What are some of the things you believe GW2 DIDN'T do right/well?

[MithranArkanere.8957]

Consitency.For example, in several locations you have buckets to be used for different tasks like watering plants, filling other containers or putting out fires, in each one the buckets work in a different way :

• In some the buckets have unlimited uses.
• In some they are one time use.
• In some they have a number of uses.
• In some they are empty and have to be filled.
• In some they start full.
• In some they disappear after use.
• In some they are emptied when used.

Instead keeping similar mechanics working the same so players can get acquainted to how things are supposed to work, sometimes it feels as if we had several different games with separate unique mechanics stitched together. It's as if nowhere was keeping track of things and the left hand didn't know what the right hand is doing.

Retroactivity.Although they gone back to improve old content in a few occasions, it's nowhere near as often as it should happen. Take, for example, the new improved story instances with more checkpoints and dynamic edges. They would vastly improve the experience in early instances, starting with personal story, but there's no sign such an update will ever happen.
The missing Season 1 is the most egregious representative of this issue.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

@Knighthonor.4061 said:

@"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said:

4: I always thought that Anet should be more liberal with the designs of PVP and WvW maps. When E-sports was on the table, I could understand an extremely heavy emphasis on balance. But, when played just for fun, there are a lot of ideas you can throw out there. Kind of like how Smash Bros. has all sorts of different stages with layouts and items.

I am confused about what you mean here. I remember Anet getting lots of praise for going full esport with SPvP. I personally didnt like the idea and remember getting slammed for it. But what sort of design did you have in mind? Give me an example please.

What I mean is that Anet should make kinds of maps. The first kind is meant to be extremely balanced and competitive. The second kind is meant to be fun and interesting. For... the entirety of GW2's life, all PVP maps have been designed to be extremely competitive and balance. This is part of the reason why we have so few of these PVP maps. We get maybe one every two years or so, when really we should be getting one with every living world update.

As for ideas for non-competitive maps, I have a few. There's always the basic corridor, which tests the ability of a team to push forward as a group through fighting in a limitless space. There's the basic flatlands for the "no items, fox only, final destination" types. You could have a 3 way conquest map that's being besieged by a dragon champion who will hop from key point to key point, using devastating dragon breath attacks to make certain areas extremely dangerous, and you can drive the dragon to different parts of the map by doing enough damage. You could have a map where the goal is to gather energy orbs to power up siege engines or golems to fight the other side. You can have a volcano map that has lava levels that rise and fall, revealing and cutting off certain parts of the map, and it erupts causing rocks to fall everywhere. Or a map with low gravity and a special action key with a bunch of floating rocks, kind of like the Shattered Observatory fractal.

You know... zany stuff. Admittedly, I don't know if this will be a good money investment, since there's little monetary gain to PVP at the moment. Also, there's a lot of people who are hardcore "no items, fox only, final destination" players who think anything that isn't a flat and even ring is just annoying. I still remember the animosity from Skyhammer's initial release. But, I always thought that the game could do with a lot more party-style maps. There's a lot of good movement tech in the game, and it can be really well explored. I actually like Skyhammer.

[EthanLightheart.9168]

Ignoring the forumfanbase COMPLETELY in every aspect, almost no activities in forums in general and the very slow pace it recently has.

[bluberblasen.9684]

sorry for my bad english !

• bad balance ( best balance was january - march 2015 before the condition patch in march '15 )
• guild hall Arena not using different balance ( cannot switch between pve / WvW / pvp setting )
• no GvGs -_- . . .
• WvW could be the best game mode in the modern MMOs.. with the 80 v 80 v 80 but they gave up or don't care about. They NEVER listen to the core community. Bad starter design ( beginners are weak because no points for WvW skills and veteran players sitting on 5000 skill points++ -_- )
• hackers / cheaters / exploiters / bug users in pvp / WvW NEVER got banned. You can report them 100000 times and they are still in this game.
• Minimap: Iam one of the 1% which using the rotation Minimap.. Give me a Compass with N/E/S/W. ITS DAMN hard to see the right direction with the rotation map.

