A discussion on 7 heroes

It's pretty obvious what she is says perhaps you just can't comprehend.

/signed

I would like my gang to have skills i would like them to have. PuG`s were never even an option, and my guildies are not always available. Henchies should not be removed, since not everyone has expansions with heroes.

sigh some people small brains Guild Wars caters to bad players....over 5 million copies sold and growing....bad design? I think not, it's just once again your own selfish reasons that you think a game HAS to be perfect/good/great whatever design that caters to YOU for it to be a good design. Sorry pal but the gaming development world doesn't revolve around you or your gaming habits or the gaming habits of the elitists or hardcore players. It revolves around what will bring in the most SALES and if that takes bad game design in YOUR eyes welp then sobeit. GW is a bad game design that made a hellofalot of money from it.

Round, round, Mary goes round.

Pop quiz, what'd you do if they give in to the demand and put in 7 heroes?
(demand! lol)

Appeal to popularity. Guild Wars grew before the game was turned into a heavier PvE game as well.

Grasp the idea that there is a very major difference between building a game accessible for casual players and dumbing the game down for them. It's not the same thing, and it's the point you're laboring over. Obviously Guild Wars is going to have a greater wealth of content for the casual player - that does not mean the game design has to be simplified and made easier. Casual design isn't fully about difficulty, it's about accessibility.

If it can be accurately determined that the lack of 7 heroes is limiting casual players (also taking into account whether they can adequately equip them with skills/gear), then it might be necessary just to bolster the life of the game until GW2. It'd make the decline even more inevitable, but we knew that already.

I'd have s** with a-net to thanks them !!

THis is a non-argument, 7 heroes doesn't dumb down the game. With 7 heroes you have skills, equipment, attributes and tactics for 1+7 to to design and tune. With H/H that is reduced to 1+3, in PuGs that's only 1. How is 7 heroes going to dumb down the game? If anything it provides more options and more choices and that is never 'dumbing it down'. If anything, the current state of PuGs is what is dumbing the game down.

Strengthening the available options to complete any part of the game without being dependent on human players could significantly help the game - and even social play - because it allows people to team up and PuG for the fun of playing together without the pressure of having to join and complete some task.

That's just what GW is though once you get past the story line in PvE what do you have left? grinding titles thats it.

Some people like sports I don't I loath every single sport on planet earth every last one of them except 1 sailing which some enjoy other do not.

But it does cater to elitists DoA is an example of that only a small minority enjoy that, I would say actually that very few that are down there for any other reason than farming generated by an inane need to get gem sets like titles.

Elitists got there hand spanked with Usran everyone could enjoy the content available now that has gone, and to some degree rightly so but what it has left I feel is more damaging to the game than removing it, sure there is cryway but that hasn't seen the same amount of up take that Usran did in DoA wonder why that is?

Don't buy propaganda that figure is grossly wrong all it means is 5 million copies sold, it doesn't mean it equals 5 million people because you have to take into account how many accounts where brought by; Gold Sellers (and then banned), People who brought more than 1 copy for storage space (which would include me), and since (presumably) we've court them out lying before what is to stop them fabricating there public sales figures to make there game appear more popular than it actually is.

Umm, play the game again with them and other people when there rarely around.

I'd do the same I do now:
- go online
- decide what to do today
- ask if anyone is interested in joining me in the guild/alliance
- if noone is interested, I either:
* join the guild/alliance in w/e they have planned for the evening, or if I'm not interested in that
* help my gf get a little further through the game, or if she's not playing
* take 7 heroes and go vanquish or quest solo (which I now do with H/H)

So 7 heroes wouldn't change a single thing for me, mostly I can team up with at least 1 other alliance or guildmember, so we have 6 heroes anyway. And if I truly am going to do something solo, then 7 heroes would make the game more enjoyable for me. I like reading about team builds with heroes, and testing/tweaking them, or simply try to make builds myself. So all in all it would make the game slightly more interesting for me personally. And that's why I support the cause.

