The majority of the community sucks (or does it?)

For depth and game integrity I would. Everybody would be better off that way and nobody would lose.

That is the whole point. Nobody wants game and difficulty balance to piss people off...they want it to make the game better as a whole.

You seem like an intelligent individual, so, I'm sure you are familiar with "the sky is falling" and "the little boy who cried wolf" syndromes out there. The medical field is never 100% correct. They told me oh 18 years ago I was going to have a heart attack in a very short time. Well that 18 years have past my blood pressure is 154/98, my cholestorol is like 399, my glucose is 384 and my Ac12 or something or other is like 12.6 and no heart attacks, no strokes, no blah blah and I had those numbers for 18 years now. Studies just do not mean everything, nor polls as no one is God or a god or a guru (no pun intended here lol). But, in all my years I've seen the sky is falling and this is bad for you and that is bad for you and generally living is bad for you so.....don't breathe ok? lol

On the other side of that though NUMBERS do generally equate to some "structure" of TRUTH...that I will agree with, but, there's just too many variables in life and even in people for any ONE thing to say something is this or that. GW is successful because GW WAS like GW was out of the box. WOW IS successful because of the way WOW is and it's been a popluar game since well World of Warcraft I. WOW by the NUMBERS is the most successful, but, of course it doesn't mean WOW is the ONLY successful game out there. Lord knows EQ is successful (was the King for a long time before WOW), Ascherons Call is successful, EQ2 is successful, AO is successful, UO is successful. And the list goes on an on. There seems to be some "my game has to be the best" syndrome here at the Guru though. Most everybody wants to knock WOW or any other game that is part of the mmo/mmorpg genre and well they can knock them all they want to and they can say GW is the best etc etc, but, the NUMBERS still say which is the BEST game. I don't really think that is much of an issue except with those that can't accept the truth.

My point is that by the NUMBERS WOW's ENGINE and TYPES of play are the MOST successful. 10 million people can't be wrong as my analogy of McDonalds everyday. Yeah there's the bad for you to eat message by doctors who eat escargo every night and probably boiled shrimp and lobster (you ever see the cholestorol levels in those things?) who tell US what's good for US kinda like religious leaders try to tell us how to live OUR lives while they go around stealing poor lil old ladies money and playing with our children in not so nice ways. So, I'm a bit don't givea damn what doctors and religious leaders say type today based on my lifetime experiences. You can choose to believe what you want and I too will choose to believe what I want and know and see. We all make choices and of course we all think we individually make always the right ones.

Typical misunderstanding of Maths: no one is asking you to proove/demonstrate anything, I'm pointing to the "basic understanding" of Maths, idem for GW game mechanics. You don't need to be a Maths major to understand how AL affects damage.

I don't need to convince you, because too much time is lost in discussion here, and if I could have been able to convince you, it would have happened before.

You have got to be kidding me. Unless you are one of those people who think Titanic is the best movie of all time and McDonalds is the best food of all time. Just because a company/franchise makes a very successful run has no bearing on their quality if you ask me...it simply means they are very good at many other things such as appealing to a wide audience, filling a void, etc etc.

You still haven't told us how you are going to make a guide (to my knowledge I may have missed it a while back). You have only talked about a general guide that would put everything together for players because the current guides are inadequate (which I disagree with). In my opinion you would have much more success with a guide that teaches how to be skilled in a specific part of the game. The question to me becomes what kind of skill is worth teaching?

That's not an accurate comparison. You know that, right? You're saying that regardless of the quality you're going to go through with it anyways. That's totally fine, but that doesn't change the quality. In regards to your experience: YMMV. If I decided to swallow fire and live perfectly fine from it, it doesn't mean the same will happen to the person next to me. YMMV.

Again: I'm not stating that the numbers are "wrong". It's simply that WoW has a lot to offer to all sorts of players, and many of those sorts of players don't really care about the going's-on with the game. They just want to get in there and hit some shit, there ain't nothing wrong with that. There *is* something wrong with that being *all* that you cater to.

Either way, none of this really justifies what's happened in Guild Wars: If the "best way" to make the most amount of players is to remove a huge chunk of skill required to get to the rewards easier, how the hell has WoW been surviving for so long (even before it got mad easy)?

To be specific, it would affect your ability to earn titles.

