Guild Wars 2

Just to throw it out there: One of the best-received events in Ultima Online was the Treasures of Tokuno.

This system had a very special system to distribute rewards. You could kill any type of creature on the Tokuno islands, and it had a small chance to drop a random minor artifact. If the creature you just killed didn’t drop one, then its Fame value (related to the creature’s difficulty) was added to a hidden Tokuno Points variable attached to the player. The next time you would kill a creature and it would drop nothing, it’d make a second roll that was related to the accumulated Tokuno Points and if the roll was passed, then you’d get a minor artifact and the Tokuno Points would be reset to 0.

The second part of the event is that you can trade any combination of 10 minor artifacts for a major artifact of your choice.

I like this system because distribution was fair and more or less guaranteed, you’d usually get an artifact every hour or so. Since there wasn’t really any best monster to kill, players spread out and hunted creatures they preferred hunting, and they’d get artifacts as a bonus. I also like that unlike a token system, the minor artifacts themselves are already usable to the player. However, if you got minor artifacts that you didn’t like (since they were generated randomly), you can dispose 10 of them to get a NON RANDOM greater artifact of choice. This is awesome, because one way or another, the minor artifacts would be valuable (either because you choose to use them directly, or as trade-in material to progress to something else you want).

http://www.uoguide.com/Artifacts_%28ToT%29

By the way, the randomly picked minor artifacts weren’t always less powerful than major artifacts. Leurocian’s Mempo ended up being one of the most desirable items in the game for a long time.

No I don’t want a season 3, I hate the living story and its characters with a passion.

I don’t care if it’s packed into an expansion, but I want to have new features that fundamentally change the game.

1) open world zones without waypoints
2) building houses and guild halls in said open world
3) crafting and delivering packs in said open world
4) PVP in said open world to steal packs
5) seas and sailing with packs
6) new skills and the ability to actually customize your skill bar
7) dual or tripleclassing
8) ability to wear any armor on any character
9) NPC heroes/henchmen
10) challenging dungeons for more than 5 players
11) players actually PERMANENTLY determining the outcome of live events and being able to pick sides (more players siding with scarlet and choosing not to defend lion’s arch? it’s burned down PERMANENTLY)
12) Being able to pick an actual side (including the dark factions) and build reputation with your faction and having unique content per faction

At the moment the only 3 things I enjoy about guild wars 2 are the targetless combat system, the wardrobe and the lack of subscription fee. The rest is just dull and boring.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Shakkara.2641:

In my opinion, Black Hole is one of the few awesome stories that came out of Disney.

Unfortunately, it flopped for many people and was disappointing on returns. Not hard to agree with it being “not-good” as a movie since it had a lot of padding in places and . . . “Dat Ending”.

Awesome story? Possibly. It was atmosphere and the escalating pacing which made it work better.

Errr, I personally think that the ending was one of the best things of the movie.

Definitely an order of magnitude more powerful and original than dat ending of Interstellar. What a terribly disappointing movie that was for me. I couldn’t identify with any of the characters, it was full of plotholes, no atmosphere, only had the special effects of the space scenes keeping it mildly interesting, but if you want SFX space scenes there’s already Gravity that does that a lot better.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

If only Guild Wars 2 had a villain like Reinhardt with a looming evil monsterous Maximilian sidekick instead of Scarlet with wtfmarionette, how bloody awesome would that be?

. . . ehh, not sure. That dynamic is powerful but I don’t know if it would fit all that well just lifted and placed in translation. First you’d need a villain who can muster enough charisma and “unsettling aura” to make you on edge even as you admit you don’t have a reason to distrust them yet. Second, you’d need their devoted protector to basically be a non-entity as a personality and just the enforcement stick used to beat people who get out of line . . . something which does not work well considering there’s no need for that.

Lastly . . . we can do better with what we have already.

What exactly does GW2 have going for it in terms of story though? I think all its terrible and I want to skip it as much as possible. It lacks interesting characters and is just generally dumb and childish. It’s like watching Shrek or something. Or any Disney cartoon shudders.

