Guild Wars 2

Yeah, I feel like they need to stop trying to make raids out of megaservers. If they want to make big multi-person coordination events, just make the kitten ed raid with the tools for organizing people. Otherwise, just stop it.

I know they might lose their hipster cred if they make the “R” words, but there’s a reason MMOs do it. If you want a big multi-person coordinated event, you give people the tools to organize a big multi-person coordinated event.

After today’s patch, did 1130 chances, got one monocle, 3 favors. This MMO is a worse grind than any korean MMO.

I’ve had these tickets piling up, so I decided I should put them to use. For 3 hours I ground out over 1000 tickets. Through two movies. 4 gambit first tier fights. Pick gambits, pick boss, ask to fight, over and over and over. Half way through Dark Knight Rises I was done. Lets just say if they decide to add a quick conversion for the tickets after this I’ll be a little miffed. XD I’ll understand though, because this is BS.

Oh are you wondering what I got for my reward? One monocle. For 3 hours grinding is it worth it? I don’t know. But I do know if they decide to use this as the normal method for offering loot, I am so done with this game.

Right off this whole thing made me think of Dark Souls/ Dark Souls II, what people often consider a decently challenging game. Quite a lot harder, per enemy, than GW2, or most MMOs. What makes it so satisfying though is you know up front it’s going to be hard, and generally you can tell what you did wrong when you die. That also means you can work on getting better and its immensely satisfying when you do.

Its sort of the opposite of how GW2 is being described here. Hopefully the dev team spent all their time off playing Dark Souls 2. :P

People in this game seem to still think they’re playing WoW and expect every skill on their bar to be useful in some dps meta button jamming puzzle. Its like people who use a knockback skill on cooldown just because it’s on their bar. You already have single-target damage. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the evade might actually be the point. An AoE skill on a largely single-target weapon set might be the point. Kiting bleeds on a monster that would otherwise rip your face off might be the point.

You have to remember that for kitten measuring, people generally can’t handle more than one stat. Things like surviving more than one hit are too ethereal a concept for most players.

They prefer a stat you can compare directly like damage output, because you can objectively see what one is higher on paper, and ignore things like if you’re face down you aren’t doing damage. If you’re rolling or hiding to wait for your heal, you’re not doing damage. Damage uptime is of paramount importance.

If you’re grinding dungeons that might be fine, but if you’re doing world bosses like teq or worms, you’re going to want to survive. If you’re doing endgame which is fractals, its good to survive. People will just say you can cover it all by just dodging all the things, but they’re generally the ones face down trying frantically to shift blame.

Going with celestial gear is going to lower your statistical damage output on a training dummy, it’s objectively true. However, you also get survivability and you get healing to recover from an unfortunate situation. You know, that 1/1000 times that you don’t roll all 20s like everyone always for some reason assumes they’re going to, or you don’t get a team that plays GW2 professionally and you might need to account for. Then instead of winning half of your runs and ragequitting and complaining about bads on the rest, you win all of your runs. Mesmer’s a class with a lot of nifty tools that can really cover when a situation turns out to be less than optimal.

My class is fine, its every other class that’s OP bullpuppies!

—for any given “my class”.

When this game was new, there was a lot of promise of rpg in the game.

There were personality traits. Your character was going to be different from your friend’s character. You could make choices like a bioware game to change your storyline.

The heart system provided an immersive world where you didn’t always have to stab things to help people. You could do other stuff like gathering.

There was town clothes. You didn’t always have to wear combat armor. You could collect neat noncombat clothes to wear.

There was a personal instance that held the promise of being modifiable as you progressed. You could make permanent changes to this area to grow your story.

Yet I feel like Guild Wars 2 has forgot about all this and decided to go with yet another stab people simulator. Instead of more story elements we get skins and collectibles to unlock like its a FPS.

