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

How can you consider minipets to be fun when they're completely useless and all they do is aimlessly wonder around your character? They'd be fun if you could actually take control of them and use them in Polymock but that would wear out quickly because you'd move back to playing Pokemon. Pika pika? >_>

As for the rare minipets and tonics - that stuff should have been customized to the account they were awarded to. This simple act of customization would have solved the problems of duping and high prices. I can't get my mind around the fact they've completely missed this when implementing that sh!t.

Agree with the tonics, mostly just e-penis for those that have a tonic worth 9,000 ectoplasm. Minipets are useless, but on the bright side none are worth that much besides the tournament minipets and other limited release. I think we could have really done without tonics.

I really don't mind the minipets they are kind of useless and it would be fun if they could do something.

Send them to find players go shopping race them teach them tricks, though those ideas are probably out of the question.
The simplest idea would be to add them to the zoo we have let them roam around there.

Tonics are ok as are costumes, I was hoping these would become used more at festivals and parties but we do seem to like running around in them all the time, bit sad really though I do it myself at times.

Don't have any serious objections to them as anything that makes the game richer for other players is fine by me even though I don't use them myself.

Not a good job at all for PvP.. Like someone said , the game would probably be much more fun and played if they didn't do anything....
- Most places are totally empty during half the day, which means PvP is unplayable or either abused by item/title farmers ( i.e Syncing codex/GvG/Ra or farming Hall of heroes 1v1)
- The delete of 2 formats and the implement of codex was probably one of their biggest fail , yet they still didn't do anything or have any position toward it .
- We don't really know if they still do play the game when we read some of their reasons in developers notes
- Skill updates lead to a meta which won't change and which isn't fun to play when you aren't running meta yourself...
- Most recent updates showed that they don't really know how to deal with problems.... 5mn restriction for GvG , the last one , was terrible and basically not rewarding players who win fast , whereas syncers can still afford waiting 5mn.....

PvE is generally a fail , but that's in my opinion due to the lack of reactivity on time , especially concerning skills such as shadow form and consumable items which has a bad impact and like i said above , about knowing how to deal with problems fast

Nice rant and read please... I said I'm wary and a few others I've played with are also. Sorry if myself and the few other people I played with make judgements by actions not spin/bs spouted by Anet that the playerbase is more then willing to gobble up without question.

I understand there's flaws/design issues and complications with Guildwars but guess what every game has them but given the circumstances could they have done a better job?

When Anet roll out and update that makes even the new player to the game think wtf are you doing, they fail.

When Anet spend 6-8 months on the dervish update and before you even load the update, you scan over the update notes and instantly start picking up overpowered builds/ skill combo's..... stuff they should've easily been able to pick up you start to question wtf was happening those 6-8 months.

The latest update with the strongbox issue thats effecting GvG atm.... anyone could've seen from a mile off the it was going to be abused yet Anet still roll out the update anyway. You would think they would've learned from the whole red resign fiasco with HB... but nope.

This is just some of the updates that are most recent... there's numerious updates over the years that follow the same theme even and it occured alot before they decided to ditch this game and make Guildwars 2.

People seem to think that Guildwars 2 is like the second coming and everything will be rosy and even if it is, how long will it be before Anet start to driving it into the ground?

Look at it this way, I can pick up Guildwars 2 from the bargin bin when Anet announce Guildwars 3 and some form of god mode will appear along with other various broken skills/builds. (If there isn't already) Anything the playerbase has worked for will either be watered down or made alot easier, any high end elite content will also become alot easier or a complete walk in the park.

On a final note piss poor design decisions/balance updates quickly become a good reason why a subscription based game gets a bad rep and/or fails completely.... I wonder where Anet would be now if it was.

I think they didn't do so hot with all that. Basically, we got the cheapest possible GW1 service, post-GWEN. Not even big enough to be called a skeleton crew, but like a couple people tasked with doing everything.

Now it took them years to come up with GWB (not coincidentally as a way to write in some GW2 ads and HOM stuff more than anything) and it was nice to finally get one chapter of content. The only big problem is that the actual War in Kryta ended July 8, 2010. It's been ALMOST A YEAR AND CHAPTER TWO HASN'T STARTED. The Kieran stuff wasn't worth anyone's time.