Guild Wars 1 did a much better job in that regard, in particular with Guild Wars Factions. I really enjoyed the Shiro story arc, how Shiro starts out loyal but gets increasingly tormented and corrupted over time, and the whole aftermath of the curse slowly manifesting and all that.

Guild Wars 2 totally messed up the Guild Wars universe for me, although it went downhill with Eye of the North already, IMO. Factions and Nightfall were much stronger storywise.

Everything in Guild Wars 2 just makes me want to kill all my allies for being annoying kittens and take the throne for myself. I’d pay good money to see that stupid Kasmeer burned at the stake, Trahearne flung off an airship and have the rest of their heads served on a silver plate. Marjory, Faren, Thackaray, Eir, Caithe, Rox, kill them all. I don’t want to be around such people and I sure as hell don’t want them on my team.

I’d take people like Razah, Magrid the Sly, Master of Whispers, General Morghan, Livia, etc. Hell, I’d even take Norgu over any of the current cast. At least he keeps his annoying mouth shut.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Blackmoon.6837:

I just hope there’s more concern for serious and adult storytelling. Her Disney background is leaving me rather skeptical.

Sleeping Beauty says hello for adult storytelling. Likewise, “Aladdin”, despite having ol Robin Williams . . . or how about other things, like Pete’s Dragon? (Hey, child slavery! >thumbsup<) Or Black Hole?

I know they’re synonymous with “lighter and softer” but seriously . . . Disney had enough to hit people hard. Want proof? I’m about to say something, so trigger warning for an entire generation:

Bambi’s Mother.

In my opinion, Black Hole is one of the few awesome stories that came out of Disney. First because it is original and not a rip-off of some existing story and second because the characters were quite well done, despite their often poor dialogues. And the whole atmosphere of the movie is great. No sci-fi movie comes close to the awesomeness of the bridge design of the Cygnus, in my opinion.

If only Guild Wars 2 had a villain like Reinhardt with a looming evil monsterous Maximilian sidekick instead of Scarlet with wtfmarionette, how bloody awesome would that be?

Not all MMOs are grinding…

• Ultima Online before AOS
• EVE Online
• Archeage
• A Tale in the Desert
• Wurm Online
• Second Life

And any other sandbox game. Because sandbox games either will pit you against other players, so the endgame is to kill other players and conquer their open-world territory, or it is to do social engineering and become well-known and well-liked amongst other players, or it is to express yourself by creating the most awesome new constructions and content.

I would love to have sandbox features in Guild Wars 2. I kinda expected it to have that, and was very disappointed to find another grindy themepark game. I’ve been having a lot more fun with Archeage these past few months, but unfortunately that game has many bugs. For me the perfect game would have the combat system of Guild Wars 2, the class and equipment system of Guild Wars 1, the player housing and open world of Archeage and the territorial PVP and player-driven economy of EVE Online.

Not too hard, but I did find it extremely BORING.

I hate leveling in any MMO but GW2 was probably one of the most annoying leveling processes I ever experienced. It just takes forever. You want to do your personal story for quick XP, but there are huge gaps so you have to grind XP somewhere else. Crafting cost a load of money. You have to replace your gear every few levels. And then there are 80 levels, urrrghhhhhhh!!!!

To tell you the truth, I reached max level on my first character by exploiting a dynamic event that respawned every few minutes in the early days. I paid the neighbour’s kid 10 bucks to sit there and spam 1 for a day. That made me go from level 20 to around level 50 while I was at work. After that I could do the personal story for another bunch of levels and had some money from the event completion for crafting. Had I not done that I’m sure I would have quit the game my first week, just as I quit Wildstar after 3 hours due to the atrocious leveling experience.

Since that, I have raised three more characters to 80 (through normal gameplay). The experience of level 1-50 is truly awful, in my opinion. Mainly because it takes too long and because you can’t really customize your character much. In Guild Wars 1, the leveling experience was great. Only 20 levels, and you get nice attribute points and new meaningful skill unlocks all the time. Guild Wars 2 skills and traits are quite ‘meh’, in my opinion.

And I want to be able to reach max level in a day or two.

Vayne.8563:

Ashen.2907:

Vayne.8563:

Making more from an event that was never meant to be failed to profit is considered an exploit.

