How did Heroes kill Guild Wars?

Why are we letting one moron continue to troll the thread?

You seriously have issues if you can't handle people disagreeing with your opinion. The Daesu trap? It's better than the head-in-ass syndrome that you seem to be stuck with. I have no issues whatsoever with people being able to use Heroes to do whatever they want. I have a problem with permasins and speed clears because those render other professions obsolete.

That's not a problem, and that is not how balance is achieved. I could've said that players are extremely high reward for varying risk levels. Would that be unbalanced then? I guess you think they should only allow PUGs.

Ok, no more feeding the troll.

The problem is that you're stuck using your personal and arbitrary definition of "team".

"Team" does not mean eight human players. If my Party window is full, I've got a team. Frankly, if there is more than one character in that window, then it's a team. It doesn't matter what combination of human or AI characters is used, it's a team.

For someone who only considers GW to be a game for a team of eight human players, I could see why heroes would be a negative. But you have to understand that there are players who bought this game to play with a buddy or two, and players who bought this game to play with a few family members, and many other combinations of players who bought the game with the intention of enjoying a multiplayer game, but with no intention of meeting new players or joining guilds or PUGs with new people.

And what you're refusing to admit is that this form of multiplayer gaming is not only valid, but fully intended by Anet. And I would expect that for a vast number of the players I just listed, heroes did nothing but enhance their experience.

So you've got eight combinations of multiplayer in GW (for the most common party size):

Two friends/family members who only care to play with eachother,
Three friends/family members who only care to play with eachother,
Four friends/family members who only care to play with eachother,
Five friends/family members who only care to play with eachother,
Six friends/family members who only care to play with eachother,
Seven friends/family members who only care to play with eachother,
Eight friends/family members who only care to play with eachother,
Players who prefer to play in full human parties, but not necessarily with people they know.

All of those players correctly bought GW as a multiplayer game, and only one could be conceivably hurt by the addition of heroes. Nobody really knows how those combinations are weighted in terms of real people, but I guarantee you there are many, many players in the first seven groups.

People from the last group being upset that someone bought the game to only play with a friend are as misguided as people from the fourth group thinking that five players plus AI is the only real and valid way to play. Sounds kind of silly, doesn't it?

Never mind the fact that GW was set up from the get-go to make single player a perfectly valid playstyle...

As soon as they announced GW2, that set the game on a downward spiral. Saying it wasn't coming out till 2010/2011 killed it. Until then, there are a lot of good games coming out, with some having big IP, that people will go to. They needed at least one more expansion before GW2. EotN was too little.

Still waiting for my 7/8 Paragon Hero team.

You know the answer to this already. We've been over this before in the other thread about allowing 7 heroes. I'm mostly just stating my opinion to everybody else who hasn't heard it yet. Me and you could probably go back and forth forever about it.

Again man...you are saying that since human teams have the potential to be super powered, that means H/H teams are ok. Thats not a good argument. It would be best if levels only completeable by skilled human teams got the best rewards completeing the toughest areas instead of the screwed up system we have now. Makes sense right?

Sigh...here we go with the pug talk again. That ressurection of pugs is not the main point I'm trying to make here which I hope you can see by now.

Not exactly. I am walking towards a game that is more skill>time and balanced than the game we have now.

Why are we letting one moron spew an insult and not add anything to the thread? Hell if anything I am one of the only people on topic given the OP. I am simply answering his question.

Huh? I don't mind people disagreeing with my opinion. I'm not the one saying people have their head up their ass BECAUSE of their opinion. Its hilarious how the truths that are coming from my opinion are apparently hitting some people so much that they have to spew insults to protect their own opinion instead of legitimately backing it up. LoL. Anyways as for your claims, yes permasins and speed clears are a problem. What does that have to do with my claims regarding heroes? (Welcome to the Daesu trap).

So you are claiming that something that is low risk but gives mediuim or high rewards is balanced. Cool dude I'm glad you understand balance. The entire reason things such as Ursan or Permasin or whatever else is inbalanced is because it is low risk with high reward. It gets more complicated than that obviously, but that is the reason broken down into its simplest form.

I don't mind the situations you suggest (except for the people with no intention of joining a guild or playing with anybody at all but I digress). I really don't think we can talk about the intentions of Anet though for many reasons. For starters, I could argue that they never really intended for their game to be solo to the degree that it is today. Put that aside for now though. The biggest reason is because their intentions have changed over time. I bought the game in a time when their intentions were clearly different than their intentions today or for the future. Does that mean their new intentions are better than their old ones? The other reason is because many times Anet has had intentions with their game that didn't turn out the way they intended. All the ridiculous inbalance in the game shows that...unless they intend for the inbalance to exist? The only thing anybody can say is that it is Anet's game and they can do whatever they want with it, but that doesn't stop me from saying that their intentions are crap and I disagree with the direction of the game.

