Guild Wars 2

CapN Biku.6024:

I still don’t like the idea. What about the people who don’t follow the forums or twitter and just play the game, how will they find out about it? The hard way.

I can find so many potential flaws in this idea. (Not anything personal against you, you’re just saying what we’ve all thought)
Like bugs that could potentially make you stuck as a target. Make you not be able to reply to the request or maybe not even receive it.

For this idea to work there can’t be any flaws and people can’t be mean (which we all know some can’t seem to manage)

Lol, If I should get pissed off for each little no or mmm… during brainstorming sessions at work where people have different ideas, then it would be horrible, plus this is a game, I like the game but I’m not a teenager anymore, it’s just a relaxing friday evening with the forum, trying to give some inputs here and there as I’m not always around.

So, there are endless possible flaws in countless systems in any game. Nothing is flawless. It’s important that they can implement the feature well, if not they will improve it later anyway, until it solves a problem properly. It’s not about people to be mean or not, I quite trust the capabilities of anet team and I know there are challenges with budget, time and decision making, and obviously they are human and make errors.

Soulstar.7812:

There is going to be one idiot that hits that button, and “accidentally” sells something he didn’t originally mean to…

Then that same idiot is going to these forums to cry about selling exotic materials or a legendary precursor because he didn’t take a minute to sort his gear and got lazy and hit a button.

This is a horrible idea.

It’s not just that, this could be solved with a multiple selection clicking on each icon and a final confirm. In the end you have to select things, one shot sell all is not smart,99% of cases are not going to have everything to sell in the inventory.

Actually it could be implemented by bag, in this game there are all sort of bags with different specs, some bags could have an auto collect certain items and sell all at lower current market price, with a button perhaps close to the bag title in the inventory expanded.

The real problem is how to define the price for each item you want to sell in the block, so if we want an automatic multi sale, it needs to be associated with another variable true for all items, either sell all for the current market price, put all 1 copper lower than the market price, sell all at the lower buyer price. Something like that, otherwise you need anyway to set the price for each, what’s the point lol

Liewec.2896:

hey all! i just have a pretty simple suggestion!

i’d like the option to sell multiple items quickly in one big go on the trading post rather than selling each item individually wracking up quite large down-times for the simple act of vendoring.

Obviously there would need to be restrictions, perhaps allowing us to click a “select multiple items” button where we choose the options as with a normal trade (meet highest bidder etc) and then click the objects in our bag we wish to sell (they’ll become highlighted so you know they’ve been selected), click a “sell” button and BAM it all sells at once.

anyway thats my idea! thanks for reading!

While this is a valid suggestion, if countless players are submitting several items within microseconds I suspect it could give issues overloading processes with spikes to the database, perhaps could be solved using more shared resources. It could perhaps create very long pause for users during the submission before giving you the ok with all transactions done, not sure if it’s convenient enough in the end.

Unlike Diablo 3 with it’s 10 items limit, you can submit all items you want here, and it generated an incredible traffic of IDs with associated data, maybe 1-2 orders higher, I presume several millions per day, this can bring the traffic to 10 to 100 times more, from the users point of view looks easy, implementing it to be stable, I’m not quite sure

BurnWeed.5902:

They’re working on a gem store appearance change package. . . hilarious how they can devote resources to this but not major game flaws

One of the main selling point is the appearance here, so they are supposed to put some resources in this area. How do you know that they are not working on fixing also game issues? Are you passing by their offices and watching their screens? Or you know someone working there and getting spoilers on what’s next planned?

Flaws? May I know what exactly is troubling you?

Steven.9803:

To this day Im am disappointed about how there is no first person view option in Guild Wars 2, when it is first of all: Become the standard of most MMo’s, is key essential for bringing a community together through the use of Machinimas

Really agree with this, The game could be a source of good machinima, so first person view, free camera and possibly a video recorder integrated in the future (just to avoid using fraps or others, could be a good addition.

Being a designer (and photography/music production enthusiast) I would appreciate to be able at least to make interesting compositions (starting with Rule of thirds?) for some wallpapers of my characters, maybe a little trailer, if I get time.

Just look at what Skyrim has generated

I’m a perfectionist in term of look and naming, (well naming is something also related to work ;D working around branding and design for many years that’s why). It’s something I hope to see soon, and considering the objectives in this game and the fact that ncsoft has a good past with other games in term of visual customisation like Aion, I think we have good chance to see great improvements in this area.

The game is young, mmo are big beasts to develop and improve.