Anet’s stated position on purposefully failing an event (for profit):

Chris Cleary.8017:

There are really two sides to this, and when it comes down to it, you are both right – and you are both wrong. Both sides have the right to complete the task that they set out to do (completing or not completing).

Note that Mr Cleary states that the side attempting to fail the event has the same right to do so as does the side attempting to complete it.

If the company says that exploiting is not allowed, but that purposefully failing an event for profit is allowed, then they have said that failing an event for profit is not an exploit.

That said, I believe that failing an event should not be more rewarding than succeeding and hopefully Anet can come up with a fix to this trend. If they redefine purposeful event failing as an exploit int he future that would be their right, but as of the their most recent comment (unless I have missed something) on the matter it is not.

So how do you explain the Iron Marches bans for farming linen by not completing an event?

I farmed that one for weeks and have not been banned.

The people that got banned there were most likely botting (and not admitting later that they were using a bot)

It probably is only in effect on characters under level 80, so they get more gear from drops that they can use for leveling up.

It doesnt really make sense in a level 80 character, because you don’t really rely on drops for outfitting a level 80 character (because you only want exotics and ascended and those barely drop – you go for dungeon tokens and crafting or just buy off TP).

Vayne.8563:

Shalloe.4867:

Never did the blix farm but was wondering why was it nerfed? was it blocking progess for peoples story line? or because the event failing was more rewarding to farmers then succeeding and they was giving grief to players for completing the event?

If it was the second then surely they need to take a look at respawn timers for failing on all events and adjust them otherwise the problem is just going to continue to move from event to event until they are all adjusted

It was changed because it divided the community in an unhealthy way. Events were meant to be finished. Not my opinion, but what the devs are saying.

Making more from an event that was never meant to be failed to profit is considered an exploit.

Sorry, but players have a CHOICE. Do A and get X, or do B and get Y.

Making a choice in a game that is marketed to give players the feeling that the world “Cares that they’re there!” is an exploit now? Lol, so players making a choice and getting rewarded by the designed consequences is not allowed…

If failing an event is not allowed, then it shouldn’t be an option in the game at all. Then we can have a nicely linear WoW game without a “living breathing world” that doesn’t care about player input at all.

This is by design, and if its not intended, then Anet should change their design to reward ‘proper’ behavior a lot more. Right now, the rewards from completing an event are pretty much non-existent, while the actual loot comes from champion mobs that spawn as part of the event. So the question for farmers is simply: “Which event chain spawns the most champions the fastest?”

If Anet wants to change this mentality, then it should properly reward successful event completion with loot that exceeds the champion loot.

Shalloe.4867:

Never did the blix farm but was wondering why was it nerfed? was it blocking progess for peoples story line? or because the event failing was more rewarding to farmers then succeeding and they was giving grief to players for completing the event?

If it was the second then surely they need to take a look at respawn timers for failing on all events and adjust them otherwise the problem is just going to continue to move from event to event until they are all adjusted

Trolling players actively go there to succeed the event that the train wants to fail, while noone cared about that particular event before. They actively go dance and all that sort of stuff to taunt people. And then they report people that smack them, just for lulz.

Then they come to forums and whine whine whine how evil farmers make their life miserable and try to get Anet to nerf the event.

Then they send mails and whispers to the commanders that ran farming trains to laugh at them for ruining their farms.

Let’s never fail gates of Arah either, cause that is clearly an exploit, eh?

Who cares that noone can do the event that unlocks their traits.

Morsus.5106:

I see capes clipping through my Charr’s torso every time he runs.

Solution is super simple.

Just race-restrict certain cape items, similar to cultural armor.

Normal capes and cloaks -> Human
Plant wings, vine cloaks -> Sylvari
Fur cloaks -> Norn
Technogizmo -> Asura
Samuraibanners -> Charr

Option 1, because 2 will be such a hit-or-miss thing.

We already listed our top 3’s of most important issues a while back.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/ArenaNet-Reviews-E255820.htm

Just pointing to this, maybe that helps some players to understand why Anet is struggling and why it is not really the developer’s fault. Pretty hard criticism towards the management and vision of the company. I just hope some of their managers actually read their company reviews.

