Guild Wars 2

The search is ongoing. I don’t bite, believe me. ^^

Hello there!

I’ve been part of two raiding groups so far, each of which broke apart after a couple weeks due to too few people attending. I tried LFG but I find it rather frustrating as you have no idea what it will be like; it’s typically filled with either training runs for those who’re completely new to raiding and who don’t even manage to phase VG, or runs of people looking for 60+ LI’s with Spirit Tonics, which I can’t really get without having a proper group first.

But I still like raiding and I’d love to continue with it, despite it being more and more difficult with each coming week and each new raid wing to get into it properly. And so I’m trying my luck here now.

I’m looking for a friendly, EU-based, not-100%-rep guild of people to raid with up to a couple times a week in the evenings, one which is capable of killing bosses but open enough to take me in. My goal isn’t breaking world records with low-man kills, but rather having a more reliable way of killing bosses, having a group of friends to progress through the raids with, and just having fun.

My current experience level is The Eternal and 12 LI (I know I could fake this number, but I don’t exactly consider dishonesty the best possible start): 5 kills of VG, 5 kills of Gorseval, 2 kills of Sabetha, ~1 hour of training of Slothasor getting him to ~25%, guide level of knowledge for Trio and Matthias.

My available roles (in the order of preference) are:

• Herald – full ascended, preferred
• Tempest (Staff fully ready, Fresh Air also ready but so far untrained) – full ascended
• Dragonhunter – full ascended
• Reaper – ascended/exotic mix, so far untrained

I don’t live in spreadsheets and DPS meters, but I’m open to suggestions and constructive criticism, and my only other real barrier for entry would be toxic behaviour (or non-English voice chat ^^).

With the ever-growing amount of collections in the game, the Basic and Rare Collection achievement categories are becoming more and more unwieldy, difficult to traverse and, between the two, difficult to differentiate.

Basic Collections are flooded with order backpacks and Machined Weapons, and what’s the real difference between Basic and Rare Collections anyway? Why are Leystone and Bladed Armor, Auric Weapons and Hivemaster considered Basic, while the Ambrite Weapons or something as simple as Toy Tonic Tippler are considered Rare?

I suggest a reorganization of these two achievement categories in order to make them easier to browse through and find what you’re looking for. Ideally I’d like to have Weapon Collection and Armor Collection categories, but the dungeon and order achievements combine the two, and I can’t think of a feasible solution for these in that case.

So, instead of Basic and Rare Collections as they are in the game right now, I’d organize them like this:

• Equipment Sets (used for collections of whole sets of equipment; generally takes the form of “unlock these skins in the wardrobe”)
  • Acolyte of Dwayna
  • Alpha Crafter
  • Ambrite Weapon Collection
  • Ascalonian Catacombs Collector, Caudecus’s Manor Collector… (8 in total)
  • Ascended Accoutrement
  • Auric Weapons
  • Bandit Weapons Specialist
  • Bioluminescence
  • Bladed Armor
  • Dungeoneer
  • Exotic Attire
  • Exotic Hunter
  • Fractal Master
  • Grawl Archaeological Study
  • Hivemaster
  • Hylek Historian
  • Jormag Defense Guide
  • Krait Antiquarianism Study
  • Leystone Armor
  • Machined Weapons
  • Ogre Expert
  • Pact Reformer
  • Priory’s History
  • Rare Regalia
  • Spirit Crafter
  • Vigil’s Honor
  • Whisper’s Secret

• Unique Equipment (used for collections for a single equipment piece; generally takes the form of “do these tasks to receive an item”)
  • Agent’s, Crusader’s, Lightbringer’s, Magister’s, Scholar’s, Warmaster’s Pack (6 in total)
  • Luminate’s Backplate
  • Luminescent Coat, Footwear, Gloves… (6 in total)
  • Machined Axe, Dagger, Focus… (16 in total)
  • Winter’s Presence

• Miscellaneous Collections (generally takes the form of “collect or use these various items to finish the collection”)
  • Ascended Recycling
  • Brewmaster
  • Eldvin Monastery Brew of the Month Club
  • Fine Dining
  • Fine Wining
  • For the Children!
  • Koutalophile
  • Miniature Collections (3 in total)
  • Old Tom
  • Seeker of Lost Homework
  • Style Guide
  • Toy Tonic Tippler
  • Trash Collector
  • Treasure Hunter
  • Tricks and Treats
  • Uncanny Canner
  • Utility Utilizer
  • Uzolan’s Mechanical Orchestra
  • Wintersday Toy Weapons Collection
  • Zinn’s Prize Student

I could understand the overall difficulty nerf before the core game’s release; I didn’t agree with it but I could see how some new people could be frustrated by dying at the early levels.

