No fee - b.net quality?

I only recently got to know Guild Wars and I still wonder wether it's a good idea to launch a MMORPG without a monthly fee.
Servers are expensive, but you can cope with it (see b.net)
But the people who take care of the game are expensive - you can either pay too few and you get something like the b.net, which is quite faulty, not all too much happens and cheats are common (speaking from my experiences of D2)
Or you can pay enough people, which would be very expensive.

So I wonder - how will ArenaNet finance their servers and support if not through a monthly fee?
Just the price for the game itself probably won't be enough.

they're going to finance it by releasing expansions often. Supposedly this network achitecture is much cheaper than any other mmo out there. This games architecture is setup much different than b.net was. I'm sure there will be those who attempt to cheat, but I'm fairly confident we won't have those problems here.

I've gotten to know the devs from discussions on the alpha forums and they've learned from those past mistakes. I think you're going to find a high quality game here.

Yeah from what I heard. Things mostly are server side and less from the client side. So cheating would probably be noticed since most things that happen are server side. Correct me if I'm wrong

Guild Wars is great. It is free because the people from Battle.Net made it so. You will ahve to play it to totally see its goodness. Servers in this are "districts" of Ascalon.

With how Anet streams patches out so often any problem once found will be quickly corrected. Their is no doubt in my mind that they will take reports of cheating seriosly and if it has merit squash it before most people even know about it.

Not really serves Nova, since everyone can go into them.

The game servers will be somewhere that has 1 or more oc3 trunk lines in the building. The districts are just different lvl's of the game. A way to ease network traffic. IE when you tele you and your party get put into different districts. Usually this means that you have been put into the fastest network condition for you and Anet. And yes having a bunch of linked servers can get very costly as well as paying the saff to keep adding game content.

Also they are hoping that people who like the game will have more than one copy. Because they limit the number of char. that you can have per copy of the game. It has forced me to get 2 copies. One for myself and one for my kids. That means I will be buying 2 of every upgrade that comes around.

And thet are hopping that it will outsell games like D2 which is Blizzards (still) best selling game. This game is far better as well.

Was Diablo II Blizzard's top seller? Not Starcraft?

And then there's the technicality of including the expansion packs of both into consideration.

On a random note, I recall a statistic, probably false, which said that productivity in the US dropped by 33% the day Diablo II hit shelves.
-- Scaper-X

I don't think the streaming-system will decide if there will be cheating, you still need the people to look for cheats and solve the problems. And cheats are always possible.

I don't think it'll outrun D2 - no big magazine coverage, no ass-kicking first part, no hype.

The numbers of chars a limited? How many can you have per game?

i think it'll be better then d2... give it time... word will get out and it will take off...

quite obviously, loads of money coming in doesn't mean good content. Look at World of Warcraft. 10 bucks every month from every single one of their thousands of players and they can hardly keep their servers from crashing every day.

Thats what I am talking about guys. Servers ease up the traffic and make less lag. But Guild Wars is better because everyone can play with everyone you aren't confined to your server! Its better this way. Its not servers but has same purpose. will restate this: Guild Wars has taken the downs of otehr MMORPGs and made a better game by fixing all of those problems.

It still is. And they hate to admit it because they stopped supporting it or adding anymore patches or addon packs.

I beleive (just my guess) that is why the team that created GW created it. If I am not mistaken they originaly created products for Blizzard. And this game is so much better than anything that Blizzard has to offer.

You're certainly not mistaken. The developers in ArenaNet are the same people who brought us the Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft series. Hell, some of them came right from early World Of Warcraft designing when they realized it was going to be Blizzard's answer to Everquest.

Not sure if you've seen some of the early-early screens of Guild Wars:

http://media.pc.ign.com/media/552/552148/imgs_11.html

Look a bit like WoW? There's a reason.

Also, you're absolutely right on Diablo II/IIX being Blizzard's top seller.
-- Scaper-X

The game sure does look better now. And I never did Play anything other than D2 so I can only compare to GW BWE and D2 as far as RPG's go. I do play all the other standard games.

Halo2
quake3
doom3
ut2004
and most of the x-box online games.

D2 just got so boring. Nothing new. Just go killing in the PvP. And once you had a perfect build with all the armor that was it. No more incentive to really play. I have 4 lvl 92 char. I just cant stand to do Baal runs just to lvl. BORING

ANet was founded by people who, hopefully, learned from BNet's mistakes.