With all this new focus on PvP, removing the personality system, gutting town clothes, forgetting about the multi-pathed resolutions after leveling is done, it feels like they’ve made a choice to remove the RPG from the MMORPG and focus on hack and slash ‘cheeve hunting. I’m starting to wonder if this is the game I thought it was.

Or let charr tie their capes around their waist like a towel.

I feel like maybe people aren’t trying hard enough, heh.

Here’s an example of some I made that I thought turned out pretty ok:
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b36/gravity999/GW2/Gw2faces_zps619c8b0e.jpg

Here’s another but using a beard is kind of a cop-out. I don’t know why I have a picture of him blinking:
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b36/gravity999/GW2/GW2armor1.jpg

I do agree however that a lot of the faces are by default very young and wish overall there were more range.

Yeah that really is too bad they didn’t make more matrix movies. That movie seemed like such an outstanding story and solid start, it’d be nearly impossible to mess up a sequel!

Is it ever explained what the “Mean Asura” are up to in the player’s dream if they start as a Sylvari are up to? I haven’t played through their full living story.

Also the shadow dragon uses Entangling Thorns and Summon Plant Wolves.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Elder_Dragon

They keep the magic balanced by consuming it and drawing it into themselves; though indications show that this isn’t their goal or intention, but rather a side-effect of how they function. Every several thousand years (roughly 10,000 years according to the Durmand Priory), the dragons wake and consume everything in the world, thereby reducing the world to a low level of magic, before going back to sleep. Then the magic they have consumed bleeds out into the world, harmless unlike when they’re awake, only for the dragons to eventually awaken once more and the cycle to begin again.

I know my luck so I don’t even pretend I’m going to get one, and by the gods I never gamble in the toilet. I’ve instead sold all the exotics I get. I’ve bought a precursor, and will be saving up the T6 mats, though I sold all mine with the news that pvp will drop them too after the 16th. Will see what prices do at that time then start saving mats.

They should make mounts like satchels. You go pick up a horse at a stable for a small sum of gold, but they you have to dismount it to fight or port or whatever, so it’s a limited use item for a small sum of coin.

They shouldn’t add them like most MMOs do, where you pull them out your butt when you need them.

Even if they were pretty much superfluous, they should be added for immersion sake. Its hard to believe in a world where they’re smart enough to hold the right end of a sword, no character ever thought of sitting their butt on an animal and letting the animal do the walking.

What I’m saying is its the Mass Effect story.

No it’s pretty simple actually. The dragons come around every 10,000 years or so to eat magic, otherwise magic gets too powerful and living beings rip Tyria apart. This balance has lasted for who knows how many cycles.

Unfortunately, things have begun to change. Our heros, mighty Shepards of the population, defeated one of the dragons. Its starting to look like the beings of Tyria might be too powerful this time.

Scarlet decided Tyria needs her and sought to wake all the dragons at once so they could overcome the mortals and set the cycle right. She probably didn’t think of this on her own, she seems to be mind controlled, or “indoctrinated” if you will, by some other force that seeks to spark the conflict in the favor of the dragons, a “catalyst” of sorts.

How about a forum setting to change between kitten and puppy?

Here’s an idea to give people a system for unlocking non-combat related progression.

Imagine if they made a new action slot, the “social” slot. This slot would be divided up in to 3 categories: gestures, pets, and toys. The slot could be swapped on the fly, combat or no.

The way it would work is you’d start with nothing in it, but you could unlock new things for it through a wide variety of ways. Some could be from achievements, some could be from rare drops, some could be from accomplishing certain other things.

Attached to this would be a new system: Epic stories. These would be stories for a single zone. One or two might be added per update. They are sort of like mini living stories, and don’t go away when a new patch comes out. They would be side stories that tell about the lore and people of a zone. No kill 5 X type missions, but talk to so and so, protect this other guy, go raid this camp, etc. At the end would be a social action unlock. Each zone might have a few unique unlocks for people to go after.