But Heart of Thorns is supposed to focus on the end game, and I sincerely hope that isn’t limited to raids. The open world and the story is made for level 80s, for people who already know their profession, it should not be training grounds for new players anymore but rather training grounds for the more challenging content.

BWE2 balance was great, it was finally decently challenging and you couldn’t just faceroll everything. The threat of the snipers in the story mission was huge, but if you managed to beat them without dying, it felt great; you actually had to think how to deal with them, now you just press buttons randomly, again, and things die.

What you’ve done now is removed any sense of challenge from the story and open world, and suddenly the map feels much less enjoyable, and I’m not as excited for the expansion as I was before. I tried the dragonhunter and went afk in a spot while forgetting that a veteran beetle spawns there; when I came back, he was attacking me but I stayed at full health. This definitely wouldn’t have happened last time, and it definitely should not happen at release.

tl;dr: Bring back BWE2 balance, we’ve had enough facerolling enemies until now.

I was fine with Scarlet in the beginning as well. Although I was never a big fan of her involvement in all threats that appeared in the world over several months prior to that, the short story about her on the website was very interesting. Ever since then, though, I got more and more annoyed by her and the moment she popped up in the Thaumanova Reactor fractal was the last nail in the coffin.

Unless there’s an incredible plot twist coming, I find her one-dimensional, bland and simply an escape route for the living story writing team that needs to somehow add more and more evil alliances to the world.

I could get over the horrendous hordes of dredge that continually spawn seemingly everywhere, even though it only serves to prolong an already excessively long fractal. I could even somewhat get over the bomb phase, as impossible as it is to complete it by fighting. And the final bosses are actually quite good.

But the part that makes me hate this fractal with passion is the control panel pressure pad room: either remove the easily interrupted 20-second channel and make it into something more along the lines of the “3 simultaneous console presses” puzzles, or drastically reduce the amount of dredge so that it is actually possible to pull them off the person at the panel.

But as it stands, yes, this fractal is by far the worst one in the entire dungeon and always manages to ruin the fun it otherwise provides.

This is very disappointing, actually. The fact that I can play WvW on one character and see no progress whatsoever if I decide to try it on another is currently a very strong deterrent for me to going there at all.

Regarding the “it’s a character progression, not account progression” mentality: getting to level 80 takes significantly less time then getting to world rank 9945, besides doubling as a means of teaching how to play with the profession. WXP does nothing of that sort, it only takes a lot of time. The idea of levelling all professions to 80 is fine but the idea of getting 8 characters to max rank sounds even more ridiculous than the Yakslapper title.

This just repeats the mistakes with the karma system, which was originally a “character reward”, then we got inventory mess through liquid karma and finally it became account-bound. Why not skip over the middle step then? Why not make it like SPvP rank?

The distribution of points could still be permanent and per character, but the unreasonable grind to get the points would be reduced and people with more characters they like to play on wouldn’t be punished anymore.

This, or even better a system similar to the permanent finishers, would finally make collecting miniatures worth it.

Barely anyone bothers to use them now when you have to carry them with you in an invisible bag and activate them after every change of zone or death, and considering how many minis are constantly being added to the game, it’s high time to make sure people care about them a bit more.

Four weeks and two major releases now and still nothing; this is seriously getting ridiculous…

(in my case: sylvari male, transmuted)

As the most interesting, nostalgic, breath-taking, artistically brilliant and overall memorable continent of the original game, it would be a terrible shame not to enrich the new world with all that Cantha has to offer.

Kaimick.5109:

Thanks for disproving me and supporting my case all in one

(…)
It was not specifically designed before launch. However the concept of progression rewards with a shallow curve bridging other rewards was. Hope that makes sense.

