Henchman skill bar contest

During August and September, 2009, ArenaNet ran a contest that allowed players to submit skill bars for the henchmen that would soon replace heroes in Guild versus Guild and Heroes' Ascent. Players could submit their skill bars to Dizhou [Xunlai Pollster] in the Great Temple of Balthazar. Out of over 30 000 entries, the Guild Wars Live Team selected forty skill bars that the new henchmen would use.

Prizes
Forty winners (twenty GvG winners and twenty HA winners) will receive one of each of the following prizes:
 * Name a henchman; a henchman named after the winner's character or an appropriate name of the winner's choosing. Names must abide by the Naming Policy and are subject to the approval of the Development Team.
 * Everlasting Henchman Tonic; one Everlasting Henchman Tonic. These unique items will grant the winner the ability to temporarily transform into the image of the henchman that they are named after.

Guild versus Guild winners

 * 1) This henchman was initially named Etron, but was changed to Errol Hyl in the November 19, 2009, update.

Controversy
Many players were upset by the outcome of the competition for various reasons. The majority of the builds were part of the GvG or Heroes' Ascent metagame, either historically or at the time of the announcement of the winners. The bars were hosted on many build documentation sites, notably PvXwiki. One argument is that these copied builds violate the Originality condition in the official rules and thus should have been disqualified. A comparison of many of the builds and their "PvX counterparts" was posted here.

In addition, community representative Martin Kerstein stated that "niche meta builds" were unwanted and "common gimmicks" were unlikely to be picked, and the same for builds that "made use of certain AI advantages." Common opinion is that most of the winning builds fail these criteria.

In response, it has been argued that, due to the limiting nature of the AI and the vast difference in power between "good skills" and "bad skills", it is difficult to create builds that the public hasn't discovered, without using much less effective ones. Martin Kerstein stated that the henchmen builds "are not meant to replace human players", which some players interpret as a justification to make them less than maximally effective.

A second line of complaint is that the AI cannot use the selected builds effectively. Meanwhile, some skills (such as "Make Haste!" and Song of Concentration) are allegedly not suited for use by any AI, and only make the builds more inefficient. However, ArenaNet has stated that there is a possibility that the AI would be "tweaked" to improve performance with these builds. The enormous amount of work required to make these changes, compared to the current size of the current live team, is one defense for the delay.

A third line of complaint is the long-standing argument against the use of AI in Player vs. Player gameplay at all, which was reignited by the contest. Many players consider the use of computers in competitive play to greatly devalue the experience for the human players, particularly those who have earned some skill. Such a position concedes that the replacement of heroes by henchmen is a step toward the respect of players' skill, not that of possibly unfair AI, but argues that this goal would be fully achieved by the removal of all AI in GvG and/or Heroes' Ascent.