Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

And your solution is selling are mere selling character name changes and other small things in the store? and in effect making us pay more and more?
NOTHING that can be sold in the ingame store and no micropayments can be a solution to the game's real problems. There's nothing wrong with the business model right now, absolutely NO NEED to make it worse - for the players, no need to make them pay more.

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

Another ideas from #gwp yay! We just had those incredible ideas about completely removing 80%+ skills from the game and now this!
<sarcasm off>

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

Ridiculous nonsense full of bullsht statements OP!

So GW is dying, omg! The succesfull business model is now poor and generally accepted as bad! And your solution is selling are mere selling character name changes and other small things in the store? and in effect making us pay more and more?

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

NOTHING that can be sold in the ingame store and no micropayments can be a solution to the game's real problems. There's nothing wrong with the business model right now, absolutely NO NEED to make it worse - for the players, no need to make them pay more.

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

If the rumors about delaying chapter4 to make the game better are true it's only better for all of us and it further shows that the concerns about these micropayments are completely missed. We are getting free updates that are fixing the most important issues, we just got Reconnects and Party Search which are both great, and there are Big Changes coming for HA and GvG very soon! So as we see Anet isn't just making more and more of the same but is significantly improving the game overall.

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

The suggestions of: Name changes, Expanded friends list, UI Presets are nice but very very minor and not affecting the state of the game.

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

True, but soon to change. I hope for some real rewards for pvp this time, not a bunch of candy weapons that everyone will get for free anywyay.

Originally Posted by Grasping Darkness

EDIT: I have played gw for so long and put so much in to it if they were to flip the script and do something like monthly fee's you better call every fire truck in the world to extinguish the the flaming you'd hear from me. (this was meant as an analogy not literally) figured I better say that or the fbi might be giving me the rubber glove treatment lol ....monthly fee's,horrible idea,booooooo

Originally Posted by Rustjive

Some of you are either not reading all the way through, or something. Who knows.

Originally Posted by DarthGreg

Micropayments may be great for ANet's business, but they're awful for the player. It's already begun with PvP unlocks, I wonder how far it will go?

Originally Posted by Rustjive

Edit 2: For those too lazy to read, an abstract: Guild Wars is dying! A restrictive business model is to blame.

Originally Posted by Rustjive

Long story short, Guild Wars as a game is in fairly dire straits. They're not in financial trouble to the best of my knowledge, but in GWP there's been a great movement of players towards WoW - and these are the top PvP players, moving to a game infamous for grind. Too many fun seasons and too few skill balances for a totally out-of-whack metagame is a big reason why this is happening, as is the backlash against 6v6 in HA. However, there are other reasons as to why:

1) Expansions: Guild Wars and its expansions are standalone - but for the PvP community, this doesn't hold true. All skills are balanced against all other skills across expansions, so with Nightfall there was a good deal of power creep in which Prophecies-only players found themselves on the very short end of things. As more expansions come out, and with a staff that doesn't really grow, certain areas of Guild Wars will fall into disrepair. This isn't speculation - there have been rumblings on GWP that certain people working on the project would like for the release schedule to not be every 6 months, a schedule resulting directly from Arena.Net's business model.

How does this affect PvE players? Not so drastically, but while the game itself is standalone, the community is not. Areas in older campaigns become ghost towns, it becomes increasingly less MMO and more 'you, yourself and Alesia'. Obviously Arena Net can't dictate where its community goes, but it stands to reason that the less diluted the community, the better.

And affecting all players is that certain builds are undeniably more effective than others, whether PvP or PvE. Some of these builds may be campaign specific, but more likely than not they're cross-campaign. New players will find it harder and harder to break into the game, and if they choose to, the cost is substantial - in fact, it equates to paying for every month since the initial release of Guild Wars, something much more than in other MMOs.

2) Game updates and staff: Arena Net's staff is fairly stagnant - their teams alternate chapters, and then others work on updates for existing games. However, as the list of 'old' games expands, the resources of the company are stretched thinner and thinner. Hiring is the logical out - but in this regard the business model is a hindrance - you're hiring people for games that no longer make money.

----

The running joke is that Guild Wars will be dead before Nightfall finishes its set of balances. But while this is merely exaggeration by some drama queens (Beo), it's not difficult to see that Guild Wars has a somewhat limited future. It's the proud owner of a PvP community that is stacked against growing, and it's the proud owner of a marketing campaign that seems centered around emphasizing the merits of its skill-based PvP over other grind-based games. And almost all of these problems are the byproduct of a poor business model.

There is an out, however, and it got a lot of forum coverage a few months ago, when Guild Wars first announced it - micropayments.

Originally Posted by leprekan

People are leaving the game for many reasons and I doubt name changes is anywhere near the top of the list. I fail to see how charging people more money will make them stay in a game. Charge monthly and see how many install wow.

Originally Posted by Rustjive

Edit 2: For those too lazy to read, an abstract: Guild Wars is dying!

Originally Posted by Marco1983

I think that people who complain about the skill balance part really don't know what Anet is up against. Anet will never, ever, be able to balance the game in a way that is best for everyone. The main reason for that is the total amount of skills, which at the moment is something around 900 or 1200 i suppose (don't really know for sure). With a total of 8 skills at your disposal while playing, you have an aweful lot of combinations. There are ten thousands of combinations possible, and don't even think about it that Anet is going to investigate every possible situation, and eventually will tweak it to death... It's so complicated that even Einstein wouldn't want to take the job, trust me!

Secondly, i am really not liking the 'Guild Wars is a dying game' talk... It just doesn't make sence to wath we have seen in the past months of in-game action going on. There was the new Nightfall campaign, and at the moment we still got the Wintersday event going on. Last named broke every record, as posted on the Guild Wars website just recently. Sure there are some ghost towns in the vast world of Guild Wars. But it's absolutely not the case that there isn't any in-game action anymore. We all know that there are some very badly designed places in the game, and some places are visited more often by other players than others. But you also have a mega amount of content at your disposal to be more than happy with.

The business model however definetely needs a few tweakes here and there. See, the thing is that i absolutely don't like some things that have been going on since the beginning of the Factions and the Nightfall campaign. Things like having extra storage space when you had Factions, and Profecies players did not, and having the ability to use the inscriptions on weapons while other campaigns don't. That are some things that i really don't like, as Anet always said in the past that you'd have to only pay for content, not for updates to the engine and the game itself. And the two things that i named have absolutely got nothing to do with content!

Lastly i think that micropayments could deliver Anet some extra cash, but if they go asking micropayments for every little fart in the game, the idea would end up like a stabbing knife. Also i like to say that i would not pay a monthly fee for a game like Guild Wars, as it definetely lacking a lot of things that other monthly fee based games do have. However, for a game that has no monthly fee, no one can ask for more then we have at our disposal! It's an amazing thing to see what is possible for a game that has no monthly fee's! And i really think that some people are compleining a little too much here and there...