Guild Wars 2

I think what you need to ask yourself, whether you’re a player or a developer, is "Would there be a reason to log in to GW2 if there was no achievement system at all?"

I strongly suspect the answer is a resounding "NO!" for a lot of players.

Dailies are the fix that ArenaNet rely on to keep people logging in and therefore exposed to the gemshop.

GW2’s never going to be the game you want it to be Kaleban. It’s a shame, but I realised this a while ago and simply stopped playing. I still come back to the forums and post in the hope that ArenaNet see the error of their ways, but they’re far too focussed on dollar signs now to pay any attention to customers.

Take a break.

Play some single player games that aren’t designed to keep you playing by repeating the same thing over and over. If you’re anything like me, you have a Steam back-catalogue full of games you’ve bought in sales but never got around to playing.

Play some multiplayer games that aren’t MMOs. I’ve found Diablo 3’s a very good substitute for GW2 with a focus on excellent loot and over-the-top combat. Besides which, recent updates from Blizzard have been outstanding, only serving to improve the game. And D3 really is a "pay once, never again" game. No gem shop, no auction house, just a focus on providing the best experience in their genre that they can.

And then there’s incredibly exciting things like Elite Dangerous just around the corner, with a dev team who aren’t afraid to tackle delicate issues head on and consistently provide clear communications for the players, with no wishy-washy, legalese style loophole PR speak.

Of course, there are also games out there on Steam and other digital stores that will cost you less than a weapon skin in the GW2 gem store and will provide hours, if not weeks of entertainment.

And at the end of the day, because at its core GW2 is buy-to-play, it’ll still be here in a year or two if you feel curious about checking it out again.

Something else preventing long-term absentees from returning:
The longer you stay away, the more expensive it becomes to return and play any new content that’s been released.
If you’re a current player, any seasonal content (the only content that actually gets released for this game) is unlocked permanently for your account as long as you log in while it’s active.
However, if you haven’t logged in for a few months or years, if you want to experience content that has been and gone, you have to pay to access it. So you’re immediately presented with exactly the same game you left (this is slight hyperbole, as I’m aware Lion’s Arch and Kessex have gone through hefty changes).
Actual new content is minimal, unless you count the addition of more skins through the gemstore.

This strikes me as being a particularly backward way to attract lapsed players.
It’s basically saying:
"So hey, you haven’t played for a while but you’re interested in trying the game again? Welp, you’re gonna have to pay for that privilege! Yeah, that stuff was free for all those guys who log in every day, even if they are a drain on server load and have cost us more through just playing than you have without. But hey, them’s the breaks! Pay up or get lost!"

It’s an insane business model.

I’ll say it now:
ArenaNet, if you make past previous content freely available for all customers rather than just those who log in, I’ll re-install.

Somehow, I don’t think you’ll do it.

And for those guys who go on about people who threaten to leave but then continue playing, go ahead and add me in-game. I think you’ll find I haven’t played in well over a year now.

Edit: In response to Vayne:

Vayne.8563:

Actually there are two new zones that you don’t need to pay for to access. The only thingt you can’t access is the story prior to the current story. And technically you can access those if you want to tag along with someone who already unlocked them.

So if you don’t care about the rewards and achievements from those stories, you can play them for free. I’ve run a couple of people through them.

Still, my point stands: charging people for content that’s still available to others for free purely based on whether they’ve logged in or not is insane.

I may take time replying to posts, as due to restrictions placed on my forum account, I am only allowed to make one post per hour.

Welcome to the underside of the carpet guys.
“The death of one person is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic”. And we all know how much ArenaNet love statistics.

ArenaNet’s moderation policy means that when they make changes they know will anger the community, the act of bundling all related responses into one huge topic makes it easier to ignore.

Our individual responses no longer matter. We are now “the mob” and can be dismissed as such.

Oh, by the way, how’s that wardrobe system looking now that charges have suddenly sky-rocketed in price and necessitate buying gems in inconvenient amounts?
They’ve been planning this for ages.