I must say that the maths behind this are truly fascinating. On one hand, you have exotics, on the basis of which all max-level related numbers, such as enemies’ health pools, damage, armour and so on, have been adjusted; and then as the next step you have legendaries, which have exactly the same stats. So, it’s only natural that in order to bridge those two tiers, you’re going to need a higher set of stats. I mean, what else could they have possibly done? Oh, wait…

The concept of bridging other tiers might have been thought of before launch, but that description doesn’t fit for ascended equipment. Bridging 2 tiers would look like this: LT (lower tier) < HT (higher tier) changed to LT < NT (new tier) < HT; whereas ascended items follow this structure: LT = HT changed to LT < HT = NT. That isn’t equivalent, therefore it isn’t supporting your case, unless you’re seeing things which haven’t been said.

Second, no, the stat increase isn’t minor, it ranges anywhere from 8% to 33%, but you’re probably right that it won’t keep you out of dungeons, just like people aren’t necessarily asking for full exotics now.
(..)
So lets change everything cause there are elitist out there that no matter what is out there they will do the same thing. I have booted elitist out of my group or left for trolling a 45 for joining a AC exp run. The actions and mentality of a player is not the games fault, stop blaming the game.

I have just said that this won’t be happening so it’s not a major reason for the change. Stop putting words into my mouth.

But it didn’t add even 1 point of stat increase, that has never ever happened in GW1, not even in expansions. The comparison is simply misleading.

Your right it never added stats, KITTEN Arena Net for creating a set of armor that has better stats that are not necessary to do the basic stuff in the game.

The quote was taken out of context, “The comparison is simply misleading.” was related to the whole paragraph.

Furthermore, the problem isn’t the “basic stuff”, you won’t even have that armour for it, but oversimplifying the current non-“basic stuff”. As an extreme example, imagine they added armour with 10 times the present stats: the leveling and story would be just as easy as it is now, while the current dungeons would be trivialized. So they would probably also add a new, harder (in other words with higher numbers) dungeon to take advantage of the new gear (doesn’t it ring a bell?), and that is called power creep. And power creep is very difficult to stop once started, which is the main issue: not the 12 or so percent now, but the potential hundreds percent in the future.

Not to mention that it has been said that Ascended items will be accessible through different means in the future ( IE: not in fractals )

Again your lack of research, I agree at this time it is a problem but the fact that the fractals leveling system is flawed is the main problem.

I know about that very well, despite your constant talk about lack of research, I follow the game very closely, for several years now. That’s why I also said “we’ll just have to wait and see”.

Glad to hear about “sometime this month or next month” though, might I see a source for that?
You sure can
“points to the search bar at your top right hand corner” Type in LFG or any variation of that and look for the one out of maybe 50 threads that has a moderator comment on it and there is your source.

I did and nothing of interest came up. Then I searched through the last month’s worth of dev tracker for any talk about lfg, groups, parties, dungeons and whatnot, and apart from some comments how gw2lfg.com is useful and “when it’s ready” nothing about this or next month came up, so for the time being I’ll just assume you don’t have any tangible source or quote.

Leo G.4501:

(…)but then I kind of also wish they’d expand gear a bit more so that utility stats like that kind of were open to all gear among other things. Being able to choose Berserker gear with utility stat of +magic find (not talking runes) or maybe +consumable duration or +gold or +experience or +karma etc. Basically you’d be able to choose just what type of utility to use or focus on in gear…

Now that’s a very interesting idea and a nice compromise!

Kaimick.5109:

5. No discrediting of old content You probably need to do a little better Research on this subject, someone else pointed out already Ascended gear was in the game from the get go just it didn’t have time to get implemented. The stat difference between Ascended and exotics is minor and nothing that will be the deciding factor of success or failure in normal dungeons. They had this present in the original guild wars also, and it holds true here, Ascended is only beefy in Fractals where Agony will be present as when the Armor sets are released it will probably have some sort of agony resist on it.

For starters, I think I don’t even have to try very hard to disprove “Ascended gear was in the game from the get go” since that’s clearly not the case. Not only was it not in the game at launch, it wasn’t even designed by then (source):

9. Was ascended gear actually conceptualized before launch? The blog post that introduced it made it sound like something that you guys came up with just recently.

It was not specifically designed before launch. However the concept of progression rewards with a shallow curve bridging other rewards was. Hope that makes sense.

Second, no, the stat increase isn’t minor, it ranges anywhere from 8% to 33%, but you’re probably right that it won’t keep you out of dungeons, just like people aren’t necessarily asking for full exotics now.

