The decline of Guild Wars

Guild Wars is ruined. You're probably wondering what I mean by that, after all it has a strong fan base, a lot of support and they're producing a second game. However compare the game now to the game when it first came out. It's like comparing a 9.5 superb game to a 5.5 "mediocre at best" game. My thoughts on this are as follows.

First, Guild Wars was built on a few principles. The base architecture or building blocks you might say. A-Net hasn't made any secret about their recipe for greatness - two of these building blocks were "skill before grind" meaning skill should always win out over someone who has played 1100 hours and gotten all the gear and "teamwork not soloing" meaning you're supposed to work together to accomplish objectives. Both of these building blocks have been eroded over time and I'll explain how and why below.

First, with the expansion, Nightfall, and Factions added to Prophecies the number of people waiting in any given mission declined drastically, meaning that someone who wants to play the prophecies campaign isn't able to play with full groups anymore. On top of that, A-Net added in hero henchmen. Gone are the days when you would play through a mission with 7 complete strangers, lament your losses, argue, support each other, cheer each other on, and feel the thrill and rush of victory when you rocked out the last boss of the mission. Those were good times, and it created camaraderie that is now lost. When entering missions you now see two people pairing up with three henchmen each. The necessity of teamwork is essentially dead now.

Skill before grind. In fact, by adding the number of skills, professions, armor sets, runes, and everything else that has been added since proph has come out the learning curve is so steep that even seasoned vets lose their way in the jumble. Additionally the new play styles that have been added to the game, while exciting, tend to cause balance issues and also make it impossible to build a skill set that can guard against all play styles. Some would argue that's not balanced however if the idea is that with careful preparation and practice that skill will prevail then creating a build that can play on even footing against all styles or most should be possible. Sadly in todays world of guild wars there are some play styles you just cannot defeat because with 8 skills you can't guard against all these styles. I believe this makes skill pointless as the real issue then becomes whether or not you're lucky enough to avoid getting thrown into a match with someone who carries one of the many skills that can overturn your build with the click of a button.

Those are my points, I find the erosion of the necessity of teamwork to be a huge issue for PvE whereas the necessity to grind for skills and experience is now an issue for PvP more than PvE. I will post solutions to this in the near future.

Q.q q.q q.q q.q

A) GW is not ruined, it's just OLD. People stopped playing because they had already done everything, not because the game suddenly became bad.

B) Group play was very troubled even before Nightfall, due to the trouble asociated with PUGs. Many people, myself included, had already decided to do everything they possibly could even before Nightfall ever came out.

C) "Skill, not grind" is exactly the reason PUGs failed so much and led to people preferring AI company.

D) I have a feeling that your solutions will generally go along forcing people to group, eliminating heroes, probably. This will only ram you back into the problems of pre-hero days, with the added absence of players.

This is the second thread like this in 2 days. Welcome to 2011 not 2007 (eotn release).

I played on a clean account with no help from anyone and it still is Skill>grind, until you hit EOTN and DoA where rep titles are needed.

Half of your argument is false. One of the core design decisions was the ability to play with others or alone with the aid of AI teammates. The introduction of heroes in Nightfall merely upgraded the ability of the AI, but it never ran counter to the design.

ANet plans to address the diffusion of the population with Embark Beach. They can hardly be blamed for the population of players in a game with no expansion content since 2007. Their original intent was for players in PvE to play a campaign and leave, then return for new campaigns. It was never intended for players to remain in the original setting.

I would have to agree with you. I can't count the number of times I go into a place for mission and try and find a group and get "sorry, I am doing this with heroes" or some other blow off. This has become a solo game and with the exception of guilds, it is almost impossible to meet people with the same play style that you can become buddies with. It is frustrating.

I believe thats why GW2...is coming out ? cuz GW1 is dead cept on festivals ?...

Also didnt u hear A-Net wants to update the game from 3 heros to 7 heros ...what then?

And yes PvE in Proph is dead like in Faction and NF aswell , but thats why you got Guilds for ....to meet new people and to help you .

Forums exist for problems to be brought up. If you don't like it, why are you here?

Solutions for the issues above. Though I know that with progress on Guild Wars 2 underway and nearing completion A-Net likely has its hands full I'm posting because I really hope the same mistakes aren't made on GW2 and hopefully someone in A-Net will see this and decide to make a change to help alleviate some of the problems.