Of course...but effective and rampant to this degree? Heroes have replaced humans and even guilds in many situations. To me that is a problem with the game compared to the days of hench. At least back in those days there was a legit reason to team with humans or find a guild or whatever. The only reason to do so nowadays seems to be the fact that human teams can turbo farm an area faster than a H/H team. The skill>time and team strategy based aspects of the game are all but gone. I find it amazing that not many here have any problem with this at all. I truly do understand the position people are coming from and how being able to add heroes from time to time can be nice, but in many of the posts it is like my point is not coming across correctly.

Skill > time is not what you think it is.

It basically means that you are able to get chance on any elite area without any necessary grind and with minimal time required played. It means that you can play effectively and on level with 'big boys' on day 1 if you are smart. No grind saving someone ass by buffing him up and on the other hand no grind necessary.

Your translation sounds like 'leet areas are for leet humans only'.

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Heroes do not break skill > time because they are avatars of it: instant teammate with good bar.
Heroes do not break balance because they play by rules. Balance benefits them just as it benefits human player

Got it? Balance and Skill > Time will not root out heroes.

The only way you have to root out heroes is to make game too punishing for mistakes hero would do: istakillzones with small safe spots, specific timing needed when using skills, etc... basically, raid-dance than only humans can do and that is totally sucky gameplay.

This begs the question: is it a problem of heroes, or a problem of game?

How many other games do you know where people prefer to play with AI as opposed to humans? Do ever hear people complain that they can't have bots on their Counter-Strike team? Have you ever heard someone in WoW go "geez, this raid would be a lot easier if my party was controlled by PCs"? In all those other games, AI is a complete afterthought. If there was ever an instanced where you'd have to be paired with an AI you'd say "wow we are red-engine'd". It would take a VEEEEEERY long time before you even had a remarkably decent AI, but the industry standard can only do so much...and I think that can say a lot about Guild Wars.

If heroes are being so widely used, I think we'd have to look at PvE's design in general. As is it's pretty easy to "be good" in PvE: Find build then copy-paste, and sadly there isn't a whole lot more to that. As Zwei stated, your performance is going to be judged majorly on what build you bring. There is very little "skill" in the way you play, and this can be evidenced by heroes: they don't really have to do much besides use their skills, and the same goes for players.

From my view, I don't see heroes being a problem as much as I see the general design of PvE being at fault.

I.e. more like old-school WoW. What fun.

I totally agree with your whole post. Although I don't really see it as a 'problem' per se, I think it's really how GW was designed (see the back of the box as someone posted earlier about playing with others or a "team of skilled henchmen"), but really that was the product we purchased and what we expected. My gameplay now is no different than it was when I first played Prophecies back in Sorrow's Furnace days.

Regardless, it seems Anet is trying to address this with GW2 and not requiring a whole party to just play. Instead of filling in team roles with bots, everything scales in difficulty depending on the # in the party and the characters should be fairly balanced to fill any role or solo. At least, that's what I've gathered.

This is how many other MMOs handle it, and it seems to work okay. The only problem here is that GW loses that uniqueness of pure team play. Like I said, that is the game we originally purchased, and that's how it works now. You can argue up and down on whether you like it or not, but you cannot deny that it does work. Also, opinions on what a team full of AI should be able to do or not are just that - opinions. That has no bearing on how well the system works.


To the point of the thread - I don't think heroes killed Guild Wars. I think a game that focuses so heavily on content, then fails to deliver the content regularly is what killed GW. The original plan of GW was to release new content every 6 months, and while it was happening, GW was booming. It was a poor idea to begin with because the playable areas grew too numerous for even the amount of new players piling in.

Heroes just happen to come in with the final full content package. Guild Wars saw the usual spike of players at release of Nightfall and the usual slow decline after. The announcement of GW2 and EotN was made too soon, offered a little excitement but also showed players the end of their game (and characters), and the decline kept going. So, it appears that heroes or Nightfall was the 'death of GW,' when it was really just the end of good and large amounts of content that everyone loved in the first place, and the promise of 'not much more in the future.'

It's a combined problem.
Most human players are superior to hero players except when abusing AI.
A good example of this was the Discord GvG team, 3 humans and 5 heroes.
Inexperienced GvG teams were not able to catch the spikes that the AI put out the moment the hex/condition was applied.
Other complaints I heard in the past had to do with mesmer heroes in HA teams or tainter heroes.
But in general AI is predictable and stupid and does not help in any area where they face human opponents.

