Guild Wars 2

My suggestion: adress all issues listed below and bring GW2s interface from ancient MMO history to todays standards

Existing elements that need improvement

• Positioning of enemy health bar (should be beneath center screen)
• lack of conditions/boons on nameplates
• no option for highlighting buffs/debuffs on oneself
• no option for highlighting buffs/debuffs on others
• no option for highlighting availability of cooldown skills
• no option for increasing visibility of combo fields
• no colorblind option (10% of all males are red-green colorblind, hence red and green are bad choices for highlighting stuff)
• no option for highlighting low health/endurance
• no option for custom audio clues (for example a loud sound if one is blinded). The commenting audio clues are unreliable, they don’t always happen and your voice depens on your race rather than on if its you or an ally. Hence it being more confusing than helpful sometimes)

Information that isn’t displayed at all

• no option for displaying type of combo field
• internal cooldowns (for example cooldown of http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rune_of_the_Grove 4-set-bonus)
• no displaying cooldowns of the secondary weapon set
• no displaying cooldowns from underwater skills
• no changing underwater slot skills without diving
• no display of chain attacks in the hero menu
• incorrect display of condition length (some modifiers aren’t applied in the tooltip for example http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Master_of_Terror
• incomplete combat log (healing for example is missing)
• insufficient time stamps in combat log
• no cast bars
• no analysis tools for damage/healing (very important for minmaxing your character and improving in PvE)
• complete lack of customization options. Customization of any parts of the game greatly increase customer loyalty through the phenomenon of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_customization
• no display of locked skills due to transformation
• no display of normal weapon sets while wielding an item
• many tooltips are incomplete or plain wrong. For example condition duration is almost always displayed wrong. It is very important for decision making to know how a skill/trait work and what it does exactly. “Improving your damage for every boon on you” is like “Haha… dumb player! Go find this kitten out yourself, we don’t give a kitten about other games properly explaining themselves. We are more elite and yesterdayish than that!”
• expected queue time for tPvP
• different nameplates for minions and players (note illusions should have player color, phantasms shouldn’t)

missing UI elements

• macros. As a developer you can not decide if a player uses macros but rather how accessible macros are. With todays hardware and several programs it is quite possible to create macros for any software. Since hardware macros are programmed onto the device itself they are basically undetectable. Hence your choice to not support macros is rather… interesting. In addition the whole social aspect of macros goes missing (taunts/chat lines/…)
• Interface Addons. Addons are important for mass customization, improve and strenghten your community and enables you to be lazy with UI developement yourself. Think World of Warcraft which still has a worse standard UI than what AddOns provide. WoW is basically unplayable without AddOns (Guild Wars 2 plays worse due to the lack of AddOns than it could as well)
• dungeon finder (its a standard feature for MMOs and GW2 needs it, never done a dungeon because I can’t be arsed to search for a group. Searching for groups oneself should belong to ancient MMO history…)
• queueing for 8vs8 and 5vs5 outsite the Heart of the Mists
• no general/system that helps solo players in WvWvW to join up and do something useful (many players don’t like to commit to groups/join voice channels, for those players WvWvW is just terrible)
• incorrect display of cast times. While skills actually cast as long as stated there is a hidden pause after each skill. Best example is plague blast of underwater Death Shroud
• confusing display of damage that is dealt throughout several hits. 5×250 reads 5 times 250 and not 5 attacks that sum up to 250 damage
• no hint to defense values. Is 2600 defense high or low?! (I know it but the paper doll didn’t help at all…)
• aciton bars for consumables. I don’t want to search for my consumables in my UI, ancient MMO history yet again…
• No Default Chat Channel. Channel defaults to the last channel typed in.
• Alt/Mouseclick spams whatever you’re clicking into your default chat channel.