But the main thing I’d like to correct is this: apart from the names, ascension, agony and infusion aren’t anything like in GW1. Both ascension and infusion were storyline steps, just like choosing an order or forging the Pact in GW2. Moreover, infusion was applied to your current armour, which only gained the word “Infused” and which granted protection from one mursaat spell, Spectral Agony. But it didn’t add even 1 point of stat increase, that has never ever happened in GW1, not even in expansions. The comparison is simply misleading.

So, you know, do more research.

Kaimick.5109:

2. Region-wide party search Again research, Over flow has every regional server in it. Secondly if your waiting hours for a group then your doing something wrong. I wait no more than 15 minutes tops usually 5 minutes, use www.gw2lfg.com Arena Net supports this site and sometime this month or next month that interface on the site will be an in game UI as per the dev’s.

I’m very much aware that the overflows are region-wide but they also have population limits. That’s especially disastrous for Fractals, at least for now, as the probability that all 5 players wanting to do the same level will end up in the same overflow is minimal.

I know about the site (as should be apparent from the sentence “Without external sites it would be basically impossible to group up to dungeons anymore.”) and I use it. Besides, I never said anything about hours of waiting.

Glad to hear about “sometime this month or next month” though, might I see a source for that?

Gilgamesh VII.8690:

At the moment ascended equipment doesn’t give you a boost its like having exotic ring or back with an gem attached to it and the infuse slot

That is objectively wrong. For example, let’s look at Red Ring of Death and its exotic counterpart Ruby Orichalcum Ring of the Berserker. The attributes increase from 92 Power to 103 (12% increase), from 63 Precision to 68 (8% increase) and from 6% Critical Damage to 8% (33% increase). And you have the infusion on top of that, which also has an attribute increase. Yes, that’s just one ring, but if you extrapolate that for the entire equipment, the difference is easily noticeable.

However, that’s not my point. I still don’t like it, but I wasn’t even talking about that. My point is that all the effort they have put to all the unique skins from dungeons, vendors, mystic forge and so on, will be overshadowed by a new tier of equipment. In a way, they are reducing or replacing some of the end-game goals, which is a wrong direction to take. And who’s to say they won’t do the same thing again in a few months. At least we have transmutation, which just so happens to cost gems…

Olba.5376:

9. Would rather defeat the purpose of having such an extensive system for changing skins on armor. I could agree on this if we did not have the ability to choose the skin and dye on each piece of armor, though.

Not entirely, as they are completely different skins acquired by completely different methods, and in GW1 it worked perfectly. This would be a bit similar to saying “what’s the point in attributes when you have the extensive system of traits for becoming stronger” – the same goal but a different method. But I get your meaning.

Anyway, there’s still the question about inventory space, since, unlike in the predecessor, you’re buying the items and not unlocking them. If I decided to buy all the town clothes from the gem store, I would be basically punished by not having enough space to store them.

6. Choosing MF or not choosing MF is a personal thing. Honestly, what you’re saying isn’t any different from complaining that they should remove Berserker gear because everyone is going glass cannon and thus being useless in dungeons because they die as soon as a mob breathes their way.

This is a very interesting and fairly reasonable argument about the issue and I can accept that. But it’s an argument why magic find should stay, not why it’s good for the game, so I still think it further increases the gap between casual and hardcore game. Let me tell you an example for what I mean from the previous game:

In most of GW1, the intended party size was 8. It could be 8 people or just 1 person and
7 AIs, doesn’t matter. When loot dropped, it was randomly given to a party member, including the AIs (you didn’t actually see it drop for them, but the ratios still apply), which would mean that going to a map solo should give you approximately 8 times the normal loot. So to prevent extensive farming, the drops were reducing as you repeatedly entered the same map. This, however, was negatively influencing some regular parties that just went questing to the same map several times in a row, so in one update they removed this and instead the loot was then scaling to the party size. Not 1:1, but a solo farmer had about twice the amount of loot a full party would. The point is this was narrowing the gap between farmers and non-farmers, as they only got twice the loot instead of 8 times. Magic find does the exact opposite, though, as if they received, say, 20 times the loot of a regular party.

4. The culling issue isn’t even close to as easy to fix as most people think.

I never said it’s easy to fix, just that I hope they will do so in the future. I’m quite patient but this is what’s mostly killing WvW for me at the moment.

