Guild Wars 2

Hello,

Mods, feel free to move this to where ever you feel this belongs most. I opted to post this on the Guild Wars 2 forums because the original Guild Wars obviously has no official forum (and the unofficial ones are dead), and I’d like to make sure devs can read this.

Like many, I’ve spent an unholy amount of time playing the original Guild Wars. As it stands right now, Guild Wars is actually mostly entirely solo’able. We have heroes, and henchmen. Except PvP and elite content (DoA…), this could work well as a single player RPG. So here’s what I was thinking – how about making Guild Wars available in offline mode? Instead of having a client downloader, allow owners of the game to download all the game data like with all other offline games, and ensure we can play Guild Wars for all eternity (or until the next Dragonrise!). I know Anet have said maintaining the old servers costs them little to nothing, but still – it would give us a sense of reassurance that our hard work will never be lost.

You could even allow players who still wish to play together with their friends or guild to rent servers, as some games already do. At a low, low price of course ;-) Maybe even custom servers, where you can allow others to join or not.

Guild Wars Offline: yay or nay?

I’d love for Gw to get an offline mode no doubt but probably it would be too costly to do it for them. Its not an easy task to convert and online only game to offline. It would involve quite an investment.

Maybe if people are willing to pay for it, say selling the whole thing as a sort of box version to which you can import your online Gw character?

I don’t really know how these things work, as I’m not a techie. Wouldn’t allowing us to download all game files to our machine be sufficient? I’m not really sure why it would have to be so expensive.

Mental Paradox.3845:

I don’t really know how these things work, as I’m not a techie. Wouldn’t allowing us to download all game files to our machine be sufficient? I’m not really sure why it would have to be so expensive.

No it wouldn’t work. Servers and clients use different software used for completely different tasks. The server application has a database to hold all the data, both player data and world data, in order to present it to the players. It’s not possible to easily transfer a game from an online only version to an offline version, and I doubt it will be worth it.

In the past, MMORPG server files found their way to the internet (or attempts to emulate the server files), allowing normal users to create pirated servers of various MMORPGs where they set their own rules.

It takes quite a bit of understanding of computer software to setup and run the server part, and since all the data is stored in an actual relational database I don’t think they can move them easily to a different format.

The “easiest” they could do is offer an emulator for the server you could run in your computer, then use the game client to connect to it, that is have both server and client on the same computer, but running a dedicated game server is not as easy as pressing the “play button”, there are loads of systems that need to be connected to work together… surely not for non-IT people

Mental Paradox.3845:

I don’t really know how these things work, as I’m not a techie. Wouldn’t allowing us to download all game files to our machine be sufficient? I’m not really sure why it would have to be so expensive.

basicly for it to work we would have to emulate our own local server.

and it would open much ways to do bad stuff if you get what I mean :P

or just recode the game but both ways is kinda bad :/

Mental Paradox.3845:

I don’t really know how these things work, as I’m not a techie. Wouldn’t allowing us to download all game files to our machine be sufficient? I’m not really sure why it would have to be so expensive.

no unfortunately its not that simple in fact actually MMOs are generally build to get as far away from that as possible for many reasons.

let me try to explain it a bit, think of the game on your computer like an unmanned drone. the unmanned drone can get from point A to point B but on its own it cannot do anything it needs a pilot that sits in a remote control system on a server. You can “download” the pilot to the drone easily but that is not going to help you, the pilot has no where to sit in the drone and even if that was possible the drone is just not designed to be controlled manually. There needs to be a lot of engineering to make the two work that way.

Same thing with an Online game like Gw.

The game client has all the necessary stuff to run the game but the game logic and operation happen at a server online. Simply speaking when you say cast a skill its not your game that handles what happens but the server itself. This is done on purpose to avoid cheating. If it was your game that handles that logic then hackers could edit the game and make a basic attack do 1,000,000 damage instantly killing everything. Now obviously the game can be changed to handle such things itself or easier like other have suggested give us a copy of the server to run ourselves.

That being said they might not want to do any of these until such time as they plan to close the online servers if ever. having access to the server would make it easier of cheaters / hackers to do their thing which in turn could be security risk for the official server if they’re still running. Its also possible the server is designed to work with resources that are normally not found on a home computer making it impractical to run.

Its not impossible but its not an easy thing they can do with just a simple flip of a switch either.