Guild Wars 2

Anet already has a hard time adding a complete set to the game. It would be a waste of budget to add 6 sets and then lock them under race restrictions.

If anything, I would like to see LESS cultural armors. Let my human character use some norn or sylvari stuff!

JonPeters.5630:

Asukai.4507:

Guild Halls and Housing would be good in the game maybe getting some crafting going with it

Do you mean some form of Guild Crafting? How would you expect that to work?

My biggest problem with GW2’s crafting is how we must craft items we don’t need for the sake of leveling our craftsmanship.

For that reason, anything that adds more unique crafting recipes to the game (across all levels) is a plus to me. Several solutions for this could include making all obtained recipes account bound after being unlocked/ used (it would only affect alts crafting experience, though, but still a highly desirable QoL change) to adding more unlocked-by-default recipes (like the newly added backpieces, which makes crafting so much more enjoyable to me).

So, any reason to add more stuff would be interesting. “Guild crafting” could be one additional reason for it. Make it so players could manually and individually craft furniture across all crafting levels, and then have the option to use it either for a personal housing system, or to lend it to a guild hall of choice.

(In the previous CDI, I mentioned how anet should take the opportunity to design and implemment a housing system that would work both for guilds and for personal instances, killing two (big) birds with one stone AND having, as a result, two systems that have excellent synergy with each other).

Examples of that could include:

• Wooden furniture (huntsman);
• Leather carpets (leatherworker);
• Weapon and armor decorations;
• Cloth decorations (tailor);
• Potion and magical decorations (artificer);
  (Some of them with selectable buffs)
• Food plates, with selectable buffs (chef);
• Jewelry;

This could be done in various ways.

• For most of the armor/ weapon decorations, they would re-use already existing models;
• Recipes for those could then be very similar to the recipes for making the equipable versions, with slight varions of the materials required;
• Some unique, decoration-only models should be there: 1 for each discipline, recipe unlocked by default, upgradable across levels (much like how crafting backpieces work);

Perhaps wooden furniture, due to how limitless it can be, should have its own discipline, or be available in more than one.

hackks.3687:

why should they give a kitten about it?

Nothing good has come from it. In fact it’s been quite the opposite.

IMO they should just delete it.

Because we all know how solo queing in the team queue and getting farmed by premade teams offer a more interesting experience and creates a better sense of competition, right?

Conncept.7638:

Caedmon.6798:

We’ve had hundreds of threads like these,mounts won’t be coming to gw2..and most threads about mounts will get removed.

Quit spreading misinformation, the developers have not ever stated they will never add mounts. In fact in the same interview where it was stated they wouldn’t be in at launch, the same interview you and everyone purposely misinterpret as stating there will never be any mounts, that same developer blatantly states they are a possibility for future development.

Besides, I highly doubt that anet would ignore what is one of the most requested features from their playerbase. Take a look at GvG, for example. Gw2 was not designed around gvg, but the playerbase has requested it since forever, and there we are, with a GvG CDI thread coming sometime soon. Likewise, the game wasn’t designed with raids in mind, but now we all know they’re probably in the works.

There’s a lot of support, indeed, but it’s variations or nuances within homogenized DPS builds. GW2 lacks clearly defined roles and categorizations, with clearly defined niches for each of them (some exceptions excluded), and the playerbase hasn’t been reacting very well to that.

I love the idea of airship guilds, especially if they could hover close to each other and allow members from different guilds to chat with each other with /say. How feaseable would that be?

Besides, a feature like that seems to be massively marketable, especially if it’s expanded beyond guilds. Think of FFXII’s airship travelling services to access to new locations and to floating continents.

Open-world guild halls would add a new layer to the “living world” concept and experience, so if possible, I think that should be the goal. It seems quite harder to implemented than instanced, though.

Benefits for open-world:

• Dynamic events could be designed for the halls (say, mobs trying to raid the hall, and event chains where guild players would take that fight to the mobs’ home);
• World would feel more alive;

How those benefits could still exist in instanced halls:

• Make dynamic events in the open-world for guild resource gathering. This would still give some life to maps;
• Make the portal’s locations different for each guild hall, spread around the world map, and give those entrances a small hub for guild members.

Randulf.7614:

Also, better achievements eg hard mode style ones in season 2 story. I think they need improving and n execution, but they are the right step forward.

A bit off-topic but, is there any anet’s statement about this?

I also found the “hard mode acchievements” a bit underwhelming as a feature, even though I love the idea of a hard mode version of missions. For example, why must you be forced to play the entire instance once to even unlock acchievements? This works nice in real hard mode, because it offers layered levels of difficulty/ progression, where you first get the basics of the instance, and then attempt to do a harder version of it. However, most of the “hard mode” acchievements so far are about acchieving things that can be easily acchieved on the first try, and do not change the entire experience enough to justify a replay. (There are exceptions.)

Although I haven’t taken a deep look at this thread yet, one potential solution to solve/ make it easier to implement a guild hall map system that could be expanded (in space, especially for housing), would be to get inspiration from palaces.

Palaces usually have a lot of corridors and rooms intertwined with each other. They remind me of spider’s webs, in this sense, except under a squared architecture.

So, if a guild could purchase a guild hall, and especially if there was a housing system there, the hall’s interior could start with a few rooms unlocked (doors opened), and the guild would expand its size by unlocking rooms and even entire floors.

This would be interesting both for small guilds, which would have less influence/ merit/ gold/ whatever to unlock them, because they wouldn’t even need to, while bigger guilds could unlock the entire palace structure.

