Guild Wars 2

Here’s a quick list of changes that I think would really improve the game (in no particular order):

A real LFG feature: I don’t even know how the current feature works… is it proximity based? There’s also no customization for it so you have no idea what type of group the people that are even using the feature are looking for. Using chat is insufficient because you quickly become locked out for “spamming.” Something along the lines of checking off dungeons you want, your profession, and then an area for a descriptor to describe paths you want to run, your “role/spec”, etc. would be a huge improvement.

A character inspect feature: I remember one time specifically near the end of a CoF run where I felt we were going slow that a ranger started linking all the exotics he was wearing. Lo and behold, he was wearing all magic find. Inspecting allows you to screen members and make sure they’re up to snuff, especially since everything can be skinned…

Armor sets and Trait saving: Both of these changes would allow for better switching between situations without having to use the slow and clunky processes that are already in place. Of course, you still have to be out of combat to change armor and you still have to pay at a trainer to retrain skills, but this small change would be nice.

An option to list items as text: How many times have you equipped the wrong item or searched way too long for the proper item because they all have the same icon. Sure, sorting your bags out helps, but as you unequip and reequip items they become all jumbled again. An option where you can view all your items as a list of text would make life a lot easier.
Reward skill, not only time: The whole reason I began to dislike WoW was the fact that they began rewarding time put in rather than skill. Dailies and tokens became the new means by which you would get gear. HOWEVER, the best gear was still only obtainable by actually doing the current content. GW2, on the other hand, only has the grinding option. There is no unique gear that you can get from displaying skill. Legendaries are the worst offenders; having one doesn’t prove that you’re good, it only serves to prove that you went through a mindless grind. Maybe there are plans for more difficult content that utilizes unique drops rather than just token grinding explorables that even the worst players can get through. I’m all for having the option of grinding for gear, but I’m against grinding being the only option/grinding giving you the best stuff.

Incentives for crafting skills: Maybe it’s because they didn’t anticipate how the economy would shape up, but having a crafting skill up to max provides almost nothing for you. The “crafting fee” that you earn when making something and then putting it up on the TP is almost nothing. That and there’s no way to trade items safely, the option to offer up your services for a fee is also not really an option. Maybe add a trading system? As it is right now, the only incentive I personally have for leveling a crafting skill is to help supplement leveling a character with extra experience.

Revamp the TP: There are a ton of bugs as well as poor interface/sorting options that make the TP one of the worst market systems I’ve seen in a game. The “Only Show Available” filter doesn’t quite work after you sort by price (or any of the other sorting options most likely), you can’t sort by specific armor types (I’m sure this bugs a lot of people), constantly being unable to see the details of an item and not being able to buy until the game is reset, refresh button doesn’t work, can’t inspect items, forced to pickup all items and money instead of choosing what you want to pick up (sometimes I want to pick some stuff up on two characters, this forces me to take the extra step of using my bank which is often full), the list goes on. The TP is terrible.

Consistent/clear wording of tooltips: A lot of tooltips are unclear. For instance, take the 25 point trait in strength and arms trees for warriors. Stick and Move only says that you gain a damage increase if your endurance isn’t full. Attack of Opportunity specifies a 10% damage increase to bleeding targets. Why does one specify the actual increase while the other doesn’t? Not having clear tooltips makes comparing traits and builds extremely difficult. These are just two examples, there’s plenty of vague wording in plenty of other tooltips.

Incentivize winning in sPvP: Let’s face it, sPvP is just a bunch of people running around from point to point, trying to get points by capping a new objective and killing as many people as possible. Everyone piles up onto the first objective even though it doesn’t cap faster if there’s more people on the point. Strategically, only one should cap the point and the rest should go off to contest another point. So then why do people do this? Because it’s a free 10 glory. What does winning get you? Something like 30 glory. Defending a point to your death 1v4 but putting up a good fight? 0 glory. The best way to get glory is to kill as many people as possible and swap around the ownership of objectives as much as possible. Often times the losing team makes out with much more glory than the winning team.

More hotfixes: As it is right now, patches only roll around once a week. However, there are MANY bugs still in the game and a lot are pretty game breaking at times. Rather than lump all the fixes onto one day of the week, release them when they’re done. This has been done on a few occasions, but I feel that they need to loosen up their requirements for what deserves a hotfix and what deserves to be released on path day.

