Guild Wars 2

Hey guys!

Yesterday I posted a thread on Reddit. My intentions were to humorously shed light on the smaller and non-trivial things of the game that mildly annoys the players. I went to bed with around 20 comments and woke up to 200. There were alot of feedback on bigger things like “little build diversity for engineers” etc, which were far from the point of the thread. I have therefore gone through all comments and added those I felt were appropriate.

I dont mean this list as a “omfg anet l2dev”. Far from it. I primarily just want to have a little laugh about those small irks we all have taught ourselves to go around, but also to inform the great people at Arenanet of these digital equivalents to that itch on your back you just cant seem to satisfy.

As an interaction designer, I know it takes a long time to map all possible faults in a system through usability tests. I hope you guys at Arenanet can use some of the things in this list to improve the game we all love. If not, I hope at least you will enjoy it as well

This first section are my own points, and further down you will see the comments made by some of the users on reddit.

• If you do a movement skill that does damage at the end and you hit certain items, you get in combat. E.g.: timed bombs between Lupi and Alphard in Arah p2, but some items that dont do damage can do this as well.
• Waypoint tooltips dont update when you get out of combat. This is super annoying in dungeons when you wait for your teammates to get ooc so you can use the waypoint. Having to move the cursors in and out of the waypoint icon is mildly frustrating.
• Cutscenes closes all your active UI elements. If I want to retrait for Lupi or swap out my weapons and some teammate start the fight, I have to open the Hero tab again after the cutscene is done.
• Speaking of cutscenes, it does not “tickle me fancy” when I cant press esc to skip the cutscene. Nor does it when the cutscene cant be skipped.
• Skills cant be swapped if they have a cooldown. If you got useless stuff on cooldown before a fight, like Shadow Refuge or Portal or something, you have to either sacrifice that utility slot, or you have to wait for the cooldown to wear off. I dont mind the replacing skills to have the same cooldown, but let us at least swap them out.
• Continuing with skills and cooldowns, sometimes the replacing utilities get the same cooldown as a “cooldowning” utility. I believe this is a bug, but worth mentioning here.
• When I search in the wardrobe and click another category on the left, the search gets reset and I need to type it all over again.
• Spinning death camera is back. I dont like it one bit. It confuses me.
• Auto-login from the launcher was changed and I frown every time I need to click “Login”.
• Trading Post won’t let you buy more than 250 of something.
• Cannot copy text from the chat.
• The General achievement tab is a mess.
• Warrior Greatsword skill 5 makes your character run in place if you’re not inside a huge enemy, like Lupi.

• Waypoints putting you in the opposite direction that you really want to be facing. (/u/nexzen)
• Guild chat resets and is no longer visible in the log when you switch characters. I don’t even know why this is a thing when no other chat element does this. FF14 lets you use chat while in cut scenes and loading screens, that’s a nice feature. (/u/Faervhan)
• Party chat still likes to disappear when you leave parties. (/u/Faervhan)
• Having to double click almost everything inventory related. (/u/Porturan)
• Party members are blocking the waypoint when they’re inside it’kittenbox. (/u/JamicaXD)
• Human male thighs.. like …THEY’RE NOT NORMAL! o_O Sylvari male huge shoulders, butts, and deformed boots while wearing anything non-cultural. Charr tail clipping. (/u/Sethroque)
• There’s a limit to how much you can type in the search bar in the new tp. So if I wanted to search for something like, Berserker’s Orichalcum Imbued Inscription, I could probably only fit the first two words and a bit of the third. You can still find what you’re looking for most of the time, it just irks me. (/u/meguzara)
• Not being able to consume stacks of essences of luck at a time. I clear out my inventory and that nets me like 40 essences of luck at 10 luck each. Give me a “consume all” option so I don’t have to put 80 clicks on my mouse. (/u/mspahr4)
• I can’t see my own title. They went to the trouble of making every other character’s title in the game show up on my screen over their head, but I literally don’t know what title my characters are using. I never see it and forget. I don’t give a fig about other people’s titles; I didn’t work to get them. Titles are great. I enjoy them. I want to see my own title. I know it’s possible, my mesmer clones have titles. (/u/Typetoupe)
• If you want to use account-wide items like ascended gear, unlimited gathering tools or toys with several characters, you have to constantly trade the items in the bank. Instead, those should have collections in the bank that allow you to take copies of them out individually with each character. (/u/MithranArkanere)
• My resizing inventory window. (/u/rich-platinum-ore)
• The players that want me to have 5000 Achievement Points for running a dungeon with them. (/u/Monkeibusiness)
• The Birthday Blaster should be account bound, not soul bound. (/u/Facekillz)
• Minis have a collector title when they are not even a collection. But spoons are. (/u/ChentallyMallenged)
• When you click a waypoint and the dialog appear, if you double click that wp again and port there, the dialog will still be active after you ported. (/u/disarm76)
• Character sounds are gone as of the September patch. Including condition/buff/death sounds. I can hear other players’, but not my own. (/u/SWyman89)
• I find it mildly annoying that in a game whose end-game is apparently mostly driven by cosmetics, I can’t pull up a large, rotatable view of other characters. I don’t really care about seeing the stats on their gear, but I want to clearly see the skins on their gear. Instead, I have to jiggle my camera around and the person usually buggers off before I can get a good look at them.
  This also has a very mild dampening effect on my own play. What’s the point of working incredibly hard to get a rare skin if just about no one will ever notice or see it? I wish GW2 had an “inspect” feature similar to WoW’s, though I understand not wanting gear stats to show. (/u/OhSoProfessorial)
• Not being able to choose what overflow to join. (/u/shinitakunai)

