The root of all evil (true reason for Factions hate)

You know i think people have gathered that.

Its more a case that content wise its more of an expansion than a full game in comparison to the 1st.

My perception of A.Net has been continuously blown away in small bits since Factions released....this is not the company I bought Prophecies from...something is terribly wrong...maybe A.Net has become "afflicted" with a different kind of foreign plague...such as NcSoft Corporate Execs....

One thing I'd point out to you is that saying something is/was much worse than Factions does not in fact make Factions good.

Here is an over-the-top analogy of your statement: Getting shot by a rifle is way worse than being shot with a bow and arrow.

I totally agree, but it doesn't make getting shot with an arrow a good thing either.

I understand completely. It is not mindless ranting. We can only hope they will make the adjustments.

Well, I completed Prophecies in just a week after released. But I'm still in House zu Heltzer RIGHT NOW. So, your point is?

GvG took center stage in Prophecies? Then how come a PvE player like me never have a chance to GvG AT ALL in Prophecies? Yet I still feel good playing the game. And I don't see anything different in that in Factions.

So, again, your point is?

Give me Conical HATS!! ANet and i promise i will stop complaining :P

Edit: Add a full body cloak and i will buy chapter 3 CE without question even

That's true at the moment but I can see them raising the reward for alliance battles to make it more faction-profitable than quests. If they do that then more people will turn to PvP to try and win control of the capitals.

No matter how the game is built, people who dislike PvP are just not going to do it, contrary to what Anet may believe.

Or give up with the factions system all together. Lets not forget, many players do not and can not stand PvP or that style of play.
The alliance system needs as many players giving faction points as often as possible as quickly as possible. Rewarding PvP more would tick off PvE players a great deal.

Here's a fix:

Rather than having two faction turn in NPCs, merge them. When you turn in 5k faction points, you are "rewarded" 5 amber/jade. Make them two in the same. The PvEers who are going after the armor and not investing in the alliances will get the armor they want, and the alliance will get the needed faction points.

Edit: UndeadRoadkill is correct in saying that. I have already been asked to join in PvP from alliance members. I do not enjoy it at all, and have turned them down, which in turn just makes them mad. If Anet thinks that people will just say "yes" because they are allied, they are sorely mistaken.

Though you can access all of these in the Monastery, you do not yet have a second profession, and the areas you travel through still have enemies at level 2 or lower who do not aggro you unless you attack them. If you've noticed, the only Kappa mobs before Harbor that will attack once you enter the aggro range are those with a level 6 Kappa "babysitting" the level 1s.

We can't really draw a precise parallel between the "training areas" in Prophecies and in Factions, but there is a huge jump in enemy "party composition" and tactics after the Harbor, and you only need to look at the henchies who are level 13! at that point to see that ANet sped up advancement on purpose. I agree there is another huge jump between leaving the island (even if you do Captured Son you only get to level 18) and hitting the mainland (where even random city mobs are level 20), but that's just additional proof of the greatly shortened learning curve in Factions.

I don't really have a problem with fast advancement. What I have a problem with is the fact that in Guild Wars - and I mean the "theory" of the concept of Guild Wars here - advancement does not equal better characters or better players. The "theory" is that Guild Wars is a game based on skill(s), both the skills you choose to bring on your character and the skill with which you can use them. What good is fast advancement when there are fewer skills available from quests in Factions (so new players who haven't been saving for Factions can't get the skills outright) and when there isn't time to figure out how different skillsets work on different enemies (so new players who haven't played Prophecies don't have the advantage of figuring out good skill setups)?

I believe that's one of the main reasons we see so many assassins dying in missions and quests. As new players, they never managed to stick with the steep learning curve ANet based Factions around, and they didn't realize the need for better armor/skills/skill sets. It's the same thing we've seen with W/Mo in Prophecies, really: new players don't realize when the challenge level has been raised so far they need to reevaluate their tactics.

