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

Many in the community are always ready to berate people. Example: Was playing an a/me build somewhere and decided to go to do some Tomb runs. Everyone in Tombs is A/E (currenly the fav build since the SF nerf), was not within 2 seconds of warping in I got A/Me????? flashing in chat. Give a guy a chance to switch over.

PVX/Guru is nice to get base ideas/information from and expand on if your so inclined. Take base build add X is it more fun, if so enjoy it, if not try something else.

Always glad to help people if they want help, what someone considers good or fun may totally suck and bore someone else. Play styles are a big part of the equation.

IMO: a normal community with diverse player types due to the nature of the game. Play the game how you want and have fun.

The thing i hate is when you have players who ask for help , you decide to give it a try and you explain how your build works - gd example was once helping a group do gates of kryta.I explained i was a 55 monk and i need to be in front attacking - all they need do is keep back and collect thier drops.
Now most ppl if told to sit bk and u do it for them will do that - nope the group decided to wander off and get obliterated then complained that i didnt heal nor res them - i even showed 55 build at start and stated i dont heal nor res.
They all rage quit - now that wasnt 1st or last time thats happened.
Its hard to show ppl when they cba to listen to simple instructions.
When u offer advice on their builds - eg a minion master going somewhere with barely any corpses - the responce is stfu noob.
Helping guildies out tho is a lot easier and somehow they do learn and listen so all the above problems are almost non existant.
i`ll rather go with h/h then a pug team - yes h/h ai may be bad but its better than a lvl5 warrior who thinks hes superman and runs into everything an dying , also h/h are more polite and dont answer u bk lol

Of course, it's the classic "Which came first, the chicken or the egg." Imo, the bad PuG came first." which is what I paraphrased leaving out the "Of course, it's the classic 'Which came first, the chicken or the egg.'" part. Maybe the OP should consider this being the reason why players suck so bad...IQ's <100.

- No personal attacks.
- Sun Fired Blank

The average shitty PUG player (sorry for the redundancy) thinks the wikis are "for noobs."

As it has already been said before, lazyness is the main reason for players being bad and not learning. There is this mentality of "teach me, feed me, i'm an invalid!" that is further reinforced by the existence of pvxwiki and guildwiki. Need a build? Wiki it. The newer players have this mistaken notion that the older, more experienced players have to somehow be their mentor, that they have to have their hands be held and shortcut their way to greatness by hanging on the coattails of more experienced players. Whatever happened to finding stuff out on your own?

When i first started, i didn't bother to ask questions, trial and error are my friends. Observation my teacher and reading posted articles by experienced players my eye opener. That was how i grew as a player. A lot of quirks and oddities as well as synergies of skills is only really realized and understood by playing with and experimenting with builds. Stuff you don't really become aware of by just copy pasting a wiki build.

This need to be "taught" is kinda like a computer ignorant guy posting on a experts hardware forum asking very basic questions. The experts might try answering him, but because of his utter lack of knowledge of computers, they might end up having to give him a whole course on computers. Its fine if its just the one guy and he understands, however, what if he doesn't? And what if there are a thousand more just like him, waiting to be spoonfed? What if there were more than a thousand? Argh, and you wonder why experienced players don't really teach.

To really teach someone, the one being taught needs to have a willingness to learn and have at least a base competence and level of knowledge. Yeah, you can "teach" quantum phyics to a 5-year old, but would he even understand a word?

Of course, not all blame goes to the "teach me, feed me, i'm an invalid!" mentality of newbies. The game itself is to blame. Heroes/henchies removing need to interact with others, as well as being effective enough that they can clear an entire area for you while you do squat. Other problems include pve skills, consumables, dumbing down of hard game areas, power creep, do i need to go on? All these serve to give the newer players an easier time and hence removes the need to improve. For example, pre-nerf, why think up a build when you can ursan through the entire game? When you really look at the big picture, its really all just a big vicious cycle of lazy players breeding more lazy players aided by bad game design and assisted by easy access to cookie cutter solutions. And people wonder why the majority of the community is bad heh.

For PvP, I don't think a lack of transitional content is the problem. There's a pretty fair amount of easy-to-find, high quality information onlinedespite a lack of transitional content, and it's easy to self-improve if you bother to self-analyze. The problem is that most people don't bother anymore. They think they deserve ranks on a silver platter and that ranks equal competence. They don't put in any legwork to be decent players, they find easy methods of obtaining their goals, and they think they're decent players once they have them. And, in a sick twist, once they get specific ranks, they determine that ranks don't equal competence since "they're easy to get," and anyone can get them. Those sorts of thinking and egos are hard to fight, and they perpetuate bad players remaining bad players. One of the reasons that Gladiator's Arena is a huge cesspool of useless or (even worse) misleading information is that you have too many of these people overrunning it. We really need people like Karla and Amazon who are willing to step up, but most people of that quality don't bother to post; the highest end players don't bother to read the forum, much less contribute.

The bottom line is that most people these days are not really willing to help themselves, and they're not really looking for people to help them. They're looking for people to give them something, and that masquerades as an appeal for help. For me, a surefire sign of this kind of reliance is when people ask me a more vague question instead of a more specific question, or if they experience the same problem over and over and don't ask whether it's a problem they can avoid.

I would like to agree that the biggest problem is people don't learn from their mistakes.

I speak from experience since I have been making the jump from PvE to PvP. A perfect example of this is a GvG we had the other night. We had a couple champ types guesting for us and I was one of the 2 mesmers. It was a new bar and position for me, which I told them, so I knew I was going to be off. In the middle of the match after the warriors had been screaming about being blinded all the time, someone asked why the BS ele wasn't shut down. At that point I though that should have been me as I was running a fast cast LC with sighum.

