An open letter from the Guild Wars Community
Dear Arenanet,
Guild Wars is an original and entirely unique game, and no other game in the market today boasts the distinctive and creative combination of features that has separated Guild Wars apart from them. Because of this, there still remains a large and dedicated Guild Wars community. There is plenty of untapped potential to be realized in the game, and I personally meet at least one player that is new or returning every day.
This letter is being written in the hopes that you will address the Guild Wars community concerning the current state of the game and its future. We understand that your focus is in developing Guild Wars 2, and that there are no plans to make large content updates - that's not what this is about.
Please consider the following:
First and foremost, the bots and real money traders have taken over the game. The PvP arenas are so infested with bots that they may as well be called PvB arenas. Real money traders and their bot teams are controlling the market from outside of the confines of the game, causing massive inflation, not to mention their incessant advertising throughout every social hub.
I recall when I first started playing Guild Wars over 10 years ago with how impressed I was that Arenanet took serious action in eradicating bots and real money traders. In fact, here was an update note taken from Wednesday, June 8, 2005:
"This week, as part of our in continuing promise to keep Guild Wars free of hacks, cheats, and other exploits, we closed the accounts of more than 100 users of bots. With today's update we are taking further steps to address the bot problem. New changes will improve our ability to identify and ban users of bots, rebalance mission areas that were highly exploited by bots, and reduce the overall effectiveness of bots, exploits, and other highly repetitive forms of gold and item farming. We are taking these steps to improve the game for all players, so that people using bots to farm gold cannot generate a huge influx of new gold into the economy, which increases prices for everyone and encourages other players to engage in repetitive farming just to keep up."
Have your standards changed? Do you no longer intend to keep this promise? We ask this with respect, as many of us do not understand the type of work that is involved to curtail or eliminate illegal activity, and we also realize that you may be doing work behind the scenes that we are not aware of. Having said this, is it too much to ask that you address our community concerning the bots and real money traders and assure us that something will be done? The in-game reporting tool appears to have no effect. All we are asking is that you don't leave us in the dark.
Secondly, we would like to have a community relations person again, someone to serve as a liaison between our communtiy and your development team. Bill Freist did this in an unofficial capacity, and much of the community looked forward to his periodic communication; as few and far between as the simple updates were, we were happy to know that someone in Arenanet still cared and had a vested interest in the game.
Lastly, many in the community have expressed interest in funding certain areas of development for Guild Wars by the use of crowd-funding campaigns. We will happily shell out our hard-earned cash for anything that will keep Guild Wars alive and thriving. We will buy items from your online store even when we don't particularly need them, just to support Guild Wars. Are there plans to have a permanent price reduction? Or at the very least, periodic items on sale during holidays? If we can get more information on how we can create a financial incentive for ArenaNet to continually support and update the original Guild Wars, we will be that much more likely to drop our dollars into your bucket.
We eagerly look forward to your team addressing these concerns.
Sincerely,
The loyal and devoted Guild Wars community
