Jeff Strain on GW2

What do you base your statement on that WoW's majority are not casual players? Most WoW players I know, except for one addict, play less WoW then I play GW.

Nobody disputes WoW is bigger, I would dare to dispute that bigger equals better. I didnt like WoW, my wife didnt like WoW, a friend of ours who bought GW first and then WoW likes WoW better. We dont argue about it, he prefers one thing, we prefer another.

Secondly, WoW had a large advertising budget from the outset backed/owned by a multimedia empire (Vivendi), it also had $40 million to develop the game based on a long established franchise which was coming from a developer with a strong reputation and fanbase, it also came out before GW.

Anyway, why oh f'ing why does everybody continue to drag WoW into this discussion when this is NOT about WoW vs GW but about how Jeff Strain sees the future of GW/2, There's a topic on WoW vs GW, how about using that one?

Back on topic:

GW2 will do fine. It will probably sell better than the original Guild Wars, because it has higher levels, new races, and what appears to be a more casual based PvP... all good selling points for the masses.

Even if only a 1/4 of the people who bought a Guild Wars product buys GW2, that will still be a million in sales. It may not make Anet rich, but that should pay the bills....

*me smacks head*
LoneSamari was the name of the Forum poster who brought up Tabula Rasa who I was responding too. Not a game.
*me smacks head*

Anyway, as another NCSoft game, its existance matters because if it is more successful then GW, that means there will be less focus on NCSoft's marketing team on GW2.

Umm wha?

Sry for the double post, had to point this out though cause it's kinda funny.

GW was nice but the skill nerfs on pve started to kill the experience all in the name of pvp balance. while balance is a good thing it's bad when pve only players get left out in the cold when the bosses become so insane that they can't take them without some serious planning and problems. while that's been fixed it's still pretty hard to take down some bosses. not that i'm asking for dumbed down and too easy in the same breathe i'm asking for something that does not kill my brain or will to play. while that can be hard to achieve it's something i believe they should stride for. the splitting of pvp from pve in GW 2 in my oppinion is a good move one that will keep players on all sides happy. yes people will gripe, moan and generally try to make things uncomfortable for the people who enjoy the game but ultimately don't you find these retards in every game of every genre?

Just listened to it, and I like the idea of fully separated PvP / PvE.

In my opinion, GW's is pretty close to that already by comparison with say, WoW. In GW's I don't have to worry about 'Charr players' attacking me in Ascalon, or the factions of Factions fighting it out just outside the gates of Kaining... if I want to avoid PvP, I can.

In WoW, even on a PvE server flagged for PvE, you can get baited or tricked into PvP just about anywhere (killstealling to provoke, or using hunter pets of the creature type of a local mob to fly past you and try to trick you into flagging, or even standing on your NPC and bouncing so that you misclick and hit them instead - all have been done to me to trick me into flagging PvP...).

I don't like PvP, and I find I rarely like the players who like PvP. They're a different kind of people, and we just don't get along no matter how many attempts game makers try to bring us together.

So keeping ti fully separate is, in my opinion, a good idea.

Neither side has to sacrifice its style of game play for the other, and yet both get to have a multiplayer online game. That's good for both.

hehe, ok, I did wonder

Highly doubtful, Tabula Rasa comes out soonish and is a totally different game which is clearly geared towards the Counterstrike players, its an MMO FPS plus I think NCSoft can handle publicizing more then one game at a time.
GW2 isnt out for a long, long time (in gaming terms) and by that time TR will either have established itself and have a following or it will have died already.

Anyway, everyone is talking like there is a set amount of MMO players but thats complete nonsense, the MMO market is still growing fast with more and more people worldwide having access to broadband, every new broadband connection is a possible new MMO player and while growth is decellerating in some western countries other countries are more then compensating for that.

agree and heres the link

World of Warcraft vs Guild Wars
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10188112

Don't go by that, its nearly a year out of date, they are wrong, plain and simple

"only" 4 million? That is a very respectable number. Until WoW came out, 200K subscribers for an mmorpg was considered very successful.

Anyways, yes, WoW is more successful than GW, but that does not mean that it is because players prefer grind based games to non grind based games, as you so claim. Correlation is not causation. There are many differences between WoW and GW, and grind is only one of them. Vanguard has even more grind than WoW does, and I think we all know what a bag of crap that game is.

I'm confused when people throw around the 4 million in sales line. Because 4 million in sales doesn't = 4 million accounts. Many have bought multiple copies for multiple accounts, and the MANY normal fan buys it and adds on to their current account. Where as companies like Blizzard with P2P MMOs only count active subscribers.

It would be interesting to see the actual number of active accounts in Guild Wars.

4 million sales probably means 1-2 million active accounts.

