Leo G.4501

Because they've always been second rate. Have you seen the armor in FFXIV? And I think outfits are plenty creative. Are they the level of personal custom character creation as the likes of perhaps City of Heroes? No, it never was, but for what it's for (making a great looking character), it works, IMO.

That's not zero then. Subjective much? I guess? I honestly wouldn't mind outfits specifically for a set of the races (or just one) so long as the price reflects that. The problem is, when they make a skin for the body, they are forced to make one for every race and sex rather than just the ones that it suits best. I have no nostalgia for gw1. That is the main appeal to them. They don't have to fit every part of it to a corresponding equipment slot. Um, what? That's any skin or dye. I propose the GW2 team heavily consider dropping the concept of armor pieces and focus solely on outfits as well as more options to customize them (such as turning parts of them off). As for the prices, that is likely another topic to discuss.

Thinking back to City of Heroes, it was an amazing time when they introduced the ability to scale the instanced content. With this feature you had nearly full control of the enemies you'd face: you could make the enemies +/- your current level up to, I want to say -3 and upwards to +5(?), you could scale the spawn sizes from 1-person team spawns (the smallest) to max-team size (would spawn a certain amount of mobs per team member), you could make it so Lieutenants or Bosses spawned or not (I'd equate them to Vets and Elites from GW2) and if you wanted to downscale final Archvillains/Heroes (rather than max HP/regen and mez resistance, you could limit them to downgraded AV/Hero which were more suceptible to mez or in some cases, downgrade them to bosses). One thing I'm not fond of in the story missions are all the achievements that require you to do really specific tasks that might require many resets. Not saying all of them are bad, just the ones that specifically require you to replay things over and over. But what if some of those repetative achievements were exchanged for running the mission scaled to a higher team size/difficulty? You know, give a bit more weight to them as team content? On the other hand, open up scaling so you can downgrade certain mobs/mechanics to make them easier to traverse for newer players? It's all about accessibility and variety. Of course, scaling those other instanced story content would require more than just swapping in Elites or some such. Scaling them to add more party aspects to them would be required.

MMO as genre lost its apeal now its shooters and mobas wich sells Only in the mainstream sense. I think MMORPGs can still exist and thrive (just look at some of those 10+ year MMORPGs) but won't be sustainable if they are chasing after the newest features. Like for me, I couldn't really give 2 kittens about GW2's lauded twitch combat mechanics and its high action-esque content, for me I just like the races and the voice/personalities they have and had the game gone for an old skool tab-targeted, dice-roll type of gameplay but gave 10x the build options and 2x the race options, I'd have liked the game 500% more. Hell, if NCSoft hadn't shut down CoH so I could just play both (GW2 for when I want combat closer to action combat and CoH when I want to craft personal characters, builds and stories), I'd have been 45,000% more happy with that. COH was really underrated, right out of the box you felt beast and the story was very well done I hope we get a COH 2 esque game in the near futureMany games can thrive at once I fear that it won't happen because so often game devs are roped into keep adding more and more features that keep up with the new hottness. I guess the different MMORPGs have their niche that makes them "perfect" for a particular audience. Someone above mentioned how EQ1 was near perfect for them but I bet if I played it I'd feel just as limited and underwhelmed even disregarding the graphics (although I heard it has quite a few race choices to play as). It still doesn't hold a candle, IMO, to CoH where I can make my own race and powers and even going so far as to make my own enemy factions (with their own looks, powers, story and dialog) and story arcs or play other players' arcs and experience their creativity. But CoH was far from a perfect game, as much of the content was quite repetative and heavily instanced.

MMO as genre lost its apeal now its shooters and mobas wich sells Only in the mainstream sense. I think MMORPGs can still exist and thrive (just look at some of those 10+ year MMORPGs) but won't be sustainable if they are chasing after the newest features. Like for me, I couldn't really give 2 kittens about GW2's lauded twitch combat mechanics and its high action-esque content, for me I just like the races and the voice/personalities they have and had the game gone for an old skool tab-targeted, dice-roll type of gameplay but gave 10x the build options and 2x the race options, I'd have liked the game 500% more. Hell, if NCSoft hadn't shut down CoH so I could just play both (GW2 for when I want combat closer to action combat and CoH when I want to craft personal characters, builds and stories), I'd have been 45,000% more happy with that.

