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.

you dont need a gm to get back stuff you merched, you could just have a buy back option at the trader.

Bolded = so true. Gw could be really great again, just Anet doesn't really care anymore. It never had to end like this. It's not like Anet is going bankrupt anytime soon, they could afford to put a little more care in the game.

They never had to release new professions and new skills with each campaign.
Hell, they never had to release campaigns every 6 months either, 1 a year would have done fine, instead of just rushing them out.

Nonetheless, I wouldn't be playing, AT ALL if there was monthly fees, benefits to the system or no benefits.

I can see your points and some I agree on...it would be nice to have such things (GMs, constant support, etc). Really though, I would not have even bought the game if it had been pay-to-play. I've been down that road before and for me it just wasn't worth it.

I thought so too. But then again, it's NCSoft. Aion is P2P, and let's see....

1. No GMs. Or at least no visible ones, in EU servers.
2. Yeeeeaaaaaahhhhh no.
3. Same. We don't get to say anything about balancing.
4. Wut? Care to explain?
5. Heh, yeah, CMs... One on holidays after doing NOTHING after the release, the other one only cares about stupid stuff like "Michael Jackson Dance" or "Tamat's Avatar Contest!!".

Erm, don't kid yourself. GW's biggest selling point was and probably still is, that it has no monthly fees. If you played the betas and were there at GW's launch, you should know that GW had very little advertising done.

Much of the advertising was done for them by word of mouth. And you know what those three little words were? No Monthly Fees. That was how GW got to be the accidental success that it was.

Had those words been pay to play, it might have just died within months, like so many of the other MMOs present today.

Just to put things in perspective since you seem to have rose-colored glasses on. GW's pve didn't even have Sorrows Furnace at launch and if you played the betas and went as far as they let you for pve, you already completed about a third to half of the game. Why would you pay monthly for that when WOW was there?

The original plan was to release a new 'chapter' every 6-9 months. The customer's expectation (i.e us) was that each one would include new professions and new skills.

I remember sorrows coming in, and that too was a rod for Anets back. They could'nt then really release huge amounts of paid for content with no new professions or skills as they had just done a huge content update for free.

Look at the grief eotn got because it had no new professions and only a few new skills. Now add to that on a 6-9 month cycle as disapointment with each new chapter would grow and grow and you see the problem Anet faced.

Add new professions and skills and make the game so complicated you can't balance it, or don't add them and cheesing off your customers every 6-9 months.

But paying, even a small amount to keep things fresh and updated while you work on your major content every 2 years/18 months or so seems to be a way out of that trap. Anet decided on the other way. Put GW on life support and focus everything they had on GW2, hoping it would be able to break that cycle

What I was thinking was that maybe the pay to play route would have been a better one to take, rather than the slow, painful decline we are seeing now.

As this part a little of topic .ill just answer this part on Blizzard.
If you were a D2 player and awaiting the release of D3 it will be some time as............Torchlight is a clone of D3in most ways and its being released in under 2 years. Blizzard now has to remake D3 thats why no more informaion forthcoming.

On topic as I have a few accounts, and did not mind paying one of for those
Also slots .panes ect .they are still making money btw mabe not as much but still making money.

So over the plus 4 years this game has cost me Zero re playtime and Anet found a market that produced a worthy income to them by adopting the F2P

How many games thats f2p that you get updates ect content for free

So in my mind the made the game available to anyone who bought the game..play/go aways for 3 months come back and you continue where you left of.

Actually they do care but programming takes time and they put the majority of the staff on GW2. You have seen a few updates i like the new dhuum atleast it dragged down the SC farming a few minutes which is good.
New quests for Halloween even thou i didnt enjoy them as much as the old one.

The reason i started playing I like the graphics and the plot line both for prophecies, factions, nf and eotn.

Pay to play is probably gonna make a lot of people loose interests I prefer buy to play, and a shop if I want more char slots and a few other goodies they add now and then.

No. I'm sorry. If GW was released as pay-to-play back in 2005, it would have lost the one thing that made it unique to a very large section of the playerbase. And doing it now would only mean massive ragequitting. And no sales for GW2.

On the other hand if that was done back then, very likely, we would have all the things mentioned in OP post. Because we would be playing WoW, or some other pay-to-play MMO.

Pay to play is not a business model I will ever support. Monthly fees = no sale. GW did not turn out perfect, but regardless I've enjoyed it for well over 4 years. I seriously doubt monthly fees would have made GW more enjoyable - the reality is I would never have even played it to find out.

It also seems to me, that when a game is pay-to-play... the majority of players are absolutely unforgiving. If it is not absolutely perfect from day one, they abandon it... go play WoW instead or something, and the game either dies within months, or is forced to go free-to-play. (Yeah yeah, there will always be die-hard players, but not enough to maintain "critical mass").

Publishers drool over WoW's revenue, and dream that they can do the same... but they can't. They missed that boat a long time ago, and now WoW will probably always have an effective monopoly on that business model. The sooner they wake up and follow GW's business model, the better. It's their best (and maybe only) chance to compete in a crowded market.

They could have done something better.
Release a campaign once a year. The campaign could add new skills, but MUCH less skills than what Factions and Nightfall have released.
Just add a handful of skills per core profession (a little more than EotN obviously)
And then only add ONE new profession per campaign. The new professions would get more skills than core professions, based on how many campaigns they're released in.