[trev.1045]

The pricing structure for new players

After spending 35 quid on the expansions i hit 80 in 3 weeks and then have another 17 to spend for living world 2.

In another few weeks i imagine ill want lw3... although ill have some gems so it will be 8.50

That means a cost of 60 quid to access content... all within a month or two.

Wow is currently 26.99 to buy all content although of course there is a sub.

It feels new players are being milked, and i have seen many potential new players annoyed at this

Still like the game though

[MoriMoriMori.5349]

@"archdemonXIII.7063" said:

2. Making things in gem store available for a limited time. for the first 3 years I played, I was working on a biweekly pay. To make matters worse, more often than not, things would go on sale for a week that was between pay periods, so I just didn't bother.I believe it's the main point, and it works as intended / is a good thing. Otherwise everybody would be able to buy any rare skin, and it would result in this skin spammed - and this would decrease its attractiveness as a premium thing over time (I mean, what the point of paying for something when everybody wearing it, you won't feel a unique snowflake this way :D). To combat it they would need to produce times and times more new premium skins which feel unique, and that's probably unrealistic expectation. So they decide to timegate them like this.

[MoriMoriMori.5349]

@BlueJin.4127 , totally agreed about effects spam issues. What you show on your screenshots is completely atrocious. I despise this flashy approach modern games take in this department. There should be at least graphic options to reduce this flashiness without making the rest of visuals worse.

[Naxos.2503]

-Prohibitively costly guild hall upgrades for very little utility, would be one of my biggest gripe with the game currently. I lead a small guild, and want to keep it small to avoid the obligatory drama ensuing when people of differing opinions and thought process meet. But the guild hall upgrades are tailored toward mass gathering. Since gathering is limited per day (some crafting are even more artificially gated by day = Ascended mats), the process of upgrading our guild hall has been grueling. The fact that we cannot even upgrade the workshop to include profession crafting station to this day still strikes me as incredible.

-Little Reason to replay Living Story episodes or their maps. This has unfortunately been extended to Path of Fire maps. For a Reason or another, Metas dont attract other players because they're unrewarding for the time they take to complete.

-Raids unbalance. The challenge from raids comes from having specific builds and specific gears, rather than actual skillful play : The right skill at the right time in the right position : That is how it should be. Instead, most players trivialize raids by skipping most of the hard parts through sheer damage or overhealing. It comes from a bad balance overall, as a miss incurs a full wipe, while skipping 70% of the encounter is considered a success. Those are two extremes, with no middle ground.

-There is no logical, loreful Reason to keep living story 1 unaccessible. We could already travel to past instances (Old lions arch) during some parts of the main storyline. We can repeat all the other storylines, but cannot repeat that specific one storyline. Unfortunately, this is a storyline that establishes how many events occurs around the world and how the maps are designed. There is otherwise no sense as to why there are Toxic towers scattered in Tyria, or why Kessex Hills is in the shape it's in. That's a major storytelling flaw. At the very least, a NPC could send us in an instance of the old map, with the previous content.

-Town clothing is going against it's original idea. The fact they're so rare and expensive runs counter to what they're meant to do : be casual outfits to relax in in cities and such. Few people had access to the skins, and so few people have them as is. Some of the best looks can be crafted using parts of it as armor skins, exclusive only to perhaps 1% of the playerbase. Adding them as outfit was a good idea, tying them to a sizeable amount of Currency only accessible from Black Lion Chests was not. Outfit versions of town clothing should be cheap, and armor type skin versions retain a high price, at the very least.

-Racial Skill obsolesence. In the word of a retired dev : "It's sad to see so many play humans only, when some of the most interesting things happens across the other races" (more or less), I find this Apply to racial skills as well, some of them are interesting, and could be made to play really strongly with specific classes, if only they were up to snuff compared to normal utility skills. Variety is greatly appreciated by everyone, and leaving those racial skills unexploited is a Strange decision. Classes themselves arent balanced, and never will be. Including racial skills in balance updates wont cost you that much time, and will certainly renew a Lot of interest in them from players of All game modes : PvP, WvW, and PvE.