At the end of the match the 2 guests proceeded to explain how bad it was that I had to be told to use my sighum in which they were completely correct. I took this as a learning experience and studied the rest of my bar to make sure I understood what my main focus was in that new position. Basically I failed and learned from it.

The other mesmer was a Dom mesmer with diversion & shame. They also ripped on him for not diverting BS. He then quit the guild. These are the people that continue to suck and complain that no one will help them

There are plenty of learning guilds out there [Kisu} alliance for example. All you have to do is put forth the effort to find one then learn from criticism.

As I read these posts, I am reminded of the game I left to play this one. Some of you may know the game, Dungeon Siege.

I started GW about 8 months after its release. I started playing DS online about a year after its release. For both games, there were several veterans around to help me get a leg up on the games. As each game aged, the more experienced gravitated more to themselves, either solo or "exclusive" clans/guilds. By exclusive, I mean, X amount experience, certain basic knowledge needed, etc. to join.
As both games aged more, questions once answered directly, are/were being answered with, "wiki is your friend"(GW), or "go get the tutorials"(DS).
DS is dead and gone now, no longer supported online.
I played GW nearly 8 months before learning of the existence of these or any forum. Before I found the forums, the updates were just part of the game. Many times, the updates made me change the way I played a certain character or certain groups of monsters. I just "adapted" and went on. After the finding these forums and reading about the changes and why the changes were made, I started letting my opinion be known. (But that is another story.)
GW players bad? Who is to judge what is bad? The elite crowd? The ones that no longer play in PuGs? IMO, bad players are the players that have the knowledge to succeed in a given mission/quest, but chose to grief the other players in the group. E.G. goes into mission, takes off their armor, dies over and over, just to be a jerk.
Elite, great, good, normal, below normal, bad. Just a scale someone created to see how the rest of the world stacks up to themselves.

i in no way claim to be a "1337" player or anything but i would say that, coming from back when proph first came out and (after coming back from a 6 month extended vacation and giving away everything i had on the game) starting from scratch and being able to afford Obs armor within the first 2-3 months of playing again, i am resonable experienced. I have also not really done my part to assist the newbies to help change their build to something more efficient.

just recently i can recall a situation where i was starting a PuG FoW group (my guild mostly does UWSC so noone wanted to do FoW with me) and i encountered an E/R with an absolutely rediculous build that used mostly trash ranger skills. I kicked him immediately without much thought about it.

now though, looking back i remember using builds that were just as bad if not worse. when i first started i ran an ele "nuker" who based most of his attack power out the the skill "flare" and i got all the way to the southern shiverpeaks, where i realized just how terrible thie build was (i was doing about 15 dmg to these guys) and after all the work i had put into it i was just pissed off, assumed that eled sucked as a class and, if it wasnt for a bunch of IRL friends playing GW with me, i would have quit. I kept being a newb for a while before finally starting to get the hang of making efficient builds that utilize elites. but thinking back, back then there was no way to "ping" you build. if there was i would have never made it anywhere with all the 1337ist mentality that goes around these days.

a big problem IS that these guys dont KNOW anyone to help them with their builds. also if they go on the forums chances are all they will get is some sort of cookie cutter build. People need to learn from experience and experience players need to give them the chance to get that experience, whether it risks the success of the mission or not.

(i kinda rambled, sorry)

I think it is a combination of all things causing the problems.

Just a few I have seen:

• Casual players mixing with hardcore players.

• Runners allowing new PvE to bypass skill quests and quest that would teach them how to play the game a little better. When is the last time you saw a pve tank even attempt a body block?

• Too lazy to read the skill description. I see this a lot in pve.

• Give me now type of attitude. I am getting feed up with this problem.

There is a reason I H/H everything and when I forget that reason I only need to PuG one mission. I have felt sorry for people trying to find a party for the mission only to realize they shouldn't be that far into the game.

I am tired of game developers making it too easy just to satisfy casual players and at the same time I understand that game developers need those casual players. Maybe with the economy like it is they will realize only hardcore gamers are going to buy games now and up the challenge level.

I wish there had been a requirement for players attempting their first time through to do all quest in the game.

1) Are GW players really that bad?
-- No. Can't generalize a whole community. Different players have different objectives. With time, thanks to unnecessary high number of skills, Heroes, power-creep by introducing extremely overpowered areas, PvE only skills and by stacking underworld with all the goodies, GW reduced from a CORPG to OMFG (Online Massive Farming Game). People started playing in silos while being completely oblivious to their surroundings.

Also, over time, people bought into the idea that if they could get a build then they could play the game better as oppose to understanding the objectives and the battlefield to successfully utilize a skill. Hence, the BuildWars: New people taking a shot at rebuilding a Wiki-skillbar with no regards to skill-synergies or compatibility. There are countless times I have seen the following types of conversation happening in GW:

Person 1: I made this build. It Rox!
Person 2: Ping it.
Person 1: *pings*
Person 2: Noob! Its from Wiki ....lawl.
Person 1: NO. I made it!
Person 2: Nope. You suck. Its wiki build lol.
Person 3: hmm...why would you have GoH and WoH on same bar?
Person 1: Huh??

GW never fostered the idea of community. It was very objective to ensure everyone gets one's own piece of action. So, the quality of improvement in players slowed down drastically as more and more campaigns were introduced. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for people who started after factions to keep up with ever-increasing skills and skill-balances (huh!).

