Population decrease

Simath, while I'm not in any way disputing the fact that the game is less competitive at the moment, due to a dwindling pool of available players, some of your points are off the mark.

This has been the case since times immemorial. In fact, it used to be far worse before inactive guilds was hidden on the ladder.

This has nothing to do with competitiveness or activity, and is more due to the fact that the ladder is no longer being reset. This has as an effect that the ELO ranking system is now working in the way it was intended, and the long lived guilds are approaching something like their "true rank" (artificial though the concept may be).

Actually, I would argue that the top level GvG has not changed drastically in quality, but rather that the depth of good guilds, and indeed player base, at the top has been reduced. That "bad guilds" sometimes bubble up to top positions in the tournaments is a function of the swiss and single elimination formats, where good guilds are matched together and slightly less bad guilds are made to fight the "bottom of the barrel" guilds

As someone who's "only" been around since fall 2007, I don't see the dying in any significant sense. The problem with theQQ'ers is that you're on the left hand of the bell curve of player experience and interest. You've been around the longest, played the hardest, done the mostest, and, surprise surprise, are now finding out there aren't so many players around doing what *you* see as the game.

I do 99.9% of my playing either by myself or with my brother and some friends. I bought the game on a whim, convinced and/or bought the game for these few gaming partners that I've known and gamed with for decades, and 15 months or so into our play experiences we're still loving it and have plenty more to do. We fire up Team Speak and chat (we're all now separated by hundreds to thousands of miles), we work on what we feel like, and, crazy, we have fun. We've never defeated Mallyx, or The Underworld, or any other of the end game elite areas with the exception of Sorrow's Furnace, which was only beaten because my brother has a "thing" for minis . We've still got character professions that we haven't begun to master, we've still got heroes in need of proper gear, we've never had so much money we had to worry about whether to sock it into ectos or lockpicks. No matter how broken, dead, imba, whatever *your* current skewed perspective is, I assure you from the p.o.v. of the people still playing this game that there's at least a solid two years worth of content and activities. After two years, probably not so much, but just what the hell are you expecting from the amount of games and expansions that usually only equal about six to twelve months of content?

You can't judge the health of this game from your perspective. Two real life friends and heroes can do the overwhelming majority of the game's content without ever spending any more time in town than it takes to run to the necessary NPCs. Hell, if three of us want to do the same thing, we have to figure out who gets to bring what heroes, it's almost too many people involved . We don't spend our time worrying what the ecto market is doing, or if the non-economy is "falling" more than usual, or how lame or not the title that we personally want to work towards is, we just play, and as long as there is a server to accept us when we log on, the game ain't dead.

is that it?
Why not call him a noob or say "your mom" or call him a scrub?

wow what a flame..shows your maturity/creativity/intelligence level.

close the thread my vote..pointless..just more nonsense fighting now..beating a dead horse.


lets change it to something more interesting like..ummm...i think anet will nerf the res sig

But that horse has been asking for it.

On a serious note this old man agrees that this thread has gone on too far and turned into useless bickering.

Yes you have a right to an opinion however you didn't present your arguement as an opinion, rather you presented it as fact. As for my comment about you not being in the Top 1000, I wasn't flaming you, I was merely pointing out that you don't really have a right to say the #1 Guild in the game is bad, when they clearly are not. Maybe if you were in a Top 5 Guild, who has beat [rawr], then you could say that but going on current situations, you're not.

I agree that the competition has died down, there isn't as much incentive anymore to really push for perfect play but that again does not prove that the top guilds are bad players.

As for Vent Rage getting 3rd in the November monthly, yeah, they suck. Really, really badly. They didn't get there though because everyone else also sucks, they got lucky draws and when they finally did face a good guild (sup) they got destroyed. Then when they played in the December monthly, not getting the lucky draws that they did in November, they finished the first round with 0 wins and 4 losses. So that route of arguement isn't very valid either.