CapN Biku.6024:

I just think this would get abused by targeting players who are AFK.

Could be feasible if anet makes afk shorter and don’t switch to red target at least 30 seconds after the afk timer, so any user can get back from the afk and have time to move the mouse, confirm that it’s a real player.

All users would know the rule (twitter/forum/whatever), and eventually wait couple of minutes if they want to find out if it turns red and destroy him (possibly call friends to do a collective one shot kill

drifter.8453:

OneTyper.7045:

They are trying to balance things out to avoid every possible situation that makes gold quicker than average, so after months of stats research and fixes, everything will give an average income result compared to the time spent and difficulty.

Result: Less specific places to get better results, more content used for the end-game, obviously gear treadmill lovers with the dedication to find the most efficient spot will get somewhat bored when they can less and less advantages for the mechanics studies After all, this is a game with different interests.

Seriously as long as there a gold sellers and people that buy from them. Gw2 will never be balanced out. They need to stop nerfing Shiat. Is aNet that blind and can not see that nerfing Shiat is the way to: “Balance Shiat out”?

Gold sellers (botters) have a threshold based on how much they can make (botting and selling) and how much they spend (electricity, new game copies when the old get caught, buy or develop botting toolkits, machines management) , if the game has no spot that profittable, they are going away towards game that can offer better income, it’s not going to happen tomorrow, but if Anet plays its part well, they may win overtime, at least against the most professional ones that are looking for higher profit and are not losing time.

Unfortunately I would say (considering the game) there are also legit gamers with similar thinking and interest to similar challenges while are not using bots, but playing legit, they still seek enjoyment finding exploits to earn way more than the average gamer, they may go as well if they will find a wall too big for them.

Most of those players are not going to bring any additional positive results anyway to anet, as they are interested only in making profit through analysis best gameplay mechanics and not spending any additional money in gems, but just lots of grinding , at least in most cases.

This game is billed more towards the asian mentality regarding the visual style, that means while it has a westernised overall visual more realistically designed, it also has a specific asian touch with sexy short armors in the mix aks light ones.

It could show better progression if they would make the starting sets more like broken or badly made armors, and progressively update the look in a more organic way, but due to audience and the way they want to attract at first sight the dress lovers, I think they set to make their initial set already very nice, look at the light starting set, it’s very cool already.

Lose sense of progression a little visually, but make the game visually appealing from the start

They are trying to balance things out to avoid every possible situation that makes gold quicker than average, so after months of stats research and fixes, everything will give an average income result compared to the time spent and difficulty.

Result: Less specific places to get better results, more content used for the end-game, obviously gear treadmill lovers with the dedication to find the most efficient spot will get somewhat bored when they can less and less advantages for the mechanics studies After all, this is a game with different interests.

Re-edit

Moreover, if they get the whole balancing improved to new heights, both botters, hardcore farmers will get closer to casuals, probably at certain point, botters won’t earn that much anymore and many will leave to bot on games less strict, making hopefully the game a better place, the same for certain hardcore players interested to make bigger income and get rich quicker, if all their techniques and content exploits will get somewhat nulled, will get bored and quit.

The casuals and moderate hardcore interested more in the content will thrive, and I guess that’s the main point for Anet

I really like to experience those monthly events but I think if you could spread it across 4 weekend subevents in the whole month instead of concentrating all within one week.

- give continuous and steady sense of changes in the world (lore, events, bits of additional items every weekend)
- give more chances to everyone to experience new content events
- make every weekend special, instead of firing all in one week, and 3 following week/weekends where lots of people are basically back to repetitive content, often getting dull after doing it endless times
- have more time to balance each sub event, get things done better, less lag, more thoughts about what you are doing and giving away, less mistakes, happier playerbase.

If you want to make each subevent a bit more exclusive and special, make it just each weekend friday to sunday (instead of the whole week) where most are online like me, yes I have little to no time during the weekdays between work and family.

So you can give each week 3 days of special event for everyone especially lore/events enthusiasts and other 4 days for normal routine, dungeons, WvW and so on especially for the more hardcore and legendary farmers with lots of time during weekedays

And considering that many workers are getting the salary the last weekend of the month, the cherry on the top would be the final subevent for each month around payday weekend

Deal?