I think you missed this (for about the umpteenth time):

Reread above text repeatedly until glued into mind. Is there any specific reason you don't believe us?

You did miss it probably.

Which one isn't worth?

I have come to the conclusion the reason most ppl $uck at this game is reliance on heros and hench.Then there is the mob AI control which should be changed instead of whole mob coming at you just one does if you attack it or aggro it.I stick by my first response as to why they do considering I am playing another game atm and most are better cooperatively where there is none of that in this game.

Heros and hench make it possible to solo most of the game where there is no cooperation.The builds being used are not that great as well as no strategy.How do you expect a person to play well in group with what said?

There use to be cooperation in this game once upon a time.

Correct, Age. However, heroes are a blessing, seeing as how without them you'd either have to tolerate henchmen, or you'd have to PuG. You could always group with friends, but in Guild Wars the community isn't exactly great a lot of the time so making friends can sometimes be difficult. I agree that it makes things easier, and people become reliant on certain things, which makes them weaker in the long run. Been in groups and have had people run ahead of the group as if we were heroes, then whine about dying. Or monks pinging their energy and asking politely for the group to wait... And then they don't.

Stupid people and popularity draw to each other. This is why (if you were there) and played WoW when it first came out the community was (dare I say?) enjoyable. WoW was still very popular when it first came out, but the community was far better than it is now. I guess the same could be said for Guild Wars, the bigger something is the more likely you are to run into random jerks and noobs. HM had just come out when I started GW, so I've really no clue how the community used to be with GW.

If it is because of the game integrity, I'm sold.

Although we need a character wiping and a purgex of everyone's xunlai chest .

We don't want other people, although it doesn't personally affect me, to be affected and feel bad about the titles and items other people got because of bad design.

We also need to make sure 600 smiting monks and 55 get destroyed and the UWSC too.

So, no consumables, no PvE-only skills, no crappy skills.

All for the good of the game integrity and skill.

Lol. As if you need PvE only skills to get titles.

Sincerely, controlling an earth shaker Koss in DoA raven hearth gloom cave, making him stay body blocking and not get to far ahead, selecting offensive stance when I want him to fight everything, avoid combat when I want him to stay back, while managing my own character, doesn't make me weaker.

Community sucks because they care too much about titles and skins that have no relevance to the game play.

Sure it is nice to have them, but you invite some one to play and they will say "I don't need that dungeon", "I'm mapping" or "I'm sorry but I can make 500k in 30 minutes trading in kamadan".

You fail to realize that depth is subjective, for one person who says there is no depth there is at least one who says there is, who is correct? You want to restrict the rewards to those who you think don't deserve them. This is another reason why you want to nerf, nerf, nerf; you want to turn the clock back so you can experience the game when you played it the first time which is impossible.

A bit on topic, the community sucks because of PvX wiki which makes them skip an important part of the game, maikng builds and trying them.

Yeah for the first few months, I just played the game without looking at strategy and guides to get a feel for it without preconceptions.

Or is it because passable build from wiki that is played in 1-2-3 style is more than enough to win?

If you want to nitpick, nearly every good build is like that. The problem is that the player doesn't experience the making of a build himself, but just copies is. I only use pvx wiki for farming builds.

Also, the best thing you can teach a player is to always ask why. Why does something work like that, why did I fail, why did I win? If someone starts asking that, he will improve much faster and learn more.

Yes tank and spank by a GvG top team to do DoA is skill. Same tank and spank build played by PuG is 1-2-3 style.

Of course every single build has a majority of skills that are used constantly and a few that are used on occasion.

If most of the skills are in your bar without being used, then you have a bad build.

Correct. Even though I wouldn't personally care about a wiping (even with my FoW chars ) you still can't do that. Like I said, we aren't in the business of pissing people off over trivial things. People play the game for different reasons. The problem becomes when something abusive is one of those reasons (like old soul reaping/ursan or current consumables/pve skills) where it must be dealt with at the cost of some people getting pissed. We are in the business of making the game better...well at least Anet should be heh.

That is why you strive to make the game deep for the better players of your game. Doing so will make it deeper to everybody else.

