Old School Proph Mode

I was reading a thread today about what it was like in the pre-faction days. I myself started playing about 6 months before factions. So I was thinking it would be cool to play the game again but with added difficulties like:
1. No pve skills eg faction skills
2. No hero's, only henchies
3. No weapons with inscriptions
4. No green weps, only the original proph ones.
Ofcourse I could just do this individually now but I never would. Thus it would need a title to encourage people to actually go through with it. I think however that such a title would be well sort after and could actually revivie the game alittle before gw2 comes out.
So thats what I was thinking, what does everyone think?

Added req's
5. No consumables
6. No title bonus

Sounds fun but hard to implement

Agreed with this.


@ OP: as you already stated you could it yourself. maybe you can convince some guildies/friends and set your own rules.

This. Did it with some alliance ppl/guildies, all Sorrow's Furnace quest and you could only take prophecies only skills...was a lot of fun

/wave

I personally couldn't give up the Inscription system, but everything else there could go away for a while.

I love this idea. It would be refreshing.
You don't know how hard it is to implement.

Considering something similar myself.

Create a new char, don't open a xunlai account, don't take any handouts from anybody, doing leave proph until the campaign is complete (that includes going to eotn/nf to pick up heroes) and avoiding MOX. Then once that greatness is done, move on to Fac.

Really? Would need a button like NM-HM mode. Skills could just have a lock like pve skills in pvp. Not too certain how difficult a lock on weps would be though.


On another topic, I think this would be good for reviving the game a bit. People would visit the outposts, and because of the difficulty should be there longer. This would be good for guidies playing together. PUGs will still be useless but people will still be looking for others to play with.
Lastly, the no inscriptions rule would see a revivial in the market place of these weps, not just Q8 or lower ones. As well in a revival of the proph green weps in the market.

You've forgotten about armor. To go REALLY old school, you need to drop insignas and get rid of a few runes as well, I think.

People have already done this before. You don't need ArenaNet to waste developer time on making a mode for it when you can easily do it yourself, given any bit of discipline.

/notsigned

That's exactly what I am doing with my baby ele. She can't access to my Xunlai, she is not getting help from other chars unless they're Proph-only and won't move onto Factions until the campaign is completed.

I'm doing this because the first GW chapter I got is Nightfall, so I never had the opportunity to know what it felt like to play when Guild Wars was released.

/notsigned. If you want to do this, do it. No one is stopping you. Also, I don't think this would encourage a lot of people to play this Proph only mode anyway - if they wanted to they'd do it like everyone is suggesting. No need to waste dev time on this.

I'd absolutely LOVE a separate server with old Proph only GW and a fresh new start for everyone.

BIG FAT /SIGNED

But there's a huge lot of things to be decided upon - making the best set of available content, updates and balancing.
Example decisions:
-Tombs PvP or PvE with HA as PvP?
-UW/FoW with endchests?
-Hard Mode?
-Loot Scaling or insane amounts of pure cash from solofarming?
-and maybe Z-Quests? (EQPacks are nice)
-250 more questions here...

People want ArenaNet to make if official because they want it to feel like an achievement of some kind, I see...

well mission and quests were there before z quests and coins. Yet noone had any reason to do them. granted this wouldnt be a permanent fix just like zquests arent but it would work temporarily to generate interest.

Also your point about wasting dev's time, well going by the latest update, they have alot of time on their hands.

I don't really feel like playing a game mode where I can't use my profession's skills (this mode, as I understand it, is Prophecies skills only?), where all my weapons become useless (I don't use uninscribable pieces of shit), where Heroes become disabled, etc... so I don't see the benefit in restoring interest to that horrible gametype. And I think most players would agree with me.

You want to do it for yourself? Go ahead. There's no reason for it to be official, and nothing stopping you from grabbing your guild buddies and doing it yourself.

That's why it should be a SEPARATE SERVER with a FRESH NEW START for everyone who would like that.
Forcing some kind of update like this onto the current live servers would be far harder to implement and would almost surely end in an epic fail. Separate server is the only reasonable way to go.

