Guild Wars 2

It’s a book by Neal Stephenson.
One of the main characters is responsible for creating an incredibly popular MMO.
One of Stephenson’s better observations about MMOs is in his description of the two new player factions that spring up in the game T’Rain:
The Earthtone Coalition and The Forces of Brightness.

Essentially, it comes down to players who dress their characters more tastefully and thematically (the Earthtone Coalition) and others who wear hideous colours and gaudy outfits with little regard paid to taste or appropriateness (the Forces of Brightness).

Where do you think you fit?

I’ll start by saying that I feel I very much fit in the Earthtone Coalition, and to that end, attached is a picture of my main. Agree or contradict me as you see fit and post a picture of your main saying which you believe you belong to

That bloody humming from the new jumping puzzle in Gendarran Fields can be heard from miles away and is REALLY irritating.

Tyr.1963:

I like the idea, however I also understand why ANet didn’t implement it this way
There’s already the issue of overpopulated areas not displaying all the players models, minis are just another model to load.

They had an elegant way around this in the first game: there was a limit on how many minipets could be active in a given instance.
If you tried to get yours out when the limit was reached, the game would notify you.
I can’t see why the same couldn’t be done here.

OP: good suggestion, and as you suspect has been suggested many times before in one way or another. ArenaNet are just incredibly slow in developing anything that doesn’t immediately benefit their bank balance.

At the moment, dungeon design in GW2 promotes exploitative play, where players do things the designers never intended in order to do it as quickly as possible.

There’s a few problems with this, on both sides of the fence.

The vast majority of players in this game are obsessed with rewards and will take the path of least resistance in order to obtain them.

The developers overtune content and are never able to really balance it properly, as the defined norm when playing said content becomes the exploitative method. This results in no feedback on content that may very well be badly balanced, such as annoying amounts of high health trash mobs in between the “fun” bits of a dungeon.

This further drives players to find ways to exploit the dungeons and avoid having to do such dreary content.

So I propose that in order to make sure ArenaNet get some actual valuable feedback about precisely how badly some dungeons are designed, they apply “Painkiller” style blocks to dungeon segments.

For those of you unfamiliar with the FPS Painkiller, it used a mechanic that stopped progress until everything in a particular area was dead. If you tried to skip content, you’d just come up against impenetrable barriers that wouldn’t disappear until you’d killed everything.

Of course, this would cause uproar amongst the community and a massive amount of complaints about dungeons, but that’s the point.

If you try to play a dungeon “normally” at the moment, you’re fully aware of just how tedious they can be. If everyone in the community was forced to play this way, ArenaNet would finally get some useful feedback.

Sorry, my key point got lost it would appear.

ArenaNet see more value in being able to siphon gold from players through using the BLTC as a goldsink than in implementing P2P trading, which they can’t control.
P2P trading makes gold selling easier, can cause scamming (even if it’s never happened to you, it does happen) and doesn’t drive gem sales.

Remember, at a base level, everything ArenaNet does now is centred around milking you of your cash. By taxing the use of the BLTC, they’re applying low-level pressure to players in the hopes that they’ll buy gems to compensate.

This is NOT the same ArenaNet who made Guild Wars 1. Those guys have mostly left (Jeff Strain made the wildly popular Dead State for example). These guys are far more interested in monetisation rather than quality product.

One thing that cannot be argued:
The laser barrier room does NOT promote teamplay.
Having more players and having to res them actually makes it harder, where having all players alive is of no benefit other than providing more DPS.
This isn’t team content.

I like it, as much like Hidden Garden in Mount Maelstrom or even the final simple jumps in Troll’s End (Lion’s Arch), it gives as close to a “Hard” fail state as is possible in this game.
If no-one’s around to res you or portal you back, you’re going to have to start again.

What I DO think is poor are the amount of badly signposted rocks with poor collision detection that are crucial to progress.
Bounding boxes that result in your character slipping off of terrain when they would otherwise appear to be stood on it is simply bad polish and map design.

