Guild Wars 2

Awesome post. I’m on board with everything but #7. I think the pop up should be bigger and play a noise.

2- The game needs an internal CD display of some sort for on proc traits and sigil/rune effects, desperately, it would increase the skill cap in a good way by allowing you to actually see what and when it’s coming off it so you can time your own actions appropriately, as opposed to guessing and hoping for the best which is about as good of an approach to competitive gaming as it is to medication.

Yup made a thread on this before and I think Evan agreed that it should happen.
Honestly hurts gameplay when you can’t see your ICD’s.

Just want to add on the deposit collectibles thing, can glory boosters stay in our bags as well?

Very nice list.

The only thing I would add to it would be the ability to make complete custom builds and allowing us to swap between them on demand when not in a match.

mrook.4163:

Just want to add on the deposit collectibles thing, can glory boosters stay in our bags as well?

Oh yes, I second that. Those should only be deposited if you right click deposit it individually.

I believe invisible bags could prevent an item from being deposited by deposit all.
What we need then, is a way to purchase invisible bags using glory. =)

Kaon.7192:

I believe invisible bags could prevent an item from being deposited by deposit all.
What we need then, is a way to purchase invisible bags using glory. =)

That’s an even better idea, nice going, it should have like a blue color behind the bag slots so you know which one it is and then anything put there is not affected by deposit all. Would be nice for pve too.

Julius.1094:

Kaon.7192:

I believe invisible bags could prevent an item from being deposited by deposit all.
What we need then, is a way to purchase invisible bags using glory. =)

That’s an even better idea, nice going, it should have like a blue color behind the bag slots so you know which one it is and then anything put there is not affected by deposit all. Would be nice for pve too.

Invisible bags are actually available in PvE since the beginning of the game. You can either craft them or buy them from the trading post.

I think the 8 slot ones go for about 30c last time I checked.

SPvP should be self contained though, so it would be ideal if there was a way to buy invisible bags from glory vendors. I mean… you can already buy regular bags from them for 500 glory each.

Kaon.7192:

Julius.1094:

Kaon.7192:

I believe invisible bags could prevent an item from being deposited by deposit all.
What we need then, is a way to purchase invisible bags using glory. =)

That’s an even better idea, nice going, it should have like a blue color behind the bag slots so you know which one it is and then anything put there is not affected by deposit all. Would be nice for pve too.

Invisible bags are actually available in PvE since the beginning of the game. You can either craft them or buy them from the trading post.

I think the 8 slot ones go for about 30c last time I checked.

SPvP should be self contained though, so it would be ideal if there was a way to buy invisible bags from glory vendors. I mean… you can already buy regular bags from them for 500 glory each.

Ah didn’t know, don’t pve much. Yes it would be nice if those were available from the pvp vendor. Hope devs take note of that, seems like an easy thing to do.

yup, that’s a good list

Very nice additions.

I’d like to see a way to more easily organize your bank.

Mine looks like a cluster-kitten and since items don’t automatically stack in your bank I have to play a visual memory game to try and find the respective items.

Amazing list!! But expect a 6-12 month eta for any of it.
We still have a broken skill point in wayfarer from 4+ months ago.

Agree with everything in this list.

+1

I think i might just wait a year or two until this game is really released before i come back to playing it

Great ideas!
Especially the camera thing… kitten es me of so much when using grenade kit on engi.
and the queue wherever you want..

Option to hide the exp bar, i seriously get sad when looking how slow it goes up

Have some of my own:
Option to turn of the self cast if you are using a ground targeted ability on the targets portrait(this have screwed me over a few times)

Bigger Condition Icons on yourself with maybe option to add a number timer on it similar to skill cooldowns but only for <10sec to keep it simple?

