What's your stand on GW1? You think Anet's doing a good job?

Umh, i don't play so long to talk about the oldest treaths...but imo:
-Anet has done errors in the past (and present) which could be easily avoided, and this is really a shame.
-"Worst thing happened to GW is..." GW2 imo. Drained wayyy too much forces from GW team afterall. Which leads to every other problem (balance, lack of new stuff, slow reaction to players ect.).

This single sentence describes perfectly everything that is wrong with GW1


I'm telling you, after all that was happened to GW1, GW2 better be the best game ever.I have never seen a company neglect their previous product so badly before.Normally they wait for the sequel to come out to throw the previous installment in the trash.

qft^ took the words out of my mouth

people need to realize the game has no monthly fee, so expecting arenanet to cater to their every needs is ridiculous. sure arenanet has made mistakes, but they more than made up for them afterwards. and I see all these posts about proph and factions being the "good old days." that may be true, but that is because back then, people actually played guild wars rather than afking, speed clearing, and title hunting with heroes all day. I dont think the games decline has much to do with anet, but it has to do with a decline in players and a shift in their priorities.

I think ANet did a pretty good job, I mean this game is nowhere near perfect but it's brought me back for four years now.

I'm glad that the cash shop was just costumes and other useful items instead of overpowered weapons and armor. I enjoyed all three campaigns and I still to this day go through just for the storyline again and again.

EoTN ... It just wasn't that great. I mean I loved how Gwen was thrown in and it was nice seeing her after all she's been through but other than that I have to force myself to go through EoTN.

I'm glad that they decided to make GW2, I mean seeing that they were going to make another expansion before they decided EoTN. Guild Wars in my mind was and still is a bittersweet experience and I've never regretted playing this game for as long as I have had it.

Nightfall was my favorite campaign though. Yeah. That guy's article was bashing it like it was EoTN haha.

I think Guild Wars suffered heavily a few years ago, but it's gotten better since. Although major portions of the game are still imbalanced, and although several decisions I simply cannot agree with (Smiter's Boon'ing Smiter's Boon, PvP / PvE skill split, removing HB / TA ...), the post-Izzy Live team have done a much better job handling the game. Stuff like WiK, 7H, rewards for vanquishing, etc are all good changes.

Game balance at the moment is ... not good. At least the PvP scene is getting better, certainly better than it was a few months back. PvE is actually more balanced than some people would give it credit for (7H-wise), but big parts of PvE are still grossly imbalanced.

I think people complaining about grind are largely being silly, because Guild Wars already has little grind compared to more traditional MMOs. Also, there was a change some time ago making the allegiance / reputation-related titles from taking that much grind to be effective. Just imagine what these same people would say if ANet introduced a 17-25 damage Sword that drops from Dhuum at the same rate as Dhuum Soul Reapers. Grind more, people. I think some players are just too spoiled for their own good.

I think GW1 was a great game with severe flaws, but the pluses outweigh the minuses. That's why I'm still playing it. I've made many good friends via it and played thousands of hours, so no regrets.

I strongly disagree with the Wiki article and the endorsement thereof.

First, the article falsely asserts that GW has failed. It has not. It is one of the big games of the period, it has sold magnificently and has generally well satisfied the people who made it. As a matter of fact, it did so well that NCsoft gave Anet an amazing amount of time (and time=wages+rent=lottsa money) to get GW2 right.

GW1 is an amazing but old game. That's it. The core philosophies are wonderful. The engine is old and limits innovation. The content is nice enough, and was wonderful initially - it's just that we've bloody well played all of it 10 times (literally for me, I have 10 characters who have done all the quests in the game).

The only bad thing that has happened to GW1 was the abandonment of the expansion model. Simply, the expansion model turned out to be rather problematic in terms making the game overly complex. The switch to GW2 instead of more expansions is what lowered the amount of incoming content. This has resulted in:
-overplayed content becoming stale
-lack of new content
But that's not necessarily bad. Anet are still hard at work preparing new content in the form of a new game for us. Bad for GW1, but not for the players.