I was pretty shocked to see they only have ~50 people… I thought Anet had like 300 people and had expectations for new features based on a 300 man strong team. Makes me appreciate the things that they do manage to pull off much more though, but also makes me a bit worried about the future.

ColinJohanson.2394:

ipan.4356:

May I ask, “not allowed” by whom? You guys are the developers. Who do you need permission from?

Sorry that should say: “Our company policy is not to talk about what’s in development”.

-CJ

I can’t wait for the first game studio that just puts their whole SCRUM planning thing and backlog online for all to see.

And then has players vote every month on stuff in the backlog, with the player vote deciding in part what goes in to the next sprints.

EVE Online did that to a degree, with the actual voting stuff too. Many people in the company wanted none of that, but players loved it while it lasted. They had these elections, where 9 players were voted in by the rest of the players and flown into CCP HQ to raise issues and be an actual stakeholder in the company.

Can’t wait for another game studio to go all-in on this approach.

http://skemman.is/stream/get/1946/5394/16183/1/MA-ritgerd_heimspeki_pjo.pdf here’s a whole bunch of blahblah if you don’t know what EVE did.

continued…

Steps on the right track fail to have an impact

There have been moments where Anet did produce content that seemed to cater to player wishes, but in the end failed to have any impact. Examples are the new skills and new traits. It feels like delivering exactly what players asked for, but still there is disappointment. Why is that?

1) It is building on a broken foundation. If you introduce new skills and traits, the only thing I am judging them by is if it makes me deal more DPS. Not more DPS? Then I’m not going to use them. For PVP it’s a little bit more complex, but still. Compare the thief traits Invigorating Precision to the old Executioner trait. I was interested in InvPrec, but why would I take it? I can kill my enemy 10% faster if I take Executioner, but does InvPrec make me 10% more resilient? No. Not even if it allowed me to leech 10% of health, as a lot of my resilience actually comes from simply dodging and blinding not direct damage mitigation or healing (IF I get hit, odds are high that I lose). So we’re back at DPS being king, for tanking also, because killing enemy 10% faster = 10% less time it can deal damage to you, and that’s especially true for the PVP thief metagame, thieves being total glass cannons and all.
2) The content is just not enough. Whoop, a few end game bosses that unlock a few traits that don’t really do much. While I appreciate the effort, it’s not really a return to GW1’s skill hunting, nowhere close.
3) It brought a bunch of negative side effects: Leveling a new character is now incredibly tedious, because what little character customization options we had is now gated down completely. I already found the first 60 levels of the game a terrible experience, now just can’t bring myself to level any additional characters at al.

Disassociation between what players ask for and what devs create

Often, it feels like players are pretty much in agreement when asking for things. And then devs doing exactly the opposite.

Players: We want a more meaningful role in the story! Our personal story has Trahearne make all the decisions, not us!
Devs: Let’s make this epic living story, which is run by a bunch of ancillaries! Players really love to help out ancillaries, yes?

Players: We would really like to have capes!
Devs: Let’s make loads of non-combinable OUTFITS for the gemstore! (that still have clipping issues anyway…)

Players: We want Cantha/Elona and a more realistic Chinese/oriental theme!
Devs: Here, have some giant robots and cybernetic madness!

Players: We want more rewards from dungeons etc! And more skills to personalize our characters!
Devs: Here, let’s add a new rarity tier! Ascended gear! Go craft it now!!! (this really made me hate Anet more than any other thing you did – and it also forced people to stick with their Power-Precision-Ferocity stats even more as experimentation with different stat sets became unaffordable)

While I can see that the devs have been busy, they just do not seem to work on things that I want, and that is the main source of disappointment. Many people might not have wanted this living story stuff, so they disregard it and go shout: “Muuuuuuhhhh Anet has done NOTHING these past two years!”. Anet did do stuff, just not any of the things they wanted.

If you ask me personally which things Anet did these past two years that I actually wanted, I can only answer with “Wardrobe!”, “Secondary upgrade slot in 2h weapons!” and “Heart of the Mists!” (at least some aspects of it are nice).