Next observation is that heroes have limits, but are further limited by their 'owner'. Experienced players usually run better skillbars and equipment on their heroes than unexperienced players. People who fail at cerain missions won't succeed because they have good heroes when the problem is a strategic or tactics problem (the Desert missions for example)

Then we have the PvE design problem.
PvE can't be too hard. First of all it's limited by the same AI as heroes.
Next (normal mode) PvE needs to work the same as every single player game: fixed spawning points with fixed foes. The reason is that PvE players gain their initial experience by failing and adjusting. When the environment constantly changes people find it hard to adjust and things will be too difficult. This is already a problem in single player games and even more in a multi-player game where 8 people will most likely learn and adjust at various rates while being in the same team. Learning in a constantly changing environment is something for people interested in PvP.
So a skilled PvE players should be able to succeed with not that much effort after learning the environment.

What happened the last few years is that focus shifted from learning to efficiency.
Worse, there is a huge gap between experienced and new players. They don't meet up that often anymore.
And when for example a new player hits an outpost that happens to be that days Z-quest he will be told often that his bar is below par or he has the wrong profession. And he has no HM access ofc... No explaination on how to improve, that would take too much time and less time means less zoins.
And players in the somewhat near past were just told to run certain builds.
This created a vast number of players who are decent at playing some skillbars but are lacking understanding of game mechanics.
And thus made them about as efficient as heroes except when teaming with them for stuff that requires tanking, PvE skills or split strategies.

Next we have a derived problem. People who play with H&H only will initially be a burden to an experienced human team. H&H behave different than human players, you can't flag them, they won't run right behind you and might not have instantcast reflexes.

All this leads to one simple conclusion: it's better to take heroes than unknown human players when looking from short term perspective, except when there is no alternative (like SC). In some cases it's even better to take henchies when no heroes are available, just for efficiency (it takes ages to find someone in certain missions and henchies most of the time get things done on NM).
Only when you team up with someone frequently it might be worth investing some in them to make them better players.

This isn't just about heroes or PvE game design. It's also about player knowledge and mentality.
This started a couple of years ago and today's game reflects what happened.

Ok perhaps I used "skill>time" wrong in my previous post. Although I still think skill>time has been compromised greatly in Guild Wars, let me rephrase what I mean for the purposes of this thread to "proper skill to reward balance".

Let me see if I can describe the problem here. In your translation above, replace the word humans with the word teams and it is correct. Whenever I say elite areas should be completeable for elite teams only, I get one of two responses.

1. Parties made up of heroes are still considered teams

Lets say this is correct. The problem is if only elite teams can beat elite areas, you are claiming that heroes have the potential to be elite. IMO this is a huge game imbalance. If you say heroes are elite, that means they can beat nearly anything in the game and to me that is a problem. It bypasses nearly everything that makes up skill in this game.

2. Human teams are capable of doing elite areas better

This is a completely seperate problem. Human teams should only be able to do areas better if their coordination is better. The fact that they can succeed easier means that power creep has been introduced. Regardless, I want people to be rewarded for playing with people they know or joining guilds to complete areas. I don't think some guy with H/H should be able to complete the same areas as a competent human team. It is only logical to me. The fact that we are judging difficulty based on HOW FAST a team can beat an area is really a joke.

When I talk about gameplay, I do not want raid style gameplay like you suggest. I do prefer areas that require team coordination to achieve however. I don't care how good you are with heroes, you should not be able to bypass team coordination to beat areas and especially elite areas (which is what using heroes does). I simply know what I don't want, and that is what we have now = improper skill to reward balance.

You bring up an interesting point. You are right in a way. I have two views.

From my perspective, heroes were a patch to a problem that didn't need to be fixed. Some people think the entire concept of Guild Wars was a problem. I suppose in a way it is...but it is also a large part of what made the game unique.

But if you are talking about about PvE design being flawed or too easy...well then yes that is a problem. In that case then heroes didn't help this problem at all but made it worse! Now that Anet realizes that everybody wants to play with AI, they are forced into making PvE areas that are beatable with that AI! That is a huge game design problem, particularly for human teams that want a real challenge.

You are correct...and I think it is one of the issues I am trying to get across here. Guild Wars has almost no depth anymore....no reason to learn. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I am arguing that heroes PROMOTE this problem.

Like arcanemacabre pointed out, no new content, no new skils, no new game mechanics etc. are the reason we are at a status quo.