So I'd say as far as ever doing well with post-GWEN content, they almost fixed the problem and got on track... then took a nosedive into not caring at all about the updates being timely again.

Even Blizzard balances SC2 by first buffing stuff and then regulating it. The problem is not the way, but the limited knowledge of high-end pvp in the eyes of the developer.

I received GW for my 32nd birthday back in 05. At the time I was headlong addicted to Diablo 2 and only gave GW a cursory walk through. Diablo 2 not only became repetitive but the support seemed to surrender to the invading robot spam army. Thus, I removed D2 from my hard drive and began playing GW regularly in 07.

(Speaking of Diablo 2 and Battle Net>>) Amoungst the endless tirade of spam we had kids that were free to curse you out endlessly, all while running open scams. Hacks, Bots, lawlessness, a vast online market in which one could purchase any component needed, Diablo 2 provided me with a great barometer in which to judge GW by.

I do not see how anyone could reasonably complain about the support and Anets ability to keep their servers clean in compare to other free-to-play MMO's.

In respect to game-play and content. Overall grade of B+.

I feel there is a disconnect between Anet and the player. PvP was poorly thought out. Codex was received by me as a joke. I couldn't believe that this was actually implemented. If they were shooting for a 'Less is More' angle, they hit their mark for sure.

Armor: Never liked the angle they took on this essential piece of game equipment. Luck was never a factor in garnering leet skins. It is now, and always has been, about $$$. How much wealth you got? Not much? Better get grinding or you're doomed to wear that lame robe for the duration. Intricate, interesting, rare and otherwise desirable armor pieces should be available through drops, as are weapons and shields.

Specifically because there is no difference between full sets of armor that cost under 6k to craft, and armor that costs in excess of 100k, I have to say that the message Anet wants players to send to each other is "Check out how rich I am".

Why is this sentiment so heavily pushed? That being, so much of the content being about flashing ones wealth with tonics and overpriced armor skins that DO NOTHING TO BETTER YOUR CHARACTER?

I can but a weapon an hour into the game, as a total nooby, that will be just as good as any weapon wielded by the leetest player whom has been grinding since the beta phase.

I will not play GW2 if they don't change the dynamics of weapons and armor. There is a way of introducing elite weaps and armors without grossly overpowering them, and I suggest they find it. Give me something to spend in game wealth on that isn't purely for show. I want elite functionality. Why not just have a merch selling fur coats and limousines for 100e? How cool would that be? You could roll into town in a stretch limo and pimp slide to your storage chest with your cane, fur coat, top-hat and bejeweled monocles?

Anet, in your effort to keep the elite from being overpowering, you have created an entirely dysfunctional sense of brandishing elitism through useless objects.

I'm saying this....It bothers me that I see so many folks spending 10 times what my accounts worth so they can stand in town looking like a frog or whatever.

I might have agreed with much of this ranting a few years ago .. when I too was stricken with GW myopia.

Then I spent the last few years playing some other MMOs .. drifting in and out of GW in between. It sure put all of this stuff in perspective. Compared to other (subscription) MMOs .. the GW support team has been excellent.

You think game balance is bad here? You think PvP has some broken 1-button builds? LOL! GW is the paradigm of game balance in the MMO world. It's not even close.

I never knew how good we had it until I went out and spent $15/mo to get less frequent updates , communication, and (attempts at) balance.

They don't cover up armor and they are so small it's actually like having a pet tag along with you. That to me is fun.

If you look at one of the videos to the shatterer there are people at the end looting a chest with weapons, shields and armor in it. Have no fear GW2 has adopted many typical MMO aspects but with some of it's very own. Both are good things for GW2

1st game released by new company.
Six years later.
Still has large audience, and high traffic fan sites.
Still selling new copies.

Yeah, I think they're doing a good job.

That would be more valid if you think that SC2 is well-balanced.

Then again, maybe BW set the bar too high for RTS balance.

BW tended to follow the same balance pattern, too.

