Where has the sence of Community gone?

As the title says I am wondering what happened. When Profecies came out you couldn't go to any mission without players looking for groups to play in. The Guilds weren't always competeing for points, there was even friendly rivalry between some of the guilds.
When Factions came out it pretty much fractured the community into those who love to farm and those who do not. I don't believe this is what NC-Soft envisioned for the game. The faction point farming was pretty much designed for those who like the PVP part of the game, while ignoring the rest of us.
Then NightFall came out and introduced the Hero's. In all they are a good idea but the way they are fractures the player base even more. Why get a group when you can now have customizeable henchies? Again I realy do not think that NC-Soft has envisioned this type of problem.
I personaly like to go and get pugs for missions and quests. I don't use henchies much even though they are available.I like th human interaction that there used to be when GW first came out.
If anyone else feels the same as I do please feel free to post here.

Mega Mouse

There's a lot of threads like this. No need to start two new ones.

ok, you seriously want to know where the sense of community has gone? I would answer with how I feel, but I'd be banned and then slit my wrists from depression...

I'm sad to say I've actually become bored of the game... after two and a half years...

How did you make it past that boring first year before the game was released?

A great guild and an amazing group of friends... Oh, and Factions and Nightfall new content

I haven't been playing GW for 2-1/2 years , but in the 21 months since I picked up the game, I've seen lots of things come along that have weakened the "community" aspect of the game. The introduction of Heros did a lot of damage in this area. The spreading out of players over 3 chapters has thinned out the population, but even in the busiest places there's not much chat going on.

But most of the problem lies with the players themselves. Too many people are in too big of a hurry to get through the game to spend time in town chatting: 1. Do mission A. 2. Visit merchant ot get rid of unwanted loot. 3. Visit storage. 4. Pick up Quest B. 5. Gogogogogo! 6. Repeat.

Many people have abandoned the local chat due to the high volume of WTS/WTB spam that doesn't belong there. The "market towns" of LA, Kamadan, etc. are no place for conversation, but there's no reason to keep local chat off in most other areas.

There are many, many guilds out there with 40+ members, most of them in Alliances. That's all the community most people need.

Using TS or Vent to chat with guildies really cuts down on the in-game chat, so that part of the "community" aspect of the game goes unnoticed, making it seem as if the problem is even bigger than it is.

yep..same here farming is useless...and im not gona make a ele just to farm, HA is taken over by stupid guilds...ahh gota luv it!

All you need is a good guild to regain the sense of comunity. Get out there and do things. I love the Heroes and henchies and very rarely play missions with People for so many reasons. The game can be frustrating enough without someone rushing a mission messing it up and proclaiming everyone else is a noob.
Im increasingly getting more bored of the game with perpetual nerfs coming out and screwing up things that I enjoyed doing. I didnt do them to get rich and by no means is it advantages for some players and not others as all you do is come here and find builds so you can do it too.
I find myself logging on to the game now and half playing then getting bored. The last thing that inspired me was capping all the warrior elites but now Im back to being bored

Plus gimicky events like wintersday dont really add to the game and are a minor distraction to consistant players. They should try something different to inspire some of the longer serving players

I've never farmed and the titles don't mean anything to me... New content every six months kept me going, but its not thee anymore...

BF2142, here I come!

Where has the sense of community gone? It died when the wammos went off and aggroed everything on the map. Think about it...A lot of players are complete idiots...why would you want to play with an idiot that doesn't know how the game works, how to play it, what skills go well together? That is why, when Nightfall came out, Heroes are "teh win"...EVEN if you give Koss a Monk secondary profession HE doesn't aggro every god damn red dot out there...

It's like the Other day when I was in The Wilds. We were going to go in with heroes, my brother and I, but he took pity on a wammo and invited him. Mr. Wammo was desperate for the bonus (and we wanted it too) but even though we said "Don't kill the Centaurs", clicked, and drew furiously on the map the STUPID wammo still ran on in and killed them.

Was there a Community?

As soon as a new game picks up, major cross-game Guild pick up Vent/TS and just disappear, dragging multitudes of players with them.
Then youve got the unavoidable: Anti-Socials! Self Explanitory.
Mass AFKing creates a sense that no one wants to talk to you; so hey i wont talk to any back! There goes another chunk of players.
Hell by the end of the night, youve got like 20% of the game still talking to people they dont really know.
The only other way to get people talking is forced co-operation, which then falls on Alliances/Guilds.

Again, Was there a Community?

well if you compare the wintersday just gone to the one before you will notcie a huge differnt in the commuinty. the first wintersday everyone one was happy and willing to chat and help. but the one just gone was just full of hate and telling peopel wrong things.

so basiclaly some where last year something happend

Your "Community" is what you make of it. I go through periods where I don't want to take real people or people don't want to go with me.

