Post-launch review: Guild Wars

Post-Launch Reviews just posted a review of Guild Wars, actually taking into account updates and changes. Check it out here:

http://postlaunch.tumblr.com/post/81...wars-developer

A good article in all from someone who seems to have spent time playing the game. Nice to have new publicity for the game.

Nice article
However : "if something is broken, it won’t be for long." xD

good article with some faulty statements such as
'ArenaNet pays close attention to player feedback and makes adjustment and new content based on that feedback.'

How is that faulty? Sorrow's Furnace was added due to complaints about lack of high-end content; Dervish and Mesmer received massive overhauls because people found them boring or too much work to play effectively; skills are constantly rebalanced for PvP metagame... Can you give me any counter-examples?

The Paragon.

I'm curious why their only marked criticism of the game was population (yes, I realize others were mentioned in passing). A lot of people still do play the game they are just highly concentrated into specific places now and that's part of having so many veteran players.

Because they find it boring too be hanging out
in a (Supposedly) Huge town [Kamadam], and have to face
a huge amount of spammers or a mob of AFK people.

No fun there, at all.

to be fair the guild wars community bitches WAY more than any other game community i know of, and i think anet has done a fantastic job to deal with such a tough audience

Than wheres the balanced PvP ?

We're not bitchy, we just want more for our money.

@Prestige: Jumping into a 6 year old game and expecting to see people en masse in the Maguuma or Crystal Desert is wishful thinking. Veterans go where the content is such as Kaineng Center for WoC. It's not a bad thing, it's a the game is old thing.

I played Aion for a little and trust me... They bitch way more then any other game I have played.

Sorrow's Furnace was one of the few positive updates this game has had. And they have let it rot since and is only really used for the mini black moa now. It needs an update to the enemy AI and an end chest. It is something people have been asking for, yet they have not listened and have shown no intent to update it.

The Dervish and Mesmer overhauls were asked for at least a year before they even acknowledged they would do them. Only the PvE community asked for them though, and the PvP community was adamant about not buffing them, knowing full well they would negatively affect PvP. Guess what, they negatively affected PvP.

Skill updates are done for PvP yes. They are rarely ever what the PvP community asks for and 99% of the time they are whatever A.Net feels like doing, or nerfs to giant skill buffs we specifically tell them not to do. Examples being the two giant elite buff updates and your Mesmer and Dervish updates. In fact, we are still fixing the Dervish update and even some Mesmer skills just got updated (Fevered and Mind Wrack).

They don't listen to the community. The biggest criticism of A.Net has always been they don't listen. Every person I have ever spoken to who actually works closely with A.Net on balancing, both before and after Test Krewe formed, always say that A.Net has their own agenda. The only feedback they really listen to is toning down the OP crap they suggested in the first place. And for the most part, the toned down version of these skills that actually do get released, are still insanely OP.

They will listen every now and then, and it almost always brings positive results. But the times they listen are so few and far between the times they don't, that they might as well not exist at all.

Team Fortress 2.
Seriously, if an update shipped ten tons of pure gold to everyone's address, the TF2 community would then complain that they don't know how to sell gold for money and Valve should have just shipped them the equivalent in money.
And then Valve would ship them cash, and the community would complain about having to carry all that cash to the bank to deposit.

The TF2 community is astoundingly hostile to game updates considering that they're so friendly in-game.

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Interesting. I now feel kind of isolated -- I've played 2,000 hours of Guild Wars but never really followed the community and communications, I just played the game.

Exactly... Obviously they're not going to read all suggestions from every forum, but the supposed wiki forum isn't read neither....
Which lead to complete illogical and pointless updates , leading you to ask yourself : ' do they play the game ' ... You still wonder it today , when skills updates are only about nerfing what won GvG MAT....You can easily predict what's gonna happen everytime now....

Too many stuff with a high level of potential let down :
- Codex Arena ( going with Team Arenas And Hero Battles)
- Polymock
- Sorrow Furnace
- ToPK
- Contests( henchman one had potential , however it didn't really reward originality like it was stated...)
- Alliance Battles( it never ever had any care)

What's fun though is that they usually said they would do stuff about those and never did.... also fun is that all PvP( or could be PvP) arenas i mentionned would require brains and not only buttonmashing....

This is not true. It may have been a positive side-effect, no doubt, but the real reason that Anet invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs to create SF was to address a serious issue with spiraling weapon prices with max/perfect mods.

The addition of green weapons was an outlet for many people to easily get perfectly modded weapons. (True that some of the weapons had crappy mods, but they were still max...)

Failing to fix this was leading to a meltdown in the game economy, and people were already starting to leave because they felt at a disadvantage. It was becoming a PR nightmare, so they chose to fix it with greens.