It's how you balance games - it's delicate, because player opinions are important. If you merely bring it up to snuff, it won't be noticed. It has to be blown out of proportion, then nerfed, so players notice the changes and actually play with all the skills.

In RTS games, it's the same - if a unit receives a slight range buff so it's not killed immediately before it shoots (example), people will probably still play the same they did. If it receives an extreme buff, so it promotes different playstyles, and then is nerfed later, those playstyles were still introduced, and were still valid - both the original way, and this way, but players will notice and use them.

Very smart and very well put. However, the issue remains that after the dust settles, things need to be balanced. In Anet's case, they have never managed to achieve that.

I judge a game on the replayability of it, how long it keeps my attention. 5000+ hours and counting seems like it's doing a pretty good job for me considering some games I would consider as "classic" gave me perhaps 50-100 at most.

When I first bought GW, I also bought 3-4 other games all at the same time. (Big Best Buy sale!) After 2 weeks, GW was the only game I played. Over the past several years I have tried other games of various genres. I even tried Wii and PS3 platforms. I forced myself to try different games to take a break from GW. Somehow I kept coming back.

After seeing how other game companies support their products (or don't) and how the game community accepts said company without fault or chastises them, I feel that GW is by far near the top of those I have experienced.

Sure the game has faults as does every other game I have tried. But 6 years after initial release the company is still providing some updates to keep it fresh and as catered to their player base as they can.


As a side note, Chthon's post about what should be fixed sounds like the current recipe for GW2. And in general I'm in agreement with those ingredients.

As far as how much I've payed to the entertainment I got out of GW, it's impossible to say Anet failed. I loved GW before I quit playing, and that was mainly because the community just died shortly after EotN was released. If I were to name Anet's two biggest mistakes it'd be these two:

A) Extremely incompetent skill balances. I mean seriously, they're just BAD. You could hire any decent player at minimum wage, even me, and they could do a better job and furthermore love their job even with cruddy pay. Izzy just didn't care. The community made volumes of sensible skill balance suggestions, mostly all the articles were the same because the balances needed were so freaking obvious, and they were almost entirely ignored. I remember making a massive balance suggestion once, and about 7 or so skill suggestions were used verbatim, and I remember being proud of it for a day or two. Then I thought, wow, those were the skills that needed changing the LEAST! Sure water trident now has a lower arc so it actually hits. Yay frenzied defense had it's moment of glory for a week or so. But the skills suggested that would actually make a difference to the meta and allow really interesting stuff just were completely ignored. I'm convinced that the only reason Izzy is still on the team is he's someone's friend and they're too nice to let him go.

B) Having great ideas in pvp that failed because of a minor flaw... and just letting letting that flaw stay. No reason, they just let whatever aspect of the game totally fail. They were like "Hey lets spend thousands of man-hours making an awesome idea. Oh noes it isn't going 100% as planned! Oh well, we could've fixed it with about 5 hours of work, but let's just let it die instead." This is seen with:

Lack of ladders: Yay lets let codex arena and team arena totally fail because we won't give the players some fair competition. Pitting newbies against good players so they'll never come back and have the arenas die within months kinda sucked... oh well? Having Hall of heroes degenerate into rank descrimination for the exact same reason and not doing a thing about it... not a problem.

Hero battles: Ooo lets let people use their heroes to battle each other 1 v 1... only not actually have them fight each other, just have them run around in circles 90% of the time. Wait people are abusing this by making builds that are ENTIRELY focused on running around in circles? That's bad. Let's kill it (instead of, you know, just letting people ACTUALLY FIGHT in the darned arena).

its not there fault, there just very busy working on guild wars 2

If that was in response to my post, yes those two issues really were their fault, independent of working on GW2. The skill balance failure was a problem way before GW2was being worked on, and the lack of follow through was a problem that took massively less time to fix then to have made the original concept.

I dont get how people still play and continue to complain about how bad it is. If you dont like gw anymore, go play something else theres no monthly fee so you're not bound to this game until the month is over or anything.