Also, while I have the diving goggle achievement, I can’t help but think that having to jump through the mountainside was probably not intentional. It feels like those times you manage to escape the map and can walk through spurious terrain.
In short, that final bit feels unprofessional and unfinished.
If it was done on purpose, I have to raise my eyebrows in consternation at the designer’s ability or lack thereof.

Edit: Oh, and there’s another signposting issue with this jumping puzzle.
The diving goggle platform feels more like the natural conclusion of the puzzle than the actual chest itself.

It’s not just spamfest/scamfest that makes player-to-player trading non-viable.
ArenaNet want to control all trade that goes on in game, and they can only do that by making sure the Black Lion Trading Post is the only method of trading.

The other suggestions are good and have been requested before, so I’m +1ing the OP.

I’ve noticed that for the past few weeks, whenever I’ve done Troll’s End I’ve no longer had problems with the midway plank jump.
It used to be seemingly random whether I’d make it or not, but it now feels like someone has tweaked that section.
Is this right, or am I going mad?

Thing is, mounts aren’t a new idea (every other MMO under the sun has them), and really would add nothing to a game that as Gandarel quite rightly points out, wasn’t designed with them in mind.
If they were to add mounts, they would have to completely redesign terrain and mob distribution in the open world.
That really isn’t going to happen.

Lastly, and because I’m feeling cantankerous, mounts are requested by people with little imagination who fear the new and live in the past. They’re dull, unnecessary and unoriginal.

I actually quite like QuickLime’s idea as he/she/it is obviously poking fun at the bleating idiots who continually request this garbage.
They’ve made a suggestion that would actively punish the mounted player, and for that they should be applauded.

The idea of mounts in Guild Wars 2 needs to be taken out back, shot and sent to the glue factory.

Reisinger.4203:

AoE being limited to 5 targets would be tough on a lot of people. I run a shout-healing build for WvW and sometimes go for banners, so that would render both types of builds pretty useless. Then again, warriors have plenty of other options and we aren’t exactly the best healers in the game…

Um, that’s EXACTLY how it works at the moment, and that’s my point. With ALL area-of-effect skills currently only affecting a maximum of 5 players, it encourages stacking and zerging.
Did you not know about the 5-person limit on AoE?

Or how about we just ignore all the requests for mounts and accept they’re never happening?

But no opinions on the other stuff Temariah? Just the stealth stuff?

Good stuff so far guys. I particularly like the “Pulsing Turret” suggestion. Maybe it could be an addition to the Thumper turret?
It seems much more reasonable to make certain professions have inherent hard counters rather than making a one-off expensive item purely to counter a badly balanced mechanic.

I still like the slightly different suggestion that waypointing to your home city should be completely free from anywhere in the world. At least it would give some added life to those cities.

But yeah, I’ve been saying since release that waypointing to LA should be free.

I really like this idea!

Maybe the burst could be a wider radius Staggering Blow (Hammer 4) type skill, so an additional blowout? It could also count as a Whirl finisher.

I think you could take the core idea further and use it to improve transforms such as Rampage. Rampage is in desperate need of improvement, and giving it a burst skill would make sense.

Crowd Control and Unshakable/Defiant
These boss abilities are the reason direct damage weapons and skills are massively more useful than bringing along any form of crowd control. Again, it feels like a lazy fix to prevent bosses getting stunlocked, and the end result is why virtually all PvE Warriors and Guardians favour greatsword above every other weapon.
It also goes directly against one of the development goals they had in mind while developing GW2. Throughout development they were stressing how they wanted to move the player’s attention away from watching healthbars and buff / debuff icons back towards the game window itself. Yet if you bring any form of crowd control to a boss fight, you have to watch their health bar like a hawk in order to properly time your skills.
As for suggestions on how to fix this problem, I’m unsure, but I know in my bones that Unshakable/Defiant need to go.
Maybe treat bosses like players and give them stability skills with cooldowns? That way, the buff can be stripped, but they still have some CC protection.

