What's your stand on GW1? You think Anet's doing a good job?

Umh, i don't play so long to talk about the oldest treaths...but imo:
-Anet has done errors in the past (and present) which could be easily avoided, and this is really a shame.
-"Worst thing happened to GW is..." GW2 imo. Drained wayyy too much forces from GW team afterall. Which leads to every other problem (balance, lack of new stuff, slow reaction to players ect.).

This single sentence describes perfectly everything that is wrong with GW1


I'm telling you, after all that was happened to GW1, GW2 better be the best game ever.I have never seen a company neglect their previous product so badly before.Normally they wait for the sequel to come out to throw the previous installment in the trash.

qft^ took the words out of my mouth

people need to realize the game has no monthly fee, so expecting arenanet to cater to their every needs is ridiculous. sure arenanet has made mistakes, but they more than made up for them afterwards. and I see all these posts about proph and factions being the "good old days." that may be true, but that is because back then, people actually played guild wars rather than afking, speed clearing, and title hunting with heroes all day. I dont think the games decline has much to do with anet, but it has to do with a decline in players and a shift in their priorities.

I think ANet did a pretty good job, I mean this game is nowhere near perfect but it's brought me back for four years now.

I'm glad that the cash shop was just costumes and other useful items instead of overpowered weapons and armor. I enjoyed all three campaigns and I still to this day go through just for the storyline again and again.

EoTN ... It just wasn't that great. I mean I loved how Gwen was thrown in and it was nice seeing her after all she's been through but other than that I have to force myself to go through EoTN.

I'm glad that they decided to make GW2, I mean seeing that they were going to make another expansion before they decided EoTN. Guild Wars in my mind was and still is a bittersweet experience and I've never regretted playing this game for as long as I have had it.

Nightfall was my favorite campaign though. Yeah. That guy's article was bashing it like it was EoTN haha.

I think Guild Wars suffered heavily a few years ago, but it's gotten better since. Although major portions of the game are still imbalanced, and although several decisions I simply cannot agree with (Smiter's Boon'ing Smiter's Boon, PvP / PvE skill split, removing HB / TA ...), the post-Izzy Live team have done a much better job handling the game. Stuff like WiK, 7H, rewards for vanquishing, etc are all good changes.

Game balance at the moment is ... not good. At least the PvP scene is getting better, certainly better than it was a few months back. PvE is actually more balanced than some people would give it credit for (7H-wise), but big parts of PvE are still grossly imbalanced.

I think people complaining about grind are largely being silly, because Guild Wars already has little grind compared to more traditional MMOs. Also, there was a change some time ago making the allegiance / reputation-related titles from taking that much grind to be effective. Just imagine what these same people would say if ANet introduced a 17-25 damage Sword that drops from Dhuum at the same rate as Dhuum Soul Reapers. Grind more, people. I think some players are just too spoiled for their own good.

I think GW1 was a great game with severe flaws, but the pluses outweigh the minuses. That's why I'm still playing it. I've made many good friends via it and played thousands of hours, so no regrets.

I strongly disagree with the Wiki article and the endorsement thereof.

First, the article falsely asserts that GW has failed. It has not. It is one of the big games of the period, it has sold magnificently and has generally well satisfied the people who made it. As a matter of fact, it did so well that NCsoft gave Anet an amazing amount of time (and time=wages+rent=lottsa money) to get GW2 right.

GW1 is an amazing but old game. That's it. The core philosophies are wonderful. The engine is old and limits innovation. The content is nice enough, and was wonderful initially - it's just that we've bloody well played all of it 10 times (literally for me, I have 10 characters who have done all the quests in the game).

The only bad thing that has happened to GW1 was the abandonment of the expansion model. Simply, the expansion model turned out to be rather problematic in terms making the game overly complex. The switch to GW2 instead of more expansions is what lowered the amount of incoming content. This has resulted in:
-overplayed content becoming stale
-lack of new content
But that's not necessarily bad. Anet are still hard at work preparing new content in the form of a new game for us. Bad for GW1, but not for the players.

So, what's the problem? The players. Instead of accepting that the game is old and that we could stand to take a break and play something new for a while, we persist in repeating old content time and time again, and then wonder why the hell it's not fun. And since nobody these days has the ability to use a mirror, everyone blames Anet as it's their fault and not our own for keeping playing the same game way more than it was meant to be played.