It still beats me why would one would nerf Ursan and promote Shadowform. I can guess the reason, but, that's a separate discussion. Sure as hell Shadowform does not foster team-culture of CORPG but, keeps OMFG alive.

2) Could it be that they haven't been taught how to play the game correctly? Maybe they missed resources like GW wiki, PvX and Guru (without even going into the "cookie cutter build" mentality)? Or they didn't have the time, given that it's a game and they don't want to invest much time in it?
-- There was a huge gap between PvE and PvP from Day 1 of GW. And still there is. Also, heroes killed the co-operative aspect of the game and people started playing in silos rather than taking shit from 13 year olds who probably would have played better. The real issue is not the people but the demographics this game is catering to. If you want one game to address the needs of all the demographics, you will end up with OMFGs after the game is aged a couple years. People end up doing one thing and one thing only, i.e, farming whether its champ points or ectos.

** PvPers did not teach PvEers how to DoA. That build evolved over time. Somewhat similar concept was used in FOW to manage agro several years ago. Only difference in DoA was people took advantage of the monster-pathing and terrain more than what they used to do before in any elite areas. And yes, I remember beating Foundry after 7 hours+ struggle the day after it was released. After a few days it took around an hour. Just because someone posted something on a forum does not necessarily prove it was an indigenous effort. That's the reason when I posted a proven DOA build on GWO (not sure if linking to GWO is permitted on Guru) during early DOA days, never claimed it to be myself. Most builds or team setups aren't. They evolve.

3) Isn't it rather so-called "good players" that are bad at teaching how the game works? (not helped by lack of in-game good tutorials on many aspects of the game)
-- It's a game, not a school. Instead of Hotkeying Wiki, adding a menu item called "HelpWiki" might have helped. Also, like the emote battle in one of those NF missions, they could have done, identify the skill animation battles, interrupt important skills challenge etc. Observer mode was half good for many and little to no-good for newbies. Instead of match reports on GW website, if they allowed good players like Yue, Panda, Awowa etc. actually comment on the matchplay videos showing what went wrong where etc. would have been very helpful. Battleground movements are so much important but, there is hardly anything that explains how to.

But above all, its all about available time, personal interest and dedication.

1) Are GW players really that bad?

No but there are alot of beginners that have never really took off. They are casual players. This game requires a boat load of time to get mastered and lots of people don't have the time.

In my opinion its the good players that research and know the skills by heart. Implementing them is secondary

2) Could it be that they haven't been taught how to play the game correctly? Maybe they missed resources like GW wiki, PvX and Guru (without even going into the "cookie cutter build" mentality)? Or they didn't have the time, given that it's a game and they don't want to invest much time in it?

I don't think its a matter of taught correctly. Its a matter of I am happy with how I am doing, or I think I am doing poorly so I need to research to find out if I can do better.

3) Isn't it rather so-called "good players" that are bad at teaching how the game works? (not helped by lack of in-game good tutorials on many aspects of the game)

Without the current Wiki or fan forums how many of us would still be trying to get masters on one or two missions. It is a valuable tool in any sense

Simply put the answer is no. GW is a complex game based on skill. The GW community for all its faults are the most skillful group of gamers ever assembled because the game made us that way. Even horrible bad GW players go on to other games and dominate with ease. That being said there is a gap within the ranks of GW players that is widening leaving many stranded at lower tiers unable to develop further.

That is obvious. ff someone was taught to be successful they would not choose to fail. However, people could be taught to be bad as well. Getting run around pve is bad, "tank and spank" is bad, and of course degenerate gimmick builds are bad. However people who use these methods become good at being bad thus start a cycle of perpetuating bad play. So the newcomer who aspires to learn the game runs into a successful professional bad player and tries to emulate this model.


False. Good players teach good technique 100% of the time. Its the veteran bad player who teaches other players to be bad that is the problem. Bad guilds full of weak players developing more weak players are also part of the problem. Urasan title crunching guilds and IWAY fame farming guilds are two examples from GW history.

The solution is in Anets corner. They must make bad play unrewarding. If they eliminate the possibility of bad play being successful it will go away.They make a noble effort in pvp , but in pve they neglect all too much the consequences of degenerate play.

Are GW players bad?
some are some aren't same with anything

however i think the problem lies not in the areas, not in the missions, the problem is not that. the problem is that people are not willing to play with other people any more, and why would they? you can complete any title with just sabway or discordway without ever needing to talk to anybody else. I remember in prophecies when, you had players, and you had henchmen, the difference was, you completed the mission or you failed miserably. People actually found missions HARD. yes hard. remember the days when people would spend days trying to get through thunderhead keep? there was no, "just take sabway" you played with players, and you played as a team, or you did not complete the mission. Now? heroes never leave, never go afk, never screw up and everything is easy with them. so why would anybody play with people?

this, i think, is the heart of the problem.

People come into nightfall, go into kamadan, shout "anybody wanna do X quest" a few times, the someone pms them and says "just do it with heroes". and from then on, they complete the game with heroes, they do not speak to other players, which means nobody ever gives them a good build, nobody ever says, "frenzy healsig = fail" or "try X build, it works better imo" becuase people never actually play with people. then the player gets to DoA, they get to EoTn, and they haven't got a clue about how to position themselves, what builds to run, which skills work best and how to follow instructions, and then they get yelled at for being noobs.

Anet clearly sees this problem, but what can they do about it? they've dug their own hole waay too deep. for a start, in nightfall, they practically DISCOURAGE you from playing with people by saying "must have X hero in your party for this mission", which is VERY stupid. its an MMORPG, the emphasis being on MULTIPLAYER, so why force people to use an NPC to get through the damn game?

