[Chojin]

It's really not an MMORPG. It's more like Diablo 2, where there was a lobby and you agreed to play a game with a few other people. The difference being, each of these towns acts like a 'lobby.' The tradeoff is that you can't meet people in the wilderness and have them steal your shit, kill you, and take your stuff in exchange for no monthly fees and a lag-free experience. I personally favor the exchange. The only thing you're missing out on is watching people run around and possibly ganking one while they're out doing said run-arounds. Since those situations usually only result in one person having fun, it was a wise move on their part in my opinion.

Okay, here's what you can do when you join a guild:
- Access to guild channel which reaches everyone in your guild with it turned on that is online
- Access to people that will help you with quests/missions (this is really helpful since this game doesn't have a team searching feature like COH)
- If your guild leader spends 2 Plat (2000 Gold), everyone in the guild wears a cape of the leader's choosing
- If your guild wins some important PVP arena event (I forget which), you get a Guild Hall. Guild Halls are locations you travel to by map. In the hall are 4 level 20 NPC Henchmen who can help you on Guild Raids. You never want their help because they don't have any tactics and will be killed in short order. The Guild Hall area actually has two halls on opposite ends of an island, with a dock and small outpost town inbetween. When you do a Guild War, the other Guild starts at the other fort and then you run at each other and hug and pick flowers and watch the sunset together.

Fun shit you can do: The minimap in the upper right lets you draw on it football-commentator style. You can use this to show lost teammates how to navigate a particularly gay area or to coordinate advanced flanking maneuvres. Last night we were on a mission to take an urn from some Charr, but we had all died ridiculous amounts of time and were down to 40% skills, health, and energy, so we were drawing football-style patterns to distract and run past the 20+ kitties guarding this thing. The game definitely encourages creativity and I'll always love it for that.

For the record, though, I find combat in COH to be more interactive and fun. Playing Guild Wars in PVP is way, way more wieldy though as it's easier to figure out what the classes (and combinations thereof, since multiclassing is all but required) are capable of and build a strategy around that. Also, since you are restricted to using 8 pre-chosen skills in combat zones, it streamlines the process and adds more strategy to it. I don't see myself playing it for longer than COH, but this game really is a masterpiece for what it's supposed to be. It hasn't crashed on me once yet and the engine runs flawlessly.