voltaicbore.8012

The Saga was always going to be a dumpster fire. Remember, they had a uselessly flashy launch event for the Saga, and promised us "expansion-like" content while only including the same old throwaway living world masteries and no plans for elite specs. I cannot fathom how anyone at the studio thought they could pull it off. I'll admit that the Saga had its few moments where I thought ANet could prove me wrong and deliver something epic enough to fill that "expansion-like" niche, but ultimately it ended just as it started: much fanfare for an empty shell of a product. That said, I'm just glad the Saga is over. While the finale we just suffered through does close of a ton of interesting story paths, aside from that I think EoD can still deliver a quality experience. Lol I do think it's cute that OP writes about having 10 characters as if that's a lot.

Of course I am. That wasn't in the original post, but was only extracted later in the thread after the obligatory "just simulate your own sub by spending on gems every month" and other such rote responses. I didn't elaborate any further because most things worth noting were already noted in this thread, and the many others that already exist on this beaten-dead-horse topic. So yes, you are correct in noting that I'm not really interested in furthering this particular discussion. I've never seen any good points raised by the "subs are how it should have been/will improve GW2" camp, ever. I'm just here out of boredom. On a superficial level, this would be a nice thing to have in GW2. Just as it had the effects you described in WoW, it would indeed be cool to have more cosmetics tied to achievements. Specifically, I can think of just a few gem-store skins that might have served well as achievement rewards - the Phalanx heavy armor skins might have been a good LWS3 reward, Aetherblade stuff could have been S1, and maybe a handful of others. There are admittedly many more candidates among the mount skins, as they are often tied to specific areas of the world and could easily be dovetailed into a regional reputation system. But digging a bit deeper.... hard pass. As you and others have pointed out, the achievement-based cosmetic system would merely replace the existing gold grind with an achievement grind instead. I (and many others) prefer the existing gold grind, as it allows for much greater content choice flexibility. In fact, this flexibility might be one of the most deeply rooted long term problems with GW2's design - it's so easy to only do the few things you like doing, and over time be rewarded pretty well for it (with the exception of the money sink that is WvW). This also extends to why so many people make it so long in this game while being absolutely worthless in combat. If you only do the easiest open world stuff, you can get away with not understanding anything at all about being combat effective while still being steadily rewarded for bad gameplay. I think the result of this "do (almost) anything you want and be rewarded for it" is that it's easier in GW2 to tunnel vision your own little sector of the game, and thereby remain highly resistant to behavioral changes (trying more instanced content, trying raids, trying more interesting and threatening pve mechanics, etc) the devs feel the need to attempt on the playerbase. But of course, far be it from any pro-sub commenter to bring this up.

I agree with the sentiment but would replace "whole story" with "whole concept of the Saga". While the story in GW2 is overall quite weak and often downright juvenile, I think the very first story elements of the Saga actually had some meager promise at the beginning. However, I believe none of that matters because ultimately the Saga concept itself was deeply flawed and half baked to begin with. The tried to sell this to us as "expansion-like" content, while having throwaway masteries that look exactly like other throwaway living world masteries, and no apparent plan for elite specs. So in other words, the Saga would not offer us new or changed ways to play the game at all, but would only extend the story.... just like a standard living world season. Even in the story, it turns out they bit off more than they could chew. How many more episodes would we need to have done Primordus and Jormag justice? Each could arguably fill their own independent expansion or living world season. Cramming them into a package already filled with a Charr civil war, the murders of Almorra and Smodur, talking directly to the Spirits of the Wild for the first time, grappling with the legacy of Svanir/Jora/Aesgir, etc.... utterly ludicrous. ANet set itself up to fail from the very beginning. It sounded like a terrible idea to me from day one, and covid/pivoting to the xpac are just convenient excuses at this point. It was always going to end terribly.