This palace structure could also be a common model for all guild halls, with the only difference between selectable halls being how they are skinned. This may come of as lazy, or may be a good way to save resources.

Ohoni.6057:

Because calls for “harder” content typically comes packaged with this sort of elitist bullkitten that makes us not want you to have what you want because you want it.

That’s a generalization. I could say that current dungeon farming is filled with elitism, yet dungeon farming is mindless easy. Elitism will be there regardless of content.

In the end, harder content being more rewarding comes to common sense: it’s simply fair that players who work harder deserve better rewards. Of course, “work harder” might mean different things to different players, and by no means should it imply that players should be forced to do a specific piece of content to ever get a good sense of reward.

But if the entire game is driven by instant gratification, there’s no long term satisfaction, fulfilment or sense of acchievement neither.

Lynne.8416:

It’s the players that are the problem. Not anet.

This is not a good excuse, because Anet has direct control over their game’s mechanics, while players can only play with what they are given to.

If the playerbase has learned to break the game’s systems, then it’s the systems that are faulty. If the playerbase can ignore – and is rewarded for ignoring – core game mechanics, then it’s the game design that – to put it bluntly – failed at its intended purpose.

A game designer sets the right amount of options and restrictions to estabilish how the game should work. If most of the options are pratically or mathematically useless or redudant, and if most of the restrictions are ineffective, players have no blame in it, because they weren’t the ones that set them up.

Grevender.9235:

is there anything that relates harder content with it being interesting/highly replayable? (it’s an honest question, ‘cause I don’t see a logic link between the two factors)

That’s an interesting question.

In theory, harder content demands more out of the player making the best use of the battle system. Conditions, boons, stun breaks, timed dodges, interrupts, etc. If a battle system is designed around those elements, and yet they are absent from 99% of the enemy encounters, then we can safely assume that the combat system is not acchieving its full potential, which in turn it’s not as satisfying and fun as it could have been.

However, there’s such a thing as a middle ground between mindless auto-attacking zergs and niche super difficult content. I’ll even go as far as to say that I refuse to believe that challenging content can’t appeal to casuals. It all depends on either the company can or can not hit that middle ground spot.

Another user has sait it best: what this game lacks the most, is fun mechanics. Something that makes battles more creative, more engaging, more distinct from each other, even if that does not exactly translates into “high difficulty” content.

GW2 needs to make better use of its combat system. Which is not an easy to thing to acchieve, by itself, when so many of its core mechanics are broken (condition stacks, defensive stats, defiance, poor infrastructure for party supporting, spammy skills, poor balance, etc).

tanztante.6532:

yes, how will he do that? just like us i guess. he learns. from the peak on. just like we did back then.

Nope. If the combat system gives to the playerbase the perception of a massive mess, then they will leave, like they have been leaving, and they won’t recommend to their friends the game, and they’ll move on, like they have been, to other games where the pvp scene is far healthier.

oh and yes, please dumb this game down even further. plx remove all teh butoons, dey make me dizzy.

Quite the contrary, this game is so needlessly complicated, that it dumbs down itself. By simplifying and clearing the excess of details, there’ll be a lot more room for learning, for skillful playing and for spectators to even understand what is happening around.

This concept might be hard to grasp, but let’s say that more complexity does not always leads to more depth. UI infodumping, condition spamming, pet zoo, passive proc spamming, aoe spamming and the like make the whole combat more “complicated” due to how messy it becomes, but that does not translates exactly to adding more depth to it – it actually dumbs down the enjoyment and the depth behind it, tremendously.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

The OP is not confused on how to get better, rather he is making this point:

~ More people would play if they could learn from a loss
~ Rather than be confused by a complete massacre

And this will only happen if anet is willing to reshape many of the game’s systems for the sake of combat clarity.

Unfortunately, almost all the systems contribute to this problem, so the game would need an ambitious, large-scale reshaping for it to happen.

I mean, the entire trait system is a culprit. How do you fix a system that contributes up to 14 passive effects that proc automatically, all under different rules? How can a newcomer ever get the slight grasp of what contributed to their loss, when so many hidden effects, with each one being so different than the other, that trigger so many times without you noticing them, all under so many different conditions for triggers? What will be a newcomer’s reaction? Simple. “I have no idea what has just happened.” And then they win the next encounter because the RNG gods, the AI, the passives, the random dodges, the random everything was in they favor. How do they react? “I have no idea what has just happened, but I somehow won this one.”

GW2’s pvp combat is, simultaneously, too hardcore (you have to study every little detail hard to even get an idea of what is happening) and too casual (too much influence from passive effects, AI, procs, particle effects, lack of counterplay), which ultimately ends up NOT satisfying either of the two types of players. It’s a walking, messy contradiction.

Spam (AI, passive, condition, boon, etc) is everything.

Is there any other pvp game in the market where conditions counter condition cleansing?

I agree GW2’s combat lacks momentum, built-up and time to react to or read everything that is happening on the screen (and the UI).

You go into a battle, and if you do not have a deep knowledge of the game and the meta builds, you get blown up and you don’t understand why. This is a massive barrier of entry to new players.

Then, when you try to become a better player, the huge amount of AI and passive procs, instant or out of nowhere bursts, and lack of general telegraphs or counter play to big attacks, makes it so that it’s much easier for a random player who picked a random “cheese” build to destroy you with half the effort you commit to counter-play that opponent. So you either master the game of antecipation and the knowledge of your and everyone else’s builds, or your victories or defeats will always feel arbitrary and hard to understand how they happened. This is yet another huge barrier to players.

