Why do so many hate Factions?

So many people I talk to hate Factions. My question is why? Factions is the most beautiful in my opinion, has one of the best storylines, doesn't have boring repetitive starter quests (like Nightfall's Istan ones), etc. The only thing I don't really like is that the faces don't really have any blue eyes (they're all brown, which is consistent with the Asian theme, but...yeah). To me they're all really ugly except a select few from the ritualist. And of course Zen Daijun is uber annoying unless you have a level 20 with heroes with you. But I love the whole Luxon/Kurzick thing, the beautiful scenery all around, and the cool story. I don't know why so many hate Factions. It's my favorite campaign. My faves go in alphabetical order by campaign and continent:

Factions (Cantha), Nightfall (Elona), Prophecies (Tyria)

So, yeah I don't know why so many people hate Factions and love Prophecies. Ewww...lol

I like it, except for how the forest and kaieng center areas all seem to be huge mazes.

Kaineng Center Dragged on a bit too long.. but Factions is easily my favourite chapter.

All but my first two chars are Canthan born.

Factions > Prophecies > Nightfall.

etc..

It's too small, you get instant 20 lvl, story line really sucks. Shiro and afflicted, what were creators thinking? Skills don't shine and sin/rt doesn't shine either.

E: Forgot to mention it has new pvp mode too. Bad thing is that it isn't really pvp.

Well as long as were posting orders..

Nightfall>Proph>Gwen>Factions

factions just fails in comparison to any other imo. The storyline really isnt all that, elona and tyria's both blow it away. The locations are 'ok' but lack originality and end up being very repetative..

factions was nice until you had to grind 10k faction to advance.

oh and it was TOO short. it only felt epic during vizunah square and then from unwaking waters onwards.

Why I dislike factions:

Crappy story line compared to Prophecies.
Forced PvP in PvE content.
Removal of skills as quest rewards.
Quests gives way to much xp, making it to easy to lvl up.
Connecting PvE skills to a PvP title just made it even worse.

These things makes Factions the worst of the 3 chapters.

Nightfall was a great improvement compared to Factions, but it will still only be second on my list, when comparing the 3 chapters.

I rather like Factions, the only thing that grinds my gear is some of the mission.
Time Attack Bonus = fail. Forcing you to team up with 8 other people in Vizunah Square and Unwaking Waters = fail, epic.

I love Factions! It's perfect on my opinion... except for the time bonus for master! I really dislike it especially if we're talking about HM some missions that you've barely done in NM not to mention the monsters there...
Wardens are also nasty but that's just the part of the forest

I hate it because it looks like the world where geography has lost all its meaning.

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Not much use for the skills if you have prophecies and night fall, no heroes, getting another chapter just to go through another storyline isnt worth it, sure rits and sins are fun but nothing spectacular or better than the other classes.

Only thing I really like is AB and how its divided into luxon/kurz.

Hehe, another thread where Factions can be bashed
What's good about it?: Echovald and Shing Jea locations are beautiful.
What's bad about it?: All the red dots in said locations, all the other locations and basically the irritation factor that is evident to me when playing anywhere in Factions.

Because I hate afflicted and Kaineng City.

IMO the only good thing about factions are the kurzick monk armors..

Now for the bad things:
- It's way too short (altho this is also positive, meaning I can complete it faster and leave it behind faster aswel)
- It looks awfully ugly
- I get lost in 70% of the kaineng areas/missions
- Afflicted are annoying, not because they got good skills or anything..just because they blow up in your face
- Some missions FORCE you to play with another 8men team, which can seriously ruin it
- The end boss (shiro) is just.. fail. Every nub and his minions making monk hero can kill that fool.
- ...

I started GW in factions and am therefore maybe biased to believe Factions is one of the better chapters. I do like the speed with which you lvl up, the short distances (I hate running for miles and miles in prophecies for no purpose), the story line, the Pve / pvp kombo.
Compared to prophecies I think landscapes are much more beautiful and diverse in faction. Disadvantage is the mission mechanics with the time constraint for masters.
NF, however, wins with the addition of heros and and even better environment.
GWEN, well, what more can ANet get out of the game within the constraints of the soon elderly game-engine. I gave up on grinding for GWEN titles and GWEN armor.
Lastly I'm primary Rit, and maybe again biased by this, Factions is were my GW cradle stood, and who hasn't a special connection to the place they were born

Factions is GREAT for Armours and Weapons. Almost all the best skins are found there. The Echovald Forest and Jade Sea are very nice-looking areas, and also parts of Shing Jea. There's a lot of variety in Factions' landscapes. The skills are generally really good (especially the elites) and the plotline is ... OK.

