Guild Wars 2

I’m pretty certain that “intentionally do a bad job” is something that would be extremely challenging to convince the artists, developers, modelers, etc, to do. It definitely wouldn’t be a good company to work at if they demanded that.

I think it’s much more likely that your aesthetic is just simpler than most people, in the sense that you like less decoration than many, so while most folks think “ooh, cute widgetty bit”, you think “ugh, why spoil the clean lines?”

Excelsior.

First of all I don’t think GW2 is “worse” now. Things have changed. Not only the game has changed, also the market around it – und thus the players. I am fairly new (about 2 years now) and I am having a blast, so while you might be dissatisfied, others are now attracted and vice-versa.

About advertisements, since switching to Kaspersky 3 years ago I barely see any advertising banners. Before I remember seeing GW2 adds on the old Youtube layout. The other ways to advertise, well, I am not sure since “the world” just wants new. New flashy graphics, new this, new that. Even this forums has its “New expansion 2 soon” stuff. A game “this old” is probably hard to market, as in creating deja-vus. As top-notch game website, I would not want to bring up older games. As regular player that still actively plays DooM and DooM II (1993/94) I do not share this attitude in the slightest, but you get my point.

GW2 is too shy in that matter. While every small fart in FF14 is worth a message, even when YoshiP burped, GW2 news are only for new content – which is, of course, not happening often. But why not highlighting the free2play aspect and other aspects unsure gamers today might be interested in. This game has many features others don’t have, FF14’s lack of dubbing is ridiculous, still people want to tell me about its great “story telling” (neither has it a great story, nor does it present it in a good way) or a super stiff and slow combat – but SquareEnix markets this slow and boring gameplay as “fun” and people still fall for it somehow.

I am sure this game won’t attract a huge playerbase nowadays since a big chunk tends to play on toys, pardon, consoles with gamepad and no keyboard (forcing lame combat as in FF14 which is more like playing SimCity2000 on the GBA) and the other ones ruin their eyes by playing on 5" phone screens. The people that sit in front of their PC, with keyboard and mouse, a pizza and a coke is apparently a dying race. But amongst 1,000 new players are probably 5 new die-hard fans like me, and those we need.

atheria.2837:

Willkilliam.5012:

Eotm has been there for quite awhile and it was a basically a beta test for new things to implement in WvW but now it just sits there and count toward servers populations. If you go in to Eotm all you see is K-trains and that doesn’t sound like beta test to me. SO why not get rid of it?

Wait, WHAT?

WvW and EoTM populations are connected STILL?

No wonder the populations are counted WRONGLY.

Anet, you are more abusive than any other MMO past or present.

If true, the game can be fixed to a huge degree by making sure one mode can’t affect the other.

How very evil! Stack EOTM, your server gets a bonus that others can not hope to fight at all?

The next MMO that doesn’t abuse players is going to make a lot of money and gain a lot of players from this game immediately.

… eotm doesn’t count toward wvw population metrics.

atheria.2837:

Willkilliam.5012:

Eotm has been there for quite awhile and it was a basically a beta test for new things to implement in WvW but now it just sits there and count toward servers populations. If you go in to Eotm all you see is K-trains and that doesn’t sound like beta test to me. SO why not get rid of it?

Wait, WHAT?

WvW and EoTM populations are connected STILL?

No wonder the populations are counted WRONGLY.

Anet, you are more abusive than any other MMO past or present.

If true, the game can be fixed to a huge degree by making sure one mode can’t affect the other.

How very evil! Stack EOTM, your server gets a bonus that others can not hope to fight at all?

The next MMO that doesn’t abuse players is going to make a lot of money and gain a lot of players from this game immediately.

I nominate this for the wvw mistaken freak out post of the year.

Inoki.6048:

Bezerker.2379:

As someone else noted, ghost thief was nerfed to the floor. It’s possible to do damage without being revealed now, but would take about 10-15x longer to kill someone. The main damage traps were made to trigger reveal.

