Guild Wars 2

• Legendaries tradeable in AH; how legendary is it to just open your wallet?

• Ranger issues, especially Pet-based ones

• Imbalance between ranged an melee fighting; ranged fighters are “lost” for their team, hence a lot of the “rangers are bad” shouting; they aren’t, they are just no contribution to the team

• Night capping in WvW devalues the hard work during prime time

• Can I please have an option to remove all the useless graphic fireworks from the fights? Maybe it looks nice to some, but it is an annoyance to a lot of ppl I’ve talked to.

Why should the glass be half-full, when it is so much better half-empty, is it not?

SpyderArachnid.5619:

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).

So true.

1) ascended gear
2) infusions
3) living story instead of adding real content (skins, NEW real dungeons etc etc)
4) TP/economy (no middle class…only TP barons that doesn t even play the game and poors)
5) “balancing”

Over a month ago I have listed the 5 biggest mistakes I saw at that point.

1- Stats bound to gear
2- Ascended
3- Upscaling
4- Effectiveness of zergs
5- Lack of skin database

Today I present a new list!
¹ Stats bound to armour is still one of the biggest mistakes I see. It ruins variety and calls for very player-unfriendly activities. Ascended gear is automatically redundant from this approach.

² The last weeks I’m coming to the conclusion that the combat has maior flaws, causing things such as zergs, champion trains, full zerk running in dungeons etc…

• AoE damage is probably the only way of doing PvP
• Abandoning the trinity the game has destroyed the base for team work: interplayer dependency.
• The scaling between Damage, Armour and Health is completely out of balance.
• Defiant as a mechanic
• The fact that mobs don’t seem to use more than 1-3 skills.

³ Levels: I literally don’t see why there even are levels in this game. Every zone is open to all players. Still they are made for certain levels, but they’re accessible and playable for any level. Why is this needed at all? Isn’t it simply easier to make all zones level 0 (and destroy the notion of level), and traits, skills, weapons unlocked through activities instead of through leveling?

⁴ Player-made content. The game lacks it. There is no way any player can create his own content in this game, and it makes end-game near non-existent. This should have been added from day 1, in the form of housing (allowing you to create your own furniture, decoration, build the house like you want it, stone by stone), crafts (involving discovering new recipes randomly, not pre-made ones), player vs. player environments (how come we can’t do anything with keeps/towers we own? why can’t we build additions? Why can’t we hire soldiers with guild insignias, why can’t we…)

⁵ Story: not immersive enough. Not original. Not heroic. Not memorable.

1: Gear being more important than builds. I really hate how much gear dominates the game, and it is expensive too.
2: No replacement for the trinity. Removing an established inter-class dependency is an original idea, but you have to put something back to replace it, or your game lacks depth.
3: Defiant/Unshakeable.
4: Poor visibility. This is a problem with the art-direction. In combat all the effects become quite a mess.
5: Deciding which sigil or rune you want, is a matter of finding out which sigil isn’t broken. I’m surprised no one has brought this up yet. But how many of us have bought runes or sigils, only to find out that it doesn’t work as you’d expect? Like that dumb sigil of Demon Summoning, that has a hidden internal timer that makes it useless. Or sigils that have similar effects, which disable one of the two. Argh! It’s a mess!

And as a side note: Poor testing. There are way too many bugs plaguing each update. I think we’ve all noticed how often even the most minor changes introduce big bugs. They really could test this a lot better.

1. Downed state imbalance offering a great downed state set of skills to only a few classes and leaving the rest highly vulnerable.
2. The complete direction 180 only 2 months after launch throwing out all of the basic concept promises from countless prelaunch interviews. (specifically fractals, ascended, tiny empty LS updates that are completed in 1 day a month)
3. Releasing the game while certain classes were still in Alpha status. (Engineer) when more time should have been spent fleshing those classes out and researching just how powerful certain types of attacks should be by calling in a weapons expert.
4. Making any material for crafting completely RNG rather than something that is easily gathered from nodes from T6 mats to T7 mats.
5. Using DR to control drop rates by completely cutting off drops entirely, the same system that caused multiple games over the history of all mmo’s to completely crash and burn due to consumer disgust.

my list:

-town clothing: this has become a huge debate but remains useless from the get go, i miss buying a costume and using it in battle.

-quests: you might think about generic quests but the world of MMO’s has evolved and they can be allot better then the old ones, i just think making hearts wastes a whole area from potential while quests fills places far better.

-no skill choice on weapons: the idea of weapon skills is a good one but i rather decide what i use, part of the fun in builds is deciding what you use but if the game treats us as babies where everything needs to be pre-done removes the fun of it and makes the game enormously boring eventually.

-achievements: now i did asked for achievements but for now the game runs on achievements, in GW1 we have titles but they did not run the game.
would be better if they improved the game instead of dumping even more achievements, it works in GW1 so why would it not in GW2.

