Guild Wars 2

I was quite excited when I first saw that my character had a Town Clothes mode of appearance. However, I quickly became disappointed as I discovered that there are almost not alternative outfits to the default outfit. Why is that? The selection of outfits and pieces of clothing on the Gem Store are disappointing because they tend to be inconsistent with the themes of the game. At the same time, I see NPCs all over the world with very interesting and attractive outfits. I’m much more interested in getting one of those medieval gowns for my character than a chef’s uniform or boxing gloves. Why don’t you make NPC outfits available as Town Clothes?

Social interaction in MMORPGs tends to be a bit clunky. Developers usually go to some trouble to create animated gestures, but methods for activating them are often too slow to keep up with the pace of conversation. When fast enough, such gestures are useful for general communication and coordination, not just for role playing. Also, the lack of public feedback for UI commands makes it more difficult for other players to make sense of a player’s apparent inactivity or to kitten his or her readiness to travel or fight.

The following are a few small features that would improve players’ ability to interact with each other:

1. Animated gestures can be activated by typing a unique substring of the gesture name (e.g., “/sal” for salute). Makes animated gestures easier to activate quickly.

2. Animated gestures are automatically directed to the targeted avatar or object. Remove the use of @ to direct gestures. Too slow.

3. Enable key binding for animated gestures for quick activation.

4. Animated gestures (e.g., wave, nod, shrug, etc.) appear on weapon bar when Town Clothes are active. Players can assign a gesture to a particular slot like they can with other slot skills. Makes animated gestures easier to activate quickly.

5. Actively stowing weapon displays animated gestures in weapon skill slots. Drawing weapon, activating utility skill or taking damage restore weapon skills to those slots.

6. Animated gesture for open Map (e.g., avatar studies a map). Activates when Map is open. Cancels when Map is closed. Shows other players what a player is doing and that s/he is cut off entirely from the world. Improves group coordination.

7. Animated gestures for other UI windows (e.g., Inventory, Mail, Trading Post, etc.). Unique animation for each. Shows other players what the player is doing. Improves mutual understanding and coordination.

8. Animated gesture for when the player is composing a turn at chat. Improves mutual understanding and coordination. (Alternative is to post chat on a word-by-word basis, like in There.com, but that is a bigger change.)

9. Show in-world chat bubbles when HUD is turned off. Enables you to chat with other players when playing with HUD off (for better aesthetic experience). Note: chat bubbles can still be turned off through Chat Options.

Arya of House Stark, on the run since the fall of Winterfell, sells her sword as she searches for surviving members of her noble family. She poses as a common boy, Arry Snow, and is accompanied by her menacing direwolf, Nymeria. Her band of fellow sellswords calls her “Arry Snowfall” after she once fell in combat under the weight of greatsword. She builds her strength and balance for the day when she will recover her father’s greatsword “Ice” and kill his executioners with it.

A coworker saw this as the background on my laptop and thought it was a real place.

Please add an accessibilty option for the color blind. Both of my sons are color blind and love your game, but sometimes they suffer serious disadvantages due to your color choices. The other day my oldest son was participating in a gate siege in World vs. World, and he continually stood inside enemies’ red circles on the ground. I kept telling him, “You’re standing in a red circle!” He just got frustrated and said, “I can’t see them.”

Providing an option that changes the red circles to BLUE should solve this problem for color blind people (7% of males). Or even changing the TONE of the circle so it is lighter or darker than the ground might do it too.

Another feature that might not be accessible to the color blind is the green/red target symbols for siege weapons. For example, when operating an arrow cart and moving the target symbol around the ground, the only thing that tells you you’re out of range is that the green symbol turns red. I’m not sure if my sons can see this, but if the tones of the green and red are the same, they probably can’t. A simple fix would be to change the SHAPE of the target symbol when it changes color.

LOVE the game, especially World vs. World. Please enable my sons to love it as much.