Issues with teamwork: Put a maximum cap on the number of hero henchmen allowed into a team to do a mission. Two per GROUP would help bring back the teamwork aspect of GW. Meaning that you would need 5 other real teammates even if you brought your heroes along. The other issue is that we've added too many lower level missions. When stand alone games were put out they added many more missions which diluted the player pool, thus making more intelligent henchman more of a necessity. In future, making the "leveling up" missions exclusive to one game and simply adding end game content will help keep missions saturated with players thus allowing players to play with players instead of bots. For current games I'm not sure there's an easy fix for this, but I hope that the same mistake isn't made in GW2 when new add ons are released.

The other solution for the skill before grind problem is fairly easy to conceptualize. Start deleting skills. Reset professions back to 150 skills per profession, delete some that just aren't working and recast some of the skills and abilities so that they work a little differently. Simplifying the skill set becomes necessary after a certain point and that point was reached at Nightfall. EotN didn't help either when things got so complicated that devs had to create pvp and pve skills because of balance issues.

Granted these solutions offered are not panaceas and may create ripple problems, for example if done improperly then deleting and changing skills might give rise to other overly unbalanced builds. However if you play other MMOs you might remember that Blizzard devs realized the problems with their talent trees becoming so complicated that players were no longer enjoying the customization. That issue has hit Guild Wars and this is one good solution to the problem.

This ^ I disagree with. You need to read the inner flaps on the origional Guild Wars Prophecies boxes. It never said it was intended for teamwork as the major function of the PVE game. It said and I quote That ^ is on the inside flap of the ORIGION Prophecies game box. Also while it did say there would be skill > time features it also did NOT say it would be the SOUL way to play the game.

As far as the statement "skill > time" In that respect it says and I quote again Not how much wealth or items you will have or titles. A mere statement about your BATTLES and the skill you will learn and use in those battles. That was there and is still there in the latest version of the game.

So we got exactly what was stated on the game flaps and on the boxes. Some players just don't comprehend well I suppose.

I'd have to agree with the OP as well. But the argument is not new. Most have known this for several years now. As for one of the points made, imo, heroes were introduced because prior to EotN, players had difficulty getting into pugs. Anyone remember the frustrations for assassins and mesmers getting accepted into pugs?

As for someone who has played the GW from the beginning, Anet has changed the game a lot and have lost many players. But new players have come and many have returned. There is still a large base of players from what I've seen. Compare that to other MMOs and I'd say GW is still one of the best.

I'm not sure what the first sentence means. However I have been an avid player since release and I can tell you for a fact that this game was NEVER intended to played alone or solo-able at all. Henchmen were only added because they knew sometimes you wouldn't be able to get a full group. Arena Net released statements on many occasions backing up the fact that Guild Wars was made for group play and builds that were made to solo (like the 55 monk) were nerfed into nothingness because of this. And no, it's not because it was ruining the economy, if that was the issue they'd have just killed the drop rate on ectos from the start.

As for players remaining in the original setting, I think you're making some presumptions there. There's no evidence to support that and even if there was, how would that be relevant to the current situation? Let me put it this way, the games were designed as stand alone so you didn't have to purchase multiple games to start playing and this helped them avoid subscription fees. Since it was a business decision I don't think it's possible to say that they didn't want people playing proph or factions missions after NF was released. That's just silly.

I understand your argument and I see how it contributed to the decline, but it is no longer contributing to the decline, so there's not really a reason to post about it. These things are either being fixed or cannot be fixed until GW2.

GW1 has to provide options for solo play because its playerbase is decreasing. However, team-based play is still encouraged with Z-quests and it will be made much easier with the upcoming Embark update. Embark Beach should fix this problem pretty well.

There's not really much Anet can do about the skills and professions they already released, other than keep a bunch of skills underpowered in order to indirectly remove them from play. Deleting them would lead to a shitstorm that no one wants to see, on both our end and the dev's. Think about PvE mobs; Anet would have to change sooo many skill bars if they suddenly found a shitload of the mobs with most of their skills deleted. And then there's the QQ, of course.

The game is old. The model was never designed to last as it has. It was intended to be sustained through regular updates, something which hasn't happened in 3 years, but I'll get back to that.

ArenaNet recognised that whilst the model worked as a proof of concept, it had some large flaws if they kept on in the same vein, some issues of which you raise.
With new chapters they introduced an unsustainable compexity of skills; they spred ther playerbase thin.

