When Guild Wars arrived last year, it shook up a lot of conventions about the online role-playing game genre. This debut title from ArenaNet proved to be an incredibly fun and engaging online experience, but part of what made Guild Wars stand out was that unlike virtually every other online role-playing game on the market, ArenaNet and publisher NCsoft didn't charge a monthly subscription fee to play the game. Once you purchased Guild Wars, you could play it as much as you wanted, as long as you wanted, without paying any additional fees. Instead, ArenaNet intends to publish completely optional, stand-alone follow-ups to Guild Wars on a regular basis, and these will let fans have the opportunity to explore whole new lands, play with new classes and skills, and experience new types of gameplay. The first of these stand-alone sequels is Guild Wars Factions, and we got the details straight from the folks at ArenaNet as to how Factions will introduce entirely new ways to play the game.