PETITION: 7 Heros

I like how the important detail behind why this won't happen keeps getting overlooked by you and everyone else that's pushing for this:

Please read the first sentence carefully, it's not that anet is saying no because they want to, but because of the way the game is designed and it is limited in what it can do. Signing a petetion will not suddenly make the game bend the rules of what it's capable of doing.

You make some valid arguments but please allow me to retort. In your post you quintessentially make two separate arguments.

1. GW = MMORPG - Player based, should interact with other people.

2. 7 heros ruins the economy - your saying here that more people can beat Mallyx (just as an example) there will be more people with the high end items.

Moving on to my rebuttal:

With regards to your first arguement. Guild wars in an MMORPG, playing with other people can be great fun and is exactly why I am in a guild, but that does not by any means negate my previous arguments. While I am happy that you have a friend that can get on at the same time as you and is always (apparently always) intersted in doing exactly what you need to do, it does not by any means settle my issue. When I get on at around 11 oclock every night the majority of my guild is already signed off or planning on signing off too soon to accomplish any significant goals. So I am left to H/H my way through most of the goals that I want to accomplish or grab a pug that has a very low success rate of accomplishing the goals of many of the higher end areas. So while I'm happy that 3 heros and another human with 3 heros works for you, you do not speak for the entirety of the player base. Also i'm sure that there are times that your friend is not online and you would like to accomplish something that cannot be attained with the H/H system. So even if it doesnt hurt you most of the time it could still help you some of the time.

Moving on to your second arguement. While you do make a point that more people will be able to achieve goals of completing all quests in high end areas is this a bad thing? So more people can do this... isnt that good that more players can successfully play more of the game? I would have to say so. Additionally this should have no profound effect on the economy of the game as heros take the loot too. There would be no massive influx of high end items and thus no economical changes.

Again you cannot H/H FoW,UW, DoA because hench aren't allowed there.... you can H/H most of the game but why not allow the 8 heros where henchmen cannot?

The reasons that Anet gives are bogus, they primarily state the user interface would potentially become too cluttered.... you can choose to ignore/minimize the hero userface as it is now so this is marginal at best. And what would another possible reason why it wouldnt be possible? 8 customized skillbars?... if you play in a pug or guilded group it is just that 8 customized skillbars.

I'm a high school student, I have daily classes, homework etc. I can only play for longer periods during the weekend too. I've never had any problem doing any quest/mission/dungeon yet, with about an hour per day of time to kill on Guild Wars.


I'm sorry but I strongly disagree here. Why should players who are more dedicated, who sacrifice more time for the game, and who do play in a team have nothing to show for it? Some areas should remain inacessible for players who aren't willing to get one friend and his heroes. That's ALL IT TAKES these days. One person. A real-life friend maybe?

Look at WoW. It has solo players who have a great time, but if you want the high end stuff, you need a dedicated raid guild. In the old days it was 40-people + (!!), now it's generally 25. Honestly, in an MMORPG I find it almost offensive you complain about having to play with one other player to get the very best things in the game.

Its not a case of they cant do it. The fact they have the heroes in shows they can do it. What they did say was it isnt in their design vision. Which for the most part translates into. Its work which we arent getting paid for so no.

However when enough people ask for it, they can either risk losing reputation with the casual player (who are a huge portion of the playerbase) or they can make a change.

@ Deadly junk: If your unsatisfied with the responses from Isileth please see my own responses to your previous arguments as they will add further insight to the issue at hand.

Because there's no incentive for any group activity left.
No.

No.

No.

Want more, play more. I'm not for handing tormented shields to every straight-out-of-ascalon noob and his band of ragtag heroes. A large part of the fun of the game for me is having something hard to get and knowing you took the time and effort to get it. Guild Wars is ruining that more and more already, what with dwarven axes being craftable now etc, but at least leave us one or two things to feel good about.
K. Thx.

Are you actually comparing that to someone who is caring for a 6 month old? While also cleaning the house (possibly working from home).

An hour of free time for some people is a luxury.


