Guild Wars 2

Understand the difference between PvE and PvP and the types of players that don’t like one or the other when creating content. Isn’t the psychology of gamer types required reading by now?

1) Map Completion is PvE. Jamming the last 1% into WvW PvP, forcing players to endure endless ganking and luck to finish this creates negative results. You sour any enjoyment in achieving map completion, ruin interest and create bitter feelings towards WvW (by forcing players to go through it prematurely regardless of their own proclivity) and when players get the rug pulled out from underneath them on finishing a goal you initially set up as PvE, you kill interest in your game overall resulting in players taking their time and money somewhere else. The bottom line – if you want map completion in WvW it should relate only to WvW and not the normal PvE map completion experience/reward.

Other outstanding issues that should be non-existent by now:

2) Why is there no variety of armor designs under level 50? No visible change in your character gives a feeling of stagnation and deters investment in the character and the game itself.

3) Why do I need to zone to get to a dungeon? Remembering which dungeon is where and having to zone all the time is non-existent in most games. The standard is to simply warp the player to the dungeon when the party is formed.

4) Why does the dungeon finder not allow for you to simply que and group players automatically when enough are available or allow a player forming a party to group them? (Again this is the standard in most games.) Players shouldn’t have to check a dungeon finder every 5mins to see if there is a party available. Yes we know you can make a party yourself and wait for others to join but new players or inexperienced players are not likely to want to lead a party.

5) Why aren’t back-pieces listed on the auction house as a grouping under armor or trinkets? 2yrs this game has been around and this doesn’t have it’s own category?

6) UI layouts (as well as fonts, spacing, and colors) for many menus are generally convoluted, poorly organized, and too busy. LFG drop downs for each dungeon under the friends list menu is a good example of this. Why is dungeon finder not its own separate thing? Why are social functions (friends list) not compiled with social functions (guild menu)? Again this is a standard grouping in most games. The pairing (LFG w/ Friends list) is counter intuitive.

7) Crafting menus suffer the same poor design and layout. Why do I need to see every single recipe for a given armor or weapon type all the time? Most of the time you are only working with a couple of recipes given your stage of progress. Why can I not hide extraneous ones or have a listing of what I want in some manner?

8) PvE content (missions, zone completion, etc) needs substantive rewards – including gold. Leveling a character to 80 and having less than 10g is kind of joke and makes this game feel more like a pay for gold scheme. Very few of the rewards from finishing PvE content thus far are much to get excited about. Having to buy excitement on the TP is rather underwhelming for a journey from level 1-80.

Wrap-up:

I bought this game on release with high interest and optimism (having not played GW1) tried it out for 2 – 3 weeks and found it lacking for reasons that aren’t worth going into here and viewed it as a general waste of money. I gave it another shot this past month and found myself enjoying it more and having a higher opinion of it believing I sold it short until being incensed by WvW ganking for dumb PvE design from there those smaller issues weighed heavier and I find myself itching to look elsewhere for a better (more worthwhile) gaming experience.

Just some quick corrections on a few of your points:

2) You’ve got three different skins (drop, crafting, karma merchants) per armor weight for each of the level brackets 5-20, 25-35 and 40-50, plus a set of cultural armor somewhere in the late 30s I think, and a set of rare drops starting around lvl 39(?). That’s a total of 11 different skin sets available to any given character at level 40 that I can think of off the top of my head (not counting gem store and pvp reward tracks). Not exactly what I’d call “no variety of armor design”.

4) With a class/combat system as flexible as this game’s, you can’t just throw five random people in an instance and expect things to work and everyone to have fun. It’s much easier in a system where you know that you’ve got key roles in every group (tank, healer) and can random-match groupes based on that.

Personally, I like how our lfg allows for groups to at least give a basic idea about what kinds of people they’re looking for to play with, and for me it usually works out great, regardless of whether I’m looking for a group to join, or for people to fill up my group.

7) Take a closer look at the upper left of the crafting menu. There’s a search box that lets you type in a string of letters that will only show you recipies that have the search text either in their name or in the name of one of the components. If I’ve got too many onions in my bank, I’ll type in onion and see which of the recipies my cook knows look like a good place to dump the extra onions. If I want to craft an ascended berserker weapon, I type in Zojja in my weaponsmith’s crafting menu and only see the recipies related to that task.

Right next to the search box you’ll find a drop-down menu that allows you to refine the display even more, by checking/unchecking what crafting level(s) and/or what rarety of result you want to see (may actually be easier to just check “ascended” than do the “zojja” search I mentioned above), as well as a few extra conditions (have materials, gain experience).