So, what's the problem? The players. Instead of accepting that the game is old and that we could stand to take a break and play something new for a while, we persist in repeating old content time and time again, and then wonder why the hell it's not fun. And since nobody these days has the ability to use a mirror, everyone blames Anet as it's their fault and not our own for keeping playing the same game way more than it was meant to be played.

Doesn't anyone see a logical conclusion that if you pay a finite amount of money, you're supposed to play a finite amount of content and then STOP?

A side note here: gamers have in recent years acquired a rather strange notion that they're entitled to additional support of a game after the game has launched. Not just patches that make the game playable, you know, to make the original product what it should be (bug free), no, they all expect more content. Why? Content costs money to make. Money you have to get back somehow. So, either you get the money by selling the content, or by using the content to make people buy more of what you do sell - all beyond is simply just generosity of the developer.

Once this is taken into consideration, we can see that Anet are, given no monthly fee, offering a surprising amount of additional content to us free of charge and exercise great restraint in what content they do charge for.

(Posting now, additional post regarding the 7 heroes coming up)

Hold on now, if henchman were changed to have the functionality of heroes from the beginning or at least changeable skills, attributes, would it still be a mistake? Now there is the add hero, leave party to help others out. They could easily implement a system where the player who brought henchman/heroes from their account with their skills leaves the skills revert to a default bar. I personally enjoy heroes, henchman just don't have the skills to do what I need. The problem may lay in the balance of skills and not heroes at all.

Lost a long post about 7 heroes, and can't retype it all. Short version:
-GW1 requires skill and coordination to succeed, and all human groups all too often didn't manage to be good enough.
-henchmen were lower level with average builds and only focused on your own target - but in that they already beat most normal groups with poor builds and no coordination at all
-as a consequence, many people, me included, stopped playing with humans if at all possible long before heroes were even introduced. Enough to warrant Anet's attention as a costumer sub-section
-heroes were added for those players. They didn't kill grouping - the people who heroes were meant for wouldn't want to group anyway even if you never added heroes.
-7 heroes are a separate issue. They are a continuation of the above philosophy and are primarily there to make up for the dwindling player base. Things that used to be very hard (WiK with henchmen... brrr....) now became possible to do.
-Apart from UW, FoW and DoA, the 7 hero update has practically not affected my grouping habits. I've long played with H/H, and avoided players if at all possible.

i'm sick of seeing people says this BS...i can assure you the day GW2 is released..you will be first in the line...aswell as the other 5000 who say this...you will say 'no i wont'...but seriously you will..ppl who say this should have a temp ban for lying out there arse.

/rantover

I disagree. In my eyes, there is no reason for me to buy or commit to an MMO, pay-to-play or not, the moment it comes out. Look at all the ambitious MMOs that have come out. Warhammer.. Rift... Both games that brought huge hype that died a few months in. You lose nothing by waiting to see if the game will hold up, and the same goes to any online focused game these days.

The difference between online games and single player games is that the enjoyability and success of the game is much more unpredictable due to it's reliance on a decent player base. GW1, though not a true MMO, is proof of this and it's addition of 7 hero parties much caused by it and the drop in players.

Waiting to see if the player base holds up is something that many players will choose to do, and it is something that I hope Anet takes into consideration, because if there's one thing I've learned from lurking and watching MMOs, is that most of them just fall. A person it not at fault for taking this into consideration before they buy a game.

Now, that isn't to say I don't have hope for GW2. If anyone can be successful in an innovative way, it'll be that game. I just hope it holds up to reality.

People using hyperbole while complaining about an online game, yeah never seen this before.

The game is fine. Actually it is more then fine, it is great. ANet didn't do a perfect job, but the majority of the problems comes more from the fact the game is getting old then anything else. The older a game gets, the more streamlined it will be due to how the community evolves. At first everyone is eager to try stuff out and doesn't care that much about efficiency regarding build, teamsetup etc. They simply want to play through the game and get the small things (max armor, a decent weapon, an elite skill or two etc). There is always going to be theorycrafters refining builds purely from an efficiency standpoint and sooner or later people are going to adopt those builds, which will be the death of innovation. Everyone not using those builds are going to be shunned and the focus of the game goes from exploring and experiencing the game to getting the most done in X time. It is inevitable, GW isn't the first online game this has happened to.