The unlocks would range from very easy ones to gain to very kittenes. Some might be nearly impossible, or take a long drawn out process.

Moving pets here means you’d have access to all your pets, they’d just take up the social slot while in use. They wouldn’t take inventory as they’d no longer be items.

Toys would be things like the flute or the kite. Move them from items to actions. While you have them in the action slot, you can activate them. For something like the flute, this actually activates a state that temporarily switches your other abilities.

Gestures would of course be unique unlockable gestures. Dances, special cheers and other unique unlockable emotes.

The nice thing about having these actions to try for being non-combat is devs could go wild making them because they don’t need to be balanced, and this gives players something to try for besides yet another shoulder skin. I already have a nice shoulder skin I don’t want to replace!

SoS gets crapped on for yet another week and I don’t WvW for yet another week. Yay nothing new since the last 9 weeks.

Redenaz.8631:

Leamas.5803:

When I started playing you could buy The Legend on the TP for 60g, now it’s 722g, over a 1200% increase in just over a year. This is the definition of runaway inflation and it is largely caused by the gem to gold conversion. There are no limits placed on how much gold can be injected in to the economy and this is a bad thing. There is a reason the US just doesn’t print more money to pay off their debts…it would make the dollar worthless and would destroy their economy.

You think the rise in prices is mostly from people converting gems to gold, and not, say, from dungeon-running, the Crown Pavilion, Scarlet Invasions, champ farming, or even the normal progress of people just playing the game over a full year?

Unlike a real world currency, the game is required to print money constantly as players earn it. Over time, that inflates the currency supply (devaluing each unit and raising prices,) unless the currency is removed/destroyed, via the TP fee, NPC vendors, waypoints, etc., because there’s more of that currency floating around.

The more people convert gems to gold, the less gold they get per gem, and so I’m skeptical of it as a cause of inflation, or at least as a significant one. It enables a player to bypass the unequal distribution of wealth between serious farmers and others by whipping out the credit card, but I don’t think it creates a substantial amount of gold (since the exchange rate is based on players exchanging currencies, and there is a fee removing gold.) In other words, prices might be lower without it, but I’m not sure they would be, or how much lower.

Farmers farm to pay high prices, which raises the prices even higher.

Economics Disclaimer

hide spoiler

The main thing I know about economics is how much I don’t know. I’m describing inflation very casually in reference to the increased money supply, but the actual situation is a lot more complicated, as the supply of goods goes up, the number of participants in the economy changes, some prices stay completely static while others change, etc. So if someone with more knowledge of economic theory wants to chime in with a more informed opinion, please be kind.

Rukh.9287:

-snipped for brevity-

Huh, really? I’ll occasionally equip a piece of dropped gear on an alt, but I usually don’t have much use for it, and alts outgrow gear so quickly that I never consider buying gear off the TP until I’m at the end game, and never for blue/green stuff. I’d be curious to hear how other players approach the subject.

The way most games successfully combat this is they make expensive but not required vendor items. GW2 has the commander tags, but 100g isn’t very much anymore. They need some sort of 500g nifty to have but not required thing. WoW had mammoth mounts around 10k, and then new mounts for higher amounts. This means that if people save up, they can take a huge chunk of change out of the economy, but it’s not something that’s going to hamper people who make less.

On the other end, when gw2’s economy wasn’t as inflated, having relatively high prices for teleports and auctions (taken out before sales, not taken out of the sale) meant that it was inhibiting to all levels of income, not just the high incomes. A worse solution.

Redenaz.8631:

Most people probably don’t gear up from common drops (using karma vendors and personal story on the way to 80, and rarer gear after that,) so the change doesn’t seem like it would create much more demand for crafted goods…even though it sounds like it will flood people with crafting materials. If I don’t like crafting, auctioning small-cost crafting materials isn’t any more exciting than auctioning greens/blues. Gathering nodes become even less interesting (to the non-crafter) because most drops become crafting material, unlike the current situation, where gear drops can end up as crafting material (along with essences of luck,) or be sold to vendors/TP, or equipped (rarely) or be tossed in the Mystic Forge.

