Guild Wars 2

Kodesh.2019:

For the love of the Six, please do not bring up the topic of the PvE version of WvWvW maps.

Err, why not? It’s a perfectly reasonable suggestion. PvE versions of the maps, with PvE content, and no PvP rewards (badges, blueprints) have at least three benefits:

• PvE completionists no longer use up a WvWvW slot;
• no essentially permanently inaccessible POIs;
• JP enthusiasts can enjoy themselves.

No Gift of Battle would be achievable; likewise there would also be no particular reason to award the Gift of Exploration since both are only used in the construction of a Legendary.

It would also not change any of the existing WvWvW mechanics and would not spoil the PvP game.

DeWolfe.2174:

Never…. EVER…. should this be promoted. We live in a world where we need to foster inclusivity, tolerance, and community. A video game should not promote or reward exclusivity, period! Especially in the United States where narcissism is on an rapidly escalating high.

As I’ve pointed out, for gear checks, it’s already too late. Human behaviour is what it is.

Let’s at least make it easy for those of us who want to share. If you don’t want to, opt out: that’s the whole point of providing choice.

Kodesh.2019:

DryHumour.1307:

My favourite of the suggestions I’ve heard for map completion is to have PvE only versions of the WvWvW maps which award only PvE benefits (no badges, no blueprints). That would get PvE completionists out of WvWvW slots, freeing them up for contributing PvP players. To get a Legendary, you’d still have to compete in WvWvW (to get the necessary badges for the Gift of Battle).

I think this is a great idea as long as it doesn’t let the players get Gift of Exploration. There is nothing Legendary about avoiding pvp combat and not fighting to earn your POIs and Vista’s.

Since the PvE map suggestion would preclude getting the Gift of Battle, that would also preclude getting a Legendary without WvWvW participation, regardless of the Gift of Exploration. However, I agree that there is equally no particular reason, if the maps are split, to award the Gift of Exploration either since, likewise, its only use is in a Legendary.

The other concurrent related thread seems to have disappeared while I was composing this response. (!?!) Since it is equally applicable here, I’ll post it.

Kodesh.2019:

I can see your argument about not wanting to bother PvP’ers or take up a slot, but giving away the final POIs and Vista’s does take away from us PvP’ers that fought so hard to earn ours because we wanted world completion too. It’s a kick in the groin to remove obstacles and challenges many players have overcome. Especially if the reward is not diminished in any way.

Yes, I can definitely see how those who earned it “the hard way” could be annoyed. Perhaps, as in another thread, one gift of exploration for PvE and one for WvWvW? Or some other nerf to the award? Perhaps different titles? Or a different star? (Speaking for myself, the functional reward is not really of importance anyway, but obviously there will be others who feel otherwise.)

OTOH, those of us just joining don’t have the benefit of free server transfers which some (not all, of course — and I do not mean to be insulting or to minimize the effort involved) will have used to earn their achievement. Perhaps that serves to balance it out somewhat? And Legendary continues to be Legendary: those who earned world completion the hard way will be further along their way to the Gift of Mastery.

It looks like WvWvW changes are in the wind anyway which may (or may not) serve to shake up the static nature of some of the POIs — but I doubt it will help with the spawn points by their very nature.

It’s currently really tedious to send someone your full build. As many have suggested an opt-in inspect would solve that problem.

We already have gear-checks anyway — e.g. fractals groups often require you to prove you have AR. That particular part of human behaviour has already found a way to route around the artificial barrier. It’s only those of us who want to share our builds who are inconvenienced.

My favourite of the suggestions I’ve heard for map completion is to have PvE only versions of the WvWvW maps which award only PvE benefits (no badges, no blueprints). That would get PvE completionists out of WvWvW slots, freeing them up for contributing PvP players. To get a Legendary, you’d still have to compete in WvWvW (to get the necessary badges for the Gift of Battle).

Lavath.8924:

The best way to have peace at the JP is to remove it from WvW and put it somewhere in PvE where it belongs.

Totally. Having PvE versions of the maps (with PvE-only awards i.e. no badges, blueprints) would also solve the problem of PvE map completion players taking up WvWvW slots.

It would be convenient if the comparison tooltip that popped up for unequiped underwater weapons compared to both available slots (for classes with two). When not underwater, it takes extra clicks (and an inventory slot to compare directly via tooltip) to compare an unequiped weapon to a weapon which was not your last selected underwater weapon.

[ TL;DR Colour rotation good; alternative pure PvE version of maps better. ]

The colour rotation (not randomization) suggestion does seem like it would provide pretty much what the completionists (myself included) want without materially changing the current state of WvWvW play.

