Guild Wars 2

I don’t think there’d be many (any?) people who played GW1 who don’t feel that a number of design mistakes were made in GW2.

My list:

• Downed state in PVP zones. Adds nothing to the game but detracts a lot. It’s annoying, disrupts the flow of combat, introduces imbalance and farcical rally situations.
• Fixed weapon skills. Far too restrictive for me, pigeonholes weapons into roles & can causes whole weapons to be ruined because of just 1 bad skill.
• No resource system. Has caused GW2 combat to be all about spamming skills/dodges.
• Removal of skill capturing (signet of capture). One of the best & debatably most game-defining features of the first game, I cannot fathom the logic of why it was elided from GW2.
• Addition of ascended gear after release. Massive PR blunder. Pushed the game into a grind corner it has yet to escape from.

Interesting list. I agree with three of them, but I disagree that the downed state adds nothing to the game. A lot of times, I actually used the downed state as part of my strategy. I know I’m going to go down at a certain point and I position myself in such a way where I can rally. I find fighting back from the brink more exciting than just dying.

Also, skill capturing was annoying, one of the reasons that Anet sold skill unlock packs. Not everyone liked running around the world to get a skill, particularly in places where you didn’t know where the boss would show up. Sure it was okay on your first character, but after that I found myself annoyed by having to go get a specific skill to make a build that I’d rather just make and start playing with.

My own list:

1. The addition of ascended gear
2. The personal story over all…it was designed to work with levels so that it matched up between races. To me, this ten chapter thing made the personal story too limited for those writing the stories to do what needed to be done to make the stories engaging.
3. Lack of longer engaging quest lines that cross zone boundaries.
4. Legendary weapons should have never been sellable on the trading post.
5. Dungeon ownership/kicking procedures. You should need at least 3 votes to kick, and having a dungeon owner get kicked or leave without transferring the ownership to someone else in the party is just…well…bad.

Vayne.8563:

Interesting list. I agree with three of them, but I disagree that the downed state adds nothing to the game. A lot of times, I actually used the downed state as part of my strategy. I know I’m going to go down at a certain point and I position myself in such a way where I can rally. I find fighting back from the brink more exciting than just dying.

I find fighting back from a sliver of health left to be far far more exciting and rewarding than rallying because someone tagged with AOE died 900m away. In games without downed state, you would still try to die in a position where your teammates could rez you, there just wouldn’t be these farcical rallies.

Also, skill capturing was annoying, one of the reasons that Anet sold skill unlock packs. Not everyone liked running around the world to get a skill

I agree – it would have been a good thing to monetise. I really miss the way mobs would use player skills on you when fighting, it made earning the skill so much more rewarding.

I never played GWI but here is my list:

1. The transmutation system – if the game is about cosmetics then we should be able to simply unlock skins and switch between them anytime we want. We should be able to right click on any item slot and then be able to select between all skins we had collected.

2. The living story – they claim it is supposed to be delivering an expansion’s worth of content over time, yet most of the content is temporary. How can you call it an expansion’s worth of content if I can take a break for a year, and by the time I come back there will hardly be anything new for me to experience, simply because I wasn’t playing every single day?

3. The personal story – if every character is going to die, at least make it feel varied.
Don’t make everyone die at the same level, and give the characters an actual reason for dying. And don’t make the final mission require a group to complete when all the other missions are made to be solo’ed. I won’t finish my personal story because of this.

4. Legendaries – why on earth can you sell them on the trading post?
Because of that very reason I don’t concider them any different than any other skin – in fact I admire fractal skins more because you know that someone has played a lot of difficult content to get them. I could just farm for a few months or buy a ton of gems, convert them to gold and voila, legendary for me!

5. Quest/event rewards – there are no meaningful quest/event rewards in this game. When you complete a quest/event you get xp, karma and coin.
If you’ve seen WoodenPotatoes’ video about breaking out of Brisban Wildlands you will notice he is using an experimental rifle from Orr. That rifle is amazing, but it has a single charge. If it was unlimited charges then a ton of people would go and do whatever it takes to get that rifle.
And it doesn’t even have to be something that gives you fluff skills, it could be stuff like the Watchknight Tonic. There could be tonics like that for inquest, flame legion, sons of svanir, nightmare court etc.

I’m going to answer in terms of process rather than in terms of detail design decisions.

1. Investment decisions, and design decisions, are made in an inward focused way rather than with clear focus on the customer.

2. There is not a clear segmentation of the customer base, based in data, against which investment and design decisions are measured before they are made.

3. There is not a clear prioritization of the segments of the customer base, with a clear decision to delight players in this segment, try to retain players in that segment, and acknowledging that players in this other segment will attrit as the result of the decisions needed to delight the first group.

4. There is not a clear understanding of the unstated expectations (this is a reference to the Kano model from marketing textbooks) of the various customer segments. This results in entirely predictable customer reactions which could have been anticipated at the time investment or design decisions are made, but seem to come as a complete surprise to ArenaNet when the features are rolled out.

5. Prior to GW2 release, ArenaNet appeared to clearly communicate about GW2 and acted transparent. My perception is that post release, not only did the initial positioning become “no longer operative”, but also the transparency ceased. I believe retaining the traditional MMO player segment depends heavily on continued trust in the developer, and that the lack of transparency erodes that trust.