Because GW was advertised as a game where skill>time.
Just because someone can play more they should be rewarded more? They should be allowed access to areas where others cant? GW would have sold a lot less copies if this is the way the game was set out.

And as I said before. Even with 1 friend. If you have to go afk multiple times it doesnt help at all. There is still real people being put out because you cant dedicate time to the game.

This isnt WoW, it was always advertised as a game a player could go solo and do just the same as someone who went in a team. Again they wouldnt have sold as many copies had this not been the case.

We also arent complaining about playing with other people. We are saying the option to go solo should be balanced with it. After all it was advertised that it would be. So why should pugging suddenly be the right way to do it?

Well.... ain't life a bitch?
Could say the same thing about every social activity that involves people that don't live in my house.
Or even watching TV or reading a book.
When I do X, I can't do Y. If I want to do more Y, I have to do less X.



They should accept that they have Z time that they have to devide by activities X and Y. Since there are 24 hours in a day, Z will have a max.
Time devoted to X and Y can be shifted, while that may not be desirable.

If Y is playing and X is all other activities including sleep, heroes are not going to get you more time in Y. You have to take that from X.
Playing 30 minutes will not help you vanquishing. Even with a decent human team many areas take a lot longer than an hour to finish.
DoA, Deep, Urgoz's are also not 30 minute play areas.
You need to take time from your other activities and dedicate that to playing.
If you can't do that, heroes are not going to help.

Heroes only help speeding things up, but not that much.
If they would speed up things a lot, I'd say the 'overpowered' argument is valid.

It speeds things up over standard h/h and is still significantly slower than a good guild group. Im not certain why exactly your so adamantly opposed to allowing players to have another tool in their arsenal? if you dont want to use additional heros then dont... many players are better than the heros anyway, but heros can allow for a short period of afk without griping and should i have to leave i dont feel as though i have let the group down.

Boo-friggedy-hoo.

Yes.

We also arent complaining about playing with other people. We are saying the option to go solo should be balanced with it. After all it was advertised that it would be. So why should pugging suddenly be the right way to do it?[/QUOTE]
A) Shut up about pugging, I have never advocated it at all. Get a guild, get a friend.
b) About Guild wars would've sold less if it was that way?
WoW=7 mill player base, GW=2.5 mill.
Honestly, stupid complaining! You can get everything, do everything except Doa, FoW and UW. You can get perfect armor and weps etc. Jezus, I know it's not WoW but just by comparison, you can't even get a near-max damage weapon on WoW unless you raid 5 nights/week and I never hear their player base complain. If you invest more time, you should get more reward, it makes perfect sense.

playerbase casual yes

fansite base casual no way

this site has turned for the most part from casual into a hardcore farmer/trader/item site

the number of true casual players here is miniscule.

the yelling for this is *7 heros i can hit every elite area* and farm it without a quitter.

or

i can do the high non elite areas faster and more efficiently with myself and a party of 4/5 heroes instead of needing the full 7 henchies which increases my loot on exemptions

No it wouldnt speed anything up (apart from the forming of parties) once your out there fighting they are not better than real players.

And the point of being able to do these high end areas is I get 30 mins in. Kid wakes up. I go off. When I come back....my team is all still there! No one has left or gone afk themselves and I can go ahead and carry on playing.

And yes we have to balance things in life. I can set aside X time for gaming.
But when a game requires you to have more then X time free it suddenly starts to not get purchased by casual players. Now while GW1 is all done and no more profits will really be made (Not as if any fresh game was launched anyways) suddenly making changes looks bad from a financial point of view.
What they need to remember is a lot of people who buy GW2 will come from GW1. Now should casual players not be able to actually play all of the game they might look at GW2 and think...hmm I wont actually be getting my moneys worth. And they will go and buy a different game.

The reason I purchased GW was that it would allow me as a casual player to actually play in the time I had available. However im still at a disadvantage to someone who has more time. So obviousely at the moment I have my eye open for any new games that claim to be open to casual players.

I do find it interesting that you originally didnt post because you didnt want people to flame at you then you respond to a reasonable argument with something like this... regardless your still not responding to my rebuttals to your previous arguments.

