Guild Wars 2

I’m having fun playing GW2, but I feel the same way about all of their cash shop offerings that aren’t account wide. I’ve approached GW2 the same way I approach any non-MMO videogame — that is, I paid $60 and I’ll enjoy it while it lasts. I have no intention of spending any extra money in their cash shop on anything other than character slots or bank space, and even with those it’s more likely I’ll have stopped logging in regularly before I decide that stuff is worth buying.

I really do think that the gameplay, content and polish level of GW2 is a major achievement in subscription-free MMO design, and for that I hope that there are plenty of players out there who blow tons on gems and show the industry that subs aren’t the only way to offer a complete MMO experience and still make a large profit. I just have a tough time justifying the cost of extra microtransactions for small convenience upgrades.

I really liked that SWTOR had auto area loot. It was so nice to be able to click one dead mob in the pile and get the loot from all nearby mobs. I would love to see maybe a 900 range radius of auto area loot put into GW2.

While this isn’t something I would take part in, there are some great ways they could implement it for the people who would. They could sell a consumable item on the cash shop that spawned a little decorated gazebo with some chairs/NPC guests, and an NPC priest/mayor that both players would have to ‘talk’ to, bringing up the dialogue box with the “do you blah blah blah?” thing and an “I do” response. After both players clicked “I do”, some fireworks could shoot off, and they would each be granted a name change to create the same surname, or get a completely unique title like “Husband of so-and-so” or “Wife of so-and-so”. They would just travel to their favorite location, bring their in-game friends or guildies, use the consumable and have a fun little event to take part in — and ANet makes cash off it!

I have always preferred having NPC names turned on rather than constantly mousing over everything on the screen to see what I can and can’t interact with. For players like me, it would be great if we could display the names of NPCs with some practical use — merchants, trainers, story characters, even named NPCs with dialogue trees for lore purposes only — without having to fill my screen with dozens of anonymous Citizens, Locals, Blood Legion Soldiers, etc.

I realize this would take a little work, probably requiring all NPCs to have a 0/1 value determining if the game would display their names in the UI, but it would sure make the game prettier and less cluttered for those of us who like having NPC names on. Those “ambient” NPCs could still display their name on mouseover and allow F-button greeting as they do now, it just wouldn’t be filling the screen with names.

I was wondering what the deal was with that skill, as I didn’t pre-order or buy a deluxe edition. For me, it still shows up under the elite skills tab where I purchase skills, but it’s grayed out. They should really either remove it completely from versions that don’t have it unlocked, or make it purchasable for 10 skill points like all the other elites for everybody who didn’t pre-order.

I am against this. The only difference between Vistas and all the other little unlocks on the map is that some of them are tough to get to, and getting 100% unlocked should have its challenges. Those occasional vistas that take a lot of determination to get to are no different than any other challenging aspect of a game — some people will give up and walk away, but the people who stick with it will feel a sense of accomplishment when they finally get through it. Points of Interest and Vistas are designed to encourage exploration, and exploration should be more than just a checklist of places to run to. You don’t really tell stories about going to Rome if you never left the hotel.

All that said, they could definitely tighten up the camera and terrain in these areas to make it more forgiving, though. Jumping puzzles in game engines without physics can be frustrating…add in a wonky camera, and some people are probably going to be pulling their hair out.

Any issue with quick respawning is going to be on a case by case basis, obviously, depending on a number of things like level discrepancy between player and mobs, how quickly the player class/build can kill, how closely the mobs are spaced together, etc. I can personally attest to a handful of places where the first mob that was killed in the group respawned just a couple seconds after the last mob was killed. In those rare cases, you could end up going through 3 full cycles of the enemies before gathering everything in the area. I guess that could be considered the risk that comes with the reward…I really disagree with that quick of a respawn rate, however, but that’s a different issue.

