ArenaNet, LLC is an American 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. History The founders of ArenaNet were former employees of Blizzard Entertainment who played important roles in developing the video games Warcraft, Warcraft 2, StarCraft, Diablo, Diablo II, and the Battle.net gaming network. They left Blizzard 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 September 10, 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. In October 2019, the remaining founder, Mike O'Brien, announced his departure and founding of a new studio called ManaWorks. Titles Guild Wars Guild Wars: Prophecies Guild Wars, retroactively called Guild Wars: Prophecies, is the first in the Guild Wars series. It is an action role-playing game, 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 "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 massively online role-playing games (MMORPGs), 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 MMORPGs 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.