Guild Wars 2

Well, hmm. Do you create your universe from scratch? Or do you have shared elements, like “this is a modern western urban area with cars and hotels and casinos.”

If someone writes an urban fantasy, they’re still using a recognizable modern urban setting, possibly actual cities that exist RL, but telling a tale using that backdrop.

You don’t have to be scripted by what the game does. My human noble doesn’t pal around with Logan, and has only obliquely interacted with Anise. Faren stands in for a whole crowd of roisterers he’s caroused with over the years. He did run away and join the circus … sort of. He toured with traveling players, for very solid IC reasons. I set up a plot connection with another player before launch, and after a year of play it was finally ICly discovered they were half-brothers, le gasp! All having to do with his father’s infidelity which made him grow up thinking he was adopted when he actually was his father’s son.

None of that came from the game “script.” It was only vaguely inspired by the orphan with a broken-token the PS suggested. Our guild’s current adventure has us dealing with a life-draining magic rock discovered in Dry Top. We’ve had wilderness treks, lab experiments, heart to heart conversations with those who may die thanks to the magic rock … it’s been a blast, and we only used the world as the background.

While doing our best to stay within the world’s lore and continuity, of course.

I’m sure Predator will outdo me on this but here’s my Charr elementalist (her tail swished as I snipped the shot, but she is a she). She’s in cultural Invoker, with Student Shoes and Seer Gloves. I don’t know about sexy, but I’ll go with classy and dignified. The colors are what I chose to set off her fur and eyes.

Part 2
Customizable – Let the guild choose the theme and décor. More, let guild members with the right permissions make alterations or at least be able to view the options. It has frustrated me no end that the only way I could ever see guild banner design was to be the leader, so it took a couple of years for me to make a personal guild for some storage and to finally see that part of the game. LotRO allows anyone with permissions to add and rearrange furniture, paneling, floor tiles, etc. Let the GM choose who to trust with that power.

That means lots of attachment points, or even free placement of objects. Lots of objects to choose from, colors to select, the works. In CoH I played with friends for a tiny amount of time and was blown away by the Secret Headquarters where they’d put in a conversational couch area that blended beautifully with the room. Let us have a salon, or a tree pod, or a busy asuran lab. A stately mansion, a rough tavern. A steading or a great hall. Even a Kodan ice building. Give us all the furnishings that would suit each theme, but don’t prevent us mix and matching what goes in there. Let there be trophies, banners, proof of what the guild’s done. Maybe let each guildie have their own sub-area to customize, an instance inside an instance?

Permanence – No taxes, no rents, no mortgages. This is instanced, remember? So long as the guild exists, no matter how inactive, a member should be able to log into game and “go home.” Decoration and buildings should only vanish when the guild elects to get rid of them, when making room for new things or when remodeling. Again, that’s part of this game’s base design and philosophy. You don’t lose progress or fall behind if life takes you away for a time.

Accessible — Sure, more resources poured in can make for grander halls. But keep the threshold very low. Someone suggested a three person guild should be able to get a guild hall. Yes! It might just be something like The Dead End or a smallish sylvari pod, or even just an apartment (lookit all those buildings climbing the sides of DR), but let any guild have a home for a fairly basic investment.

Part 1 – I will try to keep this short, but I would rather highlight my ideas than do a detailed proposal for each one at this point. Skimming the thread I see a number of people agreeing with my desired features, especially MakubeC.

Instanced – open world land grabs will not work. Just look at the flame fest going on in ArcheAge now, or refer back to DaoC and Horizons for other open-world land ripping communities apart. GW2 is a cooperative game founded on sharing resources, not fighting for them. I do like the idea of having a number of access points around the world, but suggest they not be on the other side of high level zones. New members need to get in too!

Varied instances. E.g. LotRO’s neighborhood mechanic, with themed areas and preset houses in the zone’s architectural style. When one fills up, a new one’s generated; you pick from a numbered list to choose which to enter (maybe here it would be an alphabetized list of guilds). I’d suggest that for guild hall purposes that only guild members (and permitted guests) can enter and inhabit that instance, though of course a guild could set the permission to “all.” Assuming that there are granular permissions inside, that is, so “all” can look but not touch. We have 5 races and a number of sub-races, let a guild choose an overall theme. (And if it’s an airship, as my guild surely will pick, let it take on the guild colors!) I don’t suggest doing it exactly like LotRO, just use the endless-instances method.

