Titles: Did it kill PUGing in Guild Wars?

I disagree. In the tougher areas, I find that most PUGs are actually better than heroes. With PvE skills, consummables, and the ability to run out of AoE already gives players a HUGE edge over heroes. Furthermore, players have the ability to split up and work independently (e.g. Eternal Grove mission). What really made heroes more popular than pugging is the lack of good party forming technology in the game. With heroes, you dont need to wait for a long time shouting LFG in half desolated towns being discriminated against because you are playing a ranger then have your team mates leave halfway through the missions. To me, that is the biggest draw of using heroes over PUGs, not because heroes are more effective but heroes are just more RELIABLE.

Titles in GW1 are like more levels in GW2. It provides a reason for players to continue playing GW1 after reaching a max level of 20. If you think players discriminate based on titles now, they can also discriminate based on level differences even without titles in GW2.

Titles did not kill PUG'ing, if anything the guardian titles helped the PUGs alot. Only problem with the old pugs were lack of communication because there is usually no vent, where the guild runs always had vent and better communication.

Also PUGs are much better now because everyone knows the missions and there is less need to give directions. Last couple of characters I did legendary guardian with I pugged them all without failing a mission. In the elite areas you may get a bad PUG because people have less experience and there is less room for error. However if even two people know what they are doing then chances of success are still pretty high.

PUGs are still alive and kicking, I think they are better than they ever were.

I'd love this as well since I find vanquishing boring because often you're alone. Lack of chat and interaction. Besides, it's nice to split up to find that last foe or mob that is sometimes missed.

I spend much time pugging. I am unreliable, elitist, and I run really bad builds it seems.

I'm gonna have to go with heroes on this one. Titles only kept people playing the game longer. Without titles there would be no pugs, because no one would still be playing.

I disagree with the idea that heroes killed pugging.

I personally finished Prophecies and Factions before Nightfall even came out and by that time it was already the standard option for me to use henchmen over PUGs.

The henchmen were predictable, may not have had good builds but had moderate builds party over, behaved predictably and could be relied on. You had to learn how to use them, but at least you knew that if you used them right, you got the job done.

And even at that time, many many people on the boards were already complaining about PUGs. There was already a crisis of PUGging going on.

Heroes SOLVED the PUG problem by allowing those who already had a problem with PUGging to play the way they wanted.

I doubt many could explain it better than this, certainly far better than I ever could.
It would form the groundwork for a pretty good thesis on guild wars if ever anyone was asked to write one.

You know what killed PuGs? PuGs.

It was all the horrible players who looked up at the guild teams, and thought they could do it too. It's the players who decided to turns a PuG into something more. It was the elitist PvErs who, despite being trash, thought they were pro - and as such made PuGs impossible to form. It was the players who started trying to grasp as SOME way of making their terrible teams into pro PvE ones.

If titles weren't there, these scrubs would have used other mechanisms to decide it. Titles didn't ruin the game - it just added an additional way for scrub elitist PvEers (oxymoron right?) to exclude others - despite the fact that they themselves are constantly excluded from guilds due to their lack of skill.

Last time I checked fenix, it's the ranked, and many times accomplished players that choose to exclude the lesser, not the other way around. Titles are the most visible, most primary means to differentiate and discriminate amongst players. Am I right or wrong? Your first sentence in that statement I give credit for as it does hold weight. I disagree with the rest of it, though.

I would agree with you on this if you replaces PvErs by PvPers. And this will lead to some problem in GW2 PvP probably , since i guess people will form teams there according to their friends from GW1( or even xxx guy that they remember with y title ... )

Heroes actually killed Pugging faster than titles did. The power of being able to be 4 characters instead of one helped to kill pugging.

Pug players also helped to kill pugging because more and more were starting to act like morons and retards by running into groups of mobs, jumping back n forth in the zone in teleporter, not doing anything but standing around until some gold or green item dropped for them and the list goes on an on.

No monthly fee also has a place in why you have so many morons and retards playing the game now. Mommy lets 8 year old tommy play so she don't have to entertain him. So he goes berzerk acting like a moron and an idiot and just doing whatever tommy likes to do (which is usually pissing other players off).

Titles never kept me from pugging it was always other players and heroes mostly though. I can build such a strong set of heroes along with my own skills that I hardly even need the extra 4 henchcies so one has to ask themselves why pug when it's more entertaining and fun just to play by yourself?

I would bet money that there are a lot of unplayed-for-five-years accounts that are sitting at THK still. There were a couple of bottlenecks during the Prophecies storyline.