Sorry for the lack of organization. The list was really just a stream of consciousness, typing up whatever I remembered as I went along. I’m sure there’s more things that I’ll think up of later.

EDIT:
Another change I remembered:

Remove free server transfers: WvWvW is only going to become worse and worse as more people transfer to the servers where they’ll autowin. Jade Quarry is pretty much untouchable right now. It’s only going to become more and more skewed as time goes by. Sure, sometime down the road, other servers might begin to emerge as a dominant force. But the longer transfers are up, the stronger the dominant servers will become while other servers will be left in the dust. Maybe implementing a account-based transfer time limit for new accounts is the way to go, since the whole reason they have open transfers is because new players will often join a server and then find out their friends are on another server. Give new players 15 days or whatever to find their friends, make everyone else pay gems.

Titles in Wvw. Agree with inspecting gear.

Mario.6309:

As it is right now, patches only roll around once a week. However, there are MANY bugs still in the game and a lot are pretty game breaking at times. Rather than lump all the fixes onto one day of the week, release them when they’re done. This has been done on a few occasions, but I feel that they need to loosen up their requirements for what deserves a hotfix and what deserves to be released on path day.

A developer that has many kinks to work out, as you say, can only do so much in a short amount of time. Once a week is spectacular in my eyes.

Just sayin’…
Lalabu

wont being able to inspect lead to “your not good enough to play on my team?” i dont agree with that. it makes a new person feel like they are not good enough because they havent got the best stuff. its already hard enough to find a group without having them wanting to make sure you have what they want before you can play with them.

SoulTrain.2157:

wont being able to inspect lead to “your not good enough to play on my team?” i dont agree with that. it makes a new person feel like they are not good enough because they havent got the best stuff. its already hard enough to find a group without having them wanting to make sure you have what they want before you can play with them.

Sure it can be abused, but it can also be used for proper screening. I would personally only use it to find people that are using magic find, blue/green gear, etc. Rare gear isn’t that difficult to acquire, and there should be some unspoken prerequisites before jumping into explorables that are supposedly “endgame.” I had the same issue when I was thinking about implementing damage meters. It’s a good tool in judging both your own damage and the damage that others are doing, but there’s a lot of other factors such as boons, healing, tanking, and overall utility that a member can be contributing to a group. This could lead to kicking of members simply because they’re not doing “enough damage.” In the end, any of these screening/monitoring tools are double-edged, but I still would like them implemented as I feel they would do more good than harm.

Didn’t read what you wrote wall of text. But More content yayyyy. <—- really needs to happen.

I’ll just comment on a few things:

1. LFG – I would agree that it needs work, sorta like a status message that says what exactly you’re looking for. However, I think people are getting used to the spam /m method, and while sometimes it is a bit annoying, it’s a good thing that there’s really only 2 places to look for a group: LA and the map of your dungeon.

2. Char inspect – no, many times no. This will be similar to the gear score (or whatever it’s called) in many mmo like wow or dcuo, where the barrier to entry in dungeons are based on the gear you have. It also encourage elitism in dungeon groups. I’m glad in my server from my experience there’s little to no discrimination based on class/level, but adding this will really give it another layer to discriminate people.

3. Reward skill, not time – What exactly do you mean by skill, or rather, how does one effectively define what skill is? Imo, getting dungeon armor is the best way to display skill as even the easiest ones you’ll have to know how to time your dodges etc to be successful. But that’s where the problem or disparity lies in imo, some people are too good (pros, veterans, what have you) that they feel the dungeons pose no real challenge to them, where there are people on the other side of the spectrum who feel dungeons are too hard. Also, when you said best stuff, I assume you meant “best-looking”, as the “best stuff” you can easily get while spending <15g on TP.

4. Tooltip thing – Yes, for me it is also annoying not knowing how much exactly is added. Sometimes, they are quite clear (gain 90 toughness holding a shield), but sometimes, I think they are intentionally obscure to prevent players from min-maxing and focus more on the mechanics and interaction of the traits themselves. Kinda silly if you ask me though.

