Guild Wars 2

We clearly need more hats in this gear, and what could be cooler than social clothing for your ranger pets? Like hats, little shoes and maybe a chest piece.
Also an integrated dog fashion skill system where you must play your animal and mimic your own characters movements as they are judged by a jury of NPCs, and the person with the highest score from value of clothes + bonus % based on how well you played the mimicking mini-game. Plus of course a fluctuating trend-system that would update a scale on how trendy certain color combinations would be that day, to avoid everyone just using black and white for everything, this rewarding a player for being attentive towards the point system and color and local fashion combinations and thus use this knowledge to score better and earn more coin in pet-fashion contests, and gain karma of course.
Until someone came up with a probability calculator and figured out your system which would lead to the same boring combinations being made every day because everyone could read the trend.

But still, at least give us hats.

I was thinking something like typical sports pants clothes. Optionally jogging clothes from the 80’s. But your pets must get those matching clothes as long as you wear that set.

So I just my new norn ranger for a spin.
Had a couple of drinks in Twinspur Haven until I was properly kittenfaced, then staggered outside for a little fun. Shortly thereafter I found myself in a small cave in Frusenfall Creek where a mother arctodus was nursing her children. Drunk and full of bloodlust I drew my greatsword and charged in and started hacking away at the beast. Shortly the big animal was nothing but a mess of blood and spilled guts, dragging itself along the icy floor of the cave in a last attempt to protect it’s babies.
Well, needless to say, after I had carved away it’s skin I proceeded to charm one of it’s little cubs.
And we’re having such a great time together now! Surely the cub was too young to remember what happened so I’ll just tell it I found it while it was lost in a snowstorm.

Good thing Kryta has heroes like us

Thanks for the answer. Yes I’ve noticed a large variation in the… theme of writing. Both the more mature parts as well as the comic parts.
My grief was mainly with the main quest, because of the inane behavior of the destiny’s edge, because we don’t get to know the characters that were killed off enough to really care (Well maybe Tybalt a bit because he was a rather well written comic relief character), the sudden and anticlimactic rise of Trahearne which in himself feels like a very neutral and low profile character.

As someone who prefers mature tones, was there ever subjects you wished you could have brought up or delved further into? I mean the setting is ripe for more complex issues, you have an industrial revolution, an imbalance in technology that would affect social classes, politics and black market trade more than just a few bandits living in cool looking tree forts, plus you have exploitation of tribals and wast amounts of alcohol consumption.

edit: Oh yes and as for the ambient scene dialogue, I haven’t memorized to many of them but they do make the world feel more lively and often give some more personality to npcs that aren’t vital to the story.
Such as the Charr pup with his mother outside the tribune(?) quarters in the black citadel, I enjoyed that one among others.

If Mr Stein is still keeping an eye on this thread I’d like to ask:
Was the writing in this game mainly done with a pre-teen/young teen demography in mind? I bet you have some really good writers on your team as well as being one yourself, and I understand the necessity of writing on the same level as the target demography but… please tell me you guys wrote this with crowd pleasing marketing in mind

And two things I just noticed:
The way the AI works I can engage mobs close to camps/safe zones or start skill challenges, and then just stealth, and the monster will automatically go and kill the afk player unless I “take back agro” so if I was a less kind thief I could grief my own people by killing them while afk and then failing an event and come back to res them and then do it again.

Also, I was just traveling through Fireheart Rise where some non-quest NPC was talking about looking for five grawl necklaces, which is either satire in which the would be quest giver asks for an item that does not exist in the game, or it should lead to an event if you could kill the local grawl until you got a rare quest-drop.
Because I felt it was kind of sad that they never delved further on those two random villagers in the world.

Oh yeah and it would be cool if we could get instanced maps with our houses, and in the area there could be events based on upgrades you have done on your house/it’s nearby land. Perhaps rare events randomly happen, so you can yell at your friends to come visit your house to kill a rare champion for loot.