For what it's Worth, I consider Guild wars 2 one of the shiniest pearl in all MMos, and one of the best video games to date, and I've seen quite a few. It's well and truly unique, and should continue to be. Do not get tempted by other companies into turning this gem into another "regular" MMo. The devs who made this game made it with heart, and that's what gives this game it's uniqueness. Streamlining it robs it of it's Identity.

[Sodeni.6041]

Not enough and good ingame tutorials, Living story season 1 not playable anymore and not revamping/updating old content and instead almost exclusively making new content.

[beeftotem.4137]

As a new player who bought both expansions, the biggest turn off to guildwars 2 for me would be how much money I will have to spend to realistically keep playing.

I have only been playing a few weeks but already I'm seeing some issues that i am going to HAVE to spend money on to fix.

Bag space, shared slots, character slots, bank space, crafting material stack size.

If i remember right for each slot it's ten bucks so thats 50 additional bucks just to get one new slot of each.

Just to be able to have one of each class is 40 bucks. 70 bucks to hold 2000 crafting materials.

I dont know what the max is for bank slots, shared stash, or bag space but from what I've seen all these things become an issue later on when you have played for a while.

I understand why they have a store, and I understand that they need to make money but with how limited this makes just playing the game on its own I could see why new players would have issues starting it.

[Samuel.4812]

It would be so simple to add amalgamated gemstones or even funerary incense to pof map metas but they didn't. And no one does the metas or cares about pof since they are so unrewarding):

It's absolutely silly that everyone does old hot metas to get gemstones for gen 2 weapons rather than playing the new expansion.

Oh. And legendary collections are super fun (not kidding). I'm sad most of the gen 2 are just wood/mithril buyouts

[zityz.6089]

For a lot of stuff I do enjoy about the game . There are a few things that do bug me.

1. Abandonment issues:This includes. Tengu/ Home starting area not being finished after launch.Poly mock, The other racial mini games. ( I think the only thing we got was keg brawl) Storylines (Remember that Malyck guy and his "pale tree"? neither does the writing team), SAB.Dungeons- They could have at least added 1 new dungeon to each Xpac, with corresponding armour/weapons from those as well. Could have also improved dungeons.Note I'm glad they did add fractals and raids, but the dungeons also gave more rich backstory

2. Skills: One of the greatest things about GW1 was the skills. The skills in this game feel like all flash-no functions. Vast majority of the elite skills are a joke, the fact that skillswere not separated by Game mode for damage modifiers is odd. The fact that with weapon place holder skills, they have not bothered to add more of them.Skills being tied to elite specs- I get the idea behind it, but if they're tied behind 1 trait, it makes it more limited as you have to pick one or the other.Downed skills - Some of these are really good(necro,guardian) , some of them are an absolute jokes how and only semi function for a brief moment ( mes skill 2 I'm looking at you) half the time now.

3. Crafting- feels tedious and grindish. I slogged through my main to get the tailoring to be able to craft my ascended gear, will not ever do that again.some of the crafting i think is completely useless now, as there are better and faster ways to get the things you want. I feel like while the game improved in a lot of aspects, crafting did not follow.

4. GUILD WARS!!!How do you name a sequel of a game that is not even based off of the core name itself. Zero GvG , Zero HoH, and even PVE wise, it doesn't fit cause all the damn races are buddy buddy chums! You could state that its now tied to WvWvW, but even then that makes no sense as these are being fought in the mists and have no real impact on the world much anymore.

That's mainly it. Everything else I enjoy. I would have added the story on here, but overall they have been much better with it.

[Katastroff.1045]

The way the warclaw was implimented. To throw the community an half finished mount just to take away the focus from recent events was really not a good move. Some achievements cant be completed, some exploits are abused. I would've rather wait a few weeks more to obtain it then to have a broken mount.

