Has GW officially moved away from the casual player market?

GW is evolving with the times.

But like I was saying earlier, how do those same players expect Arenanet to have enough funding to cover the production costs of GW2 along with the maintenance costs of the servers? Again, factions for ten bucks isn't going to cover the necessary income. Personally, I applaud Arenanet for being able to walk this tightrope of offering in-game items and unlock packs without trying to sell something that really breaks the game.

Anet I am still waiting for the "Class changer".

Rusty indeed.

UO had paid gender changes before WoW even existed. To say nothing of games like CoH (also out before WoW existed) that has (and has since the beginning) complete character customization tokens earned ingame. Or SWG, which has an entire class dedicated to changing your character's appearance (image design, which does everything but gender and species). These are not new concepts; games were doing this years before WoW launched.

Guildies of mine played MUDs in the 90s that had daily quests. UO had quests with caps akin to dailies - such as escorts.

Very little in WoW is actually original. What they do well, is bring it all together in a shiny polished package.

Guild wars was built for casual gamers and they are still loyal to them. However at this stage of the game there are more hardcore gamers logging hours. I mean you have to be hardcore to play a game with no new content seen in a couple of years and none ever scheduled to be released again. So this update was just aimed at that audience who will run the same missions happily for the 500th time. Nothing wrong with it at all. Just like the last update was aimed at softcore players who wanted a GWAMM but the grind was a little too much for them so they watered down many titles to accommodate those guys. I think there are many players in GW and the devs are rotating each playstyle. No need to QQ if a particular update doesn't ring your bell because the next one may be just for you.

No.
All the content causal fans used to play and were interested in is still there (storyline, causal dungeons, light PvP).

Stuff like the z-quests, titles, and high end PvP have always been to give hardcore players something to do. Hardcore players are, after all, the ones who need more content.

Selling games, of course. Steam will help a lot with that, especially since there's very few RPGs in their store worth buying. Guild Wars is already #4 on that list.

Still though, it all depends on the financial situation and how many methods ANet has to cope with it and what ANet's willing to sacrifice (which may not be what many players are willing to sacrifice).

Personally I am in no position to understand their situation at all. But I consider all of these recent additions to tell me that they're really throwing out every single thing they can think of out of desperation, and it's starting to get irritating.

But if it's what ANet has to do, and as long as they keep the transactions on "vanity-only" terms (NOT like the bonus mission pack), then I'll be fine.

Actually cash shop is more towards casual gamers. If you look at all the free to play games the exp up stuff and weapons go that way and it seems most of the player base is casual little kids.

If you run the numbers, you would know Anet made a lot of money on this (or NCsoft) $20*6mil = 120mil, a good mmo cost about 10mil to make, but that's besides the point. You are right, Anet deserves praises for not breaking the game with cash items, but everyone's point is that GW players will not be able to receive regular new free content update as Anet originally promised.

Actual load on GW servers is very light especially in PvE, the game is mostly peer2peer with some server verification.

I completely agree with you about Factions. I remember how they made grinding for faction a requirement to access the Deep... haha.

Cheap-ass who wants things handed to them does not equal casual.

Someone who pays for a service because they don't want to put time into it, or just plays for simple fun = casual.

You and you guildmates are just whiners. My girlfriend is casual. She plays for fun, makes new characters, finishes missions, and is now going to fill up her Zaishen Menagerie. She isn't asking to be entitled to something because she has hardcore-envy. That's what you're doing.

I don't see how charging for 'extras' like character recustomisation has anything to do with whether or not their target playerbase are casual or hardcore. It's been my experience that the limiting factor for casual players is time. Hardcore players usually have time on their hands to invest into the game, casual players do not (or they have the time, but don't want to invest it). Willingness to invest money into a game is an entirely different issue, and seems more likely to be linked to one's financial status than one's free time.

If anything, I've known casual players who are more willing than most to invest larger sums of money into their games, because they had demanding -- and correspondingly well-paying -- jobs, which was one of the reasons they didn't play much, and time was literally worth more than money to them. I have at times fallen into this category myself.

