Guild Wars 2

I’d remove stealth.

Then I’d roll back ascended gear.

I’d implement a “One fractal group a day” limit to get players out of crappy instanced content and back into the world.

I’d halt all development on more instanced content and encourage the team to brainstorm potential emergent systems, ones that don’t rely on scripted content.

I’d re-implement the inter-player trading from GW1 as well as retaining the BLTP. It may or may not kill a stream of revenue, but at least I’d be showing my players some respect and removing some potential for scamming.

I’d seriously look at increasing duration of crowd control effects, reducing cooldowns and removing immunity from bosses. I’d encourage the programming team to find some way to get monsters to dodge incoming attacks in the same way players do, with their own endurance bars. That way they can still attempt to avoid a certain amount of CC, but it doesn’t feel cheap.

I’d completely remove the Fear crowd control effect from the game. Taking control away from players is a cardinal game design sin.

I’d change Confusion so that it affected a certain number of skill activations rather than being time-based.

I’d remove armour repairs from WvW.

I would attempt to find some way of legitimising gold farmers and botting. We obviously can’t beat them, so we should integrate them. Separate zones for botters, a 2 way gemstore where gems can be converted back to cash, storefronts for individual sellers, that sort of thing, all subject to an ArenaNet handling fee.

I would remove all other forms of currency except gold and karma.

I’ll stop now.

I think that’s why people get antsy about these things. It’s not explained what the time limit for doing each stage is, or whether there even is a time limit. And after others received precursors for doing the Karka event, people get nervous they might be missing out on a similar reward. Again, because you’re not told what the reward for completing the activity will be.
Sure, the developers don’t want everyone to know every step of the process, taking the fun and surprise out of their work, but there do need to be some hard limits defined in order to keep people happy.

I know they’ve said in the patch notes that Combo Killer has been removed, but are they going to add it back into the daily rotation once they’ve fixed it?
My friend and I really enjoyed it, and it made us examine our skills for the best combos.

Oh, and Dodge is simples as log as you haven’t disabled double-tap to dodge. Probably best done on a dodge-clone mesmer.

A guild member has had two drop in open world this week, so they’re still in the loot tables.
What I find tragically hilarious is that I’ve had more keys drop in general open world play than lodestones. I’ve had 4 keys drop in open world since release; I’ve had 3 lodestones drop.

The three that count are:
Nageling Event in Diessa Plateau
Harathi Hinterlands
Crucible of Eternity Story Mode Risen Monster

I know the last one counts as when we did it the other night, upon its death I dinged 10 giant kills.

Don’t get rid of MF; I make a lot of money selling MF stuff on the TP to mugs who believe it makes a difference.

While I don’t like the cost of the laurel gear, I’m fine with the Chauncey and Goedulf minis.

I like the rebalance touches to general Orrian levels, what little I’ve played so far.

I like the amount of event fixes in Queensdale, although I’m dubious about how long they’ll last before jamming up again.

I like the addition of jewellery to the Orrian Temple vendors.

I like the new dailies, including the Combo Killer one.

I like that I can once more preview armours from different professions.

While I’m not a fan of Fractals, I appreciate that you can now reconnect.

I like that World Transfer Fee has finally been implemented, although I fear it may be too late to save some servers.

Check it when you have time; if you want temple armour with Power / Vitality / Toughness, you will only be able to get 5/6 pieces, no matter if you’re Heavy, Medium or Light. It’s designed like this.
On top of that, you have to get it from different temples; you can’t get your 5/6 from one temple, only up to 2 pieces. So that means no 6/6 runeset for you.
I can only guess that their intention was to encourage stat spread by buying all of your Karma gear from one particular temple vendor.

It’s also scandalous that it’s taken them this long to add jewellery & accessories to the temple vendors.

But then it really ticks me off that not all stat combinations or quality levels can be crafted. It devalues crafting. As has been highlighted, Ascended gear is effectively killing Jeweller as a craft, as why would people bother crafting Exotic jewellery when it’s not BiS?
This will only extend to armour when they finally introduce the Ascended tier to that unless they allow us to craft Ascended quality gear.
Congratulations ArenaNet, you’re making one major aspect of your game entirely redundant in order to satiate those people who want to chase higher gear tiers.

Oh dear gods, please make it stop
Seriously, can’t the moderators merge all these mount topics like they did with the Ascended gear thread?

It is rather disappointing, isn’t it?
Whole gear stat lines need to be finished off, such as only 5/6 PVT pieces being available from Temple Karma vendors (was this fixed in the new patch?), yet ArenaNet persist in adding the ever-unpopular Ascended gear, and in a way that’s simply not consistent with existing stat lines.