However, given the stories of long WvWvW queues on some servers, it really does seem commercially foolish to encourage PvE players to use up slots: that’s just going to annoy everyone. I really quite liked the idea someone else here (or was it one of the myriad other threads?) came up with to have pure PvE versions of the maps, populated by PvE mobs.

Anet could add DEs, perhaps related to the battlefield flavour of the maps. The JPs would yield the achievement but only PvE loot — no blueprints, badges, etc. That would get non-contributors out of WvWvW, would not provide any underserved WvWvW benefits, and would not materially change acquiring a Legendary (since badges would still be needed).

(For the record, I suck at PvP: I’m underlevelled, undergeared, and – most importantly – underskilled. But I nevertheless gamely try my best to contribute while ever so slowly racking up my Map Completion. But frankly, I’m still just a liability to my team since I’m using up a slot a better, more committed WvWvW player could be using.)

Syeria.4812:

As for additional data, I’m not sure there’s much value in allowing access to more than we currently have. There’s certainly uses for it, but while most anyone can utilize spidy’s data (and the similar other resources) the other data that hasn’t become available wouldn’t likely be as uniform in its benefit. That could be interpreted as conferring unfair advantages to the players able to best utilize that. That’s just pure conjecture though of course.

I would have thought that publicly available data, ideally through an official Anet portal, would provide a more level playing field. The data that is available now is actually quite lacking since it provides little insight into the actual volumes and prices. All that it tells us is that bids below a certain price may not be being filled and that asks above a certain price may not be finding buyers. Where the spread is relatively large, there might actually be quite a healthy market which we just never hear about….

Why does Anet not provide full data on prices and volumes in something approaching real time? Is it just a question of (real world) cost to them? Or is there some theoretical reasoning behind having this type of market?

We know that gw2spidy et al. only publish the information that is made available: the buy and sell orders outstanding at the instant of sampling. And we also know that these data are not fully representative of the ask/bid or volume in any given good (since, e.g., they do not provide information concerning contracts fulfilled within the sampling interval).

IANAE (I am not an economist ) so this question may well be naive. It may also have been asked before, but I could not formulate a search query which discovered it. Apologies if so; and please point me to it. Pointers to applicable underlying economic theory also welcomed.

ancient highway.4256:

15 alts over 2 accounts. I know about the character swap to pull things out of the bank.

But I also know that not every one of my toons are what I would consider active. One account is active only when doing dailies at the moment. The other account, only a daily doer and the main are active. That leaves 12 toons that I can leave parked in the crafting area to craft or access bank as desired. If the new acquired equipment is needed right now on one of the three toons in the field the trip to a crafting table in the field or a city is probably worth it.

WvWvW offers the account and guild bank along with crafting tables and trading post. You can enter it from anywhere. You can exit to Lion’s Arch or go to PvP, then leave PvP and put you right back where you were when you first entered WvWvW You could even go to character selection while in WvWvW and return to the starting point when that character reenters the game. This convenience and flexibility of your character’s actions is already in the game. Yes, there may be a delay entering WvWvW, and if you really can’t wait, just go to the Mists and take the gate to LA, which btw is available in WvWvW also.

Full disclosure: 8 alts on one account myself, all of which are active since I’m trying to keep them close in level so they can benefit from each other’s finds. Thus the current system is particularly onerous for me.

These are excellent workarounds, and I thank you for mentioning them! But think how much easier and nicer it would be if we didn’t have to do it at all? Particularly having to log out and log in again on the alt and then back again totally breaks the flow of adventuring.

However, given the sheer volume of material in these Suggestion threads, I’m not optimistic that Anet has the resources to even track it all, let alone do something about them (assuming they think it’s warranted in the first place). So workarounds are certainly appreciated!

I know that this has been brought up before as part of larger discussions ¹,² but no search shows it coming up as an idea independent of the notion of Altaholics. Since it has broader application (even to a single toon player) I thought I’d bring it up separately.

It would be really handy if it were possible to view the Account and Guild banks while in the field. Just view them — not manipulate them in any way. Ditto the inventories of alts. (“Where did I leave that BL key?”; “Do I have any more Omnomberry bars somewhere?”; etc. etc.)

¹ https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/From-Altoholics-for-Altoholics/1161038

² https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Altoholics-What-features-are-needed/1142215

I thought it was just me

Yes, I can only imagine that the current behaviour is a bug.

ancient highway.4256:

If you are out of bank space, form a mule guild. One you create for yourself just to get the guild bank.

