GW community vs the paying rpg gaming community

Since Guild Wars is only my second online game and first mmorpg ever, I was wondering if the GW player base is any less mature or friendly than other mmorpg communities out there. I do not intend this thread to be a slap in the face to any younger players out there, as I have met many mature and well-behaved players in this game, both young and old. However, I have heard it said by others that since GW is free, it attracts younger players and as a result, the overall maturity level of the GW community suffers. Sometimes this sounds believable when I see very immature/cruel/racist/etc. conduct in local chat or while in a pug.

So, to all those out there who are veterans of online gaming and have been around several games, I ask your opinion. Do you find this community to be better, worse or the same as subscription based mmorpg's such as WoW or Eve Online? Are mmorpg communities better, worse or the same as, say, FPS or real-time strategy communities? Does any online gaming community consisting of people in their teens, 20's, 30's and 40's have an equal blend of friendly people and douchebags? Your replies would be greatly appreciated.

Just because it's free doesn't mean anything.

If you want to say "Because it costs money you get..."

You could say WoW gets nerdier players, wealthier players, and more children with paying parents.

All communities are generally the same, if you must know

i think that gw has more behaved players then wow becuase wow is a nerd magnet and that mean people will get more mad/upset about the game becuase of money cost so it about the same community

One would normally think that Guild Wars would have all the jerks because it's free, and lots of jerks are too cheap/are 7 years old and cannot pay for a subscription.

Apparently that's not the case. Perhaps these are the kind of jerk who think a game that has a fee = awesome making them "awesome". Also, WoW is famous so it has naturally drawn more people in general.

Despite not really being any different from any other MMORPG (in terms of what audience it appeals to), I've found a lot more adults on Guild Wars than teenagers. Once again, perhaps all those immature teenagers who think WoW is awesome just because it has its name everywhere went there?

Then again I'm a teenager. Immature? No.

Having played a number of MMOs for a reasonable amount of time, there is nothing hugely different about the GW population vs WoW or L2 or EQ2.

Generally I'd say that I've met more "older" players in GW than in most other games, but I'd attribute at least 50% of that to my alliance.

If anything I'd imagine pay-to-play only influences the 16-21 demographic, whose parents think they are old enough to work and pay for things themselves, but who find it hard to earn enough to feed all their habits.

Having been a member of both p2p and free MMORPGs for a number of years, I can assure you that you find racists, bigots, trolls & the like everywhere. It isn't the free factor as much as it is the assumed anonymity.

Wrong, GuildWars wasn't your first MMORPG ever because GuildWars is a CORPG.

Sup Loot, Shen here : )

Can't say I've really noticed much of a difference in terms of playerbases. The only two I can comfortably compare are that of GW and WoW, but I'm only one person so I can't have much of an opinion there. I will say that my WoW experience has been a little more favorable than my GW experience, but experiences vary greatly, so I wouldn't take that to heart.

Do you think GW would be as popular as it is now if it wasn't labelled as a "free to play MMO"? Signs point to no. That aside, it's an online game and it shares a much similar community and mindset as MMO games.

I only run across about 1 in 10 being non funtioning human beings. About the same in WoW and many other MMOs, about the same in Real Life.

interesting subject. yeah I have played WOW a little, Ever Quest and EQ2 alot more, almost as much as I have played GW, I have played GW since day one.

for my opinion wow is slightly worse than all I have played. though if filter is off on GW it gets prety bad here too. the best for age and maturity seemd to be EQ and EQ2. is paying like WoW but seemd better, to me anyway.

Im 42 and enjoy playing games where I can just chat with players from all over the world. loved EQ2 alot for that, play with folks from germany or japan in a night, can here too, but I cant understand there text so.... hehe.

I have some kids in my Guild SMTC that were under 10 when we started the guild, some are still with us, almost 3 years later. and I can see how they have matured in game play for sure, and also in the way they talk in game.

most 10 year olds dont understand basic concept of game mechanics, just want to hack n slash, this isnt really thier type of game hehe, but some of the best players are also those kids that DO get it.

I just enjoy playing the games, and this one has been alot of fun.

It was never labeled as a "free to play MMO". It was always labeled "Free to Play" and yes Guild Wars is a CORPG. It eventually took on many MMORPG elements so everyone started to call it a MMORPG when in fact is a CORPG.

Here are some websites that rightly name it a CORPG:

Those are just a few examples. But even though Guild Wars has many MMO elements it really is or, you could say, was a CORPG.

