Guild Wars 2

Riselight.3695:

Faowri.4159:

It’s okay to be disappointed by the result, but acting like everyone made the “wrong” vote just because it’s not the result you wanted is pretty silly. There is no “wrong” vote.

Casual players vote for Kiel, because they know her from Living Story, unlike Evon, who always has been ingame, but never was involved, I bet half of the voters don’t even know what both candidates have to offer. Another bs excuse people are voting to vote for Kiel instead of Evon is ‘every vote for Evon is a vote for RNG’, this is just stupid…

I say again, vote for Evon, I’m a fan of the lore, and if you know the full story of Abaddon you would agree with me and you would vote for Evon as well.

Played GW1 and all campaigns. Beat Abaddon multiple times.

Still voted for Kiel.

It’s called difference of opinion, not right and wrong. Also, the ‘casual players’ thing is a bit of a broken record now. Everyone who plays this game, plays this game. Their opinion isn’t more or less legitimate than somebody who has more time to play or plays more seriously, whatever definition of the term you might be using.

lordkrall.7241:

Faowri.4159:

Considering cross-region play was a promise made before release (“play with whoever you want no matter where they’re from!” etc.), I like to hope they’ll revisit it at some point. I was really disappointed when this promise was broken.

I am fully able to play with whoever I want no matter where they’re from so I don’t really see how that is a “promise that was broken”.

That’s nice for you. Unfortunately I have a lot of American friends I can’t play with. I even have American friends I literally told “GET GW2! It will allow you to guest on other servers so the ocean divide is cool! Come join me!”, and then when guesting actually arrived, it was with region restrictions. So I then had to tell them “I know I convinced you to buy the game and all, but I actually can’t even play with you without paying to switch over to an American server every single time we want to play together. Sorry!”

The ArenaNet blog is pretty much gone, so unfortunately I can no longer provide quotes from pre-release confirming that yes, they promised us that with guesting we could play with anyone regardless of what server they were on. They went back on that. Perhaps it doesn’t affect you, but that still makes it a broken promise.

EDIT: Actually, thank you, GW2Guru:

A World of Choice – The Regions of Guild Wars 2

In time, we’ll also introduce free “guesting,” which will allow players to visit other worlds as guests as long as they have friends on those worlds. This feature will be free, but guest players will not be able to enter World vs. World, and the Power of the Mists bonuses from their home world will continue to apply to their characters.

ArenaNet: GW2 to be region tied for logins but you can play on any server

And don’t worry — we want you to play with your friends wherever you are. This policy only affects where you can login from — not which worlds you can access. People from NA will be able to play with people from EU at launch. We’ve got two datacenters — one in NA and one in EU. Those who do not fall into either of those two regions will default to the NA datacenter.

Considering cross-region play was a promise made before release (“play with whoever you want no matter where they’re from!” etc.), I like to hope they’ll revisit it at some point. I was really disappointed when this promise was broken.

I don’t think it’s the safety issue that’s the problem. Being able to store gold someplace separately is convenient and organised. I don’t do it because I’m afraid of accidentally spending it; I do it because it’s easier to manage separate funds for separate goals.

If depositing gold in the bank is to be removed, it’d be nice to see a new saving fund feature where you can create so many separate savings funds at the bank, give them a custom title, and deposit gold toward a goal.

I loved the twins, personally. My favourite story arc regardless of race

I do agree a bit about Caithe. I was fine with her being a little hard of heart after all that’s gone on in her past with Faolain, but the ability of the PC to soften her to a less brutal outlook (or encourage it, with the branching storyline possibilities) would have been nice. Instead, as you said, there’s little real opportunity to object to her merciless decisions. What character development does occur with her seems to happen mainly through the story dungeons, and not often as a result of any PC action. It’s point blank hard for the PC to have any impact on characters like Caithe because we are constantly positioned as subordinate to the likes of Destiny’s Edge, Trahearne, Order officers, etc. right up to the final showdown with Zhaitan. Always the educated, never the educator or even the peer :P Bit of a missed opportunity, methinks.

The simple solution would be to make these kinds of achievements collaborative and team-based, instead of ensuring that most people deliberately skew the way they play the game to focus on their solo achievements, often to the detriment of team play.