Also regarding the titles being grindy, who cares? So what if Drunkard is too expensive or Legendary Vanquisher is too time consuming to get, they are only there for show anyway. Even the titles connected to skills provide no noticeable benefit when maxed compared to what you get by simply doing the main quests most of the time.

Bit of a no win situation for anet given that they do actually listen to the players.
many alterations to the game have been based on comments I have read in this very forum.

Criticism has been made that when a bad situation is pointed out they take many months to remedy it, I wouldn't know how long these things take to fix so couldn't judge.

To be fair to them they did take the Mesmer Assassin Ritualist and Dervish classes and take them from some of the most underused and despised classes to being some of the most popular.

When the only PvP skill balances in the past three years that didn't buff something to stupidly broken levels were nerfs to skills that they just buffed, it's not a good sign.

Look it up if you don't believe me.

The info in the link was a bit dated, but mostly spot on.
Anet failed hard at PVP. They had a great foundation for PVP, then proceeded to full it with wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of shit. It's something that you desperately wanted to love, but they forced you to hate.
The PVE is ok. It's easy enough and not as grindy as some other games, at least at the basic level. It's the extras that are grindy.
The bottom line is that the only reason people still play GW is that there's no subscription fee. If GW weren't a one-time purchase, and people had to pay monthly fees, this game would have been over and done with long ago.

Well before I finished reading your whole article I noticed you seem to think
this is a single player game? Who cares if "Mages kill Warriors" etc. This isn't a 1v1 game, it's a team play game where usually 4-8 players gather and use team work & strategy to take down the other team.

Balance doesn't exist in an mmo? Were you around for early GW? Pvp was insanely good.

got to be my favourite post from reading through this thread, completely agree with everything. good read =]

All interesting reads with these posts so far, for the most part this has been a intelligent conversation and I thank everyone for that.
To me if even Anet shut down this game, I would find a way to create a private server to keep playing it. With that said.

There have been plenty of mistakes, corrections and great adds. However to me this is the best online game I've played. At one point I felt like GW1 had nothing more to offer, the game was boring, the game sucked. So I went and tried other games like Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO), Warhammer ect...
After several months (3-4) playing trying out all these other games that went limited free to play accounts. I began to see again, how GW1 was so great. Little things here and there, I could do in Gw1. In LotRO I mostly now just parkour on the roof tops...lol

I guess my point is one as to sometimes just walk away from something to get the full picture.

I think too many people look at the days of Prophecies with the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. But that always seems to be the case. Personally I find Prophecies to be the least-interesting and most-flawed of the campaigns, and the slowness of it kept me from getting into GW for about a year.

I think Anet is doing fine. They've largely moved on from GW1, but it's an old game. The fact that they still keep it going and they still keep up with updates (which have gotten decently numerous in the past year). Updates that are, for the resources they still have available, actually quite huge. But it can't keep everyone happy forever, which is what I think a lot of people are expecting. If you've played for six years, and you're bored...go play something else. It won't hurt, I promise. There are many, many other games and genres out there.

And why do people complain about titles being grindy? Yeah, they are. So what? They're not required. You do not need to max Drunkard or Kurzick or Vanquisher to get through the game. You'll live just fine without maxing those.

GW is the only MMO I've ever enjoyed, and I've tried a pretty wide variety of them - both free and paid ones. None has ever kept my attention for longer than a couple of days; GW has for nearly three years now. No, it's not perfect by any means. I think the design for the elite areas is terrible, for example. But, despite it being an aging game, it's still a far sight better than anything else in it's genre.

There's this game called Counter-Strike. A sizable number of people still play it.

I can sum the problem up this way: during the period after the initial release when expansions were being made, we paid MMO prices but didn't receive top-tier MMO content.