I don't know about the same community as L2 - open pvp tends to generate a lot of online sociopaths with rotten attitudes to their fellow players.

WoW and GW using structured pvp systems dont have so much of this.

Subscription has nothing to do with the overall maturity of the game's players.
I played runescape for 2 years (NOTz one of my best ideas) and I was simply disgusted by the players. They were rude, obnoxious and overall annoying. When I moved onto GW, it was like walking into heaven.Both are a Free to play game, but Guild Wars seemed to have a better population. I suppose it has to do with the level of skill required to play.

Of course, tha tis just my opinion.

You find the exact same people in all aspects of life, not just games.

Keep in mind that many people that play those other games have also played GW, some first here then there other come to GW after trying other games.

Guild Wars takes the best elements of today's massively multiplayer online games...

That's from guildwars.com.

It basically is an mmorpg

I think the community in GW is exactly like paid subscription games. 90% idiots, 8% introverts and 2% trying to get a decent guild going.

If we're getting technical, then Guild Wars isn't an RPG any more than, say, Halo: Combat Evolved is. It's just an MMOG.

When I start seeing real storyline and dialogue choices, maybe then. Until that point, it isn't.

I've been in GW first for a year then wow then back to gw. So for me the group of idiots are the same amount in both sides of the fence. Just because they pay monthly does not make it a tard filter.

Which group are you in?

He's in all

Well, GW takes much more time and dedication for an average person to fully understand this game then some other MMO's currently available.
So PvP'ers in this game might be more nasty in general then in some other games, because your understanding of game is best shown during PvP for the most part, and the gap between someone who just started and some pro guy is huge. So, in other words, other games are a bit easier and less complex and thus more friendly to an "avarage Joe" while in GW you need a lot of time and persistency to progress, and not all can do it. Those who can, will see most of people as "noobs", I guess.

I agree with you fully that it is not an MMO - but that sure as hell didn't stop a zillion other publishers from labelling it as such, most notably IGN and 1UP.com (who also awarded it with "MMO of the Year.")

It involves character building and broad character customization, a big indicator of an RPG.

Introvert. It's easier doing things on my own. By the time I could be using to tell the warrior to stop running away from the damage and luring to the monk, I could have annihilated the entire map.

And hello to you, Bryant. I've forgotten which Shen you are, as i know two such people, please refresh my memory. Anyhoo, I'm glad my post aroused some interest. I am sorry if I ruffled some feathers by referring to GW as an mmorpg, but i figured if MMORPG.com refers to the game as such, they must be right. Back about 14 months ago when i was in Utter Noobs, a bunch of the guys started playing Final Fantasy 11, and they commented on how much more polite and cooperative people there were. They also said that that game was a way harder grind than GW(remember when GW wasn't about grind?) and that it was a huge task to get a single quest done. Another time i was doing some research on Eve Online and found a comment on a forum somewhere that the EO community had a higher age and maturity level than other online games. Comments like that got me to thinking. I asked the questions in my opening post because I, as an older gamer, was wondering if there are greener pastures for me in the online gaming world. I appreciate all your input.

I consider myself mature.

Mature for my age anyways. I've seen ethnic groups of people at my school in year 12, at the city, on the bus etc in there school uniform. Screaming at people and starting fights with other ethnic groups. I'm thinking, arn't the seniors meant to give our school a good name?

And I'm afraid so, but this game is over run by immature children/teenagers. Not all of them, some extremely immature adults too actually. And World of Warcraft isn't any more mature than Guild Wars. My brother, sits behind me on his PC, swearing into his little microphone when his team loses. He's 16 turning 17 pretty soon, hasn't had a girlfriend.. ever I think.

I'd say that you could easily have it entirely backwards.

Mostly children and teenagers with wealthy parents or people with money to burn play Pay to Play games. Not to be mean but, generally, people with lots of money, and/or their children, lack proper social skills.

On the other hand, GW players are more likely people (Children to Adults) within the middle, possibly lower middle class, or people who wish to save money. In general, these people have better (but not necessarily great) social skills.

So there's a spin on the possible effects of Pay to Play that people tend to not realize.

Is there a source on this?

My experience: No. The WoW community is as bad or worse. EverQuest2 community was possibly slightly better. EVE community is completely rabid; I eventually came to the conclusion that EVE players are bitter wannabe accountants. A Tale From The Desert had no community, which is weird as its main selling point was the great community.
Other than these I've mostly played FPS's, and insofar as they have communities they're pretty much on par with GW or far worse.