When i first heard about heros, i thought great, when your in a team thats 7/8 and you need a monk, you can take a hero. but it has gone so much further than that. now, its impossible to find groups for things because everybody shares the mentality that things are easier, quicker and less likely to fail if you take heros.

the other thing thing that annoys me is sabway, granted it is a very good all purpose build, but i've seen people in alliance chat like "plzz help with X mission, tried it with sabway and it doesn't work, im stuck!!". I told the guy to try it with a BHA, an e-surge and a melee hero, he tried it, and y'know what? he completed the mission easy. Heroes would be less infuriating if people learned how to use them and how to look at an area, decide what you need, and run it. but no, if sabway fails its impossible with heroes, NOT true.

One last thing, i do not view wiki as a "crutch" i view it as a helpful tool. i am at the moment going for my skill hunter titles. without wiki i would not have the faintest idea where any of them were, how would you? there is no ingame guide to where they are, it would just be complete hit and miss. Wiki is ONLY a crutch, when you use it as a crutch. i have seen lots of players in missions, when you get to the stage of, "where now", say "brb i'll check wiki" and many times i have said "no, we can find our way, lets look at this logically. i like to think i do not use wiki as a crutch but i do agree that it is overused and people rely on it too much.

Rant over..

When I started playing, 3 years ago, I remember being one of those really bad PvE players, yes, I ran mending on a Warrior. Since it was a while ago I don't remember if I got raged at a lot or anything, I also don't remember anyone offering me any help. I tried HA once or twice with a friend who got had his r3 doing iway at the time. However I only made 16 fame and the consistent loses were frustrating so I gave up and went back to PvE.

However about a year and a half ago I saw a thread on this forum were a guy called Tiyuri was offering to take unranked players in HA and show them some of the ropes. This was a massive eye opener, the essential communication, the tactics, the feeling of winning with a balanced build was exhilarating. Sure I sucked but hearing players who were then, far far better than me helped my play immensely.

It was only after I started to PvP that my play started to improve. This could be attributed to my new motivation to become like those players I played with in HA, who seemed to know so much and were so confident in what they were doing or it could be attributed to the lack of requirement in PvE areas to be a skilled player.

I think this is one of the main problems. Players who have never played any sort of PvP are rarely good players. PvE does not demand you to be good, it does not demand adaption or many advance tactics. So bad and mediocre players can progress through the game being terrible without even realising that they are in fact bad players.

I'm not saying that you should make the normal game areas more challenging, that would not solve anything whatsoever, it's just the nature of that game mode. The player interaction in PvE can also be attributed a great deal to how skilled the players are. As there is no need for many advanced tactics or any competitive nature to PvE players have no need to criticize each others game play and the players don't even notice they are making mistakes.

The style of PvP however is completely different, it requires players to think, adapt and use different forms of communication such as ventrilo, also most importantly I think, it encourages criticism. Due to a teams desire to win, they will point out mistakes other players in the team are making and because they want to benefit the team, they will offer advice on how to correct those mistakes. It is then up to the individual players if they wish to listen to this advice and if they do, then they can progress as a player.

You can argue that if this is bad advice then the player will not progress but in reality this isn't really true. If you're playing HA or GvG and someone gives you bad advice that you take on board and say repeat with another team, they will correct that mistake and the more this occurs, the greater the amount of correct advice that will filter through. I mean for every 1 person that tells you to lineback 24/7 on a hammer Warrior, 20 others will tell you NOT to do this unless the occasion requires it.

As for me, I became a better player due to a desire to become better. I read guides on the internet which helped me immensely, I observed matches on obs mode and I listened to the advice that was given to me by team members. More often than not though it comes down to trial and error. If you can recognize your own mistakes you can then go about trying not to repeat them. If you think you're awesome and don't make any mistakes then you will never improve.

A lot of players seem to have the latter mentality and will not listen to advice given to them, they are usually among the worst players and generally do not improve much at all. Some players will listen but really don't have the will power or desire to become better players and so they don't improve either. Only the players who are both willing to listen and have the desire to improve will actually become better players.

I don't think you can attribute the fact that a lot of players in the game are terrible to one particular thing, rather it is a multitude of different things. I for one do not understand why any player would not strive to become better however a lot of players probably feel that they are good are do not have the need to become any better, this isn't really there fault, they need someone to first point out all the mistakes they are making.

I agreed Eddie

PVE is all about having the right skills and helps to survive. What I mean is, to complete most of the quests in GW. You only need the skills that work well for your profession, one or two healers, some AoE, and few melee or support units to help you through the quests. It doesn't take much to beat them. If you can get actual players versus henchies/heroes it can help out alot.

I remember having my guildies and alliance peoples help me on Cynd mission since it's hard to complete it using henchies/heroes who can't pick up the keg.

In PVP, everything changes. You don't get random AI to help you. You have actual players and the word teamwork plays vital part in success for PVP. But you can said the same about teamwork in PVE but for me, PVE doesn't require that much. Sure you can get some of your friends to help you in PVE quests/missions, but the same can be done with the right heroes or henchies. I haven't pvp much yet, but I seen how it's done. Peoples has to be coordinated and well organized to win a match.

To this date, Im still lost at what good builds are. Heck, I just make random builds for all my characters. Does it make me a bad player, maybe but I can get better as time goes by!

