After playing this game since launch and searching through the forums for a week now, many people including me seem to have the same issues with this game. These issues include:
1. PvP content is lacking.
2. PvP mechanics are lacking.
3. Ascended gear is a boring grind treadmill.
4. No sense of community.
5. The diminishing returns on loot in this game is too much.
How to fix them
1) Clearly, there are a lot of ways to improve this so I think it is kind of pointless for me to describe it. Just look at GW1.
2) It feels like I’m at an arcade spamming buttons right now. Some ways to improve the mechanics easily is to :
- add more skill slots or skills
- completely revamp the combo system, the effects are very minimal for people to bother with it right now.
- allow classes to wield more weapons, it creates more variety of builds.
3) Personally, I wouldn’t have added an extra tier of gear just because it is GW philosophy to not grind to compete; however, it is kinda late to take it back. Most people have a problem with the ascended gear because earning those daily/monthly achievements do not coincide with what they usually do in-game. This makes a difference because many feel the need to farm them but they cannot play the game they want to such as PvE as opposed to PvP.
Ways to fix this:
- Add a variety of ways to earn the daily/monthly achievement such as have a list of to-do lists and the player has to complete only 5 out of X amount of activities.
- Have a PvP daily/monthly that also gives laurels BUT the laurels goes ONLY to the achievement earned first. For an example, if I completed the PvE daily, I cannot get laurel from the PvP daily for that day. If I completed the PvP daily, I cannot get laurel from the PvE daily for that day.
4) The GW2 world feels very segregated atm because many maps are empty. I feel that Anet has been slowly noticing this issue thus that is why that added loot at lower levels that matches your level recently. However, there is another easily implementable feature that can help this issue.
Add a global chat for the server. If it cannot hold that many people, have separate global chat channels. There are so many benefits with global chat. It creates a sense of community especially for the lower levels who have no choice but to solo level. Also, for an example if Jormag is up, someone can call it and everyone will flock to the area.
5) Diminishing returns is there to prevent farming in one area too long which prevents botting. To efficiently farm, we can’t farm in one area too long; however, why is there a cost to travel to waypoints…? The price to travel from WP to WP should be removed. You want us to explore the GW2 world yet we get ‘punished’ for exploring new areas to farm. By removing this travel fee, more players have an incentive to explore. This travel fee does not have much of a purpose anyways. It is a money sink; however, there is already a bigger money sink out there which is the TP. Also, adding a global chat will also help this cause since people will generally tell others on global which event chains are up and running. This will get people to move from area to area.