5. crafting – I agree I was surprised that crafting provided little economic benefit to me. However, when you realize how easy (relatively) it is to craft from 1-400, the barrier to entry is not much, and everyone and their grandmother can be crafting things. Imo, the only real reason to craft is so you can change your items automatically to crafted stuff (without the trouble of selling and bidding for a low offer on tp), and legendaries. Oh, and they were fun for the first 50-100 levels or so.

penatbater.4710:

I’ll just comment on a few things:

1. LFG – I would agree that it needs work, sorta like a status message that says what exactly you’re looking for. However, I think people are getting used to the spam /m method, and while sometimes it is a bit annoying, it’s a good thing that there’s really only 2 places to look for a group: LA and the map of your dungeon.

2. Char inspect – no, many times no. This will be similar to the gear score (or whatever it’s called) in many mmo like wow or dcuo, where the barrier to entry in dungeons are based on the gear you have. It also encourage elitism in dungeon groups. I’m glad in my server from my experience there’s little to no discrimination based on class/level, but adding this will really give it another layer to discriminate people.

3. Reward skill, not time – What exactly do you mean by skill, or rather, how does one effectively define what skill is? Imo, getting dungeon armor is the best way to display skill as even the easiest ones you’ll have to know how to time your dodges etc to be successful. But that’s where the problem or disparity lies in imo, some people are too good (pros, veterans, what have you) that they feel the dungeons pose no real challenge to them, where there are people on the other side of the spectrum who feel dungeons are too hard. Also, when you said best stuff, I assume you meant “best-looking”, as the “best stuff” you can easily get while spending <15g on TP.

4. Tooltip thing – Yes, for me it is also annoying not knowing how much exactly is added. Sometimes, they are quite clear (gain 90 toughness holding a shield), but sometimes, I think they are intentionally obscure to prevent players from min-maxing and focus more on the mechanics and interaction of the traits themselves. Kinda silly if you ask me though.

5. crafting – I agree I was surprised that crafting provided little economic benefit to me. However, when you realize how easy (relatively) it is to craft from 1-400, the barrier to entry is not much, and everyone and their grandmother can be crafting things. Imo, the only real reason to craft is so you can change your items automatically to crafted stuff (without the trouble of selling and bidding for a low offer on tp), and legendaries. Oh, and they were fun for the first 50-100 levels or so.

2) Inspecting: Yeah I was kind of on the fence on this one, but the problem lies in the players using it incorrectly. Either that or remove magic find because it’s pretty annoying not knowing which member isn’t pulling their weight because they’re being extremely greedy. Another thought is to at least require a certain level of gear (i.e. level 80 greens) to even enter an explorable version of a dungeon so you don’t have someone rolling in with . I believe WoW did something similar to that. I dunno, the solution in this is pretty tricky.

3) Rewards: The dungeon armor is a grind. And the dungeons themselves aren’t all that challenging (IMO). Let’s be honest here, some really bad players are running around in full dungeon sets. I guess the real problem is the fact that there isn’t a real “endgame.” Taking WoW as an example: there’s the dungeon, the max level of it, and then the heroic version of it; and then there’s raids, hardmodes, etc. (It’s been awhile since I’ve played, not sure if that’s all accurate. But my point is, the endgame feels like heroic dungeon grinding than ANYONE can do. And yes, dungeon difficulty is subjective, but I think it’s pretty clear that there isn’t any content in PvE that remotely challenges a veteran player.

Add to the list gear customization.

Guild Wars 1 had the ability to change insiginas as well as runes, and perfect salvage kits so you only had to collect a gear piece once, not 6 times.

darn it, idk how to quote :| anyways

“And yes, dungeon difficulty is subjective, but I think it’s pretty clear that there isn’t any content in PvE that remotely challenges a veteran player.”

I guess that’s the problem then. They did say they’re catering to more casual players than hardcore, so it’s not really surprising. I’m half-surprised/half-not-surprised that people have gotten legendary weapons in <2 months since release o.o I guess alot of people really needed that carrot o.o

penatbater.4710:

darn it, idk how to quote :| anyways

“And yes, dungeon difficulty is subjective, but I think it’s pretty clear that there isn’t any content in PvE that remotely challenges a veteran player.”