Cute arguement. I have puged and h/h all 5 of my tormented items and all 4 sets of my FoW armor as well as countless 15k sets. I dont NEED to have the 7 heros, but it would be much more enjoyable for me if i had the OPTION of having 7 heros in a party.

This isnt a thread intended to complain about lack of time... I have 4.5k+ hours spent in GW so far... I play pleanty, but the game would be more ENJOYABLE if i could have 7 heros in many areas.

/signed on A

/signed on B

Throw rocks at people that disagree.

8 elly team, 8 elly team, 8 elly team, EVERYWHERE I GO, 8 elly team, 8 elly team, plz plz plz plz plz plz plz......

Im just gonna cry more and more cos I'll never get my perfect game.

As far as farming goes, using 7 heroes isnt going to make me more money then solo farming Ecto's and Rubies and torment gems.

Im not going to keep replying to everyone now as im getting tired
Dont normally post this much and its getting late.

As for people saying it would help farming and get extra loot in high end areas etc.

I have never farmed once. Why? I dont have enough time (Not to mention doing the same thing over and over doesnt appeal to me).

I dont care about skins or high end weapons. My main char of over 1 year doesnt even have a max bow. I play because im here to have fun.


I also agree most people on this forum wont be casual. But that doesnt mean all are. And when from a group that mostly isnt casual you get a lot supporting something like this imagine what it would be like if we had all the casual players on here as well!


Now for the lucky one to get quoted and replied to be personally (Prepare to feel special)

How does that help anyone? Please dont ruin this thread which has otherwise been a good discussion of the pros and cons of this.

Also as for your comment that yes time>skill rather than skill>time.
That wasnt what GW was advertised as. You would have them turn around now and screw over a big portion of the playerbase? How thoughful of you.

We need to make one thing clear but I'll have to ask one question first.

Who the hell are you? No, seriously. Who the hell are YOU to tell me how I AM supposed to play GW? That's one thing. Second thing- GW isn't ordinary MMO, it's CORPG. Third thing- GW was advertised to allow to play with friends OR AI controlled players (then henchmen, now also heroes). 4th thing- no, you aren't better than my Tahlkora. See, she doesn't whine, she runs the build I want her to run, she doesn't bitch about me being an assassin.
My heroes > henchmen > you.

And if you want to respond, remember about the most important question

WOW you just pwnt the thread.... grats

Well, you forget one thing there.

When playing with a guild group you need to organize things and that takes time.
A couple of days ago we did a spontanious FoW run and it took about 45 minutes to set up a team (getting people to join, deciding on professions, 'omg... I have homework. Cya', 'everyone has 3 hours at least to play?', 'Oh, I have to ask my mum', 'wait', 'Y, I can play').
Now take heroes.
Go to ToA 1, load heroes, load templates, go.
You just won 45 minutes.
Same story for spontanious vanquishing with a larger group.
Mind you that I'm in a dedicated HM guild, so people are willing to join quite often on spontanious events.

The only thing to avoid this is making a schedule, get enough people to sign up, appoint roles and builds and insist on people that signed up to join or get boot from guild (sounds like a PvP guild to me).
With a bit of luck you can start 15 minutes after scheduled time.
Since H&H allow for spontanious group setup, I will keep that as reference.

Once in an area the guild group will be faster.
But there is still 45 minutes to make up for the initial group setup.
Did you also calculate that in your 'significantly slower' statement?

Oh, I am not opposed to an other tool.
I just know that if A-net even starts thinking about this again (which they probably don't) they need to dedicate resources to it (it's not as easy as it sounds to implement).
And since resources are limited, other things will not be done.
I can think of very few things that are less important than 7 heroes.
There is no need, only 'nice to have' and no-one has yet convinced me that this is a 'must have'.

The first valid argument of of the day award goes to the jos... even if the change was small it would take time away from other projects, imo the small amount of time would be worth it. iyo it wouldnt.

Yeah I must thank the_jos for continuing to post good arguments and in a sensible manner.

