Is GW dead?

Lets just say its really old, not dead "yet". The glory days of GW are long gone my friend.

Well, lately i could swear that everytime i open GW, i hear something like "braaaaaaaiiiiiiinnnssssss" coming out of speakers and some creepy sounds.

I think the issue for PvP was incentives being removed, elitism and competitiveness has to be present in PvP formats and players from any game expect it. TA was removed for some stupid reason, which meant friends can't make teams and synergistic 4-man teams like HA, so a lot of people stopped playing there. Codex was a bad replacement. Not sure what happened to GvG, because I enjoyed it when I played, but HA was just too gimmicky.

PvE side, a lot of people play it, but it's instanced so you don't see that. More people need to PUG so other players learn to be not so shit.

As long as you don't see "Rule #1: Cardio." on the log-in screen, you'll be fine.

Another big problem that the game has is the untethered connection to NCSoft. It would do Anet wonders to become financially independent enough to separate.

PvP has it's problems as stated in other posts.
However from where I stand Guild Wars it is not dead. Just before HoM points came out there was definitely an issue with population, could tell when ectos were at 2-3k. My community within the game is still going strong. The only time I stand still is in Kamadan for advertising the Guild Wars guild, which usually as around 100-150 people using the party search. Otherwise, I am out the door killing foes, with guild events or helping people with whatever they want to do.
If you are in America districts you'll see plenty of people. If you are looking to play with random people, your best bet is do the Zaishen Quests (daily).

Have to realize that The world of Guild Wars is one of the largest video game lands out there and people who are playing the game are, actually playing it, not standing around for hours waiting for a group. Also most people play the game once or twice week for a few hours. With no subscription fees, people don't feel they have to sit at the computer all day to get their money's worth.

Pretty much.

With the 7 hero update, there is little reason to play with other players now, and people get bored.

PvP died back in 2007, and has be rotting ever since. Vets and elitist pretty much killed GvG and HA since they would never allow new players into their groups. AB gets little to no attention, and of course that would get boring.

It is also a 7 year old game, and has to compete with many other popular releases.

Also thank goodness for the 7 hero update, otherwise the game would be unplayable because there are not enough people in the outposts and the henchies are too crappy.

I wired GW to the MMORPG-ECG heart rate monitor and the pulse is getting weaker.

There's been a noticeable drop in the local Kamadan population since Diablo 3 release.
Other recent MMOs + big blockbuster titles are all eating away at numbers.

There's still returning players from time to time but many who have returned over the last 12-18 months have finished the quests/titles/HoM points that they wanted to.

2006

Inscriptions = death

R.I.P GW

i wouldnt say its "dead" but its definitely not in its glory days. Its kinda like Brett Farve. I think multiple things really contributed to its lack of community so to say. Inscriptions i think really ruined alot of things, heroes (i like them but its eliminated the pug for the most part) and the elitism of pvp players basically running the tables and not letting new people in, turned alot of people trying to do pvp away from it. Its still a good game, fun to log in a couple times a week just to do a quest or two. Id still say one of my favorite games of all time.

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also i liked to add that inscriptions ruined the green items market, making boss drops from them worthless

If there was one team for every 8 people that incessantly bitched and moaned about "elitism", then the game would be far more than fully populated right now.

Anet neglected the middle of the ladder. There were a several incarnations of builds that were never good enough to win at the top of PvP, so Anet never did anything to them; at the same time these builds were easy to play to the point of mashing buttons, so that the middle of the ladder was nothing but these builds. It shouldn't be too hard to realize that middle of the road players got sick of playing against the same build played by button mashers and quit. Even folks that aren't playing at the top of the game want to play a game that has some sort of strategy and tactic rather than who can mash buttons the hardest. I'm not even being hyperbolic about mashing buttons.

Like every other problem with PvP, it goes back to Anet neglect.

It's dead when the servers go down.

Simple.

Cow excrement. The problem is the players, not Anet.
I just say it like i experienced it: I tried to get into HA a few times but no one EVER let me play.

Guy running team: rank?
Me: (pings perfect wiki build)
Guy nunning team: RANK
Me: Look, i need to practice this somewhere ok?

