A small package to ArenaNet?

Hello everybody!

Over the last few days I've been thinking about sending a small package to ArenaNet with some gifts from our little community.
I've thought about sending some specialities from my country (Belgium.. some pralines perhaps ;)) - I'm certain they'll like those.

I'd like to ask the opinion of all of you on this and perhaps we can raise our donation meter a bit to pay for the shipping as well as our gift.
The easiest thing to do is sending a box of chocolates of about 1.5kg (it costs around €40 and contains about 100 pralines) . That leaves us with about 500 grammes, in which I'd like to put letters and posts from us all thanking ArenaNet for the great game they've made with Guild Wars 1. Memories, great moments, screenshots... submit it all!

That way, we an show ArenaNet that we as a community are grateful with the game they've made as well as give them some sweets. We haven't made it that easy for them over the last few months and we might not all agree with what ArenaNet is doing with Guild Wars 2, but this is a way that we can try to thank them for the game.
(Btw, I will add a note that everybody who worked on GW1 should get a chocolate first ;). And we'll need a picture of Josh Foreman eating his. That guy rocks.)

So what do you say?

The costs would be:

• Chocolates: € 40
• Shipping: € 26.10

That would make about €67 that we should raise as a community to do this.
In the case that we won't reach the amount, I'll simply send them a Holidays card instead.

Kevin

I'd like to do it before the end of the year, not a hard deadline though

Quote from Jayson

Is the motivation behind this idea to get them to pay attention to GW again? Honest question here.

Other than that, I'm finding it difficult to see a valid reason to send anything to Anet. They'll get the chocolates, eat them (possibly taking pics doing so) then go back to working on the over priced train wreck that is GW2. That's been made clear even by this very forum.

That in and of itself, makes it very hard to get people motivated imo. We're being honest here and Anet only does things to profit. Anything people feel that was done above and beyond was nothing more than a business decision. That's neither good nor bad... just business.

So sure, it's easy enough to take up a collection and buy the chocolates but I feel it's the equivalent of sending them to your ex, who's already moved on to another person and has no intention of looking back. They just don't really mean anything, and nothing good would come of it.

I'll make it clear that I feel the intent was good hearted, but maybe not worth the effort? Do any of them even bother to look at this site?

ArenaNet is quite aware of Guild Wars Legacy and I have no doubts that they look at our site - in fact, months ago I have contacted ArenaNet and we're in their fansite lists/relations.

I have reasons to believe that they haven't forgotten about us, believe me. I can't really say anything and I have absolutely no information about what's in store for Guild Wars.
Call it a underbelly-feeling. But if we treat ArenaNet with respect, we'll get respect back.

In general, I'm really glad Guild Wars 1 is still online and being maintained. Yes, it's not getting new content, but we have known this for years. We've had the live team, which never was intended to actually make content. We got that as a gift from ArenaNet, without it costing anything to us.
People tend to forget that.
They have been working actively on GW1 for as long as they could during the development of GW2. And yes, I still want to see those chapters that were planned, but they're never coming I fear. But we have gotten so much from them for free, which other companies would never have given away for free.

I've played many MMORPG's in my time, and most of them have been pulled offline for years now (might be because I have a kinda special taste): Dungeon Runners, The Chronicles of Spellborn, ArchLord. None of those games, save TCoS, could capture me as well as Guild Wars can. That's why I have been playing it and still play it daily. But it's really rare to see a game that's nearing it's 12th birthday still being run and even being maintained. We all didn't expect updates this year, but we got one that fixed an issue that was in the game for years - and it was a proper fix. That was a long time in the making I guess, since you don't whip that kind of stuff up in a month.

People should realize that with almost every other company in the world, GW1 would have already been sunset. Don't even doubt about that.
And that's why I propose sending them those treats: to thank them. For the game they've made, but also the game they're still running after all these years. Yes, a lot of people from the GW1 era have left, but many of them are still working at ArenaNet on GW2: Joshua Foreman, Gaile Gray, Izzy, Mike Zadorojny, Tirzah Bauer, Joe Kimmes, ... I have only named a few, but still quite a lot of them are at ArenaNet.
It's also a nice way to, as Max said it, build bridges. I mean, not much positive news (about ArenaNet) has come out from us as a community over the last years, which is completely understandable.
But what if we try to improve our standing a bit? It might not do that much, or even anything, but it can only improve and I think that's something that all of us want.
And believe me, they won't throw away real Belgian chocolates ;).

About my feelings I expressed earlier, I have to agree with Max. It's nearly impossible for me to say anything about this. It's something that will be revealed later once we can.
But I can say that they have done enough to make me feel that we still matter.
Things have gotten both me and Max (and others) excited, so you know it has to be good ;).

Quote from Jayson

I can appreciate you having to keep quiet on whatever information you have, but try to look at it from the other side. Whatever it is you know... we don't. And I don't think the majority of us intend to be rude or to burn bridges but frustration does that.

It's hard to have the same enthusiasm we used to when we lost out on the Elona portion of GW Beyond, the Ranger and Paragon skill updates, as well as and rest of the Lunatic Court storyline. All for a game that is literally nothing like the original so many of us loved. Old news, I know.

