GW should have been pay to play.

The more I think about it and with the benefit of hindsight, I am pretty much convinced that Guild Wars and in all probabilty Guild Wars 2 should have been pay to play.

So what's made me reach this almost heretical conclusion?

Guild Wars has one of the best combat ideas ever seen in an MMO. Being able to change your skills, the equality of equipment and armor are all completely wonderful. They allow for a richness, inventiveness and nuances of gameplay that in my experience have never been matched.

The lore is evocotive, intesting and compelling and the slickness of it all just draws you in.

Some may say the free to play, chapter model worked really well. Just look at how many copies were sold, how much we got for our money etc etc. And to some degree I agree. However consider what we would have got, had we had to pay even a nominal amount (say $5) a month.

We would have been able to.
- Have proper GM's who could retrieve deleted items/trashed accounts.
- Have a bigger development team releasing regular content updates
- Able to have a team of people re-skilling mobs and so adapting to fotm builds, and thus keeping us on our toes and busy
- More of a sense of 'hands on the wheel' by Anet, and so a more confident community
- More CM's who have the time to interact with the players.

Now, what we get now is great for having to pay nothing a month. BUT we would be able to get all the above AND GW2 being developed for a nominal fee a month. Especially when GW2 is still a least a year away.

I was never really a fan of Pay to play, but in an MMO I can see where such a thing can add real value to the players.

Take a look at the current (sorry) state of PvE, and think what reskilling of AI/mobs every so often would do for the game, regular skill updates and new content once in a while. Think of PvP with proper cash prizes(as it used to be) with a full team of developers behind it.

That is what pay to play brings you.

Think of GM's who can get back your stuff/accounts if you have been scammed or hacked and the comfort you feel from knowing if the worst happens, they have your back.

That is what pay to play brings you.

GW may have never been intended to become a full MMO, but thats what it is now, and thats what GW2 will be, and indeed this is now my major concern for GW2. That we get a year or so of good stuff, and then due to lack of resource it dies at the vine. Pay to play would give Anet the resources to manage it better longer term.

Would GW have sold as many copies as if it had been P2P? I don't know, my gut feel is that the effect on sales would not have been as bad as I once thought. What I do realise is that MMO's need continual changes, updates and 'an energy about them' and that does not come for free. Without that they, whither and die and lose their way.

That is what happened to GW in my view, and I would hate it happen to GW2.

I'd rather not spend 480 euros to play a game 4 years.

If anet kept its pace they expected - expansion/chapter/major paid update every six months, they would be able to afford 'paid mmo' resources.

Because in the end 50$ every six months is quite good 'subscription fee'.

Yes. But they never hit that ideal, and it was clear even when factions hit, that increasing the number of professions and skills every six months was going to be real problem.

They could have just sold lots of content with no new skills and no new professions but then they are on hiding to nothing as they had already released major new content for free in the form of Sorrows Furnace.

I can see GW2 hitting the same wall too.

GW isn't really a MMORPG. It's a multiplayer RPG with really nice
lobbies (outposts). Look at it that way and it bears no relation to MMORPGs that require monthly fees.

Also there;s the fact that a majority of the playerbase would probably never have bought it if there were a monthly fee. I know wouldn't have bought it. The only reason I started was because I got the GOTY for $10 and I knew there was no monthly fee. Of course I've since spent about $100 more on 2 more accounts and all the expansions, but I won't have to spend any more again. That's about 6 months of typical monthly fees.

It started out that way yes. But in the minds of the customers it is one, and anet has supported this view by their changes and actions.

Edit: I agree GW would have lost some sales, but the overall quality of the GW experience would have been greater and given more longevity/

it would have lost MOST of its sales. That's the only real selling point, by far. You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise.

MMORPGs with monthly fees come and go all the time, the only reason Guild Wars is still around is because there is no monthly fee.

i can honestly tell you i wouldnt be playing it, and i guarantee that a lot of my friends wouldnt be playing it..I'm not saying that there wouldnt be more people who joined though

But my life would definitely be better..lol

I wouldn't play it because it would feel like i don't get my moneys worth unless i play it all the time

Pay to play Assassin Wars? No thanks.

same here, and same reason why i dont play aion

That was one of the points I was considering. With enough money coming in to cover the extra resources it would'nt be 'Assasin wars.

