Population decrease

Well, I have been around for a long time. This old man remembers the days when there was only one Guild Wars and that was the original. To me those were the good old days. Since then we have had three expansion packs. I havent played them all yet because of my lack of money but I have been around to nearly all of the world. Well recently after my three month leave from guild wars I came back and decided to do a few missions and help out some new players for free. But when I got to these mission areas I saw that they were practically empty. I started to wonder why because back in the day you could hardly see the merchant through the large crowds players in these mission areas. So I decided to investigate the reason behind the small attendance of players. I went to these beginner cities like Ascalon and I just sat and listened to the newer players. I cant recall all of the conversations I had but most were deterred by the immaturity that goes on. I have always noticed there were a few players that just hanged around the beginner cities and just talked complete immature nonsense. So most of the newer player just quit after a few days because no one will help them and that they are just sick of the nonsense being spilled in these cities.

My question is has anyone else been noticing a decrease in the population of new players and what do you think is the cause?

-Very many towns and outpost to spread the same player base over.
-Heroes allowing ppl to PUG less
-Normal mode nurfs to game difficulty allowing people to PUG less
-People seen and done it all now, so they can either do it on their own, or not at all

the game is pretty stale, only the diehards remain
no amount of summoning stones is gonna change that

Heroes or no heroes, nerf or no nerf, the game is almost four years old. It is inevitable that there is a decrease in population, especially in the newbie areas.

To keep a game fresh you have to have new content, new quests/missions, new rewards, new areas, new challenges, ...

There have been plenty of threads about this before.

Not many people look to buy a 4 year old game unless theres a great deal on it or repackaged in some way. More leavers than new players = smaller player base QED.

As far as the immaturity, thats always been there... maybe you noticed it because you actually went and stayed there to see it rather than passing through.

Decrease in new players?
It's been a while since I've been actively playing in the starter areas besides starting a new character a couple of weeks ago so I wouldnt really know.
But pre-sear seemed to have activity and not only from experienced player.

I can think of three reasons.
First of all, prophecies is old. Factions is old. Nightfall is kinda old. EotN is also getting old. From gamer's perspective where a game is old in 6 months (or even before that) so starting to play a +3yr old game isn't very appealing.
Even though the game got cheap it's not going to attract a lot of new players.

Second, people can start in 3 continents now.
Even if the flow of new players would still be the same you would only meet 1/3 of the original population in any starter area (given equal distribution).

Third, the 24/7 players got aboard ages ago.
So now the active players are the ones who play in short bursts.
And waiting for someone for 30 mins when you are only playing 2 hours is a complete waste of time. So people solo or play in smaller teams with heroes. Result of that is empty outposts.

A stranglehold addiction to this game disappeared when I reached my goals. I went from playing 3-4 hours a day workdays and all day weekends to.. nothing.

total I racked up was 3,840 hours, now i find it hard to sustain a single dungeon or uw run before I get bored.

It still goes down as the best game i ever played, just waiting for gw2 which will come out sooner or later.

/sarcasm

I disagree!

/endsarcasm


i have played this game since the beginning. took a break a week before factions until nightfall came out. i RARELY play. ive done what ive wanted to do, and its just not fun anymore. Excellent guild activity (atleast in mine) is good, but the game is stale. Its bound to happen.

PvE has become really dull. JQ has become very popular lately and it seems like a small amount of the population has moved there. That is what I have currently started doing is PvPing in JQ/FA/AB instead of the PvE.

A) God knows why you're proud of playing that much
B) Frenzy OWNZ?

On topic:
Yeah there's less players but there is still a pretty big population. It's just because there are more areas so the population is thinned out between them and also because a lot of people prefer to take H/H now and so spend less time idl'ing in the towns looking for groups.

It maybe that the population thinned out but I still remember over the summer of 2008 where Factions was very crowded

Bingo I left in august, the game is just a grind, the lack of new content makes GW a boring game.

try going to Kamadan D1 on a friday or saturday night.. the districst is full. also TOA says hi

as stated.. alot of people still.. just spread out over 3 continents not to mention with heros coming into play that people dont look for pve groups standing around a mission anymore. with heros u just add ..go in mish.. and try not to fail. yes i know alot of people left gw as well but i still see alot of people just in different areas now.. and yes the game gets boring.

So it seems to me that Heroes, although a great concept has in a way destroyed some of the fun out of creating a party and reacting with other people. And what is TOA? Temple of Ages.

Depends on if you count as fun, finding that halfway through a mission the War in your pug thinks he can solo everything or a monk has to sign off coz his mom says he has to go and eat.

For a game almost 4 years old, GW is doing exceptionally well. At least population-wise.
It is in fact still one of the most populated online games I know. Probably the highest populated game I've ever played myself (since I passed on WoW).

