Zephire.8049

One of the first issues is that you expect content from 2012 to be able to tell you how to play other content that is post-HoT. At this point, core Tyria is just a tutorial/chill MMO with a focus on lore and exploration and it won't be able to teach people how to play in raids or fractals when neither of those were on the table when GW2 was originally in production. WvW and PvP were, but one of the things about MMOs is that they change over time. It's common knowledge that if you stop playing an MMO for several months to several years, you will have to relearn things or grind out entirely new sets of gear if you return. WvW hasn't changed much mechanically since launch. The main things I can think of are the addition of Desert Borderland, changing how experience works, and adding masteries to it. There's some changes here and there such as map tweaks and a mount (which they have nerfed repeatedly since adding it so it no longer has much of an impact on anything) but the bulk of the change is skill changes and player strategy changes. Skill changes happen in an MMO and Anet can't control player strategies. And personally speaking, I find it the objectives really clear, albeit some of them are boring if you're playing it solo. I don't PvP so can't speak to that other than PvE =/= PvP. When I poke my head in there is a lot of info and it can be overwhelming, but after adjusting to that it's fine. Which isn't really strange when it comes to completely different modes or video games. It seems one of the things you don't like is that GW2 doesn't hold your hand the whole way through everything. There are gaps in teaching, I agree, but that's something they are now addressing—strikes teach people raid and fractal basics and are easy to jump into and the upcoming map looks like it will teach some WvW basics. PvP they can't really do much with, especially after all but doing away with the stronghold mode. Though as early as HoT they did incorporate finishing downed enemies into PvE. But there's only so much Anet can do without being patronizing or making everything ridiculously easy. If they gave out BiS gear when you hit 80, there would be no reason to buy or craft anything else and you'd never have to think about stats because you were automatically given them. Even using the level 80 boost only gets you soldier stats because it's a balance of offering survivability and keeping decent enough damage up, but it's training wheels. What you get from your level up rewards isn't even max level and doesn't offer a full rune set because it was never meant to be permanent and is supposed to look off to encourage people to look at what else they can use. I also don't know what you mean by "deep skill tree". Assuming someone jumped into WvW or PvP without playing to 80 in PvE, there's 5 options and each of those has 3 other options and you can change them at any time outside of combat/a match. I've played single-player, multi-player, and so many other MMOs that have convoluted UIs and dozens upon dozens of choices you can't change once you hit "Okay". Of course if you aren't used to a UI, it will be confusing at first, but GW2's skill/trait UI is extremely streamlined and forgiving compared to other games out there. You also have to accept a certain degree of responsibility of your own confusion if you willingly jump into a mode where everything is unlocked instead of gradually unlocked so you can learn about them without getting overwhelmed. And ironically, GW2 was designed so that players such as yourself aren't punished for not playing daily for years. It's supposed to be an MMO that can be your primary game or a supplementary game that you come back to from time to time. And even people who are hardcore into raiding/open world/fractals/WvW/PvP often find other modes in GW2 confusing because they're so different and require different knowledge and ways of thinking, so don't be too hard on yourself for not learning how to play each and every other mode well in a matter of days/weeks. If hardcore raiders who sell CM runs can fail on Forging Steel, you can be forgiven for not knowing the meta way to play everything while having the muscle memory to do so. To me GW2 makes socializing much easier than older MMOs I played ever did, exactly because it does not force me to group up with people. I'm the kind of person that likes to stop and smell the roses, not race towards goals, and I found a lot of my in-game friends by casually grouping up for content and getting to talk to and know people. It's easier to find "my kind" of people in this game precisely because it does not herd you into specific content avenues the way I've experienced in other games. There's nothing stopping guilds from getting to know people by playing with them and asking them to join. In fact one of the guilds I've been in for years I found by chatting with people on the old dungeon forum, getting asked to join their dungeon and fractal groups and eventually their guild. The variety of players and guilds in this game however does make finding people that mesh with what you are looking for in the game more complex. However that is a "problem" you can't fix technically unless you are willing to curb the variety by making the gameplay more restricting to only one (or a few) right way(s) to play. I have to agree. Forced socialization is the best way to make me put down a game or refuse to do content. I find that extremely stressful and it sets off my anxiety something fierce. GW2 has it set up so you know clearly if you're going to do organized group content instead of springing it on you out of the blue. Even group events and world bosses in open world PvE don't force you to talk to anyone if you don't want to but you still work together on everything. As a result, I'm far more social in GW2 than in any other game I've played other than Team Fortress 2. I can understand why some would like content/systems that force people to talk and interact, but those things end up alienating others as well. I think GW2 does a good job of encouraging socialization without making it a requirement, it just requires a bit more pro-action on the part of people who do want it.