If you can tune one bar, you can tune eight. If anything's a non-argument, claiming more heroes makes the game more complex is it - especially as most 3-hero/1-player builds are half of a full build and would just need to be copied.

My point was, in any case, drifting away from 7 heroes specifically to talk about the entire general trend of PvE development, and referring more to a difficulty shift rather than a complexity shift. There's no necessity to make any aspect of the game easier - accessibility is only a problem in the elite areas which were never meant to be done solo (evidence: lack of henchmen).

There's the Prophecies answer, and the Factions answer. Guess which one I like better.

Not entirely true, since you need to be familiar with multiple professions, ánd more importantly, there needs to be synergy between the heroes to make it REALLY succesfull. If you take the "wrong" professions with the "wrong" builds, you won't get far (well in HM at least). So there is definately an interesting thing to investigate (if you get what I mean).



Another thing that came to mind: right now, you can already take 6 heroes. Simply ask a friend/guildy or even a random person to loan you their 3 heroes. Tell them what you need, ping them your needed builds, go outside, the friend leaves, and voila: 6 heroes. This is often better than 3 heroes and 4 henchmen. So if people really want to use heroes only, they already can.

We *can* comprehend, it's just poor game design. You don't cater solely to one end or the other. If this game catered solely to the bad player, it would be a terrible game. If it catered solely to the best kind of player, it would be a highly inaccessible game. You come up with a middle ground, a game both players can enjoy and find rewarding, and then you're on the right track.

Pretty much what you two are agreeing with is that a person who just picked up the game a day ago, doesn't know jack shit, and is horribly inexperienced would have more valuable input than a player that's been playing this game since release, has played every profession through every campaign, and then some. See how bonkers this is?

The equivalent is like writing an english paper and you want to ask one of your friends for advice. One of them is an English professor at a Community college and the other a very recent foreign student who is still getting his grasp on this English language. Not only would it be logical - NOT discriminatory or "elitist" - to ask the English professor friend, your other friend should have the knowledge and care to not help you with something he's very inexperienced with. The same goes for pretty much everything: why would you want to take your car to a mechanic who knows nothing about cars?

To reiterate: you don't cater solely to casual players. You don't cater entirely to hardcore players. You create a middle ground where both can find fulfillment in the game.

You heard it here first: the only way to make big moneyz from games is catering entirely to stupid people. This is why Zelda, Metal Gear Solid, Starcraft, and many other games have done horribly.

/sarcasm.

Starcraft's popularity completely voids any points any of you have made arguing with Avarre.

It has catered to the elite, and has been successful by all definitions.

Guild Wars has catered to the idiot since its original conception, and its few remaining competitive players can't play an automated tournament because the servers are so bad.

In other words, piss off.

3 heroes + 1 player.
You fill up the team with:
1. 4 hench. You just pick up what's available.
2. 4 heroes. You at least need to copy 4 additional bars - even if you just copy them from the hench.

Full hero parties are more complex by default.
(And only the average players would just copy the builds without even modifying them based on the area or the human controlled character - which means that full hero parties would give better players a bigger playing field.)


I think people messed up here a bit.
I have no idea why people started to equal "hardcore vs. casual" with "good vs. bad".
It doesn't matter who the game is targeted at - the point is that in good games players strive to and can get better.
GW PvE lacks this quality.

Having the ability to design 3 balanced bars shows you have the understanding to design seven. It's not a linear scale of difficulty - if I can add one monk, I can add two. Many of the more effective builds are the simpler ones, and if the player isn't able to develop complex 8-man builds they won't be personally developing complex 4-man builds either.

Yes because World of Warcraft isn't adding difficult end-game raids in their next expansion that completely out number the content in their actual new continent nor focused on a system of PvP that makes the good better and the bad worser.

oh wait it does!!!!!!

also 5 million copies sold doesn't mean it isn't bad design. Age of Conan had over 700,000 subs on the first month, and you'd be hard pressed to find people who will tell you that's a game with a good design.