Seems to me the biggest problem in the community is the "veterans" of Guild Wars. I've lost count how many times somebody has asked a simple question in Lion's Arch or Kamadan, just to be ridiculed or called a "noob". People need to understand that not everyone has been here for 3+ years. Not everyone knows every mission inside out, or knows what the best builds to use in areas. Instead of teaching them, people just call em a noob then boot them from the party. The veterans need to be more understanding and helpful. We need to take the knowledge we have gained from out time here to help others in the community. The more knowledgeable players we have, the better the game will be for everyone. I tend to get impatient when i'm zooming from place or working on titles. Helping people more often is something I need to work on.

(I'm leaving out everyone who doesn't know mechanics and/or are new to the game. Instead I'll focus on skills.)

A lot of people are so much worse than me that I can't help but thinking that they are bad players. But truth is I am a good player at some points and a bad one at others. I have a different approach to the game than the people I think about as bad players. When a team messes up I don't think it's because I was surrounded by noobs, but instead I am surrounded by people, including me, who have totally different strategies.

That is why I always want to discuss the strategies with my team before I go in or in the second try. For instance I was in Urgoz Warren where my team failed miserably and everyone seemed noobish to me. We sat down when we lost, took 5 minutes of strategy, and during second try we owned the place. No skills were changed, only strategy

Agreed. Totally agreed.

Also people, especially veterans, tend to be very narrow minded about the possibilities in gw. I have often been called a noob for using Glimmer of Light on my monk heroes, or Rage of the Ntouka on my warrior, or even when I used Grenths balance on my Mesmer. I don't really get it. Instead of giving it a try or at least looking at the build instead of just that one skill, I'm instantly a noob who "doesn't know about the game".

There are other options for a Sin than Shadow Form, other options for a monk than WoH, Other fire skills than Searing Flames. Those skills are amazing I concur on that much, but that doesn't make other skills less useful. I am sick and tired of having to defend my builds all the time. Constructive criticism is ok, but noobifying someone for using a particular skill is what I would call narrow minded and insanely stupid.

Does the majority of the community suck?

No, not really. However, I could say yes for the few people who have told me "If you don't play PvP, you suck and you'll never prove to anyone you're even worth having on a team."

Last I checked, I never needed to prove anything, but as it stands, I don't play PvP due to, how I call it, severe restrictions...

I think its more the problem that there a less people playing together in the parts of the game where you learn the skills you need to succeed later on. If they arent playing with others, they wont get the advice that xyz works better, or its more efficient to do this or that. Not only that, but they arent actually seeing what builds work and which ones dont based on other players. When I started out, I pugged almost all of it, and learned from other people saying "bring this skill, it'll make it easier" etc. It all adds up and you quickly learn what works. Now though, with the lack of people teaming through the core of the pve stuff, they wont learn these things from other players, things that cant really be described on wiki without being shown, or things so are so simple to the more experienced that they just get flamed on here. In the end, they finish the game without much knowledge, or with a bunch of builds copied off wiki not understanding why they work so effectively. Of course there are other factors, but that the main issue imo.

This seems to be a really really common attitude among the less experienced players.

The reason people do not want you running those elites is not because they are narrow minded, it is because they are sub-optimal. Generally for each profession there are maybe 3-8 (ish) optimal elites for various bars. Most other elites, while they may not be terrible, are simply not the most efficient.

Aka, Word Of Healing is simply superior to glimmer, it's nothing to do with Glimmer being a good or bad elite, the fact is WoH is better and people do not want to run sub-optimal elites.

It's all about efficiency.

Another common misconception a lot of less experienced players have is that just because they can't run Aura Of the Lich on their MM Elementalist or Charm Animal on their monk, then they can't have fun.

Just because you're running an efficient bar does not mean you cannot have fun in the game. Being good at the game is not mutually exclusive with having fun. In fact being good at the game will probably increase the amount of fun you will have.

With regards to them not even trying out the bar, that is because generally the very experienced players will be able to tell what will work and what will not work without even playing the bar. If you know a lot about the game mechanics, areas and skills as well as how they interact with each other then you can pretty much build up a good mental image of how the bar will perform.

i don't think the community is bad at the game. rather, i think it's mostly because most of the players don't know how to play properly, and there's nothing available to actually show them how. instead, they develop their own way to play, and more of then than not, their homebrew methods are not terribly efficient. while that's generally sufficient to get them through pve, the pvp game is a whole different kettle of fish. their inefficient play styles will get instantly exposed and they get run over.

the wiki and pvx are good in that it shows WHAT to play, but never mentions HOW to play. i am currently planning to do a series of instructional videos and post them on youtube. while i am hardly the best player around nor the most knowledgeable, i do believe i have enough skills that players will find interesting. now if i can ever find the time to get it started....

I agree.

Also if you really want to help someone it's important to make sure that the understands what he plays, why are those skills even on the skillbar , how do they work together. Once he starts to ask himself that he'll want to learn more , be less dependent on wiki/pvx and learn to make builds and play trough personal experience.

I would have to pretty much agree especially if you rush through the game by getting a run if it is your first toon.It seesm that players have gotten bad over the years when they won't learn how too put together good build that works for them.They won't do the research required to do this and learn all about thier chosen profession.They won't look around for a good guild.

When I first started there was no wikis at all I got advice from those over at The Guild Hall and some of it here.

At least you didn't call me a noob ^^.
I wouldn't call myself a "less experienced player" since I have played GW since it came out and got all the campaigns including bmp :P But that's a minor detail.

WoH Is better when it comes to the amount of health gained. That makes it better than glimmer of light due to... the amount of health gained :P Glimmer of light has very little casting time, making it very doable even with dazed or migraine on + hard to interrupt, + it has an extremely short recharge time making it spamable.