-champions: the reason why this is a design flaw is because more and more ppl are more playing to farm champions and less to simply explore and do activities with players, that’s the exact opposite of GW1 where ppl do play for the fun of it and where a boss isn’t important except for elite capping.

While everyone has their own personal list, I’ve noticed a few items that seems to appear on just about all of them (Ascended gear, Gem store, etc).

I’m at work or I would do it myself, but can someone (OP?) compile a running tally of the top 5-10 items listed? Some of them are similar enough that they can be grouped together for the purposes of a Top 10.

1) Level 80 characters on an account contribute nothing to other level 80’s pm the same account. How many character slots. storage space, boosters, skins, etc… would they have sold if each unique combination of profession/race/order learned abilities that could be equipped on other characters? Maybe two equip slots like food to pass training on to other characters. This would have given players a reason to play more of the existing content, more gem store purchases, and given alts a reason to exist. As it is, they have killed alts and reasons to buy gem store items.

2.) Letting an economist have final say in design decisions. 300 silk scraps a day, more than your account can store by default, didn’t come from any game designer. It is obvious who has final say in this game and fun isn’t the winner.

3.) Tequatl. This was ego pure and simple. Designers didn’t want players beating it too fast. If you put in harder content, you need to give players the ability to iterate on it to learn it. Liadri was tough but you could keep trying it. Would you have beaten Liadri waiting two hours per attempt? Now multply that by how many people need to be on the same page on the learning curve. They should have upped his spawn rate initially so people could iterate and learn. Design motivation was for not beating it fast on release, not challenging content. They killed a world boss off for ego for a majority of players.

3.) Laurels keep getting more uses, supply not increased. Kills alts.

4.) Ascended gear forces players into one build which gets boring fast. I used to play 9 characters. The last two months just my mesmer and just one build. Rather than leave all that work on the selection screen, I just stopped logging in. Removing player options due to barriers on changing skins, builds and weapon sets leads to no varied game play and boredom/ It did in my case anyway.

5.) Abandoning the manifesto. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. I just don’t trust them anymore and this also contributed to my leaving the game.

-No 2 hand Axe

- Legendary GS favoritism

-warrior: off hand axe looks cool but poor skill set
2 hand hammer not useful in pve

Matisse.9356:

Why should the glass be half-full, when it is so much better half-empty, is it not?

Why would you accept a half-full glass when you can ask for a completeley filled one?

1. Thief and Mesmer mechanics
2. No PvE and PvP skil split-up
3. Class favouritsm
4. RNG
5. RNG
6. and much much more

Halvorn.9831:

Matisse.9356:

Why should the glass be half-full, when it is so much better half-empty, is it not?

Why would you accept a half-full glass when you can ask for a completeley filled one?

There’s no such thing as a half full glass. It’s always all full—half water/half air.

Vayne.8563:

Halvorn.9831:

Matisse.9356:

Why should the glass be half-full, when it is so much better half-empty, is it not?

Why would you accept a half-full glass when you can ask for a completeley filled one?

There’s no such thing as a half full glass. It’s always all full—half water/half air.

Or half water, half oil.

1. Dungeon hosting & 2-vote kicking
2. PPT
3. The Zerg
4. Charrmor
5. Necro siphons/ death shroud/ building a class around passive defense in a game built around active defense

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.

So much of this.
Although they could add a suicide button, sometimes you know you’re dead and rallyings not an option, and in those situations you just need to wait for them to kill you, slowly, very slowly… Also a suicide button would get these guys to stop complaining since if they really hate downed state so much they can just instantly give up on life and go to the nearest way point.

Nothing personal, really, but once you put something here, you’re up for praise and criticism.

scerevisiae.1972:

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.

I agree.

• 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.

I completely disagree. This is exclusive to GW2 and makes total sense!

• No resource system. Has caused GW2 combat to be all about spamming skills/dodges.

I completely disagree. GW2 is different from other games, thank ANET! You can’t spam skills because of their cool downs, and that is enough. Each class has its own mechanic and its own resource (warrior with adrenaline, necros with life force, mesmers with how many illusions, etc).

• 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.

Because GW2 is much more balanced. I agree that the mechanic of acquiring Elite skills on GW1 was unique. But my biggest fear towards it is ANet creating too many useless skills, just so we capture them. Plus, the one thing I love about this game is having skills with multiple benefits, like Chaos Storm placing conditions on foes and boons on allies. I can’t really express how coherent that is, other than saying, I love it. Chaos is just one example, of course, many others do the same, thank ANet.

• Addition of ascended gear after release. Massive PR blunder. Pushed the game into a grind corner it has yet to escape from.

I totally agree here. I don’t think we need gear progression on this game. GW1 wasn’t like that and GW2 doesn’t need it. Let all players have the same “base power” on WvW and their own player abilities and decisions differentiate them. It works for games like Quake 3, Team Fortress and others. All players have the same chance, but different players, different play styles and abilities. Personally, that is what GW2 should be all about. No more grinding, please.

