Guild Wars 2

Don’t the huge orange circles already appear on the map? I agree, not having enough bodies is a problem, but it’s not like we can force people to show up.

I think it’s also a map thing… for example, the noob maps don’t seem to have much trouble finding people for events, and if you say something on map chat there’ll usually be a bunch of replies. On the other hand, the levels 40, 50, 60 maps tend to be quiet most of the time. Heck, last night I ran around one for like a solid hour and didn’t run into anyone else at all. That was pretty unnerving, since when I stepped into Lion’s Arch it was full as usual, even got kicked into overflow. Some maps just aren’t popular.

Agreed, I (tentatively) think this is a good idea. I don’t PvP – much – so I really don’t care about it. What’s so vital about identifying someone properly anyway? It’s not like the traditional trinity is in the game, all you need is a few seconds to see what skills the other guy is throwing out.

If a few seconds to identify someone’s class in PvP is a problem, well that just reinforces my dislike of PvP, why play something where you kill or get killed in seconds… that’s not a fight, that’s scissors-rock-paper hotkey spamming.

Options allow you to toggle on display names above other characters, but how come your own character doesn’t get it?

I second this; as a fellow screenshotaholic and game modder, I take thousands of shots in every game I play.

Being able to supply a custom string affix would be very useful, but I’d settle for Vick’s $name.$region.$date format if it had to be hardcoded.

On that note, I wouldn’t object to a guild advertisement chat channel – let’s face it, right now people just yell in map chat – that way they wouldn’t clutter map chat, and activating that channel in chat means you’re either advertising a guild or looking for one, and if you’re doing neither you can simply untick that channel from your chat tab. Win-win for all.

Back on topic, a “/who” command to list players in the current region would be useful, excluding those players who’ve set their presence to offline (invisible) for whatever reason – I might not care about MY privacy but I should respect others’ wishes for it.

Old hand at korean knockoffs MMO here. Chat aside, biggest contributor I’d say is the mob mechanics and player interaction change. In previous MMOs everyone camped spawns and god help you if you happened to walk by and hit it first if there was already a bunch of people standing around waiting for it. You could also randomly gank other players whenever you felt like it, depending on the server.

Many players just want to mind their own business. The fact that in this game you help out instead of kill steal turns other players from potential competitors into collaborators. You WANT other people to show up, because they represent additional help against mobs – and guaranteed you won’t suddenly find yourself dead with 3 griefers standing around your corpse and laughing at you in some foreign language.

This means for the majority of folk who just play and don’t socialize, random people showing up is a good thing, when in previous MMOs it was almost always a bad thing.

Agreed.

New player here btw, didn’t play GW1, wasn’t even aware the reservations should have expired after the opening weekend – I merely thought there was a hard deadline.

I bought the game like 2 weeks ago, every now and then I pop into character creation and the name’s STILL locked. Why should someone get to reserve a name if they’re not going to use it?