Guild Wars 2

warbignime.4610:

2.No duelling , It is their design choice to not add duelling into the game rather than technical difficulty. I understand where the worry comes from, duelling might encourage unfriendly players to annoy others , but they can always add a auto decline all duel option . I see duelling as a nice way of making friends, I have enough faith in our community to not abuse this feature.

I can relate to the friend aspect of this, as someone who lost all their friends over time where they moved to other games. Being able to duel at a certein location and potentially meet the same people on your server could build friendships.

For me, the trait system redesign takes the booby prize. That it got beyond the ‘hey, what if…’ stage remains one of the era’s greatest and most troubling mysteries. NPE is a distant second. Considering that the people who came up with these sins against gaming are the same people who are working on HoT, the future of GW2 does not look at all bright.

Beyond that: the questionable decisions began in earnest on November 15th 2012 and have continued with unquestionable regularity ever since. And yet, the core of what the game was and might have been remains a candle flickering in the darkness, so bright and lovely…

1. Removing automated paid and free tournaments from PvP.
2. Not sticking with season 1 formula.

Gibson.4036:

12. Not giving enough value to builds heavily speccing into support and cc.
13. Condition damage not affecting objects.
16. Rejecting the idea of adding new playable races.

this, also whole thread has some seriously good points. i pray anet devs read this.

1- Traits problem
2- Traits problem (because if they can make a second thread, it can have two spots)
3- Megaservers wrecking WvW loyalty
4- Megaservers killing RP for the RPers
5- Town clothes into tonics instead of skins in the wardrobe
6- Precursor crafting as xpac feature instead of QoL feature as it was shopped to us
7- Forcing PS to be played at set intervals instead of when WE wanted
8- Silence policy

(1) Having a bad in-game camera from day one (now made better – finally).

(2) Not having a build saver in a game that relies on builds. I just don’t get this at all.

(3) Making classes with limited condition removal in a game that spams aoe fields.

Not in any specific order of priority… just my Top 10.

1) Traits – lack of reworking useless traits for better synergy of builds
2) Skills – lack of new skills added or new weapon skills or new weapons since launch
3) Dungeons – content removed rather than added, no new dungeons or paths
4) Wallet does not hold all currencies
5) MegaServer – trivialized all of the World Bosses / Temples (Champs in general) no longer epic or require build / strategy to complete
6) Daily – Need more variation for PvE options, system is good just add more than 4.
7) Not enough use for non-DPS builds, not asking for Trinity, just build variation and usage, make each class feel needed because they bring unique utility, feel special.
8)Remove all Event chains that benefit from failure – failure should never be a benefit or an option bad mindset for players.
9) Make World Bosses harder, can roam the zones, and remove the schedules, the game needs some randomized danger to it, have difficult events that will trigger them (player controlled timing, rather than server controlled timing)
10) And FINALLY – Reward / Loot system, need some love in rewarding for the higher difficulty / time commitments, make all of your content worth playing, the player should decide what they are willing to do for reward, willing to put in the skill/time then give them something that is fair.

Bonus: Armor stats/skins – need a lot more variation such as Chain v. Plate, Leather v. Cloth, with bonuses and penalties, and then make appropriate skins/sets for that, variation in MMO is NEVER a bad thing. Players want to tinker and look good, plus will satisfy the hardcore min/max player and the fluff/fashion player as well.

Just my 2 copper…

1. Dropping development of SAB after selling the infinite continue coin
2. Removing TA FW/UP
3. Disbanding dungeon team and pretending dungeons dont exist anymore
4. Failing to add in the activities that were promised at launch, and failing to make existing activities playable with friends
5. NPE and traits revamp
6. Temporary nature of living story s1
7. Living story s2 being almost entirely in private instances, lacking development in other areas of game.
8. Making features of HOT things that were promised for free years ago aka. guild halls, precursor crafting.
9. Outfit system (cant mix and match) and the town clothes tonics
10. Condition cap in PVE

Bonus: The gold – gem exchange fiasco – fixed now

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Gibson.4036:

9. Moving world bosses to a regular timer.

Not only is this more convenient than it was before, the way megaservers work requires it (since every map instance used to have its own independant boss timers, including overflows).

Convenient, but way less immersive. See my post about FE.

Gibson.4036:

10. Including Fractal rewards in Mawdrey recipe.

Is running a level 1 fractal five times (less now, if you wait for fractal dailies) really that hard?