Blackwolfe.5649:

Or possibly in hex. That is, 00 to FF. I do hope they will find a way to do this however, in which case an extra F would allow for stacks of up to 4095, but I do think if they do increase it they only allow for stacks up to 999 for display reasons.

Hex is just an alternative way to write the numbers down, in the computer they are stored in bytes using binary regardless. 00-FF, which corresponds to 0-255, is still 256 combinations that completely fill 1 byte. Adding any new information to that, such as an extra value, or 4 as you’re suggesting, would still require a new byte (unless they already work with the numbers on bit level, which I’d find rather impractical).

I might be wrong but I’m afraid that changing the stack sizes would require some heavy changes in the code. I presume that they’re using 1-byte unsigned integers to save those values, which gives access to the numbers 0-255, and doubling these numbers’ sizes would be kind of a big deal. So while this would certainly be a welcome change, I think it’s highly unlikely to be actually implemented.

Master Ypoc.3765:

11- Traits templates managing system and no fees required to change traits
(…)
12- Way point travelling fees

You have a point, although I personally would be a bit careful with completely removing the fees as gold sinks are important for the economy not to inflate. I think that the main problem with waypoint costs is the way the price scales: it shouldn’t scale with level, travel to cities should be free and elsewhere it should scale purely based on the distance to the closest city.

However, as you have said, GW1 didn’t have fees for travel and respeccing (or even death, for the matter) and I don’t remember the prices ever skyrocketing, not to mention that GW2 already has gold skins absolutely everywhere. On the other hand, as maddoctor said, when GW1 released, you couldn’t change your build freely either, you had to earn attribute refunds and do secondary profession change quests, and they were slowly making it easier to respec as time went on. I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar happened in GW2; the number of traits, weapon skills and slot skills will be only rising in the future, so perhaps this will change one day.

13- Targeting

You’re right, this can be incredibly frustrating at times, both finding the target and then not losing it for whatever reason. I don’t understand either why you can’t call a target if you’re not in a group, and they should certainly add an option to disable targeting by right-clicking.

xCrusadentx.2784:

5, 6, and 7 I am all against, everything else I am in agreement with.

I can definitely see why 6 and 5 are a bit controversial. The thing is, I (yes, I personally, but I’m certainly not alone at that) despise magic find in any game: creating unimaginably low chances for something and then playing the good guys and giving you access to the chance’s increase, including for gems, that just feels disgusting, even more so if the selfish behaviour is encouraged. I am yet to see a reasonable argument as to why this is good; all this system seems to manage to do is create an even bigger gap between casual and hardcore gamers, which is against everything ArenaNet has been promising prior to the release. But fine, we’re all different and there are apparently people who seem to enjoy this.

What I’m a bit confused by, though, is the negativity towards 7 and I’d love to hear more feedback about that. Because I’m not suggesting removing chance and luck from the game, that would be unreasonable, I just don’t want it to be the only way to obtain anything. Adding, not replacing.

The intrinsic problem with randomness and chance is that you never have a 100% probability for anything. You could put millions of exotic weapons into the Mystic Forge but you’ll never be guaranteed a legendary precursor. And this issue is growing even worse with account bound items such as the various Mists Essences – if you’re unlucky enough you’ll simply never get any of them. Does that mean you like this idea?

So, what I’d like to see, in addition to these random occurrences, are guaranteed, if long and difficult, ways to obtain them: shards (such as the Pristine Fractal Relics for rings), scavenger hunts etc.

I agree that the game badly needs a replacement for Nicholas and this could very well work (although I’d say that up to 3 ectos a day might be a bit too generous).
I would however stick to the weekly timeframe, which gives a bigger chance for those that can’t play every day to complete them.

Agreed. This is certainly very annoying and it shouldn’t be hard to fix.

Certainly not before you complete them, but once you do, why not.

This is a very interesting idea which I’d love to see implemented, but I’m not sure how hard it would be to actually script it.