You don’t see ghost thieves anymore because Anet nerfed it when a thief solo’d a raid boss with it.

A trap should never reveal a caster, but the victim. Logic, duh! ANet again demonstrated they have 0 clue and no common sense whatsoever.

I like the fact it got nerfed, but I expected a more logical approach, like removing the even so completely obsolete Trapper runes, removing certain condis from the thief or reducing stacks and duration. How absurd does this even sound… you place a trap and YOU get revealed? This does not make any sense!

And again we got a nerf only after something happened in PVE… if this kept going on in other game modes they wouldn’t care…

Good thing ESL cancelled this game.

I absolutely agree, I mean in real life when I’m using my magic powers to make me invisible and I trap people I don’t suddenly become visible. Where’s the logic anet!

Smfh

Willkilliam.5012:

Eotm has been there for quite awhile and it was a basically a beta test for new things to implement in WvW but now it just sits there and count toward servers populations. If you go in to Eotm all you see is K-trains and that doesn’t sound like beta test to me. SO why not get rid of it?

Eotm wasn’t a beta test for anything, don’t know where anyone got that idea, I don’t remember anything being thrown in there before wvw.

It was developed to help deal with heavy map queues that happened in the first year of wvw. It turned into a k-train since it was mostly uplevels in there and nothing is upgraded. It still is an area to level, just not as good as before.

Willkilliam.5012:

Eotm has been there for quite awhile and it was a basically a beta test for new things to implement in WvW but now it just sits there and count toward servers populations. If you go in to Eotm all you see is K-trains and that doesn’t sound like beta test to me. SO why not get rid of it?

Eotm does not count toward wvw populations…

Just because you don’t like it and find no purpose to it, doesn’t mean others don’t feel the opposite.

expandas.7051:

It’s very easy for me to say that the superior alternative would be to address the community outcry against the Desert Borderlands, game mechanic changes, and skill balancing at the time- in short, to fix their game.

They could have increased the rewards for playing the game mode a la PvP season 5.

They could have discouraged server stacking and omniblobbing by tweaking map population caps and the outnumbered buff to give substantive advantages.

For whatever reason they chose the arguably simpler and faster route of just pairing servers together which introduced its own set of challenges.

They weren’t able to “fix” their game for four years, I don’t think it would be reasonable to assume they could have fixed it post HoT mess up. They fixed the desert borderlands problem, well to most players anyways the hardcores just want it deleted. Game mechanics and skill balancing still haven’t been touched much in the last 18 months, that’s stuff anet doesn’t want to spend time on.

They did increase rewards with the reward tracks, but yeah could have done better since then, they’ve never treated wvw fairly against the other game modes.

When links came around they had all the main servers locked, that’s not discouraging stacking? Players cried about it and eventually they started opening up. Players did stack on the lower population servers for certain links, which would be ok in my book because that meant shifting populations to the smaller servers, some might leave after the relinks, but some might have stayed as well. In the long run that was one step in helping spread some population back to those lower servers, until main servers remained opened which shot that to hell.

Lower map caps wouldn’t have done kitten, let’s be real here, most times it’s 1 tag up on a map and most people will flock to that tag or the orange swords. We would still have blobbing, just on multiple maps now. Nothing but hardcore limitations will be needed to force most players into smaller groups.

As for the reason why they went with links Tyler had explained it..

Tyler Bearce

We had/have another, much more elaborate, solution to world population imbalance. However, we decided to table it (perhaps indefinitely) in favor of World Linking for three primary reasons:

1. Time – We felt we needed to improve the world population situation as soon as possible. Any solution that was likely to take 6+ months was off the table.

2. Acceptance – Our two ‘quick’ solutions were World Linking and World Merging. We went with World Linking because we felt players would be more likely to approve it, due to it better preserving the identity of all original worlds, and being more flexible than a more traditional World Merging solution.

3. Complexity – World Linking and World Merging are both fairly easy to understand solutions. This ties back to points 1 and two, but a complex solution would have taken longer to implement, and have been harder to get players to understand and accept.