Vanity Items/Social Clothes:
I suggest that you could buy random loot chests from the gem store, for from 10 gems to like 200 that can contain different levels of random loot both account bound and also weapons, items or crafting materials. To make players who wants to obtain for an example a fancy hat or a set of heavy armor skins but can’t afford it, can gamble to have a chance of getting either the item they want or one they might be able to trade away. This way you could release more “poor” skins/models for little gems and more extravagant skins/models at a higher cost but also much smaller chance of getting randomly. Perhaps also involve social clothes crafting through dismantling these items into social clothing equivalents of that tier of crafting materials.
That would allow for more variation of social gear plus an initiative to actually have one.
Plus mystic forge recipes for 4 boxes of the same cost/tier can either return 1 – 3 boxes of the same rarity, or of one level higher rarity. Allowing for further gambling and obtaining more materials to drive the economy and make gems more attractive for the player to buy.
And if you want to be really devious, link the materials used in crafting social gear to be used by rare furniture crafting recipes, meaning that in order to have one kind of exclusive furniture you would need to buy gems so you could gamble for social crafting materials or simply buy social clothing and salvaging them. That way crafting social clothes would also give more crafting xp at level 400, resulting in more crafting xp to gain crafting points to turn into rare gear-skin/models.

Weekly bonus loot dungeons:
As we know there are several ways to make gold in GW2, most of them involving trading in one way or another, I think a good reward to encourage people to actually “grind” something and use that +Magic Find stat on items would be that each week you get a token on your character where you can enter a zone full of events for Karma and increased drop rates for +MF purposes for one hour, and the ability to do daily events to earn additional tickets like once every day or something, so they could enter that zone for an hour and do whatever they want there and then be instanced out of the zone when their ticket buff expires.
And have you be able to choice what level you want the zone to be, so you can grind specific look tiers if you want to and not just the highest. This would also keep the economy active.

Well those are some suggestions, if anyone bothered to read them all.

cont.
I still think the 1-man dungeons would act more like quest-maps rather than typical difficult encounters that can only be beaten with teamwork, yet still a level more advanced in technicality and could probably have event-scripted bosses (Like the NPCs automatically fulfilling their role as carrying ammo into a cannon or pressing various buttons, and not directly affecting the HP of the boss, just affecting the gameplay.) and the player himself having to fight the boss partially through mini-games (like using a cannon) and fighting boss-minions or the boss itself.
Like you could have one mission where you get to go on patrol inside one of those huge charr war machines, and man the side-guns on it, like a rail-shooter, until you reach to the second part of the dungeon/quest. But of course you would just get a turret view for the duration, so you don’t have to handle the animations and physics/pathing of a moving actor. Then during a cinematic you get to see the tank getting damaged by a huge fireball or something, and from there you get to the part of the map where you fight on the ground to get back to your base from behind enemy lines. But here is where there should be one of the random events that affects your relationship with your NPCs. You could get a conversation with the commander of the vessel where he says for an example “We have a valuable experimental char weapon in the front of the vehicle that our superiors within the pact has said is of the outmost importance gets back to the base, but there’s also the mechanic Grimface Doublewolf or whatever stuck under a heavy wooden beam, there’s a fire in the ammo storage and we’re going to have time to recover one of them, which one will it be?” or something else like making a choice further ahead on the map, but always with some options that makes the player having to make a choice that affects NPCs personally/morally. This way would allow you for example having certain quests being unlockable by attaining a certain relationship level as well as custom appearance skins-rewards both for the NPCs and yourself as well as from having a high relationship with someone and having a low one with them.
When you reach maximum or lowest relationship possible with them you could get a quest to “seal the deal” where you get to do something that personally sets the future relationship so that it cannot be decreased/increased again (Forever a bro or a nemesis) so that the player for an example can only receive a weekly BRO BOX of loot that has a chance to contain BRO [NPC NAME] SKIN ARMOR that you can wear, or the recipe to craft it, or a NEMESIS BOX of loot with contains the nemesis counterpart. That way players would also get an additional reason to be able to offer semi-exclusive crafts instead of just generic ones that doesn’t even involve doing anything to get the recipe.
And I’d like to see some interesting concepts both for characters and quests, not just galiant Strongface McOneliner and his righteous hollywood quest, but things that actually makes you involved in a character and a story. You wouldn’t even have to voice act much, text is good enough. But of course you wouldn’t have to be all Dostojevskij about it, some interesting character concept I think could work is:
Grawl Engineer who learned that Inquest used some kind of tools to make his tribe worship them, but that he became disillusioned with their “God” and tried to tell his tribe but was cast out for blaspheming. You could have a story line that involves his tribe, clan, or what they have being given ray-guns from Inquest, resulting in what happens when you give native tribes AK’s in reality which is of course much suffering to the Grawl from in-tribe fighting where they duke it out with lethal ray guns instead of beating on the ground with a stick or something, as well as being used as cannon fodder by the Inquest. You could then have the option of through relationship leveling being able to release them from Inquest tyranny and leaving them to their old ways, which the NPC would want, or do instead recruit the tribe for The Pact with would result in the NPC’s tribesmen dying in warfare they aren’t used to which he’d hate you for. Or perhaps a Norn hunter whose childhood pet and animal companion was taken by Svanir Frostborn(Or whatever those frost-corrupted are called) and that she never got another animal companion, and now she’s hunting a rumor that it was corrupted by them. Now your options will lead you to either encourage her that it could be cleansed of corruption with powerful magic, or try to harden her to the idea that it has to be killed to be sure so that it doesn’t kill others. Which could result in the NPC having an animal companion during your 1-Man dungeon runs, or not. Depending on your choices.