If I want to do a mission or a quest, though, I can almost always find a group of some kind. I can pull from my guild, allaince and or form a pug. I seldom do missions without at least a few Guild members in my group and I often recruit new members durring missions where we can't field a whole guild group. Sometimes I even join parties on this message board. (Jade Quarry mapping for instance)

Quite often I adventure with Heros/Hench though. I am one of the few people in my guild that likes to capture every skill and explore every nook and cranny of the world. When I do that I am limiting my community to heros/hench unless someone wants a specific skill I am going to cap at the time.

Quite frankly...it is more fun to go with friends but much more efficient to just take heros to go cap a skill.

Basicly better games have been released. Anet's constantly changing things so you have relearn the game over and over. If you stay you'll be bored. If you leave for a month or 2 its really hard to get back into the swing of things in pvp.

WoW burning crusade is out. So is vanguard.

There wasn't much community to begin with after beta. Then people just started leaving. I've seen a constant flow of people leaving the game. Not many new players these days.

there is a ton of people out there still were just all spread "thin" on doing diff. missions quests pvp gvg hoh uw and fow there are more options out there now so naturally your going to see less people out in the one mission you're doing

I think there was. When I started in the summer of 2005, the game was relatively new and most people didn't know what to do. Of course a lot of it was the newness and the charm of doing everything for the first time, but you still can't help remembering times when you could actually chat in towns, have people help each other and not laugh if you're an inexperienced player and having a purple 13-29 hammer was special. But the community spirit was definately better and morale overall higher.

It somehow seems to me that so much of the community is just so damn angry all the time. Spamming, cussing, being impatient and rushing their way through the game. It's definately become an allegory of the rest of the world, but it sure wasn't always so.

Before release, during the E3 for Everyone event, there weren't even henchmen. You had to play with people in the missions.

(The areas between missions were also designed for one man parties, so much for that one. The Guild Hall seems like a fansite that liked what Guild Wars was going to be...)

The people were much nicer, you'd get into a group with one or two people interested in talking maybe 1/4 of the time... If there will ever be a time like that again, it'll be after GW is dead and only crazy people who won't let it go (Hello, I can not let things go) are around.

The last time I let a PUG into my group:

Was doing the first mainland mission with the 5 billion exploding afflicted guys (as opposed to the other 5 million places in that campaign that had the same enemies. More scorpians plzzzzz grrr). Was a ritualist I think. Had a guild mate with me. He had Barrage. Barrage is a nice skill when used against a billion guys at once.

Was planning to go in with him and the henchmens. Two mesmers instavite me. I feel whimsical, and say what the hell. Let them in. It is a class with a touch of finesse, right? There was maybe a chance of intelligence here?

First guy leaves after a few seconds of looking at the henchmen.

Second guy says we need a "tank". The second I saw that word, I knew I should have just kicked the guy. But no.

I tried to explain that we had barrage and a couple NPCs with an armor level that wouldn't make them a liability, despite their horrid skill lists. I would have gone on to explain that if any class is a "tank" it is the monk. Or maybe the ranger with its longbow range, that's kind of like a canon? But no class in the game has treads nor stores large volumes of water. So the very word "tank" should never be mentioned in the game. But by then...... he was GONE!

A mystery. Maybe his internet connection dropped.

So I went in with my one human buddy and got Masters without any stress.

I quit PUGing years ago. Why bring people who might be a liability in the Desert missions, or the falling down crap level, when I have an army of mediocre but reliable bots?

It's great being able to beat every mission with an empty skillbar.

And by great I mean kind of lame.

Edited to note:

I ended up in my guild when I saw some wacko demanding an all-necromancer group in the underworld. We had to put up with one elementalist that day, but dang if we didn't get far.

Too bad Nature's Renewal was still a huge piece of cheese back then. Damn those behemoths.

Its very sad to see so very few people wanting to play with each other anymore. The games population has been spread very thin and that is why I felt they introduced heroes. While it does let you play through areas where you couldn't get a pug it has killed the community a bit more. Honestly I don't think we will ever have what we did in Prophecies. I've had to play through Nightfall four times now with just heroes/henchmen and its been very dull. So when I see a pug I just jump on it for fun even if I don't need the mission. I will always prefer playing with humans over the AI.

I agree...and I think its called a bunch of kids(not just talking age) got the game for christmas last year and weren't to LA last Wintersday. After that the community just stopped...they don't care, its all about them, and STFU NOOB, if you say different, but by God you better answer my question that I spam a million times!