Mojo.7986:

3.) Tequatl. This was ego pure and simple. Designers didn’t want players beating it too fast. If you put in harder content, you need to give players the ability to iterate on it to learn it. Liadri was tough but you could keep trying it. Would you have beaten Liadri waiting two hours per attempt? Now multply that by how many people need to be on the same page on the learning curve. They should have upped his spawn rate initially so people could iterate and learn. Design motivation was for not beating it fast on release, not challenging content. They killed a world boss off for ego for a majority of players.

I couldn’t disagree with this one more, and I also think it is dishonest and unfair. Before the Tequatl change, everyone and their mother was complaining about how most of the world bosses were an afk fest. People were begging for Anet to make the dragon champions harder, so you couldn’t just stand to one side, and hit 1 to win.

Could it be balanced better for lower amounts of players? Definitely. But people seem to forget that this is what a lot of players asked for, and they delivered. Also, it is pretty exciting to fight Tequatl now. Case in point:

And you can see my name somewhere among those players. This was AG’s first Tequatl kill and I was there. Cheering went up as if we’d just blown up the Deathstar.

the tequatl buff is somewhat ok the timer is just stupid and/or at least the megalaser shooting now every 25% hp instead of over time

1. AE that only hits 5 targets: It causes to everybody just stacking in the same corner and expecting the same from the other players. And when we while theres always somebody asking “Who moved?”. This little thing takes me out of the world every time and as a Mesmer Player it completely removes my play style from the game.

2. Ascended Gear: There are other things to grind for. I know, its just a few points of difference but still you feel like your char is incomplete when he’s not “full ascended”. And your focus directly goes towards the gear grind.

3. No Dual Classes: With this I want to address the lacking of vailable play styles. This raises expections to bring a certain skill into a dungeon because you don’t have that many choices anyway. Dual Class system brought a certain uniqueness to your class choice. This could be solved with skills that only unlock with a certain amount of points into a trait line. Like a new potion if you put enough point into alchemy and then display a little “Alchemy” symbol besides your class symbol.

4. “Everything has the right to grow” chapter in the Sylvari storyline and everything comparable. Its basically the story of two twins who couldn’t be more different. But as some Hylek start to conjure their goddesses power into their leader, things get all dramatic and the twins decide to now work together. And in the end it is explicitly stated, that “Now we’ve learned, that together we can achieve more”. Right children? Lesson learned? “Yeeees” Dam Anet, please try at least.

5. The gem/money economy. Well, at first glance it seems logical that if more people buy gems, they get more expensive and if people sell them, they get cheaper. Its a simulation of real world economy, right? NO, its not! Because this way Anet wants to ensure that there are equally as many gems sold as bough, that it balances out. Now lets put exclusive hairstyles or transmutation stones or skin splitters or minis or anything that is a “must” for a certain amount of players and then make sure that half of the stuff is bought with real world money in their free-to-play game. And then shrug and say “We don’t force you to put another skin on your Celestial-Pearl-Greatsword, thats all your problem. Well, you still have the Zenith skins, right?”

1. Personal Story
I am not asking for a Mass Effect quality of work, but if you gonna let me choose my bio at character creation then take sides between the 3 faction~at least make those choices matter in the mega story~no one like that bloody tree

2. Seperation of PvE/PvP gears
How in the world am I not allowed to bring my hard-earned PvP skins into PvE!?

3.World vs World
I am not a fan of turning this game in to clustercrap of large-scale zergers, however cool the idea may sound. Imagine how many resources could have been used to make sPvP fantastic had ANet not waste them on this….

4. Living Story
I HATE THEM. Why not use those efforts to continue the Personal Story? Everything before the pact and Trahearne is great…and All Is Vain

5. Seperation of PvP & Balance team
This game IS advertised as a PvP-oriented game!!!!! So how the bloody crap can you not let PvP designers balance the game!?!!? E-SPORTS!?!?!?

1) WvW Balance : I like WvW. But kitten its a hard place to find balance in numbers. I don’t totally blame that one on Anet, I pass long hours with friend talking about how to fix that and its hard as hell. But if there is way to balance number between server this would make WvW so brilliant. Making the gameplay more diverse, more engaging and allowing everybody to be able to fight more than 3-4 servers ever.
2) Narrative : Even if the quest system is better that more traditional mmo, this is traditional mediocre quality in term of Narrative. NPC may have a voice but usually its a inexpressive one reading a poor dialogue line by a poorly designed character.
3) Living Story : Temporary content and bad story telling what a terrible combination. Don’t get me wrong some of the update were really nice. Halloween the first year, the karka fight at Southsun Cove (even if it wasn’t perfect), the Aether Path, SAB, etc. But most of them are cheap content boost by an achievement hunt. Do it small I don’t care, but make it good and permanent to improve the game, not leave only a bad taste in our mouth while the game don’t improve.
4) The Unity of DPS : I don’t want to get back to the Holy Trinity and find this system better, but still he lack some diversity in kind. I make fun of people trying to support our group with healing power and this is sad. They said their new Trinity is DPS, Support and CC then prove it.
5) Ranged weapons : I understand that Melee have more dps since they are riskier but seriously we can melee most of the stuff after a couple of run making range attack useless. Hell even a Ranger is better in melee.

