Guild Wars 2

Just a post to recommend some basic UI improvements that would greatly improve the Trading Post user experience.

Additional sub-filter options are required:

Trinkets:
Back
Accessory
Ring
Amulet

Consumables:
Food
Potion
Recipe
Book

Aesthetic:
Number of dye slots
Set (as in all armour pieces belonging to a set, for example Anton’s, Masquerade, etc.)

Interface improvement:
Allow users to choose which page opens by default when pressing O. I understand you want the first thing people to see to be the Gem Store, but it’s very irritating when navigation between panes is so slow.
Get the window to remember which pane you opened last and what text was in the search field.

Pie-in-the-sky desires:
Allow re-sizing of the window.
Allow multiple panes to be displayed in the window so you can quickly compare what you’re buying and selling without having to wait for a new pane to load.

I’m sure there’s some other points I’ve thought of that I’m forgetting.
Would anyone else care to offer similar mechanical improvements?

Zappix.7928:

@Mungrul that skill point with that Mesmer that clones herself and has all the birds? Dethra I think? Was a very tough fight but managed her solo. Confusion constantly and other conditions it was nasty lol..

Nah, it’s actually a turret firing bolts that cause confusion. It’s right next to “Sharn’s Free Camp” on the map, south of “The Promenade of the Gods”.

Actually, it’s NOT a completely different game engine. It’s an evolution of the GW1 engine.

Could this be ArenaNet repeating the mistakes of old?
In the first game, when you got your armour ascended, they didn’t take into account your pet.
They eventually fixed this.
Unbelievable that they would make the same mistake twice. I guess it really IS a completely different team.

Rooks Zaer.5846:

I think he’s saying that skill -should- be the only difference.

Thank you, that’s exactly what I mean.
But then again, I come from an old school Quake death-matching background, where the only difference between players truly is skill.
I look at people asking for vertical progression and I see weaklings needing the crutch of bigger stats to make up for their lack of skill.

If you want a laugh at the expense of people who really do need to “Learn to play” (I hate that expression), go camp by that skill point in Cursed Shore by the pirates. The turret continuously dishes out Confusion, and it really sorts the men from the boys

Amun Ra.6435:

What do you people want? You want the BEST gear in the game for a legion of alts in a matter of weeks? Please explain how that makes sense?

Because it was possible in GW1. That’s how it makes sense.
You want to work your kitten off in order to play on a level playing field? You want it to take months to reach the stage where you know it’s your skill that differentiates you, not some arbitrary numbers on a fantasy construct that says its armour?
How the heck does THAT make sense?!

ColinJohanson.2394:

Saying something like “expansions worth of content” means different things to everyone, and is nearly an impossible goal to meet expectation wise since everything expects something different, which is a big part of why marketing stepped away from that plan very quickly after asking us to use it when speaking to the press/fans.

I knew it!
Foo to you! Objectifying your user base!
Either that or you’re giving bots your blessing!
Or, or, or SKRITT ARE REAL AND PLAYING THE GAME!!!

Anchorwind.9016:

/sniff with happy memories. Don’t you miss strategic thought and tactical play?

You know, I really do.
My GW2 Mesmer is fun, sure, but nowhere near as much as my GW1 Mes.
But this isn’t just down to the class being limited to only a couple of viable builds comparatively (although this is a major contributing factor).
It’s down to core problems with the profession and gear system in general.

I could spend hours upon hours designing fun, quirky, interesting builds for my Mesmer in GW1. I think my builds list had upwards of 100 Mesmer specific builds in it, all of which I tried out and a lot of which I could use for very specific situations.
I was able to do this because respeccing stats was free, transport to anywhere in the world was free and max stat gear was far, FAR easier to acquire. It was so simple it just let me enjoy playing the game rather than spend most of my time preparing to play.

That’s the thing I hate about GW2 the most.
If I want to try something a little different, yet plan it optimally, it requires an inordinate investment of time and money.
It’s not about playing the game. It’s about preparing to play.
That’s just wrong.

