Supreme Final Update Petition

In the future, someday Guild Wars will go offline and the servers will shut down.
I petition that they release an update when it gets close to this time, no matter how big the update size may be, to put all server side data needed to play the game in each players dat file.
Meaning make it able to be played offline.
Yes i know there would be noone to group with , It would be all hero/hench and all pve.
I think it would be a great move to retain the favor of the many loyal GW customers.
This gives those who have not completed mission "x" the chance to finish the game.

/SIGNED

/SIGNED

Interesting but not real sure how they could implement this. They would have to give out the server data. Another thought is to allow players to host their own GW servers.

Mega Mouse

Wow, you have confidence Arenanet!

Ok, it will happen SOME day, but that's in like 10 years or more, so why worry about it now?

Also, before they shut it down, they'll probably start requiering monthly fees.

They wouldn't dare. With the many times they have promised otherwise, to introduce a monthly fee would completely kill their business platform and they would have virtually no consumers, new or old. It would be the death of the game, and quite possibly the company (as buyers of their other products would see that they are not firm on their promises and platforms), unless they were to change names and hide all ties to the name "ArenaNet"...

I like this idea. Sure, it may be ten years from now, but it'll be nice to still play Guild Wars when the servers are no longer up and chuggin'.

/Signed For Single Player Campaign

hmm not a very realistic view of future events I think

It wont be closed in the near future, since the community is growing and not shrinking.
Should it happen to start shrinking, Anet will probably stop releasing new chapters, but the servers will be maintained by advertisements on the site or ingame.

Deciding to pull the plugs from the servers would be the downfall for any gamers-company. People will loose faith in their games, they know it and thats why they wont do it.

Should Anet finally decide to cancel the series, they probably sell the servers to a 3rd party company which will require fees or ads to stay online.

Don't make me cwy with those scawy words

Show me an online game, which, in attempt to prolong the life of a game, introduced monthly fees.

It works the other way round. When a game starts losing popularity, they drop monthly fees, and even purchases in order to attract players.

I seriously don't understand the fascination with monthly fees. There never will be any for GW, and even after over 20 months, or perhaps over 2 years since it was first announced, every is still rehashing this pointless content.

Why is nobody constantly bringing up the point that WoW will drop monthly fees next month. It's just as absurd.

Diablo II servers are still up, the lag is minimum, and there's never been monthly fee. Unless ANet fails badly on their next games, Guild Wars will be playable online as long as people play it.

WoW is dropping their fees?

No, they're not. Next month they're releasing their first expansion pack and it would insane to drop fees when more people will be playing than ever.

WoW can't afford to drop fees - its their primary source of income. The fees for keeping their dev team as well as their huge server fees would never allow this model to work.

Ya, this is true, but with 7million ACTIVE players, if they did drop their fees how many more players do you think would buy their game? They might be able to drop them, although it wouldn't be something they would do right now.

They will release GW2 before they end this series. But when/if they do I would like this option as well.

/signed for after shutdown play


BUT they will most likely not do this because they want to pull ALL the GW1 customers over to GW2. This is all speculation and a long ways off.

7 million subscriptions. Probably less than 3 million active, but then, activity is hard to define. Keep also in mind, that WoW is small. Big online games have upwards of 10 million active accounts, some exceeding 50 million. WoW is only defined by lots of hype.

This has nothing to do with a game. It has to do with business model.

WoW uses subscription based model. As such, they cannot remove their main income source. The game is designed for one purpose only - to keep players subscribed. Reason for this are the insane operating costs that WoW has. With thousands of GMs, data centers, support staff, administration, sales, management, their profit margin isn't as big as most think. They don't make 1 billion in profit yearly.

GW is based around box purchases. As such there's no incentive to keep playing, but plenty of motivation to buy the next chapter. Then again, GW staff is what? 200-300? Much less expenses, much less overhead, much better profit margin.

Read this, to find out why WoW isn't the money-maker many consider it, and how you need to work out of garage to make millions, not invest millions for a mediocre return:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/75/15

If they do shut down gw1, I'm definitly buying gw2, as long as the graphics engine were to be updated. It's good as is, but I'd love to see what a.net could do with next gen tech!

GW shutting down.....thats unthinkable and it hasnt been out for more than 3 years. When it shuts down (in the distant future) its a good idea for players to be able to play the pve content.
/signed

Yeah its good to plan for this as early as possible.

/signed

GW2, they should do this and not keep updating Guild Wars after a while. The game will eventually become old, and they will need a new start for something new. so yeah I agree with this thing where u can have GW as a solo game. Maybe they could include all the campaigns of GW in single player with the next full game. But still, this seems a very long way off and possibly not even likely. We'll just have to wait and see

I don't see GW closing in a lot of years. Anyway, they could sell the server to anyone that will continue with the free service; There are millions of people already playing, I am sure that people like Google, Microsoft, could keep the free servers in exchange for send only ONE email per month to +1 million of people The ONLY way this game die is if people DON'T play it anymore, not if ArenaNet close it.

And as far as I know ArenaNet is right now working in one (maybe two at the same time) totally new campaigns, and GW, as far as I know is a total success, so, why the hell you talk about an "end" at this moment? The only I know will end soon is this year

Seriously... Whats with all these doom topics? Sheesh Guildwars isnt going anywhere for a long time unless of coures a nuclear attack happens... then im all up for a single player.

Aren't you being a little too pessimistic if you're already thinking that about the end of GW?

