Guild Wars announces winners of the henchmen skill bar contest
by Rubi Bayer 
Oct 2nd 2009 at 9:00AM
Filed under: Fantasy, Guild Wars, Contests, Events, in-game, PvP
As part of the PvP love update that Linsey Murdock mentioned back in August, Guild Wars will be removing heroes from Guild vs. Guild and Heroes' Ascent, replacing them with brand new henchmen. Heroes in these formats were a bit of a problem, as they sometimes put players at a disadvantage if they didn't have access to heroes.These aren't just any henchmen, though. This new group comes straight from the Guild Wars community, courtesy of the henchmen skill bar contest. Players were invited to submit henchmen skill bar suggestions via Dizhou, a temporary NPC placed in the Great Temple of Balthazar until the contest closed on September 10th. ArenaNet chose forty skill bars from these submissions. Each of the lucky winners will receive a henchman named after them (or by them, if they preferred) and an everlasting henchman tonic that temporarily transforms them into their namesake.
Check out the winners in both the Guild vs. Guild and Heroes' Ascent categories, and congratulations to all of you!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
GaaaaaH said on 9:37AM 10-02-2009
I'd prefer that some of them have ANet approval/spellcheck instead of the creators names.
"Eric The Devistator"
"Our Guild Is Leet"
"Rolol Lololol"
"Leet T H E O R Y"
What happens to the builds when the balance cycle affect them though?
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Vulturion said on 11:24AM 10-02-2009
Those aren't the names that will make it into the game, thankfully - those are just the winning players.
They've always said they will negotiate the henchmen names with the winners, and just make up their own ones if the player suggestions till aren't good enough.
Of course the bigger controversy is that the contest rules claimed that the entries had to be original and robust - stressed further by dev posts on the forums - only for the live team to then turn around and pick the least original and least functional entries imaginable.
Seriously; a number of those builds are quite literally copy & pasted from PvX (the Guild Wars build wiki), and almost every black-listed skill (the ones AI sidekicks won't use/can't use right) appears in a winning build.
It's pretty much the biggest triple-whammy of "competition FAIL" imaginable:
* The henchmen implemented will be - on the whole - completely worthless.
* The loyal-est/most enthusiastic players have been slapped in the face, as everyone who spent weeks planning & testing original/AI-appropriate builds lost to copy & pasters and people simply entering their Human builds.
* Anet themselves implemented new 'build capture' technology to take entries and report that they have spent week sifting the 30,000 entries - colossal investment from such a small team when the outcome could have peen achieved spending 15 minutes on PvX.
In perspective of course this is an inconsequential blip at this point in GW1s lifecycle, but it still deserves to go down in the annals of MMO infamy as an example of promotion gone bad.
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Master Saji said on 12:07PM 10-02-2009
Yeah, when I saw the winning builds, I immediately recognized many as builds that have been around for years(some, if not most) and most of them can be found to have counterparts on PvX, but it's PvP, which is dead to me ever since Factions was released, so I could really care less, so now I'll just wait for the PvE henchmen contest! =D
If only...
Ashre said on 12:15PM 10-02-2009
Oh man...they could've just gone to PvXwiki.
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wookie909 said on 3:54AM 10-09-2009
Man, did they actually think about how badly henches tend to spam skills? E-management ftl on many of those wiki builds, tbh.
Biiiig fail, ANet, big.
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