Heroes brought more depth to this game. You can experiment with team builds and what not. Spend time setting them up etc.

Doesnt efficiency comes from learning in the first place.. How can you be efficent when you do not know what you are doing. Even when its regarding heroes especialy microing them .. you yhave to know how to do it.. in order to know how to do it you need to practice. And practice means learning.. As said before Guilod Wars is instanced....not persistent.. the copy of your own guild wars is yours. only your party shares it wether its with heroes and friends.... if you want to come to PvP side people who want to have a full fun blast with GvG or any other "serious" form of PvP can learn to play with their respective teams.. Regarding PvE "Elite" areas just implies its at the end of something and holds "Greater" rewards then something else... Besides once mor ei will say it.... THe Guild Wars Box Said thsi ' Cant Find a BUddy? No Proiblem you can take a bunch of henchment to assist in your quests" or something like that.... It was desighned from the beggining to give a one player experience..... ISNT IT ENAUGH that they restrict these ELITE areas away from those who can help you (Henchmen) .. They just game you 3 more skilled AIs to deal with it.... Heroes were meanjt as substitute to players.. so why shouldnt they be able to help you in every areaa of the game.... PvP wise thouhg i agree they should be gone from there because Player vs Payer means PLayer Party vs PLayer Party

Anyway some one gave 8 scenarios of party formation above... completetly agre with them Not every 1 can make or wants to have 8 full humnan party members in their team.. and heroes are decent replacement for unskilled and untrained players.....Complaining about some 1 elses game style is really....useless.

It was definitely a fun system that brought me a lot of great times, that's for sure. But I'd much rather trade it in for something more comfortable.

In general, Guild Wars PvE can be pretty unforgiving. This is really emphasized through mission-vital NPCs (i.e. Prince "Run Into Mobs Thus Dying" Rurik), restarting the entire mission on death or failure, the occassional nasty bug (only Sanctum Cay runs through my mind atm), some pretty bad difficulty scaling (Factions) and generally noob-stomping game design (Assassins vs. Afflicted).

Granted it can be pretty fun when you learn and get past all that, but that doesn't stop it from happening. It's still a huge blow when a Monk loses connection in the middle of a fight, leading to everyone dying and a restart of the mission (and losing half the people because we lost). It's horribly upsetting seeing a player be AFK from the start of the mission and never coming back. It's never fun seeing someone overaggro one mobs too many, thus leading to another whipe (and restart of the mission).

For me, it took me quite a while to see that the pros were outweighed by the cons. I'll admit, when you get everything set-up and running, playing a PUG is a blast. But it just feels like having to go through so much for so little, and it feels especially taxing considering you avoid all of that "so much" by playing with heroes.

None of this is why me stating why we need heroes. All of this is attempting to show why pugging might be such a pain in the butt.

And I will say heroes are a definite boost to help players in an aging game.

In a game like WoW, I'd actually consider this quite a feat. It would be a micro-management *hell* having to do some of the raid bosses with AI you'd have to babysit. Same would have to go with Counter-Strike: My jaw would stay dropped permanently if one guy on a team of expert bots was able to win against a team of highly skilled players.

As I said earlier, players should really want to look at heroes and AI partners as more of a second/last resort. What would you rather have on your team in StarCraft, computer players or good players?

But people aren't saying the same for Guild Wars PvE, and this would have to be because so much is emphasized on the preparation and not on the execution.

Oh come on.

They make game that is beatable by average player. You know, the kind that will not really run efficient meta builds but will run something that "works for them", will not read wiki and probably won't have max armor/weapon. Casual player is THE customer for anet.

Harder content like Catacombs of Kathandrax is definitely not balanced with H/H in mind.

If you emphasis team coordination to extend to where H/H becomes dangerous or liability, that is exactly what you get.

The more teamwork and coordination is part of challenge the closer you are to raid dance.

The complete Epic Failure of Guild Wars is not hero's or skill nerf/buff, or anything like that at all, it failed because it's free to play. It's a failed experiment, making this game free to play, means that this software company can basically take a product they create, buff it up and advertize the hell out of it, sell a set number of units, then turn it into a less desired product, because they have your money already, and they could care less if you played or stopped playing.

Now say they were like WOW and charged a fee to play, then they could not do the type of bull crap skill balancing they like to do, or farming nerfs, because they would lose money if they pissed off their customer base. WOW expansion are basically free, because the come with play time attached, while GW expansion cost 50 plus dollars, because play time is free.