Basically, players get scared of the absurd amount of information they get from so many pets/ ui icons/ passive procs/ particle effects while instant-bursts come out of the nowhere and take all their health. It’s extremely unclear for new-to-average-and-even-to-merely-good players. By then, the remaining playerbase gets demotivated by their attempt to learn, because they feel no sense of progression against the cheese. And even if they will is made of steel and they decide to master as much as possible the pvp combat of GW2, they will ultimately feel how unfair it is their effort vs how easy to play other builds are.

But the worse of all of this, is that we do not see Anet interacting with us players about those issues. They have said they acknowledge one or another, and that’s it. Do they have a deeper idea of this problem? Are they trying to fix it? Most of the balance patches we’ve been getting revolve around buffing underwhelming skills, with only very few and shy attempts at actually fixing the core issues of GW2’s combat system… and only once every few months. What is happening? Can anyone at Anet tell us what is happening?

Shockwave.1230:

Interesting. People feel like pvp failed because of the combat system requiring an extremely high level of awareness and game knowledge.

I don’t have nothing against high level of awareness and game knowledge, but there’s so much information you can show at once before it starts have a negative effect on the overall quality.

It forces you to play more instintively, and demands you to have a stronger notion of the game (heavily based on experience and knowledge of the opposing build) to get a subconscious idea of what the hell is happening to you in more busy situations (and there are a LOT of busy situations).

It’s worth noting that if that amount of information was decreased, it wouldn’t dumb the combat system. Quite the contrary, it would open up more strategical plays, because players would have the time required to read and react to all the details that are occuring.

There’s other problems with this too:

• Casual spectators will be unable to understand what they are viewing in streams;
• The more number of players on the map, the worse the infodump scales, greatly restricting the potential of GW2’s pvp;
• Most of the playerbase – and I feel this is very important – does not feels a sense of progression most of the time. They either play with easy cheese, or are forced to master as well as possible a hard build to have a chance. There’s no middleground here. You are either win masterful, or you win with cheese. If you are merely “good”, chances are, the hard-to-play build you’re using will get destroyed by the meta easy-to-play cheese a random player decides to take from the internet. But this is worth a discussion on this one. Sense of progression = weak in this game.

If build templating comes in, locking your class on the start of the match could lead to several situational builds becoming more popular.

When it comes to map rotations, mobas (at least LoL, the only one I’ve played) do it in a way that is more friendly to PUGs.

With clearly defined lanes, rotations and roaming are usually done by the jungler, or by a laner who gets the opportunity for it. Meanwhile, it might come at the cost of farming and turret breaking, so it creates a nice balance between comitting to your lane, and rotating and roaming through the map. There’s a risk/ reward in here, like in almost everything else in the genre, anyway, which is why it is the esports that it is.

Conquest Mode is too circular/ cycling in nature, so pugs have a natural tendency to roam through the map like headless chickens, or to stay at a point far longer than they should. Conquest is really pug-unfriendly, and is a game mode that is far more enticing to coordenated teams.

Although we can identify many problems, the one that personally bothers me the most is the following: “infodump”.

The game throws way too much information at you at every single moment. Conditions, boons, “random” passive procs, pets, “random” cleaves, particle effects, and skill spamming. There’s always way too many things happening at once, it’s nearly absurd. Throw into that pot the unsatisfying number of key telegraphed skills, because some weapon sets are entirely designed around being powerful with very quick cast times or animations that are too similar to each other.

I’m not a top player, but I have a hard time believing that even the best players can manage so much information at the same time and react strategically to it. For most of the situations, I feel, it’s much wiser to react instinctively, and you only have some “room to breath” when you pick the OP easy-to-play or hard-to-counterplay cheese.

The information this game expects you to be aware at any given time in combat makes more sense to a turn-based RPG, than to a fast paced RPG like this one where you can lost your entire health from a sudden 3-second burst.

Even if the top players can somehow manage this infodump, it still creates a massive skill gate to most of the playerbase, which turns the entire learning experience into a “I don’t even know what the hell killed me, again…”. And no, it’s not only about “L2P”, before someone throws this excuse. If the first impressions (and second, and third) of this game’s combat system is that of a mess, and if you need to study hard and dig deep to even understand what the hell is happening on the screen and on the UI versus each meta build, it won’t motivate many people to keep investing on, when there are other pvp games in the market that are equally complex, possibly deeper, but with much, much clearer gameplay.

The same problem applies to spectators, who can’t even understand what they see.

To me, this is my biggest problem.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ohoni.6057:

Thanks for your reply. I was just talking about the design dev process primarily. We do have a QA team that tests the work and an Alpha group for feedback.

The process i described above is definitely not about speed (-: It is a quality iteration process as well as a best working practice that allows us to learn and improve the quality of the experience as we go along.

I will ask Ed Hocking our QA director to comment about the QA process and Gavian (our production director) to talk about production practices on Monday.

Once we have the feature ‘as designed’ i would love to chat about the design side of the release regarding NPE.

Phys is right. Whatever role your internal QA teams play in negotiating new feature changes, it can’t be enough given how many features go live that the players would never let you get away with. I mean, clearly the internal teams approved the April Trait changes and the Fall leveling changes, where if you’d asked the community about these “features” we’d have shot them down in a heartbeat and saved you who knows how many man-hours in implementing and subsequently un-implementing them.

I know that the NGE isn’t working “as intended” yet, and some of the community complaints are related to that, but many of them seem to be related to a genuine disagreement on intended elements, and since nobody from ANet is willing to give a breakdown as to which changes are bugs and which are “features,” we’re left treading water for now.

