A Few Suggestions.

Being new to GWs, as I have been playing WoW since beta, I would like to make a few comparisons and suggestions.

Firstly, The new Net Store. I had a bit of trouble figuring out how to download the game as the Client said something like, "For Existing Accounts only" but fortunately I ignored this and was able to enter the store and finally purchase a campaign, Maybe add a Download for Dummies link. Instead of Download Client link, stop using Tech speak and say, Download "Game" also had trouble setting up an account, as I was a bit confused. More hand holding here would help.

Once in the store I was unsure whether the campaigns were stand alone products or needed the original GWs, again better info for Dummies so we can jump right in.

First thing I wanted to do, was create a Nordic style warrior in (Prophecies), then start campaigning in Nightfall with this Warrior (RP thing) -- Couldn't do this, was a bit disappointing. Consider allowing models to cross campaign -- If player owns rights to said campaign models. The Avatar is everything to some people.

There should be some feature that decompresses the game, the load screens are very cumbersome, give players an option to run the -image command overnight, or at least let them know the command exists.

A few complaints about GW from friends who play WoW; lack of character movements: jumping, swimming, falling to your death, stealth abilities (accompanied with stealth detection skills).Need more weather effects, as well night/day effect would be nice. More attention to interior environments and other things that would ground outposts and Towns to make em feel safe, real, eventful -- stuff women like, lot a women gamers in WoW, more women means more men, means more gamers ...

Some things could be better explained by NPCs in-game: Talents, Skills, how to access different features such as profession changes, weapon upgrades How-to.

I'm not sure about PvP yet, just started playing PvE to learn the ropes. PvP is why I left WoW, and PvP in WoW, quite frankly, sucks.

Instancing in GW is amazing. Consider a separate PvP instance for some of the PvE zone, to be capturable and controllable by guild alliances, (persistent battles) perhaps a total of 5 alliances available. Maybe Alliance aligned NPCs to populate these zones while under control. Perhaps control deteriorates over time, and must be maintained.

I'm hoping Factions is something like this, a persistent PvP environment, but I still can't figure out how to get into these areas. Again your Gaming for Dummies Reps need to give things like this more attention. Perhaps I'm not the right race to enter Factions. A quest showing me how to get here would make sense.

Everything else is amazing in GW, combat, outdoor environments, player/creature models, quests, loot progression. Quests are excellent.

Skill bar could use some customizing options, to allow better viewing (Active, not active) when skill becomes available, and allowing the bar to be separated into different bars, Stance bar, attacks bar, enchant bar, etc.



Great game, glad I finally tried it, Net downloads was a great idea.

when you get to Lions Arch there will be a quest that you can take to get you over to factions with your Prophecies character. They do have towns in factions that are owned by alliances but they are not fought over in battles (not exactly). An alliance can own a town by donating faction. (kind of like war bonds i guess). Some people really liked this and some didnt like this due to the fact of how the elite missions tied into this. Regardsless in the 3rd chapter, Nightfall, there is no more faction or alliances owning towns.

If you want a Tyrian character in Elona or Cantha you have to work yourway to a port city so that you can take a quest and then a ship over to those areas. Each chapter has it's own distinct group of players and it's own distinct storyline that it roughly follows. Having characters from Elona or Cantha in pre-searing Ascalon, and vice versa, would be rather strange.

Jumping, falling, swimming, etc. has been brought up before and it doesn't look like it's going to change. Day, night, and weather would be nice. As for females... well you're not really able to ascertain the sex of a player based on who/what their avatar is. "Hey there big boy!"... "You're not a girl"...."Yes I AM a girl... TEE HEE HEEE"

And as for more females equals more males; well, if the game is depending on male players to be pulled into the game based on how many female players are in there and can be hit on then the game isn't really worth playing then is it? If GW starts to develop the game such that females are more attracted to this game so that hordes of males can roam around looking for women to talk to then I'd say it's a good time to leave the game. GW is not a dating service.

Try Factions I guess. Don't hold your breath on it being all that fun though.

You have 8 slots, allowing them to be separated into enchants, attacks, adren, etc. wouldn't make much sense. Since you can group them accordingly all on one bar allowing them to be seaparated would just make a big mess. And not they aren't going to allow you to carry 30 skills at one time. There are also upkeep and effects bars if that's what you're talking about when you mean Acitve/Non-active.