Looking at the lists above, many of the items involve tradeoffs between the needs/wants/expectations different segments of players. Perhaps the real problem is that each decision is made in a vaccum, so the overall decisions are not self consistent, so GW2 delights no one.

scerevisiae.1972:

Vayne.8563:

Interesting list. I agree with three of them, but I disagree that the downed state adds nothing to the game. A lot of times, I actually used the downed state as part of my strategy. I know I’m going to go down at a certain point and I position myself in such a way where I can rally. I find fighting back from the brink more exciting than just dying.

I find fighting back from a sliver of health left to be far far more exciting and rewarding than rallying because someone tagged with AOE died 900m away. In games without downed state, you would still try to die in a position where your teammates could rez you, there just wouldn’t be these farcical rallies.

I guess you don’t solo as much as I do. There are times, living in Australia, when there is no team. It’s me out in the world. Rallying, at that point, becomes a life saver. Running back from a way point is pointless and annoying.

There’s not always going to be someone to rez you.

1) Endgame that came as an afterthought, and it doesn’t help that a lot of the gameplay is held up with mindless zerging/stacking mechanics and boring grinds to get the rewards you want.

2) Having a cosmetic system that revolves entirely around a gem store-only item.

3) WvW being a game mode that encourages boring PvD over PvP, with skill lag making it unplayable at times.

4) Diminishing returns and timegating everywhere… except the trade post. Should have made anything bought on the TP acctbound. Anyone that made 1000’s of gold did it from the TP while the rest are left to languish, hoping for Anet to slip up somewhere like the Deadeye farm.

5) A completely uncompelling story with characters no one really cares about (minus Tybalt). (Though he world building/lore is good)

1) Glacial balancing pace.

2) Bait and switch from token rewards system to RNG commercialized system of reward acquisition. You need to play the economy to gain the prestige rewards, not the game.

3) No regard whatsoever for build variety/state of PvE. Warriors, guardians, and zerker gear in general has reigned supreme for more than a year and they’ve done nothing.

4) Pointlessness of multiple races/lore. They give you many races, yet by the end the story and approaches is the same for all of them. Orders don’t matter.

5) No real content updates. 1+ year later and high end PvE content is largely the same.

Vayne.8563:

scerevisiae.1972:

Vayne.8563:

Interesting list. I agree with three of them, but I disagree that the downed state adds nothing to the game. A lot of times, I actually used the downed state as part of my strategy. I know I’m going to go down at a certain point and I position myself in such a way where I can rally. I find fighting back from the brink more exciting than just dying.

I find fighting back from a sliver of health left to be far far more exciting and rewarding than rallying because someone tagged with AOE died 900m away. In games without downed state, you would still try to die in a position where your teammates could rez you, there just wouldn’t be these farcical rallies.

I guess you don’t solo as much as I do. There are times, living in Australia, when there is no team. It’s me out in the world. Rallying, at that point, becomes a life saver. Running back from a way point is pointless and annoying.

There’s not always going to be someone to rez you.

I should have qualified that my inclusion of DS as a design mistake pertains solely to PVP/WVW. I think DS is fantastic in PVE. I should have said i’m a WVW-only player, apologies.

1) Too much rewarding of time played > skill
2) Lack of incentive to de-concentrate player volume and spread it across the game world
3) Execution of the new trinity. It’s current incarnation promotes a DPS-fest style of play.
4) Combat mechanics promote zergfests/stacking, instead of well executed positioning
5a) Lack of emphasis on Storytelling/Lore
5b) Too much focus on grabbing money from customers without providing adequate value in return.

1: dr/timegating/hard nerfing/ascended gear.
Main reason i stopped playing the game, *new*poor<gap>*old*rich.
2: risk/reward.
3: personal story/ls rewards&fun factor
4: Orr temples that never worked, except melandru.
5: unfun dungeons/fractals

Enjoyed the game till wintersday 2012.
“Only needed no culling/account wallet/guild acitivities back then”

1) Ascended gear
2) Ruining the Plinx and Pact Operation Southern Advancement events
3) Limited-time availability of playable content and rewards
4) Ranger pet mechanics
5) Completed and proposed changes to ranger abilities

1) A near-complete lack of the features that made GW1 unique. Skill capturing? Gone. Story missions? Gone. Fast leveling? Gone. Fast and convenient build experimentation? Gone. Mobs using player skills? Gone.

2) Dull encounter design that promotes DPS over everything else.

3) The slow attack speed of mobs.

4) Dull utility skills.

5) The gem shop. At first, I liked it, but the way it’s been handled is pretty bad. Selling digital lottery boxes is a bit disgusting.

1. Living Story: It feels like an after-thought, it plays like an after-thought. It feels not consistent, giving very little motivation or curiousity about what’s going on. The different alliences are failures and Scarlet is the best villain only on opposite day.

2. The Zerg™: Creating stampedes that kill every challenge as part of the Living World makes the new content even worse. The Zerg™ is the one most horrible thing that could happen to GW2. It sucks any bit of fun out of the content. Unfortunately most new content is involving the Zerg™, and it kills the fun for new starters in Queensdale.

3. Ascended Gear: This will haunt the DEV’s forever. ANet has lost a lot of its credit for breaking the trust of many of its customers.

4. The Waypoint System: Way too many waypoints make the world feel tiny. It kills immersion.

5. The Currencies: A mistake made by many MMO’s over time. But GW2, after one year has so many currencies that it is getting ridiculous. Every event brings some new ones too. Short-sighted and bad at the same time, ANet creates inflation at so many different spots, that it gets impossible to control the side effects.

