GW should have been pay to play.

lolNo.

Guild Wars having no monthly fee was a great idea, and one that I hope they always stick with. It set them apart, and tbh was the only reason I ever started playing MMO's.

Their business model was a sustainable one, but over time....shit just happens and they lost control of it. Which is regrettable, but that doesn't mean that they should scrap the idea entirely. They just need to learn from their mistakes in GW2. Grassroots business models can really appeal to players and if they had stuck with that model (and remained inclusive with players), then they probably wouldn't be in the situation they are now.

But, like I said, shit happens.

4.5 - 5 years is a pretty epic lifetime for a game! tbh.

The game will get boring after that amount of time, be it ft2 or p2p.

unless your seriously addicted...or havent played from zerohour.

I wouldnt have payed for nearly 5 years with monthly fees. And that is what first cought my eye about it. And that it was my replacement for my d2 addiction :P

now would gw have been better with a monthly fee? if it was then as it is now..then a slight maybe..

BUT if they kept their original idea or vision of GW (vision of the game NOT the business model of chapters). then NO! It would have failed..

It was built ground up ORIGINALLY to be how it was, not to compete with the wow's and other p2p's. but to be the mirror opposite.

If they had built it differently, to be p2p ( ala wow style) it would have been lost in the shuffle.

GW only had the success it had due to how it was delivered originally! as a "dark side" to the wow's "light side" *or vise versa how ever you see it :P

Im free! im not grind! come this way if you want to play with skill over equipment! Man that WAS the hook!

But yes Gw lost its way, from what originally was, could have been, should still be! /sadtimes

Been what it was wouldnt have lasted if it was p2p

my 2p :P

i REALLY loved what GW used to be!...

My post would be a paradox then, because it would not exist if GW had ever been P2P. Same song, same verse for me if GW2 is ever P2P.

I DID PAY for GW! GW2 is yet to be determined.

Now if you want to take the retail cost of GW, amortize it over say 5 years, and collect that cost on a monthly basis (at full transaction cost to the manufacturer/distributor) then maybe we can talk about a monthly subscription.

Umm no guild wars is buy to play last time i checked

Thank goodness GW wasn't pay-to-play. Otherwise, I might still be subscribed to Runescape.

I have 3 guildwars accounts. All campaigns. If they made GW p2p, I wouldn't buy more than one account and probably won't be able to play for more than four years.

I didnt buy aion because it is p2p.

I wouldnt buy gw2 if it will be p2p.

The "you are still paying a monthly fee argument" is only valid if anet was actually still cranking out expansions. Which they aren't and so that argument is null and void. For everyday that an expansion doesn't exist, the cost of GW gets cheaper and you get more value for money.

As opposed to pay to play, everyday that passes, the game gets more expensive and your value for money becomes questionable. If an expansion is released for pay to play, the game becomes even more expensive and less value for money since you pay for the box sale as well as the monthly fees.

GW isn't even anything like pay to play. Arguing that it is, especially now that expansions have stopped is just silly.

I wouldn't pay to play GW. ANet is a relatively new developer and it has only produced one game. If it had Blizzard's track record of making relatively balanced and fun games I might have considered paying to play it. Its like ANet's higher ups are satisfied with their one sorta good idea. Why hasn't ANet developed games outside of the GW series? Anyway, the way ANet has handled GW1 has been degrading over the years and I wouldn't be surprised if sometime soon they stopped updating it altogether. *sigh* I wish GW had more dlc than the Bonus Mission Pack and skill packs. I'd pay $10 or so to gain access to well done, well balanced dungeons or even realms of the gods. Despite the fact that the chapter model was probably the wrong way to go it has provided the GW universe with a metric ton of lore that could fuel any number of downloadable adventures.

Hind sight is 20/20. Had GW been P2P from the outset I never would've purchased it at the store nor would I or many of you people be sitting here talking about it.

Fine. But that isn't the point. The point is IF Anet was following their model (and probably plans to continue to follow it in GW2) then we are essentially paying a monthly fee to be updated in the game. The other point is even though GW is getting cheaper now due to the model not currently being followed, it is also getting worse now.

I don't deny that the game has gotten worse, but is that really a financial consequence or a managerial consequence? My thoughts are that its more of the latter. Anet simply didn't know what they wanted to do with their game. They tried to cater to everyone and everything and ended up falling short in all departments. If its a failure to manage their game and make the right decisions, how will throwing more money at them suddenly make their decisions right?

