Official Suggestions Thread - March BWE

[WolfpackEE]

- Provide a method for messaging to an offline player. Such as mail in WoW

- When a player is selected, provide a drop menu somewhere with options such as Trade, Whisper, Follow, Invite (instead of having the Trade button in one place, Invite button in another)

- Instead of using different shades of green for NPCs and players in both names over a characters head, and in the chat window, use more distintive colors. NPCs are yellow, players are green, Guild chat is blue, whispers are purple, etc.

- If a team wipes in a mission, let that same team go back into the mission and pick up where they left off (meaning don't respawn all the mobs). If this game is about little downtime and not requiring a lot of grinding, then not having to rekill everything you just cleared would be nice.

[Aria]

This is somewhat of a silly suggestion -- nothing serious

But I would love to have a /panic emote.

I know Scaper wants a /hug emote too.. With /hug, /panic would definitely come in handy..

[Greentongue]

Suggestion 1:
Use Charm Animal as an AI toggle. Initially the pet is Defensive.
Recasting Charm Animal on an existing pet will switch its AI to Offensive mode, or back to Defensive if already in Offensive.
Defense = Attack opponent that attacks master.
Offense = Attack opponent that master attacks.

Suggestion 2:
Allow Alliances. Have a chat channel that combines guild chat of another guild with that of your own.
This allows several small guilds to work together when the number of people online is not enough for a single guild to support an activity.
It also allows the combined guilds so that the 100 member limit is not such an issue. The "training sub-guild", the "pharming sub-guild", and the "PvP sub-guild" can all work together smoothly. They will exist, this would just make them fit "in game" better.

[=WM= Azrael]

Just A few the Widowmakers compilied...

-We still would very much like to name out pets. We mostly want this because when you have a party of 4 rangers, with 4 warthogs, it makes it difficult to differentiate whos is whos.

-Nice job in the new guild construction- KEEP THIS!

-Having an auction area to either A) sell items here only or B) leave the item and come back for either the item or the gold i.e. theres an auctioneer in old ascalon. you leave a hammer there with a minimum bid of 20 gp and say 24 hours. You come back in 25 hours and pick up your 50 gold as the highest bid in that 24 hour span was another character who paid the auctioneer 60 gold and walked away with a hammer, the auctioneer took his cut, and the player got 1.5 times more then he expected. Also, no one has to see the players repeating the same crap over and over in town.

-have an area where rare wapons may be bought at a gamble, somewhat like Diablo2.

-Something must be done about the lag. Friday and Saturday through the afternoon were pretty bad, whereas saturday evening up until Gwen nuking the towns was really good. I'd hate to think someone who preordered the game came on friday and thought thats normal and left for good.

[Pantaloon]

Shield of Deflection needs a longer recharge time.

You might want to also consider an draw option for guild battles. I was in one for 2 hours this weekend. I wouldn't recommend that it be a draw after a certain amount of time, rather there would be an option to declare it a draw which both teams would have to check.

I would like to see a button that would open all your bags and place them to the right of your character screen instead of underneath. I always have to open them 1 by 1 and then move them over so that I can access them all and read the chat log.

Create a town or outpost specially for trading so the chat doesn't get filled up with people trying to trade, or make some type of auction house where you can leave your items and you get to put a price on them (Gold, crafting materials or other). Then these items can be sorted into categories to make them easier to view. The number of items a person can leave would then be limited so that it would not be overflowed with people trying to trade anything they don't use.

More statistics for character. I would like to see characters have records for gladiators area and guild battles. It would also be nice to have a top 100 or 1000 ranking for fame.

Things to do in the guild hall while you are waiting for people. Sometimes you are just sitting there waiting for upwards of 30 minutes. You could add some mini games to play like poker or other card games which you could gamble your money or play for fun against other guild members.

I know you guys are working on a guild storage system. I feel this is one of the most important things and should be done before other suggestions such as minor tweaks to the inventory system.

[Losandros]

Suggestion on the difficulty of the game.

Please dont reduce the game difficulty (mission-wise), if ArenaNet is looking for a succesful long term game the most crucial thing to do is keep it difficult and challenging. I actually think it could be made harder. Think about it, we've only played small "sessions" of 3 days at a time and already its obvious there are some skilled players who can complete the missions with relative ease. Imagine after launch, within 2 weeks people will be developing rush strategies and stuff like that.

I say that the devs should ignore all the complaints about it being too difficult, (aside from the tutorial like Pre-Seared Ascalon) because reducing the difficulty ultimately will result in the missions being boring rather than intense and fun.