Sorta makes ya wonder what their "real" community is like don't it?

Are we seriously going to go over this again?

People don't like to play with each other. Too many conflicting personalities, goals, skill levels, play styles, maturity levels, intelligence levels, etc. You don't see wide-scale problems in a lot of other games because in those games you aren't directly dependant on 7 other people that you may or may not known in order to accomplish anything. When you're forced to play the game in a party, all of the conflicting traits that I mentioned above become serious threats to teamplay and general enjoyment of the game.

Common example: Player A is a consumate powergamer. Her idea of fun is to rock at this game, and if that means she has to memorize game mechanics, skill properties, and play GW like it's a second job, then so be it. Failure is unacceptable, incompetence is a deadly sin. Player B is a casual, for-fun gamer that just doesn't care that Mending might not be the best choice on a warrior. She's having fun taking her time, using wacky builds that may or may not work well. She's not an idiot, but she just uses GW as a way to relax so she doesn't see any point in getting good at it.

Do you think Player A would play well with Player B? Ever? I've exaggerated their qualities somewhat, and these certainly aren't the only two camps, but there are a significant number of players who are closely aligned with one camp or the other, and there's essentially no way to reconcile them. And this is just talking about playstyle and gaming mentality. It only gets more complex once you factor in things like skill level (players of vastly different skill levels often find it hard to play nicely together) and maturity.

I've 'met' a lot of people playing GW, and that's what convinced me that I'd be better off with heroes and all chat channels turned off. Given the responses on the forums, a lot of people feel the same way. Whether something about the game is stifling community is a moot point, because the real issue is with the community itself.

well lets see.. i absolutly ENJOEYED the game back when.. ha was 8v8 and offerd a challenge, i can farm if im bored, and skills were SKILLS
and i know most others liked that stuff too

with those fun things bieng gone... most of the "good" guys left too


just my 2 cents

I think what killed the comunity is farming.

I remember like a year back, when people would go in fow/uw with a 8 players party.
Now that farming was allowed, you dont need people anymore! You alone can make 8x more profit then playing with others.

The improve of the henchmen AI + heroes just helped giving the final blow. Who here remembers tanker alesia or orion making rain of fire on dead bodies? The henchmen were so stupid it was worth riskin getting a PuG. The last missions were impossible with henchies only.

Nowadays, i rather make my own builds with heroes then getting stupid players who got no sense of logic and play incredibly stupid.

It seems like everyday there is a new thread like this, saying the exact same thing, over and over, repeatedly, redundantly, all the time, frequently, many times, much, oft, often, oftentimes, ofttimes, regularly, ad nauseum, and ad infinitum.

The community never was that great. You're just remembering those first few months that you were new to the game and met other new players to the game. New players today have the same experiences now, that you had then.

QFT! We as a community doomed ourselves from the beginning. It's not the Devs it's us........

I've grown bored of the game (I login like 3 times a week now for a last few weeks), but I don't think its so much their fualt as it is just..getting bored of the content. In PvE I don't feel a real desire to get any titles I don't have, or any "uber leet skins" of weapons I dont have, so theres not much too do. In PvP RA and the lower areans I've never been a fan of, and in GvG I really only loved playing because I liked Mesmers and playing them, but since Nightfall they've been just Spikers so I lost interest in that since I've never been a fan of spiking (thus dont practice it much, thus arent on time alot anyway, so yea..). I'll get on and see what my guild is running and if it pleases me I'll try to get a spot in gvgs for the Mesmer or a necro or something...if not I'll continue doing what I am now.

Which is considering WoW once my economic situation gets alittle better, for the moment I'm just playing around in Runescape to pass the time til then.

I have to somewhat beg to differ here. It is 'us', in the sense that no one held a fellblade to our throats and forced the GW 'community' to become a group of collective rodent droppings, but that things would come to this pass was imminently predictable based on design decisions made by the devs.

Just to mention a few of the many obvious ones --

1) Being free-to-play -- While something many of us consider a great feature, it does tend to attract a younger crowd with all of the attendant problems. More importantly, it means that resources are extremely limited. Things that could be done to try and clean up the community some will never be done because the resources to do so are not available.

2) No policing -- To put it kindly, Anet takes a laissez faire (in the extreme) attitude towards player interaction. Other than accidentally appearing to be a 'bot (ironically, it's likely a 'bot that decides if you're a 'bot or not) or saying something that sets Ms. Gray off, there is little or nothing you can do in-game that will be likely to have any negative consequence. Leaching, griefing, scamming, standing in town spewing your racist/sexist/homophobic rants, it's all fair game. In such an environment a sadly large percentage of the population will strive to be the most annoying ulceration on the behind of humanity that they can manage to be. A lack of resources means this almost certainly won't change -- hopefully no one imagines that the lack of in-game reporting is an accident -- and likely the downward spiral to depths of incivility heretofore unexplored (well, save in certain Usenet groups) will continue.

