Curse

Mav · May 24, 2005, 06:22 AM // 06:22

I agree with the o.p.

But I think a little differently on the community part

From what I gather, the forum communities (more on this in a second) are mostly nice people looking to play and have fun.

However, this is really offset by the fact there are no official forums. I've got a forum account on like all five major (elite) fansites and it honestly feels like the "community" is more or less a rag-tag bunch of fansites simply strung together by links on guildwars.com (which is basically what it is).

Now I realize it's partially like that for a whateve reasons. Maybe cause theres no monthly fee ArenaNet didn't want to shell out for storage and bandwidth for official forums. Maybe ArenaNet took a look at large forums for a massive game like WoW and realize they'd just be opening a pandoras box by making official forums, who knows. But what I do know is the community has this feeling of being spread out. Add to the fact the only real interaction ingame are the towns themselves and not the explorable world (minus partying) and your community feeling dwindles to something smaller even moreso.

I realize technology might not be there 100% yet but a game company needs to take an MMO (or corpg in GW's case since some prefer that term), and make it so your towns and exploreable areas can hold literally hundreds if not thousands of people without crashing itself AND with minimum fps lag on the clients. I know theres going to be some pressure on the person to have a decent system in order for that to work since even with a very stable well-rounded graphics engine yer still preforming millions of calculations based on actual players moving about in real-time. BUT, if this was accomplished you'd get a massive and I do mean MASSIVE community feeling ingame, as you could log into a town or city and be with hundreds if not thousands of players.

Of course the overall feel also henges on the support of the game. Personally when I buy and play a game, specifically an MMO (and yes even a corpg like GW) I expect to go to that game's website, or that companies website and find a nice large community based forum for the game. EQ, WoW, AO, DAOC, SWG, Planetside, etc all have official forums, and official forums always get the most traffic and user base (except maybe in Diablo II's case). When you visit those you get that feeling of a community. When I go to guildwars.com and am presented with a list of fansites, I get the feeling of being scattered across the internet.

Lews · May 24, 2005, 06:52 AM // 06:52

Thats because in the old eq and D&D days all the kids were Christians whose parents wouldn't let them get it.

Gear853 · May 24, 2005, 07:01 AM // 07:01

I have a agree with Mav, With thousand of fan site for one game there isn't really a sense of community.

i only joined my guild, because one of my real life friend is in it. which is why. so far is pretty good.

I think there is a need for a offical forum, but i'm guessing because GuildWar is free we don't get to have such thing

DrSLUGFly · May 24, 2005, 07:29 AM // 07:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mav

corpg in GW's case since some prefer that term)

forgive my ignorance, but what's a corpg?

Gear853 · May 24, 2005, 07:31 AM // 07:31

Competitive Online Role Playing Game

Anariel · May 24, 2005, 07:42 AM // 07:42

The Guild Wars communities are small. There is a limit to your friends list. There is a limit to the size of the party, and no raiding parties are available. There is no single gathering place or district. There are international players and regional players. There are people that solo most of the time with henchmen. There are people that play exclusively with their guilds. People hardly even respond to chats because the spam gets so extreme, even loot spam. As a result, it can feel like a lonely place. I've felt that way about it before.

But it's wrong to generalize about the people that play this game, in my opinion. There are young teens that play it, yes, but there are many people in their 20's, 30's, 40's, etc. that play it. The guild I run is really tiny, having less than 10 people who are mostly friends in real life or from past games, with level 10s up to ascended level 20s. It's hard to put together groups even within the guild, but we try to help each other out with missions, quests, items, runes (okay mostly it's me farming my ass off and giving freebies :P) etc.

Community is what you make for yourself. Get your friends to play. Make friends. Yes it's harder to make lasting friendships online, but I met my boyfriend of 5+ years online seven years ago. By the way if any REALLY poor newbies wants free minor runes PM Ms Rose in-game. I might have some good weapons to give away as well.