Links eventually got them thinking about having more smaller sized servers, which could have helped balance out populations by having more pieces to put them together. The players disagreed of course.

Perhaps if they had acted sooner and not wait six months after the expansion to actually fix wvw, and actually went through with the rumored battlegroups, things would have turned out better than links. Just pretty obvious Anet doesn’t not care to spend that much resources and time on wvw for years now.

expandas.7051:

More common are the laments of the self-described “fight” guilds fielding 20-odd players in open field and their frustration of always getting “a—jammed” or “blobbed” down by the map zerg of the hour.

I think it is to fair to say that for these players, the influx of players and elimination of many matchup tiers made the possibility of having clean engagements and winning outnumbered fights more difficult- before you factor in arguments about post-HoT skill balance and the like.

Why would you blame links for bringing server population back up what they were just before HoT landed? Getting jammed or blobbed existed years before links. The problems you hear about for smaller groups stem from the changes to combat from HoT, less players are willing to run solo because class balance has become a joke. How many complaints have we heard by now about thieves, mesmers, druids, dragonhunters with broken dps or unkillable specs. It’s harder to get outnumbered kills because of combat changes that made conditions even more cheesier than before, numbers just make it worse, but the situation forces players to run those numbers to win.

I do understand the complaints of those that stayed in the lower tiers in order to get those smaller fights, and how much of a shock it would have been to be thrown into t1 for the first links, because naturally anet would start links off by just folding servers from the lowest populations to the biggest populations. Eredon Terrace players were not happy to be with Blackgate and t1 apparently.

I have made a couple suggestions already to either build separate tiers for each type of player, the blobs t1, the small to mid zergs t2/3, the roamers havocs t4, back when the glicko wall was still around. More recently I have suggested to just take the 3 lowest population servers and stick them in t4 with no links, and then add links to the rest of the servers.

expandas.7051:

Whether it was intended or not the implementation of linked servers knocked down the support pillars of each community that was slowly erased. It removed any incentive for the scouts, roamers, and defenders, sometimes playfully referred to as the “homeland moms” to keep participating.

Your server now existed in name only, and each cycle of relinks only diluted the familiar names you remember. On the flip side, if your community was the guild that you played with then links probably had little or no effect in this regard.

I don’t fully agree with this. There were other changes that killed havoc groups as I outlined in the other post. Scouts and defenders basically got removed with HoT introducing automatic upgrades, sentries, and watchtower. Desert borderlands was a pain that no one wanted to play on, so why would anyone bother building siege and tapping it every hour when the map was empty for the most part? Besides of which the main servers still had their “homeland moms”, why would they quit from links?

Keeping track of siege was a pain since the keeps were basically giant mazes and easy to lose track of siege placements, no one wanted to spend 15 mins running around a keep trying to keep everything tapped. Let’s not forget the stupid decision not to have waypoints in the side keeps other than emergency waypoint. Everyone dog piled into ebg for 6 months which meant zergs were operating in there most times, and people eventually went with that flow.

Roamers were left but they have started to die off because frankly with the changes with HoT and elite specs, it has made it boring and in some situations stupid to bother roaming when 75% of the time you meet a thief or a mesmer out in the field. Do I mention ghost thief here? Havoc sized groups still exist if you really want to call them havoc, more like gankers taking advantage of roamers 4v1.

Guild buying and stacking was already a big thing before links.

Now again I say look at the alternatives to links and tell me it wasn’t the best option at the time. Every other option would have been more damaging to servers and their communities. Does anyone honestly think if links was not done and servers left alone, that we wouldn’t have more of than half the servers dead of players? Even roamers would have been moving up. Links left communities the option to keep running, players just chose not to care anymore that their server name was not in front of another. Communities were already dying before links because of HoT.

In order to tackle the subject of server links, I’d like to take a step back and pose a question to help frame the discussion. Why do players play WvW and what keeps them coming back? Once we tackle this big picture “WHY” we can move on and worry about the finer details like game and game mode mechanics, concepts of fairness, etc.