1. Stats being bound to armour and weapons. Worst design ever.

2. Ascended gear

3. Upscaling alts in WvW; it’s a joke

4. Zergs being most effective & profitable in every area of the game

5. Skins: why is there no database? Wtf

[If I can cheat, I would add Living story (or actually the general story): so stereotype, so bland, it’s fit for a 12-year old. A total letdown]

Grinding, way way too much.
perfomance, or lack of
Ugly amor
blobs/zergs
living story.

1) Endgame that rewards TP speculation over playing hard content (Teq., TA, high lv. fractals…).
2) Living Story that ends ALWAYS in a zerg
3) WvsW that is soooo boring
4) No random stats for armors/weapons, nothing cool that is not on the TP.
5) Gemstore skins…lemme pay 10$ monthly but plz let these things DROP omg…and stop recolouring ugly ones!!!

Here’s some that really annoy me in addition to what has been mentioned above.

1. Introducing DR that hurts legit players (not sure if it counts as a design mistake but it’s my biggest bane and have the porous bones and globby goo to prove it).

2. Having a consolised unchangeable FoV. On most games I need increase it to 100-ish for it to feel comfortable and afaik this game is stuck at around the 70’s.

3. Every monster having way to many knockdown, immobilise, pull or generally any type of boring skills that remove control from the player. This is infuriatingly overused. Here’s an example. I was fighting a random monster on my Guardian, it knocked me down, I used a stand up skill, it knocked me straight back down again. Sigh, now imagine there are 2 of them, 3 even. Not fun, boring!

4. Gear system that makes the freedom to try new things more hassle than it should be.

5. Set in stone UI, many parts are even not required after a while of playing and just serve to obscure the view of lovely Tyria.

1) No real preemptive measures to dissuade server stacking (WvW)
2) Ascended Gear carrot and associated time-gated grinding.
3) Single use skin system; plus lack of skin variants.
4) Zerg favoring WvW design
5) Content design that favors zerker glass cannons over almost all other stat arrays.

1. DR/Grind/Time Gates/RNG: I get that other games have RNG in them, but here it is extremely bad. It goes beyond traditional RNG. Top that off with DR slapping you down and being stuck behind time gates with massive grinds to obtain anything, and it is just not worth the effort for anything. Like I always say, for a company that prides itself on not making grindy games, they sure do make grindy games.

2. Gem Store: What was supposed to be an innocent place for you to buy cosmetics and convenience items, ended up becoming a gamble fest. Gamble for weapon skin, gamble for dyes, gamble for minis, gamble for weapon tickets/scraps, etc. They just seem to care about conning money out of the player base by making them gamble for everything, instead of caring about player satisfaction. And the fact that the only armor sets and weapons we are actually getting, are in the Gem Store only. Cause god forbid we earn them through in game effort.

3. Ascended Gear: Even Anet admits this was a mistake. They straight up said, by level 80 we should have the best gear in the game. Yet the best gear in the game is behind a large grind and time gated. Introducing Ascended gear was the first step backwards on everything they stated GW2 would be. It was a panic move. They saw players leaving the game (which happens to every single MMO in it’s first few months), yet instead of learning from experience, they panicked and changed the direction of the game just like that to appease a small crowd that already quit.

4. Legendary Weapons: There is absolutely nothing Legendary about these weapons. It is an insult to even call them that. The word is right there in the title. Legend. You don’t do some epic storyline to get them, they don’t have some epic story behind them either. There is no Legend to these weapons whatsoever. They are flashy skins that require a ton of grinding, farming, RNG gambling, and tons of money. And they can be sold on the Trading Post. So please tell me what exactly is Legendary about that? Absolutely nothing.

5. Lack of QA: Let’s face it. There is a severe lack of quality assurance going on here. Anet doesn’t listen to their players, and straight up ignores them on the big issues. Take the recipe reset for example. So many players discovered all the recipes, yet Anet reset all the recipes all those players worked for. They lost gold, time, and materials spent for all that just so Anet didn’t have to make new recipes for us to level off. When the players voiced their concerns, Anet ignored them all and reset them any ways. Then the whole MF fiasco that made a ton of regular MF gear soul bound, instead of account bound like was stated by Anet themselves. They ignored everyone and then even changed the wording on all their statements to say account bound instead of soul bound. They lied to everyone and then tried to cover it up by claiming they never said that. Now here we are again with Fractals being reset. A ton of people are in an uproar about losing all their Fractal levels they worked hard for. And what is Anet doing? Ignoring everyone yet again. They don’t care what we have to say. They are going to do it whether we want them to or not.

And then there is all these content updates that are littered with bugs. Heck, even bugs since release are still here and being ignored. We get content patches every two weeks and every single time it comes out, it breaks a bunch of stuff and causes crashes. Then we get update after update to try and fix them, just to release a new content patch two weeks later that breaks even more stuff. It’s an endless cycle of bugs that keeps piling up cause they don’t fix everything before the next content update.

These are the reasons I quit GW2. There is also the Living Story to add there, with it’s nothing but achievement grind and filler content for a mini or back item, but I’ll leave it at those five (apologizes for the long post).

Mine

1) Living story instead of expansion.

2) Ascended gear. Every other MMO does progression via increasing stats. Why not make GW different? Do progression via new skills instead and amazing skins.

3) Fixed stats/traits/weapon skills are too restrictive and take choice away from players.