I feel the need to reiterate. First off, we are customers. We paid for Factions based on the expectations that we had from Prophecies. Clearly, we got a different game, and "different" can mean good or bad depending on the person. But as customers, we have a right to voice our opinions on the game. Your logic could just as well support "If you haven't made a successful game, how can you praise them?" Neither of us has created a top-selling video game; how can you say I have no right to criticize ANet without implying you have no right to claim the game is good? If only experts can comment on the work of other experts, experts lose touch with the common people.

Second, ANet doesn't actually have a precise way of presenting the public with accurate play numbers. Unlike WoW, where you know X million subscriptions means the gaming community is X million players strong this month, ANet's disclosed numbers - Y million games sold - show only how many people have bought the game. The distinction is incredibly important because if ANet could/would tell us how many people logged on within the last month the numbers would be much lower. Of course, it would be commercial suicide to reveal these numbers (if ANet even keeps track of them), but without an accurate count we can't actually tell how many people have already quit.

ANet has listed GuildWarsGuru as an "Elite Fansite." ANet employees constantly prove they're watching this forum by making posts. This makes it as good an avenue as any for player feedback, and each "I hate Factions!" thread is, at the very bottom of it, the very letter you describe. They've already been written, and they're still being written as I post.

I, personally, do not "hate" Factions. I greatly dislike certain decisions that ANet has made for Factions, but not to the degree to stop playing. That doesn't mean I'll keep playing Factions silently, when ANet has given me the hopefully true impression that my opinions matter to them. I hope that, if ANet sees a large enough dissatisfaction with Factions, and if it recognizes certain design elements as the general source of negative feedback, it can make different design decisions for future games.

The Factions focus on PvP is more a perceived than an actual thing. Players want to see a reason behind the mad rush to level 20 and through the storyline, so they assume the main thing that was there for Prophecies characters - PvP/GvG/HoH - is still the focus in Factions. Problem is, Factions is about "Alliance Wars" rather than "Guild Wars," and getting faction points for the alliance becomes the only real pursuit, since it leads to elite missions. This indeed leads to a grind, whether it's an Alliance Battle PvP grind or faction farming PvE grind.

Backtracking may be the way other games have been set up in the past, but it's not one of the main design elements in Prophecies the way it is in Factions. My point isn't just that backtracking is bad; it's that it was a necessary feature that ANet chose to include because of the way they designed Factions. If the continent wasn't so compressed, we wouldn't have so much backtracking; if there wasn't so much of an emphasis on persistant alliance warfare, the continent wouldn't be so compressed.

Why should I be happy with what I got when I was happy with what I had?

You're correct on the story - the way the Factions storyline is set up you don't need to know the Prophecies storyline at all. But what about the gameplay? Can you honestly say that people who learned the game at the much faster pace of Factions will be as able to take on the same tasks as people who learned it in Prophecies? As a Prophecies player, I already had a general idea of what to do and how to set up my skills when creating a new character in Factions, but working out skill setups and combat strategies takes time - time that Factions characters simply don't have.

Even In terms of the learning curve, Factions is an expansion rather than a stand-alone game.

Oh yes. And any day now, they'll die in an Afflicted Explosion that kills us all because we're standing too close and attacking them in a Frenzy

Alright, lets look at this more closely. You say you're a PvE player; that means you have purposely removed yourself from the PvP realm. GvG combat was the main emphasis of Prophecies at least in theory, because I believe ANet thought PvP would extend the gameplay time for people who got through PvE or didn't like it at all. Why do you think the first GW World Championship was made into such a big deal, if you don't think GvG was the main focus of Prophecies - which incidentally was originally called Guild Wars?

In Factions, however, the main emphasis of post-storyline gameplay is on alliance warfare. Again, you can purposely remove yourself from this aspect and trade faction points for rare materials requred to craft certain armor. But where in Prophecies that choice would mean you still have the whole game world at your disposal (with "mini expansions" of UW, FoW, SF, Tombs), in Factions it means you will miss out on content because you'll have no way of accessing elite missions.

