General Feedback - My thoughts to A-Net - Long-Time Player (WPE) comments welcome!

Kakumei,

Thank you for clarifying your earlier post. Your previous post was vague, and I did miss the concept you were trying to convey. You feel that the system is fine as it is, and therefore we know your stand on the matter.

I have already stated the reasons for my opinion... that there are things that should be changed.

For those that do not agree with Kakumei, do we have a counterpoint?

i agree with you 100% chet.

I still love Prophecies and i think is still the best all around chapter. The different environments made it amazing. they way people just formed groups to explore areas. places where a path leads that have no quests or cities, like in the maguma jungle after the blood and stone quest i think it was, where you could follow this place that led no where, but the scenery was just amazingly breathtaking. i miss the snow capped mountains with frozen lakes and green valleys next to them. Im sick of the one scenery campaigns. Facitons was way to much city and not enough green, and there was no snow except in shing jea. In Elona what happened to a jungle?? any oasis's around.. no its pure sand and sand and more sand. Gold is pretty big in africa and yet theres no mines around? the same monsters and creatures throuhgout the entire game in Nightfall and Factions.

Misisons and quests arnt challanging anymore in NIghtfall. Factions at leasts had slightly challanging missions but nothing compared to some missions in Prophecies where everyone was stuck looking for a way to win like THunderhead keep, and the ring of Fire Chain. go to missions like Abbadons mouth now and there almost impossible because no one is there anymore. i cant hench it with my mesmer, and will probably have to just go to elona to grind up heros in order to beat profecies again, unless some guildies help me. i miss CHallanging quests the Defend Ascalon after the Ring of Fire. 4 people taking on a huge amount of high level char. it tooke me 3 secondary class changes and about 10 tries with my friends to come up with a build able to win. u can hero/henchway almost everything now. You can easily get through all of Kourna with just 3 heros and youself, mabye 1 hench healer. I did it myself to have a challange and get some good runes and inscriptions which i never seem to get. In vabbi where i currenlty am, I'm doing the same thing, except i have to have that 1 extra healer henchie instead of just three heroes and me. if i had a full 8 then it would be way to easy and pose no challenge. Killing the Drought with 3 heroes and another healer proved very interesting. thats the only way PvE is challenging at all anymore for me.

IM sick of farming builds of like 3-5 ppl that have a certain skill setup with certain professions just to get the best drops, like 5 man oro farming, and all the Tombs groups now. greens are farmed like hell and are so common now everybody has at least 1, if not more than 1. The introduction of the green item also destroyed the economy. the people that got the first green ran like wild to sell it for outrageous prices and are now uber rich. I think theres an even bigger economy gap in GW than in RL. about 2% with 750 plat or more, (mabye a little off, not sure exaclty), and like 80% between 0 and 50 plat. and the rich just get richer. I seem to spend every available piece of platinum just to unlock all the skills. I love the way Prophecies incorperated skill learning by quests. now i dont have any money to spare to get NF armor so i can put inscriptions on them. I would rather have about half the skills available in each campagin to learn and you can buy the other half from a skill trainer.

I dont like how GW is turning out now and am hoping that they spend a little more time on the next chapter to make it good actually.

I guess you ignored all those quests helpfully labeled [Difficulty: Master].

Not sure about Nightfall as i didn't buy it but isn't Masters obtained according to how fast you complete a mission?

They have quests given by NPCs labelled "Difficulty: Master" for particualrily hard quests, normally involving hordes of monster spawns attacking you with little break.

i havnt beaten nightfall yet, so i dont really know about the back high end part but so far ive been unimpressed. and im truly unimpressed by Factions.

I agree totally with the OP - if this is the direction that guild wars is taking... they might as well take the entire thing offline and make it a single-player game like Oblivion or Neverwinter Nights. What's the point of trying to sell this as an online game when everybody just sits in the district and plays by themselves with the AI.

Heroes should be limited to 1... as in Diablo II - you have 1 hero to work with.... not an entire team of them.

Time for my somewhat random 2 cents on this issue. I know EXACTLY what you mean, when someone said that it felt weird to see a mission district 1 with absolutely nobody spamming for missions. There are several reasons I occasionally like to play with other random people, and they are:
1) People sometimes use intelligent builds that I've never thought of using or thought I didn't like and they demonstrate how good/bad they are.
2) Heroes/henchmen can't talk to you/make lame jokes/call you a noob.
3) I actually kinda miss the "W/MO with Heeling Honds/mending LFGGGG" because you could take that as a kind of "challenge" mission to see if you were good enough to get that team through.
4) Other people add variety to the standard profession layout I use when I use heroes, because I'm too lazy to fully equip all my heroes with builds and what not, and it's way easier to spend 15 mins and make a different build for me than it is to take 40 mins to make a different build for me and 3 heroes when I want to mix it up a bit. Yes, I'm one of "those guys" who, even when he finds a good build, then goes on to make some other totally random weirdness just to see how it works, and occasionally blows up his own party because of it (Pestilence/Toxicity for example).