Completly hide the flame and frost+daily counter, i don’t want this on my screen when pvping

Option to move around the ui elements more and maybe change size of stuff invidually(i want bigger party frames, bigger health pool/box whatever but smaller buttons for example)

Option to disable Skill queue(i really dislike skill queue)

Smart cast on invidual skills instead of all or nothing(similar how you can in LoL)

Skill activation on button up(i don’t like this but others do) as an option

Tone down particle effects on abilitys(seriously sometimes a team fight looks like a total cluster kitten)

Able to set refresh rate to 120fps if you want to without using vsync/unlimited option

Ingame latency bar

Fps counter without having to use dxtory/fraps/whatever

A way to access bank from the mist would be awesome…

And the popup thing when a match is ready from Smite would be great http://i.imgur.com/6kNQdiU.jpg

A Green Screen Background/Screenshot “page” @ Character Selection screen (attachement to show example)
Perhaps an option to do emotes in said “screenshot page” etc.
Just “borrow” some features from EvE Online gosh darn! ;D
example: https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/50045/ExeFile_2013-01-27_16-44-06-298.png

Allow stackable items to stack beyond 250, or add a service to Gem store to add duplicate deposit slots

A “Compact” Feature for Bank + Show / hide “Bag” in bank aswell.
Option to Name Bank Slots(possibly a gem store feature?)

Could we also get the option to click links on the forum without having to copy paste everything?!

I agree with all these. Especially #1, its been kitten me off since beta. Also an option to change points in a trait tree without erasing your entire trait page would be handy.

Kaon.7192:

Very nice list.

The only thing I would add to it would be the ability to make complete custom builds and allowing us to swap between them on demand when not in a match.

I miss this so much from gw1. It’s such a pain to keep swapping builds. Don’t know why the template system isn’t in place!

Added suggestions from thread and a couple more to list. Anyone else have any?

1. Instead of everyone in the mists showing lvl 80 , why not you’re rank instead ?

1. Also you’re spvp rank in guild roster list

2 good Quality of life proposals there

There is not enough builds to justify templates atm sorry i had to say it

Evan Lesh.3295:

can’t quote because of post size

1) I agree that targeting has been a point of contention around here since everyone has a different opinion on how it should work. We have not forgotten about this issue, but it is pretty low priority, unfortunately. This polish would fall under the umbrella of a combat team.

2) This would certainly be cool. There was a thread on this not too long ago. This is non-trivial polish that requires some back-end tech to be possible. This feature would also fall under the combat category.

3) This is a combination of how the reward system was designed, and the fact that we can’t have different rarity items in PvP for technical reasons. Once this is solved, each item could have a correct rarity and not always ask for salvage confirmation. This is a feature that the PvP team would be responsible for.

4) Vendors and collections were an existing way to get PvP items into the game. Ideally there should be a proper unlock system, but time and tech prevented this from happening. This is a feature owned by the PvP team.

5) I really don’t like suggestions like this, because its a complete band-aid solution to something that should just be redesigned for PvP. Why do you need to even buy free items to apply it 6 times? This is a feature owned by the PvP team.

6) This is some good polish, but it only affects these two specific collections out of the entire game. I would go so far as to say we shouldn’t need these oddly working collections in the first place (see 4). This particular part of collections is a feature owned by the PvP.

7) Haha yes. This. Polish owned by the PvP team.

8) This is a big one! Expanding our skill tooltips to buffs, traits, and items is already on our radar. No timeline. This is a feature owned by a combat team.

9) The reason for making people go to the mists is because the transition from PvE to PvP is a big one. If I new players were to queue directly into a PvP game, they’d have no idea why all their armor, weapons, and traits were different. Making this a two step process helps to eliminate this confusion. However, we realize that the flow of PvP is not efficient, and plan on working on this. This is a lot of features and polish owned by the PvP team.

10) Something I started, but never had time to get back to. This is a feature owned by me.

11) Not sure how this would work. What problem would this solve?

12) You cannot have bank access in the mists because anyone can port there for free.

13) Sounds cool. I don’t see why not. This would be a feature/polish owned by the PvP team.

14) This is a definite must for the future of the game. It is planned. It will come in time. This is a feature owned by the PvP team.

15) This requires some back-end reworks to become possible. This is a feature owned by the gameplay programmers.

16) The limit of 1 is a technical limitation.

17) This will not happen as it affects way to many things in the game. Why do you have that many things stacked at once as to need a stack size of 1000? The problem is not the stack size.

I hope this gives a rough idea of the kinds of things different teams own and the difference between a feature and polish. Anything I can do to make development more transparent is a win. A lot of people wonder why certain things aren’t “high priority” for the PvP team. Sometimes it’s because some other team is in a position to do it. Our team usually is not scheduled to work on game-wide polish or features, because we have so many PvP specific features to do!