Hmmm, fair point. I wonder if they consider the combination of damage and durability overpowered then?
Or are they just being lazy with not implementing a Knight’s Ascended option?

I was thinking about this on the way to work.
I don’t think they’ll ever add PPT Ascended gear. Why?
It’ll push crit chance closer to 100%, and they don’t want that.
Even more evidence that Ascended gear really wasn’t planned before release and that Exotic was supposed to be the top tier. They’re having to compromise stats in order not to break the game, hence the closest to Knight’s Ascended you can get being Power / Crit Damage / Toughness.

He’s not referring to HoM gear. You could buy BiS armour with bog-standard artwork for 1,500gp a piece, a tenth the cost of any prestige armour with the same stats that would show in your HoM.
HoM gear was not needed to get BiS stats. It was purely aesthetic.
Stop trying to change history by implying that only HoM gear was BiS.

XxTAFxX.6741:

Did they remove the rich orri node from south shore?

Yup; it’s now just a normal one.

Another thing:
They said they’ve adjusted level scaling. I don’t know about anyone else, but it still feels pretty much the same to me. I’m still steam-rolling content in Queensdale when I go back there.

One thing I’ve noticed is that Orrian trash mobs seem to move slower now and look a lot more zombie-like. I don’t think a new walking animation has been added; the existing one has simply been slowed and it looks suitably more shuffly.
I approve.
It’s also weird getting hit by anchors and NOT getting pulled this way and that.
Weird but good.

darkace.8925:

Mungrul.9358:

You said that’s how games work. If you use sweeping generalisations to justify your case, expect to get picked up on it.

I would think that given the context of the conversation you guys would be able to realize I’m not comparing Guild Wars 2’s leveling system to games like Super Mario Brothers, FIFA World Cup, or Frogger. Use a little sense, people.

Then that’s a very narrow-minded point of view, where you have already decided certain games must behave certain ways.
Just because other games in the same genre do things a certain way, doesn’t mean all games in that genre have to do things that way.
If developers and publishers follow that line of thought, we’ll never get anything new.

Do you want the same old crap recycled over and over again, or do you want new experiences?

You said that’s how games work. If you use sweeping generalisations to justify your case, expect to get picked up on it.

Quake 3 doesn’t work like that.
What I’m saying is, if you say “games work like that”, you’re dismissing a whole buttload of game types.
That’s pretty narrow-minded.

It’s a shame this one has currently been removed. My friend and I had great fun last night figuring out exactly what triggered a point for both of us, and once we had it sussed, it took five minutes. It made us examine our skills anew and come up with efficient ways of killing things that we knew about previously, but just took for granted.
This actively made us time our skills to conicide for best effect.

We achieved it by my Elementalist friend casting Ring Of Fire and me as a ranger simply auto-attacking through the field. It was maybe a little unreliable, but we had great fun doing it, and like I said, it took five minutes.

Any achievement that helps people play together and communicate more is fine by me guys

Really, fractals are incredibly simple once you know them. I’ve done them, and I can’t stand them, because they never change. You don’t run in to random players. Events don’t bleed into eachother and create interesting new scenarios.

People who insist that instanced content is difficult are fooling themselves and trying to fool others into thinking they’re some kind of elite.
You’re not. You’re just able to repeat the same action over and over again. Congratulations.
Your task could be performed with as much style and panache by a robot.

Oh for god’s sake Kitty, some of us don’t want to spend our limited time grinding away the same content over and over. That’s not fun; it’s work.
Why is it ridiculous that Dailies should have the same reward rate as Fractals?
What if I think players who are able to adapt to new scenarios and seek out different ways of achieving dailies are better than people who play the same content that doesn’t change over and over again?
Let’s face it, there’s nothing hard or unpredictable about playing the same instanced, scripted content over and over.
You just have to have a complete lack of imagination and be stimulated by repetitive grind.

Even if it takes a couple of hours Wasabi Kitty, it’s still stupidly quicker than a month grinding out laurels.

I’m getting very close to just giving up.
I really enjoy GW2, I honestly do, but this constant feeling I have of being given short shrift is driving me away.

I already stopped buying gems with cash after the Halloween event.

Soon, if the game continues to feel more like work than play, I’m just going to stop.
I miss the days of being able to experiment cheaply with different builds simply by dropping new inscriptions on a piece of cheap armour. Why on Earth can’t I do that here? Why do I have to spend either a load of gold or a buttload of time grinding out materials just to experiment with exotic gear that’s not even top tier?
Building up a set of armour and weapons for every possible scenario was so much easier and pleasurable in GW1.
Now I feel as if I’m being told that if I choose a character and build, I have to stick with it.

