Guild Wars 2

Hello ArenaNet. I’m sure your community managers are very busy, but I hope someone at ArenaNet takes a few minutes to read my post. I have followed Guild Wars since 2004 and I love everything about the game. From someone who only wishes the best for your company and its future, here are my suggestions.

Forum viewers, do not bash me for my views please.

Alliances

As of right now, the guild system is flawed. You lose a sense of belonging by having the ability to join many guilds. Being able to quickly switch between guilds creates the notion that it doesn’t matter who is in your guild or who you represent.

Instead, an Alliance system should be implemented (a la Guild Wars). Guild representation would be restricted to alliance scope, so that you can only represent guilds if they are your allies. This creates a much bigger sense of belonging and brings exciting development opportunies when creating future PvP features.

Rethink your skill/trait system

I love the idea and concept behind your skill system, but the implementation feels flawed. As a Guardian, I feel like some skills aren’t viable enough to ever be used, even in situations they make sense in.

For example, why should I ever use “Hold the Line!”? It grants protection to my allies for only four seconds, mitigates -33% of incoming spike damage… and the cooldown is 35 seconds. On the flipside, “Ray of Judgment” applies a blind to foes and heals allies… Why not apply a longer blind and remove the heals? Because of this, many skills feel flawed. They are either too viable or too impotent.

This is a big mistake. Although you are working towards the goal of requiring multiple roles at once, this restricts players into one play-style and doesn’t allow build diversity to grow, which is what made Guild Wars so beautiful. We should be able to be potent healers, DPSers, and tankers if we chose to, but be unable to survive by only playing one role. This allows theorycrafting to improve, players to evolve, and build diversity to flourish.

This means your skills need to mean more and do more. Simpler is better. I need to know exactly what my character can do when I take out my mace. I need to know that my Healing Breeze will matter. I need to know that speccing into a certain trait will improve certain things. This will allow myself, and other players, to see weapons, skills and traits logically rather than abstractively. We will no longer see weapons for the skills they possess, but instead see weapons for the properties they represent.

Simplify your game design

As a developer I believe simpler is better. Make it obvious to your customers what your product does. There are many aspects of Guild Wars which, although vast and elegantly designed, seem over complicated (except for crafting, which IMO has been implemented beautifully).

For example, it is hard for a player to pinpoint their flaws because there is no simple representation of what is happening on your screen. Although it is there, it is not understandable. Players want to understand why mobs can one hit them, or why certain conditions take so much life. Players want to know what they can do to be more viable or hit harder. Although the means are there, the simplicity is not.

Putting your item quality system into perspective, players have blue, green, yellow, orange, and red items to keep into consideration. What was wrong with blue, purple, gold and green? Just by eliminating a tier of quality, it all becomes much clearer: blues are extremely common, purples are rarer and are good items, gold items are extremely rare and powerful, and green items are legendary items. This system brings joy to players because items mean more.

Currently, there are eleven conditions in your game: this is simply too much. Take for instance chilled and crippled , conditions that apply the same effect (both reduce movement speed). Why not instead create “slowed”, and give skill recharge reduction to another condition, to make it more apparent what it does?

The more you simplify your game, the easier it is to develop and amplify Guild Wars 2’s scope.

Story needs to have a purpose

I am terribly sorry for whomever I will offend with this next point.

I adore the world of Tyria, realized by your talented and unmatched art team. The lore to Tyria is so rich; it gets me excited thinking about the future. Please, then, explain to me why the writing is so abysmal? (only story, not world writing)

Why did you split the story line into so many branches? This increases the chances of a forgettable story and hollow characters. There are so many characters in Guild Wars that all had distinct personalities: Vizier Khilbron, Confessor Dorian, Prince Rurik, Jalis Ironhammer, Glint.

None of the characters in Guild Wars 2 are nearly as memorable. Eir is so hollow that it enfuriates me. Zojja is annoying, there is nothing enigmatic about Caithe and Logan is a complete whiner. How could this have been allowed? What happened to the themes of family and honor? Of war and fear? What happened to ever present doom and enigma that clouds the uncertain future of Tyria?

Because of this design, the cinematics also suffered: an art backdrop was introduced to help streamline the process of creating a heavy story. This was by far the biggest disappointment. So many possibilities for improvement were thrown away when it was decided to use an art backdrop instead of the environment.

The solution: stick to one story from now on, and make it darn good. I don’t care about fifty stories. I rather watch the same great movie fifty times than watch fifty bad ones.