In other words I can see what you mean about efficiency but that is pretty much what I said before. You look only at the skill. You shoulod really consider the area and the build before you jump to the conclusion that WoH is better than GoL. I don't dislike WoH. But I am open to the fact that other elites can be just as good all depending on the use. I wouldn't say that I would call anyone a noob for using WoH, I would just not call them a noob for using GoL either. I'll let them. Perhaps they might be even better than the general WoH users. Won't know unless you try.

GW's population isn't bad.

Guru's population is.
As is the majority of any online gaming forum. It starts out all rainbows and sunshine, but quickly descends to trolls once the novelty of a new game has worn out.

There is so much gold in this thread.

Your post being one of them. I agree 100% with everything you said.

Yep. We have to fact the facts that the PvP community is mostly dead due largely in part to the management decisions of this game.

This is possibly the key part of the thread that a lot of people aren't addressing. It isn't that people are "too lazy" to get better or that good players should "teach" bad players, it is that Anet has moved in the direction where their game rewards bad play and good play isn't rewarded enough.

Most people don't care anymore. Skill>time has completely gone out the window in this game. There are so many people who would rather grind, or do an easy rinse and repeat, and Anet has obliged. Many people just want a feeling of success in the game. People don't care about improvement because there is no longer a reason to. There is a reason why other games that are essentially fail-safe (and I won't name names) are some of the most popular games on the planet...while failure may occur in real life regularly, people decide to move to a game and "have fun" where they can't fail.

So yes...in my opinion Anet screwed up. The rewards for good play and the consequences for bad play today are both essentially zero.

Generally the shorter casting time doesn't make much of a difference, daze is quickly removed in any good team and rarely causes much annoyance. As for interupts the health gain by WoH outweighs this making it worth the risk.

As for how spammable glimmer is compared to WoH, again this isn't really something you want to do, especially in a PvP environment. Spamming makes it incredibly easy to divert and counter skills with short recharges and also burns a lot of your own energy.

Again with most of the efficient elites they remain the most efficient in the majority or areas/arenas. Only rarely will you have to change to some other elite to satisfy a requirement in some niche area/quest. Players are open to using various elites but that doesn't change the fact that they are not as efficient. If an elite gets buffed and becomes more efficient than WoH players will use it, they will not ignore it just because it used to be considered a bad skill.

As for your comment about GoL users possibly being better than a WoH user, this is getting into player skill rather than the actual build. A good player running GoL may well be more efficient than a bad player running WoH but you have to assume the player skill is constant in order to fully analyse the effectiveness of a skill. If you have 2 players of equal skill, the WoH user will be more efficient than the GoL user.

In a practical environment, even though player skill varies, you still have to apply the same principles in order to maximise the efficiency of the players. Chances are if they are good at using say a GoL build, they will be even better then using an optimal build.

At least two major reasons why a player would suck:

1) I'm still learning the neuroscientific stuff on my own, but here goes: Insufficient brain cortex space allocated to control of the hands. The easiest way to be good at these kinds of things is to start early; either using a keyboard, instrument, or doing something that uses the separate fingers of the hands. The easy way to figure out how bad you are at this kind of thing, is to wiggle one of your fingers around and notice how much it makes a nearby finger move. This is because your brain didn't think it was important to allocate space to individually control the fingers on your hand at the most minute level. So when your brain tries to send a message to the hands, it doesn't quite send it to the exact place you need it to go. These are the types who cannot keybind things so they have to click stuff with the mouse or one finger press things; this results in a pretty massive delay that anyone can notice as a person using the wrong skills or reacting too late. You can learn to go from mouse clicking to keyboard if you make the effort, but consider that good players have a higher developed brain-hand connection that they've worked on their whole lives.

2) The other group of players have learned something that prevents them from being able to learn the mechanics of the game. The most common example of this, the worst advice ever given in the game: Go to the wiki and copy. These players learn to rely on the wiki, they become dependent on something else to do the thinking for them. They never learn the mechanics in the way that someone who observes and puts hands on involvement in the game does. If the best advice a good player can give you is to look at the wiki, he has the hand-brain skills to make up for the fact that someone else does all the thinking for him. If you look first for the solution, and spend no time working on the problem, you are never going to learn anything. This is actually the most common reason why people suck, they don't take on learning the game the same way they would any other problem (which means not just seeking out the answer). This is why most text books don't print the answers in the back, it leaves a path of no resistance for people to follow so they can avoid learning.

Oh, and I suck because of reason #1, that's how I know about it. Most of my brain is developed around not solving problems with my hands; part of why I play games is to force myself to develop the brain-hand connection.

Majority of the community does suck because of reason #2. Answers wouldn't have made sense without my reasoning:
1) Yes, they are bad. Just look at what they say.
2) They aren't missing resources, they are skipping ahead to the easy answers and not learning how to play.
3) Good players aren't as good at game mechanics as people think they are. Most dominant play styles can be traced back to 1-2 players developing them. If players were better, game mechanics would be learned at closer to the same rate for many people; instead of having to copy something that someone else was doing for weeks.

Edit: Reason 3 could have been lack of experience, since it's always a reason for being bad at something. If you haven't dealt with something before you won't be good the first time. I don't truly consider this a bad player though, inexperience has nothing to do with potential.

I've actually seen little if any evidence of this personally. People don't generally complain that many players are bad at the game--they simply point it out. I think this is mostly due to there being very few formats left where people are actually seeking good competition (title grinding and chasing rps are higher priorities than enjoying increasingly strong competition for most people left in GW). And in GvG, there are still really good teams out there, so veterans can still have solid competition even if the pool of skilled teams is dwindling. This is in addition to a 3-year knowledge base on various forums to draw from should someone need resources to improve their play and understanding of the game.

