LAN party questionaire (for non-GW friends)

Perhaps we could help Anet by listing reasons why some of our gamer fanatic friends won't buy or play Guild Wars.

I love Guild Wars Nightfall (the only chapter I own) and I love lan parties, but I can't yet enjoy both at once. None of my real life friends want GW. Yet.

Last night my husband and I hosted a LAN party. I collected this data from everyone who came, who were: six males and two females (I'm not including myself) representing four ethnic groups(1f Cuban, 1m Chinese, 1f&1m mixed Af. Am./white, and 4 white dudes) - aged 19 - late 20's and all living in or around Clemson, SC.

All own/played together: WOW, Warcraft III, Diablo II, Starcraft and Civ III (and LOTS of Super Nintendo back in the day)
Some own/played together: WOW expansion (4m, 1f), Counterstrike (3m, 1f), Oblivion (3m), Final Fantasy XI (2m), Civ IV (2m, 1f), EVE (1m)
2m own Guild Wars Prophecies, but never play it
1m, 1f have not yet played any chapter of Guild Wars (all others tried trials or started chars on friends' accounts)


Reasons they've not yet bought Guild Wars yet

"Wouldn't play on my Mac" - 2m, 1f
"Female chars look like Barbies, are dressed too skimpy or look silly" - 2m, 2f
"Male chars (of my favorite profession) all look gay" - 3m
"No auction house" - 1m
"No world PVP (ganking players unaware)" - 3m
"I suck at PVP" - 2m, 1f
"I love playing with others, and think I'd have to play alone a lot" - 2m, 1f
"I love WOW's professions (fishing, herbalism, tailoring, etc.) and GW doesn't have all that" - 1f

You left off the real reasons:

Im too addicted to WoW to think and/or care about anything else.
I've invested too much time/money to play anything else.


Although they will never admit it.

I play guildwars because its free. Its a game based on skill, because everyone has max equipment, the only variance is style. I don't have to invest time farming and raiding in order to compete in PvP or PvE. Guildwars is the only game that isnt trivialized by equipment. Henchmen, heros, random pvp ect. Dont have to waste time LFG.

I was actually just thinking about this today. Some reasons I think are:

-Level cap is 20.
-Very competitive.
-Not open-ended (at all, almost).
-Six classes (10 now, but you have to pay 50 bucks for them) with one race.

Pretty much with WoW you get more for your money.

Also, even though Guild Wars has no monthly fee, you still have to buy three campaigns. All three amounts to $150 plus tax. A year subscription to WoW costs around $180, unless you take that different monthly payment method where you like, pay a lot than don't pay again for four months....or am I making this up? I heard it from a friend, soooo...Dunno.

Typical.

One of the biggest reasons I like GW is that there is no world pvp.

All male skins *do* look gay. I made due with female skins.

Most importantly I don't have money to throw away on WoW.

The only excuse on that list that held any water with me was the Mac excuse. I don't use Macs myself, but if that was the only thing I had it's a valid reason. Everything else is vanity.

edit: Bryant- You are correct, all three campaigns cost $150. For those of us that have been around since the beginning it is a lot cheaper. The second campaign didn't come out for a full year, so we paid just $50 for the first year. For WoW it would have been $50 for the first three months (or six, whatever it was) and then another $135. Close to $180, like you said, but it was still $180 vs. $50. Add another year and you have two GW campaigns for another $100, making $150. Add another year of subscription dues and the expansion for WoW and you get $400. If you had jumped on the bandwagon later, it would be different, but for even just one year it's still less. But I digress. That topic has already been beaten to death.

Well you're still throwing plenty of money away on Guild Wars, unless you just stuck with one campaign this whole time.

Also in Wow, you have the choice of playing in a player-kill server or a safe server.