Anyway, removing the need for four different button presses would still only reduce the amount of time it would take to gather 10 pieces by a couple seconds at most, as the speed of the swings would stay the same and you would still only get one ore per swing. I definitely wasn’t talking about granting all 10 ore in just 3 swings.

I’m no programmer, so I can’t profess to know how much effort would have to go into this change and whether or not it’d be worth it, but it would definitely be nicer to just take 10 swings on a rich ore vein in one channeled interaction, rather than having to ‘use’ the node four times. It doesn’t help that rich veins are often guarded by a group of mobs with a Veteran in it, when they can start respawning in 15-30 seconds in some cases.

Yeah, it definitely seems like lazy design when looking at the map, but being in the zones themselves doesn’t feel boxed in, so I can overlook it. It’ll be pretty cool when we finally see a true open world, seamless MMO without loading breaks, that has gradual changes in terrain, real dynamic weather, and all the other bells and whistles to make the world seem more alive. But that’s still some years off, I think.

I just posted about a click-and-hold AoE targeting mechanic earlier, as well. It seems like a good balance between execution speed and targeting accuracy.

I’ve seen this come up many times in different game-related forums, and it always seems to devolve into a fight between a few different people in various branches of the military who refuse to accept that someone else may have had a different experience than them. Suffice it to say that, while most military outfits address their female officers as ma’am, there ARE some females in the military (or other positions of rank, such as civilian police) who insist that their subordinates address them as sir. In any case, as a subordinate, you are to address your superiors however they prefer to be addressed.

I agree with pretty much everything but including a Dungeon Finder tool. Nobody can argue that it makes it far quicker and easier to get into these dungeons and accomplish what you want without the need for long sessions, and as a working adult with way less time (and less desire to play during the time I do have) than I had back in the EQ days, even I would benefit from it. I certainly used it a lot after it was put into WoW. However, GW2 (and the MMORPG genre in general) has already moved so far in the direction of becoming a lobby game with menu screens leading to instant-action that it’s lost a lot of what made me like MMOs in the first place. I’m all in favor of a more useful, streamlined LFG tool, but I’d prefer players to actually have to talk to each other to build their groups.

As for melee combat inside dungeons and against bosses, it would be much more forgiving if they added audio cues before those big one-shot attacks. Players would still have to dodge a lot and stay mobile to survive, but at least they’d have another cue to react to when the boss gets lost in the chaos of particle effects and flashing numbers.

I always felt like big population centers in MMOs should have an ambient background track of unintelligible crowd noise and talking for this very reason. It’s nice to have actual conversations occur between NPCs, but they can’t happen so often that they drive all the players nuts after hearing them for the millionth time, so just a general ambient track that makes it sound like you’re in a big, bustling town filled with people conducting business would add a lot to the atmosphere. For the more personal scenarios like the throne room you mentioned, though, they really should have recorded dialogue for it.

I haven’t switched to fast targeting AoE yet, so I hadn’t even thought about that. Maybe a happy compromise for the fast-targeting mechanic of those AoE skills is to have it so that when you hold down the button the AoE target comes up, and the skill is fired off when you release the button. That should still be pretty fast execution and allow you to see the targeting area first.

I think there are a lot of reasons to explore the cities, though I do agree with your suggestion that they should have some sporadic gathering materials. I was just bouncing around in Lion’s Arch in the SE fields for a long time while I looked for that Vista, and thought how strange it seemed that there was nothing to harvest up there.

A /follow option is pretty much a basic MMO feature, so I see no reason why it shouldn’t be allowed in GW2. Regardless of whatever reasons you may not want the feature in this game because of people who break the rules, there are plenty of legitimate uses for it, especially for families that play together.

I get no vibe from this game or its developers that they intend for it to be an esport kind of game even a little bit. It has sold a more-than-healthy number of copies out of the gate, and while plenty of power players will undoubtedly stop logging in as we move forward, sales should stay pretty strong through the holidays. I don’t think you really need to worry about population levels for awhile.