Not filled with utilities. Perhaps a guild bank, but all personally used stations should remain in the open, to promote the populated feel. There are plenty such stations around the world already, putting them in guild instances serves no real purpose to my mind.

The starting dye set is well nigh irrelevant. While it should apply that as a base to any neutral-colored items you pick up, the arrangement of dye channels may vary. Also, if you have three channels on a starter item, and get a four-channel piece of gear, you’ll have a pale muddy brown in that fourth channel until you apply it.

As you can change dyes at will and whim for free (once you have learned a dye, there’s no charge to use it) any time you want to pull up your hero panel for the purpose, you’re really not locked in no matter what you pick at the start.

I don’t know that there’s any way to have flames without light. However, you could get Ebonblade, which is the same sword design with no flames at all. I know you want the flames, though

All the world’s a stage, so to speak. RP is the stories we tell upon that stage, using elements the game provides.

In the LA attack, one of my guildies permadied. She was my main’s lover, and beloved of many in the guild, so that added the personal touch as we responded to the larger disaster and brought home the death and devastation when a city of 40K people burned. I also started my Scarlet Pimpernel sylvari off there, as a Whispers agent leading lost citizens to safety.

RP can be about love and hate, adventure (like stealing an airship from the Aethers via completing the Not So Secret JP, or delving into the Dream to rescue a lost soul), or just friendship and banter. Use the events and the terrain, don’t let it limit you. A lot of the events are cyclical rather than resetting, so one can be a world-weary seraph fighting off yet another centaur attack. Or the RPers can come to a consensus that “Ok, we fought off an attack, now we’re going to stand over here where the event won’t attack us and just say that ICly there’s no fighting now.”

RP is about telling stories. If you ever read braided novels back when those were a popular form of S&SF, it’s somewhat like that. Each player is the “main” in his/her own tale, but works with others to let them shine as well.

There are thousands of people around you RPing in any MMO you’re in. It certainly is viable!

If you mean PvP in GW2, then go to the PvP forums. Any suggestion should be put in the most relevant subforum to get it in front of the eyes of the devs devoted to that subsection of the game. That’s how it’s been since they retired the one-size-fits-all jumbled mess of suggestions by archiving the specific “Suggestions” subforum. Put (Suggestion) or (Idea) in your title to help the devs spot it as such.

If you mean something not GW2 related, I think you’re out of luck as there is not an off-topic area in these forums.

Go to a black lion armor merchant in a city and talk to him/her. You’ll get an option to retrieve items that were worn (some will become tonics, not clothing).

While I may not be on much over the weekend — lovely weather to go to the Renn Faire! — I’ll be happy to help out and answer questions when I’m around. I’m on NA Tarnished Coast. I don’t WvW or EotM but I do plenty of PvE and RP. Just don’t ask me for the best builds, I’m no min-maxer.

You mean the hair that’s been out quite a while? I just scurried to look via hair kit and there’s nothing new there.

I mean yes, it’s lovely getting all the new hair (my main got a new do for the first time since headstart creation, love that male human ponytail) — but the new styles came out before the current LS chapter. Am I missing something even newer?

I was going to watch this, expecting it to start in an hour. However, going to the page for it I realized that oh, yeah, they’re in Europe so the time is different and they did the Points of Interest seven hours earlier than usual.

Did anyone watch? Were there any revelations?

Retro, I think you actually came up with a viable 3rd heavy profession with a unique flavor and flair. Kudos!

Can they at least see map chat? If so then we can maybe do some announcing “willing to help and answer questions, I’m standing at X spot, come wave at me so I can add you and we can whisper or group.” That sort of thing.

Also note the story is not profession based. Whatever profession you’re playing will go through the same story. Race determines the first phase’s options, and to some extent the second phase (the three choices of sub-race to study vary), and everyone gets the same Order missions and Orr fights.

So while it’s worth replaying on alts to see other story choice results, don’t expect it to be any different if your only change is to what profession you’re playing.

I love that movie! You got the look really well.

In beta I ran out excitedly onto the ice in Hoelbrak. And wept softly into a tissue when it acted just like nice solid full-of-friction land. I was so hoping this game would have environmental effects on movement.

Danikat.8537:

A game where you can play as a dragon would be amazing. A humanoid dragon themed race in a fantasy MMO would be cool.

But it wouldn’t work in GW2. It wouldn’t make any sense with the lore we have on dragons and I can’t see them making any of the reptilian races playable.