While having mobs drop materials might sound more efficient, doing away with salvaging kits, it doesn’t sound more fun or interesting, and I’m not convinced it would have the economic effects you’re imagining.

You don’t think so? I certainly did on all my characters. I rarely used karma vendors because plenty of gear is just handed to you. Its twice that at endgame, where you kill a deer and get mastercraft platemail. If I didn’t get a drop, I’d get it off the BLTC, which is a drop another person got, or something they spammed out to raise crafting.

You remove all those drops, crafted gear gains value. Karma gear doesn’t take gold, but karma is more valuable than gold these days.
now.

I think that’s a problem too, Leamas, but it’s a separate problem.

Why not have three sigils?

But seriously. 2h weapons are currently balanced around the # of sigils, so it’s not that it’s unfair that 2h weapons only have 1 sigil.

I understand your concern about making certain weapons desirable based on abilities instead of skins, and yes that would happen. I personally am ok with that but I can understand others not.

I don’t think your second concern about classes being “half” a class is correct though. What it does is change your class identity from how you swing a weapon to what other skills you get. You move the important skills that were formerly weapon skills to class skills so people can mix and match them. So, while your class may now be less about what primary attack it grants, overall your character has a whole lot more variety.

And yes, you can’t overpower the legendary weapons. That goes without needing to be said. You can make them unique, but as I said, balance needs to be closely adhered to.

Gathering revamp
Then, you make all zone levels have iron nodes. These are the common nodes, but since all levels of crafting take it, there’s always some demand for it. But, it’s iron. It’s common. Its ok for it to be common. You give all people the ability to harvest the common nodes without expending mining picks or axes. They take no skill, anyone can make a bit of coin grabbing them.

Second, you take the sub-ingredients that vendors sell and you distribute them unevenly around the world. You might find coal in ascalon mainly, and primordium might be found in the maguuma jungle. Since you can’t just find it anywhere, there’s a demand on the market. The population of those areas is going to be enough there’s plenty of competition, but these things will move on the market in large supply.

Then, you make other ores be rare. Silver, Gold, platinum, should all be rare random nodes.

Implement gathering professions
Yes I know GW2 didn’t included them, I think because they feel kind of grindy, which is understandable. But gathering professions do some important things. One, it makes it so you have to make an interesting choice between a second crafting profession and a resource gathering profession. Two, it makes the people who can gather these things a bit more specialized, which creates market demand from people who don’t gather but instead craft. Third, it makes it an investment. You need to skill it up, so you’re not going to drop it to switch gathering professions when you need a different resource. You are invested in it.

You then can do things like have rare nodes like mithril actually exist in all areas, even low-level areas, but they’re only visible if you have high specialization in the specific gathering type. This incents people to gather all over.

So, to level mining for instance, you need to explore and gather silver, then gold, then platinum, then mithril, then orichalcum. Each of these are only visible with a certain level of gathering, and are less common than the previous, which means it does take effort (and feeling of accomplishment!) to level your mining.

summary
What happens right now is a double whammy to gathering. People go to end-game areas to complete those hearts, and those are the mobs they want to fight. Coincidentally this is where the “high tier” ores are, so since you have a lot of people in that area anyways, they’re gathering them anyways. Creating a huge supply. And, since every single person can gather them, the supply isn’t limited in any way.

By making these modifications you now have the correct restrictions on supply and create demand to make gathering an interesting thing to do, expanding the things to do in the game.

Intro
I feel like Anet had a great idea with gathering. Look at herbs. They’re interesting. Certain herbs only grow in certain areas. You need to go to places you might not normally go in order to get certain things. This is neat. If a herb is rarely gathered, the price goes up and people go travel around. Furthermore certain herbs can only be got by killing veterans or going to remote areas. Nifty!