Some people play for the sense of thrill, the excitement of an intimate fight, large or small. Others are playing because of the community, whether that’s coming from the guild that they’re in or the server that they’re on. There are also those that play to win, either through the point totals at the end of the week or the outcomes of each individual organized scrimmage or duel. Lastly, you have people that play WvW because of the rewards, namely the Daily rewards and Gift of Battle.

These groups are: for-the-fights, community-driven, play-to-win, and rewards-driven. They are themselves multifaceted in both polarity and intensity, and most definitely not mutually exclusive. The implementation of linked servers benefited and hindered these groups differently, but how so?

I often hear that the for-the-fights crowd benefited from having more players squeezed into the same matchup. Servers that were formerly described as ghost towns would now get a taste of the action that they had longed for. However, things aren’t so cut and dry. Being for-the-fights isn’t reserved for liking large-scale 30+v30+ engagements. We as a community don’t hear very much about the solo roamer who walked with two heavy loot bags after getting ambushed at a camp. You rarely hear the tales of the organized roaming teams winning five versus seven, eight, ten, and so on. More common are the laments of the self-described “fight” guilds fielding 20-odd players in open field and their frustration of always getting “a—jammed” or “blobbed” down by the map zerg of the hour. I think it is to fair to say that for these players, the influx of players and elimination of many matchup tiers made the possibility of having clean engagements and winning outnumbered fights more difficult- before you factor in arguments about post-HoT skill balance and the like.

Community-driven players are a diverse bunch as well. You’ve probably heard of the term “server loyalty” before—previously as mark of praise and now a self-contained sardonic joke. Whether it was intended or not the implementation of linked servers knocked down the support pillars of each community that was slowly erased. It removed any incentive for the scouts, roamers, and defenders, sometimes playfully referred to as the “homeland moms” to keep participating. Your server now existed in name only, and each cycle of relinks only diluted the familiar names you remember. On the flip side, if your community was the guild that you played with then links probably had little or no effect in this regard. In fact some guilds took advantage of this system to get in favorable matchups and drive their poaching and recruitment of players. To be quite honest I don’t really hear about this disparity in winners and losers talked about very much. I suppose it wouldn’t be as discouraging if the doomed servers weren’t home to predominately smaller and medium sized communities that rely on each other even more.

Partially because of time constraints and because they weren’t significantly impacted by server links; the last two groups, the play-to-win and rewards-driven players can be covered together. When I say play-to-win I’m talking about folks in the upper-end GvG guilds, the server leaders and organizers that take after buying guilds and managing communities, or the aficionados of siege play who use every tool at their disposal to achieve victory. Aside inflated numbers of players and the syncopated nature of relinks, nothing else here is drastically different post-links that hasn’t already been covered. The same applies to folks hopping into WvW for rewards. The zergs that they run with might be larger, but it goes both ways. And once those dailies are out of the way—out they leave, as fast as they came!

Understanding the underlying motivations driving WvW players has helped me defog my picture of the situation. The server links produced distinct winners and losers. These winners tended to be players on more populated servers that weren’t at risk of closure and large guilds that gained from the escalation in combat sizes. Their guild centric mindsets benefited from easier recruiting via links. The losers were the sentenced players on servers about to be erased and those players that enjoyed roaming and medium/small size engagements. The unaffected were the PvXers and the resident “elites” of each mid/upper tier server.

Is there any surprise that the feedback that ArenaNet surely received and factored in to their decisions benefited the aforementioned parties? Is there any surprise the discord between the parties rarely intersect meaningfully on the subject?

Balthazzarr.1349:

I believe that HoT in itself didn’t hurt WvW. What really hurt WvW was bringing something as big as HoT in while at the same time completely changing WvW with new borderlands that were almost impossible to navigate.