I love the idea of this update, especially account-bound karma, but I do think we should still be able to deposit gold into the bank (which is account-bound anyway). I personally like to keep day-to-day character funds and stored funds for a rainy day separately, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who likes to save up gold in a separate chunk for a particular reward.

More trenchcoats AND more wildly different male and female versions of the same armour? Boooo.

As much as I love GW2, I lament some of its failings, too. Shortly prior to and ever since launch, it has seemed to me like it has suddenly tried to cast a net for an audience it was never intended for – the insatiable content-devouring ‘hardcore’ gamer, and on top of that, the dodgy RNG focus in-game and in the cash shop along with some pretty questionable pricing strategies has left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

I think the reason GW2 will never quite be at the top of its game is because it tries to be a jack of all trades, but is effectively a master of none because it can’t decide whakittens audience is. It feels like a constant tug of war between casual, time-friendly, skill-based content and grindy, hardcore treadmill content. I love the game, massively appreciate the team behind it and have supported Anet since the GW1 days, but at the same time, it’s just not as good as it could have been if they had really fully realised those manifesto promises.

I really want that rapier, but after wasting so much of my time on Dragon Coffers without a single sniff of a jade ticket, I’m not interested in more RNG. That’s not to say I won’t try any new content that happens to have RNG rewards, but I’m not trying for RNG loot anymore. There are aspects of this game that are actually fun, so I’d rather focus on them.

Haaaaaa, I hadn’t seen that video before x’D Nightfall in a nutshell, hurr.

EDIT: I actually liked Kormir as a character, but there is definitely a neverending habit in GW storytelling where the player character is the main character’s assistant. I know a certain amount of it is unavoidable unless you’re very careful with the storytelling, since there are thousands of ‘main character’ player characters out there in reality. But still . . . Trahearne, rargh!

Apart from a few heavy armour sets, there are criminally few revealing male armours. Even if you discount barechested, a lot of the time the guys of Tyria are afraid to even wear bare arms, or show some chest cleavage.

I say, down with trenchcoats! We need more form-fitting clothes, more cute guy butts, more bare manly manliness and we need it, stat.

I think the main reason people get so antsy about the LS skins/rewards in particular is not because they’re particularly awesome, although some have been nice, but because they are (at least so far) time-limited and potentially one-time-only in terms of availability. That makes them more coveted, no matter how they look. It’s more the ‘limited edition’ tag that draws people than the reward itself, so for people who don’t care about the former, there’s definitely no reason to panic if you don’t follow the LS.

I always check in with dulfy’s guide to any patch updates for the LS to see what type of content is available and what rewards are on offer. A lot of the time the actual content doesn’t take very long to play around with, and it’s the achievements that require some focus and time. So if I’m not bothered about the reward, I just take a peek at the basic content and move on.

Story content (instances etc.) I usually complete because I like story, although nothing in the LS has really grabbed me yet. I wasn’t too bothered about the mini reward of the sky pirates patch either, so I didn’t set out to finish this one (although I did in the end kind of by accident due to going along with my guild on a dungeon run).

So overall I think Uvatha has pretty much nailed it. Don’t feel compelled to complete the LS just because. Preview the content and rewards if you like, and if it doesn’t take your fancy, don’t worry about it. The only possible exception I can think of is to at least keep a general awareness of the story elements because so far, they do lead into one another sequentially. If you do want to do any LS content down the road, the context will help you know wtf is going on.

I honestly enjoy a lot of the platforming content in GW2 and it’s some of my favourite launch and post-launch content. I do think the camera could use some extra features and flexibility to support the growing amount of content of this nature, though.

I’ve had some strong criticism of some of the previous living story, but I’ll be honest – this one has been my favourite so far. I’ve found it a lot of fun and it feels less grindy than the other ones. Definitely a step up as far as the living story is concerned, from my perspective.

Kristen is totally a force of nature. I’ve always loved how she takes the time out to talk about her design processes and get feedback from players, too. She’s been posting in the sylvari section recently <3

Sneaky Saza.7608:

I would most like to see the existing hairstyles become available for either gender (I have my eye on you, mohawk).

Agreed!

I’m also in the ‘more long hair’ boat, but I’d love to see more branch styles, too. Vine dreads would also be awesome <3 Honestly, there are so many possibilities for the sylvari. Ever since the reveal of their new designs, I’ve had a massive art crush on them. They’re aesthetically fantastic.

