Guild Wars

[Orn]

Well and new expansion is out so I'm getting back into the game. I'm playing in the new expansion, but I'm also replaying through the original (which is cheep $30 these days).

I'm playing GW so I can do stuff with real life friends that have moved away. It would be awsome if some people from here will play as well. Names for a new Guild are currently being concidered.

Who not give GW a try? Its an inexpensive MMO (with non monthly fees), yet it's recieved very high ratings!
Heres a Review from IGN
<http://pc.ign.com/articles/612/612079p1.html>

[AlexMax]

Getting people in this forum to play PC games is like trying to pull lion's teeth, so I would probably give up at this point.

However, I'll humor you with a response. Guild Wars is a game that's full of potential. The game is quite well put together, with a neat installer that streams content to your machine as you need it.

The PvE content is fun. Whereas in something like WoW, the absolute fastest way to the endgame is doing (Get X bear pelts) through questing, in Guild Wars you progress the story through instanced storyline dungeons, which is a great deal more fun. As of Nightfall, you don't even need to worry about getting a party, since you can just henchmen your way through. The PvP content is also organized, with tournaments, Guild vs Guild, and random PvE action avalible at an instant. The low level cap and similar gear at high levels means that skill at those levels is dependant on skill and less on gear. Sounds great, right?

Unfortuniatly, there are a couple problems with this formula:

* Arenanet has show that it is supremely incompitant at balancing the game. There are thousands of skills in the game, but 90&#37; of them are completely worthless. Arenanet has focused more on making overpowered skills balanced (or more likely useless) instead of making the thousands of unused skills in the game worthwhile. Worse, their community managers have decided not to visit forums any longer due to the large amount of flak they were getting for balancing issues. What this eventually ends up with is what is known as "Flavor of the month" builds, where only a few specific builds are worthwhile. This gets boring quite fast.
* Old content is old. Nobdoy wants to slog through old content any longer. Unfortuniatly, this means that if you want to unlock skills in prophacies, you have to hench the entire game by yourself. It's doable, but requires you to have Nightfall, have made some progress in it, and know how to properly hench. Worse, they never go back and 'fix' old content, which means that some of the more retarded prophacies holdovers (such as important skill caps that take place in some remote part of Tyria or in the middle of an extremely high level encounter without a guarenteed drop) have never been "fixed" make skill capping a chore. You can buy "PvP versions" of the expansions if all you want is the skills, but it's too expensive for what you get.
* You can also unlock skills through PvP, but the problem then becomes one of chicken-egg, you need a good PvP build in order to be able to reliably be able to win matches to get more PvP skills. And there are tons of skills, how do you ensure that you're not getting a skill you don't need? And where do you go to earn it in the first place? Guilds most likely won't take you because you're not fully unlocked so GvG is right out, you would be better off nailing your dick to a door than trying to accomplish anything in a pickup hall of heroes team, TvT is in a similar situation (with the added bonus of there always being some other team there that you beat that comes in a few matches later with your hard counter, a side effect of nobody playing TvT anymore), RvR is too random to be reliable, and Factions PvP content doesn't give out the correct type of faction to buy skills with. Oh, and you also need all the expansions too, or else you're not going to be competative, since those skills will be locked to you.
* Because of the above problems, getting into PvP content is a chore unless you beat the latest campaign with a Warrior/Monk and cap everything you can, then PvP heavily in order to unlock things you've missed so you can fit in the latest 'flavor of the month', and then hope a guild will take you. Or just buy the PvP editions of all of the expansions, try to learn everything at once without any PvE to rely on for when you're bored, and then hope you don't get bored before someone takes you and you start having fun.
* There's no such thing as ganking. Honestly, ganking is what is awesome about having a non-instanced world, and you get none of that in Guild Wars.