Long story short, I miss the random people who (for me) added spice and variety to this game. Come back, PuGers, come back!

Thank you Domino. That was another of my ideas as well. I originally thought that Heros would be just like that. You would get 1 companion to go with you through the game, whom you could change out, but never more than 1 at a time.


I did them. Been there. Done that. Yawned my way through it. More monsters does not mean more excitement.
To me, it's how you fight, not how many you fight, that makes for great gaming.


Just on a side note: I did bonus for Dunes of Dispair tonight with full PUG groups...and it was great. Better than when we took the blasted heros. We didnt get it on the first try, but we did get it....and had a lot of fun doing it.

I only oplayed for one day in the WPE, but I feel that the OP has brought some real good points that I feel the same about. I took the time to read his post fully to make sure of what he was saying and it makes sence to me. If the next chapter doesn't knock my socks into next year then it may be the last chapter I buy. I have literly gone back to starting a Warrior in "gasp" Pre-Searing. Not for a title, not for glory, but to enjoy the game. I ahve several lvl 20 characters and have finished NightFall with one character. Where has the teamwork and comradery gone? Out the window I think. The hero's were a good Idea but they should be limited to only 1 spot on the team thats it. I do not PVP or GVG at all I realy do not like it and would rather be exploring finding new areas to marvel at and get teh old jaw to drop. Tyria did that for me, Cantha did that somewhat, what happened to Kourna? Nuclear war. I want to see new and exciting things again not the repeat of the same old sand. Those are my feelings on it.

Mega Mouse

I would like to add another factor to this, even though I don't use heroes and henchmen they are good for most players who always get rejected by some PuGs because of their profession. mostly assassins, mesmers and dervishes. so heroes are a godsend for those people.

Mouse I don't entirely agree with you. I think the teamwork and camaraderie has just been given a new dimension. I know that many times I'll join a party and the first thing that happens is we try to figure out who has good heros and we cooperate with hero builds to form a more effective party. This is particularly good when monks are being a little too uppity or difficult to find. Although if you ever want to team up and just go exploring add one of those character Id's under my name to your F list and give me a buzz. If I'm not busy I'll roll out with you for the hell of it. I'm particularly enjoying exploring with my Dervish right now since he can handle himself pretty well in any campaign setting and just about any area in those campaigns. He's just fun.

@grottoftl Yeah I'm not down with profession hate. I love my Mesmer and I guarantee you you won't find anyone better for those tricky bosses than my mesmer who can drop 15 degen on a boss in less than 2 seconds. Dervishes too. I have had to fight to get into groups with my dervish and I have no idea why. My dervish needs little monk maintenance, is almost always the last one standing when I do get into groups, and saves a lot of squishy butt by keeping enemies unable to effectively attack. Assassins are also so nasty now with the new buffs and skills from Nightfall that I still have a hard time believing people don't see the merits of them anymore.

Limiting the scope of a discussion is fine, it is an act designed to bring attention to a relatively small but important aspect of discussion.

I am a disgruntled E3E/WPE player myself. I have 7,200 hours on one of my two accounts [while alot were afk, alot were not].

First off, it is impossible for any modern game, of any model, to hold my attention forever. As the complexity of a game increases so does your chances to become disenfranchised with it. I did expect more of GW, which might be my fault.

=== Community Relations

Listening to, and believing, the things which Gaile says will make you disgruntled. I have a clear memory of Gaile describing the 'certain' likelyhood that reconnects will be in the game pre-Prophecies launch, and an auction house will follow. Countless other things are tantalizingly close to being lies.

The Scribe is an elaborate insult. Not only has he gotten specific quantitative things wrong in his postings, but they could have just as eaily been written by a literal carebear. I PvE, almost to the exclusion of PvP, and between the Scribe's random-acts-of-kindness and Gaile's cutesy-nigh-ditzy-act I am left apprehensive about how seriously they take themselves.

This may or may not be thier fault, but having seen the development of GW's community relations staff, I have not been impressed.

=== Favor - broken by design

I am amazed that this remained in the game, to be honest. It is amazing to see how easily people will allow one sector of the game to dominate (in the past) or influence (since the release of other 'high end' PvE gameplay) how the rest of the player base spends their time.

I remember once before Sorrow's Furnace release I tried to organize a UW clearing with my guild, spent a whole two weeks working out schedules from players around the world. We had a 6 hour window on Saturday, and a 4 hour window on the next Sunday, in which we could start the UW (this involving some of our eastern-hemisphere players loosing sleep). Power Of My Rangers held the Halls the entire time, and we were all on American servers.

