A solution to negativity: Charge a monthly fee

Lol~! Well I knew I was opening a can of radioactive worms with this topic; thank you all for keeping the flamethrowers on "low" setting.

Does anyone have some other ideas or solutions to put some intelligence back into the overall gaming community? I'd love to hear them.

Talesin

If Guild Wars started charging, they would have to redo all the boxes and ads because they would be falsely advertising. They would also have to sneak into your house and change the words on the already purchased boxes.

Hahaha. Negativity. Lets see... How do you stop people from complaining?


Fix your f***ing game!!



It's as simple as that. All your completely idiotic solution does is make people pay money. You'd think it would rout out a lot of idiots, but you're wrong. Look at WoW. Tons of idiots there. And it has monthly fees.

the solution to making the game more pleasant is to pay close attention to people like Weezer and be sure to not party with them in game...

the quick jab aside, I think the most practical solution (what I do) is to NOT be impatient on levels and go back, help people often. Our guild is growing rather slowly, but it is growing. This is mostly because the 4 ascended characters will go back without hesitation to Amnoon, Sanctum Cay, The Wilds or further to help out a guildmate who is still on said mission. Anyone of higher level helps out lower levels. I find that when I help out people who make it onto my friends list, it pays off.

lol, yesterday I got a gold sword drop and the warrior I was with asked me, "give it pls" (not being rude, english was second language) so I said sure and gave it to him. He later gave me a gold hammer (though I don't use warrior, but it was all he had) and now spam-chats me... but it's good stuff and he's being kind (I"m more than twice the kid's age, lol)...

rambling brought to a point = you get what you give. I find that when I'm kind to people they're kind back. If people are rude or impatient or whining they usually don't stay in the group for longer than a single quest, 2 at the most, by the third or fourth quest of the night the PUG has been naturally selected for success and the friends list grows.

a) Join a good guild
b) turn off local chat
c) play

I think that's the best advice I've heard all day...

If ANet starts charging, I'm going to have to call it quits. I don't play MMO's (or whatever you wish to call Guild Wars) specifically because of the monthly fee (that, and some killer lag/server issues).

Also, a monthly fee will NOT weed out the morons, stupidity, immaturity, etc. It will just make the community smaller. So it will make the number of the aforementioned people go down, but not change the percentage of the community they represent

a.) a lot of smart people wont play GuildWars anymore if Anet would start charging a monthly fee
b.) a lot of dumb people would continue to play anyways

conclusion: if Anet would ever start charging monthly fees, all it will accomplish is reduce the number of smarter people in the community and retain the same number of dumb people. so the smart people who stays and plays the game will only bump into the dumber people more often. so monthly fees ain't exactly the best solution

simplest solution? just dont mind em and turn off local chat in town. and play only with your guildmates or friends if you want to avoid dumb people in PUGs. oh and avoid threads in forums with the word "nerf" in the title if you wanna avoid whiners

Back in the day when AOL only gave you only about 5-10 hours a month and then charged an insane hourly rate, I played a free MUD. Some people were racking up hundreds of dollars in AOL fees due to this game; despite a significant number of players putting their online gaming fix on equal footing with a car or mortgage payment, we still had our fair share of idiots, jerks, and griefers.

When AOL introduced unlimited billing plans, the MUD's population exploded, but I'd say the idiot to decent-person ratio remained about the same.

When the MUD itself went to a pay-per-month subscription scheme (with multiple pricing tiers offering different levels of access to the game areas), the overall population declined a bit, but the ratio was still about the same. Of course, now we had the added tension of the sense of entitlement monthly billing gives, plus the resentment the lower levels of paid access had for the higher leveled folks.

While all this was happening, a little game called Ultima Online was being introduced. You'd think the text-based nature of my MUD would be a further impediment to the addled masses, but nope, idiots and jerks are pretty universal.

Best way I see of approaching the problem is to give the player population more tools to find like-minded folks. Guilds and the friends list are a huge step in the right direction. (Getting access to friends of friends could be cool, setting up a trust network without the repurcussions that a direct feedback system would have.)

I am one of the normal(intelligent) players and the big thing that attracted me to this game was that it was a mmorpg that didn't have a monthly fee. this game is suppose to be focused toward the casual gamer. If you make people pay money per month then you eleminate the casual gamer because who wants to pay $120 a year for a game that they only have time to play on occassion.

I'm with you on that. Part of the good thing about Guild Wars is I don't pay to play something I already bought. If monthly fees were introduced, I'd just leave. I have too many other things I want to do, and if you have to pay to play it means that I should have a certain amount of commitment to the game. If I want to stop playing for a couple of months due to family issues, extra work, wanting to pursue drawing for a while, or whatever, why shouldn't I be able to do that? I have so much stuff I want to do I don't want to be tied down like that.

I know my mates have been looking at MMORPGs recently and it's kind of pissed them off at times when they've gone out, bought it, played it for a couple of months, and found they don't really like it, or haven't really got the time at that moment. One has come over to Guild Wars and we play quite a bit at the moment, the others have yet to see the light.