I guess that’s the problem then. They did say they’re catering to more casual players than hardcore, so it’s not really surprising. I’m half-surprised/half-not-surprised that people have gotten legendary weapons in <2 months since release o.o I guess alot of people really needed that carrot o.o

Really? They said they were trying to cater more to casuals? I haven’t seen any quotes firsthand, but I keep seeing people throwing around quotes from Anet saying that explorable dungeons are “endgame” and require “organized groups” etc. etc. Not sure if those quotes are legit though…

they’re all pretty solid, though the item thing is a pain.

The game was designed for casuals they beat around saying that but essentially yes. Ironicly the only friends i have that still play the game are the types that log on 2 times a week max. Everyone else i know has long since quit within about a month (got to 80 got bored went to play something else). Some are just waiting for spvp tournys to get real and pvp not be a joke littered with imbalance and broken traits etc.

Dungeons are a grind. i’m glad they made a reason to not just find the easiest path and grind it like mad, but its still lacking any real sense of accomplishment. Sadly a lot of people tie this to the lack of rare boss drops and player roles in a group.

But yea they designed the game so any combination of players could jump into a dungeon, you dont have to waste time grouping to take down …well anything at all outside a dungeon. I explored every thing the game had to offer and excluding dungeons never had to talk to another player. This is great for a casual who doesnt have time to make friends, organize groups, or stay up to pace with guild activity. Your not locked out of anything…cap gear is easy to get so no worrys of falling behind or not having adequete gear to do something (unless a lot of time is invested). As you can see it has endless advantages for casual players. Hardcore players tend to burn through everything and find themselves grinding stuff they dont enjoy for cosmetic gear that doesnt prove anything. Thus they feel unsatisfied…bored..and quit.

Is this a problem or just the design of the game? perhaps that demographic is not a wanted customer and the type like my few friends who log on a few times a week were the target customers. I dunno tbh. I’m just going off my own personal experience. I played this to get in on the e-sport scene. Right now it has no real ranked play and is imbalanced and buggy. Thus i quit to go back to games like TF2 or LoL etc… i just check in occasionally to see if spvp is improved now.

Char inspect is no problem whatsoever in GW2, because everyone runs in exotics anyway. You don’t need better gear, because everyone has gear of the max strenght. I instantly bought my exotics when I hit 80, with the money I aquired during leveling.

The only people who are now afraid are the magic find users, cuz if char inspect comes they will no longer get carried by people with normal stats.

The skill not time thing is really a problem. The whole anti grind thing was great when they said it, but the whole game is a grindfest. I’d rather the dungeons be really hard then give you stuff for beating them rather than pug/faceroll get tokens and repeat. And legendaries lol, the most un-legendary way to get them. I want a challenge that rewards skill not just x hours equals x rewards.

A real LFG feature: It’s just so impersonal and I always hated it in mmos. Ppl just end up being jerks most of the time.
A character inspect feature: Everyone would be running around with the same builds. And any1 who wants to play differently will be ridiculed and kicked.
Armor sets and Trait saving: Agree
Reward skill, not only time: One of the main points of Anet’s design was to remove this. It just creates elitism. The playerbase would be segregated.
Incentives for crafting skills: The exotics are great and I’ve made a fortune from selling stuff.
Revamp the TP: No idea where this can possibly be coming from…aside from maybe the sorting. It’s the best market I’ve seen in a game. The scale of it is incredible and it works on an economic level…it’s brilliant.
Consistent/clear wording of tooltips: Some could be clearly, aye.
More hotfixes: Like, they do hotfixes all the time. This is just entitlement gone crazy frankly. They’re doing an incredible job with hotfixes.
Remove free server transfers: Agreed

nice point squirrel about the skill. Although to be honest, I have no idea what “skill” exactly is, and how different is that from “learning the game”, especially with regards to dungeons.

OP was talking about difficult content tiers to some extent. To show skill.
Atm they feel GW2 is all grind, no skill.
They mention wow…….so I will too. Wow is just a different grind, and a frankly dishonest one in my view. I’d much rather chase after something cosmetic than some item that’s supposed to show my level of skill. That is just an illusion tbh. And sadly wow still does it very well.
It’s just funny how the OP equates skill to gear. It’s a sadly prevalent idea.
The idea of fun doesn’t even enter into any their OP. It’s all grinding out gear…sigh.

