Official Suggestions Thread - March BWE

[Draken]

Originally Posted by Bobangry

Add a way to rejoin GvG with the same EXACT character, same person, same everything, and provided they were in the game and went linkdead, not disconnected. If all that holds true, I don't see a reason to not be able to rejoin after going linkdead. (assuming Anet can tell the difference between linkdead and a forced disconnect, I don't know the mechanics.

I agree but they would have to keep track of the death penalty for people who went link dead and implement a small punishment like an additional death penalty when they join and they have to wait for respawn or be ressurected at the point they went link dead. Just so it can't be exploited.

Although this would still leave an opening for people who were to far away from the guildlord when he comes under attack to warp back.... so something would have to cover that.

[MezMercenary]

I'd liked to see more customize options for your character.

1. A color slider for Hair Color. This way you can have 100's of different hair colors and not just 5 or 6. The same things goes for skin color. Who wouldn't want a green warrior with blue hair?

2. Make Dyes easier to get. I played the February & March beta weekends and saw 2 & neither was the color i was looking for.

3. Maybe even let a person use dyes on the character build screen before they start playing.

4. More hair styles. Possibly head tattoos for the bald guys.

5. Facial Hair Options.

6. More inventory spaces. The 5 space belt pouch is too small for the work to get one. 10 might be sufficiant.

7. Release the game sooner cuz I'm already going through withdrawls.

[Darneith]

My guild frequently had 9-10 people on, so that a few had to sit out on the guild battle. It would be very nice if there was a spectator option for guildies in the Guildhall when a GvG was going on. To prevent abuse it could work like when you are dead and can click a party members name to see from their location.

Also we would have liked to practice against each other in small little skirmishes. A feature to form up a couple parties of guildies for an in-guild skirmish would be nice, as well as satisfy those wishing to duel a friend.

[Phoenix Avenger]

TRADING
Create a new town ("Marketplace" or something) where people can go solely to trade. Have it be so that you can put certain things on sale and leave the area to go questing or something and still have them on sale there. Other people could come in, do a search for items they need, by weapon, name, attributes, etc and buy them at a price that you set when you put it up for sale. I also suggest that a "fee" be place where it takes a % of the money you get from the selling as a sort of "transaction cost" for the traders there.

CHARACTERS
Allow more customization of your players hair and face. Keep the different hair styles but allow people to change the lenth of it. A few more face options would also be nice but it's not as essential as some of the other things that have been suggested. Also, allow an ability to dye your hair with dyes that you find on missions or trade for.

GAMEPLAY
1) Spells, you can use them by using the numbers on your keyboard 1 through 8, why not make it 10 spells and use all of the numbers? I have a lot of spells that I want to use consistantly but I can never fit them all onto the 8 spaces.

2) Add an ability to tell your pet or minions where to go, or which enemy to attack and when, its kind of annoying to just have them follow you instead of being able to command them like a necromancer or ranger should be able to do.

GUILDS
1) Have a Guild bank that members can donate to that can be used only for buying things for the Guild. Also keep track of who donated to the bank so that the leaders can see who is really contributing to the Guild and maybe promote them.

2) Have more titles than just Member, Officer, and Leader. Maybe have the ability to buy more titles and be able to customize them. That way you can add a "Trainer" title or something for people who help out the newer players.

3) Add more things that your Guild can buy. Maybe some in-game things such as good weapons that can be distributed by the leader. Or maybe some defenders for your Guild hall and Guild battles such as more rangers to defend, more warriors, more monks, etc (obviously these would be rather pricy ) Maybe you could also buy a sort of forums for your guild so that you can leave messages for other members of the Guild and get to know the other people.

4) Add an ability to wager gold on a Guild battle so that the winning Guild can win some money to either be distributed to the members who fought in the battle or have it go directly to the Guild bank(as discussed in #1)

[Dragonne]

Something else for the KoA...

Add a note to players FIRST THING that any NPCs with the green ! above their heads means they want to talk to you. A surprising amount of new players miss this simple thing and I have on many occasions told them this fact and they suddenly have a much easier time with the flow of the game.

It might also be good to explain the CTRL and ALT keys. Ascalon city in KoA is often filled with "How do I find so-and-so?" or "Anyone know where so-and-so is?" and the player is standing 10 feet away from them but don't know how to use those basic keys to find their name and locate the NPC. This would also cover basic targetting.

Maybe make these part of the very first event when a new player spawns into the game. Using blue popups, give them text like this:

WELCOME TO GUILD WARS!
Your first task is to locate Warmaster Tydus.
To do this, press the ALT key and look around you for his name. In towns
and outposts, the ALT key displays all NPC and object names in your local
area. Outside of towns and outposts, the ALT key will show all friendly and
neutral people as well as objects nearby.