Bottom line to me is that linking seriously damaged WvW more than it helped. Do I have an answer? No I don’t know what the answer would be. So I figured out how to live with what has been done and have some fun again because frankly I still really like this game and the people I know in it

You can believe that if you want, but the desert bl was only part of the problem, the expansion brought a lot more changes that affected wvw badly in the past year and half. We’ve had alpines back for almost a year and wvw is still in terrible condition.

• Guild upgrades moved from base accounts to HoT accounts, upgrades for the wvw part of the grindhall, players were then forced to pve to reacquire those upgrades, of course the bigger the guild the easier that was to do, but it was also time gated with resources. Let’s not forget the expense of scribing. Guild level 37 was required to regain our most important upgrade in the +5 supply aura, who the kitten cares about magic find aura?

• New guild upgrades that broke certain parts of wvw, watchtower, smc airships, smc stealth water, banners, shield generators.

• Guild catapults nerfed in supply cost, this was a staple to havoc groups, but it also allowed zergs to get through walls much faster.

• Elite specs which forced players to upgrade for because they were in every case better than vanilla specs.

• Introduced new broken specs, stat combinations, and runes into the game.

• Trait changes of june 23rd 2015 which were the first step into the revamping of classes and combat for the expansion.

• Stability change which broke melee front lines and turned the game into pirate ship meta for 6 months.

• Combat change to focus more on conditions and boons, which at first produced boon sharing meta for more than 6 months, now still condition heavy with epidemic bombs.

• Desert borderland which was left in for far too long before fixes were made, and alpines returned. Rotation of the maps should have been their first thought when bringing another map into the game, not shoving it down everyone’s throat until players left.

While linking has it’s own set of problems, the alternatives were bleaker.

• Servers left to rot on their own, which they would have, and be in the same state as they are today. I was on Ehmry bay a mid tier server when HoT landed, the expectation for most on that server were there would be a lot of returning players, it didn’t happen. Instead for the next few months activity in the forums and TS went down before links even happened. Once links happened it was pretty much the last call for a few guilds who decided to move up in tiers, the glicko wall was also a problem at the time.

• Merge, which would have instantly deleted half the servers. And frankly with all the movement guilds have made in the past year would have put servers back to square one of being unbalanced in population. Maybe even in worse shape than today, at least we can rotate servers every 2 months to try and fix the damage players are currently doing.

• Battlegroups which would have probably taken 6+ months to implement and possibly destroy every single server and it’s community, depending on how it was implemented.

Identity is one of those QoL things they should have worked on early on, to help those link servers keep some pride and purpose. But at the time I believed links were suppose to be a temporarily solution that they could implement quickly and not months down the road, now it seems like it will be the permanent solution.

At the end of the day, it’s up to players to keep in touch and keep community going. At this point a lot of players have left the game or turned to their guilds as their community for the game.

OriOri.8724:

I think my opinion has gotten lost in this thread.

I’m not explicitly against bigger bags. But it wouldn’t actually solve any of the problems that we face in regards to our inventories right now. Which means that the development effort that would go into make the recipes/cost of these bags would effectively be wasted, as the actual problem wouldn’t be addressed in the slightest.

I don’t think we need bigger bags.

But as a programmer with experience with game engines and object oriented programming in general, I take offense at the fact that people are talking about “development cost” of adding bigger bags.

The development cost is nothing.

The engine already has provisions for adding arbitrary game items, and the engine already has provisions for arbitrarily sized bag objects. Adding new bags of a larger size is trivial as far as development costs is concerned.

The question of bag size is purely a question of game design, not development cost.

Bump for a good idea that I’d like to see implemented.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

If the ‘vast majority’ of players do not like the Desert Borderlands, I wonder why it was voted to stay…

I mean, the playerbase did get to choose whether to keep it, or have it removed permanently.

At least, WvW gets polls for the playerbase to choose what to add/change/remove; and more than any other game mode, it seems.

I believe it required a 75% vote, and that’s a pretty high threshold.