And if they are having financial problems or it's a management decision to pull the plug, do you think they'd use that last remaining time (or even if they have the time) to do something for almost no benefit to them?

Although I don't want to think about an end to GW (they sold a bazillion copies of NF and Factions), I doubt they'd put out server data. What would it do for them? It'd infringe on copyrights i'd imagine. I'd love for them to give me the entire game-server data, with my account info loaded in, so i could play the game after it was dead, but I doubt they'd do it.

And this is a point that has been brought up many times, but the Diablo servers are still up, GW will be up for a long time I assume.

Also - Add Ability to control 7 heros with this potential update

Hopefully this will be a long time away...
but when it does happen /signed

I doubt it will happen, if the population gets so low, they can just cut it down to one international district, it would take barely any space, people will still buy the game every now and then, and if support is high enough then they can keep making money off new material.

You don't know what the technology will be like in 10 years time (or whenever GW dies out). We might not even be playing GW on PCs anymore, or over the internet.

I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Yeah this isn't going to happen for at least 5 years. I'm sure someone will think of this again before that time, or have a better suggestion. We may as well just close this.

heh its pretty much their only source of income now. taken a look at blizzard's website recently? all other projects besides WoW are on hold . .. kind of pissed me off since they didn't release Ghost . ..

hopefully the only day Anet decided to shut down their servers is the day that GW is no longer profitable, so althought it would be a great service to the fans of the time to do this, it certainly wouldn't help retain any financial losses they would be suffering at this time.

Private Servers are available for many MMORPGs and online games, I'm sure a GW private server is already available at a less than EULA maintaining method, but available non the less. (just did a quick google they are)

So that is probably the way that GW players will have to go to play, or they could decide to make it a Pay to play at that time to try to keep some money comming in.

Dont you think that if they were in such a financial problem, they would change the game a bit and add a montly fee?

And yes like mega jamie said if they dont do it ( in 10 years when GW dies , if ever :P) people can just make it themselfs, if im to believe jamie they already have.

They don't need to do monthly fees, they can just keep adding more and more things to the guild-wars store, like unique item and armor skins.

If ANet were in a position of shutting down GW and feeling generous, they'd probably release their server software rather than figuring out how to budget all the work of bundling it together. Server software that likely will be minimally documented and your average user won't be able to set up, but enough community people probably could figure out and you'd connect to their servers.

One thing that strikes me with these discussions is...

Will they ever really need to make a GW2 rather than just adding more chapters?

Graphics updates can be introduced in new chapters - they've already updated existing character models at least once, and while old chapters may start to look progressively dated, newer ones can continue to have incrementally updated graphics as technology improves. Server and engine updates can also be progressively rolled through. While some people objected to the 'duplicate' skills introduced in Factions, I don't think anyone would really complain about a skill being brought from an old chapter into a new one as a 'multichapter' skill (have Ether Prodigy, say, as both a Prophecies skill and a Chapter 7 skill). Heck, if it wasn't possible to link Prophecies and Nightfall, one might even think Nightfall was GW2 with all the new features. Even if that isn't the case, I'm sure the point is coming.

One spot of weirdness that could arise is if the story team wants to return to an existing continent - however, a certain extent of time travel has already been incorporated into the game as it is - technically, any character who's visited Elona that then goes on the work on the Prophecies or Factions storyline has gone back in time three years. Returning to, say, Tyria could be achieved using a method similar to that used now with the Garden of Seborhin; one method of distinguishing Old and New Tyria could be to use a different port to reach New Tyria (Port Sledge, for instance, or some completely new port if the chapter is using a map that only overlaps the old Tyrian map rather than completely overlaying it).

The only real way I can see where the design team would be forced to put a stop to GW1 and introduce GW2 is if they were to make a really big change to the way characters worked - on the order of the change of the magic system from developing a spell library in Diablo to the skill trees in D2. Most other updates can probably be progressively rolled through without making previous chapters incompatible. (Obsolete, perhaps, and a character from Chapter 36 may look seriously out of place in terms of graphics quality in a Prophecies location, but not incompatible.)

So, in short: As long as the franchise remains economical, I don't think a GW2 is as inevitable as people think - we may just get a continuous stream of chapters that provide improvements equivalent to what you'd expect from such a sequel every five chapters or so.

blahblahblahblah

anyway, regardless what the hell the future holds, you can be sure gw will be online as diablo has been for how long? and i guess a few people here have forgotten what the meaning of old school is? how bout classic? how bout retro? how bout thinking, nintendo (NES)... finally spelled it out?

You beat me to it.

well if it happens
/signed, oh and maybe you could let us establish a direct connection and play it with our buddies?

If that ever does happen one day, I would hope they would give us the ability to play offline.

MSN dumped its online lobbies for Age of empires 1 and 2, and Age2 is still for sale in stores :S ! So dont say it can't happen.
But it is a LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG way off, i am just being suggestive of Best solutions

/SIGNED

Great idea, I hope it happens to whatever extent...

/signed Man I hope this never has to happen though. GW has become my favorite game of all time (even better then atari 2600)

Im filled with confidence now. I like the idea...

/signed

...the question or issue I see is how would they transfer all your account date onto your computer. I suspect that information would be huge and in excess of a few gigabites.

The game content, they could release on a cd or dvd. But they obviously couldnt put peoples accounts onto cds for security and because of the numbers.

I question if they even could do this, because Anet has said on a few occassions that its impossible to single out one account from the database and manipulate it.

For instance when people are hacked or scammed.

So I expect if this was to happen, we would loose all your accounts and have to start a fresh.