Titles: Did it kill PUGing in Guild Wars?

I sure think so. I think titles enabled players to discriminate and lock each other out of PvP, and even PvE [see: Elitism]. From requiring a champion title for GvG to summoning stones for UW/FoW, titles have killed the spirit of playing with each other for the remainder of the game's life cycle.

What're your thoughts on titles? Do you want them to exist in Guild Wars 2?

Note: Be careful not to flame!

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Pugs killed themselves because they're terrible, full of dumb, bad players with even worse "creative" builds. Last time I joined a pug was when doing some zaishen mission, I decided "what the hell, i already have l guardian so might as well". Monk with a time reflex of a turtle, warrior with endure pain- no thanks. Never again.
And no, no titles in GW2 please. Some achievement system for people who can't play the game without it- yeah, sure, but make it so it isn't there to show-off.

I think heroes killed PUGging more than titles did, to be honest.

Both snograts and seraph nail it i think.

Titles have never been a justifiable way of seeing if someones good or not, there's no real measure of skill in the game. Hence why any GvG guild uses your previous guilds, references and such but near enough completely ignore your titles.

Then with no measure of skill available, we were given the option of 3 heroes that were better than the large number of pug players available to us. These 3 heroes could also then carry the other 0-4 henchies in the team. Which resulted in a team that took what builds you wanted and did things the way you wanted, sadly far superior to most pugs.

Is the problem with this thread not obvious enough?

Metagaming killed every single multiplayer game ever. Stop blaming the developers for your own lack of creativity and tunnel vision. Thats all.

yes and no. beyond protector and guardian is there really a reason to pug the rest of the titles? besides the dungeons on EoTN all but 2 missions in the game are easy enough to H/H and if you dont take the speed clear additude to the dungeons they can be done H/H too. i seem to remember early in the days when titles were introduced and later when the henchie builds sorta updated, the biggest cry for 7 heros were due to vanquishing failures in pug groups do to afk'ers or leavers. yes titles brought on the discrimination in the elite areas the same as rank does in HA. do you really need to pug the skill hunter titles? most rep titles besides luxon and kurzick are easy enough to get just playing the game and picking up bouinties as you do protector,guardian and vanquisher. i think the biggest killer of pug groups was anet skill balances. everyone hated what ursan was doing to the game at the time, but people pugged. everyone complained about the 600 build, but people pugged. anet killed those and other builds but still left perma SF. as builds got nerfed, people either adapted or left the game. hero's were probably the biggest killer to pugs, but we got what we wanted. the level of play was already dropping off before nightfall was released. it was before nightfall that i stopped pugging as i found back then i was more successfull completing missions with the crappy henchies better then some random non-guild or alliance group. people were crying before nightfall how crappy the henchies were, they wanted customizeable henchies as the henchie builds sucked and anet never updated them as skill balances happened. we got heros then anet was dumb enough to give us more with EoTN. its easier to take 2 or 3 humans then load the rest of the party with heros then take a chance at failing with random people. as time wore on the skill level of the player dropped off as those that maxed their titles left or took a break from the game due to no decent content updates after EoTN. the empty mission outposts are another reason for the lack of pugging. unless it the z-bounty or z-mission day your lucky to find enough players to make a full human team. theres no world chat channel to broadcast LFG for a misson that people in other towns would see. either way there are alot of reasons for the lack of pugging. no one reason can be singled out as the biggest. im sure theres more that i didnt list

In PvE: No. Titles did not kill PUGs. But they mayh have thrown another layer of dirt on the grave. Over the years, there have been lots of things that ruined PUGing in GW:

1. Players who would join skill capping parties (back in Prophecies only days), get their skill and bail on the rest of the party.

2. Bad players ("Unskilled player" is a sub-catergory)

3. The "holy trinity," cookie cutter metality

3. The rise of the "super guilds." (Not that there's anything wrong with them)

4. The advent of PvX wiki snobbery (pro and con)

5. Heroes - when Nightfall came out, you couldn't even get into a party to do the Chabeck Village mission!

6. Titles - Yes, they have caused some problems. Especially the rep titles tied to PvE only Skills when they first came out (And Ursan Blessing was wayyy OP). (Glad A-Net addressed that problem) But I don't think there's as much emphasis on them as there originally was because most people figured out that they really don't mean jack.