Oh, and in WvW on my Warrior, I have so much regen I find I can just power through Confusion.
That never happened with Empathy in GW1. It would basically stop me attacking until I found some way to get rid of the hex or let it time out. I had to be that much more aware of what was going on with my character.

I think they should buff the damage and change the behaviour so that rather than having it be time based, the condition is stack based.
What I mean by that is that if you have 5 stacks of confusion on you, it affects your next 5 actions. Each condition removal skill would remove a complete group of stacks.
Simple, effective and makes the condition a lot more fun.

Oh gods, I miss my old Aspenwood Elementalist Griefer Mesmer build.
Basically, all of the spellcasting slowdown hexes I could cram onto a bar, that skill that damages on interrupt, and a couple of interrupts.
It would take the poor blighters 30 seconds to cast Meteor Storm, and right at the last second, I’d interrupt them.
I made sooooooooo many Elementalists rage-quit with that build.

Good times.

Goettel.4389:

Martin, while you’re at it, could you please, please ask for an option to get rid of the personal storyline tracker ?

But that’s the big reward for completing it :p

And historically, people do not react well when you advertise something to them, claiming it’s going to be awesome, only to “release” it preventing access to all but a select few.
I shouldn’t have to say this, as it’s blatantly obvious, but I’m not sure ArenaNet even understand this simple rule any more.

I’d like to raise another point here.
I’m not that interested in the Ascended reward for this content, or the potential of receiving a legendary pre-cursor.
I’d just like to have more content to play with my guild. Not with someone else’s guild.
It’s not about the reward. It’s simply about having more game to play with my friends, and I’m being prevented from experiencing this content with people I know and love thanks to arbitrary gating mechanisms.
The bounties sound the least interesting if I’m honest. The Puzzle though? ArenaNet only need to check the logs associated with my account to see how frequently I play jumping puzzles. I love ’em.
And the guild rush looks a hoot.

All of this exciting new content, locked away from my guild with no likelihood of ever being able to access it. If we do want to play it, we probably have to rely on the charity of larger guilds.

Utterly ridiculous.

I’m getting the feeling ArenaNet are estimating the amount of gold owned by any given player by a simple average. This is allowing the super-rich exploiters and trading post moguls to throw the average gold per player out, so that ArenaNet believe the userbase have more gold than they actually do.
They honestly think these prices are affordable to the average player.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced by the idea I posited earlier.
Why lock the last guild activity behind a nine week calendar gate?
Simple.
It’s not ready.

To announce the guild missions more than a month in advance of the update where they are “released”, then lock that content away for a further 2 months (with no warning that this would be the case)?
Well, that’s idiotic in the extreme if it really is the case.

No, the only logical reason they don’t want people playing this content right now is that it needs further development.
If it were ready, it would be insane to lock up something that could draw in potential players and also bring backs swathes of those who left.

The guild puzzle, the one thing that requires a new area and finely balanced play-testing, is simply not ready.
That’s why even the largest guilds with the most influence have to wait nine weeks to play it.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

There’s just one hitch. Since I laid this out, there’s probably a high chance ArenaNet can’t use it.

At the start of January before they announced the new system for Dailies, I outlined the same system almost word-for-word.
I don’t think they have a problem taking inspiration from the community.

In addition, 27 days ago I also suggested Achievement Tracking, again which they have adopted word-for-word.

There’s nothing in a Black Lion Chest you need. It’s all pretty much junk.
Myself, I have 290 BLCs in storage.
Ignore them. They’re just a callous way of separating you from your money.

It’s all a bit of a clusterfudge Pirlipat, and not thought through at all. The more I think about it, the more I see it was completely rushed.

I’ve had another thought, one that’s technical.
Perhaps Guild Bounties are the only Guild Missions they’ve actually finished development on, hence why they’ve time-gated the others. They’re giving themselves more time to finish the content while at the same time trying to fool people into believing they’ve released it.

Everyone touting the muti-guild functionality conveniently ignores the pettiness of human nature and the fact that many guild leaders will resent you representing another guild.

Indeed, this is more likely to happen now that ArenaNet have attached such value to representation.