Maximum Condition Stack Size
Like Unshakable/Defiant, this limit ensures that direct damage remains king. In group situations it ensures that only a couple of people running condition builds quickly hit the limit with any condition stacks after 25 essentially being wasted damage.
I propose that the stack cap should remain, but that any condition damage applied above and beyond the cap be applied as direct damage. Sure, use an algorithm to balance the damage, but this needs to happen.

Stealth
This one is going to provoke the biggest amount of negative feedback. If I had my way, it would be completely removed from the game.
In Guild Wars 1, ArenaNet considered adding Stealth to the game on two separate occasions, but both times realised that it’s ridiculously overpowered and backed away from implementing it.
The first time was during initial development. In one of the original Public Beta weekends, my Ranger had a stealth attribute; this was eventually removed prior to release. With the development of Factions and the addition of the Thief’s Grandaddy class , the Assassin, ArenaNet once again considered giving it stealth, but backed away from it as being ower-powered again, instead creating the fantastic compromise of shadow stepping.
These design sensibilities flew out of the window with Guild Wars 2 and we ended up with the Assassin class but with added invisibility.
And the problem is, ArenaNet didn’t learn anything from any of the other MMOs out there that have invisibility.
In almost every other MMO, invisibility can be broken if the invisible character is in plain sight in front of other players, especially if there is no environmental cover around. There are dice checks against an invisible player to see if they successfully remain hidden. If the invisible player attacks from invisibility, they are unable to re-enter invisibility unless they completely break out of combat.
Invisible players in other MMOs definitely do not move faster than visible players.
And finally, cooldowns for abilities that confer invisibility are measured in minutes.
So maybe Guild Wars 2 should learn from those other examples if they’re not looking to remove invisibility from the game completely.

Does anyone else have other game mechanics suggestions?

And I know it’ll be tempting to make this all about Stealth, but please try to discuss the other suggestions too!

So with the recent patch a lot of people balked at how their professions had been affected by balances.

Myself, I was rather fortunate, as I rarely follow flavour of the month builds and make my own rather than waiting for someone to make a build for me.

My Warrior build was barely affected, moving 5 trait points from Arms to Defense; my Mesmer wasn’t affected at all, although I find myself playing with scepter more now as it’s more viable.

However, I can understand why others are upset, and I’m a bit disappointed that ArenaNet have, against all assurances, fallen into the Nerf/Buff cycle that plagues the vast majority of MMOs out there.

To that end, I propose that instead of continually tinkering with professions, traits and skills, they rather look at tweaking the overarching game mechanics.

Things that still aren’t satisfactory and feel like unfinished hack jobs are as follows:

ALL AoE being limited to 5 targets
I propose they look at tweaking this on a more granular scale. It was made like this because of the perceived power of buffs affecting massive amounts people in WvW.
I believe there is room for AoE that affects entire groups of people, but understand the need to balance that against the more powerful group affecting AoE. To that end they should examine AoE effects on a case-by-case basis, limiting or unlimiting the amount of affected targets where necessary. The blanket fix they applied initially feels rushed and amateur. It also promotes the ridiculous “Stacking” tactic in WvW and ensures that zergs remain king.

Continued below

I’d also offer the couterargument that no-one can really begin to learn all of the ins and outs of a profession until it’s level 80 and all skills are unlocked.
You can’t properly make a full build without all trait points because not all skill line synergies will be available, your stats will be sub-optimal because you’ve not got max gear, chances are you won’t have your final runes and sigils because you don’t want to waste them on a non-80 character, etcetera, etcetera.

I’d say you’re better off really trying to learn a profession once it’s fully opened up to you.

I don’t like levelling either; I like having everything unlocked and experimenting with builds. GW2 is a lot worse than GW1 in that respect.
Of course, you can level by crafting, and it’ll take less than a day, but it IS expensive.
For my last three characters, I used the speed crafting guide here: http://www.gw2crafts.net/

Unfortunately, GW2 at 80 is quite inflexible. In order to properly explore builds, you’ll need to spend a LOT of in game currencies of one kind or another investing in multiple armour sets.
I get the feeling ArenaNet want to make it expensive to change build so you’re more likely to spend money on gems to convert to gold.
Either that or they don’t want people playing more than one build per character.

