Guild Wars 2

Unless you know the name of the food, the search function is useless. Is there a fix coming for this?

Do you have a suggestion of how to fix it?
Cause well, how does one find something one does not know the name of?

The desirable solution for players (though I imagine it’s a huge undertaking for Anet’s programmers) would be to have better, more advanced search options. If you could search by buff (i.e. magic find, vitality, condition duration, etc) finding foods would be far easier. Currently, I try find food with the buffs I want on the wiki, then just search by name.

The food crafting system is definitely well though out in combinations, but in it’s interface, it’s far too simple, so it becomes clunky and not useful. Luckily there are plenty of sites that have broke down various levels of organization making it not too tough to find a food you want. Personally the Wiki has been enough for me as it is organized by buff and level.

I think it could be broken down into a few basic branches, but personally i don’t think that player research is really a bad thing. For food if you are 80, then there really isn’t that many different recipe/food items to look through. but this is just me, i enjoy researching

consumables – lvl 80, have fun looking through stuff for 5 minutes.

The strange thing is that there’s a food subsection under Consumables, but for some reason there’s hardly anything in it.

I usually just filter it by Consumables, level range (e.g. 55-65), blue rarity for single serving and green rarity for group dispensing. Yeah there’s some other stuff in there, but usually a 10 level gap means 2-4 pages of results. Pretty quick to scan down the list and watch tool tips. Even faster if I rank by price.

That’s a work around rather than a solution. But I while the lack of a detailed search is annoying it’s not a big time sync to me.

Look it up online ahead of time:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Food

SandraSolace.7682:

Do you have a suggestion of how to fix it?
Cause well, how does one find something one does not know the name of?

1. Search for “ice cream” in the Consumables section.
You have two options at this point: try to scroll through the countless dyes and other unrelated items that turn up, or try and narrow it down with subcategories.
2. Try and use the Food subcategory.
No results.
3. Try “bowl of ice cream”
Even more unrelated items appear – anything that has the word “bowl” in it. Good luck.

As far as I can tell, the weighting on search is broken. It returns everything that contains the specified words, but it doesn’t seem to assign value to how many of the words in question are matched – meaning that “bowl of soup” and “bowl of ice cream” are considered equally valid results for the search string “ice cream bowl”. Fixing this would be a good start, but ideally I’d like to see something closer to Diablo 3’s Auction House search system in the end.

Consumables needs a few separate subcategories:
1. One for food or anything associated with a food buff
2. One for potions or anything associated with a utility buff
3. One for dyes
4. One for recipes (or this could even go into a major category of its own?)
5. One or two for the remaining things: eg. alcohol, tonics, skins, etc.

This would help in many ways to establish more vibrant, accessible market. I myself would buy & use a wider variety of food & utilities if I didn’t need to use a wiki to identify a level appropriate food for the buff I want nor devise clever search strategies to fish out items I really want from an ocean of items I don’t.

Also there appear to be existing subcategories that don’t serve any function or contain any items. Is there a plan for adding these types of items? Or do these items just not get sold? If they aren’t going to be used for the TP, perhaps they should be removed…

Actually, I think the way to do it would be ’food – subcategories containing the type of buff. eg, food+vitality+precision woudl return all food with those stats.