They won't dish out $120 bucks for it (mostly interested in PvP).

ya GW isn't lan friendly. my friends and i usually run D2 LOD or just classic and hack the weapons and rip through the games (all off line of course). But over all we play CSS or some racing game like Need for speed for LAN parties.

my suggestion or comment would be some offline PvP mode. Some sort of unlocked random Guild hall and you can submit matches to all who are on the lan. i mean
1) you'll all be level 20.
2) all unlocked skills
3) chesses max skin weapon.
3) i guess a few unlocked basic henchman
4) no drops or gold or exp to farm or exploit.
So ya i think it be a cool offline LAN mode for GW. Ya it suck if someone hack a file so there weapon does 10000 dmg (which can probably be verified my matching files and sizes) but i think it be neat.


hope this helps the OP or this thread..... o.O

For the most part, your friends are right. Other the subjective opinions, you cant really help people if they certain features dont appeal to them.

Guild Wars has a good appeal, but you can't please everyone, and you shouldn't try.

They're right, but they play it and get to lvl 20, have some fun then they get hooked

For new players, you can get all three for a total of $100+ including tax... given that you buy it at the right time and from the right place. Before Christmas, all three campaigns would have cost you about $90 with tax, but prices went up a few dollars each now I'm sure they'll be cheaper again sooner or later though.

Right, that's for new players. I spent $150 + since I got them when they first came out.

There's also the limit on how many characters you can have, just thought I'd add that.

Yeah, the lack of Non Windows support is a major reason for people not playing.
There is a large Unix Based market out there, and you only have to make one client to reach that market... There are even alternatives to Windows drivers Anet could use.
So the lack of unix based support is a major reason. It didn't stop be from buying though. Now I've got a pretty box, and a game I can only play If I get that Windows disk unlocked, or extort my brother for PC access...

There are ways to play gw on a unix system, I've heard about it and seen it on a friends rig. But not as easy as double click on guildwars and play kind of thing =p

"i heard it was terrible"

Hey,

If one of your friend wants to try one of the chapter, let us know. There are free trial keys (I've got some) and they can try instead of just thinking about what it would be like to...

If after a trial they don't like it, then I guess it's truly what they feel. Apart from that, talking about it won't really help. It's a bit like talking about why people don't speak this or that language, first try then decide. The "someone told me that..." story is really the shortest one and the one where you miss so much!

Good luck with spreading GW, the game deserves it!

We enjoy doing that also with Diablo, and I think this is an awesome idea.

As for Mistress Mindbender's There's a little truth to that, but not much. Most of the group I polled has been incredibly bored with WoW, which is why a few haven't bothered with buying the expansion yet. They are not ready to sale their 60's on EBay, but love playing other stuff on the side. A year ago LAN parties at our house were pure WoW, but now more time is spent with non-MMOs (especially Counterstrike, Diablo and Oblivion). Since there's no monthly fees, Anet doesn't need to get clients addicted, just interested enough to buy the game.

Some of the complaints my friends' had might be expensive to fix, but if such fixes encourage enough new sales, Anet wins.

I think the complaints of my friends are legit. They gave GW a shot and a couple are discussing buying it despite their reservations. Four of us (myself & three dudes) all played GW trials we collected together two months ago before I bought the game. One guy bought Oblivion instead, and the other two followed suit, making fun of me for preferring to play "Barbies." To be honest, I would have bought Oblivion also, but my graphic card isn't good enough and I didn't want to invest money on a new card AND a new game. And I love PVP and can't wait to get competitive in GW (at which time my other friends might be more impressed).

Help me poll! I think Anet could benefit from these, if they care to even listen. (I'm now attempting to collect data from long-distance gamer friends I got to know through WoW, free MMO's and Battle.net back in the day...)

What are you basically asking Anet to do? Redesign graphically the characters to suit your tastes or those of your friends? I think it's a bit unfair to ask Anet to listen to you because you gathered information from 8 or 10 non-GW players, unless you have some huge database to back it up (Anet may have several hundred thousands players to satisfy all around the world...).

(personally, though I may agree with some of the things you said, this does not prevent me from greatly enjoying GW so I don't see the point...yet?)

Anet says they listen to individuals' opinions on the forums, and I think polls would be more viable.

My point is the social aspect of the game is important, and if the game lacks diversity its chance of being THE GAME for many groups of diverse close friends to play is slimmer. GW lacks non-pretty character options. GW lacks not-combat playing options (except dancing). GW lacks non-Windows OS options.

