User:Shard/Flaws

WARNING: This page may contain material that might be offensive to some people. If you are easily offended by strong language, sexual references, or the thought of people failing, DO NOT READ THIS PAGE!

Ok well I think we all agree that, while some aspects of GW can be somewhat entertaining or even fun, it was killed by both mistakes made by the design team early in the game's life, and by inability to maintain new features.

Attributes

I like how the design team took a chance with the attribute idea. Few other games have done anything like it, and none have been very successful. In traditional RPGs, you get "skill points," a balance mechanism whose power level never changes. One skill point = one skill gets leveled up. In Guild Wars, one attribute point could be anywhere from 0 to 8 skills "leveling up," and possibly some other benefit in the case of primary attributes. Diminishing returns limits how high you could put wide attribute spreads, but you can easily maximize your build's strength by choosing only 2 attributes.

In addition to the randomness of attribute spreads, the attributes themselves aren't very restrictive. Warriors are fine - they have one for each weapon they use, then one for miscellaneous skills, then one for useless skills. Elementalists started out that way, where each "element" had its own purposes, but with Nightfall, these purposes got mixed together, so now any ele build can do almost anything. The purpose of having separate attributes is to separate what effects go where. Why would you make assassins, but give them only one thing - damage packets? Shadow arts is their healing line, but critstrikes and dagger mastery are identical, and deadly arts is what you run when you want to save 97 attribute points (you dont need to critical when you have 5 knockdowns and a ranged deep wound every 20 seconds).

Every profession should have attributes like this:

1. Survival
2. Main Offense
3. One or two kinds of Utility

Take monks for example. They have healing and protection for defense, smiting for damage, and divine favor for healing and some utility. They're fine - when you choose to play monk, you choose heal, prot, or smite (or some arcane combination of them). When you choose rit, you can choose all three easily, because both channeling magic and restoration magic have damage, healing, and utility all packed together. Same goes for rangers.

Another thing related to attribute points: Scaling. Skills that scale their primary use are usually more balanced than those that don't. Scaling is an important mechanic for Guild Wars' crippled combat system. Without scaling, you wouldn't need attribute points at all, so you could run a bar that does everything. I could name tons of skills, but Rend Enchantments is a familiar example of this. Rend is used for the super duper enchantment removal, yet with no spec, it removes 5 enchantments from the target. Under normal circumstances, most players will have 1 or 2 enchantments on them at any given time, so rend almost always translates to "Remove all enchantments." This is why you see monk heroes in pvp with rend and rip, they don't require any points to be effective. The Bottom Line: Guild Wars failed because attributes aren't a control mechanism anymore.

Time Constraints

Prophecies, despite expected new-game-bugs, was a great game, and with the exception of a few little things (Spirit Spamming), was well balanced. The team had about 2 years to create it, and they seemed to do a good job. Factions came out a year later. The engine was already there, they just added new areas, quests, and skills. Again, some new-game-bugs, some overseen skill combos, but aside from that, factions pvp was moderately balanced. Some people think Guild Wars was most balanced during this time, though I am strongly against allowing people to be anywhere, anytime.

Then, Nightfall came out only six months later. Arenanet made a game the size of Factions in half the time, and it showed. Almost nothing was tested. Almost everything about the expansion was bugged. Many of the skills released were so game breaking that it took months to fix it all (some of which still aren't fixed). Practically none of the missions were balanced for level 20s.

The Automatic Tournament System, delayed a total of 8 months that the public knew about but a whole year in reality, wasn't even completed when it was released. Not only was it not done, its purpose of preventing smurf guilds and rating farming was undermined by some idiot's decision to change the party requirement to 4 guildies, which basically nullified the whole purpose of the system.

Around this time, arenanet was working on a new way to play the game: Hard Mode Enemies are Higher Level and are on Steroids, but are Still Stupid and thus Not Challenging Mode. I see the concept. Make an easy game harder. However, you don't make something harder by making it take longer to do. You make it harder by making it more challenging. I don't know how they could have missed that, it's so simple, the words tell you what to do to.

Grind of the North came out another six months later. Man that game fucking sucked moldy ass. Again, very few things were tested. Some of the 100 pvp skills didn't even work (how do you not test 100 skills?). It's obvious to most that by this time, Arenanet gave up on GW1 and was working on GW2. Eye of the North brought up another "Go to point A, kill enemy C, go to point F, collect reward, go to point E" quest system introduced by Factions. It was boring and grindey. I didn't even finish EotN until many months after its release because I could not bring myself to crawl my way through the same quests over and over again. I need to get this out of the way. FUCK YOU EYE OF THE NORTH

Bottom Line: Guild Wars failed because Arenanet didn't take enough time to develop, balance, and test additional features.

Community Relations

Arenanet is probably the worst game company I've ever known about in the customer service department. Let's leave out the half-assed updates for this section.

