Things that brought me to GW, and concerns about GW2

99.9% sure they mentioned something like, all missions being instanced (to progress storyline I suppose). While things like areas with monsters and what not will not be instanced. Don't worry about KSers and Looters though, I'm sure Anet will figure out a unique idea.. Same with the whole "random spawns". In other MMO's like Age of Conan or Warhammer Online, monsters work as a civilization, they group up and migrate, once they get a large enough group they settle down and begin building a camp which could evolve into a town -> city of that monster race if not stopped otherwise. I believe Anet will do something like this, we've already seen monster races within the game currently with mini-villages (Ex: Tengu, Hekat, Centaur)

99.9% sure I heard in an article that GW2 will have a "side-kick" type system, sorta like City of Heroe's. This might of just been an example or thought of jeff strain in an interview, he may have not actually meant it would be implemented.
No fees, they already announced it.
They have talked about changing the way skills work. On a positive note, I remember a mention of being able to "create" your own skills.

I'd love some links that indicate that this is true, because I can't easily find any sauce for these claims. Guild Wars was praised for it's innovative design, but I have a feeling City of Heroes/City of Villains or Lineage 2 is probably more of a money maker since they have monthly fees and lots of subscribers...

Failure is relative. Yeah, they make money, a lot of it. But last I checked, Blizzard makes ~$6 billion dollars a month in subscription fees alone, just from WoW. ANet may be making their parent company some good money, but compared to other leading online games... =/

I hold the exact opposite opinion. Increasing the level cap or removing it from the game makes this game different then the one I wanted from GW. I want a game where PvE worth isn't from the amount of time I have invested in the game and I can go anywhere I want to play. Games based on leveling systems are fun but they are games that I like a lot more in the single player setting, plus there is a lot of those kinds of games. The game I want guild wars is the only one thats even attempted it.

I'm excited for persistence, it really does have a lot of advantages.

I think ANet knows that sometimes people want to play alone and they will allow that.

The reason they did GW2 is because they wanted to make a game that they felt addressed the flaws in GW but were unreasonable to fix in GW. I'm pretty sure its not fiscal concerns.http://www.warcry.com/news/view/7150...-Q1-Financials

I didn't say it was their top, but one of their top. http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?op...753&Ite mid=2

"Lineage I and II again drove sales for the period, generating sales of $62.3 million combined. The Bellevue, Wash.-developed ArenaNet franchise Guild Wars generated $8.9 million and California-based Cryptic Studio's City of Heroes/City of Villains raked in $6.9 million."

Lineage is the Korean WoW and makes accordingly.

So, everyone but WoW is a failure? I'll take 8.9 million a quarter even if you want to declare that a failure. Heck, you seem to think that City of heroes/Villains was a profit maker and GW beat it fairly well. No one is arguing that any other online game on the planet makes near what WoW does, however that is a far cry from being a "failure". There hasn't been any MMO that gets the player base WoW has yet there are many that are successes - GW is one of them. In fact, with sales like that it puts GW squarely into some of the top percentages of earnings period and well deserving of the phrase "success".

Not to mention monthly fees would have to be MUCH higher than 15 dollars for 9 million players to generate 6 billion, somewhere around 667 dollars assuming all their players were active accounts (and since in August they announced 8 million subscribers and 9 million players I suspect there are at least 1 million extra in there). Whoever came up with that number on monthly fees only has some math troubles.

I'd say it's very hard to tell with Guild Wars. Sure, 4 million copies is great, but which campaigns got sold? How many campaigns bought all went into one account? How many players are active? How do you even define activity in Guild Wars?

This is just me saying that what's successful to WoW is very different than what's successful to Guild Wars. WoW has 9 million active accounts, that means 9 million players. GW has sold 4 million copies total, but we don't know how many of those are active, how many of those belong to the same person, etc. etc.

But of course, player activity "doesn't matter" in Guild Wars, so I guess we don't need to worry about it, apparently.

A longer levelling grind doesn't guarantee better players at the top level. After all, WoW is where the Leeroy Jenkins meme originated (even if the rumour that the purpose of that video was to make fun of excessive planning is true).

All it tells you is that a particular player has been playing longer with that character - it doesn't tell you if they've earned that doing challenging quests or via mindless cookie-cutter grinding, nor does it tell you if they have several thousand hours logged on other characters.

Furthermore, the (relatively) grindless environment is one of the things that attracted at least some GW players. By moving away from it, Guild Wars is losing some of it's uniqueness and is moving closer to being in direct competition to WoW 2.0.

To the above post: That's an interesting question. I vaguely remember seeing somewhere that it was the number of unique accounts that is counted (so someone with all four installments isn't counted four times), but that doesn't take into account things like abandoned accounts and multiple accounts belonging to the same person in the days before new character slots were available, while subscription games are counted in terms of active subscriptions (and, presumably, active players). I can't remember the source in question, though.

I share the OP's reservations about the instancing, for me the ability to choose to play solo is all important, as that is what i do now, with h/h of course.

I have played persistent games and to some extent they are ok, but waiting on spawns is annoying especially if there is a queue to kill something.

instances have been more fun for me, I enjoy exploring the whole area, vanquishing it and finding everything out

However i do like PvP, and enjoy mass battles and runnign about crazy, what i liek about GW is that these are mostly kept seperate from one another and youhave a choice to do one or the other. I don't like the idea of being forced to continue the storyline by being made to play with large groups of unknown players of unknown ability. I lost many a survivor character in presearing when leaving to this type of thing.

The use of h/h though in the play ares is not too important to me as long as its possible to play without then thats cool, though i can vaguely remember so talk of beign able to bring 1 hero with you.

With regard to activity of players, me and my wife have bought 10 campaigns between us, and 2 expansions, most players seem to buy all so i would assume that players are at least a third of the 4million sold units

If they want more money, just add a subscription fee.

