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

I'll join late.

I see a ton of whiners and typical rants, but as far as I go: I love GWs.

I'd easily say Guild Wars is my favorite MMO hands down (and I've played almost all of the mainstream ones), and it's almost for sure in my top 20 games I've ever played. I've logged thousands of hours, and even after taking copious breaks from the game (I've been going out of the country a lot for work over the last year), I still enjoy a quick RA match or dungeon. Anet updates the game enough to keep the skills fun, silly, and shake the meta. They respond to the community more than 90% of the P2P games I've been part of over the years, and for a darn near free game, offers more content and lore than ANY MMO I've ever played, let alone for the price.

You know what bugs me the most?

It may be trivial, but the overuse and supersaturation of pop culture references in quest names, bosses, locations and even some explorable areas. I mean, really, can't come up with something creative?

I bought GW in May 2005. I'm still playing it. That says something right there, in itself as I bore easily.

Is the game flawless, of course not. Over the years, staffing at Anet has changed and people have came and went. 2 of the 3 founders aren't even there anymore and the game philosophy has changed numerous times. I remember how they nerfed trapping because they thought you shouldn't be able to solo farm the underworld...

I can list the few things they did truly wrong on one hand: (in no particular order)
1. Taking so long to come out with HM and more challenges after beating the campaign(s)
2. Caving into complaints and making HM a right instead of a privilege (Discordway, overpowered PvE skills)
3. Changing the UW 50 times to stop farming, then not stopping farming.
4. Perma-Shadowform (pre-nerf)
5. Waiting too long to do the PvP/PvE split and not reverting some "nerfed to hell" skills.

Simultaneously, there are about five things they've done great:
1. They came out with the first three campaigns and expansion fairly quickly.
2. They support all aspects of the game, though not as even-handedly as we may always want.
3. They are always finding ways to keep the game new. Not just GW:B but stuff like the Commando were epic and well done.
4. They strived to improve where they could. Storyline was the greatest weakness in Prophecies, but improved greatly in Nightfall and EotN.
5. They respond to the community (slowly, oh very slowly and not consistently. But they do it nevertheless.)

I addressed mainly PvE, because the heart of a game like this is always PvE.
PvP has had numerous issues over the years.
1. Dumping HB and TA for CA?? I'm not dissing the Codex format, I don't like it but I understand the thrill and challenge of "closed deck" play. However, gladiator is now further out of reach and anyone who worked hard on the HB title is SoL.
2. Uneven skill balances. Most recently the dervish, which was not a weak PvP class to begin with. Turret Rangers on and off again, Searing Flames post-NF release. Shroud of Silence (I abused the hell out of that to get my first glad title) dual monk with smite support.
3. There are problems in HA and GvG that I've heard about, but I don't participate in either anymore so I don't have any up to date rants.
4. Overpowering hexes
5. Poor balancing of professions across PvP. They didn't like what paragons did to GvG, so they just forgot them.

My biggest hope is that they have learned the important lessons from these failures, disappointments, and successes; and that it shows in GW2

Actually I find it amusing.
Though some of the stuff is way to topical and current and the internet memes are already dated (Red vs Blue, For Great Justice, etc.)

I think Anet has done a good job. Not every thing went smooth but GW has a large player base and has given most players hours of time well spent. I think that the one making that wiki articel has come to realize he or she spent more time into this game and regret it and now feels to need to QQ about his/her bad choices.

Anet doesn't force you to kill so many enemys. Anet did not put the standard of good players. The players did it. But it is always easy to act and then blame someone else.

And if it is so bad as some say in this thread then ask yourself shouldn't you just stop playing?

let me put it this way.... pay to play aion is about 2 orders of magnitude worse than guild wars management

as an example.... it wasnt possible AT ALL to get black dye, or pure red dye (pink dye sure) in game or out of game via cash shop.

let me spell that out.... aion was so retarded you couldnt buy dyes for the massively wonderful graphical game it was. so many char customization options and for YEARS it simply wasnt possible to have your armor dyed black or red or various other colors.

there were a lot of people asking to spend money to buy these dyes or whatever it would take so they could get these dyes. a lot of those people ended up becoming disinterested in aion and quit.

a lot of these old games theyll put out a patch and it create some massive bugs that never get fixed. yet somehow guild wars 1 is still running easily, people are still playing it.....