... Girlfriends, wives, daughters, sisters... Dating isn't the thrust of my suggestion, being married. TS and Vent makes it very hard to hide your gender unless half my WoW guild are incredible Voice Actors.

Well that's not really my point. The fact is people should want to play the game for it's content not because there are lots of 'girls' that hang out in the outposts.

And putting things in the outposts that would make girls want to hang out there is not only disrespectful to women but it's also a very good way of getting 'posers' to hang out in those areas anyways. With your guild aside not everyone in the district is talking over a mic and there isn't much that anyone can do to prove or disprove the gender of the player who is playing a certain character.

As for how this is disrespectful to women; avatars and images aside the actual female gamer should not be used as a lure to get male gamers onto a game. They should be treated as a gamer and more importantly as a person not a promotional tool. This is a pretty slippery slope and treating people as such simply opens the door for abuse.

I love "A Few Ideas" threads. They're always so entertainingly dumb or old. This time it's the latter.

Good point. Most women (myself included), who play this game do so because they are gamers. The rest most likely play to be with husband/boyfriend/children or what ever. I do not want them remaking towns and outposts all froo froo. They are fine, just the way they are (although I'd like to see merch and storage closer together).

I agree that is not a dating service, although some treat it as such. Which is why all my characters are guys. I think the women's armor is a bit slutty and I've seen too many guys hitting on female characters, even if it is a man on the other side of the computer. I'm not sure how armor that looks like it came from Victoria's Secret can protect at all. Women's armor needs to look like armor and not underwear.

Guilds own towns and the territory of those towns is defined by alliance battles.

Perhaps they should work on this, I don't know as I used the old fashioned method of "walk into a store and buy it". Anyone have any views on this?
GuildWars.com should have filled you in on those details. There's probably a link to it on the NCsoft website that gave the link to the store. I presume that it is assumed that you have seen information that then lead you to the spot to purchase. It won't hurt any, however, to put in the word 'standalone', or whatnot.
As someone stated, each land has their own storyline and distinct look. Also consider that the Tutorial area of Prophecies is 2 years in the past. While it might be nice to see the occasional Elonian/canthan, it wouldn't make much sense to the storyline for them to be present.
There is an -image command to download updates, some thread in this forum has it. It's a simple change. As for actually going between areas: don't worry about it, the further you move the story(and the more you visit an area) the less the load times tend to be. It will just seem slow the first few times because the comp hasn't been there before(and of course the occasional busy times)
There is an old thread still going about jumping, swimming, etc. Most reasons/ideas for this have been shot down because it would take extreme effort from Anet and take a lot of reworking old content(to prevent someone leaping from one path to another and skipping half a mission).
I'll agree with Aki on this one. People should be playing the game for the content(ie story, etc) not because more women are playing it. As for the weather, interior environs, etc. I agree with you. Many people have asked for these kinds of things, and they have slowly been integrating weather into different areas. Certain missions are at night, rather than day, but no cycle has been put in yet.
These things are better explained in the Tutorial of Factions than in prophecies, because prophecies came out before the online store(i.e. people read the manual that came with the box). If people have questions, they tend to just ask the community in presearing, and they usually get good answers.

We are all human, so there are no races forbidden from being anywhere. Prophecies comes with arenas, and when you get to the Port city of Lions Arch you'll get two options. You'll be able to travel to any other continent you own the game for(i.e. factions) as well as Battle Isles, the main pvp area.
I'm afraid you're going to have to get used to the fact that you no longer have 30+ skills available at any given time. You get 8, therefore you have no need for multiple bars.
The best thing to do is to position your skills as you learn:Skills you tend to cast first on one end, chained attacks/skills next to each other, skills you tend to use the least(res's) on the other end.

Finally, welcome the game and the forums. It's going to be a bit of a transition from the Wow, but I hope its a good one.

And thank Anet for that. I can't even imagine trying to keep all the skills straight like wow has. That would just be way to confusing.

lol and if you think about it, if you were to be able to use ALL of the skills...(of which, GW has more than WoW, no offense) everyone would be INVINCIBLE. absolutely invincible. even if you were STILL limited to one elite, youd be amazing lol. sorry just something that SOME people havent noticed lol. WoW players specifically seem to think that we should get all our skills like they do lol.ahhhh *imagines being a God*

I go into the store every once in a while and read the Wow manual(I wanted to get GW to see if I like online games, and was planning to move on to wow or another. 1 year later...) so I can think about skill combos. And from what I can tell, because of the power of being a higher level, their skills are much less powerful than ours. They have a few skills for broad situations, while we have lots of similar skills for specific situations.
I do like the idea of being able to pull a skill out my bum whenever I need it, but thats part of the fun of GW(you can't!). The feeling of invincibility would get dull pretty quick.