I’m an outsider looking in; I haven’t played for well over a year now precisely because of tactics like this. Whilst I’m positively gleeful over how badly ArenaNet have screwed the pooch on this one, I do actually have a serious suggestion, and it has precedent in Microsoft’s Xbox Live.

In addition to reverting back to allowing players to buy custom amounts of gems or gold, they need to go further and remove gems altogether.

Game currencies are only ever implemented to create a degree of separation between real-world money and in-game items. Even one layer of separation has been proven to cloud people’s judgement as to the real-world value of digital items they purchase. In other words, gem or point systems have been proven to be dishonest. Real-world courts have even determined as much, hence Xbox Live moving from points to actual currency.

ArenaNet need to attach real world prices to all gemstore items so that players can more accurately judge the value of these items and make more informed decisions.
Of course, this also means that gold would be converted to real-world currencies as opposed to gems. This is not actually a problem, as long as ArenaNet make sure to emphasise that players are buying gemstore credit and cannot withdraw real world money.

I feel this would completely nullify this bad decision and serve to foster trust between the community and ArenaNet.

But this is highly unlikely to happen, as ArenaNet aren’t interested in trust or honesty. They just want to bleed their customers dry.

Iason Evan.3806:

The gem shop isn’t lacking in the regular updates department. That’s really the kicker for me. If skins and costumes can be added on a regular basis for the gem shop, why can’t things be done on a regular basis for the game?

ArenaNet have an economist on staff. That should tell you all you need to know.
Face it, it’s been blatantly obvious for a long time now that quick-fire, gem store “content” they can generate cash from is more important than hard-to-develop, quality content along the lines of an expansion.

One thing that actively prevents me from returning out of sheer disgust is their decision to charge players who haven’t logged in for access to past Living Story content.
Even though I haven’t played for well over a year now, I suspect I have ploughed more into the gemstore than most (more fool me). Yet people who have paid nothing more than the initial price of the game get access to this content for free, whenever they like.
Instead of using this content as an incentive to draw me back to playing, they punish me.

I utterly resent the money I have wasted on Guild Wars 2.

Yet I gladly threw money at ArenaNet when I played Guild Wars 1, to the extent that I had two of every Collector’s Edition, all of the pre-release packs and even the Guild Wars 2 art-book.
Hell, when GW2 pre-orders became available, I ordered a Digital Deluxe to play and a Collector’s Edition to keep in a box.
Where the original Prophecies CE only continued to rise in price over the years, the GW2 CE has remained at a constant price among eBay sellers, something that indicates there’s no demand for the thing.

ArenaNet have burnt all of their bridges with me, and unless they spectacularly change course and realise that players are more than cash cows to be milked, I’ll never play an ArenaNet game ever again. What’s more, I take great pains to explain to friends who show interest in Guild Wars 2 exactly what they would be getting themselves into.
I actively dissuade them from spending any money on ArenaNet products.

And it’s worked.

Of course, aside from Gaile, who they’ve recently wheeled out in an attempt to better placate the community, they’re not really ArenaNet anymore. Most of the veteran developers have left to pursue actually innovative projects rather than soulless cash grabs.

I mean for the love of Mike, they’ve even managed to make Blizzard and Diablo 3 look like a superior alternative, and there was a game that released to much derision from the community.
Yet Blizzard listened and improved the game until it’s now focussed on actually being a great game to play rather than a conveyor belt of shiny things with a price-tag attached.

Don’t get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for Gaile, and she works like a machine, but it’s blatantly obvious they’ve asked her to step back into the fray in order to try and increase respect amongst veterans.
But all it’s done for me is strengthened my respect for Gaile whilst making me realise people further up the chain lack the ability and and requisite decency in order to do the job themselves.

Setting top level to 80 compared to GW1’s 20 was an incredibly bad decision on ArenaNet’s behalf.

Maybe they could make the active heal more like the original GW1 skill, where it’s a fairly long cast and you take increased damage while activating it.