Let's assume ANet does this to discourage faction farming through PvE quests. Would that do anything to the nature of faction farming? You'd still need a ton of faction points to gain access to elite missions, but instead of farming for them in PvE you'd be farming for them in PvP, relentlessly grinding away in Alliance Battles. Tying elite missions to the alliance system does about the same thing that rank did for HoH: you can't get in unless you know how to farm faction.

Right. And if they find less content accessible to them in Factions due to both smaller map/storyline size and greater emphasis on PvP, guess what they'll do on these forums?

Length of the game... perhaps not as long as prophecies. But I believe the maps are about of the same size... and here is why. Prophecies is pretty flat were as Factions has a lot of hills... higher areas to get to. I've been attacked by things at the bottom of a hill yet I was a good ways away from them.

I must say I agree with everything the OP has said. The back tracking in quests drives me insane. Here go meet his guy, now go meet this guy, now go back to this guy, there wasn't that fun!? At least move the rewards guys back to an outpost or something so don't have to run through mobs to get to him. And I hate running around that multi-level maze. Don't even know if I'll take my Prophecies chars through here, because I hate that area so much.

I have also been stuck for like one week because I have no idea where to go. Made it Zivros something in the Jade Sea, but do not have any primary quests, and have done them all that I could find. I have no idea how to advance the story - very frustrating.

And I am in a large alliance - just happened to be that way, we are mainly a PvE guild, but are allied with many PvP guilds. I do not enjoy PvP - I can probably get to elite missions, but have not tried yet. Mainly because I do not find Factions nearly as fun as Prophecies.... gets old real quick. A shame - I spent many, many hours playing Prophecies - I think I will take my Canthan char over there....

Shyft, as usual you'll probably have a lot to quote on this one

There are some issues with Factions, I agree, but I don't necessarily believe that this is reason to call Anet the "root of all evil" as this thread's title suggests.

Here are some issues that I think the game does have:
(I'm probably forgetting a few things here)
-Too much grind
-Experience is inflated
-Elite missions are denied to too many people

Now here are the ways I think Anet could fix these problems:
-Spread out the game more, as it is too hurried and rushed
-Make more quests instead of every basic, insignificant quest giving 3000xp
-Lower the requirements for accessing elite mission areas

Now it may be too late for Anet to fix all of these things for Factions, but they can do their best, and consider some of this for the next chapter.

Haha, if you buy a car and the door falls off as you're driving it to work a week later, would I tell you to go build your own car if you're having such a problem with it?

Seriously though, I found Factions to suffer the same problems as many forms of entertainment do these days: Flashy lights + 'splosions = money maker! If you didnt find the story and plotline of Factions laughable, I hope you had a great time as Mission Impossible 3 and Lawnmower Man 2.

Realize the thing that made games like Max Payne, Half LIfe, Final Fantasy, and Clive Barker's Undying so great was the fact that the plotline behind them was flushed out, thought out, and interesting. There are so many holes in Factions that I won't bother elaborating beyond:

I, like Josh, enjoy immersing myself in a story worth telling and, let's face it, Factions (where enemies are humans, plague-infested humans, and, well, minions of humans) reads like a Mad Libs page:

The evil Lord _______(proper noun) has returned and is threatening the land with _______(noun). You and a select group of _______(plural noun) must bind together and combine forces to stop his evil scheme by _______(transitive verb) the _______(noun) before it's too late!

No depth, no twists, and the only mysetry is caused by jumbo jet sized holes in the story. The result of this was that the game feels rushed. The entire theme is packed with a feeling of "Hurry up and defeat Shiro!" without any significant background of "Discover what is going on and act accordingly upon it."

Anyway, let's just say I agree with the OP. I felt like A.Net said Factions would be all these things and then it turns out to be rather few of them. I am still playing it and still enjoying it but probably not for much longer. I played Prophecies up until the day Factions came out without taking more than a month or two break and never got sick of it. I am already losing interest in Factions (to the point where i can see an end to my Guild wars playing) after a couple weeks. It may keep me for another month, but that's nothing compared to the 12 months I got out of the first chapter. When C3 comes out, I will have probably been away from the game for a while. Maybe I'll check the forums to see if it's worth getting and maybe I'll be playing something else by then. Who knows? The point is that A.Net needs to realize if they ever want me (and others like me) to buy their games again, they need to do more then just set up some situation where we are forced to fight and then let us do so. We want some Role-Playing in the PvE sections of our RPG and the whole "Quick, kill everything!" scenario just doesn't cut it.