At the worst for GW, we might say 1 million - 1 million for each chapter / expansion under an assumption that GWEN has already sold just as well as everything before it did, and they all sold equally. From there, we could assume maybe half of them no longer play at all. So maybe 500k accounts.

More likely, sales are heavily skewed towards chapter 1 - maybe half of them. And from that may half quit, for maybe 1 million active.

An optomistic guess would be 2 million, which assumed fairly even sales and a lot of returning customers who haven't 'moved on.'

NCsoft knows, but they have no need to talk on the issue.

Oh... and when WoW says it has 6 or 7 million subscribers... that is very different from active. If you want active, check the stats at warcraftrealms.com.

Warcraftrealms records characters that have been seen in /who within the last month - so, active use. If you account for multiple characters per account, you get a figure from 1/2 to 1/4 as high as warcraftrealms, and its figure is already lower than what blizzard is getting in subscriptions.

Plenty of people keep paying their WoW bill without logging in for months at a time. I've got at least 10-20 of them in my guild over there... And more that I know outside of it.

Blizzard said it was 9 million paying customers who have been active within one month.

So that rules out people paying and totally inactive.

The above site is kinda confusing not really sure what any of it means.

More on topic. I am very interested in the world pvp for GW2 and what it is all about. As the world pvp on WoW servers is awesome. Some of the 1000+ people raid videos looks soo kwl.

This can easily be avoided if you roll on a PvE server. Even though you do mention it below, this is a popular misconception about WoW and I thought it would be good to elaborate or whatever le word is.

Being provoked is your own fault, along with trying to talk to the NPC when they're jumping up and down on him. Hunter pet's can't just "run past you", they need to be attacking a target. Not only that, but when you target the pet it should say "Petnameetc, Soandso's pet".

Most of this stuff can be avoided if you pay attention. If you don't pay attention, then boo-hoo. Pay attention.

If every Guild Wars player was active, then it would be 1.3 million accounts. That's pretty unrealistic, so it'd be somewhere under 1 million. Don't forget to factor in people with multiple accounts.

That's not terribly bright. Why are they paying for something they have no intention of playing? Unless they *do* play, in which case they're qualified as an "active player".

Also, a little more on-topic: GW and WoW may be two vastly different games. However, they both appeal to the same audience - the MMO playerbase. It's how I got into Guild Wars, people labeling it a "free-to-play MMO".

Pay to play GvG is the way to go!

Gw2 - PvP Only - Subscription Based - Perfection!

For those who don't get it, this is a quote from a signature from someone on TGH.

Blizzard says that, but other independent tracking methods all come up lower in stats. Not by too much, maybe a million, but enough.

Active for them is paid up, active for the rest of us comes from addons that scan /who to see who is online and report to a number of different websites.
- I'd say warcraftrealms is more reliable for most servers than blizzard because it is independent and it is tracked based on hundreds of users sending in the data to get a broad spectrum.


Its also a popular misconception that you can't be tricked into PvPing when you don't want it.

In addition to the methods I outlined above, there are also some primary quests that will flag you. For example, "The Final Message to the Wildhammer" - you have to go to the center of an alliance outpost and flag PvP. If you time it right you can do it when there aren't many Alliance on, but the outpost in question is also a drop in point for high levels going to former endgame instances. Less of a problem in the post-BC era than it used to be.

So it is a player's fault if they are trying to turn in a quest in say, Ratchet, and an Alliance player runs in and stands over the NPC 'Chen' and starts bouncing around to move their mouse pointer so that they can't click?

A fast enough alliance player can get in there and in the way before being noticed while someone is clicking through the quest sequence.

Once you're flagged, you're flagged for five minutes, and Alliance max levels love to start their hourly raids of towns like Crossroads with PvP-tard moves like this so they can grief low level Horde players.

The same trick works in Whitereach Outpost (I think that's the name) in Thousand Needles.

Plus, you -can- as a hunter take control of a pet and walk it around, and this method of 'luring' is popular among Night Elf hunters in Thousand Needles as they can remain stealthed so that the pet appears to be alone. If it rushes you from behind while you are say... talking to an NPC at Whitereach, you might click back before stopping to realize its a pet and not one of the nearby hordes of identical looking cats.


Point is...

PvE and PvP crowds don't mix well. There's a lot of hostility between them in games where they are forced to co-exist. Log into WoW and chat on Horde side is full of people who are mad about having world PvPers do 24/7 raids on Crossroads or Tauren Mill to bait them or prevent them from doing from primary quests. Log over to Alliance and the conversation is similar over Astranaar, albeit about 1/3 as often. Both factions on PvE server have small crowds of people bitter after having formerly played on PvP servers.

By contrast, talk to the PvPers and you get complaints that those people have no right to play WoW if they refuse to PvP - I've been told I should cancel my account many times, and it often degrades into less than polite terminology. Some server forums are full of hostility over this.