Hi Ohoni,

Still watching the game and then i am doing WvW after so sorry about the sporadic replies everyone else.

I wanted to comment on this :

‘but many of them seem to be related to a genuine disagreement on intended elements,’

I agree and that’s why i want us to get to the point where we can have a clear and focused discussion on ‘as intended design’ where we aren’t tripping over unintended issues. I feel that is the most valuable way to move forward.

Chris

Do you think a public test server could have prevented this?

Guild Halls in the open world is such a cool idea, that I’ll try to develop that idea next week. (If I get the time…)

Even if the game couldn’t handle the full scope for it, there could exist a limited number of places in the open world and the big cities for them – at higher, probably pax-paying costs. Then those places could either be closed or open to the public, but we’d certainly see Tyria more alive this way.

So, is that another QoL for the game? A more living world (lol)?

What I fear, is the scope and ambition for housing + open world together. Adding a few selectable instance maps is one thing, making them customisable, possible to expand in size and in the open world is another.

I want to see a guild housing heavily expand the gameplay’s and reward’s systems as much as you do, but it’s easy to understand how, at the very least, a few gem-only cosmetics here and then, and space expansion based on gems (for big guilds), would be a potentially good way to monetize the system without hurting it (as long as the bulk of it is in the gameplay and not in the gems). I can understand how unlocking merchants behind gems might be more questionable, but considering they are just a convenience upgrade, I would ask, why not?

The bulk of the rewards should be statues and other decorations of the monsters we kill, furniture we would craft, decorative relics that we would discover around the world, and new dynamic events and mob spawns specifically designed for that.

I’d say a guild hall-housing system with some (key word: some) furniture behind gems, merchant unlocking behind gems, and perhaps even space expansion behind gems would potentially give more revenue to Anet than the current Royal Terrace pass, so I wouldn’t use it as an obstacle.

Space expansion for housing is specially interesting, I think. Small guilds wouldn’t need it, and big guilds would love it for the sake of prestige. This would offer a nice sink for big guilds, without negatively affecting smaller guilds, as they would probably be satisfied with smaller guild halls.

A Guild Hall could also be used as a way to physically represent guild upgrades, making the whole upgrade system less impersonal and more visceral/ tangible.

Make it so each upgrade expands or decorates a specific area of the guild hall.

Some of the guild buffs, instead of being automatic, could also be manually obtainable within the halls. Slightly less convenient, but far more immersive, and clearer. Clearer, in the sense that in the current system, players might sometimes forget that those buffs even exist, considering that the only way to see them (?) is by checking the guild icon or navigating through some menu windows that won’t be of interest to everyone. Having those buffs clickable in a guild hall is, say, easier to understand for the overall playerbase, and thus a clearer mechanic.

Besides, I’m a fan of any mechanic that has stronger visceral impact, but unfortunately, it has the risk of skyrocketting the development’s budget. :P

Donari.5237:

That said, without going into all the foundation details of what makes it worth having a guild hall I’d guess QoL might include:

I think what Jon Peters is asking is, what QoL changes would a guild hall offer to GW2 as a whole, and not what QoL changes are needed for itself (which, as you said, it’s impossible to determine without thinking of how it would work in the first place).

Halls would enhance the guild community and social experience, expand content and rewards, and improve world immersion/ roleplaying, I think.

DiogoSilva.7089:

JonPeters.5630:

Ok time for a third topic.

Guild Halls.

I see this subject come up a lot in this thread and while we can talk about other aspects of Guild Halls at some point, let’s try another exercise.

What are the 3 top QOL features you think Guild Halls could provide that maybe couldn’t exist otherwise? Try not to list features that are beyond QOL, but I won’t hold it against you because its hard to do.

I’m out for the day hiking at Mt. Rainier but will try and return with my own top three later this weekend.

1. Guild members being able donate furtiture (or the funds for doing so).
   This would make players personally invested on the guilds they would donate to, creating a sense of home and strenghtning the feeling of primary guild.
2. Place for all guild members to meet each other and talk with each other.
   A bit more personal/ intimate than just having a guild chat and nothing else. Also allows for funny events, emotes, etc.
3. Unique sense of progression by itself.
   Getting halls, unlocking hall features, hall-related gear and acchievements, housing collecting/ customisation…
4. Zone with tutorial golems.
   Interesting for guild members to share and show off their builds with each other, without being disrupted by other players in the map.

Wait, that’s 4.

Also want to add that guild housing should not come at the cost of personal/ home instance housing, so it would be interesting if a system like that could be developed for both instances, killnig two birds with one stone, and then have each one tweaked differently.

Example 1
All members being able to donate furniture to their guild halls vs players being able to unlock story npcs in their home instance.

Example 2
Guild halls having guild-only furniture (something grander and more majestic) in addition to the humble furniture that would be available for personal housing.

And then, both versions of the system could use the same means to obtain, what I would call, “furniture collectibles”:

• From new dynamic events;
• From new crafting recipes (wood furniture, metallic statue and sword decorations, leather carpets and hunter’s trophies to put at the wall);
• From new achievement/ pvp/ wvw rewards;

Which would lead to two other big QoL changes that a housing system could bring to the game:

5. An opportunity to expand already existing content and maps of Tyria.
6. An opportunity to add plenty of new rewards and reward types to the game.

Bad@ss Prestige Example
Killing Tequatl would unlock a wall decoration to the guild hall with Tequatl’s tooth, claw, scale or even his entire head.
It could even be a tiered reward, getting more impressive the more times it was done.