The only disappointing things are the character skins (small in number and some plain fugly) meaning that the same small number of good-looking ones appear everywhere. Especially true of Rt's. And like everyone says, Kaineng City is horrible. It's not particularly attractive (like standing inside a Borg Cube) and hideous to travel around, even short distances. GW is a 2-dimensional game; this multi-level stuff was a bad experiment.

Overall though I think there is a lot to enjoy in Factions. Nightfall suffers from a lot of grind and samey-looking landscapes. Prophecies is great but taking 60% of the plot to get to level 20 isn't good for replayability.

As a result, most of my characters are Tyrian made, wearing Canthan gear, with the trimmings (heroes, reputation skills) from NF and GWEN.

Although I don't agree with Factions having the best storyline (quite possibly the weakest of the four games in my opinion) I do think it's the most unique of them all. The terrain and variety within Cantha is beautiful, with the atmosphere in every region just right. From a small island settlement to a sprawling urban city all the way to a sea made of jade and a petrified forest, the amount of detail in Cantha is impressive.

Alliance Battles also created a nice balance between PvE and PvP gameplay, with both gamers coming together to clash away.

All in all, probably my favorite Guild Wars game. (And also the first I brought.)

i dont hate factions, i like factions, but it has no real game play, only 13 missions and is more for PvP in my opinion, prophecies was great how they set the missions and bonuses up, but timed missions can be a c**t when u have lag or a slow loading player on ur team(when helping online freinds), every mission is easy enough with just heros and henchies(except "The Eternal Grove" mission) (had to call in a guildie with heros)........but other then The Eternal Grove every mission is fun.

another thing people hate is the 2 party missions, but i just simply go to the european districts and find the empty district simple as that....

Factions is one of the easiest...it has a pretty good story line, but also started the suxon and kurzdick insults(annoying watching 12yr olds do that/say that)....oh and thanx to factions we have Ritualist

why does factions suck? for the following reasons:

1) voice acting is even worse than prophecies (i didn't think that was even possible...)

2) the storyline makes no sense whatsoever because the actions of the antagonist make no logical sense.

shiro: "i will now wreck havoc upon you from beyond the grave! try and stop me!"
us: "okay, we'll try and stop you! haha!"
shiro: "so you've thwarted me again! well, then i'll just become mortal so you can kill me!"
us: "wtf??? as you wish..."

3) areas cannot be run to. that would normally be fine, except some very useful skills are all the way south requiring going through several missions to get to. it's really annoying after going through the game for a 5th time.

About the only good things to come out of factions are high xp quest rewards and predictable boss spawns.

Aesthetically Cantha wins (awesome graphics and visuals)
Practically it loses (Afflicted Soul Explosion, forced PvP and forcing you to join with other teams)

It's all great, except for those &$%@! timed mission bonuses. Not so bad in NM, but they stink for HM.

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i dnt get why every1 h8s factions....nightfall was far more boring for me, + its just big deserts and a stupid dreamland with demon bastards in it. storyline was rubbish, and heroes ruined the community playing together. they shud have been added only when eotn came out, as they seem kinda needed there. personnally my order is like this
eotn>proph>factions>>>>>nf
tho i can understand why some ppl may not like proph if they didnt get it 1st...i cant stand to play proph any more, but it was incredible when i had just started. but i have to agree that kaineng is the most rubbish place to be in the entire game. i nearly cried with joy when i saw the grass in pongmei valley :S

factions too short and some character looks you start with them doesnt look good

prophecies - eotn - nf - scrabble - poker - washing up - watching paint dry - cutting the grass with a pair of scissors - writing 1 million lines - cleaning a fur rug hair by hair - and some way off in the seriously distant plains of omg how crap was that....:O is factions.

For me this story was rushed.
The foe are boring, the areas are...yawn...
The chars are all fugly - well the male ones anyway.
Some of the weapons were ok'ish but still.....shiros blade anyone - req 13 wth :O

there are one or two good points such as the dragon festival, shing jea boardwalk games, a lot of bosses are easy to solo and...umm...errr.....scratches head....urrmmm......oooh look, theres some paint drying over there....

While is hate the maze-like areas, they do make sense, in the context of an urban environment that is deteriorating; remember that the current emperor can barely retain control, and the various ministries are corrupt.

Anyway, I prefer the faster pace, as the game really does only pick up at 20. I also find many of the armors to be quite good looking, and haven't really noticed ugly face or hair options.