It really isnt a huge change. Its not as if they need to implement heroes all over again. They already have them. Yes it will take time, yes that time will be taken away from other things. But I really see that as time well spent.

This would benefit so many players. And would help keep the faith of casual players that Anet still cares about them. Long live skill>time.

/signedA

Now, usually, I find a 3 hero team fine. Did most of the GW:EN expansion quests and dungeons (with the exception of a few of the harder ones) without too much difficulty.
However, it would be nice to have 7 heroes in Hard Mode. These are my reasons why:
When I get a chance to play with other people, I do so. Vanquishing is kinda lonely solo, I like to have company, and that extra bit of intelligence really helps. I even PuG occasionally.
However, the simple fact is that there are not always people around. Even in a large hard mode guild like the one I'm in at the moment, it can be a chore to find people to play with. So you HAVE to Hero it. Now, this is all very well for Ascalon, but what about other areas?
Take, for example, Vanquishing Kessex Peak. I went from ToA, with my 3 hero, 4 hench team. In fact, I killed over 80% of the foes, and still had no dp. I thought I was doing quite well.
That was when I came up to a group with three Shepherds of Verata. Now, I knew that these guys had Healing Hands, so I'd given my heroes high damage builds to counter it. After all, they weren't going to avoid the targets, AIs love to smash things. However, the henchmen were not the same. Oh, they had good build in the own way, yet in my oversight, I had forgotten that they did little damage. At least, not enough to stop healing hands working as a heal. Neither could I remove their weapons, to make the staff attacks, which would heal the monks for ~40-50 health, stop. In hindsight, I should have brought an enchantment remove. But it can be very frustrating to get that far and fail. And the optimal build (in my view) for the area is in fact a high damage build, as it renders the monks useless, where as an enchantment removal is just a counter.

So, to cut the long story short, I would like to get planning back please. Now that we have powerstones of courage and the like that remove the requirement for skill, the pleasure at seeing a well executed plan is all we have left.

Anet have already tested 7 heroes on their closed servers before deciding no, so yes it can be done, they just dont want their game to be fun.

Who is buying GW2?

Also Powerstones of Courage have completely removed skill required to play HM. I still havnt used them, but after being party wiped to 60% DP on the final mob in ascalon foothills and being forced back to the outpost (Earth + Fire elly enemies with Meteor + earthquake spam GG), Im not going to do anymore HM without them.

Oh, the reason for the party wipe was the nooblet called Alesia. Also would have been a lot easier If I could have replaced Claude with a mesmer. But I cant do that!

1) Remove the imba PVE consumables (And PVE skills too would be awesome)

2) Remove the sent back to outpost at 60% DP thing

3) Add 7 heroes

Return 'Skill' to PVE.

Let me say I really like GW. Its a fantastic game.

But slowly they have gone away from skill>time.
PvE skill that while as people are quick to jump to arent needed do make you more powerful.
Titles in GW:EN that grant effects. Again not needed but make you more powerful.
Consumables that for those rich enough to keep stacks means they can never fail. Not needed. But with them you cant loose.


I will deffinately be looking at GW2 but should there be signs of this sort of thing I wont be buying. And that will make me sad. For GW is enjoyable. But being forced to grind to be on the same level as someone else is not.

Skill>Time

Very important question indeed.
From A-nets perspective however it would sound like this:
<start A-net speak>
"Who the hell are you to tell us how we are supposed to build GW?"
.......
"We decided to implement certain parts of the game so they are human-only (elite missions) and made our game in a way to support teaming.
Human teams always had advantage over hench.
That's a core part of our game, called Guild Wars (not Hero & Hench Wars) for a reason.
What you are asking now from us is abandoning this core part of the game.
We implemented heroes for you to help you get things done without requirement of a full human group, since we noticed players were spreading more and more when we implemented Factions with it's split storyline.
Not as a full replacement of human players or to turn our game into a single-player one."
<stop A-net speak>

Actually jos Anet did advertise GW as a game you could solo and do just as well as someone who went in a team. So if they are now taking that stance then they screwed a lot of customers.

