Why the use of henches and Heroes puts us miles ahead of PUG dependant MMOs (eg WoW)

Get a good guild, then you got people to play with.
Also FoW, UW, DoA, Canthan Elite Missions etc. are usually still subject to "heroless" player groups.

But waiting in a Ring of Fire outpost for 3 hours to get a group (because even before Heroes were introduced, only like 3 players usually were in those outposts)?
Trying Thunderhead Keep over and over and over, because most PUGs are simply too stupid to comprehend the simplest tasks and orders?
Suicide-Whammos, 55 Monks, players who still use their starter-skills, uninfused players in Mursaat missions, players with tutorial armor, people drawing genetalia on the radar?
People leaving after 2 minutes (usually one of the monks)?
People NEVER having the patience for a second try if the group should wipe?
Totally unbalanced team builds, because nobody listenes or speaks if you try to do some strategical skill-coordination in the outpost?
Simply not having fun in PUGs, because there are always (at least) 2 people who find out that they hate each other, infecting the whole atmosphere until everybody curses and hates everybody?
Getting rejected by 99 of 100 PUGs if you are a mesmer?
And once invited into a PUG, having to wait for another hour, because it still needs 2 monks (and the leader refuses to take hero/hench monks)?

No sir, I am glad that those times are gone. I can still play with people in FoW/UW/DoA/Elite Missions or when I PvP.
But many of the frustrating/annoying/time-wasting parts in GW are history.

[edit] Seems like many people --after playing too long with AI heroes/henchies-- start to long for social interaction with other players, suddently feeling the desire to play in a PUG agin. However, doing so they often glorify their memories of the pre-NF-past and PUGs.
The GW community unfortunately never was that great in the first place, and above mentioned points made playing in PUGs everything but fun (in most cases).

i love NOT sharing drops with Henchies in WoW! especially when i'm lvl-ing and need the exp and gold!

1) Did you even read my OP? I've a lvl24 Belf Mage called pyroelf in WoW.
2) Im not attacking WoW. I said it was a great game, but I feel it has a downside when you cant find people to help and you end up standing around for hours waiting.

And yes im in a guild and yes I have friends who play the game. They do occassionally help when their online, but they are virtually never online.

This is why I say GWs is better in offering an alternative. WoW looses its apeal when your limited to passing the time by framing, because you cant complete a quest.

You can only kill a mountain lion, or a bear so many times until it looses it apeal. And if you lvl up too much you no longer get favour for killing them, then your stuff for stuff to do in that area.

AI in GWs is a great thing. It just annoys me when people claim the entire world of GWs is falling apart because of it. If people want a purely PUG game, then they can go play any other MMO out there. If they want one which offers AI as an alternative then they can stick around and stop winging.

So so true.

Lemme fix that for you: "Quoting for both irony and hypocrisy." Oh, the irony

Another reason to like Heroes and henchies: You can design a team build and run it (well, half of it atleast) without someone going, "That's a useless skill. What does 'We Shall Return' do for a B/P group?"

Being able to design 4 skill bars is heaven for megalomaniacs like myself

I still enjoy pugs but they have become too cookie cutter unfortunately.

At the OP you have made some good points, also I see people still complaining about Heroe's... my question to all of you is "Why?" because you don't talk to an insane amount of random people as before? Is it because you miss the wammo aggoring everything on the map then luring it to you?

The Hero addition to GW is nothing less then a huge immediate convinience, if you want to pug nothing... absolutely nothing is stopping you.

YES! JERK! LoL, JK. But really, I do sometimes miss the really stupid wammo aggroing every mob on the map before I even get oriented after zoning. Oh, the days of PUG SF runs without organization or builds. /cry

Visit Vista Cemetary, Kodonor Crossroads or Nundu Bay during the week and make this same claim. If you can form a group that contains no heroes (other than the one required hero) in less than 30 minutes, I'd be flabbergasted.

Good point.

And if we removed the AI and the Heroes as some would wish, what would we be left with?

Ghost towns where you cant complete near-by quests or missions because no one is around to help. A situation which happens in alternative MMOs which are purely PUGed.

I agree that some of the remote parts of the earlier chapters would definitely have a ghost town problem, which is why I've said that, IMO, the original intent of the developers was probably to have heroes/henchmen available for those particular situations.

Now, even in towns where there are tons of people (in those towns I refer to above, you can normally find 20-30 people running around with "8"s over their heads), but no one wants to group. Whether that was intentional by the developers or not, it definitely hurts the multiplayer aspect of the game.

In WoW, most of the game is played Solo until you decide to do an instance/raid.

