Guild Wars 2

It certainly would be fun to see them again – I thought exactly the same while using the Warband skill the first time. It would be fun if the skill itself would have a prolonged duration, so that you can go drink with them!

I mainly play a female charr thief – since I just think the male charr model doesn’t fit a thief at all. It’s just too big, bulky and doesn’t have the same kind of grace that the female model has. Also, I personally like her voice, even if the quality of the voice acting seems to get slightly worse in later cutscenes.

I agree – the clipping just bothers me visually as well, but I didn’t expect that to get fixed (especially since I’m using an old armor skin that will probably never be updated anyways ) But it’s a shame to hear that even newer stuff has that problem. But I’ld greatly appreciate having more “fitting” choices as well.

I must admit taht the most fun I had so far in MMO’s were the 40-man raids in vanilla WoW. Of course most of them weren’t considered too hard (MC, BWL, etc) – but I can remember how our (bad) guild slowly worked on them, practicing on the bosses, failing, failing, failing – until we finally managed to get further, and further. It just really felt like we were progressing as a team, and everyone had his/her role(s). The strategy, organizing and training was the fun for me.

That’s what I was looking for in GW2, and I must say that I was quite disappointed in that regard. The instances mostly feel… well, “brainless”. It’s just a running trough most of the times, and since everyone has so much practice with all of them, you don’t even have the time to see the details. That’s not going to change of course – if you come late, you missed the chance to really see the content (I had nearly a 1 year break from GW2 after reaching max level, high equip and getting bored pretty fast).

At the moment, most instances / bosses really feel the same. Zerg. No splitting, grouping, planning, or role changes. Just run there, hit, dodge, hit, wait, hit – maybe dispell or heal from time to time. Of course, there are some minimal differences inbetween, but most bosses lack any kind of identity. Going back to WoW, if I think BWL, I think about the first Dragon there (forgot the name) with the eggs, and how we had to solve that. If I think about GW2, I couldn’t give you a single specific boss description at all.

I think the strategy aspect is really lacking imho – If I hear “Hard Content”, then I personally think “Many, different, unique strategies you need to train to defeat a boss / mob group / etc”

Of course, I’m more of a casual player by now and missed out on a lot of GW2’s older content, I just give you my personal, current (and old) view of things – if I go trough an instance with some friends that still regularly play, it’s just a constant “run trough”. I literaly have more brain activity while watching TV. Maybe that’s another issue, actually – simply running trough everything shouldn’t be that easy. If you were spotted by an enemy in a WoW instance (in-combat) and you didn’t kill it, it followed you until you’re dead. You couldn’t just “run” trough – well, except for paladins.

More unique strategies where people have to organize themselfes a bit would make the content a lot more interesting imho. And not only for “super hard fractals” or whatever, but even for “easy” sections of the game.

Including more puzzles would be an interesting idea, and working around the issue with the spoiling would still be possible as well: The puzzles have to be “dynamic” / randomized. Let’s say, a labyrinth for example – it could be created in a way that certain walls are placed by random, while the trigger would be the player himself (like, when a player has to activate a door to enter, the labyrinth shifts – making it harder for those already inside, so that the “turn left each time” technique wouldn’t work too well either!). And despite the fact that it’s pretty hard to write a guide for this kind of thing, it’ld surely be interesting – especially when combined with other elements like specific creatures to fight for keys.

Of course it’s a lot harder to do this kind of thing for actual riddles – since even if the change in text, it’s still a lot of work to voice all those different versions. A possibility there would be to reference “things” inside the riddle, that reflect something the player had to go trough (wich can, again, be generated randomly) – for example, let’s go back to the labyrinth:

You, as a player, wander trough the labyrinth, and as it’s the nature of labs you probably will run into a lot of inscriptions. Those would hold advices, and numbers (the game would’ve to register what kind of advice you would get).

Your first advice is the number “8”.
The second advice is “The Liar was here – everywhere. That’s not true.”.
The third is “Eternity is not the way. The sum of all things is the solution”
The fourth is “10”
The fifth is “Never trust the rolling ones. Half of it is true.”
The sixth is “2”
The seventh is “You cannot proceed, without a choice. The third time always works”
The 9. is “Focus, or you’ll loose your path. It has many children!”

At the end of your path, you reach a ghost / statue / whatever, that asks you for your answer.

I just came up on the spot with it, so I didn’t check if I’m actually correct, but the solution would be 2. “The Liar was here – everywhere” implies, that one part of every advice has to be a lie. So from now on, you have to choose wich one is true (if you didn’t get this advice, you might have another way of solving it). By the way, the “That’s not true” also implies that the Liar really was here – since whitout that, the first part wouldn’t make any sense. Now, “Eternity is not the way” would drop the 8, and “The sum of all things is the solution” would need you to sum all numbers up. “Never trust the rolling ones” implies that you should drop round numbers. “Half of it is true” implies that you have to use half of your numbers, or half them. “You cannot proceed whitout a choice” implies that you need something higher than 1, while “The third time always works” implies it’s a 3 or a multiple of three. “Focus, or you’ll loose your path” implies that you need a 2, or a very small number (when going back to the ‘choice’) while “It has many children” implies that it’s not a prime number – wich cannot be true in any combination of the above, so only the 2 remains (since the possible end results are 2 or 5, and “Focus” means that the 2 has to be right)

With this kind of dynamic puzzle, it could be kept quuiiite interesting And yeah, I probably made a mistake above, but it’s really a 5 min thing I just came up as an example, to get my point trough

Edit: I could rephrase it: The riddles should be “dynamic logicals” – that’s what I originally tried to say. Logicals that “grow” / change with each advice, and as long as those advices are randomly generated from a larger pool, each player still has to “think” to solve them, even if he understands the ‘hint’ behind the advices!