On the good side, seems like they are doing something about it.

[Hyper Cutter.9376]

@Naxos.2503 said:-There is no logical, loreful Reason to keep living story 1 unaccessible.Yes, there is. It would take as much effort to do that as it would be to make actual new content, as directly stated by one of the devs in the past, and they prefer to do the latter.

(also season 1 was god-awful and I don't know where all this nostalgia is coming from)

[mixxed.5862]

There's only little challenging group content. While raids and fractals are fun, they're also a bit gimmicky and one new raid wing a year just isn't cutting it for anyone. Then there is an entire open world filled with content of trivial difficulty. It's tuned so you can play it solo in a laid-back manner and that's alright but also pretty boring in the long run. There'd be so much potential in a challenging, instanced version of it for guilds/groups - a hard mode like in the original Guild Wars. Ideally it'd be balanced for groups of 5 including a healer and even so all the events should be plenty challenging...

Guild Wars was just such a good, social game designed to be played as a team! With Guild Wars 2 it seems like they've mostly buried that concept and made it a single player focused game that allows you to hit the same mob as a friend on occasion.

Back to the roots! :o

[Nemo.8759]

Raids, play experience is very badSee how many people are still here play w6

[TexZero.7910]

@Hyper Cutter.9376 said:(also season 1 was god-awful and I don't know where all this nostalgia is coming from)

I don't think it's nostalgia, it completionism.People who missed it have this void that fails to explain the group you now call friends and travel with.

Though you are correct S1 was about as fun as watching paint dry.

[Tiviana.2650]

@"BlueJin.4127" said:AbandonNet’s release and forget tendency, not addressing major issues brought up by a lot of players... repeatedly.

1) Too many unhealthily bright camera flashes. They hurt my eyes from my own skills (I can't even play Holosmith), other players' skills, enemy skills, gathering Volatile Magic, gathering tools, story, etc.

2) Too much visual clutter when doing large group events resulting in unengaging, boring, and mindless skill spam-fest since the players can't see what the enemy is doing, or you know... even see the enemy. Too many skill effects, names of other players/minions in squad obstructing view, the enemy target nameplate at the top center that can't be moved and obstructs large enemies so players don't even know what they’re targeting, etc.

3) Ridiculous aggro range of PoF enemies (900 in PoF compared to 600 everywhere else). This keeps me out of PoF except when I have to. I hate PoF zones with a passion because of this.

4) No build templates, wardrobe templates, or mount templates.

If I use a weird analogy, it's like a very talented chef made a very delicious steak. Then, for some reason, the chef decided to pour sugar on the steak because, you know, sugar tastes good. And when people say the steak seems great, but they can't really taste it since the sugar is ruining it, AbandonNet… er, I mean, the chef just shrugs that it's annoying to fix it and has started cooking something else.

With postprocessing on...

Because of the targe nameplate obstructing my view, I didn’t know the enemy in front of me was NOT what I had targeted.

OMG THIS!! a 1000 times this! They really need a way to let players adjust this, so annoying i almost quit. Im blind!!

[Tanner Blackfeather.6509]

@beeftotem.4137 said:As a new player who bought both expansions, the biggest turn off to guildwars 2 for me would be how much money I will have to spend to realistically keep playing.

I have only been playing a few weeks but already I'm seeing some issues that i am going to HAVE to spend money on to fix.

Bag space, shared slots, character slots, bank space, crafting material stack size.

If i remember right for each slot it's ten bucks so thats 50 additional bucks just to get one new slot of each.

Just to be able to have one of each class is 40 bucks. 70 bucks to hold 2000 crafting materials.

I dont know what the max is for bank slots, shared stash, or bag space but from what I've seen all these things become an issue later on when you have played for a while.

I understand why they have a store, and I understand that they need to make money but with how limited this makes just playing the game on its own I could see why new players would have issues starting it.