Basically GW is pretty much average as MMO communities go.
There's one unique trait about the GW community that I've noticed, and it is that the GW community is the only community I've been part of where it's considered cool to disparage their own game.

Do you want opinions or do you want facts? Asking a forum will give you the former in large quantity, but the lot of them aren't as useful as a single fact which you will not get here. Try asking ANet and Blizzard. Pretend you are a social scientist interested in "Interweb Trends (tm)".

It's mostly the same, from game to game.

The WoW forum community is absolutely horrible, but behavior in the game doesn't seem as bad. I rarely ran into the racist/homophobic/sexist/etc... garbage in WoW that I've witnessed in Local chat in the major cities in GW. That might be because of in-game support rather than a monthly fee though.

Note: This is based on the 2+ years I played WoW -- I haven't played since last September though, so things may be worse(or better) now.

Despite the fact this sounds completely baseless and without reason, you're making the assumption that the deciding factor to play the game is the payment. A lot of players play the game for the gameplay, not because of a small cost which is balanced in the long run anyway.

One thing which worked against the GW community from the start was that GW inherited the Diablo/battle.net community, which was, simply put, the worst on the net. YouTube-comment level bad.
Fortunately most of them pretty quickly moved on to other, more grief-friendly, MMOG's when it became obvious that GW wasn't Diablo, but they did set the initial tone.

@Avarre: One expansion per year plus $15/month = $220/year. How does this balance in the long run?

Can't speak for anyone else, but generally out of the various online games I've played the community in Guild Wars ranks in at #2 for me.

Perhaps it's because I'm not in a big or active guild, but in terms of the experiences in towns, where most of anything remotely resembling "massive" is going on, the community is not the best I've come across. Local chat is pretty woeful and tends to consists of insults, cybering and spam.

I play both WoW & GW, not so much of the latter of late to be fair. On the whole I've found the general community better in WoW. It's possible to have conversations with people over the General channel while questing, help people out and be helped in return if you're struggling etc. There's a downside to that also if you're trying to do a quest that a lot of other people are doing to, but even then unless they're the opposite faction you can always team up and hammer it out quicker.

I've even started PVPing in WoW because it can be spontaneous fun stomping on Alliance when they try raiding Orgrimmar. It's completely stupid and imba at times, but can be quite funny.


The only thing I've found annoying is those that type /who (to find a Priest / Paladin)and then pester you on whisper to come heal them in a lengthy instance when you've made it clear that you're already doing something and can't come. But that's what you get for speccing holy...

And no I don't think age has that much to do with Pay to Play. I'm 40 and quite happy to pay for content if I think it's worth it.

I don't know where he got that from, or what the numbers for just MMOG's might be, but according to Hart Market Research it's parents who buy games for their kids or are present when their kid buys games for 92% of all sold videogames.
This, in turn, means that the average age of video game buyers is 37.

Do parents care about the quality of the game? Probably mostly insofar as the game should be safe. Do they care about price? You betcha. Ask any parent.

I'm not sure monthly fees really has any bearing on the 'maturity' or stupidness of a particular gaming community to be honest. It would be interesting if somebody could study it more in depth. The above are all just personal opinions based on personal gaming experience, as will be my comment

I've played GW for a long time now (not quite from the beginning, but close) and it does get rather bad in some towns and outposts, but in general it just seems to reflect the way society is headed. Kids - and yes I will say it's mostly kids, so no flames from 13 year olds telling me they're not to blame. It IS mostly kids I'm afraid - have absolutely no manners or social awareness these days. They expect rude words or hatred to get them attention, and it does...so they spam it. They demand things, argue for no reason, don't listen to advice when spamming their "Where can I get? What is this thing? How do I do it?" whine all day long. It's not the game...it's society as a whole.

I also played WoW for a year, and it was pretty bad there too. Barrens chat anyone? The amount of begging for gold there seems a lot worse. I think because the servers are smaller there is less of a tendency for people to just spout racial hatred, etc as much or as often (unless they're on an alt and hoping nobody will discover it's them). That's not to say it doesn't happen though, as obviously it does. There's also more of a tendency for bullying there, as the server community is smaller and tighter, and basically if people want to grief you there's no real getting away unless you get a GM involved or just log off. No hopping to a different town or district to escape the idiots...they just follow you.