That being said, there is a great dissonance between what you read on the forums and what seems to actually happen. For example, if you read WvW threads enough, you would never assume things like mobile cannons and focus on scoring to count because lol PPT ALL ABOUT THE FIGHTS, but then they do. And this is frequently reflected in actual gameplay, so that is why I brought up that there’s a much more diverse population in WvW who have very different interests and this is quite difficult to reconcile.

There’s a ton of problems (and I feel many are self-inflicted) that no one entity is going to save things. Which is fine. I generally dislike targeting specific individuals especially when they’re trying to help matters that may or may not be in their control.

First off, balance. As WvW involves player to player combat typically, skill balance is a difficult issues because combat fundamentally changes as numbers changes. However balance is decided by a single team in this game that does it for 3 game modes. This would be bad enough, but given the lack of splits, changes intended for other game modes also affected WvW. It’s only recently that we started seeing more skill splitting but this is going to require a ton of work.

Secondly, WvW is left in an awkward place after the controversial HoT changes. It seems to me that the plans were scrapped due to numerous complaints about HoT content, including sky high WvW upgrade costs, a unpopular map, and other new mechanics that introduced expensive power creep to the game mode.

Third, is the WvW has or had great diversity in its population. It is very difficult to cater to it all, and some of it is even contradictory and at odds with each other. As a single example, consider the group that wants variety in their matchups, and then consider the group that finds it outrageous that a 4th place and a 11th place could be in the same matchup.

Fourth, related to the second issue, the issue of community or identity has been pretty much abandoned. Not just talking about the server links, but the megaserver system has pretty much rendered the existence of servers irrelevant outside of WvW. I remember both Roleplayers and WvW’ers suggesting that the cities remain some kind of community hub, but these concerns were completely ignored. The guild upgrades in HoT inherently favored large guilds, and small groups that used to help their servers found buffs they had were taken away and placed behind very high paywalls. Guild halls seem to be quite the failure as well, being too small and keeping broken confusion/retal mechanics that really ruin fights.

And of course this isn’t just WvW. The problem with guilds is across the games, and the game has done a poor job of making sure guilds stay healthy. Look at Guild Missions, which really haven’t had much attention paid to. They basically made a bunch of ones, some good, some not so good, locked some ascended equipment behind its gates, and called it a day.

Fifth, the reward system has always been in a difficult spot, though improved over time. It is very difficult to find a balance between rewarding participation and curbing freeloading. WvW’ers generally have to spend the most gold playing their game mode, and make the least, which again simply puts in more disincentive.

And finally, population. It’s really a symptom of the above problems. You have a smaller, more insular player base that continually shrinks, resulting in more imbalance as the remaining crowds converge on places to play out their last days of this game because of low morale. This results in little more than a never ending cycle of decay, and not an environment that can keep or gain players.

To be fair, as with HoT maps, WvW has seen some improvements as some of these issues were addressed, but I think the damage has largely been done as some will never come back. HoT was just a perfect storm of numerous failings about this game just came to the forefront all it once. At this point in its lifespan, I think it has squandered a lot of its potential, and that’s not going to change. To be fair, I never thought that it would have succeeded in content with compeititive potential anyways (lol espots), and it’s honestly quite impressive that it got so far to begin with. But it still can remain a decent game despite all these issues as long as it manages to address these issues as well as it can.

There are so many assumptions in your question that it’s hard to give a response that will help you see what’s going on.

WvW is, as you say, a big beast. There are dozens of posts and reddit threads that make it clear that those passionate about the game mode can’t even agree about what the mode is, never mind what needs to be fixed, let alone what would be a good way to address them.

Comparing anything about fractals to WvW is like comparing Apple Computers to Oranges: fractals are small-group, instanced content. Most changes have zero impact on other game modes, adding a new fractal has no impact on anyone’s enjoyment of any other fractal, and so on.

I love Ben’s level of communication, but it’s a horrid model for WvW — first, he does it on his own time, not ANet’s. Second, his communication is reactive, i.e. he responds to specific issues of concern to us, but he rarely offers any insight to the overall direction. Thirdly, there’s very little discussion: we post, he tells us what he thinks is going on. Only when the fractal team can’t decide does he ask what we think. That wouldn’t fly at all for WvW fans.