1. An interesting idea, but this will never happen. I would be fine with the way it was at the release as long as they don’t continue to add more tiers (which obviously currently doesn’t look very likely…)
2. Yes.
3. I think it would be better if they were slowly adding more useful weapons to the professions than to dump them all there and creating useless skills.
4. Certainly!
5. If it stayed as an option, why not.
6. As a chef I would love to see this, perhaps with a prompt listing all the base materials just to be safe.
7. If the skill points get more use, such as with 4, sure. Otherwise I don’t really care.
8. I wouldn’t say free (it’s an important gold sink after all), but it should scale better: slowly or not at all with level but more with distance. Travel to cities should be free, though.
9. Maybe.
10. Magic find should certainly be removed from equipment, but I’m not sure about the big groups. I’m fine with magic find consumables, though.
11. That’s a very good idea!
12. There are safe zones on each map and I’m not entirely sure if it’s necessary to indicate them as such. There should however be access to the bank, TP and possibly crafting stations on each map, just like at the low levels.
13. I don’t really care either way. Two separate togglable build configurations might be enough.
14, 15. No opinion.
16. Yes.
17. No. There’s no need for all MMOs to do the same things over and over again.
18. Perhaps, but it would be very difficult to pull off well.
19. Yes.
20. Yes for stacking, no strong opinion on the UI change.
21. No, it should just be clearly noted on the tooltips if you will do so.
22. Perhaps.
23. They mostly do, but it can be frustrating to look for a gathering tool only to find an omelette trader, so yes.
24. Certainly.
25. Perhaps.

DreamOfACure.4382:

7. (Disagree, cause it won’t happen) Random-rewards like new items in chests are also how Nexon made MapleStory into a cash-cow.
It’s intended to be like a gachapon, one of those machines that you stick a dollar into and get a plastic ball with a toy inside - You never know what you get. You’ll never convince any game company to get rid of that. It’s a legal form of gambling for children.

I know that all the gambling and luck is a major part of their economy, both the one in game and the company one, and I certainly don’t expect them to completely abolish this. What I would like to see, however, is so that this is not the only way to get rewards.
I admit that dungeon tokens basically do this, you know that if you finish the dungeon X times you will get the armour, which is fine as long as it is something you actually want (that’s connected with the 5th point).
But in addition to this system there could easily be more things like the aforementioned Black Moa Chick miniature scavenger hunt in GW1, for which you had to travel through the entire world and then let it incubate and hatch. You knew what you’ll get when you started, instead of receiving several Bags of Epic Loot that contain some random blues and greens with a 0.002% chance for the mini.

DreamOfACure.4382:

By the way, are pristine fractal relics the dungeon-tokens for Fractals? That wouldn’t be a new thing, all dungeons have that.

When Fractals were first introduced, daily bonus chests in the boss fractal at 10+ difficulties had a chance for a random account bound ring and the infused version had a chance to drop from 20+, so the probability of you getting what you wanted was minuscule. In the Wintersday update they added Pristine Fractal Relics (in addition to the already present regular Fractal Relics), which are apparently guaranteed to drop from the same chests and you can exchange 10 of them for a ring of your choice and later infuse it in the Mystic Forge.

DreamOfACure.4382:

6. (Disagree) Magic-Find is just another way to make the game more entertaining for casual players.

Yet it isn’t the casual players who tend to use them but the hardcore ones. I fail to see what’s entertaining about a farming stat like this; magic find has no real place in MMOs, especially in groups and at the expense of other stats.

DreamOfACure.4382:

5. (Disagree) The point of ascended gear IS that it’s superior to exotics.
Ascended gear are suppose to be an additional peg in the gear-ladder because the gap between Exotics and Legendaries was far too great.
However, it HAS already been stated that ANet will make Ascended gear have sources across the game. They just didn’t have the time to complete that transition yet, but found it necessary to introduce the gear-type into the game.

It’s very interesting that an additional step between exotics and legendaries, which have the same stats and are just fine, has to have a stat increase. GW1 never had any kind of stat increase and people never missed it, because there’s really no point whatsoever in increasing numbers; max will still be max and the only thing it causes is that players who don’t play as often will no longer be 100% effective. It makes sense in subscription environment, but not here.
And if you’ll want to keep any of the current equipment skins, you’ll have to transmute everything, which *ahem* costs gems. I see what you did there...
Guess we’ll just have to wait and see. I simply wonder where has the "release it when it’s ready" philosophy gone.

DreamOfACure.4382:

4. (Not sure) Stuff don’t load quick enough for you either?
I always deal with this issue in PvE with mobs; I chalked it up to me having a poor video card. I have to wonder if this is really a GW2 problem, or our video cards being sucky.