In the next popup:

Once you see his name, left click on him then hit the spacebar and you
will move towards and speak to him. Notice that there is a large green !
above his head. Any NPC with this above their head means that he or she
wishes to speak with you concerning any of a number things from giving you
a quest to simple information.

After talking to Tydus, popup something like this:

Excellent! As you see, talking to NPCs can have rewards as well!
Now have a look around you. Not all of those people are NPCs. Some
are players like you. To display all player names in towns and outposts,
press the CTRL key. Clicking on one of those names will select that player.
Press the spacebar to move to that player's location. You can now trade
with that player by clicking the Trade button. Outside of towns and outposts,
the CTRL key will show the names of all enemies in your area. You can
then click on those names to select a target, and hit the spacebar to
begin your default attack on that enemy.


I think that should about do it, and familiarize new players with the extremely basic use of these keys and the ! icon of NPCs.

PS: Adjust grammar as necessary for ease of understanding.

[DJC]

My goodness, I can't believe people are actually suggesting to leave PvE as is, or even make it more difficult. I have to ask if you guys who think this whether you played missions like The Wilds or the one before Lion's Arch this event.

I don't mind a challenge, it's not a big deal to fail a few times before getting the right strategy or a reasonably balanced party. You're right that there needs to be difficulty for there to still be excitement and motivation to play PvE, and I think pre-searing Ascalon and early missions accomplish this.

Many wilderness areas and some missions, however, are just way too hard. And yes, I think I'll use the word 'impossible' here since I was not able to complete the mission before LA a single time this event despite trying all sunday long. And I do mean the ENTIRE day, I must have teamed with half the people playing this weekend or something. Some wilderness areas are also without a doubt impossible with henchmen as well.

Please, I'm begging here. Something has to be done to balance out PvE. There is no way I would accept a retail game having a brick wall of difficulty that takes days of trying to "find the right party" to complete a single mission. I seriously just threw up my hands in disgust sunday night and gave up. :-/

[Beelzebubba]

Originally Posted by Sinfear

3.) I actually very surprised that this wasn't added this event. I would love to see a remove quest button or something along those lines in your quest log.

Yes, please do this. Not sure I want a share quest button as others have suggested as discovering new quests is part of the fun of the game. At the end of this BWE I had 7 quests in my list that could not be completed. At least two were bugged, both of which I reported, and two others were from the pre-searing area in February, which I obviously cannot complete now.
Another, "Barradin's Stand", was completely blank, but I believe I finished it last month and got it again from Hollis this month, so maybe it was not supposed to give it to me at all.

Originally Posted by Sinfear

4.) Multiple quest drops.

This has been asked for quite a bit, and I would be surprised if they did not listen to this suggestion. As long as a party member has the quest, he should get the quest item when it's dropped.

Originally Posted by Sinfear

6.) Something I would love to have added is a way to link off your item you are selling into the channel. Having to type out the stats is a huge inconvenience.

I have several friends who play WoW, and the way they describe it from that game sounds like an ideal solution. Just click a button, like CTL or ALT and then click the item to copy the items description and stats.

[Dave III]

Originally Posted by Dragonne

I think that should about do it, and familiarize new players with the extremely basic use of these keys and the ! icon of NPCs.

Adding to this thought, maybe have Gwen give the extreme newbie some more basic tasks, essentially using her as a training device. The one task she gives you is a good start, but there's no real mention of how if you give her a working flute, or the red flowers, or the cape, these too will achieve an in-game goal, plus they are good training.

On the other hand, Gwen isn't exactly Ms. Popularity right now. ^_^

Dave III

[OMGitsCracker]

I have one short and sweet suggestion, When summoning minions or if you have a pet, please put pet/minion icons under your conditions icons.
This could make it easyer to target your pet/minions. As a necromancer I use boneminions + death nova but I can't always target them right away. If I miss click I could end up running toward my enemies, and while im trying to do it i'm wasteing valuable time. The icons could also display the # of minions/pets you have and also their health status.

[The Human Torch]

I think the way damage is shown needs to be re-done. I'm getting really tired of looking for those little yellow numbers that say how much damage I'm dealing while huge blue +some number things appear when I'm being healed. The way targets are seen also needs to be made more clear, like making names larger and having them show up (faded) all the time without having to scroll over them first. This way, you wouldn't see something's name if it's farther away than you can see on your map, but the name gets clearer and clearer as they get closer to you. Then numbers could appear next to the name to show them being damaged by you, different colors for your pets damage, then for ally's damage, then them getting healed, and so forth. The way it is right now just makes my eyes hurt and makes organization difficult. It would also be great if therre was a way to double click a target's name or something to make your character say the name to all members of the team, to help with targeting and things of that nature.