Search box plus filter options should give you enough flexibility to customize your crafting menu to your tastes.

8) Substantial rewards are only substantial to the point where everyone gets them … and things like zone completion and story missions are achievements many people do, thus making the rewards you get from them somewhat common-place. It’s hard to award something in that spot that feels special.

On the other hand, I completed two zones on my mesmer this weekend, which got me a stack of 40 iron ore, a stack of 40 cotton scraps and two blacklion keys. I wouldn’t exactly call that a joke (and I would’ve even been happy with 2x 40 logs and two transmutation charges, but this definitely is better).

Can I just reiterate the final point of the above poster OP, substantial rewards are only substantial if there is no inflation or any other form of market dynamics, since GW2 has a live market in the auction house the mission rewards will never keep up unless they are tied to the inflation rate somehow, at which point people will have more money, and then more to spend, and then prices will inflate as more disposable income is around and so on. It is almost impossible to make the mission rewards worth anything in an economy like GW2’s.

Anyway 10 gold is plenty, considering how short a time you have actually played when you reach 80 and how much left of the game there is to do. That’s a few exotic pieces to start getting your char equipped properly.

I don’t want to see the forumers come and trash this post when many of the OPs points are valid and I can support the fact that some of these have lead to players leaving. Not myself, because despite any flaws I still can’t get enough of this game, but my friend who started playing maybe a month and a half ago now doesn’t play, and very quickly only wanted to play the game to play with me, and didn’t really care much for the game itself.

• Adding WvW to map completion was always a weird decision. I’ve learnt to live with it but for new players I can remember it being “why do I need to do this?”, “this isn’t part of the world”.
• The TP search system has needed updating for a very long time. Not just back items, dyes, armour by weight type etc. These are QoL changes we should already have.
• UI issues. I have always found the crafting UI messy. I’m not quite sure what it is about it but its annoying format does make me groan. In addition to this, one-click items should be a thing in the Mystic Forge and the craft discovery tab. And where is our “use all”?

• In regards to your points on LFG and dungeons, I can’t say I see a problem here. Going to a zone for a dungeon for me is no issue, and seeing where they are before I learnt them isn’t hard either. The LFG tool needs some updates but random queues are not one. Why? Because you would need specific queues – level 80 only, any level, new players, experienced players. Then what if I want to queue in experienced but I don’t want to end up with non level 80s? I would hate a queue. Then if you just introduced a queue with no specifics alongside the current system, I can’t imagine many people will use it.
• Even though some new income sources would be nice, 10g at level 80 isn’t bad considering how little you’ll have played by then. And you don’t realise how much G you have in the form of materials.

Singh.9713:

Understand the difference between PvE and PvP and the types of players that don’t like one or the other when creating content. Isn’t the psychology of gamer types required reading by now?

1) Agree. It took me several weeks to get that last wvw portion of map completion and while I do wvw a lot it was still a pain due to being stuck on the wrong color for weeks on end and not being able to take those garrisons near enemy spawn to get those pois and vistas.
2) There’s no variety because there doesn’t need to be. You literally get to 80 in like 3 days nowadays and most people don’t spend that much time at low lvl ranges.
3) Zoning into a dungeon is a good thing. It prevents griefers and other trolls from messing with your own dungeon experience.
4) Not really. Most mmos don’t even have a lfg feature like gw2. This is not a standard although it should be. Also some groups have specific requirements such as gear and AR which a queuing system would not be able to sort out. So it’s best to have players make the decision to join a team rather than get auto joined and then being kicked out.
5) Agree.
6) That’s your opinion. I happen to think the UI layout is fairly good.
7) You’re able to hide items by typing in filtering words in the search bar above the UI.
8) Wrong. Gold is already inflated and giving out more coin rewards would just make it worse. Giving out more coins does not make it better. It just makes it worthless and everything cost a lot more gold and essentially wipe out everyone’s existing coin savings.

Everything you stated here as an issue is either a non issue or even worse in most other MMOs. Your criticism lacks perspective.

I agree on lack of armor variety under 80 in general. I think mail suffers here the most, 1-65 normal sets look almost the same.

Considering the most common complaints I see about the LFG system are that people don’t read the descriptions and that there is no way to check peoples gear and builds before they join I think a system that randomly groups people together would be incredibly unpopular.

Even when a group is advertised as open to everyone it’s not strictly true because there’s an unspoken assumption that saying that will deter speed runners, build elitists and other people who expect the group to meet their person standard from joining.

If the LFG menu suddenly started throwing everyone together it would quickly make everyone unhappy.