First of all, they ban you for the most ridiculous things you can imagine. Guild Wars is a Teen rated game in the US, and equally rated in foreign countries with a rating system. Banning people for saying "butt" in all chat, in a Teen rated game...there are no words for how stupid and how unnecessary that is. It's almost as if they don't want people to play the game. If you are reported, they look through all your chat logs from the moment you bought the game, and even if you were reported wrongly, could still be banned for using profanities or racial slurs in team chat, guild chat, and whispers to friends. They really don't want people playing their game.

Also, banning people for using words the chat filter blanks out without avoiding the chat filter is like giving someone a gun for protection, then suing the maker of the gun when that person shoots themself. If there's a chat filter, and people don't want to use it, why punish everybody else? Obviously, the chat filter was placed in the game for the specific purpose of not ever being used, according to anet's philosophy.

Also, lowering people's ranks is low. You can deny it all you want, but I've seen it happen to friends, I've heard rumors about it before, and I have had my own titles changed.

By the way anet, thanks for persecuting certain members of the community just because they point out the reasons the game sucks. It would be too much work to just fix the game and make it fun and interesting, so you take the easy road and just ban people who don't spam "OMG I LOVE EVERYTHING YOU DO" on your pages. When I think of anet's management, a certain World War 2 German faction comes to mind.

Bottom Line: Guild Wars failed because Arenanet doesn't care about its players.

Game Balance

Other things turned GW from a great game to a mediocre game, but it's the playability and fairness of the game that really killed it. Despite the endless (in the hundreds) number of balance articles written by the Guild Wars community, Arenanet decided to ignore them and stick with A SINGLE PERSON TO BALANCE THE GAME. Double big and boldicize because of importance:

A SINGLE PERSON CANNOT BALANCE A GAME. IT TAKES A TEAM OF AT LEAST THREE TALENTED PEOPLE TO DO THAT, AND MOST GAME MAKERS USE MORE.

Having a single person to balance a game causes many problems.

1: He may be biased.

2: He doesn't get every angle.

3: He can't go through and playtest that many skills on a regular basis.

and in the case of Guild Wars:

4: He can't balance 400 new skills every 6 months.

5: He can't balance the game if he doesn't play it.

If arenanet knew they were going to work on GW2, they should have hired more game balancers. One person cannot balance two games, especially when he has no time to actually playtest them.

I won't go into details of skill balance because you can type balance into search and find at least 50 articles about it.

Bottom Line: Guild Wars failed because game balance was not a priority.

Grind/Playability

The big one. This is why Guild Wars is not fun. Balance is a big part, but this is the one that puts it over the top. Prophecies was ok. You didn't have a million identical quests to do to beat the game. Hell, you didn't even have to do all the missions. Factions was a mistake. I can summarize every Factions, Nightfall, and EotN story quest like this: "Go to point A, fight through area B, kill enemy C, collect reward at point D, get next identical quest."

Guys. I know how to kill enemies. Do I really have to do it 8,000 times?

Is someone who has won 50000 high end gvgs better than someone who has won only 5000?

Is someone who runs touch ranger 10 hours a day in Random Arenas better than someone who is actually good at the game, but plays RA a few times a week?

Is someone who farms an area 100 times better than someone who's only done it twice?

You made titles outrageously unobtainable, especially the pvp titles. Nobody has even earned any of the highest pvp titles after 3 years.

EDIT: Congratulations to Leeloof Esp, the first player to earn rank 15 without being given fame or by abusing bugged skills. At least now I can make a point by saying it takes 3.5 years of every-day playing to reach the top hero title, and that's only if you're good.

Titles Grindables

Here's my mini-rant about titles. Titles, according to arenanet, were a way to keep players interested in the game until Guild Wars 2 comes out. Ok. If you want people to be interested in GW1, make it interesting! It's not a hard concept.

Instead of doing what they wanted to do, they gave us busy work. Many of your players are in high school or college. Their teachers already give them busy work. They don't play a game to do homework. They play a game to have fun. I have often been so bored with GW that I have logged off and sat down and stared at a wall. I have done that. Other people I know have done that. That's how boring your game is. The only thing remotely interesting about the game is pvp, and thanks to ineptitude and stupidity, that's not fun either.

Playability

The reason Arenanet makes these stupid decisions is that they think they know what the players want, but they're very wrong. NOBODY WANTS TO KILL ONE-HUNDRED-SIXTY THOUSAND ENEMIES TO MAX A TITLE. You don't know what players want because

1. You don't read ANY form of community feedback.
2. You don't play your own fucking game.

If you go to the arenanet website and into their jobs section, there's some bullshit line that says "we make games we want to play." and "we are a company of passionate gamers." Correct me if I'm wrong, but, passionate gamers...they play games.

Bottom Line: Guild Wars failed because Arenanet had no clue what players wanted or how to make the game fun.