'nuff bout that.. back on topic. GW has been around for 6 years now. 6 years... Everything is explored and all the best ways/tactics/strategies/builds have been discovered. Anet is only nerfing some skills and builds from time to time. They can't make too big changes, as that would mess up the balance of the game, so their "changing power" is limited. This said, think of them having been through nearly all possible solutions of how to make this game more fun for us, and think about how excited they are about gw2 and how much work it requires and how much work they put into it. Would you do a better job at maintaining the ever so demanding crowd of gw players, with limited employees? I sure wouldn't...

Well as I've said, I think Anet did a great job, GW kept me very entertained for a long time. It's just the points they did poorly at were truly bizarre considering how simple they were to fix is all.

Who says that everyone complaining still is?
I'm not.

yeah I wonder how he missed the "I quit right after EotN", it was right at the top of my post o.o

They could fix most of the pve problems by removing forced grind, but maybe gw1 would be a ghost town if people didn't have to grind. OR MAYBE IT WOULD BE FUN AGAIN.

They could balance most of pve by removing tons of skills, but pvp'ers would say it's boring cuz they don't have as many options. OR MAYBE A BALANCED PVP WOULD BRING IN MORE PEOPLE AND MAKE IT FUN AGAIN.

I will say this; I have played video games since Pong was released in the 70's, and I have never played a perfect game. That is to say, if one wants to complain, criticize or otherwise make cynical comments about any game ever created, it is quite easy to do so.

GW has retained playability more-so than most games I have ever played. The freshness has worn off, but every time I quit I come back and wonder why I quit.

The assumption is drawn from a lack of reason as to why a person would frequent a fan site for a specific game long after quiting said game. Seems....odd...to say the least.

If you don't play then I care even less about your complaints.

You haven't played many video games have you?

Yes?

Difference in opinion I suppose.

He may not but I have.
Starting with tv game controllers that played squash and tennis then just about all the early arcade games.
Comodore PET / Acorn Atom / BBC Micro / Spectrum / Amstrad / Atari ST /Comodore 128 / 486 PC and then to date played games on them all right back to the days when you bought a book and typed them in using basic.

Bought a basic handbook to convert variations in basic so I could get the latest rpg adventure running on my machines.

Have seen just about every game that's come out, played many of them and in all that time 1 other game has seen nearly as much play as Guild wars and that's Ghost Recon 1

lol well i didnt say "everyone" i said "people" which means the people who do still play and complain (ie: not u then)

When I try to evaluate a product I have bought one of the first things that comes into my mind is value and for A-net has done a great job at keeping the value up for me. I mean the game is over 6 years old and I still play it almost everyday and there are still may people that play.

Oh and it doesn't cost me anything unless I want to buy add ons that are not necessary to play. While I do not agree with every change that has been made I think ultimately it has been done to improve the quality and increase value for people. For some that may have happened for others not so much but at least they put forth the effort for something that has no monthly fee.

For me A-net has exceeded my expectations for a game I bought 6 years ago.

they would have done a better just if they just left the skills how they were.

I have, and GW does retain more playability than any other game I've played; I've sunk ~1400 hours into GW. And there's still things I want to complete in it. Very few games can do that sort of thing - and I'd say none outside of the MMO genre can.

Wow...you took me back a few years. I remember playing the Sierra games on my 386 PC. Kings Quest and the like. Ultima III was my first Massive RPG. There were other predecessors I cannot remember the name of that were text only, accompanied by heavily pixeled RGB color pictures. I remember swapping out floppies as the game progressed (Insert disk 2 lol).

So yes, I have played a few RPG's in my day. And thinking back to those antiquated days I could never have imagined that there would some day be a way to play a seemingly never ending adventure with thousands of random people throughout the world, Chinese, French you name it. The idea would have seemed ripped from Sci-Fi.

I think back to 6 years ago and again, no idea that I would still play in 2011. I didn't think I would play GW for 6 months, let alone 6 years. So good on Anet for constructing one of the Top 5 games I have played in over 30 years of video game play.

Ultimate III was my first big RPG, also. The grind in GW is NOTHING compared to that monstrosity. Entire weekends of my adolescence disappeared in Death Gulch.

And you'd be wrong.

There are tons of games with player retainability that have done so with thousands of players that arent MMOs.