I’ll get to it eventually, but yeah. It definitely doesn’t fit with the way I play the game. I know, hit the dailies. I haven’t been able to line up the days I find a good chunk of time to play with the dailies yet.

Fractals were introduced for the people wanting elite, endgame instanced content. More power to those people, and I have no gripe about ArenaNet adding Fractals or spending time developing them. I love how they introduced Agony so that people who did Fractals would get their AR for doing more Fractals, and it didn’t effect any other part of the game. They did a great job of creating a division between Fractals and the rest of the game. You can safely ignore them or not, as you desire.

Mawdrey, as a neat little LS reward with a long scavenger process (if you count the previous two back items to get there) was a nice idea, but for some reason ArenaNet decided to break the clean division between Fractals and the rest of the game with it. I think that decision was misguided.

It’s not, by far, the worst decision they’ve ever made, but there was no criteria about the scope of questionable decisions. So I included it as a minor questionable decision in my overall list.

I’m not the only one. Posts I’ve made mentioning this in the past are among my higher rated posts on the part of other forumites.

Gibson.4036:

11. Too many waypoints.

What?

Again, convenient, but not very immersive. The world would be a be more cohesive if we had about 1/3rd of the waypoints we have now. I’d rather have the population moving through the world more rather than teleporting to world bosses, node farms, and events as we check off our endgame to-do-lists.

1) Traits (‘nuff said)
2) Listening to minorities when it’s about not neccessarily needed stuff, like the trait revamp as some people wanted this game to be more like GW and like the “first person” view which destroyed the mouse turns (I’m not making this up, but only people who need to move a lot, like me, notice, you need to move your mouse slightly more to move with it, so a 180° turn now hurts)(Please look into it and change it back, anet, pretty please!)
3) Not leaving at least LA out of the megaserver system.
4) Making events on a certain map a daily
5) Closing maps down when there still are a bunch of people (~20) doing a world boss
6) Making fights seem like a giant disco (How should people learn how bosses work if they can’t see a thing?)
7) All those drytop and silverwastes currencies.

Anyway, they also did good stuff, like the wardrobe (I love it), the now account bound dyes, ascended weapons and more stuff whcih went from soulbound to accountbound and I think someone is finally looking into the wvw servers (bugs, lags etc) and for that I’m grateful.

maddoctor.2738:

1) How they completely changed how traits were supposed to work pre-release. Learning traits by defeating profession specific challenges, Elementalists reading about forbidden lore, Warriors engaging in drunken brawls and other things like that made me LOVE the trait system of GW2. Sadly, none of that could be found anywhere at release..

You’re right, I didn’t know this. This sounds very fun and similar to suggestions I supported in the traits mega-thread. It makes sense to have profession specific, soloable challenges you can activate on your own time. I am not opposed to group content for some traits, but not all of them, especially when leveling. I think the Grand Master traits are fine. There are only a few and by that time you have a better feel for what you want your build to look like and don’t feel pressured to get them all right away. When you are leveling you are experimenting and that needs to be easier.

So yeah, my list would be …

Traits revamp

Trolling the players with SAB minis and no intention of releasing SAB content

The current communication policy (i.e. zero communication)

Loot not rewarding. Specifically the fact that everything is completely random and the concept of working towards an item doesn’t exist for the most part. Yes, this is being addressed, but it’s surprising to me that it has existed like this for so long.

some smaller things, but honestly, these are the ones that bug me the most and are what made me stop supporting this game until real changes are implemented.

I could also go on and on about things in this game I love, but the pros are very much overshadowed by the cons at this point for me.

Removal of soloQ

IndigoSundown.5419:

The Gag Order. “We won’t tell you anything about what’s coming until it’s imminent, because the juvenile among you accuse us of breaking promises when we can’t produce what we discussed.”

Dear God, yes. The “communication” policy. This is exactly the first thing that popped into my mind as well. But hey, as long as they’re really committed to it, I think they should embrace it at ALL levels and see how it feels. I’m imagining a conversation between an imaginary high-ranking executive (Let’s call him, say, Bike O’Mrien) and anyone on the dev team:

Bike: “Hey, I just wanted to check in and see how we’re coming along with [Feature X]. Can you give me an update?”

Dev: (Blank stare, total silence)

Bike: “Sorry, maybe you didn’t hear me? How’s that feature coming along?”