I don't pay to play. Anet said: "Part of our bussiness succes is because our players don't have to pay monthy fee." And that is propably the reason why they sold millions of copies.

Guild Wars should have been pay to play? This is the best mmo I have played, but I wouldn't had ever bought this game if it had monthy fee. You sir, are mad.

No subscription fees was a major attraction to many gamers back in '05, if it had a monthly fee I highly doubt I'd of played GW for as long as I have or bought any of the campaigns.

I'm so glad GW and GW2 have no subscription fees, it gives gamers a quality alternative from the heavy influx of subscription based mmorpgs.

i think guild wars got such a huge fanbase because it is a great game and WASN'T pay to play

Actually Dreamwind is wrong as you don't buy the game at all you buy a license to play the game. You don't own anything as like when you buy a retail game that you keep in your library forever as long as you own the cd and the OS will run it. GW's on the other hand is a licensed product and thus if Anet or NCsoft decide to pull the plug you will have no game to play as your license will be void and null.

The majority of people (outside of Dreamwind) know that when the statement "pay to play" is stated it means a "monthly fee" always has always will mean that. So don't let him derail the thread with his semantics and apples and oranges comparisons. Just ignore him as I do. )

At any rate it really needs a monthly pay to play feature oh say $20-$25 and that'll get rid of em nickely split. Dreamwind probably couldn't even afford that. hahaha

My orignal thoughts were the fact that by the time GW2 is launched there will have been no major updates to GW for nearly as long as the game has actually been out.

I also still don't adhere to the 'management don't care' theory. They can have the appearance not to care because of other factors, but when it comes down to it all those other factors are down to money.

A buisness should not be out to create customers, but fans. Look at Apple for example, that's a prime case where it has created a fan base from it's customers and so enjoys tremendous brand loyalty.

Anet created fans, because of thier buy/free to play strategy, compelling game play, great art work and a wonderful community. We see the fruit of some of that good work here and on other fan forums where people react strongly against thoughts other than the established fanbase norm.

BUT Anet have and are gambling away all the fans they created by effectivley letting GW1 go at strategic level. Can you imagine what things will be like after another year or more of this? How many still feel positive towards Anet now as opposed to say when eotn was released? Now add nearly that time on again to see what that 'fan base' could feel like when GW2 is released.

I really do feel for lindsey and her little team as they work so hard, trying to keep GW fresh but can only do so much.

It's all very well saying well I would'nt have bought it, or no way would I pay for XYZ, but the brutal truth is someone has to in some shape or form. Does'nt matter on the model f2p,b2p, p2p etc we the customer will always end up paying for it.

Some people think we can have the content and changes we need for free, that we can somehow pay just the once 4 years ago and that will be enough to keep us in content and updates forever. As wonderful as though that idea is, it is not the brutal reality of business in 2009. I wonder if Anet would still be in buisness without the shelter of NCsoft behind them?

MMO's take tens of millions(if not hundreds) to develop I very much doubt if they got enough money from the sales of GW to pay off the initial GW1 development costs, the ongoing expenses of keeping the game running AND the development costs of GW2.

It's obvious something had to give, no I cant quote chapter on verse on it, but it's obvious what that was.

What I am saying is that with a different charging model perhaps we would not have to had to sacrifice GW1 quite as much.

The only thing that would have maybe helped GW1 along is user made content, but apparently reading between the lines there is no easy SDK for GW1 and each mod would need to be validated before being allowed to be played.

Someone said that the future is micropayments, downloadable content etc etc and I agree and thats why I worry about GW2.

My concern is that unless Anet keeps with the 6 monthly expansion cycle, and finds a way around the complexity trap 4-5 years from now we'll be exactly where we are now. I strongly suspect we will be seeing more and more micro payments in GW2 to suppliment the buy/free to play model GW1 had.

I must admit to being surprised at some of the reactions on this thread. It's like I turned up at Nvidia HQ wearing and ATI T-shirt, or wearing one saying 'I'm a PC' in an apple store

Sometimes whats needed is to take a step back and ask the question. Was there a better way?

@OP

IMO there would've been no significant difference had it been pay to play or not. It's not the lack of money that made them take the maintenance decisions they took and I am pretty sure they would have taken the same decisions even if it were a pay to play.

So for us players, it would have been an extra cost with no benefit. I am convinced they would have still dumped GW1 to go work on shinny GW2 charging us monthly in the mean time and offering the same quality of updates they do today. Because let's face it, they don't face a money problem there at the ANet studio. It's ... just a studio unable to properly maintain their game, unexcited about the orphan GW1 and all focused on the next big thing GW2.