Finally, it’s unfair to say that WvW has been abandoned. It gets just as little (or as much) attention these days as it ever did. Change comes slowly to a complicated game mode, as it needs to.

The biggest problem with WvW is that, like any other part of any MMO, players evolve their gameplay faster than the developers can grow the mode. We’ve been playing largely the same version of WvW for 4.5 years and the full-timers have gotten bored or disgusted with the drama (that is inevitable after playing that long with the same people) and moved on. The mode is still a lot of fun for folks who don’t play all the time or who are new; they haven’t learned to be jaded.

If it were easy to do something to please WvW fans, ANet would have done it already. It’s a hugely complicated mess.

(All that said, I think ANet could do a lot better, both with how they tackle WvW and with what & how often they share about that. I just don’t think that’s going to end up satisfying many of us.)

Hoarders need more bag space, the rest of us have several dozen open slots. We sell or salvage everything. Shared slots for salvage, food and toys. An extra armor set a few extra weapons sets on each character and I have multiple 20 slot bags waiting to be filled with more salvage and sell items.

Oh, I am not against there being larger bags. I’m not against expanding the wallet or adding key rings. But, hoarders are always going to hit the limit. Its in their nature.

Daddicus.6128:

Guys, there’s no downside to creating more bank slots, bigger bags, and more inventory bag slots. Those who have chosen to spend their time managing inventory simply don’t buy them. Those who have decided that time is money, and therefore they want to think about it less, they buy them. Which earns ANet more money.

Almost everybody wins, and absolutely NOBODY loses. Why is there even a discussion about this? This is a no-brainer:

ANet should just continuously add slots to all locations, until the amount of real-world money they receive for doing so drops to near what it costs them to create and maintain the extra slots.

As mentioned multiple times in this thread, its not about people winning and losing. Its about the fact that bigger bags won’t do anything to solve the problem itself, so why even bother?

The actual problem is inventory management. Some players might get angry for being called out like this, but it is the actual problem. And yes, a lot of it does lie on Anets shoulders for giving us so many things in our inventories that shouldn’t be in there (again, currencies should go in wallet, crafting mats should be in mat storage, “mass” eater, bookshelf etc…). And making bags bigger won’t address this problem in the slightest.

Daddicus.6128:

Guys, there’s no downside to creating more bank slots, bigger bags, and more inventory bag slots. Those who have chosen to spend their time managing inventory simply don’t buy them. Those who have decided that time is money, and therefore they want to think about it less, they buy them. Which earns ANet more money.

Almost everybody wins, and absolutely NOBODY loses. Why is there even a discussion about this? This is a no-brainer:

ANet should just continuously add slots to all locations, until the amount of real-world money they receive for doing so drops to near what it costs them to create and maintain the extra slots.

Actually that is not quite true.

There is a very real downside to creating more bag space which I adressed in a side note earlier.

More bag space comes at a higher cost to get said bag space.

Either in form of more required gem purchases or more expensive bags. At the same time it would cover and soften poor item implementation allowing arenanet to keep designing and implementing items which do not go into the material storage for example. Desiging around 160 maximum bags space is different then for say 200.

Net result: everyone has to pay more to get maximum bag space which eventually becomes needed.

As repeatedly said in this thread, it’s not about bag space.

Just curious if other people with multiple accounts have this problem.

Have you ever logged into your second account and jumped off of something really high, and only then remembered as you are tapping the spacebar furiously that you don’t have gliding on the second account?

Or is it just me? Cause I seem to do it at least three times per week.

Balthazzarr, can I come live at your place?

It would be nice, but then we’d get a flood of people demanding refunds for their redundant tools.

I can’t say it’s an easy decision for Anet.

Iridium.6385:

I wish to have absolutely nothing from that game in Guild Wars 2.

