Guild Wars 2

I love Guild Wars 2, and I have to say- this is one of my all time favorite games. That said, no game is perfect, and I’d like to offer a few suggestion which I think might increase the quality of the play experience in the future (though I don’t pretend to be a games designer). Hopefully my suggestions will prove useful.

1. Achievement Armor Sets
I’ve considered buying cosmetic items before, but I never have, because I would feel no sense of ownership over the item, and there wouldn’t really be anything special about it. It would be great, in my opinion, if you added a new tier to certain achievements, which, upon completion, would award players with the rights to purchase a unique set of armor designed specifically for that achievement. Players would have the option of paying for the armor using either gems, or gold.
Example:

• My character has just completed the new final tier of the ‘Indiscriminate Slayer’ title track (let’s say it’s ‘Faunacidal maniac’).
• Since I now have the highest tier of the achievement, I can go to the NPC ‘Bob- Title Armorer’, and choose to purchase the armor set ’Faunatic’s Garb (Required level 80)’ for either 8g, or 875 gems.
• I now own an armor set which I’ve most likely paid for, I feel a sense of ownership over, not just any old yahoo is going to be running around with it. It becomes special, and it can provide additional cash flow for the gem store.

This will also provide players who desire a more directed experience, but lack the time or resources to pursue dungeon sets with a long-term goal.

2. Major World/Meta Events/Major Content Updates
As demonstrated by both the Halloween, and Lost Shores events, there are (at least in my eyes) two major problems with major updates like this:

• Lag makes the game borderline unplayable.
• A glut of players concentrated within small areas wreak havoc upon performance, especially on mid-range to lower end machines. I run a higher-end set up, and the game wouldn’t render the karka until the Wizard’s Fife invasion.
  The large amount of players also detracts from the general experience- obscuring objectives, characters, making it hard to focus on the narrative, and making it so events must occur at an immersion breaking rate.

I completely trust you guys at Anet to fix the server-related performance issues. But there’s something I’d like to suggest as a solution to the second bullet point: reintroduce districts.
Being able to choose between a high-population instance and a low population instance is something which appeals heavily to me, largely because of the reasons I’ve stated above. In general, an ultra-high population detracts from the experience more than adds to it, and giving people the option to choose between population densities helps players tailor the experience to their individual play-styles.

I’ve always preferred low-population maps, because I have a chance to read through all the flavor text in an area, individual boss encounters provide more challenge, and when I meet other players, the interactions are more meaningful and memorable, because I get to play with a group of individuals, as opposed to a hoard of voices, blades, and explosions. Of course at other times, joining a larger mob can sound like an appealing concept.

Having multiple instances of an area on one server will also allow you to fine tune the population distribution during big events, so that large events can reach their full potential.

Another thing I might suggest for events like this, is to lean more heavily on instances.

3. Future Expansions

• Campaign
  One of the only gripes I have with the campaign of GW2 is its pacing. The missions are spread far apart across the map with little transition, and stopping to level my character (even two small levels) can make me feel disconnected from the story when I’m not doing anything closely related to the campaigns events. I believe that if, instead of having full missions close together, but forcing a full stop to the campaign narrative after certain missions (especially painful when you start to get invested in the story), why not increase the use of meta-quests like the Halloween scavenger hunt, which take the player through various parts of the region, encouraging explorers to stay in an area a little longer, and allowing for the writers to develop the narrative more without having to worry about breaking the cinematic or voice-acting budget.
  This could also allow for more effort to be put towards producing fewer, but higher-quality missions.

• Player Characters
  If/When new standalone campaigns are released for GW2, I’d like to see different options for character creation based upon the regions from which they hail (i.e. Elonians of whichever race can be identified as Elonians.) GW1 did a good job of this.

Addding achievment armour sets is a good idea but introducing it for slaying will be far too time consuming for Arenanet too do. They could introduce more content in the time they it could take to introduce achievement sets for all the slaying achievements. Unlocking all jumping puzzles and pvp achievements would be good for achievment armour sets.

If Arenanet had spread the karka out across Lion’s Arch and made an actually invasion instead of us fighting over a small area then the lag would have been less. Districts are nessacary for improving the one time events but the world is already empty enough without introducing disticts.

Arenanet has announced that they will not implent standalone camapigns because they are a terrible idea and result in using more character slots and splitting the playerbase and draning the regions. Personal story needs to stay be instanced otherwise it wouldn’t be your story. Your idea for replacing personal story just makes your complaint worse. Having fewer quests will make you feel even more disconnected to the story.

You’re absolutely right about the achievement armor sets. I was simply using a slayer title track as an example. If they were to introduce armor for the slayer track, I would recommend they introduced it at % of slayer titles maxed.

Truth be told, I wouldn’t really mind if districts were exclusive to world events. I only ever really play at peak hours though, and I find that some maps usually have a higher population density than others.

I absolutely agree that a lot of the personal story needs to maintain a high level of instancing. That said, I think it would pull people out less if after each mission, you were given a task to carry out in the open-world ala the karka investigation, which would incentivise players to explores the current area they’re in without turning it into a check-list, and add to the narrative (Nightfall, for example, did this relatively well, thought there were a few hiccups). But mainly, my complaint is that the narrative takes a hard stop after every mission while you stop to level up.