Guild Wars 2

Disclaimer: These are my personal opinions, but I have heard them echo throughout the game community. For the sake of saving time, I’m going to give a list of changes that I would like to see. I have extensive WvW experience and I really want it to succeed, but the basic exploits and problems in WvW were never fixed and I really hope they are addressed so WvW can be taken more seriously in the Guild Wars 2 community.

1. Grouping. The inability to kick an offline player from a group is a large annoyance and I cannot believe this was not fixed months ago. It would be amazing if there was a toggle to put yourself in a group with your guildmates when you entered WvW.

2. Commanders. The squad abilities are basic. Every commander icon looks the same. I suggest that the icons be changeable by the commander to different colors or even a guild symbol. Commanders should be able to quickly tell if they have any mesmers with them (or any specified class). Commanders should be able to cancel upgrades on a keep or tower once an hour (and have it refund the person that bought it). I also think they should be able to draw waypoints on the map for everyone to see. Commander chat would be nice too.

2a. Commander book costs 100g. It should be expensive, but 100g is an archaic requirement when there are so many other currencies/influence. Eventually, there will need to be a limited amount of commanders in WvW.

3. Multiple exploits to jump into towers and keeps still exist. Please fix them. Also, mesmers dying in doors. I really would like the ability to right click on someone and report for exploiting with a screenshot and type a nice paragraph explaining it instead of emailing it to exploits@arena.net outside the game.

4. Achievable achievements. Achievements like: take three towers in 30 minutes, or take a fully upgraded keep, or push 100 people off a cliff are fun, but achievements that take years to complete are not fun in the short term. The lack of titles is also disturbing.

5. Prices and purchasing. Karma is used for yellow gear, badges are used for exotics, but the most highly used commodity (gold) is used for upgrading every tower, supply camp, keep, and stonemist. Badges and gold are also used for buying siege, but as far as the metagame goes right now- most siege that large guilds use comes from farming jumping puzzles (mesmers + everyone’s alts run through). Karma and badges should be able to be used for upgrading towers and keeps. You should be able to open a resource pool on a tower/keep so people can pool their resources and buy an upgrade and if there isn’t enough donated in 5 minutes, then it should be refunded.

6. Gear. There is no variety of gear to be purchased at a WvW merchant as well as sigils and runes. WvW requires gear from outside WvW and it’s a shame that WvW doesn’t have every type of gearset (not to mention, ascended backpieces). Sigils and runes and certain types of gear would be nice to purchase. Why not have a RNG system to get random sigils or runes from badges/karma?

7. Siege mechanics. Guild Wars 2 is a fast paced game, but if you are unlucky enough to be assigned to a trebuchet then you might get bored at a very fast pace . Personally, I would like the ability to make trebuchet’s autocast so I can type easier and treb at the same time. Akitten checks would be necessary, so maybe autocast would only work for 10 casts or something.

8. Newbies. WvW is incredibly complex, and there is no tutorial and no direction for newbies. I would like to see a toggleable auto-join so new people can automatically join up with others so they can help each other out. A newbie chat channel would also be great. Underleveled characters also have a severe disadvantage and are absolutely destroyed by lvl 80’s with exotics without much chance- and this discourages them from playing WvW until they get exotics. I suggest having the first three deaths per day in WvW to be penalty free to encourage daily play in WvW.

9. Chat. No ability to create custom chat channels makes it extremely hard to communicate between WvW maps and between alliances. It would also be nice to see what guild the commander is representing if you hover your mouse over their name in chat, or a guild tag next to their name in chat.

10. Queuing. The queue system is very basic and archaic. I really wish portals to WvW were in every city and not just Lion’s Arch. I wish I could queue for all battlegrounds at once and I wikitten told me how long it is probably going to take. Also, a toggle to autojoin if I queue would be great (and a stronger akitten kick to go with it).

11. Jumping puzzle farming is the best way to get badges and siege- not killing enemies, taking towers, or defending keeps. This should be changed if the badge currency is going to be used for anything else in the new updates. Please award badges (maybe a chest?) for taking a keep/tower.

Those are my top 11, but I have many other qualms with the WvW system such as the mechanics of white swords preventing a waypoint to be used, siege placements in starter zones in citadel is still in the game, and dolyak escorting does not give an ounce of reward to anyone but is still necessary for winning. Also, many consumable items should not be able to be used in WvW, *cough * skale poison hylek *cough *.

I like all of these suggestions.

I’d add for prices, loot bags are fine as is if they give us tokens in a different way. Make badges a currency much like Karma. I’m tired of missing out on badges after getting killed, or simply focusing more on objectives than my own personal gain.

It would be nice to have badges as a currency instead of having to make so much room for badges.

I updated this thread with a few edits. At this moment in the metagame it is not these broken or old mechanics that is holding the WvW game back, but now it is the lack of incentive for servers to win.

Without rewards for winning a match, the incentive to win has dwindled to almost nothing. I cannot stress how important it is to reward the teams of players that have put everything into their server for the win. It is getting hard to even find guilds that care about their server winning now. Every Titan Alliance guild is gone because there was no server progression or award for winning matches.

I would also like to add that the upgrade system for all towers, keeps, and camps is wholly irrelevant because the same upgrade path is taken everytime and it should have been automized for release.

Upgrade path -> walls, doors, waypoint, walls.
Camp -> increase supply, escort, whatever.