I would like to take some time to discuss some of the things that guildwars did well. The point is not to tell people "you don't realize how good you have it stop complaining" but to try to and remember and capture what is good about this game. Many people, including myself now, have moved on and won't be playing guildwars much until GW2 comes out. Between now and then we'll be playing different games and perhaps GW2 won't even be the game we hope it is. So what is it that distinguished GW1 and sets it apart? These are of course just some of my thoughts on the matter and I don't take myself to covering everything. What aspects of Guildwars PvE or PvP set it apart and would be sad to lose?
This has come up a lot so I thought I would add a comment about it here. The "its free" message while true is and always will be misleading and not exactly what I was looking for. I doesn't even come close to saying it all. Its misleading because its not something that makes a game good or bad. Having no monthly fee doesn't mean anything if the game is bad. If Guildwars was a bad game I'd never play it, free or not. What is important is the content of game and that is I was looking for. What I was looking for were things internal to the game.
Autonomous well developed PvP system:
We might complain about skill balances and thats fair. There is no reason to not want to improve things. But the distinction of PvP from PvE - by which I mean GvG HA TA RA HB etc. - is incredible. The fact there are actual locations for these places is even nice and mapping between them is easy and painless. There are no waits for games (well - in gvg there is now especially higher up but that has to with player drain). The system is and how it functions is very polished after three years - even though we don't always like certain aspects of it (maps in HA, certain skills, etc) the structure of the PvP game apart from its particular content is almost ideal.
The Great Temple of Balthazar:
This might sound odd but the ability to use isle of the nameless to run around and test things and really learn the mechanics of the game is incredible and better than any tutorial system I've ever seen
PvP Characters:
Some people might not like this but I think they're nuts. I don't think anything has made the pvp aspect of this game more accessible than this. First, instead of having to grind a pve character up before playing you can simply have characters ready to go at the click of a button.
This not only allows more people easier acceess to pvp, it also allows people to get greater experience with a variety of classes that they would not otherwise have. If before playing any class in pvp i had to spend the time to get gear and grind the levels I would be much less likely to play that class. This greater accessibility I think leads to better player skill and greater knowledge of the competitive game as a whole.
The Classes:
There have been complaints about the expansion classes and the effect that they have had on the game which are justified. But the core classes of the game are well designed, autonomous, and form what feels like a complete set. By this I mean that each class covers a distinct portion of the game play (rangers cover snares conditions interrupts, survivability, warriors melee damage, toughness, monks healing, mesmers caster hate etc etc) which taken together leaves very little room for the introduction of anything novel into gameplay. In other words it feelslike there was a vision of what game play would be and these classes complete that vision. These classes are reasonably well balanced. This is not to say that certain classes don't receive greater emphasis in game-play. The game is somewhat driven by warriors who run the offense and monks who keep the team alive. But the other classes are ideal roll players that facilitate defense and offense. Eles can blind warriors, mesmers can shut down eles etc.
thats all you need
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