And it has been said elsewhere in this thread but I really think that there should be a section displaying your total armor rating and any other modifiers such as 10% physical damage reduction or health degen due to items etc. This also is important especially in a game with crafting heavy items, and will help slightly in the formulation of strategies and deciding what to equip your character with. PLEASE implement this.

[Perishiko ReLLiK]

Originally Posted by Draken

Dont allow Green as a team color in tombs or allow us to change color options so that all enemies are one color and friendlies are another. My eyes aren't good enough to see the differing shades of green but alteast im not color blind .

Lol, i totaly agree with that, had that sort of problem a few times.

[Double Wolf]

First of all, I would like to suggest that there be a lot more hair styles and faces for the character creations. I often see several, characters that look Identical to mine. I know that there has to be repeats in a game as big as this, but all efforts should be made to minimize that.Maybe adding the option of making your character fat or skinny would increase the options greatly.
Tatoos,would also be good, custom made tatoos that you can create yourself. I think the addition of all these would Improve the Character Diversity greatly.

Another Suggestion is that there could be an option to have special custom "Civilian" clothes while youre in town. Because you dont really need your armor in town. There should be shops and tailors where you can buy these civilian clothes from or custom fabricate them.


One thing that i found hard to do was to buy or sell items to or from other players. I think there should be a system or Shop where you can drop your items off, set the min. price you would like for it, and then leave. Then other players that are looking to buy would go to this shop and look for items (categorized by type). The player that leaves items can then return at a later time and collect the money from their item sold. This would greatly reduce the need to go wandering around trying to look for someone selling an item you want or Asking endlessy if someone wants to buy something. (I found myself doing that alot). Basically it would be like a Swapmeet/bank. A safe box/storage box wouldnt hurt either.

[Chev of Hardass]

Ok, here we go,
Some of this stuff has been said but I will rehash it till it happens or I get booted.

A) Pets
1) The Pet AI is terrible, especially for the Monk Primaries. While you heal your group the pets hang around and do nothing. I think the Mo/R combo was good while soloing, but due to this problem the pet turned into nothing but a way to increase your death penalty.
2) The death penalty for pets was too large. How about having the death penalty on the pet, not the character “controlling” (see above) the pet.
3) Why do I have to look at four Malandru’s Stalkers to try to guess which one is mine?
4) Once I left pre-seared Ascalon I had no idea how to loose my cat and get another animal type also, if I do that, I really don’t want to loose a level 15 cat to get a level 1 wolf only to find out I can’t charm the wolf and I have to go get another level 1 cat.
5) Why does resurrection not work on the pets? If I have resurrection I should be able to resurrect, I do not want some low level spell there only to resurrect my pet since Heal Other is far better at healing and resurrection is better at resurrecting. If this was changed anyone could resurrect a party members pet to aid in survival. Why not?

B) Monks
1) Spells. Ok, why does a warrior have as many places for spells as a monk? That is plain dumb. Let’s go back to fantasy 101 and look. We will see that the warrior relies on his ability to beat on his opponent and the Monk uses knowledge.
2) The Mend and Live Vicariously enchantments did not work at all. My suspensions were confirmed after I watched them take up valuable space on my skill line (see B.1.). P.S. these enchantments may be too powerful if they did work, in all honesty, but I do like the idea. Perhaps I was using them wrong, but in that case there needs to be better direction.
3) Why can I not carry two foci, or attribute helpers. The wand did almost no damage and just took space. I would rather just run around casting spells that do damage of 30-50 than wasting space with a wand doing 5-7 damage.