Ranger pets. I really loved how in GW1, you were involved in the evolution of the pet. It felt like, ‘see this pet—-this pet is mine—-I made it this way’. Now it feels like just getting some fast food to go, pity really.

The dodge and downed system makes combat extremely binary and reinforces the lazy “dodge or die” 1-2 hit combat that is so common in this game. It reinforces the “DPS only” gameplay that so many people seem to dislike too. Why take a defensive build or dedicate party slots to defensive measures when someone still gets one or two shot by a boss unless they dodge? And even if they don’t dodge and go down, there’s no penalty, since it takes all of a few seconds to pick someone up off the floor with near full health. Great idea…make an extremely binary succeed or fail system, and then make it difficult to actually fail in that system. What is this, MMO little league where everyone gets a trophy and nobody gets their feelings hurt?

No resource systems. Seriously, cost is one of the most effective balancing tools in a developers toolkit and Anet has just decided to throw it out. Instead we have a system that rewards spamming on cooldown and blind rotations, combined with the dodge/downed system it means that combat boils down to popping your rotations on cooldown and dodging when you see a red circle.

Locking some 70% of the skill bar…I’ve got an idea, lets advertise a “play your own way” system that encourages players to develop their own builds and strategies, and then make them unable to actually customize said build by locking 50% of the skill bar to a weapon, and locking 2/5 remaining skills to specific skill types. That’s some pretty intense customization when you can pick all 3/10 of your skills.

Focus on temporary content. This game has been out for nearly 18 months, and in that time the only permanent content we’ve gotten have been balance patches, southsun cove, fractals, a handful of pvp maps, some mini games, and some number quality of life fixes. Some temporary content is fine, like Wintersday, Halloween, or other such events. But the entire game to date has been one big temporary patch. It’d be nice if we got some new dungeons, zone, weapon/armor skins (that don’t require the cash shop), or maybe some storyline that doesn’t feel like its a sixth grader’s fanfiction story.

Yeah, its four, so sue me. You’re not my supervisor.

Kimyrielle.3826:

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.

This has hit the nail to the head!

GW2 combat is awesome in small scale, but at large scale, they are forcing so much ,combat is showing flaws of system.

I hope some one from Anet will read and acknowledge you post, because if they are not aware of this system flaws they should be. And if they are I hope they are trying to fix those design flaws.

For me number one problem has been lack of mouselook toggle.. having to constantly press right click down sure eats tons of gaming fun. and targetting overall is still too much of old generations one .. really would wish it would be more like new generations action mmos

quest hearts to 100% the map, these are just boring to do. And in the end make game awfully grindy with slow progression on slow levels. hearts are are step forward from quest hubs but being forced to do them for map sure is pain.

these were biggest problems for me. i think.. there are minor things like autoslow when you get hit and are forced to fight..

1. visual edges vs. physical edges.
2. Legendaries not being account bound
3. Introduction of D.R.
4. The use of soulbound mechanics
5. Reliance on gimmicks to create “challenge” and “variety”

1: Tying stats to gear. Always an incredibly bad decision, it’s a case of following the MMO herd.
It limits build flexibility massively and is probably the most bone-headed decision ArenaNet made when developing GW2.

2: Over-reliance on spiky, over-sized, glowing gear design. Subtlety is hard to find in GW2.

3: Achievement points and the rewards associated with them. I thought the title grind in GW1 was bad enough, but achievements as they are used in GW2 are an incredibly cynical piece of game design, keeping the players playing whilst investing the minimum development assets needed. It’s operant conditioning.

4: Blatant monetisation and the over-arching importance of “The Economy”.
All other design decisions take a back seat to “The Economy”. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If a game focuses more on “The Economy” than the game, you’ve failed at making a game.

5: Time-gated materials. It’s really just a sub-problem of 3 of the previous ones, but it accentuates points 1, 3 and 4 dramatically, making what should be a fun pastime (playing the game), a grinding chore as you repeat the same old content day-in, day-out in order to meet your quota. It’s like having a job.

Lack of class roles - Everything devolves into a mindless DPS race. Could be alleviated with better encounter design but I doubt there’s anything that can really be done to fix such a basic issue with the game.

No collision detection and AoE limiting - Different issues but together make for poor group combat. All stack on top of each other… dull.

