Did GW spoiled others, more traditional MMO for you ?

I spend most of my time making offerings of goat to Zeus and beseaching him not to allow anet to ruin the formula with the sequel.

I agree completely with the OP. Guild Wars just seems to make other games lack.

you can use a PvE skill (sin support) in PvP? i didn't know....

Yes. The only MMO I could play after Gw was Age of Conan (mainly to use my Necromancer for unfair attacks on other players), and even then only for around 400 hours.

I also played Mythos for a while but that was mostly Diablo 2 / Dungeon Siege nostalgia, and since it was a closed beta with not much content (and no storyline AT ALL, literally. I don't mean just a weak storyline, I mean there wasn't one) it got old fast.

Forgot to mention - one-shot in PvP, and in PvE you have Ebon Vanguard. Now happy?

GW really spoiled me. But I'm going to try Runes of Magic, it's suppose to somewhat anti-grind, and it's a western based game.

Actually no it didn't spoil other mmo's. I enjoyed my time in GW and still play sometimes. But to compare it to something like EQ2? Well to me anyway EQ2 is the better game.

It's a little hard to compare the two because they are not the same type of game. I enjoy crafting, adventuring, raiding, owning a house and yes rolling the magic dice for a high end master lol.


GW is a good game in and of itself but it was pretty easy to put down and/or pick up which appeals to many.

But EQ? For now anyway I will pay my sub with no regrets at all

I agree, GW loot system is a no BS system. Much better; there's no room to b****.

I rarely pvp so I can't really comment here.

This is actually the beauty of the game, if you do have to re-roll, it doesn't take months to cap your character like in other games.

Yes and no. I'd rather have a very high level cap, but allow me to level fast. If it took me two months to reach level 20, then the low level cap would suck just as bad as WoW's level 80 cap. I love the idea of GW2's no level cap - as long as it doesn't take 15 hours to gain one level.

Working games are good. Bugs here and there, but this game is a godsend when compared to Korean MMOs.

LOL, has anyone ever played Sword of the New World? Someone stab my eyes out!

Separating servers = suck, but queues are necessary if the server can't handle it. The game is designed around instanced content, so the servers don't get the big load that other games get.

It's the nice factor to instanced content.

I assume you're talking about lag here. That's with anything.

Oh, I would like to add another thing to our ever-growing list! [b]Tanking[b]!

I don't know, maybe it's just my playstyle but i find the idea of tanking and "stealing a tank's aggro" to be very foreign, especially when I tried out Perfect World, which I found to be way to "LFG!" and grind intensive for my tastes. I'm so used to having minions + Ebon Vanguard Sins soaking up damage that I often find myself in a situation where I'm constantly asking, "Okay, can I attack now?", "How about now?", "No?".

Also, more MMO's need hybrids and/or party support roles like the ritualist and the paragon. I would probably jump on that Runes of Magic game if it had a class that was like one of those.

I would agree that with other mmo's GW has ruined it for me. By far my biggest peeve with other games is the mutiple server concept. It closes you off from more social interactions. lets say you pick up WoW and play for yourself and not just to hang out online with your friends. Selecting a starting server is gonna be a random choice. You could be stuck on a server with a bunch of idiot players learning idiot tactics that will eventually fail you at endgame.....time to reroll, which means more time wasted on your part to achieve something that was meta months ago....time to reroll again...which in the end means more money for blizzard. And if you do play for your friends then, you feel like your being dragged into a game that your not sure about, just as a proxy for actual human interactions. In the end you get closed off from the other 12 million players just to play with a select few.

I personally like the concept of making most of the game instanced while keeping the more social aspects open between any two people possible (chat, trading hubs, etc). I have made many online friends from playing this game, those noobs that i help to teach the game basics too, to those that i learned greatly from myself, i consider all my friends. and that, at the of the day is what i took with me when i close the game for the night.

As most of my GW friends moved on, waiting for GW2 to come out, we occasionally come back for fun urgoz/deep/fow/UW runs not for speed clearing or for money but for the joy that we get just playing together. I mean does anyone do UW w/o using a speed clear team anymore?