When it comes to logging and mining though, it feels like anet said “Forget it! We’re on a schedule. Aint nobody got time for that!” so they distributed them purely by level. At the start they made silver and gold less common alternative nodes, but then they even forgot about that with platinum and created a purely linear node progression. It smacks of deadline production compromise.

Furthermore forgetting that most of the community is going to end up at end-game. So those high level ores? price crash. It was inebitibble.

Solutions a’ plenty
So what needs to happen is they need to go back and fix that.

Overhaul crafting recipes
Crafting recipes need to change. They need to take more of a variety of ingredients. As it is now, if you’re crafting a mid-level item, all the ingredients are going to be from mid-level nodes. What would be much better is make them all have common ingredients, then the higher level, need more rare ingredients.

So for instance, all heavy armor should take iron. At low levels, you might make the armor purely from iron. Mid levels, you might oxidize it with coal to make steel, and high levels, you might make an alloy with mithril. So at all levels, iron is needed. It has a demand.

Furthermore, crafts should have two types of recipes. One is recipes that are made purely with that craft. These will be blues so you can level up your craft, make some basic armor for yourself etc. The second kind should take ingredients from other crafts to make. In order to make a masterwork armor, it should include ingredients from clothcrafting and leathercrafting. If you’re making a rare cloak from clothcraft, it might take some silver clasps that are made with gemcutting.

This does two things: one- crafts now synergize. It becomes interesting not just what craft you pick, but what combination you pick. Will you be armor and leather for the sub ingredients for a certain type of armor, or instead wood and weaponcrafting for another combination? Or artificing and wood? or weapon and leather? etc.

Two: sub recipes become valuable and worth selling on the market so people who don’t have that craft can get the ingredients to make items. Right now, the only reason to buy sub ingredients is laziness. The mid-steps of making the cloth lining and then the metal sheet exist purely to extend the time taken to make the item, but since you intrinsically have the craft needed to make the components if you can make the done item, it’s just extra steps.

Intro problem
Lets face it, gear drops are boring. Except for a very few cases, they’re salvage fodder.

The problem is though, this ties in to a greater overall economy concern.

Rewind time a little bit, I think devs realized that gear was dropping far too often. Greens were not worth auctioning, they might as well have been greys. “masterwork”? Apparently “master” is an assembly line somewhere in Metrica.

So they applied a bandaid approach. They made salvaging them give you luck. Okay, so this took a bunch of greens and blues out of the market, great. The price rose as intended. But they at least had the foresight to realize this did a second thing— a huge deluge of materials. So, they added some recipes that took large amounts of these materials to take them out of circulation too. Great.

Looking at it from a purely economics standpoint, the bandages had the desired effect. There’s a problem though. This is a videogame, not an economics simulator. The solution isn’t very fun.

Blue and green gear is still nameless fodder. Gathering nodes are fairly worthless because you can get more from salvaging the gear that drops from nearly every mob or lock box. Furthermore, the system is now awkward and not very immersive.

What needs to happen is an actual fix, not a bandage to cover the problems.

Solutions

Remove gear drops from mobs
Here’s the change that need to be made. Mobs need to not drop gear. Mobs can drop materials, like the claws, blood, etc. That’s great, and it gives plenty of incentive to kill mobs. More rare materials to make the more rare items will drop from harder mobs. Champions might drop the cores a percent of the time and other mobs don’t, for instance. Then, players sell these things because people want to buy them in order to craft them in to things that players desire to buy.

People will still be able to gear up easy enough. Players craft gear that suddenly has a market. As a price control, hearts still sell gear for karma. If the price on crafted gear is rising too much, people can still decide they don’t want to spend the coin and use karma. Furthermore, if players suddenly have an incentive to craft gear, they desire materials. Materials that come from gathering nodes, and of course salvaging still in order to keep the market from being flooded by gear. Gathering becomes more important.