Why are you not CEO?

edit: or dev captain or something

Amazing, thanks.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Julius.1094:

16- Ability to stack more than one piece of the same gear in locker, 2 would be ideal.

16) The limit of 1 is a technical limitation.

I thank you for your time here, but dude that is plain sad, where did you outsource the code for this to?.

so we should see some of these in a couple years after custom servers and solo queue. kewl

I think #1 needs an higher priority, rotate camera and lose target is a big issue.

Julius Wrote:
17- Increase pvp consumable stacking limit from 250 to 1000 (the limitation doesn’t accomplish anything other than creating nuisance for players).

Evan Wrote:
17) This will not happen as it affects way to many things in the game. Why do you have that many things stacked at once as to need a stack size of 1000? The problem is not the stack size.

Don’t need a stack size to change like that, but the problem is the reward system for tPvP.

Problem more concisely: You get a bazillion duplicate skins that clog your inventory and you have to get rid of some how. You can’t sell them, so you salvage them. You now have a bazillion dusts that you can’t sell, and you can only store 250 in locker. How much time do you want to spend fiddling with the mystic forge to get rid of them?
Answer: none. Now what? I suggest that giving some kind of cross over for PvP crafting materials directly to copper/silver/gold would be logical. PvX players could use it for whatever, and PvP onlys could convert to gems to help bare the cost of their fancy new custom arenas. Win-Win.

Thought: You have a bunch of vendors in the mists already. Let them buy stuff. Implement the code that all of the other vendors in PvE world already use. It may take some programming to work, but I would expect that the lion’s share of the code you need is already sitting there being used in other places.

Julius.1094:

11- Enable auto target on cast to be set on a per skill basis (sort of like auto cast is now) as opposed to all or none.

Hi, I would like to see something like this:

Nice to hear about #10
Hope you get time to finish it “soon”

Evan Lesh.3295:

Collections can clearly support more than 1 item per slot, as seen elsewhere in the game. The problem is that it takes 8 times the amount of space to support more than 1, and PvP has a ton of items. In this case, “technical limitation” means size constraints.

To make collection store 2 items instead of 1 is only twice amount of space.(2bits instead of 1), and you also don’t need 2 slots for all the items, only for specific weapon types(e.g. daggers), so i suppose it is maybe 10% larger at max.Such small fix would definitely help untill fully featured unlock-system will come in place.

DIFFERENT KEYBINDINGS FOR DIFFERENT TOONS.

For heavens sake, every other game does it…

Why the kitten do I have to spend a minute rebinding keys whenever I swap from my ele to my ranger… and god forbid, if I ever want to play my warrior again I’ll have even more trouble with it…

Evan Lesh.3295:

12) You cannot have bank access in the mists because anyone can port there for free.

Then put a bank tab in the PvP locker for people to store extra pvp mats and whatnot. This logic is moronic. Instead of just putting the bank in the Heart of the Mists you’ll make people go through Heart of the Mists to get to LA to use the bank for free anyway. But kitten if that person wants to go back to where they were they’re gonna have to pay a couple silver for that waypoint because you gotta have nonsensical gold sinks all over the place… As if people aren’t spending their gold anyway. Either people are constantly spending their gold and being basically unaffected by waypoint costs or are power trading and amassing an absurd amount of gold.

Just put a bank in Heart of the Mists.

Goorman.7916:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Collections can clearly support more than 1 item per slot, as seen elsewhere in the game. The problem is that it takes 8 times the amount of space to support more than 1, and PvP has a ton of items. In this case, “technical limitation” means size constraints.

To make collection store 2 items instead of 1 is only twice amount of space.(2bits instead of 1), and you also don’t need 2 slots for all the items, only for specific weapon types(e.g. daggers), so i suppose it is maybe 10% larger at max.Such small fix would definitely help untill fully featured unlock-system will come in place.

Be fair to Evan, as he is good enough to come here and post. Obviously he is pointing to the way the system is currently coded and thier choice of variable types (if you don’t know anything about programming than skip my nerdy post).