Cheers

Instances of the past

Make it as a instance of the past (kind of black and white memories or sepia event, this could be applied to mad king and other future one time events)

- A special NPC will bring back to the past of your choice
- Collect a team of “x” players and start the instance
- Other players can add for a max “x” players (if the first instance is full, create a new one and collect new players, rinse and repeat…)

- Loot from thrash, vet and champ like the past real events (in this case I guess no loot)
- Final big chest gives the rewards only one time with the same chance as the real event

You can repeat as much as you want, it will contribute as exp only, after the first time you successfully collected your items from the ancient chest.

So basically you give enough time to everyone get their rewards at their own pace, and discourage to repeat again if you have done it, so others can do that without overhead.

I would be really keen to see some sort of real life collection cards related to the game. This game has a nice character design/sketchy style and seems to have lots of love in term of art, could we extend this love to a new level?

Some merchandise could intrigue additional fans interested in collectible cards like Magic the Gathering, add a more real collection, and one day when this game will be history, you will still own some memories.

I suggest:
- cards you buy for money or gems like special pets already sold as virtual model and retain their value with a color scheme, silver card, gold card… depend how executed it would bring an additional fan base, good set of merchandising, new marketing experiments and possibly additional revenue for the gem shop

- cards you can earn in game, card to top achievements like world completion, legendary item card upon a legendary completion in game, and anything that really needs lot of efforts to complete, it’s not giving any advantage but a solid art piece of that legendary item you earned printed in high quality thick paper and signed

Create a separate system for it, to collect them as virtual card, and when a player reach a certain number of card collected
- like 10 for cards bought in store
- like 1 for card earned

they can manage the card fill an online form for delivery (possibly we pay the delivery, so less cost for anet other than storage/packing, easier for them to do), and the cards “possibly signed by the artists (obviously printed signature)” will be delivered.

Franckly I’m a casual player with very little time, pro designer with over a decade experience and ex-MtG player so the below would be an additional point for me to care more about getting a legendary item or any other difficult achievement over time.

BabelFish.7234:

Good thinking but this is pretty much validating the existence of bots within gw2. I’d rather they just figure out a system to keep the botting to a minimum (there’s no such thing as bot-free).

If they make it more automated and yet still effective, less resources would go to fight bots, and more towards actual content development.

At the end of the day, each part of a game have a budget, take money from something, give up something else to balance.

vespers.1759:

man i just want them to get rid of the bots. I’ve never seen a game with so many of them.

Anet alone will never be able to tackle all the botting unless they hire countless mods and security experts and devs, there is too much of it and they always improve the system just like virus/antivirus battle.

Crowd sourcing systems have done a lot, nowadays there is very little a private developed encyclopedia can do more than wikipedia, and there are various projects to create enormous crowd sourced database for family search or solve computer problems through organised information submitted by the crowd. A lot can be done, and with a rewarding system could even be fun for everyone.

We could see a new in-game job patrolling and getting tokens for that, and exchange token for items or gems for example, sky is the limit.

Couple of ideas to improve the system and get the community more involved with a more crowd-sourcing reward and report systems.

Rewarding system
- Players can earn special tokens if the bot is banned successfully and get a progressive achievement in the hero as contribution, with different tier and possible badges or symbols like Commander, create some sort of in-game police ranking and organize a side guild to be part of, managed by Anet where the best players in term of reporting can join. I’m sure horde of players could love to partecipate and would add an additional layer to the game. Obviously it would need some protection to avoid exploting, so most likely a price to pay of some sort if the report is negative.

Report System
Report system start with a combination of keys that record instant screenshot and log of 3d movements for players close to you within a range of seconds with the ID of the requested report, that could be analysed with a 3d tools by Anet mods and see clearly the path of bots involved in a simulated 3d space in a separate version of the game, quite clear once you see how they are moving and dealing with mobs. In the report UI it could be included a list of names of players around you when you pop up the report window, show you the screenshot (with zoom/arrows to move around) and let you select only the names the player thinks are bots, and other additional information key to help you Anet.

The power of crowdsourcing to me is a very good way to minimise resources from your side, get a lot of data to improve the botting situation, and the rewarding system with protection could bring a lot of good info, as the players are interested in both good rewards for the time spent, not only because they hate bots.

Win-Win to me if you can execute well.

Chamone.6890:

They should just get rid of gold altogether IMO, it’s a worthless currency.

Impossible, they need an healthy gold/gem market, or the game will be in trouble.
Companies like this need several millions every year to sustain development teams, all the updates, hungry managers, directors, board and all the tech behind. The boxed price only is not going to bring the game far, or put it in a better way, is not going to make millions for the investors and top management

Or do you think the top people in the company are working for your average salary?

