In my opinion, game design should be centered around player enjoyment as a first priority. Design aspects, such as special effects, should add to the enjoyment of the game, not take away from it. There are a lot of excellent design elements to GW2 which make this game truly enjoyable, which is why I’d like to bring up a few which I don’t think fit among the rest. Most of my design concerns will be raised as questions:
1) What is the purpose of damaged / broken equipment? The only thing it seems to do for me is add to the number of small tasks I need to do other than actually playing the game. My suggested remedy is to remove this feature entirely. The game will be less “realistic” but more enjoyable.
2) Why do I have to pay small amounts of in-game currency to use a waypoint? Why does this scale to higher prices at higher levels? None of this makes any sense to me at all. The only purpose I can come up with is to discourage waypoint use, which, as stated, makes no sense in this game. I suggest making waypoints free to use, or at least add a character- or account- based achievement to unlock which makes them free to use.
3) If I complete a Living World story chapter on one character, then do it again on another character, why am I not eligible for Mastery achievements and rewards on character #2? It makes no sense to me that the Mastery achievements must be done on the same character, since the achievements themselves are account-wide and, once earned, can’t be repeated with new characters. In its current state, I am sacrificing enjoyment of the game by having to repeat the same story instances on the same characters.
4) Could an “Auto-equip best gathering tool” option be added to the Options menu so that I don’t have to go into my inventory every time a gathering tool runs out? Furthermore, could rich mining nodes and nodes with extra RNG gathers just continue mining so I don’t have to click the “mine” action 2-3 times? I know these questions sound petty, but the number of repeated actions adds up over the course of hundreds of hours of play and these are actual annoyances while playing the game.
5) Why am I always pulling aggro and being slowed/crippled when I am just trying to get somewhere? In most cases, it is impossible to avoid being attacked when you have no plans on fighting. I think a cool fix for this annoyance would be if zone completion unlocked an option to toggle aggro on and off such that (most) “red” text enemies within that zone would become “yellow” text enemies for your character. This would cut back on unnecessary aggro and overall improve my enjoyment of the exploratory aspects of the game.
6) Could we add an “automatically consume next” option to our foods and other consumables that add buffs to the character? Again, this is to reduce the number of times I must revisit my inventory when I just want to be in combat. After Wintersday, especially, I have stacks of consumables which never get used up.
A special thanks goes out to the GW2 dev team for making constant improvements to the quality of the game. These improvements are the reason I haven’t set aside Guild Wars 2. I know that with new content and new patch releases, the game will actually get better (more enjoyable to play) and not worse. Strangely, most games go the other way.
I would love to hear comments on my proposed ideas (numbered 1-6). Thanks!