It would frankly be stupid to re-write all of that code so that you can store 2 items instead of 1. There are way too many things of greater value that they could spend that time on. A better solution would be changing the locker system to an unlock system (skins aren’t consumed, you just unlock and use on demand), but this is so far from important that I can’t see a reason why they should devote resource to it at the moment.

Instead of storing multiple items, why not just make them item unlocks? Where we click an unlocked skin and can then apply it to a pvp item as much as we want.

mrook.4163:

Just want to add on the deposit collectibles thing, can glory boosters stay in our bags as well?

Ger an Invisible bag and put the stuff you don’t want to go to bank when you deposit collectibles and the the stuff you don’t want to show up on vendor in that bag.

Problem solved.

Goorman.7916:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Collections can clearly support more than 1 item per slot, as seen elsewhere in the game. The problem is that it takes 8 times the amount of space to support more than 1, and PvP has a ton of items. In this case, “technical limitation” means size constraints.

To make collection store 2 items instead of 1 is only twice amount of space.(2bits instead of 1), and you also don’t need 2 slots for all the items, only for specific weapon types(e.g. daggers), so i suppose it is maybe 10% larger at max.Such small fix would definitely help untill fully featured unlock-system will come in place.

Programing does not work that way, what the dev is saying is technically correct of course, because they are likely working with an 8 bit format integer (up to 256) rather than a Boolean type (1 bit true or false).
Having said that, server storage is not precisely expensive now days, specially considering that is 1 collection per account and not character.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Apolo.5942:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Julius.1094:

16- Ability to stack more than one piece of the same gear in locker, 2 would be ideal.

16) The limit of 1 is a technical limitation.

I thank you for your time here, but dude that is plain sad, where did you outsource the code for this to?.

Collections can clearly support more than 1 item per slot, as seen elsewhere in the game. The problem is that it takes 8 times the amount of space to support more than 1, and PvP has a ton of items. In this case, “technical limitation” means size constraints.

Hi Evan,

What do you think of using a similar system for sPvP skins as the HoM rewards?

Change the chest reward system to reward 1-time skin unlocks instead of items. Change the RNG result handling logic of the chests to reward a certain number of pvp materials for each skin that the player has already unlocked. This system would essentially result in the same rewards as a player who salvages all skins that he has already collected in the current system.

Let there be a basic set of merchants similar to what we have right now that sells the basic weapons/armors/amulets/sigils/runes. And add in a special Weapon/Armor merchant that sells unlimited copies of skins that you have unlocked for 0 glory.

Unless I missed some important loophole I believe this system would solve most of the inventory related issues on the list when combined with a proper template system. It obsoletes the salvaging system, and gives each player unlimited copies of the skins that he has unlocked.

And it seems to me that you have most of the required infrastructure in place already elsewhere in the game.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. =)

Evan Lesh.3295:

17) This will not happen as it affects way to many things in the game. Why do you have that many things stacked at once as to need a stack size of 1000? The problem is not the stack size.

I appreciate all your other answers, but I think this one is faulty. Some exotic dungeon gear costs more than 250 tokens. Same deal with PvP gear and tokens. Players are stacking more than 250 of those tokens because they’re required to do so to obtain gear.

Same deal with crafting legendary items, which require 500 or more of some mats. Players don’t have a choice in stacking more than 250 of those if they want a legendary item.

Kaon.7192:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Apolo.5942:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Julius.1094:

16- Ability to stack more than one piece of the same gear in locker, 2 would be ideal.

16) The limit of 1 is a technical limitation.

I thank you for your time here, but dude that is plain sad, where did you outsource the code for this to?.

Collections can clearly support more than 1 item per slot, as seen elsewhere in the game. The problem is that it takes 8 times the amount of space to support more than 1, and PvP has a ton of items. In this case, “technical limitation” means size constraints.

Hi Evan,

What do you think of using a similar system for sPvP skins as the HoM rewards?

Change the chest reward system to reward 1-time skin unlocks instead of items. Change the RNG result handling logic of the chests to reward a certain number of pvp materials for each skin that the player has already unlocked. This system would essentially result in the same rewards as a player who salvages all skins that he has already collected in the current system.

Let there be a basic set of merchants similar to what we have right now that sells the basic weapons/armors/amulets/sigils/runes. And add in a special Weapon/Armor merchant that sells unlimited copies of skins that you have unlocked for 0 glory.

