Topic: How Long Can A Game Like Guild Wars Last?

[beo]

I've been playing Guild Wars like a mad man recently (pretty much put other game purchases on hold) and I have begun to wonder how long a company like Anet continue to provide servers for its customers. Does the fact that it can be run on dial up make a difference? Thanks in advance for answering my question 

[the_mitch28]

Yeah once the intial puchase of the server is complete it doesnt cost that much to keep them running, all these game companies claim that the mounthly fee is for 'server maintence' but really it doesnt cost that much, I mean come on wake up people, WoW makes tens of millions of dollars a month it is an actual licence to print money and do you think they need millions of dollars to fix a server every now and again, of coarse not. The only thing that will kill guild wars is when people loose interest and the company starts loosing money and thus end it, but they counter this by making expansion packs and there is a new one for Guild Wars coming out soon.

[WinterSnowblind]

I've been playing it a lot again lately, and plan on going through it with three other characters after.  The PvP and Guild options really help the game last longer, and with Factions coming out soon, that should really help peoples interest, especially considering you don't need the original to play it.  They've also announced a second expansion to come out near the end of the year.  They're hoping to release them every 6 months or so.   And of course they've been doing the special holiday events.

And considering it's about the only MMORPG that's free to play, it should last quite some time.   I only hope they do more for the single player with the next expansion.  They keep claiming how it's a MMO that can be played by yourself if you want, but once you're about half way through the game it's completely impossible.  You NEED to team up with other players if you want to do it, and Factions just seems to be making that even worse.  I don't mind playing with a few friends online, but I'm really no interested in joining up with random people.  A simple sliding difficulty that depends on how many human players are with you could easily fix this..

[Kaze]

The no-monthly fee thing is the future of online massively multiplayer games. Make no mistake, just because Guild Wars is completely instanced, does not mean the model will not eventually consume the MMO market as a whole. While the game in execution may not be perfect, the financial model is in my opinion, the forefront of the future.

Guild Wars will only fail once the community loses interest. My interest faltered a few months after release. Mind you, I was a rather long running alpha tester, so I had been exposed to it for quite a while before that. The main problem I had with it is that it was simply too much of a time investment. Leveling up may not take a while, but organizing a team of eight often took longer than playing an actual match. I could not justify that kind of time investment. How long will the rest of the community remain interested? Given that no monthly fee is required, which means people can come and go as they please, I imagine it will last a very, very long time.

[alphager]

mitch, you have no idea how costly a data-center is. The initial investment in hardware is not the major cost-point. Maintenance cost _huge_ amounts of money, not to speak of
-energy
-humans
-security.

[WinterSnowblind]

Was anybody affected by the rollback a few days ago?  Apparantly there was some king of glitch that made merchents sell very rare items for incredibly low prices, which would have completely screwed up the games econemy, so they rolled back all the servers by an hour.  I would have hated to be in the middle of a quest and lost everything.

[Encrypted]

mitch, you have no idea how costly a data-center is. The initial investment in hardware is not the major cost-point. Maintenance cost _huge_ amounts of money, not to speak of
-energy
-humans
-security.

Aint that that the truth.  Not to mention support contract costs  and  salaries (or maybe that falls under "humans"?)

[otaku62]

Was anybody affected by the rollback a few days ago?

I had to redo the mission of Nolani Academy to get to Yak's Bend 

[beo]

So what is costly? Maintaining the data centers or maintaining the servers? (or am i just deluded and those things the same thing)

Also, what is the importance of the fact that the game does not require as much bandwidth to play?

[alphager]

Maintaining the servers costs more than pure maintenance on the datacenter (although the datacenter is not cheap. The bill concerning cooling is enormous).
The other thing which costs money is energy. The electrical bill is huuuge.

 But those are pretty fixed costs; you can't really drive them down.

Arenanet did something to make Guild Wars cheap: minimise network traffic.
They pay for each and every byte that gets to them or is sent by them.
The pretty unique design of guildwars helps saving huge amounts of money.

Considering that chapter 4 is being worked on, Guildwars will at least survive another 2 years.

[syphonbyte]

And considering it's about the only MMORPG that's free to play...

Don't forget about Anarchy Online. The classic version is totally free.

[Sawmill]

also, those idoit " HACKERS " that try to hack every online game, costs money also, because i know in WOW that peoples guys are hacked all the time, and have around 30-50 servers, and about 1 hack a day on each server, that must cost allot for them also to fix everything that gets mixed up or stolen

[PHI-1618]

I was also under the impression that Guild Wars didn't feature a persistent state world. Is that right, or am I crazy?

[Damned_Zombie]

Both.