In Guild Wars, you really aren't supposed to go solo....

The problem is not henchies or heroes. The problem is the lack of intellegent players. It's the lack of enemies that are to easy. The fact that the AI can be a worthy enough ally proves that the enemies and difficulty of the game is not hard enough.

There simply should be missions where you would need 6 real people. Not 5 people and a hero. But 6 people to win.

Game is to easy.

But also... we got the community scattered around 3 major games, in many different language districts.

They need to merge the districts... at least the european ones. the game is too thinned out. It will get awful when chapter 4 gets around.

It's right there on the damn box, why is it people still can't get it through their skulls that MP in this game is supposed to be optional?

I would also note that nowhere on there does it say "Join with a band of whiny incompetent strangers." All the people that love PUGing so much need to create a guild and play with each other and leave the rest of us and the game the hell alone.

the only time i play with ppl is Pvp= gvg/ha
in pve is not worth getting a group, e.g. wait like 10-30 mins for a complete group for missions, then start the mission, then 1-2 decides to leave. then your left weak, or some ppl are too noob to understand aggro/pull and just rush on enemies. i hate random grouping in pve, 80% of them are noobs who dont follow orders. in pvp is totally different, team spirit is all about who supports the others and gets the job done and well done.

Yup, that hits it on the head exactly - I wouldn't entrust my life to a team I don't know at all these days, simply because the ratio of bad groups to good is about 10 to 1. If it were any different, I might still be pugging, but I'm not. IMO, bad PuGs are responsible for the death of the PuG, not anything else which people find easier to blame, (heroes and hench obviously cannot defend themselves against such claims, so they are an obvious target for when people want to point fingers.)

That right there is also describing a single player game with "optional" multiplayer part. Why on earth is it online only then? Surely it would be better to have it like virtually all other single player games where you don't need to be online to play it. After all, that would save Anet lots of money in server bandwidth costs, it would save the players from Err=007 or other related network errors, no lag etc.

Thus you've neatly shown that the OP is in fact incorrect (in the multiplayer aspect, again)

No, it is online play that prevents cheating.

It's the quitters that have added substantially to the bad reputation of PUG's.

Because there are good things to the game that require the online aspect to be rewarding. Ie: Showing off good looking titles, armor, weapons etc. to all the bad players who can't get the same thing because they are too busy complaining that no one will let them leech through the game on their backs instead of learning how to be good at the game.

I know that this about henchway vs Wow but for a change in pace you could always Yes go and PvP if you are sick of PuGs.You could go to TA and look for PvP only guild or turn yours into a PvP only guild.You could do some TA for now and when you get enough on your guild get into some GvG.This might or can give you an idea what it really like to play with real players instead of the AI.This is great thing about GW PvP system it lets you do this.

They make mistakes in PvP but do they blame anyone or a certain player No why because they all learn from their mistakes.They know how to play together really well what is about the PvEers who can't learn from them.I would dare anyone to use if they could Hero/Henchy team vs a real guild in GvG match.

PvP has no relation to doing PvE with a PuG and the PuGs you want me to join do not change if I were to do more PvP.

I wouldn't call henchmen and heroes a stellar feature as much as a neccessary kludge. Guild Wars PvE is only designed to support groups of a particular size for a given mission, and completing those missions is mandatory to progress in the game. I.E., if you want to get anywhere in Guild Wars you're going to be playing almost exclusively in 8 man teams (with some smaller groups in lower level areas). However people don't come prepackaged in groups of 8, people want to play games in groups of all sizes, from solo to massive raid-sized teams, and that doesn't mesh well with the PvE design of Guild Wars.

Hence heroes are a way around the problem of the solo or small group of players being forced to play in a world designed for eight people. They can fill out with henchmen and heroes, and progress in the game more or less normally. Disaster averted for the solo player.

I have two real gripes with heroes. First, that you have to level them up and equip them, and second, that particular heroes are *required* to even attempt neccessary storyline missions. I think both of those ideas are terrible from a design standpoint because they actively punish heavy grouping. Players don't just want to play solo or in duos in order to level up their heroes, they *need* to so that their neccessary hero for a mission three stops down the road isn't just a brick when they get there. As a solo player, leveling heroes was mostly an inconvenience, but for friends and guildies who wanted to play with each other in a group, it was a huge problem - they'd get to a mission, and no one would have the neccessary hero leveled up and geared.

To that end, heroes are a decent, albeit flawed, idea. But the system that makes them neccessary is simplistic and not exactly a sterling design example, so I'm not going to give A.Net any points for building a workaround for their games' shortcomings into the game itself.

Peace,
-CxE