C) General
1) Chat. Do something. I do not want to know every time some noob starts dancing while I am trying to find some cloth.
2) Trade. There needs to be a channel of some sort. What is in place (read: NOTHING) doesn’t work.
2.1) If there were some sort of swap meet, inflation would drop drastically, and I think that was one of the goals, right?
3) Quests need some guidance and there needs to be a drop, or even better, hide option.
4) Names. There should be a way to change your name. Chev’s Trophy Winch is now a lot more fun to play than Chev of Hardass and I would like to change the names around to Chev’s Bread Winner and Chev the Gigolo or something like that without having to grind through all the missions just to change a name. Furthermore, the friends portion should be linked to the account so there would be less confusion when this sort of thing happens.
5) Henchman. Either delete them or make them somewhat useable.
6) Party travel. Why can’t this happen vs. trying to figure out what district everyone ends up in and having to regroup.
7) Crafting. I like this, but why do I get to collect all sorts of crap that I cannot use. Spread out the use so that I can use some of everything I find. This would make it much more worth it to explore for every type of item worth my time vs. grinding for and hour looking for forty of one thing.
8) Inventory stacking. Like the suggestion earlier stated the salvage kits should be stackable, but more importantly so should everything else. I had several cases where iron, hides, and cloth all would not stack. This is a bug I know but, here it is anyway.
9) Inventory. There should be no Bank. If you do not have to make tough decisions about what to keep and what not to keep then there is one less interesting part of the game. Anyone with two bags, a belt pouch, and a backpack can store all the rare items they could every want and keep their supply of junk to salvage as well. If there is too much of a problem then the party can always stop to salvage items. I use one bag since I am capable of salvaging items while I follow my teammates with auto follow
(for those that refuse to listen this is: target, spacebar).
10) Rare item whoops. This seems simple enough that it may just work and avoid loosing the one cool weapon that you find in the pile of crap weapons.
11) Mission-difficulty. Either leave it hard, or make it harder. Reward those that can work together as a team even if they only just met in town. This game is all about Guilds/Teams right?
12) Finally. There needs to be something done about the time it takes some players to connect to the game. If this game is going to be advertised as playable on dial-up do not make those of use that have broadband suffer while we wait for those that are on slow connections to join us.

Thank you for your time. I am an instant fan of this game since the Feb BWE. I will continue to spread the good word about it, but I would really like to see some of these things come together.

[Dragonne]

Leading from a conversation on another forum...

IN RELEASE please have a available a way to create a guild that is not dependent on PvP in any way. Don't make PvE players have to wait for players in tombs to make their guilds THEN sell sigils to the sigil trader, or more than likely have to buy directly from those guilds (who obviously don't need the sigil) for whatever price those guilds want to charge. It would be a tremendous disservice to all of the non-PvP groups, and even those groups that want to wait until later on to PvP. I don't want it to be easy, but a group shouldn't have to rely on others (and suffer under their greed) to get something so intrinsic to the game.

Forcing PvE players to play PvP is one thing (Academy)... forcing them to have to win to make their guild? Completely unacceptable.

Other random suggestions:

1) To address the AFK issue:
Currently /sit and /afk are the exact same animation/emote. Add something to the /afk to show the player is in fact not just sitting down for a moment while waiting for something in-game (lots of people tend to sit down in the outposts while their party gets themselves together before entering the mission). Maybe lower their head from the /sit emote and have "ZzZzZzZ..." pop up above their head, not in normal text though, do it as part of the model so it blends into the scene and doesn't stick out like the gray background text from NPCs does.

2) Add player merchant capabilities (not what you think):
A few things would be nice regardless of having trading channels and consignment shops. I, like many players, are personable in our sales. We enjoy personally merchanting our wares, and the following suggestion set would not only make it easier for others to locate player merchants, it would also add a bit of "random color" to the common areas (in the long run, the dynamic visual nature of this makes less work for the devs as they won't have to go nuts to placate the 'it always looks the same!' complainers, heh). An easy way to make this easier using existing code functions is to add a few emotes:

a) /merchant - this would have your character sit down indian-style (or some other unique position that is the same for all professions) as an easily recognizable position for someone who is being a merchant at the time. Once in that state, lock the player into position until they type /merchant again (toggle mode). An accidental click that moves you and "closes your shop" would be quite annoying. Automatically defaulting that player's chat to the trading channel would be cool also. Creating and placing a specific type of hat on a player in merchant mode, or putting a nice rug under the player (lay out the player's guild cape under them if they have one or use a default rug if not would ROCK), or any other kind of accessory to make them more easily identifiable would be great as well.
b) /brb - hang a sign around the characters neck or something that says they aren't there at the moment. This should only work in /merchant mode. Using /afk in /merchant mode could do this as well, but leave the player in merchant mode and don't switch them to the typical /afk mode. Just adjust the /merchant mode position to reflect this status.
c) This is for the entire game actually, when someone is in a trade screen with another player, those not in the trade should be able to see that they are busy. I've been trading with one person and have had other people trying to trade with me at the same time, all the while complaining that it's not working. Anything would work, but a lot of people don't like the icon over the head deal as it messes with the feel of the game. Even a little popup notice: "That player is currently trading with another player." would suffice.

3) I'm going to have to restate and agree with the suggestions about player name color alterations when in towns. Blue for guild members (guild chat is blue, natural choice), green for party members. Party should override guild (a guild member on your team would be green).

That's all ATM, mybe more later.