All the best online games have catered to the hardcore. Did you know StarCraft is a profitable game that actually out profits Guild Wars for Blizzard, is 9 years old, and also is completely focused on the elite competitive community? Did you know Diablo 2 has done nothing except add decidedly hardcore content at the end game that most players won't ever see and do things that only benefit the hardcore metagaming community, and yet it's one of the most played online games in the world still?

heh...who do they think they are focusing things on the end game where all the difficult content by good game design has to be (easy to hard, this is the difficulty curve for everything) and where most players where spend their time, especially the good ones...

heh....i sound like i know what im talking about because i talked to a few designers who clearly don't know what they are talking about to anyone with half a brain who knows anything in the industry (it's goals for the bad AND top end there buddy, but it's with the intent that the good will advance faster and ergo claim the better awards long before the bad players ever have a chance. very few people have still beaten Kil'Jaeden in World of Warcraft for example. Because a lot of them suck.)...

With 3 heroes only - many of end up using 3 necros.
And then we run out of necros.
If full hero parties were enabled - one would have to look at additional options.
Now I am not stating that full hero parties would be insanely more complex then just 3 hero parties - what I am saying though is that to state that the game does NOT have the potential to get more complex with the introduction of additional hero slots is flat out wrong.

Just give us the 7 damn heroes ...geez.

if you like them use them and if you dont then dont. so damn simple.

I mostly agree with what you are saying here (shockingly because I don't normally agree with you). We can all agree that the game has severely changed over the years. I only brought up the fact that the game was originally built as a multiplayer game in response to some who didn't believe it.

I think the problem me and people like me have is not as much that 7 heroes would destroy the game, but the whole idea of solo taking over that started with Nightfall and is being continued today. I never personally wanted this game to be a solo game and I find it objectionable that it ever happened. But I suppose nothing can be done about that now. I am certain that the trend will continue in GW2 as well.

Honestly its quite shocking to me that a company could make such a radical change in philosophy over the years. I don't think I've ever seen that before.

I have to say I couldn't agree more. The best games will always be the ones that cater to the "elites" but are easily accessible and fun for the newbies and casuals. This is true for many reasons which have already been listed in this thread. Its just a general good game practice. I do think Guild Wars did have this in the past though. Oh wells.

Its not that simple. I want a skill that does 1,000,000 damage. Should they give it to me even if it doesn't affect you?

They didn't change it, it was forced upon them. All of this was inevitable from the start. Game aging + gameworld growing = less concentration of people. And again, soloing didn't "start" with NF.

Like I said before, it wasn't catered to until Nightfall. There was solo before, but Nightfall was the official "this game is a true single player game" release.

Also I'm not convinced game aging and gameworld growing had as much to do with it as we think for this reason: Guild Wars 2. We know Guild Wars 2 will be a solo dedicated game from the start even when it is freshly new and has a large concentrated playerbase. I think they just completely changed their game and company philosophy.

I'm not so sure about this. Just because a game is "solo friendly" does not really mean it is "solo dedicated". World of Warcraft is "solo friendly" in that you can play so much of it all by your badself and level up to the maximum level without ever grouping if you want to.

From what I can determine of GW2, it sounds like it will actually be *less* solo friendly than GW1, in that you will have to group for some of the instanced content. At least, that's how I read this:
from the horse's mouth, so to speak. I am guessing these "areas" will be instanced content you can group with others to experience -- or skip altogether, if that's your preference. All in all, that (to me) sounds much more WoW-like, conventional MMORPG-like than what GW1 is now.

There's a difference between that skill and 7 heroes.

If you want a skill that deals 150 with a condition to meet. You can ask for one !!

The only way you could benefit from heroes is if you truly knew your shit, how to put them together, and how to deal with them. If you couldn't do at least one of those you were better of going with henchies. It would have to be "truly single player" if everyone found heroes beneficial. As is, it's only a minor percent.