I think threads like this ("GW2 with sub = better! Also subscriptions = fundamentally better design motivations!") demonstrate a complete lack of understanding about why this game was made, and why it's survived this long despite being based on an highly obscure IP and numerous fiascoes along the way. As others have noted already, GW2 set out to deliver a sub-quality experience without the sub. You can argue about the feasibility of such an idea or how well ANet pulled it off, but you need to actually address these ideas instead of just assuming the usual framework of sub-vs-f2p design motivations apply to GW2. Trying to imagine GW2 with a sub is akin to trying to imagine a Tesla that runs on an old combustion engine. Tesla are cars... combustion engines make cars operate.... so a Tesla would of course operate if you built one to run on a combustion engine. But the entire point of a Tesla is to have a well-running (and as of the current day, quite expensive) car that specifically doesn't use an old combustion engine. It would lose the very essence of what would make it a Tesla in the first place. IMO such discussions are utter wastes of time.

Many have asked for this, and predict that failing to fix the issue that you faced here will also sink the Steam launch in an ugly way. I, for one, agree with you. The seasons do occasionally go on sale. I nabbed all of Season 2 at a steep discount, and got the rest for free for logging in while they were live (which I know is not an option for you and other returning players).

I could be reading the matchmaking algorithm on the wiki entirely wrong, but I think it actually allows for teams that are rated up to 1200 points apart to end up in a match against each other. I am not sure if that "roster rating" variable is on the same scale as our personal MMRs, but that seems to be the case. That's... that's an absolutely enormous score difference. So that might explain why the matchmaker is so quick to pop poorly matched games for you - it just doesn't take that long to patch together a team that's within 1200 points of yours. This is mostly (educated) guesswork on my part from reading the wiki post on the matchmaker. If someone knows I'm wrong about this, I'd be interested in hearing the explanation.

basically every fighting game I think you summed it up perfectly yourself - it's the standard in fighting games, which GW2 most certainly is not. You can probably scratch together a decent duelist build on any class in WvW where there is much more stat freedom, but in normalized spvp (and the ever-shrinking number of amulets), I think certain classes would be forced to sacrifice much more in order to attain a duelist level of coverage. The result would just be that some classes are inferior duelists, period. "The result would just be that some classes are inferior duelists, period."Yes, just like how some classes are inferior in 2v2s and yet we already have that gamemode, so it clearly isn't a problem is it, you absolute slug.Amazingly, you missed your own point again - 2v2 allows for your partner to cover some weaknesses - either directly providing something you're missing, or just running a superior duelist class. Good job, son.

basically every fighting game I think you summed it up perfectly yourself - it's the standard in fighting games, which GW2 most certainly is not. You can probably scratch together a decent duelist build on any class in WvW where there is much more stat freedom, but in normalized spvp (and the ever-shrinking number of amulets), I think certain classes would be forced to sacrifice much more in order to attain a duelist level of coverage. The result would just be that some classes are inferior duelists, period. Given how important kiting and terrain are to surviving at high levels of pvp in this game, of all things Smash Bros might be the one fighting game that comes anywhere close to demonstrating what 1v1s in GW2 might look like. There's substantial use of ledges and map-specific features in some matches, rather than straight combat. But even there, there's significant imbalance when it comes to 1v1s, as many matchups are known to be widely unfavorable for certain characters. If we look hard enough there's probably some long-dead mmo that had a decent 1v1 format as a mainstay. Chances are such a game would be build significantly differently than GW2, so the analogy would likely fail.