That being said, where I've gone PUGging, (Z-Missions & Bounties mostly) I haven't seen anyone asking for "Rank X in ______" in a long time.

^good list. couple things to add:

7. rise of solo/duo farming builds, running builds, etc.

8. spread of playerbase across 3 continents.

9. splitting of playerbase between normal mode/hard mode.



regarding titles: i think the most deceiving title that has ruined pugs is the vanquisher title. vanquishing is pretty much the anti-pug game mode in gw no lie.

For me, specifically, people killed PUGs. The notion that you can only complete a task with Xx/Xx class and one specific skill set is a load of crap and I refuse to change the way I play this game to suit someones egomaniac idea that they, and only they, know how to accomplish anything in this game. There are only 4 things in this game I have never done & 3 involve farming for items that I think are moderately ugly and/or for items I liked but purchased a long time ago. The one thing I've yet to do that I actually WANT to do is UW in HM but it's near the bottom of my list of "things to do before GW2 comes out".

I used to PUG a lot, back when the game was still young, before many had it set in their mind that awesome build xxxxx they found on whatever forum was the be all end all of accomplishing task #123. The longer the game is around the more this mentality spreads. I will still PUG on occasion, but it's been a long time.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who avoids PUGs for this precise reason.

That's my $0.02 on the topic.

I think titles is the whole reason a big part of GW players are still playing the game. Without tiltes this game would have a lot lower life span since there isn't much in it that would attract players. So tilte's are a big aditions to the game.

And as mentioned and really obv. Henchman partly took PuG out of game and the addition of heroes was putting oil on fire.

Edit: For the oldtimers for us that remember when GW was out for only a few months. Thunderhead Keep PuGs XD freaking awsome.

people really aren't to blame for that--hard mode and skill imbalance is. unless your trying to pug a farming hotspot, then speedclear builds are to blame for that.

/rolleyes

I especially love how you think this is a particularly new or interesting topic, rather than the same old rehashed dead-horse-beating that it actually is.

Titles did not kill PuGing. Heroes did not kill PuGing. "Elitism", whatever the hell you think that word means, did not kill PuGing.

First, it is not clear that PuGing is even dead. If you go to any active areas - you know, the areas that actually have populations large enough to support PuGing in the first place - there are crowds of people forming PuGs. Second, people want to succeed, and generally dislike having their time wasted. Thus, they will tend to do things that maximize their chances of success, which, in a group game, starts with finding yourself good teammates in a reasonable amount of time. Naturally, there are many approaches to doing this, including just taking H/H if you don't trust other players, or using some measurement of a player's ability and experience, however crude that measurement is. Removing titles, heroes, or summoning stones wouldn't change the situation at all, because people would simply find a different way to filter their teammates. Case in point: prior to the introduction of heroes, many players completed the game using henchmen only.

idk that it's a bad thing. My Alliance is really active and we do stuff with each other all the time without the PUG headache and without "6/8 needs UA and HB to go" so...

At this point in the game it is really nice to have such a wealth of builds and heroes that if you don't have enough guildies or alliance mates on you can roll some heroes with 2-5 people and take down almost anything and for areas that require humans...well get yourself in an active alliance and if you don't want to leave your alliance then recruit and teach people how to play.

10. Discord

I think recently Discord has killed PUGs with more than 2 human players. I don't know how many times I have joined up with someone in a group and then immediately see Livia, Olias, and Master of Whispers get added to the group. I really wish people would realize that Discord is not the only way to do HM.

Before that it was sabway and SoS+AotL is having potential might discord get nerfed or w/e

Shadow form killed pve( people got more and more arrogant in areas , like if you're too slow you're crap ..) , rest got killed by lack of content updates ....

Titles did not kill pugging, and I wouldn't even say pugging is dead, it sure isn't to me.

What might have hurt pugging the most though is the fact that GW is 5+ years old. This causes for a huge gap in different players' experiences. A good part of the experienced players probably prefers to play with players of similar experience as well and therefore shun pugs where there will occasionally be lesser experienced players.

GW also got a lot bigger. It's no longer just Prophecies, but there's Cantha, Elona and EOTN as well. If you think about all the VQs/Missions/Dungeons/Elite areas people may want to do plus the fact the game is 5+ years old then I'm really not surprised that it's harder now to find a pug for some of the 'lesser' things in GW than it used to be in the past.