This is incredibly disappointing. I came to Guild Wars 2 to get away from the constant grinds of other games such as DCUO and AoC. Turns out, it’s gradually turning into them.

Meh, always half-baked implementations forcing players to favour certain ways of playing the game over others. I’m glad there’s finally a way to get this gear that doesn’t involve the hateful repetition of grinding out the same Fractal content day-in, day-out.
But you’re still saying to players that Fractals are what you would prefer them to be doing.
Judging by comments here, for the average Fractal grinding player, getting rings is a trivial affair. I would judge that for those that do nothing but Fractals, it would take probably 2 days to get 2 ascended rings.
Yeah, the 90 odd days to grind out the Laurels required from dailies really compares favourably.
Oh yeah, I have 10 characters too. That’s over 900 laurels.
That’s a slap in the face ArenaNet.
No grind my kitten

Oh, another thing that’s a pet peeve for my friend and I, especially in regards to heavy armours: lack of neck protection. Almost every set features no neck covering, exposing one of your biggest weak points to harm.

Welp, that’s it. I believe I have just “Completed” chef. I must have learned every cooking recipe in the game. I have at least one of every ingredient and nothing appears in my experimentation tab any more.
Yay!
Shame there’s no achievement for it

A friend and I had a similar idea, although not quite as dramatic, that should be applied on a borderlands basis.
Each enemy server on your borderland should not be able to host an army larger than yours. Indeed, each enemy army should only be half the size of the host’s.
My friend went the other way, suggesting that they should be able to host an army the same size as yours, +10% or so.
Either way is better than the current arrangement.
That way, even if you’re outnumbered in EB, at least you have a chance of retaining a grip on your borderlands.

It also stops nightcapping of your borderlands, as if you’re in bed and not fielding a force on your borderlands, the enemy can’t either.

Myself, I can’t STAND doing instanced content much more than once. It insults my intelligence. And the drop rates for lodestones in open world are far beyond simply ridiculous. I’ve got ~1,400 hours on my account, and I’ve had a grand total of 2 lodestones. One icy and one charged.
I heartily agree that there needs to be some other form of reliable acquisition.

The human cultural tier 2 has a pretty good Swashbuckler look to it, but is utterly ruined by the pointless addition of useless, seemingly tacked-on at the last minute spikes on the right arm. Seriously, what IS it with ArenaNet and spikes?!

One of the most awful examples of spikes-gone-mad is heavy Armageddon armour, or temple armour.
I’ve attached a Before and After comparison with a crude shop job by me revealing the really nice armour underneath all the crappy spikes.
Unfortunately, I can’t do anything with that nasty helmet.

Interesting, but I think it may come down to how much impact such graphics would have on your system.
I’m a bit out of touch with this technology, but the way cel shading* in games used to be done was that the character model would be processed twice. Obviously this takes significantly more grunt than just showing the basic model.

Mind you, like I say, my knowledge on this subject is very old, and I will happily stand corrected if someone would care to explain the tech behind achieving such results in a modern engine.

*That’s what it’s called when you can see an outline around your character.

Monagan.6925:

Sorry to barge in there, but might I suggest that there might be some women out there who are playing games to escape from the reality of being objectified?
(had to use Quotation marks because apparently this forum doesn’t support multiple quotes)

Great point Monagan; games are an escape from the drudgery of everyday life. If women playing games want to find out what it’s like not to be objectified, I suggest they play as a male character.
But I’m positive lots of women have already caught on to that trick.

I make no bones that I am not in a position to first hand understand female objectification; I’m a straight white man, about as immune to cultural slurs and inequality as it’s possible to be.
But in some ways that helps you see inequality.
You notice it because it’s so blatantly different to how you’re treated every day.

People don’t get nervous walking along the street towards me because of the colour of my skin.
People don’t wolf-whistle at me or size me up and down with their eyes believing they’re well within their rights to do so.
Other men aren’t looking at my legs, hips or chest when they speak to me.
I don’t have to put up with being talked down to on a daily basis or treated like I’m not capable of taking care of myself.
People don’t touch me without permission.
If I choose to pursue success in business, my options aren’t limited by what is situated between my legs.

So when I see that happening to other people, it’s blatantly obvious they are being judged on merits other than their personalities or intellects.

The armours that offend me in this game do so because they strengthen these behaviours and make it harder for women to be judged in the way I wish myself to be judged.

So tell me lady gamers: would you rather be judged by the shapeliness of your legs & chest, or by your mind?

Everyone’s a critic.

Look, this is a usability suggestion for a user interface. The aim of a user interface is to make things easier for the user. If you can perform a repetitive task in less actions, this is a good thing. Over time, all those actions add up.