Inventory

• no option for salvaging all white items
• no option for salvaging items beneath a certain quality
• no option to salvage all items of an armor type
• no equipment manager. I use different items for solo PvE, group PvE and WvW and swaping between them is a pain in the kitten /li>

PvP bank

• could have more tabs instead of one huge scrolldown-window
• needs filters to remove unuseable items from being displayed

• Stuff that would ascend the UI from AAA to legendary
• Allow sharing and joining of external VOIP servers through the chat. I always wanted to just send other players my Teamspeak Server adress through the chat. Please DO NOT implement your own VOIP, its a lot smarter to allow players easier access to existing infrastructure than adding a new one
• Allow sharing from sPvP build, including equipment, sigils, runes, traits, slot skills and so on through the chat
• Implement a possibility to invite players to watching what is happening on your games screen. For easier discussion of strategy, builds and so on
• Implement an automated system that picks up lonewolves in WvWvW and PvE that organizes them to become able to do group content. (For example all lonwolves get the suggestion by the game itself to capture a supply depot, which will add extra rewards if they succeed, while opposing servers lonwolves will be suggested to defend said point)

to be continued

I wholeheartedly agree, esp. with the bit about macros. I use them via my Logitech keyboard, which has a limited number of banks.

This message was brought to you by a Kitten with a Keyboard

Please add:

- No Default Chat Channel. Channel defaults to the last channel typed in.
- Alt/Mouseclick spams whatever you’re clicking into your default chat channel.

There’s quite a few things that I am against.

For example, minmaxing characters and UI addons. Minmaxing causes there to be “builds”, and I am pretty sure not having those is one of the big parts of GW2.

UI addons bring elitism in guilds and dungeons. You’ll be told to get this and that add-on. And a lot of those add-ons trivialize parts of the content, which is bad.

Striving for perfection that is completely aided by machinery isn’t really what this game needs.

Olba.5376:

There’s quite a few things that I am against.

For example, minmaxing characters and UI addons. Minmaxing causes there to be “builds”, and I am pretty sure not having those is one of the big parts of GW2.

UI addons bring elitism in guilds and dungeons. You’ll be told to get this and that add-on. And a lot of those add-ons trivialize parts of the content, which is bad.

Striving for perfection that is completely aided by machinery isn’t really what this game needs.

Ye shall not use a calculator for all machinery is evil.
I agree to disagree. It improves involvment with the game and people do that anyway but its a lot more cumbersome than it has to be.
Btw there are already builds in the game.

Fiesbert.9816:

Ye shall not use a calculator for all machinery is evil.
I agree to disagree. It improves involvment with the game and people do that anyway but its a lot more cumbersome than it has to be.
Btw there are already builds in the game.

Calculators are mostly useless anyway.

The thing is, with UI additions and options to check for DPS, you run at a risk of alienating quite a bit of people. I don’t play WoW, so I am not quite familiar with how they work, but the picture I got is that there’s ridiculous competition for DPS going on there and that Blizzard “had to” change certain things because of a widespread UI addon.

As for builds, there are builds, but they’re all voluntary. Since there’s no way to know the DPS, you cannot alienate someone because they prefer using a weapon or armorset that is less than optimally efficient. In fact, I was originally not going to buy GW2 at all out of fear of being alienated from group content due to preference for certain weapon combinations that might not necessarily be “optimal”.

Olba.5376:

Fiesbert.9816:

Ye shall not use a calculator for all machinery is evil.
I agree to disagree. It improves involvment with the game and people do that anyway but its a lot more cumbersome than it has to be.
Btw there are already builds in the game.

Calculators are mostly useless anyway.

The thing is, with UI additions and options to check for DPS, you run at a risk of alienating quite a bit of people. I don’t play WoW, so I am not quite familiar with how they work, but the picture I got is that there’s ridiculous competition for DPS going on there and that Blizzard “had to” change certain things because of a widespread UI addon.

As for builds, there are builds, but they’re all voluntary. Since there’s no way to know the DPS, you cannot alienate someone because they prefer using a weapon or armorset that is less than optimally efficient. In fact, I was originally not going to buy GW2 at all out of fear of being alienated from group content due to preference for certain weapon combinations that might not necessarily be “optimal”.

So from your second hand experience we are suppose to go back itno caves hutning mammoth?

Ill update this thread tomorrow

Holymoly batman. This thread got updated!