So I think vets not spending their time teaching others is not such a dissonance like you make it sound. If there really are many people out there complaining that other players aren't good enough and/or advancing their skill at a decent pace, I'd be interested to hear their motive for being worried about that.

lol, ppl have cried about a "bad community" in this game for ages...
Just another thing to complain about really... It happens to all games..

Recently i started playing GW agian. I used to play this game hardcore, and of COURSE there are always going to be multitudes of ill-informed, or naive players that just don't know better, or the other extreme; the players that are complete jerks. Every online game community in the history of online games has dealt with this.

Sometimes it may just seem worse. In GW's case, its a long standing game now. Been going for a healthy amount of time. Over the years most of the long time veterans, since day 1, beta/alpha players are mostly gone and moved on... and the recycling of players begins. With every long time player that leaves, i am sure multiple new players arrive, especially since the game is still on shelves!

I am sure that over time (such as GW's several years), the new player base starts to greatly outweigh the veteran/longtime "not-so-knew" player base. It just happens. I don't think its about a community "sucking", its more like the natural life of a game unfolding... So overall "deep" game knowledged players will start to fade bit by bit, as new players congest the arenas & pve. Of course with time, the once new players will take the position of the "fading deep game knowledged" player, and the cycle continues...

The great thing i always loved about this game since day one was the *FOCUS* right from the getgo on community... the name GUILD WARS, emphasizes and encourages people to join a guild of players. And the hope is that players who have been playing longer than others can help inform eachother within such guild communities. Everyone cannot be informed at all times, hence the cycle of old to new, becomes old and the new cycles in again, etc etc... The circle of life as it were? /endcornyremark

anywhoo, im back for the jib&jab in the forums and game.
cheers :P

Like alot of things in life, there are people who will succeed and people who fail. Obviously, there will be good and bad players. In GW, the best players have left because the game is stale and they are bored. As such, they will look for a new challenge. It is no coincidence that alot of top GW pvp players are also top ranked in pvp in WoW. The people who are bad also happen to have a higher threshold for repetitive tasks or do not feel like exploring something new. It shouldn't be surprising that the skilled players are more apt at adapting to different situations, and use that same skill to explore other games and get far in them, while those who cannot will stagnate and "grind" away with copy-and-paste builds.

An real life example would be people who grind away from 9-5 with no drive for career advancement will keep doing the same tasks for life, while those who are bored will either push for more challenging tasks and get promoted, or move onto something new.

I've been on Guild Wars since Factions first started, and the community's grown far worse since then. I think part of it's the older, more mature players from the alpha/beta days leaving, and to fill the void, the more experienced players tend to be younger and have bad attitudes. When I talk with people about how the community is, I compare it to the "Barrens" section of WoW anymore, complete with the junk-waving, "I'm better than you" attitude everyone seems to have. It used to be when you'd ask for help, you could get an answer from someone. Now you get "check wiki nub."

There will always be an influx of new players into the game, players without the knowledge or experience that people who've been on the game for a while have. That much won't change. But do you think they'll get better if you dismiss them, or if you offer to teach them a few things about the game? This game has a pretty steep learning curve. You can't expect everyone to grasp it right away.

So yes, the community sucks, but not in the way that the OP indicated.

I'm just gonna throw out some of my ideas. PvE only since I don't do PvP.

I. "Just let the new guys experiment and find out stuff on his/her own, it's better learning that way."

While this is true to some extent, guidance is still required. I started playing about 2 months before the NF release, didn't know the existence of wikis until a year and half into the game, didn't realize the importance of interrupts until a few more months into the game, and like someone else mentioned, only put dshot on my ranger bar about 2 years into the game.

This is IMO quite normal as far a discovering things goes (your mileage may vary), especially in PvE where it's all about BIG YELLOW NUMBERS! and PUSH THAT RED BAR! However, we have the so called "veterans" telling new players to discover things on their own, ridicule them for doing things wrong, and never explaining anything, and somehow expect these new guys to learn the ropes in 2 days. It just doesn't happen.

II. Elitests

This one kinda go hand in hand with the above. Just the other week on gfaqs was a pretty nice thread on gfaqs (inb4lolgfaqs) about a ranger build able to spike for 180+ damage (glass arrow/conjure/asuran scan/triple shot/IAtS etc). The thread started out as a "guess the build" discussion, then turned downhill pretty fast. The person that originally mentioned this build ("doing 180+ dmg to warriors in HM") was a veteran by all means, knows pvp pretty well too, and he went so such a length to mislead others and hide this build (which honestly is known well in the Guru I think, it's just not posted under pvx's GREAT PVE BUILDS!!), even to the point of contradicting himself to prevent this build being known. It's like the vets get enjoyment out of seeing others fail.


It doesn't mean ALL vets act like this, but we get enough of these "bad vets" to create a bad community.

III. The new guys

I don't deny there are idiots. Sometimes, "look it up in the wiki" is the correct answer, especially to such basic questions as "how to do this quest?", especially when the quest menu gives a step by step guide, AND helps by pointing where you need to go on the mini map; while there are other cases like "why is weakness a good thing to apply to the enemy?" that can be looked up in wikis, but doesn't exactly kill them to explain it.