At least that's how I see it.

The age of the game and nothing else has led to a deterioration in pugging but by no means its death.
Sure players are chasing titles rather than pugging but if the titles didn't exist they wouldn't be playing at all.

Time was the game was new and no one new anything about how to play it.

Pugs ranged from bad right up to excellent but then there were a load of players in every town all wanting to do the missions so this wasn't a problem.
The main problem in the early days was players refusing to move out unless they had a t least one Monk sometimes 2.

5 years on and many of the players are doing other things, unless the game makes it worthwhile for older players to repeat mission pugging will always deteriorate over time.

Joining a guild works best for pvp not pve even if your in a decent guild always being able to find 7 others to do missions isn't always easy.

I fanything, titles gave people a reason to go back and do a lot of content they would otherwise not done. In the early days of titles they very much helped pugging.

In my opinion, what killed pugs the most is the attitude of the playerbase. I used to love pugging when people where more carefree and casual about pugs, but now it seems as though the playerbase that i run into when I pug is all hardcore and elitist. In general, they make a big deal about builds and professions and finishing everything fast. Why would I want to pug when the playerbase is acting like this? As a result, Im now sticking with my heroes and my guildies for the time being.

In PvE. no, I don't think so. Players are too spread thin to really pug most of the missions / questing / vanquishing regardless of whether they want to or not. The only times I can remember people title discriminating in PvE was in the early days of DoA people demanding high lightbringer levels.

In PvP, it hasn't helped make pugging easier that's for sure. But Pvp people have always discriminated against each other so much that they effectively push alot of the player base out of pvp anyways, so no it's not the problem their either.

hero, pve skills, and HM(yes, HM) killed pug.

people are at the same intelligent level as 5 years ago. they still run bad bars.

However, back in the days, there was no hero to use instead of real men. And since there was no HM, ANET don't need to tune up the skills, bring PVE only skills into the game, wouldn't need to introduce cons. With all those tuned-up skills and cons, ppl ran with guildmates, had some 10mins run, and never bother doing a mission with PUG for 30mins ever.

I still pug....see just about as many of them now I as did a few years ago...
I did ALL of the guardian titles with pugs on 5 characters...so saying that titles killed pugs for me gives me the great big "HUH"???????
Without the pug I would not have been able to do many of those. Without the title hunt I would not have even WANTED to do them----

so

HUH????

Honestly heros "killed" PUGs. Henches were terrible in prophecies and mediocre in Factions. The fact that you had to bring along a hero for some of the Nightfall missions meant this was *forced*.

EoTN PvE skills made it stupid easy to play GW even if you spec your attributes like an idiot (i.e. req8 sword, let's put only 8 attribute ranks and spam seeking blade!). pre-nerf Ursan, for example.

Then PvE skill split made it even more easy to play PvE.

I don't see why there is a fuss about PUGing. Just go to where the zaishen missions are.

I even PUGed with a necro that was doing Iron Mines of Moludune for the first time because he had no one to help him. (He was running lvl 15 minions so I had to give him a suggestion to use Superior Death magic before we finished.)

Heroes killed PUGs, titles killed PUGs, elitists killed PUGs, game mechanics killed PUGs.....the whole game just didn't pan out well for PUGs. I have a preetty limited view as I never played during the 'glory days', but what killed PUG's would seem to be a mixture between people wanting to get everything done as fast and easy as possible, and the fact that heroes can be made to so much more easily roll through pretty much any PvE situation. More to the point, it's sort of come round in a circle, PUGs became less wanted, so there were less of them, so people didn't PUG so much, so there were less of them, so loads of people got bored and quit, so nobody even bothers to try any more.

As for whether I want titles in GW2, that's still a yes, though I hope they make some funner ones to get, though that is really up to how much better they can make the game mechanics, I mean even Vanquisher could be a fun title if the combat was still enjoyable and it wasn't just as simple as blasting through with two discorway teams, which will not be the case in GW2, they aren't gonna make all the same mistakes twice, and the more controlled build system will hopefully mean it's more about how you play, than what you play as.