Indeed, it's ultimately an apples-to-oranges comparison if you're looking at the games themselves. However, I think there are still good lessons to take from PA with regard to your second point. Yes, most BDO updates have some form of microtransaction in mind, but as you note the entire game has always been built around a great measure of that. This is where I'd fundamentally disagree with you, and suspect your experience with BDO is quite outdated. While they do sell things that directly increase your efficiency, all but one of them have been given out for free in significant quantities within the recent past. Aside from the initial purchase of the game, I've spent maybe $50 on cosmetics. Yet I have hundreds of dollars worth of efficiency tools that I didn't even have to grind for, I just happened to be playing actively at the time they were handing the stuff out. The one glaring exception to that is weight limit increases, which they seem to give out the least. It's still available for free in significant quantities, but it just takes a very long time to match cash-shop levels of weight. Fortunately the rest of my (100% free) efficiency kit more than makes up for that deficit. That's a generous assumption, but I think the truth is far less kind. In the case of dungeons and their total abandonment, we know that it's an issue of technical limitations paired with a lack of willingness to revisit them. So we weren't given fractals because they wanted to give us a more diverse experience (they're essentially dungeon equivalents in terms of content type), but because they couldn't (and didn't want to figure out how to) work with an existing system that served the same purpose. Fractals themselves receive almost no updates at this point. Strike missions are nice (they feel like mini raid bosses without the hassle of actually doing a raid), but I get the feeling they'll go the way of fractals and raids - not officially abandoned, but it could be years between updates on those. I really don't mean to be a downer about the game - I actually happen to think there's still a lot of mileage left on GW2, although I'd be surprised to see another expansion after End of Dragons. I still haven't found a game that combines tab target and action combat quite as smoothly as this one does, and I think the mounts here are far and away the most superior such system in any existing game. PvE is open enough that I can really try a huge variety of interesting builds, and almost all significant grinds in GW2 are optional. If anything, my negative feelings about the game's present state are probably due to the overall weakness of the Icebrood Saga, and that the Saga repeats some errors from other aspects of the game on top of adding new weaknesses of its own.

Glad to hear the game opened up a bit for you with HoT! TD is a map that took me a good long while to get used to, but I found the process of getting to that point very rewarding. Funnily enough, I actually had the opposite direction in HoT - I became that much more interested in soloing as much of HoT as possible, just because the challenge of doing so was finally enough fun. I have always treated gaming as a more solitary activity for me, and am thus obsessed with soloing absolutely everything I can in MMOs. Sure, it's usually less efficient (and sometimes the rewards are also flat-out worse), but it's a bit of a control thing - it's comforting for me to know that when push comes to shove, I can get something important done on my own without being at the mercy of a group. So while HoT is where you started playing with others more, HoT is where I truly began to enjoy the solo adventure. Combat HPs in the core game are an absolute joke, but in HoT the combat HPs were actually a challenge. Suddenly almost every aspect of my build mattered, and I had to actually watch what the enemies were doing to win. Being able to solo every single HoT HP (including the notorious Balthazar HP in Auric Basin) is an extremely valuable alt-assessment tool for me. The way I see it, if I roll a new character and try a weird new build on it but cannot solo every single HoT HP on it, then something's wrong. Either the build itself is seriously lacking in a key area, or I'm just not making enough use of the class' innate strengths. I can only get this assessment if I solo the challenges, and HoT gave me so many cool places to try. You also mentioned trying BDO for a short while. I think that game is the best example of a niche product that is run by a dev team that seriously knows what it's doing. ANet could really take a few notes on how Pearl Abyss (the folks behind BDO) do things on a systems level. PA is not afraid of revisiting old systems that didn't live up to their potential, and radically updating them to give players a reason to give it another shot. As for some BDO systems (like the cancerous RNG gear upgrading system) that are too central to the game's operation and revenue to change significantly, PA adds new systems that allow reasonable workarounds to players' greatest pain points.In contrast, ANet has, for many years now, demonstrated a troubling willingness to straight abandon promising systems. Instead, ANet seems happy to just throw another shiny new thing at us, only to abandon in turn. It always pains me to see that BDO is financially healthier than GW2, because GW2 is just such a great and generous player experience. I genuinely believe that health difference has more to do with good management and less to do with the games themselves. PA simply knows that most BDO players are there for snappy action combat and the best waifu customizer possible, and that these same players simply accept enormous levels of grind as part of the game. Everything they do leans into this knowledge, and I can't think of anything they've added to the game in the past several years that wasn't a straight improvement for every kind of player. On the other hand, ANet's willingness to always try something new at the expense of fixing what is already there just feels like the studio is lurching around from one failed initiative to the next, even if that's not a very accurate description.

OP, I'm sure others might agree with you (and someone already has, in this thread), but I'm not one of them. As @Zephire.8049 noted, once you learn how to get the most out of the skyscale, the liftoff stamina consumption becomes negligible. I'd say the only true limits I run into on the skyscale are traveling long distances over open water and pathing blockers. Aside from that, it can pretty much go anywhere. Seems plenty worth the effort to me.

