There Is No Community !

The problem with guild wars is, there IS no community, maybe for guild members etc there is, but from beginning the game onwards its rare to find anyone to help you. The pre sear is riddled with old players restarting and robbing people blind of their dyes before moving on and its no better post sear, but who can blame people for not wanting to help noobs?, lets face it, if you killed more than one creature per quest presear, you wont get any exp for the next 12 hours of play (im exaggerating a little for ranting effect).

This is definitely not helped by the fact that English seems to be a redundant language in the Guild Wars world.

I find it difficult to believe their arent language specific servers, its a joke.

This is a problem that needs resolving, its ok for the Germans and the French because the majority can speak English, but i cant read a word of their language. And dont say I should go out and learn another language because I bought the game in English and thats the language Id like to play it in

Ah yes. The answer you'll get from most people is, "it's a free game so you get younger players". And that's basically true. For a good community you have to find a good guild. But they are easy to find. And these message boards have a good community spirit, not a lot of nerf this threads, like you see in some games.

I totally agree. I'm post Sear and it's a joke. I finally got into a Guild and I get no help whatsoever. I ask for a little help so that I can get the experience from a hard quest in order for me to get better, but does that cause anyone to rush forward? No. I get asked " Can you help me first? Or What can I trade you?" How is this any sort of "guild" when everyone treats everyone else like an outsider. I got more help from a non- english speaking ranger then anyone else in this game. If I have to pay fees for a better playing experience I will. This free stuff obviously allows all the little kids to get it and be immature buggers to everyone because it's funny. I'm going back to WOW

byebye then.


*sigh*

I never...NOT ONCE...had these kinda issues in my D&D days

Origin Boudine....

msg me and if I'm online I would be more than happy to help at whatever. Unless you are further than me, then you are SOL. But seriously if anyone new to post-sear or GW in general needs some help don't hesitate.

I'm really trying to enjoy this game, but so far to be honest I've played it with henchman entirely and I see no reason to party up with players unless it is for PvP. Towns are just props for people standing around (or dancing) begging for parties or items. Thanks to the chat sytem with no audio cues when someone whispers to you I usually miss people. I've had no problem with completing quests with the henchies, but they don't laugh at my jokes.

This game is a beautiful single player game with some online PvP at the moment.... I'm getting the itch to back to WoW....

I think the sound overall is lacklustre but the lack of audio cues is the most annoying. I dont mind the npc's staring blankly, lips sealed, while they shout in a cut scene, but when i type /roar I want to hear a roar dammit !

As I see it, community doesn't mean everyone gives you free items and hugs and helps you do all your quests. It would help if people defined what they were talking about when they said community, then there might be something to say about a lack of community in this thread.

Community is something that you have in MMOs, where you have a limited number of people on a server. In a game like Guild Wars maybe a broad sense of knowing that such and such guild is the best will be around, but individual players will probably never get reputations of their own, which I believe is a major part of community. Guilds will certainly have their own communities in GW, but the player base is simply too large to actually develop a global sense of the word.

I suppose you would translate this out into the real world (I've heard it exists) using a city as an example. There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people living in cities. Modern transportation (game transportation and multiple servers in GW) lets you get around all over the place, so people generally aren't hanging around in one place to make friends. You'll have your smaller community groups in a bar you frequent or an arcade, but I'd be hard pressed to find a sense of community in such a large mobile place. An MMO is more like a small town in comparison. A limited number of people populate the town (server), and everyone generally gets to know each other. Who's a ninja, who's a good group leader in difficult areas, etc.

Am I making any sense?

I have a slow computer so I don't generally party with people because I don't want to hold them back. When I get stuck on a hard quest and need to rethink my skills, I usually go back to LA, Ascalon, or a town with a hard mission and give people hints and crafting materials.

I'd be glad to help anyone that needs it as long as they don't mind waiting a few minutes for me to load the map and aren't farther than me. I generally play as Blaidd Gwyn (Mo/R with a temporary focus on smiting and beast mastery(I change it to match the mission)). Feel free to pm me. I'm always looking for people who need help.

As leader of Prismatic Verge I try my darndest to help my guildmates. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. But thankfully, my officers are both crazy and skilled enough to give FAST guided tours of entire regions. [my salute to Maxximus Decimus ^_^]

But if you're going to categorize and blast this game for being full of idiots because it's free, I STILL run into more losers in p2p games [like Ragnarok Online who bot their days away and say *I'm better than u are cause I played 99 million hours more than you and have 1337 GEAR*]. Come on...

You must remember there's balance in aspects everywhere. Thankfully, I've yet to discover a bot style program for this game which will play it for you... [which pretty much gains u nothing since lvl 20 is the cap and I don't see bots being programmed to react in team formation anytime soon]

By saying everyone is anti-community losers means you're putting the people that DO HELP the community in the same barrel. Bad move...