In PvP though, you could easily say titles killed a lot of the gameplay. I always had a vague hope to play a bit of HA, but generally found too many elitists and people only wanting high titled players to go with, so I was mostly ignored. God I can't wait for GW2.

Everytime i go to TOA I lol so much seeing ppl: lfg uwsc show stones 50+ etc etc.....

Actually titles did not kill grouping, the concept of Speed Clear did it....UW SC or FoW SC are not SC are FARMING....XD

What killed some kind of PUGing is this concept of fast farm of Elite areas, done only for farming rare weapons/materials.....

What killed Gw is RARE's fever.....everyone has his BDS, his VS, his Crystalline etc etc...it's just fashion. Nobody group for areas like UW/FOW cos they just want the final chest and not the fun of playing...

I've never blamed someone for his low title or expirience...but most ppl do it.

There is one and only one reason why PuGs died in this game: This game doesn't force you to group.

The correct term here is in fact force. FFXI had plenty of pugs for all sorts of things, but in that game you needed a PuG for absolutely everything.

It really isn't about providing 'benefits' to grouping. Until there is a point that play cannot proceed without grouping, then PuG's are going to disappear. The only reason that PuGs existed in this game to begin with was that people mistakenly thought that they needed to group.

Eh...

The fundamental game design killed PUGs.

1. A-net wants to make the game fun.

2. "Fun" in the context of a video game usually means something that presents a challenge the player can eventually surmount. Something so easy it presents no challenge is rarely fun; nor is something so hard you have no chance of ever prevailing.

3. There's a limited number of ways to create this sort of challenge. Chief among them are:
A. The random factor. Getting lucky feels fun. Everyone likes winning the lottery. But place too much weight on randomness and the difficulty feels forced or "cheesy." GW features randomness heavily in the loot system, but only sparsely in the combat system.
B. Erect a finger-twitching "wall of execution" between what the player wants their character to do and what the character does. Climbing over the wall of execution is fun. Successfully executing Akuma's raging demon or Zangeif's 2x-360 throw in Street Fighter gives a great feeling of accomplishment. But GW isn't Street Fighter. Network latency and synchronization problems make that level of execution impossible for a large portion of the player base. Execution matters very little (as compared to something like Street Fighter) in GW PvE, and not terribly much in PvP either. (Though I would say that execution matters a bit too much for PvP given the technological issues.)
C. Give them an endurance test. Finishing a marathon feels great. See UW & Dhuum. GW generally stays away from this sort of challenge in an attempt to stay friendly to casual players.
D. Erect a "wall of complexity" that makes it difficult to ascertain the optimal course of action. Figuring out the game is the challenge. This is what the GW devs chose as the main source of challenge for their game. Figuring out which skills are best to bring and which skills are the best to use at a given moment is a problem that turns out to be (a) almost impossible to mathematically model completely, and (b) sensitive to some inputs that are very hard to measure. Coming up with the best approximations to answer those problems is a daunting challenge to the player.

4. And here's where we run into trouble. I turns out that (a) the intelligence and logical/mathematical ability and education required to climb the wall of complexity vary greatly across the player base, and (b) the level of motivation to even attempt the inquiry in the first place also varies greatly across the player base. This leaves us with, on the one hand, a player of mental aptitude and motivation crunching numbers to see whether IatS, Dodge This, or BuH best improves the performance of a particular build, and, on the other hand, a player of not so much mental aptitude, nor motivation, who does not understand why his Sever Artery + Crystal Wave warrior is not a great build, and doesn't really care to think about it anyway. How do you make PvE challenging for one without making it either too easy or impossible for the other?

5. A major part of a-net's best "solution" is to split up the player base between NM and HM/elite areas. The difficulty in NM appears to be set to offer a challenge to the 30th* percentile or so, while HM/elite areas are more tuned for the around 85th* percentile. (* These numbers are pulled out of my butt for demonstrative purposes. They are simply my best estimates made from observing the player base.)

6. Unfortunately, NM still has some 30% of the people who just fail (actually more because the top end is off playing HM/elite areas) and HM/elite areas have a fair percentage of people who just fail (far less than 85%, though, since much of the bottom end does stay in NM).

7. Now, let's pick up where Burst Cancel started: People don't like it when their groups fail. Usually it's a waste of time. Sometimes you can learn something when you fail, or get a good laugh, or get a good drop along the way. But usually, it's just a waste of time. Especially when it's entirely someone else's fault.