For optional subs you have to either offer things that have no real benefit, thus making it far less likely people will get one outside of showing support, or you offer a tangible benefit which makes the sub all but required. From what I've seen of other MMOs that have an optional sub, this means crafting ends up becoming a "premium" ability which in turn makes crafting pointless for anyone who doesn't want to shell out $5-$10 a month for a game they already bought. Your suggestion of making material storage unlimited would already cause huge issues of people buying up thousands of stacks of cheap mats just because they can. (You also have to find a way to compensate people who bought material storage expansions) You can currently support the game by spending $5, $10, $20, $50+ on gems every month. Why do you want to punish others—a large number of whom chose GW2 because Anet has been anti-sub for 16+ years—for something that you can already do, albeit without automation or being able to feel superior to others who chose not to/can't afford a sub?

First I just want to point out that 100+ hours (30 of which went into making Dusk) in two weeks means you played for about 50 hours a week both weeks. That amount of time spent on anything can lead to burnout and affect your views of whatever you invested that time in. Next, the things you complain about are why myself and so many others have spent thousands of hours playing GW2. Chasing stats is boring when it's a chase that will never end and you can't take a break because that will leave you even further behind. Skins you have, you have forever (literally—the engine doesn't allow for support to re-lock skins) and you can tailor your goals by pursuing the skins you want most. Dusk may not be worthwhile for you, but for others that's their top goal. GW2 is an MMO where you largely set your own goals, not have them set for you. At level 80, with only ~70 mastery points, and 5/7 mounts, you've only scratched the surface. It's fine if you want that stat treadmill to keep you going, but if you can get over the panic that comes from not having a game tell you what to do, GW2 improves vastly. To use Dusk/Twilight as an example, some people see Twilight and see an awesome skin. Some people see a QoL upgrade for raids. Some people see $$$. Some people see another goal. Some people just don't care. No one is wrong and because there's no stat treadmill, people have the time to pursue what they want to pursue. A lot of MMOs railroad you in what content you can do, to one degree or another. GW2 guides you through the story and supplies ideas of what to do via achievements, skins, masteries, and exploration, but after that you're free to do whatever you want without having to worry about falling behind when the next stat increase hits. Even if you don't pick up GW2 as a primary game, it may make it a great supplementary game for you since it was designed to not punish people over not being able to dedicate hour(s) a day every day to playing it. Maybe GW2 is for you, maybe it isn't. But think of it more like a theme park MMO than an MMO like WoW where you can technically do various things but are punished for not doing the "proper" things. (Also salvage blue and green gear, don't sell it. The raw materials generally sell for more than the gear and being as you're new, the luck is worth it as well. The exceptions tend to be green weapons in the 30-65 range with +power and +precision since people use those on leveling characters.)