[RedRabbit]

The warrior profession quests are ridiculously difficult with the low-damage weapons and useless skills that are provided. Additionally, you start off with a hammer and then you get only sword-type skills (I’m talking about killing the 6 things in green valley). I think there should be an option that would give skills depending on what you use / want to use, ie. axe, hammer, sword.

I also think that there should be quests where you get slightly better weapons and not just experience points, especially for warrior and ranger professions, though the others need them too. Perhaps even quests where you get gold as a reward.

Again, I strongly suggest that some types of mission checkpoints are implemented. Missions are ridiculously long. While this is no problem for the hardcore gamer, casual players will suffer. Also the difficulty for some of them should be reconsidered.

The pathing of NPCs also needs to be fine tuned. I'm mainly talking about Rurik here. It seems like the pathing has gotten worse for each event. He either stays behind or runs ahead and gets himself killed. Nothing more frustrating than failing a mission after hours of playing because some idiot NPC decided to run ahead in the middle of a large spawn and dies.

More skill trainers need to be added between Ascalon and Lion's Arch. It's pretty lame when you can only use the same newbie skills for so long.

When casting element. skill and the target dies before you finished casting (which takes a really long time for some skills), the spell goes to waste and the mana is lost. This doesn’t make any sense especially for AOE spells.

Henchmen need to be upgraded so they aren't totally useless. It took forever to find groups for some missions (in some case i never found a group and just had to skip the mission), and henchmen simply were too weak to complete the mission with. While I'm aware the player population is lower than it would be during release, once people level up and move on, the same problem can occur.

I also think that you should be able to add a henchman from the same class multiple times. Like if you wanted 5 healers, you should be able to have that... as you could have a group with 5 monks.

I also don't like the loot generator currently. I noticed that you barely every get loot that could be useful for your character. While I understand that this encourages trading, I think it should be tweaked so you have a better chance to get a weapon that you can use. For example, when I played an element., I got hundreds of bows and swords/hammers and axes. When I played a warrior I got a crap load of staves.

When playing movies at the end or during missions, the leader of the group should have to decide whether or not to skip it. Or add something so when the majority opts to skip, it skips. I’ve been in various groups where 5/6 people skipped, and one person had to watch the movie which took forever. Or, have an npc in the following mission place where you can replay the movies from the previous mission, and just skip them during the mission.

It'd be nice if there was a way to skip pre-ascalon. It's really tedious to do the same boring quests with each new character.

Dye on basic element. armor is useless because you can’t really see any change as only tiny lines change color… maybe 5% of the whole outfit.

Have an options to toggle the party window display on/off.

Don't reset the chat window after traveling. Or have an option where you can select which chat you want to have as default. I never really use the All tab, so it would be nice if I could set a different one as default.

Option to set waypoints to the minimap and have an arrow in the radar point to its location.

[The Deranged Hermit]

We have the target ally command useful for buffers and healers. We have the target enemy command useful for smacky hands and debuffers. However there is a target that is VERY important to one of the classes yet there is no hot key for selecting it that I'm aware of.

CORPSES!

I would give up my first born child* for a way of cycling through the fetid remains of my slain opponents. As it stands I find my self trying to click on a small name tag in a swirling mass of living opponents and party members, resulting in, either "invalid target" or my reaction times being slowed due to selection issues resulting in diminished efficiency and effectiveness.

Necromancers can put new life in to that old corpse that would otherwise go to waste; they are the great recyclers of Ascalon, those who use what others discard. Evil? Nay, we seek only to keep the countryside clean and tidy...and drain a soul now and then but that's beside the point.

Select nearest corpse, please, oh, please implement this.

Of course, if in my fevered power crazed ravings I have overlooked an existing implementation of this please do tell and I will skulk off back to my hole.


*offer valid to citizens of Ascalon and surrounding provinces only. Subject to status. No purchase necessary.

[Nascent]

I think it might be helpful to have a sort of...limited journal in game. one that you can write in, just to record little tid bits of info regarding to the main quest and where collecters are, and what not. With so much to do in the game, I found myself forgetting some of it.

[Lansing Kai Don]

Originally Posted by Chev of Hardass

6) Party travel. Why can’t this happen vs. trying to figure out what district everyone ends up in and having to regroup.

I guess a reason not to implement this (as I have seen it several times so far), is because not every team member has visited that particular spawn point and shouldn't be allowed 'say' to travel to the other end of the world on lvl 3 fight huge freaking monsters and make levels 3-15 a two hour trip. But I do not see a point in keeping a team that has all been to Fort Ranik to be able to travel to Fort Ranik (have to have an Agree option or some new guy will send everyone to Ascalon before he logs off). If they use some sort of flags in their code to deem which areas you can quick jump too, this would be a quick check.

