A lot of the patch changes today have given us many new options in terms of developing a unique and distinct appearance, but along with these welcomed changes come some (for me) unforeseen and fairly negative effects on the role-playing elements of the game.
Plenty of people have already mentioned how the megaserver will split up the RP populations who used to band together on a couple of servers (TC and Piken iirc), but I am not on one of these servers and I do not tend to hang out and RP (in terms of speaking in character, etc.) But I do value many aspects of role-playing in a game like this, especially in terms of immersion and progression. I play mostly with a very small guild of close, real-world friends and we develop little storylines across our characters, etc., much of which is naturally tied to appearance.
The more I log through my toons and play with the new content post-patch, the more I keep encountering these little consequences in today’s changes that have a negative impact on both casual RP (and therefore immersion) and character progression. Some examples:
The decimation of traits for leveling characters (Character Progression)
This one is mind blowing to me – you do not get a single trait point until level 30. You are flat-out removing one of the most interesting parts of leveling from the game until people are nearly halfway done with their characters. If you want build diversity, then please allow people to start working with and understanding builds as early as possible. This, to me, is the worst decision of the patch.
Simple solution: Give people one point every 5 levels starting at level 10 (mirroring the old system) – honestly I would rather go back to the 1 point per level method – it makes so much more sense (you gain a level, you get a little more powerful). I do, however, fully applaud the ability to reset traits whenever you want, and the ability to “+ or -” your way through builds (which mirrors the original Guild Wars system much more), but why that simple change had to come with the plethora of other bad decisions (to both the system design and the system interface imho) is beyond me. It would also be nice to be able to save “builds” like we could in GW1 – but that is a bit tangential.
The loss of town-clothes and the removal of the toy slot in our equipment (RP/immersion):
The biggest advantage of the town-clothes was to have a secondary outfit you could swap to – a way to go from a combat-heavy look to a non-combat style without transmuting. Many characters that looked like Juggernauts on the battlefield looked much more like friends you would enjoy drink and revelry with while safe inside of a keep. Now we all have to choose one look, and it seems that most people will simply keep their “battle armor” look and forgo the casual options.
In conjunction with losing our secondary outfits (and a lot of the customization we had in terms of dye for these outfits), we also now have to use our bag space to carry our toys around – and we can no longer use our toys via keybinds (you could outfit swap/hit 1 before the patch – now you must open your inventory, double click the item to receive a bundle and then hit “1” to use it. Way more clunky and far less appealing without my alternate outfit to accompany my witches broom
Furthermore, I do not want my level 80 exotic/ascended helms to look like the launch weekend baseball cap, etc. – so now many of these these holiday hats that were once fun and silly have become a mostly useless permanent xmute that very few people are going to want to apply to their sweet lvl 80 gear.
Simple solution: Give us back the alt/town outfits – it would have worked so beautifully with this new wardrobe system I am a little shocked that it was completely removed. It would also return our toy slot so we can easily store and access our favorite non-combat items.
I guess this post is already getting long, so I’ll quit my patch-day whining while I am still (not) ahead. I am grateful that the devs are interested in improving the game’s structure, I love that new content gets rolled out, but I feel like some of the aspects of today’s patch were wholly unnecessary and – in many cases – absolutely detrimental to the “RP” part of this RPG.
There are plenty of other aspects of this patch which are great, and plenty of other things I didn’t mention which I feel are horrible (maybe b/c I am a boon-based support Guardian) – but those will be fleshed out in excruciating detail by the theorycrafters.
What I hate to see is the spirit of the RP being watered down, true character progression being sacrificed in order to (I guess?) balance end game play, and all of the little fun items I have collected since early access feeling much more like annoying bank clutter rather than fun-to-share toys.