There is in fact such a game. I have no idea what the playerbase is like or how the engine’s changed since I stopped playing during the first few months of vanilla WoW, but in this game http://www.istaria.com/ you can play a baby dragon and then do extensive questlines to grow and gain flight, as well as to gain a humanoid form to toggle so you can fit in buildings with your smaller friends. I RP’d there for a few years.

But indeed, I don’t see it working in GW2. (Never mind that now humans and charr are at peace which wouldn’t have been foreseen in GW1’s milieu). If we stay true to the lore, that would be like saying “let’s have a player race made of earthquakes or tsunami!”

Now, if storytelling in GW2 gets extra bold, perhaps Sylvari will have to deal with being dragonish … /grins

Thanks for finding that old patch note. That was one of the praise-be-to-Anet moments in this game’s history. We need it back!

Any minute now there will be a CDI on Guild Halls. Why not participate in that thread? It will be full of red posts and player suggestions and hammering out of ideas.

*CDI = Community Development Initiative

Ok, here’s hoping my post went through — first time the new page bug has gotten me.

edit: Phew, it did. Page-holder post!

Ok, so our fave three now that the thread’s been filled with suggestions? I’ll leave out guild halls because while I want them, want them baaaad, along with player housing, I don’t feel they come under QoL/Logistics. In no particular order:

- improved UI and granularity of information available in it; improved permission controls for guild bank tabs
- a vast reduction of chat and mail spam suppression between guild members
- easily manageable multi-guild chat, be it alliance, new chat channels, custom chat channels, etc.

I checked earlier today on an 80, no banker. Just now on my 36, the banker golem was at 0 gems. I’m pretty sure the 36 has used the golem before, as he doesn’t have one now and all my alts get one on creation.

I just checked, I see no free items. The golem is “Hot” and 500 gems. I do have the high end account via CE preorder.

As others above me, so many choices of character. I shall stay with my main, Sir Donari Mal di Bette.

Smell: Assuming he’s not been in a crisis preventing grooming (such as LA’s demolishing), he’s got a clean scent, perhaps a hint of smokiness and roses thanks to judiciously minimal application of cologne. Those sensitive to the difference between vegetarians and carnivores would know that he does eat quite a bit of meat. He wears silk, wool, and leather, so those will add their grace notes.

Peanut Butter: “A gourmand will not restrict himself, but suit the food to the occasion. Yet I find that chunky allows for more interesting variations.”

Cash: “Now would I take your money? Ah, well, as you insist.” He flashes a smile. “Shall we say ten twenties and a hundred?” For with just one higher denomination bill, a dextrous prestidigitator kittentainly befool a mark or two.

Pizza: "I did mention that I am a gourmand, did I not? I enjoy so many choices. One I’ve found that gets excellent results when I make it for a lady — " he winks just a bit suggestively — “is a thin crust with honey, chopped garlic, fresh basil and goat cheese, with a fine crumbling of seasoned ground beef.” A pause. “But if I am eating merely for myself, I enjoy fresh rosemary with pepperoni on a thicker, chewy crust.”

Dogs: “Of the three you mention, a shepherd’s best. I’ve a good friend with a large dog who’s quite won me over.”

Math/Humanities: “Six spare me from math. It’s the most horrid part of doing my duty as the di Bette heir … ledgers, accounts, columns of figures. A man needs to live among people, not tot them up in valuable rows.”

Sure, no problem! This is an astounding labor of love on your part. All my thanks for it.

NoxInfernus.2361:

Of course it stabs the feet.
How else do you harvest someone’s sole?

I love you.

Whoops, missed my page 3 one about moving the Leave Guild button and adding warning messages.

LFG shouldn’t put you with anyone you have blocked. That’s just asking for drama.

I’m trying to remember the name of it — Acolyte? — the set that is mostly from PvP but you get the chest from a PS step fairly early on. It’s a high necked long sleeved top with beading.

I suggest you go to the bank and open the wardrobe, select Light filter, and just preview chests one by one with your hood on until you find a match. Remember the preview will use your current chest dye colors and those might not match the way you want, so look past the color to the shape.

They are the same thing as far as the game is concerned, just with inconsistent nomenclature. If it shoots at a distance underwater and isn’t a trident, it’s a speargun no matter what its tooltip says.

Kaz.5430:

Proposal Overview
Minimum representation limit (the sledgehammer option)

Goal of Proposal
The system keeps track of how often players have represented the various guilds that they have chosen to join. If players drop below a certain threshold of time spent representing (e.g. 10%) the system request that they either represent the guild (until that threshold has been reached), or leave it. This will occur over and over until players get in the habit of representing all guilds that they have chosen to be a part of, or leave guilds that they have no intention of being a part of.