This is the first game I ever enjoyed without any of my close friends. I miss playing with them. And when I started this post, I was very excited about becoming a serious GW player. Now I seem to just be a serious forums poster, so, perhaps, my GW days are numbered. (lonely.) I now am pondering getting a WOW account and start playing with my Granddad. (see http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...0110953&page=2)

Actually, when I got to thinking it about it, most of my friends that don't play GW fit into these buckets.

There was one person though that didn't like the instanced world idea - it really is a love it or hate it kind of idea. Me, I love it, because I can get together a good group, go out questing or doing missions, and no jerks (other than the ones in my party in some cases).

And what makes you think they're not listening to you?

Agree, but such situation may not be the most common: you consider yours (I've got a group of friends and want to carry that on different gamees) as a standard one?

For the 1st, how would explain to Anet what "pretty" is? For the 2nd, there are plenty of emotes, which one would like to add? For the 3rd game, I totally understand Anet on this topic as I know how costly this can be, but on the other hand you're perfectly right because there are a lot of people not able to enter the beautiful GW world (as a side note tell/remind your Mac friend that the same problem occured for Mac OS which would never been ported to Intel by Apple...until recently of course). In other words, this is a monetary/business decision here, not a technical one (it's like finding PC games in game stores, at least in the UK, it's more and more difficult, contrarily to Xbox and PS games).

Well, did you consider getting each of them an account so that you can try just one time to play all together? After all, the solution may be simpler than you think... (I didn't mention the obvious answer: you Mac friend should get a PC, your other friends should try to play despite their tastes, play PvE and not PvP).

Well if that's what you think, I'm not sure where we can help here! On the other hand, I've got the feeling you're more trying to put your taste and wishes (in the collective sense of your family and friends) into the game, rather than the game into your group/family ...

(and about your last comment in the other thread "It's all about who Anet wants to market to", I guess they can't just satisfy everyone, and after some time and several chapters, with millions of game copies sold, so I'm not sure that if the game is not for you it's a "market" thing...)

Being able to unlock all skills from any one campaign would make this game much more accessible to new players. I just started playing GW when Nightfall was released, and it was sometimes hard to find groups with my Necro because I didn't have a few Factions-only and Prophecies-only skills that people wanted. As much as I love GW, if I have any friends that consider buying one of the games, I will warn them that they will probably need to buy more than one to get all the skills they need.

True, but who would buy Prophecies if they did that?

Thank gawd for that, if there was a non-lan version this game would just get hacks for it left and right. "Cheats" on your super nintendo back in the day was cool, but if anyone remembers Wc3 maphack and "AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs" realized that online cheats should never exist again, and since there is a non-lan its insanely difficult to even try to get one rolling.

One main reason I have actually heard was that people won't play the game because it isn't "blizzard" its from the guys who "left/sucked" which after playing the beta for WoW for 5 minutes, and this game for 5 minutes I came to a very fast conclusion that WoW doesn't have alot going for it. The limited characters I believe is a great idea, keeps servers clean, and storage becomes important and something non infinite... but it is insanely small, and needs work.. thats another debate.

I think the top 4 reasons,
~People aren't familiar with skill restrictions
~People don't completelty understand the balance at level 20
~Guildwars doesn't push people to play, through mass media*Cough Blizzard Cough* :AKA haven't heard of it
~Requires too many people for good success, you cannot say that it isn't frustrating those henchmen half the time, you either love or hate them. Compared to games like Wc3 where your by yourself and you can just play a solo game, takes 2. Where as something of a similar level say gvg, requires 16.

Mistress Mindbender, after cooresponding with some long distance friends I see that you are right about a lot of people. For the sake of many females, to your list should be added:

"Get my closest friends to go to GW from my current MMO, and I will go with them."

There's not a lot ArenaNet can do for such people.

One guy I talked to about this had a point worth adding. Guild Wars' 2nd and 3rd chapters are not spectacular enough for serious gamers playing other things to give GW a new try. (I disagree, I think Heros added a lot, but my friends say heros are just pets and nothing new.) This guy thought new chapters should have some concept that no other game has (or has done acceptably well). He suggested mounted combat, which to me sounded unGuildWarsish.

