Guild Wars 2

Right to the meat and potatoes…

Logic (I know we’re in a fantasy world but that’s no reason to ignore obvious logic issues):

• Burning should end on swimming and those already swimming should be immune to burning.
• Burning should end if chilled. Chilled should end if burned.
• Undead should be immune to poison.
• Ice monsters should be immune to chill. The icebrood included. I mean c’mon, they’re minions of Jormag, the ICE DRAGON. Fire monsters should be immune to fire, earth immune to bleed, air immune to… weakness?

UI:

• No item hotkey box(es). There are items that people want to use in battle. Why are you forcing them to bring up the inventory to find them? This is bad design. The fact that WoW is still kicking every MMO’s kitten in UI customization is sad. It’s been almost a decade and other mmos aren’t coming close to what Blizzard did with lua.
• The achievement window is bad. If I expand my achievements, or anything in the upper right, it should STAY expanded unless I collapse it. Events and other things shouldn’t repeatedly collapse it. Just give us an option, “Auto Show Events and Achievements – Locked/Manual”. Bam, everyone’s happy.
• Target of target. I’d really like to know who that boss is targetting. Is it me? Is it the person next to me? I DON’T KNOW! But here comes a big kitten boulder.
• We need an option to prevent selecting other players in pve. It’s so, so fun to click a champ surrounded by people and even though your mouse was on the champ, you grabbed a player, not the champ. Great, because I have so many uses for selecting players in pve. Take it one step further… disable selecting of FRIENDLY players. Now it’s useful in wvw as well. Just include this in the options menu.
• Fix the BLTC window. Awesomium does have a command that allows you to delete the cache (after doing more reading, the command can’t be used while the webcore is running which I assume doesn’t end until the game ends. I dunno, but you know your kitten is broke, fix it), I’ve never used this in any game I’ve worked on so I’m not an expert. There has to be a way to get it to stop from loading blank pages after seemingly random events. This is your portal to your money maker, why would you leave it this broke?
• Gems purchasing for gold should tell us when it loads how much 100 gems cost right that moment. I’ve got 5.36 for 100, and on the screen to trade gold for gems, I see no indication of that value. Another one of those things where you leave players guessing.
• Friendly players on minimap outside of pvp areas. It’d be nice. It’s just a client thing. You’re not sending any extra info since they’re already in my knownlist.
• Crafting window. Let’s say I want to make a cinnamon pinwheel. I have my pile of cin and sugar but no dough. But I have the ingredients to make dough. Give me that little + symbol indicating that I can just tap that to get myself a ball of dough so I don’t have to scroll through my recipes or type it in the search box and make it that way. Just like you do with discovery window when there aren’t enough count of a certain mat to discover something new.

Cont…

Skills:

• Non-buff/non-heal aoes should have no max target limit. Instead you should have 100% damage at the center of the aoe, tapering off to 25% at the edge (or 50%, or 33%, or whatever % makes it not insane, but no less than 1% at edge). So basically an aoe with a 600 radius with a character standing at 300 in it would take 62.5% of the intended damage 100%-((char_distance_from_center/aoe_radius)x(100-min_edge_damage_percent)). You’re already running a loop to check for valid targets in the area AND you’re running a check to see who is positioned closest to center and affect those only. So you’re not costing much more overhead to run the formula to modify damage % based on distance from center. Performance isn’t an excuse here. Random hit aoes like meteor whatever would need to be modified to work in this, either not taking a damage reduction or getting a damage increase to compensate for lack of consistent hits in the center.
• If a skill or passive has a cooldown, it NEEDS to be listed in the tooltip. This shouldn’t be guess work for players. Mark of blood on dodge roll for example; no cooldown listed. New players are going to guess why it only works sometimes and still won’t understand why the cooldown is longer than the staff skill. Especially after playing a thief and dropping caltrops all the time with no cd. The game shouldn’t make you guess. Everything should be clear on a passive, a skill, etc.
• On that subject, skills like Portal Entre which have a limited duration in which to cast and use them should have visible timers AND range indicators for when they won’t work. The use part is fine, sort of, a little buff shows up. But not for how long until the entry portal poofs. And there’s NO mention that it has a range limit, but it does. Again, clarity in tooltips and skill information. Don’t make players guess.
• Elites are boring, long cooldowns for what feels like little reward. You know it, other players have complained. Get it looked into. Even if all you do is allow elites AND regulars in that slot, it’ll be a vast improvement over having a skill slot which is rarely used and niche utility at best.
• Things like marks (traps?) which override themselves should clearly state in their tooltip “Only one mark/trap/whatever named insert skill name can be active at once by a single player.” Again, little clarity for new players so they’re not going, “what the hell?”

Other:

• Load times are awful; even with a pcie SSD. You’re dynamically loading parts of a map when you could just cache it. I’ve got 16Gb of ram. The game almost never goes north of 2.5gb. It’s LAA enabled and I’m on a 64bit system. Please, give us a launch command parameter that tells the game to cache the entire map, textures, etc. Let it load objects, players, skins dynamically, I’m FINE with that. But I shouldn’t get a load window when I port around in the same map. Max out that available 4Gb you have access to. I can take it. Unfortunately I can’t see which files exactly gw2 is pulling from the dat dynamically to tell you how to do this better. But I know you guys have the tools and can run the game uncompressed. You know what’s being hit all the time as players move about and what you can cache. Right?
• Lack of customization… c’mon, admit it. End game is barbie’s fashion show. Everyone wants to look rad while they’re killing, right? So why limit stuff to town clothes? Who even uses town clothes? I’d love a quaggan hat instead of a boring spiked helm or whatever. Plus, you’d sell more transmuation stones! Win/win situation if I ever saw one.

Gameplay:

• Not a single champ or boss I’ve seen gets rid of debuffs on themselves. Why? How boring.
• Kind of disappointed that vit, toughness, and healing are pretty much useless stats. At least that’s how it feels. I know you’re trying to stay away from the holy trinity. More power to you for that. But they shouldn’t be as useless as they are. Suggestions to fix them? I haven’t researched it enough to offer some knowledgable fix. Just venting.

I know I’ve not played as long as most people suggesting. But a lot of my frustrations with GW2 come from me going, “well why isn’t this working like I thought it would? Oh that’s how it works? Well why the hell didn’t the game/tooltip say so?! Why is it even like that?” In fact, the majority of my dislike comes from those moments where things are just not made clear to players.

While I’m no arenanet or done anything on their scale, I’ve done my work in a few mmos. Some of the things I’ve seen are just lazy. Others, I can’t explain why they are how they are and from what I’ve read, the devs never explain it either.

Forgot…

WvW:

• Limit the ability to rally to something like twice in a 60 second period.
• If a player is dead, don’t send packet info for enemy players to the dead person. They shouldn’t have a tactical advantage by having a dead person laying somewhere reporting on movements. You save bandwidth this way AND a player can’t modify the client/client’s memory space to cheat and see what’s going on.
  Edit: If you do this, you’ll have to refresh the dead player’s knownlist if they get revived. Otherwise anyone within that radius will be invisible to them.