I bet several thousands of players would LOVE this as much as I would so there would be NO NEED for any reward on the current live servers for people who would play there. It's just for pure oldschool fun. And I know I would play that instead of standard GW, would play that for years untill GW2 comes.

No. Too much effort. If you want to play that way, then it's a matter for the player. GW got few enough resourses as is to spend it on inventing a gimick game mode.

I could interrupt.
It's structured.
No Shadow Form.
It's like hard mode, but refreshing to newer players.
It would be easier to do with guilds, friends, and pugs if it's official.

Not sure about the weapon part. Maybe if it automatically nulls the inscription part while in that mode.

I think that through this disccusion so far we have sort of gotten off track a little. One issue is whether or not Anet has the resources to implement something like this. Well no one but Anet themselves can answer that question for sure. im just saying I think this is a good idea.
Secondly to more clearly state my vision of this mode. I was thinking of more of a hybrid of the original Prophecies game and what we have atm. I was thinking of more of a proph/guard title thing. All done with my original suggested additional requirements (plus no consumables).
I thought that people would be interested in this because of the difficulty. You see pve has steadily gotten easier as time has gone by. Titles like Survivor which were originally very difficult to obtain, used to give the title holder some sort of gratification upon achieving it. Now its so common its intrinsic value is next to nothing.
One of the reasons this title would be a perfect pve title is because it would almost always force people to play in teams. Working on the HM ie guardian part of it solo would be next to impossible. not because of excessive amounts of grind and time needed to complete but because of the sheer difficulty. You see I remember it taking me a year to finally finish all of the last 3 missions of prophecies. Thats the sort of difficulty that Im talking about. The only way to win is the team up with others who know what they are doing. Not load heros with overpowered builds, use consumables and cruise through HM missions.
So thats what I thought of when refering to Old School Proph mode, it was the sheer, extreme difficulty of the game, and actually being able to acquire a title that sort of shows that i had achieved something in this game that actually meant something to others and myself who play this game, in the pve side of things anyway.

I can't stand the sole mention of the word 'old school'. Things should go forwards and forwards only. Going back only brings back the mistakes of the past. I have enough of that with some old guys yearning for old dictatorial governents where they felt safer but actually were not in my country.

Good old games are good, yeah, but they are even better when they are remade and improved. Just look at Monkey Island or all those Game Boy Advance remakes.

And if with 'Prophecies original weapons' you mean just 5..10 different skins per weapon, but some being sold for waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more that they should be just for having a 15 instead a 14 in their properties...?
I'd rather have many different skins with various rarities and finding one maxed and usable once in a while than the very same skin dropping again and again and only 1 out of a gazillion of them being usable in months or depending in a almost nonexistant in-game trade system or third party systems outside of the game.

Anyone liking the old ways doesn't make them good. There is 'people' that like things like throwing stones to birds or cats, killing spiders or baby seals, exceeding speed limits, eating human flesh or eating at McDonald's.
Yeah, sounds crazy, but there is.

And I absolutely will disagree with any kind of separation in servers.
One character should be able to access everything. Separate servers or private servers are always bad. They only spread the already shrinking playerbase.
Segregation is bad both in real life and games.

Do you know what happens when you look back and yearn for all the bad things of the past that you wrongly consider good?
You are turned into a statue of salt.

Mith: this mode unsurprisingly wouldn't appeal to you but there are many players out there who would absolutely love it. And I doubt there would be any spreading of playerbase involved - the current GW game would be unaffected, players who would enjoy the Prophecies-only server the most aren't in most cases very active GW players nowadays.

Going forward isn't always going the right way. Many decisions have been made which permanently hurt the game experience for many and tremendous damage was done which is unrecoverable.

GW now is a mere shade of what it was in 2005-2006, huge player masses have quit because they didn't like the changes that happened to the game and the direction it went. Many of them are still regular forum readers and follow the game without actively playing it. I'm absolutely sure that with good enough promotion an official fresh start of an Oldschool GW server would gather thousands of players.

