Titles: Did it kill PUGing in Guild Wars?

I sure think so. I think titles enabled players to discriminate and lock each other out of PvP, and even PvE [see: Elitism]. From requiring a champion title for GvG to summoning stones for UW/FoW, titles have killed the spirit of playing with each other for the remainder of the game's life cycle.

What're your thoughts on titles? Do you want them to exist in Guild Wars 2?

Note: Be careful not to flame!

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Pugs killed themselves because they're terrible, full of dumb, bad players with even worse "creative" builds. Last time I joined a pug was when doing some zaishen mission, I decided "what the hell, i already have l guardian so might as well". Monk with a time reflex of a turtle, warrior with endure pain- no thanks. Never again.
And no, no titles in GW2 please. Some achievement system for people who can't play the game without it- yeah, sure, but make it so it isn't there to show-off.

I think heroes killed PUGging more than titles did, to be honest.

Both snograts and seraph nail it i think.

Titles have never been a justifiable way of seeing if someones good or not, there's no real measure of skill in the game. Hence why any GvG guild uses your previous guilds, references and such but near enough completely ignore your titles.

Then with no measure of skill available, we were given the option of 3 heroes that were better than the large number of pug players available to us. These 3 heroes could also then carry the other 0-4 henchies in the team. Which resulted in a team that took what builds you wanted and did things the way you wanted, sadly far superior to most pugs.

Is the problem with this thread not obvious enough?

Metagaming killed every single multiplayer game ever. Stop blaming the developers for your own lack of creativity and tunnel vision. Thats all.

yes and no. beyond protector and guardian is there really a reason to pug the rest of the titles? besides the dungeons on EoTN all but 2 missions in the game are easy enough to H/H and if you dont take the speed clear additude to the dungeons they can be done H/H too. i seem to remember early in the days when titles were introduced and later when the henchie builds sorta updated, the biggest cry for 7 heros were due to vanquishing failures in pug groups do to afk'ers or leavers. yes titles brought on the discrimination in the elite areas the same as rank does in HA. do you really need to pug the skill hunter titles? most rep titles besides luxon and kurzick are easy enough to get just playing the game and picking up bouinties as you do protector,guardian and vanquisher. i think the biggest killer of pug groups was anet skill balances. everyone hated what ursan was doing to the game at the time, but people pugged. everyone complained about the 600 build, but people pugged. anet killed those and other builds but still left perma SF. as builds got nerfed, people either adapted or left the game. hero's were probably the biggest killer to pugs, but we got what we wanted. the level of play was already dropping off before nightfall was released. it was before nightfall that i stopped pugging as i found back then i was more successfull completing missions with the crappy henchies better then some random non-guild or alliance group. people were crying before nightfall how crappy the henchies were, they wanted customizeable henchies as the henchie builds sucked and anet never updated them as skill balances happened. we got heros then anet was dumb enough to give us more with EoTN. its easier to take 2 or 3 humans then load the rest of the party with heros then take a chance at failing with random people. as time wore on the skill level of the player dropped off as those that maxed their titles left or took a break from the game due to no decent content updates after EoTN. the empty mission outposts are another reason for the lack of pugging. unless it the z-bounty or z-mission day your lucky to find enough players to make a full human team. theres no world chat channel to broadcast LFG for a misson that people in other towns would see. either way there are alot of reasons for the lack of pugging. no one reason can be singled out as the biggest. im sure theres more that i didnt list

In PvE: No. Titles did not kill PUGs. But they mayh have thrown another layer of dirt on the grave. Over the years, there have been lots of things that ruined PUGing in GW:

1. Players who would join skill capping parties (back in Prophecies only days), get their skill and bail on the rest of the party.

2. Bad players ("Unskilled player" is a sub-catergory)

3. The "holy trinity," cookie cutter metality

3. The rise of the "super guilds." (Not that there's anything wrong with them)

4. The advent of PvX wiki snobbery (pro and con)

5. Heroes - when Nightfall came out, you couldn't even get into a party to do the Chabeck Village mission!

6. Titles - Yes, they have caused some problems. Especially the rep titles tied to PvE only Skills when they first came out (And Ursan Blessing was wayyy OP). (Glad A-Net addressed that problem) But I don't think there's as much emphasis on them as there originally was because most people figured out that they really don't mean jack.

That being said, where I've gone PUGging, (Z-Missions & Bounties mostly) I haven't seen anyone asking for "Rank X in ______" in a long time.

^good list. couple things to add:

7. rise of solo/duo farming builds, running builds, etc.

8. spread of playerbase across 3 continents.

9. splitting of playerbase between normal mode/hard mode.



regarding titles: i think the most deceiving title that has ruined pugs is the vanquisher title. vanquishing is pretty much the anti-pug game mode in gw no lie.