TLDR
guild wars 1 is doing above average, tbh they could be doing better, this or that could be better.... but im quite happy with "good" and "great" will come later with gw2 hopefully.

ofc now the cash shop opens up and black/white dyes are now purchaseable.

but.... its aion, so they managed to screw that up, buy more than 2 things with a legit credit card from the cash shop and your account gets autolocked from buying more things.... for many days.


so when people complain about gw1.... just realize sometimes the perfect decisions arent being made, sometimes they dont pay attention to whats happening in game that much. but at least you arent paying a subscription to deal with absolute incompetence like in aion. something is REALLY wrong with the management over there if they cant figure out a way for years to accept people willing to give away real money for something as simple as black dye.

That's always bugged me too. I'm sure it's super hilarious to the Anet staff when they named an NPC "Kiilroy Jenkins" or whatever his name is, but I can't help but groan when I grab the quest "Winning, Duh" from NPC "Sharlie Cheen", or whatever equivalent of that. I bet the devs thought it was really creative and funny when they made it, but it just screams of short-sighted non-creativity to me. And it has never been funny.

But, coming from the view of a non-hardcore PvP player, the argument in the opening post I agreed with wholeheartedly. Especially the attribute part. I really noticed it in Factions when so many Restoration Magic spells dealt damage, and when so many Channeling Magics healed, and the attributes just became so multidirectional that it just seemed unbalanced.

Prophecies had it right for the most part. Attributes had a set purpose and they stuck to it for the most part. Anet just attempted to make all professions after that "jacks-of-all-trades" that it just killed the game. Dervishes are basically uber-warriors, Paragons were Rangers plus Ritualists times 1000 when they first came out. Remember when every single freaking team in GvG had a Defensive Anthem chain? Or when every single HA group had at least one Incoming/Anthems Paragon? And don't even get me started on having to deal with that Trip Derv garbage for months before that got balanced.

Basically, Anet hasn't cared about GW1 since around 2007/08 when GW2 was announced. They're just trying to keep people interested so they'll sell more copies of GW2, hence the unacheivable max PvP titles and ridiculous grindmode missions.

I agree. I've accepted as an inevitable truth that somewhere in GW2 will be a "Winning, duh" reference.

I agree with you 100%. ArenaNet obviously doesn't follow the rules of most game companies, because in-jokes and pop culture references are amusing if they are used sparingly. The important word here is sparingly.

There's so many pop-culture references that it almost looks like there was some kind of award being offered for Most Unoriginal Game Content. You can't even avoid them if you wanted. They are in the skill names, NPC names, quest titles, quest reward dialogues, and area names. Even random NPCs standing in the middle of nowhere are sometimes pop-culture influenced.

For those that think that it's really great, I'll explain why it's bad game design. Most games actually try to get the player into the game and some people call it "immersion". When a developer uses a lame pop-culture reference, it's the equivalent of breaking the fourth-wall with the player. It's the game telling you, "Ha ha, yeah, I know this is just a game."

Also, all pop-culture references get stale very quickly and your game looks dated after a time. Years later, when nobody even laughs about Leeroy Jenkins anymore----your game will still have that garbage meme forever. Why not put in a NPC named Kramer who says, "Hey, can you do me a solid?" or "Giddyup!"?

I don't have problems with pop-culture references and absolutely loved "Worthy deeds done dirt cheap".

Me too. Sometimes, Nightfall felt like there was nothing BUT references in the game, once I went back to do the quests...

I don't mind some, as a "spice" to liven up the meal, but most of the substance should have been original GW stuff.

I still play Halo:Combat Evolved and BF2. Both still great games.

It's not bad per se. Just really stale and bland.

The skill updates need to come faster, a lot faster. Make Smiting Monks pve viable etc.