They could have done a different calculation and ask 250 dollars box price and cover all the updates with that, and give all gem shop items as normal drops, would you pay 250$? 400$ collection edition?

- Make crafting materials with different quality level, similar to white/legendary grades
- Mobs should drop more salvage items/body parts and with different quality level too (ex. chances of normal fur from a boar, exotic fur from a champion boar, legendary rough fur from a dragon size mob), not coins/weapons/armors and anything they cannot realistically carry
- Mobs should not drop coins anymore, most of them cannot realistically carry coins, and won’t be fair that only thieves can, otherwise would be a massive farm.
- Dynamic quest and heart quests compensation should be aligned with gold value in the market (not just quest level), otherwise one day when 100 gems will cost 10 gold, and you will still get the same amount from a quest, will make the experience not balanced between old player and new ones. Or a better one would be to just stop giving money for any quest. Just give a token.

Why that? Yes it could push a bit too much for the average mmo player after countless years of gear drops and treadmill, but isn’t gw2 about changing the conventional in mmos? Crafting would be more meaningful, lower quality gear more interesting, create a slighly better challenge to acquire gear in a more realistic way, possibly more balanced market, instead of all the junk white/blue/green at vendor price these days, easy gear through levels. It’s only 2 months, very soon even rare will be at that level, and by the time the game is mature some exotics may get very close.

Think of Monster Hunter salvaging/crafting and Skyrim realistic drops applied here.

Promega, is your set of components giving stable, better or worse margin within a period, let’s say days or weeks if you have done that for long time?

MMOs are just like the real life and its economy, people who know how to invest in the stock market are making big money (flippers), other people are working everyday for a salary (casual players or let’s say legit players), thieves of gold, jewelry, banks and houses (botters/hackers), some other are gambling in casino (Mystic forge players).

The game is giving changes to play with your own style, without risks, it’s all about you if you are talented and mature enough to embrace that style

This game is heavily based on a well-balanced economy, they are trying their best to keep things in place. While there are systems that could be better structured, it’s always going to be like this, unless you cut any trade system and currency including any botting/hacking, which honestly it’s a dream, every online game with item drops and currency successful enough is going to have any sort of trouble, no matter how good are the developers.

They are doing their best to give a bit for everyone, perhaps a mistake would have been to market this game as very casual friendly and very opened to inexperienced, while setting quite hardcore mechanics that are misunderstood.

I understand kids that have little to no knowledge of how the world goes and complain, fair enough, but if you have a certain age and still can’t grasp that… get out of gaming and look a bit around you.

Perhaps I have to say that one thing maybe Anet didn’t understand is that considering the little advantage in term of stats for legendaries, hard core wouldn’t be really the target, as hardcore players are interested mainly on the stats, not vanity, and the average good exotic is good enough in most cases, and in the meanwhile the casual players are struggling as they are more towards the vanity yet they don’t have the capability/mindset of the hardcore ones. That’s perhaps a poor psychological analysis by your side, Anet.

I have been exploring the deep sea between Lion’s Arch and other areas more frequently due to the event, it’s quite beautiful and with a lot of fish and seafood types around. I think you have already planned to introduce fishing in the future, and make all the green fish types eventually catch-able…but…

…to me would be interesting to see some difficult fishes to catch swimming around, and try to catch them for halloween, maybe in a mutated form within the theme, and earn extra ToT or something cooler, and give some halloween-themed raw fish cooking materials (some kind of intro for fishing in gw2). I think the assets are more or less there, maybe some zombified retouch to the textures? and need to create some logic for it. Maybe you already have something like this for the next acts?

Hope so.
Cheers

Equanox.2081:

@kitanas

I like what you are saying. I understand this is a problem. Scaling provents people from steamrolling over low level area’s but as you say there isn’t a quick solution for content that wouldn’t be accesible for players that do not want to obtain gear etc.

Think we have to wait for extra content from Anet to see what they have planned but I think there is not enough content to keep a level 80 player around for a longer time. The game as it is now seems to be optimized for ‘every gamer’ and not enough for the players that want a bit more progress at 80.

Guild Wars 2 to me is clearly a game for casuals to somewhat hardcore with stuff to do in real life. It’s not a game for extreme hard core gamers without anything else to do in life, and you can see that starting from the user friendly dynamics to the UI, they have got a very good team that really understand user experience applied to games, and their target is the mainstream public, user experience these days means makes things easy to enjoy and the gameplay reflect that strongly.

