State of the In-game Community

[Mireles]

Guild wars made 4.9 million USD in sales last year so new copies and in-game store items are still being bought by new and old players alike.... Guild Wars population has shown a decrease trend, but I don't believe Anet's updates are as highly responsible for making people leave as some say (people that leave because their exploit was closed didn't really have any interest in the game except to exploit it) ...the decrease can largely be placed on lack of interest... even players that do still log on are not "playing" they log on to "chat" or just to check in...

The community has also seemed to evolve into a highly discriminate one... this may be because we have tools that eliminate the need for taking anyone incompetent in place of an even more incompetent henchmen like it was in prophecies days...But also because there is a high focus on wealth and time efficiency of "farming runs"... anything not a "prime meta" build or strategy is absolutely unacceptable, prepared to be laughed at and shunned for your free thinking...

Playing for profit and title time efficiency not for fun and social interaction with Anet handing us the tools in recent updates to increasingly enable discriminate behavior is what makes the community what it is today....

[Lasai]

The point most of you miss is that for a new purchaser of the game.. it is ALL "new content" and will consume their time, potentially, for just as long as it did for those who purchased it long ago.

The game has evolved.. and many of us will play the evolved game blissfully unaware and uncaring of how you all used to do it. I bought this to AVOID pugs and forced grouping and use the tools provided to let me do that. I entered a game where forced grouping was dead and buried.. so why should I care about pugs? It has never been a part of the GW I have experienced.

The myopic point of view of the 6 year veteran or most of this forum community does not reflect reality or the experiences of many of us who have played for much shorter periods of time.

The "Good Old Days" do not exist for many of us.. because they never were. That was then, this is now. Rose colored glasses of nostalgia.. every game, every forum has them.

It is pretty funny actually, as the comments are the same regardless of game, and even more funny is the fact that they are so often preceded by.. "I just came back after being gone for X years". If the good ol days were soo good... um.. why did you quit?

I play this game for what it is now, as it is now. The past I never experienced has no bearing at all nor do I feel any great sympathy for those who insist on expectations of reliving that past.

[Verene]

The myopic point of view of the 6 year veteran or most of this forum community does not reflect reality or the experiences of many of us who have played for much shorter periods of time.

That's a point I wish was brought up more often whenever someone goes off on a tear about how the game is so much easier now. Yes, things have been buffed and updated...but also keep in mind the fact that the longer you play, the more experience you have. Just because vets that have played for 5-6 years find things easy (because they've played for half a decade and know how skills work together and have experience from all of that playtime) doesn't mean someone starting out more recently is going to find it a cakewalk. I myself am starting to shift into the "most of it's pretty easy" mindset, but there are still things I find a challenge, and I remember very well just how damn difficult a lot of it was before I gained all of that experience from having played for a few years.

TL;DR - things may have gotten easier but they aren't necessarily universally easy and people discount the effect that player experience has on the game's difficulty far too often.

[Sam I Are]

It is hard as hell coming back. I just returned after 4+ years of not playing. Needless to say, it was overwhelming. It was also a little sad to see the only person I ever really played with in the game was gone (He never logs on, so I assume he quit). In a sense though, I guess that's good for him. On to bigger and better things.

I noticed the overall poor attitude of players as well. Most people are on their high horses calling everyone a noob for just about anything. It's tough to learn how to play the game again, when people never give you a chance in the first place. Playing with heroes is alright, but it sure gets boring after a while. It seems as though people forgot just what guild wars is, a game. They take it far too seriously as if this is their way of life. To those people: Go outside and take a break from the game for a good while.

The good news out of this is that everything is really easy to buy now. I got my obsidian armor done in under a month. So I guess that's a tiny bit of a trade off for the attitudes of some of the players.

I would love to see the happy helpful attitude of old guild wars come back though. I know I've said it in game, and many people agreed with me, while other said to "Get [French Toast]ed".

I wouldn't mind joining up with you to play though, just PM me in game or something! IGN: Sam I Are


Edit:

To Lasai:

Some people quit because they wanted to do other things. Like I said before, guild wars is a game. I just got my priorities straight and stopped playing a game that was completely controlling me at the time. I'm way more mature now and I can handle time management. The funny thing is, I actually found this game by accident and I wanted to see if there was even going to be a single person left playing. I figured the game would be completely unpopulated due to the nerfs going on at the time I quit.

[Skyy High]

*WTB sticky thread where people can post their desire to party with new/returning players*

Obviously no ingame names required, just a list of names that players can PM for help.

[cthulhu reborn]

Originally Posted by Lasai

The point most of you miss is that for a new purchaser of the game.. it is ALL "new content" and will consume their time, potentially, for just as long as it did for those who purchased it long ago.

The game has evolved.. and many of us will play the evolved game blissfully unaware and uncaring of how you all used to do it. I bought this to AVOID pugs and forced grouping and use the tools provided to let me do that. I entered a game where forced grouping was dead and buried.. so why should I care about pugs? It has never been a part of the GW I have experienced.

The myopic point of view of the 6 year veteran or most of this forum community does not reflect reality or the experiences of many of us who have played for much shorter periods of time.