Once upon a time, some months ago, a message popped up in the map chat in Orr; "Anyone around? I need some help for the Melandru chain" There were a few "OMWs" and "Where at?" and one "You have my ax!". That last one was me by the way. I hope no one was disappointed I was using a hammer scrapper. When I arrived there were two players already there. The person asking for help, elementalist, and a necro. All three of us were playing Asura. Cute but we set out. As we finished the events more players joined. They were all Asura as well. Here's the kicker: We were all mostly clad in primary colors. Orange, green, white, black. That's right. We were Asuran Power Rangers taking on a giant statue. If only we had a big golem to jump into. Great memory. Entirely casual. I do a lot of map completion AKA "peak casual content" yet most of my positive memories come from it. Pointing someone to a POI or vista that's hard to find. Helping someone out with an event. Seeing someone getting downed because they ran into a high level area, reviving them, then being their bodyguard until they make it somewhere safe. Giving a new player tips on what to do and then 6-12 months later them sending me a whisper with a link to their very first legendary. It's great. My memories of raiding are those of frustration and boredom. I raided in GW2 weekly (sometimes multiple times per week) for over a year and can't recount any specific positive memory—even the first time downing bosses are devoid of emotion. I did it for a long time so I must have enjoyed it to a certain extent, just not enough to actually form long-term memories. I literally have more positive memories about raiding in WoW 10 years ago than I do for raiding in GW2. But the best memories come from helping in the open world where people don't have to help or expect to get much help and yet people will go out of their way to help others. It's fleeting but that moment of unforced camaraderie is better than 1-3 hours of people forced to group up where people get frustrated, angry, or don't respect other's time.

Not everyone likes raiding. Analytics are helpful in determining which areas for a company to focus on. Just because some companies misread or skew analytics to say what they want doesn't mean analytics are bad and no one should use them—they're a tool, nothing more. In the case of GW2, raiding was never a part of the original plan and in its heyday it was still a minority of raiders who raided, a number that has steadily dropped from wings 5-7. If <5% of players are participating in content that can take 50%+ of the PvE resources, that's not fair to the other 95% of people. Not everything has to have raiding. Not everyone has to raid. Not Everyone likes to raid. There are other MMOs with raiding out there if that's what you want, don't demand GW2 and GW2 players change just so your personal tastes can be catered to. Also, raiding in GW2 is not accessible. No automatic LFG toolComplicated encounters that need researchHigh skill floor for everyone in a raidThe only DPS tester is in an obscure roomNo official modsOne unofficial DPS metre that can be confusing for people to install and crash their gameGroups willing to take new(ish) players are few and far betweenHaving to search for training groups outside of the gameSaid training groups often fill up fast the moment they announce a runCommon cheese/speed-run strategies that confuse people because they intentionally ignore mechanicsOther MMOs you can hop into a raid fairly easily from my experience. GW2 requires effort, time, gold, and willing to spend multiple hours trying to find a group. That's not even going into how toxic raiders are and what people are expected to listen to over voice chat. Throw in how many bosses have a mechanic that wipes the group if even 1 person doesn't play perfectly and it's just not fun for a lot of people and those people aren't wrong for not liking it and they don't need "convincing" for them to like it.

I don't know if it's still the case, but back in WoW during the Wrath of the Lich King era, humans were the only viable Alliance PvP race outside a handful of niches where the other races were only a slight downgrade because the human racial skill was so much stronger. In PvE it didn't matter as much, but if you were serious about PvP you had to play human, especially if you wanted to join a PvP guild. It sucked. A lot. I am so glad Anet made racial abilities thematic rather than making them comparable to profession abilities. As soon as the min-maxers figured out which race had the "best" racials, anyone playing anything else would be mocked and/or excluded. PvP, WvW, and even PvE before raids. You can't simply change a race or class in GW2 so people would have had to make a whole new character... and then make another one when a patch changed up the meta. And again the following balance change... Racial abilities still serve some purpose anyway when leveling. They may not be as powerful but if you only have a few profession skills available, they're a viable alternative.

It's not easy if you have a type of photosensitivity that is triggered by them. Culling the number of models shown only goes so far when you can't specify what to cull or turn off certain skins and Anet keeps adding more such skins and animations.

I love the look of the mount skin... I just wish it had been kept as art or a single character in SAB. It's a lot harder to ignore a raptor running around than minipets or the tools that disappear after a few seconds. Something about the animations are also deeply uncomfortable for me. I have an issue with certain types of gifs and the raptor elicits the same response where I can both feel the animations and a crawling on the back of my neck and skull. I can control what mount skins and not use it but with no way to turn off skins for other players' mounts, that's something I'm going to have to deal with whenever I play the game now which I'm not thrilled about.