So in conclusion, GW2 will also be one big failure in the end, because by allowing a gaming company to take your money and make you sign a contract that gives them complete control over a product you are paying for, you basically are throwing your money a way. I would rather pay a fee, then play for free, because then I would have some power on what happens with the product, if they change it to the point where it pissed me off, I stop playing and they lose money, times that by a couple 1000 or 10000, and it's a lot of money.

to lose $300,000 plus a month over a skill balance is a very bad business decision. That is why GW failed, because it's free and you have no power at all.

Have you seen the last update regarding the rits?

Have you seen what Regina has posted about Heroes in HA?

Have you see what Regina has posted about Test Krewe?

Have you noticed that GUILD WARS IS Still running? Means enaugh money is in

Have you noticed that there are Fans of the game?

Your argument had nothing to do with topic .. you just came here to trash talk instead of having a decent discussion like other have (Dream Wind Bryant ect).....And learn your facts before posting regarding US not having power... YOU DONT but those of us who try ( Either by whining or just expresing ourselves) DO

Heh...I suppose we have wildly different views of what depth is.

There is a big difference between learning how to play properly and learning what to place on your heroes.

True...unless the game style is in an online game where people playing the game have to deal with it.

Sure...heroes can be a comfort at times. I am not only talking about pugs though. I really believe heroes turned the game into a majority single player game and that made the game worse to me. I know I've said that before but its just my general feeling on the topic.

I agree this is a problem Anet never really solved. They should have put much more focus on the execution while trying to fix the preparation problem. Instead they came up with heroes that bypassed everything altogether. Not my idea of a good fix.

Also Bryant, what did you think about my point of heroes restricting Anet's PvE design?

That is fine. But when the casual player is able to beat harder content with H/H, there is a problem. And if the entire game is designed around the casual H/H player, the depth for everybody else is sacrificed.

I disagree. Look at THK (assuming the power creep never happened that allowed H/H teams and bad teams to beat it). That area in general require(d) teamwork to succeed. The team generally had to split up do different things etc. I wouldn't call THK a raid dance. I would call it well designed that got destroyed due to power creep. And that isn't even an elite area...

Well...I agree with all of your post except I don't think we can call Guild Wars a failure. To me it was a success in all ways except for the fact that it changed drastically and Anet was not held accountable due to the reasons you specify.

Nope.

Small story from work.
We have a rather complex process in place for handling specific transactions.
However, we automated this process so that it's possible to handle the transactions with a couple of clicks with a mouse (export them to system A, process them in system A, import them, export results to system B).
While people moved to other departments and companies the knowledge of the underlying process faded and only knowledge of the mouse clicks remained. People were very efficient and learned through practice. Press A, press B, press C, press D, done.


Guess what. Something went wrong. Somewhere in system A things were not processing the way as expected.
And people came to my department yelling that things were wrong and since we maintain system A it was our fault and we should solve it.
Me and another colleague have extensive knowledge of the business processes (far more than required for the job) and were able to pinpoint the problem somewhere into the process and not in the system.
The weeks after this incident we were ask to give some presentations on how stuff worked (yes, we had to tell others how their job worked) and later people were sent to courses to learn even more.

You can be very efficient without really knowing what you are doing.
There is no or very limited need to know why you are doing certain things.
Just press the buttons in the right order and everything will be fine.

There is a huge difference between efficiency and knowing what you are doing.

Right. The new staff ( According to you the old staff that knew how tro do the original procces left) learned what they were seposed to do and they needed to learn how to press a,b,c,d and were efficent at it according to you correct?.. They had to learn the secuence of the operation, they "keys" the effect and at least were their part of the job was going.. Still learning still efficent.... The fact they didnt know how to fix it.. wasnt their job correct? They did what they had to...

Now apply it to guild wars.

People learn that playing with PuGs is ineeficent takes longer at time and very unrelieable.. their answer heroes... Learning the faults of one side and taking advantage of the other is...natural.....DOesnt excuse them from LEARNING to play with other PLayers.. But still in order to be EFFICENT with other players you need to learn to play with them.....only after playing wiht other constantly will you become Efficent as a player/emplye....

Workshop that you mentioned was meant to teach (Learning procces) how to use the prograam or whatever in order to be efficent with it correct?

That's a very interesting viewpoint considering how many other problems have been thought to have plagued party-play since Proph came out.

In a game that's far more active in terms of playstyle and skill, people would really want to play with other players. The fact that it's just "meh" may not just be a problem with heroes in themselves. Just because so many of transitioned into H/H could not just be going into something more convenient. Some of these players may've been fed up with how player groups may've been acting up and thus they were insanely relieved to see the release of heroes.

