Guild Wars 2

In my opinion, game design should be centered around player enjoyment as a first priority. Design aspects, such as special effects, should add to the enjoyment of the game, not take away from it. There are a lot of excellent design elements to GW2 which make this game truly enjoyable, which is why I’d like to bring up a few which I don’t think fit among the rest. Most of my design concerns will be raised as questions:

1) What is the purpose of damaged / broken equipment? The only thing it seems to do for me is add to the number of small tasks I need to do other than actually playing the game. My suggested remedy is to remove this feature entirely. The game will be less “realistic” but more enjoyable.

2) Why do I have to pay small amounts of in-game currency to use a waypoint? Why does this scale to higher prices at higher levels? None of this makes any sense to me at all. The only purpose I can come up with is to discourage waypoint use, which, as stated, makes no sense in this game. I suggest making waypoints free to use, or at least add a character- or account- based achievement to unlock which makes them free to use.

3) If I complete a Living World story chapter on one character, then do it again on another character, why am I not eligible for Mastery achievements and rewards on character #2? It makes no sense to me that the Mastery achievements must be done on the same character, since the achievements themselves are account-wide and, once earned, can’t be repeated with new characters. In its current state, I am sacrificing enjoyment of the game by having to repeat the same story instances on the same characters.

4) Could an “Auto-equip best gathering tool” option be added to the Options menu so that I don’t have to go into my inventory every time a gathering tool runs out? Furthermore, could rich mining nodes and nodes with extra RNG gathers just continue mining so I don’t have to click the “mine” action 2-3 times? I know these questions sound petty, but the number of repeated actions adds up over the course of hundreds of hours of play and these are actual annoyances while playing the game.

5) Why am I always pulling aggro and being slowed/crippled when I am just trying to get somewhere? In most cases, it is impossible to avoid being attacked when you have no plans on fighting. I think a cool fix for this annoyance would be if zone completion unlocked an option to toggle aggro on and off such that (most) “red” text enemies within that zone would become “yellow” text enemies for your character. This would cut back on unnecessary aggro and overall improve my enjoyment of the exploratory aspects of the game.

6) Could we add an “automatically consume next” option to our foods and other consumables that add buffs to the character? Again, this is to reduce the number of times I must revisit my inventory when I just want to be in combat. After Wintersday, especially, I have stacks of consumables which never get used up.

A special thanks goes out to the GW2 dev team for making constant improvements to the quality of the game. These improvements are the reason I haven’t set aside Guild Wars 2. I know that with new content and new patch releases, the game will actually get better (more enjoyable to play) and not worse. Strangely, most games go the other way.

I would love to hear comments on my proposed ideas (numbered 1-6). Thanks!

1) It used to be a gold-sink. The Devs felt that being defeated was enough of a ‘punishment’, and removed the cost.

2) It is a gold sink.

3) This was changed after Living World Season Two. It is no longer necessary with Season Three, and, guessing, all Season henceforth.

4) As long as it is an option, seems ok.

5) No opinion…rarely bothers me.

6) Seems ok, as long as it is an option.

Some of the old features would probably cost more in time and resources to remove completely from the game than using said resources to create new content/other QoL features. Or cause more bugs than they are worth. The older the feature, the more difficult to change without affecting other content, it seems.

Good luck.

1) Most of the time, especially if you mainly play open-world PvE, it is just a minor annoyance. But in certain situations like raids, long meta-events and for some people/groups dungeons it adds an extra element of risk to encounters because you can’t simply attack, die, revive, attack, die and repeat until the enemy is dead. If you keep doing that you’ll end up with broken equipment and therefore reduced stats.

Think of it as a long-term death penalty.

2) It’s a gold sink. Something which isn’t fun on it’s own but makes the game as a whole far more enjoyable by curbing the rampant inflation that would otherwise occur as a result of the gold constantly being added to the game whenever an enemy is killed, an event is completed, an item is sold to a merchant and so-on. (Same reason the TP has fees.)

It also serves the secondary purpose of making some people think twice about using a waypoint, encouraging them to actually travel through the game world instead which means they might encounter things they would otherwise miss.

3) They fixed this with Season 3. I have no idea why they didn’t update season 2.

(Ok forum and cooking doesn’t mix. I’ll have to come back to 4, 5 & 6.)

For (5) if there were no enemies, gathering resources would become ridiculously easy. Easier. Combine that with free waypoints…

Danikat.8537:

2) It’s a gold sink. Something which isn’t fun on it’s own but makes the game as a whole far more enjoyable by curbing the rampant inflation that would otherwise occur as a result of the gold constantly being added to the game whenever an enemy is killed, an event is completed, an item is sold to a merchant and so-on. (Same reason the TP has fees.)

Isn’t the need for a gold sink a design flaw in itself? Shouldn’t the need to use that gold on ingame purchases be enough to curb inflation?

Also, someone else commented on how easy it would be to gather resources without waypoint prices or aggro. Waypoint prices aren’t enough to stop someone from using them, which is why I think there’s no point to them. So that has no effect on the gathering rate. As for aggro, how much faster would people REALLY be gathering? Most of the time when I’m gathering I just tank the attacks. It’s just annoying to have to do so.

djemben.6924:

Danikat.8537:

2) It’s a gold sink. Something which isn’t fun on it’s own but makes the game as a whole far more enjoyable by curbing the rampant inflation that would otherwise occur as a result of the gold constantly being added to the game whenever an enemy is killed, an event is completed, an item is sold to a merchant and so-on. (Same reason the TP has fees.)

Isn’t the need for a gold sink a design flaw in itself? Shouldn’t the need to use that gold on ingame purchases be enough to curb inflation?

Also, someone else commented on how easy it would be to gather resources without waypoint prices or aggro. Waypoint prices aren’t enough to stop someone from using them, which is why I think there’s no point to them. So that has no effect on the gathering rate. As for aggro, how much faster would people REALLY be gathering? Most of the time when I’m gathering I just tank the attacks. It’s just annoying to have to do so.

Unless you have a really robust economy in a game, including all items needing to degrade over time and be replaced, you absolutely need gold sinks in a persistent online game. Otherwise over time all the players will have more gold than they need to buy everything and anything.

The concept makes absolutely no sense. Why not just not give us that gold in the first place? By not giving it to us, and not taking it away, it’s two less things to worry about.

djemben.6924:

The concept makes absolutely no sense. Why not just not give us that gold in the first place? By not giving it to us, and not taking it away, it’s two less things to worry about.

So, this is more or less MMO economics 101, but … if we went with your theory, and didn’t have anything that removed gold from the economy, you have one of two things happen:

Thing one, players can “create” gold out of thin air. When they kill a goblin, it drops newly minted gold, which the player then has. The can spend it, or save it, but ultimately the amount of gold floating around increases, right?

So, by changing the amount of gold that drops changes the slope of the line of the amount of money in the economy, but with nothing to consume it, the amount just moves around and around. That line keeps going up and up as time passes — inflation.

Thing two, players can’t create gold, just move it around. So, if a critter is gonna have some sort of reward, it’s gotta come from somewhere. Once the very first players have looted the dungeon, where is the reward for the next person to come from?

So, that’s why it can’t work. Unless money goes out somewhere — a money sink — you end up with inflation running rampant. Over time the cost of everything necessarily goes up, because everyone has more gold, blah blah. It kinda sucks. (Also, this is why in WoW the price of everything is in gold, and copper and silver coins are just noise — inflation made them worthless.)

In GW2 there are a bunch of them, including vendors, waypoints, consumable boosts, etc. They eat money so that the economy doesn’t constantly keep getting more and more flooded with money, which just raises the cost of everything.