When was the peak of Guild Wars?

Sorrow's Furnace +1
it was the fun time

The best GW appeared with Nightfall and get on until now.
- Pophecies:
* Horrible disappointment when you leave pre-Searing and everything is charred. Why?! WHY?!! >_<
* Too slow. Enemies should have started being at level 20 around Lion's Arch, and ascension should have been around the time of Divinity Coast. Elites are all compressed at the end.
* Crappy drops with few skins, that are almost not linked to species or regions at all, and may have properties like req10 fire magic... along a 20% recharge of divine favor skills... o_O?
* Properties fixed to armor skins.
* PvP too mixed with PvE.
* Too much freedom with missions. Many missions can be easily skipped, and they can start without making primary quests. It's ok to travel the whole world, but plot must be revealed in order.
* Too many empty maps. Hundreds of miles of nothing. I've seen places were you won't even see a rock around... until you get to the last map, were it seems there was some overbooking.

- Sorrow's Furnace.
* Always fun to play, always fun to replay, can be done with both players and heroes.
* Cool free soundtrack!
* Kilroy!

- Factions:
* Too fast.
* More skins, and there are many drops linked to areas or creatures, but still crappy properties.
* Almost every boss gets his green.
* Properties not fixed to armors, but cannot be changed.
* PvP and PvE get more separated.
* Too much limitation in movement. It's nice to require plot to start missions but it is not nice to find so many closed doors.
* Too many crowded maps. Hey! Let's get some balance here, ok?

- Nightfall.
* Perfect speed. Not too fast, not too slow!
* Lots of skins you can customize the way you want thanks to inscriptions.
* You can wear what you want, and mod it anyway you want it, that' howrever you want, thanks to insignia.
* TALK TO START! No more stupid 'start' button. What the hell was that? To start an adventure, you make the required primary quests and then the outposts, which was just a normal outpost, turn into an adventure outpost. Unfortunately, you can't go anywhere in the map, but you have quite some freedom in each region after you unlock access to it.
* Great maps. There are areas with many monsters, areas with less, but they are all great to vanquish, most of the time you don't have to worry to over-agrro 4 teams that are patrolling around a place. The torment maps are annoying, but great to learn to cope with things like lack of energy or constant damaging.
* Heroes help those that had a hard time making things with henchmen.
* Junundu!
* PvE skills!
* HM!
* Searing Flames and Savannah Heat. Killing stuff wouldn't be the same without them.

- Eye of the North.
* Go anywhere you want, but stick to the plot! You can explore, but can't skip. To make a quest, you need the previous, to go somewhere, all you need is legs to move and guts to defend yourself. That's just perfect.
*PvP versions of skills!
*The green hills and forests are back!
*More nicely overpowered PvE skills!
* HoM
*Dungeons!
*New races! Everyone both loves and hates jellies!
*Books!
*Siege devourers!
* Kilroy is back!

Around now
* Nicholas
* Account-wide HoM
* At last headgear collector in pre-Searing.
* ZQuests
* Moss spiders

So far, GW gets better and better for me, with the sole exceptions of lack of retroactivity, the way you have to pay for appearance changes for characters and the prices of equipment bags.
But everything else just keeps improving.

Definitely agree with that the peak of GW was around Faction's release. SF comes close

Sorrow's Furnace <3

I remember running Orozar and all that fun stuff. Hell, I loved when picking up a barrel made EVERYTHING attack you and only you.

Sorrow's Furnace showed the worst in players. It was great, but I took a break right after release.

Too much repetitive farming. For the green weapons.
Really, most if not even all players did not explore or fight in this area, they just farmed it with the stupid gear trick.

This was a bit sad. It was nearly impossible to get someone who did not want to farm with hyper-specialized farming builds.

Factions was not bad. Tigers did not grow for years, this angered me the most.
The difficulty was also right, the timed bonus was a bit annoying though, I prefer the Nightfall and Prophecies style.
The worst part was probably that Sins had such a terrible time against PvE mobs. The whole way Factions was set up was so horribly Anti-Sin that they probably scared away tons of new players! My Necro thrived and became my main char, on the other hand.

I think this is what got lost in Nightfall. Heroes made things so much easier, but the game became much easier, too.
EOTN added somewhat harder areas, but it always felt unfinished and due to Heroes and the tons of buffs and PvE skills things became easier than ever. This is really sad, the empty Tyria map always reminds me of what "could have been".

Before Nightfall those heroes ruined everything

First months were the bestest and saw the highest activity of players everywhere, Sorrows update might have been the peak moment. Factions release didn't change much, but starting from Nightfall it was only a ride down the hill. 2nd biggest blow was the announcement of GW2 which meant no more campagins and was a huge letdown for a large part of community.
At least not all is lost, as this April update is easily the peak moment of the last 2 years.

the problem was the inproportional increase of content and players. while the exploreable are of gw increased, the total number of players stayed about the same. due to the daily updates the respective outposts and areas receice a boost in popularity, while the rest stays abandoned.

i wouldn't say that the april's updates is the peak of the last two years, but it definately rejuvenates the game overall.