Factions gave us a great but short-lived PvP environment after the initial issues with Ritualists in GvG were addressed. The PvE content was unspectacular; the re-use of instances felt forced and it wasn't the art team's finest hour, but we did get a couple of interesting endgame missions out of it.

Nightfall provided a great deal more PvE content but trashed PvP balance. PvP never fully recovered from the triple whammy of replacing the paid junkets with the AT system, the reduction of every format to a small number of degenerate builds, and [iQ] breaking the GvG mechanics in Germany.

The less said about EotN, the better.

Since then, the game has been free and we've been getting what we pay for. The crux of players' complaints is that many other legacy games have succeeded in establishing an enjoyable long-term steady state, but GW has not. ANet keeps shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic without solving anything, which simultaneously makes it very costly to come back to the game after a long absence but rarely improves the experience for the players that remain.

I hate to piggyback off Marvin here, but there's also the fact that the game is still being sold. Should people who have just bought the game accept its shortcomings, because it's an older title?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. ArenaNet is well aware that adding the new professions made huge problems in the game. Which is why they stopped adding new campaigns and went in a different direction with GW2.

It is easy to say they should have committed more resources to GW1 after they decided to develop GW2, but they didn't have the funds at that time. I'm sure if NCSoft had increased their budget that long ago, they would have brought in more staff in 2007 instead of 2010.

Overall, I think that knocking one of the most successful on-line games is ridiculous. Every game out there has its good points and bad points. Come back and complain when you personally have created a "perfect" game. Meanwhile I will keep playing the game that has kept me occupied for almost 5-1/2 years.

i thought they did a okay job until they started delaying updates. was okay when it was a day to two weeks. but when it got longer i knew anet was going downhill some. xD

Agreed with most of this post. However, with regards to the expansion model. They may have abandoned it to stop GW1's complexity, but had continued to create updates to at least try to appeal to the player base. This problem created meta shifts and horrible balancing. I would have been happy if they kept things as they were, even just after Nightfall was released.

Their attempt to bring professions back into play and to have "GvG updates" were and still are horrible meta shifts and power creeps that the game didn't need.

The game is about skill, everyone agrees on that. But Anet's constant updating has consistently baby fed the player base easy wins in both PvE and PvP. They should have realised this but they thought they were doing a good job by making the majority of the whining kids happy. Sorry, i meant players.

As long as Arenanet focus on sticking to their guns rather than sucking up to whining kids. I mean players, then the community of players who actually have half a brain will respect them more for creating something that can stand on its own legs.

I was, in some fashion, enjoying what was being said. I had hope that maybe some well thought suggestions could be made.

But then I came across this:

Yes. Anet is very similar to a dictatorship responsible for the murder of 6 million human beings and an Iron Fist rule, which the world hasn't seen the likes of since and hopefully never will.

That's when I closed the page, snapped out of my delusion of hope that this would be constructive, and kissed the credibility goodbye with the realization it's the same regurgitated wailing that's been said dozens of times before.

Been there, done that, y'know? But since this is a discussion about the state of the game based on this..article...I'll give my summary of thoughts.

Anet isn't perfect. No game is perfect. No one can create the perfect game because the perception of perfect differs in each individual.

Has Anet screwed many things up? Yes. Have they gotten things right? Yes. If you made Guild Wars, would you have screwed stuff up? Yes. If I made Guild Wars, would I have screwed things up? Yes.

Could they have just spit out the same generic MMO like a dozen other MMO companies? Yes. Did anet take a chance in 2005 in making something different? Yes. Did it work? Sales say yes. We're still here 6 bloody years later, so longevity says Yes.

Could things have been different? Yes. Could things have been better? Yes. Could things be worse? Yes.

Is Hindsight knowledge? Yes. Will knowledge be passed to correct the ways of GW1 in Gw2? We'll soon find out....

In the meantime, dust off your tears, be a man, or woman, pull yourself together, and play...if you want. That "Choice" thing.

It's just a game. You didn't lose your life savings in a stock market crash. You can still eat, drink, and have a roof over your head and the freedom to emo-lash at a video game from the comfort of your warm home, while in places in this world, people are being shot in the streets against the true oppressors this world had the nerve to spit out.