After this frustration, I begged Gaile to have the mechanic changed, and was merely told that I should have used that team to go and play HA instead.

Gaile, and ANet, I dont want to play HA. Trying to turn the PvE game into a naive's PvP tutorial is foolish.

=== Bots and Memory Intrusion

Guild Wars does not scan for memory intrusions. You can write complex bots that literally read information directly from the game client, and manipulate their internal functions. This is laughable.

Trying to ban bots while leaving by far the single largest bot-abused exploit open is absurd.

With this and the lawsuit pending against ANet's parent company by a former employee, accusing them of unethical practices involving the intentional promotion of bots and banning of legitimate players that complain about this, I am left speechless.

Oh, did I mention that these sorts of bots allowed you to cheat in PvP too? Interupting 1/2 cast skills with Psychic Distraction is amazing fun, especially if you do it while in the middle of fixing yourself a sandwhich.

=== Content

GW is a game reportedly designed to be played by a casual gamer. The unfortunate aspect of this is that the game is too complicated for a casual player to really do that with any success, and too simplistic for the dedicated players!

While learning the sheer 1000+ skills that GW has is a steep learning curve in itself, after you have done that and mastered the game mechanics, what is left? Practice practice practice (guild rank, hero rank, etc) in PvP, or grind grind grind (FoW armor, greens, skill points, etc) in PvE.

Unfortunately, for someone who has completed the plotline, all quests, tried their hand at PvP, and all elite missions, there is nothing to do. This actually doesnt take as much time as you might think to achieve, either. I have been playing sporadically since I got NF in November, and have already completed NF in its entirety on 3 (very soon to be 4) characters.

Prophecies was a wasteland when it came to quests, Factions introduced grind as neccessary if you wanted to play the elite missions and Nightfall finally introduced a raid-like environment. Not what I really expected from GW way back when, which might be my fault...

But, remembering those NPC's, which I knew must have originally been designed as part of unmade-quests, were removed, I begin to think it might not be my fault. Look to the UW armor crafter, which was never properly implimented and quickly removed, or the various NPC's in FOW which dont even have dialog to see a modern-day version of this.

=== Weekends

Woo. Double scroll drops. Woo.

Are you trying to be patronizing?

=== Skills

I know that no game can be perfect. I know that no game can ever be balanced, without being restrictive. But I also know that allowing things like Nature's Renewal spam for months is either neglectful or regretable incompetence.

Combine this with the countless useless skills, and the number which

===

There is more, alot more, but I am /exhausted/, literally and of this game.

The only thing I have left to do before I feel like I never, ever have to touch GW again is to 'solo' Hero-way Urgoz while simultaneously utilizing both of my accounts (one running on my Mac laptop, at that), and nothing else.

I am buying a decked-out next generation computer just so that I can at least get eye-candy out of any future games I invest my resources in. (this may sound unremarkable, but realize that I am a penny-pincher to a nearly unrealistic extreme)

Oh, and get Apocalyptica's version of Tool's Schizm. It is an unexpectantly classical instrumental version without any vocals.

Man, if you guys don't want to take henchmen or heroes, then don't do it. Don' t assume everyone wants to play with people like you and try to coerce Anet into 'forcing' them to. The henchmen and heroes are there for the people who would rather not play with other humans, for whatever reason they choose. If you don't like it, the answer is simple, don't do it. Stand in an outpost for hours waiting for someone to come and complete your party. Spend your time mid-mission trying to tell that the warrior the cons of rushing into battle before everyone is ready. Sit and explain to that new monk how to run a proper heal or prot bar. It's your choice, play it like you want.

Str0b0 brought up a good point. While a lot of players like to use the Hero's there are just as many who do not like them. I use henchmen and hero's only when I have to. Even in the land of NightFall a good Nuker is almost always wanted for groups in any mission. But for the most part as the OP said somethings must be changed or a lot of players will be leaving.

Mega Mouse

Chet Ingram Kabak

i totally agree with what you said, even doing the quests is more of a chore than excitement, i tell you what the main problem is, they are giving themselves 6 months to make a new chapter to earn the cash, im pretty sure from the sale of GW propercies along the servers could be run for at least 10 years so why is there a actual rush for a new chapter when:

you can tell its rushed with all bugs poorly designed terrain and landscape
nonscence quests like feed a npc his soup
etc etc i could go on

the main problem with guildwars is this, the customer service and relations of anet is very poor, when your a game enthusiast and want to help and submit ideas and everything they fob you off to a forum, and more than likly none of the material is read until 6 months later.

if you have a in game problem the first responce you recieve from a actual human from the cust support team, instead of those crappy auto ones is implying your to blame for a problem you have.

recently i sent this email to arenanet.

