Hypothetical Question

Another good reason why I felt that ANet should've made an overall easy game. I think back to places like Eternal Grove, THK and Vizunah Square and think "how the hell did I get through these places when I was a sucky player?".

And don't even get me started on those Afflicted. I strongly believe that those things have killed Assassins more than players have killed anything else! "Here's a melee class with low survivability! Now we're going to pit you up against bad guys that rape your face with explosions when they die!"

Nope.

Oh, you want arguments? Well, what about the fact that most of the good players quickly stopped using PuGs and went with henches or guildmates everywhere? And since guildmates aren't always available...

No, it encourages going with 3 heroes + 4 henches or 3 heroes + 3 heroes from another account, yours or another player's.
Solution was proposed 10000 of times. Don't add extra flags or skillbars, except for ones under K button. Only 3 first heroes would be controllable, the others would be just henchmen with your own skillbars and equipment.
Well, we could kill every normal human and it would be more fair... This way the IQ would jump really high.
3 heroes get boring after few years.They won't. Don't kid yourself - only the Testing Krewe is left, and you saw how they "fixed" the game so that EVERYONE can abuse SF.

Don't live in denial, it's bad for your lungs. Heroes rejuvenated the game. They were henches, but ones that could use non-sucky builds.

PuGs killed PuGs, that's quite simple if you can open your eyes for 10 seconds.

They're definitely not things that could fix GW at this point, rather they're a bunch of ideas that would've helped GW zounds at the beginning.

Plus, party size also plays big into this: the fact that an overwhelming majority of the game needs eight people did not help. Finding four people was relatively simple, six wasn't so bad, but eight? Eight party slots?? I've had trouble in WoW finding people to do entry-level raids that were easy as crap, and that was at a party size of 10! Granted things were a bit more localized in GW, but still: geeze!

Well there are numerous paths they could go to make this interesting.

If there is still a mission structure to the campaign and story, it would be pretty refreshing to have the missions require the grouping and getting to and from a mission to be solo. It adds an interesting pacing as opposed to running the some party config the whole way through, providing different forms of play throughout the story.

Then there's the rumor that missions would be scaled off of party size, which could also make things interesting. It does, however, further the argument that classes could be a bit more universal this time around (which branched from the game being solo-friendly).

I will feel it'll be a much more manageable route, though: it'll be great to see areas that are actually designed for solo-play as opposed to it being an oversight.

I will miss the old days of GW, though - but it's definitely not a game area I'd want to see revisited. I like it when my sequels go in different directions as opposed to getting the same game with prettier graphics (that's just me, though...)

Yes, good teamwork is fix for playing for people. But as notice, people are not going to put much effort in it.

It is because PUG group is usually for signle task: one mission, one area, then it usually falls apart.

I would disagree that what I said does not apply to guilds and organized pugs: Being able to plug in latecommer would help a lot.

I mean, there is guild event and you are going to be 10 minutes late. Currently, if guild wants to play with you, they have to wait for you (that is, if they come at all.). If they just add hero and start without you, they just lost human player.

What they should be able to do is to put hero in your slot, start immediatelly and when you come online, they can just tell olias "get lost, we have real human now".

Similary, If you need to leave early you could just leave and they would have option refilling your slot with AI or with another human.

Anoither example is that I, as a looner, would simply start vanquish with H/H and if someone who wants to join, they can (I'd simply put myself on LFG for that area).

See, joining group needs to be easy. You need low waiting times. Ideally, you could start with few people and some ai and flesh out party as more people become available by replacing ai with humans.

Heroes are fix in this because they make is easy to form party. Basically, you'd want human party creation to be as close to adding heroes to party in terms of ease.

Zaishen quests indeed prove that pugs and individual players are fairly competent nowadays. I call then "PUG 2.0". But what you need is ability to put them together casually. To be assured that any issues with party can be solved in mid run without having to abort mission. ZQ pugs are especially great for short missions and close bosses. Cost of failing there is very low (one minute lost for shiro, noone cares) so people are more willing to 'risk' humans.

Heroes are the NOT the problem, the problem is getting a group of total strangers with no experience working together, and entering a mission with minimum planning.