ArenaNet has already said that a large part of the culling problem is due to loading times - once the client finally receives information about new entities it takes non-zero time for them to load and appear, which, if you’re running one into another, often takes long enough to meet.
It seems that this is a problem they’re working on, though, so perhaps it’s just a matter of time. Interestingly enough, this has never happened to me in the betas, but then again, it was laggy at the time, which could explain the change.

Gannicus.4132:

Guild vs Guild

SpelignErrir.4263:

11. 1v1 Dueling PvP

I’m not much of a PvP player but I can see why this (and the observer mode) is desired. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if GvG became expansion material, similarly to more weapon skills.

GW2 is a great game with many interesting twists and ideas; however, it often seems that the ideas were only half finished or they just don’t really work as intended. These small missing features are in my opinion what’s preventing the game from being not just great, but excellent, and it would be a shame if that came down to such small issues.

While these certainly aren’t new suggestions, it seems that they are largely overlooked, so I’d like to use this opportunity to list several little things that I hope will be addressed sooner rather than later.

10. Badges of Honor going straight to the inventory
Nothing in WvW is more frustrating than killing a large number of enemies, whether solo or in a squad, but being killed sooner than you have the time to search the ground for the tiny bags of loot. That’s the worst possible thing you can do when facing invaders trying to smash your skull in, but in that case you just so happen to miss out on most of WvW loot.

9. Town clothes wardrobe and the skins usable in combat
Currently I see next to no reason to buy one of these; unlike in GW1, they completely clutter up your inventory and you can’t even fight in them. Add armour skin options and Costume maker-like NPCs to towns and many more people will be willing to buy them.

8. Equipment and dye preview on the trading post
This one is fairly straight-forward, but I’d love to know what I’m buying before I waste my hard-earned gold on it.

7. Non-random rewards
It’s understandable that you can’t have a loot system without any random element. Nevertheless, there should be much more content in the game that you do for a specific reward, just like the Black Moa Chick scavenger hunt in GW1, compared to purely luck-based system. Mad Memoires and Pristine Fractal Relics were a step in the right direction, now keep it up.

6. Remove magic find from equipment
This one I find very puzzling – what good could ever come with this stat? I’m fine with keeping it on food and other temporary bonuses, but why are you encouraging people to be more selfish and less useful, especially in dungeons?

5. No discrediting of old content
Adding ascended equipment the way it seems right now will more or less completely discredit all exotic armour and weapons from dungeon vendors, crafting, karma vendors, mystic forge recipes and the likes. Sure, you can transmute them, but because of the whole subscription-free hop-on-hop-off model, the very last thing this game needs are ever-increasing stats that you need to constantly keep up with. If you need to finish the ascended gear, put it everywhere where there is exotic gear now, and don’t keep doing this in the future.

4. Player render culling/loading time fix
One of the main reasons I don’t play WvW as much as I thought I would in the betas is that it’s incredibly frustrating to run through the countryside and suddenly emerge in the middle of an opposing army. I can sort of understand this in 50vs50 battles, but I had this happen when I was completely on my own, which is just ridiculous.

3. Account bound siege weapon blueprints
This one simply doesn’t make any sense. If you can transfer the blueprints by dropping them, why can’t you do so in other ways? I can understand why they shouldn’t be freely tradable, but if I want to choose from several characters to go to WvW with, I don’t like the prospect of having a separate set of siege weaponry for each of them sitting in my bank.

2. Region-wide party search
As the game is getting less populated with players this issue is growing more and more important. Without external sites it would be basically impossible to group up to dungeons anymore. I don’t want an automated grouping system, but a global communication option for party search, similar to the one in GW1, but across all maps, would be sufficient.

1. Chatting with multiple guilds
Now this, this is a big one for me. When I first heard about the ability to join several guilds, having one for just chatting, dungeons and whatnot, one for WvW, one for real-life friends and family and so on was very exciting. Alas, this is exactly what the system doesn’t allow. In fact, I don’t see any point in the way it’s organized now. Let us subscribe to multiple guild chats independently on representing and this feature will finally be useful!

I have been using this feature for ages, to look what armours I could give to my alts or just to see what else is in the game (especially for dungeon or racial armour); I always thought this was a wonderful feature and I never noticed any kind of a bug, certainly not in any way game-breaking. You’re focusing on the wrong part of game to “fix” (although removing entirely is not what I consider fixing at all); this feature was fine, not to mention very useful.