JonPeters.5630:

Ok time for a third topic.

Guild Halls.

I see this subject come up a lot in this thread and while we can talk about other aspects of Guild Halls at some point, let’s try another exercise.

What are the 3 top QOL features you think Guild Halls could provide that maybe couldn’t exist otherwise? Try not to list features that are beyond QOL, but I won’t hold it against you because its hard to do.

I’m out for the day hiking at Mt. Rainier but will try and return with my own top three later this weekend.

1. Guild members being able donate furtiture (or the funds for doing so).
   This would make players personally invested on the guilds they would donate to, creating a sense of home and strenghtning the feeling of primary guild.
2. Place for all guild members to meet each other and talk with each other.
   A bit more personal/ intimate than just having a guild chat and nothing else. Also allows for funny events, emotes, etc.
3. Unique sense of progression by itself.
   Getting halls, unlocking hall features, hall-related gear and acchievements, housing collecting/ customisation…
4. Zone with tutorial golems.
   Interesting for guild members to share and show off their builds with each other, without being disrupted by other players in the map.

Wait, that’s 4.

The answer for the question “what would define a primary guild?” could, in my opinion, very well be the same for the question “how would a guild make us feel at home?”

This reminds me of societies and clubs, where members gather at a place to socialize with each other, sometimes owning a place collectively, and donating/ contributing furniture and other things. All of them would have a key to said place, and be able to enter it whenever they would wish, but of course, the rules depend on case-by-case.

Which makes me wonder, if this wouldn’t be better accomplished with guild housing – not in the sense that GW1 did it (selectable halls + merchant unlocking), but a more customisable housing where its members would be able to contribute and donate cosmetic enhancements. This way, they would feel “personally invested” and “at home” within said guild, because they helped shape it.

Guild Halls is off-topic, but it would probably be a better way to acchieve this feeling of “primary guild” than QoL changes to logistics.

What do people think of my previously posted proposal for being able to form a “web of parties” within the same guild? Would it help making large content easier to organize, especially when pugs are involved too? Would it be worth the effort?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

steveway.3167:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

steveway.3167:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ben K.6238:

steveway.3167:

If these issues were resolved by opening up a seperate channel for all guilds you are a member of, dividing all influence earned between each guild you are a member of and displaying the MOD and online members of each guild you are a member of, then it would not be a problem. In essance you would need full access to each guild you are in at all times to truly be in multiple guilds.

Quick comment – if you could switch between repping guilds without losing guild chat, dividing influence wouldn’t matter so much. If you wanted to go 50/50 you could switch over at will. I’m not sure how complex divvying up the influence would be to implement, but until then there’d be a workaround if we could have all /g channels displayed.

How would you handle the UI design. Specifically clutter?

Chris

As far as clutter for general features, it could be just a matter of clicking on the guild in the guild menu and displaying all the information avail to a repping member to every member. you would select the guild and it would display mod, online members, influence, upgrades etc as it does now to repping members. If you wanted to change to another guild then just clicking on the guild would give you access to that guilds info without clicking rep each time.

As far as clutter in the chat, each guild would have their own color to signify each channel like map/say now. Players would have the option of turning off specific channels as they do now. It does present the porblem of channels with alot of discussion hiding comments of other channels. This is already an issue though when say/map chat gets really going in some areas. We would alwasys have the same option of hiding specific channels like we do now though.

Hey Steve,

Interesting points. If you had each guilds chat on your main chat panel you would likely get a huge amount of traffic and not be able to keep up with the volume. I get that people can hide channels but it needs to be designed in such a way that at its max functionality it doesn’t break immersion.

Chris

I definately see your point. Its currently an issue in some areas now too. There are days when map/say chat in Divinities Reach can get going and I miss comments from my guild chat. Adding more channels could make things worse, definately. Maybe a chat revamp is neccessary? I don’t know.

Something for us to keep discussing.

Chris

Few things come to mind:

1. Make /map and /say chat fade away faster than /whisper, /guild, /party when the chat menu is not opened. This would mean that, if a guild member said something, and two people on map followed up in the chat, after a few seconds, the /map chat would fade away but the /guild words would still remain on the screen for, say, twice the duration. This could also be customisable, allowing players to set up priorities for this.
2. Alternatively (or in addition to), chat channels with “priorities” would have their own section of the chat reserved just for themselves – say, about two lines. So if your chat window is filling fast with /said messages, and if a guildie or a whisping friend would tell you something, that particular line would be stickied at the top of the chat, without being pushed back by the incoming /say or /map messages, until a set amount of time has passed.
3. Alternatively (or in addition to), players could choose to divide the chat in two – with an upper and a lower part for different channels, as well as set up how much space each of the two divisions would take (say, a /guild channel would take 70% of the lines’ space, the remaining 30%, all up to the player).
4. And there’s also, of course, emphasized brackets for whenever a new message is posted on that channel.

Proposal Overview
Guild Parties

Goal of Proposal
When the members of a guild form several parties to participate in the same content at the same time, it’s hard to track how many of them exist or how full each of them is, as well as it is hard sometimes to even chat across all parties within the same guild. My proposal attempts to fix this, which would be interesting for guild missions, and even more for world boss events where guilds recruit all kinds of PUGs.