FrostSpectre.4198:

Not to mention that Vitality and Health are what pretty much combat against Conditions…
More health, the more time my conditions need to chew through it.
If mob has no armor, it takes full damage from Direct Dmg DPS, which is used by many when they do these group events, more health means few more hits from Direct Dmg source, while for conditions it’s usually more than 30 seconds, even minutes required at worse…

I’m under no illusions that ArenaNet would even consider this solution, and I’m sure there are plenty of players who will also balk at the suggestion, but if a damage type isn’t scaling well, the obvious solution is to make it percentage based rather than dishing out a fixed amount of damage.
For the sake of example, have it so that poison, if allowed to run its full course, removes 20% of an enemy’s health bar over 10 seconds. Change stacks so that they don’t increase the potency, but instead need to all be removed before the poison effect is removed and then make condition removers only remove one unit from a stack a time.

That would strike me as being the sensible solution to the poor scalability of condition damage.

I think the problem with the surveys during beta, and I thought this at the time too, was that we were so excited to even be playing the game, objectivity suffered.
And this is why bringing those in-game surveys back now would be a good idea.
We’ve had time to get over the novelty and excitement phase and are now better equipped to criticise content.

But this is all pie-in-the-sky thinking, and I’m not likely to play this game ever again. I feel too strongly that ArenaNet have critically compromised their artistic vision and integrity with a base lust for cash.

I would add open-world, open-season PvP.
There would be no opt-out, and the winners in these encounters would take a percentage of the loser’s gold.

Yet another area where GW1 did it better. Instead of dividing professions into light, medium and heavy, each profession had unique armour sets. The GW2 system doesn’t allow for such nuances.

When they introduced Ascended, the monster thread was bigger than anything seen before or since on these boards, most of it telling ArenaNet they’d made a mistake. ArenaNet ignored the thread, rolled out Ascended anyway and lost a huge amount of players.
Unfortunately, I can’t see them having learned from that, and I’m sure they’ll follow exactly the same policy again and leave this monumentally stupid piece of game “design” unchanged.

I’d actually like to believe that this is down to blind stupidity on ArenaNet’s behalf.

But let’s face it, this is all about squeezing more money out of people through the gemstore. Within the next month or so, you’ll see new items added that allow players to bypass the “tutorial” segments of the game.

Say goodbye to the rest of your player-base ArenaNet. You lost the founders of the game a long time ago, and now you’re being ran by inexperienced industry noobs.
And boy, does it show.

It’s only a matter of time before they release gem store items that allow “advanced” players to unlock weapon skills quicker and more in-line with the old method.

You guys are being fleeced by professional charlatans.

I think you’d probably be better off starting a simple “Yes/No” thread with the question “Would you pay for an expansion?”.
Ask for it to be moderated so as to avoid repeat posts or opinions getting in the way of simple data.
It’s been a while since I checked, but last I knew ArenaNet’s forum software didn’t support polls. That’s a shame, as it would be the ideal way to gauge opinion and direct development funds.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way Kickstarter works.
ArenaNet would have to start the actual Kickstarter campaign. A third party has no legal right to the GW2 development process.

Active effects that affect gameplay mechanics? No.
Cosmetic effects however? Sure, go wild.

Vayne.8563:

Or it rewards loyal customers, however you call it.

“Loyal” customers?
Hah. I would guess there’s a buttload of players who play GW2 every day and have never given ArenaNet a cent beyond initial purchase price.
How do they contribute to development costs beyond taking up server cycles?

Face it Vayne, creating an arbitrary two-tier system of haves-and-have-nots is never good business practice.

Your opinion from the inside looking out is also incredibly condescending.
You’re okay, because you’ve got yours.
Those people who may be interested in coming back?
Yeah, screw them!
Make them pay!

And that you don’t know of many other games that offer regular free updates just highlights how much time of yours GW2 takes up.
I doubt you’ve got time to play many other games when you’re playing GW2 on a daily basis.

There’s a world of games out there that regularly offer new content for free, with Valve’s DOTA 2 and TF2 being prime examples.
And one of GW2’s main competitors, Diablo 3, has just released patch 2.1.0 which adds swathes of new content, all for free.