I really don’t understand why the spawns at the hologram projectors were nerfed. Whose definition of ‘fun’ does camping a static location and smiting pirates at 1 minute intervals 25-50 times meet?

The current pace of the LS is definitely getting a bit tiring. Quality > quantity for me in all cases, and so far I feel it’s been a lot more quantity than quality. It’s getting better, but since the pace is also due to increase I can’t say I’m not concerned. I’m also casual, as in I usually play 2-3 times a week at most. The trouble at the moment is that even when content from the living story is made permanent, people abandon it the week after because there is new living story content again to work on – see Southsun Cove as a prime example. LS has become the new treadmill, and since a lot of it so far has been driven on trashy RNG and achievement grinding, I think that’s a fair metaphor.

I’ve found the sky pirates arc less frantic than the last few living stories, primarily because a) I’m still feeling pretty ‘jaded’ about the jade ticket RNG farce and the wasted effort gone into trying to get one and consequently have a few less kitten s to give about the LS in general, and b) the reward for the sky pirates achievement isn’t something I particularly care about in and of itself. It’s been pretty nice to spend my few gaming sessions a week mostly working on my progress in the core game again for a while.

Too much for my liking, unless we’re going to move away from the grindy achievement-based rewards being the end goal of these things. Quality > Quantity.

Monthly was far better. ArenaNet still have an actual game underneath the living story stuff, and as someone who only plays usually twice, maybe three times a week, it’s hard to progress with that and keep up with the LS. I know the same teams don’t work on LS as they do the fundamental game world, but it would be nice to see more subtle, non-gemstore-promoting changes to the basic world occasionally (changes in dynamic event chains for players to discover, for example, without all the fanfare) so that when you’re doing Map X for the 10th time, it’s shaken up a bit.

My general progress on ‘completing’ the game has slowed due to wanting some of the LS rewards and needing to go out of my way to get certain, often grindy achievements or wanting and being frustrated with RNG rewards. I’ve enjoyed some of the LS, but on the whole it’s not quite there for me yet. I just think it’s a bit sad that ArenaNet don’t seem to have enough faith in their core game that they need to keep dazzling us with SUDDENLY, NEW LIVING STORY CONTENT.

This is just one reason why I hate the gendered armour splits in GW2.

I stare at them in the hopes that they will magically turn into weapon tickets.

I really enjoyed running this with my guildies tonight, even if it took longer than we were originally expecting A vast improvement on previous living story dungeons, if you ask me!

Electro.4173:

SilverWF.4789:

Don’t worry guys, Dragon weapon skins really ugly.
A few days ago bought 500 coffers and got 4 tickets from the first 100 coffers.
Still can’t realise what to buy – dislike all skins…

Hilarious how people who hate the skins always get insane luck. I was expecting that to happen to me during Last Stand with the Southsun crates, given that I hated those weapons.

Situations like this really make me wish you could sell the things.

At least then there would be a finite way of working up to the price and buying one. I’m really frustrated with the quite frankly criminal drop rate for these things. I’ve opened so many, spent much more than my usual casual allotment of weekly hours grinding for the chests, and I have nothing to show for it but candy and fireworks coming out of every orifice.

What a waste of some great skins. As someone who has bought the CE, gems, art books, novels and plushes, the RNG practice of ArenaNet (or NCsoft living vicariously through them) has really soured my opinion of the game of late. Cosmetics are one of my main drives in the game, so I abhor this kind of artificial enforcement of rarity. I’ve never spent real money on what I find to be wasteful or unethical items in the gem store – consumables and RNG chests primarily – and I encourage everyone else who hates the practice not to spend real money on these types of items in the future, but this whole event has put me off buying anything else, RNG or not. I know I’ll just be indirectly supporting more of this crap.

Temporary content should lead to some permanent content. There’s not much point to a living world where nothing that happens actually impacts the world long-term. A good example was the Southsun stuff leading to a new permanent meta-event on the island.

Longer-term rewards would be nice, too. A lot of the achievements are so grindy that they’re not very friendly for the casual player who can’t grind out the event for the full X amount of weeks it runs. My misgivings about RNG aside, the jade weapon skins were gorgeous and it’s frustrating that they will shortly be off limits, even to people who have opened thousands of boxes without any luck.