If you really truely want to play a game that perfectly puts you in control of everything, er... play another game offline by yourself?

Im not suggesting free items and hugs all round, A community is a group of people with a common interest, as I said, only the guilds achieve this and, no doubt it is due to the fact its not pay monthly so any child and his dog can play, and i dont want to keep harping on about it, but until youve played the game with a vast majority of foreigners you cant communicate with in the towns (chatrooms-spam rooms, call them what you will), you dont know how lonely it can be out there.

The game really picks up during End game, which may seem bad, but most immature people will not make it to the Ring of Fire. Everyonce in awhile their will be a very immature bunch of kids in your party, but what they lack in the social interractions department, they make it up in skill.

It is sad reading this... A guild that doesn't help its members? Jeeze thats sad... If anyone and I mean anyone wants to be in a tight knit group where we're all friends and actually help each other with quests or getting better armor and such, just look up mine in the listing.

I find it sad that the way people act at times in GW is causing it to give it a bad image, not necessarily the game, but just the entire fandom. I'm always willing to give a hand when I can. Even if I'm in the middle of a mission with someone else, I'll finish it, and then come to help you as soon as possible. I expect nothing in return, I just want to help people have an enjoyable gaming experience, like it SHOULD be.

Try the international district. I've encountered none of the problems that I often read about except for people rushing in and aggroing a load of creeps and/or people going nuts drawing on the map... no rudeness, no idiots... and I've found lots of times people who help me reach a point or do a mission (lots of times I haven't too though).

Also I've met a number of cool and kind people too. I've joined a guild but they tend not to be active at the same times I am so I'm not sure if I'll stay with them or not. Your best bet is to find a guild.

Small guild = closer community, more sharing (likely)
Large guild = more possibilities for mission help/twinking etc.

It seems like a lot of guilds may not help their members is because a lot of people just enter a guild so they can say they are in a guild and have a cape flapping in the wind behind them. They couldn't care less if one of their guildmates is stuck on a hard mission.

My philosophy is to help others whenever you can because you never know when you are going to need help from someone else. I always giv away items I do not need to lower level guild members, sell things to them at extremely reduced prices, like 50g for a Minor Rune, most of the time I just give it to them. So, help them out when they need it, as long as they aren't expecting you to bend over backwards, it is just fine.

We aren't sticklers about ours, but if someone is not working out... then well we have to do whats best to keep our guild together as a strong working community. We have ten members, myself and Corwin included, two share a computer, and the third isn't on much, due to personal reasons. However out of all of us, we seem to work well together. Sorry if I sound all advertising and such... I do not mean to.

But anyway, I've encountered a few international district problems, at least the times I was there...

There were some people from another country busting on me for being an american, or well I happened in at the wrong time it seemed. I made a comment about liking the UK chocolate [Mmm Cadbury Mini Eggs] and someone made a comment about 'Oh what a suprise, an american who likes chocolate'. Ok so, this is just a random thing, I was a little suprised at that, but I happened in at the wrong time. NOt always will you find these people, and not always will they be bad in the normal districts either...

It all depends on where you are, when you are. I rarely get help from random people on things, I've had a couple bad experiences, but thats why I have the guild so we can get to know each other while we play and such...

I just wish other guilds would get rid of thse freeriders who merely want capes, or a guild hall. -_-; Quite annoying, but it isn't my place to be commentating on that I suppose...

See that really sucks and defeats the purpose. I'd rather be guildless (capeless) then in a guild where its just a race for having the most members. I understand the difficulties in having a community when you can only run into people in towns and each district is gonna have many different people running around too, but seriously, the lil shlts that district hop to gather dyes from noobies are really starting to bug me. Local chat is for chatting, not screaming out your wares. Use the damn Trade chat so I can turn that off and not watch you spam your listing. Sorry, got off topic a little. My point is are there any Guilds out there that actually help each other and go on group missions and stick in teams and do things together? I almost feel like a One-Quest-Stand. Once they've gotten what they want they leave me. It's kinda sick. I'm not a Quest *****. I don't see anything wrong with monogamous partying. Or maybe it should be termed monogamy questing. I dunno, it's late and I'm starting to crack

First, as suggested the International districts, second, there are different language options. The problem with those is that most of the people who would play under their local language would be quite left out as you will find more people playing under the English language. So you can find, German, French and several others localized, you just need to select the language you want in your options menu.

What the Dickens are you talking about?

you can change the language of the game in options, nothing else.

I agree with the o.p.

But I think a little differently on the community part

From what I gather, the forum communities (more on this in a second) are mostly nice people looking to play and have fun.

However, this is really offset by the fact there are no official forums. I've got a forum account on like all five major (elite) fansites and it honestly feels like the "community" is more or less a rag-tag bunch of fansites simply strung together by links on guildwars.com (which is basically what it is).

