Fury in CPL, Anet Fails Again

1. Guild Wars was purported to have a thriving CORPG/PvP community. Indications in the past seemed to point to potential 3rd party league/tournament support for Guild Wars. It has never occurred.

2. WoW has PvE and has an emerging PvP platform with 3rd party supported leagues. How do you explain that then? Particularly given that Anet was out the door with solid PvP first, and still has a better PvP platform today.

/sigh

Again. It's ANet's game. They never propped up GW as the most competitive PvP you will find out there.

Secondly, how does Fury's entrance into CPL and GW's abstinence from CPL constitute failure?
If I were a game designer, I'd keep my game out of CPL too...

And............................................... ....?

1) Indications? Under what assumptions? Under whos statements? What leagues were Anet/NCsoft talking with and didn't finish their negotiations?

2) If Blizzard wants to focus on 3rd party support, thats their business. Anet isn't focusing on 3rd party tournament support.

Yes Guild Wars has great potential for 3rd party support and it has not occured. This is a fact.

However, comparing it to Fury, which has gotten into CPL, is still a broken arguement, since GW didnt FAIL to get into CPL. If it did, that would be a direct and meaningful comparison.

If you really want to point out the mistakes and failures, do this.

This indicates that there is HUGE WASTED POTENTIAL by Anet to not pursue 3rd party support when it can do so easily. Thats the failure and that is sad, especially since GW pvp is very solid.

Fury didnt waste this potential. Thats a direct and meaningful comparison.

The arguement that:

Fury got into CPL = Anet fails -is false.

Fury got 3rd party support > Anet not getting 3rd party support -is true

Why argue about this? 2 Different games..

Serious design changes rarely happen in beta. By that time it's mostly fixing what you can and stress testing.

I might assume too much, but I think that this is the failure that the OP is actually referring to.

Comparisons between GW and Fury is inevitable, but as stressed by Auran, they are very different games. As such a direct comparison is not very helpful, but one might certainly compare the marketing strategies between them.

Auran, presumably being on a tight budget (Gamecock, their publisher, hasn't published a single game as of yet and the amusing name aside, have little to show for themselves) courts third parties that have good relations with their target audience - In effect they are using partnerships to push their products. A tried and tested approach. Of course, how effective this will be depends on what partners they manage to sign and how important a deal Fury is to their partners.

ANet has done marketing in the form of global tournaments with large cash prizes - Indicating that they were indeed, at that point in time, interested in pushing GW GvG as an e-sport of sorts. They have also secured some "exclusives" in game magazines. Aside from that, I can only remember one other marketing ploy. Indeed, the sole reason I'm posting here today is that the E34E event they hosted managed to get a mention on Penny Arcade.

I think that that decision to put the world championships to the knife was made for two reasons:

1. The group it targeted (PvP players) were seen as not profitable enough, partly due to...
2. ANet decided that GW would be replaced by GW2 in a couple of years and they realized many of the target audience of the championship marketing would not be interested in investing time in a game that's already on the scaffold.

Personally, I would have liked to see ANets GW line of products being a PvP benchmark among RPGs. This opportunity is now lost, and not likely to return. For this I am sad - Fury has made a number of design choices that make it unlikely to ever appeal to me and so will not be a replacement for GW.

Enough ramblings.

are you for real with these statements? you are crazy.

Yes. Im very real. And yes I am crazy.

See heres the problem. Lets analyze your OP

Ok....thats all good. That statement is fine. Thats all pretty true.

Now this statement by itself is also fine. Its pretty true.

then you added this.

Thats where it falls apart. Its insinuating that:

1) Getting 3rd party tournament support is "getting it right".
2) Guild Wars / Fury / WoW are all the same type of game.

Because.

1) Just because Anet doesnt have 3rd party tournament support doesnt mean they are "doing things wrong". Fury or WoW having 3rd party support is IRRELEVANT and NOT APPLICABLE to Anet doing things right or wrong when it comes to having 3rd party support.

Wether or not Fury got into CPL wont change the fact that Anet doesnt have 3rd party support. It has no meaning or impact to Anet's situation.

If...say.... Street Fighter, Pong, Pokemon, or any other competitive game got into CPL, does that mean anything to Guild Wars?

because:

2) Guild Wars / Fury / WoW are all NOT THE SAME GAMES. They appeal to different players each. They have their own combat systems and those are unique to each game.

If Fury and Guild Wars were EXACTLY alike and both trying to get into CPL, and CPL chose Fury over Guild Wars for the same gametype, then, and only then would such a comparison be directly applicable.

----------------------
You are right that Anet not having 3rd party support IS a failure.

But this would be a failure even if Fury never existed.

Fury getting into CPL does not add or detract or enhance this failure.

Furthermore....Anet is focusing its energies on its playerbase. And in case you cant tell, the playerbase has CHANGED severely from the original inception of the game. If they choose not to focus on getting 3rd party support that is THEIR CHOICE.


If you want to directly compare. You can compare that Fury is using their 3rd party potential better than Guild Wars. And thats about it.

Like i said....if Lance Armstrong won the Tour De France (again), would that detract from Jeff Gordon?