If Tier 3 is just for the skin, well it should be a skin and not actually armour. Like the Dragon / Scleric / Molten weapons.
But as has been pointed out, they won’t do that because tiered gear is one of the primary things driving fine transmutation crystal sales in the Gem Store.

Reading comprehension fail there “Ok I Did It”.
FIRST PHASE, NOT SECOND.

Another thing that the majority of players don’t seem to understand about the first phase:
Explosives do the most damage to both the ice shield and the Claw itself.
Don’t just stand on a ledge auto-attacking with Charrzookas if you want to do it expediently!
Pick up a bomb kit and RUN!

Astralporing.1957:

Only by limiting stuff so that I and only I may get it can we create a truly good game.

This is an amazingly perceptive quote and has struck a chord with me.
It highlights the petty need of some people who can only enjoy something if they’re spoiling the enjoyment of others.
It’s god-complex level stuff, a very egotistical, selfish view of how games and society should work. It shows a distinct lack of empathy and can almost be classified as sociopathic.

Casual and Hardcore are lazy labels used by ignorant people to pigeon-hole others unfairly.
They’re stereotypes.

Every player enjoys games a different way. Labeling them is pointless and offensive.
Both terms have negative connotations, so using them will always provoke impassioned responses.
“Casual” implies fly-away, non-dedicated, transient.
“Hardcore” implies no-life, exploitative, elitist.

Overall, they’re marketing terms used by money men to categorise their audience.
Gamers have unfortunately taken these terms to heart without understanding their origins.

I don’t think of myself as either.
I’m just a human being and a gamer.

Don’t change how the F key works!
I have stupendous amounts of fun griefing people opening boss chests by dropping portals!
(This post may not be entirely serious; I have done this in the past however, and it is DEEPLY funny).

LA overflow could be improved if they just moved the entrance for Fractals somewhere else. Stupidest idea they ever had.

Yeah, I’ve often felt the pain of this one. In addition, it would be nice if all windows were resizable or if interface decorational clutter could be minimised.
On stupid one in particular is having recipe names in the crafting window that are too long to be displayed in the column.

Xenon.4537:

Stuff

Where did I say I wanted instant gratification?!

The problem with people like you is that you see the gear and the stats as the reward rather than the winning or taking part itself. The most important thing in any game is the game itself, not some nebulous virtual item. I cherish a hard-won victory much more than a simple orange item in my inventory. Yes, getting loot tickles some primitive, unsophisticated part of my psyche, but it’s a fleeting thing. It’s lowest-common-denominator stuff, and frankly, while this may sound snobbish, I turn my nose up at such unsophisticated carrots on sticks and the people who require them to have fun.

The point of play should be enjoying yourself.
The point of dungeons should be the challenge.
The point of WvW should be the competition.
The point SHOULDN’T be something that gives you a distinct advantage over other players with potentially more skill than you, simply because you have a larger wallet or more time to mindlessly grind repetitive tasks.

Of course, it’s a played-out, tired argument, but it doesn’t make it any less true, and others here have already said it:
If you want that type of game, go play one of the many thousands like it already out there.

You don’t have to change everything in the world into your ideal model. Try respecting other people for once and being less selfish, and realise that some people like different things to you and don’t appreciate it when you try to make them do things your way.

Variety, as they say, is the spice of life.

That being said, if your friends are like you and can only get satisfaction by being rewarded some meaningless crap in an online game, well I’m quite glad they’ve left.

Xenon.4537:

I agree that grind sucks, but some people sound like they just want to be handed gear without putting in any time or effort… It only takes a couple hours of play time after you hit 80 to be fully exotic geared (karma vendors + TP + a couple dungeons).

There are so many things I find objectionable about this paragraph.