If it was necessary to have 2 professions each campaign, they didn't always have to be NEW.
Factions: Assassin and Ritualist
Nightfall: Ritualist and Paragon
Utopia: Dervish and Assassin
<campaign name>: Paragon and <new profession>

Just an example, but they could have done so much better with the balance issues, and still had a steady stream of new campaigns.
Adding so many skills per campaign was a bad idea.
The idea to add so many skills every 6 months..... was a bad idea

Pay to play? er, no thanks, if I wanted to pay a sub I would have been playing Lineage II and now Aion not GW and I would hazard a guess that most of the membership would have not played GW if it was a monthly sub as there is now so many free MMORPGs to play..

If you think otherwise, your living in lala land..

This. ^

The fact that ArenaNet has a business model that can rely on box sales gives them a lot of stability. Too many MMOs bank their future on the hope of subscriptions. When there aren't as many subscribers as they hoped, they have to cut back on their ambitious plans for content. Cutting back on their plans means the game is ultimately not as interesting, and more people leave.

It's a make or break vicious circle, and I'm just not sure anyone but WoW can pull it off anymore. You get such a huge amount of content available from day one that people are going to keep playing and paying regardless, where in other MMOs they will eventually hit endgame and get bored (see WAR, Aion, AoC...).

If you compare the value we get from Guild Wars and the value someone gets from WoW against the money paid for either, we are getting a pretty even deal. If you like Guild Wars so much that you would like to pay ArenaNet even more so they can make more content, good for you! Maybe they should set up a PayPal.

ArenaNet has (what was) a revolutionary business model, and it works well for them. At a time when the genre is plagued by dying MMOs I would love for ArenaNet to stick with it.

Every game has its day, every game declines. Its something that needs to be accepted. Its fair to discuss and maybe blame the management of the decline but don't have any illusion that it won't happen. With pay to play it will probably be worse as soon as people think they aren't getting their money's worth they stop their sub. WoW is the exception, not the rule. Its unrealistic to expect that any MMO will receive that kind of attention.

I don't have a lot else that I want to contribute to this discussion as I truly believe that the buy to play nature of GW is what makes the game but I wanted to bring up the point of character restores.

It is blatantly open to abuse. Its easy to envisage a scenario where someone through some (not so)complex scheme is able to make ANet staff duplicate items for personal gain. A group gets a load of valuable stuff on an account, passes everything to another account (aka fakes a hack), appeals to staff, gets the stuff back. The rest of the items have been passed around and broken up between different people and players... I know there's holes in this example, but its something that is a possibility. Anet would have to set up a raft of rules as to what could be restored and then you're not necessarily much better off than you are now.

How is this any different to what we have now today?

We need to cast our mind back to when GW1 was first released in 2005. WoW had'nt been out long, still had issues with wait times etc etc and had nowhere near the level of clout it has now.

I'm not arguing that GW was'nt fantastic vfm, i'm saying that their business model is flawed because it cannot deliver what people expect of an MMO(which whether it was intended or not GW is now) in 2009 and in the long term.

flawed business model. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA . if its flawed the company would have closed down by now.

Arena Net specifically says they DO NOT want to be like other mmo, so if you expect it to to like any other MMO. your playing the wrong game.

Would Anet still be trading if it was'nt for the NCsoft link? Dunno, i've not got the figures to hand to work it out.

Gut feel says no, or they would have needed to move to a different way of funding(new chapters, another quickie game, p2p etc etc)

If GW was p2p it would not have anywhere near the ammount of people playing it and numbers sold would be very small compared to how many have been sold now.

Even so, GW does not have enough in it to warrant people paying a montly fee.

One way Anet could have given us more for GW1 is when they realized GW2 was gonna take longer then they thought the could have send some people to work on GW1 and come up with a mini expansion/update that you had to buy,if they did this about i dunno in july of this year,people would be happy to give Anet their money.

But no Anet is lazy, and that is the ONLY reason why we arent getting enough crap for GW1.

Take for example the skill update we were suppose to get,the now we will probably get in jan,Any thinking person would think that when you say you werent gonna make the deadline, you would let people that you arent gonna make it, not let the date arrive then let people wonder what has happen and then tell them , oops were sorry we didnt get it ready in time (more like we didnt even start haha sucks to be you)

Or something they probably never even thought about.

Ow no the update is gonna be late at this pace,lets borrow a couple of people from gw2 crew and let them help us a bit,Its not like anyone will know GW2 got delayed a few days because of that.

Why would i pay for GW1 or 2 for that matter,not having the pay is the only reason im not playing WoW.

And another thing. OP seems to think the monthly fees mean everything will smell of roses. Well, I'm sure it DOES bring real benefits... but personally I think there is a "dark side" to monthly fees:

As a business, the publishers will want to keep people playing (paying) as long as possible. So what kind of design decisions could that lead to?

How about... provide juicy rewards later in the game... but place many obstacles in your path to reach them, so you must invest a lot of time (money) to reach that stage of the game. In other words, built-in grind from the outset.

As a player, monthly fees seems like holding your game characters hostage... except that even though you pay the ransom demands every month, the characters remain "hostages". They will never taste "freedom".

By the time you reach the more rewarding parts of the game... you are reluctant to stop playing, because you invested so much time and effort - you don't want that to be "wasted".

Then there is peer pressure. Every expansion adds extra rewards and character power, and if you don't grind for them, you get left behind... your characters become sad and weak in comparison. If you let that happen then again, you "wasted" the time invested so far. So you feel compelled to keep playing (paying). At this point you are a junky.

GW largely (!) avoided this type of scenario... low level caps... no rare and uber-powerful armour or equipment... etc etc. Not perfect of course, but still way better than most in my opinion.