Focus on cosmetic items - Admittedly from day one they said this was the focus, rather than upgrading stats etc. However, if this is the focus there needs to be some exceptionally designed armour, weapons etc. Not kittenty backpacks, pets and whatever generic armours you come up with.

Downed System - I admit at first this sounded like a good idea. In practice it is terrible. Completely eliminates any sense of achievement or whatever from killing someone when they just spring up again, or wait until you’re killed by an ally and spring up… no.

GEM STORE - Has just been done terribly. (IMO) a lot of the game is designed around ways to bring in money through the gem store (DR and so on). Others may disagree but I see the ugly influence of the cash shop with every update.

My top 5 (although in truth I’d name close to 100 mistakes):

1. Gem Store – ANet has taken the store in the highest priority and only finds ways to make more money without giving anything back to their customers. Every update seems to be built around revenue from the cash shop with little influence to the actual game. For more than a year the only real worth addition to the game has been Fractals, everything else is just cash shop items.

2. Living Story (aka Temporary Content) – Temporary content is what keeps the game dull, the “story” is uninteresting and stretched way too far and after that’s done you’re still left with the same old vanilla content. The playground is always the same size, an expansion pack like GW1 would expand the playground but it needs to be permanent.

3. Timegating – What’s the point of limiting ascended crafting to 1 a day but you can still buy as much as your wallet can from TP? doesn’t make sense. Dungeon paths ain’t less, doing every path 1 time is rewarding and once you’re done there’s no reason to do that again until tomorrow, in GW1 I didn’t have to mind such things there was freedom.

4. Class Distinction – No matter which combination of classes your team is made of, it can still be done and it always boils down to the same thing: DPS amount, the exception of this is very very rare. I’ve been playing RPG’s for over a decade and I love the idea that character roles have unique abilities, GW2’s class system is almost all identical with a slight twist.

5. Game Mechanics – I remember back in GW1 some conditions couldn’t be applied to specific mobs for logical reasons such as fire can’t be burned or even worse poisoned. In GW2 no matter what enemy type it is you can put every kind of condition “It just works!”.

The downed mechanic is a renamed “Mommy hold my hand”, when the red bar is depleted you should be dead, done, deal, finito, game over until an ally resurrects you and that’s how it should be.

Another mechanic I dislike is how the skills are interrupted/used. The best one I can think of atm is the Warrior’s Hammer burst skill where your adrenaline doesn’t deplete if you don’t hit any enemy, no reason why the adrenaline should remain full.

There’s no depth to the game, from an MMO I expect content to keep me engaged like GW1 did for 7 years. GW2 is slightly better than those F2P games around and the content that came out past release feels half hearted. In GW2 I don’t see the same passion and love ANet gave to GW1.

Shadey Dancer.2907:

Ranger pets. I really loved how in GW1, you were involved in the evolution of the pet. It felt like, ‘see this pet—-this pet is mine—-I made it this way’. Now it feels like just getting some fast food to go, pity really.

Mind you, GW1 seemed to have a whole lot of people who just went Dire. And the Menagerie sort of made the pet’s evolution nothing you needed to worry about – they would provide you with a spread of options of pets at various “evolutions” and levels. Including Level 20 Dire/Hearty/Elder.

1. Defiant
2. Mob’s low rate of attack
3. Larcenous Strike’s boon steal nerf, rather nerfing the damage or increasing the cost.
4. Not going with the Revealed no matter what nerf
5. Buffing Warrior so much its weaknesses were negated.

Personal Story – (speaking as an Asura here): Am I ever going to meet the person I selected as my old master during character creation? What about the final two members of my krewe that have been sitting in my homebase since level 1 who don’t even have a dialog box for me to talk to them? Will it ever matter at all whether I saved Pol or not? I’m sure there are analogies for the other races too; does it ever matter to Norn which spirit animal they have, etc.?

Dragons – I took a break from this game for about a year, and am shocked and disappointed that when I come back there apparently still aren’t even suggestions that we’ll be moving north to take on Jormag eventually, to say nothing of the other dragons. I want to see Deep Sea Dragon, but I get the feeling that it will either be twelve years before that we even know its name, or never. And now they’re saying there won’t be any expansions? And I’ve missed out on most of the Living World stuff so I can’t really speak for them, but am I the only one who thinks it absurd that they might EVER hit on something that matters or really opens up new content?

Map – How much of the total map can we access now? A fourth? A fifth? Will we ever get to see the Crystal Desert, the Maguuma Wastes, the Far Shiverpeaks, etc? In the year and a half this game has been out, they have added… one small island with nothing on it? And yet they assure us that “Living World is the way of the future! No more boring Expansions”? Give me a break.

Dungeons – PvE in this game seems to be “fractalsfractalsfractalsfractalsfractalsfractalsfractals”. This is another thing I had hoped would change during my months of absence, but nope! I hate the fractals, I hate the idea of them, I hate how non-integrated they are, I hate how they just can crank the level of them up in lieu of actually making new and difficult content, I hate them.