Any time you represent one guild, you’re not generating influence for the other. Therefore, the guild leadership may very well resent you, and they can definitely claim to have a valid reason, so they’ll end up kicking you out of their guild.

Indeed, on the other side of the coin, the leadership of the large guilds you are now representing in order to get your shinies may very justifiably insist that you leave your other guilds, otherwise they’ll kick you and cut off your access to the guild missions.

This will happen.
It’s just the way people are, and this kind of behaviour is only made easier thanks to the relative anonymity of the web.

The instant gratification argument is an easy one to make, but it doesn’t see the whole picture.
Look, you really do have to look at Guild Wars 1 to see why so many people are kitten off.
In GW1, it was simplicity itself to get to maximum level and get a suit of armour with “Best in Slot” stats. On my warrior I had 4 sets of armour, likewise on my mesmer and ranger, something for every occasion.
The grind after getting that gear was purely for cosmetics. You got no mechanical advantage; it was all about the looks. And that was fine.

Here, even though the statistical difference is (currently) small, the effort needed to acquire “Best in Slot” gear is ridiculously high and makes any prior investment in your armour redundant. And gods help you if you want to get different sets for different circumstances. It’s massively different to the first game and feels like a bait and switch to many long time customers.

It’s catering to a more traditional MMO audience. And it feels positively abusive when you’ve been used to a system that positively encourages radical build experimentation through flexibility of “Best in Slot” gear.
My mesmer build list was astonishingly long, with many crazy, viable builds, all relying on some combination of gear or another, thanks to the easy availability of gear.

In the first game, I went out of my way to buy things from the store as and when they became available, even if I didn’t need it or particularly like it, as it was my way of saying thanks to ArenaNet.
Here, they’ve not had a penny from me since October, and if they continue the way they’re going, they’ll never receive money from me ever again.
I’ll continue to play, as it’ll cost them in bandwidth, but they’ll not see the inside of my wallet ever again.

I wonder how much ascended pieces of armour will cost? Look at how much the trinkets require at the moment, then apply that to armour.
Let’s say that conservatively speaking, ascended trinkets are approximately six times as expensive as exotic ones (in reality, it’s probably closer to ten times).

Let’s directly apply that multiplier to the existing currency for WvW armour, Badges of Honour.
That means the price for one piece of ascended armour, given ArenaNet’s current behaviour, is likely to cost 1,800 badges or more.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Exotic equipment is already too expensive badge-wise. Ascended will just rub salt into the wound.

Note that this is conjecture, not based on any secret knowledge.

I was thinking about that Xericor, and I think it’s a perception problem on ArenaNet’s behalf.

They’ve always been a bit weird with economies of scale anyway, what with titles in the first game “requiring” ridiculous amounts of grind to max out. Legendary Defender of Ascalon, the Kurzick and Luxon titles, the Gladiator track, etc. all required an inhuman investment of time.

But here I think they genuinely got riled by how quick a minority of players got a hold of Legendary weapons, the thing that was supposed to be end game content.
They ignored the fact that those who got Legendaries in a month had done so by exploiting various economic loopholes and have instead reacted long-term by designing goal acquisition times around those people instead of the larger gaming populous.
This is further compounded by various obnoxious elements reinforcing these decisions by agreeing that things should be this difficult to get.

It’s going to drive the greater population away, as they’ll see that nothing is attainable in a sensible amount of time.

I’ve just extrapolated further along the “Big Guild Consolidation” line of thinking.
What’s to stop these big guilds from throwing their weight around once they’ve absorbed all of the smaller guilds?
Things could get positively abusive, especially as the power in guilds is not decided democratically but is rather in the hands of the guild founders.
These super-guilds could enforce nasty rules, insisting on guild taxes and the like, and no-one wanting access to guild content could fight back against it. If they leave to form their own guilds, they’re going to be up against guilds that can offer instant access to guild content, while they have to start from scratch again, yet again making it harder to recruit new members.
Seriously, has no-one at ArenaNet read Catch 22?

Then why have forums at all?
If community feedback means nothing because the contributors account for a minority, why even bother?

I’d rather do a normal event than help some other guild get geared thank you very much.
And this is what the community at large will think.
It breeds resentment.