It would be interesting if they added sort of "Sorrow's Furnace" style content. Maybe with a new armour for each profession.

New Skills/Professions would be really cool, but considering the current issues... (I play solely PvE, so skill balancing doesn't really affect me)

Any new armor would only be a re-skin of an existing model as are EotN armors. And since we payed for EotN there's no reason to think that a SF-style update would have truly new armors SF being a free addition and all.

It works for Family Guy so it must be great.

Tell that to Zerg rush type quests and zones peppered throughout the game. An excessive number of enemies is not a substitute for actual difficulty, it's just laziness.

This.

Excessive numbers of enemies in no way shape or form contribute to difficulty except in a numbers game like WoW. GW isnt designed to be a numbers game.

We also get dumb mobs like 30 Oni from the deep which are all either way too easy to slaughter with a single counter build or impossible because you did not counter their build. We get tons of stupid 1 dimensional zerg teams composed of the same thing in GW1 like Wind Riders and Ruby Djinn which the developers must conclude as difficult to counter (if you have no brain).

Then we get WIK which is both a Zerg and a capable team and the same goes for DoA.

They havent learned their lesson yet in mob design.

Kind of surprised that pop-culture references are considered so egregious, they're really not that bad. If you think it's too much, you haven't seen anything.

Here's a random one:
It's not like a character such as Blimm is such a big deal. I feel Anet generally does them subtle and witty enough without trying to goad us.

Well as for pop-culture references, I wish they just stuck to keeping them in shouts like they mainly used to. When they're all bundled in one place they don't break immersion and you're actually curious what they'll come up with.

Except drakes on a plain, that was pure win.

I read suggestions on Guru, and a lot of it is the same crap. The game sucks, so give me a new Sorrrow's Furnace and new armor....are you kidding me?


What seems to be missing, is a single coherent skill philosophy from ANet, and I'm already worried and hopeful about GW2 from the little that I've heard.
[*]First problem, is reactive updates. No one likes their mesmers, or their ritualist, or their dervs anymore....buff the everlasting crap out of them and force them into the meta.
The fact that there even is a meta (ANet embraced the meta concept at first, probably out of exhaustion or laziness) is a serious problem.
This leads to continual update envy. "Elementalists are useless in HM!" No, elementalists just haven't been reworked since HM came out.

A lot of these can be fixed with small changes. With the PvE/PvP split, I'm surprised that issues like this are not resolved or resolved oh so slowly.
[*]Second Issue, giving up. Paragons are a great example. When first unleashed in PvP they through team based PvP into chaos. Unstrippable, spammable prots and blocks. The Anet answer was to nerf everything (almost every para shout is split) and write off the profession. Why not just buff vocal minority so that 5e, and insta cast with 3 sec recharge?
You know, strategy. The PvP format is becoming stale and 1 dimensional, where everyone brings the same teams, the same professions; because anything else would fail.



A lot of this is being fixed in GW2, except that PvP is already starting to seem gimmicky. Apparently guardians ruled the matches until someone figured out how to spike with thief.
So already the format is building around Guardian, thief to kill their guardian, and thief stoppage (assuming engineer glue gunning or maybe unannounced profession (the mesmer) ability).
The game isn't even released and three professions are already meta'd.

You don't need counter builds to easily take on a mob of 30 Oni.

BLA is a single quest, so I don't see how it can be representative of the majority of WiK.

I think you answered your own problem. If they actually tried balancing the game before it's even finished, I would completely lose confidence in gw2 since they clearly don't know how to program.

You must either purely run counter builds or use so many consumables that your screen is filled with effects.

It's pretty near impossible to run through The Deep with just a balanced build, because with your 2-3 monks, you can't heal or prot anyone when you come up against those insane Oni mobs. Every single party member has Shadow Shroud chained on them and they deal 80-100 damage per attack.

Also, there's that one quest in EotN where the only objective is to stand in one spot and kill 200+ of those Modniir centaur things. How is that good game design?

I think they're doing well with GW1 support now. However, the fact is that much of what is currently/has recently been done, should have been taken care of long ago.