Miscellaneous

• Bring back chests so we can look forward to rare drops from mobs, like keys

• Introduce an option to remove combat music (but not meta event music)

• Change the ugly floating combat text font and remove italics. Make it obvious what is happening: add colors like in Guild Wars

• Implement target of target

• Add borders around items in inventory so we can see their quality

• Develop Black Lion Trading Company as a native feature, so we can preview armor

• Remove the Home Instance completely

• Introduce Guild Halls

• Create content all over the world: make your game, truly end game

• Explain how creatures agro and how we can control a creature

• Many more things I cannot list

I know all of these suggestions present big challenges, but I think that at this stage it is possible. Don’t be afraid to take risks and change things that have already been implemented. Previous MMO games have became giants because of their risks. Guild Wars was no exception. Guild Wars 2 has the potential to be one of the greatest gaming experiences of all time.

I have many more suggestions but of course, I’m just an average joe. That said, even with all of its flaws, I absolutely love Guild Wars 2 and I look forward to its future! Thank you for all of your hard work!

I think the current guild setup is great. I would rather have guilds set there own rules for being in other guilds.

I can see a few of your points bu some of them just seem like whining for whining sake. Reduce the amount of item tiers? Really? How it that a big deal? What is wrong with the current combat font?

I agree on alliances and the fact some skills need to be seriously buffed/redone but that is about it

I’m not sure how that qualifies as whining… Suggesting that the combat font be clearer and provide more information sounds like a valid point to me.

Id just ignore people like that, if you cant respect my input as input and refer to them as whining, I don’t see a reason to reply to you, just ask a moderator to remove his message.

But back to your topic, there are random chests in the norn area which dont require keys to open.

Would be nice if they had something like treasure chests like in nightfalls.

As far as guild housing goes, they’re already looking into that I believe, and targeting…. really could use more help, its too easy to lose a target and calling a target means you have to manually click on the target instead of ctrl + clicking the icon like the old guildwars.

You’re right about the characters though but the Destiny’s Edge voices were done way better than the other in game characters.

Towards the enkittenpt hearing the same womans voice in her annoying accent in 3 people, Captain Jayne, Merry and Priestest of grenth, I mean Caithe and Eir are the same people but youd ever guess.

Its like they ran out of funding for voice actors towards the end, and traeherne was memorable but only for the wrong reasons.

Tybalt on the other hand was good a change, as a player of guildwars Ive always resented the charr for what they did to Ascalon, however tybalt got me over my charrist views and saw that not all charr are bad, sure most are still but some are nice and like fruits.

He will always be remembered.

Rizzy, thanks for your input.

I’m actually really looking forward to Guild Halls and improvements to the combat system. The potential is really limitless. I hope ArenaNet takes criticism well (and doesn’t hate me for bashing on the story)

Story:

The story really is horrible. It seems the people writing it put no effort in to making complex characters. Everyone is disposable and posturing.

Tybalt is the only character that I think anyone remembers fondly and it is largely because he doesn’t act like a cutout character. But even he is fairly bland in comparison to other media, it’s just a testament to how bad most characterisation is in GW2 that he is held up as the sole example of quality.

Guilds:

I disagree with you about guilds. I have a guild and I feel very connected to it. My problem is in the opposite direction- the additional guilds are so hard to actually coordinate that they may as well not exist.

Why allow additional guilds if you cannot actually communicate unless everyone represents that guild at the same time- somethinkittenossible without communication. Really everyone should have 1 major guild and then other guilds should be akin to chat channels. Instead we have a broken system that is no good to anyone.

For example, I started a Dungeon guild to coordinate cross-server dungeon runs as a bandade to the broken LFG system. But it doesn’t work, no one is representing- nor should they as they have their own guilds to chat to and work with. If 15 people from different guilds cannot form an effective subguild together then what is the point of additional guilds other then a poor quality additional friends list?

I can see where you are coming from. But I don’t agree.

I mean, GW1 was really really really corny. The dialogue, the drama, the voice acting, the buggy cinemas. It was a mess.

You had to look past it and pretend really hard that it was not so…. generic. Not the story (that was great) but the execution of the story.

Maybe you placed GW2 too high on a pedestal, and it didn’t live up to expectations? Hence the whining for whining’s sake.

I don’t think Chaz was insulting you. I think he was just pointing out that is looks like nit-picking (which I do about the horrible clipping issues).

I find the personal story really involving. I know the characters, even if no one else does. I met them, and it makes sense that only I know them. Some of the animation is as choppy as GW1 (the White Stag storyline for the Sylvari, as you just stand there for no reason while the enemy runs away…. wtf?)

But it’s just little things. I hate Logan. But I must admit, he was ‘real’ and not as one dimensional as I would have pegged him.

Opinions differ, so not meaning to knock anyone else’s. And I can relate somewhat. But maybe hearing another perspective will shift a view?

(PS: Fix the clipping) lol