Guild Wars 2

What you’re going to read will be nothing short of a major essay. I can’t make a tl;dr version, otherwise the detail of this thread will be left out. every detail I include (even my gaming history) is extremely important to validate my statements.

I have played more MMORPGs than I can count. I’ve played LOTR online, I’ve played Requiem, I’ve played Aion, Rift, Exsteel, World of Warcraft, and many many more. 24 years of gaming with 14 years in MMORPGs. I am not claiming to be the foremost authority of MMORPGs, but I would like what I say to be taken into consideration, because I’ve seen games rise and fall, and this game, Guild Wars 2, can evolve into something more amazing than it already is, something that could even rival (If not outright destroy) world of warcraft.

I will address these issues as best as I can, and I will explain my reasoning behind them. I will also include polls to see what the community thinks.
1.
Roleplaying: We’re starting off with the one that most of you would probably guess for me to bring up. It’s roleplaying. I have reason to believe that if roleplaying was encouraged and some tedious mechanics be taken care of (Range of talking and emotes), to say that it could open a whole new universe of possibilities would be an understatement. Now, if for some reason you don’t believe me, I’ll bring up the pie charts of two of WoW’s most popular roleplaying servers.
https://realmpop.com/us-moon-guard.html
Moonguard is somewhat of the “bad example” of roleplaying due to its… questionable content, but the numbers are there. As I look at this pie chart, there is 600,000 characters. Now, i’m not sure if “Characters” is referring to the multiple characters on the realm or not, but we will say that it does. Each player on WoW has 10 character slots. We’ll assume that each account has all of the character slots taken up. Divide 600k by 10, and you got 60,000. That’s 60,000 players that have chosen to play on a potentially lewd roleplaying realm over normal realms.
Now, let’s venture into their more common roleplaying realm of Wyrmrest Accord.
https://realmpop.com/us-wyrmrest-accord.html
A little over 500,000 players seeking to roleplay. Now we take that and divide by 10, we got 50,000 players seeking to engage in a roleplaying realm over normal realms.
I want the following things to be kept in mind as I refer to this:
1a. It’s approximately 2:00AM as I am writing this, so there’s a potential of active/inactive users.
2a. I am ASSUMING that all their character slots are full.
3a. I am doing generous rounding to the lowest hundred thousand to be fair.
4a. Most importantly, this is only one game.
Roleplaying, no matter how you swing it, attracts players. The reason being is that this game indeed offers a lot, but at the end of the day, the grinding gets repetitive, and players hardly interact with one another outside of taking down powerful monsters together. Roleplaying opens possibilities of being able to connect with other players, their character, and create your own scenarios.

Poll one: http://www.strawpoll.me/13175314/r
Poll two: (pending)

2.
Encourage players to create artwork of the game.

In addition to exploring the creativity of our fellow players, artwork in all its shape and glory is essentially free advertisements without them actually being advertisements.
Who here has seen a video on youtube by the channel WatchMojo? All of you have, even if you don’t know it. The reason being is that they upload so many videos on a daily basis that through sheer statistics, you’ll eventually find one of their videos.
The same thing goes with popular games like League of legends, Overwatch (as much as I hate OW), and of course WoW. The amount of player-made artwork, videos, etc, will get someones attention through sheer statistics.
Now, I’m not saying the player base needs to become third-party advertisers, but it is an inadvertant upside. Another upside is that it may actually bring people to the website, the forums, and cause people to take a gander at the rest of the work that the artist in question has made!
My suggestion is to host monthly competitions for GW2 related artwork, short stories, screenshots of the scenery, or even machinima videos!

Poll 1: http://www.strawpoll.me/13439379
Poll2: (Pending)

Now, these are just ideas that I’ve culminated, but I’d like for it to be kept in mind that I’ve been playing videogames for an extremely long time. I understand that changes cost money, so it’s not expected to be done over night, or even at all.
I just want to see this game become more than it already is, and from my observation, it absolutely can if certain things are introduced and inspired. Most importantly, these would also double as an excellent business strategy.

There are loads of things I’d love to stress, that are completely meaningless. Is this a bad idea? No. Is it the kind of idea that I think can’t be stressed enough? Again no.

It’s not a bad idea to have contests, and some contests have happened before. More to the point, there are channels that Anet has that promotes Art already. They have pinterest sites, they call out art sometimes on their podcasts and on their twitter account. Seems like people are posting art almost every day on reddit.

I just don’t think this issue is that important. Same thing with RP. RP attracts a certain kind of player. But there’s no much RP in League of Legends and it’s certainly one of the most popular games of all time.

The game is what it is and people who are interested in it will find it and stay. Some people who might be interested in it will miss out.

At the end of the day this is your opinion, and I don’t know that most people will agree with it, and even if they do, they likely won’t agree with how strongly you stress that opinion.

It’s probably the same 50/60 thousand accounts that RP on those two servers. Just like in Guild Wars, or even here in GW2, where many players have multiple accounts.

The Devs have responded with the reasons why art contests aren’t part of GW2 at this time. They do, however, promote player-created submissions.

Good luck.

Have you seen the Guild Wars 2 Art Show (advertised on Facebook and Twitter) that sounds like pretty much exactly what you’re asking for in Point 2.

They encourage players to create fan art (which players were doing anyway) by promoting it and also discussing how it’s created. This in turn gets people talking about and sharing the art work.

Oh, they also have a system where players can submit their artwork to be turned into merchandise, which other people can buy and wear/use. That should be pretty effective for getting it out there – you could literally see someone walking around wearing GW2 fan art.

But if you have any other ideas I’m sure they’d be happy to hear about them. Besides spamming youtube, there’s hundreds (possibly even thousands) of GW2 youtube videos already, so I’m not sure what adding more would achieve.

I have about the same experience gaming as the OP and would not support doing any more for RP. Anet – please keep the emote ranges and don’t waste valuable development resources making more. I don’t care about any art being done by the players. As long as it doesn’t effect development time of making new content or figuring out some balance (HELLO WvW!!) in the game.