There is potentially a way to address this problem

There was one big moment in GW2 history where the devs actually… 1) gave players a choice in the outcome of an event and 2) gave players influence on the future of the game. This happened during the Evon VS Kiel election. If players used their ingame votes to vote for Evon, they’d get this fractal and that discount. If they voted for Kiel, they’d get another fractal and some other discount. Which was a totally AWESOME idea, and I think devs really were onto something there.

Why have this interaction on toxic forums where most of the players don’t even go to? Why not just have this interaction directly in game? Make a bunch of NPCs, let them present their vision of the future in the game in the game itself, and then let players play to vote for what they want! You’ll have a much more representative result, everyone feels they have an impact, and you can do what you do best: Make actual game content which players enjoy playing instead of fighting an uphill battle on the forums. Everyone happy! And if the things I want are not what the majority of players votes for, I can live with that a lot better than when I see devs make arbitrary decisions and implement content that I do not like at all.

Chris, thanks a lot for the interaction, I really enjoy it and I think so are you.

Let me sum up some of the problems I perceive with the game. I agree with Lost Prophet that some of them require a fundamental rework of core systems in the game, and the reluctance of Anet to touch any of these fundamental flaws is really the main reason I lost hope.

The game doesn’t care that I’m there

This really is the biggest thing for me. The manifesto really talked a lot about putting the player central. But I just don’t see any of that in the game. The outcome of dynamic events resets 5 minutes later, bosses respawn 5 minutes later, the personal/living stories are on rails and doesn’t allow us to make any meaningful choice. In Guild Wars 1, I could at least decide which of the NPC characters I wanted in my party and with Heroes, I could even choose their gear and skillbars directly. In Guild Wars 2, I’m forced to play with Trahearne, Kasmeer, Rox, etc, while I don’t like any of them, both in their appearance and their actual character. Only possible exception is Marjory. But I can’t decide to leave the annoying Kasmeer at home

Solution: Let players make a party of NPCs of their choice for their future living story. They actually have to play some specific content to unlock an NPC to join them (like Razah in GW1) and once they have gathered enough NPCs they can proceed with the living story, having these NPCs join them. Allow us to personalize/customize these NPCs to a certain degree.

So you may say: Well but then we can’t do as much voiceacting and cutscenes for the narrative! I’d say, mewmew the voice acting and cutscenes. I want the choice in my hands and I don’t care if the game becomes text-only! See attached image. I think that applies very much for GW1 vs GW2 too. Even though you unlocked zones one at a time in GW1, GW2 still feels way more constraining somehow.

Fundamental Problems with Character Stats/Skills and Battles

This is one thing that really irks me and I wonder why the developers do not see this. It’s a bit hard to explain, so bear with me…

We have weapons that give us a package of up to 5 skills to use in battle.

Then there are there stats on our gear that influences the effectiveness of those skills in different ways. Some aspects of skills are influenced by a single stats (eg, healing done comes from Healing Power stat) while other skills are influenced by a boatload of stats (eg, direct damage is influenced by Power, Precision and Ferocity). Then there is one big odd thing: There is also Condition Damage. It is influenced by both Condition Damage and Condition Duration.

And now the developers ask us to pick three stats… But then I look at my weapons and their skills. And I see that most weapons are actually hybrid weapons. They have some skills that do direct damage and some skills that do condition damage, and even more fun, they have hybrid skills that do both direct damage AND condition damage. And you can probably see the point that I want to make: I am forced to choose between either direct damage OR condition damage, which as a result makes some of the skills that I get from my weapon useless to me.

In GW1, you had diminishing returns (each level of an attribute required an increasing amount of points). While in GW2, you have incremental returns (power, precision and ferocity multiplying eachother’s effectiveness), which makes it unattractive to raise multiple stats, in most cases. In addition, in GW1, an attribute made ALL of the effects of an associated skill better: If you increase points in swordmanship, both the bleeding duration of Sever Artery and the direct damage of galrath slash would improve. So all sword skills were a valid choice.

Right now we have this monoculture, because min-maxing power-precission-ferocity has the best result and investing statpoints in anything else is wasteful. So we end up with a monoculture of DPS-centered characters.