And you may say "look at what Nightfall did with heroes!", I say "look at what we the players did in asking for a larger gameworld."

In response to the first comment above: The older a game gets the less new players it will receive annually until it starts to lose players altogether. The larger a game gets the more spread out the playerbase is. The only way this could be "remedied" is if the game was a ridiculous smashing success so that there were enough players to fill the gameworld.

And yes, they changed their philosophy and core game design because in GW1 it just didn't work. It's hard to say "look at how good it was at the start"...when it was *at the start.* It was inevitable that we were going to run into the problems we have now.

Wrong again. SWG's and the NGE guess you didn't read about that one. Players whinned so much about how HARD it was to get Jedi status and then came the NGE. I also know of a strategy game that v1.013 was so hard players came on the forums and whinned that the AI was too HARD on easy and normal levels. lol And I'll be damned if the developers didn't make a patch 1.017 and dumbed down the AI on ALL levels of difficulty. That game is Spartan by Slitherine.

Its not that simple. I want a skill that does 1,000,000 damage. Should they give it to me even if it doesn't affect you?[/QUOTE]

sure ...and I have the option to use it if I like the skill, same for everyone else.

...And look how just awesome and popular those games are now.

:3

This isn't generally a safe point of view because you can use to justify any and everything "bad" in the game. "Exploit that gives you 1million gold in a second? Np, don't use it. Skill that kills every monster in an area? No worries, if you don't like it ignore it."

I didn't ask for a larger gameworld. I was happy with Prophecies. Cue omg the game would have died post.

How did it not work? It seemed to be working fine to me. As far as I know Prophecies was still the highest selling part of this game (unless Nightfall outsold it but I don't think it did)?

Well of course I was being dumb. I don't think there should be 1,000,000 damage skill in the game. I'm just saying you can't necessarily add anything to the game. Some things could destroy it/make it worse/etc.

Because it would? GW would've been declining much, much earlier if not for all the new content.

"How did it not work back then?" Well it worked pretty well due to a couple reasons, largely being a new game with everyone not sure of the direction and with a very small playerbase. Now? Not so much. Not because of "bad decisions" ANet has made but by simply expanding the content.

In fact it was declining during Prophecies understandably so due to the length of time between the new content of Factions, so much so they had to launch Sorrows Furnace to keep people playing in the mean time.

You had little faith in the game to begin with then. I think the game had the potential to be one of the best competitive video games ever but not anymore. Real games never die. (SC, CS, blah blah all the standard).

The only games that die are the ones that people didn't think were that good unless they get constant expansion.

They could have expanded the content in other ways. That discussion goes completely off topic though so whatever. I'm just saying this game should have never went solo for purposes of this thread.

I was not around during the beta testing stages of Guild Wars. So I look up reviews and write up from other sources.

And people who think guild wars is a MMORPG just doesn't understand the "game mechanic" (word choice, I can't find a better one, had to use that and I think its appropriate, I also don't claim to be a game designer so don't come debating with me base on the fact that I also don't know the game mechanic, just so we are clear.) to the fullest and I think this November 4th 2004 Article on Guild Wars Beta Impression tell it best. have a read. here excerpt 1 Another Article May 15 2005 here excerpt 2.

excerpt 1:

"Another interesting feature is that GW lets you fill out your party with computer controlled henchmen."

"The greatest appeal of instancing, however, is that it allows for the linear and epic style of adventures common in single-player RPGs, while still within a large online community of persistent characters."

"Guild Wars is arguably not a massively multiplayer game. Nowhere is this more noticeable than when you're exploring a wilderness area and your party never comes across any other players."

excerpt 2:
"Once you head out of them into the wilds, they instance on a party-by-party basis. In other words, it's you and your friends (whether human or computer controlled henchmen) versus the world with no other people wandering around."

"This is actually fine. In terms of the actual player-versus-environment experience, it's a solo game which you can invite your friends (new or old, at any time) to join at any times."