That is, of course, you believe they (Anet) really are like the Third Reich, in which case, sleep with one eye open. They're coming for you.

I think they've done an amazing job. There's not a game out there that I've enjoyed as much, and it's free to boot, after buying the game - better content, cheaper, and better service than other MMO's.

They've made mistakes, to be sure, but it's better mistakes than I've seen in other games. I'll give them that. Overall, it's been many more pluses than minuses. The posts above (Iuris in particular) describe my opinions pretty well.

yup..

i have absolutely no complaints for a game that is ftp and SIX years old. oh sure sure, i probably could find something to pitch a fit over. paint my face and tie a black sock around my arm. but seriously, why? considering the crop of near perfect crap that has been released since 2k4, (mostly premium sub, i might add), the endless abuse of hype vs what is actually released and pay to beta embarrasments to highly respected IP's such as Conan, Star Trek/Wars, Marvel, DC, on and on? I would say that focusing on the "dot" instead of the "big picture" is way beyond grounds for a solid if not drama filled argument like this.

If there is one skill that playing mmo's should teach any player of said mmo's and one that is obviously overlooked a great deal.. that is adaptation. The argument of balance in pvp and it's automatic pigeon hole response to overall game quality or "hey, this game is broken, you no fix fas enough" has been around since AC darktide, daoc, shadowbane and even today with darkfall and to some extent.. Eve.

enough.

GW is a SOLID experience. It runs like glass on most all systems, and even runs on nets. There is a proven track record of blogs, patch info, dialogue with players and so on. Rivaled only by very few other developers (if any), there have been promotions, prizes, community managers that give a toss and many fond and fun memories past and present for a good deal of players.. past and present. The game has been alive for six.. years.

Now.. i have to think.. which games have i played or still play that have been around for that long. hmmmm. oh hai! Eve online, DAoC, and Asherons Call (Dtide server), AND that have the loyalty and respect of said games (from its players), AND desperately want a Pt 2 for those same games. (well Pt 3 for AC LOL to be fair) AND, (my last and) still have people who still pay to complain.. LOL>

As far as I'm concerned.. they move ONE dev off GW2 to make a six year old game "balanced" or "fixed" for the folks who would complain if they had a billion bucks stuffed in thier pockets and could build their own mega mmo and STILL complain, content. Then, there would be cause for argument.

Keep up the good work Anet. Ty for an awsome six years! and look forward to another six with GW2!

cheers
d

ps.. i love you all.

I started playing when NF came out and i still love this game. They have made updates that clearly show they still want to improve this game. The best thing is that there are no monthly payments. That's the only reason i'm able to play this game. I think they have and still has been doing very well.

Godwin's Law saves the day once again, well done.

This game has had an amazing run. The fact that there are still complaints about it to this day speaks volumes about how much people really do love it in spite of all it's failings and flaws over the years.

Since SF, no.

They got better ever since the change in the Live Team.
Linsey Murdock was nice making quests, but under Mr. Stumme's direction, they are no longer afraid of breaking with old customs and conventions and change stuff. Most of the time for the better.

Lately with most updates I think: "Gods, this is how it should have been in the first place!!", and If I had a time machine, I'll go show the guys in ANet back in 2005: "See? This is not a good idea! You should do what they did in this update instead!".

ANet definitely catches a lot of heat that should be caught by the parent company. NCSoft was in a financial position in 2007 to commit the needed funds to ANet and simply chose not to do it. Evidently Korean MMO developers do not attend American business schools, where they would learn that it is vastly more expensive to lure new customers than satisfy existing ones, and that it is often even more expensive to lure former customers back.

That's probably a more accurate way of putting it, at least for the PvP community. The original experience was unique and wonderful, but it is gone and there is no getting it back.

You can't fully relive the original experience with most legacy games, but in most cases there are a lot fewer changes from that experience.

I think Anet is good at recognizing the problem... but instead of creatively solving the problem... they dress it up with bells and whistles...

