Guild Wars 2

OPTIONS

- Low Res optional download, to allow for play on lower end and portable computers. Basically reduce poly count of models and the environment, resolution of textures, and all post-processing to a bare minimum. I.e. an optional downloadable pack that MineCraft-izes the game for max performance.

- Save custom Talent / Skill Point presets, so I can go into WvW with one custom, then come out with another. Not everyone’s computer comfortably fits into the Walmart (low), NewEgg (medium), or NASA (highest) categories.

- Option to make loot glitter much larger.

INVENTORY

- Minipets should not be considered “collectable” when using the “Deposit All Collectables” function. In fact, if they could simply be summoned by any character on the account as an optional slot spell (see also: WoW), it would function much better, and I would be much more inclined to actually buy the things. At least make it so they don’t get dumped in the bank with crafting items.

- Color coded bags slots
Should be able to turn on/off bag slot coloring, whereby slots (outlines) and items have a hue to indicate information. Such as equipment that the player cannot wear should be red (including equipment soulbound to another character), equipment that is equipable but of lower level should be greyed, equivalent equipment blue, and superior items as green. Bag slots should be colored based on the bag type, such as those that hide items from vendors – so the player doesn’t accidentally have garbage in that slot. Quest items should have a distinct hue, such as gold or yellow.

- Dragging from inventory to the vendor menu (even if on the Buy pane) should sell items.

- Preview item shortcut / key combo.

- Equip-compare even when “using” the salvage kit.

- One button specifically to salvage gear at the basic level, even if there’s a fee. It’s a pain in the butt to keep having to double click the kit; likewise it should not be disellected if you try to salvage something “non-salvagable”.

- Ability to “lock” inventory and bank items to prevent from accidentally trashing or vendoring the item.

GAMEPLAY

- Give players the ability to replay hearts and story missions. Some are very unique, such as being transformed into a Steam Hulk, and would be great if they could be replayed. If designers feel that replaying personal story quests needs to be justifiable (in terms of logic or lore) then they can be called “Memories”.

- Follow command.

- Reduce pet aggro radius.
- Pet bar for major pets (Epic and Ranger), with passive, guard, and aggressive, as well as attack / stop attacking, possibly with “Pet go to” / “Stay” buttons.

- Allow two players to queue up for sPvP and always be on the same team. This wouldn’t introduce a strong imbalance, especially since I would foresee a good number of players using this. It’s frustrating to queue up with a buddy for some randoms only to end up constantly battling against each other, it eventually has us just leaving sPvP to play WvW or other computer games that allow buddy teams in PvP.

- More gameplay modes to the sPvP as has already been suggested, such as Capture the Flag, El Presidente (or “Defeat the Leader”).

- Dueling. I know that ANet goes to PAINS to keep players from QQing about their class (including the omission of any method of measuring DPS), but honestly people have been wanting this since day one.

- Wider, perhaps MUCH wider event radius detection. Players are frequently asking in zone what if there are any events. Events are significantly more entertaining than ho-hum hearts and it gives players a chance to meet and work together. Hearts are barely any better than question-marks from WoW. I’m sure that ANet doesn’t want players zerging from event to event as a giant mob, which is probably the main reason why the event detection radius is fairly low… So, to compensate, multiple events should co-occur, forcing players to choose which event they want to participate in, splitting up zergs and keeping players on the move, doing interesting things in small groups.

- Ability to block spammy NPCs? I’ve run into a few (and reported them as bugs), where they taunt players in the zone with not only text but an audio file of the taunt, every minute or so… ugh. I can block players, I’d love to be able to block NPC spam too! I’m sure this is a “hard to code” idea, but if not that, then please remove NPCs ability to say anything more than once, ever… at least until it is killed and it respawns again.

- AOE loot. Not that big of a deal since only every other mob drops loot, but it seems to becoming a standard way of handling trash loot in MMOs.

- Should be able to go through or open friendly NPC gates. I can think of at least one friendly NPC town that closes its doors for an event, but you can’t get in. There should be a “side door” players can go through (similar to those found in WvW).

USER INTERFACE

- Hotkey for all UI features, such as Achievements / Talents.

- “Sell Junk” should be on the Buy tab as well as the Sell tab in vendor screens.

- Latency should be visible somewhere on the UI, namely in the form of a basic color bar with mouse-over info. A mini-graph on mouse-over would be very useful for anyone experiencing lag spikes.

- Ping the map, draw on the map for Party members.

- Ability to “Store” and share talents / builds in the game, possibly the ability to link them to and from the internet. FOTM arguments aside, people are still doing this in some form, it’s just made more tedius without a way to quickly import/export builds, especially those that players create for their own use.