The only other game that i believe comes close to this type of social interaction is EvE-online. Most people are put off by the time commitment the game takes but i have never found another gaming community that is more willing to take in newer players than this one. Both EvE-O and GW stray from the grindfest that other games try to be. The skill system is one of the best ive seen because with enough time you can specialized into anything you want to be, from industial to a capital ship pilot.
(check out some of their vids: www.youtube.com/ccpgames)

This brings me to my next peeve with other mmos. Basically most other games look like shit...plain and simple.

Ive tried Warhammer; and for 10gigs of HD space and taking 75% of system resources (i run a quad core at 2.4gHz with an nvidia 8600 card). the game looks like a piece of crap. Dont get me started on WoW. (You can freakin' see the pixels and still get lag wtf???) Guild Wars and EvE-online, to me, are probably the best looking MMO's on the market today; considering the lower system requirements to play such a "pretty" game. Its hard not to say other games have been ruined.

No, since Guild Wars is nothing like most MMOs and barely even qualifies as one. And it hasn't spoiled any single-player RPGs for me either, which is more what Guild Wars is: a single player RPG with an online component and a bunch of 3D chat rooms.

And most of your complaints are either make-believe, specifically about WoW, or about problems that haven't existing in any major MMO in years.

I am with the OP on this one when it comes to MMO's

I still play my single player RPG's so there it didn't change much but for MMO's it's clear.

I tried a bunch of beta's and they all failed to impress, including the likes of WoW and Lotro and even though I love the LotR books and movies even that game annoyed me.
So the next one on the list is Aion, which is from NcSoft, so we'll see about that one.

But I don't think it should be that we are spoiled. They set some new standards for games in the sense of graphics and gameplay and the rest of the industry is lagging behind as far as I am concerned. So I prefer to say that other games/companies are underachieving.

WoW may be a good game to many but I feel that if I see how much it costs to play it and what you get back for it, they are all overpaying. I would gladly pay monthly if the game looked the part as well as being a good game to play but otherwise they are just ripping me off. Hell, if I had to pay for the game and the expansion and then 15 bucks a months, I don't think I am being spoiled to expect the game to meet certain standards.

A lot of it correlates with Wow save for four, and those examples become much more magnified on a high-pop server.

This is what irks me about MMO discussions. They always revolve around WoW because it's so big. People whine about it because it's a mediocre game and then conflate its lousy performance with the MMO genre as a whole.

It's like a Will Smith summer blockbuster. Everyone will go to see it because of the big name behind it, most people will be disappointed, and then everyone will complain "summer movies suck" even if there are a half dozen excellent releases playing in the same damn theater.

I fully agree with the OP.

I tried WoW, AoC and Warhammer online, but yes GW spoiled me.
Only Warhammer I thought of as an option for me, but apparently I still play GW these days.

Yeah, I tried WoW for a bit, quit after about a month. Frankly, I like Guild Wars enough to keep playing avidly until GW2 ... I love the graphics, revisiting old areas, and I have enough characters that I will have plenty to do for a while even after 39 months of playing.

I don't think that GW spoiled me, but I think it is hard for most people to move on to another game in the same genre after starting out with and sticking to another for so long.

This game has spoiled me. It makes me laugh to hear people mention AoC. I played that heap for 3 months in the beginning, and recently went back to see how much it changed. They tease you with Tortage, then beat you with the grind stick and mediocre content afterward. I won't get into the lameness of PvP, or the imbalance between professions. As for scenery, you can't beat GW's artists for creating a vivid atmosphere for each part of the game. It's been out over two years, and Factions still rates in the top 5 on MMORPG.com. LotRO matches it with the scenery, but loses with the crappiest character mechanics ever. WoW loses out on mechanics and scenery(Hello Ocarina of Time), and does nothing more for advancement than modify the same kill-twelve-boars-and-get-your-reward theme.

GW offers titles and armors for those who like to grind, an easy leveling system for casual players, and the best, most balanced PvP in the industry. Besides, you can't argue with the fact that a game that hasn't had a content update in over a year still has such a huge active community. Look at the list of active people on this forum if you deny it.

Did you seriously attempt to compare WoW and Ocarina of Time?!

That's not comparing apples and oranges, that's like comparing apples to a filet mignion.

That's idiotic, and you know it.

Did GWs spoil me? Maybe.

I still like Oblivion / Morrowind just as much, but that is because I can customize just about anything. If I want there to be more sunny days and less rain, I can just change it. However, it is a single player game and therefore it does get rather lonely.