GW has been rightly called an accidental success. The devs got a lot of things right the first go round without really knowing how or why. Then they spent a very long time making unwise balance changes and producing content that was interesting and enjoyable, but also inseparably entwined with intractable balance problems. Beginning with the Live Team = Linsey era, we started to see changes that were about as good as could be expected within the constraints of not being able to solve certain major problems.

I guess a few lessons to take to GW2 are:

• Pick a challenge model and stick with it.
  
  In general, video game difficulty comes in two flavors: the "worthy adversary," and the "dime a dozen horde." The "worthy adversary" is something like Deep Blue the chess program or Ryu from Street Fighter. They play by the same rules you do, and generate challenge by doing a near-human-quality (or better) job at it. The "dime a dozen horde" is the huge pack of gimmick-driven foes you find in Diablo II, or side-scrolling beat-em-ups like double-dragon, or spaceship/WWII top/side-scrolling shooters. Horde foes are dumb and weak, except for a 1-dimensional gimmick that always defeats the player if the player faces it head-on. Challenge is created by confronting the player with a handful of gimmicks simultaneously, forcing him or her to find a solution that overcomes all of those gimmicks, and then permuting the foe setup to present a new puzzle.
  
  A huge part of GW's problem is that the devs made a very sloppy shift from the "worthy adversary" model to the "dime a dozen horde" model and ended up with a dysfunctional hybrid. It probably didn't help that they don't seem to have been aware that's what they were doing. At the outset, monster mobs were meant to resemble unskilled PvP teams. (Think Thirsty River.) Starting around the release of Ruins of the Tombs, the devs stopped trying to make the monsters better imitators of PvP players, and instead started giving them gimmicky monster skills (Finger, Afflicted Explosion, etc.), bigger team sizes, and bigger stats. The end result is that we have a bunch of skills and mechanics that are suited for facing off against themselves in a duel of wits, but we're forced to use them as gimmick-killers. Some of them prove too effective, many of them prove worthless, and few of them are "just right."
  
  For GW2, the devs need to pick one model and stick with it. If you want to be Diablo 4, be Diablo 4; If you want to be Counterstrike with Swords, be Counterstrike with Swords. Just don't give us another mutant hybrid. (You could hybridize, but you'd do it differently. For example, you could make all humanoid foes use strong AI to play effectively by the same rules as the players, while making all animalistic foes dumb with a 1-dimensional gimmick. What you shouldn't do is garble both together in the same foe.)
  
  
• Don't make it so easy to be terrible at the game.
  
  The average GW player is absolutely terrible compared to the best players (or even the average Guru-goer). (If you don't believe me, try PUGing the ZB and ask people to ping bars.) This leaves us with a problematic skill-level distribution among the playerbase where any difficulty level the devs pick for new content leaves a segment of the playerbase unsatisfied.
  
  Part of the problem is due to unavoidable variances in player intelligence and dedication. Part of the problem is due to the player being given a choice among a huge pool of potential builds, the overwhelming majority of which are profoundly awful. Part of the problem is due to mechanics that are really opaque ("Conjure ignores armor? But it says 'fire damage'..."). And part of the problem is that feedback is poor. Except for the Factions missions with par times, it's hard to tell if you completed a goal with flying colors, or just completed it. Especially if you've never actually seen a good team do it, and especially given the cognitive bias to think that we personally are above average at everything. It's also hard to untangle how well you personally did from how well the team did.
  
  For GW2: (1) Make the pool of potential builds more flat in quality, and the median build closer to the top. Failing that, make the pool smaller. (2) Make the mechanics more transparent. (Or at least publish the underlying math on the wiki.) (3) Give players better sources of feedback to help them know that they suck, so they can better begin the process of learning how not to suck.
  
