I am guessing that all or most of the developers and in-house beta testers are right handed, under 30, with excellent reflexes and have good color vision. I say this because GW2 seems to favor high speed continuous button mashing to get things done, has no predefined left hand option, and doesn’t seem to offer any options to change interface colors to help those with less then a full spectrum of visible colors. I have played GW1 thousands of hours and have never had the sore wrists that I have developed in a few hours of GW2 playing. Why? GW1’s click to move. Simple example. Loot collection. Picking up 5 loot piles in GW1 requires 5 mouse clicks. The GW1 character AI runs the toon to each loot pile and automatically puts the loot in inventory. In GW2, it takes many and continuous movement button pressing to do the same thing. And the loot markers in GW2 are far more subtle than those in GW1. Another example, cross country travel. GW1, click on distant objective, character AI runs the toon there, complete with limited obstacle avoidance abilities. This allows the player several seconds of time off the controls. GW2 requires full time input from the player. Skill targeting. GW1 assumes you want to target the critter you are fighting. GW2 brings up a AOE targeting circle, which is generally halfway across the screen. And uses red/green to indicate in or out of range. Red/Green deficiency is the most common type of color blindness. I have to wonder how many folks can’t tell the difference between in range and out of range or friend, foe and NPCs. (Yes, I know about the double press skill button to target AOE on current target, but it is buried in the wiki that wasn’t available at launch so I didn’t find out about it for a while.) I have a friend that pre-purchased GW2 like I did. He has some color blindness and he did several years of SCA fighting, resulting in less than fully functional wrists and shoulders. He quickly became so frustrated with the UI and resulting wrist pain that he gave up and returned to GW1. There is a lot to like about GW2 but I feel like in comparing GW1 to GW2 that I have moved from a mid-2000’s UI(GW1) to a mid-1980’s UI(GW2). My GW2 toon has about the same user friendliness as my Telenguard toon did on the Commodore 64.
Suggestions:
1. Implement click to move as a supplement to the current movement. Keep the current movement methods, but add click to move as a way to move cross country, pick up loot and harvest trees, ores and herbs, and interact with THAT npc.
2. Make the loot markers more pronounced, perhaps using a thick white outline with brighter sparkles.
3. Have an option to have the AOE target circle begin on the currently targeted critter and move the mouse pointer to match. If no critter is targeted, have the AOE start 30 feet in front of the character.
4. Allow options for changing the colors of in game indicators.
5. Allow some type of command to allow players to take a break without having to return to one of the few safe places. The toon would become inert, unable to affect or be affected by the local critters. (May not want to allow in pvp but would be very welcome in pve. )