Now I realize it's partially like that for a whateve reasons. Maybe cause theres no monthly fee ArenaNet didn't want to shell out for storage and bandwidth for official forums. Maybe ArenaNet took a look at large forums for a massive game like WoW and realize they'd just be opening a pandoras box by making official forums, who knows. But what I do know is the community has this feeling of being spread out. Add to the fact the only real interaction ingame are the towns themselves and not the explorable world (minus partying) and your community feeling dwindles to something smaller even moreso.

I realize technology might not be there 100% yet but a game company needs to take an MMO (or corpg in GW's case since some prefer that term), and make it so your towns and exploreable areas can hold literally hundreds if not thousands of people without crashing itself AND with minimum fps lag on the clients. I know theres going to be some pressure on the person to have a decent system in order for that to work since even with a very stable well-rounded graphics engine yer still preforming millions of calculations based on actual players moving about in real-time. BUT, if this was accomplished you'd get a massive and I do mean MASSIVE community feeling ingame, as you could log into a town or city and be with hundreds if not thousands of players.

Of course the overall feel also henges on the support of the game. Personally when I buy and play a game, specifically an MMO (and yes even a corpg like GW) I expect to go to that game's website, or that companies website and find a nice large community based forum for the game. EQ, WoW, AO, DAOC, SWG, Planetside, etc all have official forums, and official forums always get the most traffic and user base (except maybe in Diablo II's case). When you visit those you get that feeling of a community. When I go to guildwars.com and am presented with a list of fansites, I get the feeling of being scattered across the internet.

Thats because in the old eq and D&D days all the kids were Christians whose parents wouldn't let them get it.

I have a agree with Mav, With thousand of fan site for one game there isn't really a sense of community.

i only joined my guild, because one of my real life friend is in it. which is why. so far is pretty good.

I think there is a need for a offical forum, but i'm guessing because GuildWar is free we don't get to have such thing

forgive my ignorance, but what's a corpg?

Competitive Online Role Playing Game

The Guild Wars communities are small. There is a limit to your friends list. There is a limit to the size of the party, and no raiding parties are available. There is no single gathering place or district. There are international players and regional players. There are people that solo most of the time with henchmen. There are people that play exclusively with their guilds. People hardly even respond to chats because the spam gets so extreme, even loot spam. As a result, it can feel like a lonely place. I've felt that way about it before.

But it's wrong to generalize about the people that play this game, in my opinion. There are young teens that play it, yes, but there are many people in their 20's, 30's, 40's, etc. that play it. The guild I run is really tiny, having less than 10 people who are mostly friends in real life or from past games, with level 10s up to ascended level 20s. It's hard to put together groups even within the guild, but we try to help each other out with missions, quests, items, runes (okay mostly it's me farming my ass off and giving freebies :P) etc.

Community is what you make for yourself. Get your friends to play. Make friends. Yes it's harder to make lasting friendships online, but I met my boyfriend of 5+ years online seven years ago. By the way if any REALLY poor newbies wants free minor runes PM Ms Rose in-game. I might have some good weapons to give away as well.

I'm a 29 yr old teacher... just a few nights ago I was gaming with someone for about an hour or two and then out of nowhere he tells me his age/job and says he's a 32 yr old teacher. I was floored... such a bizarre coincidence. I told him about myself and we had a good laugh over it.

Yeah, it can be tough. But look at all the people complaining these boards or any gw boards about the abusive idiots online. There are so many people playing who just want some cool folks to play with who will treat them with respect and share a few laughs. On the subject of having met your bf online, I had a co-worker a few years ago who had met her fiance playing Diablo2. When they got married Blizzard used them as a promotional tool and gave them each a free computer as a wedding gift.

I help people all the time from low to high. Pre-searing it's tough to find people but after searing it gets easier.

As far as the guild, if this is the first time you're asking for help and they're just ignoring you then you should leave the guild and this time be more selective. Look around the forum boards for guilds that talk about helping eachother. Better yet, start a guild and you be all about helping members and advertise it thus.

This is coming from my past experience as a guild leader in EQ. When you say they won't help you I have to ask how many in the guild you've helped?

My standard speech to anyone coming into the guild is this.

"If you get help from 3 guildies for 3 hours on one of your quests you should consider that a loan of good faith that you'll give 9 hours back to the guild. We're not tracking it, and we try to help because we're a team but if you're not thinking of it like that when you're asking for help then you're taking more than you're giving."

In my own experience the first people that say nobody is helping them are the last to help others.

If that's not the case and I think it's probably not then I think you should leave that guild for one that is a team.