4) No difficulty/level adjust for players. Difficulty, same/constant for all players regardless of ability. So players who want harder are unhappy, players who want easy are completely cut off from content.

5) Too much nerfing across the entire game. Rewards, skills, traits, weapons, special items etc…Anet in a year have implemented 1,000s+ nerfs. By far the most nerfing in any video game I have ever played. Was the original design that broken?

1) Levels – A totally unnecessary mechanic that despite levelscaling makes most parts of the game world redundant at max level, and makes having alts a complex process.

2) The skill system – Inability to unlock/capture and choose skills freely, which was the key feature of GW1 and the reason why I loved that game so much. Now all characters are the same. Most skills have terribly long cooldowns. Elite skills don’t synergize with any character builds, etc. Skills should NEVER have more than 20 sec cooldown, and that’s a lot already!

3) Stats – The game should never have been stat based, I don’t want to chase stupid numbers going up, I want to create new characterbuilds alltogether, see 2.

4) Gear – Shouldn’t have stats on it, instead gear should provide situational bonuses (like 20% enchantment length), many of the things currently provided by traits would be perfect to move out of the character tab and put on gear instead. Gear of higher rarity shouldn’t provide any additional bonuses at all; Rarity should influence cosmetics ONLY.

5) Classes – Game should be clkitten, instead bring back skill categories like GW1 and give points to spend on the categories. Categories not tied to a profession like in GW1, but various categories that would fit a certain profession well synergize well together. Bring back mana as universal resource. Wearing heavier armor reduces mana regeneration.

So in summary – remove levels and stats and gear rarity and classes, add 1000 more skills, move bonuses from traits to gear.

And they say forums are full of trolls and whiners. I see more salient and well-written criticism in this thread than I’ve heard coming from some professional game designers.

My own list would be way bigger than five items, so I’ll just mention one item that I can put into words…

1. Lack of design documentation. What’s that? It’s a an ordinary text sheet presenting a grand plan for the entire game that you’re making, taking into account ALL game systems and features before they’re developed. This is needed for many obvious and not so much reasons – but… But.

In case of Guild Wars 2, it would mainly be needed to avoid having one part of the game completely contradict another.

• “Let’s focus on cosmetic progression.” Then, instead of progression, only allow switching out gear looks for cash once and once only.

• “Let’s allow players to easily switch out their builds with skills and traits.” And lock them down to a very specific and costly set of armor.

• “Let’s have a huge open world with lots of attention to detail.” Then let’s make sure most players populate only 1/100th of that world and have no reason to do otherwise.

These are all contradictions in design. Makes the game feel schizophrenic or, worse, lying straight to the player’s face.

(I’ve written and read some design documents, by the way – it’s not an easy task, and it’s barely ever done right in any industry. It’s really friggin’ important.)

Draco.2806:

Lack of design documentation.

A lot of my issues with the game can be traced to the effects that prompted this comment. I can’t say ANet doesn’t have such a document, but the amount of times that it looks as if Peter didn’t talk to Paul is staggering, so I’d call it, instead…

1) Lack of overall design direction (see the rest of Draco’s post for examples).
2) Design of condition damage in a PvE game in which open world content is made to be played in large groups (Hopefully, no example needed).
3) Too much, “This would be so cool!” in design meetings and not enough, “What systems will this break, or what systems will break this content?” (look no further than the turret AFK and overflow issues in the Teq event).
4) Designing endgame around horizontal (cosmetic) progression, and grossly underestimating the amount of options needed to provide the voracious MMO customer base with things to chase.
5) The compromise of Ascended gear, which pleased neither GW fans who wanted obtaining BiS to be not-an-issue, nor the hardcore raid crowd from other MMO’s. Ascended gear as implemented involves mostly a time requirement.
Dishonorable Mention) Particle spam and the lack of an option to remove it — to me, this is an extremely annoying, and ubiquitous, eyesore.

My top 5 game design issues for GW2 starting from the biggest are as follows:

1. Extremely population imbalanced WvWvW servers, which ignore not only prime time but off-time population differences.

2. Lack of optimal game infrastructure for large scale game events, this includes both hardware and software and comes to play at events such as when Tequatl 2.0 launched and in WvW.

3. Lack of AI / poor programming on encounters. Vast majority of World and dungeon bosses can be face rolled with auto attack in pure zerk gear. This is very bad game design.

4. Lack of appropriate rewards for the few in-game encounters which are challenging and can not be face rolled using the above in point #3.

5. Lack of many in-game basic functionality tools, such as those used for guild management or trait / gear switching in other games.

I have few problems with the game, but…
1. time gated anything
2. soulbound drops on characters that won’t use them
3. not enough emotes
4. not enough reasons to be in any town but Lions Arch
5. the almost impossible set of circumstances that must be met to achieve rewards from the Tequatl fight.

scerevisiae.1972:

• Downed state in PVP zones. Adds nothing to the game but detracts a lot. It’s annoying, disrupts the flow of combat, introduces imbalance and farcical rally situations.
• Fixed weapon skills. Far too restrictive for me, pigeonholes weapons into roles & can cause whole weapons to be ruined because of just 1 bad skill.
• No resource system. Has caused GW2 combat to be all about spamming skills/dodges.
• Addition of ascended gear after release. Massive PR blunder. Pushed the game into a grind corner it has yet to escape from.