GW was (and still is) a great success. ANet's business model worked. A-Net far exceeded my expectations for updating GW1 and keeping me playing.

But no game lasts forever. Everyone who has exhausted what GW1 has to offer should simply move on. Come back when GW2 is out, see if it looks good enough to spend your time and money on, and whether you think it will be as successful as GW1. It's that simple.

If they get it wrong with GW2, why does anyone care, really? Don't buy it, continue playing other things. The industry is full of failures that nobody cares about.

Seems to me, too many people just don't know when a game is over. Instead of moving on, they bitch and moan about how A-Net's support sucks, how they should put more time/money into returning the game to its former glory (as they see it) - pointless cos it aint gonna happen. It's water under the bridge.

Some people become so bitter and twisted about it that they go on an anti-Anet crusade, like some kind of vendetta. They put large amounts of effort into pointing out ANet's mistakes (as they see it)... how much Anet sucks... how GW2 will surely suck too so don't even think about buying it... how they should change their business model (even though it has already been successful) or whatever, presumably so that GW2 can last FOREVER instead of "only" 4-5 years like GW1. Even how people that still enjoy GW1 are in fact, idiots and they are NOT enjoying GW1. Etc etc.

They torture themselves by refusing to "let go", and they torture others preaching their doom, gloom, and misery.

You actually proved your own point wrong as soon as you said "sure you can play it". That means that you get no monthly fees. Besides here's a definition of a monthly fee: It's monthly. Not 6 months broken down, but monthly.

I'm not gonna make this a build thread, but if people hammer you around in PvP you have 3 options: 1) Learn to make a good build with what you have. It's possible and don't say otherwise because there's been builds since the very first GW came out. 2) Buy another game. Notice that this is "optional" meaning that no matter what you say you still can play GW even without paying more. 3) Don't play PvP. Which speaks for itself.

No point in playing PvE: I can tell you that the amount of people who only have one or 2 of the games, which is more than you might think, proves you wrong already there. You are limited to playing with your mates in that area, but you can still play with your friends in that area. Saying that you feel compelled to buy another game is extremely subjective. It's how you feel about it. Not everyone. And since you can still play your game without paying monthly fees. Wooptidoo there you go! You don't have monthly fees at all.

Seriously stop with that logic! You are getting abstract over something very simple! Yes you can define p2p as just paying to play, but everyone in this thread knows that the p2p refers to the monthly fees. Besides with your logic downloadable games are not free either since you have to pay for an internet connection, pay for a computer, pay for electricity and so on. You said very simple, but you are making it more abstract than needed at all. This is not a philosophical thread.

You have yet to show , why the state of the game is related to lack of money on Anets part which is why your argument is just completely fail.

That is because you just are making no sense and continue to post "feelings" and "assumptions" based more from your imagination than anything factual.

NCsoft has had to lay off staff, re-structure their business and that alas has included some Anet employees. I don't believe the spin that it's all so they can be better poised to grow etc etc I've read it hundreds of times in all sorts of announcements.

e.g http://www.reuters.com/article/press...009+BW20090213

40% drop in profits from 2007-2008, 31% drop in pre tax profits, 15% drop in income.
How can it not be about the money?

http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6204551.html

This quarter Aion has made a huge improvement in NCsoft's figures, but that is not in the time period we are talking about.

No one can really know the state of things, but no other explanation makes sense.

I'm glad people are still enjoying the game. I am too. But there is a large part of me that sees the potential that still exists.

Guild Wars is a great game, but if they had asked for a monthly fee then I definitely would have spent it on something else. For what you currently pay it's great, but if I were going to pay a monthly fee then I would have sooner spent it on City of Heroes or something.

Guild Wars was going to lose support sooner or later. Not even a monthly fee guarantees support, just look what happened to EverQuest after EverQuest 2 came out. Or Asheron's Call after Asheron's Call 2 came out. A sequel to an online game like this is obviously going to divide your player base, so you might as well put the majority of your eggs in one basket.

edit: As for the layoffs, even EA has had to lose a ridiculous amount of people recently. It's happening to everyone and it's not a symptom of Anet's revenue model, it's a symptom of the current economic situation everyone's in.

Ahh, I understand now. This completely explains why pve is a degenerate farmfest. Thanks for clearing that up.

Fixed that for you.

