Guild Wars 2

This game has a lot of content requiring groups, yet the user interface for forming groups is extremely lacklustre. I’m not talking about LFG here: just the party-forming UI.

Currently the game has four distinct “operations” for parties:

- Invite player
– Join player
– Kick player
– Leave party

UI Problem #0: It seems that the existing party-forming options do not reliably appear in the context menu on player names in chat. This makes chat commands the only reliable means of forming parties. Using chat commands is fine, and required when using gw2lfg &c., but this leads right into…

UI Problem #1: Redundant yet mutually-exclusive commands. There is no difference from the player’s perspective between Invite and Join, yet they are separate commands. Both operations have exactly the same result: the named player gets to accept/decline the result and a party is formed. However, at any given time at most one of these commands can work. Moreover, which command to use may depend on information not available to the person entering them (whether or not the other player is currently in a party). This usually means that I have to just try one command, and if it doesn’t work, try the other.
Suggestion: make /join work regardless of whether or not the named player is currently in a party.

UI Problem #2: No way to merge parties. You’re currently in a group, LF3M. You found another group for the same content, LF2M. Great, we got 5 players! Let’s go! But grouping up at this point is way more difficult than it needs to be, usually a multi-step process along the lines of the following:

- First, you /whisper a member of the other group to ask if they’ve got room for 2.
– Next, you use party chat to inform your current party member of what’s going to happen.
– Next, you /leave your current party.
– Next, you /join the other party.
– Finally, you /invite your previous party member.

With pug groups this can easily go wrong at any step by another member joining the group. If that happens, you need to /leave, group up with your originam member again and go back to LF3M. No fun for anyone involved, because still nobody has a full group.
Suggestion: make /join work even if you are currently in a party, as long as the combined party would be 5 or fewer members. The UI for accepting the request would need to be augmented to show that it will bring in 2 (or more) members at once.

UI Problem #3: No way to split parties. After a run this is sometimes needed if not everyone wants to continue as a group. Currently, the options are to either have everyone /leave and then form a new group from scratch, or to ask others to /leave (or kick them). Neither of these are convenient, especially of any members are afk or not on the ball with the party UI.
Suggestion: add a new command allowing you to invite multiple members of your current party into a new group.

Thanks for reading!

Arenanet did so many things right with this game, but IMO they dropped the ball with the grouping systems. MMO’s that came out 5 years ago have 10x the grouping system that GW2 has.

- Still have to manually invite everyone to a group while in WvW zones. (no right click options)

- Absolutely NO in game way for guilds or more than 5 people to group unless you use a commander pin which basically invites everyone in the zone to join your private events.

To be honest, it’s the worse multiple grouping system I’ve used in the last 4 MMO’s I’ve played. They at least need a way to hide the commander pin AND still retain all the functions of the squad system for guilds and medium sized forces who wish to coordinate privately.

i really like what ahmrill mentioned about retaining the functions of squads, for those who wish to coordinate privately.

Atm everything that relates with grouping is rather poorly implemented.

- kick system – broken. When you need only 2 votes from a total of 5 members, instead of 4, its almost guaranteed griefing.

- no party leader – I like the fact that everyone can invite in the party. I don’t like the fact that everyone can use target, in pugs especially, everyone targets everything. Also the fact that there is no party leader, but there is an instance leader (as in the person who enters first in a dungeon) is quite stupid.

- raid group or some other kind of large group – I get that GW2 doesnt have raids, its all good. But when you, as a developer, come with content that requires a larger then 5 group of people, such as guild bounty and so on, and you don’t give players any option to group up => fail

- inconsistent context menu – Sometimes when i right click a player name i have the option to join or invite or even both. Most of the times tho i dont have neither. Am i missing something?

- wrong error messages – Try to join a player that is not currently in a party and it says that the player name is not found. WTH? First time when i encountered this i actually thought that the player who posted on LFG went offline.

And this are all the things i remember right now, they are plenty more.