Guild Wars 2

I’m a serial altoholic across all MMOs I play. I like testing a few different classes and character choices, and of course, usually doing up a matrix to cover as many options as possible!

For GW2 I’ve penciled a table that shows my professions, races, attitudes, and crafting path. I also love being able to supply the best crafted gear to any of my characters through my alts, so expanding their recipe bases is very important and enjoyable to me.

So I’m wondering what would be reasonable and excellent features GW2 could accommodate for us altoholics?

For example, I’d like it to be easier for me to outfit and gear-plan my characters based on what my alts can currently make, and without logging out and in across each character and compiling all the info (often in hand-writing). A way to review the recipe lists of my alts, perhaps?
Conversely, when I’m on a crafting blitz with one character, I’d love to have a way to compare the things I can make with what my alts have in that slot. That way I know I can prioritise those items, craft them, and put them aside, and then spend the rest of my mats knowing I’ve already taken care of my alts.

What would be your favourite feature to add to help you play and manage your characters?
I’ve posted the summary so far (7/1/13) on the suggestions forum here. Please drop by and click the +1 button or add more ideas!

{There’s a possible hitch to requests like these: Does helping players depend less on other crafting players negatively impact on the market, or are altoholics inherently supporting the market more than what they don’t buy in finished products?}

A summary so far…

Features:
- View the hero page of any alt
- View the craftable recipes page of any alt
- View the inventory (including bag types) of alts
- Optional toggle to bring up the “currently equipped” tooltip for alts that can equip items that are moused over.
- Be able to easily share account-bound items and currencies across alts, including town clothes, minipets, weapons, armour, tonics, etc. Make this possible without visiting the bank for “swap overs”.
- Be able to view (but not transact with) the bank from anywhere
- Making dyes account wide, or having the means to upgrade a dye to account-wide
- Allowing your alts to appear in your player housing instance, and interacting with their info, skills, and inventory there
- Ability to remove soulbinding from items, or upgrade items to account-wide
- Ability to access the Karma of alts (a high trade rate maybe?)
- Account-bound Gear with stats that scale with level, possibly rewarded from personal story

Improvements:
- Better incentives to play in any area for equal or higher level characters, attracting players back to all areas of the world
- Wider variety of stat combinations (likely through special runes from holiday events, etc?)
- Make Personal Stories more unique than they are, keep them unique and relevant from 1-80.
- Add more unique “factions” per race, and keep these relevant from 1-80
- Add more uniqueness to dynamic events across areas and level-strata
- Add more standard cultural armors for level <80 so each race can keep wearing culturally appropriate level all the way up
- Allow cross-cultural wearing of cultural armours (I’m sure any tailor worth their salt can remeasure and custom make their culture’s clothes for whoever turns up! Extra fee perhaps?)
- Turn tokens into currency that doesn’t take up bank space
- Streamline the character select screen for reviewing your characters easier (option for all on one screen, etc)

What’s new or great already for GW2:
- Making every area replayable regardless of level.
- No limits on number of crafting professions per character, with no waste of progress
- Biography and motivation choices

I give this a day or so more before making a suggestion forum post.

I would love to be able to see:

Equipped gear
Inventory
Stats
Traits
Skills
Crafting

On any of my characters, no matter what character Im on without the need to relog, similarly to how the awesome Altoholic addon in wow worked.

Also, more bank space And a wardrobe like function to share town clothes across all my characters without it taking up bank space. Also, a way to see the collectibles tab and bank (but of course not withdraw/deposit) from anywhere in the world.

Basically i’d like to see they added a drop-down menu in hero and inventory panels that would allow us to choose a character and see their stuff.

Actually, I think Anet has done a nice job for us altoholics.

They’ve made every area playable no matter how high your level. I haven’t had to repeat quite as much stuff with each new character as I have in other games.

Also, being able to up-level to 80 for WvW & PvP make it easier to get a grasp of each new profession in at least some way before dedicating 50+ hours into leveling one.

Being able to take all of the crafting skills on a single character without losing progress is a nice touch, allowing me to experiment and play without completely wasting my progress.

Only thing I’d like to see is some way to incentivise players with 80’s to play in the lower/mid level zones and the other cities. Often times, it gets empty in a level 40 zone and then again when I have to return to The Grove…nobody there. More incentive for 80’s to hang out in non-80 and non-LA zones would mean more social playing with every alt as I level.

I would like account wide dyes. That’s about it

Heh. I’d love it if Player Housing allowed you to “invite” your alts to it so you could interact with them there. This’d be excellent if the housing instance can become very well equipped, and you could commission your own alts to craft gear in front of you, and browse their skills and gear.
I much prefer it when such things are given a reason to be represented in game, something to “acquire” and actually “go to”.
Choosing which alts to invite to your home can also help you keep your characters within their own personality or context.

i would like to have a tag system like any battle type console games heehheh

it would be chaotic and fun

I still think they need to work on making all stat combinations for gear available through crafting. For example, only being able to get 5 out of 6 Power/Vitality/Toughness armour pieces from the Orrian karma vendors is a PITA.