The cost of running and maintaining the game will supposedly be offset by the retail price of the game and through regularly released expansions which will feature content nearly on par with that of the original release (In theory anyway. We've not seen the original release or even what an expansion might entail yet so it's all based on word from ANet itself and they're hardly going to tell us they're planning to hurry crappy content out the door in order to pay the bills, now are they?). Such expansion have been said to come out every 6~9 months.

At the same time the architechture of GW is set up such that bandwidth and server costs should be much much lower. There's the streaming technology meaning that the network is using downtime and gaps instead of happening all at once *cough*massiveWoWpatchthatnearlykilledournetworkye sterday*cough*. The data for a place will eventually be on your harddrive and the game's just telling your computer how to put it together, building things as it goes and adding to your data file as you're playing. And there's also the fact that everything is instanced. There's only so many people allowed in each and every instance, meaning the servers don't have to be capable of supporting thousands of players all performing actions at once. Town are the biggest places and they have a hard cap of, I believe 100, and they start to District out well below that (Ie if you're the 101st person there's no way you can get to that district. If you're, say, the 99th, you'd be dumped into another district but you could use the district selector to reach the crowded district). But in towns you don't have to deal with attack and skill animation, either. And there's probably a host of other tricks and techniques used which someone with more experience in network communications than I can probably speak to more. By design, though, it's a game that's not going to suck up a lot of bandwidth or server processing power at any given time.

Add to that the fact that it should be able to sell more copies than your average MMO if it's a success or even a modest one - that lack of a monthly fee puts a lot of people off. GW, by contrast, is like a FPS or an RTS, it's a game with some cross-over appeal. People can just plunk their money down and then set it aside whenever they want. I wouldn't expect WoW like sales but I'd supsect that the amount of people who'll play it day in and day out to be far less than the amount who actually buy the game and play for a month or so. More copies sold means more of a profit margin. And lower networking costs means more of a profit margin.

I wouldn't worry about the ability of ANet to afford the server costs. They've no doubt crunched the numbers backwards and forwards by this point. And they've managed to convince NCSoft that they can do it, at least. Even if it's a crushing failure on release there's probably enough there to get us through at least one expansion, if not beyond, as word of mouth spreads (What? I run a fansite, you think I'm going to assume people will actually not like the game?!?).

As for support, the plan, according to ANet is that there will be two development teams past release. The first will go back to the dungeons and start brewing up the first expansion. The second will work on actively supporting the release by balancing and, perhaps, adding new content through streaming. When the first expansion is released they'll switch off. The live team becoming the new expansion's team and the expansion team becoming the live team. So, it looks like they inted to keep the game well-policed and well protected.

Those old screens are a hoot, aren't they? There's a reason I wrote off GW when I first heard about it. I'm just glad it hadn't made enough of an impression to keep me from sampling it over the E3 event...

What do you mean no hype? Name one game that had nearly as many dedicated fans before the game was even released. Arena.net is just doing things differently. They're not paying the big magazines tons of money to cover the product, they've got all of us doing it for them. They've had over 250,000 people playing in the beta weekends. That is more hype than any other mmorpg has ever had.

For some reason WoW is selling like hot cakes. I played it's open beta and it sucked, apparently it is still crashing like crazy. Guild Wars has been just as good as most established games for a long time and they're still in beta.

they'll fund it with all the expansions i plan to buy i believe in supporting this game as much as possible because its such a great game and would hate to see it go.... and to give WOW the 1 fingered wave

Amen.

And well.. you can see how well ANet is doing when the minute that someone experiences a 1 second lag during the BWEs, everyone succumbs to panic. We're just not used to lag in GW.. ever. At all.

Coming from someone who works in the computer industry (with servers surrounding him). I would like to further this discussion with... why would the servers be expensive? Once the servers are paid for, that's it, your done. There is no monthly bill and yes many are expensive... but I'd say that 40 dollars profit on half a million copy of games ~20 million dollars would cover not only the servers but MANY upgrades in the future. The real question is why do others make a monthly charge... summarization below of my thoughts.

1) Once the equipment is paid for that is all you need (i.e. if it ran with the multitude of people before you do not need to upgrade it). You will have to pick up more equipment as number of users increase.