Now that I’ve played a bit more, I know to look at the red bars underneath my skills and it doesn’t really cause problems. That doesn’t change the fact, however, that the ‘out-of-range’ indicator in this game blends into the rest of the screen more than any of the 15 or so MMOs that I’ve played before. When I first started playing, I was pretty surprised that it actually made it through beta like that, so I’m sure this has been brought up before (I just haven’t seen it, so I thought I’d bring it up myself). It really needs to be improved by something like surrounding the entire skill button with a red border or tinting the entire button red when you’re out of range.

It’s made a little harder to understand for new players because of the unintuitive numbers used for the ranges in this game compared to other, similar games. I still have no idea if there is supposed to be some actual unit of measurement that corresponds to the ranges displayed as 150, 450, 600 or 1200.

I’ve got 2 rare crafting mats taking up bank space that I received from salvaging, and I only have two characters at level 29 and 11, so at least in my experience, they do drop occasionally.

I really think that players should be able to see their turrets’ health bars on the UI near the toolbelt bar. As quickly as they go down, it’d be nice to have that level of awareness so I could detonate them more easily just before they’re destroyed. It’d also be really nice to be able to repair turrets manually, either with a separate skill or as a replacement for the “Pick It Up” action that removes them. I think that would be an acceptable trade-off for not being able to move them around. (Note: My engineer is still very low level, so if there are repairs buried in the trait lines or in later skills, disregard this, although I feel like they should be granted with the turret skills themselves.)

I’m not sure which class you should go with (try them all?), but I’ve now played around in every race’s starting area and have to say the Asura experience was easily my favorite. It’s quirky and lighthearted, which compliments the “just go with the flow and have fun” experience of the lower levels quite well.

I would agree that players should be able to ‘stow’ their pets if they want to, if that’s what you’re getting at. If you’re actually suggesting that a ranger should be able to be created entirely without pets during character creation, well, I don’t know how likely that is. They’d have to provide some other way for pet-less rangers to make up the loss of damage in order to balance it, which is definitely possible, but probably not that probable in the short term.

The cannon event was working yesterday afternoon and I was able to reach that vista, but I was still completely disappointed by the experience because it just gave a loading screen after clicking on the Cattlepult and then I was on top of the tower. Let’s face it: flying through the air in videogames is fun! We love jump pads in Unreal and Halo, and some of the most fun puzzles in Portal involve being launched through the air all over the kitten place (I actually typed out kitten…someone help me!)

I’m hoping that loading screen was just a temporary byproduct of the event being broken right now because, otherwise, it’s an obvious missed opportunity to create memorable moments for their players. Have the ‘Mad Whatshisface’ NPC give us a little parachute and launch us over there, and then let us use the chute to jump off and get down safely!

To me, this is just a case of different players having different motivations. I think all players enjoy the sense of becoming more powerful, but too many MMOs have fallen prey to systems where the ONLY sense of progression is making players more powerful, so then they have to make enemies more powerful, and then they make players more powerful, and so on ad infinitum until the numbers flashing all over the screen are 6 and 7 figures long. Personally, I think it’ll be refreshing to get away from that.

In my experience, a lot of players don’t necessarily care about becoming endlessly more powerful, so long as there is SOME kind of bar going up that tells them they are working toward something. If power was all any player wanted, Call of Duty players wouldn’t prestige and lose all their unlocks…they do it because they lose that carrot on a stick when that XP bar stops going up, and because they get a little badge telling other people how awesome they are. If a game has that, plenty of players will keep coming back.

I was just talking about this in chat earlier this morning, and after testing it, it seems that the cooldown IS 5 seconds lower if you pick it up rather than use the toolbelt skill to blow it up. I would agree, however, with having them actually be moveable like a Warrior’s banners, with maybe a 2 minute total lifespan before self-destructing and forcing the cooldown.