@"BCPrhys.7230", I totally get the appeal. As others have repeatedly mentioned here, LWS1 did precisely what you're getting at - the game world permanently changed based on the passage of time. Although I joined the game well after S1 came and went, I personally found it extremely interesting that ANet chose to at least try that. I didn't mind at all that I wasn't able to replay S1, but was instead limited to looking at the wreckage of the fallen tower in Kessex, passing the now-pointless energy probes Scarlet dropped all over the map, or being stuck with the new LA instead of the old ship-themed one. That said, I agree with the others here who note that keeping up this model in a shared-instance open world like GW2 is cumbersome at best, and downright impossible at worst. I think the only way to pull it off while maintaining current levels of player freedom would be to segregate players by story progress, or have some other mechanism where players can choose to enter the "living world" version of a map. Either way, it's a lot of work for questionable value, and as charmed as I was by the idea, I'm totally find with open world maps being locked in time.

As true as this is, I think any reasonable player has to acknowledge that lore is more important to developing GW2 than it is for a game like LoL. Just because something isn't "main content" doesn't mean that it isn't an important element of the game. I agree that story currently drives absolutely nothing of my repeatable gameplay that moment, and hasn't for years. That said, I stuck around GW2 as long as I have (and returned to it, even in the face of competitors with superior attention to systems, gameplay, and management) because ANet cares enough about lore to make the game world feel quite richly connected with it (if you care to look for such things). As much as I dislike the direction the story's taken throughout much of the Saga, I'm still invested in seeing where it's going at least to the extent of wanting to know if EoD will bring a new narrative direction that I like better. So to bring back the original topic of the thread - for me, a Classic GW2 would do nothing. A truly classic version would shed vast amounts of gameplay improvements and every single espec in favor of... maybe getting S1 back (which we've seen is a questionable proposition at best). A classic+ version that retains the important improvements would just be... the core game we still have access to right now? Not seeing the value here.

I know you've said a lot more, and in more detail, but I'd like to dwell on the "problem" part a bit. I, too, agree the loss of LWS1 leaves a jarring narrative hole. In fact, I still think ANet was plain stupid not to see the future effect of placing so much story into what they intentionally designed as temporary content. To top it off, they thought that having some NPC give us a terrible recap of it would somehow be enough. Whoever made that call, in my opinion, needs to seriously reconsider their talent for making and executing such decisions. There are two solutions to this narrative hole. The first and most obvious one is to just bring S1 back to a playable state. We've already seen what that looks like, and it's awful. The second solution would involve improving the recap instead of attempting to resurrect the content itself. Based on what's already out there, I'm thinking this is the best way to go about it. To keep the recap system a bit more interactive, players could perhaps be given a choice to either get a voiced cutscene with skippable chapters, or go on a geographical journey to various sites around the map where S1 stuff happened. Interacting with an object there (or performing some other minor quest) could give a cutscene or wall of text explaining what was going on in S1.

Agreed. As someone who joined after HoT, I always wanted to see LWS1. Then the scrying pool let me get a taste of it, and suddenly I realized that just listening to WoodenPotatoes' S1 recap might be even better than having the experience itself. To acknowledge what other said about context/full season vs weird snippets of it/etc., I hear you and agree with you. Think it's precisely because the full context is so important that we'll never get the magic of S1 back. Sure, maybe they can DRM the tower of nightmare or reclaiming LA, but I think a lot of the appeal of S1 seems to be in the fact that those changes were live for everyone, and story development updated the game world for everyone. No matter what, the instancing of S1 content is going to fail to recapture that magic.