GW would have failed as a pay-to-play model as no one would have picked it up to begin with *and* no one would have stayed around to get GWAMM for $x per month. The only reason we're still here on this forum having this conversation after 4+ years is precisely because there are no subscription costs.

No, GuildWars shouldn't have been created as a P2P.
Myself, and all the gamers I know...would not have even read the box if it were P2P.
We have very busy lives, and find comfort in the fact we are currently enjoying a very satisfying game, and can still continue with our RL obligations without feeling cheated out of the $15, or whatever the going monthly fee is now for a P2P, just because 'something came up'.
ANet took the smart route when it came to this business model....charge for the game, and add a few expansions here and there.
I am more than happy to pay for more expansions as needed, but I refuse to shackle myself to a game with monthly fees.
Just my opinion.

I don't think things would have gone much different' had it been pay to play. What went wrong were the administrative decisions like someone else said. The people, were what went wrong, not the game's model. Although that might have had a part in it, though I think it would have balanced out between customers lost because of P2P and the people actually P2Ping.

Do you have a source on that? I don't believe ArenaNet has ever had to lay off staff for 'restructuring'.

Was'nt people let go from Europe(e.g Brighton and Germany)? Fact is NCsoft laid off people, moved some others elsewhere for money reasons.

Since we dont have transparency as to how much NCsoft and Anet intereract both practically and financially it is totally logical to deduce that Arenanet faced financial pressure to cut cost also.

Go look at NCSoft's financials. They could live on cash and legacy revenues for YEARS. They carry virtually no debt and have a low expenditure profile. It's debt that breaks you in this business. The resources to support GW are there. They simply aren't being utilized.

It's not about the money (directly). It's about internal politics, which revolves around pleasing investors with the power to influence decisions to hire and fire upper management. Those investors want the company to hit certain year-over-year targets so that the stock will perform in the short term. Since NCSoft didn't have any large new revenue sources until Aion hit, that implies cutting costs until it does.

Again, this behavior is in the best interests of the publisher's investors. It is not in the long term best interests of NCSoft or ANet, but upper management has a finite time horizon and doesn't really care. They make more money by acquiring as many stock options as possible during their tenure, and if that involves killing the cow for the milk...

Too bad. Upper management can divest its holdings before the company crumbles and the stock tanks. In truth, the company will probably perform fine. It could perform better in the limit. But the existing compensation structure just doesn't reward long-term thinking.

@ Shadowspawn: PvE is a degenerate farmfest because ANet is unwilling to dedicate the resources to clean it up, and figures that they've already driven off everyone but the hardcore farmers anyway.

*cough*gailegray*cough* (j/k)

what a smart business model; have everyone become packed with hoards of items/gold that they'll need to spend irl money on storage tabs/character slots/new accounts.

I agree Martin.

We've seen that sort of short sightness in companies time and time again.

I read that as why reduction in support for GW1 was cut.

Well I guess that is the point...we don't really know what would happen. I'm not the type who says monthly fee would solve everything. I'm simply saying all we know is that the decisions in the situation we have now haven't been the greatest. They have been a decent success in sales, but they have proven to us that their game management decisions are at times insane.

The only thing I do know is that with the current model, there is really no way to hold Anet accountable for these decisions other than not buy their next game or expansion. The problem with this is that ANet is brilliant. There was another thread in which people were asked if they were buying GW2. The majority of the posts stated that they had problems with how GW1 was run, but they are still buying GW2 in hopes for the best. This is how ANet is genius..they know they can get away with as many bad management decisions as necessary with the current marketing model as long as they make people happy with the content.

How are you not banned with your constant flame inducing posts? I never said I would pay a monthly fee, I am simply proposing a point. I would respond to you further but you aren't worth it.

Those options are good to you in a PvP game? I don't personally know any competitive player of any game who would follow what you propose. Unless of course you mean leave the game or don't play PvP, which is what the majority of PvP players have already chosen to do.

Erm... with this post of yours, you have pretty much admitted that the financial and managerial decisions are separate with their current model. So what then do you want? You want a means to pressure anet into designing the game into a vision of what you want? And that means is a pay to play model?

Well sure, take a look at Warhammer Online then. They punished Mythic with their wallets and look at the game now. Dead. There are many other MMOs similar to WAR that suffered the same fate; players voting with their wallets. And did those games thrive? No. They all died. That is what you want for GW?

I'm not sure what kind of accountability you expect from using financial pressure, except to cause the death of the game.

Umm... Arenanet never laid off anyone, and please correct me if you have a source that proves me wrong. NCSoft might have laid off people but NCSoft is not Arenanet.