Firstly, why SHOULD it take a long time to get optimal gear? When WvW is a big chunk of endgame, shouldn’t all players be able to compete on an equal footing?
Give me one good reason that doesn’t effectively amount to “I deserve better gear because I play more than anyone else”.

Secondly, this kind of thinking breeds elitism and comes from other MMOs. Hint: GW2 on release wasn’t like other MMOs; if everyone had quick and easy access to all top level stat combinations, gear checking for dungeons would be nowhere near as bad as it is even now.

Thirdly, your claim that it “only takes a couple hours of play time after you hit 80 to be fully exotic geared” is an outright lie, especially if it’s your first level 80 character. After your second or third character, okay, you may be able to get almost one full set of Exotic gear of one particular type when you get the next character to 80, but only one set, which will lock that character into a limited amount of effective builds.

Fourthly, how about that full set of Exotic P/v/t gear for WvW? Good luck in getting that in “a couple of hours”. The only ways to get P/v/t gear are through temple karma vendors or WvW itself.
And even then, only 5/6 pieces of armour are available through temple karma vendors, necessitating some WvW. You can only get P/v/t trinkets and backpieces through the temple karma vendors with there being no option to get them via badges of honour. And finally, unless you go Legendary, you can only get P/v/t weapons through WvW.

If I had it my way, you’d get a complete set of top stat gear upon reaching 80, and you’d be able to change stat combinations on the fly at no cost. The only grind would be for appearance, and all appearances would be tokens rather than requiring transmutation stones.
But unimaginative people with some trumped up, badly ingrained ideas of what “Progression” consists of, just keep spoiling this vision.

Nretep, I think you may be wrong on reverting items back to their original skin. I think it may be entirely possible.
My reason for thinking this is that if I’m vendoring stuff and click on the “Sell” tab, the preview icons for transmuted gear in my inventory revert to the original preview icons.
And I have armour sets I’ve transmuted multiple times.

I’m guessing not everybody will agree with this, but I think the holographic wings, both kinds, would look better if they only flapped while your character was moving.

But you must admit, if it IS the state of affairs, hammer warriors are one of the builds most in need of reliable condition removal thanks to how hard it gets hit by Blind. To force hammer warriors to choose between excellent adrenaline gain and condition removal or better hammer damage and cooldowns strikes me as being particularly cruel.

Cleansing Ire is great and all, but it actively discourages Warriors from going Hammer, as you have to choose between Cleansing Ire and Merciless Hammer.
Bad decision.

Wait, what?!
They moved Embrace the Pain from Adept to Master?
Great; just great.

Edit:
To clarify, at the moment I use Embrace the Pain and Merciless Hammer.
This change will force me to choose between the two. That’s just stupid.
In place of Embrace the Pain, they moved Shield Master to Adept.
They should have kept things where they were >:E

It’s Griffon*rook* Run by the way.
Mastering Griffonrook is very character dependent. Thieves have it easy here being able to stealth past the griffons.
Warriors? Not so much.

On topic, I’m always glad to see new jumping puzzles. The reward is a nice bonus, but most of the time I do puzzles for the puzzles themselves.

Yeah, I loved finding Yak’s Bend in Frostgorge. It’s now called Yakkington’s Toil, although the waypoint is still “Yak’s Bend”.
That was a real kick, as my friend and I got to 80 there with our first characters shortly after release. We wandered in without seeing the name and I went “OMG! This is Yak’s Bend!”. It’s THAT recognisable.

The vast majority of armours, scandalously including Tier 3 Cultural Light leggings, don’t take into account Charr tails. It’s embarrassing how lazy ArenaNet have been in this respect.
I mean for the sake of the gods, for a race’s own cultural armour not to take into account a vital part of its anatomy? Lazy and careless beyond belief.

Astralporing.1957:

Then you should be against ascended gear, as it actually decreases the challenge. It doesn’t offer you anything.

Um, I am?
Did you not read the rest of my posts in this thread?

Great suggestion, although I’d suggest making it an additional floating action bar instead of adding it to the existing one.
Would be good for minis, food and novelty weapons.
+1ed

Aeonblade.8709:

Of course, god forbid we get what we pay for with the game.