Unless I missed some important loophole I believe this system would solve most of the inventory related issues on the list when combined with a proper template system. And it seems to me that you have most of the required infrastructure in place.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. =)

This would work, it would change nothing storage size wise on the servers.

First of all: thank you so much Evan for giving us some answers and a real transparency, I think we all really appreaciate that

Second: about the 4th point, you said that an unlock system should be in the game but because of time and tech you couldn’t implement it. I wonder now, how is that? I mean… why not doing it like in the original Guild Wars? Glory cost for every rune and sigil, you pay the price, you unlock forever the item.

I missed this system since day 1 and I was surprised it wasn’t in the game, its absence make this new PvP system much boring than we had on a older game :/

Evan Lesh.3295:

12) You cannot have bank access in the mists because anyone can port there for free.

I do this every day in WvW, and anyone can port there and then go back to wherever they were. Please let us do it in the mists as well.

Goorman.7916:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Collections can clearly support more than 1 item per slot, as seen elsewhere in the game. The problem is that it takes 8 times the amount of space to support more than 1, and PvP has a ton of items. In this case, “technical limitation” means size constraints.

To make collection store 2 items instead of 1 is only twice amount of space.(2bits instead of 1), and you also don’t need 2 slots for all the items, only for specific weapon types(e.g. daggers), so i suppose it is maybe 10% larger at max.Such small fix would definitely help untill fully featured unlock-system will come in place.

Well while this is true, it also requires quite a bit of programming time.

I cannot recall a database type which stores 2 bit. I can just recall BIT storing just 1 physical bit. Even standard mySQL BOOLEAN stores 1 byte.
So if you want to have 1 or 2 bit varying you probably should take some sort of selfmade data type, using CHAR.
There are currently 1901 items, so you need that many bits atleast. That is 237.625 bytes or 238 bytes/chars which is needed at the moment. At the moment they could instead use 1901 fields of the BIT type instead, and easily query each on seperately.
If you want to have certain weapons twice, you would have to start thinking about some sort of bitmask used for each type. Basically you have to make a decision whether you give that item 2 bit or not, and then ‘track’ which item is associated with the n’th bit in your char(x).
So lets assume you give those weapons, that can be dual whielded 2 bits.
Dagger, Pistols, Swords, Axe, Mace.
This would increase the amount of bits to 2174 or 271.75 bytes rounded to 272 bytes.
So we need a field for each account which stores 272 bytes. Within these 272 bytes we define that bit n or the bits n+(n+1) are used for the weapon x.
Now, when you query the database for the items within your PvP locker, you would query that 272 byte string which contains unreadable data, because you are interested in the bitstring. You would then have to run through each byte of this 272 byte array, and apply several bit masks with a & operator, at minimum 4 and up to 8 (one for each bit, if each bit represents one weapon/armor piece, or a bitmask which actually has 2 bits set to 1, if the item allows storage of more then 1). After that you have to compare if the result is true (>0) or false (0).
Ultimately not ultra hard to program, but unnecessary if you are going the scrap the system later on anyway.

Of course you also have to get a logic running which will convert the old database to the new schemata (also not that hard, as you are adding stuff, not trying to compress it further).

The other possibility, which is far easier from a programming standpoint is to use a byte/char for each field.
But as Evan said, that would require 8 times the amount of space per account for the PvP locker.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Varonth.5830:

Goorman.7916:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Collections can clearly support more than 1 item per slot, as seen elsewhere in the game. The problem is that it takes 8 times the amount of space to support more than 1, and PvP has a ton of items. In this case, “technical limitation” means size constraints.

To make collection store 2 items instead of 1 is only twice amount of space.(2bits instead of 1), and you also don’t need 2 slots for all the items, only for specific weapon types(e.g. daggers), so i suppose it is maybe 10% larger at max.Such small fix would definitely help untill fully featured unlock-system will come in place.

Well while this is true, it also requires quite a bit of programming time.