As for other MMOs, I went over to a friend of mine’s house to have a look at her WoW game. I had already convinced her to purchase a couple of GWs campaigns and she said that she appreciated the non-respawning of monsters and the map-travel the most. However, because she already has some super 70th level characters, she wanted to play it more for a while.

She tried to get me to play WoW. The graphics looked pretty bad, but I said that I still might play it just to hang out with her. However, she said that her server was full, so that would be impossible. She still tried to convince me to join anyway, but what would be the point? Guild Wars is pretty wonderful in that way. I can play with anyone from anywhere in the world and I can convince people to come and play with me.

Then I toyed with playing LOTRO because of all the sunny looking places I could go explore (nice screenies!). Plus, it seemed like it would be fairly solid for role-playing. However, after looking at character class options, I lost interest, mostly because I want more versatility here. Guild Wars allows for multi-classing. What other Online RPG can provide that? AoC looks nice, but I can imagine that one is going to be limiting. Mind you I have not looked into it much, but from what I have heard, the game mechanics are not as fluid as Guild Wars, which is the best IMO.

Another friend (who is a die-hard D&D fan) told me to come play DDO, which does have multi-classing. But to be honest, when playing NWNs, I realized that I was a little disenchanted because of the loss of the 2nd ed multi-classing system. BG was the best, but is too outdated for me now. The Guild Wars gaming system is so much better than D&D’s system anyway. Besides, the game looked crappy visually. Still, I have yet to look into it more to give it a fair shake, but probably not.

EQ1 looked absolutely pathetic. I watched as my friend was hammering on a monster. His character and the monster were both repeating the same hitting action over and over while he went to the fridge and grabbed some milk. I have not looked at EQ2, but EQ1 just looked so bad. Mind you it was way back when, but still, single player games looked better than that to me back then.

Then after thinking about it just now, it occurred to me why I really like Guild Wars so much. With DDO and EQ, it is all about your levels. You are as good as the level says you are. With WoW, it’s all about the gear. You are as good as the gear you have. But with Guild Wars, the gear is easy to get, the top level is easy to reach, so then it is really about the player’s skill, isn’t it?

I think I like that.

It's very idiotic...as Ocarina looks better. Phear mah gourd!!!!!!11!!11!1!

Another thing about GW that will always bring me in...the Mesmer! There is no profession that can straight piss people off, in any game, or looks so good doing it.

I wasn't only talking about WoW, or even AoC and WAR, but corean grinders too. Aion was my inspiration for bots and killsteal, for exemple. Remember, it's not because you don't know or don't play it that it doesn't exist.

And thanks Clarissa, I don't believe I managed to forgot my favourite mmo class ever : the mesmer. I want to see more of that type of caster. Hélas, it's so hard to balance that most games don't even want to add a "diversion" type of class. A shame, really.

GW is the constant, home with hearth.

I won't say it spoiled other mmo's for me. The other mmo's do that for themselves. Played WoW off and on since it first came out 4 years ago. Latest WotLK, worth the money I guess, but the novelty wears out quick. EVE Online, tried year or so back, always promising to be a great game someday. Plus other games, not mmo.

GW got so much right, and managed to stay casual.

I quited GW about 1.5 years ago and made the leap to WoW. Had spent over2000 hours in GW and had lots of fun but I needed something new. Spent the past 1.5 years in WoW and cleared all TBC pve content. Now with WoTLK being released it's so disappointing on how easy and unbalanced everything is. Plus their holiday events are horrible. In wintersday's case(Winter's Veil in WoW's case) it's like 3-4 quests at most. While every GW holiday event has always been (atleast for me) very exciting.

Now unfortunately I bought character slots in my GW days and so I need my PlayNC account to be able to change my forgotten password. DOH! Waiting for my information to be re-instated so I can log in to the wonderous world of GW once more, make a new character and play through the 4 beloved games once more and to ofcourse enjoy the awesome holiday event.

In conclusion I can imagine you feeling spoiled by GW. It's a great and solid game, although I can imagine it being a tad boring for the more hardcore players after you've played for a long time(from a pve point of view).

Guild wars is not a real MMO. It's a simplified version of the MMO concept, designed to appeal to those put off by the monthly fees and the expanded options in gameplay.

When you've played EVE, then you know of a real MMO.

I'm not abusing the game, the amount of hours I put in GW shows that.
I had very little hesitation in jumping to EVE.