Squirrelbane.2510:

A real LFG feature: It’s just so impersonal and I always hated it in mmos. Ppl just end up being jerks most of the time.
A character inspect feature: Everyone would be running around with the same builds. And any1 who wants to play differently will be ridiculed and kicked.
Armor sets and Trait saving: Agree
Reward skill, not only time: One of the main points of Anet’s design was to remove this. It just creates elitism. The playerbase would be segregated.
Incentives for crafting skills: The exotics are great and I’ve made a fortune from selling stuff.
Revamp the TP: No idea where this can possibly be coming from…aside from maybe the sorting. It’s the best market I’ve seen in a game. The scale of it is incredible and it works on an economic level…it’s brilliant.
Consistent/clear wording of tooltips: Some could be clearly, aye.
More hotfixes: Like, they do hotfixes all the time. This is just entitlement gone crazy frankly. They’re doing an incredible job with hotfixes.
Remove free server transfers: Agreed

Pugging is pretty impersonal regardless, this would just speed up the process. Or else just run with your guild or w/e.

I never mentioned inspecting trait builds, I just want some sort of way to inspect gear. I mention the possible implementation of a system that requires at least level 80 greens (or rares or whatever) before entering an explorable. I just don’t want to be carrying deadweight that hasn’t put any effort in gearing before going into higher content. And then there’s magic find users… it’s honestly a tricky problem.

I wouldn’t call it elitism… but if everyone can easily acquire the best gear, the sense of accomplishment kind of diminishes in my opinion. I personally play MMOs to set myself apart from others, because to some degree I feel its a competition to differentiate yourself from the other players; to stand out from the crowd.

The actual difference in profits between selling raw materials vs. selling a made product isn’t that high. As an example, you may think you’re earning 2g off the armor you just crafted, but the mats themselves would sell for 1.8g, so you only made 20s. There’s SOME incentive, but I think there could be more.

For the market, the economy itself isn’t what I’m complaining about. I’m talking about the bugs and interfacing. Sorting options are pretty bad for the most part. Seems like we’re on the same page but you don’t realize it haha.

I’m not demanding that they speed up fixing the game. I’m just asking that they don’t withhold all their fixes until the next patch day. I know and appreciate all the work they’re putting into fixing the game, don’t get me wrong.

To cap it off, all my suggestions don’t imply that any of these issues are HUGE or game breaking. The inspect feature isn’t a must, it’s just a minor annoyance to have deadweight; having no other incentives for crafting isn’t that big of a deal, I just personally think that there could be more to it; etc. etc.

Squirrelbane.2510:

OP was talking about difficult content tiers to some extent. To show skill.
Atm they feel GW2 is all grind, no skill.
They mention wow…….so I will too. Wow is just a different grind, and a frankly dishonest one in my view. I’d much rather chase after something cosmetic than some item that’s supposed to show my level of skill. That is just an illusion tbh. And sadly wow still does it very well.
It’s just funny how the OP equates skill to gear. It’s a sadly prevalent idea.
The idea of fun doesn’t even enter into any their OP. It’s all grinding out gear…sigh.

To be honest, the gear is secondary for me. In the end, I just want to be challenged and it’s what I find to be fun. The PvE content is on the easy side as it stands. Being able to differentiate myself with gear is just kind of a nice bonus. I don’t equate gear to skill, especially in this game. However, gear CAN equate to skill in some instances. Hate to bring WoW back up again, but back in vanilla when nobody had epics, I had a full epic set and the legendary hammer. Sure, there was plenty of TIME put in, but it was also proof that our guild had the SKILL and coordination to complete the raids. Hope I don’t come off as trying to be an elitist. My motivation lies in being challenged and being rewarded for it, not in me showing that I’m better than someone else at the game.

It all boils down to the fact that the endgame content isn’t challenging enough to me. I dunno, I guess this is why I just PvP now haha

Sorry to burst your bubble, but having a full set of epics in vanilla wasn’t a very hard task. There was literally no skill involved when it came to 40 man raids. There hardest mechanics were decurses and knock backs for crying out loud, and everyone had addons that did half their button mashing for them. How many people were afk or not would determine whether or not you downed a boss in vanilla, so lets stop pretending. And if you truly had the hand of rag like you claim it’s because your guild decided you could, and tossed you the ingots. That wasn’t based on any skill on your part.