I'll be happy to help anyone that sends me a wisper

I feel me and Stefan have grown quite close we do most things together, he is the strong quiet type but i don't mind that, i know he has a good sense of humour and he will always fight to the death and never leaves my group or calls me a noob coz he died

1. your in the wrong guild,we have officers that, one of there duties is to help the youngsters in pre, I have a char there now. We make it a POINT to run with our guildmates, and if there is some poor guy/gal that is stuck somewhere just asking for help, and not spamming to bad, we may let them join up with us, and most of the time they want in our guild when there done.
2. There is a community, of sorts, if your not in a guild, you have the Guru Forums Many people here are willing to come help you, take down some names and put them in your friends list. I am willing to help whomever,one day I did the quest to get ignite arrows from Adien in pre about 6 times...lol Just to help other players...and not just guild mates, players from other guilds as well. Feel free to put me on your friends list, I will help when and if I can.

My guild currently has 3 members. We recently went "post-sear" and did 5-7 missions together last night. We openly give items to eachother (my fellow guildmate gave me 100gp and 6 ingots so I could craft a new weapon in "pre-sear"). We typically trade drops to improve the team on the fly during missions.

We haven't really discussed recruiting; we are happy with the small guild... but if anyone is interested in joining us, we will consider it.

-chojin

I hate to sound repetitive but again GW can be a parralle on how you function in your real life. If you try a guild, don't like it or the members then leave, move on to try another. This is like real life in the respect that there are going to be idiots, morons, and vultures to take advantage of the un-knowing (sound familier???) it is going to be the same regardless of what game you are in. Don't quit a good game and let undeserving people ruin it for simply because they are idiots. Just like life, ignore them and move on to find people and friends who are worthy of your time.

I have already quit 1 guild for lack of support, tried another and have had nothing but support since. Don't give up.

If like me you find it a bit annoying that you can't understand about 80% of what you see in chat (well, a little more - but my German is *very* rusty ), simple change you account to US in the options at the login screen.
Problem solved - 99.9% English .

I don't have any other comments on the community, as to be honest, I have played the game strictly as a singleplayer game so far (except for a few arena matches that were actually a lot of fun). The henchmen have done a wonderful job at getting me through all the missions until the desert - I hope they can carry me through the last three until ascension (and hopefully be useful after as well).

Yes, the community isn't very good in GW, but I agree with them for not going with an official forum. Most of the time you are just one of the masses in a forum like that, and you're voice is truely never heard. At least here you can make a difference and be part of the community. Admins will listen to you here.

I actually don't think the community is all that bad, alot of times people horse around and do stupid things because they are bored. You see alot of people in the areas screaming thier heads off getting frustrated at not getting into a group.... I grab henchmen do my business and leave.

Personally I'd like to see some improvements to the chat system (maybe a lfg flag, audio cues when someone whispers, and scaleable fonts because I like a small interface but the type gets small and hard to see), and a little more of an economy with some sort of a auction house to stimulate more of a community.

and my Necro looks goofy in a cape

My guild tends to stick together as much as possible. The majority of us use TS, making organization and partying a lot easier. We do use pick-up players and every so often someone fits in well enough that we either add them to a friend list for later things or invite them into the guild.

We are still small with only about 10 or 11 people at the moment. Helping people, even guildmates isn't ALWAYS possible, although we do our best. We just got a new member yesterday. He asked for help on a quest or mission and unfortunately everyone online at the time had already started a mission of their own.. It happens. I hope though that he doesn't frustrated with us becaese we could lend a hend the very first time he asked for help.

Our community, such as it is, is a small one, but growing. I feel like the biggest problem in having it grow are the totally immature people (no matter the age) that get bored and spam the chat channels, act like elite asses, and when you get them into a PUG totally ruin the experience for everyone else by either their attitude or actions. It honestly doesn't take but a few bad experiences for people to turn their chat off, and only run with a few known entities or henchies.

I would rather have a small group or go solo than spend one more second in a group with some obnoxious lil s**t who thinks they are some uber 1337 pwnage machine that everyone should bow down and worship because he/she deigned to grace us n00bs with their shining presence..

Unfortunately there are always going to be people like that. Although it is primarily a bunch of teens that don't know of any beter way to express themselves, there are also plenty of theoretical adults that seem to have Peter Pan syndrome and given the anonymity of the internet feel it is ok to act like a 13 year old.

Anyhow, the community will slowly grow and groups of people will cometogether and solidify into larger ones. Partly from things like my guild will find a good player in another guild and basically ally ourselves and so on. It is just going to take time

I played Legend of Mir 2, now thats a community

Y'know, I thought in the terms of GW CORPG stood for Cooperative Online RPG... Since at least in the PvE side of things it IS a Cooperative RPG, as in the Cooperative missions...

The community isn't bad, but non-language specific servers is a joke. Alright, I'm not asking to cater for every language, but English, German and French servers, wouldn't kill anyone now? For me Frech speakers don't bother me that much, because I am learning the language, but it'd be nice to see language specific servers. I'm getting an itch to play WoW again. Not because it's better, but because I've remembered how good MMO's are...