A common comment from the PvP crowd is that all the PvEers should be forced to go play Guild Wars instead...

Nevermind that Guild Wars actually has better PvP than WoW.

PvPers see these games as being about human v. human challenge, and people who don't want that are in their way. PvEers see these games about story and socializing, and people who want inter-human conflict are, at the least, detrimental to their enjoyment of the social element.

WoW is, in my opinion, illustrative of the problems of mixing the two crowds. As the PvP crowd there is fond of saying, in WoW there is no such thing as a PvE server, they are labeled 'Normal servers' - which means, in the PvP crowds opinion, that you are supposed to force PvP wherever you can. Where on a PvP server the human challenge is simply beating as many lowbies into a pile as you can, on a 'Normal' server the challenge is how to trick people into PvPing, or how to make it harder for them to quest by killing the NPCs they need.

(Might be obvious by now that I bear a strong dislike of PvP players)


The nice thing about Guild Wars is that no-one can force or trick you into PvP, nor can they punish you for refusing PvP (and no matter how you reply to my post, you can't deny that punishing people who refuse to PvP is easy and common in WoW - its called a raid on Crossroads/Tauren Mill or Auberdine/Astranaar - kill as many quest NPCs as you can, and the only way they can stop you is to respond with PvP. If they refuse, they cannot gain nor turn in quests until you stop, and on most servers these raids are several times a day, almost every day, for hours at a time).

Getting back to GW:2...

That they plan to further divide out PvP and PvE is, in my opinion, a good thing precisely for all of the above. The 'world view' of PvE and PvP players is just too radically different. Sometimes WoW is like playing Barbie with the dolls in combat fatigues and holding guns, or GI Joe with the action figures carrying pink shopping bags and driving a sports car to the little cardboard fashion boutique. Oil and Water just don't mix.


Roughly about the same figure I reached.

No it's not, but its common anyway. And no, they don't play. Check your guild tab. In both WoW and GW it will tell you how long since that person logged in.

benefit of running a guild (90 odd members on WoW - we're small) is also that I know some of the people, and I know they're out there, paying up, but not playing. Plus I know more people outside of the game who admit to having paid accounts they don't use. One example is my own brother - he's a doctor and for him its just easier to pay the bill on auto than cancel, then reactivate, then cancel, every time the urge leaves or returns.



Likewise. I bought GW precisely because it had no monthly fee. I wasn't sure if I would be committed enough to justify a monthly fee game.

The problem with fee games is you have to get your money's worth out of them, or, as you said above, its not terribly bright...

Another problem there is that every MMO that has a monthly fee that you join is one less sale for a competing game. But Guild Wars doesn't hurt the sales of any other games in this same way.

It hurts them by being good enough that many of its players don't care to play the others, but it doesn't hurt their 'gaming budget' the same way...

If, say, I had $15 a month budgeted for online games, I could Play Guild Wars and WoW, or Guild Wars and City of Heroes, but not WoW and City of Heroes...

In my opinion, that's gone a long way towards helping this game out. Keeping it going in GW:2 is a good move.

Like the interview said, they were hoping for a lot of sales from different people rather than a few who were dedicated to keep the financials alive. What they got was a lot of sales, and a few who got dedicated. More people were willing to try it knowing they didn't have to be committed the moment they typed in a username...

Like me, I got GW's because I knew I could toss it out and not worry if I didn't like it. I recently got my 1 year presents for 4 characters, so obviously I chose no to toss it out.

The quest says (PvP) next to it, so of course it's going to flag you. What were you expecting?

If they get themselves killed, yes. I've never ever heard this happen. "Oh look a Horde player. Hey he's flagged for PvP and standing on my quest giver, let's see if I can try to click on the NPC...Oh drat I am dead".

...No? If you make it to the quest giver first, then you're good. If the opposing faction guy made it first, then don't click. If you do click then /facepalm

Even though half of my characters are Horde, your Alliance prejudice is irritating.

Again, I don't know of anyone that stupid. Seriously, it says above the pet's name "Blahblah <Thisguy's Pet>. So if THAT'S not enough of a clue to not get you to attack, then you deserve that corpse run.

Very server dependant. On Onyxia, we kill any Alliance we run into. This is extaordinarily mean since Horde outnumbers Alliance on the server, so it's hard for them to kill for "backup" or whatever. The Horde can be just as assholeish as the Alliance.

In my two years of playing I've never heard or seen that.

...Then tell them to stop. They're helping to support a game they don't play, and on a whim, don't like.

37... i counted today...

There's nothing confusing about it, GW does not count active players because its a meaningless statistic for them, 1 million or 2 million active players does not generate any more revenue then 100,000 active players.

Why oh why is this so hard to understand?

Only for fanbois really, "my <insert favorite MMO> has x players".