Besides, when you’re constantly opening the inventory to deposit that one collectible you’ve just picked up that has resulted in your bags becoming full?
You’re darn tooting it’s a “Hassle”.

Gods, internet muppets and their need to make themselves look good by denigrating the ideas of others.
I despair.

Edit:
Heck, I’ve just checked your posting history, and there’s very little positive stuff there. Almost everything is an attempt to belittle someone else, and you’re not even an active player. You are in no position to criticise people attempting to offer suggestions to improve the game.

This drives me mad as well, but I don’t think your suggestion will ever happen. They want the default screen to be the Gem Store. They want you seeing it every time you press O.

Would it be possible to add a right click contextual menu to the inventory bag icon in the top left of the screen, allowing you to “Deposit Collectibles” without opening the inventory itself?

I bought my tier 3 for my Sylvari ranger, and yet I still agree it should be cheaper; after all, it’s only rare.
However, let me outline what I think ArenaNet’s idea is with Tier 3.

1: It’s an aspirational set akin to Dungeon gear that doesn’t require running dungeons.
2: It’s not Exotic because it drives the sale of Fine Transmutation Stones, which will either cost you more gold or real world cash.

With those two points in mind, I don’t think we’ll ever see a change.

To be honest, at the current cost it should be a skin like the Hall of Monuments skins, one that you could use for that character again and again, but they have no place for such an idea in their business model. I’m actually surprised that the HoM skins survived in their current format.
It’s a little too generous for their liking these days.

Just to be clear and to illustrate what I am talking about, the attached is Masquerade armor.

It looks like lingerie.
My friend and I have nick-named it “The Porn Bo-Peep Look”.

I’m not saying ALL female armour is this bad, but that still doesn’t excuse these examples of exploitative design.

Disig.7169:

Mungrel, I hate to say it but I think you are misinterpreting him. He’s not saying this is how it should be, he is saying that yes, some girls like this.

Not misinterpreting him; just trying to explain how we’re led to believe things are the way the are and how our world view can be shaped by society.
I’d be interested to hear if his female friends thought that there was nothing wrong with the human female Masquerade set for example. If they honestly see nothing wrong with that, there’s something drastically wrong. It’s a blatant example of “Male Gaze” design.

uknortherner.2670:

I see I am wasting my time debating this with you.

You wanted a response, I offered one.
I am inclined to bring out a stereotype against you based on your name to display exactly how society can program people to behave simply based on appearances.
uknortherner implies someone living north of Birmingham. Likely someone who eats a lot of fatty food, drinks excessively and is bigoted, uneducated and racist. Or on the flipside, a raging socialist who hated Thatcher, blames the Tories for destroying a way of life and plunging the north into poverty, wears a flatcap and has an unhealthy obsession with whippets. Probably smokes heavily too.

Chances are, you’re nothing like that, but popular media portrayals would have people believe “It’s grim up north” and that’s the way you are.

Now imagine the media is telling you every day you have to wear this particular blouse, those particular boots, you should smell a certain way and that you should paint your face daily and wear your hair a certain way in order to fit into society. Is it beyond the realms of possibility that you may begin to believe this is the way things should be?
Heck, parents start training you for it as soon as you’re born, dressing girls in pink and boys in blue.

Aren’t stereotypes fun?

uknortherner.2670:

I see you failed to address the little fact that I have female friends who don’t have a problem with the armour in this game. If they haven’t got a problem with it (and yes, they play the bloody game), why should you?

Hearsay and if you really want me to address it, if they really do feel that way, it’s the way society has programmed them to believe that they should see nothing wrong with being objectified.

My experience raiding in AoC is of essentially multiplayer puzzles that once you’ve solved, require no actual skill, just correct timing of particular skill activation.
You then repeat these on a weekly basis in the vain hopes of receiving one piece of equipment that 3 other people are rolling on.
The first time you do this content, it’s interesting. Subsequent times issue diminishing returns in fun stakes.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Instanced content with scripted encounters that play out identically every time you play them are the antithesis of what MMOs should be about. MMOs should be about emergent encounters driven by player interaction with a world’s systems.

…and there you have it. Three immediate responses justifying this institutionalised sexism, not even seeing it as a problem and attempting to belittle my character in order to make my viewpoint null & void. Ad hominem at its finest.

There’s also a very good reason to stop the enemy doing the jumping puzzle: they get siege for doing it.
Personally, I find PvP in the EB JP to be some of the most exciting, interesting PvP in the game.

What benefits does the exploration star have?
I see no reason not to include the option for those who want it. The only thing I can see being a problem is interface real estate. Is there enough room on a player’s info header to display it nicely without it turning into a jumbled mess.

