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

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.