Post-launch review: Guild Wars

Post-Launch Reviews just posted a review of Guild Wars, actually taking into account updates and changes. Check it out here:

http://postlaunch.tumblr.com/post/81...wars-developer

A good article in all from someone who seems to have spent time playing the game. Nice to have new publicity for the game.

Nice article
However : "if something is broken, it won’t be for long." xD

good article with some faulty statements such as
'ArenaNet pays close attention to player feedback and makes adjustment and new content based on that feedback.'

How is that faulty? Sorrow's Furnace was added due to complaints about lack of high-end content; Dervish and Mesmer received massive overhauls because people found them boring or too much work to play effectively; skills are constantly rebalanced for PvP metagame... Can you give me any counter-examples?

The Paragon.

I'm curious why their only marked criticism of the game was population (yes, I realize others were mentioned in passing). A lot of people still do play the game they are just highly concentrated into specific places now and that's part of having so many veteran players.

Because they find it boring too be hanging out
in a (Supposedly) Huge town [Kamadam], and have to face
a huge amount of spammers or a mob of AFK people.

No fun there, at all.

to be fair the guild wars community bitches WAY more than any other game community i know of, and i think anet has done a fantastic job to deal with such a tough audience

Than wheres the balanced PvP ?

We're not bitchy, we just want more for our money.

@Prestige: Jumping into a 6 year old game and expecting to see people en masse in the Maguuma or Crystal Desert is wishful thinking. Veterans go where the content is such as Kaineng Center for WoC. It's not a bad thing, it's a the game is old thing.

I played Aion for a little and trust me... They bitch way more then any other game I have played.

Sorrow's Furnace was one of the few positive updates this game has had. And they have let it rot since and is only really used for the mini black moa now. It needs an update to the enemy AI and an end chest. It is something people have been asking for, yet they have not listened and have shown no intent to update it.

The Dervish and Mesmer overhauls were asked for at least a year before they even acknowledged they would do them. Only the PvE community asked for them though, and the PvP community was adamant about not buffing them, knowing full well they would negatively affect PvP. Guess what, they negatively affected PvP.

Skill updates are done for PvP yes. They are rarely ever what the PvP community asks for and 99% of the time they are whatever A.Net feels like doing, or nerfs to giant skill buffs we specifically tell them not to do. Examples being the two giant elite buff updates and your Mesmer and Dervish updates. In fact, we are still fixing the Dervish update and even some Mesmer skills just got updated (Fevered and Mind Wrack).

They don't listen to the community. The biggest criticism of A.Net has always been they don't listen. Every person I have ever spoken to who actually works closely with A.Net on balancing, both before and after Test Krewe formed, always say that A.Net has their own agenda. The only feedback they really listen to is toning down the OP crap they suggested in the first place. And for the most part, the toned down version of these skills that actually do get released, are still insanely OP.

They will listen every now and then, and it almost always brings positive results. But the times they listen are so few and far between the times they don't, that they might as well not exist at all.

Team Fortress 2.
Seriously, if an update shipped ten tons of pure gold to everyone's address, the TF2 community would then complain that they don't know how to sell gold for money and Valve should have just shipped them the equivalent in money.
And then Valve would ship them cash, and the community would complain about having to carry all that cash to the bank to deposit.

The TF2 community is astoundingly hostile to game updates considering that they're so friendly in-game.

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Interesting. I now feel kind of isolated -- I've played 2,000 hours of Guild Wars but never really followed the community and communications, I just played the game.

Exactly... Obviously they're not going to read all suggestions from every forum, but the supposed wiki forum isn't read neither....
Which lead to complete illogical and pointless updates , leading you to ask yourself : ' do they play the game ' ... You still wonder it today , when skills updates are only about nerfing what won GvG MAT....You can easily predict what's gonna happen everytime now....

Too many stuff with a high level of potential let down :
- Codex Arena ( going with Team Arenas And Hero Battles)
- Polymock
- Sorrow Furnace
- ToPK
- Contests( henchman one had potential , however it didn't really reward originality like it was stated...)
- Alliance Battles( it never ever had any care)

What's fun though is that they usually said they would do stuff about those and never did.... also fun is that all PvP( or could be PvP) arenas i mentionned would require brains and not only buttonmashing....

This is not true. It may have been a positive side-effect, no doubt, but the real reason that Anet invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs to create SF was to address a serious issue with spiraling weapon prices with max/perfect mods.

The addition of green weapons was an outlet for many people to easily get perfectly modded weapons. (True that some of the weapons had crappy mods, but they were still max...)

Failing to fix this was leading to a meltdown in the game economy, and people were already starting to leave because they felt at a disadvantage. It was becoming a PR nightmare, so they chose to fix it with greens.

Occasionally this agenda coincides with something that has been asked a long time and it will seem like they listen, but they really don't. The people that actually make the skill balances (not the test krewe, they provide feedback) have no clue at all. And they refuse to listen to people that do know what's up.

I have spent over 100€ on GW over the past 6+ years and I feel I got more than I ever did for any game I've played before. And that's coming from a country where software and especially game piracy is as common as "hello". Okay, there have been retarded updates, nonsensical nerfs and unfathomable blind eyes on OP stuff but GW still managed to provide me with blood, sweat, tears, laughs, friendships and occassional keyboard facerolls.

GW FTW I say.

Until you realise that the first screenshot depicts a battle against Destroyers. With a Fire Magic skillbar.

Trust me, the complaints we see from GW fans don't even come close to the amount of complaints that fans of other games send in. I play a lot of games, and the GW community is one of the more tame ones. The only one I'd say beats it is the RIFT community. I mean, that game has more reasons to complain than any other I've played, yet somehow their community is very polite about it (shocking considering how aggressive they are to fellow players in-game).

It may be true that there a lot of things wrong with GW, but there are so many other games with more things wrong, and some go even longer without fixes than in GW (hard to imagine, but it happens).

Lol, I didn't say he was good at playing the game.

And, I agree, I got more than my money's worth from GW. I've got over 9k hours into the game. I've never played a game this long. It's not perfect, but then no game I have ever purchased has been either.