The "Good Old Days" do not exist for many of us.. because they never were. That was then, this is now. Rose colored glasses of nostalgia.. every game, every forum has them.

It is pretty funny actually, as the comments are the same regardless of game, and even more funny is the fact that they are so often preceded by.. "I just came back after being gone for X years". If the good ol days were soo good... um.. why did you quit?

I play this game for what it is now, as it is now. The past I never experienced has no bearing at all nor do I feel any great sympathy for those who insist on expectations of reliving that past.

Well said. I think you make some good points. I personally came back to play because I like not needing people to do stuff in the game and to just have fun and a nice chat with people when I feel like it. GW1 is great for that.

[dudemonkey]

Originally Posted by Skyy High

*WTB sticky thread where people can post their desire to party with new/returning players*

Obviously no ingame names required, just a list of names that players can PM for help.

This is a really good idea! Almost like a mentoring program.

[[狼]Izzie[虎]]

It does seem like a lot of people have gone the way of the grumpy old man. Particularly people in farming areas seem to have lost their way. I agree with a few other people that posted and suggest joining a friendly guild that just enjoys the game. Speed clear guilds, faction farming guilds, if it's what they want to do to have fun then good for them but it seems like none of them just group up for fun anymore.

As I always say, why play a game if you aren't having fun? I could be not having fun in many other places

[Hanok Odbrook]

Originally Posted by cthulhu reborn

To say that they try to cater to everybody is just not the same thing in my book. So let it be a definitions issue. Skills get nerfed because the balance was gone because of certain skills so they do something about it. That to me has nothing to do with trying to cater to everyone because you know a number of people will not be happy when you do it.

People just talk to easily in generalities and vague terms. In the end I think most people don't actually say what they mean but something more or less close to it.

Anet tries to please as many people as possible within the limits of their tools and budget and without losing the balance within the game on various levels. To me that's quite a difference from "trying to please everybody"...that's just another unfounded generalisation based on feeling, opinion and certainly not fact.

Perhaps it's more of a question of semantics than definitions. If you have four main groups of players, and the developer of a game implements four different updates, each one geared towards each of the groups, then I see that as trying to please/cater to everyone. Certainly it is an impossible task to attempt to please every player in a game on a micro or individual scale, so we then must generalize and group the playerbase into large defined demographics. Skill and balance updates are a different type of thing that goes back to the core design of any game, so should not be included in the broad term of content updates.

HM and Elite areas were added to cater to the more hardcore player. PvP and PvE skills were separated to cater to the PvE playerbase. Removing PvP's reliance on unlocking skills and equipment through PvE play was made to cater to the PvP playerbase. Heroes and the recent 7 hero party update was implemented to cater to the solo player. Embark Beach was implemented to help the social player. There's nothing to say that any of these changes were a bad thing if you are in the particular group that the update benefited, but they might not necessarily have benefited the game as a whole.

I think the point Martin was trying to make, was that GW lost a sense of focus when trying to please the many types of demographical groups we have in the game, thus, lost some of the impact it might have had on the genre. That's not to say that it didn't have an impact (it has had quite a large one IMO), but that there could have been opportunities lost to maintain a larger playerbase or increase it had they maintained some of the original focus of the game, and to be something more than just the Non-subscription based MMO that proved to the genre that it could be just that.

Hanok

[dudemonkey]

Originally Posted by Mireles

Guild wars made 4.9 million USD in sales last year

I actually hadn't realized that the GW team would be so small. Depending on their margins, I don't think you could support more than about 20 people on this kind of sales (back of the napkin math). I wonder how many are actively working out of the GW1 budget.

[Hanok Odbrook]

Originally Posted by dudemonkey

I actually hadn't realized that the GW team would be so small. Depending on their margins, I don't think you could support more than about 20 people on this kind of sales (back of the napkin math). I wonder how many are actively working out of the GW1 budget.

I don't know if they ever mentioned how many people are on the Live Team - I'm sure someone here can find the info if it has been made available. I do know it is a small number of people. Most of the Anet team is working on GW2.

Hanok

[dudemonkey]

Originally Posted by Hanok Odbrook

I don't know if they ever mentioned how many people are on the Live Team - I'm sure someone here can find the info if it has been made available. I do know it is a small number of people. Most of the Anet team is working on GW2.

Hanok

That's actually good news, IMO. Even if sales drop off, they should still be able to do a minimal amount of development for GW1 profitably.

[Skyy High]

Originally Posted by dudemonkey

I actually hadn't realized that the GW team would be so small. Depending on their margins, I don't think you could support more than about 20 people on this kind of sales (back of the napkin math). I wonder how many are actively working out of the GW1 budget.

The Live Team is, like, 7 people right now, and that's after they got some new blood. The vast majority of the company is working on GW2. Some of the other devs contribute to GW1 as well, but not full time.

Suffice it to say, the company is living primarily just like almost any other game company that is putting out a new game: through the funding of their publisher. That doesn't mean GW1 is a money pit. Even if they're breaking even, that would make it free (and spectacular) advertising for GW2.