I personally really think the stat system has to be reworked fundamentally. Or even removed altogether…

Chris, regarding harsh and vocal people on forums criticising your game, take a look at this study:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2377892/Are-online-critics-actually-fans-disguise-Writers-negative-reviews-loyal-customers.html

Most people that lash out at you are not trolls from competitors or people trying to ruin GW2. They’re very serious people trying to use this harsh language to wake you up, because they feel they have ownership of your brand and must steer you away from making mistakes by any means necessary.

I must say I have been in that stage myself. I have been playing Ultima Online since the beginning, that’s what, 15+ years now? And I have been very harsh towards their devs, to the point that moderators started warning me and even temp banning me due to the things I said to the devs. I really felt devs were doing a terrible job and that I could do much better (ok maybe I could, since I’m now a game design veteran). I just felt that the devs were not listening, making mistake after mistake, even making mistakes I specifically warned about in advance that clearly blew up in their face afterwards. So my frustration got deeper and deeper and my tone harder and harder and seemingly less constructive (because all the constructive arguments were already made 10 times over the past years, and never listened to, so I felt there was no reason to repeat them).

Eventually one of the devs contacted me through private message and added me to ICQ. And we had a very long conversation. And the things we discussed were actually fixed or implemented over time. The game was so much better for everyone afterwards.

Mike, I don’t need to hear exactly the nitty-gritty details of an amazing feature to be released in 6 months, but I would like to have Anet to communicate its vision for the game more often. Especially if/when it changes.

For example, I still feel this game is very much dumbed down, compared to Guild Wars 1. Even though some skills have been added, it is no-where close to the amount of creativity and diversity the players had available to their characters in Guild Wars 1. What I would like to hear, is if Anet considers lack of build diversity a problem or not.

Those are the kind of things I want to talk about. Not about the gritty details of possible solutions they may and may not do, because those are understandably subject to change.

There was this game a long time ago called puzzle pirates.

To get rich, you needed to invest a month or of income to purchase a ship and use (and risk) that ship to tackle very hard dungeons. Ships could sink and be lost permanently.

If you had a ship, you needed to invite other players (4 to 100 or more) onboard to act as your crew. They would play puzzles and this would allow you as captain to perform actions with your ship such as moving it around, firing cannons and repairing damage.

When the dungeon was completed, loot would be distributed between captain and crew automatically; ofc the captain and any officers would get a much larger share than simple crewmen. But this was OK because the captain is the one to put his ship at risk and allowed many other players to access the dungeon.

Good captains got much rewards and could eventually buy bigger ships (and entertain more players) while bad captains lost their ship and had to start at the bottom of the ladder. Anyone could pile up money and buy a small ship and try to climb the ladder, but few had the skills to become successful.

I think such mechanics are fair and awesome.

Aren’t chatlogs kept somewhere?

If they are, he can see who asked him about the gold.

1 Hero of Lion’s Arch
2 GWAMM
3 The Emperor
4 Blazing Light
5 Avenger

I want female armor that not only fully covers, but also does not show boobs in any way.

In particular heavy armor that does not have any breast-cups. Currently there’s not much choice in that regard.

Breastcups are totally unrealistic for heavy armor. You don’t need them as armor will just flatten those boobs. And it’s dangerous as they deflect blows and arrows right at your heart. All historical examples of women in platemail (for example, Jeane d’Arc) had them wear identical platemail as men do.

That is what I want for my characters. I’m female in real life but I play mostly male characters because I totally hate most of the female armor.

Phalanx Armor for men, so totally awesome.
And for women? Ugly helmet, ugly torso piece, ugly everything. So disappointing

Even Game of Thrones does it right, with heavily armored women like Brienne running around with platemail identical to male ones. THAT is the look I want for women!

I rather have content that changes how the game plays (new skills, customizable weapon skills, 3rd heavy armor class, etc) than something that costs a lot of work and just gives some new looks. I think a new race is way too much work because they need to make whole new starting area, new story, etc. I would rather have those devs work on new end-game areas and content that everyone can enjoy (For example Cantha and a Kurzick vs Luxon or more quests and story for the three Orders)

I really want a house.

It is the only reason I still have two active and paying Ultima Online accounts for 16 years now. It has housing that is just the best ever: Completely tile based and complete freedom, so basically how you build a house in The Sims, but more advanced.

