Bringing GW back to live again? Possible?

I starter playing again in the last few days. The game seems dead.
Only a couple of thousands of players seem to still be playing.
How can we bring it back to live again?
DO you guys have any ideas? I don't know if my idea may lead me to trouble on this forum, but i think anet should just make GW free to play.
No buy required, just create account and play. But this accounts can't be linked to GW2. If they become religious players like us, they buy it.
I think that a few thousands of new gamers stepping in could revitalize the game again. what do you think?

I think no... don't want the game to get crowded by people trolling the game.

They'll never make it free to play. I don't think there is a way to reinvigorate this game. Stuff like PvP is dead and I don't know what incentive they could add to attract people that wouldn't just make people farm more.

From a the perspective of a GvGer, i'd like to see the dailly tournaments be more accessible to players. At present a lot of lower ranked teams do not enter them because they are concerned about 3 things:

a) heavy loss of rating
b) Not placing top 8 gives no qualifier points --> cant play the monthly.
c) if you are not ranked top 1000, u wont recieve reward points.

Its a change that would never happen, but i would to see the rating change in an AT reduced massively. If teams were not heavily penalised for losing then i think more people might bother to play them. (would also help if you did not need to be top 1k to get RP's as it might encourage lesser guilds to participate) People will argue saying AT's get you to champ range faster etc if u are a good team, but decent teams can farm +200 rating in 2-3 days anyway from ladder if they were actually bothered about champ points :s

Every team that enters should receive qualifier points, even if its just 1. all teams should have the possibility to enter the monthly imo regardless of skill.

Obviously my post adresses tournament play, but i believe ladder is beyond help. Unless rating gains on ladder are increased to the point where not so good teams are able to farm their way into the top 100 from ladder farming alone. If top 100-200 was more easily achievable you might see more players involved in their quest to achieve champion points. This would obviously lead to the current top tier players achieving champion ranks 12+ and stuff, but at this stage i dont think people would hugely care about an already meaningless title becoming a bit more pointless.

@floor
Tourney lowranks will be farmed by strong guilds, giving them a free tourney win, while lowranks will still be discouraged by loosing in 3 minutes.

Rating changes are pointless imo, wheres the sense in making everyone a top100 while they still are on top1k level. This will not make them better, this will make top100 dumb.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Making the game totally free would attract more 12 y/o kids, who would just flame, troll and whine more than the current players. For someone who treats playing as a real hobby, or who earns some money on his own, GW is really cheap.

ofc ur entitled to ur opinion, but i dont entirely see a problem with my suggesion.

The way that a tournament runs, (assuming enough teams entered so there is 4 or 5 rounds), the first round the match ups are random, so the bad teams lose. the 2nd round all the teams who lost are then paired up. So you might win vs other bad ppl, or u might lose again. if u lose again (0/2), then you will now face other teams who are 0/2. The whole system of the tournament is designed so that you get better matches as it progresses into the later rounds. this system is obviously much more effective if more teams participate and there are more rounds.

Regarding ladder, you are sort of correct, top 100 would become far more populated by "bad" people if you like, but this is not really a problem in many ways. If top 100 became more active, higher ranked teams will get matches faster which in turns leads to less smurfing. It also gives lesser players the chance to face the top players on a regular basis without losing significant rating ( ladder is like -5?), this is good practise so people should improve as a result. And I'd also like to say that all of the beginner guilds i know, still have the mentality of "today was a good night guys, +10 rating", or vice versa if they lost rating. So if it became easier to gain rating, surely this leads to more "good nights" and thus people will generally have more fun.