Doesn't anyone see a logical conclusion that if you pay a finite amount of money, you're supposed to play a finite amount of content and then STOP?

A side note here: gamers have in recent years acquired a rather strange notion that they're entitled to additional support of a game after the game has launched. Not just patches that make the game playable, you know, to make the original product what it should be (bug free), no, they all expect more content. Why? Content costs money to make. Money you have to get back somehow. So, either you get the money by selling the content, or by using the content to make people buy more of what you do sell - all beyond is simply just generosity of the developer.

Once this is taken into consideration, we can see that Anet are, given no monthly fee, offering a surprising amount of additional content to us free of charge and exercise great restraint in what content they do charge for.

(Posting now, additional post regarding the 7 heroes coming up)

Hold on now, if henchman were changed to have the functionality of heroes from the beginning or at least changeable skills, attributes, would it still be a mistake? Now there is the add hero, leave party to help others out. They could easily implement a system where the player who brought henchman/heroes from their account with their skills leaves the skills revert to a default bar. I personally enjoy heroes, henchman just don't have the skills to do what I need. The problem may lay in the balance of skills and not heroes at all.

Lost a long post about 7 heroes, and can't retype it all. Short version:
-GW1 requires skill and coordination to succeed, and all human groups all too often didn't manage to be good enough.
-henchmen were lower level with average builds and only focused on your own target - but in that they already beat most normal groups with poor builds and no coordination at all
-as a consequence, many people, me included, stopped playing with humans if at all possible long before heroes were even introduced. Enough to warrant Anet's attention as a costumer sub-section
-heroes were added for those players. They didn't kill grouping - the people who heroes were meant for wouldn't want to group anyway even if you never added heroes.
-7 heroes are a separate issue. They are a continuation of the above philosophy and are primarily there to make up for the dwindling player base. Things that used to be very hard (WiK with henchmen... brrr....) now became possible to do.
-Apart from UW, FoW and DoA, the 7 hero update has practically not affected my grouping habits. I've long played with H/H, and avoided players if at all possible.

i'm sick of seeing people says this BS...i can assure you the day GW2 is released..you will be first in the line...aswell as the other 5000 who say this...you will say 'no i wont'...but seriously you will..ppl who say this should have a temp ban for lying out there arse.

/rantover

I disagree. In my eyes, there is no reason for me to buy or commit to an MMO, pay-to-play or not, the moment it comes out. Look at all the ambitious MMOs that have come out. Warhammer.. Rift... Both games that brought huge hype that died a few months in. You lose nothing by waiting to see if the game will hold up, and the same goes to any online focused game these days.

The difference between online games and single player games is that the enjoyability and success of the game is much more unpredictable due to it's reliance on a decent player base. GW1, though not a true MMO, is proof of this and it's addition of 7 hero parties much caused by it and the drop in players.

Waiting to see if the player base holds up is something that many players will choose to do, and it is something that I hope Anet takes into consideration, because if there's one thing I've learned from lurking and watching MMOs, is that most of them just fall. A person it not at fault for taking this into consideration before they buy a game.

Now, that isn't to say I don't have hope for GW2. If anyone can be successful in an innovative way, it'll be that game. I just hope it holds up to reality.

People using hyperbole while complaining about an online game, yeah never seen this before.

The game is fine. Actually it is more then fine, it is great. ANet didn't do a perfect job, but the majority of the problems comes more from the fact the game is getting old then anything else. The older a game gets, the more streamlined it will be due to how the community evolves. At first everyone is eager to try stuff out and doesn't care that much about efficiency regarding build, teamsetup etc. They simply want to play through the game and get the small things (max armor, a decent weapon, an elite skill or two etc). There is always going to be theorycrafters refining builds purely from an efficiency standpoint and sooner or later people are going to adopt those builds, which will be the death of innovation. Everyone not using those builds are going to be shunned and the focus of the game goes from exploring and experiencing the game to getting the most done in X time. It is inevitable, GW isn't the first online game this has happened to.

Also regarding the titles being grindy, who cares? So what if Drunkard is too expensive or Legendary Vanquisher is too time consuming to get, they are only there for show anyway. Even the titles connected to skills provide no noticeable benefit when maxed compared to what you get by simply doing the main quests most of the time.

Bit of a no win situation for anet given that they do actually listen to the players.
many alterations to the game have been based on comments I have read in this very forum.