It's obvious this idea won't appeal to everyone, but people who haven't played back in 2005 often have no idea how the game was like then.

It's also obvious it shouldn't be a simple release of GW stuck in time in 06.2005 or 09.2005 or any other time. There were many improvements to the game, it's balance, quality and even entirely new features added to the game much later that would be great additions and that wouldn't necessarily kill the oldschool feel. Practically the Prophecies of today should be the base to build this upon, to keep obvious game improvements and to make the implementation easier. Ofcourse some tweaks would be necessary and some additions could make the experience richer.

If everything was done right, THIS would be my game of choice to play until GW2.

Wow three attacks from Trolls and still kicking, not bad. Also got some backup, nice

Anyway back to it.

The proph only weps was refering to the Greens only. I said non inscribable weapons only, this opens it up for faction skins as well. And the reason why they are sold for more is because they are rare, which is a good thing.
Anet gradually squeezed the life out of this game by making all things easily accessable to everyone. A perfect example of this is the Mursaat hownbow or hammer. Those were so rare that if you saw one it was an amazing thing, now its nothing.
Today people do not farm for skins, they farm for ectos or the largest amounts of kills per minute. If there was a demand for non inscrib. weps than farmers would start farming for those instead. thereby making them more happy, ie providing them with variety and a ready buyer. Ofcourse certain skins would get farmed more regularly than others thereby bringing down that price over time. This I see as re-igniting the market and trading in this game for a while until Gw2 hopefully. Afterall these are rare drops so it cant be over farmed too quickly. You would actually be able to get perfect weps quite easily, places like Witmans folly and Gyala Hatchery are easily run. Those weapons are cheap so there would be a market of skins for varying degrees of wealth and e-peen.
Last point is in order to have super rare NF and gwen drops as non-inscrib weps. The Z-chest and HA chest could start dropping them. Thereby creating an interest in those as well.

Also added the following two other requirements above.
5. No consumables
6. No title bonus eg the one vs char

There never should have been "inherent" weapon mods, the inscription system should have been implemented from day 1. When it was implemented, they should have ret-conned all the non insc weapons to have a slot(and fixed those stupid quest reward weapons from prophecies, bows with caster mods encourage stupid players). Before this system, basic weapons and equipment were overinflated(sup vig and sup absorptions were unavailable unless you ettin farmed) and prohibitively expensive to anyone who didn't farm or run. There should have been gold sinks, but not runes or weapons.

Heroes saved the pugs. before them, pugs would wait for a long time in a zone for a human monk with a decent bar(IE ble to remove hexes and conditions, and didn't just spam heal breeze, this was vital in the maguuma jungle VS wind riders). Now if there's a hole in your team, a role that needs to be filled, you don't have to wait or scrap the run. Henchmen should have been customizable from the start, as in I talk to them before zoning in, and for a price I can add skills to their bar or something like that. They also used to be incredibly stupid, only ressing when a party wipe was imminent, and would not follow called targets or defend NPCs. I would not go back.

The pve skills/titles I could take or leave, some do even up the fight VS enemies that are up to 10 levels stronger then you, but many are broken, while others are pathetically useless. I also remember having to horde collectibles for candy canes every wintersday, the pepermint cane, the original conset, people hoarded hundreds in storage and mules, they sold for 1k+ each.

Meh, old proph gets romanticized too much. Maybe they implement some sort of self contained offline mode where you can do this stuff on your own, like when people play final fantasy with starter equipment only, but I doubt i'd play it.

On the contrary, it has improved much since then.

MASSIVE WASTE of DEVELOPER TIME just to satisfy people who are nostalgic for a shitty inferior version of Guild Wars, even though they can ALREADY PLAY THAT WAY.

There is but one GWO.
And there is already one 'fresh start' being prepared.

Want a fresh start with all things that can't be fixed in GWO? Wait for GW2. Only one of four different things may happen then:
* You like both and play both.
* You like GW2 more, and go to GW2.
* You hate GW2 so much that you can cope with all that great new good stuff you hate and make you yearn for 'old school', and you'll rather stay in GWO, considering the alternative of GW2.
* You go bananas, nuts and a couple of fruits more, and jump out of the highest window you can, earning a Darwin Award in the process.