"While it's possible to play through the vast majority of the game solo with the AI-sidekicks, they're hardly the brightest bunch. While anyone will have seen much worse, they can and do go wrong. And it annoys."

"At its core, Guild Wars is a game which has realised that a massively-multiplayer online game can be an online game and not a world. "

Damn instancing, its the reason players can sync so easily, love it and hate it at the same time.

Pretty much sums up it all. And is as valid for heroes as it ever was for henches.

Why not? I can use henches, so really no difference. Better for the economy anyway, having to outfit all those hero's

SWG is still up and running with near 200,000 participants. If you base the quality of a game on it's population then GW's is pretty small compared to Lineage, Lineage II and of course the king of online fantasy worlds WOW.
Guild Wars biggest popularity comes from being "no pay monthly fee" a lot moreso than it does its game engine. You put a $15 a month fee on GW and you'll see a mass exodus like never before from it as well. Then the other draw is its simpleness to play, gain max levels and get to the phat loot for everyone, face it it's a simpletons game for the most part because everyone and anyone can make just about any 8 skill bar they want to and play with their heroes and henchies and still win 99% of the time. Case in point I went through the entire Prophecies campaign using the 3 heroes and henchies and all I had to do was pretty much just loot with the occassional hand in larger battles. The hero/henchie AI in GW is powerful enough to play and win without you and I find it funny when people complain about the hero and henchie ai's and see no reason to add 4 more heroes since 3 is sufficient with 4 henchies anyways. There are even several hard level areas I can take just my 3 heroes and I never have to lend a hand and they can clear it on their own. So, no, there is no reason to add more heroes to just make the game even more silly to even play as heroes are already overpowered with just 3.
Another thing, Guild Wars is like playing Diablo 2 online or Neverwinter Nights which both had large sales figures as well and can be played online at no cost per month. Guild Wars has over 5 million sales over three years time, but, hardly has that many people playing anymore.

Everything you say is completely irrelevant to this discussion, but For The Record...

The reason you find prophecies easy is because it was first, and it's easy due to power creep (more powerful skills from the newer campaigns). You have gear and skills which didn't exist when Prophecies was released, so of course Prophecies is easy for you now!
Start a prophecies character, don't twink it, use only core skills and henches, and see how easy it is. And that's still much easier than it was in the beginning, because the interface and skill capture mechanics have been improved - plus of course you know where to go and when.

Neverwinters is much more open to the community and the CEP http://nwn.bioware.com/players/cep.html makes so much possible. The community supports the game with content almost as much as the developer.

I originally voted against 7 heroes (less challenge, quicker to finish the game and move on) but now, having stopped playing for a while and restarted, feel differently.

A-net would be stupid not to give the community 7 heroes to play with and stupid not to the give us a harder mode of play ( can’t be that hard to add ) plus area nasties; things that make you run away or get the right skills, spells that go off like bombs (sometimes) ~ maybe even weapons that break,

Basically content.

I don’t care what content. GW is haemorrhaging bored players and isn’t going to get major medical attention (the staff is in gynae looking at the scans of GW2) so the only option is more content, 7 heroes would keep going the good done by adding MOX and that little fire imp.

30/04/2010 Update notes:

Added "HARDER Mode". Monsters in HARDER Mode do quadruple damage.

Ah, but we're talking about PvE here. Two different crowds, two wildly different games. It's not that I didn't have faith in the game to begin with, it's that what they had wouldn't last, and if they wanted PvE to remain popular (i.e. multiplayer) then yes they would need to add more and more game into it.

For the sake of the PvE crowd, no you could not. Hence bigger game worlds, more chopping of the population.

And I was going to reply to your post, Red Sonya, until I read "lulz game is easy for everybodie!" and "heroes ish OP", then I didn't even bother.

I think they would be stupid to do it without any legit reason to do so. If this game was pay to play I could see them doing it to make the players happy. But its not.

Well the game was meant to be a PvP game *wanders off*....but like I said I won't go into that because it would get wildly off topic.