If you don't like heroes, you don't have to bring them. If you want to encourage teamwork then the Guild/Alliance IS the place to do it, not random pugging with a team that only exists for that mission. To build up teamwork, you have to maintain the team and practise with the SAME team over and over so that everyone learns and adapts to everyone else in the team. Great teamwork needs to be built over time, like a good basket ball team that practices together regularly.

What zwei is talking about is, strictly speaking, not a teamwork issue. He was just listing the difficulties of forming a random PUG in gw and I agree with his points.

I think I meant something other than you read for #2. I was highlighting the fact that I thought most of the game was still seeing 8-man parties apart from these areas where people were deliberately forming smaller teams so that they had a better chance of getting the good drops, not because there were not enough players to fill the team.

7(or more) heroes may be good for getting things done and watching things go 'boom', but it would further remove the human player's input from the game.

The player would just be the team manager.

"Ok, today I'm picking you 3 Necro's up front again, you know the drill. And... let's see now... Gwen, you played well last time and deserve another shot, so get dressed, and HorseGoatThing, I like the cut of your jib so saddle-up. Two spots up for grabs, so Tahlkora, Hayda, and... hmmm... Vekk, I'll be in my office awaiting your *ahem* application for the job."

The team manager won't even need to be a discord-caller. Just flag the team near the red dots and sit back and relax. This is why 7 heroes are bad. 'Players' won't be worthy of that title.

It would be nothing else than positive,

I mean, sure playing with friends is always better than using hero's.
maybe not in a technical way, but for fun(only when they play random) its always better.
This would not be any different when we were allowed to use more hero's.
It would however give us the opportunity to play in a way as we want a team
to be, only without real players and pve skills when your friends are not online.

As I see it now. the most pugs that are made. Are those that want to do
speedclears only, couse random fun!!! builds are taking to long for them.
So the people who want to make fun and are not in a hury to get somewhere
can't get in those pugs becouse they don't want to be forced by running
somekind of boring build.
And it are those people who like to play with friends without being in a hury,
that would like more hero's so they can go to places where no henchmen are
allowed to go, when there are not enough friends/guildies online to run some
random fun evening filling build.

I know, I opend a 7 hero topic a few years ago and it was the same as now.
people who would like it, and people who are against it.
But if you are asking yourself, Ok what pugs do we have these days..
Than it are the pugs doing speedclears. And those created by alliance members.
And most of the time they are for speedclears to in some way ore the other.

So in that way it could be only positive..in my opinion.
Extra hero's will not give you those oportunity's to do speedclears as human
pugs do.. So they can only being used to have fun.
And there is nothing wrong to have fun while playing a game I'll guess.

i'm sorry, but i have played a ton of pick-up basketball games. a teamplayer is a teamplayer no matter what team he is on and a ballhog is a ballhog no matter team he is on. yes, a standard team (or guild) is a great place to learn and develop teamwork skills, but that does not mean one is unable to utilize teamwork skills in a pug environment.

well i'm not sure how much pug experience you or zwei2stein have, but i have a shit ton. perhaps it is due to the amount of experience i have, that has caused me to be better at pugging and thus blind to the faults of the party interface. even still, i do not think it is the main problem because take a look at the history of gw: the party interface has only improved over the years of gw and the pug scene has only degraded over the years. so what does that mean? there was a time when pugging worked with its party interface, so clearly the interface is functional. it was things like heroes and spreading the playerbase across multiple campaigns and difficulty selections, among other things that killed pugging.

More heroes or less would be a moot point if the game encouraged interactive human participation. It does not.

The obvious solution is a large guild/alliance. Of course that is what most guilds say they are..friendly,helpful and active. I have joined several guilds over the years based on this advert. And while friendly and sometimes active is true...helpful is subjective.

Good luck on finding a guild that will take the time to practice and teach a new member.

I remain guild less for a reason.

If you remove heroes then pugs are still going to be as bad, some people are going to leave becauise their class get discriminated against, and there is still no incentive to learn better team work because pugs are random strangers pulled to do a mission and disbanded.