EDIT: If there are no plans to change the mechanics, perhaps the Interact tooltip should say something like “Salvage” rather than “Pick It Up”, indicating that the turret is destroyed in the process but that the parts recovered from salvaging allow the engineer to build another turret sooner than he/she would otherwise.

I’m always in favor of having as wide a variety of activities as possible. I’m enjoying the action-heavy combat compared to older, slower paced MMOs, but I’ve always felt that MMOs with a lot of the fluff on the side (mini-games, player housing/decorating, social activities, holiday events) make for more compelling “worlds” to be a part of long-term.

I haven’t joined a guild yet because I’m still pretty new and looking for one that fits me, but I must admit that having come from other MMOs and never having played the first Guild Wars, having players allowed to join several guilds at the same time sounds like a really strange idea that I can’t say I’m a fan of.

I agree. I waited a couple weeks for launch issues to be sorted out before buying, and my first character (before I realized spaces allowed surnames) now has a name I really have no interest in because I had already been denied on over a dozen names and was down to just trying anything and everything to get into the game. I would also like to see a confirmation added before finally creating the character and entering the game, for that very reason, or better yet, show an on-the-fly “available” or “unavailable” right on the side of the character creation screen before you even have to press enter.

I wouldn’t say this is a bug, exactly, just a way that the forums could be made more user friendly, so I hope that this doesn’t have to be locked. Because the forums require login every time I return, I often browse the forums without logging in and only get the login prompt if I choose to post. When I click to reply to an existing thread or create a new topic and am prompted for my login info, I think I should then be taken exactly where I would have been had I been logged in beforehand, rather than back out to the main forums menu.

I agree with pretty much everything, although I believe there are some events that are only accessible at night, so I can at least understand the reasoning behind having a fast cycle. I’d prefer 2 hours of day followed by 2 hours of night, though, uniform across the entire game world, with at least 15 minutes or so of noticeable dawn/dusk lighting. Sunrise and sunset are some of the most common times that players will just stop and enjoy the visuals, and they don’t exist in this game.

I’d go one step further and suggest a difference in the amount of NPCs out at night and an increase in the number of events that start at a certain time of day, but the more I play, the less I think of Guild Wars 2 as the kind of MMO that will make players feel as if they’re actually part of a fantasy world.

Yeah, I’m not a big fan of how NPCs a half-mile away give Dynamic Event status updates at regular volume as if they’re standing right next to you. They need to come up with a way to adjust volume levels by proximity while also being able to update players participating in an event about its progress in a way that makes more sense. It isn’t just spoken dialogue, either. I was wondering what the incredibly loud “booms” were in one of the little camps in Diessa Plateau, until I realized they were being made by trebuchets that were way off in the distance. Audio mixing needs a lot of work in this game.

I agree that it should be an option. I don’t mind constant chatter, myself, as long as there is a little variety in the lines used so that you don’t hear the same line for the same ability every time. I’d like to see them record lines for tells that are a bit more in character and not so literally used as a game tool, though…“getting pumped” works fine, but “Gaining adrenaline” and “Adrenaline full” sound pretty ridiculous.

It’s a little weird that every recorded line of dialogue for the male Charr Warrior’s adrenaline status says that he is gaining adrenaline while those same lines are also triggered when he begins losing adrenaline after inactivity. It doesn’t make any sense for him to exclaim “I’m getting pumped!” 30 seconds after my last combat when his adrenaline starts depleting.

I can see why people would feel that way, as cooking has traditionally been kind of in its own league as a minor tradeskill in other MMOs, but from what I’ve read it really provides a lot of continuously useful benefits at all levels, and the results are probably in steady demand. At least in this game, you don’t lose your progress in your trades if you choose to unlearn them and work on others, so you can still level cooking and pay a small fee later to level other skills. In the end, someone who spends most of their time on a main and feels like grinding can have every tradeskill maxed out.

I have read some people say that there are some capes in the game already, but that their stats are minimal and they don’t actually show a graphic yet. I would assume that is something that will be put in before too long.