That said, I'm not one of the pains who make this game unpleasant. I make mistakes, I get confused, sometimes I run in when I should have held back; but I appologise for that. Yesterday I admit I was particularly bad, but again I appologised for my short comings; in a group where both I and the party creator had already met a leacher on one of the missions. So GW, and it's community, will also loose out by culling many players who aren't part of the problem.

It's an admirable idea. I know why you have suggested it, and I take my hat off to you for trying to think of a way to solve this issue; but I disagree that this is the right course of action.

Been there. Read that. Doesn't work.

Go try WoW/EQ2 and see how many morons are willing to pay the monthly fee... But there is even worse. When they are paying monthly fees, players feel entitled to criticize and to whine even more. The result is that you'll increase the general negativity on all GW forums, instead of decreasing it.

Simply put, the more people you put together, the lower is the overall iQ.
Put them in groups and they will whine instead of proposing helpful suggestions.
Simple human psychology (introduction).

You pretty much summed up my feelings right there. You see I use to play Planetside, which costs £8 a month to play. At first it was great, content is good, balance was inplace and the game ran well.

However as the months went on, the playerbase dropped, lag and bugs increase... and all my money IMO was being wasted and pumped into other Sony Online Games like Everrubbishquest... Planetside getting the wrong end of the stick.

To sum it up when and if guild wars starts to suck (which I hope it doesn't) it will be good to know I'm not flushing my cash down the loo.

If they started a monthly fee, I'd quit.

This is a terrible idea that I hope never again see's the light of day.

That is all.

Fin.

Im not a moron in the game, and i cant get my dad to pay with his credit card, and so do many many friends who also dont brag about how high there level is and help new people, youll loose all those people 2
And forgive me if i call youre friends idiots who think a game with a monthly fee is better than a non monthly fee'd one.
Were gettin updates every week just like the wow players or other players do who pay per month
They just need to read reviews come play it at youre house and check it out for themselves.
I think ure loosing a lot of people if you add a monthly fee.
and the people who complaing a lot will still be complaining about guildwars but about something else

Also since the game is free it gives me the freedom to play more then one character without worrying about no investing time into the primary one.

Maybe A.net needs to advertise this level cap a bit differently... maybe replacing levels 1-20, with ranks to stop the grinders of other games bitching.

The reason I am playing is it has no monthly fee. If you add a monthly fee, sure you can kill off a lot of morons, but you also kill a lot of people don't want to pay to play. Keep in mind that not all of us are full-time gamers, paying a monthly fee and not able to play a lot really kills the fun. If you wish to pay monthly so much, why don't you play FFXI or WoW, then you will see the people in GW are not as bad as you think they are.

I agree. The whole point of this is that it doesn't charge. If they charge, I'll play something else.

AND
in the games like wow or eq or a complete different game that has monthly fees youll also encounter morons who are in a bad mood, or just had a rough day, or just plain anoying for there whole life

Sorry, but the same sort of behavior runs rampant in all games, perhaps even more so, because in other games you can still KS and ninjaloot.

Actually, companies are LESS inclined to close the accounts when they get montly fees from them, because they are afraid to lose the monthly fees. How many high level muckety mucks run around in other games, KS, show off their E-peens, exploit the crap out of stuff and NEVER get banned?

Look at CoH, for example. Almost every update includes a fix for an exploit, and they have hundreds of GenericHeroXXX running around at any given time on one server alone and I have yet to see a single announcement of "we've banned x amount of people because we won't tolerate this behavior." Instead, they go ahead and reward that sort of behavior by adding new high level content and thing that can only be accessed IF you hit max level. Same with EQ how many expansion are JUST for the high level juckity mucks and UBER guilds?

I suppose selling 250,000 copies of a game at at least $39 a pop does not generate operating capital?

It's not an insane idea to drop the monthly fee. It's a GREAT idea. It flies in the face of all that other online game companies have been telling us since 1999 that they have to charge a monthly fee, and ANet proves them wrong. The other games charge a monthly fee to soak the customer. Even with that fee, they don't come out with charged expansions any faster than ANet will. CoH's first Charged expansion will come out over a year after the game was released, for example. And how many that come out are truly worth the both the monthly fee AND the cost of the expansion?

I can't think of any that are.

Let's be honest here: those people are just making excuses for why they don't want to change games. The real reason is that they like their umpteenth level uber characters and don't want to leave that.

They will never accept that this game doesn't and will never go higher than 20th level. They will also never understand that it's not about the level, unlike other games. They will aloways complain about the level grind but wil never leave it.

Besides, I can list a whole host of real games that are 1) online and 2) do not charge monthly fees. Are they MMORPGs? No. But they maintain servers and matching systems and the like.

Games like: Raven Sheild, Halo2, Doom3 and dare I mention the king of server matching and chat rooms? Battlenet.

It seems to me that Ubisoft seems to be making expansions and even new games without charging monthy fees.


Actually if the game stays on the top sellers list long enough and epople will say, "Hmmm, better see what all the huff is about." THAT, is human Psychology 101.

ANet charging a monthly fee would not improve the game, in my opinion. I, for one, am glad to be rid of the Online Game chain hanging around my neck.

Thanks ANet for being Innovative!