Companions:
Several MMOs have companions as a concept already, and most everyone does them differently it would seem.
To add another powerful tool in the world of GW2 would just create an imbalance in gameplay and turn back from the essential gameplay of GW2 which is to get away from the skillbar system of last generation.
Instead I would suppose that companions would be used for A) a separate quest chain focusing on yourself founding a personal guild with NPCs you can recruit, with their own personal story lines, from around the world (Adding to making people discover more areas which they might have missed in their power-leveling spree, just to recruit those NPCs). Special dungeons that are 1 man + one (or two, for added potential conflict and interesting combination of classes) of those NPCs you have recruited.
The biggest issue would the idea would be whether you’d have basic control over them either through directly affecting their skill-bars, or yelling specific orders like “Guard that spot!”, “Attack my target!” or “Come back to me!”.

The ultimate function would be to A) Have an interesting side quest that can continue side-by-side with whatever interesting is happening in the mainquest which I guess will continue as they release more dragons, without anything that affects it directly happening.
B) Allow you to gain Personal Relations Points with each NPC which will eventually result in you getting some other kind of points, which can be used to either get you new equipment-skins or better/cooler looking “guildmembers”.
This way you would be true to the focus on guilds in the lore, and also give every player the power/joy/responsibility to run a guild of their own without having to yell “PLEASE JOYS INVISIBLE COWBOYS, WE ARE A GUILD OF COOL CASUAL PLAYERS IN POLAND LOOKING TO DO PVP AND DUNGEONS” all day.

I truly wish for a focus on story telling with an additions of companions, as the writing in the game is a tad bit of the “what the market wants” easy reading for preens.
Hopefully we’d see some kind of system where we could do as many 1-man dungeons with your helpers as you wish, but doing a dungeon with a companion would give you A) some personal relations points with the NPC that accompanied you on the dungeon. Some small reward that is less than actually doing a real instance with real players, and some Buy Stuff For Your Companion points, which wouldn’t affect non-instanced gameplay with others except for account bound pretty gear or new crafting recipes for said gear.
Apart from this I think it would be nice if each NPC you have recruited sends you a daily or weekly small random gift like a loot bag, depending on your relation level with them, “for the guild bank” so to say.
To make it a little more exciting, different NPCs should have conflicting interests with other npcs. Say you do a map and during the mission you get the option “Save the farmers from the fire elementals” or “Pursue the evil flame legion shaman and abandon the farmers” and your choices during the dungeons would affect your relationship with the npcs which would result in a little text-dialogue between the character and the npcs most strongly involved in your choice.
Like say you abandon the farmers, one of your human npcs was a former separatist who recently switched to the “good” side but still sees this as humans suffering from what charrs do which would make herkitten off at you (And possible the charr npcs) and let you know about it. While the Asura would thank you for making the difficult choice, but inform you that the estimated success probability of our general mission increased by 7% thanks to not letting ourselves be distracted.
cont.

Going to list a few things I’d personally like to see in the game, I know it won’t happen but I wanted to write them down anyway.