And again, this has nothing to do with rewards and I wish people would stop bringing that up. I could give a crap less about rewards. I wouldn't care if GW had ZERO possessions (being a true PvP game). But I understand that there are many people who DO care about rewards so they must be attended to.

And I know I will never be able to experience the game when I first played it (that would be awesome but sadly no). But I do know that the game has taken drastic turns over the years that would better if they never happened.

BTW, I was listening to a GVG vent recording of a KiSu game a while back, and all I could hear for most of the first 20mins (stopped at the end of the first part) is an endless repetition of "3 2 1". Yes, the infamous spike metagame, which requires so much skill right? I've been wondering what differentiates the "skilled players" from the other ones for a while, is it hand-eye coordination mainly? Look at this video on "Become a better gamer" for a funny (but true) explanation of why this is plausible:
http://uk.video.ign.com/dor/articles...4uo71 99xbvwz

Completely agree. But you need one bit more, when you look at skills, you need to understand game mechanics so that your build does actually work, rather than feels it could work. Trying, failing and changing is a brilliant method, but how many people have the patience?

We've been pretty much advocating that since we started here.

Then how would balancing PvE skills affect your game?

Thing is the only way to make it deeper is to make it continuously challenging.

Thing is, if you beat Part X of the game, you will be able to beat Part X of the game again, by repetition of the same strategy.

You can make a mistake, like over aggroing, but it isn't faulty strategy, it's faulty tactics.

You can increase the chance of failure by faulty tactics by improving enemies builds, giving them the illusion of a cohesive team - example of that is Stone Summits and Charr balanced groups in EOTN, erratic patrols and pop ups. Even then, they will present the exact same AI issues.

The AI issues aren't fault of the players or the game becoming dumber. Actually the game became better in terms of AI - they now scatter from AoE damage.

In a game of limited content it is impossible to achieve continuous challenge. Either you add more content or you implement ever changing opposition. That is PvP.

You can give me whatever examples you wish of great games and their difficulties levels. I bet you will be hard pressed to find one where you spent more time playing vs AI than in GW (I don't think I spent as much time in Diablo II).



When people start this thread, and you included, say that some players aren't supposed to play HM and some of the rewards they achieve are undeserved and that is a reason to remove consumables and PvE only skills, it gets a bit hard to dissociate those things.

You will also have to attend to the players that have beaten the game more than once too.

Starting that 3rd or fourth, or in my case tenth, character isn't fun. All those quests, and missions that I can do while asleep... I want to move. And those missions where I fall asleep, pretty much include every mission in NM. I want to get my characters in HM and Elite areas/dungeons.

As loads here will state, they dislike grind. They play GW because grind was small.

But then if we talk about reducing the time needed, by usage of powerful skills and consumables, people complain because what used to take hours, now takes a fraction of that time.

So how is it?

Is grind bad or not?

Is it bad if we are talking about "reputation titles", which by the way require less grind now, meaning players get more powerful skills earlier in their careers as opposed to later when they were more experienced, but it is good if we are talking about doing a vanquish (or the same vanquish by nth time for faction) or doing an elite area/dungeon?

Spending time to get somewhat stronger at the game is bad, but having to spend x hours doing some area for the nth time opposed to x/2 hours doing that same area for the nth time is good?

As it is, the PvE end game is getting resources to spend them on money sinks or grinding titles.

Is it bad removing the time needed (read grind) to acquire your resources for the money sinks?

Look at the change on the level required to go in EOTN. For players starting for the first time, it is bad. They are skipping loads and getting their hands on consumables and skills a lot powerful quite early (and the less grind required means more powerful too), but for veteran players means you can skip a large part of the repetition content.

You cant ignore neither the veterans or the new players.

snaek said something that it took time for the player base, veterans included, to catch and understand the power of skills like save yourselves and cry of pain.

So veterans aren't challenged by the game but they still take time to realize and use the power of the tools available but then when the less veteran/sharper player base catch up, they cant use those tools anymore, because the veterans are already done with those?

You cant ignore GW PvE is a limited in size environment.

After you finish PvE and if you want to keep playing PvE, what is left is repetition.

I know Bryant Again will say "but look at Fallout 3 and Mass Effect! The harder difficulty settings are challenging! GW HM isn't challenging anymore!".
How many hours did you spent playing Fallout 3 and Mass Effect? How many hours did you spent playing GW?