Another thing that needs work is balancing monks. I don't think it's right that a team absolutely CANNOT survive without 2+ monks, and more monks usually means more power. Considering that monks are (for the most part) a boring proffession compared to the rest of them, which can't be helpful to the PvP of the game. I also encountered numerous problems with the new guild maps, such as not being able to open and close gates and things like that which will probably be fixed for the release.

Besides that, this was by far the best beta ever, and I thank Arena Net for making such a great game and letting us play it before it's released!

[OMGitsCracker]

O yeah one more thing, Please make your team's names show up as green all the time, and please make the green team not green on the minimap. I've ran into a group of enimies more then once because allys and the green team show up the same on the minimap. Its also confuseing when you see their names in green and your allys in yellow or some other color.

If you can't think of a way to do this please just take out the green team all together and add some diff color.

[RedRabbit]

As someone touched on previously, it would be nice to have some way to track your damage. Maybe make another tab in the chat window called 'combat' where it lists all the combat actions, like how much damage you did, how much you were healed for, and how much you were damaged for. I don't know how complicated this would be to add, but it sure would be nice.

If I remember correctly, Anarchy-Online had something like this... or maybe it was SWG, or both....

[Kiwi]

Wow that was good, but I like to tutorial the way it is.

[Nik The Barbarian]

Hey Lansing, we partied for that Surmia quest... took us only 50 minutes to even get to Surmia from the gate...

Anyways, I would suggest a player's activity effect drops as well. For instance, when one of your teammates goes afk, and you run off and kill something and it drops an item you want but it belongs to that afk, its very frustrating. Like just add something that detects if a player is attacking or using a skill in the last 15 seconds or so.

[thaumaturge]

Well I'm not sure how much of this has been addressed but I've tried to read a few posts (some suggestions I make have already been said )

1)Quests
- need to have more rewards, especially some of the hard ones that give you 250xp? eh? I think giving upgrades on items or some other items would be good, giving high exp or gold would probably destroy balance but.

- delete quest button needed

- The green arrows, are they meant to be ambiguous or are they meant to lead the wrong way? Are they meant to disappear? Please fix them! Or provide the exact spot for the quest on the large map so we can get there ourselves

- Quests later in the game are in my mind impossible for solo players, even if you face only a few enemies it's near impossible to defeat them. Fighting foes that give you no xp is still very, very difficult. At this stage solo players will not enjoy how hard it is imho. Reduce difficulty for solo players and reduce xp so at least you can do quests but you can't just grind to level up...

2) Gameplay

- Blocking is for me a serious issue, it's one of issues that really annoyed me. Sure monsters can gather around you and block you. But one single character (friend or foe ) in front of you should not stop your character from moving or attacking in that direction, you should move around the player automatically to attack the monsters or just to move there. It is very frustrating.

- Rurik needs to be tweaked so he doesn't just run ahead by himself so much, a little is ok but at this stage it's too much.

-The camera gets very annoying when you are on a sloped land, it prevents you or forces you to view certain ways.

-Henchmen in later levels are still level 6? This is too low, they die far too quickly, and although this promotes getting good teammates rather than npcs. A few extra levels/hp is needed.

-Make zones a little more obvious, a white cloud on the snow mountains is hard to spot.

-Same with the white line drawing on the circle map, on snow it's hard to spot.

[Tur713]

Originally Posted by Enix

Oh, can we change "Scales" to something much different than "Shells"??? People have twice tried to sell me Shells instead, and I dont know if it was by mistake or not. Could lead to nefarious business practices.

Yeah, I ended up doing this on accident once. I'm sorry if it was you!

[worthless]

Originally Posted by DJC

My goodness, I can't believe people are actually suggesting to leave PvE as is, or even make it more difficult. I have to ask if you guys who think this whether you played missions like The Wilds or the one before Lion's Arch this event.

well i got a couple missions past lions arch (starting with new char this weekend) my little brother did like 5 missions past lions in about 2 hours... not saying your bad, maybe you just needed a better party iono, but i didnt think it was impossible i liked the improvement in dificulty...

another thing id like added is more char customization at the create screen as others have mentioned

[Ravidel]

It's been mentioned a few times that guilds would benefit from having more than just all-out, 8v8 team matches available. I wanted to second (or third, or sixteenth) this suggestion, but with a few more details on why it's so cool.