There’s a reason that in this game, crafting has been relegated to mainly leveling xp bonus and a few end-game recipes. There’s too many systems that utterly obsolete it.

So lets stop with the band-aid™ fixes and do a real systematic fix. Lets remove boring gear drops.

*note: There could still be some world gear drops, but make them interesting. None of the generic gear, but some unique gear. A unique sword that can only be obtained from a random rare drop from mobs is interesting and valuable.

Considerations

Difficulty in implementation
The thing is, this doesn’t take as huge of a revamp as it sounds. The long part would be to develop a system for balancing skills. Classes would need some changes: it would be nice to turn some of the current weapon skills in to class skills, and class skills would probably see a lot more action instead of being the clutch ability for tough fights.

All current weapons could be revamped based on their weapon type, then they could go through and see if they want to add unique skills to some of the current interesting weapons. The sword that looks like a saw might get a septic slash, a flaming sword might get a blazing sweep, etc.

Class homogeneity
Yes, it does mean that you are reducing class variety by making a dagger wielded by a thief do similar attacks as a dagger wielded by a mage. In this way it does reduce variety.

But the thing that makes this work is you move skills to the class that synergize with the weapon type. For instance:

On a thief, shadowstep would be moved to a thief skill. Backstab bonus damage would just be part of the class. Daggers would be a natural for a thief in order to set up these backstabs, apply poison etc because they would be themed on ignoring defense, allowing thief skills to find their mark. Swords would be good for a different style, more swordsmanship and combat instead of sneaking in close and assassinating.

For an elementalist, yes daggers would still have the same skill as thief weapons and for a lot of mages it might make staves more attractive, but there could be some skills that do things like enchant your weapon with magic damage bonus. A nasty surprise for someone who gets in close to your elementalist.

On the other hand, staves would be focused on range, and the damage would be modified by your magic damage. Staves could have a lot of interesting variety too. A flaming staff could have different attacks than an ice staff. There could be a healing staff that doesn’t even have attacks, letting you instead rely on your elementalist or guardian class skills and use the weapon for support instead.

Balance
This is probably the area that would take the most work. If a dev is making their super cool unique sword that replaces the slash attack with a flurry of bone projectiles out of the ground, there would have to be some overlying system of rating the strength and balance.

There would need to be a way of converting “units”. How much is 500 damage of single target melee range damage worth compared to 500 damage of point blank AoE damage? How much is that worth in single-target elemental damage, or armor penetrating damage? etc. Once you set up a system of conversions, you could actually affect balance with a single adjustment of a conversion. If they decide AoE skills are too overpowered, they reduce the conversion rate, and suddenly all weapons with an AoE skill do slightly less damage. Easy overall system to balance.

The thing that can be hard to balance is if certain skills synergize too well with a certain class skill. And like any MMO, that probably would just take constant tweaking. That already happens anyways. That wouldn’t be a new problem.

conclusion
As you can see, overall, this creates a huge opportunity to create variety and let people tinker with all sorts of new combinations. In something like an MMO, or any game really, being able to fiddle with combinations to find what you really like is a big draw and great way to personalize your character.

Furthermore, now the weapon you use suddenly matters. The difference between weapons isn’t purely on a “this weapon has better stats so is objectively better” level, but instead weapons that are of equal strength may be totally different in function to each other. Horizontal growth instead of vertical.

Boring intro:
Hey I doubt few of your ideas will be implemented either.

Here’s an idea for how I think weapons should have been done, and perhaps should be done. It would take a drastic overhaul though. It could happen, with an expansion or something. Hey, WoW completely redid their entire world for Cata; and skill trees from the ground up for Pandaland.

Current state
As the game currently exists, weapons are not very interesting. The weapon type matters, but other than that, they’re basically stat sticks. They have some neat graphics, but functionally, the difference between two great swords is purely the difference in stats. Boring.