But perhaps more important is deciding if everything you are squirreling away really needs to be squirreled away. Are you keeping that Green or Yellow weapon just because it’s Green or Yellow and eventually you may take the time to level a character that can use it? Sell it. By the time you can use it, you’ll have picked up another, or something better, or decide that weapon doesn’t fit the build, or have the coin to buy what you really want on the TP.
Are you stockpiling upgrades because you might eventually decide you want to use one? Or the useless morph potions? Stacks of unused boosters waiting for the perfect time to use them?
You may even have a bank token in your bank that is being ignored, I know I do. With a mule guild, you can build Vault Transports to bring you guild bank to you.
But if you are really insistent on being able to mail something to put something in the mail, buy that 2nd copy of GW2 you’ve been struggling to justify just so you can have a character in every class. Account 1 mails to Account 2 who returns it to Account 1. It’s in the mail.

It’s not a question of space: it’s one of convenience, particularly if one has multiple alts. Even if you dump items into the bank, you then have to log into each of your alts and pull it back out again. If they’re in the field, it might be some time before it’s convenient to do so, either for “them” or for the player IRL. Doling items out to the ultimate recipient is much more convenient. (I certainly often forget about items I stored away in the bank for an alt and end up having to do tedious vault sweeps across multiple alts to get everything out to those who need it. I realize I have an exceptionally bad memory and may, in any event, be in the minority.)

Keep in mind also that those with lots of alts are also those with more real money invested in the game, which may make it more attractive to Anet to want to improve those players’ game experience….

Evan Lesh.3295:

The reason we don’t allow this is to prevent players from having 50 free inventory slots.

But everyone would have the same number of slots, so the playing field is level. The current mechanisms are tedious, even with (rather pricey) banker golems. (E.g., as it stands, anyone with a friend online can do this anyway: send to them, they immediately send it back to your alt.)

In any case, there are any number of ways to monetize or otherwise limit this. Off the top of my head:

• One time gem charge to unlock this ability (possibly per character)
• Charge nominal currency per email in general (would also discourage spam)
• … or just for item email — possibly scaled to items’ value (ala LOTRO e.g.)
• … or just for intra-accound email
• Set a lower limit on the number of in-flight items within an account or per alt
• Purchasable (gem or currency) carrier pigeon (eagle?) consumables

Note the potentials here for (variously) monetization, currency sinks, and spam reduction. Look at it as an opportunity, rather than a problem.

(Sorry if I sound like a crotchety, entitled gamer. It’s been an especially long week at work, trying to get people to cope with real world software self-inflicted non-problems….)

One thing which is sometimes mentioned for 100% world completion is to double check that you have actually accepted all of the individual map rewards. (I have no first hand experience of this — still at 73% or so )

If you are in combat when harvesting T6, you can end up with ruined output.

Revolution.6301:

and even having an overlypowerful proccessor like mine doesn’t help?

I believe, to the extent that anyone outside of Anet knows, the problem is a combination of bandwidth needed and of server resources required.

Radio Isotope.3045:

What about the person that wakes up at 6am est, goes to work at 7am est, comes home around 8pm est, then goes to sleep at 9pm est? Should they suffer because you play this game non stop? It seems rather selfish to just assume everyone revolves around your OWN play-style. Please people use logic before you post against things, and think about all the other players who don’t speak their minds on the forums. I’m kinda tired of these armchair developers who haven’t ever looked at the big picture, but only their own mirror.

Although there is nothing inherently wrong or illogical with your proposal, by the same token there is equally nothing wrong with the current implementation either — assuming that Anet means it as an extra perk to encourage a more populated, “alive” world (which does appear to be the case from their various communications). Each is a legitimate design approach. But, to my mind, the latter seems better aligned with my conjecture of Anet’s goals for this feature. (With that said, I am not arguing one way or the other.)

As practical advice, keep in mind that there is no need to complete the daily in one sitting. You have a full twenty four hours. If, for example, you only have from 23:30 until 00:30 UTC to play then for the first half hour you complete the current daily and for the second half hour you work on the next daily (which you will finish later on that day).

If the problem is that you can’t complete the daily at all in your available playing time, then you may want to consider working towards the monthly instead.

Toxyn.9608:

The only way to avoid setting the drop rates at -20% per less player would be to have the difficulty remain the same while soloing, meaning it would be hard as hell to solo.

My earlier kidding aside, was the end-game GW1 content solo-able with mercs? (I never tried and, as a decidedly mediocre player, I certainly never got past the start of any of it with companions/heroes…) Point being that it may already be sufficiently hard for a solo player disadvantaged by A"I" bots. (Those heroes had to have been on drugs, I swear.)

