Guild Wars 2

I am not 100% sure this is the right sub-forum, but it is a bug/usability issue that I wanted to highlight.

I got a chance to try out the raid in the beta last night, and discovered that the Squad UI was very annoying to use.

Once I created a squad, I was no longer able to invite people to my “squad/party”. If I change to a raid squad, which switched to the new UI, the “invite” failed consistently with “the other player is already in a guild or party”. I no longer have an obvious party.

The only successful way to get someone into the squad was if I found their player character in the same map as me and right clicked their name and said invite to squad. There is no chat command that I know of which works, and there is no way to invite to squad from a whisper (even if they are friends!)

This makes it incredibly difficult to get all our friends together, since we can’t guaruantee we end up in the same map instance. We can’t even taxi people because we’re now in a squad and can’t invite them from a different map instance!!

I suspect some of these issues will be resolved and were created just because of the beta test and not being the true live environment.

However, it should be setup so that we can easily invite people from different maps much more effectively, via whispers as well as some sort of /invite or /squadinvite, or the regular party invite options. If squads are suppsoed to replace parties, then the invite option there should work as expected! If they are not then a separate way should be created to ease the interface issues.

Based on reading a few other threads, it appears the current UI is not really what we will have in the final result of the expansion, but I hope the points I made here are taken into account to make use of the squads much easier.

It was REALLY frustrating yesterday when the only way I could be in a party was to disband my squad. It looks like they fixed that as I was tagged up and just invited to a party

Nothing was changed/fixed, the beta is over and the new squad UI isn’t there now. It’s back to the old system for now.

When the new squad system is active, there will be no need to be in a party while in a squad. Squads have their own ‘party’ list and give you most (if not all) of the features a party does. A 5-player squad set to closed/invite-only is basically a party with a different party list UI.

There are some things to be worked out, like what the OP mentioned. But it seems to be mostly missing UI elements for handling invites. I believe others can invite themselves to a squad using the /squadjoin [commander name] command without being on the same map. And I might be mistaken, but I thought there was a /squadinvite (or /invitesquad?) command available this weekend.

I think once the missing pieces are in place, and the UI is polished, squads will easily take the place of a party for when you need a tag or more than 5 in a group.