Alex

Got a couple of favorite memories....

First was joining a guild during the beta called "The Naked Army" and hosting a party with a hundred or so characters dancing in their underwear in the last hours of the beta until the GMs came and spawned a monster invasion of the hub town to put down our debauchery.

Second is just the feeling of discovery and accomplishment when you'd come up with a new build or overcome a hard mission in the games early days before the games metas were completely solved and AI heroes could do all the heavy lifting. I would run some silly Blood Magic/Healing Prayers build on my Necromancer/Monk and it was suboptimal as hell but back then just the idea of using the unlimited mana pool of the necro to throw out backup healing spells felt like finding a cheat code, and it was more than enough to save runs back when healing wasn't 99% handled by AI heroes with uber efficient builds. The original Thunderhead Keep mission in particular really felt like a mountain to climb and while it did cause a lot of headache it also spurred so much activity in players to coordinate and really come together to share builds and strategy.

People in the Guild Wars subreddit organize some PvP still, just have to be online during the planned times. And the game just had a pretty decent resurgance with the anniversary event currently going on. From what I saw posted just the other day they had Alliance Battles populated for an entire day.

But outside of planned events yah PvP is basically dead. RA might work during peak hours, at least while the anniversary hype is lasting, but otherwise the only mode with regular activity is HA, but it's 95% bots with 7 hench teams and 5% players with 7 hench teams farming the bots.