Dev: (Looks away; Even louder silence)

Bike: “I just asked you a question. Twice. What’s with the silent treatment? Have you no respect?”

[This continues a few more times, until Bike is extremely angry and frustrated]

Bike: “ANSWER ME!!!”

Dev (finally): “You should know that I’ve certainly heard every question you have asked, and I really value any input that you might offer, but I’m just really not ready to talk about it yet.”

Bike: “Not ready to…?! What do you mean?! Can’t you just give me an OVERVIEW, for heaven’s sake?”

Dev: “Eehhhhh, not really, because I might change something later, and I really don’t think you’re capable of understanding that a general overview is not a guarantee of my final, completed work.”

Bike (sputtering indignantly): “Are you HIGH? Why WOULDN’T I understand that? I’m not STUPID. Of COURSE I would understand that! Give me some credit, will you?”

Dev (suspiciously): “Nah, I don’t think so , Bike. Nice try, though. Look, thing is, it’ll be ready when it’s ready, and until then I’m afraid I really don’t have any new information I can give you. But if you’d really like to discuss the feature that I may or may not be working on — that may or may not be ready at some point in the future — please feel free to start a post about it on the official forums. I promise I will read every word.”

Bike: (begins to sob uncontrollably)

Dev: “MAN, I love our communication policy!” (whistles happily as he returns to work on [Feature X]. Or maybe he doesn’t. We don’t really know. Shhhh. )

Oh yeah, I’m sure they’d love to be on the receiving end of their own policy. For realsies.

serenke.4806:

Lovely, another Shakespeare thread. You know, Much ado about nothing.

Are you sure you didn’t mean “The Comedy of Errors”? That’s Shakespeare as well. :-)

- New acquisiton of traits
- Incorporating the cities into the megaserver system.
(Completely destroyed certain server communities and the sense of belonging, which is huge in an mmo)

they kicked over my sand castle qq

The major crack down on RMT/buyers now almost 3 years later when they should have been on top of this from day 1….

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/RMT-Purchases-Expect-them-to-be-Removed/first

1.) Diminishing Returns
2.) Town clothing disaster
3.) Precursor crafting presented as QoL, then locked behind pay wall
4.) Watchwork Mining Pick
5.) Tradable Legendaries
6.) Better rewards for failed events than success (this should really be a no brainer)
7.) Silence policy (resulting in a company that is at odds with its customers, not working with them)
8.) Final choice for forum programmers/creators
9.) Hiring former Nexon employee to run monetization (and then wonder why some users refuse to trust them)
10.) Did I mention Diminishing Returns?

Allowing macro’s for instruments.
Removing SAB.
No direct trade system.

minbariguy.7504:

IndigoSundown.5419:

The Gag Order. “We won’t tell you anything about what’s coming until it’s imminent, because the juvenile among you accuse us of breaking promises when we can’t produce what we discussed.”

Dear God, yes. The “communication” policy. This is exactly the first thing that popped into my mind as well. But hey, as long as they’re really committed to it, I think they should embrace it at ALL levels and see how it feels. I’m imagining a conversation between an imaginary high-ranking executive (Let’s call him, say, Bike O’Mrien) and anyone on the dev team:

Bike: “Hey, I just wanted to check in and see how we’re coming along with [Feature X]. Can you give me an update?”

Dev: (Blank stare, total silence)

Bike: “Sorry, maybe you didn’t hear me? How’s that feature coming along?”

Dev: (Looks away; Even louder silence)

Bike: “I just asked you a question. Twice. What’s with the silent treatment? Have you no respect?”

[This continues a few more times, until Bike is extremely angry and frustrated]

Bike: “ANSWER ME!!!”

Dev (finally): “You should know that I’ve certainly heard every question you have asked, and I really value any input that you might offer, but I’m just really not ready to talk about it yet.”

Bike: “Not ready to…?! What do you mean?! Can’t you just give me an OVERVIEW, for heaven’s sake?”

Dev: “Eehhhhh, not really, because I might change something later, and I really don’t think you’re capable of understanding that a general overview is not a guarantee of my final, completed work.”

Bike (sputtering indignantly): “Are you HIGH? Why WOULDN’T I understand that? I’m not STUPID. Of COURSE I would understand that! Give me some credit, will you?”