Its because other genres do things a lot better than any mmo. Balance is better in Fighting games like Street Fighter or FPS like Halo, TF2, Counter Strike. Boss Battles Are better In games designed more for single player or small groups like Dark Souls series. Games like GTA actually have dynamic events that feel less scripted and can seem to happen randomly. Every category is somewhat compromised in an mmorpg and I believe there are a few reasons:An mmorpg tries to do everything instead of having more focus like other genres.There are network limitations, including badwidth that make things harder to accomplish in mmorpgs. Population of the game plays a role. Having so many people playing at once makes it hard to balance and codeThe old RPGs And MMORPG's set a trend which still happens today where skills fell less real, less impactful. They followed the Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Turn based games. MMORPGS would have been in a better spot had they followed more of the real-time/ action mechanics and strategies like Secret of Mana, Zelda, Terranigma, etc etc. Hopefully MMORPG's of the future will catch up in other areas like other genres, and I have to give GW2 credit for trying to make dynamic events dynamic and somewhat random, but I think they just found it hard to implement. They also added the dodge mechanic which was another step in the right direction. So out of all the other MMORPG"s currently, I think ANET's original mission for GW2 came the closest to being able to leave some of the less desirable things from the MMORPG market. It was not a complete failure, I call it a partial success. Hopefully they realize some of the stuff they wanted to implement some years down the road. MMOs have always been a compromise since the beginning. The difference is, back in the early days of MMORPGs, the concept of building up a character that interacts in an open environment with other players in real-time was a newish concept, so much so that there were individuals who thought they had the concept patented and tried to sue several MMORPGs. But in the current year, it's common place and the compromises that were necessary back then are practically all compensated for. Rather than look out for the health of a game genre, it's more productive to express what game you want to play and what should/shouldn't be in it. Since connectivity and speeds are becoming less of a bottleneck, the old version of MMORPGs that players long to have regurgitated to them aren't necessary or sustainable. Although, one day, maybe players will be able to easily run and maintain current online games like we can with older versions of games so you won't need to have a corporation bottle feed this type of content all the time.

The problem lies with the population. The issue is one of expectations. If a game has a particular experience (or set of experiences) it wants to provide the player, the game is still expected to provide a laundry list of other features which can have a large effect on the end product and the intended goals of those supplied experience. A developer might have a focus on narrative and group guild activities but get roped into providing PvP esport activities or large group content that could veer from the intended goal or completely derail the goal. It's just expected to provide these extra features and for the story to go on and on rather than decisively conclude. Then we ask why people complain or get burnt out or lose interest when the fault lies at our feet. The industry has changed to appease what the majority wants but the majority doesn't know what it wants. Luckily for the industry, their only goal is to profit so as long as that window of opportunity stays open and shifts one way or the other, they will just shift their product in tandum for profit. I can imagine an original creator of their game feeling alienated from their own creation after a time as the creative work grows a mind of its own and decides independently where it wants to go. Then you have a mass of thoughts and ideas with many different types of goals trying to go in different directions with a director supposedly trying to drive this ship with a corporate heel standing on their throat. Whether the game is "the best" or not is irrelevent, it's how sustainable it is. With how MMOs exist these days, they survive on a whim and can cease to exist or be unplayable. If they stop being sustainable, then that's it. Even if a game is 20th or 100th place in the MMO market, if it can be sustain then it will exist and you will be able to enjoy it.

Now you can play as a Tengu on the forums. Unfortunately, I can't as a berb doesn't fit my account name.

From a profit and competitive PvP standpoint, Blade and Soul are about even if not completely surpassing GW2 despite GW2 being advertised more (from my perspective).

and many, maaany others... Ofc i have the option to grind gold, and that's what i do if I really want it. I'm not mad about it.That's not my point. Hell i'm better off not wasting real money for these items and getting gems with gold instead. What I am doing is being nice, and taking my time and effort (as a real life economist and a player) to let A-net know there's a big market right under their noses they're not tapping into. The poorer/F2P players, that aren't ingrates and given a good deal would happily throw few $ at the game to keep it going and flowing.But few very big mistakes with gemstore policies prevent that from happening, costing A-net a lot of money it's clearly not aware of. A game can sure as hell run on whales that's true. But it'll run a lot better if everyone is happily willing to chip in a bit of their $, rather then going by "you gotta be thiiiiiiis tall (money wise) to pass that gate" policy. As a real life economist, you should know better than to suggest there is a problem with their prices without having the data you need to make that statement. As a real life economist you'd also know that when there's so many people that complain about prices, there's bound to be some issues. In this case marketing issues, not economical ones. Total Makeover Kit is cosmetic and allows you to change your appearance.Perm harvesting tools allows you to avoid a major gold sink on each toon that possesses them and will eventually pay for themselves if you use it enough.There is no monthly subscription. That kitten is expensive. Arenanet has to keep the lights on somehow. It's not going to happen. You have no business talking for the entire userbase, let alone me. Account inventory slots are already a thing?Are they? Are they really?> @Leo G.4501 said: That's true, but doesn't that happen to every other "account upgrade"? There's a limit to bank tabs, crafting professions, item stacks, character slots. I don't see why bag slots couldn't be account-wide You do have a point, but doing so would still be adding more hard-capped upgrades to the list of hard-capped upgrades. Question is, is that a bad thing? Also they've shown often enough that they're willing to increase caps when they see a chance to profit (like when they increased bag slots to 12). Yeah. The proper name is Shared Inventory Slot. They are 700 gems each if you just buy one. They are the most awesome thing ever if you have any teleportation items, consumables or unlimited salvage kits.https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shared_Inventory_SlotI think you're not understanding the context of the quoted. The person that you're replying to was talking about making character bag slots unlocked by account rather than by character (so buying the upgrade would open up a bag slot for every character on your account rather than the singular character). Shared inventory slots is a singular slot that is added to the base inventory of every character. One is increasing inventory of every character by 1 (not really, since if occupied, it's occupied for every character) while the other is increasing how many bags each character can equip. I'd say, however, comparing the price of a shared inventory slot to a bag slot unlock should show the relative value and thus how unlikely an account bag slot upgrade would seem.

