Guild Wars 2

My opinion on different parts of the game. I do all parts of the game myself, and I am more than able to form a valid opinion. So here it is:

DUNGEONS:

Huge improvement here. Dungeons used to be a lot more buggy, exploitable, with inappropriate rewards and no real incentive to play. And then COF path 1 farm came which was just.. terrible.
Dungeons now are almost perfect. They provide a decent gold reward. One path can’t be farmed over and over again. And they vary in difficulty. However, HotW path 2, SE path 2 and CoF path 3 should give more gold. At least 1.5 gold. Those paths are extremely unpopular and reason for that is simple. Why do them when we can do all other paths to get the same reward.

WORLD EVENTS

Again a good update, with just a few tiny changes needed. One of those changes is that Shatterer should definitely give additional 2 champion boxes on defeat. It takes between 10 and 15 minutes to kill him (usually) and the reward is just not worth it. Not just because of the time invested, but because it’s actually quite an active fight if you are meleeing or even using mortars.
Golem scaling is obviously broken. It has way too much health when there are many people in the area. And it doesn’t have enough health when there are few people only.
Champion Svanir Shaman (Maw) could use some health reduction. The fight is pretty much /afk autoattack and there is no point in making it so long.
Other events are fine. Tequatl will have his own section here.
Also, you should really add some underwater world event. Underwater combat is a major part of the game and it should be relevant in some way.

FRACTALS OF THE MISTS

Surprisingly balanced. It’s something that you either like doing or not. The only thing that I would change is have a bit less spawns on Dredge fractal as it just takes too long. At higher levels it takes longer than most of the dungeon paths. It does get repetitive after doing it for a while but Anet announced 3 new fractals (aetherblade, molten and thaumanova) so there will be more diversity and more fun (unless they’re like dredge fractal…).

TEQUATL THE SUNLESS

I personally would’ve kept this for 2 weeks only, but with slightly better rewards for defeating him. And I would have Tequatl come back every couple months or so (but not as a part of regular update, just something extra).
Now problem here is that we don’t know what exactly Anet wanted to accomplish with this. If they just wanted to make the event harder but still possible without needing over 80 people in an overflow instance.. well, they failed.
However, if they wanted to make it elite content, for organised guilds and groups then it would be fine if there wasn’t one error. It is not instanced. And I am sure that Anet didn’t want people to use overflows for this (if they did it’s just wrong). The way most organised groups do it is to create an overflow instance and do it there.
Solution: either add tequatl in his own special instance (which would be difficult to do). Or simply make him scale, so you don’t need a full map to kill him.
Also, adding daily is just bad. People go hit 2-3 risen and go AFK because it’s not possible to do it without being super organised. Therefore, the whole point of daily is.. pointless. Remove it, or as mentioned above, make it scale.

LUNATIC INQUISITION ACHIEVEMENT
Bad way of making people play that minigame. You shouldn’t attract people to content by adding daily achiev to it. You should attract them with quality.

WORLD VERSUS WORLD SEASON

Great idea. Season or tournament types of competitions are always a plus, in any game. If there should be 2 or 3 leagues or if they should have different number of servers we can’t know yet. It’s something to see near the end of the season.
The achievements are quite easy to get even for casual players, and it will get them in WvW, make it more active, it’s quite good.
However, the motivation to win as a server is not that big. Very few people care about the colour of finishers that they’ll get in the end. What I would, and what you should do mister Anet! is simply put some type of Wall of Champions in Lion’s Arch and WvW citadels and put the winners of each league for each season (if there will be more seasons). It will motivate people more, and when they see their server there in few months, or in couple years, they will still feel some sense of accomplishment. It’s a psychology thing, too long to discuss here.

EU/NA SERVERS
I know that servers are in different physical locations right now. But you should keep working to remove this barrier. Everyone should be able to play together, and this gap just divides the game population in half. Not good! Work on fixing it!

PLAYER VERSUS PLAYER
Sigh…
Obviously there are many, many things wrong with it, and PvP population is getting smaller and smaller. One thing you should never do is add extra achievements related to capturing points, killing, top stats, etc. You should add better rewards though. Some way of getting some valuable items that could be sold for gold.

Maps are fine. Even Capricorn would be fine if water combat was more balanced.
Very big problem is the flawed matchmaking that still hasn’t been fixed. It still puts the people of the similar rating in the same team. So if top 10 players enter: team A will be players ranked from 1 to 5 and team B will be players ranked from 6 to 10. It’s obviously completely unbalanced system.

So besides the matchmaking fix I would also add seasons. It would motivate people to play and try to work together and win. Have it to be similar like in WvW. At the end of each season top 100 or 500 or 1000 or whatever should get some sort of reward. And the winner of the season should have their name written on the wall of champions.
Also for this it would be important to add proper ladder decay. What they have now does not work at all.

OTHER SUGGESTIONS

- Balance between the updates. Make one more intense update (scarlet type) and then one slow and relaxed one, so players can balance their time and not have burnouts.
- Be more active on these forums. Inform players on what you’re working on, even if you don’t know if it will be released or not. Don’t care if 3-4 people complain and whine when something doesn’t get introduced. Just communicate with the community and explain why. Be more friendly, make a random post with some joke sometimes or something, so people know that you’re here. If you want the game to be good, it should become your life, and you should post on these forums when you’re at home, at your free time. Then there is no excuse for it taking up “valuable time for work”.
- Don’t have so many festivals.