QFT. Next year will be very important for the game. An expansion could help a lot, but in the end I’m not going to stay if the PvP keeps being boring. 2014 will be a make-or-break, imo.

Wall of text coming up.

Part I

Broken combat system favouring melee combat
In theory, GW2’s combat system is fun. I belong to the group that agrees with ANet that eliminating dedicated “stare at other people’s healthbar” healers and “sit there like a duck and absorb hits” tanks was a good move. I also don’t mind action-oriented combat at all as long as it’s not too twitchy (I am a huge fan of TERA’s combat system).
But GW2’s combat system is clear evidence that good intentions don’t always equal good results.
To add some complexity to the role-less combat system, ANet introduced Boons that can interact with other player’s skills. But those boons have a comparatively short range, so what ANet effectively did was eliminating ranged combat from the high end game. Oh yes, I know that people still run bows on rangers and greatswords on mesmers. But sooner or later, someone will kick you from their dungeon group for doing that and call you a n00b. Because high end combat in GW2 is melee combat and it’s not because ranged weapons are bad per se, but because your character won’t be able to share boons with other players unless everyone is balled up tightly. It’s a serious, serious design flaw, turning a game that was advertised as “Play it the way you want” into a “Go melee or go home” game. Yes if you’re stubborn like me, you can still play your ranger as an actual archer, using a longbow (a ranger using a bow…shocking thought, I know!), but better be prepared to get ridiculed by the playerbase at large for it.
Another consequence of the demise of the holy trinity is that combat in GW2 feels chaotic and unorganized more often than not. Mobs will more or less randomly aggro players, who, due to the lack of tanking and healing skills, have only one viable way to counter the unwanted attention, and that’s running around like a headless chicken and wait for the mob to switch aggro to someone else. To add insult to injury, ANet’s idea of difficulty in GW2 relies on one thing a lot more than any other: Ridiculously overpowered one-shot skills. And to escape instant death, players run around like headless chicken even more, trying to dodge those red circles of insta-doom that GW2 keeps spamming around in much greater numbers than any other MMO I have ever seen. Combat in GW2 is basically run, run, dodge, dodge, run, dodge, dodge, get a hit on, dodge, dodge, dodge…ad nauseum. To escape that silliness, most players don’t even bother with any other approach to combat than boon-stacking and massive DPS output. Because the best way to make sure the randomly spammed insta-gib skills don’t wipe the group is to kill the mob fast and thus minimize the time bracket where they can spam said insta-gib skills at you. Which is -the- reason why nobody in their right mind would ever run any other gear than full Berzerkers in this game.
Is this great combat system design? Nope.

Gambling and RNG
Ok, random generated drops are a staple in MMOs. But boy, did GW2 overdo RNG. At least I have never seen any other MMO where the literal centre of the capital city was a slot machine, and the best weapon in the entire game can be only viably produced by playing a lottery in said slot machine. Yes, I am talking about the “dump metric tons of wealth into a slot machine and hope a precursor for a legendary weapon will drop for you” thing. I hate it. With passion.
You know, there is a fair method for assigning very valuable items to players that are too precious to hand out of any single activity: It’s called “Token currency”. Yes, the same system ANet implemented for the dungeon gear. And with good reason. Because it sucks having to kill some boss again, and again, and again and again and never getting that chest piece you’re after, because RNG always makes it drop the legs – and how often did we see stuff like that in MMOs? Tokens eliminate that issue by making the process to achieve a valuable item determinate instead of totally random and unpredictable.
At least nobody will ever be able to convince me that it’s fair randomly making one player filthy rich by dumping a precursor on them out of the blue. The way GW2 is assigning its most precious drops is akin to someone dropping a million dollars on a sidewalk for some random person to pick up. It’s a completely arbitrary and absolutely undeserved windfall gain. While the way it should be is equal work for equal reward.

Part II

Transmutation system
Character customization is a really big thing to me. I love collecting great looking gear and building a comprehensive wardrobe for my characters. I was thrilled that GW2 was basically marketed to me as the game that’s about collecting armour and weapon skins.
But then for some reason they included one of the most punishing wardrobe systems (if you even want to call it that) in any MMO. Not only does it cost six Fine Transmutation stones every time you want to change your looks, which is bad enough. But you can’t remove your skins from the gear without a serious gem store purchase either. So the only “viable” way to actually wear your skins is to buy/make/farm duplicate gear to put them on.
This completely annihilates any desire in me to actually collect skins, for the only economically sound approach to deal with this horrible system is to decide for just ONE look, put that on your gear and never change it again. I do understand the need to generate income to fund the game, but players should never EVER have to pay money to change their clothing. It defeats the basic “collect nice looking things” design approach of GW2 with a near total vengeance. Because – why would I be motivated to farm more nice looking stuff if the game discourages me from wearing it? By all means, make us pay for the clothing, but let us change whenever we want to and without destroying our gear in the process. Other games solved this problem a long time ago – with that thing called “appearance/costume/wardrobe” slots where you can put in any piece of gear that would then override the looks of whatever item you have equipped in your gear slot.