From what i can tell the only real 'problem' as such, would be that the top guilds will win more champs (lol titles?) by beating the new breed of top 100 teams. But due to the nature of smurf guilds etc, this currently happens anyway if im not mistaken. At least if the top guilds actually use their main guilds, teams will lose less rating compared to being rolled by a rank 1000 smurf, have the potential for champ points if they pull off a shock win, and should improve as a result of facing better opposition regularly. Doesnt seem to be too many drawbacks to me :s

Again, feel free to voice ur opinion if u disagree

Making the game totally free would also cause an influx in botters and gold sellers etc. And it wouldn't matter much to them if they get banned, they'd just make a new account...for free? nowai :|

That's a nice idea and all but I would rather not want to see an increase in players. I think Guild Wars is already a respectable size for almost six years now and people have started coming back thanks to all of the new updates. After paying almost eighty dollars for all of the expansions and now seeing it for twenty dollars for the whole game I believe it's already generous enough for the price of Guild Wars.

Don't need to bring it back to live you just need 12-ish active people in guild to have great time and there is a lot of active guilds in game at least for pve . For pvp it could be harder .
Unless you are one of the players who ''enjoy'' playing with pugs .

Basically, it would make the game just like an internet messageboard about the game.

Been playing for almsot 4 years, I don't think it's dead... GvG is dead in my eyes but...other than that...

you sure? a week or two ago i saw plenty of people, 4 districts in a tutorial area, to me, doesn't seem dead. You gotta look in the right places, but this MMO is a significant amount livelier than it was 2 years ago.
join a guild, go to the main cities. you'll see plenty of people around.

You convinced me , i think that would be a really good idea , but i would also like to be able to play GvG alone with heroes ( or even mercenary henchs; or let's say 6 heroes+2 humans) and i think there would be some more players doing AT's then...
I don't think it would be a real problem since top guilds would faceroll most of them and people would register sec accs for nothing since there would be more guilds playing.....
It would also help for people who want to register " hard tournaments "... Some people aren't registering because there are 6-7 top50 guilds and they know people will just rage and forfeit after they lost twice...

Very nice idea though it would revalorise all PvP since rest would be really hard to fix....

Pre is where it’s at.... you missed the memo There is a new well not so new title and it is only 1k at a time and no death leveling involved. Not to mention the 3 gold collectible drops. Pre has at least 4 districts every time I log in.

To bring it back they need to announce GW2 release/specs. They need to and add some mini spoilers in GW in anticipation of the release. Scavenger hunts ~ collect things~ some NEW monsters run amuck ~ stop them now etc... all from GW2. People are ready for GW2 and sick of waiting. Unfortunately it looks to be still 9 months plus from release (at least from the recent PC gamer May edition) Don’t get me wrong they need to finish it / perfect it. Hate to have a Cyrsis 2 multiplayer fiasco like crytec did.

For people starting new it is still fun to play, but to start for collectability the market is sour ... basically done. The ecto farming frenzy has ruined it. Inflation is way too high. Sorry its not the 90k for a 20% sundering mod days. (inserts lack of auction house complaint)

The release of the HOM spiked play but people have hit there levels they want to hit and are happy with where they are at. I am sure some are still working on some titles.

On the radar

Diablo 2
Old republic
Rift is released
Etc… they pull people away and will in the future

Just watching the forums and seeing regular posters disappear is the call sign

For a game 6 years old, I don't consider it dead at all. The fact that it also still such an active fansite says a great deal as well.

There's also GW2 to consider. As yet, it has not received what I would term "a great deal" of media attention. Sure, we may hear a lot about it - but in the main, that's because we're fans of the title already, and we're quick to click on any reference to GW2. But in the general "gamer cloud" of the 'net, on TV, etc., GW2 has not been publicized to the extent it eventually will. When that starts there will likely be a significant influx of new (or returning) players to GW1, especially since the Hall of Monuments provides a tie-in between account rewards in GW2 based on your activities in GW1.

For many of the same reasons others have already mentioned, I don't think making it free (in the sense of not needing to buy a CD key) is needed... or a good idea.

Actually...if Anet made the game totally free at this point it wouldn't surprise me, it would actually make sense and go with the trend of making things more accessible (I'm referring to titles).

We paid for the game back then, now people get it for free.
We grinded for the titles back then, now people get them easily.