The fact that it took nearly 6 years after the game's inception to get support forms is ridiculous.

The fact that it took nearly three years after the Dervish/NF release to get the class to play smoothly is ridiculous

The fact that it took nearly 3 years for Razah's changeable primary to finally match the NF manuscripts is ridiculous

And on and on. And there's still a lot to do.

Yes they're doing a good job now, mostly because if things were absolute garbage and took forever, if ever completed, previously.

This word has lost all meaning and needs to be locked up tighter than the Claw of the Khan-Ur, only to be used again if it's worth losing your hand. A game is about fun and that includes it being able to poke fun at itself.

Maybe reserve judgment until we're no longer ignorant, rather than cast it early based on little information? We've only heard some examples that prove combat is reactionary (being able to force a reaction from your opponent) rather than build wars countering everything.

Ward against melee, SY!, Ineptitude, Shadowsong, and Epidemic aren't enough to counter an oni mob? I'm not a Deep expert, but I don't think they remove blind and even if they do you still have the ward up and SY! plus you can add in weakness just in case, which should be brought on any Necro bar in high-end PvE.

Balanced groups have too many builds and skills available to struggle badly with those Oni of the Deep mobs. Some are mentioned above Ximvotn's post, but then there's even knock downs, Aegis, spirits, and various shutdown builds that are in no way a specific counter and are frequently used in general PvE.

Just so the thread doesn't get derailed with oni discussions. Use a tank, nuke what he aggros, call it a day.

I think A-Net is doing an average job with the number of people they are working with. How many people are on the live team now? FIVE!?!?!?

I mean, there are things I think they could do a lot better but with all that which is on their plate, I understand that everything comes with an opportunity cost and it is impossible to fulfill every gamer's wants/needs. Really I just wish the live team would take some time to actually sit down and play GvG a couple hours per week with the test crew guys. At least that would grant them some understanding of where they are coming from. I'm not on the test crew so if they are already doing this then I apologize... and I would also have to downgrade my opinion of "how A-Net is doing"... lol

Some of the balance issues in GvG are blatantly obvious to anybody who actually plays the format so that is the perspective I am coming from. I have heard from the test crew guys that they inform the devs of these issues but A-Net often ignores/disagrees with them and refuses to do anything about it.

A lot of people care about this game a lot, and want it to be as fun as it used to be before A-Net systematically ran it into the ground. This is the only forum (no pun intended) that they can use to try and have their voice heard. People don't post things on guildwarsguru to vent their feelings. People post things here in hopes to enact change that will benefit themselves and others. It's called "constructive" criticism.

Complaining is a vital role in making all of our lives better. It is what people do to say, "hey... there is a better way to do this".

Given amount of resources they have, live team is doing awesome "I would like employees like that" job.

Speking from experience, they are most likely working way more than 40hour week. "I am kinda worried about their wellbeing" more.

There is no doubt they are doing best possible at current setup.

Are there issues that beg for addressing? Yes. Is it possible for them to do that? No. Do we actually care about those issues anymore? I don't and I doubt many others really do.

Given all this, yes, they are doing good job.

This is where one of their problems appears.They have many things on their plate and they have very often chosen the wrong thing to work on before others things.

Like was said in this thread before, its much cheaper to keep older players in a game, then it is to get new ones into the game (not a exact quote, but gets the message across).

I mean seriously whats wrong with fixing existing problems and improving existing gameplay that they constantly just choose to add more (problems) and more eyecandy.


Things like War In Kryta only matter for people that are already playing the game or ones that have left, but its not going to add new people in the game,I don't think I'll ever hear anyone say they want to play GW because it has WiK, whereas I might very likely hear someone say they they want to play GW because it's balanced ( that's if it was)

Yes there should've been more than one balance guy.
Yes some skills were broken (every game is like that).
No they didn't do a bad job.

Think about it in terms of the big picture. Remember that GW was Anet's first MMO, using a completely unique system for everything compared to all other MMOs (combat, mechanics, gear, business model etc.) and they were successful, unlike the countless others who fell within a few years. You can't blame them for getting some things wrong trying to keep the game alive for 6 years!

