Guild Wars 2

I have a couple ideas (mainly for WvW) that would really help with the ability to plan attacks in either large groups or small groups.

1) Give players the ability to “follow” a commander (in the Twitter sense of the word), and give commanders the ability to issue commands to all players “following” them. This was used rather well in Abyss battles in Aion as the leader of any Alliance (I think it was alliance, could have been something else, I’m not sure) could display a message in the middle of the screen of any player in that alliance. It was very easy to organize attacks if at any moment the leader of the group could issue a command to everyone in said group. At the moment, the only way the commander has any use to anyone in WvW is as a movable indicator on the map which connects the organized Teamspeak/Ventrillo crowd to the unorganized zerg. With this implementation, both the people in TS3/Vent and others could be easily organized with a simple message instead of just hoping they follow the leader. As long as you aren’t following a commander, you will not be bothered with screen messages.

The ability to follow one particular commander will allow the people that intend to stick with him to see which commander on the map is the one that they want to follow. Even though two commanders in one WvW map isn’t a constant occurance, when it happens, it is potentially catastrophic to any organized effort as half of a large group could just run off randomly with the wrong commander.

2) Let party members put permanent waypoints on the map (visible to only their party) instead of the 5-second pings. The pings that are already there are useful, but only if someone is already close to that ping and is looking at their minimap or if they happen to be looking at the area map at the correct time and in the correct place.

Also allow commanders to place these waypoints on the map and display them to their “followers.” There will be no map clutter to those who do not follow commanders.

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I believe that both of these additions will allow the WvW experience to be better organized for every team. While it does and a lot more use to the commander feature, and may stack the fight against teams without commanders, I believe that the 100g price point for the book is worth a little bit more than a fancy little blue arrow.

I believe that these sort of additions would actually make the commander book more useful and not just for decoration.