With all the possible places for people to be..sometimes it is hard to see how many people are playing---prophecies, factions, nightfall, eye....as well as american, european, asian and international districts---the player base is really spread over a lot of game.
as well as
lots of people are now just playing with their heroes--no need to stick around an outpost when your trusty band of ...heroes ...is there at your beck and call.

as for pvp.....cant help there as I have never done any.

Ah stereotypes, the world would cease to function if they died.

But in all seriousness Guild Wars has a lot of inactivity but it also depends where you're playing and at what time.

look at ddo and lotro GW could easily go completely f2p if they did that they would make up for the money in cash shop for costumes, etc.

btw from my online experience younger kids are more mature than older ones, i am 21 and so are all my friends around this age, we act like a bunch of idiots. i see 12-15 year olds with epic grammar and acting like adults. stereotypes are funny aren't they?

meh the reasons why i think the community looks dead is


except for most elite areas/zb's
pugs are generally not sought after, this game is filled with loads of idiots that wouldnt know how to use their pvx bar they loaded for the first time, even in elite areas youll see this commonly
because of that ^ ^
all of the old/fun areas are no longer grouped for anymore just farmed to hell too difficult to find a group or just plain not worth doing anymore
these include
-urgoz
-deep
-slavers
-tombs
-sorrows furnace
-most missions
-what the hell people only do doa fow and uw now >.> unless its part of a zb/zm. or a guild exclusive run. or if they wait over 2 hours just to form a team.

the game is over farmed
-the only things worth farming are the really rare gold skins (you wont see those until after 100+ runs),and rare materials
-greens/most mods (99% of them)/golds/etc are not worth farming anymore the most you would get for them is ~ 100-500g

its REALLY hard to sell anything in this game without dropping its price to 50-75% even with the auction page on gwarsguru youll only sell about 20% of your items without waiting for days.
-this creates a LOT of scammers that refer to their work as power trading
-most people also sit on 10-20 plat at all times because they cant be assed to wait a few hours to sell something thats worth 2k when they can just merch it and farm its worth twice over by the time they sell it.

pvp is practically dead except RA and HA and CM's

RA:basically
-IF YOU DO NOT USE A PVX BUILD EVERYONE CALLS YOU A SCRUB
^#1 reason why everyone hates pvp
-if your team doesnt win and you made just a small flaw like not brining a res your team calls you a scrub
^#2 reason
HA:
if you dont
- know anyone thats good and willing to teach it to you
- have vent/mic
- and the skills required to run their metas
they dont even bother inviting you. not that its a bad thing i can see why they do that with all the idiots around.

CM: these are actually quite decent but they have very little if any pvp
jade quarry: basically everyone is a shrine bomber!! little to no pvp what so ever
Fort aspenwood: kurzicks can easily win without even fighting by using bond monks/st shelter spam etc

the other pvp forms
AB: kurzicks lose 90% of the time unless you team with a group of people that ab regularly

GVG: 30min-1.5hr wait time just to be slaughtered by a high ranked guild or a smurfed one

and what i think the main reason is why this game is low on population is unlike 4-5 years ago this game is no longer new
-99.99% of the community now uses pvx like its a religion, most people do not use builds that are fun to them only the awful pvx builds (me included)
-the only thing that hasnt changed is the horrible pugs

I think GW2 will help GW1 out a bit in the end. If you think about it, GW2 isn't going to just be filled with GW1 players. Players new to the GW series starting with GW2 and players new to MMO's altogther. It would be foolish to think that they wouldn't want to play the prequel game in the series for fun. That'll probably be quite a bit of players.

if they make gw f2p i want my money back

There is truth to your statement, but I don't think the number of new players it will bring in will be more than or equal to the amount of players GW1 will lose when GW2 comes out. Especially since GW2 seems to have focused quite a bit on improving the PvE, which is what the vast majority of the player base plays.