Jumping puzzles:
If they aren’t already planning it, I think we should get a map that is pretty much all about jump puzzles. Maybe something funky like an Asura virtual reality machine that let’s you travel to a world where you have either single player jump puzzles or like a dungeon that you have to complete together with other players in other to progress, like some players has to reach a certain point and stand on a switch which will allow the group to meet at another level of the “dungeon”, that way you can designate some players to do the more difficult jumps while others can still help through the easier parts and everyone is still contributing.
And you could have a little story-line with it, with something corrupting the VR turning “higher level” jumping puzzles into really bizarre stuff (Kind of like the jump puzzle in Malchor’s Leap, with lots of holes everywhere which might or might not be where you are supposed to go, loved that jump puzzle) which eventually turns into a big (dragon lieutenant size) boss fight, still with puzzle elements during the fight, changing the environment with his special attacks which creates news paths to jump around on.

Furniture crafting:
I heard we will be getting houses eventually (Which I didn’t verify, I hope we do though) and surely there will be furniture crafting, but in which case it wasn’t planned, I hope it will be. With loads of recipes for creating everything from chairs to chandeliers, including “cultural furniture” because that would be awesome.
With rare recipes for things like flame legion, ogre, sons of svanir, etc. decorations.
Another idea if you include houses, could be to add something like a personal shop which is connected to the trading post, only it’s physical in your home so items listed there will give some kind of bullkitten points that can be used to get some riff raff account bound items to the buyers, while taking off say 2 – 3% from the sales fee for the seller.

Crafting:
Please, at some point further on, introduce daily crafting quests for each “tier” of craftables, giving you an order for X amount of [items] from each craft tier you are capable of, giving you a currency reward equal to like 2x or 3x of vendor price for items (Since most items goes directly to the vendor when you skill up nowadays).
This would a) allow the grinders to grind something else. b) allow casual players to level up their crafts without costing them so much currency to throw at the vendor.
Also please allow players to buy/find MORE recipes for items with alternative skins (Since GW2 is more about looking cool than “having the best gear”) that actually takes an effort to obtain, so that crafting might become something that people actually asks others to craft for them instead of just buying the results at self-cost at the trading post.
If you want to be more advanced, in addition to this make an “Crafting” tab in the trading post, giving people the option of listing themselves as able to craft specific items (Pick from a list) where they can offer to craft items for others, so that when someone asks for such an item to be crafted then one random listed player (from that server to make it somewhat manageable) gets a small amount of copper added to their Trading Post plus a small amount of XP, and everyone on the server that has listed themselves as able to craft that item gets a tiny amount of xp as well based on the tier and rarity of the item crafted and their own current Craft Level.
This could be solved by the purchaser simply putting the items needed for the craft in a window and pressing a button, sending that item to their Trading Post and taking away those needed resources.
In addition to this there should be a system where just like your Character Level you can have more than 400 in your crafting skill, only it adds points when you level just like you get skill points when you level up past 80. These points would be used to buy more recipes for different skins.

Guild Crafting:
Right now it feels like crafting isn’t really anything exclusive, but if it becomes something others don’t just level up for themselves since it’s so cheap and quick to max it, then one idea would be adding a Guild Crafting function.
This would work similarly to the aforementioned idea that a player adds the materials needed in a crafting window, then this window will store those crafting materials until someone from the guild that is able to craft the item they are asking for clicks a button in the guild tab where he can craft the item for them, giving him some crafting XP and the guild some Influence or whatever it’s called. Making it more profitable to offer crafting services within a guild rather than just on the open market.

Buy pretty items and strut around in lions arch so everyone can see how rich you are

The economy of a game is part of the fun for some players, like me.
When I found out about Black Lion kits from a friend I went from 1½ gold to 120 in 5 days, and if I had more money to begin with I would probably have ended up around 300 before everyone got in on the deal and profits started going down.
Now the competition is very high so the profit has gone down by a lot so I don’t even bother any longer, so I’d say the market is pretty stable.
There’s one thing though, less than a week ago some players with lots of money started pushing up the prices of level 74 to 80 rares by bidding several silver over the next highest bid, I don’t know if this was due to ignorance or if they had saved up loads of globs and wanted to sell them at a higher profit but of course it affected the global economy a lot.
But there you go. I’ve never played an MMO where the economy remained stagnant from day 1. In a while everything will be stable, and you will probably have years to farm for whatever items it is that you want.