Curse

Doppelganger · Jul 24, 2005, 12:45 AM // 00:45

The following has been bothering me about Guild Wars:

In the beginning, I was playing Guild Wars quite a bit, no surprise. After having completed the game, unlocking a large number of skills, fighting various PVP, and going through the underworld many a time, I had not much to look forward to except for playing with individuals I had become acquainted with in PvE and PVP, and it was good.

So time wore on, now I find myself logging in a little less at times. When I do feel like playing, it's hard to simply guess the right time to be online with the players I know. I am unwilling to run guild wars for long periods of time doing nothing simply to wait for other people to log on for some structured play. What I need is a mechanism to see my friends list from outside Guild Wars and talk to the people on that list so that I can remain in touch in a relatively un-obtrusive way so that I can jump in for a quick game when everyone is around. I am also unwilling to ask them all for IM information, as it is often on various networks that I may or may not have. I am also not willing to add them to my various IM lists, an organizational annoyance.

Ideally, what I'd want is one of the following, not in order of preference.
1) documentation of the current protocol for guild wars authentication and sending whispers.
2) a Jabber (or other open IM protocol) server that would bridge the in-game Guild Wars and out-of-game Guild Wars players. Jabber happens to have many implementations and is unencumbered by patents or burdensome copyright. For this application, this may be my favorite.
3) Like above, but some newly defined protocol that is publically documented. (XML stuff has a tendency to carry a lot of fat....)
4) an api to call into Guild Wars that could accomplish not only messaging, but whatever other functionality A.Net thinks the community should be provided. (Obviously, we'd want GW.exe to have a way to be invoked in a mode where it does not load graphics and other resources for this purpose)

What I don't want is a completely proprietary and seperate application for accomplishing this provided by a.net unless it's absolutely necessary to do so, as there is a tendency for peripheral application to suck or not be maintained, but if one used the Jabber option, mature and innovating clients would already be available.

This solves the problem of people idling around looking for/waiting for people on their friends list, so that the wait-to-play ratio is further reduced. In addition, it would be a win for arenanet on bandwidth consumption, as people won't be sitting around sucking down player movement information for no good reason, as well as preventing burnout and maintaining interest in Guild Wars so people are more inclined to buy the for-pay expansions that are supposed to make additional money.

Sereng Amaranth · Jul 24, 2005, 01:32 AM // 01:32

www.xfire.com

Doppelganger · Jul 24, 2005, 04:08 AM // 04:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sereng Amaranth

www.xfire.com

I downloaded xfire. It appears that, like many other IM services, it requires sign ups for all thse who want to participate.

I don't want another IM service, what I want is some accessable way to talk to and know of the online status of fellow Guild Wars players based on their presence on the hypothetical GWIM service and/or in game. The service I'm proposing should allow a player to communicate with someone who is logged into Guild Wars via whispers transparently.