Guild Wars 2

Well, back before this thread devolved into insulting one another, I saw some folks suggest adding crafting stations to guild halls. I suggest turning the scribing station into an anything station. It lets you craft whatever discipline your character has unlocked. No art changes.

Ok, let’s talk about what this does to other parts of the game. Here’s one example: imagine a character out in Tangled Depths. Trying for map completion, so I’ve been in TD for some time. My bags fill up. I would like to donate a lot of the materials I’m carrying to our guild hall. But first, they need to be refined at a crafting station. Before today, I could zap to WvW, refine, then port to our guild hall, donate, and finally return right back to my spot in TD and keep going.

Now what? Jump to LA, refine, donate in the hall and waypoint back to TD? This is going to put me nowhere near where I started. Very few waypoints on that map. Just run back? Sure. That map is very frustrating to navigate. Running back won’t take any time at all.

So that’s the issue: the WvW crafting stations were a big convenience. Removing them makes my in-game goals more tedious to reach. How is that good game design?

If the crafting stations need to leave WvW due to load, that’s fine. Move them someplace else, don’t erase them.

Before megaservers, I could leave WvW, jump to LA and, being on my home world, call for help in map chat. Typically, a bunch of people would follow me back to WvW and we’d rally. Can’t do this anymore. If I jump to a megaserver and call for help, I’m more likely to rally our opponents who already outnumber us.

My suggestion is to add a world chat channel. If I jump to LA and talk in world chat, only people from my home world, who have world chat enabled, will hear me. World chat would not extend outside the current map. It’s a way to bring back a little home world focus in PvE.

Here’s a feature I want for mega servers: world chat. World chat is a channel that only members of my home world can access.

We’re not a tier 1 server with constant WvW queues. If we need reinforcements, I can bounce to LA (or some other hub) and call for help. When mega servers replace world specific instances, if I try this, lots of players from different worlds will hear me. Some of them will not be involved in the WvW match, and see my call as spam. Others will be our opponents. If they hear my call for help, it could make things worse. We need a way to call upon members of just our own worlds.

Extra bonus: it will help maintain the sense of community from role playing servers.

People keep telling me there are ways to tell when you’re outnumbered. Sure. I go to wvw join a zerg of 20, and a few minutes later we get rolled over by 80 opposing players. That’s not the point. How do you tell, globally and by how much your world is outnumbered?

We’re getting stomped by a tier 1 server in WvW this week. I started wondering how that other server’s population compares to ours. According to the guesting page, both servers are “Very High” In fact, almost all North American worlds are Very High right now. So, with a few exceptions, all servers display the same population. If all the worlds are the same, the population window tells me nothing.

My suggestion is to add more detail to world population display. I anticipate you will not want to make numbers public. How about ratios? Set the population value for a some server as 100, then express the other servers populations as multiples of that base. So, a pop 200 server has twice as many people, and pop 50 half.

Why bother? It would be easier to accept getting stomped if we could look and see just how outnumbered we are. This suggestion does nothing to change WvW inequality, but documenting the numbers of players on each side should make it easier to accept.

You could still offer free world transfers to servers below, say, population 75. I think it’s a small change, with little potential risk and hope you will consider it.