Occasionally this agenda coincides with something that has been asked a long time and it will seem like they listen, but they really don't. The people that actually make the skill balances (not the test krewe, they provide feedback) have no clue at all. And they refuse to listen to people that do know what's up.

I have spent over 100€ on GW over the past 6+ years and I feel I got more than I ever did for any game I've played before. And that's coming from a country where software and especially game piracy is as common as "hello". Okay, there have been retarded updates, nonsensical nerfs and unfathomable blind eyes on OP stuff but GW still managed to provide me with blood, sweat, tears, laughs, friendships and occassional keyboard facerolls.

GW FTW I say.

Until you realise that the first screenshot depicts a battle against Destroyers. With a Fire Magic skillbar.

Trust me, the complaints we see from GW fans don't even come close to the amount of complaints that fans of other games send in. I play a lot of games, and the GW community is one of the more tame ones. The only one I'd say beats it is the RIFT community. I mean, that game has more reasons to complain than any other I've played, yet somehow their community is very polite about it (shocking considering how aggressive they are to fellow players in-game).

It may be true that there a lot of things wrong with GW, but there are so many other games with more things wrong, and some go even longer without fixes than in GW (hard to imagine, but it happens).

Lol, I didn't say he was good at playing the game.

And, I agree, I got more than my money's worth from GW. I've got over 9k hours into the game. I've never played a game this long. It's not perfect, but then no game I have ever purchased has been either.

they had such a gem, and they turned it into a pile of crap and an exhausted milking cow+guinea pig for gw2.

pretty depressing.

Haha, actually, because of this post, I'll come clean. I wrote the review and I just wandered around grabbing quick screenshots, not actually playing the game seriously. Loaded up the mission, grabbed a screen, quit. Against Destroyers I normally use an Air bar with Alkar's Alchemical Acid and the Delver title active.

That better? If not I can give you my bar

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Belated realization... that may be true, but it's still a response to something going on in the metagame that needed fixing. So they fixed it.

Every single game has that problem, Guild Wars' is to the lower extent of the complaining.

Because most games do not having an extensive testing phase after launch to view the synergy between the PvP/PvE systems with the games community. Since no testing is done you are left with players who are bitching about the games problems.

There will always be some small group complaining because that's the reason for their small existence. The trick is to separate those people from the people who want to see the game made better for the general community and satisfy them.

Guild Wars is an old game that went down the wrong path, this probably happened because it was Arena Nets first game and it took them 2 games to finally get it right... or so we hope until GW2 launches.

This I agree, If anything, its has gotten better. Anet has done a very good job of keeping up. All those QQ's/Trolls/Complainers, Go play some WoW, LOL.

Are you serious? I really hope you aren't.

This thread also reminds me how bad GW1guru still is.

Consider yourself lucky. Go now, run before you become a regular. Sometimes I wish I never started lurking on forums, it tends to take all the joy out of updates.

[edit]Oh, you wrote the article? Well then, I have to tell you, even for a devoted fan like me there were a few things that made me chuckle. First one that comes to mind: HM was added a few months after Nightfall's release, whereas SF was added a few months before Faction's release (because it was delayed 6 months or so) and titles were added with Factions, iirc. People did ask for those updates, yes, but they didn't all come at the same time and they certainly didn't come just a few months after release. This is what I'm referring to, btw:
Otherwise, it was a singing endorsement from a non-jaded fan.

The article was written by a very new, inexperienced amateur to GW.

ANet was once good at listening to feedback and adjusting content several years ago. Now they clearly have no intention of getting player feedback and have thrown GW1 into the back burner.

People have been asking for Dervish nerfs for forever now and they crap out pathetic attempts every other patch which are aimed at slapping a bandaid on the problem instead of completely mending it.

We've been asking for fixes to Paras, Rangers, and Eles forever now.

PvP has been asking for an overhaul and huge adjustments.

ANet also has the problem of letting unchecked issues fester up in their game like speed clears, Red Resign, poor class balance in PvE and PvP, SF/Sin abuse, and more.

ANet could try to fix the problem and be more vocal about what their efforts are focused on, but they don't do it.

They've already chosen to ignore the playerbase and follow some odd agenda because they know better.

Now it's about how many microtransactions they can sell instead of fixing the game.

Just scuttle the ship before it goes down. Right ANet?

A pretty accurate and honest review.

If I hadn't played the game it would make me want to go buy it.
Its mention of party formation control would lead me to expect more than we actually get but that's a minor quibble.

The major argument seems to have come from the "if something is broken it wont be for long"bit.

To some extent this is true when anet believes there is a serious fault they fix it, they do not always fix minor inconsequential faults nor do they fix every fault reported by players.
But then most of us differ when it comes to what is wrong and how to fix it.
They have made some changes I agree with and some others I don't which seems fair enough its their game.

Wait, what?