Lack of Support – in WoW if you had an issue you could open a ticket and you’d be talking to a support worker in a couple hours and they’d fix your problem immediately. Here, the philosophy is “send us a bug report so that we can ignore it forever”.

1 - No trinity-like mechanics.
2 - Button smashing based combat (no resources + no risk/reward).
3 - Vertical progression.
4 - Fixed weapon skills (0 variety).
5 - Useless races making the personal story too swallow and new armors harder to create.

You know Cevlakohn, you reminded me of something.
Even though I was never a massive fan of fractals (playing them more than a few times simply got boring for me), when they released them I thought I understood what would happen next. The format’s ideal for adding a new fractal every month or so to mix things up, eventually allowing for an incredibly diverse selection of 3 every time. But nope, that didn’t happen.

If the following 5 things were reverted/rectified I would come back to GW2:

1. Horrific class balance/utility
2. Time-gated features
3. Ascended Gear
4. Dungeon Bosses as simple DPS sponges
5. Prioritizing temporary content over permanent content

good: no flying mounts, encouraging exploration
bad: fast-travel waypoints in every inch of the map, making the world feel small and uneventful

good: no holy-trinity, encouraging player skill and not player class.
bad: no team-work at all, encourages zerker.

good: separating PVP and PVE.
bad lack of incentive for pvers to try pvp renders the spvp community dead.

good: new spvp map modes introduced regularly
bad: all of them are conquest mode, which frankly, we are all tired of already.

good: introduces new zones into the world for us to explore.
bad: doesnt attach vistas or hearts to it, making them less fun to complete.

1. no guild wars in guild wars (gvg)
2. very limited trait/utility system
3. sea players dont have their own servers
4. pvp has one mode (no kdr scoreboard that every other game on this planet uses)
5. passive play (regen AND condis)
6. crystalline blade

1. The bait and switch with the introduction of Ascended Gear.
2. No GvG in a game called GUILD WARS.
3. The focus on living story content insted of fixing/balancing old content.
4. Gambling for skins with real money.
5. Poor class/gear balance where everyone is/wants zerk guard/wars.

No Town clothes: This was a major blow to the RP’ers. This basically shut out a whole group of people and said to them that you need to spend more on the game to actually play it.

WvW: WvW based on conquest not on defense, No rewards for upgrading anything in WVW.

Personal Story: Its… Personal? (last mission)

Dungeons existing: Now I know this sounds nuts, but think about it. How can you successfully design a dynamic paced game with living events, when you have static content which is forever unchanging that you ask players to continually grind?

Fixed weapon skills: I like some weapons looks, and I hate others. I dislike scepters but am more of a staff person. But you can’t exactly forsake a 1/3 of a class’s skills now can you. :<

Lack of loot: Not to criticize but if you have to give players a free rare for completing a meta it means your regular loot system needs an overall. You should not have to bribe players to do an event.

Levels 60-80: Just my preference but as someone who has 11 80’s the last 20 levels really drag a bit too much.

Gambling for purchased items: This is silly, get what you pay for. You should not get an item that you can get off the TP for 8c for real cash. Every purchase with real money should be worth it.

Summonable weapons: My Ele can summon a great sword yet she can’t use one? If a great sword is not going to be part of the Ele class then it shouldn’t be.

The Engineer: This in part goes with me not likening the summonable weapons, so I’ll admit I’m biased, but the class should be based on weapons in the game. There aren’t 300 pages of swords, staffs and hammers on the TP for the heck of it. You should be able to change your gear, and how it looks, that is impart what an MMO is.

Ok, that was way more than five but after reading four pages of this you tend to think a bit. lol

1. No dyeable weapons
2. No second/sub profession
3. No hero system
4. Hardly any skill unlocks/removal of Signet of Capture (though to be fair, this is being looked into now with the CDI)
5. Unable to collect loot that is right next to you, when you’re dead (so annoying. Missed out on a lot of loot because of this)

The next 5 points i considder to be the main design mistakes of gw2:

1. The most ‘frustrating’ one, and the one hardest to deal with personally, is the choice to have no other skill balancing method than recharge time. Or put otherwise, the removal of mana from the game. Why is this so hard to deal with? Because i still hear Collin speak about ‘swinging your sword, and swinging it again’, well lo and behold, due to the removal of mana, the whack-a-mole skill system feels just like that.

Now i met Collin at GamesCon, and he is a really nice guy, and there is no way i would accuse him of lying, really! there would be no way he would lie about his! Yet, in the end, the skill system does feel a lot like ‘hey i swung my sword, now i swung it again’. I fear unintentionally and disappointing. The removal of mana; which, next to recharge time, cast time and impact was good to use as a skill balancing tool, and as such remove the ‘whack a mole’/‘swing your sword’ feel. Though I feel that nr.2 also has a part in this.