Feature already exists. Just don't use all that new-school stuff. No need to waste so much time and energy implementing something that you can already do on your own.

/notsigned

Nononono, no. Not only the inscription system was the single worst thing that has happened to GW PvE ever, but it would be even far far worse if they also killed all oldschool stuff and old campagins. If it was in the game from the beginning it wouldn't be any better either, it's just a plain horrible design.

I'm not saying the oldschool system is that great, it's far from that and it could have obviously used many improvements, it's stil infinitely more FUN. And mindless destruction is not an improvement.

The key most important thing in a good random drop system is to have the weapons have different variable inherent properties that can differ them. Variety of mods should exist and the quality should differ. Bad drops have to exist so others can be good.
Being able to find actually great weapons is awesome, as opposed to getting just 'skins' and separate mods, bleh. But when every single gold or purple drop you get is inherently perfect and practically the same it all gets boring in no time. Zero excitement from getting a gold drop when they're all equally perfect and equally worthless. On a Prophecies only server that great feeling would be back again!

Exactly opposite - heroes KILLED the pugs and pugging. If there was a limit to 1 hero per 1 player it would be a completely different story, but 3 heroes are so strong that they compliment for the weakness of the remaining 4 henchies and effectively turn the game into a Singleplayer Online RPG = FAIL.

@everyone saying we can do it already: NO, LOL, THINK before posting nonsense. We can try to emulate some features but many simply cannot.
*1st and most obvious is the economy of a new server, that would be a truly great experience, one that didn't happen in GW for 4.5 years. Completely different prices of everything and values of nice rare drops wouldn't be completely demolished by the fact it's easy to farm 100s of lame perfect insc versions in no time. I can dream...
*2nd would be pvp, especially gvg, it was great before Factions release.
*3rd, the achievements on that server would have a completely different meaning and greater value among the inside community, it would practically add NEW challenges out of old existing content, and it would be _meaningful_ challenges. I could try making up my own challenges in current world or try doing a Tyrian Guardian or Vanquisher without using heroes, pve skills and consumables on current live servers, but thats pointless - reward is the same title as people using tons of imba get, and not to mention _incredible_ difficulty in finding other people wanting to do the same. It would be completely different on a separate Proph only server.

If can't understand why this would be awesome for many people, look at the Pre Searing community - Pre is fantastic, I would stick to it but it lacks content and multiplayer activities. It's the closest we now have to a Proph only server but it's clearly not enough.

Explain the problem with being able to fully mod the weapon you want to use?

As I see it, it makes things more convenient, stops people from being able to sell a simple max-stat weapon for high prices, and follows the Guild Wars philosophy that player skill should always be superior, with grind never interfering.

No lie, this idea is downright stupid.

When I got to this thread I expected it to be about PvP.
But in response to the actual suggestion: Not being able to use heroes or PvE skills, consumables or anything else that wasn't in proph.
For one, I think being unable to use heroes is bad as it forces you to either find nonretarded people who play PvE, which is hard, and I really wouldn't care about or have to play with complete retards. However I do think that without PvE skills you would be able to call HM actually 'Hard', as skills like Save Yourselves are simply retardedly overpowered.
Not allowing charactars to use nonprophecies weapons (like inscribable weapons or green weapons from other campaigns) is simply retarded as I have to put up with enough garbage in my inventory simply to have the right armor and weapons. The amount of space this takes is insane. Besides, all the weaponeffects that can be acquired today, one could acquire before the release of factions.

would be very neat for completing campaigns in only proph mode does this mean no HM? ;-) old school proph didn't have HM and it would be like crazy difficult with just proph skills, lol

Before NF there were many Greens that actually sold for decent prices on the market. The price of the greens were dependant on limited customization, since a gold 14^50 wep is inferior to a 15^50 green. Golds were worth more with perfect mods since they were harder to accumulate, and the market was stable with many items over 80k. With NF the worth of those weps decreased greatly, and the market turned from perfect weps-> pretty skins. With EoTN all of the hard-to-get skins from proph and factions became easily available, and you have the trash of a market we have today (where most of the weps that are over 100k are glowy or have some sort of animation).

back OT /notsigned- I'd rather Anet fix the game we have now to hold my interest 'till GW2 rather than trying to bring back the "old school." Although it might be apealling for a while to have a decent skill balance without the powercreep that NF brought, the game would quickly become boring due to the lack of content that the other expansions offered.