It’s embarrassing as an adult playing this game to get intellectual friends to take it seriously when female characters are portrayed in such an overtly sexualised manner.
For all of the excellent work done in creating female Charr, it’s all undone by the sheer quantity of boob holes, bared midriffs / legs and even open crotch dresses.
It’s a farce and it dehumanises women. Worse, I worry that it reinforces behavioural patterns that women are having to fight against on a daily basis at the moment. Every day women are told that they’re only at their best if they’re buying the best clothes / perfume / accessories / cosmetics and that they NEED to look sexually alluring if they’re to be successful, and this game does nothing to stop that being the case.

The community really doesn’t help either and shows a worrying tendency to get aggressive when anyone even attempts to hint that the way women are being portrayed in games might be chauvinistic, misogynistic and demeaning.

Heck, you’ll even get people attempting to justify these portrayals by saying “But women artists worked on these portrayals, therefore it must be okay”.

No it really isn’t.
Grow up gaming.
People are people, not objects to be lusted after, owned and dismissed.

The sheer volume of these darned threads leads me to suspect that like vertical progression, ArenaNet will introduce the darned things just to shut people up.
Will you people from other MMOs who haven’t got an original idea between you and want to homogenise everything please stay the heck away from my Guild Wars?

Want mounts? WoW, AoC, Everquest, blah, blah, blah. NOT GUILD WARS.
Want vertical progression? WoW, AoC, Everquest, blah, blah, blah. NOT GUILD WARS (well that one changed ’cos you whinged long and hard).
Want fishing? WoW, Torchlight, Everquest, blah, blah, blah. NOT GUILD WARS.
Want raids? WoW, AoC, Everquest, blah, blah, blah. NOT GUILD WARS.

You want something familiar? Go play something familiar. Nothing is stopping you. Guild Wars was meant to be different, and a lot of us came here because we thought that was the case, but now you mindless drones are spoiling our party.

You’re stifling innovation.
You’re preventing the next best thing from emerging because you’re scared of change.
Dennis Leary wrote a song about you guys. Look it up on Youtube some time.

I’m currently at 4/8, but I’m stretching it out.
Currently, I have Warrior, Ranger, Mesmer & Engineer there, with Thief hot on their heals at 59. I have an Elementalist at 30, but my Guardian and Necromancer are both under 10.
It’s also far too easy to get frustrated with the play-style of some classes and fall back on what you know.
Warrior & Ranger are my mains, with Mesmer second in command. And they’re so fun, it’s often easier just to log and play them. I also prefer playing the game at 80 knowing that I’m at maximum level with the best equipment I can get (although ArenaNet are doing their best to annihilate that simple enjoyment).
Playing at cap allows you to viably design builds and playstyles; to experiment knowing your limits

I am really disappointed with implementation of vertical progression and feel it punishes those of us who like to make at least one of every profession. Vertical progression is designed around the assumption that people spend all of their time playing one character.

Oh ye gods how I hated mesmer levelling it.
Coming from GW1 where things were more manipulative with more of a focus on “Darned if you do, darned if you don’t” Domination style gameplay, I really couldn’t stand the renewed focus on illusions.
Domination is a half-hearted implementation in GW2, and a lot of the cool effects you could achieve in GW1 using Domination skills have been condensed into one condition, Confusion.

So I hated the new mesmer.

Then ding, I hit 80, kitted him out with a complete exotic set, including trinkets and was still having a hard time. I’d invested in an exotic greatsword with a sword/dagger combo as the swap out. And these weapons just were NOT doing anything for me, as while the greatsword may look cool in use, I found it incredibly dull to use.

That’s when I crafted an exotic staff and retraited 0/20/20/0/30.
I stopped molly-coddling my illusions.
I no longer treated them as turrets or pets.
I focussed on making as many as possible as quickly as possible, shattering them as often as possible.
And all of a sudden I was a dodging & dancing fool, nipping about the battlefield and exploding stuff here, there and everywhere. My endurance was constantly being refilled by extra staff bounces, I was hard to hit as I was constantly dodging to create clones, and things in general were going BOOM.

Life as a mesmer starts at 80.

Karizee.8076:

I run the LA jump puzzles everyday. Have recieved numerous rares but no exotic yet.
However my friend got an exotic ring the other day from Troll’s End

Oooo, that’s interesting!
I was assuming that the LA chests had higher chances based on the grade, with Splendid being lowest, Grand being middle and Magnificent highest.
But getting an exotic from a Grand chest piques my curiosity!

It’s a good thing ArenaNet don’t let me swear on this board.