For me, specifically, people killed PUGs. The notion that you can only complete a task with Xx/Xx class and one specific skill set is a load of crap and I refuse to change the way I play this game to suit someones egomaniac idea that they, and only they, know how to accomplish anything in this game. There are only 4 things in this game I have never done & 3 involve farming for items that I think are moderately ugly and/or for items I liked but purchased a long time ago. The one thing I've yet to do that I actually WANT to do is UW in HM but it's near the bottom of my list of "things to do before GW2 comes out".

I used to PUG a lot, back when the game was still young, before many had it set in their mind that awesome build xxxxx they found on whatever forum was the be all end all of accomplishing task #123. The longer the game is around the more this mentality spreads. I will still PUG on occasion, but it's been a long time.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who avoids PUGs for this precise reason.

That's my $0.02 on the topic.

I think titles is the whole reason a big part of GW players are still playing the game. Without tiltes this game would have a lot lower life span since there isn't much in it that would attract players. So tilte's are a big aditions to the game.

And as mentioned and really obv. Henchman partly took PuG out of game and the addition of heroes was putting oil on fire.

Edit: For the oldtimers for us that remember when GW was out for only a few months. Thunderhead Keep PuGs XD freaking awsome.

people really aren't to blame for that--hard mode and skill imbalance is. unless your trying to pug a farming hotspot, then speedclear builds are to blame for that.

/rolleyes

I especially love how you think this is a particularly new or interesting topic, rather than the same old rehashed dead-horse-beating that it actually is.

Titles did not kill PuGing. Heroes did not kill PuGing. "Elitism", whatever the hell you think that word means, did not kill PuGing.

First, it is not clear that PuGing is even dead. If you go to any active areas - you know, the areas that actually have populations large enough to support PuGing in the first place - there are crowds of people forming PuGs. Second, people want to succeed, and generally dislike having their time wasted. Thus, they will tend to do things that maximize their chances of success, which, in a group game, starts with finding yourself good teammates in a reasonable amount of time. Naturally, there are many approaches to doing this, including just taking H/H if you don't trust other players, or using some measurement of a player's ability and experience, however crude that measurement is. Removing titles, heroes, or summoning stones wouldn't change the situation at all, because people would simply find a different way to filter their teammates. Case in point: prior to the introduction of heroes, many players completed the game using henchmen only.

idk that it's a bad thing. My Alliance is really active and we do stuff with each other all the time without the PUG headache and without "6/8 needs UA and HB to go" so...

At this point in the game it is really nice to have such a wealth of builds and heroes that if you don't have enough guildies or alliance mates on you can roll some heroes with 2-5 people and take down almost anything and for areas that require humans...well get yourself in an active alliance and if you don't want to leave your alliance then recruit and teach people how to play.

10. Discord

I think recently Discord has killed PUGs with more than 2 human players. I don't know how many times I have joined up with someone in a group and then immediately see Livia, Olias, and Master of Whispers get added to the group. I really wish people would realize that Discord is not the only way to do HM.

Before that it was sabway and SoS+AotL is having potential might discord get nerfed or w/e

Shadow form killed pve( people got more and more arrogant in areas , like if you're too slow you're crap ..) , rest got killed by lack of content updates ....

Titles did not kill pugging, and I wouldn't even say pugging is dead, it sure isn't to me.

What might have hurt pugging the most though is the fact that GW is 5+ years old. This causes for a huge gap in different players' experiences. A good part of the experienced players probably prefers to play with players of similar experience as well and therefore shun pugs where there will occasionally be lesser experienced players.

GW also got a lot bigger. It's no longer just Prophecies, but there's Cantha, Elona and EOTN as well. If you think about all the VQs/Missions/Dungeons/Elite areas people may want to do plus the fact the game is 5+ years old then I'm really not surprised that it's harder now to find a pug for some of the 'lesser' things in GW than it used to be in the past.

At least that's how I see it.

The age of the game and nothing else has led to a deterioration in pugging but by no means its death.
Sure players are chasing titles rather than pugging but if the titles didn't exist they wouldn't be playing at all.

Time was the game was new and no one new anything about how to play it.

Pugs ranged from bad right up to excellent but then there were a load of players in every town all wanting to do the missions so this wasn't a problem.
The main problem in the early days was players refusing to move out unless they had a t least one Monk sometimes 2.

5 years on and many of the players are doing other things, unless the game makes it worthwhile for older players to repeat mission pugging will always deteriorate over time.

Joining a guild works best for pvp not pve even if your in a decent guild always being able to find 7 others to do missions isn't always easy.

I fanything, titles gave people a reason to go back and do a lot of content they would otherwise not done. In the early days of titles they very much helped pugging.