I know I've played some 4500+ hours in GW. Only 500 of those in varied PvP.

Can you say to me that I will be challenged by Mass Effect and Fallout 3 after 4000+ hours?

If I can I'm going to buy those right now! (well only if I can play them over the internet with my GF)

Increasing time needed to kill.

If you nerf defenses, more resources from offense will need to be relocated for defense - dead teams do no damage.

If you nerf offense, you just cant relocate resources from defense to offense because enemies are still as strong as ever. Most likely, you will need to increase defense, decreasing offense further more.

2 player + 6heroes are much much slower than human teams already. That is why I need 4-5 hours to do a heroway DoA full run in NM (no consumables though and the breaks to breath and eat and whatnot) as opposed to like 1 hour or less for cry teams in HM (they use consumables though).

Removal of Save yourselves for example, could imply changing one of the human characters for Extend conditions duty, meaning less damage (and if techno babble also goes an additional source of daze), maybe the drop of one of the 3 copies of discord for [[ward against harm] and further wards.

So, slower.

I don't think that's what we're asking here. Sure these changes would draw me a bit more back into the game, but it's more about maintaining it, keeping it to what it once was, and with chance improving it.

Uh, if we wanted that "grind" reduced, we wouldn't want it reduced through breaking the game.

I don't think you even know why I brought those games up.

That's usually the result when you nerf overpowered crap.

Thing is you, as everyone else in here, are pretty much just talking qualifiers. No hard data, just perceptions and opinions.

You say the game isn't challenging you or isn't challenging anyone. Your opinion and perception.

I also feel most of the PvE game isn't challenging and I can breeze through it. That is my opinion and perception.

But I can still hear people asking for help to do stuff I'll yawn and they aren't new players.

Veterans perception about the difficulty of stuff they already beat can be a bit biased

My girl and I keep telling to you each other : "Remember how hard this used to be?"

So, how many PvE hours do you have?

Can it be because you like to play games?



Or just diminish the power of skills in general. I don't see why slow down kill speed equals a good thing immediately.

Seriously you'd figure after 32 pages of rambling on about #4 in 4thvariety's post, the discussion would continue onto #5.




There is no use bickering between the select few that is going on because Anet has provided you with a game like in diagram1. The game provides you with alternate levels of difficulty throughout the game up until point #4, at which point the game becomes easy and some farm NPC or grind for titles, some quit playing, and some move onto point #5(PvP).

The stabbing still currently going on here is trivial, you are asking for Anet to alter parts of the game they have created, because you are still playing at point #4 yet all parts of the game relate to a decent game like in diagram1.

Progress the conversion or close the thread. I'll do it for you though.

The scale in which we can base our conclusion is rather lop sided, given the scale is so one sided because the majority is still at point #4. AI(very static)vs human input(dynamic).

Here's the conclusion, if the majority of the player base didn't stop at point #4.
You'd have a healthy point #5 and the PvP portions of the game would be healthy and populated. Overall if that was the case you could say the majority doesn't suck.

^misinterpretation; point #5 is not pvp.

and point #4 is way lower in reality than it is in that chart. that chart is supposed to resemble the "standard." unfortunately, gw does not meet that "standard".


repetitive gameplay is usually a result of simplistic gameplay. great depth can allow for great variety.

How many RPGs do you know that are best known for PvP?

Do RPGs generally attract PvP minded players?

I think people are reading this back to front.

GWs is successful and large because it has a PvE side. The PvP while good, doesn't have enough modes to attract casual PvE RPG players and make them into PvP players.

Strip the PvE to a bare minimum and invest in PvP and the game will have quite a smaller player base, unless the PvP is a) really good and b) need more types of PvP, including bigger random teams.

GW isn't a PvP game. GW isn't PvE game. At this moment, there are 2 GW games - GW PvP (and closer to GW GvG) and GW PvE.

Saying that the community sucks because it plays PvE and aren't interested in playing PvP, its saying everyone that play games but not vs other humans suck.

Uh, what?

Here's your hard data: PvE skills, consumables, and benefits gained from titles all make the game less challenging, with effects ranging from minimal to drastic.

That's what we've been talking about for the longest time. Not only how the game became far easier not just for us, but for everyone. I'm not disappointed with the learning curve in a game unless it's stupidly short, much like what happened in Guild Wars with the introduction of all this junk.