DrSLUGFly · May 24, 2005, 08:47 AM // 08:47

I'm a 29 yr old teacher... just a few nights ago I was gaming with someone for about an hour or two and then out of nowhere he tells me his age/job and says he's a 32 yr old teacher. I was floored... such a bizarre coincidence. I told him about myself and we had a good laugh over it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anariel

Community is what you make for yourself. Get your friends to play. Make friends. Yes it's harder to make lasting friendships online, but I met my boyfriend of 5+ years online seven years ago. By the way if any REALLY poor newbies wants free minor runes PM Ms Rose in-game. I might have some good weapons to give away as well.

Yeah, it can be tough. But look at all the people complaining these boards or any gw boards about the abusive idiots online. There are so many people playing who just want some cool folks to play with who will treat them with respect and share a few laughs. On the subject of having met your bf online, I had a co-worker a few years ago who had met her fiance playing Diablo2. When they got married Blizzard used them as a promotional tool and gave them each a free computer as a wedding gift.

asdar · May 24, 2005, 12:45 PM // 12:45

I help people all the time from low to high. Pre-searing it's tough to find people but after searing it gets easier.

As far as the guild, if this is the first time you're asking for help and they're just ignoring you then you should leave the guild and this time be more selective. Look around the forum boards for guilds that talk about helping eachother. Better yet, start a guild and you be all about helping members and advertise it thus.

This is coming from my past experience as a guild leader in EQ. When you say they won't help you I have to ask how many in the guild you've helped?

My standard speech to anyone coming into the guild is this.

"If you get help from 3 guildies for 3 hours on one of your quests you should consider that a loan of good faith that you'll give 9 hours back to the guild. We're not tracking it, and we try to help because we're a team but if you're not thinking of it like that when you're asking for help then you're taking more than you're giving."

In my own experience the first people that say nobody is helping them are the last to help others.

If that's not the case and I think it's probably not then I think you should leave that guild for one that is a team.

Stur · May 24, 2005, 12:52 PM // 12:52

I'll be happy to help anyone that sends me a wisper

Spirit Firefly · May 24, 2005, 12:53 PM // 12:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dax

I'm really trying to enjoy this game, but so far to be honest I've played it with henchman entirely and I see no reason to party up with players unless it is for PvP. Towns are just props for people standing around (or dancing) begging for parties or items. Thanks to the chat sytem with no audio cues when someone whispers to you I usually miss people. I've had no problem with completing quests with the henchies, but they don't laugh at my jokes.

This game is a beautiful single player game with some online PvP at the moment.... I'm getting the itch to back to WoW....

I feel me and Stefan have grown quite close we do most things together, he is the strong quiet type but i don't mind that, i know he has a good sense of humour and he will always fight to the death and never leaves my group or calls me a noob coz he died

CatsPaw · May 24, 2005, 01:06 PM // 13:06

1. your in the wrong guild,we have officers that, one of there duties is to help the youngsters in pre, I have a char there now. We make it a POINT to run with our guildmates, and if there is some poor guy/gal that is stuck somewhere just asking for help, and not spamming to bad, we may let them join up with us, and most of the time they want in our guild when there done.
2. There is a community, of sorts, if your not in a guild, you have the Guru Forums

Many people here are willing to come help you, take down some names and put them in your friends list. I am willing to help whomever,one day I did the quest to get ignite arrows from Adien in pre about 6 times...lol Just to help other players...and not just guild mates, players from other guilds as well. Feel free to put me on your friends list, I will help when and if I can.

chojin · May 24, 2005, 01:16 PM // 13:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by kowboi22

My point is are there any Guilds out there that actually help each other and go on group missions and stick in teams and do things together?

My guild currently has 3 members. We recently went "post-sear" and did 5-7 missions together last night. We openly give items to eachother (my fellow guildmate gave me 100gp and 6 ingots so I could craft a new weapon in "pre-sear"). We typically trade drops to improve the team on the fly during missions.

We haven't really discussed recruiting; we are happy with the small guild... but if anyone is interested in joining us, we will consider it.

-chojin

Claymore · May 24, 2005, 01:43 PM // 13:43

I hate to sound repetitive but again GW can be a parralle on how you function in your real life. If you try a guild, don't like it or the members then leave, move on to try another. This is like real life in the respect that there are going to be idiots, morons, and vultures to take advantage of the un-knowing (sound familier???) it is going to be the same regardless of what game you are in. Don't quit a good game and let undeserving people ruin it for simply because they are idiots. Just like life, ignore them and move on to find people and friends who are worthy of your time.