I wouldn’t call DOTA 2 a competitor of GW2 by the way. That’s leagues above GW2 in player attraction and retention rates.

Vayne.8563:

Or you can just log in, unlock the updates and log out again. It’s not like he has to install the game.

Still doesn’t stop the practice being punitive to returning users who have paid the exact same amount as those who never left.
Butter this any way you like, it’s a repulsive practise, in the most literal meaning of the word “repulsive”.
It actively repels customers.

Sounds like you need to take a break and play something else.
GW2 will still be there in the future.

Of course, to play content you’ve missed, you’ll have to pay, unlike people who log in every day.
To clarify, as soon as you stop playing, ArenaNet punish you for it, further distancing you from the product. Not the cleverest long-term thinking on their behalf.

PsychoT.3564:

so since you are so knowledgeable about how to make a good mmo/game why have you not made one yourself?

One doesn’t have to be a creator in order to criticise.
Your argument is one of the most common logical fallacies used by the ill informed and those with poor debate skills.

Talyn.3295:

So when we log in for the very first time we should all be given free weapons and armor with maximum stats and stat swaps. This way everyone is equal. Then we can all do nothing all day but stand there and talk.

I doubt you were the very first even if you were it doesn’t make you right. This game I’d already the easiest game in existence. Even ascended weapons are easier to get then they should be.

I have way more ascended weapons then I do legendary ones. And even though this would make my own life so much easier I am against it. This isn’t the first of these entitlement threads and it will not be the last. But this will be my last time responding to this one.

See, you’re approaching the game as if gear is the be-all and end-all, where surely the gameplay is the most important thing in a game?

I see this all the time in MMO communities, and it’s all down to people justifying the time they spend playing as well as the amount of money.

You feel guilty about the amount of time you’re spending playing, as there’s still a societal stigma attached to gaming, so you trick your brain into convincing itself that what you’re doing isn’t a complete waste of time.

The barriers put in place by developers serve to reinforce this behaviour. Their primary interest is to keep you playing and therefore paying.

There are numerous ways to achieve player retention; some that are easy and require minimal investment, such as artificial barriers between the player and the optimal playstyle (wardrobe tokens, repeating content daily, achievements with high thresholds, inflexible gear stats, etc.), or more difficult and expensive methods such as deep and meaningful additions to lore & content, and the introduction of new gameplay elements that affect the way people play the game (expansion packs, new areas, changes to existing areas, new classes and skills, etc.).

The idea behind this is that players would be spending less time in towns crafting or trading and more time actually playing, because changing build would no longer require a massive investment of time and resources.
Let’s face it, when you’re refining ore or flipping stock on the trading post, you’re not playing the game. You’re wasting your time banging your head against barriers put in place to keep you logged in.

The current state of affairs in commercial MMOs is a hideous collaboration between players and developers that neither want to admit to and is only damaging the genre.

Of course, while the MMO world is populated by mediocre gamers who have no interest in winning through ability but rather through sheer, bloody-minded repetition, the industry will be all to happy to cater to them.

As to me not being the first person to suggest changeable stats on Legendaries, well I’ll let this speak for itself.

I’m the guy who suggested swappable stats on Legendaries in the first place.
I don’t play any more for numerous reasons.

However, I honestly think changeable stats should be rolled out to all gear.
It’s a gameplay mechanic and a way to streamline and enhance the user experience.
Commodifying such things is one of the major reasons I stopped playing this game.

Putting barriers in the way of the optimal experience is monumentally stupid and short-sighted game design.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Champion Bags only can be collected on a successful event.

See, on release, I thought this was going to be how ALL loot worked. You’d complete an event and you’d get a reward choice pop-up, in much the same way you do now if you complete a Personal Story segment.
Rewards would scale based on participation.

Turns out I was mistaken, but I think I would definitely have preferred such a system, especially considering how fickle RNG can be in GW2.

Another problem?
The game relies on repetition of content and eventually, if all that exists is repeating content, people will find the fastest way of doing it. They’re already bored of it and they don’t want it taking up more of their time than it needs to.
ArenaNet need to tighten up dungeon design, getting rid of long trudges through trash mobs in between the actual meaningful encounters.