Lansing Kai Don

[Hado]

Global interface changes per account.

Mouse sensitivity slider.

[Shaggy420]

1. there should be an emote like /needgrp that puts somthing above your head, a light bulb or anything would work that indicates to everyone you need a group and go off when you join a grp or type the emote again or leave the area

2. I would really like to be able to max 3 attributes, right now i can max 2 and have 3 attr. lv's in a 3rd its kinda weird and it makes my second class useless as an ele i have fire and energy storage at max i would really like to be able to max one of my 2nd class attributes.

3. I have played 3 beta events and i play alot (like 16 hours a day) but ive only found one skill ring and no runes i think there a little too rare not that they shouldnt be rare but i cant even find a ele rune for sale

4. spell casters could use a couple more ready skill slots

5. there should be different shades of colors at least lite/dark, and you should be able to pick your default colors when you create your cha or at least ele should'nt be stuck with this queer purple color it should be more "Battle Mage" like at least the option, you should also be able to change your main color as well as secondary, and dyes should not be rare or expensive it's a personal perference that does not affect gameplay.

6. Class specific rare items i keep finding rare hammers, axes, and swords and im a little tired of it.

7. there should be high-speed districts so the dial-upers dont slow us down and i mean thats where you should first start when you travel there you should still be able to move throughout districts freely

8. personally i think it should be harder to make a guild or there should be a limit at this rate after the game launches theres gonna me thousands of them if there were less the guilds would be bigger and it would be easier to find people for gvg

9. maybe all the outfitters shoud share an inventory that save rare items and crafting materials so that there would be a large pool of items for people to buy cause im far to lazy to try and find a buyer for items i just sell them to crafter and i have a feeling alot of people do the same.

10. when your in a group you should be able to select there neme from the bar on right hand of screen no matter how far away they get and when you select them it should act like a mic. quest with the green arrow and dot

11. in pvp it should say there class and lv instead of there name "what do i need to know the names of my enemy's for"

12. when i cast a spell and my target dies my spell should be redirected to the nearest target also it should not take the energy until the spell casts espicially if my energy storagy base heal spell (forget the name ele start with) isnt going to heal its percentage of cost until it cast cause its like i lose the magic and still dont get healed kinda bogus (exception, when i fail casting spell as in someone used a skill to cause me to fail not when the person i was targeting died).

13. the green line that marks your path on your map instead of going away when you leave the area it should be replaced with a translucent less standoutish line that is permanent so you know paths youve taken before, it would be easier to find new areas. (but you should still have the green line marking your immediate path)

14. there should be hard mic. quests that give class specific rare weapons as rewards. let me explain theres alot of mic. quests there should be "main" mic. quests on your way completing that you should pass the smaller ones making them on the way and the mic. quests self progressive (instead of running around like a chicken w/ its head cut off) and i think alot more people would do them if they got a good reward and the smaller ones werent too much of an inconvenience i mean i cant even get a grp to go do them.

15. i like the market price idea they had how it changes by demand but it's far too sensitive i mean at like 8:00 p.m. they wanted like 600g for red dye by 3:00 am it was down to 300g i would imagine thats because not as many people are on that late so not as much of demand so i say its to sensitive but as i said before when it comes to dye it should be cheap just using as an example

I do think you've got a great game, im sorry i dont say whats great about it here but thats for a different topic and Iknow you probably wont use any of these but thanks for reading this and sorry its so long.

[Dragonne]

Originally Posted by The Deranged Hermit

Select nearest corpse, please, oh, please implement this.

It's set to my D key right now, so I know it exists, though that may not be the default. Check the Options tab in the upper right of the GW window, then the Keyboard Setup button at the bottom. Scroll through the keys there, it's in there somewhere.

[torry]

- I would like a command showing the skills of the team in one overview.
- Then one command to list my skills to the group.
- a command to cycle back to my target. (When I am an El/monk, I must target myself to heal myself for example? How then switch back to enemy same target? If the game distincts between target foe spells, and friendly ally spells, I guess this is already taken care of?)

[Shaggy420]

One thing im pretty upset about is the preorder weapon. It should not be store specific it should be class specific, i didnt even know about weapon when i preordered and im gonna get some stupid axe or something, what is that i mean i know its gonna be customize for me so i wont even be able to sell ill have to just throw it away its just a little bogus.

[Shaggy420]

c should not just select closest target it should cycle targets starting with closest would make spellcasting much easier esp. in pvp with the massive lag