No. If you want to play a harder game, go play a harder game. Don't make GW2 into something that the vast majority of its playerbase isn't interested in. People would quit if story content was locked behind hard group content, not "realize it's the new norm" and happily accept it. According to GW2 Efficiency, only 6.624% of people who use the site have beaten even the first boss of Wing 7. Yes GW2 Efficiency doesn't count the entire playerbase but considering the more invested players tend to use it, when it comes to raiding it is likely close to being correct. Especially as in one of the past infographs or announcements Anet said only about 10% of players have raided. Also in case you haven't done them, try the Whisper and Boneskinner strikes with pugs and you will see that you'd have effectively cut off the playerbase from the story if you locked the story behind group content on par with raid difficulty. I don't know about you but the moment I have to pay a group just so I can see the story progress is the moment I quit GW2. GW2 is an MMO that has some raids, not an MMO build to revolve around raiding.

The cursor needs to be allowed to be customized plain and simple. I wouldn't be against special or thematic versions being sold (either for gems or gold) but changing the size and colour should be default options available to everyone. (And before anyone says otherwise, I know YoloMouse is a thing and have used it before. I had to remove it after other programs started having issues with it existing. The bottom line is such a simple yet impactful QoL feature that people have been asking for since release should be in-game, not require an outside program.)

Reloading works in an FPS because everyone is subject to it (minus melee or special weapons) and it adds a layer of strategy as you can't just spend the whole time firing an infinitely reloading weapon. A good number of FPS games also market themselves as realistic and real life guns need to be reloaded. Ammo doesn't work in an MMO because it punishes classes that use ranged projectile weapons and also punishes people for playing with someone who plays a ranged projectile class. How does it punish others you ask? Because people run out of ammo mid-encounter or forget to buy several stacks before running a dungeon or raid so the whole group has to wait around for someone to port to a city to buy/craft what they need and then port back. During this time others often go AFK as well so the entire thing is delayed for 15 minutes because one person forgot ammo. As mentioned earlier in the thread, WoW had ammo in-game for years. They removed it because it caused so many issues. Nothing that was game-breaking but it did bring down the QoL for players who played classes that required ammo. If you can suspend your disbelief around magic, monsters, dragons, and objects/animals spawning from nothing, you can suspend your disbelief around people having the perfect number of arrows or bullets.