And, regardless, NCSoft is mostly supported by other games like Champions or Aion that do have monthly fees. So how does that support your supposition that a monthly fee with GW would have helped Arenanet or NCSoft? If anything the last 8 pages have shown that GW would have been a major failiure when it came out becuase it didn't have anything in particular that made it stand out from the other games, and in the long run it would have ended up like so many other MMOs whose names I can't even remember.

People got GW originally because it didn't have a monthly fee. They stayed because it didn't have a monthly fee and they could play as much or as little as they want, and the anti-cynic in me says the game itself also set their hooks in them.

Why are you even arguing this anymore? It was a moot point even before you brought it up.

15$ price isn't set in stone, you know?

Apple in no way represents what other companies do. Look at Sony and the crap that they've pulled with their products. For one, sony limited the use a DVD could be acessed to in order to prevent duping. They gave a [email protected] about customers in order to make an extra dime off of their products. If you want another example, EA is another "bad" company. If you do a little bit of searching, you'll find out they took the design of Battlefield from a team of devs and fired them after the realease of the game. Look at how poorly handled the game is. In many cases management wants money, not fans. As long as they give people broken builds and skills, people will want to play the game to get everything and the company gets money. Not all companies do this, (like Apple which you mentioned) but the world doesn't revolve around smiles and hugs and not everyone is a humanitarian.

Now before you try and twist my comment to agree with the p2p method, just becauce a company is getting a lot of money doesn't mean that they're going to listen to their playerbase. WAR didn't until people started quitting en masse because of their updates and by the time they started to listen it was too late in trying to regain the playerbase. Monthly payments give a lot of influence to the players, but that DOESN'T mean the company is going to listen.

No, but that stream of revenues does confer some leverage to the player base. It's hard to organize cutting off that stream of revenues, but the threat of that eventuality does compel companies to behave differently.

Dreamwind's argument is that GW's revenue model has delinked people's purchase decisions from ANet's investment in maintaining the game. I'm not totally convinced by his data; it's logical to expect that most people that are still posting on a GW fansite intend to buy GW2. I'm willing to bet that they've lost some business over the current state of the game, and that we never observe those people. The mods suppress that sort of negative publicity.

He's definitely on target when he argues that there's significant pressure on continuing players to purchase expansions. It really is impossible to function in PvP without them, and if your group of PvE players is purchasing the expansion you are compelled to choose between purchasing it yourself or being lonely/quitting. Functionally, charging a monthly fee and releasing the content is hardly distinguishable from releasing the expansion content and charging for it.

So? This doesn't disprove the argument that monthly payments confer leverage. You've shown that sometimes companies make mistakes despite that leverage. This doesn't imply that outcomes in GW would turn out this way under a pay-for-play model. We're in the land of "maybe" and "might have been"; anything that would increase the probability of leading to a more desirable outcome can be defined as "good" in that context.

The ideal solution now that expansions are not being developed would be to switch to a nominal monthly fee. The trouble is that you can't switch from F2P to P4P, because people feel that's a bait-and-switch. Any F2P game will be vital until the flow of new content stops, and then it's going to start to die for lack of funding.

Worse, GW proved that there's a finite amount of non-optional new content that you can release before you kill the game. Eventually balance becomes an issue; given a sufficient number of areas and skills to keep track of, the game gets away from the devs' ability to keep ahead of those issues.

This makes me skeptical of getting involved in another long-term F2P game. Those structural issues won't go away.

1. Gaile Gray was not laid off. http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Gaile_Gray She moved to a new position in Support, which was a promotion, and is still around today.

2. ArenaNet has actually hired more people since NCSoft's restructuring, including a few of the people laid off by NCSoft.

3. Due to ArenaNet's server/game system, there is no way to "create" anything on the live servers. This was a purposeful decision on their part. Therefore, no amount of monthly fee would enable you to recover lost items or characters. It is not "lack of funds" that controls this, but the fact that they would need to rollback the server to restore one person's belongings.

4. This website (and a few others) became a huge success because ArenaNet did not have the funds to dedicate employees to their own forum. While you can believe that things would have been easier with an ArenaNet forum, I believe that the lack of one forced ArenaNet to become involved in the community to a greater degree than most game companies.

5. Most of us bought the game originally because it was F2P. The other benefits, art, storyline, skill over time, etc., were not discovered until you installed the game and began to play.

No but if we played to play and got hacked we would have lost all our moneys too including the time... not a good idea imo.