8. So, people try to filter the players who aren't up to the content out of their teams.

9. The difficulty and hassle of doing this filtering leads people to often just seek out known-quantity teammates (guild/alliance members, f-list people, heroes, hench) rather than bother with filtering.

10. And that is what kills PUGs.

To summarize, the main problem is that a-net chose a mechanism for delivering challenge that spreads the player base along too broad a spectrum, which results in too many players being too bad at the game (or, looking at it another way, the game being too hard for too many players) no matter where the difficulty level is set.

Ironically, PUGs suffer not because of titles/stones/etc., but because titles/stones/etc. are not a good enough indicator of someone's ability to finish certain content. For instance, I am very wary about taking PUG people into UW, but I would not be so wary if a stone really meant that you finished UW HM and contributed meaningfully to the team (as opposed to buying the stone, or piggybacking on a SC team without contributing, or struggling through NM in 4hr with 8 full consets).

Of course, this would not do anything to help the vocal subset of people who complain that PUGs are dying because they rely on PUGs to carry them through content that is beyond their ability to otherwise finish. The only thing (aside from simply getting better at the game) that could make PUGs less "dead" for this subset would be a complete redesign that brought the difficulty level down.

Elitism is a terrible excuse for lack of PvP success.

PUGs suck anyways, i mean seriously PUGs are terrible in every game, why would you even want them? from personal experience i've found that being in a guild with well organized players with team speak and what not is far more profitable than PUGing. who wants some random that doesn't even know elite skills exist? sure noobs should be taught how to play but again, that's what guilds are for... Guild......Wars......ahemm. titles in guild wars is kinda like gear score in WoW, will always have a love/hate relationship. usually the baddies hate it and the elitists love it, then there's a group in between that just doesn't care because they're in a good guild.

What killed PuGing is not titles...it's purely a mix of player mentalities that come together, and most of it is really stupid.

1. Control - People feel other people will screw them up or more to the point take some control of the mission outcome away from them. The player doesn't want to let others have a chance to goof up the mission because they just randomly picked them up in an outpost, they'll keep themselves in full control.

2. Time wasting - Because of the instanced nature of the game, if you die in certain areas or too much, you can essentially render the hour or so you spent in the instance worthless. People don't like repeating things that take an hour onwards. We then come back to point 1.

3. A hero does as they are told - Self explanitary, they'll use whatever equipment you want them to, what skillbar they want them to, what SKILLS and WHEN to use them, hell as an added bonus to heroes, their twitch skill ability is amazing, and minion bomber builders are only doable effectively on heroes.

4. Some players just suck - Do you want to pug with a Warrior whose idea of a build involves flare spam? Yes I've seen it happen folks, and repeating missions because of it isn't funny. There is creative and then there is just plain stupidity that doesn't understand complimenting the primary class.

5. Conflict of Interest - I WANNA DO HM, I WANNA VANQUISH, I WANNA GET THE MONUMENT, I JUST WANNA GET THROUGH THE GAME. Running 2k plz. There is too many things that will divide the players, thus they just do it all themselves and be in control.

To name but a few, I'm just tired right now tho.

i agree with alot of points here

game got "killed" by:

- elitism
- heroes (yes, even someone who wants 7 hero teams can say that)
- not only wanting the game being completed for 100% on NM and HM (and perfectly, as it is now), but also they wanna do it fast, like, start new char today after dinner, be finished tomorrow before dinner (fits also in the elitism part)

elitism is something i dont need to explain, i hope

heroes, well, if they didnt do it, people would get sick of finding many pugs which arent as good as they are (calling them noobs and saying they suck)
and now they gave us heroes, but now the ones who are very good at the game are doing 2 things: solo farm and/or h/h the whole game, and why?
because they think they are better without people, now that heroes are here

i dont say 7 heroes can make the game more alive, but the only thing to let people create pugs is... removing heroes, however, now that heroes are the only ones making those "elitism" people happy (as they dont need to join "noobs" ) people will leave if they cant use em anymore

so at the start heroes were used as something fun, but nowadays they are used as super players to complete everything faster than when having people, where you gotta make plans and strategies, and you gotta find pugs, as heroes can walk, attack, not attack and use any skill you want em to use

so as for 7 hero party (please dont make this the subject): it wont destroy pugs, cuz thats what heroes have done once people found out they could use em to complete everything, whether its 3 heroes and 4 henchies or 7 heroes in a team (in elite places like fow, uw and doa, they have solo builds), they always have an excuse NOT to join any pugs anymore

but remember: the community makes the game, and in this case they just use heroes to complete their HoM and such

titles? nah, those were invented to have some more time consuming happenings in GW