Anyway, I remember the time around Summer 2005 when there wasn't really anything left to do for PvE players. No titles, no Hard Mode, no HoM.
Everyone was waiting for the big "Summer Update" (Sorrow's Furnace) which seemed to drag on forever. Most of the Prophecies outposts were almost empty, with 2-3 lonely souls in many of them - and that at a time when there were no other chapters.
Heck, I used up my 5 region switches to jump between US and EU districts - which both were kinda abandoned in most areas of the game.

Compared to that, GW is thriving nowadays.
At christmas you still see 60+ districts in LA. There's still players everywhere.
They just prefer to play with H/H (which also results in less people hanging around lfg in outposts) and are spread out on 4 chapters - counting EotN as a chapter when it comes to population spread.

While of course declining (this game IS 4 years old after all), the overall population is still kinda massive.
At least in the PvE-part of the game. PvP might be another story; especially HA has been dead for quite a while now.

I dont think it is that simple. Without heroes, many of us wont even bother to login now because it is that difficult to find a good PUG nowadays that wouldn't leave in middle of an elite mission.

Try finding a PUG to do DoA, and if you managed to complete it consider yourself lucky. Most PUGs do not know what they are doing, have low LB ranks, or leave in middle since the missions take too long. Players, unlike heroes, do not have the patience or time to see things through or plan out their builds.

I would agree that heroes be "filler"s. Allow teams to bring heroes if nobody joins the party, otherwise players should have the priority for specific quest/mission join-ups. Also if players leave in the middle of a quest/mission, allow heroes to replace them. But that would take a redesign of the game.

wtb moar instances like doa...
PVEEE

The elite missions design could have been better. You have to reserve X hours of time to go through them and worst of all they do a bad job saving your progress. If you make a mistake and caused a party wipe, you have to start from the beginning again.

That is why I avoided them like a plague for years but I ran out of new content since I have finished all 3 continents a long time ago. Too bad, it is either I quit or play these areas and most PUGs just suck in these areas and I could complete them with the proper hero builds myself.

I have tried PUGGing many times and they just fail, finding a group also takes a very long time, not to mention a good group.

Take one "Sky is Falling" thread.

Add the posters who don't play and have too much time on their hands, and their gripes.

Get no balance from the people who are out there enjoying the game, and don't have the time or inclination to troll boards.

Find a skewed view, which reinforces the Chicken Littles of the board.

Rinse. Repeat.

The sky has already fallen we are now talking about the aftermath, get with the program!

As already been mentioned the game is now 3 campaigns and 1 expansion, its obvious that population will be less than before in each of every area.

Some say heroes ruined the game, I say they made it better cause It's no longer frustrating to do something. I join some pugs for FoW runs occasionally and it's always same thing = drama drama drama.

i think its due to farming most ppl are making new char now to farm some were or with some kinda team so all there intersted is getting to lvl 20 getting armor skill and location and making gold to fund a project on there main char like fow armor.
pugs slow them down , runs and servies are all there looking.

You may want to read the 36 pages of the following thread before contributing to this one:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10332831

PuGs are a joke, if you actually take a minute before you go into a mission and ask everyone to ping their bars you will see why (providing you're not equally bad). Back when I used to PuG Prophecies I used to think it was just that the missions were hard and that is why we weren't doing so well. Now I know what the reason is. It's because 85% of PvE'ers are really really terrible and don't have a clue about skill synergy or even what good skills are.

So unless you find playing with terrible people and failing fun, then yes, by all means heroes and hench destroyed this. However now to the people who know what they are doing they no longer have to put up with telling bad players how to be better and getting flamed because of it and that in my opinion has made the game better.

As for interacting with other people, I still have a very active friends list with people I enjoy playing with and who I know to be reliable and good players. I also have a Guild who is very active, very nice people and good players also, so I don't find this to be an issue either. Although I have met all these people within the PvP Scene and things happen quite differently there. But I still think my point stands. You just have to look in the right places.

games die slowly, it is their nature. this game would have died off a lot sooner if not for the new campaigns and expansion. they made it to small to begin with and now the entry barriers for newer players are high because of the years of time other players have had to progress. fortunately the fact that lvl doesn't matter does nullify the high entry barrier a bit. but still, it is all a little overwhelming for newer players.

The game is developmentally dead. People aren't going to play a mmo with no grind after they finish the story, especially if they're finished making new content.

QFT.

If you enjoy a game and have time to play it, play it. Don't spend your time worrying about what other people are doing.

Every time there is new content (MOX, new Wintersday quests), there is a huge turnout of players, and even PUGs. The issue is lack of content that players want to do, and even less content that players are willing to PUG.

I bet the people who raved about AoC are wishing their game had the longevity of GW now. Other games are shutting down left right and center, but GW still keeps on moving along.