Dev (suspiciously): “Nah, I don’t think so , Bike. Nice try, though. Look, thing is, it’ll be ready when it’s ready, and until then I’m afraid I really don’t have any new information I can give you. But if you’d really like to discuss the feature that I may or may not be working on — that may or may not be ready at some point in the future — please feel free to start a post about it on the official forums. I promise I will read every word.”

Bike: (begins to sob uncontrollably)

Dev: “MAN, I love our communication policy!” (whistles happily as he returns to work on [Feature X]. Or maybe he doesn’t. We don’t really know. Shhhh. )

Oh yeah, I’m sure they’d love to be on the receiving end of their own policy. For realsies.

serenke.4806:

Lovely, another Shakespeare thread. You know, Much ado about nothing.

Are you sure you didn’t mean “The Comedy of Errors”? That’s Shakespeare as well. :-)

I am not worthy… great satire.

For some reason my post was deleted so ill say it again. IMO the most questionable decision they made was by removing consistent content updates. Promising consistent content and now nothing. 80% of my friend list logs on for dailies and that’s it. Worst idea.

thefinnster.7105:

id have to say pushing HoT while failing to deliver any content in the mean time is a very questionable and risky decision i personaly know at least 15 players who have droped out and at least 4 of those have stated they will not return

continuous and regular content updates have been the only thing keeping this game going when it so clearly lacks end game content for players who have been here from the start and now this insanely long wait with no new content is killing the game for alot of players who are simply bored stupid re running the same content over and over again

This.

I have noticed a severe drop in veteran activity in guild members I played with since the beginning. My guild is surviving off all the new and returning players coming into the game. Only on mission days I see my officers and vets log

I hope this format of no content between expansions is something they don’t continue, it is what set GW2 apart form the other hit it and quit it expansion MMOs. The pace of the living story and bi-monthly updates is what I enjoyed the most in this game. It hard to wanna stay logged in after daily. I don’t have anything against expansions as long as they dont come at the price of not having regular updates.

I assume that they know this and compensating by selling many of copies of the game at discount to keep metrics and population going until the expansion. They might not even care knowing that the majority of people will return for the expansion.

Also, release SAB. Even if its only world 1 and 2. Its been a year and a half. This will be new content to many people and make happy the people that have been here for 2+ years.

1. Introduction of ascended equipment with higher stats than exotic.
2. No groups with more than 5
3. Lack of sPvP gametypes apart from conquest for so long
4. Allowing legendaries to be sold on TP.
5. NPE and changes to traits

1)NPE/TRAITS.

2) Lack of Trinity with not system in place that is equally as effective if not better.

3) Lack of Raid Dungeons.

4) Lack of variety in Instanced PvP modes.

5) Developers Silence policy.

6) lack of major WvW development/improvements.

1. New trait acquisition system
2. Rework of the personal story as part of the NPE (level gating and removing “My Greatest Fear” arc)
3. Fractal Reset (and not actually putting the announced fractal weapon boxes in the game yet)
4. Not bringing back SAB, even without new zones
5. Removal of TAFU (I’m glad I was around to do it before it was removed)
6. The apparent focus on outfits over real armor sets (I want to mix/match!)

1. Narrowing dailies to be overly specific and complete removal of monthlies ( I miss my Monthly’s It gave me a goal to do for the month Wish they kept them

2 Having No content for when you reach level 80. When I reached level 80.. I felt like I have nothing else to do at all. I suppose you have fractals.. But that only lasts so long..

3 – Making Ac story Dungeon a Joke. Ran it with a friend and her son. It was so easy that it was not even a challenge ( granted we are level 80 but still are down leveled when you do it as level 80). But I remember it used to be a challenge when it first came out.. What happened. I remember getting owned by the first boss when Ac first came out.. now its too easy in story mode ( And being downlevelto the story mode level it was still too easy )

4 – No new dungeons added in three years. At all.. Like one new path for TA. But nothing else added ?. In three years we got no new dungeons.. What are you suppose to do when you have done everything ?. I kinda like having new dungeons to do so why have we not gotten no new dungeons ?.. fractals do not count

The lack of PvP/PvE splitting frustrates me to no end. I hate having to rework my playstyle because of a gamemode I have no involvement in whatsoever. As such, last week I finally bit the bullet and retired my Mesmer, which I had mained since beta.

Secondly, I hate how much safety padding this game has: from the annoying squelching system to the NPE (yes, I know I should use my healing skill), and to the egregious amount of pop-ups that have to remind me that I haven’t finished my personal story/dailies.