What you're asking for are a smaller skill base, less reliance on NPC teammates, greater flexibility of playstyle to be able to better balance players together, whilst bolstering the benefits of team work

It'd be a difficult task. I bet if they started now it would take 4 or 5 years. Good job they stared in 2007 when they decided to make GuildWars 2

My powers of comprehension work very well, thank you. I may have said this before, but I'm not getting information solely from a box. Statements released by A-Net as well as the patches they've made support exactly what I claim. However things changed and they actually started in this forum. There was a group of us that wanted customizable henchmen and while this may be a case of "careful what you wish for" I was supportive of the idea too. After seeing just how much it eroded the fundamentals though, my opinion has changed.

However much you may wish to deny it, Guild Wars is an MMO which means it was made to play with other players. That's what draws us in - can you imagine playing this game with a bunch of bots? zing.

And way to misquote the box as well as the intent of the messages.

In response to the difficulty of finding and working in pugs - I've always loved having mesmers in my groups. Their hexes and interrupts are profoundly effective. I never had any trouble finding a group as a mesmer either. Assassins were so plentiful back in the day that there were just too many and too often people played them incorrectly, leading to the original belief that sins are weak. However now that is no longer a problem, and oftentimes I've seen people complain about sins being overpowered. I believe that today no sin should have an issue finding a position as damage dealer.

Yes, there are issues with PUGS. Yes there are going to be times you lose, times you get into arguments with the monk, and someone's connection dropped that one time. But I also remember the times we blew through 4 missions with a bunch of strangers because we dominated the hell out of the game and spent the entire time telling nerd jokes and having a damn good time. When you weigh that with the static bots you carry around there's just no comparison.

More likely it'd just drive off the people who don't want to deal with others while trying to play a game, and put off new players who can't find people to group with that'll accept anything less than "steamroll this in a minute flat".

Last time anyone checked, none of the rep titles are needed for anything.

Hold the press!

I want to address some key issues people here are talking about.

What's with the decline in GW
First, people's paradigms are changing. Meaning society in America for the most part are brought up thinking newer is better and that is one reason why gamers jump from one good game to a better. Anet is still defining their game Guild Wars as Skill>grind for a reason, because the company's mindset is for gamers to stick to GW for Skill>grind if gamers truly believe that. Now, I would like to talk to Anet and get their thoughts on why that is. I believe that Anet wants to only engage people who value skill>grind.

I find Guild Wars is a very complex game that only certain people can play realizing that its more than just adding skills its about comprehension of those skills. I certainly do not like the comprehension of skills and such, its as difficult as solving a rubik's cube.

There I said it Guild Wars is like a Rubik's Cube once you solved it or give up you go and find something that's easier or find the next best thing.

The Issue with Pugs
I remember one time as an assassin someone asked me somewhere in EOTN to join into to their group to do some hunting I said sure. As soon as we went out to the explorable area they were waiting for me to run them (they were all monks). I hate the presuppositions that they made (They all left, because I was noob. I had Kurzick armor for that matter). The only issue with pugs is that you can't really find a group it revolves around being at the right place at the right time and I think that there should be some sort of Calendar in an IRC channel or forum of that matter.

I think you guys need to take a step back and see how else these issues can be viewed in an alternate way.

GW is dead because GW2 is coming out, why waste doing anything when it will mean nothing when GW2 comes out

To be honest I'm not really sure I understand what your position is on these issues...

"However much you may wish to deny it, Guild Wars is an MMO which means it was made to play with other players. That's what draws us in - can you imagine playing this game with a bunch of bots? zing."

Not only can I imagine it, I do!

When Prophecies went live, I logged on that evening. And there was Pre where there was not a lot of party activity. Just two quests. Then onward and upward where I discovered that getting into a group took a Very Long Time. Sure, I liked good PUGs when they were good. But more often they were horrid. I began to develop a real affection for my henchies. In the end I finished Prophecies with them.

Factions, I played Assassin and it was a much better grouping experience when it first came out. Kept my eye on the monk's health bar and when it twitched ran to the monk's defense. Made me popular with enough monks to keep me in groups. Those were good times! So, yeah grouping could work I had to admit.

Nightfall, I found a good guild; all of us lone wolves most of the time, but the grouping for serious work or helping new players was great. And so on into EoTN. These days, the guildies are all off playing other games after finishing HoM. So when I play now it is with the heroes and hench. They never let me down.

Don't mind playing solo, really.