If the game is too hard for someone, they should look to improving themselves through Normal mode. If even that is too hard for them it should be looked into perhaps providing an easier difficulty (never a bad move). You don't make the entire game easier.

No. I brought those games (and many others) up because of what they do with their difficulties, how they try to keep you on the tracks of the foundations of the game, and how they remind you that you're playing the game on an easier difficulty.

Because the kill speed wasn't reduced via simply lowering the health of the mobs.

Also note that foes taking longer to kill can lead to more stressful situations and rationing of resources, but it has to be implemented appropriately and in the right fashion. NOX is a pretty good example of it being done badly.

Guild Wars is continuously challenging...in PvP. As for PvE I somewhat agree that it is hard to make continuously challenging, which is why you make the game so that the difficulty goes from easier to harder (balanced) and your difficulty settings make sense (hard mode). In Guild Wars both of those don't work right.

Which is true. I don't care about the rewards but a lot of others do. The problem is we have a culture now where everybody who cares about rewards feels they must use the inbalanced farming stuff to get these rewards. This leads to the problem of rewards required much less skill to obtain.

It is bad, but the problem is there are a lot of people who like to do it. But that is another discussion. Basically the idea is to reduce grind (mostly mandatory grind) without breaking the game balance to do so.

The idea isn't to ignore people...the idea is to listen to your more experienced players (and particularly your better players) about game decisions. Leaving this into the hands of newbs leads to disaster in the long run. I suppose the problem with Anet's model is that they are more inclined to listen to newbs...but thats another discussion as well.

PvP the way it was meant to be. If you want to keep playing PvE well...

...Ok time for me to go on an off topic mini rant. Here it is: Repetition in Guild Wars is the stupidest thing there is. The only reason it exists is because ANet has tried tons of halfassed ways to turn their PvP game into a true RPG with horrible results. /endrant

You do know the game was built as a PvP game right? The problem here is that a PvP game attracted so many RPG players.

Honestly that is probably pretty close to true. I could easily argue that anybody who doesn't PvP in Guild Wars sucks at Guild Wars. Nothing against those players but it is probably correct given the context of this thread.

Ok at great risk of turning this into a another PvE vs PvP thread, screw this let me say how I really feel now:

I am saying right now that any attempt to teach players anything in Guild Wars that doesn't teach PvP is worthless as far as skill level is concerned. I know because playing the game for over 3 years I can farm any PvE area in the game but I would probably be farmed in PvP because I haven't played it with any seriousness in over a year. This isn't even close...PvP is how skill is determined in Guild Wars and its time we accept that and move on. The reason the majority of the community sucks is because the majority of the community is too busy farming PvE instead of getting skill in PvP.

Funny that, alot of higher up PvP players only consider the highest ranks of the gvg ladder are the only ones that have skill. Anyone else is either a Sh***er/RA scrub or a HA superstar.

A message to people on this crusade, its time you and others accepted some people rather play/farm PvE, accept it and move on.

Do keep in mind it was never designed solely for PvPers. It was designed for both ends of the stick, considering all the work they put into Prophecies and other campaigns. Grind is bad in my own opinion, but some people enjoy it, don't know why but they do. On the other hand, one could argue that grind is fine as long as it's fun for the majority... But it rarely if ever is. Sometimes I think Anet listens to their community too much, and caves to certain things. Is it really true that titles were only added because people were begging for something to soak up their time? I mean, when you look at Luxon/Kurzick, Lightbringer, or any faction based title it pretty much shouts "HEY! I'M NOT FUN TO DO!" The only logical explanation is that Anet threw them in to keep the more hardcore folk quiet and busy. It's hard to appeal to a broad audience of people without it blowing up in your face.

Yeah, fame does that to you. If you actually want to call it fame anyway. I like to call it "Hi, I'm compensating for a flaw in my own life so I'm a D-bag online."

I would be much more sympathetic with that kind of logic if the game had a Hard Mode from the onset.

If you want to bash GW for becoming (or trying to) something it wasn't originally designed, then bash if from stopping to be a PvP game with a small PvE introduction, to a much larger RPG PvE game.