I agree with Beat_.....I have already starting loosing interest in factions....I have 4 tyrian characters and 1 canthan.....my chathan is still on the island and none of my tyrians have gotten thru the first mission (2 havent even been past kahieng while one ran to the marketplace, only 1 has done most of those fedex quests and I dont want to have to repeat them again so soon.....they were very exhausting mentally the first go 'round).
I have been spending my gw time getting titles since, first I didnt get my CE, then when I got it most of my friends had already gone on leaving me behind to do all those dangg quests alone---not much fun in babysitting pugs or henchies. So my monk is at 98% for the cartographer title.........yep, repeating running the gwp missions is a lot more fun than the fedex/mob quests of factions.

I can't believe so many people try to use this "argument" and expect to be taken seriously.

I think the whole reason behind all this is because this is a team that hasn't necessarily worked on gw before, other than maybe a few that worked on the original

probably, so im hoping they don't peddle the same stuff in the next one

Heres my 2 cents about how long of gameplay factions has compared to prohecies:

Not all stand-alone games made by the same company need to have the exact same gameplay hours. Why should they?

GW:P was worked on for 5 years. 5 years!! Factions has, what... a year!? They made 2 new professions(alot of balencing and testing). Then added new armor, new pvp systems. a bunch of stuff, under a very short time span.

I'm not gonna say, "why dont you make something like this and then complain" because I bet even Blizzard cant make stuff as good as this.

This "argument" Is meant to help you get some perspective. Making a game isnt that easy and the time the gw team worked on to make gw,p was much longer than factions, They've really done an outstanding job.

So basically Shyft your saying that we should judge things b4 knowing what the full story is. Eg. God! i hate those starving kids in africa! Y r they starving?? They should be eradicated because they're taking up to much land and they're dying heaps!

Is that what we should be doing? IMO, no

You guys all do relize factions costed less the the orginal GW do you?

We got what we payed for.

Slowing the progression down does not equate to a better learning curve in all instances. Typically people can not learn how to use something if they do not have access to it. Essentially what you have a issue with is bad players not taking the time on their own to learn at their own pace. Then you confront them playing a class i would rate on par with a mesmer for difficulty and getting crushed when they try to use it as a warrior or expect the party to carry them through the missions. The latter being the case typical to your average bad player. This type of person doesnt realize their mistakes and doesnt even try to learn and just uses the rest of the team as a crutch, in order to explore the game that can be done mostly with henchmen easily.

Bad players are always going to be bad players compared to good players as talent does weigh in on this comparison. There are also qualities within the individual that would cause that person to try to excel opposed to just going through the motions and not caring much about the outcome.

From what ive experienced in the past and now with the assasin is that when a mistake is made while playing it, the profession simply implodes under pressure. The difference between it and other "key" roles is that the party doesn't go down with the ship.

Some aspects of the class could be fine tuned a little more, but it is still usable. The most notable is the staying power the profession has. In some aspects it is parrelell in ability to a damage dealing elementalist, in terms of overal effect versus survivability and staying power. *If* the class was built as a ranged assailant, then the entire argument could be thrown out of the window, but this is not the case. Adding striking range for safety and flexability would easily relieve the pressure the assassin feels currently while fighting in melee distance similar to the freedom rangers enjoy.

The profession isn't built that way unfortunatly, so the job is really only reserved for the highly experienced/talented players or for very niche situational use. Unforutnatly too many people just try to play it like a warrior, which simply doesn't work.