I remember playing a game called guild wars once. Of course that was a few years ago when the game had new expansions......

No, they didn't.

If there were no heroes, people would still play with henchmen. Or wouldn't play at all.

What do you do when you don't have only 1 person for a PvE group? Wait 2 hours for someone or use a hero?

Remember also that heroes are just as good as the person who gave them builds.

Before Factions came out, definitely. Ah good old days.

Sorrow furnance & Tombs release.. .... .

I won't really attempt to pinpoint a peak since it's too difficult. It may very well have been Fall of '05 following Sorrow's Furnace. However, that time also benefitted or was bloated by the numbers of people that started with release and shortly after. I know I witnessed a heavy turnover of players between that point to Factions release. Many of the players I was familiar with never did return, while some did for short periods of time with new content.

GW always was or has been a peaks & valleys, waves game, as some have mentioned. The first couple months after a campaign release was always busy. My guild had to kick people inactive for a shorter and shorter period of time to make room for recruits, lots of people playing every evening and into the morning hours. Then it would slow down more and more until next release. From my position playing the game the busiest time felt like right after Factions release for me and the addition of Alliances. There were all the people that had hung on through the slow waiting time for the new content and were excited for new stuff. We were finally able to officially link ourselves with other guilds and that made it feel busier yet.

I know some people hate(d) titles and heroes, and HM (which I didn't like but did anyway), but they really did or have allowed the game to survive better than it would have without. Not having crafting and lifeskills in the game and with an increasing difficulty to find decent players doing what you want to do the game would have lost more people more quickly. Yeah, some of the titles got a bit rediculous, but they are there to do. I can't even guess at how many hours I spent mapping with my Cartography characters. I will guess that I'd probably have a couple thousand less hours on my account had titles not been introduced.

IMO peak was somewhere between Nightfall and GWEN. Right after GWEN it all started going downhill. People expected too much out of GWEN and were let down.

Gale warriors.

For me, definitely Prophecies. GW was a bit new, different, and from what I recall it had a pretty successful launch. I experienced *very* few problems both regarding bugs and performance, and this is speaking from someone who at the time had a low-end PC and dial-up!

The SF update was indeed pretty cool, but only at the start. Longasc already stated how it soon became all about min-maxing and doing those runs for the "lewtz".

Factions was insanely cool. Fantastic environments, awesome enemy concepts, awesome armors. I'd call it near perfect if it wasn't for the horrible way the missions were set-up (timed!? Such a step back!)

Honestly, from here on out it's hard for me to really judge how the game felt from a personal perspective. I was starting to get a bit worn-out from GW, but NF was overall a very postitive experience. My only con would have to be with requiring certain heroes for each mission; a step forward, step back.

But again, concepts, environments, and badguys are cool. I just wish Varesh had a bit more to her in terms of a character: as is she has just as much lifelessness as the cut-out of her that came with the collector's edition.

GW:EN was definitely the point where I couldn't tell if I was getting annoyed with the PvE or if the PvE was just getting annoying in general. This belief was largely stemmed by the annoying music, templated dungeons, Time>Skill boosts, rep grinds, and irritating characters (I think Mhenlo is the only person that doesn't piss me off, though). The questline structure was done really well, though. Open-ended and awesome, I was really happy with it.

All in all, I'm still playing PvE a bit but PvP is the thing I keep coming back to. It's far above any of the other MMO's on the market.

From a personal perspective? Probably Factions: I had two continents with oodles of content to explore; eight professions to combine and experiment with skills; lightweight PvP to fail in; challenging PvE to fail in--including Sorrows and Tombs, Urgoz and the Deep; UW and FoW. I found PuGs, still, who weren't awful, and played in small, active guilds with smart adults. It felt like there was plenty to do, and like people were still concentrated in diverse, areas.

In terms of population and Game play? Probably mid Nightfall, before the introduction of Hard Mode. People still pugged, and the areas lent themselves to classes and new experiments.

The Fall: I cite Hard Mode and DoA. Hard Mode and DoA began to separate the experimenters, the players, the smarties, from the scrubs and noobs. Then Hard Mode and DoA began to calcify the WikiBuild CookieCutter phenomenon. Hard Mode and DoA began to make obvious the need for rank, and for PvE only skills. Hard Mode and DoA began to be used here, and in game, as a sort of mark of cred: could you talk about HM because you knew about it? How fast were your vanquishes?

I don't think heroes killed GW, but that was certainly more than a flesh wound. The divergence of players as HM was introduced, I think, did more damage than anything else.

HM was at the core of the Ursan debate: could you vanquish without the bear? HM triggered the rise of consets, speed clears, cryways, Norn weekend title grinds, Leeching faction in JQ., and PuG elitism.

Sorrow's Furnace.

For me, this...

Everything since then has done nothing but drag me further from the game.

Honestly, I would say "The Peak" was between the first Birthday and the second Birthday, so from the first birthday, it just rose exponentially, all the way until the second birthday, and then it went down linearly.

anyone remember this?

i hated those things so much.