GW should have been pay to play.

Exactly Dreamwind. New campaigns were not optional if you wanted to PvP, and pve was too limited not to have them also. You pay to play a game in some shape or form(even if it's in game advertising or micropayments). It's just that a subscription model is more 'upfront' about it.

Hmmm... I wonder what if GW HAD a monthly 8-9$ fee. Problem with expansions every 6 months is that ANet is losing money constantly, so they try to rush the content update as fast as possible to reap the money from it so that they stay in business. With a small subscription fee equivalent to buying an expansion whenever it's released, they have a constant flow of money, while it's affordable for most people (because 8$ every month for 6 months = 50$ every 6 months). I can assure you most people would pay it regularly so that they can play their characters they put so much time into. The fee would have to be small though, because if it was high, we would go "why play GW if we can play WoW instead".

The problem with GW is the lack of vision and understanding what the hell is actually going on with the game they created.

A fee would just cause this stupidity being rewarded even more.

IMHO there used to be a vision etc, until they ditched Gw1. Paying customers who you rely on to keep you in work would get back thier focus, not make them lose it.

Quality of the game has nothing to do with it's business model, but with talent of the developers and cooperation with the publisher. Quality sells.

It's not free to play. It' buy to play. Labelling Guild Wars, Diablo or any other RPG franchise as 'free to play' because you don't have to pay annual subscriptions is simply derogatory, uneducated and silly.

If you were hired by Anet or Blizzard and told on an interview that your game is free to play, you would get fired. Quality sells, 'free to play' merely breaks the entire image of quality production, so it's not viable marketing-wise.

That's nothing but an illusion.

Pay to play games are designed around leveling up, grinding for items, hard way switching attributes, skills and builds, long travel times, easy ways to 'screw up' your build, usually dull plot ... pretty much the opposite of what entire Guild Wars franchise is about.

Why such features? Because they 'guarantee' that 'average customer' will spend at least 18 months in the game and pay X $$$ before he leaves for good, because it took him a lot of time to eventually figure out it's not game for him. With Guild Wars, you could tell after few hours of playing on a free trial account if the game is for you or not. You can't tell the same about other games.

I can't imagine any live team capable of pulling out enough quality roleplaying content in Guild Wars fashion every 1-2 months and enough goodness for the pvp crowd at the same time. It's impossible, you need to 'make players grind' to slow down their progress and their demands for new content, even in a p2p game. Go read some scientific stuff or at least meet some actual people working in top MMO gaming companies, you will figure out your theory is not really 'heretic' but simply ... naive.

Read the upper part.

Pay to play brings you nothing but a thinner wallet.

The future lies in 'boxed' and digital buy-to-play games, with optional microtransactions, made by talented, small teams. Highest chance of success, biggest return of money investment to game development, easy game audience targeting (i.e. you don't make game 'for everyone and his dog' to compensate for very lengthy and costly development).

@ Dreamwind

I, and many others, would have no means to play this game if it was p2p. We don't live in a 'fantasy world' where everyone is born as an adult with a credit card.

The problem is that management is cheap, and perhaps is also incompetent. There's a difference. It's not that the employees don't work. It's that current staff don't have the time to produce the outputs that we would like to see.

There have been some questions regarding how work gets done from some previous dev posts, but it's hard to make an assessment of whether or not things are managed efficiently without experiencing the work environment first hand.

I've said it before - retain about 6000 hardcore customers you would otherwise lose, and you can pay for ten young staffers to help keep this game alive until the release of GW2. That's an investment in the future too, because those staffers learn the problem solving skills to help support the new game.

Clearly management isn't thinking this way. Best guess is that someone with decision-making powers has performance or compensation incentives that encourage mortgaging the future.

Not sure that this is true for "most" players, but certainly "many". Definitely true for the majority of the fansite community. I concur that this was brilliant marketing. Trading 20-30 hours of linear PvE content, new skills and the odd new mechanic for an effective monthly fee was very clever marketing.

Unfortunately, it also led to a host of balance problems. Same basic trap that WotC fell into with Magic. Power creep was used to sell poorly balanced content, to the detriment of the game's integrity. Look at Factions and the Fallen Empires expansion of Magic; they were received similarly and led to a similar response by the company.

Well, it would align their incentives with those of the remaining community. It isn't a feasible solution, though. As others have noted, entering the market as F2P would have doomed Guild Wars. Switching to pay-for-play after the fact would indeed cause an instant exodus. Eg: Subspace.

The basic problem is that somebody at a very high level in ANet either doesn't understand their business, or is precluded from taking proper action due to the constraint of the publisher's shareholders.

Entertainment software companies open and close all the time. It's the publishers that stick around, and they don't do that by acting in the interest of the companies that provide them product. Companies like Blizzard, Valve and Bioware that hang around for a long time are rare. They survive because they understand their business well enough to provide consistent product, and because they have the financial muscle to weather the cyclical revenue stream long enough to produce consistent products.

You'd think that NCSoft would permit the ANet people some latitude to do the right thing due to their large stake. But apparently long-term thinking just isn't encouraged for whatever reason.

So.... what's the point of this thread then?

There wouldn't be enough of these players. In particular as the competition grows.

The degenerate state of the game has nothing to do with fiances. It has to do with piss poor administrative decisions. How much does it cost to get a CR who gives a darn? How much does it cost to nerf an OP skill that takes a game designed and balanced for eight players and transforms it into a degenerate solo farmfest? How much does it cost to fix the boxing dungeon so its not a survivor factory or the chest of no resistance? I mean does it take a boatload of cash for anet to realize consumable titles encourage ebay gold? These are conscious decisions made by management not by-products of Anet being broke.