- Point Of Interest icon size increase! Alternatively, increase All Icon sizes or to have an icon scale, and allow icons to be filtered. This way if a player is looking ONLY looking for that last POI or skill point, they can make the icons very large and show only what they are looking for.

- Player notes for Friend’s List, Block List, and possibly for Guild Members. “Where do I know him from? Why did I block him?” etc. Even if these notes are stored client-side only, anything is better than nothing.

- Possibility to re-arrange abilities on the hotbar, even if only within the same weapon. When playing across several alts / toons, it would be useful to be able to use similar abilities on the same hotkeys – something best left up to the individual player. I don’t really see the point of forcing an order to player hotbar buttons.

- NPC and enemy names on/off, especially with a shortcut or key combo, likewise a show-hide UI shortcut – for good screenshots.

- Battle text toggle.

- Ability to see guild contribution by individual members.

- Do not auto-move characters at the start screen. Allow players to arrange them manually.

- Trading post “Filter by class” for all items. Likewise, a “Filter by crafting profession(s)” would be useful.

- Ability to dismiss a summoned pet… It’s really obnoxious to have to switch out a skill to dismiss a pet – and it’s impossible if a player doesn’t have another ability to fill that slot, in the case of elite skills.

- The game launcher needs to show download size remaining, not number of files remaining – I couldn’t honestly care any less how many files it is, especially since they all get crammed in the GW2.dat file anyway. Why does it even make any sense to tell us how many files are remaining? And why is it that the largest files seem to get downloaded last!?

- Built-in DPS meter, even if it doesn’t take into account utility or synergy. The fact of the matter is: people are calculating DPS by hand, there is no avoiding the metagame math crowed, they are going to do it with MS Excel if they can’t see it in game. Why even have test dummies in The Heart of the Mists if we can’t gauge a build’s DPS objectively? Are the dummies there for flavor? Are we supposed to TIME how long it takes us to defeat the test dummies?

- Party and Guild invites should include a pop-up or at least a large floating text alert (same as “New Event”). The itsy, bitsy, trial-size mini-icon at the top left is hard to notice if I’m in any kind of engaging content, such as WvW.

- Ability to filter AH results by armor type (Light, Med, Heavy), why this isn’t implemented is beyond me.

- We should also be able to search AH for items that have specific stats. Casual and new players that know how to use an AH don’t want to have to memorize a billion blizzard-esque prefixes and suffixes to have any idea what the stats are. We know what stats we want, but no one cares that it’s called the Ravaging-Bezerker-Monkey-of-Dwayna’s-Flaming-Revenge set.

- Daily quest HUD should be able to show more than just 5 quests, since we pick and choose between many at this point.

- Engineer turret ownership indicator, at least for the player’s turrets. Even a small triangle hovering over the turret would suffice.

- WvW needs to have an “enemy activity” or battle indicator on the map, as well as “open groups”, similar to Planetside 2, with a UI for finding “open” groups / squads / platoons. Right now it’s basically a big mess with people chasing after those that shell out 100 g for the icon on the map. Otherwise, activity indicators would be equally useful, showing relative number of players or combat in particular parts of the map.

- Stacking for #checking or /supplyinfo is silly – that should be implemented as a commander’s UI feature to show all within a certain range at all times, if possible.

- The specific WvW realm that guildies and friends are in should be listed.

GENERAL

- Development roadmap. Similar to what SOE has done for Planetside 2, players really want to know what is going on at ANet and it gives players something to look forward to. MMOs that have been enhanced and updated “behind closed doors” always lost my interest. I ended up leaving those game after waiting for features. My response after hearing from friends that the game saw new features that hadn’t been announced earlier did nothing to make me want to rejoin the game. “Meh, too bad. I’m already playing other games and I’m not interested in that old game anymore.” On the other hand, the stream of updates that we can look forward to in PS2 keeps my interest in the game much higher than if they were silent about what is coming up in future patches. I regularly check the PS2 roadmap, whereas I do NOT check up on old games that I’ve given up on.

- Player Wishlist “Voting”, where players can suggest new features and see the top 20 Wishlist suggestions by players, then vote on which features they want and how much that improvement matters to them (or at least Y/N something, or pick their top 5…) Using this, ANet can prioritize upcoming improvements based on how many players are interested and the resources required to implement the suggestion.

- Able to re-enter a dungeon even if it is “completed”. I DC’d at the last 10% of a bosses’ health (yay for rural internet), and since the dungeon was complete I couldn’t enter the same instance I was in. So I lost out on the completion award.

- Need to have transparent or semi-transparent environment behind the player, so the camera doesn’t jump back and forth violently while in narrow environments.

- First person perspective. There’s no reason not to have this, other than to hide ugly textures, which seems asinine.