I cannot recall a database type which stores 2 bit. I can just recall BIT storing just 1 physical bit. Even standard mySQL BOOLEAN stores 1 byte.
So if you want to have 1 or 2 bit varying you probably should take some sort of selfmade data type, using CHAR.
There are currently 1901 items, so you need that many bits atleast. That is 237.625 bytes or 238 bytes/chars which is needed at the moment. At the moment they could instead use 1901 fields of the BIT type instead, and easily query each on seperately.
If you want to have certain weapons twice, you would have to start thinking about some sort of bitmask used for each type. Basically you have to make a decision whether you give that item 2 bit or not, and then ‘track’ which item is associated with the n’th bit in your char(x).
So lets assume you give those weapons, that can be dual whielded 2 bits.
Dagger, Pistols, Swords, Axe, Mace.
This would increase the amount of bits to 2174 or 271.75 bytes rounded to 272 bytes.
So we need a field for each account which stores 272 bytes. Within these 272 bytes we define that bit n or the bits n+(n+1) are used for the weapon x.
Now, when you query the database for the items within your PvP locker, you would query that 272 byte string which contains unreadable data, because you are interested in the bitstring. You would then have to run through each byte of this 272 byte array, and apply several bit masks with a & operator, at minimum 4 and up to 8 (one for each bit, if each bit represents one weapon/armor piece, or a bitmask which actually has 2 bits set to 1, if the item allows storage of more then 1). After that you have to compare if the result is true (>0) or false (0).
Ultimately not ultra hard to program, but unnecessary if you are going the scrap the system later on anyway.

Of course you also have to get a logic running which will convert the old database to the new schemata (also not that hard, as you are adding stuff, not trying to compress it further).

The other possibility, which is far easier from a programming standpoint is to use a byte/char for each field.
But as Evan said, that would require 8 times the amount of space per account for the PvP locker.

Going from bits->bytes is a trivial change, but takes 8 times the space. Going from 1 bit to 2 bits is a much more complicated change. In any case, people shouldn’t focus on why collections only store 1 of something. People should be thinking of why we don’t have something entirely better than collections.

Thanks Evan for writing a TL;DR of my post xD

Evan Lesh.3295:

11) Not sure how this would work. What problem would this solve?

[…]

14) This is a definite must for the future of the game. It is planned. It will come in time. This is a feature owned by the PvP team.

[..]

16) The limit of 1 is a technical limitation.

17) This will not happen as it affects way to many things in the game. Why do you have that many things stacked at once as to need a stack size of 1000? The problem is not the stack size.

11) Do not skills like Ride the Lightning work that way that they move you into the direction you are facing – without a target… but moving you to the target if you targeted someone? I only played Elementalist in PvE so far… but sometimes I thought about disabling auto-targeting because in PvE I want to use that skill to increase my movement speed a bit and it always automatically targets some nearby mobs and moves me there getting me into combab… but I really like auto-targeting and don’t want to disable it completely. I think this might be something for your combat team? And probably somethink taking a bit more hours of work so probably not possible to implement this soon… it’s okay I just might disable auto-targeting. I don’t think there are that many skills where it would be useful to set it on a per skill base.

14) Good to hear. I’m too lazy to change builds every time…

17) I played a lot the last few days and I’m getting to 250 with that arcane powder. I don’t like to craft that much at the Mystic Forge and I think it would be nice to have higher values possible for these kind of items. If not by increasing stack size(might be a problem because there is only 1 stack size for all items and it would affeckt PvE stuff in your collectibles too?) then how about making it possible to add more than 1 stack? Like showing some square image of another slot a bit moved to the left and right and behind the first slot so you only can see a bit of the icon(and maybe the number of items there).

16) What does it mean? “8 times the amount of space”? You mean like database or code where it takes more space and making the game slower?

Evan Lesh.3295:

People should be thinking of why we don’t have something entirely better than collections.

I hope you mean ANet devs, not the players when you say “people”. It’s not our fault you missed all these quality of life improvements that are standard in most other games and/or were mentioned multiple times during betas.

Evan Lesh.3295:

TL;DR Going from bits->bytes is a trivial change, but takes 8 times the space. Going from 1 bit to 2 bits is a much more complicated change. In any case, people shouldn’t focus on why collections only store 1 of something. People should be thinking of why we don’t have something entirely better than collections.

Because you are working on something entirely better?)
The next question is, however, when will we see this system?