Hey, I remember seeing you in the connection error thread yesterday. My black screen/bg music problem was still present after they fixed the connection error. Support helped me fix it by suggesting that I delete the local.dat file from your Documents/Guild Wars 2/ folder (pre-warning that this will wipe any saved passwords and some client settings). This worked for me so I thought I’d let ya know

EDIT: Resolved! Deleting the local.dat file seemed to fix it.

I posted recently in the Connection Issues thread of today, and while I’m not getting the connection error anymore, I’m still having problems opening the client.

The launcher loads as normal, I can log in, and click play, but when the client opens it is inaccessible and a black screen. The background music plays as though the client is operating normally.

This issue has only started today, at the same time as the earlier connection errors. I’m running Windows 7 64bit and have an nVidia GPU. I’ve followed the stickied guidelines for resolving the problem without success. I’ve run Ccleaner to delete temporary files, tried running the client as administrator, tried running -repair, rebooted, and still have the same issue. I’ve filed a support ticket already for this, but as a few other people were reporting the black screen issue in the original connection error thread, I thought I’d post to show that it’s still ongoing.

Connecting from the UK to an EU server. Unfortunately not getting an error code with the black screen issue.

Gene Rojo.4207:

Same! The downloading 1kb/s and going 0. plus, i’m having blackscreen + music background issues after this patch. Anyone having the same problem?

Exactly what I’m getting. Glad I’m not the only one who’s getting the black screen/bg music issue as well as the connection error. Thought it was just me!

I’m getting this connection error and a combination of the black screen on startup issue (nVidia), beginning today. Sometimes when I start up I’ll get the downloading at 1/0kb, and the error message. Sometimes when I start up, it’ll let me log in and click the play button, but when it starts up it’s the dreaded black screen.

Never had any problems before today. I was happily playing at 2am last night. I’ve tried the guidelines for dealing with the black screen issue, which don’t work, as well as rebooting, the -repair command, etc.

Vote with your wallet, people. Every event that comes by, we have people buying 1000s of [insert RNG box here], then posting their results in threads to complain about chances. You know full well that the chances are gonna be low to ensure artificial rarity that benefits nobody whatsoever, so if you’re against the practice, simply don’t buy the boxes.

I guarantee you, the day RNG boxes stop being profitable is the day that they will no longer be used as a business practice.

It’s been clarified that the sylvari have sexual anatomy relevant to their gender; they just can’t reproduce. Best way to think of them visually and anatomically is as a mimicry of binary-gender humans, since the Pale Tree made them in the image of human beings. I’m sure there are exceptions, just as there are with humans, but when the sylvari are described as being gender-blind, it’s more in the sense that they view gender as more of an aesthetic or physical attribute, like hair colour or skin tone and no more important than those from a romantic point of view.

The thing that makes this unconvincing (to me at least) is that there’s still a lot of the usual binary-gender restrictions going on in terms of armour design, character creation options etc. Basically, we’re being told on one hand that they’re gender-blind and that they don’t have the usual gender roles, but then on the other, we’re limited in customisation choices based on the character sex we choose at the start. It’s not consistent, as far as I’m concerned.

Dustfinger: I appreciate that there are always often misguided business or marketing reasons for not challenging the video game norms (just look how many reports point to publishers still being reluctant to support female protagonists in games, despite the latest statistics pointing to women being half of the gamer population), but that doesn’t mean I have to like them :P I just think it’s a real shame that we were touching an idea like genderfluidity here, which is such a sorely misunderstood and underexplored concept in a whole heap of media beyond video games, but didn’t quite get there.

Of course the devs and designers may have intended not to go all the way, and I’m sure other people might be perfectly happy with them the way they are. I just feel personally that the sylvari didn’t quite materialise to their full potential as a designed race, so I find it a little disappointing. They are still my favourite race, however

A lot of people resent them, including me, but apparently there are still enough gamblers out there to make it worth selling in the gem store.

I really wish the sylvari had been genuinely androgynous, but despite what we’re told in terms of them being gender-blind, even beyond them being made in the image of gender-binary humans, they still have the same mechanical and aesthetic gender distinction as every other race in the game. It’s almost like Anet really wanted them to be one thing, but for some reason were deterred from actually putting their money where their mouth is.

I’d have like to have seen genuinely androgynous bodies, shared armour sets, shared character customisation options, animations differing based on something besides gender (such as their natural attitudes determined by their cycle), etc. It’s always frustrating when a game ventures into really interesting territory, but stops short of ‘taking the risk’ and falls back on old conventions.