Uniform gear design
I used to play Guild Wars 1, which featured some of the most beautiful gear designs I have ever seen in a game. Particularly most Obsidian sets were gorgeous. I should add that collecting nice looking gear is probably my most favourite in-game activity in MMOs.
So that’s why I have to say I find gear design in GW2 to be more than a little underwhelming.
One of my two main characters is a ranger. I love that class. I really do. But what I don’t like at all is a ranger wearing trenchcoats. And guess what? Ranger armour is trenchcoats, trenchcoats, and more trenchcoats. I understand some people like trenchcoats, and there is nothing wrong with that, but what happened to this thing called choice? Except some of the gem store, cultural and order armour, there is one, ONE medium armour set in the game that’s not some variation of coat. The Duelist set, otherwise known as the ninja-catsuit. Conversely, light armour is always some sort of (more or less skimpy) top plus robe skirt combo. Why is that? Why can’t we have some sort of variety? Why can’t we have pants, shorts, skirts of various length, boots, heels, sneakers, dresses, robes, tank tops, shirts, blouses etc. to give our character that thing called a unique look? You know…like in other games.
In GW2 I feel hard pressed to give my characters a look that I really like. There is something I could nitpick about pretty much every design. The Phoenix light set has an awesome top, but like most GW2 sets, its leg piece suffers from a severe case of Puffy Syndrome. Why do most leg pieces in GW2 have to stand away two feet from their thighs again, resulting in their backside resembling a horse more than a human/norn etc.? Most gear designs suffer from trying too hard to look “epic” instead of keeping it simple and elegant like the Mesmer Obsidian armour in GW1.
Mix and matching could be the solution to get rid of that odd piece of one set and replace with another. But very often, it doesn’t work all that well, as many GW2 sets don’t seem to be designed with mix and matching in mind.

Part III

Temporary and gimmicky content instead of expanding the world
I like to think I have a sense of humour. I can giggle when watching a costume brawl. I find the Super Adventure Box funny as in idea. I can even tolerate selling riding gear in a game having no mounts with a smile on my lips. But if there are reasonable boundaries for how much gimmick content a fantasy game can take before turning into a parody of itself, the GW2 devs have broken through them like a raging battle tank many months ago. When seeing players running around in a warzone with plush Quaggan backpacks, or a norn with dragon wings growing from her shoulders, I can’t take this game for serious anymore. We got crab tossing, jumping puzzles, more jumping puzzles, “Run around as a spider” Guild Rushes, even more jumping puzzles, costume brawls etc. And I thought what I bought was a fantasy RPG! I guess I was wrong.

To add insult to injury, said gimmick content crept into the core game in a way that you can’t realistically avoid it. Like several vistas and skill challenges require completing a jumping puzzle. Two fractals involve serious platforming. The developers obviously didn’t care about people like me and the wild camera shaking caused by the poorly implemented platforming in this game making me nauseous in no time.

Last but not least the devs somehow are stuck with the idea that making insignificant changes to existing areas would be somehow better than expanding the world and adding new permanent areas for us to explore. As a result, we got one, as in ONE permanent area added in more than a year. To me, MMOs are a lot about exploring. But GW2 doesn’t have anything new to explore for me, and after completing the world with several characters, the existing world is getting stale and boring more than anything.

Thanks for reading, yes I know it was long.

Yeah my 1 gripe with GW2 has always been downed state… it has been imo the worst implementation in any MMO ever for PvP reasons.

Also the amount of weapon skins they bring out and no ‘locker system’ in place… having to have 10+ same weapons in my pack/bank is annoying.

Conditions…. totally broken mechanic and if I was working at Arenanet and not fixed this after a year I would be very embarrassed.

Draco.2806:

I see more salient and well-written criticism in this thread than I’ve heard coming from some professional game designers.

That might be because there are also game designers playing gw2 and commenting on their afterthoughts, both positive and negative. :P

Perma stealth ruined the thief class

Only one mistake.

Removing Cantha from gw2 div reach.

Ranger
Mesmer
Thief
Warrior
Zhaitan

1. The traditional RNG loot drop system – This system sucks, it sucked with pen and paper RPGs, it has sucked in every digital RPG and MMORPG since. I will never understand how, with all the horrible RPG traditions GW2 decided to break, that it simultaneously decided to keep this one virtually unchanged.

2. Boons and conditions – These give no room for counterplay that you do not specifically build for. They basically turn PvP in to a TCG, either you have the counter in your ‘deck’ or you don’t. It is counterplay, but the worst form of counterplay there is, static pre-determined counterplay rather than the active and reactionary play GW2s action combat system is supposed to have been built around.

3. Stealth – Has no counterplay at all that is not somehow connected to luck or shared in kind with every other ability. Additionally the new ranger ability is a horrible solution, if continued across other abilities, it will just give stealth the same problem as boons and conditions.

4. The event system – Specifically how your actions within the system don’t matter. If I win at X event it proceeds to Y event, if I lose at X event it still proceeds to Y event. The world does care about my presence, as stated it would pre-launch, but it doesn’t care about anything more; my actions, choices, and my success or failure.

5. WvW – The entire mode is broken. Everything from the win condition, to point gain, to the map setup, to the complete lack of organizational tools dilutes the idea of ‘epic scale battlers’ down to ‘giant mindless zergfest’.

Runners up: Defiants non-funcionality, the many boring and unfulfilling class mechanics, lack of interface between utility and weapon skills, certain stats being given MUCH more importance than others, the WPing system, dodge being such a flat system, and bosses being solely dependent on one-shot mechanics that abuse dodges problems.

Discalimer: I am a PVE player

1: Homogenization of combat. Every class has one role- kill stuff before it kills you. Team interaction is extremely minimal.

2: Ascended gear and multiple currencies. See OP #5.