Katz.5143:

We had a person who accidently dodge rolled then died to a part of the airship we couldn’t reach in Arah. She had to stay there bored while four of us fought. If she hadn’t been out of reach we could of rezzed her. If she could have waypointed, she could have gotten back to having fun instead of snoozing from boredom.

There’s an interesting point: now that WP is unavailable in these circumstances, do we need a /stuck to at least move one’s corpse to a reachable point? Perhaps, to avoid exploiting /stuck to move to a more “rezable” location, the WP button shouldn’t be completely disabled but allow one to teleport, still dead, to the selected WP? If the party wipes, you’ll be no worse off in terms of running back and if the party succeeds, you’ll still need to run back from the WP, but that’s no worse than it was pre-patch.

It may just be my imagination, but the Sons of Svanir shelters in Wayfarers seem harder to hit as well.

GW1 mercenaries anyone? <ducks/>

+1 for being able to see your own target call when you’re solo. It would be helpful e.g. for calling a boss and switching between pummelling him and his adds.

LOTRO has a kinda neat system where you can “lock” tooltips for about 4 mobs on your UI and click of them for targeting. (Perhaps WoW has something similar?) Slightly different kind of game, but the sentiment is the same: confusion reduction in furballs. Especially given how… unusual the targeting hotkeys are in GW2 (Target Closest Enemy selected the untagged neutral mob 1200 units away and not the red beating on me from slightly off centre? Really?) it would be handy!

+1

I frequently head off toward a downed player only to have them wp before I even reach them. Some reasonably visible mechanism on both main and map screens showing them that someone is coming; and then that someone is actively healing them would be great.

On the other hand, we’ve now all been pretty much conditioned to a) ignore downed players since we know they won’t hang around and b) wp ourselves when we’re downed since there’s no telling how long help will be….

achensherd.2735:

Seriously. Sometimes I would like to respond to things, but if I’m in the middle of or ten minutes into soloing a champion, I would very much like to not have my last words being “wwwwwwadwdw1211111112223sssssssssssssasdssss”

I LOLed. (Well, chuckled anyway.) This. So much this. It happens to me all the time.

That’s the fundamental problem with an Action MMORPG: no time for pleasantries during gameplay. Now I know Anet doesn’t want to add in-game voice but perhaps what we need is in-game speech-to-/say?

You do realize that you can complete part of the daily on one calendar day and the rest the next, right? For example, if you can only play from 18:30EST until 19:30EST, you spend the first half hour finishing the daily you started yesterday and the second half hour getting started on the new daily (which you will complete the following calendar day).

Yes, this would be very convenient. It would also be nice if unusable soulbound items in the bank were greyed out or otherwise identified to make it easier to identify them.

Turial.1293:

There is an option; F11 – “double-tap to evade” (un-click)

I’m aware of that. What I’m asking for is a keybinding to toggle it rather than having to open a dialogue, click an action, and close the dialogue again. It’s a small thing, but it would be convenient.

It would be very convenient if it were possible to have a key binding to toggle “Double Tap to Evade” on and off. It’s very handy to have on during combat, but is really annoying in jumping puzzles (or during any jumping sequence really).

Adine.2184:

Noone’s stopping you from ASKING them that’s far different than unilateral inspection though . Inspection creates and enforces elitism within the game and should be left out of it .

Julie Yann.5379:

The thing about being asked about my build, which I don’t mind sharing, is that I then have to go into lengthy descriptions of stats, gear, skill, etc.

As Julie points out, the current mechanisms for providing this information seem rather tedious to me and accordingly require that I impose significantly on someone else’s goodwill. It’s time consuming to type in your traits/majors and then link all of your equipment. If there were a convenient way to publish the info, I suppose that would be fine too.

Note too that, just as we saw in GW1, gear/build check elitism is apparently already alive and well without this anyway. I don’t imagine it would get any worse with it: it would just save everyone time.

Dazuka.3247:

When playing through the personal story mission “Tower Down” I noticed something that didn’t work properly. The towers did not appear at all initially, but as soon as the bomb exploded the tower appeared out of nowhere.

FWIW, I had this happen to me as well, for all of the towers (three IIRC). Current Nvidia drivers, fairly high settings. I didn’t notice anything else missing (but I’ve only played this once so I wouldn’t necessarily know if something was).

Cirroq.2531:

For a game as complex as GW2 I’m still amazed by how little data arenanet shares about the TP. Anonymous trades, no trade volume data published and no disclosure on the amount of gem/gold conversions done. Knowing any of these things would allow most people to have some idea of what’s going on in the economy.