Of course it’s cheating, but it doesn’t particularly hurt anyone. I did the jumping puzzle properly during Southsun’s original release, and it took me ages and I felt accomplished when I finished it. But I took the mesmer teleport this time, because I had no inclination nor time to do it twice just to collect a stupid sample.

I feel this one rather falls in ArenaNet’s court for putting the sample at the end of a JP. I personally like JPs, but they can be very involved and time-consuming to get right, some people have real difficulty with the camera issues during them, and some people just hate them. They’re a great optional part of the game, but emphasis on optional.

^ Bikini/boob mail might be realistically impractical, but I’m personally not an opponent of fantastical sexualised armour as long as a) it’s not imposed on characters, but is an option for people who like that kind of thing, and b) doesn’t only exist for the female of the species, especially when the male version of the same outfit doesn’t resemble it at all.

Garambola.2461:

The short pants are nice on the Charr female though. She gets to keep them, since none of the other would wear them.

At the same time, though, it kinda makes no sense. Because we have female charr wearing the same armour as the male charr because they’re not feminised by human standards, but they’re allowed to be humanly ‘girly’ when it comes to town clothes? If you’re going to enshrine it in lore, be consistent!

It just drives the point home for me that what’s feminine or masculine should be something the player decides for their characters. I have some female characters who are quite effeminate and would totally be seen in delicate frilly stuff, and I have others who are tough as nails and want the practical outfits that often seem to be exclusively contracted to the male gender in most MMOs. I was hoping GW2 would be a bit different, but this remains a sticking point even long after I gave up being annoyed by the laughable starter scholar armour discrepancy for the humanoid races.

aeneq.1760:

I actually would like some sexy man clothes, its fairly easy (cant really avoid it) to get your female character to stretch sensuously in skimpy clothes but there’s nothing for the males!

What exists for male characters tends to be imbalanced across the classes, too. Heavy armour has some gladiator/spartan looks going, and there’s like . . . one revealing male scholar armour, I think. Medium armour class men must be really sensitive to the cold or something ‘cause they’re decked out from throat to toes in most armour. There’s only a couple that even show their arms.

Light armour could do with more lady trousers, too. It’s kind of annoying that rangers and thieves and engineers get all the pants. They should learn to share :[

The worst thing about the pick is that it’s a convenience item capitalising on a very clunky, inefficient game mechanic, when ideally Anet should be revamping the harvesting tool system so that it isn’t inconvenient by design.

It’s a fact that when you use a high level tool on a low level ore, you’re wasting money. The only solution if you care about being efficient while world-roaming is to bank or carry a variety of different-level tools around, which absorbs inventory or bank space. A better solution would be one tier of each tool that consumes more uses the higher-ranking node you use it on. E.g. a mythril node could consume 5 uses of the pick, copper could consume 1 use. That way you always have the ‘right’ tool equipped, and you can just choose to spend more on tools that have more uses available, like the old GW1 style salvage kits.

When this inconvenient-by-design mechanic is fixed, then we can start talking about cosmetic tools with sparkly effects. Until then, this kind of gem store item just seems like paying to fix a game design mistake.

Pandemoniac.4739:

I’m not a hot pants type myself, but I fully support you in expressing yourself.

Out of curiosity, how would you feel about cultural skins in the gem store? It seems to me like it might require a lot of work to make an outfit that fits all races. Would it be annoying to have more outfits available, but have some that only can be worn by a particular race?

I think it would be a good way to test how desirable an outfit is to the players by offering say, Sylvari only hot pants, and seeing how they sell and whether folks request a Charr version. I have no idea whether that makes sense from a technical perspective, but it seems like we would get more choices more quickly and help ANet focus their effort on what is popular.

I think when we’re paying real money for stuff, there’s honestly no reason why the work shouldn’t be put in to make those items high quality, including being available to all races in some shape and form. However, I definitely feel like a lot of the outfits in the gem store since release have been very human-y. Maybe it’d be nice to have race-themed gemstore months, with outfits inspired by the different cultures. However they implemented it, I’d definitely support less standard human clothing in there.

Gender disparity in clothing is still one of my major beefs with the cosmetics in GW2, though. It’s frustrating when ArenaNet have been so progressive with gender expression in other areas of the game, but they’re failing on this fundamental age-old MMO problem – the magic disappearing fabric when clothes are donned by wimmins.

