Anyone else miss the Xunlai Tournament House?

Lately I've been missing the Xunlai Tournament house thinking of all the fun times I had watching GvG games and determining which team would win. Generally, I would stay atop of which guilds were dominating the meta and which guilds would be rising to renown status. I understand people abused the tournament house to obtain zaishen keys and that it's better for the developers to focus on crafting the up and coming Guild Wars 2 game and I don't expect a revival of the tournament house but I would simply like to hear you're experiences and thoughts about what would happen if the tournament house were to be back? Do you think interest would increase for GvG and/or HA? Do you think people would only do it for the zaishen keys?

I doubt the XTH ever had an influence on players to get interested in PvP. Maybe some people actually grew to like PvP because of the XTH but I'm sure that number is small compared to those that used it purely for the money. From my experience, people didn't really watch GvG and HB matches to find out who were the best guilds/players and who they would vote for etc. In my alliance, people just pm'd the players that were actually interested in PvP and asked them who they should vote for. I remember having a lot of my guildies ask me who who I picked for the top 8 for the HB mAT since I was one of the few HBers in the guild. No one really cared about the PvP aspect of the XTH (other than maybe mAT day) but only about the amount of zkeys they could get.

I'm actually glad that the XTH is gone.

For the most part, non GvG/HB players I knew saw it as an opportunity for free ZKeys, and picked based upon the number of QPs. No one felt they really knew enough to make better guesses, even after watching obs mode.

I expect that players at the lower end of GvG would be turned off as ZKey prices would fall.

I too enjoyed watching some of the matches and trying to make an educated decision before the monthlies. I haven't popped on observer mode but once or twice since XTH went away.

It's no great loss or anything, but it was a fun thing to get into. For a while it was really cool with Sabre Tooth's commentary on the videos as well .

Let's be honest: the amount of casual interest in monthlies generated by the process of making predictions was approximately nil.

With that being said, was making people happy by giving them free money once a month enough to outweigh the problem of effectively providing a psuedolegitimate form of RMT?

Considering how some people (cough) basically wrote bot to vote for them on multiple accounts ...

Not really.

Hmm.. i dont know where some of you are getting your info.. killing Xth had a big hand in killing the GvGs.

Go back check the forums on numbers of posts on related BBS and numbers of participants of GvG from Xth days to post Xth removal.

And when is a game component that encourages a saturated player base to buy multiple copies of the game a bad thing?

Not calling for a resurrection at this point.. its a dead horse..

I've never met anyone who even tangentially mentioned the XTH as piquing their interest in entry into GvG.

And, well, it's not from Anet that people are buying extra accounts from.

Also:
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I never took part in the xth - but players i knew who took part in the predictions only did so because of the free zkeys.
If anet tourned round at xmas and said every player who did snowmen lair would get a free bear from the end chest ( 100% chance ) then players would only do that dungeon for the bear and once done they leave it alone.
Im also sure when anet gave away the free storage panes many players bought extra accounts - both for free pane and for storage mules.
If somethings free then yes players will flock to it then leave it after , i even knew one guildie who for 6 months only came online once a month and that was to get the free keys from xth and make next months predictions.

As for killing GvG - im sure many GvGers were already on the way to leaving and with forum posts in mind many new players got put off trying GvG because of it being "serioius business" ( sorry had to say that ) and seeing match rigging or some guilds losing on purpose then taking down easy newbie gvg guilds with same ranking.

if anything they could give out different rewards like a few party points here and there etc. i just don't to see them give out rp like they did before. zkeys aren't supposed to be 3.5k a piece.

either that or somehow make the points you get unable to be spent on zkeys. it would be nice to still get some free points for pvp armors.

Actually the XTH made me watch the matches in the observer mode to follow the teams. Through watching observer mode, I got more interested in the builds and techniques used in PvP which made me more interested in PvP.

Since there is no XTH anymore, I stopped watching observer mode for awhile now and I gradually lost interest in PvP matches. At least with XTH, I became familiar with who the top pvp guilds are at that time. Nowadays if you ask me, I have no idea who they are. No reason for me to know now, as XTH was the last connection I had with PvP.