Now! As far as your OP:

LFG – I agree that the LFG tool could be looked at. I would like to be able to check off which dungeons / modes I am interested in so all can see. However, I do not want a system that throws me together with random people and ports us to the dungeon.

Inspecting – Nothing good comes from character inspects. Nothing and your reasoning as to why it’s desired is the perfect example really as to why it should never be allowed. It promotes elitism. It creates cookie cutter builds, and allows jerks to ridicule others.
If you are interested in ‘screening’ your group mates, then play with guildies.

Builds – Agreed. We should be able to save our builds.

“I thought we were going slow so I found me a scapegoat.”

It’s a Ranger. Even if he’s in full MF gear he still has Power and Precision or Condition Damage. Which is to say his raw DPS should have been fine. Unless he was primarily tanking or supporting or dying all the time this is one example where MF gear should not actually detract from someone’s contribution.

Then again, seeing the amount of Dungeon Bosses that can one-shot the unwary or inattentive, dying a lot might have been just him being stupid. Which no inspect feature will warn you from.

An inspect feature does however seem very efficient at uncovering elitist kittens.

Snow White.9680:

Sorry to burst your bubble, but having a full set of epics in vanilla wasn’t a very hard task. There was literally no skill involved when it came to 40 man raids. There hardest mechanics were decurses and knock backs for crying out loud, and everyone had addons that did half their button mashing for them. How many people were afk or not would determine whether or not you downed a boss in vanilla, so lets stop pretending. And if you truly had the hand of rag like you claim it’s because your guild decided you could, and tossed you the ingots. That wasn’t based on any skill on your part.

Now! As far as your OP:

LFG – I agree that the LFG tool could be looked at. I would like to be able to check off which dungeons / modes I am interested in so all can see. However, I do not want a system that throws me together with random people and ports us to the dungeon.

Inspecting – Nothing good comes from character inspects. Nothing and your reasoning as to why it’s desired is the perfect example really as to why it should never be allowed. It promotes elitism. It creates cookie cutter builds, and allows jerks to ridicule others.
If you are interested in ‘screening’ your group mates, then play with guildies.

Builds – Agreed. We should be able to save our builds.

Try getting server first Cthulu orTwin Emps with ANYONE afk. I’ll be the first to admit that the overall mechanics in vanilla were easier mechanically, I also raided past that content, but it was still a collective effort that not many guilds could accomplish. Everyone had to do their jobs. I never claimed individual skill, it was a collective effort which makes using WoW somewhat of a tricky analogy when illustrating my thoughts on “rewarding skill.”

I guess my point is that the PvE in GW2 doesn’t feel like a collective effort. You aren’t required to have a fully coordinated team, utilize combo fields, dodge all the attacks, use group abilities are certain moment. Sure, they’ll help an explorable run go smoother, but it’s never required in order to complete a boss or event. Most of the time, you can muscle your way through an encounter if it comes to that and corpse run. I prefer hitting a wall and needing to work on an encounter rather than rolling through it on my first attempt. I’ve begun to think this may never happen, but I can hope.

As this thread has been replied to, my thoughts on an inspect system have changed. I knew that it was a tricky subject because I knew of all the bad that could come from it that you’re all posting. My focus is more on making sure people are even at a bare minimum before entering a dungeon. I’m not asking for full exotics or even full rares. That’s where elitist kicks in, requiring people that are overgeared for the dungeon so you can have a smooth and easy ride. That’s not what I’m looking for, I’m just looking for someone who won’t get one-shot by a stray bullet and doesn’t hit like a wet noodle.

I’ve sort of given up on the magic find dilemma. I believe another post mentions that you still get power precision with magic find and the only problem is defenses. Partially true. Comparing a rare mf chest to berserker, there’s a 25 point difference in power between them. As well as not getting the crit damage. The stats are more in line with something like knight gear, but that toughness is replaced by mf. That compounds as you begin to replace more and more pieces with mf gear. And then there’s running mf runes or gems instead of something more beneficial. Point is, anyone running mf isn’t running at full potential by default. But once I abandon the idea of an inspect feature, this can’t really be stopped.

I understand that a lot of the ideas are somewhat controversial in that they have the potential of bringing both good and bad with them. The whole reason I even brought up these ideas is for discussion. I don’t simply think my ideas are right, I’m open to discussing any criticisms you may have.