Guild Wars 2

We play with other people, and communicating with them is obviously the feature this game adds over any single player game. Through communication, we are enabled to share the game. There’s a number of things that could improve the communication, though. I’ve come up with a few, and others I miss from games I’ve played in the past. Consider it brainstorming, and please feel free to add to the list.

• Custom channels: Allows people to form their own little communities separate from guilds, maybe create a LFG channel, allow guilds to streamline communication in high traffic scenarios like mass-wvw, etc. Easy feature, big impact.

• Date in timestamp: The above feature might end up with a few low traffic channels. Knowing whether it was today or last week someone spoke in there can be rather useful.

• Multiple chat windows: I can’t even begin to explain how useful this is. Monitor combat log without clogging the party chat. Keep your guild separate, because you always want to read your guild chat, but need party separate as it contains strategical discussion of the current objective, and thus needs to be clean. You get the point.

• Clipboard and URLs: I can see why this wasn’t implemented, but it’s hampering honest communication. Clickable URLs open the gate to all kinds of spam, but also makes it easier to post a build or interesting, relevant article to my friends in game. Your efforts to keep gold farmers and spammers out should never affect honest communication. Period. And seriously, I’d love to copy things from chat now and then. Without having to type it out myself into a notepad document.

• More right click options: Or make the current ones work better. The options for people should always include invite to party, join party, send mail, add friend, report, block, whisper, invite to guild (if have the permission to do so). I don’t care whether they are in the same map with me, or in WvW. For guild officers, options should also include promotion, demotion, and whatever else they can do with members. Having to sift through the guild pane is suboptimal. Also, include an option to copy the name.

• More information: Once we have multiple windows, we probably want more information. Notwithstanding the fact that some damage never makes it to the combat log (cough phantasms cough), everything around you needs to be logged and viewable, especially during events, in dungeons, etc. This game has a very hectic combat system. One blink and you’re dead because you didn’t dodge. Let’s make it easier to keep an eye on things by putting it in a persistent location.

All of these are great suggestions, and most of them sorely needed. Especially this one:

mkaito.6981:

• Custom channels: Allows people to form their own little communities separate from guilds, maybe create a LFG channel, allow guilds to streamline communication in high traffic scenarios like mass-wvw, etc. Easy feature, big impact.

In addition to this, I’d like to request that guild chat be un-linked from guild representation. There’s no reason to arbitrarily restrict us to chatting with just one of our social groups to the exclusion of all the others. This is by far the biggest thing that’s taken Guild Wars 2 from a 3hr/day to a 2hr/week game for me. I’m forced to choose whether to be able to chat with my friends while playing, or to be able to participate in a large, active guild. Having to make that choice is sufficiently unfun that I usually just don’t bother playing.

Another really simple, obvious thing that should happen is Loot being put on its own chat channel separate from other Game Messages. This way we could actually turn on Game Messages in our main chat tab to see stuff like friends logging on without being spammed with items.

Custom channel! I like this. sometimes It’s difficult to converse other without guild or something. It’d be helpful totally.