3: No hard CC or direct support. Makes all fights play out the same, with only one basic strategy (stay alive, kill stuff, in that order). Closely related to #1.

4: Homogenization of skill effects. Everything is either a condition or a boon- this means there’s only one counter to every buff and debuff in the game. Also in this category, the incredibly short duration and long cooldown of utility skills that prevents them from meaningfully shaping a long fight.

5: Refusal to separate PVE and PVP, which makes fixing these problems impossible.

1) Ascended gear. It was a terrible idea last November, and it’s still a terrible idea now. It took the thing most GW1 veterans loved most about Guild Wars – horizontal progression – and destroyed it in the second content update. By aiming to please everyone, ANet lost support from their most loyal fanbase.

2) Elite skills. In GW1, elite skills were playstyle-defining staples that made your build your own. In GW2, they’re next to worthless. Aside from a very small set of them (like time warp), most are gimmicky garbage on obscenely long cooldowns that seem to say “look what the engine can do” rather than open up new playstyles or complement existing ones.

3) Defiant. I understand why it was implemented – to prevent large groups from making bosses trivially easy with multiple CC’s, but what it actually does is remove any sort of control role from major encounters, turning them into nothing but DPS and the occasional support class.

4) RNG, RNG everywhere. Especially those kitten ed Black Lion chests. A cheaper, more underhanded system to gimmick players out of their money while giving them nothing of value in return has never been invented.

5) The world is dying. And no, it’s not because of the dragons. If anything, the dragons are encroaching on Tyria to try to stop it from dying. What I mean is that, one year later, we have one new map, one new dungeon path, and Fractals – which isn’t even really part of Tyria. The “living story” doesn’t help. It moves at a glacial pace and abandons the already rich and established Guild Wars lore in favor of creating a new “threat” to Tyria that doesn’t even seem that dangerous. Look, I’m not saying we don’t care about Scarlet, I’m saying that we’re supposedly living in a world where titanic elder dragons threaten our very existence from all sides, an ancient and mysterious race lurks on an island just to the north, an undead warlord runs amok in the ruins of what was once a prosperous nation, and an entire city of bird men sits tantalizingly on the edge of our explorable area with its gates closed. We care about Scarlet, we just care about other things in Tyria a lot more, and we’re left wondering why the development team doesn’t seem to understand this.

My two cents.

1. DPS only gameplay staph plz!, where is the group play? Where are to epic group combos you could make?

2. Skills, elite skills are trash in GW2. Weapon bound skills is just lazy game design. Why can i have all skills in like a few weeks? In GW1, i played 4 years and i didn’t have all the skills.

3. What is this vertical progression stuff? I want horizontal progression like u promised.

4. Dodging… another lazy design concept, instead of someone protecting you, you need to protect yourself with 1 ability… How boring is that! Also it’s anti-team play.

5. Capes & guildhalls, capes can easly be made, the developers are just too un-skilled. Guildhalls, they don’t want to make them because it’s not original O_O I’ve only played 1 game that ever had guild halls and it was GW1. I know there are some others, but hell, not many games have them and they are awesome! Probably too lazy to make them…

Rhyse.8179:

Discalimer: I am a PVE player

1: Homogenization of combat. Every class has one role- kill stuff before it kills you. Team interaction is extremely minimal.

2: Ascended gear and multiple currencies. See OP #5.

3: No hard CC or direct support. Makes all fights play out the same, with only one basic strategy (stay alive, kill stuff, in that order). Closely related to #1.

4: Homogenization of skill effects. Everything is either a condition or a boon- this means there’s only one counter to every buff and debuff in the game. Also in this category, the incredibly short duration and long cooldown of utility skills that prevents them from meaningfully shaping a long fight.

5: Refusal to separate PVE and PVP, which makes fixing these problems impossible.

1. Stealth. No game should have invisible players. Ever. It’s as simple as that.
2. Damage. Everything is about damage. Mitigation is extremely difficult, players die very easily if they don’t stack vit/tou stats. (This means that thieves and mesmers have a huge advantage over other classes because they have special ways of defending themselves (invisibility/clones).
3. Condition spam Vs long cooldown utility condi cures.
4. Stability being a cure-all. Necessary, but silly.
5. Bloodlust buff in WvW. This was well-meaning but poorly implemented, as it always benefits the more populace side, compounding the population problem further instead of doing what it was intended for, i.e. the opposite.

1) WvW rewarding mindless zerging and bad habits … aka Stacking. in any other WvW centric game if you stack together in a blob you are quickly dispatched but in this game its the only way to be successful.

2) making Dungeons DPS races only as it stands right now if you take any armor into a dungeon thats not Zerker you are a noob.

3) Ascended gear – didn’t they say that once you got exotic you would be done with gear progression?

4) Rally – great for PVE, not so much for WvW again promotes zerging.

5) Class design – who would have though a class that has high inherent HP/Defense and can put out a ton of damage would be a popular choice … not me /sarcasm.

Bad:

1. Personal story
Idiotic. Low level of dialogs, and shallow catch-phrase characters.
Nothing memorable except last mission ending. Ultimate reward is a rare item. What?

2. Lore
Meaningless to the game. As personal story; written to a low degree of complexity, shallow characters, nothing above catch-phrases.
In game touches like Final Rest to have had some background and only found in catacombs at Malchor’s Leap, instead flatly dropping off SB are 1 example of irrelevant lore.