You just like GW like any other average GW fan and as an analogy players for these games like them as much as you do.

Nothing special. Playability is your own opinion.

BF2
CoD
Halo
Smash Bros
Street Fighter
Pokemon

To name only a few games.



I'm not gonna sit here and act like a pretentious fanboy praising ANet for the current state of GW and how blessed we all are to have this game for a F2P model like half the people in this thread.

The F2P model they promised included game maintenance with balance, content, technical maintenance, durability, and long term success.

Obviously they cannot create and field a durable and long term game with adequate balance, content patches and technical maintenance.

Thus, GW1 is a failure of a project and is decaying. Every once in a while ANet slaps on a band aid to a mortal wound and fanboys everywhere praise them for placing that band aid. Except ANet uses the wrong bandaid on the wrong wound and the mortal wound gets infected by the bandaid.

Good old days and yes I think Ultima III was one of my first rpgs though the were the text only ones in the early days.

Played the Hobbit for a while spent hours trying to open a door.
open door ---- the door is locked
Unlock door ----- I do not see the "unlock here"
Use Key and so on seems the answer was "into hole drop key"

point is yes there are lots of problems with GW mostly imo with pvp which has failed in recent years and "quite rightly" annoyed many.

pve has plodded on with enough additional bits and pieces to keep me playing.
If it had research where players could spend points and research spells create magic items etc it would have been near perfect.

Unfortunately you cannot have player created spells and items in a pvp environment so the game has remained a compromise but a very good one.

I think I have dumped hundreds of hours into Neverwinter Nights, Diablo 2, Enemy Territory, Quake Wars, TF 2, Persona games (Persona 4 at least 140 hours, 2/3 of that for Persona 3), Pokemon games for GBC (ah, Silver and Blue, my two favorite GBC games...), Megaman Battle Network, Battlefield Bad Company 2...

Sure, GW has replayability. But all of it is basically playing the same content over and over, not because it's fun (I don't consider Prophecies fun, or Factions/Nightfall starting islands) - I play it to get to the parts I do enjoy, like Hard Mode and missions and farming.

You can say the same with 95+% of games on the market. Trust me, look at all the recent EA releases. I've had.. one that actually works on the computer, when I'll beat the specs by a mile. They put out a $60 game, and expect people to dish out money, but put out no support and a game that doesn't even necessarily work, because they put out a poor port from a 360 game.

Point is, there's thousands of games that put out a game, whether it's online, or not, and a community gathers around it. There's thousands of games that go out, and the game is left sitting. People deal with the bugs and faults, and play or quit. There's only a few games where support is continual, and content still being produced. GW is one of those, and I admire it for that.

To be blunt - none of you pay per month. They have no obligation to put out new content for any of you. If you'd have preferred nothing to have ever been done, fine, then quit for pete's sake. I've enjoyed their updates, and while not all has been perfect, it's also a learning experience for the group that'll be put to use in GW2. The game worked when it was bought, and that's where their obligation ends. They didn't end it there, and continued providing content and updates. I appreciate it.

Agreed. If the goal of this thread was to see what the GW community thinks of anet, then this was doomed to fail. Guru community does not reflect GW community. Half the people on here have have quit and are only here to complain and/or troll.

The answer is simple. A lot of people are playing Guild Wars still. Whether or not you like the changes is irrelevant to 'if their doing a good job'. The goal of a gaming business is to sell the game well. They did that. In fact, the game is still selling 6 years after release, with no new expansion/campaign in years. They have to be doing something right for most people.

Or if the goal was to see what individual members of guru like and don't like, I think the answer to that is pretty clear from the rest of the threads here.

Exactly this. I remember when GW was 4 years old and people were using the same excuse "its an old game, of course it has less people." Look at TF2, it is now a four year old game and it has more people playing it now than it did during its first year.

About 4k hours over 65 months. I think they must have done a few things right. Over 6 years, there are bound to be hiccups, when things were poorly managed, but those were blips rather than the norm. I know in the past I complained loudly and bitterly about xyz and anetsucksomg, but the things that they DID do right always kept me going.