I’ve been enamored by squads pretty much since I came to realize their existence shortly after launch. The concept of the squad and its intended use feels very right to me; it fills a need that otherwise leaves players wanting.
The problem is that squads are almost ghost entities within the world of Tyria. Even though there’s information about creating or leaving squads in the party interface, they’re not really highlighted or explained. They’re a design afterthought, and as such many players aren’t even aware that they exist.
So before we get too deep into how I feel that the squad can be improved, let’s have a small primer on what a squad is, how you can join one, and how they can be used.
A squad is a group of 1-50 players tied to any individual commander. As part of activating his or her command tag, the commander also creates a squad. Any player capable of seeing the commander’s tag on the map may join the commander’s squad by left-clicking the map tag, or by right clicking the commander’s portrait.
Additionally, a player may type /squadjoin followed by the commander’s name to join that commander’s squad, ex: /squadjoin Fosthe. To leave a squad, players can open the party interface and then select the “leave” button under the squad controls. They can also type /squadleave followed by the commander’s name, ex: /squadleave Fosthe.
Squads are granted access to a special chat channel (/squad or /d), similar to party chat, that can only be accessed by members of that squad. This is useful for coordinating with a large number of players aside from any map, team, or party chats available; you can think of a squad as a group of 10 parties with a bonus shared chat channel.
The squad’s commander is given the ability to place special points of interest on the map, similar to how members of a party or your personal story might leave green or blue stars. This allows for the squad commander to set rally points, objectives, or any other sort of location-specific information that might be relevant to the players engaged in his or her activities.
You remain in a squad even if you leave the map that your commander is on, provided they continue to wear their tag.
While the concept of a squad is great on paper, in practice they’re not very useful. The commander is unable to control who enters or leaves the squad, and other squad members have no access to information regarding who else is in the squad or even where those people might be on the map.
I feel as though this is the biggest and most limiting factor to the usefulness of a squad — the whole idea is to get players working together, but the mechanics don’t really support that beyond a bit of yellow chat text.
I think that the biggest way to tackle this challenge is to change how the squad works on a base level. While I still believe its creation should be limited to commanders, I think that the lack of control over its members hurts it. I also don’t believe that a commander should have to pop their icon in order to host a squad chat.
With that in mind, here are my suggestions.
1.
This is the most important change: allow the commander to invite or remove members from his or her squad, and allow them to toggle open recruitment on/off. Also, while in a squad, change the party panel to reflect the names of all players currently in the squad, their level, their profession, and their location.
2.
Allow squad members to visually see each other while on the map. Similar to how the party dots work, utilize yellow dots to represent squad members on the map. This would allow better coordination and location information for things such as WvW defense networks/cap teams, Triple Trouble event information, Orr temple events, and so on.
3.
Allow the squad’s commander to disable his or her icon without disbanding the squad. Tie these two to different toggle effects. Doing so would allow for multiple commanders on a map to retain coordination capabilities without confusing players. This would benefit PvE guild commanders trying to run small events as well as WvW commanders trying to ninja towers/keeps away from the main forces.
To make #3 operate smoothly, simply give commanders three options: display icon to everyone, display icon to squad only, hide icon. Keep this separate from their ability to create or disband a squad.
I’m sure that these are not ground-breaking suggestions and that they have been suggested before, but I wanted to take the opportunity to express in my own words how I feel the squad might be improved. It’s a feature that has the potential to change the way in which GW2 is played (especially in WvW), but is currently ignored to the point that, inventing statistics, I’d say at least 80% of players are unaware of its existence.
Men of Science [MoS] – Tarnished Coast
(edited by Kerithlan.1659)