Proposal Functionality

• Add a subsection on the guild’s UI page for Organization and Parties.
• In this page, guild members can pre-create several parties, assign party leaders to each of them, and invite other members to each party either through said page, or through the already existing means.
• Parties created this way can be assigned specific names and be given a small description for their purpose.
• Permissions would be required to create and manage “guild parties”.
• A new command /guildparty (or other name) would exist to communicate to all guild parties. All party members would be able to read them, even those who are not from the guild. Guild members who aren’t participating/ in the party wouldn’t be able to read them.
• Party members would be able to view the position of all players in all guild parties in the map, not just the members of their own party.
• Members from other parties would be shown with a different dot color in the map, and a different colored name above their heads.

Example
Marionette Fight

1. Officer would set up five guild parties, each one named for each lane (out of the 5).
2. Officer would then assign a party leader to each party.
3. Party leaders would invite whoever they please, be it either guild members or pugs (could also be set up by permissions).
4. Party members would be able to see the blue dots of the remaining 24 other players (assuming all parties are full).
5. Lane1-3 parties would be given a short description: help lane 3-5 after you have completed yours.
6. Players would communicate across this “web of parties” to successful coordenate through the event.

Associated Risks
?

Zesbeer.8365:

Questions:
how would u prevent guild leaders/officers trolling guild members and requiring high amounts of gold or high tier items as a tax?

how would you prevent taxes from just being the guild leaders personal piggy bank? (ie skimming off the top or flat out using the income for personal gain)

how would having a guild tax allow you to get things for your guild that you are not able to get with influence?
why not have the influence system expanded to allow for guilds to be able to get the items that you want to be able to get with taxes ?

personally I would leave any guild that required taxes if taxes were added to the game.

• Taxes would be automatically defined by the game, and probably for an accessible fee too. For example, X silver coins each week or two (for each tier 1 permission on that account). Guild leaders and officers would only be able to set up/ change the member’s permissions to tier 0, tier 1 (tax-paying), or tier 2. Nothing else. They wouldn’t be able to set up the value of the tax.
• The income would be restricted, by the system, to be only spent on specific, anet-intended shops and player’s gifts. How it would be spent would automatically be registed on a guild’s text log, so players would be able to see how it was spent, judge the leader, and decide if they should leave the guild or not.
• Income could be an alternative way to buy items instead of getting influence, or even be influence itself. For example, the tax’s income could be directly converted to influence. So this could very well be an “expansion of the influence system”, if implemented that way.

EDIT
The option for taxing “normal” members (without permissions) is more questionable and could very well not even be implemented. The core of my idea is, if you contribute to the guild, you get access to some permissions/ privileges.

I’d say GvG, guild halls and the like are far more effective at making us “feel at home” within a guild, than the services said guild provides. Although that’s for other topic, as long as they are designed to make sure players need to interact with each other, then that’s a big step into the intended social direction. It’s a content problem that affects the whole game, and not exactly guild-specific.

About taxing players, here’s my idea:

Currently, guild members can have special privileges (access to guild bank, etc). Make those privileges tiered:

• Tier 0 – No access to that privilege;
• Tier 1 – Access to that privilege under a tax. The member can cancel said privilege if they aren’t willing to pay a tax anymore. (optional implementation: the “privilege” of “being a member” can be taxed too, should the guild leader decide to).
• Tier 2- Free privileges without tax.

Basically, the equivalent of tier 0 and tier 2 describe the already existing system, but with taxes as a middleground between “no access to X privilege” and “full access to X privilege”.

This system can then be improved in several ways:

• Contributing to the guild could lower the tax value, as an incentive to personally invest on the guild.
• Taxing players would have their own “rights”, to make sure guild leaders wouldn’t abuse them. For example, as long as they are paying their taxes, they have protection from being banned/ kicked from the guild UNLESS some of the player’s money could be sent back to said player, alongside/ or a “honorable reward” (for paying the taxes).
• The money from taxes would all go to vault, and could only be withdrawn by those who have a new privilege exactly for that.
• How that money would be used, and when it would be withdrawn, would be listed in the guild’s news log, for the sake of clarity and to prevent abuse.
• Guild gold currency would be used for: sending x% of the selected value to selected guild members, as an alternate way to unlock upgrades, as an alternate way to buy guild items and gear, and even to send said gear to players as a gift.
• Option to donate money to the guild directly, at the exchange of an appropriate “honorable reward”.
• “Leaderboard” of members who have contributed the most money to the guild (perhaps even including those who are no longer at the guild, reserving a special, honorable position).

Jaken.6801:

Traits do allready give you everything subclasses would do, execept the unique naming of your class.

If traits were that good at replacing subclasses, then the GW2’s community would recognize the system as “pretty much a form of subclassing”. Which no one does, at all. That’s because traits clearly exist to fulfill a different, much broader purpose: to tweak existing (weapon and utility) builds. Yes, some of those traits are subclass flavored, but that is secondary only. If you were to view the trait system as a form of subclassing, it would be a highly restricting, non-focused system. That’s why no one recognizes traits as such.

Let’s look at how many obstacles traits offer against a proper subclassing system:

• Traitlines are very restricting: 5 dictated by stat placement.
• Traitlines are too broad.
• Minor traits are too broad – most of them will be out-of-flavor to any subclass you attempt to fulfill in your imagination.
• Subclass-flavored major traits are directly (mathematically or in practice) compared with non-flavored traits. Because trait picking is generally and logically dictated by balance, the game will go through lenghy periods of time where many traits without flavor will be more viable than many traits with flavor (and the other way around), and this will never change. Even if the impossible would happen, and we would get perfect balance, the fact that non-flavored traits exist and are in abundance detracts from it.
• Flavored traits within the same theme are unfocused: generally spread through different traitlines.
• Themes are unclear, hidden, unfocused. As you’ve mentioned, subclasses aren’t called by their name, and this is probably much more important than what you realize.
• Traits are a system for passive enhancements and passive procs. They do not offer active skills, nor do they change existing skills nor profession mechanics in meaningful ways.