Chessyang's idea could be the ticket.

My friends and I still play Diablo II together at lan parties and we love PVPing it up. Sometimes WoW gets too crowded.

I begrudgingly pumped new money into Blizzard only because I missed playing with my rl friends. I'm a WoW girl again. But I still LOVE Guild Wars Nightfall and continue playing it, too. I hope the next chapter will have the spark necessary to pull my friends in. ArenaNet, Help!

World PvP blows in so many ways. God I remember Diablo 2 where you would get hostiled all the sudden for no reason at all. I ran a really nasty Javazon that could lay out a 1 hit kill but still it got to be aggravating when all I wanted to do was farm Baal or Mephisto and some goober decides they want to measure their e-peen against mine.

That is one thing I love about GW. They keep the PVP...over there. I like it over there. I can go over there but it doesn't come to me. That's good game design. Anyone that honestly enjoys just walking up to someone in game who is obviously lower in level or completely unaware and not wanting to fight has some sort of issue. Maybe mommy didn't hug them enough or the jocks picked on their glasses in highschool. Whatever the reason I applaud A-Net for going the sensible route.

That rant aside the other reasons listed in the OP seem reasonable if a little, well, not Guild Wars. Guild Wars doesn't need herbalist professions. There is no point. It's not designed like that for a good reason. That crap is very code intensive, very time intensive, and it's boring as hell.

They do need to make a Mac client though, I mean for real people how hard is it to code for a Mac?

I only read the OP.

A quick glance at the list shows the reasons most people that play GW play GW over Wow. No life skills. No overworld pvp.

So what's wrong with males looking gay? To be honest, I think it's great for a good laugh with some friends. Especially mesmers.

@Ralli Pemirl
Ya i agree. some sort of offline PvP would rock! ya like Shmanka said it could be hacked but it would total be offline. maybe the only update would be a small file for skill updates. I see no reason to download any files for the PvE world. well i guess the Guild hall, lord and his bodyguards. IF and only if you were to hack this small offline PvP mode it would completely ruin the experience for the other players on the LAN and never benefit anyone. you're only on the PvP side never touching the PvE side. so hacking a crystalline skin would be cool for this offline mode but getting owned by some A/E build your friend just made on the spot priceless! and (could) show how bad your skills are at GW.

i'm sure it can be done. i'm sure people would ask you "is this it for GW? just PvP" and you would respond "heck no!" i'm sure Anet can toss in a free 14day/10hour mode. i'm sure they would ask you "what's up with a Mesmer class?he looks kind of fruity? i'm sure people would hack an offline mode for kicks and makes mods for it(sweet!!!!). i'm sure Anet can toss in better ideal then what we dream of. but it's all up to them.

So ya i'm for a offline PvP LAN mode!

Also i can't or won't add to the debate of WOW vs GW or why no ones plays x vs x vs x OR x vs x vs x. i just wanted to add some ideas for a LAN mode. if WOW floats your boats then go for it. my only boat sinker is the monthly fee of WoW but we won't go into that.

It doesn't go up to eleven.

Yep. Go figure. People like bigger numbers. Only eight skills? Only level twenty? Yeah, but it's balanced... Nobody wants to hear of it.

Eh, I am not partial to how ArenaNet convinces my friends and family to play future chapters of GW, I just hope to pwn in PVP and enjoy PVE with them one day like we enjoy playing other games now. My time playing GW and conversations with these guys I love who won't/can't play Guild Wars inspired ideas such as this thread topic.

It can be difficult for me to not be personal or sensitive, although I try and I apologize for not succeeding. Our personal lives are not really relavent to posts. I have a tendancy to make these mistakes. (I'm a girl).

I read in an interview with Chris Chung, Vice President of Game Publishing for NCsoft US, here http://www.igda.org/online/quarterly...mographics.php that

"NCsoft currently is actively working on several technologies to mine and analyze the consumption and demographic data to improve player experience."

Fan forums were not mentioned.

They sure did succeed in making a game fun, didn't they? I play Guild Wars in solitude, and I still enjoy it.