Now for the WM, EViL statement that you made. It has been discussed quite a lot and I think the general feeling (which I agree with) is that the top guilds at the moment would beat the past top guilds. Why? Because the top guilds at the moment have been playing for 3 years. When WM and EViL were playing the game was still (relatively) new. Players back then didn't have the experience they do now and while at the time it may have seemed as if they were as good as you can get, they were not. With time top guilds have perfected the game play, this perfection hadn't yet been developed so early in the games life.

In fact, EViL DID come back, for a brief period playing under the guild name The Return [EViL] and peaked at around r500. Sure they've been away from the game for a long time but playing at the level they did and the amount of time they put in and taking into account that the player bases overall skill level has (according to you) dropped, then surely they would have got higher than that. But they didn't. If they had only come back for a few weeks, yeah I would expect this rank, but they came back for over a month and played fairly consistently as far as i'm aware and STILL couldn't get past r500. This to me makes me think the overall skill level of the player base has INCREASED due to experience.

Actually go back and read his post please. He didn't flame them, no but I never said he did. However he did imply it. "When that guild can repeatedly get first and basically all guilds suck" Think that sounds a lot like he thinks they are bad.

I also never said that the competition was as good as it was. I know it isn't. You simply CANNOT compare MaTs to the World Championship tournaments they used to hold. That does not mean that the game is dead though and it also does not mean that the competition is dead. Just because it wasn't as good as it used to be does not mean that it is bad.

If someone dominates the ladder, how on earth does that prove that everyone else is bad? Surely it just proves that they are the best current guild in the game. Rodger Federer won Wimbledon 5 years in a row, does that mean that all the other tennis players sucked? God no.

No, bringing up his guild doesn't have anything to do with how dead the game is. I wasn't bringing it up for that purpose. I was showing how hypocritical he was being. If you're going to call the #1 guild bad and not even be in the Top 1000 yourself, not many people are going to take you very seriously. Also as I said, it's hypocritical.

/sign for change topic to " why do games have a habit of making people think they are the best and everything they say is correct, its silly fighting over a game. paste you opinion and lets not discuss it but argue it "

Quote from capt. cupcake

This old man believes that its a way to make up for what they are lacking in the real world. I have run into a couple people who become over confident and arrogant that always tell me my skills are nothing but trash and they try to tell me how to play. That is one of the things that annoy me. I will play my characters the way I would like to play them because there is no true way to play a certain profession

In PvE, yeah, you can and should play whatever you want.

In PvP though I would say that there are true ways to play a profession. It is not 1 set true way but 3 or 4. Outside this though there isn't much room for movement. These set ways are generally the most efficient ways to play the profession e.g Warriors are always damage dealers and within that there are only 2 or 3 optimum hammer builds, 3 or 4 optimum axe builds and only really crip slash for sword. (In GvG)

This old man finds PvP boring. Whats the point in playing when all you do is PVP? It takes the rpg out of mmorpg. So I stay completely away from it and stick to PvE.

I thank you for your agreement on my previous statement.

I find it is quite the opposite, Monster AI is repetitive and incredibly easy to /steamroll. PvP however is dynamic, never the same and requires a great deal of skill so I find this a great deal more interesting.

Also I never said I never PvE but I keep it to a minimum.

This old man never said that you do not like PvE. I was just stating the reasons I do not like PvP.

The game has been around for 3 years, been over a year since soild new content so what'd you expect????? Population decrease is inevitable.

WoW is the only mmorpg that goes against the tide

Another one of these? How many "guild wars is dead " threads do we need? /signed for teaching OP to use /search.

The problem I think lies in the elitist playbase itself.

On many boards where I recommended GWs for PvP, the common responses are
"It's useless to try and PvP this late in the game"
"Those snobs won't let you get a shot"
"It's good, but the people to play with aren't"

WoW has rubbish PvP but it has without a doubt the highest ammount of people to play against.

All the koreans and stuff left because Europe simply dominated and because "There was no reward". Titles went in for recognition but they wanted le moneyz ala SC tourneys.

The game is almost 4 years old, with no new content in well over a year. It is only natural that a large portion of the player base quit playing and moved to something new.

Now nowhere did I state that Guild Wars is dead or dying. All I was stating was that I have been noticing a decrease of crowds in the mission areas and a greater deal of immaturity in the noob cities.