and yet you have people (not all) with the proper hardware that can play gw2 almost as if it's running natively in linux using wine + dxvk and in some cases and hardware configurations (amd cpu+ amd gpu), on par or a faster than playing it on windows (that's a lot of overhead too, compared to say, just running d912pxy on windows) "upgrading the engine" doesn't just mean changing the graphics renderer to a different one and calling it a day, it also means making your game much more multi-threading friendly to make better utilization of modern CPUs. WoW did it, Path of Exile did it, and a korean mmorpg that's barely alive with it's population: Tree of Savior also did it. just to name a few examples, all of them use custom made engines not something ready-to-use like UE3/UE4 -- and for the record, WoW's engine is ancient too. it's just that it seems GW2/Arenanet doesn't even want to try. d912pxy and (linux)wine+dxvk has shown that with the right hardware, there's a lot of performance to be gained over the vanilla client we have now. performance gains also don't pertain to just huge increases in FPS, it can also be less FPS drops (higher floor) and more stable average FPS, less stuttering and no before someone else says it, even with an upgraded engine there's no reason to immediately cut-off people with older OS/hardware setups that can't utilize new tech. many games offer old/legacy api and client builds for people who can't use the new tech. (ex. WoW offering dx11 while also having dx12 in it's options) Not sure why you think I don't want an engine upgrade—that's actually something I've been talking about the game needing for years. The OP was specifically talking about upgrading the graphics only, though, which would be about the same amount of work for a fraction of the benefit. If you upgrade the whole engine, you can pull out a bunch of the spaghetti and make it more modular, dev-friendly, and future-proof it. If you just upgrade the graphics side of things, you're still beholden to an engine that's older than some people playing it and having to work within those confines. dx12py tells us otherwise. Yes, implementing something like dx12py wouldn't solve ALL the issues, maybe not even help at the most serious of situations, but it does indeed help with a lot others. So not implementing a solution that can help in a wide range of situations, because "it won't do much" for the situations where the main thread is the issue, is a bit odd.No doubt that the engine has issues, but see above: Instead of just doing one thing that not everyone will benefit from, overhaul the entire engine itself if it will be about the same amount of work. Everyone will benefit from streamlined processing that actually works on current tech but not everyone can even run DX12. And who's to say they couldn't update the DirectX at the same time (or make space for that update to be added easily in the future)? And I was just summing up what the dev said with "it won't do much", so if you think it's odd to say you're better off talking to them since they have hands-on experience with the engine.I think you're missing the point about the "same amount of work" bit there - OP is suggesting that ANet permanently and officially implement a proven 3rd-party solution. It already exists and works, so I find it hard to believe implementing d912pxy officially would take anywhere near the level of effort required to do an engine overhaul.

I was expecting this type of response. This is Living World story content I'm not trying to get a Legendary here. It's tiresome busy work for content that should be more casual and relaxing. Where's the fun in that?Think of the skyscale as a legendary mount.It pretty much is.I forget exactly where (and I'm not going to look it up at this particular moment), but ANet said exactly this. They referred to the skyscale specifically as a "prestige" mount on par with a legendary piece of equipment. Frankly, compared to assembling an actual piece of legendary gear, the skyscale collections are nowhere near as expensive and tedious. But more importantly, as others have mentioned, ANet isn't going to lock people out of content for not having the prestige mount. I (and many others) found the skyscale and beetle collections worth doing. You, @Drakortha.6974 (and also many others) don't - and that's fine! You can get around and do everything just fine without these extra mounts. What I don't agree with is your characterization of these collections as being as burdensome as legendary collections. I think that's objectively incorrect, based on currency cost, time, and mechanical difficulty of the tasks involved.