Story has nothing to do with game mechanics. It is simply filler fluff in order to create a sesne of continuity and relieve the sense of disbelief that is caused by some of the game mechanics involved. The actual path taken of the story or the overal length/number of missions is largely irrelevant to the overal learning curve of the individual. It is up to the individual to learn things through trial and error or any other method on their own. This can be achieved at any point in the game when the skills are available to the individual. ANET can only provide the information on how things work. They have done some rather nice additions prior to the release of factions and included within factions to help this along. It is simply up to the individual to take advantage of these assets.

I checked some shops yesterday. Factions and Chapter 1 are priced exactly the same: 44.5 euro.

Factions is fscking stressful as all hell, for me. I think the root of all the hate lies in more than the short game ,and I admit, I am taking my sweet time getting 6 characters through, and it does seme to go by super quickly, but, still, the hate lies in the fact people are feeling pushed to pvp, but at the same time, are finding themselves caught up in the mundane grind.

Personally, I am only still playing because of my friends/guild.

It definitely wasn't worth the C/E purchase, and now, I am glad of the delay because I saved the 70 bucks in canceling.

@ The poster of this thread.

Like countless people said before, the game is as long as you want it to be. Ive had the game since Launch day and JUST reached arborstone.

And Im not in any rush to beat the game like most people... Im already more satisfied with factions then prophecies.. Prophecies was just run here and there...YAY NEW AREA...lets start running again..

Prophicies was a huge map with huge empty spaces..

Actually factions have more empty spaces, but I like it

So damned easy when it comes to capping elites.

COST...not costed. sorry that bugs the hell out of me. Also I recall paying 50 bucks for Prophecies just like I paid 50 bucks for Factions.

Since i really cant go through all these pages, i dont have time. Though, I think your taking it too LITERAL. its alliance battles, you have GUILD ALLIANCE's everyone is still a guild, luxons have their own inner guilds, its still guild wars. your nuts to say its all alliances theres no GUILD Wars.

Alliances are agreements between more than 1 guild that they share a common goal for this campaign. and therefore, fight the wars/battles for their desires. its the SAME THING.

This is all nonsense, there is no hidden message Anet didnt wanna disclose to us about the new stand alone game. it IS a standalone game, you DONT NEED PROPHECIES to be ABLE to compete, whos to say you will have every advantage? obviously no one has all the advantages when they don't have all the skills unlocked for prophecies only, or have the new classes - assassins, and ritualists. They are not needed, but they damn right are USEFUL to bother with the new campaign.

This topic is flawed on the wrong conception of what the real reasons are.
guess no one remembered to check the alliance tab in the GUILD menu, you know, the list of GUILDS that are ALLIED with YOURS, for some common GOALS? That would be just like an assassin, he'll stay on his own, but if the price is RIGHT (common goals are desired) then he'll go the path for an employer, and take a double roll if its worth the risk.

geez 8 pages of what, trying to figure out how 2 games are the same?

Eviscerate isn't a core skill. Isn't that laughable.

I was not calling ANet the root of all evil. I was referring to the root cause of the problems people are having with Factions, and started this thread to try and pinpoint them.

If we can take the analogy of the common cold, what you're describing are just symptoms. I don't want ANet to "fix" these things in Factions because then they'll be doing the same thing cold medicines do - reduce or eliminate the symptoms without doing anything about the virus itself. My point is that these things are problems, but they're present in Factions because of the way the game is structured.

Alright, I'll bite. If Prophecies was so successful as to sell a million copies, why is it that there was less time alotted for Factions design (as you claim) than for Prophecies? Someone should have realized that spending less time on the sequel might equal more "rough edges" and more player dissatisfaction.

ANet has already proven they can make an excellent video game. Why isn't it valid to compare the job they've done with Prophecies to the job they've done with Factions?

What "full story" do we need to hear? If ANet is a business, they should take customer complaints into account in order to remain in business. If ANet is a community-friendly gaming company as they claim, why haven't they given us the "full story" already? Perhaps you'd like the "full story" behind the Collector's Edition debacle too before people can even start complaining that they didn't get theirs?

And by the way, I hate those starving kids in Africa. Their parents keep voting for corrupt and violent leaders who keep fighting among themselves and stealing my relief money, the money my country gets from me with its taxes and sends to feed the starving african kids. And guess what? They're still starving. I hate them for that.