Hard core gamers with 16 hours a day to play will never find any game that wants to appeal to all and that they can still consider fresh after few weeks, because they are too far from the mass casual players, which is the big market and what any company is focusing today.

Moreover in the end any company has deadlines and targets, and they can’t wait 15 years to produce enough content necessary worth months or years of deadly hardcore gaming, but they start with a target ( which perhaps is few months of content for players let’s say playing 3-4 hours a day , which is not 1 hour a day for some, and not 16 hours per day for others, and yes there are people that enjoy the game playing 2-3 hours per week as well, and they can be more than you can believe…) and build up from that, and create dynamics for an average sample too.

I’m sure they will add more content and more systems that will appeal hardcore and casuals alike, but you need to give them time to balance their schedule based on their targets, which I repeat to me are primarily casuals to reasonable hardcore players, so put yourself in queue and play something else if you have gone too far.

The funny thing is that the casuals (the majority) are not really complaining that much, take it light and just play, while the really hardcore (minority) are quite passionate and keep whining for more, and they make it seems a big problem. Actually I believe the 95/99% of players are just enjoying things.

I play games for more than 30 years, I have seen the evolution, at the beginning was text based only mmorpgs and offline rpgs that most of you probably can’t understand the reason to play that, then a more 2d graphic mmorpg and then the explosion with realistic 3d graphic mmorpgs. At the beginning only techie would care about an online rpg like 15-20 years ago, then slowly became interesting graphically and more suitable for less techie and nerd, nowadays is a global mass community, and even dogs and cats are interested to play rpgs, therefore companies are adjusting, and that’s life.

Deal with it.

I was an hardcore playing sessions for up 38 hours in early 90s, then so so core, nowadays I can barely play, and GW2 is still giving a chance to enjoy a mmorpg at my pace.

If you want to ear another opinion. Franckly I never really enjoyed the loot system in most MMOs. To me mobs should not drop anything apart from skins and other materials that will be combined to produce actual useful items for battles and whatever the game offers. I really like the way Skyrim works, animals drop leathers and body parts, soldiers and mages drop armor pieces and in general equipment that make sense.

If you need to cook some venison or need deer’s skin, you just find a kitten Deer while travelling, map your source of deers in the map, and cook your venison for +20 something, while salvage the skin for some gloves, that’s a more realistic mmo experience for me

It would give to crafting a deeper and more meaningful level of enjoyment, while hardcore can still strive for higher level components to build their ultimate weapons and armors (not just receive it directly, but get rare and legendary body parts if you know what I mean), and make the difference, something in between Monster Hunter and Skyrim, if well planned and still user friendly this could be a really nice overall experience for both hardcore and casuals, and keep the game loot realistic (as it seems they pursued with cooking for example, and in general quite realistic with other crafting professions even if obviously in a more streamlined and user-friendly way), but anyway that’s my view.

If there are other games that would do that, why play gw2? Because overall the game is better than all other tried in the past, and the crafting is still reasonably good considering that it needs to follow at least a bit some old mmo way of doing things, and overall it merges well with the other systems.

While I really like the crafting system, I feel it could be improved and make it more interesting.

- Introduce Node Areas when players can spawn their own random node based on the area stats in a specific time, with special in-game harvesting machine and its upgrades to find in the world, and then harvest as usual. The node areas could be managed through server side mapping that randomise itself depend on events, weather conditions, area, time, you pick it, and obviously should not be possible to analise in any other way. ( Hint: there is a mmo game that involves investing real money, sweat monsters and different planets with a similar feature).
Perhaps through that feature you can discover also new materials (that lead to specific refined stuff) never seen before that you cannot get just walking around.

To me would be cool to actually try to find good hidden extra nodes, calculate the best area or just look at the area around, and feel there is hope for a specific material, the world has a variety of settings, this could be done properly imo.

- Create some sort of quality in the gathered materials, that improves chances for an higher quality final item (colors) , perhaps combining them and still simple and user friendly

In general as crafting enthusiast even if I have no much time to play, I was hoping this could be more realistic in term of loot (even if I still like the game and I take it as it is), and give more emphasis to the gathering, processing and refining final products. I have never really liked the fact that a bird can drop a armor chest, but more like body components to actually create armor pieces, weapons and stuff. If it was so, the middle-products and other final items won’t be that cheap in the market, and actually have more meaning, instead of having endless same items in the market, worth very little.
While this cannot change at this point, I hope to see some additional systems leading toward this direction.