Skimmed it and I can appreciate you put a lot of time into thinking about this and typing this post but just from the skimming your proposed revamp would go against what GW2 was meant to be and go against the New Player Experience where they changed, added, and removed content to make it easier for new players to integrate into GW2. The major thing I see is you gating core gameplay and class mechanics behind levels. People can't dodge until level 4? Don't get their elite skill until 40? You need to be level 45 before you can swap weapons? That wouldn't be fun to begin with, but GW2's combat is designed to be active and have people dodge and swap weapons as needed which means mobs are design around people being able to dodge and swap weapons on the fly. Literally one of the promo videos while GW2 was in development was about how this was going to be an MMO where you could dodge attacks and carry a second weapon that you could swap to (with two exceptions: ele and engie) so you were never left out of the fight. You take away those two things and new players are going to end up very dead, often, and be stuck auto-attacking before they're too frustrated by how boring it is and quit to find another game to play. Not to mention other players being frustrated how some players "are lazy and just auto-attack everything" when that's really all they can do. Your locking the downed state until level 25 just further punishes new players who are missing a huge chunk of their class' ability to deal with damage mitigation and healing. That's 24 levels where if you die, you die and need to waypoint. Then you lock weapon access for players. Fun fact: Initially GW2's weapon system was such where you leveled up individual weapons to gain access to the full bar of skills. It wasn't hard but there were enough complaints about it because people would forget to level up a weapon then be stuck leveling it up or using a different weapon when they wanted to run group content so Anet changed it to what we have now. You are doing no one any favours by locking entire weapons behind levels. Elite specs can get away from that because those are spec perks and you have a fully leveled 80 with the entire base set of weapons to pick from. Finally you lock core profession mechanics up to level 50. That is completely unfair and unfun and would actually break a lot of classes. An ele is built around changing attunements, hence why they can't switch weapons in combat.Engi, like ele, is built around having toolbelt skills to make up for their utilities being situational/being in a fixed location.Guardian's ability to do DPS, cleanse, heal, and buff are tied to their virtues—you can even trait it so you get buffs for not using it, just leaving it on your bar.Mesmer is already a PITA to level and you want to make their level experience even worse?Necro shroud is utility and balanced around having the full kit available.So for the pet class you want to... remove the ability to customize or control pets?With Rev you're gating legends which means your gating all a rev's utility skills as revs cannot pick and choose what skills they want.Skill #3 is a core part of thief and by gating it you also make the thief only have 4 weapon skills for 20 levels. It's also weird that a thief can't attack from stealth or steal.The warriors class mechanic is the simplest and most straightforward one and yet you gate it behind level 20 and make its DPS negligible until level 50.A lot of those mechanics do have level requirements but they're requirements that make the class accessible and possible to play without people being overwhelmed with a dozen skills. I've played games that have done things that you want to do and quit them all because it makes what should be fun into a grind. A character should not require several dozen levels before a player can get a sense of whether they like the class or not. 10, even 20, levels is a reasonable amount where players don't feel like they wasted much time on something they don't like after all. 50 levels for a new player likely means a couple weeks on average of playing, some more some less since it depends on their free time and desire to play GW2 during that time. People would be a lot more miffed about wasting that than 2-6 hours. Your changes also make playing GW2 about chasing the next level when GW2 was designed to encourage people to explore and not pay attention to the bar. People will focus on grinding out their next weapon/profession/skill/general ability to improve their QoL slightly instead of just exploring and looking at the world. And the suggested level ranges of current zones are just that: suggestions. Because of level scaling, players aren't punished by playing below their level or choosing to play in zones they like the story or aesthetic of instead of a map that's a "proper" level range but which isn't appealing to them. If you remove the ability for players to gain experience from maps "below" them you effectively kill that map for anyone above that level, too. That was a huge problem in MMOs when GW2 was in production and they wanted all their maps to be worth revisiting. Both for the sake of players and so devs don't see work they spent months on discarded. And the reason why some zones have strange level ranges is because they're tied to some branches of the personal story and Anet didn't want to have a set path of maps people would go through until they hit level 75 or so. You can't change the level on some of these without changing the personal story and the personal story is never, ever going to be touched or changed. Ever.

You can't split resources equally and it still be equitable in GW2. PvE needs a larger team to create and code frequent content patches. PvP and WvW do need some love, but the draw of those game modes is the other players. Anet's job is to facilitate that interaction, not create interaction from the ground up. I'd also like to point out that PvE isn't a monolith. You have raids, dungeons, strikes, leveling, map completion, stories, and more. There was a time where most PvE resources went into raids which the minority of players participate in. For non-raiders, that time sucked. Sure on paper it may have looked like PvE was getting the majority of resources but the truth is raids got most of said resources so non-raiding PvE players and PvP players saw roughly the same number of updates. All while being told PvE got all the love and why were PvE players complaining about not getting updates when they got a whole new raid wing. Really, you'd need to break it down to something like: Raids and strikesLiving World and other storiesOpen worldPvPWvWInventory and wardrobe relatedSkins and outfitsEven then, there'd be a lot of overlap, with people switching between them as needed. Artists especially.

Town Clothes definitely need their dye channels updated. But the reason why the 4th dye channel doesn't always work is because it seems the dye channels are used across all races and genders, but it only shows up if you have a specific race/gender combo. With other skins, the dye channels (usually) adapt to any extras the skin has. Town clothes are set up so it assumes everyone has the thing that the 4th dye channel is tied to so if your character doesn't have it, the channel does nothing. It's weird and definitely related to how town clothes used to be potions.

