places. http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/lessons....asp?lesson=34 Frankly, Anet probably wants to do as little processing server side as possible, and certianly not any graphics processing. The bulk of their massive hardware requirements are there to deal with the volume of players. Keeping track of locations, drops, inventory and other possible current server side activities would likely not be very demanding in an offline, 1 player with heros/henchmen situation. If properly rewritten, it would really be no worse than something like running Diablo with a more demanding graphics engine.

As for would they bother to rewrite it for this situation? I doubt it.

I'm just saying this right now: I'd pay $15 a month (via timecard, the idea of my credit card floating out there in cyberspace isn't cool) for Guild Wars.

But if the servers ever go kaput, I really REALLY want them to offer up the server data for Download so that we can keep our char data... if the severs went down, I'd kill myself at this point.

/ragequitwithahandgun

Games like starcraft are almost 10 years old, and they are still alive and kicking. Obviously supporting a game like GW is a much bigger challenge than starcraft, but I don't see GW dying out anytime soon.

again, hypothetical questions

It wouldn't be the end of the world for me if GW went down, theres a mystical thing out there called a life.

Life is pretty cool. My only problem is unlike the game, in life if I take my clothes off and dance in the courtyard nobody joins me in the dance, I usually get taken to a strange cold place.

Blizzard supports Diablo I and Starcraft, etc, sure. But Blizzard is still massivley successful. More so now than ever. So they can easily still afford to do so. The fact that they still support SC 10 years later is not proof that games like this will continue to be supported later. If WoW had been a bust.. coming off the lackluster Warcraft III.. this could be an entirely different situation.

If ANET goes bust, or if Blizzard were go go bust, it's very likely we could lose those online services. After all, who's going to pay for them? Yes, they could go to a pay per use service, and that could work, but even then, you still need X number of people to meet your costs, or you have to raise the price. Raise it too high and you lose even more. There is a point where the whole thing has to collapse upon itself.

Obviously one day.. whether that be 1 year, 5 years, 10 years.. who knows.. but one day, there will not be online support for any of the above games. I think that's patently obvious. I doubt there will be "official" offline support for any of them. But there could very well end up being custom designed "public" servers for them (as there already are for "some" games).

All the graphics processing is done at the client, not the server. So it isnt limited by infrastructure, but I dont see ANet putting in the effort to let it be played offline nonetheless.