Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet, I believe you have created one of the most excellent games currently available for me to enjoy.

As a result of your great achievement, I am personally invested in your continued success—I selfishly wish to keep on enjoying Guild Wars 2.

Here is some feedback and advice in the interest of making your game the most enjoyable product possible in a way that I believe is realistic with your current limitations.

In the following post, I have focused on what I believe to be the most cost and time effective ways for you to improve Guild Wars 2 and expand your market.

1. Truly Immersive Combat

Guild Wars 2 has great combat. The only problem is that a lot of players treat it like a normal MMO. This can be fixed by improving the control options as follows. This is heavily inspired by the immersive combat mod.

While this will take a fair amount of work on your end, it is the easiest way for you to expand your market, and is highly marketable as a new feature. Some of the improvements that come with this feature enhance the game even for players who choose not to use it.

Patch Notes:
-New “Action Mode” made available. Left click will activate your 1 ability, right click will activate dodge, and mouse turning will always be activated outside of menus.

-Dialogue menu scan now be navigated with the keyboard. 1 will select the first option, 2 will select the second option, etc.

-New option: “Target Location Ground Targeting”. When enabled, ground targeted abilities will automatically be cast at the location of their target. Abilities that are not meant to be targeted at an enemies exact location, such as line of warding, will still need to be manually targeted. Self-cast key-bind added to target spells at players location instead.

-New icons added for each tier of gathering material so that players will no longer need to hover over the mini-map. Alternatively, the name being displayed without hover is a simpler, less elegant fix.

With these few tweaks beyond what the immersive combat mode currently offers, Guild Wars 2 could offer a new and unique way to experience the game, with no bugs, glitches, or any situations where it seems tacked on.

2. Expanding the selection of Armors and Weapons in a way that is efficient for your art team

Part I: Making Existing Items more Available

a) This suggestion will make some players a little bit unhappy, but the net reward is worth it. All Hall of Monument reward items should be available for players to buy at a significant gem cost. This will significantly increase the amount of armor and weapons available to most players without adding any work for your art team.

b) I might suggest making order armors available to players from all orders, but this is already the case with transmutation stones.

c) Consider making more re-skins of existing items in different colors, effects, etc. This will be the quickest way for your content creation teams to add more variation in available weapons because it forgoes the creation of a model and can move right on to a quick recolor or retexture.

Part 2: Fractal Legendaries

Summary: New, legendary version of each Fractal weapon added to the game. Recipe is a bit cheaper than existing Legendaries. Can be completed with any fractal weapon as a precursor, not the specific one you are going for. This removes some of the RNG from achieving the fractal weapon you want—as long as you also put the legendary-farming work into it.

These will undoubtedly be considered less prestigious than the current legendary weapons, and that’s absolutely fine. The goal here is to solve the problem of RNG fractal weapons without giving them away easily, and to help your art team with some incredibly efficient content creation.

a) Many players love a particular fractal weapon almost enough to make it a legendary to them, not least in terms of time invested. Take advantage of this situation to, in a time-efficient fashion, add a new legendary weapon for every single weapon slot with minimal effort.

b) New recipes for Legendary versions of existing Fractal weapons. These recipes will be slightly cheaper than existing legendaries, but will still include some of the easier aspects, such as map completion and world v world badges. The recipe can also include a single fractal weapon, but not necessarily the one being created. This allows players to combat RNG to get the fractal weapon they want, without giving them away.

c) Add a set of footsteps, or whatever other affects you see fit. Improve the existing white line effect from the base fractal model. This single set of effects, glows, whatever you decide to add—can be used for every single fractal legendary. This gives your art team the ability to add almost 20 legendaries to the game for the price of one.

3. Simple new Features and Fixes

Once a game is released, MMO creators seem to have a problem of seeing the trees for the forest. You focus on specific details of the game, like SPvP, dungeons, WvW, without remembering that small tweaks to the overarching game itself still offer a huge benefit to the user in terms of your investment. Some small tweaks that I believe have been overlooked are:

New Options:

Sound:

-Toggle added for Player Call Outs (Enabled or Disabled). Players can now choose whether or not they wish to hear their character’s voice during normal gameplay.

-Max sound setting will no longer cause a crash during large group events.

-Size of most hammers should be increased by at least 20%. I don’t know if your art team had a debate about realism vs giant weapons, but it seems like the realism team won for hammers, and lost for every other weapon. This makes most hammers look silly when compared to greatswords. Considering that most hammer animations are slow and weighty, as if swinging something huge with a lot of weight to it, this makes little sense.

-Improve your “Best Texture Filtering” option to give actual anisotropic filtering options, to a maximum of 16X AF, which looks much better than what you currently have in game.

Thanks for reading!

Out of sheer curiosity, what makes you think these improvements would be quick and cost effective?

To the post:

2) Expanding Art

I disagree with allowing HoM skins to be made available to everyone. These were a nod to the GW1 players who played quite a bit and supported the company beforehand.

With the re-skinning and re-colouring, GW allowed us to dye our weapons. Maybe a similar system for non-named weapons (Foefire’s Essence, for example) would allow more customisation than just adding a bunch of other models, and also less ‘clutter’ in-game.

I personally come up with a suggestion where people could create skins out of different parts and small effects.

3) Others

I agree on the hammers, for the most part.

TheDaiBish.9735:

Out of sheer curiosity, what makes you think these improvements would be quick and cost effective?

To the post:

2) Expanding Art

I disagree with allowing HoM skins to be made available to everyone. These were a nod to the GW1 players who played quite a bit and supported the company beforehand.

With the re-skinning and re-colouring, GW allowed us to dye our weapons. Maybe a similar system for non-named weapons (Foefire’s Essence, for example) would allow more customisation than just adding a bunch of other models, and also less ‘clutter’ in-game.

I personally come up with a suggestion where people could create skins out of different parts and small effects.

3) Others

I agree on the hammers, for the most part.

Giving away HOM rewards will undoubtedly make the players who have them a little upset. But in my opinion, this game has too few skins for any of them to be withheld. That being said, the best solution is to simply create more and new skins. However, if ArenaNet is unable to do this, this is a stop-gap solution.

Again, the difference would be a hefty gem cost for people who did not get them from Guild Wars 1. I personally think that is a fair enough reward, along with the fact that GW1 players had them while leveling their first characters and when the game was new, before nice skins could be acquired.

Again, this is a spot for debate. It is just a matter of opinion and its up to Anet to decide if kitten off some people is worth adding new skins and making more profit from the gem store.

I actually have a long thread on dying weapons here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/197gnu/a_realistic_proposal_for_dying_weapons/

If for some reason, regular dying is actually doable and not cost-prohibitive, I think it would be the best solution. This is meant to be more of an easy compromise.

I’d also like to add:

1) When you log in to the forums, it should put you on the page you were at when you were forced to log in.

2) Ranger pet names should save. It really just feels cheap that it doesn’t. Make it save client side or something.