You don’t approach the trait system thinking that you’re going to make a pyromancer or a battlemage out of your elemetanlist character. You approach the trait system and pick the most viable traits, wherever they are and what they are, and when the choice is difficult, your real questions will be “should I go more offensive or defensive?” or trait-dependend "should I have more or less condition cleansing?, etc.

To put it simply, traits are bad at subclassing. Flavor is secondary, unfocused and unclear. You can use your imagination and traiting to roleplay a bit on a subclass, but ultimately, the difference between you and another player won’t be that big, and no one will recognize your “subclass” unless you type it on chat.

Jaken.6801:

Subclasses
Subclasses came up in the CDI and i participated there. I am against it. Why? Simply because they are allready in: Traits
Change your traits and subsequently change the effects of your ability and voila, you go from a fire guardian to a spirit weapon wielder.
Change from a Pet lving longbow master to a ninja like frontline fighter as a ranger.

I also participated heavily at that CDI, where I argued that, if traits are meant to be the replacement a subclass system, they fail at it. If traits ever work as an obstacle to a subclass system, then remove traits entirely. Or just replace them with the theorically-superior version that the subclass system is. Or make them a part of it.

The problem with some arguments against (some) new professions, is that a class having a niche skillset for theme Y or a class being entirely based around theme Y are two different things that offer a very different experience.

You can say that the Mesmer has musical themed skills for their underwater skills. But no Bard-lovers will care about that. No Bard-lovers will care about clones, damaging illusions, shatters, sword tricks, etc.

You can say that guardians have spirit weapons. But few ritualist lovers enjoy the idea of playing an entire class, and being stuck to a mostly defensive skillset, just for the sake of toying with 4 utility skills that might even (or even might not) be balanced and useful.

Likewise, no battlemage lover will be satisfied by the Guardian, because guardian is balanced around melee and protective tactics, so having 2-3 simplistic magical weapons that throw blue orbs won’t be very engaging for them.

Current classes might offer a “little bit of everything”, but that little bit of everything is always too little for anyone solely interesting on that.

No matter how unoriginal it might seem, the Dark Kngiht fills the missing spot perfectly.

The only magical knight we have is the guardian, which is heavily designed around a supportive and melee playstyle. Bubbles, wards, 2/3s of the profession mechanic tailored towards support, lots and lots of healing and blocking and aegis.

We could have a magical heavy armorer with a very different purpose, perhaps with a focus on ranged crowd control. Lots of chill, mix of long-range spells with melee attacks, poison and torment, health draining and perhaps health sharing and sacrificing. Might seem necro-ish, but without minions, weakness, bleeding, death shroud, and with new things added in, so it would stand out.

A Samurai-ish profession would also be really cool, and could fill the role perfectly. They could even replace the Dervish in name and weapon, and make them the wind/ earth self-enchanting warriors.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Next level necro: Although there wasn’t a blog post, we did announce the new combat at Gamescom coming in Feature Pack 2. Some details are listed here: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/September_2014_Feature_Pack#Combat_log
I figured it’s worth spreading the word since I haven’t seen it listed on any feature pack summary threads.

Ya, I was finding it weird how none of the blog posts mentioned the combat log yet. Did the writers forgot about it at the “game improvements” page? xD

Is there anything else left forgotten aside from this?

Can we first get better scholar male armor?

I would love for some clothes that are simple BUT elegant, with a very focused and appealing theme behind them. Instead, most of our “simple” clothes are boring and bland, and everything else is overly-detailed, busy and nonsense.

The best part of this feature patch so far.

@JonPeterts

To ease up the new system, I recommend the following:

• Make the first adept trait (number I) for each trait line unlocked by default. (Talk to the balancing team about re-ordering some of the trait’s numbers too, so that the number I would be a broad trait instead of a niche trait).
• Make as many adept traits unlocked by story instances from lv30 and on as possible.
• Make five master traits unlocked by the last five story instances (not sure if that’s already the case or not).
• Remove all map exploration/ jumping puzzle requirement for traits. One of the problems with this new system, is that you’re treating it like you treated dailies: as an incentive to do other types of content, when traits are much more than that: it’s a core progression system.

TheThiefMaster.3812:

More l2p , less QQ .

Counterplaying is a design concept that exists exactly to make a game more L2P-worthy, so using the L2P argument against counterplaying is often contradictory, and makes it hard to understand if your post was well thought or not (and let’s be honest, most L2P posts are reactionary QQ in the first place, which doesn’t helps).

I personally do not find marks a good example of counterplaying at all. They’re not the worst example out there, and once they are on the ground, they get a bit better at this situation. But they’re all very samey in how they’re cast and how they look.

SkylightMoon.1980:

The problem with your comment is that you seem self-entitled. First off all, teq is puggable nowadays for the most part. The wurm is not, and thats fine. Anet didnt intend for it to be. Let the hardcore community have pieces of content in this game. If Anet goes forth with megabosses, then you will see only more guild coordination is required. There is lots to do in this game, especially in PVE, that doesn’t require you to coordinate at all, so maybe thats more for you.

Hi, SkylightMoon.