PvE-only skills didn't ruined HM because PvE-only skills (or when you stopped having 3 and went to 23) came hands-to-hands with HM.

You can say that HM was supposed to be hard, but maybe that wasn't what Anet wanted.

So you can complain about Anet calling their "cat" a "dog", but you cant tell them they changed their game philosophy because of that. They changed it when they though it was better for them if GW was a PvE game, either primarily or additionally.

Maybe they call it HM to make people feeling better. They could have called it something else.


I don't think they listen to newbs. They listened to their wallets.



I'm saying the same, except I don't believe you can force people in to playing PvP. You can't force them.

PvPrs might be sad and angry, but the game isn't about only PvP anymore.
They can be angry at PvErs for that, but it was Anet decision, not PvErs.

Missions with books and vanquishes are much more appealing now and repeating them, especially when helping someone gives something back to you. The Luxon/Kurzick still takes too much time though.

I think you are right about the success of GW linked to PvE.
And also on your assesment on PvP.

Most PvE players will remain there except when there is some change in PvP:
- short time to enter
- relatively short matches
- not too depending on team strategy or the match must have easy to understand concepts
- posibility to win even when not being a very good player


To be honest, I think A-net is partly to blame for the lack of new blood in PvP.
JQ and Asp were dead for a very long time. JQ was mainly 'played' by explorers and some assassins wanting to spike explorers. Aspenwood did have some players, but also a fair amount of explorers. There was no new PvP content introduced in NF.
But it's also the players. Only a relatively small group is interested in high end content and farming. The rest just enjoys the story, spends some time here and there and don't even know there is this thing called PvP.
And when they find out they get in RA only to be slaughtered time after time and bitched at because they are 'noobs'. Finally they get their consecs and get to TA. Only to be refused in most teams because of failing builds.
Somehow they manage to cross that bridge and find themself in HA. Hello rank discrimination and spike damage. Starters don't have 123spike Vent, no way of telling when and how to pre-prot. So it's failing over and over and over and over agian.
Those players will never get a team together in their guild for GvG. Or just once, to fail miserably and never play it again. In AB they will be refused because of bad builds (no telling how/what to improve, because getting R2 Lux is more important than helping someone out). So all they have is JQ and Asp for PvP experience. Because those areas are relatively easy, no people spying on their builds and (according to what I've read) half of the team is leeching anyway.

And that's partly because no-one gives a sh*t anymore, except for their own titles and success.

And that brings me back to the original intend of the thread, is there a way to improve this?
I really don't know anymore.

I've already accepted that...but it is time for others to accept that those people are going to suck more than the ones that learn from PvP. This thread is about why the community sucks after all...

No but it was designed for a PvP endgame not a farming/grind/title/reward endgame. And have you played Prophecies? You do realize the entire game was designed to lead into PvP right? (desert missions, favor, lv cap, normalized equipment etc etc) Hell the game didn't even have endgame rewards until recently because PvE rewards weren't the point of the game back then.

I know. Here is the problem...what if their wallet told them to add god mode to the game? Would they do it? I'd say if they did they were an awful company regardless of how much money they made from it.

I know. I really hate the word "forced" to PvP though. Nobody is or ever was forced. You are basically saying you shouldn't be forced to PvP in a PvP game, which is like jumping into a swimming pool and saying you shouldn't be forced to swim. Fortunately for you GW isn't a swimming pool anymore...its a kiddie pool.

(EDIT: I don't know if you realise it, but your posts are quite condescending to people who are not playing the game mainly for "skill" but other kinds of fun, treating them like "kids" with a swimming pool of little depth is extremely arrogant of you, do you know all these people?)

Now may be a good time to repost the OP (where I intentionally left the question of "if the community sucks, why is it?"... unless I've written something in that way and didn't see it?), please (re)read it carefully:

I'm sorry if I come off that way but I am speaking truth here. Chances are if one of the reasons you play a game isn't to get more skilled, than you aren't going to get more skilled. People who play for skill will almost always be more skilled than those who play for fun.

The swimming pool example makes perfect sense. There is a shallow end and a deep end and most people have chosen to stay in the shallow end of Guild Wars. If you don't enter the deep end you will never learn to swim and your skills will never improve.

Your questions have already been answered.

And so am I.

Which is not related to what I said: your tone is condescending and arrogant, this has nothing to do with skill.