• The new TP’s search bar, for some reason you can only input a limited number of characters. So it’s difficult to find items with long names such as “Berserker’s Orichalcum Imbued Inscription” (/u/teejaydm)
• The way an Asura run if they are holding a staff or certain weapons. (/u/teejaydm)
• When placing an AOE of a skill that has had its radius increased via a trait, you only see the original AOE circle size which can make placement a bit tricky. Usually something you easily forget about as you get a better idea for how big the actual size of your AOEs are but still a bit annoying. (/u/Leonia42)
• Running while swinging a weapon; disconnected lower and upper body while throwing a strike. Anyone who knows how to throw a half-decent strike knows that this is stupid. (/u/magicaltuna)
• Charr backwards pawprint. (/u/nosuchtech)
• The glitch where your minimap will fanatically keep re-centering on you, I just got used to opening the map to waypoint farther because it’s too frustrating. (/u/Alether)
• Agony (and poison?) screwing with skills that are supposed to “revive”. There’s nothing mentioned about healing or condition affecting these skills, yet that’s the hidden mechanic of them. Example: Vapor form will fail to activate if you have agony and <50% downed health. Anet, if you hide a mechanic, make sure it stays hidden, for consistency’s sake… (/u/Alether)
• Burning Retreat, the single biggest fluidity feeling breaker skill in the entire game, hands down. 8 out of 10 times I use it, the game starts warping me around after the skill finishes, or rooting me in place. It looks awful and glitchy. (/u/Alether)
• Why on earth are these useless trophies a thing with this game? And why do the devs feel the need to justify the existence of junk items with a collection achievement? They contribute nothing in a practical sense, they take up inventory slots, and they sell for very little amounts of copper to the vendor NPCs (with “Sell Junk” button). A similar argument can be said about Bags of Coins (and to a lesser extent, Bags of Wonderous Goods from dungeons). Instead of going straight into your coin count, you have to first sacrifice an inventory slot and a mouse click to get a few silver. (/u/ErifEci)
• Monsters don’t have to follow the same basic rules that apply to characters. Like gravity. Launch should be waaaaaay more effective. (/u/sarielv)
• Being asked to join a PvP match 2 seconds after i clicked “wait” is pretty annoying. (/u/Ichido_Yukou)
• Armor bought with Badges of Honor can not be salvaged. (/u/g_lexi)
• Karma armor/weapons can’t be salvaged. (/u/g_lexi)
• Asura females are forced to wear male human armor skins most of the time. (/u/g_lexi)
• Unable to cancel channel stuff. Like healing dead people, communing, harvesting, etc. Annoying as hell. You can skip a part of them by switching weapons, but I’m an ele so FML. (/u/Lon-ami)
• The sort arrows on the current trading post point the wrong way. (/u/hallomik)
• Skills that are supposed to be passive (like for example “Retreat!”) make your character attack the closest or any targeted opponent. (/u/SonnigerTag)
• Can’t stack items while they are inside Guild Storage, you have to remove all stacks, manually stack them, then place it back. On that same note, you can’t just put the same type of item on top of each other in the Guild Storage either. (/u/Deathseiry)
• There is no direct sun! The nights are mostly clear but every day on all maps are just clouds. It feels like an cheap way to not implemented sun effects (/u/TekalN)
• Weapons should have a placeholder in inventory when you equip them because when I switch from 1×2 handed to 2×1 handed I’ve a free slot in my organized weapon group. (/u/der_RAV3N)
• Trinkets should have an option via right click or double click if want them to get equipped on f.e. first or second ring slot. (/u/der_RAV3N)