1. Lack of news regarding the weapon skills and animations for Necromancer’s GS and other advanced classes. Of course you are working on it all still, but I’m just being a bit impatient here atm… Need to see the skills, and given the fact that Marjory is the only GS wielding Necro atm, I can’t judge, yet.
I mean, look at Caithe’s Thief skills that are completely different to normal thief attacks. I just want to know, what animations and attacks we are gonna get. Is it some some cool DPS animations…. OR are we gonna be lumbered with lame GS skills that kinda resemble the Mesmer GS? ..with… a floating sword? Skill 5 was the only good thing with GS Mesmer, the rest was crap…. :/

2. No content to fill in the long wait after S2 ended (should have thought ahead).
3. SAB is still missing (with or without World 3).
4. SAB minis teased on SAB anniversary, but no news or official discussions regarding the matter, not one. Didn’t even add the Boom Boxes either… meh <.<

5. Poor sales decisions, regarding old skins & armors. If you actually revived S1 skins on to the gem store, as well as other skins, you’d sell a heck of a lot more, especially when most of them cannot be obtained anymore.

6. Poor hair choices (not all of them), as there are not enough decent hair styles, just some out-of-this-world styles that, half the time don’t even make sense. I mean if you are gonna do cool and crazy hairstyles for Humans (and other races), use Final Fantasy as a good example. Hell, then always had the coolest hair. Some of your weird styles have just been “meh” at best. Give us some Cloud Strife hair.
A lot of your average hairstyles are not so bad though.

minbariguy.7504:

IndigoSundown.5419:

The Gag Order. “We won’t tell you anything about what’s coming until it’s imminent, because the juvenile among you accuse us of breaking promises when we can’t produce what we discussed.”

Dear God, yes. The “communication” policy. This is exactly the first thing that popped into my mind as well. But hey, as long as they’re really committed to it, I think they should embrace it at ALL levels and see how it feels. I’m imagining a conversation between an imaginary high-ranking executive (Let’s call him, say, Bike O’Mrien) and anyone on the dev team:

Bike: “Hey, I just wanted to check in and see how we’re coming along with [Feature X]. Can you give me an update?”

Dev: (Blank stare, total silence)

Bike: “Sorry, maybe you didn’t hear me? How’s that feature coming along?”

Dev: (Looks away; Even louder silence)

Bike: “I just asked you a question. Twice. What’s with the silent treatment? Have you no respect?”

[This continues a few more times, until Bike is extremely angry and frustrated]

Bike: “ANSWER ME!!!”

Dev (finally): “You should know that I’ve certainly heard every question you have asked, and I really value any input that you might offer, but I’m just really not ready to talk about it yet.”

Bike: “Not ready to…?! What do you mean?! Can’t you just give me an OVERVIEW, for heaven’s sake?”

Dev: “Eehhhhh, not really, because I might change something later, and I really don’t think you’re capable of understanding that a general overview is not a guarantee of my final, completed work.”

Bike (sputtering indignantly): “Are you HIGH? Why WOULDN’T I understand that? I’m not STUPID. Of COURSE I would understand that! Give me some credit, will you?”

Dev (suspiciously): “Nah, I don’t think so , Bike. Nice try, though. Look, thing is, it’ll be ready when it’s ready, and until then I’m afraid I really don’t have any new information I can give you. But if you’d really like to discuss the feature that I may or may not be working on — that may or may not be ready at some point in the future — please feel free to start a post about it on the official forums. I promise I will read every word.”

Bike: (begins to sob uncontrollably)

Dev: “MAN, I love our communication policy!” (whistles happily as he returns to work on [Feature X]. Or maybe he doesn’t. We don’t really know. Shhhh. )

Oh yeah, I’m sure they’d love to be on the receiving end of their own policy. For realsies.

serenke.4806:

Lovely, another Shakespeare thread. You know, Much ado about nothing.

Are you sure you didn’t mean “The Comedy of Errors”? That’s Shakespeare as well. :-)

This is a thing of beauty. Magnificent.

I have two things that have ultimately decreased my desire to even launch the game:
1) Megaserver – Making it an optional thing that people could move into for Boss Events would have been a better idea. Instead the need to recalibrate the metrics to be more favorable resulted in the one thing that really killed my enjoyment of the game. It also destroyed the ability to WvW recruit for servers and server loyalty in general. The timing was right during our planning of our server party which also was unfun.