I think it is good for PvP for the player base to recognize the top PvP guilds. Those who are starting to be interested in PvP, can know who to talk to, to get PvP advice and which guilds are the leaders. I dont know about you guys, but I used to PM the players as I was watching observer mode, sometimes complimenting them or asking them questions.

Problem is that it was too easy to to get accurate predictions from people who pay attention and just harvest zkeys.

One of issues being that you as a player did not have to get involved in any other way than entering stuff on website and then talking to npc.

For example, bet costing considerable amount of balth faction would make everyone pay a bit more attention and think twice before voting randomly or trusting someone elses predictions.

Also, It might be worth it if you had to have better bets than, say, 50% of the players to get payouts. This would stop prediction sharing and make it a bit more competitive.

Lots of things could be made to XTH to improve PvP involvement and decrease economic impact.

the main issues was actually the calculations to do with running the site and ending up usually being wrong. Alot of this was done manually i think too. Also passwords etc linked to this account may be a slight security issue for people (just a guess).

I think there is a contradiction here whenever I read XTH and zkeys discussions.

We all want pvp to thrive and generate interest in pvp. However, we don't want too many people to have too many zkeys. Wait a minute, aren't those 2 points in contradiction? If more people really do get involved in pvp, the price of zkeys would inevitably come down!

One way to please both crowds is to REDUCE the XTH reward so that even with perfect prediction, you should get fewer zkeys than someone who is actively playing pvp. Prediction makers should not be rewarded as much as people who are actively pvping.

Do I miss a form of RMT that was not cheating....? no

We had discussed the validity and i think the legality of XTH staying broken when i made a thread.... it made alot of people that bought alot of accounts counting on this upset. ... I say that is what they get for buying accounts to exploit the game.

It didn't bring interest into pvp... what people did was ask other people who pvp/watched observe to know how to vote.... it took maybe a whole 10 mins to decide what to vote for and you didn't even have to set foot in a arena

As easy it would make it to finish maxing zrank by sinking the price of z-keys...We don't need to bring back game manufacture approved RMT...

I don't know who you have been asking to get great predictions but asking around for predictions does not always give you good returns. I would filter predictions from people I dont know, if I were you.

If you don't care about PvP and just want to protect the zkeys economy, then we should all try to DECREASE any interest in PvP. I expected most PvEers to think that way.

saying that XTH promoted pvp is laughable... did XTH require you to PvP for rewards, no... Did you have to know a damn thing about pvp to vote, no as stated above.. people use QP as a semi-reliable indicator.

but i don't care about any of those things.. I care about keeping the game skill based and not how much real money you can shell out based... sorry just because your willing to pay for rewards doesn't mean you should be able to....

The perfect way to fix XTH is make it in a way that does not reward z-keys or anything else that can be traded to account to account.... then you can have all the good times and pvp support u rave so much about... But nobody suggests this because everyone primary interest in XTH was z-keys... people bought accounts for z-keys.. not to support PvP

Ok, this is kind of funny...

There are so many ways to rake in tons of cash and rewards in this game and they are all so streamlined and casual that they might as well be a form you fill out on the website like the XTH was.

Nobody takes a "legitimate" approach to any of these methods. Almost every Nick Week is a grind-house with two or three solo builds that are gaurunteed to get you all your items in less than an hour.

Every Zaishen quest is just another lump of gold shoveled into the coffers of every player who cruises with seven heroes all sporting meta builds from PvX.

Speed Clearing breaks the hardest but most rewarding end-game areas available and provides gigantic profits. Get yourself into a guild, ask to go along or put up with maybe a day of training and just watch the ectos and rare chest drops roll in.

But if you mention the XTH then suddenly everyone is so upset about how it was ruining the game and the economy, and tries to disgrace everyone else by calling them RMTers.

I'm sure even with twenty accounts all collecting the monthly XTH welfare check, the UW still pumps out more since it's always available (why even pretend that favor exists anymore?)

Oh yes, i do miss getting free cash on my 10 spare accounts every month....

Yeah but the difference between all those things and XTH.... you have to actually play the game... with XTH all you have to do is simply log on and collect every month because you own a account(s).... you don't see people buying more accounts to do the daily's or speed clear the underworld.... maybe nick gifts but even that takes a degree of play time to farm/buy and collect the gifts in "insert random area here"