What Brought About The Downfall of Guild Wars

Things in my mind and in a few friends on what has, over the years helped to bring about the downfall of our beloved Guild Wars. Feel free to add your takes whatever they may be.

1. Selective Salvaging. The ability to choose what you want to salvage from weapons, armor, drops, etc. This had a huge impact on the GW economy, driving down prices on just about everything, from perfect Fortitudes and Sundering to Superior Vigor runes and all runes in general. You could sell a perfect +30 sword hilt for 30k minimum and Superior Vigors were sold for over 90k at the trader. Now it's pathetic.

2. Assassins. Some claim that the introduction of the Assassin is also a major reason. With many abilities that weren't balanced for far too long and left to dominate many builds for overfarming. I guess the same could be said for the 55 monks that dominated solo farming for so long, but then you were limited to being a monk at least and could still be killed by simple mistakes.

3. Heroes. Plain and simple. A vast majority of people will play only with their heroes and will not group with other people. To many out there that actually want to group up out there, it is getting harder to find a group of real people. Causing alot of anti-socializing out there. A suggestion for this would be to not allow people to add henchmen to their group if they already have heroes in it, or to only allow a smaller number into the group ala HoH.

4. Loot Scaling. You know you miss those days when all drops were yours to be had. It was an honest way of farming and making some extra coin for yourself. You didn't have to spend trip after trip to fill up your inventory, it was done in 1 run. Those white drops added up when it came time to merch them.

5. PvE Skills. Face it, these skills are meant for PvE only for a reason. But to help make the general aspect of the game even easier? No wonder alot of people think PvE is too easy. Some of these skills should probably be classified as elite due to their power, or only allow 1-2 equipped instead of the 3 that can be equipped now. Killing a high level Infernal Wurn with a single cast of Pain Inverter may look pretty cool, but like I said, it makes it too easy.

6. Consumables. This is just plain dumb. Sure alcohol and sweets are a good thing. They didn't give you any advantage over the game. But all of the GWEN consumables do.


This thread is not meant to be a PvE vs PvP flame war, but a discussion on what people think is at fault.
These are only examples that I listed here. They are meant to be an opening of a discussion of what many people may think that may be at fault. Whether anyone agrees with me or not is not really the point. The point is, what do you think is the cause? And why?

3yrs and i still have yet to see this "downfall" you speak of.

1, 3 and 4 are pro's. 5 and 6 are shit and agreeable with. 2 could've been awesome in another world, but not in GW's world.

Don't think they all brought upon GW's downfall, though.

Everything you mentioned, plus lackluster end-game content.

We never even saw the three remaining Realms of the Gods.

PvE was never really meant to have an endgame. From the start it's been "play through once, yer dun!" Granted there are things you could go back and accomplish, but GW's PvE was never meant to hold you.

But I will add that to things that have hurt GW: Treating it like and demanding features prominent in an MMO.

@Below: Yesssss

Time..................

Does this mean I can plug my doomsday thread here?

yawn, always the same moans, the same QQ, has been of more than one thread with this topic

btw i bet you NEVER use your heros, consumables or your PVE skills because you dont want to contribute to the downfall of GW and like you said this is bad, BAD things.

am i right? huh? am i?

Wrong, it was "play through once and then keep playing it for lucky pvp unlocks". That was the state the game was released in.
But the pvp community (rightfully) complained that a random factor doesn't belong into esports and got their Balthazar faction.

All that has little to do with it. The simple fact is that there's no new content so there's no reason for most people to keep playing since there hasn't been any news about the increasingly vaporware-ish Guild Wars 2.

LOTRO is releasing the Mines of Moria expansion next month, so I went back to it. What's Guild Wars got coming up? New titles or silly weekend events?

There's no persistent world, no new content, no real endgame content, the PvP is largely dominated by elite players now and inaccessible to newer people, and even the grinds are pointless: who needs to grind for a new faction skill when there's nowhere to use it?

They took a linear, single-player game and added an online component, and it has run its course liek a single-player game with an online component.

You can't keep a game running when it never changes. People get bored with it and leave.

Where is Regina, anyways? You'd think she'd work for her salary...

Are you kidding? That was one of the best things ever to happen to this game!

In summation, more campaigns led to imbalanced PvP and more grindy PvE, and in response to that, ANet decided to stop talking to its players so much, further screwing over the game design.

GW2 is also indirectly bringing down OGW through EotN and the HoM and the mindset of grinding titles in PvE, as well as taking attention away from properly balancing PvP and making it truly competitive again.