That's true, but doesn't that happen to every other "account upgrade"? There's a limit to bank tabs, crafting professions, item stacks, character slots. I don't see why bag slots couldn't be account-wide You do have a point, but doing so would still be adding more hard-capped upgrades to the list of hard-capped upgrades.

You run into the problem of once you've purchased the max number of bags (you can only have 10 per character) then Anet cannot profit from selling bags to your entire account, including future characters created on that account. While I can agree that having cheaper bag slots would be great for me, it would be capping Anet's profitability on that particular item.

Spoiler by buying with gold you still support anet pricing methods. Since all those gems on gold exchange are already paid for by other players, anet loses nothing by having people buy with gold. In fact it encourages even more people to spend money on gem to sell for gold. Gems on the exchange are not infinite, more players buy, prices go up. Prices go up more people buy gems to sell for gold. Ergo, the cheaper items are on the gem store, the fewer gems are necessary to buy things and thus the incentive to purchase gold with gems plummets because you only need 800 gems to buy the featured stuff you want thus Anet needs to pump out even MORE junk you don't need or want so complain about and then later we wonder why NCSoft has announced the closure of GW2 in the next half a year or put on auto-mode by Anet. Either that, or Anet can do some shady things like make the gem store items cheaper (500 gems for a harvesting tool, 800 for a premium mount, 200 for an outfit) but artificially alter the exchange rate for gold-to-gems so players aren't easily capable of affording half the gemstore with an easy afk farm for a day or so.

Why not complain about people pulling up older threads? To complain about "keep putting up threads and polls" on a more than 1-month old thread seems rather futile.

That's broken as crap. That'd be like giving Firebrand an HP bar for every tome along with their 5 skills. Why?

Ah, that thread. My opinion on that one is I don't think it'd be a problem with giving users more control; more control of what they want to look at, remove what they don't, who they want to listen to, etc. Like I wouldn't mind an option to just block poll threads. Granted, I probably wouldn't use it but knowing I have the option so I don't see so many useless polls wouldn't be a bad thing. Regarding the OP and within the context of what you mentioned, I'm not sure it's viable to limit players except to a certain amount of threads posted in a given time and not being able to bump threads likely wouldn't improve that situation (someone can just keep making threads, but at least it wouldn't be perpetuated by others posting in the thread). Again, I feel more controls would be the best solution, perhaps to even include now seeing old threads bumped.

Curious, what is your perspective on the topic?

I personally don't mind an older thread being bumped, but I think you should only be able to bumb a thread 1 time and any other time you post in the same thread, it doesn't get bumped. With notifications telling you if someone quoted you, you don't really need to see the same thread pushed up unless you're following it...

Something I began reflecting on in the face of the posts saying we'll never get new races; I think I'd have been fine with only the current races if Dragon's Watch had some of those races as members. But instead we have repeats of races with stereotypical tropes for their race. Not that I dislike Rytlock, but he could have just remained a strong mentor that occasionally pops in (I feel Caith has the right idea!). Get rid of Kas or Jory then put in a Kodan or Largos or Skritt in there so I could get a more intimate connection to those races. Of course, this might make some players more eager to play those races.

The last thing I'm sure Anet wants from anyone is pity.

Sounds like a bug. I hope they fix it soon.

It is time to exchange gems for gold, or it will be soon.

The PG version.

I wouldn't get bent out of shape for down votes. They don't do anything and are almost like a badge of honor having an unpopular opinion.