Criticism has been made that when a bad situation is pointed out they take many months to remedy it, I wouldn't know how long these things take to fix so couldn't judge.

To be fair to them they did take the Mesmer Assassin Ritualist and Dervish classes and take them from some of the most underused and despised classes to being some of the most popular.

When the only PvP skill balances in the past three years that didn't buff something to stupidly broken levels were nerfs to skills that they just buffed, it's not a good sign.

Look it up if you don't believe me.

The info in the link was a bit dated, but mostly spot on.
Anet failed hard at PVP. They had a great foundation for PVP, then proceeded to full it with wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of shit. It's something that you desperately wanted to love, but they forced you to hate.
The PVE is ok. It's easy enough and not as grindy as some other games, at least at the basic level. It's the extras that are grindy.
The bottom line is that the only reason people still play GW is that there's no subscription fee. If GW weren't a one-time purchase, and people had to pay monthly fees, this game would have been over and done with long ago.

Well before I finished reading your whole article I noticed you seem to think
this is a single player game? Who cares if "Mages kill Warriors" etc. This isn't a 1v1 game, it's a team play game where usually 4-8 players gather and use team work & strategy to take down the other team.

Balance doesn't exist in an mmo? Were you around for early GW? Pvp was insanely good.

got to be my favourite post from reading through this thread, completely agree with everything. good read =]

All interesting reads with these posts so far, for the most part this has been a intelligent conversation and I thank everyone for that.
To me if even Anet shut down this game, I would find a way to create a private server to keep playing it. With that said.

There have been plenty of mistakes, corrections and great adds. However to me this is the best online game I've played. At one point I felt like GW1 had nothing more to offer, the game was boring, the game sucked. So I went and tried other games like Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO), Warhammer ect...
After several months (3-4) playing trying out all these other games that went limited free to play accounts. I began to see again, how GW1 was so great. Little things here and there, I could do in Gw1. In LotRO I mostly now just parkour on the roof tops...lol

I guess my point is one as to sometimes just walk away from something to get the full picture.

I think too many people look at the days of Prophecies with the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. But that always seems to be the case. Personally I find Prophecies to be the least-interesting and most-flawed of the campaigns, and the slowness of it kept me from getting into GW for about a year.

I think Anet is doing fine. They've largely moved on from GW1, but it's an old game. The fact that they still keep it going and they still keep up with updates (which have gotten decently numerous in the past year). Updates that are, for the resources they still have available, actually quite huge. But it can't keep everyone happy forever, which is what I think a lot of people are expecting. If you've played for six years, and you're bored...go play something else. It won't hurt, I promise. There are many, many other games and genres out there.

And why do people complain about titles being grindy? Yeah, they are. So what? They're not required. You do not need to max Drunkard or Kurzick or Vanquisher to get through the game. You'll live just fine without maxing those.

GW is the only MMO I've ever enjoyed, and I've tried a pretty wide variety of them - both free and paid ones. None has ever kept my attention for longer than a couple of days; GW has for nearly three years now. No, it's not perfect by any means. I think the design for the elite areas is terrible, for example. But, despite it being an aging game, it's still a far sight better than anything else in it's genre.

There's this game called Counter-Strike. A sizable number of people still play it.

I can sum the problem up this way: during the period after the initial release when expansions were being made, we paid MMO prices but didn't receive top-tier MMO content.

Factions gave us a great but short-lived PvP environment after the initial issues with Ritualists in GvG were addressed. The PvE content was unspectacular; the re-use of instances felt forced and it wasn't the art team's finest hour, but we did get a couple of interesting endgame missions out of it.

Nightfall provided a great deal more PvE content but trashed PvP balance. PvP never fully recovered from the triple whammy of replacing the paid junkets with the AT system, the reduction of every format to a small number of degenerate builds, and [iQ] breaking the GvG mechanics in Germany.

The less said about EotN, the better.

Since then, the game has been free and we've been getting what we pay for. The crux of players' complaints is that many other legacy games have succeeded in establishing an enjoyable long-term steady state, but GW has not. ANet keeps shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic without solving anything, which simultaneously makes it very costly to come back to the game after a long absence but rarely improves the experience for the players that remain.

I hate to piggyback off Marvin here, but there's also the fact that the game is still being sold. Should people who have just bought the game accept its shortcomings, because it's an older title?