But more specifically for alts, a shared pool of town gear / outfits / tonics (everlasting and otherwise), and minipets that is quickly accessible to all alts without having to go to the bank would be great.
At the moment, my Witch outfit lives on my Elementalist, but I’d like some sort of drop-down menu available on all Hero windows so I could use it on all characters. Same goes for minipets, although they also really need a slot on your paperdoll, where any minipet in that slot is permanently displayed.

Alts need to have a different experience. Not storylines that merge to become cookie cutter, not events that are cookie cutter to every starting area, mobs that are not cookiecutter, etc. Alts should be able to pursue a cultural path till 80 at least. Norn can, to a limited extent, because of Frostgorge for example.

Alts of different races should be able to have unique appearance from the start, including white garbage weapons and armor from vendors. This should not be limited to way overpriced cultural armors. A Silvari should be in their plant based gear from the start and at least have access to the skins throughout their game, not stuck in the selfsame model as everyone else. All gear should reflect the cultural differences from a given area, not just town clothing or overpriced culturals.

And as a confirmed alt o holic for ten years of MMO gaming, I miss choices. I miss factions, I miss the ability to take paths on one alt not available to another. Oh sure, we can be in different “orders”, or have different minor paths based on creation questions.. but that becomes moot at about 45 when personal story becomes a misnomer.

I appreciate ANET trying to change the model of MMO combat and questing. I fail to understand them not even considering many of the desirable features that are pretty much standard in most major MMOs, among these being appearance gear, housing, mounts, potions (cures and heals), faction choices, uniqueness for each Alt char.

Even in GW1 there were very distinct differences starting a char in Prophecies, vs Factions or Nightfall, and it extended to armors and gear, story, mobs encountered, etc. The game experience of a Prophecy Ranger was far different than that of a Nightfall ranger.. and doing both was fulfilling and interesting. I really find it sad that ANET dismissed so many interesting things they had already done in GW1, or just commonplace things like shared and replaceable costumes by acct.

Ability to un-soul bind items.

access to dungeons my main has, access to the fractal level my main has, access to dyes. They are my main gripes with alts.

First and foremost, make overflow the default for PvE zones.

Leveling alts is incredibly boring atm because there aren’t enough players in the zones to trigger the massive events that were so much fun at release.

I have a ton of alts I want to play but have put them on hold until they address this issue. And since gear grinding in FOTM is ANET’s (WoW’s) version of endgame play, I only log in atm to do guild management stuff. Hoping the feb update fixes these issues.

Dyes should be account wide.

Karma should be account wide.

Tokens should be account wide.

There should be questable gear that isn’t necessarily as good as high end raiding gear, but still not awful at 80. It should have several gem slots so it can be fine tuned to specific characters. the stats on this gear should be variable based on character level.

Anyone remember Asheron’s Call 1 with their greater shadow armor and their composite weapons and the various quests to get gems for these things? This is what I’d like to see added to this game. The armor and weapons weren’t the greatest out there at their time, but they didn’t drop on death so you would always have them with you.

The same armor, but the stats giving something like +XX for Y level and you could share the one suit of armor for all your alts would really be fun.

It would also give you good transition gear into 80, something you’d have expected the story quests to do but they failed horribly.

I did have an interesting thought regarding soul-bond vs. account bound. What if all equipment was account bound?
I’m guessing the argument against would be that there would be more money floating around as there would be less for people to spend said money on.
But it would be an intriguing experiment.

Personally, I find the whole idea of any type of binding ridiculous in the first place, and I wish some developer in this space would one day be brave enough to abandon the concept.

Thought dungeon tokens were account bound or Are you refering to another type?

Sorry, when I said account bound, I meant not taking up bank space. Like karma, tokens, etc would be on a small line next to your gold in the bank etc.

Not really an in game request but I’d like to be able to see all 8 characters on the character screen. Currently you only see 7 with an arrow you have to click to show the 8th. Minor I know but it bugs me just the same being an altoholic, no idea why they didn’t make it show 8 characters to match the number of professions.