3. Living Story
An attempt to progress the world but keep main story static fails on both ends. Scarlet story pathetic (I’ve mentally skipped all of it), and dragons story goes nowhere.

4. Legendary Weapons
Shouldn’t be tradable. Must be achiv related. Must have lore. Not legendary at all.

5. Ascended
Weapons + armor = grind. Thus all ascended related ideas are a landslide towards WoW. If you can’t roll back ascended weapons, at least stop the deterioration of ascended armor.

I see 1,2, and 3 all related to a low quality of lore writer(s). I’d get professionals.

Oh and why are buying gems with gold?? That’s a shot in the foot for the company.

EDIT: Make it possible to select white hair color (not light purple, not dark white, not light grey – WHITE as in WHITE as in WHITE). Also add a (255,0,0) red option, but white is more important.

Thanks, and hopeless of any decision-maker reading this, much less relating,
- Kor

1. the whole ranger class
2. wvw —> total lack of any balance attempts, no WPs, boring zerg/pvdoor
3. 2 man kick in dungeons and leader leaving kicking the whole group
4. ascended gear that punishes you for having alts. they just keep making it worse and worse by adding more and more.
5. no pvp arenas

I’m surprised they haven’t closed this thread yet…

1. Ascended/Gearing:
“Everyone, including casual gamers, by level 80 should have the best statistical loot in the game. We want everyone on an equal power base. The rare stuff becomes the really awesome looking armours. It’s all about collecting the unique looking stuff and collecting all the other rare collectable items in the game: armour pieces, potentially different potions…"
Sorry I’m still holding onto those words, but that’s exactly what I wanted and expected when I got this game. It would be nice to freely/easily jump between builds or try builds out without having to worry about how painful it is to acquire max stats.

2. RNG/Legendaries:
They’re not legendary at all as Korossive pointed out. Getting a legendary (or actually, the real culprit is the precursor) is like winning a lottery. That’s not legendary, that’s just luck.

3. Class balacing:
Please, split the skills into 3 state: PvE, PvP, and WvW. Balance the skills within those states, so that PvE doesn’t impact PvP and vise-versa. Best examples, thief and warrior.

1. Addition of ascended gear
2. Addition of living story
3. How crafting legendaries are handled. Skill is better than luck or being wealthy(precursor acquisition for example)
4. Dead open world. Lack of reasom to play how i want to where i want to when i want to.
5. Zergs..every patch fosters and encourages nothing but zerg content. The current LS(tower) is not as bad, however.

1. Downed-State, especially in PvP. This is simply by far the worst thing about GW2.
2. Passive balancing. The pace of change is simply too slow.
3. Lack of coherent endgame progression system. Countless currencies and their lack of implementation really show that ANet has no coherent concept for endgame loot acquisition.
4. Loot focused endgame. Endgame in GW2 is all about maximizing loot efficiency, not overcoming challenges.
5. The engine. Tiny maps, no view-distance, lag issues etc. The engine clearly isn’t well suited for an MMO.

1. Downed-State in pvp and WvW, not needed. Seriously make some mobs in pve to go downed so people can show off their finishers there, not needed elsewhere.

2. Too sturdy trash mobs, I prefer quantity over “quality” when it comes to mob killing. Killing dozens of trashmobs in minutes is much more heroic than mudwrestle with 3 drunken quaggan for same amount of time.

3. Crafting in overall, current systems doesn’t support crafters, since everyone has everything. I prefered when crafters were actually class of their own and often really time consuming to raise to max lvls.

4. Utterly useless elite skills, since most cases there isn’t any “elite” in those filler skills.

5. Zergfesting in every game mode possible.

1. Dungeons (you cheese your way around kittenedly unfun mechanics with your stacked group – absolutely horrible)
2. The whole condition system – every. single. aspect.
3. Ascended gear
4. WvW being a playground for broken specs and huge blobs
5. Warriors

1. Ascended gear.
2. WvW xp.
3. Living Story. Its concept is great, but not its execution. First of all, I think they should go back to one update / month – instead of one every 2 weeks -, so they have more time to polish every update and could focus on quality, not quantity. The LS updates just feel too disconnected between each other. As it stands now it just doesnt feel like players decisions make any difference. Just imagine if new areas / classes / races were based on players decisions. I know its not that simple to create content based on players decision, but players should feel like they are a significant part of the evolution of the game`s world itself. A whole expansion could be based on players decision – imagine a Ellen x Evon voting where each of them had plans to send expeditions to estabilish contact with different parts of the world (Elona or Cantha, for example), and players could decide which continent they wanted for the expansion.
4. RNG – RNG is just bad design. Relying on RNG to get a precursor to make a legendary weapon? Whats so legendary about having luck on loots?
5. The combat mechanics. As it stands now, people cant just focus on DPS without any care for support / control.

In no particular hierarchy…

-Down State (Absolutely useless as a combat mechanic. Annoying and skill-less. Surprised this feature made it past conceptualization.)

-Role-Less Class System (Homogenizes the distinctions and dumbs-down combat mechanics.)

-Trait System (could have been better or just removed for more skills and instead added effectiveness for ability tiers of each skill)

-Lack of incentive to group in overworld. (Lack of deep player-interactivity)

-Poor creature AI, disparate player-creature skill system, and HP balloon gimmick bosses. (Lack of challenge)

To me, if these problems were to be addressed heavily, I would say that GW2 was on it’s way to becoming the best MMO of all time.