So while gaining a new influx of players would be a good thing, it really doesn't make a difference if GW2 lives up to its hype and the majority of current players are no longer here because they are playing the sequel.

@OP

If something isn't dead, you can't bring it back to life.

The game is far from dead. People stopped playing with others around the time heroes were introduced. Even before 7 heroes the 3 you could have +4 henchmen was far better than playing with others simply because it only took 1 idiot to screw up the whole group. Now with 7 theres almost no need to team with humans except for zaishen quests when you just want to have the feeling that GWs is a MMO.

I hope they do not make GW f2p. After playing lotro I try to stay away from any f2p games because they tend to use stealth p2p software.

GW has been talked to death for at least 2 years. It is not dead, but have been stagnant for a long time. I don't think any change to the payment model would do the game any good, but even decrease the revenue of approximately 91k copies sold each month.

As long as new players are buying gw it will trundle on with an ever smaller player base till they pull the plug.
If gw was ever to became free as you suggest it would only work if the whole game became customisable by the users.

The games that just seem to go on forever are those that can run on a pc where one player hosts the game and other join.
Its also essential that the fan base can create new content, never seen it happen in a rpg but quite a few other multiplayer games went this rout.

The original ghost recon spawned an ever larger fan created base of map weapon and uniform mods as well as total conversion mods taking a modern war game.
Players created everything from US Civil war to space sim variants.
Most of the online driver sims kept going with player designed cars and tracks and flight sims too had extra maps and aircraft.

Players given the chance will keep any popular game going long after its sell by date.
Trouble is there is no reason for a company to give up the rights to its game and essentially make it freeware.

Wait for the release of Winds of Change. The game will suddenly become flooded with people for weeks, it happens every time there is a new content release.

"Few thousands"....lol. Maybe at any one time, but collectively? God no.

If you mean actually bringing the game back to life permanently....why? GW2 is coming. If they were making more expansions for GW1, the game would still be kicking just as much as it ever was (though PvP would probably still be dead...), but they're not, and it isn't. That's really what it comes down to; with a pay method that revolves around players buying new content, the content has to have a finite end, and once the players hit that end, they find themselves without much to do. B2P means there's no reason (beyond titles) to keep playing after you've finished the content, so you quit until there is more. This really is very simple, and it's not about getting more new players into the game.

For what it's worth, GW2 news alone has gotten tons of new players into the game already. The entire package is like $20, it might as well be free for the amount of content you get...

during events/new content updates there usually is about 100+ districts in the event areas but that only lasts for the first week of them

1. Most builds that work well are up on PvX so people use them.
2. Not bringing a res in RA or any arena is a big deal, except in special cases but especially RA because you have no control over who is on your team. Learn to play PvP.
3. Co-ordination and teamwork are the keys to success.
4. Meta for a reason.

It's "back to life", not "live". Arghhh!

GW is so cheap these days, you may as well say it's free-to-play.

Many areas of the game are relatively empty now, but many areas, particularly when a ZB, ZV, or ZM is involved, are busy.

My no. 1 issue with pvp....want to play pvp.....and ppl in pvp will say this....The more ppl join in a play (whatever build/strategy/whatever) the more they will learn....Just saying learn to play pvp...would be like me saying...."Learn that the PvP format is dying...live with it or learn to accept newcomers."

"Only a couple of thousands of players seem to still be playing"

I do hope you didn't base that on standing in an outpost and counting people entering....gw would be shut down if it was 2000 .lol.

They should get rid of the American district and merge it with Europe-English. Then get rid of the rubbish languages and just keep French (don't want them in our district do we?) German (people congregate there for SCs apparently) and get rid of International.

Further remedy this by removing Asian districts in place of International.
So no one can hide. Everyone's a winner.

I don't mean it in a way to encourage or discourage people to PvP. Instead, it is what zan the healer is posting about. He is giving PvP advice that is simply wrong and heavily biased. My issue is if you post about PvP you should be competent at PvP in order to provide correct advice to people. From what zan has said, it is quite clear that he a) does not PvP, or b) is rather imcompetent at it. This leads to misinformed ideas and if I were reading his post as a first time player I would be discouraged from PvP.