And while the revealing clothing may irk some players on any gender (I’m for it as long as it’s optional), I think that the female versions of a lot of outfits often have a lot more detail and beauty than the male versions, which often look very samey and simplified by comparison.

Syktek.7912:

I too want my man-Charr to have some booty shorts.

I think that would be glorious, and that it’s a crime against fashion to deny charr the joys of hotpants.

I’m not annoyed by the hotpants and the lingerie top for the ladies existing at all.

I’m not annoyed because I think the world will collapse when women show cleavage.

I’m not annoyed because boobs sexism ehrmagerd.

I’m annoyed because I really wanted those adorable hotpants for my male sylvari, but because apparently this isn’t ‘masculine’ by the outfit designer standards, NO HOTPANTS FOR YOU, PLANT BOY.

Seriously, here. I saw Guild Wars 2 Guru post the female versions of the outfits up and I had my debit card right there on the desk, and when I logged in and checked out the clothes on my sylvari . . . it went right back in my purse.

I’m not asking you to take the sexy lingerie away or force the ‘terrified to show any skin’ clothes onto all women everywhere. I’m not even asking you to make all of the upcoming male clothing fetish and bondage gear. I’m asking you to think about how what you decide is a ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ version of an item of clothing may not match the ideals of your playerbase, and to give us a choice.

Either:

• design one outfit, and give it to both genders.
• or design two outfits, and make both available to both genders

Simples?

OP and many of the insightful comments in this thread are a fantastic summary of how I feel about the embrace of vertical progression in GW2. Thank you for posting.

Naoko.7096:

MMO needs progression.
It’s evident that players leave at dangerous rate because there’s no progression.

GW1 managed, and garnered a great deal of respect (and cash) from its playerbase because of its ethical and anti-grind game design principles. The players this type of grindy treadmill content actually pleases are almost certainly to be in the minority, and they will never be satisfied unless the game magically generates new rewards for all eternity. Other people who like enough of the game to keep playing will grit their teeth and get on the treadmill, of course, but they will resent it. Resentment = a playerbase that spends less, because their money gets spend on initiatives like this.

Creating grind to make new content 100% accessible is just a lazy method of ‘releasing content’. There are tonnes of things they could have done to generate new rewards for this dungeon without kicking off a stat/gear treadmill. Prestige gear was always supposed to be cosmetic – ANet stated that themselves. Guild Wars used to be about skill, with a very low ‘maximum’ barrier to being fully competitive. No matter how slight the power creep with this single addition, that it has been added so early in the game’s lifespan and with clearly stated intentions of it being the first of many is worrying and a direct contradiction to quotes by ArenaNet themselves.

I love GW2, and I respect ArenaNet as a great development team, but I’m worried about this change, and speaking up constructively about it is the only way to make those concerns known.

Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.

Is It Fun? Colin Johanson on How ArenaNet Measures Success

Guess they need a new success metric, sigh. As a time-limited player who barely hit maximum level on my first character a few days ago, hitting the ‘maximum’ is going to get further and further away from me as new content is released, given that ANet are plainly accepting of introducing new tiers of ‘maximum’ whenever the hardcore slice of gamers gets bored (which is all the time).

It’s extremely disappointing to see this clear deviation from one of the core success principles of GW1, and one which they touted was coming straight over to GW2. Considering that I’m the kind of player who is already screwed for getting exotics within a decent time range, I’ll be 80 years old, not levels, before I get to Ascended. By which point something else will actually be the new Ascended, I expect, and I’ll still be behind on the gear treadmill.

Hydrophidian’s awesome list there pretty much hits on everything I’d like to see for better RP in GW2. All I’d add to it would be visible roleplay status flags that you can switch on when you’re up for RP. Even on an unofficial RP server, half the problem is knowing whether or not the players around you are interested in RP.

gduber.9756:

First let me say that this is about female toons, as I don’t think there is similar demand for scantily clad dude toons.

You’d be wrong :P It’s come up on the forums many a time during beta testing. The men in this game seem to be terrified to even show off their necks or arms in a lot of armour (primarily non-heavy). And those revealing armour sets for female characters that we do have are often not mirrored on the men – the Embroidered light set could have been a great roguish, Aladdin-esque look, but nooope!