What happened to guild wars!?

I've always loved Guild Wars. I've been playing it since pretty much the beginning (Maybe a week or two after launch), it sounds pretty lame but I had some great times on this game, met some cool people and just really enjoyed it.

I've always felt the game to be the perfect balance between MMO and Dungeon Crawler. Something I felt that got totally lost in Guild Wars 2.

A year or two ago University commitments and other interests/games appeared and I gradually stopped playing. But I remember the last time I logged on and the game was still as busy as ever! The major cities were filled with the cries of traders and people looking for groups. I played a few hardmodes with a PUG and tried out some PvP.

I was feeling the urge to relive the GW hype once more. I reinstalled and logged in, only to find the game to be a ghost town. I literally scoured the earth to find people. I eventually found a lone warrior in Kaineng Centre. I asked him what was going on and what had become of the game in my years absence. He told me that I was the second person he had seen all day and that no one else seems to play any more.

I was surprisingly depressed by this news. While I know its pretty nerdy to be upset about something like this, I had some great times on this game and the thought of it being over was sad news indeed. In just a year the game had gone from a real high to only a few people playing.

And so I write this message in an old forum I used to check out, with hope that there are a few like-minded guild wars fans still out there. Are there any districts or areas that are still populated, are there perhaps a few guilds still going out on missions and farms like the old days? I hope so, I hope so... T_T.

You can try daily Zaishen quests or finding an active guild. A lot of people moved on, had families, careers, etc. Pretty sure most didn't try or play for long Guild Wars 2 with how bad it turned out.

Anet is a very different company now. They went for the WoW crowd with Guild Wars 2 at the expense of innovation and fun. Guild Wars has been neglected several times for long periods including now.

Try American districts,
I still find people even outside the major hub cities. And Pre-Searing Ascalon often have 2 districts.

few things

- many people left the game (which happens to all games)
- teams are mostly in guilds and alliances nowadays
- people are busy with daily zaishen quests (sometimes also pvp ones)
- we have weekly events instead of weekend events, which people also use alot
- lately i've seen many guilds going for owning a town with faction (meaning they might not want to help/join others that much with "normal stuff"), but find the right guilds, and you can join/help/get help
- favor no longer required to open UW and FoW, so people can do that alot now
- many people prefer 7 heroes over humans or humans+heroes teams, for many reasons, like going faster or not joining bad pugs (i had that alot) or just to play around with their team builds (which i do alot)
- and yes, american districts are way more filled nowadays

but luckily there are still many who would join for fun or even help you if needed, just dont join speedclear guilds if you want to do normal stuff (speaking with experience.... sigh) and faction based (owning town) guilds..... which i also had bad experiences with

so i'm in a small guild with allies now, and i like it as long as i can get the help i sometimes need (not always, but oh well.... GW is big enough if you make it big.... not just titles) and can chat with people

*i watch lots of anime series in between to not get bored when i dont know what to do, or dont get the help i want, and youtueb stuff, like gaming tricks and glitches
and play old nintendo games *

kamadan ad1 if you wanna talk to people. if you wanna play with others then you need to join an active guild

The Rapture came and took almost all gw1 players to gw2, we are the left behind

ANet just doesn't care. The only big people left from the release of GW1 is O'Brien, but he's not really a designer...more of a server guy (and a liar). When Strain left I knew the future of ANet was in the crapper. If ANet (or I guess NCSoft) really wanted to they could have GW1 more active still with small content updates with a small live team ala 2009-2012. So much for that finish to GW:B.

It's sad, but it's what it is. There's still active guilds and the like, but it's not the same. Anything fun is on scheduled guild events not picking up a PUG and going at it. It's hard for me to put aside certain hours of the day to do something when GW1 has always been about picking up and putting down anytime. Still, the game is active enough to be enjoyable, and the week day events help a lot for certain activities so it's always fun to take advantage of it and enjoy some population bursts.

And there's still pre-searing. Always going to be a nice community there until the day the servers shut down. A niche no other game really fills.

I'm sorry but that was hilarious lol.

Zaishen quests get people out into the world and group up, the game will feel dead until you join a large guild. Just head to Kamadan and someone should be advertising, or ask yourself.

And yeah, always go American district.

Zaishen quests exist to give the illusion of a populated world. They funnel what few players are left at the same area at the same time, so it's not as obvious that the *entire rest of the game world* is completely deserted.

Remember when you could literally just go to a mission hub and find a party for it? Can you do that now, aside from the 1 or 2 zaishen quests? No? That means it's dead. Don't be tricked by basic psych stuff. If all you do in the game is grindy zaishen dailies, you'll meet other people who also do the grindy zaishen dailies. If you try to do anything else, you'll run into ghost towns at every turn.

And don't even try to PvP. Guild Wars was literally built from the ground up as a PvP game, with many elements of the Prophecies campaign teaching players various PvP mechanics then dumping them into ToPK (which was, for years, a PvP arena - Hall of Heroes). Years ago, queue times for PvP got ridiculous. Today they're impossible. If you somehow manage to form a party for any of the "serious" arenas, you will sit there for *hours* waiting for a match.