Customer (nicole hunter) 01/17/2007 05:37 PM
my brother likes a challange and he has been doing some level creating for various games, he asked me if there is anyway he can have the level editing program that you use for guildwars so he can learn it and perhaps make some stuff, which he will forward to u at one point to see if you like it, as he would like to perhaps create stuff for yourselves as a outsider who loves the game, please can you let me know, thanks


reply was


Response (GM Lemoncobra) 01/18/2007 11:50 AM
Hello,

Thank you for contacting Guild Wars Support. We appreciate your brother's enthusiasm. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide him with the tools used to create any aspects of Guild Wars. The programs used to create the world are proprietary and cannot be given to anyone that does not work for ArenaNet. We appreciate your understanding. If you have any more questions, please let us know and we will be more than happy to assist you.

Regards,
The Guild Wars Support Team



I think then if only anet staff are allowed the tools then they should actually do a good job for once, as other games such as quake series doom series, battlefield vietnam and bf2, also command and conquer, even company of hereos all provide the level editing tool to encourage people to interact more with the game


to me this sounds like A-net implying they are our keepers and we are there cattle, and im sick of being treated like one, we come on to enjoy ourselves but wheres the enjoyment. i think at this moment with the current state of affairs in guildwars id rather play checkers on msn, because thats more fun.

No this means that we don't have any poorly-made maps that appear in said games such as Battlefield 1942 and Quake. If only ANet has the tools then they control the quality and don't have 250 big square maps with nothing in them lying about in the middle of Vabbi

We don't need people with no level building skills building maps full of nothing in order to make the game more "fun".

but how do peoples made maps actually be submitted? they wont, but if someone makes this nice little place and submits it and then gw says we like it but we would likeyou to texture it this theme, then isnt that a plus? because gw will be obviously controlling what people play so why actually deny the tools to see what ideas people come up with? and implimenting them if anet likes.

many of the skills on guildwars have been what people have suggested, the majority of the game is what people have suggested, so why not allow people acess to the enviroment and see what that come up with, instead of poorly exercised enviroments made quickly by a nerd on 30000 dollars a year whos on a tight schedule?

Chet, this is my second post in this thread, the first being somewhat of a knee jerk, in response to the opening of your post. But, I have taken the time to read everything you have written and think about it a little more.
I see one big problem in that I simply feeel you expect more than Anet is willing, no make that able, to deliver. You are totally in your right to expect whatever you want, where you have a problem is when you apply your expectations to the GuildWars community as a whole.
I honestley feel you need to step away from the game, for a long time, not a couple of days, give it 4-5 months.
You admit that you hate it, the game disgusts you,but you are resigned to slogging your Tyrians through NF, just so you can sport the protector title ! That is madness, bordering on pathological.
Your expectations have grown exponentially, you want GW's to be the be all and end all of modern MMORPG, well it isnt, and never has claimed to be.
I really feel we all need to realise ANet is doing something no one else in the gaming community had the balls to attempt, they are breaking new ground, and, whether you admit this or not, you will benifit from it, in probably every game you play on the net from now on. There is no Prima game guide for them to consult, they dont have a lesson plan outlining the steps to gaming greatness. They are trying to expand the parameters of online gaming, and basically we are all in for the test drive.
Reading this it probably sounds/reads as if it is coming from a huge ANet fanbois,simply not the case at all. I think the company has made some, even a lot of the mistakes you mention, they are not perfect, and they should be held to a reasonable level of accountability, but what you and many others seem to want is far beyond what ANY gaming company could offer.
It makes me think there are other forces at play in your life, and that your dissapointment in Anet has been disproportionatley blown up.
Anyone who claims to hate the game as you do, but will continue to force themselves through it, has more on their plate than they are alluding too. Nobody is forcing your hand, you buy the game, you load it up, you play it. People are dissapointed in the games they buy every day, I have at least ten titles I paid full value for and never played for one reason or the other(but all revolving around the mechanics/gameplay)for more than a handful of hours. Did this upset me, hell yes, but there is so little I can do about it, that I just look for something better. I dont have the time to waste wanting 'what might have been'.
I am not saying there is no place for feedback, and criticism, but you have to know where to draw the line, what is a reasonable expectation, and what is simply your wish for the game of your dreams.
In closing I have to say if it, playing GuildWars, really hurts as much as you make it out, this is very troubling behaviour, with no doubt, a negative affect on you and those around you, and perhaps should be your first concern.

I've played since the WPE and overall, I'm pleased with the games' evolution. But there is only 1 thing that I thought brought Guild Wars one step backwards. IMO, Heroes were bad addition to Guild Wars coz the game is geared to be a team game and sometimes you gotta force people to work together as a team.