US$10-15/ month is not too much if you make a hour of fun/ cash rate count.

If someone, logs for about 4 hours/day, 4 days a week, 4 weeks a month. It makes roughly 64 hours of entertainment. This is for a person like me, who is a full grown adult, i.e, I have life, work, wife, a baby, friends, etc..

Tell me what entertainment costs less than a quarter for hour? The cost benefit rate is even better for someone who can play more..

Subscription fees dont detract people, bad gaming detracts people.

The problem with subscription fees isn't really the fees, it's the game design that accompanies them. Once a game is dependent on subscriber fees, the tendency is for the game play to demand as much time as possible to accomplish anything. Endless hours of grind, slow world travel, even little things like slow unskippable cinematics or text display are all ways to juice as much money out of the player base as possible. I've never seen a subscription based game that didn't seem to be deliberately wasting as much of my time as possible, which is part of the reason I don't play the things.

To be clear I'm not worried about Anet implementing such a thing, because my sense is that they know what I just said. I wouldn't be all that surprised if it was partly responsible for the split from Blizzard, to be honest.

I said nothing about grind. After all, leveling up should never be a grind right? And the Leeroy thing was planned after all.

Your second paragraph pretty much shows that time doesn't equal skill. But that was not the basis of my statements. My statements were about the difficulty ramp and how it relates to teaching the player about the game and how the traditional leveling model made that more apparent. I did not say that it was absolute.

In the third paragraph, Guild Wars is already losing its uniqueness in the grind department because its been happening for a LONG time now. AND GWEN only made this more visible. SO if people were turned off about grind before, just think about what Guild Wars has been doing to them all this time.

Is this a joke thread?

"I like Guild Wars. That's why I'm afraid Guild Wars 2 will suck."

WHAT IN THE SHITS, DUDE!

I did not suggest that increasing the level cap was the answer. I'd suggest that you reread what I posted.

I honestly don't know if I ever posted anything about fiscal concerns or if that was just a general statement.

Thats what I call bad gaming

Believe me, I know...

Tahlia, this isn't a joke thread - a lot of us are genuinely concerned that the elements that brought us to GW in the first place will be missing in GW2.

1) There is already many games with non-instanced versions that prevent others form messing into you game.
- Protect enemies: If an enemy is attacked by or attacks a character, only members of the party, the guild or the alliance of the character can target and attack the enemy.

2) This one seems true. It seems that players will only be ale to bring one AI companon with them.

3)No PROBLEM! Already confirmed to be like that.

4)I doubt they change this. Maybe being able to change skills in PvE while out of battle, but nothing else.

My reasons for playing GW:
1. No fees, including secondary effects (see Strains words on "Marriage with the game")
2. How playing felt - skills, limitations, goals
3. Instancing, with all it allowed (Who complains about fedex-quests in Guild Wars, really hasn't played enough classical MMORPGs. If it really was like in other games, the quests in ascalon would be: 3x "Kill 10 Hulking Stone Elementals", 4x "Kill 8 Shatter Gargoyles" and 2x "Kill 15 Whiptail Devourers", possibly with "and bring me their #whatever bodyparts you want#" added. Of course quests in online games aren't greatly interactive. But there IS a difference between GW-quests and classic MMORPG-quests... possible, mostly, due to instancing (different spawns according to quests, etc...)
4. Graphics, and general style of the game.
5. The classes, and the possibility to combine them.
6. A fresh world, and an interesting storyline to play through (I got hooked on WPE... there, you played through that storyline twist around bloodstone fen... highly interesting!)

What I missed (at least a bit):
Crafting. Being able to craft stuff by yourself. Well, I like that stuff, don't ask me why... and somehow I missed it. Not much. But still...

As far as concerns go, I do think...
1. As I know, GW2 will have no fees. Good. Although, apart from the fees, the social factor is one of the more addicting/marrying-the-game factors. I don't know how that will turn out for me, with regards to interacting with more people more frequently due to less...
3. Instancing. Persistant is cool, instanced is cool. If done right. There is that "Dragon destroys bridge" story, that makes me look forward, as I think they will be able to still keep lots of the benefits of instanced worlds, while making them persistant.
4. is mostly secondary: Will my computer make it? Well, obviously: No. But the new one will, hopefully... when I finally get my money back to buy it. Well, the later I buy, the better it will be, eh?
6. Will they continue to expand the lore? Or rather build something more or less completely new? Lore, as culture, is comprised of different aspects: History (Important Events), Legends (Heroes and Villains, and their respective doings) and Gods. At the end of GW:EN (spoiler ahead)
The Charr have no gods anymore, the asurans believe only in the great alchemy... the sylvari are newborn... only the declining humans still believe in the five... err... six gods... how much of this beautiful lore will stay? How will it impact gameplay? Will my Asuran character be able to worship Lyssa in GW2?

Where is 2. and 5., you may ask. Well... They kind of go together. There is too little information available, but I hope for the best... something new, most likely, but maybe just as fascinating.

Sorry for the lengthy and mostly incoherent reply... but I'm half asleep (3:20 AM here)... and... well... the topic was just... well... I wanted to make something similar myself, all the time, just never... quite... got to it.

I agree, it just seems that bad gaming tends to crop up whenever there's a subscription fee around.

Again, not concerned about that in GW2.

Providing optional grind activities for end of game characters is kind of the natural evolution of a grindless game. People want to keep playing once they've done everything that really matters. I don't have a problem with that, as long as it doesn't leak into the "real" gameplay. Look at the grind level in GW, and what it's linked to, and then compare that to most any other MMO on the market. I think it stacks up pretty favorably.

Now remove the level cap in GW2 and you may have some real grind to worry about...