Lol I've never played WoW and never will, but I still watch Asmon. Why is this such a difficult concept for you to understand? The person who said that is actually being logically consistent: their position is that people unfamiliar with the game/spvp shouldn't give much stock to anyone's opinion other than their own, and should form that personal opinion on the basis of their own experience of the mode. You keep trying to make this about agreeing or disagreeing with your opinion on the state of the mode, which wasn't the point of that comment to begin with. Since BDO's been mentioned and I play that game as well, I can say that BDO is not directly p2w in the sense that you can buy direct upgrades to combat abilities, but you can pay your way past a ton of inconveniences involved with grinding out the in-game money needed to get upgrades. And unlike GW2, your gear and level matter a ton in BDO. So ultimately it's p2w, but you still need a significant amount of work, RNG, and knowledge of how the game works to actually take advantage of what your money bought you. Over time the game also hands out most of these conveniences in sufficient number that you can be mostly f2p and still have enough of the right resources to look and play a lot like a whale, at least for a few main characters that you play. You just have to make sure you're around to cash in on those handouts. As for combat balance, 1v1 in BDO basically devolves into 1 of 2 options: (1) whoever lands the first cc wins, as there are no stun breaks in that game, or (2) whoever is playing a class that is notoriously OP through exploiting bugs (blocks are supposed to work against every non-grappling attack, but some attacks straight up ignore them, and other blatant balance issues). Can't say anything about large-scale pvp in BDO as I haven't done it myself, but I hear it's like WvW in the sense that there are heavily favored classes due to group utility, and many others are just plain useless. To top it all off, BDO has no build diversity. The goal is to train up every single passive and active ability available to your class, since you have access to all of them at once. There really is no sense of counterplay in most small scale fights, there's pretty much no answer to getting ganked suddenly in the open world. The only way you survive is if the person trying to gank you is bad, or is below your level/gear and has no business picking a fight with you in the first place. While GW2 doesn't have those specific issues, I agree balance is still a joke in sPvP. Much of this has to do with the fact that the game forces us to pick and choose our passives and actives, so it's much easier for the devs to make nominally targeted changes that have unexpected consequences. I don't have much more to say that others haven't already said more intelligently, so I'll just leave it at that. I stopped playing ranked for mmr anywhere from 10 to 15 seasons ago, lost count. I came back to playing ranked just because it's still the fastest way for me to work up another weight of legendary armor, as I loathe WvW and don't feel like raiding for it in PvE. I'm stuck in gold 3 it seems, as I don't take any measures to queue at a more favorable time or otherwise preserve my rating. I'm certainly not having a lot of fun, but there's a good amount of gold to be had in farming the Byzantium chests, and of course reward tracks as well. I'm certain a significant portion of people putting in a lot of hours into ranked are in the same boat as I am.

I agree that raids inherently run counter to 'core design principles' of the game at large, particularly the "just show up to stuff that is happening" aspect of the game. Unfortunately for raiding and GW2, I think there is no smart way to bridge the gap. Raids will either have to be watered down so as to lose meaning as the highest tier of challenging pve encounter, or other no-barriers-to-entry encounters will have to get substantially more challenging. One might suggest, as you and others have, that doing the latter is feasible; just add Difficult Thing X to this encounter, and Slightly Demanding Thing Y to that encounter, and soon enough the game will have provided enough steadily ramped-up challenge so the typical level 80 has much better exposure to said challenges. I would counter that there is something especially regressive and entrenched about the GW2 playerbase. To this day, so many people cannot do HPs in HoT and PoF without a train. To this day, people are making threads about the expansion areas being too hard to enjoy. Power creep has advanced to a point where I can solo just about every explorable dungeon in reasonable time, and others can do CM fractals on their own as well. I'm not saying that the typical player needs to be able to reach that level of proficiency, but simply that a huge proportion of players are falling extremely short of their characters' potential despite having so many tools to do better. Therefore I do not think there is a way to insert meaningfully increased challenges across the board, given how poorly many players are content to play this game. I think most people will just stop playing things that kill them, rather than push themselves to improve. There are, of course, players that will push themselves to improve, but they're also the ones who can already get into raiding via the many resources currently available. The thing is, GW2 has been designed to be very forgiving to that kind of player, and I happen to think that's what makes GW2 unique and worthwhile among its competitors. GW2 has never been about needing to do The Right Thing at The Right Time, but for any content to be meaningfully more difficult, it can't be as non-demanding as the core game here is. So either ANet (1) betrays the fundamental design of the game by adding in stuff that you can't just walk into unprepared and unskilled, or (2) betrays the fundamental design of raids by making them less than the promised pinnacle of pve challenge they were meant to be. I can really see why ANet has chosen to not really engage with raids at all these days, given those options.