That is dead as hell.

What do you mean by tricked. You can't pug anymore, it's dead in that regard. Find a guild and enjoy playing with them if you want or don't. That has nothing to do with psychic tricks.

One of the strongest reason why this game is "dead" like you describe is because most people think like you. I heared a ton of people of the last year say "I would love to play GW again, but it's dead". If all those people would gather and would once again play GW it wouldn't be dead. -.-

@OP: Anet just destroyed the GW com to create some game I don't want to talk about.

some parts of the game are nearly dead, but the game itself still lives
all that negativity, yet i see many newbies join guilds
players who come from GW2, or even those who just found the game

if anet is smart, they'll come back one day, so if they dont, then they arent as smart anymore

Simple ways of avoiding being alone:

1. Always be in american district.
2. Bigger towns have more peeps.
3. Join an active guild if you haven't already.
4. Buy mercenary heroes and pretend they are your friends.
5. Do the Zaishen Mission once a while.

I too am returning to Guild Wars after having been disappointed by GW2 and doing other games, such as Diablo III and Kingdoms of Amalur.

I am seriously thinking about approaching the game as a new player, you know, do the quests and missions. I had lots of fun with that back in the day, and I think I have been away long enough that it will seem pretty new to me.

Maybe we'll cross paths one day, and do some red-dot-killing together.

Shane

6. Get some ingame friends while playing or via guru

they ARE my friends...

I miss those old days, even my friends moved on to different games now

You know, it is actually embarrassing to say that when GW2 came out it was like my world crashed because all I had built up and all my friends were now gone. And I'd never have that much fun in a game again and I'd never get to chat regularly with those people again while we where killing people or monsters. They were playing this hideous game that I couldn't get really that into. And it's like that now, I play alone. There's hardly anything to enjoy in a game like Guild Wars 2. Oh, but I don't dwell on it or anything, it is what it is. This game is unfortunately left for dead it seems.

It sucks so much that such a bad game can take over the whole player base of the first. I don't think that any other online game I'll play will ever feel the same way.

I miss it too It was so much fun. If I could go back I would!

Hah, I'm amazed to see that the GW guru forums are not dead yet. I thought about this game recently, as I was gamelessly browsing the internet to search for something worth playing.

I would rate GW with my top 2 games that I ever played (place 1 or 2, I can't decide). It was one of a kind and I don't think any other company even tried to make a game like this. The community was great, PvP was awesome, PvE was amazing and challenging, the events were fun... I could have played this game forever.

But then GW2 came and we all know what happened. I personally gave Arenanet the benefit of the doubt for a while (they made GW after all), but in the end I had to admit to myself that GW2 wasn't enjoyable, and I was better off without it.

I did check into GW somewhere last year, but the content I enjoyed seemed to be pretty dead. Do people still play JQ, FA, AB outside weekends? And is there any kind of player influx at all, or is the population just getting lower?

Also I recently logged into RuneScape. That game launched January 2001 and is not only still around, but crowded! Even though it's clearly a dated game in many aspect, so many people still play it, because it's just a good game and continues to be developed. I wish so much that Guild Wars had gone the same route... if the devs had stuck to their original ideas and continued to develop GW and its content, I'm sure it could have lasted 13+ years too, instead of this stupid boring thing that is GW2

There are still people coming back/new people coming to the game. The population is more or less stable or maybe a bit growing.
FA is dead (though some people wanted to revive it again), JQ is flooded by bots. AB is dead except for the bonus weeks when it's fully crowded.
A lot of content/playing together is now organised in guilds and pugging is nearly dead. If you look for other people, try to find a nice guild.

Yeah, a pet peeve (at least for me) is that a lot of guildies/ingame friends speak about GW(1) like the servers don't exist anymore. Like Anet shut the game down the day GW2 launched. They go like "Waah, I miss GW1" blabla. Well... it's not gone. Just start it up, and people are still playing. Yeah, it's not the same as before, but the game will only die if you let it. If you still want to play, go ahead and come back. You don't have to exclusively stick to GW2 unless that's what you want to.

I'm sorry I missed your post, but aren't you just a ray of sunshine.

I would say Team Arenas was one of the best things about PvP.That is if you had small guild.It was good when there was TOPK when you ascended it meant something.It was the only way to get there as for HA is so easy to get it make for bad players possibly.

I agree with Age, TA was one of the best things that happened to PvP in Guild Wars, I loved it so much. I hop on GW every now and then to see the wonders I left behind, but with all my friends gone I don't really have a reason to come back and stay. There's so much of the game that I love and will always love.

Who here has used the store since it was updated just saw this now?You have go to the website now instead of the login screen.

Guild Wars 2 happened and GW1 development stopped.

Even if people don't want to hear it anymore, the game is rather dead, but relax, even as a zombie it offers way more than GW2 ever did and probably ever will do.

The competitive PvP scene that appealed to many might be gone, even if it did not migrate to GW2 which still tries to get into eSports in spite of being dumbed down and sPvP not being too engaging.
But for PvE, you still have great campaigns and lots of builds to experiment with.