A ‘Sell at next vender’ tag for non ‘Junk items’.
-Tag an item to sell, it gets sold when you hit the sell junk button.
Some way to see the change in effect from new equipment.
-What will changing from +14 vitality to +20 toughness do to my attributes?
Only one chat area?
Target of my target?
Collections tabs dont remember if they are closed and open every time.
Fast cast ground targeting turns off the casting circle.

Might be minor things, hope they are relevant.

Well said, good points, hope someone reads them.

^^^ THESE are ALL the problems I have with GW2. Thank you OP.

This thread needs way more attention

Fiesbert.9816:

So from your second hand experience we are suppose to go back itno caves hutning mammoth?

Ill update this thread tomorrow

I just think that it’s part of the game that there needs to be room for error. As long as you can fix it, that is. Took Diablo II literally years to add in a respec option. Before that, if you happened to screw up your character, you had to remake it. And you were capped at 8 characters per account. And boy, were there ways to screw up: you might have spent stats that were unnecessary, or you might have leveled skills that later on are lackluster. And the results were equally horrific: You might end up not being able to wear your armor, or you might end up not being able to equip your weapon. Or you might end up with a set of skills that leaves you dealing weak damage. Combine all those and you have a very high potential for a situation where your character ends up being literally waste of space.

If you ask me, running around with optimized traits and gear should be something you achieve on your own, not something some programmer somewhere achieved for you.

As an example, I’ve spent time considering different combinations of Runes and traits to get “ideal” situations for Might, Bleed and Fury. I do think that the time I spent on studying those mechanics is something that has value. And yes, I do think that I “deserve” to have better results than John down the street who did not do the same process.

My point? If you want optimized stats, do it yourself. Some programmer somewhere does it, so obviously you can do it too.

I do have to agree on one point though: The stats are a big vague. However, I do not agree on holding hands in that. We already got the game telling us when a different piece of gear has equal, superior or inferior stats to the one we have equipped. We do not need it to count all the other stuff for us. For example, since armor = defense + toughness, just because your armor has less toughness does not mean that it produces less armor, such as going from Rare Knight’s armor to Exotic Soldier’s armor.

Similarly, some skills are have unusual tooltips, such as all Bleeds. Bleeds only tick per second, so the difference between a 10s and a 10.5s bleed is none at all. The tooltip does not reflect this.

A range indicator below the targeted enemy that tells us the exact range of said enemy would be welcome too. I realize that there’s red indicator below each power but it’s not very helpful.

I wish there was no UI at all.

Not sure if I am just dumb and can’t find it, but there doesn’t seem to be ANY customizability of the UI…

I kinda expected moving from the first gw to the next to have similar degree of UI customizability. Now I have a huge screen and tiny itty little bitty windows. Even resizing of items is very limited, placement flexibility is non-existant.

Would be really nice to have something of what gw1 has.

So, last time I tried I still had a problem moving the map. I mean it can be put in the top right hand corner just fine…

but when you use auto-loot to pick up items it displays the list of items you pick up permanently above the map – even when tis in the top right hand corner.

Once I hit 80 it was more about maxing my inventory then dumping it all be it bank or forge (or w/e), but when leveling a lower level character it sure would be nice to notice if I picked up something I could use, checking my inventory after every battle when I may not even pick something up is rather silly.

Not that I have to play with the map in the top corner… just would be nice to actually be able to customize the part of the game that we’re supposed to be allowed to customize.

Greatly disagree with some things.

DPS meters…class balance is bad enough as it is, don’t need more reason for Necros to be denied parties.

Dungeon Finders that automatically group people are the downfall of every single game they are implemented in. They are designed so the lowest common denominator that has no interest in communicating with people can find a group. So then dungeons have to be dumbed down enough to cater to this individual, and then it all becomes nothing but a stupid faceroll. Then gear costs have to skyrocket because everyone can do the dungeon on auto-pilot, so they need to extend that artificial treadmill. And then the game is ruined besides for the diehard fanboys and the ultra casuals.

Yea, aggregating 100k or 1M people into a single list is bound to be useless.

But we still need some UI customizability! GW1 had so much of it GW2 feels like a different franchise. Is anything planned in this direction? Anyone has any links regarding this GUI?