I was not talking about the way their combat or world design works (though frankly the world design has some good elements). Rather all the things GW2 is seriously ailing in, that is overall engine / interface / QoL / convenience:

• That options menu. You can even select which types of sounds still play while tabbed out.
• The chat interface is already a lot better than GW2’s. Although as far as copying that goes, just go for WoW’s where user mods made chat a pretty nice and convenient affair, including reply-bots while you’re in a fight and notifying when the fight ended, and other such niceties. But still, just carbon-copying what FF14 has would be a huge improvement already.
• There’s a “part of this fight”-list at the left. In busy combat (which GW2 has all the time with the amount of spell effects flying around) it helps a lot to realize just what is there to attack. Wish GW2 had something like it.
• An inventory button row which shows how full your bags currently are.
• Separate inventory (and separately limited!) for gear.
• A pop-up window for markers/signs? Instead of having to remember 20 key combinations at all times? Yes please!
• Have you seen their support for deaf/hard-of-hearing players? I was hellishly impressed, you can turn on a mode where it essentially shows a waveform pattern at the screen edges, so loud sounds make the screen “flash”, kinda. Really really good idea, and helps a lot if you have a ton of background noise, too.
• An in-UI countdown timer? Shared by party and raid?
• Linkshells, which are essentially private chatchannels.
• Fully configurable HUD layout.
• The game doesn’t run like dirt on modern hardware.

And that’s just of top of my head. There’s more, like classes with jobs, multiple classes on one character, fishing, gathering being an actual class/job, why not take the good things from other games but not the bad things?

I’ve actually left GW2 a few times for some of the games mentioned already but I do still enjoy many of things GW2 offers. For one, it is very friendly towards the casual player and rewards skill (build creativity) over gear.

Still, and while I still like the game, I think it’s starting to show it’s age a bit when you look at the character creation, graphics, etc in comparison to games like BDO or even Bless.

Either way, GW2 remains one of the best MMOs I’ve ever played. I just wonder what GW3 may be like.

OriOri.8724:

TorsoReaper.8530:

Cyninja.2954:

Which as mentioned is a design problem, not an inventory problem. Fixing this by increasing the inventory size is just a bandaid fix. The best solution here is as mentioned a fix to the actual problem, aka making more currencies go into the currencies tab instead of stack into the material storage.

It’s not a design problem, it’s BY DESIGN. How many bank tab and bag slots have they sold by forcing all this junk on us? It’s not a coincidence.

Gonna have to disagree with you considering Linsey is working on adding mats to mat storage and getting LWS3 currencies added either to mat storage or to the wallet. So no, its not all by design.

haha, yeah. As a good rule of thumb, if your theory is based on “X is done specifically to annoy you into paying money for Y”, it’s probably not even remotely reality-based.

Bigger bags is not the solution. It will just make you horde more stuff until you hit the cap again returning you to this cycle of asking for even bigger bags.

Ultimately, you don’t even need that much space. It is truly all just a matter of perspective. Inventory management is key here. Do you really need even half the stuff you haul around? Multiple food items? Several armor sets? WvW items? I’ve been guilty of having some of my characters hauling weapon skins of all things in my inventory. Once you figure out what is absolutely necessary and keep only that in your inventory, you’ll find that you have plenty of space.

In my opinion, the main issue is the ever expanding number of portal scrolls, non-currency currency items (i.e. petrified wood, bloodstone crystals, etc.) and numerous key items (bandit keys, crowbars, etc.). Much of these should go in, as many have already suggested in multiple threads, a key ring or into the wallet. The portal scrolls should ideally go into a book that opens up dialog options of where you wanted to warp to.

meh. I sported the 4 starter slots with size 15 bags on my toons until the other day. it really depends on how much gear you need vs what you want to have possible. the possible stuff is discard able.

if you get bigger bags, you will just fill those up after a while and want more space. its all on you.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I prefer “Cat Herder.”

In my guild we have a member who thanks all the officers after our weekly missions for ‘herding cats’ on TS. I’m sure we would all love ‘Cat Herder’ as an actual title, as would anyone who leads even semi-organised open world/WvW content.