Guild Wars 2

After a couple of months of crafting my way to a Commander title specifically for guild events, I find it completely lacks functionality in PvE. If it is meant to be a WvW facility, then it should only be sold by vendors in the WvW area and not in the big cities. Currently the only things it offers is squad chat, which guild chat can easily cover, and some map markers that only I can use. I really have no need of /squadinfo to see what supplies squad members have.

But as I have bought it, and find it useless, let me give you my expectations for PvE.

• It really ought be easier to join a squad. I would like to be able to invite people in from the guild roster, and they ought to be able to join in the same way. It would also be nice if entire parties could join the squad with one click.
• It would be nice to see where the squad members are. Little yellow dots for those not in your immediate party, which are normally shown as blue. Everyone in the squad needs this. Otherwise we may as well play in map, not form a squad, and just hope we can find each other.
• Squad members need to be able to ping areas and mark areas on the map seen by squad, same as in a party. It doesn’t help for someone in the squad to say “rich vein here”, “bounty boss here”, “event here”, without being able to ping us where “here” actually is.

I understand that WvW players probably want to keep Commander exactly as it is in WvW. I think functionality can toggle for WvW and PvE. My armor changes when I’m in the Heart of the Mists, my helmet and weapons change when I’m underwater, so surely Commander functions can change for WvW and PvE.

I think our entire guild was expecting an extended party system for Squad.

We’ve had another run, and my problems with Commander in PvE remain the same.

I agree with what the main post is saying here. The improvements listed would certainly be very useful as the only real PvE function for someone in the squad is (as mentioned); squad chat.

Squads should make it easier for large groups of people to organise themselves and communicate with each other, but the only person able to do this is the commander, and that’s only by using the squad markers. The commander can’t be everywhere at once, and if someone else in the squad (not in the commander’s party) has a location to share they have to link the closest waypoint, which is easily done in any other chat so there is no point to do this in squad chat .

I can appreciate that only the commander has special privileges, they’ve earned them, but perhaps the commander could assign different ranks to members that they trust (or leaders of other parties in the squad) to give them access to the functions too. Players with these commander-assigned ranks could be shown on the squad members’ mini maps in a different colour, if not everyone else in the squad.

I too am frustrated at the lack of effective and flexible grouping system for over 5+ players. The commander and squad system gets an extremely poor rating as a multiple grouping system compared to most MMO’s that have come out in the last 5 years.

Ease of grouping with players and guild members is part of the social aspect of a game. It’s kind of Ironic how difficult it is to effectively group with your guild in “guild” wars 2. It feels like the commander and squad system is still in early beta testing…. it needs a major facelift.

The 15 minute widnow, hard to find and hard to kill bosses completely make this task impossible for guilds that don’t have 15 members to preliminarily scout out the areas.

Tier 1 bounties are doable with GREAT effort and enough luck to get the easier to kill bosses, but anyhting higher and any guild that once had the ability to do elite dungeons in GW1. now it’s plain impossible. Now all ANet has done is done a huge promotion to faceless guilds for completing weekly challanges and stuff.

Now not that I’m saying faceless guilds should be done away with, I understand that some people don’t really want to associate in this kind of way, but this has done such a huge disservice to small comunity and “groups of friends” guilds.

the commander icon in general lacks functionality. you get a “squad” (read: mass of people) that nobody uses because it’s just bad. it isn’t even a party… i don’t even know how to describe what it is… people can join but you don’t know they’ve joined and there’s no party UI. and you get an ability to see supply. how handy.