I am so impressed...

Seriously,

Anet patches this game like no other company has ever done. Things get fixed every single week, the servers are rock solid, and the game is fun! I don't care about the ascention/experience thing - its best for the game long term. Now people have a reason to play the game instead of rushing to ascention.

I love how they fixed those stupid "under construction icons." It took them one week to realize and fix the problems with capturing skills from certain boss monsters (cinematics). I like the cap on exp needed for skill points. Shoot, no mmo company has ever responded so well to their customer base, and made such solid decisions so quickly.

Most amazing to me is that Anet implements more in a couple of weeks than Blizzard has done with WoW since release. They make Verant look like noobs, and set the bar pretty high for all future competitors.

Anet, you rock. I don't care what you need to do. Charge me monthly fees, do whatever. Just keep doing what you are doing right now.

/GOOD JOB

They may have no reason to do it, but they still will.

That's the day I'll quit. I simply LOVE this game. However, the reason I checked into it is because I saw it advertised as no monthly fees. I am glad of what Anet is doing. However I will never, ever, ever, never, ever, ever, never, ever, ever, never, ever, ever, never, ever, ever, never, ever, ever, pay monthly fees. No matter what.

if i have to pay monthly fee, im going to play something else

Once again, ANET has taken the potential powers of streaming technology and used them for the good. Now we are provided with constant updates and patches, some for the better... some for the worse. However, any patch at all will atleast let the player's know that they are working on improving this game by what they see fit.

$8 a month for 6 months = one time expansion fee of $50. It's really not that big of an expense.... now if it was $9 on the other hand

I am also very impressed.

The frequency, quality and delivery of the updates is something I've never experienced in my 20+ years of gaming. ANet should be proud of what they've achieved with this game both technically and artistically. They are indeed setting a precedent.

They have weekly updates due to a couple of things:

1. They released an unfinished product, but most online games are unfinished. Look at the big mess that is known as WoW.
2. They need to satisfy their cry-baby customers by giving them weekly cookies.

This game IMO was not an unfinished product, they have been beta testing this and tweaking, not developing, for more than a year before release. I have to say that this has been THE most flawless launch I have ever seen. As for the cookies, well, why not, there would be really pissed off players if they did absolutly nothing until add-on time, feed us a little to keep the momentum of excitment going from release. A fine example of good marketing and once more, marketing not at the expense of the customers expectations.

That is part and parcel of having a persistent, dynamic, player-affected or player-driven world. EULAs now reflect this.

Well Technically this game will never be finished as they will continually add new content.
But as for what your reffering to, the game was a finished product well before it was even released.

In my opinion, the only people who say this game is an unfinished product are those who aren't getting their way. GW's complete. So is WoW (even though I hate to admit it). However, what GW is doing is giving us add-ons and upgrades.

Three cheers for ANet!

P.S. If you want to witness an unfinished product launch, go play EQ2 for the past six months. Seriously, get some perspective.

More cheers for ANet!!

Yep great game, grt developers. Keep the good works. 'd love to see all the new contents.

GW was complete enough in the betas. Currently the weekly updates seem to be trying to slowly, very slowly, bring the game back to where it was 1.5 months ago.

If GW is finished, then why do all the elementalist FoW armors look the same? Armor-wise, I'm sure other classes have the same problem.

We won't!We will! And that's a promise!

Thanks for a great post -- I've printed it as Forum Post of the Day. The team will love it!

smooth launch prob best launch i've seen and i've been onlining since UO launch almost 8 yrs ago

Guild Wars will never be finished. At least, not until ArenaNet decides to phase out the product. Until then, expect continued development.

This is, of course, a good thing.

This is the best thing about GW imho.

Check out Final Fantasy on the varations of Armor... Same graphic used for 5-10 diffrenet items.

Keep up the good work, I love this game and look forward to buying up all the expansions

i can handle expansion releases, but not monthly fees (rates, etc).

dont like the idea of any company DoT-ing my wallet.

if ever GW will go p2p, ill get myself a sony PSP.