And that’s also a good point. Why the heck should I help other guilds do their guild missions when they’ll get better rewards than me?
They can go lick a bollock for all I care.

Possibly linked to the stealth nerf where mobs don’t reset aggro when their target goes invisible. I know you’re not going invisible yourself, but I would guess that ArenaNet have taken the easy and lazy option here and made it so that mobs always know where the true target is.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

These items are mainly earned through guild content, we included them on the laurels vendor to give players the opportunity to earn them if they are not in a guild but they are priced high to encourage players to try and accomplish them via the guild content.

Yeah, GREAT job on that. Nice how this new guild content favours bigger guilds, leaving smaller guilds out in the cold. Genius game design.
If you can’t tell, that’s sarcasm.

With the introduction of guild missions, and tying some of the best gear in the game to said missions, it’ll basically be impossible to start a guild from scratch.
You need too much influence to even gain access to the guild missions, yet all of the larger, established guilds will have enough influence stored to buy the missions as soon as they come available. People would rather have access to them now than join a small guild with no access, so you won’t be able to recruit.

Well at least in their stupidity ArenaNet finally have actual Guild Wars. You’re going to see a lot of guilds die as players leave them for larger guilds that have already got enough influence to unlock all of the upgrades.
No new guilds will be created as they won’t be able to compete with the older, larger ones.
I can see servers gradually merging into super guilds, where the entire population of a server all belong to one guild.

Absolutely bollocking stupid.
I can’t believe they didn’t see this coming.

ASB.4295:

BiS gear is optional, making it just as much an end game progression as skins and titles. If you want the privilege of equipping the best possible gear, you have to put your mind to it, not expect it to be handed to you after saving up for half a week.

There needs to be a way for the really dedicated players can differentiate themselves from those without the time or conviction grind out this slightly better gear set. People have said in the past that MMO players need to be weened off of wanting a gear treadmill a.k.a. becoming more and more powerful, but the same can be said for the permanent gear cap faction with demanding easy to reach power plateaus.

The traditional Guild Wars way of “Differentiating yourself” was through titles and aesthetics. This was more than good enough for the first game.
It wasn’t until the WoW-rejects came to GW2 that this new, disgusting, elitist, abusive thinking became prevalent.
If you’re dedicated, better looking stuff and shiny titles should be enough.
Having better gear than the masses because you’ve got more time to play than them doesn’t make you a better player. In fact, it could be argued it makes you a worse one. You have to rely on unfair statistical advantages gained through grind in order to beat everyone else.

@Chuo: Yeah, I hate that kind of response; “Oh it’s easy! Just play the same thing over and over again for weeks on end and you’ll get it eventually! That’s not boring at all!”.

How about separating the WvW and PvE commanders?
A WvW commander only shows up in WvW and a PvE one only in PvE?
That way you could have WvW commander cost badges and the PvE commander cost laurels / gold / mossy mandibles / whatever.

I’ve never had 50 ectos at one time. Running a full stable of alts puts paid to that, and my rare/exotic drop rate isn’t what I’d call generous. I’m more likely to get to 40 laurels before I get 50 ectos.
This new gearing policy of theirs that relies on grind is positively hateful.
I want max gear for peanuts, just the way it was in GW1.
All these eejits insisting that max stats should require grind because that’s how every other MMO does it have spoiled this game.

Ah well, yet another reason to continue not to buy gems.
As long as they continue with this despicable behaviour, I’ll continue to play without giving them a cent of money.
They can pay for me to play.

Gah, 50 ectos as well as 40 laurels?
Sure, no grind here.

Sell everything in your bank; be ruthless. All that stuff you’ve been saving for a rainy day?
It’s all cash.

When I decided I wanted to get the T3 set for my female Sylvari Ranger, I had enough stuff banked that I managed to make enough money within a week. I left the helmet until last, but even then, once I realised how relatively simple it is to make money if you’re patient, it didn’t take me long at all.

Oh, and just play the game normally, salvaging everything that’s blue or worse. It’s true you get a lot of money playing dungeons and fractals over and over, but it’s also true that this style of play will drive most people insane with boredom.