A summary so far…

Features:
- View the hero page of any alt
- View the craftable recipes page of any alt
- View the inventory (including bag types) of alts
- Optional toggle to bring up the “currently equipped” tooltip for alts that can equip items that are moused over.
- Be able to easily share account-bound items and currencies across alts, including town clothes, minipets, weapons, armour, tonics, etc. Make this possible without visiting the bank for “swap overs”.
- Be able to view (but not transact with) the bank from anywhere
- Making dyes account wide, or having the means to upgrade a dye to account-wide
- Allowing your alts to appear in your player housing instance, and interacting with their info and skills there
- Ability to remove soulbinding from items, or upgrade items to account-wide
- Ability to access the Karma of alts (a high trade rate maybe?)
- Account-bound Gear with stats that scale with level, possibly rewarded from personal story

Improvements:
- Better incentives to play in any area for equal or higher level characters, attracting players back to all areas of the world
- Wider variety of stat combinations (likely through special runes from holiday events, etc?)
- Make Personal Stories more unique than they are, keep them unique and relevant from 1-80.
- Add more unique “factions” per race, and keep these relevant from 1-80
- Add more uniqueness to dynamic events across areas and level-strata
- Add more standard cultural armors for level <80 so each race can keep wearing culturally appropriate level all the way up
- Turn tokens into currency that doesn’t take up bank space
- Streamline the character select screen for reviewing your characters easier (option for all on one screen, etc)

What’s new or great already for GW2:
- Making every area replayable regardless of level.
- No limits on number of crafting professions per character, with no waste of progress
- Biography and motivation choices

I give this a day or so more before making a suggestion forum post.

Mungrul.9358:

I did have an interesting thought regarding soul-bond vs. account bound. What if all equipment was account bound?
I’m guessing the argument against would be that there would be more money floating around as there would be less for people to spend said money on.
But it would be an intriguing experiment.

For this, and most new features, I prefer being able to “acquire” this some way. The gem store is one obvious choice, but making these features possible from within the game is great for encouraging involvement, goals, and role play. Like the personal housing idea I said above.
Making items account-bound from soul-bound could use something special like a mystic forge (but separate to it), that might require special tokens, ingredients, or currencies to unlock an item. Being able to remove the soul-binding altogether (as suggested by Asuka Shikinami) could also be possible, but at a much higher, item-scaled price.

Oldgrimm.8521:

i would like to have a tag system like any battle type console games heehheh

it would be chaotic and fun

This could be a fantastic way to PvP Tournament!
What great new skill to test, to be able to effectively play a series of different classes! Not sure how you could do it in PvE. Reminds me a lot of Heroes from GW1 tho.
I encourage you to make your idea a suggestion post!

Seren.6850:

access to dungeons my main has, access to the fractal level my main has, access to dyes. They are my main gripes with alts.

I’m not too familiar with how the fractal leveling system works. Isn’t fractal level somehow intrinsically tied to what that character has done before?
If it’s not, and it’s a level based only the player’s experience with the dungeon level, then it does seem to make sense to be able to make this account bound.

Money display on minimap to show all of the money on each toon, or a tooltip in the bag screen when mousing over it to see how much money each toon has.

The ability to deposit Karma points in the bank to be withdrawn by any of the characters on the same account.

I would suggest that if alts were in the home instance they become NPC’s that allow access to their bags.

I have my main character, Guardian, with two alts, Thief and Mesmer. While I mainly go around using my Guardian, I would switch it up to my other alts when I want to mix it up a bit. Since my main focus is on my Guardian there are a few features I would like to add to make my alts be able to support my main character.

My list of desired features:

1. Make Dyes Account Wide – (took me a while to raise money to get Black, White, Silver, and Gold Dyes. Seems tedious to farm over and over again for each of my characters.)

2. Make Karma Account Wide – (or make them transferable with an in-game fee, such as 1c for each point of Karma or cheaper.)

3. Make Cultural Armor Open to All Races – (Personally there is Human cultural armor I want so bad for my Norn . Instead, make cultural armor only acquirable in specific regions so lets say a Charr has to go to Rata Sum if he wants to wear their cultural armor.)

4. Change All Soulbound to Accountbound – (I don’t really understand the purpose of soulbound, except maybe to reduce the occurrence of exploits, but accountbound does that well on it’s own. It would be more fun to be able to swap armor and weapons between my characters as long as they meet the requirements to use it. Heavy armor for soldiers etc. This will also help with people who want to re-roll without the consequence of losing their investments.)

5. A SEARCH PARTY FEATURE!! – (It’s a pain and disorganized to find a party for an event, dungeon or whatever. Unless it exists and I don’t see it, we need a search party window similar to GW1, but streamlined. Not only should we able to see party lists in one area, but it would be awesome if we can see lists in other areas.)

6. Fix Drop Rates – (I don’t mind diminishing returns, but drop rates should be enhanced a bit. While I know grinding is not a goal for GW2, there are some who like to and improved rates will benefit everyone. Plus, as long as magic find exists then you’re asking players to farm and grind. If not, then please improve the stats on the MF gear so that they’re not as much of a liability.)

7. Players Need Greater Incentive to Spread Out – (At lvl 80 most players I run into are either in PvP/WvW, or in Orr/Lost Shores farming Loot and Karma. There needs to be an incentive at the lower levels for experienced players so the maps will be less deserted.)

These are just my two cents. It’s about half what I think should be done and half personal requests.