It’s really hacking me off now, as I’d actually give them guaranteed cash for that rapier skin alone, but by locking it in those boxes I won’t get one as I refuse to buy them. Therefore, they’ll get less of my cash.
They’ll get some of my cash, but that’s because they’ll probably introduce the final permanent harvesting tool.

I’m calling it now:
Those wonderful new weapons will be locked in RNG boxes, the Aetherblade Caches.

That’s a really good suggestion!
+1ed

Good point. Although I reckon they should be even more vicious in that respect in order to further encourage guarding of dolyaks.
Maybe mob attacks on dollies should be event based rather than relying on ambient mobs?

Longbow already is on par with the rifle as far as I’m concerned, but I use it as a close combat weapon.

As a Warrior, you should be embracing the class’ fast weapon swapping.
With the ability to swap weapons every 5 seconds, you can build up some adrenaline, lay down Combustive Shot followed by Arcing Arrow to create an Area Might blast finisher, then swap to say Hammer for a further blast finisher with Earthshaker. Keep on swapping weapons and you’ll get the best out of the Longbow.

The Longbow is functionally different to the rifle and should be treated as such.
Try using it how I do for a while and then re-evaluate your opinions.

And when it comes to sieges, either on the walls or against them, the Longbow outclasses the rifle completely.

I’ve been feeling more and more recently that all mobs just get in the way in WvW.
Removing them all would probably be too drastic a move, but making them all yellow would definitely improve things.

I don’t know about anyone else here, but AI mobs pose no threat to me in WvW and I just run past the vast majority of them. That slowdown from them initiating combat is a nuisance and just delays me getting to the next battle.

ProtoGunner.4953:

There was one quote on the 1st page, that really annoys me. Represents the casual, I-want-it-all-but-don’t-like-to-work-for-it-attitude:
Not really. I just want new armor skins. I don’t feel like treadmilling I just wanna collect.

Why do you play games then anyway? Don’t you want a feel of achievement?

I play games to be challenged. I do not play them for some kind of perceived virtual reward.
You’re the one whose idea of what gaming should be has been horribly skewed by years of Pavlovian response training.

Games do not need to give you loot to give you a sense of achievement.

Being as good as you can be should be challenge and reward enough; be that in soloing dungeon or meta event bosses, getting a high sPvP rank or doing well in WvW.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: people who need items with higher stats aren’t actually the best at these games. They’re actually worse than a lot of other players, because they rely on higher stats rather than their own skills.

I have 9 characters at 80, 2 of which are mesmers purely because I want quick access to a Rampager Shatter build and a Zerker Phantasm build.

I hate how they have tied builds to gear in GW2; it strikes me as a deeply callous core game mechanic designed to encourage the player to spend more in the gem store by buying bag slots, character slots and bank space in order to accommodate all the gear and characters necessary to maintain build diversity.

Comparing the company that made Guild Wars 1 to the one that’s making Guild Wars 2 is leaving an increasingly nasty taste in my mouth. I do not appreciate being treated like a walking wallet whose sole purpose is to be milked of all cash.

Subfocus.4732:

This game is so casual friendly I’m surprised it’s not on XBOX or PS3.

Anything else you say is going to be ignored after this comment.
If you think consoles are exclusively for “Casual” gamers, you’ve not played enough console games.
From this generation alone, Demon’s and Dark Souls can hardly be regarded as “Casual”.

Street Fighter 4? Casual? If you think that, you’re probably terrible at it.

Getting every star and purple coin in Mario Galaxy? Yeah, not casual.

Then there’s the legendary difficulty of old console games like Battletoads.

Don’t pigeon-hole things. You only end up making yourself look stupid.

Also, in general, try to avoid using sloppy generalisations such as Casual or Core / Hardcore. They’re marketing terms that have been widely adopted by the more ignorant gamer and are too broad to actually be useful when measuring a player’s gaming habits.

A clone will overwrite a phantasm if you already have 3 phantasms out Temariah.