Why do people go to War?

I believe Guild Wars to be flawed on a fundamental level. For the most part, people go to war to maintain peace and security of their home land, but if you don't have a peaceful home land that you want to protect, why go to war at all?

The complete and utter lack of any peace time activity in Guild Wars has turned me from it.

Ok, it's not completely and utterly lacking peace time activity. There was one time in Guild Wars that I remember quite vividly, and remains one of my favorite parts of Guild Wars - finding Gwen's Flute. Helping this little girl find her lost flute was the highlight of my Guild Wars career. Everything else pales in comparison.

After the Searing, what happens to my motivation? Revenge is fine, but give me something I want to keep fighting for. We need another Gwen, or at least a diversion from the constant fighting and turmoil.

In World of Warcraft, after clearing out an instance and killing the big bad guy at the end, I like to relax and work on my engineering skill back in Storm Wind, the city I'm fighting to protect. Without something like engineering, I'd surely go insane and burn out on the game very quickly. Plus, being able to craft things, and relax in a peaceful setting helps add to my desire to protect my homeland that I care for so deeply.

Guild Wars offers nothing but war.. what am I fighting for? I either need someone to follow me around and be a persistent character I would want to fight for (give me a Page or something), or I need peace time diversions to help with the burnout factor. Arenanet, enough with the faceless peasants and the constant battle, I would have followed Rurik to the ends of the earth, and done anything for Gwen.. but you killed them both

we do not know that gwen was killed

I guess Menhlo and Togo just don't do it for you That's OK. I don't care for them much either. What ever happened to Menhlo's Tryian buddies, anyways? They follow you to Cantha, but then they just kind of disappear without so much as a good-bye. I guess Cynn got fed up with Menhlo's "flirtatious" ways and dumped him, prompting the rest of the party to disband in the resulting boredom.

Be that as it may, I agree. Guild Wars (especially Factions) is missing something. Farming green items and fame just isn't particularly alluring. Those "record" missions are cool, but I don't have the time it takes to scrape up a good team. I only get a couple of hours of play time each night, and it seems that I spend most of that time trying to gather people to play with. One thing I liked about Prophecies was that I could do about 75% of the game solo (or at least just with one other person). In Factions, the reverse is true: about 75% of the content requires a real party (that is, if you want Masters on all the missions).

The whole Master idea ticks me off too. I had lots of fun the first time I went through Prophecies by taking my time to explore and find bonus objectives. In contrast, I constantly felt pressured to rush through Factions to obtain the Master level on the missions. I'm sure ArenaNet would argue that I can always revisit the areas in explorable mode at my leisure, but who wants to revisit the same areas right after rushing through them in a mission?

If Nightfall isn't a better expansion than Factions, I tihnk it will be my last one.

Wether she was killed literally or not makes no difference, They removed her from the game.. she's dead to me

If they brought her back in one of the next chapters, It would make me very happy.. maybe when they stop traveling the globe and go back to Tyria to eradicate the Charr and restore Ascalon to it's former Glory!

I've always found Togo to be really annoying, Menhlo's not too bad. I don't understand why they decided to drop the "main characters" of the game, the style that they are using for Guild Wars (an almost story book method) needs a constant, decent main character to center around. I thought they had this with Rurik, but then they decided to go with a motely band of heroes.. that always baffled me, I've never liked them as much as I did the prince.

haha, I like your story about how the group disbanded.. it's funny how the dev team has an almost blatant disregard for continuity in a storyline.

Is it just me, or can anyone remember Aiden having any dialogue? He always seemed to be in the background..

I remember some text from Aiden... as it was quite creepy. What do you do when a man... alone in the woods... asks you about... Strange Growths?

I never liked Rurik. He was nuts. Devona, Cynn and Mhenlo are the main characters of the Guild Wars storyline. Instead of introducing another landscape, a new Chapter should go back to the Ascalonian homeland. Team up with the King... retake territory... kick out the Charr.

Anyhoo... I gave some thought to the key point of this tread.

In Halo, there is no peacetime. Oh sure, you can take warthog for a ride along the shore. Yet, the point of the game is to kill. He's Red, you're Blue... what more reason do you need? It's a war of sorts... and it never gets old. I played Marathon for years... I played Halo for years... and I'm looking forward to Halo 2 on PC. It's got to be something else in Guild Wars PvP that hurts the replay value.

Also... PvP can work in MMORPGs. Dark Age of Camelot has Realm vs Realm. World of Warcraft has the battlegrounds. Alterac Valley (40 vs. 40) is just awesome!

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Michael Garofalo
Webmaster - http://photics.com

In my opinion what hurts GW PvP and PvE is the grinding It wasn't like that before. At the beginning all you really had to grind for was that obsidian armor. Now they have all these titles. I like the idea of the titles, but the requirements to get some them are outrageous. Everyone who's decent is usually busy grinding away at one title or another. If they're not doing that, they're farming greens. No one has time to participate in the fun activities (plain old PvE and/or PvP) anymore. Most people I know who are rank 3 and above didn't achieve it by doing a couple of hours of casual PvP here and there. They either played with a hardcore PvP guild for a while, or they did the IWAY grind. The game just doesn't feel fun to me anymore. Everyone's always grinding for faction, grinding for greens, grinding for fame, grinding for elites, grinding for explore, grinding for ectos/shards, or grinding for drinking money. Honestly, if I had wanted to grind I would have invested in Everquest or WoW.