Maybe it's just the order in which they were listed, but Hard Mode didn't come out "a few months" after the launch of the game, and neither did "achievements," or as I believe they had meant, titles. Titles weren't out until the release of Factions, if I remember correctly, and that wasn't until a year after the release of Prophecies.

Right here is the section that sold me on questioning whether this review was being written with a mindset from this week or several years ago. Updates don't happen this frequently, and broken things can get left broken for a long time, depending on how critical they really are to the game's survival. Bugs get addressed with some haste; broken skills are allowed to roam free.

Concerning the overall review, I'd agree that the game is still pretty stellar, but only for the starting player. Being at the top of the ladder here with having completed or glossed over all of the content now, it's rather disenchanting. The Live team is in no position to seriously maintain the game that it runs. I've got to cross my fingers every day that something changes in the world of GW and hope that ANet is going to throw another ten or fifteen employees at the very least onto the Live team to breathe some extra life back into it once GW2 hits shelves.

Using that verb in the present tense, I think you would find many players that believe ANet doesn't listen, these days. Sorrow's Furnace was a very well received update to the game, but that was years ago. The dervish and mesmer overhauls were fairly recent in comparison, but even then, many problems arose with the release of each of those overhauls, and some of those issues are still being addressed, even though they have been apparent to some people for a long time now. You're also grossly overstating the frequency at which ANet balances skills on PvP grounds. If it's not obviously overpowering these days, and I mean blatantly overpowering, it probably won't get touched.

But that is the problem.

Are you saying that you're curious about their only marked criticism being population because it's the only one, or something different?

It is a bad thing though. It's inevitable, sure, and there's not much ANet can do about such a thing, but that doesn't mean it isn't bad.

Deal with it how? Neglect? Check the dev tracker for a moment there. Only one post from ANet, and it's about some server issues. The last time I remember that ANet posted here that wasn't about the servers was perhaps months ago. Now, that's not to say that ANet's involvement and interaction with the community can be completely judged by how many posts they've made on GWGuru in the last month, but certainly there are people here who can recall the kind of checkered history that ANet has had in the past with not answering to community outcry. For example, the botting situation that was getting out of hand not too long ago, and the time when accounts were getting compromised for being linked to an NCsoft Master Account.

More often than not, ANet's solution to a rowdy community is to just let us scream ourselves to death.

I think people complain so much just because they like Guild Wars so much that the little annoyances really get to them. It is a great game, much more value than any other game I've ever played, period, so I'm not going to get upset that they have failed in some aspects while triumphed in others.

@Shayne Hawke: Of the long list of issues with this game the active population ranks low in my opinion and that was the easiest pick to avoid controversy. Losing people in a 6 year old game was inevitable and natural but bad decisions along the way most definitely impacted it. The first place I'd have started is how EotN and content released in the 4 years since has been nothing but a huge advertising campaign for the sequel, and it shows. With the way the goal posts keep moving as a veteran it's hard to not feel like things have been cheapened and that they are actively trying to compel people to move on. The sense that the staff at Anet deliberately avoid Guru because of the sometimes, but not always, legitimate criticism is also valid in my opinion and it's a shame. Of course Guru2 is a more friendly environment, there hasn't been a commercial release made yet for people to dissect and find fault with.

It's cool, I thought as much. No one who is willing and able to write a post about GW that long will not engage Destroyers with Rodgort's Invocation on their skillbar. It was still pretty funny when I realised what was going on in that screenie.

Well written article and would be a good read for any person who as not heard of Guild Wars before. Gives brief and to the point synopsis. All the things a new person to the game should know to make them aware of the basics. However the screen shots should have matched in what was being written. Allowing the reader to visually see what you are talking about would greatly improve the article.


Now for the conversation that is going on in this thread. I complain, I voice my opinion on ideas, changes, updates, but as long as the servers are still running there is nothing to REALLY be upset about. Without the small to large changes the game would stand still and become stale more quickly. Keep that plastic bag around that bread Anet. ;-)

Let's be honest... it's not like they even read wiki suggestions neither... All they did was caring a little when it was an error/bug issues ( and you get the proof with the new support forum, which is only about those kind of issues)

People leaving the game is obvious after 6 years but it's especially due to a massive change of kind of players in my opinions....GW on it's begins( even pre-eotn) wasn't at all about farming only... sure you had to farm a little like in every game, but the game wasn't only about it...

I liked the article, it was pretty well fleshed out while remaining concise and if i hadn't already played the game for 6 years then i would give it a try without a doubt.
As for all the people complaining about Anet not listening and implementing changes that the player base has made i will just say.......WHAT????
Yes people have complained about a lot of things (bugs, exploits, etc) with validity, but with all the suggestions that have been made over the years you really think that Anet would do all of them.
How on earth (or Tyria to be more correct) could they manage to please you all.
So many things that people such as yourselves suggest are just going too far, they would change/break the game from what it is to some bad WoW clone, of which there are numerous examples out there.
Yes GW is old for a game but it's still as fun and fresh for those people that haven't played it for 6 years. Anet imo is one of the best companies out there for managing a game after it's release and keeping it fresh.
Name me any company that does what Anet does for US any better, that doesn't charge an extortionist monthly fee.