2. The second thing that i have a hard time dealing with, is the lack of choice skills. Now having played GW1 since beta (on and off I will add.) and I fully supported the notion of some severe weeding amongst the skills. Each profession had around 150 and with 2 professions that meant 300+ skills to pick from. It was just to much to handle, both as a player (esp. new ones) and i would reckon also for skill balancing.

Looking at the result though, I fear the weeding has gone too far, with the 2nd profession gone the amount of skills already got cut in halve. Then with the weapon skills partially fixed and partially choice (by choice of weapon), there were basically 3 locations left to choose, from a total of 20 skills. Which, in most cases, were basically 5 builds of 4 skill types thrown in a pool of 20.

There is hardly any buildmaking any more, just ‘pick from the 5 builds’. And the traits while promising further diversification at first, turn out to contain a bunch of useless traits, and a couple of cough choices that strengthen the 5 builds you can pick from.

Yes the amount of true builds was limited in GW1 too, but each balancing act shuck up the cards and it was off to making the best combo again. which mostly took some time. Yet, with the large amount of skills it felt you did have a true personal choice, and some of my builds were (be it 2 or 3 skills) different from the standard build(s), but in GW1 that was about 1/3 of your build, so still quite different I would say.

So yes, the skills needed tuning down, I still support that decision, but then its a matter of by ‘how far’, and that is where I feel they went too far. It feels there is hardly any free choice now, and the traits just complement the builds you can choose from, so no real choices there either. This then enhances the feel of ‘having a sword, and having to swing it, again, and again’.

3. The linear crafting system, or more accurate would be the tiered resource system, well it is both really…

Let me start off by saying I support the way the crafting system is divided up, aka. the various part crafted form an actual item. This could have made a really interesting and diverse crafting system. But: By making the items solely tiered, it remains a simple linear crafting system, disguised by a discovery window. Well just look at your crafting list and you know what I mean. To that is added the tiered resource system, which enhances the linear feel of the whole.

How I could have been a lot more interesting if different resources would have had different properties, and if perhaps even different trophies could have made different looks. I would love to get my hands on that system and amp it up…

4. This one is hard to describe and really pinpoint, it may even be due to my computer not being able to run the game at max settings. But, the game looks too polished, to be convincing and believable, there has to be some sort of roughness to it. Part of the game feel almost ‘toy-like’, and here I have a hard time, because parts also look stunningly beautiful, and I have a truly hard time pointing out just what it is. Personally I have a hunch it may be due to the lighting, the world may be over lit, which gives it a somewhat unnatural feel, which in turn combined with the art-direction gives it almost a ‘toy-feel’, which in turn makes me somewhat detached from the game world, or not fully emerged.

Again though, this may also be due to my settings, and seeing I inspected the art work and deemed it good looking, and ‘natural’ looking, and thus not the reason of this ‘feel’, I don’t know what exactly it is. My bet is on the lighting (or my settings), but with no way to compare different lighting scenarios, there is no way to truly point a finger. Although I must add that the bright nights have me somewhat disappointed as well. (I will though, more consciously inspect my own reaction to the game world by day and night, to see if it changes something in my perception).

5. I think the last thing would be the choice to go with a ‘temporary’ living story, instead of building on the existing world. The pace of the story was somewhat high as well, especially for more casual players. The feel to miss something is highly disappointing, which leads to some sort of urge to be there and do things as much you can, which leads to content-stress, which isn’t at all enjoyable for a pastime that should be relaxing and enjoyable.

I do think that both can have a place in GW2, both the added area’s, as well as limited time content taking place in the existing world. It’s just a matter of finding the right pace of things, and the right balance between the too. Preferably they are combined, where a story takes off in the existing world and leads us all to uncharted areas, or adds a dungeon, or adds (and maybe removes) states in the ‘events’.

Actually, the addition to states in the events was how (at first) I personally understood the living story to take place. Anet adding states to certain zones, as such expanding the stories in the world. But even with a huge tree and toxic alliance foes on the doorstep, the Centaur were unmoved and kept going for that bridge…

So, I personally think that if you give negative points, you should at least also give positive ones, or offer solutions to the things you point out. Talking things down is way to easy.

So let me start off by saying I still like the game a lot, and I am happy that I took my time with most of it, I still have no 100% completion, things to discover, places to go, alts to work on. If only the living story would give me some time to actually do them :P … I think the world looks stunning, and in some cases even breath taking. And the hearts and events (to me) feel like a great step forward in MMO game worlds, as opposed to the wood of ! and ? and -> everywhere. So now for some suggestions:

1. I fear this cannot be fixed anymore, mana is gone, and adding it back in may not even be possible. This should be a lesson for a next game though! If you give yourself to little instruments to balance your skills, you end up with a harder time balancing, and with a more shallow skill system.

2. I hope this will be fixed by finding ways to add more skills, and thus more choices to the game. It really needs this! And hopefully with more choices, more players will find the way they want to play.