3) Don't need nobody -- The PvE side of GW has always seemed almost embarrassed to be multiplayer. An optimal group size from a loot and experience PoV is... One. For a multiplayer game that's problematic right there. Toss in henchies and... Why am I partying with other players, again? Oh yeah, I'm not. Add heroes to the mix and it's time to start wondering why one needs a net connect to play the game. You don't need other players, not really, many people had done everything in the game with henchies before heroes were introduced. Now with heroes no one actually needs anyone else for anything save a couple of areas very few care about. Sadly, many people need a reason to be nice to others, that they might need them for something helps provide that reason. But in GW you don't need them, you never really have. A multiplayer environment where players don't need each other is not going to be a friendly place.

4) Two games in one -- The idea of a game that encompasses PvP and PvE must sound good on paper, everyone keeps trying it. The problem is that it doesn't work in practice. The two have too many mutually exclusive needs and desires. What pleases one will almost inevitably infuriate the other, and rightly so. The vast majority of players will inevitably favor one form of play over the other, most to near 100%, their mutually exclusive desires inevitably create a schism in the player base that cannot be healed. An open state of warfare between the two sides is predictably the norm, the best you can hope for are occasional period of cold war. A house divided cannot stand, especially not when the division is fundamental to the design.

Decisions made by the devs may not be directly responsible for the current state of the game community, but they have quite predictably helped to lead us here.

The point was that the game has only been out for less than 2 years... lmao.

Anyway the way I see it, heros have given good players a fast way to do missions, with or without a few guildees to help. The good players equip their heros with decent builds, and blast through everything. They no longer need PuGs.

The bad players have crappy skills unlocked and tend to equip their heros with builds like echo+mending. Then having half their team gimped with noobishness, they conclude that heros suck and go find a PuG. There, their utter lack of skill is noticed less as the other humans pick up the slack. However as more good players stick with friends/heros and more bad players go for PuGs, eventually the PuGs hit the rock bottom of skill level, and nobody wants them anymore. Chat is reduced to guild/alliance, and cities become filled with WTS spam in local chat, since nobody needs local chat anymore.

I started in Factions. When I was low level I had to get in groups to do the missions in order to advance. We were all noobs, and all had only some small idea of how best to do things. It was hard, but it was fun. If someone made a mistake they were sorry, but we didnt make a big deal about it because we all knew it could be us next. I met fun people back then, and had a good time. Now there all gone. Either they join guilds that do little for each other and blend in, or they left. The only people left to talk to in towns are 12 year olds talking about there newly discovered body parts. I miss the old days.

Just because you're nostalgic doesn't mean things were ever actually any better.

Dang opened a hornets nest. I concur with the few posters on the towns, go into LA, Ascalon, Kieneg Center, or even Kamadan, and what do we find? Sellers using the chat channel to sell what they farmed. I thought that the trade channel was for that. I am not nostalgic about what GW was like in the first months it was out I would like to see more player interaction and helpfulness not this crap about who is the noob, that only discourages the new players. We realy need to help out the players who either do not know what they did wrong instead of bitching at them for doing a party wipe or scatteringthe monsters. Nothing frustrates me more than seeing someone leave a group because at least one person has just jumped their case about using a skill that scatters the enemies. If we took the time to help these new players out then they would become better players instead of wallflowers that noone wants.

Mega Mouse

*applauds* So true!!!

What utter bs. Never make assumptions my little freind. GW is now a single player game - fact. Prophecies and even dare I say Factions had a great community feel but i'm sorry the op is right Heroes have killed GW for many many people.

Just cos you like playing on your own (for whatever reason) don't think everyone is like it.

Another poster said "threads like this seem to appear everyday - well there is a reason for that........

seriously I don't get you people. why are you so annoyed that most players prefer to play on their own and not play with you? it's the players that caused the decline of PuGs not heroes. it's been like this since Prophecies, it just wasn't really noticable back then but it was there. you should really take a look at yourselves rather than blaming it on some AI. another reason you see a lack of PuGs is because everyone is spread out across all 3 chapters and the population is small between all of them, again caused by players.

and you got to stop saying GW is completely a single player game now. quit looking pass PvP it's a major part of GW. everyone is always and still grouping with each other in that part of the game. now going back to the PvE side, I don't know where some of you play or what time but I still see players grouping with each other for missions and such. mostly it's guilds and alliances that play with each other but there is still players pugging together. still I don't see heroes being the caused of this but the reason why you see more players on their own is because a lot of the missions and quests in Nightfall requires heroes for a lot them and Nightfall is way way too easy. if ArenaNet made the next chapter slightly difficult and don't have the hero requirement for missions, you'll probably see a lot more players grouping with each other.