Personally I dont believe they said that with intention to punish those who take the solo option. Its just happened over time. As such I would hope they would balance the 2 options.

How about response to AN?
"We've paid for your game. The majority wants 7h."

I already talked about this.

They are a games company not a religious cult, of course they want it to be fun.

Win awards, be widely played, beat the competition and grow steadily till they offer a replacement.
Even then they want a few more years out of is as a money spinner.

I am only guessing here but we either choose to believe arenanet are ignoring feedback that doesnt fit in with the corporate plan or that they do listen and implement what they can when they can.

We only know one side of the story we give loads of feedback to them they give little feedback to us in comparison.

Might be nice for an official post on a thread saying we have listened to what's been said and then what their plans are.
ie
Already been considered and our intent is *****
Didnt think of that will look into it etc etc

GW2 yes of course GW one has been a great success so far and I have put more playing time into it than any other game so far, and at my age thats a load of games.

In hard mode, elite missions, and the God Realms, I would choose a bunch of real people over heroes any day of the week. I joined a HM guild for explicitly that reason. However, for the harder stuff, there are not always people out there to team with, and frankly, while a lot of the henchman builds are good in their own way, I don't want to have to build my team around them. And most players can do most normal mode things without other players anyway, even if they removed heroes completely.

If you actually want a more recent reply from gaile, here it is:



(The last line)

/notsigned

Most things are already pretty easy. And this misses the point of the "controll factor" over heros as you cant really controll 7... And this would once and for all end teaming .

@bhavv

With enough support plans can be changed


@Diddy

It wouldnt be the end of teaming. Those that prefer to team with real players will carry on teaming with real players. Those what would prefer 7 heroes will get to use what they want and those that pug get to do what they want.

/signed

Even though I don't think this petition is going to change Anet's mind. Well, we can always hope.

1. People who don't want to team up are already doing that.
2. 7h + 1 player will never by stronger than 8 players
3. About control- use your imagination. You have 4 buttons to control h/h around radar, just add 4 more

The designers are saying no, and thier the ones who can dictate the way you play. I think i will start a petition thread to close this petition thread. lolz

Just ask in (y)our guild who has soloed that particular area with H&H and what team build hey used. I'm sure some have done that.

Let me think on a build I would use there.
Depending on own profession.
Probably BHA ranger with epidemic (unlinked mesmer skill).
Prot monk with Life Bond and PS (use on tank).
Optional hero: Second ranger with barrage to disrupt as many foes as possible when dazed.
Optional hero : Tank/Warrior (since you can't use a hench tank without flagging both hench).
Optional hero: Powerblock mesmer
Optional hero: Ele with Maelstrom (and perhaps ward of stability, but heroes like to kite a little too much for wards).
Optional hero: SS necro with 2 interrupts
2 hench, probably monk and ranger.

Sure, a full 6 hero team would be better, but it's not impossible to vanquish that area solo.

Could be, but that's not what my box says.
It says 'Join with friends or play solo with a band of skilful henchmen.' (seems there is a typo on my box).
Could be because the only box I see this fast is the SE box of my second account.
Now we can argue about the skillful henchmen with Alesia's warrior mode bhavv mentioned.
However, the hench were good enough for normal mode.
People started to hench their way through the game(s) because they were better than the average PuG.

Now we have hard mode.
This requires more skill from the player but should also be supported with henchmen up to the task.
Now the question is: are they?
If they are not, we have a henchmen problem.

Now I can think of several HM missions where the hench are probably not up to the task, specially masters. Eternal Grove comes in mind first.
This mission is already hard in NM with a hench team.
So if it's impossible to complete this mission HM with hench only, there is good reason to complain.

The same could be true for other Prophecies and Factions HM missions.
If those cannot be done Masters with hench, there is reason to complain.
But it's not solved by adding more heroes, since people with only Prophecies or Factions do not have heroes.

Your petition was denied by the developers before you could even make it. With respect for their wish that the issue be dropped, I am closing this thread.

Have a nice day.