(kicked)

Nice. And thats the problem with HA. Your argument is null and void.

This is just a by-product of what Reverend Dr said. The root of the problem was the disappearance of the middle ground due to neglect by Anet.

So what if Anet touroughly rebalanced pvp skills? How many hours would it take before the old pattern would return but with different mandatory builds and once again the same 1337 teams? Newbies still wouldn't get in.

I would propose making all pvp exept guild battles run on randomly selected groups denying the elitists the ability to keep anyone they dont know from practicing. then at least everyone can play. You would have to turn off all chat like you do in RA, but you would at least get in.

GW2 killed it...at least for my wife and me. When we played the beta, and my wife couldn't play the game due to changes in the mechanics, it left all reason for her to play GW1.

Also, Diablo 3 came out, which has a similar play mechanic to GW1, so of COURSE everyone's been fighting for computer time for THAT game!

This makes no sense as a response to EPO Bot.

1) He was talking about new players. Not the "middle ground"; new players. If the complaint is that no experienced players were helping new players get into the game, the presence or absence of ANet's support isn't very relevant.

2) If anything, poorly balanced metagames help those kinds of players, because they can roll up a sway or IWAY or whatever-way build with a bunch of other newbies and still have a fighting chance of winning a few games, gaining some ranks, and learning the maps in the process. That's the point of Rank, right, to show that someone is at least familiar with the format? It certainly isn't useful for anything else (ie, determining skill, particularly if we're talking about skill in a particular role).

3) What neglect? The last time I recall that the metagame (in 8v8 organized play) could really be said to be terribly unhealthy (and by that I mean: one build would have a much better chance of beating everything else, regardless of the relative skill of the teams involved) was years ago, when sway was rampant. There have been tons of balance updates since then. Oh, there have certainly been spikes of imbalance (not coincidentally occurring right after major updates, like the mesmer and dervish rebalancings), but they were mostly dealt with, and they certainly didn't make the game as unhealthy as it had been in years past. Dervishes made warriors obsolete (for a time), but hexway was just damn depressing to play against, and I contend that there's nothing that unfun in the game at this point, and there hasn't been for some time. On top of that, they added ZCoins, and more recently lockboxes, to try to reward regular players and entice new players to get in the game. It hasn't worked, despite this pushing. But no, it's aaaaaaall ANet's fault, for neglecting the game so very much. Pssh. Excuses excuses.

A competitive game can survive without any balance updates if the community is healthy. Let's look at CS: no persistent rewards, no meaningful changes for years, and yet it's still an immensely popular game. Why? Because the casual base is incredibly big, it's easy to jump in and play, and it's easy to work your way up to competitive play. Clan players play on PUB servers with random newbies, random newbies learn the maps and mechanics and can gradually learn via observation of the top players. There are tournaments, but they're played on the same maps with (mostly) the same rules, so if you get good enough on a PUB server you have a shot at joining a clan and being useful in a tournament immediately.

All of this is completely absent in GW1. New players effectively need to be taken by the hand and taught how to play GvG and HA, and that simply does not happen in this community, and it hasn't happened for years. It's really a design flaw of the game itself - which is why GW2's PvP functions more like CS's than GW1's in a lot of ways - but it's the game that we have, and no amount of "support" by ANet was going to make it easier to transition new players to competitive formats. That largely fell to the players, and the players have been doing a crappy job of it as of late.

No, forming a team of 8 randoms and waiting 20 minutes just to get rolled in 30 seconds by a r8 team is not a good option for new players. Maybe at one time, when HA was 5 districts, that was a viable way to learn the game. It hasn't been for years, and to continue bringing that strawman up as the "solution" is just unhelpful to everyone.

The game needs more people playing. Whine all you want about elitism or how that big bad team wouldn't take you along; the game needs (needed?) more players.

Why did it need more players? Because Anet's 'support' destroyed how the game felt and played which in turn ran people off.

It all goes back to Anet's neglect.

Or the game just ran it's course and only the die hards remained? And said die hards aren't exactly the most social and helpfull people around? Anet can do whatever it wants, it isn't going to change anything anymore because the game is old. On it's own tough, GW is better then it ever was.