I'm not sure what the issue is exactly. You can't do in-game flashback episodes in an MMO the same way you can in TV. The player character is not omniscient and could not have seen a number of things thus it makes sense to change the player character to be an NPC or nameless grunt. There's multiple fractals that do this, the Caithe missions of LW2, and the new Forging Steel mission off the top of my head. GW2 is also not the only game—let alone MMO—that has done this. And then there's the end of HoT where story-wise you are battling Mordy in their mind, but open world-wise you are fighting their body. Sometimes you need to suspend your disbelief or recognize the character you're playing at the moment isn't your personal avatar in the game world. This is also far more preferable to some of the things that the player character has had to do in stories. One of the most glaring ones is playing a charr and being forced to join The Shining Blade. That was bad for all non-human races, but it was especially egregious for charr players. I'll take playing a different character and doing something bad over having my character do something that they would not do, would not be allowed to do, ignoring all previously established lore in the process. And with Darkrime Delves in particular, it develops characters that haven't had much contact with the player character and who were extremely guarded around the player character. You can be sure none of the banter would have happened (thus none of the development) if any other character was around, and the ending would have been far different. Playing through a flashback also makes the whole thing more engaging and emotional than reading about it or being told about it would, which is a common complaint people have had with GW2's writing—people want to see stuff, not be told about it at a later date. You may personally not like it, but it is a legit writing and development choice given the medium.

Anet has already stated why player to player trading wasn’t made available in this game. I'm curious, was it to kill scamming? Because that clearly did not work :)It reduces the chance of being scammed, yes. It also equalizes the prices by centralizing transactions, is more accessible for everyone, and removes gold from the economy thus reducing inflation. It's also far easier to say "Don't send items to a stranger" than "Make sure you double check everything, make sure you're happy with the trade, pay attention to make sure they don't alter the trade just before you accept" when the latter is the only way to buy, sell, and trade with other players. The lack of player-player trading also completely removes a method of duplicating items that crops up in games across all genres, forcing rollbacks or crashing the in-game economy in the process. An MMO is never going to bring the chances of being scammed down to zero because people are people, there are always going to be those who will fall for it and those who will find a way to get around barriers so they can scam others and Anet knew that that. All they did was make is less likely to happen and, if you are scammed once, you can avoid it in the future.

I would hazard a guess and state ANet's design for GW2 was that players shouldn't be able to grief each another. Wasn't the idea of the game that we should all be glad to see other players? This feeling is pretty much non existant for lower level maps when it's their turn at the daily. It becomes a frantic race to attempt to earn credit before the event is over (eg: once upon a time before mounts, my mesmer would use a staff as its ranged weapon. I had several daily events end around me without being able to get credit back then). When the game tells players that the polite thing to do is to just press 1 and tag a few mobs, then I'd say that the whole point of scaling (both of players down to the area's level and of events up to the number of players) has failed miserably. Scaling in general does need to be adjusted to account for the powercreep that started in HoT, and I'd say that starter maps could have their event scaling increased as well (maybe even tied to when those maps are the daily so more vet and elite mobs get spawned over regular ones), but it's still inconsiderate players who are the primary problem since it's not hard to adjust what you do when others are around. Starter maps just have less wiggle room for everyone else if someone is playing selfishly. If people just auto-attacking slows down how quickly mobs are killed by a noticeable amount, even with scaling issues I'd say the main problem is the person who comes in on a power reaper and used shroud #4 because if that one person wasn't there, a lot more people could have gotten credit.

I don't think it's inconsiderate level 80s at fault; I think it's the way they are scaled based on the zone. A level 80 isn't going to say "Oh, a level 5 person, I'd better give him a chance to kill those mobs while I hang back and watch him/her". Level 80s also want to kill mobs :smile:It's definitely people being inconsiderate. It's not hard to notice that you one-shot mobs and there's someone (or multiple people) running around in not even full armour who take multiple swings to kill enemies. You also don't need to continuously kill mobs to get gold credit in an event. Tag what you need to and then chill out and watch the newbies. Especially on starter maps where there is no map rewards loot and at 80 there are far better places to go to farm XP or karma. I do a lot of map completion. I also have a ton of 80s in exotic and/or ascended 'zerker gear. I don't commit mass-murder of mobs if other people are around, and if there are I'll make sure to let them get a couple hits in so they get credit. Same if there's an event going on. The only time I might jump the gun is for some of the PITA hearts that are made infinitely easier when a certain event is going. Yet I constantly run into other 80s who range mobs down without thinking about others—this includes them killing mobs that are only spawned when someone interacts with an object that locks you in place so the person who spawned the mob doesn't even get credit for it. And it's not just me that hangs back and lets newbies get credit, either. Just personally I know people on my friendslist and in my primary guild also like to "babysit" newbies over treating them like competition, and I know there are plenty of others out there who do the same. Scaling could be adjusted a bit due to the powercreep that started in HoT, but if people were more mindful of others it wouldn't be much of an issue.

