Play Guild Wars? Check inside! (in Off-topic)

Since a day or 2 I have bought Guild Wars.

I am still new (duh) and could perhaps use some friends.

So if you play the game, let me know how to add you as a friend, and how you can add me :)

Shade needs hands out in "use some friends". Hook him up :D

Well i dont really play much but...I could give you some extra items that i wont be needing.

CM me Some time and ill get on. Maybe

I'll be playing as soon as I get a new computer, but I'm not sure when that will be. I think Pit plays though.

Hi Shade, Add 'Albrecht Durer' my Necro to your friends list. I'll help you out as soon as you get to the Academy, I can't play with you before then. ;)

You're also welcome to join the Guild I'm in, there's only three of us, my RL friend (The Guild leader) and my Dad. :) Oh and if you have Team Speak, I'll give you my IP address. :)

Oh, as for how to add me, press 'N' then type my character name into the add friend box. :)

what's guild wars?

its very similar to World of Warcraft. its free to play but you have to buy it first

That's funny, because my explanation was going to be that Guild Wars (GW) is nothing like World of Warcraft (WoW).

Yes, they are both within the same sphere of gaming for a number of reasons. They both qualify as fully 3D MMORPG's. They both have features such as player versus player (pvp) combat and player versus environment combat (pve). They both have a large roaming landscape to discover, days upon days of questing and storyline material to cover, and they both have instances, which allow just you and your group to fight alone.

On the other hand, GW is built around different concepts. With GW the goal is to achieve a level of skill. The level cap is low (20 levels) and gear hardly makes a difference in most matches. The game mostly revolves around the collection of skills either through quests, through trainers, or through killing boss monsters. But to keep the game focused on skill rather then time spent playing, the game restricts you to only 8 usable skills at a time. GW, unlike WoW is entirely instanced This means in every place you fight you or your group are alone. No one will come by to save you and no one will come up to you from beind and gank your sorry character. WoW only has instances for dungeons and pvp battlefields spread all across it's world.

Speaking of WoW. Granted the game doesn't require you to spend an endless amount of time to max your character's level (60 level cap), however, it does take a significant amount of time to gather end game gear. The game is very heavy into gear. To get this gear a player needs to be in a top ranking guild 99.9% of the time. This is usually true for both pvp and pve gear. But, even if you could get the top pvp gear through several months of grinding battlefield pick-up groups, it still is outclassed by the gear obtainable through pve, which you certainly need a guild for. The game has some other distractions, but it's main focus is pve and it seems it will continue to be the case.

Upcoming content in WoW will also allow the top guilds that have beaten the hardest instances in the game, to gain even higher level versions of many skills thus giving them even more of a distinct advantage. Those guilds that haven't beaten the toughest instances will not get these spells, at least not for a while, because they'll need the gear from one dungeon in order to complete the next. This involves farming a dungeon over and over and over again. The end result is this. 95% of all level 60 mages will have an attack that does 1600 damage. Yet, there will be a nice small group of mages with the gear and advanced spells to cast the same attack and do 3300 points of damage. That's a huge gap among level 60 players.

Now look, you've got me ranting. Oh well. Like I said the games might seem the same on the surface, but they are really quite different. One is focused on pvp skill, while the other around pve devotion.

Ok then... :)

My Guild Wars name is "Shadie Stalker" just add me when you can :) should be online tonight again.

Yeah, WoW marketed itself as the 'casual' players MMORPG, unlike the other ones out there (like Everquest etc). It then became apparant that (although a supirior game to GW) It was actually focused heavily toward those hardcore gamers that could spend hours and hours a day for weeks at a time online, the classes weren't ballanced (and the devs had no idea how to blaalnce thier game), the european servers where hosted with the cheapest company in France (There was posted a list of four possible companies, WoW used the worst), weekly maintainence (which should have lasted a couple of hours) routinely took the game serves out for most of the day, and they didn't really seem to do anything with the £9 per month millions of subscribers paid (at one point they had 4 million players worldwide, that's a hell of a lot of money...).

Oh, and if you played on a PvP server (which is the whole reason to play) these hardcore gamers with equipment and spells far above yourself would stop you getting anything done by repeatedly killing you without you having a hope of stopping them. Oh and it took ages to get anywhere. If you're not running (and haven't got high enough to get yourself a very expensive mount), there are flight paths, but some of those take 10-15 minutes of travel (where you can't do anything!).

On the other hand, updates to GW don't take the servers down, they just ask you to restart the game. PvP is a major element of the game, you can make a PvP character (seperate to a RP one) and unlock skills for them to use (by fighting or by getting them in RP) Travel back to places you've already been can be instant. The loss of not meeting anyone in the wild is double edged. If WoW was ballanced, it would have been a great thing!

Plus, (more to rant about...) parts of the game that were supposed to be part of the initial release are still not included ("they will be in the first patch after release! We promise!") and for some they still don't know how the will even work! (Hero Classes...). Updates get pushed back and are generally not worth it (Paladin and Druid Talent Changes...). >_<

I play GW aswell but its been ages since I've been online cant even remember my main chars name =P...

Maybe I'll start playing again when I have time and I'll tell you my char name then ^_^