As is, a huge majority of players aren't able to provide more than what a hero can bring (I too don't take PvE skills into the equation). This may be less of an imbalance issue with heroes and more a gameplay issue with the game, taking into consideration how generally easy it is to play a build.

And it's not just heroes that have an easy time with just running with the build they have. In general that's what people strive to aim for in PvE these days. The less active you have to be the better, and people have been successful in this regards. The only thing I'd consider "tactical" is just calling out the kill order.

Now sadly I have no idea what we could do to make playing through PvE more skillbased, but I do want to be mindful of the line that crosses into raid-dance land.

...although, it would be funny to see a GW version of Flamewreath : ) Thank god Kara wasn't 25man...

You'd have to bring in some examples. All I see is a ridiculously easy game, with heroes and without.

@the_jos: Your latest post describes Guild Wars' PvE perfectly. Simply mind-blowing how accurate your work problem relates to our current situation in GW D:

But you have to play with others. If every area is tuned for group you have to play most of game in group and that is very tiring and limiting.

If you get years of it, natural response is to avoid it because playing with humans is no longer social occasion, but bore and liability.

DreamWind:

Riddle me this: In game where teammwork is important, whats better than teammate that will not go afk, lag being party and while is limited can be relied on 100% and will comply to any tactic/teambuild.

Yuck, I'd hate that, too.

I think more of what I'm wanting PvE to be, largely in regards to heroes, is how I thought it would be when I first started playing with them: I'd micro them. I'd use Prot Spirit on allies that were about to get melee train'd, I'd have Zhedd use his stuff when I needed it, and I'd assign certain heroes to stick with certain targets.

Now that I'm better, I've come to realize that next to none of that was needed. All I have to do these days is load up Sabway and pwnface with one of the most intelligently structured builds for heroes.

It is refreshing to go back to those old hero set-ups once in awhile, though. Shame that it's needlessly crippling myself, I loved being able to micro up some awesome.

And the worst place you can learn from are from random puggers.

There is no socialization going on in random pugs anyway. People are just interested to get the mission done, they are not interested to know the other players in their team. After joining a PUG, how many of you really know the real names of ALL the other members in your team? Do you know if they are working/studying? Nobody bothers to socialize anymore in PUGs.

True socializing can happen in a good guild and good gaming tactics as well. Other than that, random pugs are even worse than heroes because some of them just sucks in terms of attitude and skills.

THK doesn't require huge amount of team work because it way too easy with human teams or not. Human teams make it even easier through MORE PvE skills and consummables. If you want to play in a place that forces out team work if not you fail, then try HM elite missions. Most PUGS and even heroes fail there. Random pugs are just too risky for a difficult mission, I would recommend to party up with a good reliable team that you know or use heroes. Not because heroes are more powerful (they are actually less powerful) than human teams, but merely because they are more reliable and would not afk or leave party in the middle of a mission. This is why recommending pugs above heroes is just wrong!

This is the order you should try:

Good reliable human team (BEST, learn the most) > Heroes (learn to micro manage heroes while fighting on your own char, learn through team build experimentations, learn the mission area) > Pugs (learn to cry when they bail out on you ).

You must really be a pugger if you think you have to split in THK. Many times pugs fail because they were too excited and tried to split instead of staying near the king. See? You learn all the wrong things from pugs. No wonder you would consider THK to be hard.

THK is probably the single best example you could have brought up.
You know what made THK a joke?
The same thing that made all of PvE a joke.
Finding an exploit and abusing the hell out of it.
Learn to camp the king.

Staying near the king was an Exploit?

The first time i did the mission.. fater seeing that the king doesnt move and the enemies were going after him.. we decided to saty near him?.. Logical thinking... not an exploit Unless i misunderstood you?

You do mean standing behind the king so that the incoming forces kill off eachother and then you just kill the remaining few teams?
There is absolutely no good design in that.

When my guildmate told me about this those few years ago I didn't believe him. I mean after 10 failed pugs, how could just staying around the king change anything?

Well, I did it, with henchies, no sweat. That was quite a turning point for me.

I think that the main reason is that A.Net don't know how to counter the power they were giving players.A.Net gave the players gimmicks. With every expansion, they brought a new gimmick into game, and whenever one is nerfed another is buffed. It was ursan, now its discord/sabway, who knows what tommorow. Instead of actually playing, people now just take heroes henchies, or when do partying, the people just COMMAND their fellow party members into a wierd discord/Sabway made by real players. Have you tried running what was once called "balanced" in HA? BLASPHAMY! Its hard even to find people that will agree to try it.