So no, I'd say that Guild Wars is becoming more accessible to casual players. It may not, however, be becoming more accessible to players with limited budgets, but the two do not necessarily correlate.

Can't argue with that.

But don't forget to factor in the fact that there could be players on both side of the budget line who still joined GW because of it's market plan.

I know I've loved playing GW and not paying any upkeep. Any features that were important to me I bought with the game. Now they added the makeover feature that i've been waiting for for four years and they decided to pawn it off on a totally new market plan!

The kind of stuff that I laughed at WoW for. The kind of stuff that kept me away from completely F2P games. Now it's in my own house!

Upkeep means you have to deal with purchase websites every 5 times you want to change your hair. Upkeep means you have to stress about your money every single time you make a change. Upkeep does indeed take the relaxed GW feeling out of the game for money watchers like myself.

Is this even GW anymore?

I would think with today's headlines, it's safe to assume that most companies are hurting and are looking for any which way to produce more income. As we are all mostly aware, the original Guild Wars series has no more titles left so until GW2 is released, I would think that Arenanet would need new sources of income. This solves the issue while offering a service that has had a growing demand for some time now. No, I don't completely agree with Anet's pricing (I would think that have a sex change would also include a complementary name change unless you like being a female mesmer with a name like Count De Montif) but it's still a win-win scenario in my opinion.

One quick thing I'd like to add about steam is that yes, it will help sales (as well as cut costs like packaging, etc) but with it being on steam for only a few days (as of this post), it's still too early to tell just how much business it will generate.

If they let us know they need money until GW2, and that they won't do this when GW2 initialy comes out... Then i'll go ahead and buy some makeovers.

But as long as they say they are doing fine, then they should try to look it. Instead of confusing us on both sides of this issue.

Perhaps that is only a problem for the PvP or GvG players?

As strictly a PvE player going on 4 years, I now only play about 1-10 hours per month, and I don't think it gets any more "casual" than that. And I still find enough things to keep me busy and entertained. Between the slow accumulation of titles, farming to earn enough plat to buy another set of elite armor, maxing out all of my heros, finding this new traveller dude, and the new Z-quests/bounties that must be accomplished for a normally-solo PvE guy like me to earn a z-key, etc.., I never run out of things to do. Prior to this latest update, I have to admit I was getting a little bored, but now there is enough new content to keep me busy until GW2 (which is next year, right?).

Anyway, just my two cents.... I don't consider myself a gamer, and have never played any other game, so I really don't have anything to compare my GW experience to. GW is the only game I have ever played, and I always like what ANET has done to keep it free and interesting. It must be awfully hard (impossible, actually) to keep everybody happy....but I think they do a good job.

Perhaps a good question back to you would be this: What do you want to see implemented or changed that would make your "casual" experience more enjoyable?

Regards,
Master Mapper

i don't have anything against online store but it would be nice if things you buy could be sold ingame
that way they'll be available to people who don't have credit cards or can't afford spending real money
it works with other completely free mmos
it would even lift the economy a little
p.s. i don't really mind for gw1 but they should do that for gw2
the current idea of gw online store is "unfriendly"

I have very little understanding of where ANet wants to be taking GW, but it doesn't seem like it appeals totally to either a casual market or a hardcore market.

Yes.

Casual gamers dont play as much as hardcore gamers. They have a life, they have full time jobs and real life responsibilities. They are not going to do all the ZaiShen quests on all their characters every day.

This means they would take longer to grind for a 20-slot equipment pack. Which means they are going to take longer to buy alternate weapons and armor sets. Which means they are going to take longer to get KoaBD and have a full HoM. Which means they are going to take longer to have substantial achievements to pass on to GW2, so they would probably wait longer to buy GW2 after GW2 is first released.

Besides, casual gamers hate grind and if GW2 looks like the end of GW1, they would probably stay away from it.

GW stopped being good for casual players when;

Primary quests became a must for progression.
Ascension didn't give level 20.
Farming got nerfed... repeatedly.

Only good things for casual gaming were heroes and summoning, and you still can't take 7 of them.