Few of my own to the list…

~ Items don’t give any indication that they’re part of a collection (unless they’re collection-only items with no value otherwise). Not such a problem with obvious sets of items like Godskull, Krait, ect, but for something like the Rare Items collection where its just a mishmash of different stuff, its rather annoying that you’d never know what’s part of the collection unless you’re specifically staring at the collection screen. If I go to a karma vendor that happens to have an item that’s part of a collection, the only way I’ll know that item is in the collection is if I’ve memorized the entire collection list (or am using a guide).

~ On a similar note, the collection screen itself is also slightly annoying to look at, since all you get is a picture of an item, and to actually see the name or info for said item you have to hover your cursor over it. A list form which displays at least the names of the items without any cursor hovering would be much appreciated.

~ Harvesting tools being “locked” while in combat. So many times I’ll be harvesting a node with a mob nipping at my heals, my tool breaks mid-harvest, and the only way I can equip another tool is by killing the mob first. I understand armor and weapons and such being locked during combat, but harvesting tools should be equippable any time.

~ I suppose this somewhat goes along with what the TC said about cinematics closing UI elements, but if you’re in the achievements tab and trying to get hints about certain achievements (jumping puzzles, for instance) after you view the little map scene the achievement panel has closed, which means if you’re looking at multiple achieves, between every hint you have to 1. Reopen the hero tab 2. Mouse back over to the Achievements section 3. Expand the General section 4. Scroll down to and click the category you were browsing.

~ Ditto of the above problem when it comes to unlocking traits and viewing the hints for those.

~ Also on the topic of the achievement screen, when you choose to view a specific achievement (lets say, for example, Ogre Slayer) to see you progress towards it, then back out using the arrow at the top of the panel, it doesn’t keep your scroll bar progress. Even if Ogre Slayer is at the very bottom of the Slayer list, when you back out you’ll be back at the top and have to scroll back down again.

Inventory view in list format: icon, item code, name, etc.

Saving inventory and bank lists to a file. Perhaps accessing own game state via gw2 api, for reading at least: inventory, bank, equipment, achievements, map progress, etc.

Heh, I’d been considering making one of these threads myself. There’s just something about those little annoyances that make them more irritating than big issues… like the difference between a big dog leaping at you and a thousand ants crawling over your skin: both suck, but at least you can push the dog off and tell it not to do that again.

My personal list:

• Swiftness from Temporal Curtain won’t stack with any other source of swiftness.
• Can’t search unlocked dyes by name.
• It’s impossible to see which minipets belong to which set without checking the wiki.
• The new minipet achievements don’t use the collections UI, which links to every required item in the collection.
• The new achievement organisation is messy. Dungeon achievements, for example, are still under “Tyria”.
• Tagging the bomb-the-mine-entrance event in Dry Top is frustrating if lots of other folks are attempting it and/or you’re lagging; credit is only given for helping destroy the cave-in, not for attempting to carry a bomb.
• Some armours turn into skimpy and/or ultra-femme versions when worn by female humans, norn or sylvari, with no option for males or female asura/charr to wear them (or something of a similar design), and no option for female humans/norn/sylvari to wear the “default” masculine version.
• Party chat disappears from your chat log when you leave the party.
• Guild chat disappears from your chat log when you switch characters, even if those characters are representing the same guild.
• Emotes performed by NPCs cannot be filtered out by deselecting “NPCs” in the chat filter.

Regarding auto-login, you can at least hit [enter] twice to get to your character list, so at least there’s that.

I hate getting ‘fear stuck’. Seems to mostly happen at Claw, where you get glued in place. You can /dance to get out of it, but it’s always been one of those things.

When you use an under water ability that jets you away from a mob now, instead of acting on whatever plane you are on, it seems to want to push you towards the surface, even if the surface is not directly 180 degrees from the mob you used the ability on. It didn’t use to do that.

The auto camera zoom when I’m downed. I don’t want to see myself lying there. I want to see what I’m attacking so I can rally.

The auto-login change. Why?

When I’m auto-swimming and open the map. Then I close the map and my character is now swimming straight down. Why?