Aurora Glade required that you have very, very basic teamwork. Thus, hordes of GW players couldn't get through it.

Elona Reach required that you play in a non-stupid way, as well as being able to complete a task while being under slight pressure (time limit). About 1 bazillion GW players never managed to get past it.

Then good 'ol THK. The bane of GW versions of Leeroy Jenkinses everywhere. In retrospect a very easy mission, but it was enough to inspire somewhere around two million Guild Wars players to subscribe to WoW.

Ironically, during this period I found the pugs within the Fire Island chain only made me want to gouge my eyes out. Usually they make me want to gouge my eyes out and light myself on fire.

Ahh, memories . . .

PUGing is dead? I disagree.
Sure it's less common, with more and more people realising that it's more or less a futile exercise in rage.

If a good player wants to get something done, they either ask guildies for a bit of fun or take heroes and henchmen (maybe a bit of both).
A less confident player may not think he can H/H something and a poorer player simply won't be able to. If their guild is empty or they're guildless then they might try to get a PUG going. Those are the people left in pick up groups - generally poor players with a few lacking confidence. Very few decent players try to get a PUG going (they do exist).
When a decent player who knows what he's doing does get a pug going for something he can't do (say, Slaver's Exile HM), they quickly learn that it often is just a futile exercise in rage and probably won't bother again.

Other things factor in, like a really distributed population (3 games and an expansion for a thinning playerbase to spread themselves over), but you can still groups to do the Zaishen stuff.

Remember the call for Minion Masters at THK? Back before they nerfed the necro to oblivion and he could have unlimited minions? LOL I remember so well my getting through THK with all those pets on the screen. One Minion Master and One curses Necro and you could walk through that mission like it was candyland.

This has been the case for the past 4 years. Everyone can get around it.

Yup and they have as almost everyone has QUIT and gone to some other online game where grouping is more or less required and being picky isn't as big of a problem as it is in GW. Just goes to show pay to play gets better players and nicer people.

What I mean is, if you look at the best/fastest/most accomplished PvE teams throughout GW - it's always Guild teams. It's never PuGs. So these Guild teams aren't excluding - they're just set teams, so there's no room. Insert my post here It was the wannabe PuGs that started being elitist thinking they could do it since they weren't 'allowed' into the top teams.

Elitism is in every other single game out there.

You won't get into the equivalent of a high rank HA team, or guested to a top 50 guild. Say a high rank WoW arena team, without showing them some form of experience first.

I know this is kinda outa context as it's less pug orientated, but you get my point.

Heroes were the solution to the pug problem.

Even in the early days I have been on a mission or two where a player just for fun aggroed mob after mob to destroy the party.

One asked for 1k per head to rez them, while another who happened to be holding the item needed to finish the quest asked for 5 k each to finish it then went afk when we refused.

There are and where horrible players and now many players are getting bored with the game the proportion of horrible players is higher.

That's horrible in attitude not horrible builds and tactics I make no comment on builds that is up to each player to decide on.

Its been said many times the game was set up for players to form into guilds and play against each other in pvp.
The current game goes against those ideals and so on the whole fails.

When it comes to straight pve Pugs can fail a lot because they are just too hit and miss and also because many play not for fun but for achievements to take into the next game.

Guilds too fail on this score because all the members are at different points in the game doing different titles and missions.

Forget pugs and just play the darn thing solo and hope the next game you buy gets it right.

Played GW since the day Prophecies went live. PUGs killed PUGs. So many complete incompetents, griefers, leechers; you name it. PUGs were a joke.

Not very far into Prophecies I concluded that poor as the henchmen were in those days, they were far better than a typical PUG. Yes, it was possible to solo Prophecies in the early days with henchmen, barely.

My conclusion became rather general, so much so that heroes came online in Nightfall and forever put an end to the abomination known as a PUG.

it really isn't so much about not being 'forced' to pug, rather that the other options have been made much more attractive.

it didn't so much 'solve' it as 'sweep it under the rug'. in other words, anet pretty much said, "pugging is no good? then don't pug at all". they gave us numerous reasons to not want to pug, and titles are one of those reasons.

blame people all you want for their behaviour in this game, but you can't tell me that the way the game is built has no influence on that behaviour.

if titles can influence our behaviour to want to replay the game, they can also influence our behaviour to not want to pug. quite frankly, most titles are not pug-friendly. its actually pretty safe to say that most titles are actually anti-pug.