Reasons

Arena-Net has this listed as the top fan site on the web. When you follow the link here to the forums the first 6 posts you read are people whining about how the game has let them down in some imagined way. So I have taken it open myself to make a constructive post on the game that will be comprehensive and insightful.
1.) Grouping, this game has a great system for forming small groups with your friends and going to into the world to enjoy each others company and the game itself. You don’t have to worry about some 12 year old ruining your Role playing experience by coming along and pking/kill stealing/greifing. If one of these three words describe you this game was not made for you, move along to other games that actually promote that type of behavior. This system also offers great opportunities to meet new people and form new bond that could last a life time, sure you will get a lot of people you don’t like but that just life. If you make 1 new true friend it makes up for the hundreds of a-holes you had to endure.
2.) Story, the story/plot line of this game is amazing, every bit as good as those of the well known single player RPGs out there, it moves you though the game in a why that makes leveling your character a pleasure not a chore. I have been leveling 3 characters at the same time personally and think of it as 3 times the pleasure that’s how much I personally enjoy the story.
3.) Updates, no MMORPG holds a candle to Guild Wars in this department. All of us have had the experience of sighing and going “oh boy, might as well not try to play, it’s patch day”. The new streaming technology that Arena-Net has implemented in nothing short of incredible. I went over to a friends house the other day to show him the game and we had it downloaded and up and running in under 20 mins, try that with Half-life 2 why don’t ya. Lol
4.) Player vs Player, this game takes PvP in a new direction for a lot of the MMORPG crowd, those that already have background in FPS style game are a bit more at home here. All in all I think it is a good direction though. One of my main complaints with most other MMORPGs is that it was never really about who was the better player, it was always about who was higher level and who had the better stuff.. or who outnumbered the other guy 20 to 1. Arena-net has put it into an environment that gives everyone a fair chance. If you are beat in the arena then you where beat by a better group of players, no excuses here. The other team was not 8 levels higher and outnumbered you. It was a fair fight and the better player won. I personally love this and will be the first to shake any mans hand that beats me fairly and the first one to want to slap that guy who loves killing people 8 levels lower that him.

Well these are just 4 of the points that I feel make Guild Wars one of the best games this year. And I am truly amazed that they pulled it off and without a monthly fee to boot. CHEERS Arena-Net great game!

P.S. Please, by all means post what you personally love about the game, what keeps you coming back? I'd love to hear.

That covers it pretty darn well. I'd add that the flexibility of your character is a dream, too. Most other RPGs, you'd have to start over to change your character much at all. In GW, you can slightly alter, or completely change, your attributes at the situation dictates. Obviously they are limitations (can't change secondary until ascension, can't change primary ever), but those are reasonable. Call it unrealistic than you can constantly learn and unlearn, but it's very nice.

Only the story part of that really applies to me, at the moment. No-one I know plays this game, so grouping with friends is out. I don't care much for PvP -- RTS is the only type pf game I play against other people anymore. The patching system is phenomenal, though. I booted the game up earlier and wondered why it was loading a little slower -- turned out it was patching and I didn't even notice.

No, my favourite thing at the moment is exploration; every time I play it I find a new area, and I haven't even left the Ascalon area yet. I think I found the last town in Ascalon last night, though, so I'm thinking of moving out and heading for new (hopefully greener -- brown is depressing at times) territory soon. Though I think I'll just explore a little more, at least until I've de-fogged as much of the map as I can.

I have to agree with everything that's been said already -- I love exploring, grouping with friends (friends I've made in-game... the only person I know IRL who plays is my fiancee, and he & I share an account), and generally enjoying the smooth ride and beautiful areas that the game delivers. I continue to be impressed, both with the VAs (David Lucas, YAY!), story, build options, and everything else. Hats off to ANet!

There are a few reasons why I really enjoy this game.

1) Quick and dirty - You don't need to spend vast amounts of time looking for a group (usually). You can grab henchmen and head off and do some killing. I managed to beat most missions with just henchmen (including the last mission) and even though they can be a pain on occasion, they work if you can't find a good group or tired of painful groups.