"Starving kids" is a symptom of the "bad leaders" disease. You can make the symptom go away, but it will recur just the same without its root cause removed. Did you know that Stalin managed to starve Ukraine in the 1930s, the country that's been called "the breadbasket of Europe" due to the immense harvests it could produce? Stalin made people starve, and no outside donations which his government was asking for in order to help the starving people (whom he himself was starving to death!) ever got to them.

If a leader really has the people's best interest at heart, why would he have them starve while he eats his fill?

You're making the arbitrary distinction between "n00b" and "newb" here. A "n00b" is your "bad player" who can't be helped no matter how much help he gets; a "newb" is someone new who hasn't had the time/chance to learn the ins and outs of the game yet. The "n00bs" you're talking about will always exist no matter how good the game is, and Prophecies demonstrated that with its famous Thunderhead Keep "n00b chokepoint." I, however, am talking mostly about the "newbs" who won't be able to learn the game because of the faster pace in Factions, and not necessarily just about the assassins. Where in Prophecies these players had a much greater opportunity to get used to their characters/skills/skill sets and learn by cooperating with other players in missions, in Factions this part of the game is greatly reduced, which leaves "newbs" with a much smaller chance to stop being "newbs."

How, precisely, are these goals achieved? By constantly farming quests for Faction points? By repeated Alliance battles where you'll only see more than 4 people of your alliance on the same side if you're randomly lucky? My point is that GvG - the "Guild Wars" part of Guild Wars - is quickly becoming a matter of secondary importance in Factions by the very design of the game.

You're talking theory. I'm talking practice. The "common goal" that Factions puts between the guilds isn't a "you can do anything and fight anyone," it's "fight for your alliance to unlock content or be left behind." If you do anything else with your alliance, you're left behind, because there are other alliances out there that focus exclusively on the goal that Factions tells them is what they should be working towards.

Ah, but you need to learn the game before you can compete, and Prophecies allows a lot more room for learning and development than Factions does.

Have you checked the Alliance tab lately? Underneath each guild name, there is a running total of how many faction points that guild has donated to the alliance. That, alone, should tell you about the shifting focus of gameplay in Factions. It's not that you can form "bigger guilds" and keep doing what you were doing in Prophecies; it's that you need to form "alliances" and do the things alliances do in order to keep up with the rest.

So I don't have to delete anymore posts (hopefully), here's a reminder to some of you from the Forum Guidelines:


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Swampgirl Inez has some great AI workin' there.

By the lords! That is laughable! Is there not an equal skill that mimicks this? Surely, there is, having seen all the duplicates thus far.

They claim each game is stand-alone, but seriously they would prefer it if you would buy as many chapters can you can - since we are a business. Oops, I meant *they*.

It is not a game design issue when a new player chooses to not take the time to test and train on their own. It is also not a game design issue when players opt to perform less than intellegent actions within the missions.

If you call forcing people to play the wrong way before gaining semi workable or complete skill sets the right way to go. Then having the same player assume that those "starter" skills are good, like firestorm for instance, then you have a player opinion biased game balance and development driven in a very wrong direction. I also detested not having enough viable skills to choose to use a hammer for a warrior for a long time or have the depth in mesmer to really have a rounded character before reaching lion's arch.

If having large glaring holes within the character causes a better learning curve through watching the auto-attack sequence, then prophecies was perfect. This obviously is not the case and as far as im concerned the real "learning" point began when the characters first reached augury rock and began the ascention process. Everything before that point is the game on very slow and small training wheels teaching the player the wrong way to play in the pve and pvp perspectives. This in turn caused a weird bias among the PVE only crowd to try and dictate that PVP centric players should be forced into a very slow treadmill progression in order to experiement with anything. Factions largely did away with this theory and it is almost the polar opposite of prophecies in this respect. This is not neccacarially a bad thing and if the player really wishes a longer "training period" and overly slow progression, then they can just go back to prophecies with their new professions and treadmill through that portion of the game learning skills at approximatly half the rate due to the abscence of rit and asassin skill sets in the rewards.