There's a Magic: The Gathering book by William R. Forstchen that captures the very essence of dueling houses in a magical setting. These houses (or guilds) use a ranking system for all of their members, and at any time, one member may schedule a challenge with another to surpass her in rank, thus gaining more fame inside the guild. While this is more of a "prize-fighter" scenario, I believe the game mechanic of guild members dueling (or conducting internal team games) could provide an additional layer of fun to this already fantastic title.

Some possible uses for in-house dueling:
1. Hardcore PvP guilds could foster more competition to ensure that their "top players" never get rusty.
2. Selective guilds might use it as a sort of try-out process, rather than having to watch applicants in the arena, where the grouping factors are more difficult to control, or in GvG or "Tombs" combat, where there's just too much going on. Optionally, spectating may also be implemented to allow guild masters a more complete view of the action.
3. Competitive guilds would benefit from having the option to conduct skirmishes to test out their new builds (weekly practices, anyone?), or possibly as a training grounds for new members.
4. Likely ALL guilds would enjoy a nice team game versus people that they know and enjoy playing with, rather than a random, possibly ragtag arrangement in the typical arena setting. It's plenty of fun to dive into the fray on your own, but friendly in-guild skirmishes could be enjoyable in their own right.
5. Implementing the game mechanic for internal house skirmishes would probably be a stone's throw away from making it possible to duel members from *other* houses, separate from the 8v8 scenario. Then again, that could be an organizational nightmare.


Certainly, no guild is forced to implement a ranking system, nor would the game support that directly (i.e., having both "guild fame" and "public fame" is unnecessary). All in-guild rankings would be computed externally, stored on the guild's website, or wherever. The point is to have a game mechanic (namely, specialized combat) that actually allows these sorts of extra-curricular rankings to be implemented outside what's been designed by ArenaNet. It's currently impossible to individually rank players based on how they do even in group (for example, random 4v4) combat because there's too much going on, but this isolated environment could provide a more suitable setting for that sort of thing.

Not every guild will make use of every feature that I've mentioned, and some may take advantage of none of the features at all (strictly PvE guilds, for instance). But having the mechanic there for those that do want to enjoy something like this would be tremendous, and it would make guild houses more than just empty courtyards when no 8v8 is happening.

I mean, how cool would it be to visit the guild hall and actually have people hanging out there, maybe practicing in the skirmish area, or something? (I know that players wouldn't actually "see" those already in combat when they travel to the guild hall, but you get the idea.) To me, it would add considerably to the atmosphere of having a guild in the first place, and the fantastical nature of being involved in one would be more faithfully fulfilled.

But even within the guilds that do use it, there is the issue that not every character is built with dueling in mind; indeed, Guild Wars team games are designed so that you *can* specialize your character in PvP and still succeed with team cooperation. Likewise, I can see how it might be misleading for a kamikaze warrior to be the "best" in the guild 1v1 by using tactics that fall apart during group combat. These details would have to be sorted (or not) by the guilds themselves, and I think there's a way to pull it off.

For more inspiration on this concept, check out Forstchen's book! It's a quick read, and it almost exactly represents what I could see happening in Guild Wars over time.

-Rav

[Enix]

Originally Posted by Dave III

On the other hand, Gwen isn't exactly Ms. Popularity right now. ^_^

Dave III

OMG ... I like skipping and burning cities to the ground too.

Anyways, more suggestions...
On the Party list, have a little blue Mana bar under each teamate's health (dosent need to be as big as health, for space requirements).

When you want to salvage an item, it would be nice if the little baloon told you what you would get (especially when you "identify" an item), or at least what items normally yeild. On that note, it would be nice if you could only use Expert Salvage kits on items that yeild upgrade items (I wasted about 5 uses trying to get "Energy +3"s out of wands >< ).

The ability to delete quests and then pick them up again would be nice - Especially if for some reason you dont get Items you need cuz you are with a party (or maybe this is a glitch?).

YEah and the Elementalist guy's dance isnt that great. He should totally do the ROBOT!!!!

[neoflame]

Originally Posted by thaumaturge

- Quests later in the game are in my mind impossible for solo players, even if you face only a few enemies it's near impossible to defeat them. Fighting foes that give you no xp is still very, very difficult. At this stage solo players will not enjoy how hard it is imho. Reduce difficulty for solo players and reduce xp so at least you can do quests but you can't just grind to level up...

You shouldn't really be soloing in GW anyway.

I, personally, would like the ability to spectate GvGs; some good learning oppertunities, especially for newer members, I would think, and it would be great for someone not being dedicated to fighting be able to record videos and such, both for entertainment value and to allow later review of the battle to try and improve. I don't see how it would be particularly exploitable, either, especially if you cap the number of spectators and allow them only to view from the PoV of teammates, since with Teamspeak or Ventrilo team members can (and should) always communicate instantly anyway.