2) Flexibility - I like the fact that i can be flexible with skills. It lets you change up your fighting techniques and keeps it fresh looking for new effective skill combos. This is probably the best reason I play.

3) Great PvE storyline - It's not perfect, (i.e. really don't question why you help white mantle, then oppose them, then just hand the Sceptre of Orr over to some stranger), but overall, the story is pretty good and pretty interesting and worth the 40 bucks alone if you only do the storyline.

4) PvP - the whole reason to play really. As much fun as PvE can be, PvP provides that nice change of pace to test your skills against human opponents. Granted PUG's can be a pain, but sometimes you nail a good group and spend a good bit of time winning, which makes all those other painful pickup groups you went through worth the wait.

Overall, I really enjoy the game and it hasn't gotten boring and I've been playing since the release and most of the beta weekends. Even farming with my monk on the same mobs over and over is lots of fun, even if I die tons trying new things or trying to grab one to many enemies to push my boundaries

The interactive map is the one additional highlight for me, having a dozen or so Guildmates spread out all over the map and being requested to help, guide through an area or go and pick up an item that one guild member knows that another member needs, it's sure nice to not only pick the place to travel to but pick the same "district" the other folks are in, in order to meet up quick.

As usual Stur is right on with her take on GW as a game and of course as always that is JUST my opinion.

Umm thanks chalt2 but I'm a he I have 2 female toons and a male toon, but me personally, all male lol

LOL, dosen't really matter male, female, whatever I still think your points were valid and I was just going by your Avitar!

You can't really compare the patching requirements of an MMORPG against what is destined to be a new genre known as CORPG.

There's a fundamental difference between the two that basically completely changes the way the game is assembled:

MMORPG's are persistant worlds. Everything is seen by all players and must maintain it's state permenantly.

CORPG (guild wars) everything is instanced. Each instance is created real time from a template that is always fresh on creation, and only experienced by the players in that instance. Once that instance is emptied, it is destroyed.

Because it's instanced, there's no state to maintain over significant periods of time. Changes to template do not effect the world at large, because once the template is changed, all the newly created instances from that point reflect the change, and all the old ones will eventually be destroyed in a timely manner.

In an MMORPG, anything that needs to be changed has to be measured for how that change is going to affect the rest of the world and everything in it. Because, like in reality, changing that thing ends up changing everything else around it, it creates a ripple effect.

Bringing this down into programming terms and such, making changes in a system that has no persistance is easy. It requires minimal amount of Q/A testing, minimal amounts of coding and it doesn't not affect the overall gameplay from a perspective of continuity. Large scale changes can be rolled out in very short amount of time due to the fact that world is constantly regenerating itself from a fresh template.

In an MMORPG, because 1 small change can unbalance the entire world of the game, these changes have to be measured very carefully, integrated very, very carefully and at least tested for a significant amount of time. Why? Because once you roll in the change, there's no going back. You can't reset the world if you make a mistake in an MMORPG. What's done is done because the worlds are persistant. If you were to reset the world, everything in it would have to be wiped clean (like player characters would have to be destroyed) in order to do it properly.

Not knocking your post at all; I think it's great to start a thread like this, but as a programmer, this comparison has always bothered me. It's not really comparing the same thing, it's apples to oranges. On the surface they're the same (making updates) but the methodology and the reasons behind it are vastly different, and very much so required.

- Kymber

Umm ya that still doesn't change my statement and for that matter, Ive had patchs for Half life, NwN and other single player games that took longer to download and install than anything we have Seen from Guild Wars at this point.

Coolest thing for me which I have never seen in any other game. I was playing one night when I got a message on the screen "Update released, please relaunch game when possible" I am used to seeing, "Prepare to logout in 5 seconds for a scheduled down time of 4 months while we patch." Unprecedented.

Yea that got me stunned too! I was like "Whoa that has to be the coolest patch system ever!"

Having been deeply involved in NWN, I have kind of an interesting perspective on this.