That would be a great idea.

I also agree. I still find people to group with in Chapter 1 when I go back with new Characters. The only heros I use and see others use alot are the Monk Heros.

let me rephrase before someone misinterpt it. players still have the option to take heroes into missions whenever they want, just as long as they are not required like in the Nightfall missions where you have one hero required to play that mission.

1. The game is too big.
I started playing online games in 1999. It was a cute little game called Rage of Mages. Everyone could enter a map and everyone knew each other. There was no protection at all so soon some players walked around in hacked gears. No one cared. When a pker entered a map everyone called 'the others' and we had a pk-hunt. Age? There were 12 year old kids and guys older than 50. It was no problem, just fun.

2. Age discrimmination & elitism.
Many players feel they are too good for parties with schoolkids. Reading the forums I also notice lots of answers which basically say this: 'if you want (....) than you don't understand the (our) game' 1000 Opinions and its always the same small group of people who claim they are right.

3. PvE players are not organized
In PvP its common to communicate about builds and talk things over. In PvE its not. Even in guilds you hardly see parties doing PvE missions. Probably because you don't really know each other.

4. The fun parties are those with friends
Friends from real life and those you know for years from other games. How many of you have 5 or more real friends in the game?

5.The Spirit of the age
Today, young people are multitaskers. They perform many things at the same time: Playing a computer game, watching tv, answering a cell-phone call. They are used to do things quickly for a short period of time. They often lack concentration for long online sessions, e.g. for doing hard missions. They loose interest very quickly. They hob from game to game. How many inactive players are there in your guild?

Thats one of the things i LOVE about Guild Wars, you can play without the worry of being killed by another player just before you kill that important boss

Its the one thing I really hate about Archlord, it really annoys me and I want to break something when it happens

Unfortunately alot of people DON'T understand the game and play it as if it is a normal MMO like WoW or Archlord, and this leads to most of those players leaving, or getting shit for being wrong and/or asking for stupid things to be added to the game that will never be added...

Or asking for the level cap to be raised, or for stronger better weapons... Its not WoW, theres no "Ph4t L00t"

Then they need to join a good guild, mine uses vent even for PvE and forum to discuss builds, arrange group times, etc

Me, I have 17 real life friends in the guild as well as at least another 10 that I would actually pay real money to go and meet

Out of my 80 strong guild, i currently have 5 inactive players, one is AWOL and we're quite worried about him, 2 are busy students who should have been doing work but played GW instead, so they are cramming and the other two we know have family issues to deal with

does that help?

we all should take a lesson from the mongols, we need to be forced to blend in the community!!

but think about it. . . the title Guild Wars. Sounds as if we are encouraged to be angry people who are not in your guild. but all and all Guilds are your community of the people that you have gotten to know over time.

Lets say you are in a guild for 5 months and due to various reasons the guild must go their seprate ways, you add the people you liked to your freinds list and talk from time to time. Now you left the guild and join a new one, most of the time (not all) people leave that same day entering the guild simply because you dont get a nice vibe. So now youll spend a day, a week, or even weeks to find that right guild for you. Quite honestally you probly wont. Why? because you dont know anyone in the guilds you joined.

my personal advice is, STAY in a guild for a good week to get to know people. If you like the guild stay, if not tell them "hey! you guild is cool but i just dont like the sence in comminity in the guils. Bye, Keep in touch".

as for the local community i only like it in PRE because rarely you see a "VICTOS AXE 100" (yes i have seen that, remember the one bug ware you culd axcuss you alliances Hall in pre?). also in pre i am one of thoes lvl 15 monks, only because i want 'noobs' to stay in the game so i try to help them as much as possible (also it's fun to take a new person over the wall). i often do find people who think monks are for healing, so ill teach them a lesson and heal at the last seckond telling them "you need to balance your skills to be able to be self proficant, so you dont always need a heal." i tell them this because wammos are annoying, what i call "wammers" (w/mo) are not. only because they know they cant keep them selfs alive for a X amount of time. But what thay do do is go in kill a few, go out heal regen, go back in, ect.

enuf with ranting . for all you people who complain about how local community sucks. ITS YOUR FAULT! you called someone a noob (i know you did), hell i admit i did. NOW the Noobs are getting revenge and calling new people "noobs" ths creating a cycle.