I'll say it again. Inscriptions DON'T make items perfect.
HARD MODE makes rares drop more.
It's not the average player that gets a maxed rare once in a while the one inflating the 'ecomoney' with rares, but the ones farming and making Speed Clears in Hard mode both in inscribed and non inscribed areas.

With the almost non-existant trade system, most players have to get the items they use themselves, since the alternative is spending hours farming to get gold and pay those that get the item, and even more annoying, having to spam hours for the item or what's WAAAY much worse, having to resort to external third party trading and auction sites.
Leaving a game to play that game is not something that should be.
I think that even the Xunlai Tournament House should have a fully ingame interface.

And inscriptions definitely don't make items maxed nor 'perfect'. They just make one variable property moddable. And item won't have full damage/defense/energy, req 9 nor 20% HSR just for dropping in an area where inscribed items can drop. It can even drop without inscription slot at all!
It's just one variable property being moddable, like happened with armors and insignia. All the base properties remain fixed and depend on the drop, like happened with armors and insignia.

The mechanics of a retrograde mind will make them think that a Ford-Tis way better than a flying Delorean.
It's an strange mix of fear of change, inability to adapt, longing for times that give them usually unjust advantages over others and greed.
You can't really explain it.


As for greens, I see as a bit of a shame the niche they were reduced too. There are some with nice skins, and some with nice properties, but most of them are reduced to weapons for heroes and items you give away to friends or newbies, because you already have a neat gold weapon with the same skin that will accept dyes.

If weapons had a PvE-only property that would be disabled in PvP, each green item could have a real unique property in that slot that could be better than any property you'll find in any rare weapon's PvE slot, and they would gain protagonism again, but I'm afraid that would bit a bit much of a change, although I will still go for it.

Ala, Jermaine. "Why, why, why, why....be more constructive with your feed back...why?"

Ide just like to point out that I actually am liking the discussion this thread is generating.

Exactly which would make the title more prestigious and sort after. But once again i need to point out that I did not say proph only skills, just no pve skills like kurzick/luxon skills. Afterall, we cant leave out the other prof's just because they came after prophecies.

First point.Yes it forces you to play with others who know what they are doing. After all this game is called Guild wars right, not Pug wars, or solo wars. The title for this would I think be considered by many to be the true "Guild Wars" Pve title because of this fact and the fact of the difficulty of it.
Second point about non-inscribable weapons, this I think would add to the difficulty of the title. Which is "all good" if you ask me.

If you have a second account with JUST prophecies it would be much easier to stay clean. These days Prophecies run pretty cheap, you can pick up a copy at a random retail store for about as much as a character slot.

play prophecies. ^^

They've stated that they've slowed down the balance updates so that they have more time to do all the other things on their plate. Remember that the GW Live team is only a half-dozen people or so including the community reps.

Ehhh, just nullify the ones that have effects that didn't exist in Prophecies. And, while you're at it, don't forget the suffixes and prefixes as well...

I'm Australian. If I find I'm sharing living space with a redback, it DIES. Better it than me.

Not quite true. There are some mods that were completely new in EOTN (half cast time mods for weapons come to mind).

Ehhh... it was always about the skin. You could get a perfect 15>50 for a wink and a smile from a collector right from the day of release. You had to find your own suffix and prefix to add to it, but that's still true today. Inscriptions just meant you could move that 15^50 from one skin to another.

So this would apply to C1 only?
And if not, what happens to paragons?

The Krytan Immigration and Borders Agency revoke their visas and they get deported.