But the main fix is AI, which is currently dumb as a post when compared to the AI in the original game. Stacking simply wouldn’t have worked in the first Guild Wars, and any party dumb enough to try it would have been wiped out in seconds.
Unfortunately I don’t think ArenaNet can fix that easily as too many other systems are derived from the way AI and balance are currently reliant on each-other.

But one thing that might help? Re-implement one of the first game’s best strategic features: body blocking. This allows for a lot more dynamic play with more satisfying tactics, and would give a reason for tough front-line fighters backed by a nukey, glassy back line. Placement of players and utilisation of terrain becomes a lot more important, immediately adding more complexity.

You know what Blizzard did with Loot 2.0 in Diablo 3?
They implemented a timer whereby if you haven’t had a Legendary item drop in 45 minutes, the next drop you get will be one. Sure, it may not be exactly what your current character wants, but it’s something, and you will definitely be able to use it either on a companion, another character or as raw materials for crafting.
And they also killed their gemstore equivalent, the real-money auction house.

They don’t seem to be having problems with player retention.

Vayne.8563:

In the future, stay on the topic instead of trying to make comments about the person posting.

Then I suggest you stop with ill-conceived drive-by one-liners when trying to discredit someone who has demonstrably proved their point.
I took your laughable gold-farming comment and countered it, quite effectively. Your only remit then was to imply that I was attacking you. To me, it looks like you’re the troll here.

Vayne.8563:

And you don’t really deserve any kind of answer for trying to imply what you’re implying.

I wasn’t looking for an answer, I was saying things how I see them.
Further input from you was not required.

Vayne.8563:

Except that you can farm gold to pay for everything in the gem store, and people do.

Vayne, please stop. When every post you make consists of blind devotion to GW2, people eventually stop taking you seriously.

Personally I know it’s not the case, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the majority of the regulars here thought you were a plant.

And besides all this, I have in the past proven that past a certain point, thanks to the ever escalating inflation inherent to the Guild Wars 2 “Economy”, at some point farming for gold will no longer be an attractive option.
Since I last posted about this, the amount of gold you can buy with 100 gems has almost doubled. And seeing as how that observation is only 6 months old, this is worrying.
In January, 100 gems would buy you ~4G80S. Today those 100 gems will buy you ~9G30S.

If you believe that players can influence the economy and that it’s on your side, you’re sorely mistaken.
It’s clearly designed to make buying gems with cash more attractive over time.

Put it this way:
200 gems will buy you a piece of tier 3 armour. As the gems-to-gold value has doubled in 6 months, I think we can safely say that in another year’s time, those same 200 gems will probably buy you almost, if not a complete set of tier 3.
I think when faced with the prospect of grinding out 120G for a full set versus spending $2.50, most players won’t have the willpower to avoid doing the latter.
And this will only become more attractive as the gem to gold rate increases over time.

This is just one example.

You may very well be on ArenaNet’s side, but they couldn’t give a fig about you.

I agree completely with the OP, and out of all the other uglies I’d add, this one’s foremost in my mind when I think about GW2 these days:

Forcing a free-to-play business model into a pay-to-play game.

This is where the spirit of Guild Wars has completely died. The gem shop is as intrusive in GW2 as it is in free-to-play games such as Age of Conan, Dungeons and Dragons Online and many others. Actually, moreso as it’s tied directly to the in-game economy.
When the only long-term rewards in this game are cosmetic, and most new cosmetic content is released via the gem store, it really has become pay-to-win.

It’s so intrusive in fact that many players think of it as a free-to-play game forgetting that they initially paid a large fee up front to play the game in the first place.

There’s a simple solution to this. As it’s becoming as harmful to the game as gear inspection is in others, treat it the same way.
Either make showing AP optional, or remove the ability to see another player’s AP completely from the game and only make it visible on the website leaderboards.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

There were way more builds in GW1. Just looking at my folder of saved build templates, it is gigantic. And most of those are necromancer builds for different parts of the game. I wish GW2 had that much build diversity.