  
• No more monks. GW's monk was a groundbreaking character class. Prior to GW, healers were mere red bar pushers, if the existed at all. Unfortunately, they took over the game. As compared to a no-monk world, both PvE and PvP opponents needed to be allowed much higher damage levels to present any sort of resistance to a team with a monk. And that, in turn made monks the only mandatory class in GW. This leads to a number of problems: The quality of the monk has an outsized impact on the success of the team as compared to every other member. A shortage of available monks makes it impossible to do anything. (Remember the great monk strike at THK?) AI replacements are either going to be too good at their jobs (and carry terrible teams because of their outsized influence) or too bad at them (and scuttle otherwise decent teams because of their outsized influence). Life bars are too "short" relative to damage for play to stay interesting (except with a monk refilling them). Self-heals become a waste of bar space for everyone else. As interesting as monks have been, their existence is more trouble than they're worth. No monks in GW2, please.
  
  
• No more armor-ignoring damage/Sane armor levels on monsters. For purposes of HM (and even parts of NM), ~2/3 of damage sources are useless because huge monster armor strongly negates them. (Remember that bit about "bigger stats"? Well, here's some of the fallout.) On the other hand, the remaining ~1/3 of damage sources are overpowered because they overcome a gimmick that's common to nearly every foe. For GW2, all damage should respect armor, and foe armor should be set at sane levels throughout.
  
  
• Balance ranged damage. Izzy famously said that he has no idea how to balance ranged damage versus melee damage, and that's why he kept doing balances that slowly turned ranged classes into low-damage support classes. Find someone who can figure this out and do it right. Hint 1: Follow my advice about Monks, for they complicate the picture hopelessly. Hint 2: Assume your melee class takes pot shots from your ranged class while closing the gap, then your ranged class kites and peppers the melee class, while the melee class hits harder. Both should kill each other with their final attack. Now go fill in the variables for damage, armor, range, movement speed, etc. to make that happen.
  
  
• No more redundant professions/skill lines/skills. Redundancy is impossible to balance. One option is always best, and the others are always not worth using. We don't need three melee classes, nor two lightning damage attributes, nor a dozen bow attacks that do the same thing.
  
  
• Rework a bunch of questionable mechanics. Pets, traps, nature spirits, preparations, degen, regen, shadow steps (in PvE), e-denial (in PvE), and skill theft (in PvE) are several (but not all) of the mechanics in GW that are borderline useless in their current form. None of these should be making a return without an overhaul to make them not suck.
  
  
• Simplify buffs and debuffs. SImply put, GW has too many types of buffs and debuffs, which too much complexity around stacking, removal, and unremovability. Simplify, please.
  
  
• Need a better grouping system. Embark Beach is a step in the right direction, but too little, too late. Doing away with mandatory grouping entirely might be a good alternative. (Though I'm not aware of a good method for scaling difficulty for the number of players in game.)
  
  
• Avoid PvP formats that breed elitism. Sure, Izzy didn't help, but, at the end of the day, it was PvPers who killed PvP. When you can't play unless you can win, you can't win unless you can practice, and you can't practice unless you can play, most people just give up. IN order to maintain a PvP population, PvP needs to be structured in a way that makes good players accept bad players on their team. One way to do this is random teams (assuming that synching is actually prevented, unlike in RA). Another way is to borrow from the greatest PvP game of all time, Goldeneye, by giving players the chance to play private, customized, handicapped, for-fun matches with and against their friends.
  
  
• Integrate or obviate chat. In GW1, voice chat is absolutely crucial to serious PvP. For GW2, either include the voice chat in the game client, or design the PvP in such a way that voice chat isn't necessary to do well.
  
  
• Don't sacrifice PvE for PvP. It took the devs far too long to realize who was paying their bills with GW1. PvE took a lot of collateral damage from poorly thought-through nerfs aimed at PvP that eroded the customer base and created balance problems in PvE that were just ignored. Skills splits are one acceptable solution. Another acceptable option is to go all in on a "worthy adversary" challenge model (along with randomized mobs) so that skill balances have a zero sum effect on PvE, as they do in PvP. Banning certain skills from PvP is similar to a skill split, and perhaps easier to comprehend.
  