2) Daily log-in/Dailies – I am a PvE player primarily (although due to #1 I find that to be less enjoyable). The dailies are really meant to try and force players into other parts of the game. I don’t even bother with doing them anymore and thus have stopped caring about achievement points. The log-in reward is there to pat me on the head for bothering to load a character and giving ANet their metrics boost.

Ultimately I would have tolerated #2 if there was no Megaserver. The Megaserver implementation single handedly killed my game enjoyment so I guess #2 is really an optional at this point.

#1: Hobosacks

warbignime.4610:

Anet have made some questionable decisions during the years of GW2 development , beta and after launch.
1. Remove Loading screen lore, Loading screen use to have text/lore. Anet removed it later on, What is the point of removing extra flavour text? Please bring them back.
2.No duelling , It is their design choice to not add duelling into the game rather than technical difficulty. I understand where the worry comes from, duelling might encourage unfriendly players to annoy others , but they can always add a auto decline all duel option . I see duelling as a nice way of making friends, I have enough faith in our community to not abuse this feature.
3.Remove Lore book, during old betas there use to be lore books all around, they give player extra lores about creature, organization, locations and events with motion pictures. Again, why remove the extra flavour and lore?
4.The launch trailer, many of you might not know but the launch trailer of GW2 is beyond horrible. It’s one of the worst trailer ever I have seen in my entire life, there are even no actual game in it. It definitely affected GW2 initial sales. Who thought that was a good idea?
That’s all I can think of for now.

For me these are trivial and inconsequential. None of them had any part in why I left the game, and I was a well paying customer.

I suspect, but this is only my speculation, that there is no dueling in the game because players would find out which builds are extremely OP and which just plainly suck extremely fast and A-net is not capable of keeping up with pace of changes required.

The top bad decision that A-Net has made is the neglect of WvWvW. They had a 1 of a kind niche product without competition on the market and blew it. Completely, utterly. Many servers are just former shadows of themselves and their communities are now in ruins due to this. And these were really high paying customers that have left the game. Much more so then the PVE farmer crowd because they bought skins through gems instead of farming for them.

So as a business, why would you let go of this huge chunk of your customer base ? Seriously, A-Net had a cash cow on their hands like no other and is simply too stupid to continually capitalize on it.

Why they blotched up shader effects (shadows and ground effects) last month, making stereoscopic rendering (3D) mode an eyesore when enabled.

In no particular order:

1. fractal reset and everything that came along with it (this annoyed me to no end, and still does)
2. watchwork pick
3. outfits and (almost) no new armors
4. fractal rewards
5. wvw being mostly ignored since launch
6. NPE
7. changed traits so you now have to buy them and they cost A LOT
8. sellable legendaries, these should have always been account bound on acquire
9. awful communication, failure to accept mistakes, apologise and make amends
10. abysmal customer support with ridiculous excuses and computer-like answers
11. town clothes into tonics
12. adding additional currencies to clutter inventories and not to the wallet
13. very poor class balance
14. no guild halls at game launch for a game called Guild Wars
15. no gvg for a game called Guild Wars
16. skyhammer
17. putting soloq and teamq in the same q
18. putting out the gw2 manifesto only to ignore it
19. releasing HoT info at an abysmal rate (if this keeps up, we’ll be lucky to get it at about Christmas 2016)
20. implementing megaservers (a good ideea IMO) without putting an option for server-only chat or making the major cities server-only, thus screwing server communities
21. no possibility of saving builds so you can load them instantly
22. disbanding dungeon team
23. only adding one dungeon path in 2.5 years (admiteddly a good one), at the price of removing another path
24. almost no elite areas/group raids (we only have fractals, wurm and teq), no FoW or UW
25. guilds can start a world boss, but they can’t instance it and invite whom they choose
26. no real solutions for the insane amounts of Bloodstone Dust, Empyreal Fragments and Dragonite Ore that you get
27. forum is buggy and it’s impossible to use the search function, taking much away from its utility

SkyFallsInThunder.8257:

27. forum is buggy and it’s impossible to use the search function, taking much away from its utility

How is this a “questionable decision”? I doubt they decided one day to say: “Hey let’s not have a working search function on our forums for <reasons>”

Gibson.4036:

Again, convenient, but not very immersive. The world would be a be more cohesive if we had about 1/3rd of the waypoints we have now. I’d rather have the population moving through the world more rather than teleporting to world bosses, node farms, and events as we check off our endgame to-do-lists.