The vision left when Anet grew and the founders have less hands on with the game. NCsoft bureaucrats and low level devs are not the visionary's who created this game , but they are the ones with much power and influence over it. Many companies lose their direction when they grow and no longer adhere to core principles and beliefs of the founders.

No, it doesn't. Just because a company is getting more money from their game doesn't mean that we are going to have a perfect game. Look at WAR online. It was a p2p game that has turned into garbage because the devs care little for balance and ignore the community. Anet hasn't exactly followed the community since proph, so what do you think more staff would do? Anet had a full team when they released DoA, do you thing that was balanced or fun in any way? All of the monsters were supercharged because Anet couldn't properly balance the skills currently in the game.

You also have to remember that while the staff is working on things, there are people higher up on the totem poll actually make the call. Money will never fix ignorance on their part.


Again, I bring up WAR because they didn't have any better of a security system than GW. The support there I felt was even worse than the support we have now.

As far as your monthly analogy goes you're missing a big flaw. What if I didn't want to pay for factions since I didn't like how it looked? Now instead of $8/9 per month Anet is getting nothing.

I wouldn't pay for a monthly fee simply because I've beaten the expansions too quickly to want to keep my account active until the next campaign. I mostly play GW as a place to socialize and blow off some steam from RL, so I would just jump to another game.

I'm not positive on this but isn't the live krewe just a group of players elected to help balance skills without a salary? If so then this point really isn't applicable anymore.

That may be true,it wouldnt surpise me.But do you really have to wait untill the last week of a 2 month deadline to find out the work is gonna be delayed?
Wouldn't telling the community as soon as the first mount passes that the work is delayed?At least that way the community is informed and will not be pissed when the time comes and no update is there just to be told, oops its late,sorry about that.

I mean dont they work with some kind of schedule? first 3 weeks get all updates down, test for 2 weeks after that,fix problem that have come up in 1 week,second testing for 1 week, 1 extra week for any work that might have been delayed and/or extra fixes.As soon as you see that testing hasn't began after the 5th week you know your gonna be late, so why pretend (and rush) as if your gona make it anyways, just to get to the date and then finally realized you were never gonna make it.

If managment is the one telling them to shut up and take the heat,I would quit being in their shoes,there only so many stabs a thick skin can handle.Let the managment handle the crap we throw at them.

First of all agreeing with that guy actually makes your own statement that GW should have p2p invalid.

Second: BS. It doesn't add under the definition of p2p saying that you have to buy a new game or expansion because of the following reasons: Buying the shit is optional, it immediatly unlocks the feature you know you payed for, it is a once in a lifetime fee. Saying anything else simply doesn't make any sense.

And not optional if you want to PvP? Says who? You will be limited buildwise, but that doesn't mean you can't play it. No ones forcing you to buy extra content for neither PvP nor PvE.

PvE too limited: EVERY freaking game is too limited with that logic. As soon as new content is out it gets limited to that and then more content will get out and you are limited to that. Can you see my point? You can't get satisfied with that logic. When you buy a game you get what you payed for. In GW's case you actually get what you payed for AND the bonus of updates FREE OF CHARGE! Why the feck do you want to change that?

GW is pay ONCE to play and that's it. There's no hidden unoptional fees.

People still play Diablo I and II, and they are no MMOs. And they don't get even a little percentage of the updates GW gets.

"PAY ONCE". Is the real way to go. You pay once for each piece of the content, and play forever without having to worry about fees.

That's one of the pillars of GW's success, anyone that disagrees with that is either blind or refuse to see.

http://www.planettr.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11581

http://unsubject.wordpress.com/2009/...-its-failures/

gonna drop these off here. stay loose.

Buying a game and playing it then later buying an expansion etc is not pay to play.
Let me say that again for the slow to learn it is not pay to play.
If it were then every computer game is pay to play.

One has a monthly fee that you always pay on the same date every month rain shine playing or not ok ?

The other lets you buy a game and play it for years at no extra cost and has expansions you may want to buy at some date or not if you don't want to.

Its an interesting idea but except for a dedicated pvp player who needs access every skill to have a chance of winning and needs them the second they become available there is no comparison.

Excellent post Shadowspawn.

Sure you can play it, but you are severely gimped. For most people there is simply no point in playing PvP if you don't have all the expansions, especially when other people are hammering you with things you don't have access to that are likely more powerful than what you have (think power creep for sales and Nightfall).

In the same way, for many people theres no point in playing PvE if you don't buy the expansions. If your guild members and friends buy it, you will feel like you have no choice but buy to continue.

Uh...of course it is pay to play. Let us analyze that...you have to pay for the game to play the game. If you don't pay for the game you can't play the game. Very simple. And not every computer game is pay to play...there are tons of free downloadable games.

Thanks for the links, great read.It's too bad this is the way things are.Maybe i should give one of the many F2P mmos I played the attention i give to GW.

If Guildwars was pay to play i wouldn't have bought it and if Guildwars 2 is pay to play i won't buy it - as simple as that. We already pay enough for broadband... why don't online games company's not claim money from the isp's that get so much money from us...

Sorry to say, but I wouldn't pay monthly to play a game that has had so many short comings on a company's end as this...

The phrase pay to play that's in common usage means paying a monthly fee.
I know you said in your post gw was pay to play even though there is no monthly fee.

So let me change my statement a little to be more accurate.

GW and all other none free games are pay to own the game and the right to play as often as you like for no extra cost so to that extent are pay to play.

Pay to play games with a monthly fee have a constant ongoing cost that you pay whether you play or not.
This monthly cost never goes down, unlike gw style pay to play games which have a cost that goes down the older the game is.

I can live with that explanation but its a little complex I would just rather say GW isn't pay to play and WOW is.