Wrong Forum?

First the apologies:
Apologies if this is the wrong forum (feel free to move it)
Apologies if this has all been discussed before (feel free to close it)
Apologies to the cat for standing on it accidentally (feel free to stroke it)

I have been reading through these forums all day, and have suddenly realised it isnt to gain new insights, it isnt to get info on upcoming goodies, it isnt to see what the latest nerf was, it because I am bored to tears.

Lemme explain, then let the flaming begin...

I bought Guild Wars Prophecies approx 16 months ago. This was followed by a copy for my mate who took one look and said...nasty things. I have since bought a 3rd account. Stupidly, I didnt link these accounts, for very valid reasons at the time, which I now regret.

I have since bought two Factions accounts and a Nightfall account. Notice the downward trend? These accounts are linked, P.F.N., P.F., P.

In the course of playing the game, purely PvE, I had a lot of laughs and met a lot of people. Most good people, some morons. 26 of these good people joined my guild.

24 of them have since left as a result of all the nerfs that have been implemented by ANET. And the remaining member is somewhat inactive.

The point I am making is that after 16 months, a lot of the things I enjoyed doing have been targetted by ANET for nerfing. Some of them in their attempts to stop farmers (probably to stop EBAY sales of gold), some of them supposedly to balance the game.

Dont get me wrong, I think the development team do a magic job (although factions is a flop in my eyes), and I hope they continue to do so. But what they dont seem to remember is that we are their customers. Whilst we dont pay subscriptions, we do continue to feed them money in the way of upgrades, new campaign purchases etc.

Having come back from a sanity break after attaining Survivor3, I have noticed that there are a lot less people playing the game. Perhaps its a schoolday, perhaps they are at work, or perhaps they have defected.

A lot of the things that bother me have already been listed:
Poor storage, filled up with event items and pets.
Nerfing monster behaviour in PvE to stop farming
Not allowing Tyrian pre-sear chars access to the Guild Hall
Not allowing Tyrian pre-sear chars bags etc
Not allowing Tyrian pre-sear chars the same "weapons in storage" as other campaigns, limiting them, and only them, to low level drops.
Repetition of missions and quest for each char (i have 22 chars. the missions get boring quickly)
No merging of accounts.
Blah Blah Blah

The result of this is that I have logged on today and find I have no real interest. Neither in playing, nor in buying any more products. I currently have my pre-sear character getting killed to level a strider to try for the Defender of Ascalon title. 6 Hours of pure boredom, giving me time read the forums and type this rubbish. It's also allowed me to look into what else is available on the market.

Whilst the following suggestions may or may not rekindle my desire to play, they would certainly help if implemented...

Pre-sear:
Allow access to the Guild Hall for Tyrian characters. This will put them on an equal footing with Canthan and Elonian players. Allowing access to the same merchant goods, stored weapons etc. Seems a bit ridiculous that a Canthan/Elonian characters can be created and instantly maxed out with weapons, bags, runes etc but Tyrians cant. (I keep a permanent pre-sear char to help newbs, and the lack of facilities is, pointlessly, annoying)

Titles:
As an example, allow the acquisition of the Defender of Ascalon title in a reasonable time. I have spent 6 hours watching my level 16 char die, for the gain of 100xp. Whilst I realise titles should be difficult, I dont want to be drawing my pension before I get them.
Make more of the titles Account based. Why can someone get recognition accountwide for fame, yet not have the same for survivor? or explorer? The title is a reward for the player for having put the time in, so reward the player, not the character. How many people are going to seek People Know Me for more than one character? Who can afford to get the maxed Treasure Hunter on more than one character? Who would want to?
The titles seem to be a sink hole for cash. Buy keys, buy beer, buy festival tickets, and you have to buy them all for each character.

Experience and skills:
Having loads of characters, I dont want to have to repeat mission after mission just to progress them. Nor do I want to have to endlessly repeat cap runs for each character to get the elites. Especially now that the fun has been taken out of farming, so gathering cash for the sigs has no appeal.
Why have zero xp for lower levels. This reduces my desire to help new players in missions I have completed 100's of times already. Give a level 20 character 1xp per low level kill and at least they get something back for it other than a warm fuzzy feeling. It would also make acquisition of Defender of Ascalon a bit more probable. It would also reward guildies for helping other guildies in lower level missions.