Way to finally realize Guild Wars id dead, been that way for a while. Just look at gvg and who is #1 on the ladder. When that guild can repeatedly get first and basically all guilds suck you know you are playing a dying game.

Lol? The fact that [rawr] have won 6 or is it 7 monthly tournaments does not prove that the game is dead (higher level GvG is still very competitive) it's shows that they are very good players.

Yes they won a lot of tournies during VoD farming but they have proven that it wasn't just this tactic that made them win so much and at the moment they are still a very very hard guild to beat.

EDIT: Also, I looked your guild up on the GvG ladder...you're not even on it. If you're gonna flame the top guilds, when you yourself aren't even in the top 1000 (which you can get into now by LOSING your first match), well, it's pretty sad to say the least.

I think its a combination of many things already mentioned here: 1. population thinned out across the campaigns, 2. introduction of heroes decreasing the need to build a pug so reduced time spent in outposts, 3. mature players concentrating on things such as titles that keep them out in explorable areas, 4. stale content / no new content, 5. increasing immaturity among new players, 6. increased competition from other MMO's

I can honestly say that if I play for 3 hours, I spend less than 5 minutes in an outpost. And when I play, I rely exclusively on heroes and henchies.

Welcome back to Guild Wars.

Over the past 3 1/2 years I've racked up 3,000+ hours playing Guild Wars. Until last month I was on a 1 1/2 year break from the game. So basically 3,000+ hours in 2 years lol.

First of all, I disagree there is a significant and alarming drop in players compared with the days of old. When I came back to start playing Guild Wars last month I was actually shocked by how many people still play! Guild Wars defeated the odds and survived releases by games like Hellgate (was said to be a GW killer lol), Age of Conan, Warhammer, and of course the WoW expansions. Compare the population of Guild Wars, which allows you to matchmake with tens of thousands of players to a server in WoW, which has a few thousand players on it. Even on the busiest day in Warcraft you are still playing with a population a fraction of the size you have in Guild Wars.

With that being said it does bother me that areas like Heroes Ascent aren't what they used to be. I never got into high level PvP, because by the time I wanted to do it, groups were requiring players to be rank 6 and up. I felt like I missed the boat.

I'm sure new players can feel the same way when they start PvE too. Guild Wars is a very complex game now. Trading is still difficult and hard to understand although much better than before. But there are still players, who can still get into the game, my best friend being a good example. He didn't start until after EotN was released, and he beat all 4 games mostly on his own, and we're currently sacking hard mode together.

I disagree with your reason that immaturity is to blame for new players being scared off. If people who like MMO's are scared off by a little immaturity they simply don't play MMO's, and if an extremely timid person absolutely had to play an MMO, than GW would be the best option for them, because this game is so heavily instanced.

I could list a bunch of reasons it appears there is a severe population decline, but most of them have already been listed. One thing I do want to say about this illusion of a severe population decline is that I spend much less of my time in towns than before, and I think the same is true of a lot of players. About 1% of my time is spent in towns, 5% in my guild hall, and 94% killing stuff with my friends and heroes.

LOL just because my guild is not on the ladder doesn't mean I don't have an opinion and vast knowledge of GUILD WARS.

Saying they won a lot of monthlies doesn't prove anything as the competition has died down and 95% of the once great players have moved on to other games. When a guild such as Vent Rage could make top 8 in a monthly you know competition has definitely dumbed down. rawr would stand no chance against guild such as WM or EviL but as they have quit playing GW the fact will never be proven.

Go back to pve.

...And this is where your logic deteriorates. For one he never flamed rawr, rather he brought light to a point which is blatantly obvious. If you can't realize that competition is no longer what it once was then logic isn't your only shortcoming. Just look at the ladder. It's polluted by smurfs and inactive guilds. When you have guilds that have been inactive for lengthy periods of time still in the top 20 there is clearly an issue.

Yes, rawr is a good guild, but when one guild can consistently dominate the ladder that alone speaks for the great lack of talent. In the past the number one spot was fluctuating, but now it is completely stagnant

Having to bring up someone's guild, which has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, really displays your lack of a substantial argument.

umad fanboi?

gvg is dead long time ago, all you see is tanked up guilds resigning to champ guilds 5x then sync with another champ guild resigning to each other and farmign c points... competitive gvg died way back, also the daily ats are dominated with shitter rank 300+ guilds with only 5-6 guilds signed up and half of them forfeiting
________
ZX14 VS HAYABUSA

People have already done what they wanted to accomplish in Guild Wars 1. Most are waiting for Guild Wars 2. I don't see why that is so hard to figure out.

Generally, the more competitive a game is, the more the player ranks move around. He's not saying rawr is bad, but that the GvG environment as a whole is stagnant enough to let them sit on top.

Woot another overly Discussed topic
Does any one use the search Function?

on topic, Yes The Game is Slowly Losing players
Who wants to play a game once they have done pretty much everything?