That being said, I think they lost their focus when they realised that they couldn't continue with their 6 month campaign model in a sustainable manner. EOTN seemed like rushed expansion patched together from the scraps of their next campaign. There was a painfully obvious decline in quality when they diverted their efforts to GW2.

In the end, though its like trying to squeeze blood from a rock. I think Anet have done pretty much all they could out of this game in 6 years.

I hear this ALL the time.
My counter argument is they could hire more people.
Instead of the 4-5 people they have working on the team at 40+ hours a week
maybe they should get more team players to ease the pressure and
get more work done? To me, the solution is simple. To them? I don't know.
The ONLY thing I can see that's preventing them from doing this is how much
it costs to pay each new person as opposed to making the current ones work overtime.

Yup, you are one of the ones that realizes their excuses aren't all that great.

I mean seriously does GW2 really need all the money it is getting?Can't they split (a political favorite number) 1 pro-cent of 1 pro-cent of the budget GW2 currently has to give GW just a little more love?


That's why I'm saying GW2 better be the best damn game every beating all other games in all genres out there, otherwise all that has been said and done would be just stupid.

It costs moey to either employ new people or to pay for overtime. Also, there are limits on how much overtime one can put in.

As for why not putting in more money, simple: because they don't get that much money out of it! People buy the main boxes, that's the main money source.

Really, the primary motivation to create the additional content is to keep custumers aware that they are a solid provider and that it's worth trusting them that the future content will be worth buying.

With all the whining and ingratitude we often see on the boards, hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they said to themselves "These ingrates won't be happy no matter what we do. Let's not bother any more. Stumme, cm'ere and start working on dynamic event no. 1501 instead, it's a better investment of money...

Weeeelll, with about 250 employees total and live team of 1 permanent plus redirected specific resources... I'd say we're over 1% already.

I don't want redirected resources! Gods, no. Too many games have been rushed out, too many games hadn't had the time put into them needed, to be good. There's so many games that were either mediocre, and could've been good, or good, and could have been great/amazing. I'm sick of games that have resources redirected, and quality suffers. Sure, say 1% moved. There's gonna be something missing, and I don't want anything missing. I want GW2 to completely blow everyone away when it's released, not blow most people away because there's a bit of fine tuning missing.

I could put examples, but anyone who's tried to game in recent times on the PC should know what I'm talking about..

Redirected resources might have helped. I mean, there has to someone at ArenaNet who knows how much smegged up this "PvE rewards for abusing PvP" update was.

At least I hope there is.

1% of 1% so if my brain is working correctly right now that is 0.001%.Sure something could be missing but they could easily just delay GW2 for another month, we don't know a release date so it's not like its going to affect us.

I understand your point I'm just saying out of that XX million dollar budget they could at least throw a hundred thousand or so GW 1's way, it doesn't need much for fixing/improving current content, there would be no new technology needed, the money would almost only be used for salary of the extra few people improving problems with GW1.I don't know exactly how much Game developers make but surely even 100.000 is enough for a few months of salary for improvements?

Edit: Hmm my brain might be dead at this hour but I just counted basing the budget at 50 million and 1% of 1% of that doesn't seem all that much so just 1% might be more realistic, that is of course unless I calculated horribly wrong.

Problem is; NCSoft is giving them time to develop, but there's only so much time and money they'll be willing to give. Up front in public, sure they'll go on about how it's gonna be a great game, but they are pretty assuredly going to be pushing for a release at some point. Regardless, I would rather see the game remain the same than GW2 be lessened in any way. The live team is doing a reasonable job, an amazing job considering what they have, and I do think they can keep going with it just fine. I understand why they wouldn't bring in more people, either - they want GW2 to be big, and GW1 changes aren't going to bring in significant amounts of money, either, compared to what a stellar game could.

I would say Guild Wars has been a complete SUCCESS, look at all the media attention and players it has!. It is simply amazing, and GW 2 is almost guaranteed to be even better, in fact it has good chances of becoming the best MMO so far.