I m 100% with OP on this. I ve tried a few MMOs in my 3,5 years of playing GW but none of them were as polished and fun as GW.

For instance when i tried WAR i kept thinking why this game cant be more like GW, why cant it play and be more fun like GW and why doesnt it run aswell as GW even though GW looks better. Why doesnt it have this or that feature, why cant i do this or that... Sure WAR has some nice things that GW doesnt like cities and massive battles but it has so many of those stupid standard MMO flaws that i couldnt get past the first month. Not to mention the "massive war" as they promised was rather pathetic on the med-pop server i was on. I was struggling to find ppl anywhere and that in the first month. Never had a problem like that in GW.

To put it simple:
GW is an MMO without all the crap every other standard MMO delivers and that s what makes it great.
Whether you like that "crap" or not is up to you.

I started up with playing DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot) 7 years ago. The grinding to lvl 50 was fun with my first character, then got bothersome with other characters I rolled, thank god for power-leveling! Anyways, getting decent gear was annoying, didn't really have any luck with the rolls but in time earned enough money to put together an outfit good enough for being competetive in PvP (or RvR, Realm vs Realm, as it's called in DAoC)

I started playing GW at some point, it was (and is) a very fun game. I couldn't believe how easy it was to get max level and optimal gear, when thinking about it like that, I felt a little discomforted thinking about all the time I had put in my character in DAoC.

But when I think about it again, DAoC, and other MMO's have things GW can never have, massive dragon-raids with 100+ people, keep sieges, massive zergs in PvP batteling eachother over a keep or tower.

So I ask myself, was the grinding worth it? Hell yeah!

Today I play both DAoC and GW, I enjoy both games. I'll always think of DAoC as the best game ever, it's a shame it hastn't ever been properly advertised.

However: Wanting to try something new, I checked out AoC when it came out. Starter island was fun, easy to gain levels by quests. Although when you leave the starter island, leveling becomes slower, and at lvl 61 I couldn't take the grinding anymore.

I guess GW has spoiled me, I couldn't even get one character to max level in AoC before I got sick of it, but thinking back at daoc, the grinding was worth it when you concidered the awesome end-game PvP.

But I seem to be the only one on the forums who plays DAoC, which means you guys might have a hard time to relate, so just ignore me x]

I've experienced the same thing. Guild Wars was the first online game I really got into, and now whenever I try other online RPG's after a little while the I start noticing what could be done better, and in the end, I end up coming back to Guild Wars. This is because while Guild Wars may have its faults, I think it does enough right to keep me playing.

In Guild Wars there is not excessive amounts of Grind (although the amount of grind seems to be increasing), I can skip right into PvP, there are no monthly fees or cash shops, and it is fun. If I could find another game like Guild Wars, I would probably try it out, but I think the closest thing that will compare to Guild Wars is Guild Wars 2.

I'm exactly the same. I play Final Fantasy 11 and World of Warcraft off and on, but Guild Wars is always my "home base".

Hmm, the OP did say most of what I didn't like w/ MMO's post-GW.

I also liked that comment on tanking in a game. I don't like that idea too

What I'll also say with GW compared to generic MMOs is that the map travel has cut down playtime soo much. I tend to get impatient in WoW traveling, even w/ the mounts but GW had that map travel system which was kick-ass. It was so easy to just meet a friend in a place and start playing.

Another is that GW doesn't limit or punish you for changing your mind. Its free to change builds, change attributes, change 2ndaries, and change characters. You don't feel much regret in deleting a char and starting a new one. They don't charge like "x" gold to change your skill tree or attributes.

GW also has a streamlined interface. For the most part, when I tried out WoW, I found that to just make the gameplay better, you need all these mods. My hardcore WoW friend had like so many stuff going on in his screen that it just turned me off. GW presents a clean, aesthetically-pleasing interface thats simple and effective. My only complaint is that they should make the critical hits more visible as I can't really distinguish it from the normal :P

If anything Playing Guildwars was the BEST experience of all MMORPGs I have played. GW being the first I ever played and was heavily involved in from the early beta beginnings...

Not only was its cost model way ahead of the curve, but the game was actually FUN. other mmorpgs are not always fun and more interested in the eye candy. GW however was way ahead of the game with Eyecandy from the start so instead they focused on the fun factor.