Economy:
How about fixing it? Its cheaper to buy off the material traders than to craft. Why seek out a crafter in the back of beyond to craft something when you can buy it cheaper in town?
Everyone wants to make cash in PvE, sometimes just for the fun of making cash. Why limit this? All that happens is that people either spend ages slowly gathering cash, or buying it off EBAY.
People complain, saying we need more gold sink holes to absorb the cash. perhaps we just need a fixed economy. If more people are crafting their own goods, it increases fun, means you arent a slave to the traders, and impacts the farmers.

Accounts:
I know ANET have stated on many occassions that they wont merge these, yet a lot of players are calling for it. Players paying hard earned cash. Future customers. Dissatisfied customers, potentially lost...
For players like myself with multiple accounts, and I know of many, they all have the same complaints. Repetition of missions, repetition of skills capping, difficulty swapping items between accounts, constant logging on/off etc etc.
Surely merging what is in effect a couple of database entries, cant be that difficult. Is it more a case of they dont want to commit resource than technical difficulty?...

Character Storage:
Gimme more. Super Runes of Holding giving 20 slots per bag
A keyring to hold all my different keys in one slot
Something, anything, to store event items/mini-pets etc rather than tie up my storage.
And whilst most people would say "flog it" I tend to save a lot to give to new players...

Whilst there is a desire on behalf of ANET to increase the longevity of the gameplay, dont do it at the risk of boring your players to tears. Just type a post like this instead

Bored now. Lots more i would like to say, but I reckon the flaming will be bad enough as it is. If you made it this far, you should be asking yourself why you arent enjoying the game, rather than sitting in forums so much. maybe my points bear relevance to you as well

Storage... its a bandwidth thing, although it is very limited. No-comments on this tbh.

Monster behaviour was somewhat *fixed*. Although not fully. I don't see this is a big problem, and actually, you have just given a solution to your original problem. Longevity of the game.
Now that traditional 'farming' methods no longer work, you have to think of new ways of doing it. Else, I'd agree, PvE loses its spark after you play through it once. Since the NPCs will do one thing, and is totally prdictable.

Pre-Sear: On a storyline point of view, it doesn't make sense, since Pre-Sear is set in the past, whereas, your guild membership, your greens, your runes are all found in the 'then-future'.
Secondly, the mobs you find in pre-sear, you do not need maxed out weapons / armour for. Its a training area for newer players. Its nice that you help out newer players and all but lack of storage access means that you won't have tradespam immedieatly after jumping into Ascalon for the first time, and so on and so forth. I think its quite plesant.

Repitition of missions: Well if you want a maxed out character of each prof then, it will take a little time, however, what would be the point if they just let you create a character that has already completed the game. PvE is all about the missions etc. It beats mindless leveling through killing stuff like in all other Online RPGs.
However, I must ask.... 22 chars?! I can very very thinly understand 16... ie. 10 chars that completed everything and 6 maxed chars in pre-sear... but 22?

Merging accounts: this has a lot of other problems that have been disscussed in a lot of other threads, its mostly about say selling high rank/title accounts or selling UAX accounts and such. Also, how many char slots are taken over? buying 4 new char slots means Anet gets almost a games worth of revenue. Merging 2 accounts for free means no financial gain for them (sorry talking from the perspective of a shareholder here).



A final comment about longevity, why don't you try some PvP?
There is a constantly evolving meta game and a huge ammount you can do in that aspect. I really don't think that anyone can complain about longevity of a game when they have not actually finished the game...

personally, i think your right on a lot of topics... actually the only thing i really would like to disagree with is your views of Pre-searing lol. but thats simply cause i like it the way it is. you are however, allowed to have your own oppinion, no cause for flame there.(although im SURE there will be some, sorry)

in reference to the need for an economy fix, i think thats a must to tell ya the truth. i definately think they nerfed farming to stop the ebay sellers... in reference to the Ebay sellers, i say to hell with em. who cares if certain people want to use their hard earned R/L cash to buy fake game money... personally i think its moronic. thats like buying monopoly money from your sister simply to beat her at a board game. I say continue to ban whoever it is you find buying/selling if you want to, but dont punish the rest of us. and if Ebay sellers arent the reason, then sorry Anet, dont mean to put words in your mouth. but i still think the nerfs on farming are stupid.absolutely rediculous IMHO.