When GW was released there was not the market saturation we had now. WoW was barely 6 months old. So who knows what the sales would have been like.

Wouldn't it?

All they have to do is balance one skill and they can't even manage that. It hardly takes a massive amount of resources to balance one skill. If anything it took more resources to make the extra content to slow down UWSC than it would have to just nerf the damn skill instead.

Sorry but if that's an example of how well my cash would be used if I was to pay a subscription then they have no chance of getting my hard earned cash via a subscription.

This game isn't Guild Wars anymore, it's a kick in the teeth of those who supported what this game was originally about.

In fact, every single MMO is hitting similar wall:

Be it number of classes/races/abilities/consumables/item mods/new game mechanics/whatever, eventually, game becomes too bloated to handle additions well. Then, merging and consolidation comes.

In GW it was just heavily amplified as we'd get hundreds skills per expansion and new gameplay mechanics to boot.

With little restraint, expansions would have been much more manageable. But it was already too late with prophecies which already had too many skills, and could have even omitted one class. Alas, they set bar high and continued to raise it.

Why the hell would someone even think of making a thread like this? Your reasoning is oh-so-chliche' its not even funny.

All this is a bunch of assumptions on your part. We could have very well payed to play and gotten the same scenario. The policies and administrative decisions that many players disagree with are not financially driven. The refusal to nerf SF back into the stone age is not financially driven. Jeff Strain and those founders were the brains of Blizzard, they knew the pitfalls of a MMO and made a game with their vision to avoid those same pitfalls. As far as restoring characters it is just an administrative hassle. Every moron that merchants a couple of ectos by mistake would be lined up for a character rollback. Perhaps a restore could be even automated where you have simple restore points, but the decision to omit this function more than likely was not financial.

Pay to keep the community on their toes. Pay to have someone (CM) accompany you? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA ROFLMAO.


/not signed. Not even gonna bother arguing. NO ArenaNet, Keep the no subscription fees business model please, and thank you.

Don't think it could have worked. P2P MMO means fighting against the "giants" on their own ground, thus a much higher risk. It means a level of polish, support and update that would draw Anet's resources in a different direction (in addition to having the existing staff, they'd have to have full-time support staff, event team, PvP support, this last one sucks potentially a lot of resources) If GW1 was P2P, people would weight it against WoW, Eve, Aion, (and the many more to come: SW:TOR, TSW, STO, etc.) and not play GW as it is now (play it for a while, stop playing only to come back later).

Furthermore you've got a "chicken and egg" problem here: bigger Anet team, meaning potentially bigger (active) community, meaning more problems (bug fixing, expectations, communication), meaning need for more staff or work, meaning more stretched on their budget, etc. (also: means more accountability, less game fun? PvE being bigger than PvP would get more dedicated staff, hence big fights between the 2 communities? etc.) It's an eternal conundrum best exemplified by the question: what price for the subscription? (this seem a simple question but it is not)

IMHO, GW as P2P is only the representation of players' wish that GW had the same level of polish, support and update than other "regular MMOs". But this is where you need to understand GW the way it is to "fully" enjoy it, as an online game different from the others. (may be the wish should be expressed the other way around: if only WoW had the gameplay and lore of GW! ;P )

This. I would never have looked twice at Guild Wars if it had a subscription fee, and I probably would not look twice at Guild Wars 2 if it does have a subscription fee.

The reason that Guild Wars was successful at the start, in my opinion, is because it WAS free. Now they have "pay-to-get-bonuses," which, to me, is working out quite nicely.

It's not an assumption or cliche it's what standard pay to play MMO's offer, and what people have come to expect from any MMO like game.

I totally 'get' what GW was supposed to be. but people kept thinking of it as an MMO and eventually Anet tried to give them what they wanted. GW2 is being designed as an MMO from the ground up, and without the support needed and expected of a modern MMO it could well fare badly.

Of course it's money related. I doubt Anet stopped caring as much about GW as they ever did. The reason why <insert fotm> has'nt been changed or not changed quickly enough is that there are only 3 devs on the live team. Compare the reaction to builds in PvE etc with when they had a full team on it.

It's not that they don't care it's just that they have a set amount of money they can afford to spend and the vast majority of that money goes on GW2.

I don't doubt Anets founders intentions, but Blizzard seems to be doing very well pitfalls and all.