I have already quit 1 guild for lack of support, tried another and have had nothing but support since. Don't give up.

Miths · May 24, 2005, 02:16 PM // 14:16

If like me you find it a bit annoying that you can't understand about 80% of what you see in chat (well, a little more - but my German is *very* rusty

), simple change you account to US in the options at the login screen.
Problem solved - 99.9% English

.

I don't have any other comments on the community, as to be honest, I have played the game strictly as a singleplayer game so far (except for a few arena matches that were actually a lot of fun). The henchmen have done a wonderful job at getting me through all the missions until the desert - I hope they can carry me through the last three until ascension (and hopefully be useful after as well).

Ramus · May 24, 2005, 02:24 PM // 14:24

Yes, the community isn't very good in GW, but I agree with them for not going with an official forum. Most of the time you are just one of the masses in a forum like that, and you're voice is truely never heard. At least here you can make a difference and be part of the community. Admins will listen to you here.

Dax · May 24, 2005, 03:10 PM // 15:10

I actually don't think the community is all that bad, alot of times people horse around and do stupid things because they are bored. You see alot of people in the areas screaming thier heads off getting frustrated at not getting into a group.... I grab henchmen do my business and leave.

Personally I'd like to see some improvements to the chat system (maybe a lfg flag, audio cues when someone whispers, and scaleable fonts because I like a small interface but the type gets small and hard to see), and a little more of an economy with some sort of a auction house to stimulate more of a community.

and my Necro looks goofy in a cape

Corwin_Andros · May 24, 2005, 03:43 PM // 15:43

My guild tends to stick together as much as possible. The majority of us use TS, making organization and partying a lot easier. We do use pick-up players and every so often someone fits in well enough that we either add them to a friend list for later things or invite them into the guild.

We are still small with only about 10 or 11 people at the moment. Helping people, even guildmates isn't ALWAYS possible, although we do our best. We just got a new member yesterday. He asked for help on a quest or mission and unfortunately everyone online at the time had already started a mission of their own.. It happens. I hope though that he doesn't frustrated with us becaese we could lend a hend the very first time he asked for help.

Our community, such as it is, is a small one, but growing. I feel like the biggest problem in having it grow are the totally immature people (no matter the age) that get bored and spam the chat channels, act like elite asses, and when you get them into a PUG totally ruin the experience for everyone else by either their attitude or actions. It honestly doesn't take but a few bad experiences for people to turn their chat off, and only run with a few known entities or henchies.

I would rather have a small group or go solo than spend one more second in a group with some obnoxious lil s**t who thinks they are some uber 1337 pwnage machine that everyone should bow down and worship because he/she deigned to grace us n00bs with their shining presence..

Unfortunately there are always going to be people like that. Although it is primarily a bunch of teens that don't know of any beter way to express themselves, there are also plenty of theoretical adults that seem to have Peter Pan syndrome and given the anonymity of the internet feel it is ok to act like a 13 year old.

Anyhow, the community will slowly grow and groups of people will cometogether and solidify into larger ones. Partly from things like my guild will find a good player in another guild and basically ally ourselves and so on. It is just going to take time

Kalrakhi · May 24, 2005, 03:47 PM // 15:47

I played Legend of Mir 2, now thats a community

Adaria · May 24, 2005, 03:48 PM // 15:48

Y'know, I thought in the terms of GW CORPG stood for Cooperative Online RPG... Since at least in the PvE side of things it IS a Cooperative RPG, as in the Cooperative missions...

Grim_Grom · May 24, 2005, 03:55 PM // 15:55

The community isn't bad, but non-language specific servers is a joke. Alright, I'm not asking to cater for every language, but English, German and French servers, wouldn't kill anyone now? For me Frech speakers don't bother me that much, because I am learning the language, but it'd be nice to see language specific servers. I'm getting an itch to play WoW again. Not because it's better, but because I've remembered how good MMO's are...