Feedback:User/Erasculio/Pay-to-play Official Forum

It's a great thing that Guild Wars 2 won't have a monthly fee or rely on microtransactions. Not as much so players can save money (although that is somewhat useful, considering how it may catter to a different demographic than common MMORPGs), but rather from a design point of view. Games with monthly fees often fall into the trap of limiting themselves to easily-made content aiming to keep players playing as long as possible; which translates as grind. Games with microtransactions often fall into the trap of balancing the game around items bought from the game store, requiring players to grind their credit cards in order to be competitive.

However, Arena Net does need to make money somehow. The model of releasing chapters every six months wasn't very successful in Guild Wars 1; sure, GW sold a lot of game units, but having to release so much content within such a small time frame led to a destruction of the game's balance, and to a progressive complexity that would eventually have made the game fall apart (imagine how many skills and armor sets Chapter 4 would need to have, in order to be on par with the previous chapters; and now consider how many skills we would have in the game when Chapter 6 were released).

In other hand...Arena Net is trying to use the Guild Wars Wiki as a forum, with initiatives such as the update previews and even the feedback space. Those are interesting tries, but they are relying on the wiki to be something which it isn't, and as such big discussions here eventually become a huge mess. And considering how Arena Net does not have that many resources, creating an official forum, with official (and therefore paid) moderators would be overly taxing.

However, there is a little thing called "the forum game". Some players become so engrossed on the trappings of an internet forum that they begin to spend a significant part of their time on the forum about a game, maybe more time on the forum than actually playing the game, or even stop playing the game and invest all their time in the forum. Eventually forums become dominated more by "forum players" than by "game players", and their value to a design company suffers.

Regardless of its utility, it is a game. A popular one, even. So...Make people pay for it. My suggestion is for Arena Net to create an official forum open to be read by everyone, concentrating all comments from the Arena Net team as far as the forum/wiki network is concerned, so players wouldn't have to search through multiple "forums" when trying to learn about the game. The catch is that actually posting on said forums would require a monthly subscription. Arena Net could use the excuse of having to pay the site's staff, but ideally the money thus earned would go mostly to improving the game. The unofficial forums would still exist (even if the Arena Net staff wouldn't post there anymore), the wiki would still exist (although the journals of the staff would be moved to the official forum), everyone would be allowed to read comments, and those who want to make comments would be helping the game, whether they do it on purpose or not. Even users who sign up only to troll would be helping the game, as each day they spent trolling would be one more day they would be paying Arena Net.