Originally, Guild Wars was going to have a new expansion every 6 months. They had 2 teams working on these expansions, so each of these would have a total of 1 year to develop the content.

Anet realized that what players wanted was more than what GW1 could offer and decided to release EOTN as an addon and concentrate their efforts to GW2. It is true that GW1 without new content has become stale but all of us knew this and in a way agree to wait for the new and improved GW2.

I for one, keep playing mostly in weekens and I do this to keep in contact with my guild and my aliance. My Guild members play daily and we have a few that are new to GW and in a way they make the game new to us since we help them with missions and take them to the elite areas.

We all plan to move together to the new GW2 and we all hope that all this waiting and secrecy regarding GW2 is worth the wait.

It is my "CHOICE" to wait and to play and to go and play other games while GW2 is released.

It is "your" choice to wait or not. You will still have the chance to return to GW2 like everyone else once is released.


this is only my two cents.

I don't think she actually contributes to the downfall of GW.

GW is just a finite game and people have to know when to move on, however pve skillz were complete crap and should be removed from the game. Consumables should be more expensive so people don't use them like water.

Er, no. I didn't agree to wait for anything, and I won't. If there's nothing new and I'm tired of doing the old stuff, I'm going to go do something else. Now, if ANET wants my money for GW2, they need to peel me not away from Guild Wars, but from another game offering me what I want.

They screwed the pooch on this. They should never have stopped developing content altogether for the existing game. Now people are getting bored with the title and rep grinds and leaving for other games, and to get that money back, they're going to have to compete with those other games rather than their own, outdated product.

Again, no. At this point, GW2 can't really ride Guild Wars' coattails. It's going to have to compete - for me anyway - with LOTRO or some other game, not the old Guild Wars.

As I said at the end of my post :

It had a good beginning, but the live development was awful and underwhelming all the time, which made it hated.

It's hard to explain without a billion details, but it's like GW is this really nice new thing you get, and you're impressed. You think it's slick, and well-made and that it will never fall below it's potential. Then it breaks a couple weeks after you've started using it. You're surprised. You send it in for repairs, and are sure it will come back great and you'll use it for a long time. Then it breaks again after a couple weeks. You're starting to get frustrated. This thing could be so good but why does it always screw up on you? You send the manufacturer loads of ideas, sure that they'll listen. You even realize there's forums where thousands of other people are doing the same thing. They all see it... this is a good thing but it shouldn't have those few fatal flaws. Unfortunately, the maker never really gets beyond the problem. (I mean look today and there's still no auction house, static ancient endgame, hardly popular PVP...) Then what happens next... they announce a new version is coming. You already bought a ton of upgrades to try and get them to fix the last one, so this is a bit strange. And then you finally realize... oh, I get it, I'm a fool with my money. And move on.

yea i think its been a little over two or three weeks since ive anyone has heard from her, but most of this does make a little sense as to the downfall of the game, but i have to point the direction to another place as well. When EotN came out and announcement of GW2 was the big hype, the long wait time was promised to be filled with interesting and fun things for us to do until that time. So far, we havent really been that wowed with the Bonus Mission Pack, M.O.X., and the large updates over the past recent months. I believe that this lack of things to do and the easy storyline of EotN has caused people to look for other online MMORPG games, one big one is Warhammer. I have talked to alot of people who are currently playing that game that used to play GW, and i get the response that many got tired with GW after EotN was beat, but are simply waiting for GW2 to come out while playing something other than GW for awhile.

So for some of us who are gonna stick it out in GW until the day arrives, i guess we are just gonna have to put up with lack of people online, or follow the warband that has gone to Warhammer and WoW.

i dont really think GW is dying or dead, but its just in a slump, we'll have our rebounds during the events and such. I think the time we really see GW goes down is when GW2 comes out .

#3, has always been a problem, ever since Nightfall came out, people took heroes over henchies because they could choose their skills, and before that people took henchies over people. But i can sypathize with people over this fact, most people probably dont wanna go with other people because you dont know what kinda player that person is. Most people probably dont know that Heroes and henchies also kill the drops you get, so its better to take people, most people dont know that. Now with the lack of people playing, its harder to get a group together to do anything in PvE, forming groups is more of a PvP thing. Its good that Guild Wars is solving this problem by making it possible to meet and add people to your party while out in an exporable area, much like most MMORPGs.

#1, i dont think this ever affected the economy, i believe this was a combination of overfarming, gold buyers, and drops.

sharks with freaking lazors on their heads..

but seriously for me the only thing ruining the game is the fact that ive played it to much.