FWIW, http://www.gw2spidy.com/

Not a complete solution, but does provide an insight into volumes.

I guess I’m too naive — I’d use the feature to get ideas for builds or to see how/why things work, not for griefing.

I’d also have to ask myself if I really wanted to play with folks who were so narrow minded as to reject a build out of hand. I think I’d just find someone else to play with….

It would also be terrific if it were possible to play out the alternate paths of the personal story in addition to the one you actually selected when you first played through.

Raf.1078:

Altaholism is a disease.

As a superset of 8×80s, I’m planning to do 15 toons, to cover every personal story.

Yes, I probably need professional help.

EverythingXen.1835:

It doesnt help that the other starter zones equivalent events are either too hard (Fire Elemental in Metrica Province) less rewarding (Jungle Wurm in Caledon Forest) or constantly bugged (Shadow Behemoth in Queensdale).

Interesting observation and one which would seem to play into the rate of return per hour played theory.

Anecdotally, FWIW, I’ve never, ever seen the Behemoth — I’m on Nothern Shiverpeaks, although I haven’t been trying that hard to get it since I learned it was bugged. The Fire Elemental is nasty until you find the sweet spot where it never shoots. I can’t recall ever doing the Jungle Worm either… not very memorable I guess. But I’ve tripped over the Maw many, many times in casual play.

(For the record, I personally don’t have any problem with the speed of levelling and I don’t use crafting for power levelling; I’ve only played a couple of hours of WvWvW; and I haven’t ever set foot in a dungeon. I’m enjoying the ride so far on my first two toons. But that’s obviously just my personal and subjective opinion and I understand that others don’t share it.)

LOTRO has this: characters have an “anonymous” toggle which, among other things, controls whether other players can inspect them or not.

I was going to post exactly this suggestion just now ;-)

LOTRO has its Reflecting Pools, which are kind of nifty for re-playing instances you enjoyed or for trying alternate strategies or for trying alternate paths.

FWIW, as a primarily solo player I nevertheless agree with those who say that dungeons should be teamwork oriented.

I do, however, despair of ever finding groups for every dungeon who are going to be willing to go through “slowly” while I experience the story/lore. (I tend to play solo because I understand that not everyone wants to play “my” way and I don’t want to inconvenience them.)

Full disclosure: I have not yet made any attempt at all to join a dungeon (only recently hit 80) so my fears may be unjustified.

Highest tier mats can be ruined if you are in combat while harvesting.

In addition with the hypothesis about one-time achievements making alts level more slowly, I wonder to what extent DR might be having an effect? Subsequent runs of any content will tend to go more quickly (since you already know what you’re doing and probably aren’t stopping to read any flavour text etc.). I wonder, for example, if ten one hour sessions would earn more than one ten hour session? I know that DEs are affected by DR; I don’t know if kill XP are too.

For the record, I play casually and have one L80, one L40, and various lower levels. I haven’t felt underlevelled at any point so far (undergeared and poor, yes, underlevelled no ;-) I tend to pick up all of the zone completions for all races’ starting towns ASAP, though, which is worth two or three levels early on (i.e. the diff between 12 and 15 on the when leaving the first zone).

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I think I would prefer this as an option I can select in [F11] options.

• Auto-target and keybinding targets include neutral NPCs? Yes | No.
• Auto-target and keybinding targets include out-of-sight targets? Yes | No

Yes, it would certainly be great if it were customizable.

Another similar approach would be to have multiple available keybind actions, since the number of permutations is relatively small. For example:

• “Target Next Enemy” for reds only;
• “Target Next Creature” for targets that can fight back;
• “Target Next Object” for anything which can be the target of a combat ability.

Likewise

• “Target Next Visible X”,
• “Target Nearest X”,
• “Target Nearest Visible X” and so forth.

Then we could all have exactly what we want (including simultaneously having bindings to more than one “kind” of targeting).

An L2P question from a newb: is there any good way to avoid the damage from a skelk coming out of shadowstep? I’ve noticed I sometimes see a skelk shadow on the ground but I never seem to dodge fast enough to avoid the damage. (Usually just an annoyance, but I’d like to learn how to counter it just the same.)

Yet another vote for “Target X” in general to ignore all neutrals.

Also another vote for “Target Nearest” to target the nearest non-neutral, regardless of line-of-sight (i.e. full 360 degree as in GW1 so as to make it possible to quickly target something behind you / regardless of obstacles).

It would also be convenient if “Target Next” with no current target acted as “Target Nearest”.