In the end it is up to the individual to learn how to play and it is not dictated by the quantity of content the game offers before X,Y, or Z point in the game. This is why i still stand by my previous comment regarding bad players. Those players chose to not evolve on their own and got to the end of the game by using good players as a crutch. This is one of the reasons why many seasoned players choose to avoid PUGs entirely and can have an easier run through the majority of it with just henchmen.

Your entire argument assumes that people will learn over time regardless of desire and the quality of player is dictated solely by percentage of game completed. This is not the case as demonstrated by the plethora of low calibur players that existed in chapter 1 and continue to exist in chapter 2.

Not really, because for the many-mobbed PvE of Cantha I think Triple Chop is a better choice to take with you (IMO). The Cyclone Axe + Triple Chop combo* works WONDERS all over Cantha. I've been having a lot of fun with that.


*assuming you know how to position yourself in mobs to get the 'adjacent' contact

But it becomes a game design issue when there is no room for any learning curve other than the steep one. How does a new player find out which actions are "less than intelligent" without experience? Prophecies had a much wider "margin of error" in terms of player actions, where Factions can murder you for "less than intelligent" choices while you're still on the way to the first mainland mission - which, incidentally, is an issue in and of itself.

You seem to forget that Prophecies was out for a long time before the AoE "nerf." At the time of release, and within the following 5 months, Firestorm was a staple in many PvE nukers' builds. The patch that changed AI reaction to Firestorm was an abrupt shift in the skill's usefulness, but as the game had already been out a significant amount of time players adjusted rather quickly.

While giving players more options is always a good choice, not letting them work their way through the options isn't. You say your character lacked hammer warrior skills right off the bat, but that was done on purpose so your warrior would get a chance to experience other weapon lines as well. Granted, some of the starter skills performed better than others, as proven by Sever+Gash sword W/Mo's plowing through the game, and there was no doubt room for improvement. But limiting your choice of skills from your primary profession was done to make you use your secondary profession skills and look for skill combos.

Let's assume your Prophecies character's development went at the same pace as your Factions one. If you started your first character in Cantha, you'd have access to a lot of skills, but not the opportunity to get them. There are no skill quests in mainland Cantha, which is clearly a feature to prevent Tyrian characters from accessing them, so your only recourse is to buy the skills you think you need. But even with the possibility of getting 3 skill points per mission, you will run out of both skill points and cash very quickly, where in Prophecies you could get the skills without a similar investment and effectively broaden your understanding of the game by having time and space to test them.

I understand that Prophecies players were requesting gold sinks, but what about the Factions players who don't have the same resources to start with?

"Slow treadmill progression" for the PvP oriented?! Please. Prophecies was explicitly billed as a game where you could create a maxed PvP character right off the bat. Why would you need to get a character through the storyline if you were only going to use it for PvP, other than to unlock stuff? There are even more options for the PvP oriented people in Factions - they still have the option to create maxed PvP characters and they also have Alliance battles. What Factions lacks is room for the PvE oriented people in its learning curve. This only serves to deepen the sentiment that Factions has been geared towards the PvP crowd, and PvE-wise it is hardly the game we were looking towards/were expecting/paid for.

Players will learn over time. If they don't learn on their own, they will learn by cooperating with other players who will guide them with their expertise. I've personally helped a lot of people through missions and quests in Prophecies, and only in about 10% of the cases the person turned out to be a "n00b" (rejecting my help even after I was proven right) rather than a "newb" (glad to take advice). In Factions, however, there just isn't room for player cooperation on that scale, and while I refuse to believe that the proportion of "n00bs" to "newbs" is any different, we will receive more "players who play bad" not because there are more bad players but because there are less chances for new players to become good ones.

I think you are missing out on a huge part of the aspect with learning. That aspect is failure. The miasma forces the player to use intellegent positioning or overpower its effect in one form or another. If anything this supports forcing people to learn and adapt rather than coddling them.