Now, Anet discoveres that something is too powerful, so they give the monsters monster only skills, non interruptable stuff and etc. The people start to complain the game is too hard, and than we get even more powerful stuff. I think that what the game needs most now (that have no chance of happening, and I mean besides a giant skill balance) is a complete re-desinging of monsters in the game.

You cannot counter force with force. The hardest places in the game are the ones where the mobs are balanced. Why are there 3 dervishes in an enemy group? It doesn't make any sense, so they have to be buffed to lvl 40000 so they can survive. How making the creeps have balanced groups, with 2 healers, rez skills and some dmg & melee? And then HM is the perfect example for this problem - Instead of making monsters harder, they made them overpowered. +Zillion Health regen, 33% faster walking and some UBER UBER armor + health, and viola, "Hard" mode. and again, this endless chain of power....

Too late for GW, but hopefully not too late for GW2.

I would love to see LESS mobs, but make them more challenging.

Doing Vanquishing last night in Turai's Procession with a sub-optimal hero/hench setup (I hadn't planned on vanquishing, but ended up doing it).

The only things that gave me trouble were the Kournan's with two warriors and a Priest (the priest healed to fast to kill, while the warriors took out my backline).

Still, I eventually cleared it, it was just annoying.

I don't know, I really like Guild Wars' mob groups; it's like attacking mini-parties, that all have their healer guy, hex removal somewhere, rezzer, melee, ranged, etc., and you need to figure out the correct order in which to take them out. I'm just not that big a fan of the "kill 1-2 mobs, move on" type of thing that other MMOs have for their soloing content.

It's really just psychological, you can make either style difficult, but I think there's a certain pleasure in pacing in plowing through a larger number of lesser mobs (that can be dangerous en masse), than fighting 1-2 super hard mobs.

A mixture of both would be kinda cool. A couple tough guys here, a mob of 'lil guys here, one big tough guy amongst a few little guys...etc.

Granted, I too lean towards fighting hordes of monsters as opposed to a select few. This is gained from both Diablo and Doom.

Same.. I love fighting hordes and hordes of enemies.. Thats why i loved Dawn Of War.. and any RTS games... i always want more more more.. the kind of battle were all the quiopment all tactics all classes and special all elite units will just come to a huge field and PWN pew pew pew each other.. No matter the time Past Future, now just the feel of that battlefield being wripped to shreds.. blood guts,, arrows/shells screaming commands, smoke fire .....OOOH im drooling.. lets hope GW2 will bring us this kind of battles

I agree with your assessment of PvE. I just feel that changes made to the game over the course of time (heroes and power creep included) have made the game less skill based. I'm not saying the game was ever perfect...I'm just saying the game is worse in this regard.

I don't have any examples (although there may be some). I am just talking about your opinion on my theory and the future of the franchise. My theory is that if Anet continues to allow players to go alone with AI, that means they are going to have to make the game completeable with AI. The more areas they make that are challenging for good human teams, the more the single player community gets angry. I think its a vicious cycle to the health of the franchise.

Meh...you didn't respond to my point and this riddle is pointless. Let me ask you this...in Guild Wars 2 if they made a mission where it REQUIRED 8 humans to complete, would that be a problem?

I can't believe you are still going on about pugs lol. Aren't we over that already? Regardless, I'll entertain you and say I learned more from pugging than I ever did from heroes. In particular, I often learned what NOT to do (especially in HA). I really don't see how you can learn anything from heroes...the only thing you need to learn is how to properly set them up so you can roll anything in the game.

The difficulty of THK was not the point I was trying to make (it clearly isn't hard anymore). I used it as an example of a mission where bad teams and good teams were seperated and where multiple choices were given to the team. Perhaps it wasn't the best example. Let me put it this way...choices should be rewarded. If I go in with H/H and beat a level by bypassing all of those choices, that is not a problem with the level itself. It is a problem with the thing that lets my bypass the choices. And as for your comment about HM elite missions...why would anybody do those when they can get better rewards easier or even with H/H?

Either way, Daesu can't we just agree to disagree now? I feel like our responses to each other are just going in circles.

Yes I know about the stupid king exploit. -___- That wasn't the point I was trying to make though (see above). Regardless...the exploits shouldn't exist.

That's why the occasional boss mixed in is fun...

unless he's a Monk. In Hard Mode. With couple other monks around him...

I don't agree. For the first year in GW I played mainly PUG because my small guild with friends was rather inactive. Today I ran into a guy I met probably 3 years ago and has been on my friendslist ever since.
I learned a lot of practical stuff from 'random pugs'.
Several of the members of the guild I later joined (LotU) were part of the random groups I joined in ToPK once in a while and were already on my friends list. And we discussed tactics once in a while.