2) The only serious bills games have after release is their bandwidth and their upkeep (maintenance, which is very very low... not broken, don't fix it). You can see that many bills that other MMORPG's beat around the bush about are simply nonexistent when you look at games like realmserver.com (4 dollars a month... for profit!).

3) The initial release of guild wars is expecting near half a million copies sold (don't know where I read this but any number above 100,000 is good). At 40 dollars profit per game, thats 20 million dollars. Can you imagine how far 20 million dollars goes... quite far (no matter who says otherwise, take wages and equipment, and monthly bills even electricity and figure them in and you still have a great margin)... and they have the upgrades they will be dishing out every month.

So in conclusion, don't buy into the crap other MMORPG's tell you... it is what it is. A lie, otherwise they wouldn't be considered multi million dollar games

Lansing Kai Don

Yes yes, support Guild Wars! I will pay for all expansions as long as it stays monthly-fee free which I know it will. And yes, it says right on the box, it was made from the people of Battle.Net, this being the explanation of why it is free monthly. This is the best game I have ever played. It is so much fun and it looks great. And, yes, even though I have never actually played World of WarCraft, those old screenies look like what I have seen of World of WarCraft. However, Guild Wars looks alot better adding even more to how great a game it is!

this doesnt make much sense seeing as how blizzard (who of course hosts b.net) has an mmorpg called World of Warcraft which is P2P, so how can you call it b.net quality

grrr blizzard and its P2P's VIVE LA GUILDWARS!!

Because Guild Wars was created from the makers of Battle.net

(It makes perfect sence)

One other important expense: PAYROLL, That is the largest expense.
You are absolutely right though servers are a one time purchase. I bought ours for our co. 5yrs ago and have only upgraded the OS. and increased the bandwith the co. needs.
The other large expense is pulling the trunk lines to the building the are using. Otherwise it is just PAYROLL.

And darnet people want lots of money.
But 250,000 people doing BWE =$10,000,000.00

ALOT OF $$$$$$$$$$$

Servers are not a major upkeep, but remeber that the average server is taking little bits and pieces all day which streches the bandwidth, while gaming servers take a hit constantly. But I have a ADSL with 3mbps dl / 40kbps ul I can run 2 Guildwars, E-mail, & AIM. ICQ, Trillian for 3 computers and not even use 1/3 of my bandwidth. Now for those who have seen it I gamed the BWE with 4 out of 6 dial-ups and except for initial entrance into the mission or jumping maps there was NO lag visible so the compression and streaming on Guildwars must be really efficent. Now for redundency they could go to a Serverfarm and not even have to host the hardware. But they would lose some control. Also no one brought up what kinda of Network Operating System (NOS) Arena.net uses. UNIX, Linux, Windows etc..? This could make stability reliable or really unreliable (WOW for example) and upkeep expensive not over bandwidth but the later of the 3 could kill you.

I beleive that they have found a very good way to do data compresion. That way your only feeding them small bits of data at a time. x y z . They feed the monsters x y z and your computer builds them. So the only info up and down are corordinents. Very smart way to do it while maximizing their network flow. That is why they limit parties, otherwise the info would be to large to handle. It seems to me that it is similar to the way Nascar 2004 does it (paparuys).

What 32 max players going at it at once. Right. Anymore and the individual player computer could not handle it. Unless everyone had super high end grapics cards.

It is similar to the way every network game does it.

With b.net quality I meant a bad quality, with nearly no admins taking care of the problems of the community.
As I said, I don't think the servers will be the problem, but the wages of the people.
But if the server costs are really low and they bring out expansions regulary I can lean back and wait for the release

It is awesome quality. Its like the best of the Blizzard games combined with World Of WarCraft. Like Diablo II meets World of WarCraft!

No you got it wrong Nova. Obviously you were saying a compliment, but this game is trying to be different.

I sure hope it stays that way.

If everyone happens to go into one server (just imagine), will the game lag or crash, or will GW block people at a certain limit?

new districts automatically open and people are shunted to them

Its like the same city but its liek being in a diferent server so its not laggy. Like as soon as there are spaces in 1 then people who enter go there until its full then people start being automatically put into 2 and the same with 3 and to infinity. (Yo ucan change districts yourself to meet someone)

No, GW is made by thousands of servers that are all linked togethor to make one massive server. It's a little complex, but somehow it works.

The lag isn't that bad, FFXI has much worse.

It works well and makes it so you aren't confined to one server so you are capable of playing with any and everyone.