You really have no idea what your posting about do you?

Dervs were not OP before. Players were complaining for ages that the Mysticism line was crap and the dervs were Warriors with paper armor. Before the update, scythe Sins/Warriors/Rangers were much better at being Dervishes that the dervishes were themselves. Anet fixed that and now Dervishes are better at scythe wealding than other classes (Now they just have to fine tune the class to not be completely overpowered which they are doing in smaller updates to various meta skills... because players are compaining about Dervs being too strong).

Next point;
Anet has written that they have not problem with speedclears. If you dont like it, then dont do it. No one is forcing you to do it. Ive joined a guild that focuses on balanced HM completions of Elite areas. A full clear of DOA is possible in HM in under 3 consets without having to resort to SF, SB, Obbyflesh (enter your tanking elite here) on any of the 8 players skillbars.
Red resign was one of the reasons why Hero Battles were removed... players were then warned that it was match manipulation and red resigning in matches has become a lot less common.
Poor class balance (se my comment on Dervs above) They are trying to balance the skills, but some of them take a few attempts at fixing. Anet is doing a good job at it even if it may seem slow for you personally (if it isnt fixed in the next 10 seconds, then they are lazy).
SF/Sin abuse: SF has been nerfed multiple times already, and if we can do a HM area in under 1:30 with a balanced group compared to 1:00 while skipping 80% of the foes in a Speedclear with SF I really dont see a problem with that skill. Maybe its just the lack of skill /laziness of the compainers to get better / look for a guild that suits them.

Last point Im going to address is Microtransactions. How many do you need to buy to be as good or better than other GW players who have bought everything? The Answer is Zero. The ingame store gives absolutely no advantage over other players, you dont even need to buy anything there to play the game. What are you compaining about?

you, my friend, are wrong.
here's a few hints: the original avatar of grenth/melandru, the original ws, the original maintainable mirrage cloak with virtually no spec (hello mb eles with perma block) used on pious renewal+sig of pious light+imbue derv healers.

so, no. they had good stuff before already. same goes for mesmer.

they were doing good job...the first 1-2 years after GW came out.

Guild Wars PvP would have been MUCH better off if ANet stopped updating any skills right before the removal of VoD and the two big Elite Skill updates. Discuss.

Nope, I know Im not wrong. I wrote that players were complaining that the Mysticism line was crap, not that it actually was bad. I personally like some of the old Avatars more than the new ones as well.. it doesnt mean that Anet is doign somethign wrong... it just means that I have to look for or create better builds with the currently available skills.

Look at all the threads in this forum (mostly in the Sardelac subfoum) how many "Dervishes are crap" threads there are before the update. The point of this discussion is not "is Anet doing a great job of making every single player with every single complaint happy" (which would be impossible anyways), but "Is Anet listening to its playerbase or not?"

The answer is: Yes, Anet is quite deffinitely listening to its playerbase.

The problem is however that there are so many players with so many different views that, no matter what Anet does, some part of the players are guaranteed to complain and these complainers will blend out the updated/skillchanges/bugfixes as "My problems were not addressed, so Anet is being lazy and not doing anything".

People complain about the game being dead and Anet not doing anything except for churning out new microtransaction crap. There have however been some really big content and skill updates since you bought the game for which you did not have to spend a single cent for;

• Sorrows Furnace
• Zaishen Chest
• Zaishen Menagerie
• Zaishen Mission/Bounty/PVP
• Embark Beach /Zaishen Vanquish
• Many festivities including new quests since the last few years for the major festivals
• Dhuum in the UW and the solo Haloween quests in the UW
• Many monthly skillupdates until they changed to periodic large updates
• Information on the HOM in terms of preparing for GW2 before it is released
• Ritualist update
• Mesmer update
• Dervish update
• War in Kryta
• Hearts of the North
• Winds of Change (at least one third of it at the moment)
• Razzah being a changeable primary proffession hero (basically a free Mercenary for anyone who has Nightfall)
• Loads of smaller updates that the players have been requesting such as being able to log in offline or being able to check a box next to your name to show you are ready before a mission instead of typing 1.
• plus quite a few which I have probably forgotten myself

As you can see, Anet is far from the money grabbing lazy company that some are putting them out to be. OK, they could do more, but lets face it. Their main goal at the moment is to complete GW2 and get it out for sale so that they can make enough money to carry on giving out free updates with no monthly fees for their clients.

The In-game store items are completely optional and do not in any way give you an advantage over other players. Not buying them will not exclude you from any of the content needed to play with others.