It wasn't a competition between the two - so the fact that Anet has stayed away from third party tournaments, which have so much potential in furthering the life of the game, is even more of a marketing failure.

That's the point, why are you even wasting time arguing? The thread title indicated that Anet had failed with their handling of the game - which is exactly what, with regards to 3rd party support, has happened. Again, this is not a discussion of how GW failed to do anything, but a discussion of the failures of the company (like it says in the title).

Well Fury's release will change GW quite a bit I think. I see alot of PvPers jumping. For quite a few Fury is everything they wanted. Without duel balancing Fury can stay balanced, people can compete in 3rd party competitions, instead of the yearly ANET one, and get the game they thought ANET would give them but failed. Patching should come faster too as ANET is working on three games now. Fury will be working on Fury.

Hopefully ANET watches this game, and can implement the good in GW2, and cut the bad from it. Then mix with the good they had in early GW before PvP degenerated and a lot of top guilds and players just left only to play a month or two a year if.

You failed to see one of my points. Being that maybe its not marketing failure but rather a concious decision, since the game's audience has shifted, the company has shifted focus.

And since that, imo, is a bigger contributing factor, Fury getting into CPL doesn't have any warrant comparison since theirs is a concious decision to get into CPL and Anet hasnt.

Because arguing is fun!

And the OP seems to have difficulty wrapping his head around the fact that, I AGREE with most of his points.

Nothing wrong with the message. But the delivery is terrible. His post has poor insinuations and if he really wanted to point out this failure, he could have done without sounding like an ass.

All I can say is this a clear sign of things to come for GW. When one of your pvp developers and a cornerstone of your community jumps ship you can easily get a clear idea of where GW is heading. The community might not all jump to fury but other games are learning from Anet's mistakes which can only mean it will be a better game.

When GW turned down the opportunity to get involved with the Championship Gaming League they sealed their doom as far as 3rd party competitions.

JR is a great player I also had the pleasure of having him guest monk for us on many occasions. In fact we really never found a core monk because we always had JR.

I don't know if you could call Guild Wars a competitive game anymore. Sure, it has player vs player competitions, but you don't get more skilled at it.

I'm dead serious. There's nothing in Guild Wars that tells you "You're not quite good enough; you should study how to do this." You want proof? Ask yourself if you are a good player or a bad player; you probably answered "good".

I have KoaBD on my W/Mo, and 15^50 Sundering IDS. I'm good. ktnxbie.

</sarcasm>

Basically, after reading 5 pages of this thread, and being a top 50 GvGer since the beginning of the game, I can safely say that ANet's CR people have done a horrendous job at keeping PvP exiciting, balanced, and pleasing to most PvP'ers. All of you PvE'ers who don't know what VoD is, please don't say competitive PvP is Guild Wars is alive and kicking, because it's not. It has been beaten time after time and has lost nearly all of it's top competitors, maybe even more. Competitive PvP in Guild Wars is dead. If you want to find some of the old players, PM me here and I'll tell you exactly why they left and why most people are leaving from the PvP scene. Sorry to whoever controls CR at ANet, but you need to take a look at the job you are doing, give it to someone who can do something with it, and sit down for a while.

[QUOTE]i do not believe you meant to type *CR* people as they do not have any control over the following

1. making the game (exciting or not) which is the developers not CR

2. balancing which is again the developers and the balancers again not CR

3. pleasing to most PvP'ers which is the design team not the CR people who have to deliver the message having as stated no control over the message they are being personally held responsible for delivering

did you mean developers instead of customer relations?

because the best CR in the world wont be able to fix the problems you list

The CR people are responsible for relaying information from the community to the dev team.

If there's no PvP CR (and god knows Gaile doesn't PvP) how can we be heard by those in charge?

remember that customer relations goes both ways.

i HIGHLY doubt that the developers sit around all day and read these forums for customer feedback.

even though its been said they do, i think its a crock of shit.

lets see, work on code? or read forums.... which is my employer paying me to do...

This is kind of off topic, but still related to 3rd party leagues/tournaments.

In South Africa, The Amateur Gamers Association of South Africa have a league for Guild Wars (As well as several other popular games) which has been pretty successful. And even allows players to earn national colours for gaming.

I am suprised that there are not more 3rd party leagues. I guess that alot of people have trouble accepting Guild Wars as a competitive game, and rather see it as an MMORPG.

That is what you get when you tr y to cater to 2 large, but different markets. PvE and PvP don't mix, in my opinion.

Cyberathlete Professional League?

Maybe they are not interested in them since GW has its own tournaments.

Umm..maybe direct relationship with the dev's to avoid confusion and misrepresentation?

Just some food for thought.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Anet is funded by NCsoft, who can afford to set up tournaments and get enough sponsors to help. I doubt Fury has anywhere near the financial support NCsoft can offer, so they must seek 3rd party support in tournament hosting. I'd say 3rd party tournaments are a necessity, not a choice.

This sums up the problems nicely

http://archive.gamespy.com/top10/april03/progaming/

It's gamespy's Top 10 Reasons Professional Gaming Doesn't Work.