The reason its like this is because the skills that come with weapons is purely attached to the class you are. So a guardian will see any great sword as the same abilities, and a mesmer as a totally different set of abilities.

Cool new idea
Now imagine this revamp: Skills are attached to the weapons instead. Or, in other words, ever weapon is a satchel. Now in one sense, this does cause a bit of homogenization. If a mesmer picks up a great sword, it is going to give the same attack skills as if a guardian picks it up. Some of the unique skills that classes have would have to be moved to the class specific skills instead.

But here’s the interesting part: What if not every weapon had the same skills? There would be general weapon types: most great swords would have similar skills it gives. But there could then be a few neat things: sub-weapon types. If you have a one-handed broadsword, it might give a range of skills, but if you pick up a rapier, it might have one or two skills different. The two swords might share the first two slots: a thrust attack, a flurry attack, but then the broadsword might have a cleave and the rapier instead has a defensive parry. In general, weapon types would share themes. Daggers would all ignore defense but not be as high damage, though a shiv might have more stabby type skills where a main gauche might have an attack stab, but then two defensive parries.

And, if you pick up a magic phantom blade, instead of having the normal thrust attack, maybe instead it has a ghostly flame attack, unique to that sword.

In other words, the weapon you wield suddenly matters. You get that legendary sword, it’s not cool because it has a flashy skin and on a spreadsheet marginally increases your damage over seconds by a fraction, but it has unique abilities!

Obsidian.1328:

Just because something is there, dangling in front of you like a carrot, doesn’t mean you need to go after it.

Its true, you can quit and go play another MMO instead, like many people do.

The most fun I had in WoW was doing events with my guild. Not just dungeons, though we’d do that too, but killing 10k spiders for the achievement, raiding and knowing the guild was progressing through content, etc.

Just in general, guilds need to matter a whole lot more. Guild wars 2 needs more guild-based content and long-term progression.

So easy ideas:

Guild housing. It would probably need to be instanced. They could set it up a bit like the instanced personal story areas. Make it a section of the city you can buy upgrades for with guild influence. Then, have the guild perks based on these hall upgrades.

Have guild achievements. These will unlock unique guild hall upgrades. Special guild commendation vendors can be unlocked by this.

I don’t think we need raids, but some type of long-term guild progression. Maybe have guild missions give currency that can be spent to unlock new guild missions that unlock even better guild hall upgrades.

Add in guild vs guild pvp battles where each team has to be part of a guild and winning gives you a currency that unlocks pvp-based guild hall upgrades. Banners, trophies to put in your hall, etc.

Lastly, there simply needs to be more long-term progress rewards based on guilds. Like WoW has unique mounts you can only get through high-end raids. GW2 needs unique skins that can only be got by long-term guild development.

I’m sure there’s a ton of other ideas, but I think in general, Guild Wars 2 needs to shift the focus more to guild based progression.

That being said, night should be much darker. Think the forest in the snow fractal. That feels SO like night time, they should use that everywhere. Its very well done. It would lead to a lot of neat content too. Think of walking around in the dark carrying a torch and suddenly a wraith is stalking you. Scary!

Then, as people say, a standardized rotation per server. I’m thinking even shorter than 5 hours though. Why? Because then you can do things with day and night. Have certain mobs that only come out at night, or certain harvests change at night. Certain events, like seiging a centaur camp under the cover of darkness, etc etc. Make it something like 1 hour day, 40 min night. That would be long enough.

No. World of Warcraft did this, and because of my work schedule, I only ever saw night time. It was a world of eternal depressing darkness.

I’m not asking for player mounts, I’m pointing out the lore doesn’t support mounts not existing in lore.

I think instead of that they should give class specilization options. Your main class could have two exclusive sub classes that give unique skills and maybe one new trait tree.

For instance, the guardian could be shadow knight or paladin. Each having unique defining skills of a unique skill type. Say paladins get blessings and shadow knights get invocations, or something. and a new trait tree that focuses on buffing their unique skill type.