I've played many successful splits at THK when I played monk for fun there (halfway 2006). With a little coordination it was about as dangerous as camp strategy since many PUG teams would get overwhelmed at the king.
Things changed a lot since then. You describe PvE skills and consumables. Those were not available back then. Several of the Proph skills used nowadays functioned differently. Factions, NF and EotN regular skills were not available.
Viewing THK as easy is true when looking at the mission now. However, before the powercreep in skills it wasn't an easy mission.
It's the same with FoW, as I described earlier. In 2006 it was seen as a hard area, nowadays it's just an area for having some fun and testing builds.

@Ghost Omel
On my work situation: whenever we can automate things we do. Else we can't handle the volume of work. However, when things go wrong the department involved should be able to solve it.
Or at least pinpoint the problem. That's why they are there and getting paid, to make sure everything processes the right way when errors occur.
To handle exceptions in the process, something that just happened with the error I described earlier.

A system can be a black box but the underlying process should not be for the department. It's just a regular settlement process as used by about every investment company in the world.

There are two reasons why that department needs to press some buttons.
The first is easy, one of the systems involved needs manual operation to export and import files. We just tied some extra functionality to that to distribute the files to two different systems.
The second one is that processing to one of those systems isn't always flawless. People need to check if everything went well and we choose to make the processing a step that needs to be started manual. They can track the processing to that system and if there are any failures they can correct them.
This wasn't the system at fault btw.

The inhouse training I gave first was just a freshup on the settlement process. What happens in the market and how is this translated in the system. This should be common knowledge.
The course the department got later was specific made for our company and also covered those basics, just a little more in depth and some other topics the department lacked knowledge about.

This is also what's wrong with GW in my opinion.
Players think they know what they are supposed to know (they were teached to push the buttons and it gets the job done) while it's not what they should know to be regarded as experienced players.
Learning to play certain builds is part of getting better, no doubt. In our PvP time we would give people mandatory builds. Learn them by heart. When people know the build they can start looking around and learn the actually important stuff. Position on the field, looking at what is happening around them, pressure or spike, keep backline clear, talk to each other about what you see (split going on, roles of various opponents, skills used).

Many PvE players stop at the builds part. The least important part.
And many won't get past tank&spank, because that's easy to understand.
But this doesn't make them experienced players, it just gets the job done.

Should they know more?
Well, if all my colleagues from the other department are doing is pressing buttons I would be upset if they make more money than I do. I can also press those buttons. Even worse, I can fully automate their job with some additional work. But this is not the case, they are paid to handle exceptions and error situations.

Now compare this to GW. You can get away with only knowing some basic builds and some knowledge of a specific farming area and make a shitload of money. Up to a certain point I don't really care about this. They learned the trick, the trick will vanish at some point and they need to seek other farms.
However, the fact that a random generally inexperienced player can make a shitload of money with things like speedclears by learning a small number of things should raise an eyebrow.
It shows that something is really broken and might deserve a fix.

So you have only pugged with just 1 guy out of all the years you have played GW? Was that a 2-man PUG? What happened to the rest? Apparently most of them didn't make it to your Friends list.

So did I, I used to learn alot of bad things from pugs. According to pugs mesmers and rangers suck, so dont party them. Or rage quit on the first death.

THK has always been easy, even without cons or PvE skills. I dont know why you guys make it sound so hard when I have beaten it with henchies before any PvE skills or cons. And now it is even easier. Since it is so easy, it is a poor example of a place that requires good team work when it can even be beaten with henchies.

Really? Then why dont you show me how you roll over HM foundry with 6 heroes then?

What better rewards? Farming THK?

What choices do you learn from pugs? The choice to rage quit or not after the first death?

To each his own. Guild Wars definitely went downhill in the high-end area, but I still can't singly put my finger on anything. Too many variables with no sources besides personal testimony.

What would be the difference between an area attuned for hero/hence play and one catered towards human teams?

Hiro Nakamura goes to the future, returns, brought a copy of Guild Wars 2, all other game company copied it because its the best, hench that's how Heroes killed guild wars

Daesu I'm sorry but I can't respond to you anymore. It is going nowhere. We agree to disagree.

Even something as simple as requiring multiple switches hit at once would eliminate heroes from an area. That isn't necessarily what I'm talking about though. I'm more talking about areas that require splitting of the team, strategies and tactics that heroes can't use, etc. Anything that is attuned for H/H is going to be easier for any competent team. It leads to the problem I suggested of limiting future PvE design.