It was a bad skill then, but it is a worse skill now. That does not validate it as an excuse for people who chose to use the horrible skill. Your statement merely reinforces my point.

Actually you got to experience sword skills along with strength and tactics up until halfway through the northern shiverpeaks where you could start to experience axe skills. The hammer skill set doesnt even begin to be complete till you begin to include eliete skills. The tactics element is not bad in this consideration, but many strength skills have very little merit. Forcing people to learn to use bad skills in the wrong situations is not a good method of learning or progression.

You are continuing to confuse the development team attempting to create challenge within the pve progression through limited skill options versus a environment ideally suited for learning through slow progression. If chapter 1 was truly the slow progression through adaptation, then you would have had skills taken away from the characters periodically forcing the individual to change instead of just re-using or adding to the existing skill set.

Actually all it did was breed stupidity, as those same individuals continued to use those skills against things that were completely immune to their effects. The undead in kryta is an easy example of this and one of the worst examples of teaching how to play the wrong way through coddling and not allowing diversity and addaptation through slow skill aquisition.

Skill points are not the problem in chapter 2, money is. The normal quests dish out massive amounts of experience and with that sometimes skill points. This forces the player to use the known skill sets to earn the money to aquire more skills. This forces practice and experimentation, but also allows ch1 characters to earn a reward while playing through the ch2 content and not missing out on anything. It is a wise design choice overall for this reason and the reasoning you mentioned.

The simple answer is to play solo. The drops increase and it doesnt split the cash while forcing more resourcefulness on the player's part causing the individual to learn the limitations of the profession better. New characters in ch2 can do everything on the starter island, excluding the 2 missions (i havent tried the miasma solo yet), without any assistance from other players or henchmen. This is very similar to going through all the explorable areas in ch1 from pre-searing ascalon to kryta solo with any ch1 character.



What you have unlocked is more important than overal character level. Actually, if you could seperate skill points from character level, it would still defer to skill points over level as well. This is another common misconception among PVE only players.


This reads as using them as a crutch. Anyone can tell you how to play, but its still the individual that has to play it. Typically its more along the lines of assumption that the correct technique is used while the other party operates efficiently.

Actually this is where we differ. I believe that there should be more idiot filters in the game forcing people to learn it right before moving on, rather than assuming they are learning anything through a slow and long coddling process. That slow and long process can be imitated through the basic actions required in every day or run of the mill "farming". That does not require additional missions made solely for that purpose.

FFx>FF9>FF7 not sure what happened to 8,unless maybe i just chose to blank it from memory.also realy looking forward to 12.there were some very short games in the old days such as,resident evil (2-3 hours),nightbreed(2 hours).but there are some nice long games old and new such as,the dizzy range,chucky egg 2(never managed to finish myself),the grandia series are all very long stunning looking and fun games + chock full of sidequests(roll on #3),and of course the original tetris which was infinate(all be it looped but that was easy to overlook given the addictiveness of the game).also on the subject of tetris a little known fact is that the 1 man creator of tetris never copyrighted it and as such has never seen a bean from the bigest selling game of all time(ouch).and nobody can over look the extreme fun and replayability of the FF series which is always graphicaly stunning,offers many many hours of gameplay + end-game content on later edditions.to me nothing i have playedon the pc compares to the stuff you get on console so console FTW,except of course the console conversions which are nice thx to the use of game changing mods.the only game i play on pc is guild wars and i'm starting to think after more than a year its time to give my full devotion back to my consoles same as most of the people i started GW with,but i'll wait for info for ch3 first i think.

p.s. can't remember first game but my first console was either the A2500 or the intertelevision which ever came first.

The old guild wars was called GuildWars Prohicies. (Bad spelling) These One Is called Guild Wars Factions.

neither of them are a game called guild wars, they each have their own name.

My problem with Factions: There are to many areas wher the Devs pack the mobs in too tight. Granted we are still smarter than the AI but still, 12 level 20 and 2 bosses, just come on.

I'm begining to aggree with a guy at work; if we lvl cap at 20 everything should lvl cap at 20.

More THKs please~~