Then they wouldn’t have to make new weapon skills or anything like that. it would add a ton of customization and adding two to each class would probably be less work than adding a single new class.

Those horsemen are interesting.

I don’t think this would take much work though, it’s certainly not on par of adding new weapons to each class. Its just some new character models. If you can make a centaur you can make a dude riding a horse. : P

Its just so weird that they did this. I mean I guess they were trying to validate not having player mounts, but player mounts don’t need to exist for npcs to use mounts. Deer, dolyaks, cows, moa, other humans, there’s a metric ton of animals that could be rode.

That’s definitely teakettle.

Guild wars 2 is a pretty good game. I think there’s a few changes that can be made, but overall, its well made, the gameplay is active, and it feels like there’s usually stuff to do. The story is immersive and the world is believable, except for one glaring exception:

Mounts! And I’m not talking about player mounts. If Arenanet wants to keep players walking, that’s fine. Being able to pull equines out of one’s nether regions on command has always been an odd feature of other MMOs anyways.

The thing is, from a world experience perspective, it’s absolutely loony that no npc has ever thought “You know, that animal runs pretty fast, I’mm sit my behind on it and let it do the work.” Its just one of those technological things that comes with civilization. You craft metal pointy things and someone runs someone else through with it, you cut down trees and make shelters so you’re not getting rained on. You have a strong tame animal, you hitch it to wagons and sit on it and let it do the work.

Its just a glaring hole that animals aren’t used in such a way in GW2. I mean they put things to haul on dolyaks, but they didn’t think of putting themselves on one? It doesn’t make sense. Its fine that horses seem to not exist, but Asura could easily ride moa, and there’s some expertly trained moa. Its impossible that a race that has figured out laserguns never thought to plop their butt on an animal so they don’t have to walk.

There’s a lot more of animal powered things that should be commonplace in such a world, and simply don’t exist, and that’s crazypants. NPCS should get mounts.

I think that’s a great idea.

Short answer yes. Long answer yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

They need to add a few mid-high level recipes for it, then stop making every godkitten ed thing account bound. Do they want economy or not???

They need a good mix. They can have temporary features that give rewards you may never see again, but they need to be constantly expanding the world and features with permanent content too. They need to have temporary story arcs that appear and you do stuff, but then leave permanent game mechanics or content to expand the world.

Also they need to add more long-term guild based goals. I think they’re pretty good on the long-term player growth, but they need big epic things for guilds to achieve and be glorious with. Things that people achieve as groups and are bigger than what any one individual can do is what MMOs are about.

Brendar.3548:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

how about a new formula to make them into “ascended buffs” or something. :p
The kinda like the food and oil buffs thing.

That would likely be Chef 500

This is a really good idea.

I really hope they do add a demand for these. I was worried. They are already endgame mats that sell for dirt and then they add a very huge new source in all sorts of people salvaging for luck. If they dont add a new demand its judt going to bury items that arent even worth swinging a pickaxe at as is.

Oreo cookies taste good with milk.

No new source has been added and a very big demand has been added.

My question specifically is is there any reason that I’m discovering places I did not see before and my explored isn’t going up???

The ones I was missing were Griffonrook Run and Tribulation rift, but I discovered both, and now both show white on my map, but as I said, I’m still at 173/175. What gives???

So I have been trying to finish off achievements that I’m close to having done. I noticed I was 173/175 on Shiverpeak Explorer, even though I finished by world completion. Weird! I thought, so I did some reading, some VERY CAREFUL map reading and managed to find two jumping puzzles that weren’t showing on my map.

I’ve gone to both now, and upon entering the area they said “Discovered” in the yellow font overlay and now show on my map where they didn’t before.

This leaves me at a grand total of … 173/175.

What the hell am I missing here? Should I be posting to the Bug forum?