The problem isn't mounts, it's geared level 80s who are inconsiderate of others. Depending on which area in the starter map you are, mounts don't even one-shot mobs because the damage was nerfed already. Meanwhile a level 80 in full berserker gear can easily one-shot mobs from range, repeatedly. It was a problem before mounts existed, mounts just make it more obvious who's aware of others and who's thinking only of themselves.

Not going to happen and Anet has said they aren't going to do that. It's completely unfair to the person who chose the name first, especially since it's impossible to know if they're never going to come back to the game or on hiatus due to real life circumstances. Sure you may be attached to a name as concept, but that doesn't mean people aren't attached to the same name on their existing character. Also, think of other names to try. Add titles. Do two or more names. Look at the massive fantasy name generator site (that actually has a GW2 section!). If you want a meme name or the name of a character from a different piece of media, you're probably out of luck. If you go original names—especially with the aforementioned addition of a title or multiple names—it's far easier to find a name that isn't taken. I have 35 characters currently (spanning since launch to the latest being created in December) and only three ever weren't taken. One was a meme name, one was a pun, and the third was plant-based and everything was taken for some reason, so I just made her last name "Plantsbane" out of frustration and she's been Plantsbane ever since, and honestly she's more memorable because of it. Be original. You can also rush through character creation to try names you want. If you find one that's free, you can delete the character and remake them properly as your account reserves the name of a character for 24 hours after deletion.

The only things you list that make sense are a new expansion (doesn't need to be Cantha) and new elite specs. Everything else would be a resource sink and cost more to make and implement than it would bring in. Playable tengu or other race: would require new voice actors, new models, new animations, new starting area, and all existing armour would need to be modified to fit them. That is a lot and there's no way to monetize it without pissing people off, so likely a net loss.Demonetizing build templates: ignoring the fact that the number of people who quit (and didn't come back in 1-4 weeks) because they couldn't have unlimited templates probably didn't even cause a blip in Arenanet's fincances, they can't demonetize them without spitting in the face of everyone who bought more. They don't hand out free gems so there would be a massive influx of people contacting support demanding a refund. It's similar reasoning to why the original mount contract does not and likely will not have a mount select license.Overhauling dungeons: dungeons are old, extremely buggy code and would need to be rebuilt from the ground up, and how are they going to monetize it to recoup the upfront cost of it when they could have worked on other content that would bring in money and new people? I would like to see dungeons be relevant again but it's been over 7 years and they were barely touched the first couple years and that's it. Fractals exist to replace dungeons.LWS1: They've said that's one of the things they're going to use Visions of the Past for. LWS1 was coded in such a way it's impossible to bring back in its original form, so they're going to bring back parts of it.Story speed: So you want to bring back players and make people play together, but you want Arenanet to stop updating story content entirely until they have X amount and release it at once? Small updates are vastly preferable to no updates with a single content update once or twice a year. People still play together, both on the new maps and old ones. There's also several years worth of content for new players to do.Guild update: Sure, but like dungeons I doubt it will happen and it won't bring money in. New content gets people playing. Someone isn't going to start playing a brand new game because they changed guild missions.Gem store: They have been putting new skins into the game that you can get by playing. The general pace is 1-3 brand new gem store skin a week. Shadow in the Ice introduced 34+ new skins, minis, and emotes, as well as three new guild decorations. And this is where subjectivity comes in because I find the "free" skins nicer than the "premium" ones that have come out. Plus there's the gold-gem conversion so everyone has access to gem store skins. (Also how can you demand that Arenanet change things up to bring in more money then demand they cut their primary income in the same post?)The only thing that will bring in a huge influx of money/players at this point is an expansion. Everything else needs to be assessed on how much it will cost to do (time, money, people) and how much benefit (retaining players, gaining players, bringing in money, making future development easier) it will bring in. Much of what you listed is high cost with little benefit to Arenanet and at the end of the day Arenanet is a company (beholden to yet a different company) that doesn't have the resources to throw at everything players want changed. Especially now that so many people who have been with the company for years—some even since GW1—have left, meaning the number of people familiar with the code and its various iterations is dwindling. A lot of long-standing games and programs become limited in what can be done with them not because of money but because after a certain point, no one knows the original code anymore and any change can result in a seemingly unrelated area being broken. And the Guild Wars engine is rather infamous at this point for being old and not being written to account for future changes to the game or available tech.