It is a shame coming from GW1 where armour was profession based to GW2 where it’s a lot broader. It’s very hard identifying a profession based on their outfit, and there’s also very few armours designed with a specific profession in mind.
Try finding a medium armour set that looks thematically correct for a Charr engineer for example.
Unfortunately, producing new armours requires a lot of work by the artists. This is probably less likely to happen, as making the profession tiers in the first place is an indication that they wanted to streamline this process from the very beginning in order to save resources.

All kidding aside, I’ve had 2 exotics from the jumping puzzles in Lion’s Arch.
I got Moonshank from Troll’s End and a fugly heavy helm from the pirate one.

Riffing on lin’s suggestion, perhaps Magic Find should be removed from armours and added as a title benefit?
Same for Gold Find?

In one of the betas, one of the “End of” events was where there was a dragon flying over Plains of Ashford, setting off mini, related events and turning players into branded IIRC. It would fly all over the map setting off these events, including battles against champion branded siege devourers and the like. To be honest, that’s what I thought dragon events in the finished game were going to be.
But yeah, having a whole map dedicated to a fight against a dragon would be very cool. However, it would be a fine line between each stage just consisting of a mass of HP and interesting, challenging gameplay.

Oh yeah, and the Jaguar is possibly the only REALLY useful pet when there’s lots of enemies around in WvW. Its stealth move can be used to target people behind enemy lines, and they don’t reveal themselves when attacking from stealth.

I use pets that compliment my current build.
It’s a condition Ranger at the moment, so I use a snow leopard and jaguar on land and a shark and river drake underwater. The trait “Rending Attacks” means they apply bleeds on critical.
That particular trait can be changed whenever you like to confer benefits based on what pets you’re using, so for optimal results, choose pets based on that trait.
It’s a case of finding synergies in other trait lines and with your equipment.

tigirius.9014:

snip

Ack, that picture you linked annoys me ‘cos it’s not like-for-like and hence harder for people to see the clear advantage Ascended gear offers.

Here’s a better one.

This needs to be done sooner rather than later for a couple of other reasons I’m not seeing mentioned here.

Firstly, when they had the outstanding idea of adding the entrance to Fractals in LA, they all but killed off normal social chat there. There’s a slow clap moment if ever I saw one.

And secondly, while I appreciate how useful gw2lfg is, surely it poses a security risk?
At the moment it doesn’t require account names or passwords, but it DOES require a character name. If the operators of the site decided to, I’m sure they could find some nefarious way of exploiting the site and the userbase. Do ArenaNet really want to be forcing their players to use something that could potentially put their accounts in danger?

What irritates me more is when people talk about MMOs as if they’re the entirety of gaming.
You won’t hear mention of “Trinity” in the majority of games out there, because that majority aren’t MMOs.

I still want combo-killer back. You can tell that now they’ve removed it from the list, that list is a little too short and the same ones tend to repeat too often.

fishergrip.4082:

I dunno about dungeons and fractals because I don’t do those, but in terms of general PvE leveling ease from 1-80 I’d put mesmer last. Also, ranger is very strong in general PvE.

I’ll echo those thoughts. Getting from 1 to 80 with my Mesmer was a horrible experience for me; I crafted the last 20 levels out of disgust. Since getting to 80 however, he’s become one of my favourite characters. He just needed all of the traits and gear to really shine.

And Ranger in open-world PvE is fun, engaging and easy. After playing my Warrior, my Ranger was a lot simpler. Sure, some of this was probably down to familiarity with the content, but the fact I keep going back to her, to the point where she’s probably taken over as my main, is telling.
She’s even fun to play in WvW, although a little weak if caught on her own.

Oh, there’s another reason I don’t think we’ll see them do this: Even GW1 had a better system than GW2.

In GW1, you could buy “Perfect” salvage kits for materials, gold and skillpoints that would extract the inscription from an armour whilst leaving it in tact, meaning if you wanted to change stats, you weren’t going to destroy the look you like.

They could have just brought this system across unchanged, yet they didn’t.

They WANT you destroying styles so that you’re forced to buy them again.