And on topic: From what I can tell, Wow players end up putting their most commonly used skills on a hotbar for ready use(the others being held in back until they need to be dusted off). So, except for the restriction of not being able to use non- "hotbarred" skills, our skill setup is similar. Anyone coming from wow simply has to learn to slim down their build a bit so it fits only on the bar.

But that's just my two cents

Hi Eljin, welcome to GW, and no matter what everyone says here, cheers for getting involved up front and sharing your ideas! You're far braver than I was. I lurked guru for months before ever posting.

I agree with your suggestions about ANet doing a better job explaining the features and limitations of owning one or multiple chapters. I haven't gone to see exactly what they present and when to new customers. But I have seen a lot of people confused about how the different campaigns compare, contrast, and work together.

Pleeeeeaaasssseee don't anyone go flaming about "noobs" or "idiots" I'm talking about people that come off as perfectly literate and reasonable human beings who simply haven't ever played GW before. Yes, the answers to all their questions are probably already available somewhere on the gw or ncsoft sites or the big fan sites. But ANet does itself a disservice expecting new customers to dig far for such answers. They'd make a better first impression if the online store (and maybe even the retail boxes) had more easily accessible and understandable FAQs on such subjects.

I won't play a character I don't like the looks of either (though they wind up making marvelous mules for the characters I do like.) But ANet works really hard to give each chapter it's own theme, and any characters created in that chapter share the theme. Now, they don't restrict you from creating a Tyrian character in Tyria and following the (non-intro) storyline of other chapters. But I have to go with /notsigned on this one. I like what they're doing. A character that looks Tyrian came from Tyria.

Ok, opinions vary and yeah, the games are very different (I'm told.) If I may, though.

• I don't agree on weather cycles. I always found that more of an annoyance than anything else. I like being able to see what I'm killing.
• As for stealth modes, I can see how it would be a fun novelty for a while, but the feature would either be mostly of little use or make the game boring.
  ANet is *extremely* into the idea of balance. Special spells, armors, or weapons do not win this game - a player's strategic use of those things is what wins the game. At least, that's the theory.
  If you're talking about a stealth mode for travel, GW handles that with map outposts. (For the most part) once you've been to a town or outpost, you can map-travel there again. See the markers on the M map.
  You might look into the possibilities of building an Assassin character in Factions, though. Stealth attack is one of the concepts for that profession.
• I find the interiors of towns and outposts quite nice. I like the open-air feel of them. And as for eventful, I suspect you'll enjoy the towns in NF most, as they've added a lot of NPC's that just wander around making remarks. It does feel more like a town that way.
• Ok, I just gotta say it, "stuff women like" is a horrible generalization and unfair to every woman playing any game. I have all three chapters and at least one character that's explored every outpost and most every map. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "More attention to interior environments and other things that would ground outposts and Towns to make em feel safe, real, eventful", but I don't feel like they're unsafe, fake (well, I can still tell I'm playing a computer game) or boring now. And I am a female player.

I agree with other posters that you may be more satisfied with the NPC explanations given in the later chapters' tutorials for new characters. You won't be able to access those quests with a Tyrian character, though. As for profession changes, they tell you about that when you're ready. It's not an immediately available feature to new PvE characters.

That almost perfectly describes Factions except the alliance battles and control have effects on the PvE map, and there are only 2 alliances. If that's what you like, I highly recommend Factions. Some people loved it, some people hated it. I can only offer my opinion, as mainly a PvE'er I found it mostly just inconvenient and not as enjoyable as Prophecies and Nightfall where the state of PvP activities doesn't (usually) interfere with me in PvE.

Ok, well you don't figure it out immediately upon starting a PvE character in any campaign. The storyline reveals it to you as you go along. They may gloss over this one in the official FAQs because it would be something of a spoiler.

And once you get far enough in any of the storylines, there are quests leading you to the (non-intro) start of the PvE storyline for any other campaign you own.

Totally agree!

And finally, thank you for the detailed and well written first impressions of an experience WoW player's first interactions with GW.

Again, welcome and best wishes for constant awe and utter glee!
Luny

Read the stickies.

READ FIRST - Suggestion Forum Guidelines