I’m with Malafide here.
My favourite was designing Mesmer builds. I had incredibly specific builds for different scenarios, and coming up with a successful build was a kick with a real sense of achievement associated with it.
GW2?
Yeah, not so much.
Builds are inflexible thanks to the inherent inflexibility of the gear system, resulting in a very stale metagame that very rarely changes. And when it does, it upsets a lot of people because it forces a re-gear. And even if it weren’t held back by a restrictive gear system, there’s just not that much variety to be had.
I suspect part of this is from over-complicating the trait system in an attempt to emulate the skill trees from more traditional MMOs.

It’s just a very messy system with very few builds and therefore no room for individual expression.
Your character is rarely very different from A. N. Other player’s.

The irony is, I can only see this driving an even larger wedge between GW2 and lapsed players. The longer someone takes a break, the more they’ll have to pay in order to catch up on content.

So if I decide to revisit the game in 2015 (I’m really not likely to this year given how much current development strategies disgust me), I will not be able to play any new content unless I pay for it. I will be faced with the same game I left because I thought they were leaning too heavily on the gem store in the first place.

ArenaNet and GW2 have completely lost any faith I had in them.
I hope, sincerely, it comes back and bites them hard. They don’t deserve the adulation of their fans. And they certainly don’t appreciate it anywhere near as much as they should.

This thread is full of people defending them, who don’t realise they’re trapped in a soul-sucking loop of trivial, mediocre gameplay.
They’ve been doing it so long, they’ve forgotten what value is and don’t realise there are games out there that offer so much more than GW2 for less money.

Ashadow.6874:

I am not sure if they realize. But there are only three huge reasons anyone plays a video game:

Loot. (Fun for people who loves shinies, and gives them something to do.)
PvE/PvP. (Fun for the people who just want to kill everything. And be challenged.)
Story. (Fun for the people who love immersion and suspension of reality.)

This is an erroneous statement. Please change “video game” to MMO.
I don’t play Street Fighter for loot.
I don’t play Deus Ex for PvP.
I don’t play TxK for story.

I’ve been away from the game for quite a while now. I can’t see myself playing again any time soon.
However, give it another few years, and it might be worth revisiting.

The problem all MMOs have is that on release, while there may seem to be a lot of content, players will burn through it very quickly. After that, if someone continues to play, they have to face the reality that they WILL be playing the same content over and over again.

For me, Guild Wars 2 lost its sheen quite quickly, as while the content is initially engaging, it doesn’t offer enough variety to remain interesting over extended play-throughs.
And the problem with new content added by ArenaNet is that the actual content has been very short in regards play-time. First-time completion takes an hour or less in most cases. After that, ArenaNet rely heavily on excessive repetition in order to gain rewards.

Some people like that.

Personally I can’t stand it.
I find GW2 relies far too heavily on achievements which promote this repetition, and I honestly think they’re the worst thing that has happened to the game. They promote quickfire development of lighter content that needs to be repeated ad infinitum.

But it’s obviously proving more profitable for ArenaNet to stick to this type of development than spend more time making deeper, more rewarding content. And note that by “rewarding”, I’m not meaning loot. I’m meaning that content as it stands has very little sense of accomplishment when it’s the 300th time you’ve completed it.

So I’ll give it a few years and drop in to see how, if at all the game has improved.

I’ve recently done the same with Dungeons & Dragons Online, a game that I initially bought when it came out seven years ago. At the time, it didn’t have enough to maintain my interest, but now there’s a wealth of content to enjoy, sufficiently varied enough to keep me interested for a while at least.

So if you’re not enjoying the day-to-day grind of GW2, simply stop playing and do something else. Come back when it’s had a chance to mature, and you may find yourself enjoying it again.

All MMOs on release must be regarded as still very much in development. GW2 is still there. It’s not an excuse, but you’ll have more fun if you leave it alone for a while.
The other benefit is that coming back to a game after many years, most if not all of the obnoxious players should have disappeared. Only those with a vested interest will remain.