What would that actually accomplish, other than making traveling anywhere tedious? That’s what the WvW maps, Orr, and the Silverwastes are like, and none of them are fun to travel through.

ReV.6097:

5. Poor sales decisions, regarding old skins & armors. If you actually revived S1 skins on to the gem store, as well as other skins, you’d sell a heck of a lot more, especially when most of them cannot be obtained anymore.

What season 1 items do you want that aren’t available? All the gem store items from season 1 still appear in the store occasionally, and all the old achievement rewards can be bought from the laurel vendors.

maddoctor.2738:

SkyFallsInThunder.8257:

27. forum is buggy and it’s impossible to use the search function, taking much away from its utility

How is this a “questionable decision”? I doubt they decided one day to say: “Hey let’s not have a working search function on our forums for <reasons>”

I’m actually not ruling that out, but what I meant was that there are ten million billion forums out there and I don’t think they all have this issue; not working on fixing it is a questionable decision.

1) Marketing.
2) Not developing sufficient content and areas to support 1.

Infrastructure is already there, despite a few hiccups such as skill lag to this day.

Making the only access point to crafting and banking in the Sylvari starting zone (Mabon Market) the place of a frequent event (somehow every time I go there :-)) during which said services are unavailable until the event is finished (which can take some time).

Ascended Gear being added after we were told no vertical progression.

- NPE
- Trait system
- Megaserver

- They over Hyped the Game.
- Made it not as cool or as exiting that it could of bin.

1. npe (feels narrow and stiff to me in comparisson with the more horizontal former system). It doesnt have that organic play feeling to it.
2. Damage to the beginners area’s. They where fun and a great way the learn the mechanics of the game. Now they are just random and boring and not a learning curve at all.
3. Removal of many of the first map pets. The Norn still have enough pets in the city, but other races dont have many.

maddoctor.2738:

SkyFallsInThunder.8257:

27. forum is buggy and it’s impossible to use the search function, taking much away from its utility

How is this a “questionable decision”? I doubt they decided one day to say: “Hey let’s not have a working search function on our forums for <reasons>”

Most people just seem to use this thread as a place to complain about whatever. So yeah, better not to question.

I remember when the previous host of POI made a video with two basic messages – one to the development community (message: Involve your customers/players in the development process) and another to the player community (message: Smart people make games and you shouldn’t assume you can do better). Paraphrasing those messages from memory so forgive the inaccuracy and brevity. I think she got the first right, but like most of the development community she missed on the second. I don’t think the issue is building better games and who can do it that bother most most of ANet’s customers – its the quality, soundness and thoughtfulness of the decisions that get made in the development and implementation of the game. By a certain point in almost everyone’s working lives they have endured poor decision-making that directly impacted them in some negative way, and when that happens in something that is supposed to be “fun” and not “work” it becomes especially annoying and difficult to passively endure in silence.

My list, in relatively loose order of importance:

1. The Gag Order Communications Policy. This actually deserves to be #1 IMO because it exacerbates every issue and problem that arises in the game. Its like a multiplier effect. Can’t stand “X” and want it changed . . . too bad now multiply your personal annoyance factor related to that issue by large dose of silence from ANet that comes off as indifference and/or contempt. BTW – minbariguy’s post is a brilliant take on this ANet policy.

2. April 2014 Traits Revamp. This one is especially puzzling since it just seems so obviously a bad idea that from the outside looking in that it makes no sense that it actually made it into the game. This is a decision that alienated a large portion of the player base that it seems to me MMOs want to keep in their games and keep happy – the “altaholics.” Altaholics play the hell out of these games and this choice feels like ANet went out of their way to alienate and annoy them. There are two long threads (probably about 100+ pages by now) about the current “Trait System” and how much it sucks and how it might be improved so I won’t rehash that but instead focus on my experiences. Since April 2014 I’ve not started any new characters but I’ve helped my wife level of 2 new characters. In both cases she managed to stumble across about a handful of traits – none of which could be considered to result in any kind of “build.” So, in both cases she simply bought the traits she needed to have an effective build rather than grind map completion, visit WvW which she hates, or play a game of hide-and-seek or wait-and-see with the traits she needed hoping to pull a build together eventually. So, if the intent on ANet’s part was to push players out into various PVE areas and WvW, the system was pretty much a complete fail. If the intent on ANet’s part was to promote build experimentation it was a complete fail since she bought the traits she needed for 1 build for each character. The only reason I can see for this change is that ANet thought it needed another gold sink AND a serious skill point sink. The skill point cost of purchasing all the traits is actually significantly higher than the cost of buying ALL the skills on that same character. If that was ANet’s real motivation, there are smarter, less annoying gold and skill sinks they could have implemented. I jokingly suggested adding a collection for mystic weapons which are 50 skill points a piece and with a decent payoff of say, an ascended weapon, they would clear out a lot of banked skill points – I still think its a better idea for a skill point sink than adding skill points to the cost of traits.

