ArenaNet

ArenaNet is a video game developer and subsidiary of NCSOFT, founded in 2000 by Mike O'Brien, Patrick Wyatt and Jeff Strain and located in Bellevue, Washington. They are most notable as developers of the online role-playing game series Guild Wars.

The founders of ArenaNet were former employees of Blizzard Entertainment who played important roles in developing the highly successful video games Warcraft, Warcraft 2, StarCraft, Diablo, Diablo II, and the Battle.net gaming network. They left in February 2000 to form their own company. Their new studio was briefly called Triforge, Inc. before changing its name to ArenaNet. The company was acquired by NCsoft in 2002. On 10 September 2008, NCsoft announced the formation of NCsoft West, headquartered in Seattle, Washington. ArenaNet founders Jeff Strain and Patrick Wyatt left ArenaNet to take roles at NCsoft West in 2008, and ultimately left NCsoft in 2009. The only founder left is Mike O'Brien.

Guild Wars is the first in a series of Guild Wars, a game that merges the Action RPG and the role-playing video game genres into one, with competition in both the player versus player (in random matches, teams, tournaments, or guild battles), and player versus environment (in missions, quests, or area exploration) forms. The developers call this blend a CORPG, short for competitive online role-playing game. Important goals of the game are both to minimize the amount of repetitive actions a player has to perform to become a respectable force in the gaming world (called grind), and also to minimize a player's dependency on game items to stay competitive. These are two goals that set the game apart from most MMORPG's, where one hardcore player will gain major advantages when competing against another more casual gamer simply from having played the game more and found better items. In Guild Wars, the advantages in battle will instead come from how well a player picks and uses the character's 8 skills (from a library of hundreds), an art that is hard to master. The game is different from most MMORPG's in that it did not have any additional recurring fees, but bases revenue on standalone game expansions, or "campaigns" (in addition to microtransactions). This structure was discontinued with Eye of the North, which was a traditional expansion pack that required one of the three standalone campaigns. ArenaNet stated that this was because they felt that this format was restricting their ability to add new game mechanics and balance the overwhelming number of skills introduced with each title, and decided to begin work on Guild Wars 2 to address these issues (with Eye of the North bridging the gap between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2).