Then there are the idiots that beg, run stupid builds, etc. Often, it is very hard, to spot a true idiot from someone who is just new and don't know better. The problem IMO lies in communication, something I rarely see in game anymore. Everybody are focused on tittle grinding and etc, and assumes people know about wiki/guru/pvx. Does it kill you to talk with people? If they are just new people needing guidance, help them; if they're idiots, have a good laugh (and boot them). Since when did GW become such srs buzinez that it is mandatory to go "omg y u not as pro as me RAAAAAAAGE!" all the time?

True story, I've been kicked from one of my alliance's group after I was asked, and pinged my build, because
1. I had no PvE skills in my bar (lolwut? ok i'll let that one slide)
2. I had charm animal, with no other charm animal skill, with 0 beat mastery (ok that's bad, but bear with me)
What were the group doing? The 6 minute SS run that is done completely in the wurm. I brought charm animal to level up my pet. Hell, I could've ran an A/Mo smite build and it wouldn't have mattered.



So yeah, it's getting late, I've pulled an all nighter yesterday and is pretty sleep deprived and thus rambling incoherent nonsence, my point? Less purple bar pushing, more communication/interaction. The person on the other end of the screen isn't telepathic (neither are you), talk to them! THEN feel free to ignore/boot if they turn out to be a-hole/idiots, and if it really turns you on, boost your e-peen by ridiculing them and calling them noobs.

So to answer OP's question. Does the community sucks? yeah it kinda does. But does that mean you have to go with the flow and not be that one random helpful person? No it doesn't. QQ doesn't make the community any better, go out there and talk to a random player, who knows, you might just find a new PvE buddy (or find a hilarious story to tell your other friends).

The majority of the experienced players either have beennplaying a while or buying runs now days if u have money u can get anything

If you punish the players for bad play, they will leave. This is something most game developers figured out a while ago, and ties into the major focus on "casual gaming". If you want to get a lot of people to play your game, it has to be easy and rewarding; people don't like to fail, especially in this age of instant gratification, and if it happens too often they'll just give up.

The enemy of good game design has always been the player. Chess and Go are amazing games, but not all that many people play them (comparatively speaking). People have long held onto the idea that play should be more-or-less effortless, that somehow, having fun and using your brain are mutually exclusive. This kind of mentality punishes developers for making deep and challenging games. Everyone wants a game that's just difficult enough for them to beat on the first try, and not one bit harder - this is an extremely low bar.

Bottom line, apathy is the killer. The problem is and always has been that people just don't give a shit.

It is a helpful tool. It is also a "crutch". The line is pretty fine. If you're looking for things like 'how many mobs are there in this area that I want to vanquish?" well - it's not exactly telling you how to do it, only how many mobs there are in a particular area. Similarly, when you look for bosses, you're not looking for strategies to defeat a boss. That's wiki as a helpful tool.

It becomes a crutch when you start relying on it for builds and strategies and don't bother to develop your own skills. (I assume that if you're trying to vanquish an area or are trying to cap your way to the Skill Hunter titles, you've got a decent amount of skill to start with.)

Not sure if you're still reading this thread, but I'll respond anyway.

When DoA first came out, everyone died. They tried to take their mending whammos and healing breeze assassins in and got obliterated - a combination of too many monsters with too many hexes and a ridiculous area effect did them in. So, naturally, people whined incessantly for weeks.

Then Rep Protein A and a few of his bugs from Team Quitter (one of the top GvG guilds of the time) went in with a tank and a bunch of SF eles... and won. They beat the entire thing, at a time when that was completely unheard of.

They posted their build on qq/guru, and naturally everyone on earth started running it. Once PvX got ahold of it, it was the only build pugs would accept - some tank class (most teams used that sillyass W/E obs flesh tank), 1 or 2 monks, and a bunch of eles. The tank would group stuff up, the eles would blow stuff up, and after 4 hours and many deaths, the team would manage to win - mostly due to exploiting poorly-designed AI.

But nevertheless, "winning" wasn't heard of until PvPers came in with a PvP mindset to set up a build specifically to counter the area - the PvErs weren't trying, weren't learning from their mistakes. All they would do is whine about how hard it all was.

That basically repeated itself later on. When Hard Mode came out, nobody could beat Mallyx. There were entire threads on guru (back in Karlos' hayday) talking about how impossible Mallyx was - mostly because people failed at the game. All they tried to do was tank/nuke and when mallyx killed them, they quit trying.

So Kris (Racthoh from SMS, a past PvPer), rob (a PvPer from SoF Victrix) and trubs went in with heroes and beat Mallyx. They were playing Guild Wars as it was meant to be played - learning from their mistakes and updating their build to beat the area. If an area had too many hexes, they brought expel. If it had too many condis, they brought song of resto. Either way, their paragon-heavy hero/hench team beat Mallyx in hardmode because they adapted.

When kris posted about it here on guru, the first and loudest response was "you cheated." "You glitched him somehow." "You did something wrong that caused him to die quickly." Nobody was willing to accept that Kris et all had simply been good at the game - it had to be a glitch.

That mindset is what holds most people back. "Oh it's impossible." Instead of trying something other than their failure tank/nuke build, they just sit and moan. Instead of coming up with something that works specifically against Mallyx, they spend their time looking for ways to "glitch" him.

All in all, they sucked. And that was the majority of the community (read - everyone who was doing DoA). Case closed tbh :/

The best remarks in this thread
"No. Can't generalize a whole community."
"It's a game, not a school"

Unless I have a completely bad memory, but i remember that this was right after they fixed the door glitch, and people were trying to kill him, but mallyx had a glitch where he used summon shadows every 3 seconds, which was confirmed then fixed. The guy you mentioned ended up winning using an imbagon and pre-nerfed 10 sec 20 sec recharge Seed of life. And this was in NM, not HM.