@K A O S Theory I don't think we need to be thankful for them keeping the game running.
They're the ones who tied the HoM to it in the hopes to generate sales for their new game. If GW stops being profitable or useful to them? They'll close it pretty fast. Nothing personal, just business and it would suck but that's life and we move on.

What we know has nothing to do with the game or plans for the game. We only know Legacy-related things.
I can't really say more than that. We literally know as much as you guys about the plans for the game.

The big issue is that they've said they wanted to do those things, and as such, we were kinda expecting them. In the case that they didn't talk about it, people wouldn't complain about that so much.
However, this is completely normal and is why ArenaNet now has a "we don't talk about anything unless we ship it in a week" attitude for GW2. Which kinda looks like the attitude that they had for GW1...
GW1 had it's share of cancelled projects as well, like the Guild Vault which never saw the light of day; The Xunlai Market, Ahmtur Arena. But except the Vault, we officially don't know anything about these, they never talked about them.
Look at it from the other side: we did get War in Kryta, Hearts of the North and Winds of Change, which in total is quite a huge amount of content we got for free. I literally can't say that I know a company that created such a ton of high quality content and released it completely for free in a triple-A game, especially an MMORPG.
We can still be thankful for that. It's not like just any company would have done that completely for free.

And I actually got excited for the Hall of Monuments and I think it is a very good addition to EotN. When they talked about adding the HoM to GW1, they literally just started development of GW2.
Back then, they didn't know that the game would turn out to be completely different and that GW1 players wouldn't really like it. That was when they were even just prototyping things.
So yes, they added the Hall of Monuments to boost sales in a way, but rather to give us GW1 players something extra in GW2. It took years before we knew what we would be getting, and that's for a good reason: they didn't really know themselves.
The skins that we get in GW2 for our HoM-points are mostly GW1 references. You can only get the Fiery Dragon Sword in this way.
I'm not trying to talk things good here, but I'm trying to put things into perspective. Game development isn't easy - things change a lot during building the game (note, I can relate to this but in other ways, I'm a programmer myself).

Was I dissapointed when GW2 came out? Yes and no. It never replaced GW1, but I think nearly nothing can replace it. It's so special, unqiue and there's nothing like it. Is GW2 a good game? Yes, if you cut it loose from it's GW1 roots. The biggest dissapointment for me in GW2 was that the lore was minimal. I liked the wall of texts in GW1, the quests which gave you so much detail.
I liked that when you did a mission you would return to the area around it to do quests to broaden the story. I really loved that, dynamic events are too limited for that.
I much prefer the skill system in GW1, the replayable missions in GW1, hard mode, the gameplay, the story... GW2 is a good game on it's own, it's just not a good successor for GW1.

But enough about that and time to end my rant - ArenaNet didn't make all the perfect choices, but no company ever did. I'm just glad we're in a position to keep playing our dear game with no clear signs of it being shutdown.

Quote from K A O S Theory

I'm not affiliated with arena-net in any way but with what they HAVE come out with, I can be very confident in saying that the GW1 servers will close when ArenaNet dies. Why? Because their server architecture is very similar to the two games, and because GW1 takes minimal amount of resources compared to GW2. Because of this they can easily just piggyback any GW1 instances open out of the servers for GW2. In short, I am pretty sure that GW1 is alive now in large part to GW2.

Its easy to call ArenaNet a single entity, however there are many people with many different opinions and positions in the company. Yes a good chunk of their GW2 employees have probably never even played GW1. Yes their network security team has had a bad rep for mass bans before. Yes their support team was outsourced which allowed for very mediocre service. But realize that there are good people there, even to this day.

Also, I think most people know, whether you want to admit it or not, that most of the 2015 bans were warranted, whether they got their accounts back or not.

A fun fact: after the Gaile hack, they brought the servers down for Guild Wars but not Guild Wars 2.
Guild Wars 2 kept on running perfectly, but the entire integration was blown: you lost all your HoM points and titles and the God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals title as well.
Which means that Guild Wars 2 doesn't really need GW1 to keep on running, but it would take quite a lot of work and resources to decouple them.
I think it's way easier for them to just let GW1 run... and they might still earn a bit from it too.

Quote from korrel

Back to the OP, I'd happily donate a fiver(£5) to this good cause as I'm one of those strange beasts who loves both games and has had years of enjoyment from them.
Kevin,pm me as to how you'd like the money sent (if you're still doing this).

You can use the "Donate" tab on top (below the logo, next to Recent Activity).
That will open up the donation screen

Quote from Jayson

Well it's nice to know they at least know of the forums.

And without saying anything specific, what's the reason behind your feelings that they haven't forgotten about us? I know that's a hard question to answer without giving details, but at least try.

And I'm now able to lift the veil only a little bit...
Follow us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/guildwarslegacy/), I might drop some hints there in the following days.

Everything will be made clear on the 15th of December, if everything goes according to plan...
I just hope everyone will like what we've been working on ;).

Quote from Sadness

So what's the news?

You'll have to wait, but it's oh so close.. Check Twitter/Facebook..