I like the idea of putting houses in the mists, but with the servers being merged, it would be nice to have the actual houses directly in the game world (not instanced), just like Ultima Online does it. Would need some expansion of the available land, but wouldn’t it be awesome to just explore this giant new wilderness and establish towns and set up services from your house for other players to use?

Also it would be great if guilds could get together and build these floating islands in the mists. You could get the islands of guilds to collide with eachother every once in a while and have GVG battles emerge over it.

No, I NEED capes, even if they have to delete the whole Charr race to get it!

I’d like a riding broom kinda of item that does floaty Mursaat movement animation.

Personally I hate the statsystem and would like to see the system itself overhauled.

Why?

Because right now there are so many different stats that all influence damage in some way.

But there are also skills that are hybrid, that do both direct damage and condition damage. Why would such skills rely on two completely different stat groups?

Why are the stats split up in two groups anyway? Why can those not be merged?

For damage we now have:

• Power
• Precision
• Crit damage
• Condition Damage
• Condition Duration

To be honest I think this is silly. Why not merge condition damage and power, and condition duration and precision, for example? Then at least those hybrid skills are viable to use.

In the PVP locker, you cannot select the icons for racial armor for a race that isn’t your own. I suspect something similar in the wardrobe.

Hello, I am just wondering, about the new account wardrobe.

First I must say I really love this feature, I’ll sure buy many of the premium armors when I can apply them infinite times.

But this also brings me to a problem: At a previous event, I purchased many duplicates of the toxic shoulders and gloves, so I would have one for each of my main characters. I still have two of each of these items in my bank box, these haven’t been applied to any items. But with the account wardrobe feature, I can get as many duplicates of these items that I want (as long as I have transmutation stones, but I will end up with over 100 charges so…).

Anyway, would it be possible to get a refund on these still unused items? Or an exchange to any other cosmetic items of equal value?

Bah levels.

Why can’t we remove that horribly outdated mechanic entirely?

I really wonder what computer you’re using if you’re getting such shockingly low framerates.

My housemate is currently borrowing my 5 year old laptop and finds GW2 playable enough.

I agree that GW2 isn’t the best performance wise (I had a few overheating issues before they fixed that) but it should be able to run at least 25FPS on even the worst hardware, as long as you configure your computer somewhat well and don’t have 2 virusscanners running in the background, etc.

Base game has like 100 armor sets.
Price of game is 40 bucks.
So value of 1 new armor set is 40 cents.

And the base game includes a load more content than just armors.

I just rather pay 20-30 bucks for an expansion with a dozen more armors and other content in it than pay many times the price of the original game on ‘microtransactions’.

That, and the skins are just a pain due to their single-use nature. Once you purchase them you should be able to apply them an unlimited amount of times, like the festival hats, bonus items and costumes in guild wars 1. I’d be more inclined to pay their high price if I would get the convenience of applying the skins whenever I want, as many times I want.

CrashTestAuto.9108:

I think the important message from this thread is that the character selection really needs to be extended. I mean, really. Eight classes in the game and only seven characters can be viewed simultaneously, only in thumbnail, and even the highlighted one doesn’t have their weapons ? Where’s the bonfire from the original Prophecies screen? Or at the very least, the option to see a grid of all alt thumbnails.

Agreed!

I would like a selection screen like what you get in some beat-em-up games. A page full of portraits and then a preview of the character on the side. That’d be nice.

Supported, a lot of the stuff you listed is quite easy to do and really benefits players a lot (account wide dyes, turning soulbound items into account bound are my favorite two)

I’m on UW and I’ve been looking for a chance to leave for another server for at least 2 months now, its just that it is too expensive to my tastes. With the free transer, I’ll definitely leave.

I’m already guesting on Desolation 90% of the time, as on Underworld PVE is pretty fail too. I haven’t seen them able to beat the three watchknights and even if they do they often fail at holoscarlet. On Desolation overflows kill them most of the time so yeah…

Mursaat or Margonite.

Well I think any MMO that didn’t have levels and all kinds of gear tiers would be infinitely better than the everquest/wow clones.

