Guild Wars 2

I am having difficulty understanding a lack of several things.

1. I may be missing something here, and I’m hoping I am, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to have custom chat channels. Actually, custom channels I can do without, I just want a channel where the officers in my guild can discuss things in private.

2. Why the total lack of voice support? Lord of the Ring Online has an adequate, if slightly buggy, in-game system that works for everyone in your party. It makes communication during dungeons and PvP much, much, quicker and easier. Without it we are obliged to download Teamspeak, Mumble and Ventrilo and hope that everyone else has the same programs and that we can use a server… or make do with typing which invariably gets people killed.

3. Target indicators. Again I must refer to LotRO which has a system of about a dozen different icons that can be used to indicate both the roles of party members and the target priority of the enemy. GW2 seems to have a single target indicator.

As an officer in LotRO, you can tell your party “we are going to attack Skull first, Spear second and Crossed Swords third, while Joe, who has the Leaf over his head, kites around the guy with the Bow & Arrows icon.” in voice chat and then type in the /officer channel “if this idiot screws up again, I’m gonna kick him”.

Shouldn’t Guild Wars 2 have better in-guild communication? Since voice chat is usually considered essential to guilds, shouldn’t there also be voice support? Since GW2 is a game with a heavy focus on group PvP, shouldn’t we also have something better than a single target indicator?

@1
I’m with you on this one. I don’t get why there are no custom channels.

@2
Voice support is expensive, I get why they don’t offer it.

@3
GW2 has such a system, at least for WvW.