Proposal Functionality
The system would most likely have an effect of reducing the number of guilds with the negative “100% rep or boot” rule. It would also have an effect of removing players from guilds that they do not have any intention of actually interacting with, and therefore improving the social aspects of the guild system by ensuring that players ‘want’ to be in a guild.

Associated Risks
“100% rep or boot” guilds will complain, a lot.

My problem with an automated “rep or leave” system is that can take control away from players. For instance, I’m in two guilds I never rep. One is composed of my friends from many years in WoW, who have gone back there (or onwards) rather than remain in GW2. I can still glance at the roster to see if anyone’s on. Someone was, just last week, and we had a nice chat. The guild itself is defunct but it still allows me to track a specific subset of friends. Without better organizational controls of the friends list, I’d hate to lose that function.

The other is a spinoff guild mostly of alts of my main guild. I have yet to get an alt designed to fit their darker, grittier RP, but they’ve invited me in and I could “listen in” any time I want. The thing is their leader has a lot of RL distractions and stuff in that guild happens only sporadically afaik. So why should I get automated messages telling me to GTFO if the guild itself is fine with me not repping?

Behellagh.1468:

Sokia.3710:

Fernling.1729:

I’m missing something here… You only have to unlock a few of the top traits, right?

You have to unlock every single trait individually, except for Minor traits which still function the same as before.

But you don’t have to unlock all of them, just the ones you want to use. You can’t honestly say that you’ve used all the traits in all the trait lines.

I finally got back to leveling a sub-80 alt. He was made after April but before September. I took him from level 35 to 36 today, got a trait point, and said OK! Time to get my fall damage trait! (That being my first trait choice on every alt ever). He’s a Necro. And apparently the unlock is to do Obsidium Sanctum.

HELL no.

That ain’t happening.

I scanned other traits. The kill-a-single-tough-thing ones were fine for me, the do TA and CM Story look to be simple enough, but 100% map completion of a zone for others? I think my trait selection is going to be dictated by which tasks I can do, not what build I actually want. At least for this alt who mostly exists to test out some PS and systems, not to be a core character.

So while it sounds like levels 1 to 15 aren’t the shambles many claim, later levels may in fact be annoying if I want to test out Necro traits I haven’t used on my two 80 Necros. That’s how I keep alts fresh, I give them different flavors of the profession.

I don’t WvW. I PvE, and in dungeons I have no option to rez until everyone’s dead or the fight’s over.

I literally get sick to my stomach when the camera spins like that. Anything spinning or flickering in my visual field does that to me as my eyes jitter to follow the motion. In WoW I had to ask guildies to turn off their shaman orbs whirling around their bodies when we were all sitting in a group RP I couldn’t leave. At home I make my husband turn off the ceiling fan when we’re watching TV together.

And in GW2 I was one of the voices crying out to end the death spin and one of the rejoicers when ANet listened.

Please listen again, ANet. Please!

Tonight’s gold whisper spam has given me an idea. Let a player have a section in the Block/Ignore interface where s/he can put in a letter string s/he has no desire to see. For instance, a certain spam site name.

Then anyone whispering anything at all containing that string is blocked. The whisperer has no idea they were blocked (so they don’t start playing games with their text strings), the whisperee has no idea the whisper came in. Bliss!

Cons: ANet will get less reportage on the spammers because those that abhor them won’t even know they’re up to their nefarious tricks. Innocents might get blocked if the blocker has too simple a character string (perhaps require a certain length to the string? To avoid misunderstandings such as those to which the feline filter is prone?).

I’m glad I saw it before it was moved! It’s too hilarious. I’ve reported the OP to ask that it be moved back to where the humor can flow. The mods usually do a good job but I think someone just read the title and not the OP here.

I’m sorry you’re ill, Chris. Rest well and ingest those things that will help you feel better.

For the rest of us we may want to ease up on posting in here today unless another dev or assistant is going to be in to guide things a bit? Or there’ll be a ton to catch up on just as Chris is trying to overcome his illness.

I do think this phase has pretty much run its course. Though some QoL/Logistics discussion is still going on (interesting banner ideas above), mostly we’ve been on Guild Halls which is the next phase and probably needs its own thread kicked off soon.

Alas, the technical issues are real. The different weights are on different “rigs,” I think the term is. Mixing them causes huge graphics glitches (not clipping — actually serious things like distortions, color and texture bleeds, etc). Thus they’d have to re-rig every single piece of armor in the game before the pieces could play nice together.