1) most builds that work well are not on pvx your confusing them as being actual builds :P they're basically a construct used as a "build off of this".
eg: if you look read most of them they say bring optional skills based on certain situations, people are only choosing from them as well when there are a lot of better skills out there for the skills they list as non optional.
if you go into ra youll see assassins bringing builds with almost no defense/survival skills and they get roflstomped by pretty much everything unless there is a strong monk in their group

what people are doing now is blindly copying pvx builds and making very hard to use build instead of a build that you would know by heart.

also people are still confusing the pvxs theres pvx.wikia.com and gwpvx.com a lot of people are going to the outdated pvx.wikia.com and using outdated builds

2)ra and loldex are the only place you would bring a res unless your team specifically says they want you to bring a res signet ive been kicked from ha/gvg groups because i brought res signet without asking them

3)well duh :P never said it wasnt

4)most metas work horribly well but a ton of people find them boring,
for most of the metas you need a ton of coordination
eg: chain lightning spike you need to spike near the same time/target(s)
for this reason the groups require vent/ some sort of verbal communication that not everyone in this game has or uses.
most people like to have vent as a option and not forced upon them

The only professions that don't bring res in HA/GvG are backline and flaggers. The only time a midline won't bring a res is if you are running a dedicated split build and your ranger or whoever would be more effective with an added snare, self heal, or damage skill.

So if you brought res as a monk, you got kicked because that shows you are clueless to what your job is supposed to be. If you got kicked for bringing res on a midline or frontline, your group was clueless and by no way represents the PvP community in any way, shape, or form.

Here's an idea: move everyone from the GW2 dev team to the Live Team.

Wait, there's no way that's happening... How about ANet just hires some new people to put out more content?

Well, no, I suppose if they were going to hire people to get work done faster, it would be for GW2... Maybe we just need to start shaking things in the game up and mess around with every skill in the game? We can turn every profession into something brand new like it's never been before?

No, wait, that would take a lot of time to do effectively, and it wouldn't be good for those of us who have gotten used to and paid for this game already... Perhaps we could just delete everything and start over? If everyone had to start from scratch again, that would certainly bring players back to earlier parts of the game and now-dead outposts and missions.

I'm quite fond of everything I've done with my characters up to this point though, and I'm sure that a lot of other people don't want to see everything get sent to square one... What about just dumping a bunch of money into the game for prizes, like those PvP tournaments?

That costs money, which would have gone towards GW2...

Huh.

Here's a little fact that's not at all breaking news: Guild Wars is an old game. It has run through its life cycle, for the most part. With their focus on its sequel, ANet is probably not going to be putting much back into this game, and could very well be done with it when Stumme and company are done programming in some skill balances, profession changes, and the last of the Movement of the World stories. From the onset of GW2, ANet's view of GW was that it wasn't something able to accommodate everything that ANet wanted it to become, so they decided that the only way to have that world and engine that they needed to make everything they wished come true was to make a new game. The only reason they'll ever be looking back at GW is to say "We did this right, so let's keep it and make it better," or, "We screwed this up, so let's not do it again, or figure out how to make it really work," and not, "Now that we've got our new dream game set up, let's go back and do lots of work on the old game!"

GW is dying, and isn't likely to turn around without becoming free or being funded by a mysterious and deep-pocketed benefactor, and even then might not be able to do it due to its age.

taking this out of context ****** warning **** /troll start

this is what i mean xD the "pvp community" isnt just the high tier competent people it consists of the new/low tier and bottom feeders as well what a high tier player sees in pvp is completly opposite of what a low tier/bottom feeder sees just saying. "your not a high tier player so you have NO say" just shows how competitive the pvp community is

/end trolling

anyway im gonna stop arguing here

edit: sorry put hostile instead of competitive xD