Update - December 15, 2011

Why remove the grentches from town? Is it just too early?

Are they really?

Sure. Most of the better guilds are full of hardcore PvP-ers, but we usually field a couple of pure PvE-ers and several more players with limited PvP experience (ie: Bambi and low Glad titles), consistently make the single-elims and win regularly.

Once you get past the contenders for winning an AT, you're looking at teams comprised almost entirely of players that spend 90%+ of their time in PvE. It's really not hard to finish in the top 16, which IIRC is good for something like 16-17 keys. That's pretty solid for a 90 minute investment of time.

If you gimp the rewards, the marginal players will go away and the hardcore crowd won't make the effort to play as often.

Further proving that everyone likes loot. It just depends if you want to farm actual players or NPC's.

If they removed the need to have a corpse exploiting skill for Urgoz, shouldn't they have fixed the gate in The Deep as well?

Right, but remember that loot is relative. If we buff all loot, all that happens is the price of everything goes up. So the devs have to use loot selectively to promote behaviors.

Lemming is just saying that he'd rather see the devs promote daily ATs over Snowball ATs. Unfortunately, using loot as a carrot to attract PvE types won't persuade them to invest the time and effort necessary to become competitive with the pros. The barrier to entry is way too high.

Instead, people just find ways to game the system such as red resign.

Why is Grenth gradually being taken out of his own festival? He only had his own special Wintersday gift boxes during the first Wintersday, and now he lost his Grentches (and now the towns feel less lively . . . ), and his and Balthy's version of one of the pve quests. Melandru only lets you participate on her and Dwayna's side.

Well by taking out Crushed spirits (no the pvp isnt the same thing) anet has done exactly that.. Crushed my Wintersday Spirit!

No longer interested in wintersday.. oh well back to afking in my guild hall until GW2 comes out

So do you and Lemming think that they have found a solution to this problem in GW2?

I play a lot of Street Fighter. It's the same type of thing: easy to learn, hard to master.

I think the problem with PvP in this game is that cheating is perceived as rampant in GW1. Who wants to have a steep learning curve and deal with bots/cheaters/gold farmers/smurfs and foul mouthed people that troll mid match all day all while losing over and over again while you learn the format? Adding loot is great, but not if you know you aren't going to win anything. I only play RA anymore. I still get pretty ticked off after 5-10 wins and then running into a sync team. I just don't see any viable solutions to the problem at this point.

The only real solution is to build a mousetrap that's good enough to attract a large community, and resistant enough to hacking that it doesn't get overrun by cheaters quickly.

I've heard varying opinions on the former, and there's no way for anyone outside the company to know about the latter.

I don't recall many people doing Crushed Spirits. It seemed like most people did Fighting in a Winter Wonderland which was pretty much the same scenario and is still available. I think they removed crushed spirits because it was just too much of a duplication with fiaww and they wanted to make something a little different available to the players.

I always mess around with them whenever I pass through Lion's Arch. Towns are just filled with decor without them.

What is there to fix? The gate is meant to be opened by finishing the room.

The problem with many metaphors, including this one, is that in the effort to be easily understandable there will be underlying variables that become confounded. For me at least there are a few here that I will try to explain because I love Street Fighter and can't really stand Guild Wars PvP.

For me it isn't the cheating at all, it's that (most) Guild Wars PvP is terribly boring; to a lesser extent, the way that it must be done to get any reward at all is awful.

I used to play a different MMO, back when they were called MUDs, which had fantastic PvP throughout. The most notable distinction from Guild Wars, I think, is that right from the center of the world you could enter into three free-form PvP arenas with anyone else: a 2x2 pit (remember this is a MUD, so they used discrete rooms), a 3x3 pit, and a larger arena. There was also an arena you could enter with another player where you started off with nothing and ran around finding equipment before battling it out to the death. That was actually my favorite part of the game.

Anyway, that's just the basics. They also had extremely complex team-based games with point-scoring objectives that couldn't really be won by "kill the other guys". (Guild Wars has something like this too in Jade Quarry and Fort Aspenwood, and in my opinion they are the best PvP format in the game.) One thing that all of these formats shared was that I didn't need to wait around forming a team (save the occasional 2v2 events). This was either because it was 1v1, or because the format was designed in such a way that you could have a large number of players enter and be placed automatically on a team and that was actually okay and balanced. This is not an impossible design goal, it's just that when ArenaNet was first going about creating PvP they hadn't yet figured out how to do this and now they're married to the old ideas.

I was ironically quite excited when my friend first told me about Guild Wars and how convenient PvP characters were (in this old game you had nothing like the equipment window); this was convenience I had wanted for ages. But all the convenience in the world can't improve a terrible format, so I ended up loving the Guild Wars PvE and not caring for the PvP.

To bring this all back to the point I was making about metaphors, Street Fighter is a fantastic game that has many, many differences from Guild Wars PvP and to compare the two like that is to confound a large number of variables.

I was under the assumption that people needed to die at the gate and get Rebirthed over, but I guess killing the nightmares that spawn opens the gate, which I didn't know.

It was also stated (somewhere) that the necessity of bringing a teleportation skill was by design, not accident. You have 12 slots and there's no reason one of them can't be a necro so I honestly don't understand the issue here.

@Wenspire; that's the Aspect of Lethargy in the Deep and there are multiple ways to get through that gate.

Consume Corpse and Necrotic Traversal are Prophecies skills. Urgoz's Warren is a Factions elite area. Requiring skills from another campaign runs directly counter to their original stated design goals for the campaign model.

It is my understanding that one of those two skills was required to progress prior to this update. Correct me if I'm wrong, as I've never been further than the suicide vampires in the beginning.

Hmm. I could get up to Urgoz with a 7 hero team, now the 2nd prof can be freed up. Just need to find a way to essentially solo urgoz now...

You're not wrong...NT and CC are the way to do it. The Elite was designed in a time period when people actually, you know...grouped. Assuming 1 person in 12 owns both Prophecies and Factions is not a huge leap to make not even back in 2006. Urgoz is full of traps, the bridge just being a minor one. Rooms 7 and 10 are pretty lethal if the entire team runs in. All of these things have been well documented in detail for years. It takes all of 5 minutes to read the wiki article and anyone new to the area would be far better off just having the patience to do so.

you used to be able to do it with rebirth under the bridge because of the z-axis. But they "fixed" that and made it so that at least one character (player) had to be necro, or gimp their build and take a necro secondary. Not much of an issue in the early days witn no heroes, but these days when you only need two players (probably all you can muster for it) it's a big deal.