My only complaint is the reasons for Shiro's actions aren't revealed in factions - only in NF.

Anyway, I do prefer NF over factions, just because it's more wide open and you get heroes. I don't care for prophecies, but that goes back to the slower leveling issue, and I think we should have stayed w/ the king & rebuilt Ascalon.

I haven't played GWEN yet, but I probably will get it at some point...

Faction's is my favourite to play through, though it's a shame that the storyline isn't as good as the others and the mission system is bs. Skill Quests would have been good to keep too, I'd rather have had them then the collectable trading things (Imperial Commendations, Luxon Totems, etc.)

Even though the storyline isn't the best and voice acting is far from good, i love faction. I also like Kaineng. The only thing i dislike in Kaineng is that i always lag in that place so i have to do it on speed to get out faster.

Where are we "forced" to PvP in Faction? I finished Faction several time without having to PvP once.
The only place you are kinda forced to PvP in Guildwars is to exit Pre-Searing in Prophecies. Which you can just skip by logging off/on.

The only things i hate about faction is it's too short and that Alliance battle is more a Factions battles with random people than Alliance vs Alliance.

When they fist talked about alliance battle, redrawing the map and acquiring town/outpost, i thought that in order to take and/or keep an outpost you had to fight the alliance holding or attacking it. Having to farm faction points to get an outpost is meh. And that's when imo Anet started to go toward time > skill with the game.

I see a lot of ugly male monks from cantha. I know that'd be something I'd be upset about! Oh, and I'm thinking Sousuke went to Elona to find better textiles. Random..yep

if they made factions a little longer, it would be the best
but it's still my fav. out of all


Factions>Nightfall>Prophecies

ps. the time bonus just sucks in factions

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I love factions, the plot is great, the environments are the best in game. Especially the city, it's so different from anything else. I love the profs too, much better than the Elona ones. The only bad thing about factions was the voice acting.

If you ask me the storyline is much better than prophecies!

I find it annoying that some of the people say that the plot of factions is bad! Here is the plot of proph summed up by FelixCarter...

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Factions was meant for people who already did prophecies.
If you came from prophecies and are level 20, why the hell do you wan't to be fighting weak crap, with no challenge?
If your new to the game, factions puts you into the action head first.
Also, factions has better quests than prophecies >.> only problem is no unique quest rewards (like -50 hp offhand)

Faction's story made sense to me even before Nightfall.

Shiro Tagachi was a strong soldier, just as we are. Shiro was doing a patrol, and a fortune teller read him a fortune of his impending doom. Shiro would not believe it, he had faith in his country. The fortune teller told him again, and Shiro struck her down for her treachery. As shiro went on, through mere coincidences the Fortunes teller prediction started making sense. Shiro was asked to be invited to the harvest temple (where she said he would die!) The emperor said no one else could be let in. The emperor called for Shiro as he walked up the stairs.
The thought of dying, scared Shiro, and even if his emperor was innocent he couldn't afford the risk.
However, Shiro failed, he died anyways and became an envoy.
Shiro as an envoy then looked up ways to return to mortality after 200 years.
Its obvious he still had not accepted death. In his anger and search for the cure for death he unleashed a plague. This plague would mask his objectives from anyone who suspected him, and strike revenge against Cantha, the country that killed him. We found Shiro out, and so he went to stop Vizu from leaking ways to his demise, he failed there.

Shiro gained morality, and then died. The simple answer is he wanted revenge, so many tales are of people wanting revenge, how does that not make sense?
Cantha also has some rather interesting Missions.
Eternal Grove is challenging, raisu palace is interesting.
Nahpui puts you to the test as your foes refuse to die (celestial dudes)
Shin je island is also more beautiful then all of nightfall and almost all of Tyria by itself. Cantha as a whole is better than Tyria in art.
The petrified forest, with sky high trees. The likeness of todays modern urban decay.

In nightfall really the only place that feels beautiful in anyway to me is Tihark Orchard =P.
Prophecies beauty is so scattered that it subtracts from it.

Atleast faction's missions aren't retarded.

Oh uh...Abbadon has an evil demon serpent called the Harbringer!
To kill it....splash water on its face.....then you win!

I finally got factions (I've run my new dervish through nightfall, ptrophecies and gwen thoroughly) and I'v really really enjoying it so far! I've almost got my 10k rep with the Luxons and, honestly, think it's fantastic. It looks amazing, the story is nowhere near as bad as people make out, and hey, its Guild Wars. And Guild Wars kicks monumental ass!

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