I acknowledge that my post fits specifically my tastes, and that not everyone would agree with me. As I’ve said there, I think that content like the Wurm is fine, but because it doesn’t appeals to everyone, there should exist different kinds of world bosses for different tastes. I believe that’s a perfectly fair request. :P

There’s a lot of PvE content that is not challenging. I would like to see more challenging content, especially for some epic encounters, that can be acchievable by other means other than mass guild organization. Something more (or equally) demanding of personal skill, for example, but that is less punishing to pugs and random Tyrian travelers.

The problem with Tequatl and the Wurm, for a player like me, is that they are heavily reliant on massive guild organization, which I don’t have a preference on, so I would simply ignore that this kind of content exists. Me, and many others, which can be bad when some bosses are heavily hyped in trailers, like Shatterer was.

“Oh, I can’t wait to play this game and fight this guy!”

“Nevermind, it’s all about guild coordenation, not to my tastes.”

Of course, the current version is not any better.

“Here I am, standing in a spot auto-attacking. Yay, I won. Here’s generic rare loot for me. Savage fodder! When will I be able to farm this guy again?”

I would like to see this battle expanded, but not into the direction that the two newest world bosses went to. I would like to see more mechanics for this boss, some fun stuff like what we’ve had with Marionnette and others, with creative and interesting movement and position tactics, and zerg-spreading content, etc, but done in a way where even the casual player could engage in and – even if said casual player would lose and find the content to be (too) hard at the beginning – with enough dedication they would eventually be able to overcome it – and perhaps even beat the guy in times of the day where the map would have fewer people.

And that’s why I don’t like the new Tequalt or the Wurm. No matter how much you “learn”, how much you improve upon, you either have the entire map coordenated, or you lose. It’s an interesting challenge to guilds, certainly. It is NOT, however, an interesting challenge to me, as an individual player.

Oh, and unique rewards! You can’t make one thousand marketing trailers hyping this big guy, and then have new players come in and not get a single unique reward out of him. This game is a RPG, and one of the strenghts and main appeals of the RPG genre is (among others) rewards and sense of progression. Especially for content that is (wants to be) challenging in nature and must be overcomed. (“Challenging” does not means ultra-hard content).

Mesket.5728:

The OP has a solid point.

One of GW2 strongest features was the leveling system. Fun, not repeteable and filled with tedious quests, gear was never an issue, etc… while probably one of the weakest is the endgame content.

This feature pack is like getting to manage any poor country on Africa and start by putting resources on implementing free Wifi for everyone instead of taking care of the basic needs…

Some of the game’s strongest points are the combat and the seamless and highly detailed game exploration (before it gets repetitive), which carried the game’s quality a lot early game.

Leveling was never anything “special”, and gear and customisation much less so. It was not an “issue”, but it didn’t stand out either. The lack of interesting gear/ loot rewards is a general problem that has been discussed and accepted by the community since a long time ago, and everyone also complained about how fast it is to unlock all the “needed” skills. The only thing that the leveling experience had of interest, by itself, after the first few levels, was the (old) trait system, and even then, it was only meaningful every 5 levels.

Although I agree that GW2’s endgame is one of its weakest points (coupled with content that becomes highly repetitive after a while, and in addition to the underwhelming reward & progression structure), and although the changes to the trait system were poorly executed and backfired, it’s not like the leveling system was something that much better before.

If anything, this new change gives a lot more emphasis on leveling. Higher and more visible rewards and unlocks, more impactful stat buffs, and a vehicle to slowly introduce tutorials into the game. The new leveling system pretty much becomes the skeleton for tutorials and for the early game structure, which in a way, that’s what it was already before this change, just not that good at previously.

It’s a good improvement, as long as we are willing to adapt to the changes. Let’s imagine the opposite scenario: If the new system was there right at launch, and if the old system was suddenly implemented in this new feature patch, people would be criticizing the old system heavily: What, less tutorials? What, generic stat buffs like other mmorpgs? What, no loot on leveling anymore? Story episodes are now going to be spread apart? – Yeah, not very interesting.

Brother Grimm.5176:

I’m more confused about why this change concerns LVL 80 players…. This is an area of the game that has been LACKING for 2 years and when they try to improve it (not saying the improvements are good or bad), the player base wants to complain?

Gotta love the Dev hate this forum thrives on….

True, most of the changes announced so far for this feature patch are based on player’s criticism on the early game experience.

Something tells me that the concept of Karma should be reshaped.

Much like laurels are a “time-gated currency”, which you receive for logging in (and do some dailies), Karma is some kind of “content-gated currency” that is common to the entire world map.

For this reason, I rather see Karma treated more like Laurels: with an unique merchant, with an unique set of karma-only rewards (tha goes beyond what we get in the temples), or even have both used for the same merchant, giving the player the choice between logging in and doing dailies, or doing other types of content (or both) to get those ascended trinkets.

Alternatively, I think this game lacks a “prestige” currency, one which you could use to unlock prestige rewards, and Karma could be revamped into that. Make all current karma merchants into gold merchants, remove karma from events and the like, and then add a new karma system that is only obtainable through challenging content. Players would then be able to unlock cosmetics, ascended gear, account conveniences and other stuff through this revamped karma currency as a sign of prestige.

EDIT
Karma could also be a tiered currency, with several different levels (think of copper->silver->gold, but without one automatically converting into the other). This way, low and mid tiers of karma would be used for what they currently are used: unlock rewards (from karma merchants) by your “casual heroic deeds”, and then a high tier of karma would only be obtainable from challenging content.

Shalloe.4867:

After years of hearing the game will be released “when its ready” makes you wonder if the devs considered the game ready for release when it was.

It clearly wasn’t.