Now on to Eve Online. I started a free trial for this the other week, and I can honestly say it's the worst of the three I have played. The chat was FULL of spam. Meaningless, hate filled, often intriguingly bizarre spam. And seriously...if you think GW has it bad for gold sellers/spammers, count yourself lucky you don't play that game as I spent most of my time blocking the gold sellers rather than actually playing. The game is plagued by it.

All in all, no matter where you go there will be total asshats being...well, total asshats. That's life. At least with GW you can hop districts, jump towns, go out into an instance and get away from it.

*hugs GW*

A common misconception. RPG is a roleplaying game. If customization and character building define roleplaying games, then CoD4 for example is a roleplaying game... but the only RPG in CoD4 is the Rocket Propelled Grenade :P

Depends. I consider Guild Wars in general to be roughly equivalent to a typical PvP server in most other games. My experience with the games I've played:

EQ2: Pretty decent overall. Seems like it tends to only retain more mature people in the long run, but it's also really waning in popularity so it may just be that the only people left are the long term players who are a little more measured in their behavior.

WoW: Earlier stages and major cities tend to contain a lot of whiners and immaturity, and the PvP servers on WoW are markedly stupider than a room full of dead goats, but once you get past your level 20 areas, especially on RPG servers, it seems to really thin the herd, as it were. Problem here is you get the real hardcore junkies who leap down your throat if you make the slightest mistake.

Eve: Really tends to only retain more thoughtful people because the game, frankly, doesn't care if you lose. If you're not patient and at least somewhat intelligent, you ain't goin' nowhere in this game, and you're goin' fast. The brats usually get themselves mopped across a system pretty quickly and don't come back. However, Eve is very cutthroat, so being a jerk and ganking people for the sake of it is actually a legitimate form of play... so you still have to have kind of a thick skin.

LOTRO: I was really impressed by this group. Comparing these forums to LOTRO's forums, for me, was like the difference between watching 5 year olds argue over the best Pokemon and a debate between Plato and Socrates. If I weren't buying a house, I'd still be playing LOTRO just because the people are so much more intelligent and mature over there.

Guild Wars : LOTRO :: Forrest Gump : Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking is hard a measure of intelligence or sophistication.

As for the game itself, its too bad the game is so bland and generic. Unless you're really into LOTR, theres way more interesting games out there.


As for the whole... pay to play vs free concept... You should examine other free MMOs where you can optionally pay, those that DO pay have some tendencies to be the assholes since they get a superior feeling with their "fancier" gear, which is equivalent to the hardcore grinders in most MMORPGs with their "epic gear" demanding some sort of recognition.

The game identifies itself as an MMO.

I don't think we really need to argue about the semantics, but in the end CORPG is just a made of term the developers used to describe the game, and is unlikely to ever be considered a real genre and I'd be very surprised if GW2 didn't lable itself an MMO.

Other games, that are very similar to GW, such as Phantasy Star Online/Universe also call themselves MMO's, even though they work in the same way.

I have a theory about mainstream MMOs and the ones that arent mainstream, that rather cater to specific groups.

I considder GW and WoW to be the only current mainstream MMO games. Its not about population size, but what its made of. Their appeal is universal (even though GW has tried to present itself as the game for casual gamers), likely to appeal to most members of the society, children, teens and adults alike, from various social classes, cultures and life habbits, interests and aspirations.

Whilst, there are games that specialize.
One i can name is City of Heroes/Villains, also distributed bu NCSoft. It is targeted at comic book and cartoon fans, so i cannot say for the game that it is mainstream.

I played all 3 games, and i havent noticed much difference between WoW and GW communities, they are a cross-section (if thats the right term) of the predominant european/american cultures, you can find everything, friendly people, highly competitive ones, sub-communities based on countries, or intrests in particular areas of the game, grinders and farmers with their unique attitudes...

But CoH/CoV is a completly different world. Most of them have one thing in common, love thowards commics and the whole Heroes and Villains concept. They are mostly friendly, very talkative, they heavily role-play, and dont worry much about the leet vs noob conflict which is rampant in GW and WoW.

If you come from europe or north america, you will likely find that you can fit into the communities of WoW and GW, whereas your location has nothing to do with communities such as City of Heroes'. If you dont like the comics thing, you just wont fit in.
So in my oppinion it has nothing to do with the monthly fee.

EVE also specializez in geeks Silkroad Online in grinders, LOTRO lures Tolkien fans, etc...