It seems that Mr. Strain and some of his coworkers that left with him were essential for the success of GW. GW1 is a much better basis for future games than GW2, unfortunately Jeff Strain seems to have gone dead with Undead Labs and ArenaNet is doomed to work on GW2 for years. A pity!

To end on a high note:
-> Get some of your friends to play this oldie with you, it's a goldie!

It breaks my heart that the game is so empty and I'm pretty sure Guild Wars 2 had a lot to do with it. Guild Wars 2 is sadly nothing like Guild Wars 1 and I have a feeling that nothing quite like it will ever exist again. Such a great game; I'll always be disappointed that ArenaNet went in the direction they did.

I would tend to think a lot of this is coming from NCSoft Korea not so much ArenaNet.NCSoft has but a lot of money in Gw2 and want a return on their investment and the numbers are nothing like compared to that of GW.The Guru 2 and GWOnline is no where as busy as it was back 07 ,08 and in 09 started to die down with the annoucement of Gw2.

ArenaNet lost some of its most important people during the development of GW2. Jeff Strain, James Phinney, and Patrick Wyatt all left to cofound Undead Labs. Phinney was one of two of the lead developers on Starcraft 1, the most popular RTS game of all time. These guys were the brains behind GW1. Management was probably the thing that got to them. Could it have been pressure from NCSoft? Was NCSoft not funding them adequately? Was O'Brien a shitty boss? We don't know...

If I was to just say at the top of my mind what I think it was, I'd say I think it was a change of directions. Remember that the original game was designed for PvP, and lets just say that failed epicly in GW2. The games combat depth is so out of this world it doesn't even exist.

I think it's when other people decided that the game was gonna be a PvE, noob-friendly, dumbed down to kinder garden level MMO with flashy weapons and over shaded tits that the rest of the bunch where like: Damn. I'm out of here.

I know I would run out the door if I designed a challenging game with very deep combat mechanics and someone said they wanted it the complete opposite.

This was probably the reason why i think so aswell.

But then on the other hand why did they invest years of balancing in a game design what they never gonna use anyway? was gw so bad in the first place for the devolopers? did the community ever mourn about pvp beeing so bad in this game?

The only things i see from players nowadays is the whining how they dont enjoy gw2 at all (me including - i still enjoy GW even though i didnt play for years - but yeah pvp is still good just that none of the good players are playing anymore so its way less challenging)

I dont understand why Anet just threw a project like this away and never looked back - but i want to understand

Economics.

Max

If you think about it logically, if you can make a game that caters to both casual and hardcore you have the perfect game. And if that game is F2P but has a cash shop, that's even better and you're gonna be making a ton of money. Focus the game solely on PvE and cosmetics and you pretty much got yourself a deal. Peoplelove customising their characters, while the hardcore players like getting the most expensive(legendaries, excluding the light sword) and highest gear(ascended). But then try to even all that out for the casuals, if you can do that, which GW2 has done, you got yourself a gold mine. However long you can mine gold out of there thought, depends on how long it takes before the players get bored of the shallowness of the game.

I am the only one who misses hero battles? It only takes 2 players to set up a match too... sounds like it'd be fun to bring it back.

I feel like HB would be the most visited area nowadays. I have been such a big fan of it, I wasn't really good at it, but I loved just following the matches and the tournaments.

Anet decided to go with Guild Wars 2 full time that's what happened. The curent gw2 all zerker meta is a bad joke; 5 players stacking in a corner with basicaly same armor setup doing nothing else then dps is completly retarded, I enjoy more a League of Legends game with 4 trolls or a Dota 2 game with 4 mega noob russians spaming cyka (because I can try alone to win the game, I know the chances are damn small to do it but it will help me improve) then stacking in a corner in gw2 and spaming random some skills, yes i can spam random the result will be same anyway.
In Dota 2 we have some words for patches that add only cosmetic items "Volvo more hats please", funny part is that it applies to GW2 patches also. NCSoft probably become greed and wanted more money that's why gw2 end up what it is now (no real end game content, fractals are boring because it's same thing over and over and over, pvp is bad cause classes are badly unbalanced) and gw1 development was shut down.

The funniest part is that The Secret World is damn close to Guild Wars 1 than Guild Wars 2 will ever be. I would had went full time in TSW if the 3d engine wouldn't had been a pure junk (random fps spikes, stutter for no reason at all). Anyway TSW is a dieing game, the last issue (dlc in reality) killed it, buying it in the curent state is a bad idea (the player population is low, even at peak hours it takes a lot to find people to do a dungeon/raid and you hit the gear discrimination if you want the hardest modes, pvp also has issues one arena is dead, one is active only at some hours and the persistent pvp zone is dominated by one faction). Why I mentioned TSW? Because I want to point that someone else made a game closer to GW1 then Anet...

From the mmo I played Guild Wars 1 is overall the best, The Secret World would had won if that 3d engine wouldn't had been so bad.
I was sad when I saw what happened with gw1 after gw2 launch. I'm still looking for a decent replacement for gw1 to be honest.

What i would like to see are some new skins added especially for swords and bows.I would really like to see broad sword.More realistic looking swords and bows.