Definitely no. Team chat in WvW is horrible and whenever I have a look I have to report and block half the people in it, and in general it moves too fast to respond. And that's just 1-3 servers with less than a thousand people. A global PvE chat would be magnitudes worse. All you have to do is look at LA or Mistlock or Silverwastes chat to know exactly what people would do if they could spam everyone playing. I'd prefer it if you could "watch" LFG channels and get a ping with the LFG title whenever someone lists their group. Far easier to contain and monitor that than a global chat.

I'd say overall the technical difficulty is fine, however the tools needed to play them are lacking. Strikes are the first thing that come to mind. They aren't hard, per se, but finding a group of people to do the harder ones is difficult and time consuming if you don't have enough friends/ a guild that does them. Even easy fights get harder if you have people regularly failing mechanics and few people are doing substantial damage and even fewer can heal or spread boons. Raids suffer from this as well, as there's no easy way to find a group built into the game. (LFG is terrible and still time consuming, assuming you don't get kicked randomly or fall victim to a squad merge troll). There's also the issue of escalating visual noise and lack of attack telegraphs which make content needlessly frustrating under the guise of challenge. All that said, though, GW2 is pretty good with open world difficulty and players are able to change up how hard or easy content is by changing their class, spec, or gear. It would just be nice if there was some more help available for players to learn mechanics and whatnot without just throwing them to the metaphorical wolves and hoping they don't get so frustrated they quit.

If they made it with a single-player (preferably offline) option with heroes as a default, maybe. But I don't see much of a point in a complete remake when the company has other issues/focuses at this point in time with neither enough people nor money to go around. They'd pretty much need to redo animations, textures, and models (and probably the engine), and they've been open about how much a nightmare it was to balance the hundreds of skills that every class had access to (with the exception of the class-restricted ones) so I'd expect the skills to be changed and/or culled. GW1 was a good game, but it was a product of its time and nostalgia only goes so far. It would be better served with a small dedicated team that slowly improved on things rather than an entire remake from the ground up, which would be a huge undertaking to bring everything up to modern standards.

Jawgeous and Hizen for starters. Dulfy a while ago Hizen streamed GW2 9 days ago, Dulfy appears to have stopped creating content for not only GW2, but also all other MMOs on her site. I doubt it has anything to do with GW2. Also WP branched out in the past, like his Grimrock or Tomb Raider stuff, so it's nothing new. He's just saying he wants to grow his channel by reaching a bigger audience, which is reasonable for a youtuber.Dulfy stopped because she got a job that required her full attention/her job got busy (not sure which). So less the game is dying/content creators are leaving a dying game, more putting IRL priorities ahead of video game content and documentation in her case. And honestly I'm fine with that and I wish more content creators would move on if they're tired of a game or being a content creator doesn't cover all their expenses so they need to cut back on video games so they can focus on things like rent and food. That's not to say content creators don't benefit their video game(s), but I'd rather people be happy than burn out. Also GW2 has been out for over 7 years now and that's a long time for anyone to be focused on a game full time.