Your example can be moved upsite down: most people who mainly experience the game mechanics part of GW are in the shallow part of GW, ignoring the rest. I wasn't making a point here btw, simply pointing to the fact that your statements are not "truth", only very relative opinions.

No it hasn't. As pointed above, there's no simple "truth" or a Yes/No answer here. And if it was only about that, don't you think I'd have asked for a poll?

If it wasn't for you, Bryant Again and Improvavel deviating from the main thread direction, there'd either be useful contributions or silence.

This thread was supposed to be "not Yet Another Thread on Skill", but something different around the idea of guiding players, teaching tools, new ideas.

Right. Now that we *have* it all that crummy stuff can go away now.

I would be much more understandable if HM didn't exist - it does. The OP stuff doesn't need to exist anymore.

Do you mean they, along with consets, made it balanced?

If such is the case, that's not essentially the point of higher difficulties: it's *knowing* you're going against more stressed odds and succeeding against them. If you don't want that then you can stay in the less stressful difficulties.

Besides: I still don't consider it OP. We're still zounds smarter than them. That's why any boost the monsters get is actually them trying to be as good as us.

it makes me wonder why simply rewarding fa/jq better brings in more people. are they only playing it for the reward? not because it is a fun game mode?

honestly, if [rawr] told me that the only reason they do gvg is to win gold trims, then i'd probably lose all respect for them.

A large part of the increase in popularity of both JQ and FA has to do with the increased reward and the nerf of the old (H)FFF .
Before the increase the best way on Kurz side was (H)FFF. By far. People wanting to max a title for KoBD track would probably take this one.
That one was shattered. The Luxon part of the game offered a less benefitial (H)FFF, so many players on that side would either play AB or do the quest where you have to kill some npc's (forgot which one, never did it for this reason).

What the change did was forcing Kurzick players out of HFFF, which was also a very good money maker when taking leechers.
The best posibilities to gain faction became either vanquishing or playing the factions PvP missions.
The advantage of vanquishing being getting loot, the advantage of PvP gaining balth faction.
By 'forcing' the kurzick players to the competitive missions and AB A-net increased the popularity of them.

When comparing JQ and AB (I'm less familiar with FA) the huge advantage of JQ is (or was, been about 2 months since last play) the huge amount of faction that can be won there. It's a more relyable source than AB, the only real problem would be a very bad opposing team that could not recap shrines.
Other than that it's a constant flow of npc's giving +10 balth/lux/kurz.

Sure it is a fun game. Take JQ again. You could take your necro, blow yourself and everyone else to bits and get faction while doing that. Awesome. Oh, take a RoJ monk and people will love you. Splinter barrage? Sure, bring on more.
It's.... well... PvE and you get faction for it. Isn't that lovely?
But take away the reward and it people won't be motivated to play it anymore.
There is no fun in blowing up npc's hundreds of times (well, some farmers seem to enjoy that, but they get loot). Change the game so players will only get faction from human players and the areas will be dead again soon.
Why? Because you can't RoJ nuke a player with more than 2 braincells more than two or three times. Then (s)he will just step out and .... well... RoJ doesn't work that well when people are not standing in it. The necro bombers? Sure, those would be annoying. But when you blow yourself up and only get +10 faction, well, that's not so much fun. People don't do such things in RA or AB very often because it's not working. So the area will be like RA with less reward. People will shift to AB or vanquishing for Lux/Kurz and to AB/RA for Balth.

This has to do with the fact that FA and JQ need titlehunters. Even AB needs them up to a certain point. They are active, play a large amount of time and are willing to do the same thing over and over again, keeping it populated.
If teams ain't forming in 10-15 mins in FA and JQ people will leave the outposts again, specially if they remain as seperated as they are now (several euro districts, US, other regions). Why wait on a game that might never start.

But my general impression of JQ and FA is that a fair amount of the regular players are mainly playing for the reward and less for the fun. Titlehunters.
Nothing wrong with that, but change the reward and they might go somewhere else. They don't care about PvP, they care about faction.