And which gear slots require a transmutation stone?
Certainly not jewellery slots.
You could argue weapons and backpieces too.
Most people when they transmute, are transmuting the 6 main areas:
Head
Shoulders
Hands
Chest
Legs
Feet

This is what armour sets come in: 6 pieces.

If they were being honest and not trying the tempt you into spending money, they’d have given you 12.

Edit: It’s the same crooked marketing logic as selling you points gems in batches that can’t be used to buy something for an exact value.
Want that 800 gem armour set? Then you’ll have to buy 1,000 gems, leaving you with 200 “spare”.
ArenaNet are essentially overcharging you by 25%, and leaving you with an incentive to buy more gems to make up the difference.

I notice they didn’t give you an amount divisible by the number of gear slots. It’s one of the lowest, most common tactics used by cynical money grabbers who regard their customers as nothing more than wallets to be fleeced.
By doing this, they’ve ensured that you will buy gems to get the extra charges necessary for your second full transmute.

ox DigitalShaman xo.2816:

I paid for goods from you, and now you’ve decided to change how that works.

This is the key part right here. Only in gaming can people get away with drastically changing the behaviour of purchased goods post sale, and it should be illegal, much as it would be with physical goods.

Lore is poor reasoning. The lore was created after the name.
The name was designed to evoke PvP, and the first game had a very strong eSports focus. Guild versus guild was the beating heart of this experience.

If you want to use lore as an excuse, the game should really be call Tyria: The Dragon Wars.

Ah, didn’t read the notes, my bad.

But the stuff about gems and micro-transactions being conspiracy theory?
Not really. There are regular seminars about this stuff at the big developer expos and articles on Gamasutra explaining how best to leverage these tools to exploit your audience.

Just because you’re unaware of this stuff, it doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Guhracie.3419:

What? Why are they removing transaction history?

They don’t want you checking your history and going “WHAT?!? I spent HOW much on gems over the past year?!? Screw this for a game of soldiers, I’m off to play something that offers better value for money!”.

It’s all a part of obscuring the real cost of gems.
Gems exist in the first place to confuse the consumer as to the value of micro transactions. If ArenaNet were more confident that what they were offering was truly value for money, they’d show dollar prices for gem store goods. But studies have proven that even one layer of abstraction serves to obfuscate the true value of items and disconnect the player from the real world value of these transactions. And when consumers don’t understand this, they are liable to spend more without realising it.

Oh, one of my old suggestions from the Suggestions forum:
We already have the /wiki chat command, so how about adding a Wiki option to the right-click contextual menu?
That way you could right-click an item link or item in your inventory and instantly open the Wiki page for it.

Age of Conan did it. Every zone in the open world had a hard mode alternative.
Nobody ever seemed to play it though, but then again, AoC is a much more traditional MMO the GW2 in some respects, and its idea of hard mode dictates that soloing isn’t really possible. It pretty much necessitated a well balanced group with a good spread of classes.

Personally, I’d prefer to see stats removed from gear completely.
One of the worst decisions ArenaNet ever made.

Lishtenbird.2814:

How exactly is it supposed to work? Just a crosshair in the center of the screen which automaticaly aims anything under it or aims nothing if there’s nothing? That’s basically a very narrow auto-aiming cone I think. Or a more visible constantly floating crosshair?

Pretty much.
Here’s a video of “Combat Mode” in action, although this is an old video, so it has probably changed significantly.

It’s not the same development team, that’s why they’re making the same mistakes again.

Two of the three ArenaNet founders now work at Undead Labs, the guys responsible for State of Decay.

If you want to be fans of the people behind a game, don’t pin your hopes on the companies they work for or even found. Don’t even pin your hopes on the franchises they create. Remember their individual names and follow the games they work on and chances are you’ll be able to guarantee a certain degree of quality.

ArenaNet is just a company with revolving doors that holds the intellectual property rights to the Guild Wars franchise.
They’re no longer the people who made the original.

Those guys are off doing innovating things in another genre now.

This thread is a thinly disguised request for dueling.