But that’s coming from someone that has played ultima online and EVE online for many years and knows that it’s possible to have a succesful MMO that works differently.

I think we just have to wait for Everquest Next or similar games that offer a next-generation MMO that has sandbox features and removes/changes the progression grind. Then all the other MMO designers suddenly go “oooooh, see how succesful that is, we want it toooooo” and start copying that design instead of copying the previous most succesful MMO, WoW.

It’s the main reason I like thief most. All the other classes just spam everything as soon as the cooldown is over. With thief I can make a choice what to spend my initiative on.

…if only we had the energy system from GW1 from all classes and skills on a much shorter cooldown. It was so much better…

Sylv.6514:

No, we need LESS of this. My ele is the only character i have in a semi-skimpy outfit, and that is just because 99% of the light armors are either skimpy, or just plain ugly. The game needs more decent looking light armor sets that aren’t revealing.

This. And female heavy sets that do not emphasise breasts.

There is no realistic metal armor at all that has breast cups or anything like that. Look up statues of Jeane d’Arc. She wears male metal armor! I WANT THAT FOR MY FEMALE WARRIOR! NO BOOBS!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Statue_de_Jeanne_d%27Arc_Place_du_martroi_Jargeau.jpg

Due to the fact that you can perform task X for a million years straight and STILL not get the result you want.

I really like a system that was used in Ultima Online a long time ago as part of the Treasures of Tokuno system: Every time you killed something, the system would give your account some treasure points. It’d then roll a random number and see if was under the treasure points, and if so, treasure points were reset to 0 and you’d get a treasure item.

So basically, each time you FAILED to get an item, the odds of getting an item next time you killed something slightly increased.

Everyone loved that system, as it would average out much faster and not be subject to the extreme streaks that normal RNG would usually have (not give unlucky person A anything, but give lucky person B a lot of it)

On one side I’m glad that it doesn’t have a bonus and we don’t seem to get better infinite tools every few months that we need to rebuy to replace our old ones.

On the other hand Anet never replied to the original issue and while I still need an infinite sickle, I’m not planning to buy anything until they made a statement about these tools and what we can expect in this regard in the future. Else I fear they just MIGHT release a better sickle in 6 weeks and I’m stuck with a bad one.

Agree. Buying an armor should unlock it permanently and allow you to apply it as many times as you like.

Yep I asked the same thing recently. Plant/flower cape things for sylvari please.

And fur capes for norn.

CAPES CAPES CAPES!

Guild Wars 2 is just a severely dumbed down version of Guild Wars 1.

Dumbed down combat
Dumbed down character customization
Dumbed down mobs
Dumbed down party size

Since the only thing your character can do is DPS and there aren’t really any smart creative character builds out there, or different roles for characters in the party, there’s no real need to have more than 5 people in a party as it’ll just mess all the other dumbed down systems up. Many boons don’t really stack well. You can’t really use more than 1 guy dealing conditions. Boring combo fields is just about all we got in the way of skill syngergies. Etc etc.

5 man parties aren’t the main problem with this game. The stupid dumbed down combat, character and skill mechanics are.

1) To have the ability to switch when Anet decided to nerf your main class into the ground.

2) For completeness sake I want to have one of each class at 80

3) To have the ability to buy all cultural armors and get the title

4) So you can harvest more ori and ancient wood nodes per day

5) Some dungeons are easier to do with certain classes

6) To have some variety in gameplay

7) Cause having a lineup of pretty characters looks nice and inviting when you start the game

8) Cause I rather have a single set of armor per character and a lot of characters, than having multiple soulbound sets for one character in case you want to switch build, half of which go unused

The only thing that annoys me is that it costs an arm and a leg to get ascended kit and it is almost impossible to outfit all of them

Suggestion for new items for the gem stores, now that we no longer have cosmetic-only items:

• Sickle that gives toxic spores
• New finishers that give PVP rank points when used
• Armor skin items that give an extra luck boost to the armor they’re applied to
• Node for the home instance that drops an azurite orb each day
  Etc…

:(

I play with sounds disabled so I wouldn’t know.

Racial capes.

If Charr cant have capes, why not make them racial, so nice velvet human capes, flowery sylvari capes, woolen norn capes, etc.