3. I fear that the only way to improve on the crafting system is to do an overhaul, which I do not see happening. Things may be added to it, but seeing crafting is not a defining system to the game, an overhaul will be unlikely. Hopefully though at some point, it will be the issue of the CDI and I wont hesitate to chip in my ideas. Or Anet can hire me, I’m currently unemployed ‘hint, hint’…

4. I hope they will look into the lighting situation of night mostly, and maybe even the lighting overall. But seeing I do not have a way to mess with the settings myself (apart from on my end), it will be hard to determine what exactly gives this ‘toy-detach’ feel to the world at times.

5. Here I think the Dev’s need to find the right balance between the content they put out, how they put it out, and the pace at which they do so. The idea is good, and both temporary as well as persistent changes have their place. Currently there is a lot of ‘temporary’ content, and there is some just critique to that, just make sure you don’t shift all they way to the other side, and just do persistent content.

Again, this is new to both Anet and the players, and perhaps the dev’s should flat out say that they are still experimenting with it, and ask the players for feedback and patience. I am sure that we will find the balance in both pace, as well as the mix between one time events and persistent additions.

=
Other points that came up while writing the above:

6. There was once the idea to reduce the amount of conditions since there were so many. But now, with the addition of boons, and the addition of some more conditions, the list of boons and conditions double the amount of things in GW1.

To make matter worse, in my views, the higher content is made more ‘difficult’ by using the most annoying conditions (confusion and agony) on all foes.

This, well I can put it like this I think, as its the most clear, makes it feel like ‘political statements’. We all know them, where this party says X to get you excited, and by the time you voted he blatantly does the opposite… I read that more people get this feel at times, and it is bad that this happens (more so in politics then gaming btw, but that is off topic).

So my advice to the dev team would be to go back to what was said to be intended, make a list of things and put it on the wall or a book. And when you have a new idea, check if it’s in line with things you said or promised earlier. If it is not, no matter how good the idea looks on paper, it is just not a good idea by default.

Another would be to not add more boons or conditions anymore, there are more then enough, and to work on AI in general and skills more particular, to make new content harder, instead of plucking confusion and agony on everything.

I’ll be short and sweet. Rated in order from MOST egregious to least.
1. Lack of skills, skill diversity, skill builds, and the hunt for skills. (signet of capture)
2. The face-to-face style of the cinematics is shameful. Return it to GW1’s style.
3. Terrible optimization that needs correction.
4. More detailed and in-depth lore that is optional.
5. Gender-equality in armor. Females aren’t objects, and males aren’t ugly refrigerators.
5.5 Better armor variety (even updated GW1 models would be sufficient)

1. Making stacking optimal. Now the average pug run is “STACK HERE!!!”
2. Ranger pets being tied to mob AI.
3. Turrets not getting help.

1. Particle effects everywhere – New armor – add particle effects to old one. Boss-unique weapons – add particle effects to old ones. New skill animations – use old animations, just change particle effects. I know having shinies is cool and all, but (however unlikely it might seem!) you can make a game with nice visuals without turning the player characters into christmas trees and boss\WvW fights into epilepsy triggers.

2. Passive Skills – For a game which advertises intense action combat, there are way to many passive and generally AI-related skills which allow classes to pretty much play themselves. Ranger spirits. Necro Minions. Mesmer Phantasms. Don’t get me started on traits which do stuff for you when X happens. (Usually ‘X’ being CC or health threshold, and ‘stuff’ being stability, stealth, dozen boons or immunity to damage/conditions/falling pianos/hatemail/shame for using all this passive crap)

3. Domination as the only PvP mode – And yes, I realize everyone here calls it conquest. It’s boring. It’s probably least played mode in history of PvP games. Hell, even Smite deleted theirs recently because no one wanted to play it. Players kept saying they hate the mode. So why make it not only the main, but the only PvP mode in the game? 1.5 year post relase we got confirmation of other modes sometime in the future. Kinda late now, when 80% of PvP population does it only for the dailies.

4. Grinding Story – a.k.a. Living Story. A game which covers lack of proper new content by always adding new stuff mixed with grind in 1:50 proportions and feels more like a chore or fulltime job than something you do for fun is… Well, it’s just another MMORPG, so let’s move on.

Aaaand…. I actually have trouble thinking of #5. Sure, there are some more issues but nothing so serious to qualify it as design-level mistake.

1. Diminishing Returns
2. Ascended Crafting
3. Gutting of Karma Rewards
4. Gutting of the Orr Event Zones
5. Lack of focused Balance Content – Most of the time they make sweeping changes as opposed to focused per content type changes, something that was promised to us at launch.

1. Ascent gear with almost same stats as exotic gear (Should be 10-20% beter at least)…

2.Ascent gear soulbound….(Let alts use them to)

3.Legendary on TP biggest mistake ever!!!