Other RPGs are all about the drops. in GW there is no real quality drops other then personal bragging rights. most weapons are generally equals of even the best of greens. although with durability coming into play that may not be the case soon...

Other mmorpgs have better markets. GW has no market to speak of. its only flaw.

Other MMORpgs deal with looting and market flooding, and devaluation. Again, not a problem in GW if you avoid the scams all together. Generally you don't need millions to play this game. its all about the fun factor... Not the grind factor. BUT if you like to farm or grind you have titles to play with too... so there is something for everyone.

@=HT-Ingram - the "durability" was part of the April Fool's update. It was not, and will never be, implemented. http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Game_updates:April_2010

It didn't spoil me for mmos; Guild Wars spoiled me for games in general. In particular, I wish I could find another game with structured pvp like Guild Wars. Pretty much everything that's come out since, even the stuff that tries to sell itself as pvp-oriented, have been a huge disappointment because of how high the bar has been set by Guild Wars. I'm actually afraid that Guild Wars 2 won't do it as well as the original, but hopefully I'm wrong there. At the very least, I think I can count on not having to do bullshit grinding just to get the pvp. Just have to hope they get the gameplay right. I'm kind of tired of Guild Wars, but there's nothing that does what Guild Wars does, so I either play Guild Wars or do something completely different.

Hmm, this 2-years-old thread is rezzed again. People in this thread are talking about the uniqueness of GW apart from the other MMO. ANET should really read all these for GW2 development. tbh, I really afraid of the "high level cap" thing and fear that GW2 would be become another common f2p MMOcrap.

No other MMO lives up to gw. For some reason when i played Aion beta i just couldnt deal with the "grind". Then i went back to gw to spend 5hours doing HA over and over again. Maybe ive been brain washed?

^ Haha, indeed.

I get ticked off by 'collect 10 rats' or 'kill 5 warthogs' in any MMO, only to log in to Guild Wars to farm the stuff for Nicholas. Hypocrite much?

Indeed.

Having come the other way (from Eve to GW), I see GW as being less of an MMO and more along the lines of Diablo II and Oblivion with a few added multiplayer options. And I don't mean that negatively either; I throughly enjoyed both D2 and Oblivion.

Indeed, having come from a game like Eve where there is such a sharp focus on grouping into corporations/alliances, I enjoy the change of being able to solo through much of GW, but still having the freedom of pugging whenever I feel the need to.

Both Eve and GW have positive aspects over the other imo, but I think the biggest thing GW has over Eve is the ability to switch off local without it impeding your gameplay (PvP in Eve is very "serious business" and local there is used as an intel tool more than random chat).

I also appreciate how easily - compared to the likes of WoW for example - one can attain what is statistically the best gear in the game without too much grind, while still providing vanity options for those who still think they matter.

And of course, I have to say the no-monthly-fees was the clincher for getting me into GW to begin with.

Thread necromancy ftw. Though I suppose its not entirely inappropriate with GW2 coming out, WoW getting ready for a new expansion, Aion having been out for 6 months, and the Warhammer fiasco.

Since I'm an old school RPG player I must say that Guild Wars is the only game that comes close to the experience of Baldurs Gate and such because it's so story driven.

Unfortunately I don't see how GW2 will be as good as GW in that regard since the "team play" and instanced areas is what made that kind of thing possible.

- No, I don't want to enter a 30 mn queue to enter a server, nor do I want to see a massive population of bots taking the place of legitimate gamers. I don't even want to see 30+ servers, full of people I'll could never play with because I'm only on one or two. Separating servers is just one big mistake that should be in the past.


this game is called Bot wars

Separating servers isn't a mistake if you have a large player base. Seriously if WoW were to combine all their servers into one you'd be look at 24 hour wait times to get in the game. I know a few servers are dead, but they have several that still pull a wait time on occasion. Believe me having 2000-3000 players in an open world game at any one time is plenty.

I'm glad that finally somebody said it. Fans of Guild Wars are so indoctrinated that they don't want to believe any kind of negative criticism of their game. If you listen to honest criticism, then they can tell you that Guild Wars is only cosmetically different from the competition.

Whoever says that they are playing Guild Wars for over four years and still claim that there's no grind or repetitive action in the game, then I'd like to know what they are doing. Over half of the titles in the game are specifically about grinding, and loot farming is just a sugar-coated word for grinding.