Longbow ranger is also great for open world ranged, and barrage in particular can easily get you 20-30k dps on packs of mobs. To get the full effect of barrage on open world mobs when you're alone, it takes a bit of practice in terms of placing the aoe itself, as well as pushing back the leading mob with point-blank shot back into the circle. Yes, longbow for rangers is primarily single target (and does that quite well), but knowing how mob movement and terrain works can let you use barrage for excellent lonbow aoe in open world pve.

This is an important sentiment, I agree. More eyeballs is better, and getting more of those on GW2 always increases the chances of snagging a new player. Twitch can definitely help with that. What I hate to see though, is Twitch being thrown around as some magic solution. It isn't, and if incorporating Twitch more centrally into a marketing strategy for ANet requires more effort than the team can spare, I'd say it's a dumb idea to pursue.

I wish we had some numbers on how many people, if any, Summit's week-long stint in GW2 brought in. I have a hard time believing that anyone who joined thanks to seeing him play actually stuck around, but that's just speculation on my part - as is any guess that he brought in anything approaching an appreciable number of new players. As for twitch drops, I also play BDO and will agree that they work for that game. I find the whole thing to be a massive annoyance though, and I it essentially boils down to bribing players to "watch" (i.e. leave running but tab out of) uninteresting content.

I have some pie-in-the-sky impractical ones, centered on making new mastery/trait lines centered on the 3 Orders and the Pact. However, it would be nigh impossible to make them properly behave like the other mastery lines (which can benefit all your characters regardless of where they are in terms of story choices and completion), and as such I don't think it really has a place here. The nice thing about housing is it can do several things at once. And if done right, there doesn't have to be a particularly competitive element to it, while still being social if people can show up to yours. BDO, a notoriously competitive-minded game (people and guilds literally pvp each other to occupy pve grinding spots) has physical houses in the open world cities that transform into personal instances the moment you enter the door. As you enter, you can choose to visit a friend's instance, or a public instance of sufficient rank - all with no loading screen. Obviously GW2's instancing doesn't work as seamlessly, and BDO found a way to make it competitive anyways (to access certain completely unnecessary extras in a city, you have to have the most decoration points of your housing plot in that city). SWTOR - which is hardly a shining example in any modern mmo in terms of system design - probably has the closest thing to what we might expect out of GW2 housing. That game's housing is fully instanced, and you can let friends visit your house(s) by giving them keys to enter as well as making it publicly accessible. But none of that really matters as much as what the overall housing system can do for the game, and admittedly in this regard I'm not confident it's going to be awesome as I'd like. We already have a wide variety of places that can serve as safe bases for players, and finally with Eye of the North we (almost) have a full-service equivalent to places like Mistlock and Armistice Bastion for people who don't want to buy a pass, missing only stuff like the mystic forge. As for RP "my character actually lives somewhere in this world" stuff, I think the devs have always considered the home instance to be a hand-wavy version of that, which has resource functionality to boot. Properly done housing would just combine those services and RP elements in one place, but frankly I'm not sure it would be worth the development effort, as much as I'd like to see it happen.

I think for spvp it is too late for that. Unless they rework the system from the ground up, the expansion would not really matter. And yes we are on our way to 2 amulet. Agreed. EoD cannot fundamentally change anything, that ship has sailed. ANet would have to be considering a serious rethinking of how traits and other basic game-wide functions work in spvp, and there's pretty much a 0% chance that will come in an xpac that they themselves admitted is coming in a bit of a rush. As for amulets, as sad as I am to say it, I think we really are on the path to 2 amulets. With their prevailing 'balance' philosophy, I can see amulets being removed steadily over time, with no new replacements.

I don't even like DRMs, but I like your ideas and I'd actually spend more time in them if these were applied. While we're on the topic of Caledon - not only are the solo-wipe mechanics pretty steep, the narrow bridge is beset with little cracks that serve as pathing speedbumps. Given that the boss can consistently turn off the bonfires and area chill you, the addition of the bridge cracks stopping you short and requiring a jump IMO contributes to the greater challenge in getting that one on a timer when you're alone or undersized. However, rather than take away any of the particular challenges or annoyances, I think @Funky.4861 has the right idea - just scale them back slightly so it's not a wipe each time they compound.