Never plan your purchases based on other peoples' experience, plan them based on your. Don't buy QoL stuff before you feel an actual want for it. There's also a huge difference between buying some increase (a single expander, 1 or 2 bank panes, a few bag slots) and maxing out. The game never, ever, pushes you to hold on to 2000 at once of really an material, and definitely not of several different ones! That's only a convenience for hoarding.

I'm an avid gatherer and have only bought a single Storage Expander (Material stack increase). I've bought a single extra bag slot for less than half of my 9 characters. I have maxed out Shared Slots, but over time and only as a convenience.

tl;dr: None of those things are anywhere near as necessary as some parts of the community makes them out to be, especially not maxing them out!

To keep to the thread's topic though - I do wish Bag Slots were account wide rather than per character!

[zealex.9410]

The mmo part, as well as going with wvw instead of just having small scale pvp and large® scale pvp through gvg.

Also not going for a new engine.

[Valeryk.3547]

I got a question for long standing players : seeing as characters don't have an energy bar for the abilities my worry is that you just end up virtually spamming most abilities off cd without any consideration or limitation I've been playing for a few h and at one point just set my abilities to autocast and the character was 100% effective just mashing out whatever comes off cd. This kinda put me off since I'm used to TBC wow private servers and ESO where resorse management is key so I was wondering if this changes in high levels ?

[mixxed.5862]

@Valeryk.3547 said:I got a question for long standing players : seeing as characters don't have an energy bar for the abilities my worry is that you just end up virtually spamming most abilities off cd without any consideration or limitation I've been playing for a few h and at one point just set my abilities to autocast and the character was 100% effective just mashing out whatever comes off cd. This kinda put me off since I'm used to TBC wow private servers and ESO where resorse management is key so I was wondering if this changes in high levels ?

In open world it changes a little bit in the expansions, in a few areas. The thing is in order to deal optimal damage you'll just want to use your best DPS abilities in a rotation, or really just in any way you like because the game is mostly very easy. The gameplay is only exciting when you're required to alternate between your offensive and defensive moves. And there is little PvE content that requires you to use your skills smartly, where you can't just spam everything off-cooldown.If you're looking for a challenge and a good combat experience I'd recommend giving PvP a try! That or just play naked through HoT...

Edit: When the game provides a challenge (HoT hero points, PoF bounties) combat is really fun and the lack of resource management makes for a different experience but isn't an issue at all.

[Crise.9401]

Not sure if this will make much sense to other people, but one thing in particular GW2 didn't do well was being an RPG.

Because it gives you everything there is little to no impact on character development choices (I am not talking about story here, but game systems... story has a similar issue but that is out of necessity as the vanilla personal story proves). Another way to put it is that the leveling is too easy (since in an MMO you have to reach a common ground for balance reasons at some point).

Also, most post launch content updates in terms of story and narrative do have RPG like stories (particularly the early stuff, like LA's destruction even if I hate the lobster, but again that changed out of necessity). But the game systems don't have very many RPG like qualities. The RPG in MMORPG usually does have to make some concessions for the sake of the MMO but for some reason in terms of the vanilla game it felt needlessly shallow in my humble opinion, particularly during the leveling experience which is the only time in an MMO the RPG side can truly shine on an individual level as in end game everything normalizes.

[SexyMofo.8923]

Just about everything.

[Seraphina.6859]

@Yannir.4132 said:Not having traditional quests.It was a breath of fresh air at first not having these but over time I've come to the conclusion that ANet is missing a lot of environmental storytelling, side stories and worldbuilding by not having the option of doing quests. As a result, the world sometimes feels empty, lacks context and every map that looks alike feels alike. Especially in the core game. For example, Iron Marches feels the same as every zone it connects to.What's worst, I think having a traditional questing system would compliment hearts and achievements really well. There would be no need for fetch quests or other dumb things like that are designed to be time sinks for players.

I second this. Personally, I really liked the quests in ESO, Anet should try something similar in GW2 as well. They could also introduce recurring characters through quests who remember you and what you did.Would be great to have changing weather effects and a better day/night cycle too.