Guild Wars Rocks! It is well worth the time I waited for it's release. The regular patches are great. ANet is awesome. Everybody that worked on the development of the game deserves an huge round of applause and a big trophy and a big pat on the back on many thumbs up!!! Keep doing what your doing and you will have players that will play this game for many years to come.

The patches are nice but I can't beleive they patched the price of ale and an icon for it before releasing a fix for some of the hideously bugged skills in the game that are seriously impacting PvP balance in many matches.

Guild Wars is amazing. I really think ArenaNet has revolutionized gaming forever with this thing. Updating is quick, easy, and frequent, and they actually listen to and fix the bugs I report! Technically I'm very happy with it as well. I have a very modest laptop with nearly minimum system requirements, yet I can still run the game flawlessly on 1024x768! Even better, I get minimal lag even though I'M ON A 5K CONNECTION. 5K. Now THAT'S an achievement.

ArenaNet, you've changed the industry. I guess all I can say now is

Ryoushi Takaido claps.

Which skills are you referring to?

The price of ale and its icon are probably 5-minute fixes. Possibly someone did it in their lunch break and decided to submit it :P Fixing a bugged skill that isn't working properly may or may not be far more complex.

I must add my 2 cents in as well. Guild Wars is my second MMO. I played SOE's Star Wars Galaxies for a little over a year up until there Combat Upgrade. I was here on launch day and was VERY impressed with the lack of bugs the smoothness of gameplay and lack of any lag. (56k modem in Alaska). Updates and patches every week new content and bug fixes....bug fixes that I didnt even know existed.
Over on SWG there is bugs in game that are over 2 years old. Each patch they do they seem to break more than they fix. As one poster posted : Each patch is like a nicotine patch everytime they add one your that much closer to quiting.
ANet and the Guild Wars team in the words of Darth Vader....Impressive most impressive

Just wanted to chime in on this, because I see a lot of people complaining about the addition of little things like the ale, and whining that Anet is spending time on pointless things instead of fixes, etc.

Rieselle is on the right track here. Changes to an icon or a price are much simpler to make and fully understand than fixes to gameplay mechanics or bugs.

Think about this for a moment: Guild Wars has what, 450 skills? Something like that, right? And a lot of those skills are interrelated. For example, if I place Diversion on someone, and they cast Shatter Hex on themselves, does the Diversion kick in? You might say, well, yeah. That's obvious - of course it does! But think about it for a moment. There's nothing to really prevent someone at Anet from accidentally changing the order of things so that the Shatter applies before Diversion does. It might seem logical to him or her, since there's nothing really obvious written in the descriptions of the skills that says 'this skill takes affect after this skill, but before that skill', etc. The Vengeance/Unyielding Aura bugs are an example of this. Those skills worked fine before, but a change made in one of the patches broke them unintentionally. The sheer complexity of GW means that you cannot expect ANet to fix a bug in 5 minutes. Furthermore, even after a bug is FIXED, you're not done. You still have to check very carefully to see if your changes altered anything. Often, during the development of a large piece of software like GW, a bug in some important piece of code will end up causing other pieces of code to be modified to deal with the bug. When you fix the bug, all of those other pieces of code suddenly don't work correctly. An example of this is how the fix for the Balthazar's Aura bug happened to severely weaken Smite Crawlers, because it turned out that their AI was stacking Aura. I doubt that many people expected that to happen when the bug was fixed, but it did.

So basically, yeah. Don't get upset when Anet makes changes that appear to be small or irrelevant. I'm sure that they're doing the best they possibly can to take care of bugs; the fact is that it can take quite a while to do things right, and Anet seems to make that a priority.

HAHAHA, have you ever seen a "finished" MMO upon release? One thing I've realized is that MMOs are never finished.

Are you trying to become the one guy that everyone here is most annoyed with or does it come naturally?