PS. i dont wanna make it another 7 hero party topic, i just used this as example to explain how pugs died

oh yea, i saw someone helping a newbie today, it made me feel good, better than any amount of heroes in 1 team can do

last point: why do you think GW2 has no hero or hench? and that they made it solo-able mostly? cuz some want to solo, and they will get bored, cant use h/h, and will make/join pugs (just a few may quit)

I whole-heartedly disagree with that. Elitism puts people off even wanting to do PvP, and unfortunately nowadays some of the most popular PvP areas are very elitist, hence people really don't get much opprtunity to even start.

Besides all the factors which killed pugging (and I agree with most of the posts here) you oversee one thing which really helps to keep PuGs alive: the Zaishen Missions.

While questing/bringing a character through a campaign I hardly ever join a PuG (if I do I'm usually disappointed [some just leave during a mission after capping a skill]) - but for zaishen missions I often join pugs and most of them are OK. The same goes for AB - normally I don't even bother to visit the AB outpost, but when it's Zaishen Battle I KNOW that people will be there (I don't know how the situation in "real" PvP is)

I personally miss some kind of "Zaishen Vanquish" - I don't like vanquishing alone and even in a guild it's problematic to find people who need that specific area too. And it would make it easier to find PuGs for vanquishing as well.

Dunno why everyone thinks that only they go through the Elitism bullshit in PvP. We all dealt with it, some of us just didn't give up when we came up against the first bump in the road. And obviously a lot of you did.

Anyways I love how this guy just remade the topic 3x and eventually the mods were just whatever. Good message to everyone.

Pugging died in GWs because heroes are more effective than your average PUG

i do have something to say about that

"heroes are more effective"
i agree, but also disagree, as you can have a group with people being better than heroes, not talking about spiritspam etc, just about the way everyone knows what they're doing
but then again, you can control heroes, just not for 100%, like 3 heroes at the same time, while 3 people can move and use skills at the same time

it is true, in the way that "effective" means that they do what 1 player wants em to do

A group of experienced players who know what they're doing will always be better than heroway. H/H will always be better than PUGs (i'm excluding endgame areas such as DoA/UW but the pugs there are still horrifying as well).

Wow! I'm pleased by the amount of interesting input everyone's made thus far!

Don't get me wrong here, titles are a reward mechanism for players to strive and achieve, and to keep going. The big problem though [as I've already highlighted in the OP] is that players lock each other out by demanding pre-existing titles, which makes the game unplayable for new comers, and even some players who just never got around to certain areas of the game. Sure it's understandable that everybody wants to win, it's only natural and logically sound that we do. But when it comes at the heavy price of negating play for others, it becomes the perfect recipe for game-death over time.

I have rank 3 hero [almost on two accounts now], but I've hardly like playing HA or GvG simply because a lot of the people there just take the issue of titles way too overboard. They're filled with so much discrimination and spite that it completely repelled me from pursuing gameplay there. That, and the thought of having to assemble teams also played a contributing factor. That's why I like Random Arenas more, because it's a click enter 'n' go, and things are often different per match. I'm sure many other players have been similarly impacted by rank-discrimination as well. For heaven's sake even PvE is using some form of discrimination, preventing the newer players from joining! It's not right to generalize and say that all non-ranked or non-accomplished players are "retarded". There are players that're good, but just never got around to HAing, GvGing, or have taken a very long break and fell behind on the whole PvE farming thing.

Anyhow, the bottom line is: though titles were added to give players something to strive for, they've taken it far south and beyond the scope of positive gaming. In GW2: I'm hoping that, at the very least, titles get introduced way later in the game like they did with GW1. That way, GW2 can be an awesome gaming experience like GW1 was in it's early years.

Again, many thanks to all of you for all your inputs!