  
• Prevent PvE build wars by randomizing the monsters. It's been said that all of PvE is easy (and immutably so) because it's static. Just zone out and come back with strong counters to everything the monsters have. This creates the possibility for farm builds and SC builds that distort the in-game economy, and also drives the "PvE is too easy" problem that leads the devs into throwing more and more stat-pumping and "cheese" difficulty at the players. The solution is a randomly permuting roster of monsters that forces the players to be ready to deal with anything.
  
  
• Make item mods matter more. While it's absolutely necessary for balanced PvP that all players have access to perfect-modded equipment, that does not mean that the mods on the equipment have to be so damn boring. Tiny damage boosts. Tiny armor boosts. Conditional resource boosts. GW item mods just don't do very much in most cases. I'd rather see equipment mods that have as much impact on your build as skill choices or attribute spread.
  
  
• Tokens instead of lottery drops. It took awhile, but it seems that the devs have finally figured out that having super-rare drops in the game causes nothing but trouble -- duping, hacking, botting, scamming, RMT, etc. Reward tokens like ZCoins, Medals of Honor, etc. is a much better system.
  
  
• Better security, please. It's more NCSoft's fault than a-net's, for sure, but the fact remains that GW has suffered epidemics of account theft. GW2 needs to do better from the very beginning. I'd suggest that all of the following be implemented: (1) Zero control and zero credential info for GW2 account available from the NCMA account. (Look, we know that NCSoft is never going to do more than the bare minimum to secure the damn NCMA, so it's best just to cut them off.) (2) Changeable username and password. (No more locking the username if linked to NCMA.) (3) Require strong passwords. (Minimum length, expanded character set (cap, lower, numeral, symbol), not in dictionary). (4) IP blacklisting/whitelisting. (Ex: I can configure my account such that if anyone logs on from something other than my home IP, they must supply an additional password; and IPs in China aren't allowed to log in at all.) (5) Alerts on next login for failed login attempts and prior logins from unusual IPs. (6) Character/item locks to limit damage when an account is compromised.

^This is a thing that can't be denied: Anet seems trying to "Learn from GW1 mistakes" when building GW2 (your list is a nice sums of most of them)....this is my only hope when i think about the current GW1 state and look up to upcoming GW2.

And yes, overall, GW1 isn't THAT terrible for be a 6+years old game w/o a dedicated large team for last 2 or more years in matter of balance/community/addons/etc.

Prophecies days were without a doubt the best, it all went downhill from there, anet started caring less and less and now here we are...
i even got 50/50, but i deffo won't be playing gw2, anet doesn't deserve my 15$ or w/e, if they don't give a shit about a game they make why the hell should i buy it?
2 months after gw2 comes: ok f u ppl, we are making gw3, hf in unmaintained gw2!

You described DoA and a lot of other really really broken shit.

WiK, Shards of Orr, Urgoz, The Deep, Kathandrax all come to mind as being inherently broken similarly to DoA.

Smart post. Certainly better than most all of the other half wits on Guru. Only a handful of these people even frequent here anymore.

The worst thing about the first year of GW, in my opinion, was /fame.

I loved the way that GW differed from other online games and wasn't all about earning numbers through grind. But /fame was the exception. In fact, the level cap is low and achieving lvl20 has always been an easy feat. Even XP means nothing beyond this.

Roll on Factions and the cursed titles came along and brought developer-sanctioned grind which morphed GW in to the mainstream MMO grindathon. Nowadays every aspect of the game has one or more number titles for us to aspire to. Glory.

Anet's addition of titles is like a food company's incorporation of sugar and water to their products. We as consumers do kind of like it but it's a cheap way of bulking it out.

Minipets and tonics = worst ideas ever. Too bad we'll be seeing them in GW2 too.

I agree with this^^^

I complain about skill balancing and misuse of resources in GW all the time. But after almost six years, I have never played a better overall MMO.

I'm kind of 50/50 on minipets. They are completely useless and making them too rare causes insane prices, I am looking at you Kanaxai. On the other hand they are fun.

Tonics are without a doubt the stupidest thing imaginable for a game. What was the point of covering up that super expensive armor? Oh, to show off you spent another 500e. IMHO tonics were a way for Anet to get around the fact they did not want to create new armor.