I would be INCREDIBLY happy if they put EVERYTHING in the game back the way it was right before the farming and AI nerfs... maybe it wasnt perfect, but i didnt hear that many people complaining and i didnt see that many balance issues... I've been poor MOST of my GW life. and it wasnt that bad. i made enough to get by(buy armor and weapons and the like) and i never spoke out against the rich, wishing for their downfall. i just in the last couple of months reached the 500k mark. im not seeing it as a whole lot of an advantage lol. yay i can buy useless 15k armor now...W00T! ive seen both sides of the coin. and neither is really better than the other. so why nerf everything? only Anet knows.

No offense to ANYONE at anet, i dont mean to be that whining little n00b, but shit happens. personally i think Anet should swallow their pride, listen to some of the things that are said here on Guru and other forums(YES, i know you do and have changed many things in response to player feedback, and i THANK you for that more than i could EVER express) and put the game back the way it was. we dont need more realistic AI, not when its annoying as hell and makes the whole game unfun. we dont need to destroy the upper class citizens. the capitalist class system has worked for many a country. and we dont need PERFECT balance. yes i am SOOO glad GW doesnt require HUNDREDS of hours. but that doesnt mean we dont need things that reward you for USING hundreds of hours lol. just dont make it crazy unbalanced. farming was a fun(and useful) way to take up time, and it didnt make those who didnt farm bottom of the heep.

I appologize if Ive offended ANY anet staff members or any of my fellow GW players. i love the product(although i loved it more as it was) and im happy that you pay attention to what your players want, but when your entire fanbase loses the drive because of some change you made to their beloved game, maybe that change wasnt what was needed... so suck it up say "thanks for the feedback, we've looked the update over and decided it wasnt what was wanted by the fanbase" and change it back. shit happens(yes thats my motto) YES, it IS your baby. NO, you dont make us pay monthly fees. NO, you dont HAVE to give us what we want. YES, we do pay for the game and would like to have fun.

Gaille, if you see this, plz dont flip out. I'm not TRYING to be ungrateful(although it may sound that way) you guys do a wonderful job and im IMMENSLY grateful for that(and dont think im alone in that) theres a reason i continue to play your game. its great(not just cheap ) theres just a few things that im not extremely happy with right now(dont think im alone in that either)

Thank-you for the game(sure you cant hear that enough )

sorry for the second post, but my LONG post was started before yours was posted lol. so MY response to this, i dont want to. plain and simple. I dont like PvP, and if i wanted a game in which i had to PvP simply to find something to do, I'd buy a pure PvP game. I like PvE THATS what i wanna spend my time on. NOT PvP. so if that means going to another game, although thats not even CLOSE to what i wanna do, so be it.

PS, i hope this doesnt get closed lol cause its a good conversation starter and although some of these ideas have been posted before, not in this fashion, or at least not this month(thread ressurection FTL!)

It looks to me that your personal choices are just grind based:

- Trying to max out pre-sear characters. There is no need, if you choose to do it, accept the grind that it requires.

- 22 characters. Why? There are 10 professions and a primary of each can be anything, why make more than 1? Your choice again here, you don't like to repeatedly do things yet you choose to make multiple characters.

- Titles. Optional, don't pursue them if you don't want to.

- Economy is fine for me, I have everything I need and am a casual player. If you want the glitz, you pay for it, your choice.

- Accounts and storage. This seems obvious to me, use the other accounts for storage and play your primary account. Kill 2 or 3 birds with one stone (storage in the form of mules, fewer characters to play).

This thread is being closed for the following reason:

Various violations of forum guidelines. Please be sure to read the forum stickies before creating a new thread.