The casual players will enjoy those kinds of play from time to time.
But when teams ain't forming fast enough or the experience difference gets too great casual players will not play it. There is no fun losing about any battle in TA with your PUG hoping to meet an even worse PUG sometime to get one more win. Some dedicated players will do that, the rest will go back to PvE and keep playing that. It's also not fun to wait half an hour for a fight to start (that was happening on some exploration evenings with my guild in JQ). PvE players could have saved the earth a couple of times by the time they learned to play JQ a little (not concidering wiki and other players as teachers) just because of the waiting times.

But then, I could be completely wrong and many people are actually playing JQ and FA mainly for fun and not for rewards.
But the last time I played there the comments of players surgested otherwise.

People who speak a lot of truth sound arrogant to those who don't believe them.

It isn't an opinion. The majority of players choose not to partake in the most skill intensive portions of the game for any good amount of time. We know this to be fact.

So what have you learned about your original questions that hasn't already been said?

Some are quite retarded either in NM or HM. Look at aataxes. Powerful beasts of destruction. What can they do against conditions, enchantments, weapons of warding or shouts? Nothing.

Buffing stats in monsters will only make us, that are smarter then them, abuse their fails.

Why bother try to match them play for play, if their "reactions" are faster, their skills and spells do more damage, they have better energy gain, they are better in everything that is a stat?

When they are like that, you attack their weaknesses - the fact they don't know what is happening. So you put a tank in front of them, let them waste themselves against it, while beating the shit out of them. Boring, simplistic but brilliant versus AI.

Even GvG players do that, either when they come to play PvE or when the NPCs in GvG do more damage than they do!

Before the advent of PvE only skills, ursan and consumables, tank-and-spank variants were the mainstream.

It would still be fun to see if a balanced team, like the ones in PvP, can do NM (HM I guess is out of the question) DoA, without PvE skills, consumables and titles. And if they can, then a team with AI heroes mixed in the bag.

The main problem of consumables and PvE-only skills is that they can be used outside HM and NM late/elite areas.

We already have the "wikis". We have forums. People that want to learn can educate themselves.

The few I know from the game, I learned on my own, using my own experiences, wikis and the forums.

The only additional thing you can do is teach in game.

Some, as long as you are polite, will hear you right way. Others will think you are full of BS.

The better way to teach both groups is Always Succeed when someone ask for help. You do that and they will think "That guy/girl knows what s/he is talking about". They will be a lot more ready to hear to your suggestions.

I find PvE-only skills and heroes very useful to achieve that, by removing the weakest links in the chain and letting you control the situation completely.

That is all we can do.

Being skillful in guild wars is a very unimportant thing in the great scheme of life. Being skillful in any game is quite unimportant unless you can make a living out of it.


The other thing it could be done, is in Anet hands.

Anet could redo the henchmen build and stop giving them single profession builds and crappy skills.

Additionally the game could create some templates when installing and it would be better if they give a short description how they worked, what it intends to achieve and in what teams they work well. And they should allow heroes to use those templates straight way, unlocked skills or not.

The community sucks, not because of any lack of game skill, but because it is a human society, relatively large and where everyone is basically anonymous and their actions have pretty much no consequence.

Hidden behind that mask of anonymity, people can do what they can't in the real world without being a pariah.

Or they just want to play a game they like and have fun with, that for some reason (Anet anti-piracy) needs to be in internet servers instead of their own personal PC.

And Fril, I've suggested a random GvG game mode to allow players interested in PvP a easier learning curve and a base to know players that want the same and form a GvG guild.

even if playing for rewards was a good thing, resorting to degenerate builds and attitudes to attain them is not a good thing, i.e. suicide bombers and leechers/bots.

personally i think the real population problem of ja/fq was its accessibility--it had none. it supposed to be a low-skill (casual) arena, and yet its such in a remote location that no ones even heard of. the update did not fix this one bit imo. it still doesnt appeal to low-skill (casual) players...it appeals to farmers. which can be considered even worse, because how can a lower skilled player learn if he is playing in arenas vs farmers/leechers/bots?

i still believe that environment plays a huge role in learning. if a new player has good friends in a good guild, he can start out in gvg or ha. now even though that these areas require most skill, he is in a good environment to learn much better than a new player who plays in lesser-skill demanding arenas like jq/fa.

this made me think of that tv debt commercial... 'you'll be stuck on a treadmill going nowhere fast.'


perhaps we need more guilds like kisu?