Streaming the update in is absolutely wonderful, provided (as is the case here) that the updates are streamed in from the server you log into for the world you're using. Unfortunately, it also means you're limited to whatever they design for Guild Wars; user-created worlds will likely never exist for Guild Wars.

Is this really a problem? No, not really. It's a fine game, well made, and balanced. It has great challanges and such. It's simply a limitation for this game, but as such limitations go, they've provided a lot of other things worth enjoying in the game.

In NWN, whenever they updated the game, those of us who maintained persistant worlds had to scramble to update those worlds. If they made a mistake in the patch, though, we might find ourselves scrambling to undo those changes. It got pretty ugly at times, so much so that the persistant world I worked with avoided updating until about a day passed.

One of the complaints I had in NWN involved not being able to automatically download and install personalized bits for the worlds we created. I notice in Guild Wars, you will find yourself downloading new files on occasion, as you progress through the game. This strikes me as an intelligent design; you save time getting started in the game, and will gradually get updates that enable you to continue on to more challanging areas as you work your way through the areas. If Guild Wars offered a way to create your own areas, I'd expect the same mechanism could be used (although I'm sure people would freak out at the possible security hole this could leave).

One of the complaints I have had to endure with NWN involved people jumping into a particular area, consuming the quest, then moving on.. such that few others could get to that quest, since it wouldn't reset. It takes a lot of building skill in NWN to create a 'resetting' area. Guild Wars neatly sidesteps this by creating the adventure specifically for your team... so you can redo the same mission over and over, ad nauseum, and it always seems to reset for you.

I very much like how PvP is handled in this game, especially considering the remarkable number of mentally diminutive people out there. It's great that you can be as powerful as the next person, emphasizing skill over how much you've collected. It's also great that PvP can only happen in areas specifically and blatantly designed for such adventures.

I will confess, the best PvP adventure I had in this game happened for my PvE character, when I entered a gladiator's event with a random team. The team turned out to be a very good one. We managed to win against every one until about the 6th team, which featured a much stronger series of characters (we were all barely 10th, but they were 13th or better). I think their system intelligently puts together teams to graduate the challange if you do well.

Finally, there's the way they introduce you to the game. Very, very gradually, they introduce the various elements of Guild Wars, through a series of quests. They incline you towards co-operative play, PvP, exploring, and everything else the game has to offer through the intelligent layout of their quests.

I don't think you could even create a persistent world in Guild Wars. The game can only be played online and every time you login it checks the status of your .dat file and updates it as required. Any changes you made to it would be reset when you log in. It's an interesting idea, but more applicable to off-line games.

After playing EverQuest for 6 years I can say without question the patching that A-Net uses is amazing. They should push that more.

I can't tell you how many days I played hookie so I could play EverQuest only to try and log on and find out the game was down for an 8-12 hour patch.

This game is amazing, while I just try to have fun I RP a lot also and have a blast with it.

I agree with OP but I'd like to comment on #1.

I do wish that there were a bit of danger from other players, or hostile territories/shared instances, etc. Mind, I've never been to HoH yet and from what I've heard quite a few people can go mad on each other at the same time...

I've gotta throw a positive comment toward the whole fogged map thing.

Whenever I feel a little put off toward quests I just pick a fog'd area on the map and we'll head over to check it out. Some of them have no towns at all but some very cool mobs. It was hard for me to believe that someone had never seen a Hydra when we went through a whole zone filled with them at level 10.

The quests I think deserve a little bit of a positive as well. It's pretty rare to find a stupid quest, low level ones have their share of stupid but the higher you go the more they tie into the storyline and actually seem to mean something.

There's negatives of course but every negative I find I've wondered if that was really a negative point for everyone or just myself. I think they've got a good balance all around. The biggest negative of course is that the world of GW isn't infinite, but even that I think, "maybe it is," I mean they're downloading new zones as we speak and with the only way they make money being expansions I'm pretty sure we'll get real and meaningful updates until something better comes along.

Interestingly enough, this is no longer true! While the guru USED to be listed as the 'recommened fansite', it is now 5th on the list. This happened a while ago and I always wondered why...