3. The “New Character Experience.” Note that I did not call it the “New Player Experience.” since that phrase is a lie. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been playing PC games since the “trash 80” days and MMOs for a decade or more or if you make a new character in GW2 you get the NCE. I personally hate level gating basic features of a game like this – every time I am in Ebonhawk and I see the empty platform/pedestal where the guild banker was I think “wth made them think this was necessary or even a halfway decent idea?” What is so annoying about the decision is that all that would really be required to make it acceptable (or at least far less annoying) to most GW veterans or veteran PC gamers generally is an “opt out” option. At the start of the new character personal story instance ask everyone if they are a “New Player” – explain what that means in two or three sentences and give them a yes or no choice. Yes, means you get the full NPE. No means you get the “Veteran Player Experience” including no rewards but also no silly level gating of basic game features the like the downed state or vistas or underwater combat, etc.

Continued

4. Temporary Content in Living Story 1. I understand the desire to experiment and to be cutting edge. I also understand the first blush appeal of turning the game into a series of “I was there!” moments. However, from the start I never thought those things were enough to offset the loss of permanent content for players. And at another level, from the perspective of an employee I thought it robbed the developers’ jobs of something intrinsically satisfying about their jobs which is the ability to look at something in a game, that people are playing and enjoying, and say “I did that” or “I helped make that happen.” I figured the results of relying on temporary content to keep players engaged would be fairly low quality and buggy content – and at times (not always) it was both and nearly always at least the latter. With a little forethought they could have set it up so that most of LS would have been replayed as a series of “storybook” style instanced content a la GW1. But unfortunately they didn’t, and as a result ANet sacrificed a lot time and effort that will now require even more time and effort to salvage for an ongoing payoff to the company and the players.

5. Megaserver and Cities: To this day the megaserver system still makes guild missions an occasional serious annoyance but that isn’t the primary reason I see the current megaserver as a poor decision. Simply put ANet should have pulled the city zones out of the megaserver system. Doing so would have provided a haven for the CRPG player base and kept server identity meaningful for WvW purposes. Btw – neither of those things are things I enjoy but these are two fairly significant portions of the GW2 player base, and companies need to make an effort to NOT alienate significant portions of their player base. Prior to the megaserver system, players on certain servers that enjoyed CRPGing could do that on those servers and players on every server could use the cities for WvW guild recruiting and real-time pushes for more players in WvW. Now, not so much and not at all.

6. Shelving SAB. Confession – I don’t have any nostalgia about old platform games and I didn’t particularly like SAB. It was ok, but I was very “meh” about it. On the other hand I knew a lot of players that really, really liked it and it seems like there was/is sizable portion of the GW2 player base likes it and would like to keep playing it. So, why not at least turn Season 1 and 2 back on for those players to grind away on, or for new players to experience? But “NO” because it didn’t fit in with their Living Story direction – that direction that turned into an expansion and doesn’t seem to stop them from doing holiday events on a continuing basis. Add to that the sale of the “permanent continuation coin” or whatever it was and even my response was “Wth ANet!!?” And I don’t particularly want to play SAB. What ANet should do is simply take the current set of mini-games (with their relatively lackluster participation) and have Moto “update” them as part of an “arcade” along with SAB in LA or Rata Sum and keep it as permanent content that they can then add to on regular basis (here’s a thought – while ANets at it they can add Polymock – another thing I didn’t and probably wont play but a lot of GW1 players did and GW2 players likely would play – to “Moto’s Arcade”).

So I think I could probably keep going for awhile (balancing PVE and PVP together based on PVP, combining “traits” with “characteristic” points in a manner that often lacks synergy, over-reliance on RNG loot, etc), but its making me a little . . . down . . . so I think I’ll just stop now.