I don’t use mine in PvE. In fact I never planned to get one until this price hike, which got me to shell out the 100 gold while it still cost less. Why buy one? To use the squad as an ooc “custom” chat channel for group RP with not everyone in the same guild.

Used it last night for a 4 hour plot-advancing session and it was marvelous. I guess some people might have wondered why there was a stationary commander tag in an Asura crafting area, but given that my group got booted from the low pop map at least twice, I don’t think many were around to wonder. /grins

Well, this way the new player has time to learn (if they read ranger forums) that the name won’t stick if you load a different pet anyway …. I’m sure that wasn’t fixed in the patch or there’d be Hallelujah Choruses flooding the forums.

I love both these ideas. Sure someone can link you stuff but what if you’re the opposite gender? What if you want to get a closeup of their dye choices? (Side request — preview dyes from character panel dyes so we don’t have to search them out on the TP to get a preview on gear we don’t own yet).

Just last night some of my guild spent a while in RP with some friends not in the guild, and right away up came the topic about wanting some sort of descriptive MRP style thing to allow others to “see” visible things about the character without having to take time repeating it for new arrivals. Sure folks in my guild know my main has got a raspy voice now thanks to the Miasma and other lung assaults, but I still have to establish it every time I RP with someone new.

As to RP instances, ‘twould be loverly, but given the lack of response on giving us RP flags to shift us thusly megaserver-wise, I’d not hold breath. Otoh our RP last night was in Metrica and we twice got booted to fresh maps when the pop got too low, so certainly it was pretty much just us most of the time

Ramza.9421:

Err, is the spoon collection are the only one they added yet? I was thinking I can get them from something like JP chest or hard to reach locations.

There are plenty of collections. Check in your Achievements tab in the Collections section. More will unlock as well, for instance if you chow down on a Seared Steak from the bandit-plagued ranch near Claypool in Queensdale.

But indeed, most of them do require a giant investment for a reward you could get directly (eat all the steak, including learning two feast recipes, for a Metabolic Primer. Whee). So have fun filling the collection but don’t do it for the cool reward. One exception: I don’t think you can get the spirit backpack unless you make all the spirit weapons. Whether that’s worth it to you is up to you.

It plays in the Grove, and also during your final PS step prior to the Arah Story Dungeon. The sung version plays during the credits after the final PS celebration in Fort Trinity, I believe.

Out of game, just google for Fear Not This Night GW2 Soundtrack. It’s the final track on the 4th disk of the (no longer available) 4 CD soundtrack, and all the tracks on that got put up on YouTube long ago.

edit: Here you go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdtfnxfRm1o

I offered to demo dyes in game because the preview doesn’t always show you how they’ll look in different lightings. It’s miles better than AA’s (my gosh, don’t get me started on the saturation issues there) but still can be misleading if you have a very specific color effect in mind.

Chris, I may have missed it — did you do that list of CDI game impacts yet? (no pressure, just don’t want to miss it due to distraction once it’s up).

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/NEW-SUGGESTION-SYSTEM/first#post4408904

You even posted in that thread.

I guess I was going more in size than shape. They’re hardly majestic archangel wings

Oh right, thanks for bringing that up. A long time ago we asked and asked and asked for a steady death cam. They gave it to us! And much was the rejoicing thereby.

I was surprised and sickened when running a dungeon recently to find that old spin had returned. Literally sickened, spinning stuff on monitors makes me queasy. (So do ceiling fans, to my husband’s dismay, but ANet can’t block out our family room fan for me. More’s the pity).

Please fix this, ANet.

Let’s save the nitty gritty of hall design for its own thread (I still think the question should have been saved for that). Right now the focus is on QoL — what function or fun thing in the game would a guild hall do that cannot already be done with existing systems?

This phase of the CDI is all about improving systemic functions, not designing entirely new features. Believe me, I’m champing at the bit to get to the design part but we need the devs to have focused topics of conversation so the good stuff doesn’t get lost in the flood.

In which case we already have exactly what you’re asking for. People post suggestions, in the appropriate subforums, other people chime in with support or disagreement or modifications, the appropriate devs review them and if they like them they use them and if they don’t they don’t.

Putting in a “vote” that has no binding effect will only make people froth harder about not having their pet projects implemented. “But you asked us to vote and we did, we voted for flying mounts, we don’t care that you’d have to completely redesign the world to allow for flying like Blizzard did for Cataclysm and that there are so many side issues with what flying would do to the game, WE VOTED.”