I Now Know What Appealed to Me about GW

I enjoyed reading your ideas, but I would say that while there are many things I like about Guild Wars, the "appeal" for me was primarily the way the game is at once solo and group friendly.

I love the AI (heroes/henches); no other comparable MMOs offers anything like this. I like grouping with other players, but I hate being thwarted by the dreaded NEED TO GROUP WITH PLAYERS when no one is around. With Guild Wars, this never happened. NEVER. If I cannot find a group of players there is always AI. "LFG Hell" is the bane of most other MMOs I have tried. In fact, I have moved from just appreciating having an AI option to actually preferring them to most player groups (i.e., PUGs).

While, I, too, am taking a break from Guild Wars, I have to say that returning to WoW for a bit has made me appreciate even more how open Guild Wars is to all kinds of grouping options and playstyles -- including grouping with just heroes and henches if that is your wish. But then, maybe that's part of the "creativity of expression" that you were referring to in your post.

GW only has a hero hench system because most of the game is based on playing in a party of 8. In WoW and other MMOs, you can play the game perfectly fine on your own, you just need a party for the instanced dungeons and raids, neither of which are required for solo play and are the equivalent to PVP in GW and places that cant be H/Hed like elite areas.

I still dont see why people think that GW is more solo friendly then WoW, it is far from being as solo friendly as other MMOs are.

1) GW is meant to make each battle a 'fresh start'. So every time you zone you have to activate everything again, and after most battles everything wears off (exception some enchantments).

2) That's something that only works in discontinuous games, where the matchs has and end, like Real Time Strategic, Neverwinter Nights modules, etc. I saw the Neverwinter Nights approach to persintent worlds, and its... well... disappointing. Things specifically meant to work one way usually work bad in other ways.

3) The problem with grind titles is that they are way too far from XP evolution, they are too slow, character based, or both. They should be like XP, easy to get and faster to max, but account wide.

4) You know what I'm going to say here. Yes: We need the Xunlai Marketplace.

5) In GW hte important thing is the skin. What we need in this case is better customization. Why? To make it appealing, and thus remove much more items form the market. Requiring cutomization to being able to use the item would be a bit too much, but considering how easy is to get items, that could do too. Not updating all the skins to inscriptions is a mistake that I hope they fix soon.

6) Yup, some siege weapons, bundles and a couple of mounts won't do. More is better in this case.

3) Titles and grind: bad boring mix imo, especialy when you need to grind to pump up or to get skills and ranks.

4) ask MithranArkanere

It's simply because in WoW (and similar MMOs) the instances contain some of the best content in the game but are restricted to player groups only. In Guild Wars, this is not the case.

You do have to realize ANet was trying to make sure anyone who jumped ship on World of Warcraft to Guild Wars had something to do. Not everyone cares about storylines.

There isn't a single max level raid or instance that can be soloed. While there are a variety of soloing options, the arguably "best" content requires you to interact and spend a lot of time with other people.

I'd say that this is why Guild Wars is different, but in retrospect Guild Wars feels like it has a lot in common with Diablo than any MMO I've seen. Grouping now feels like an option.

In regards to the OP:

1. I don't think this would work too well in a competitive online RPG. It would be fun in PvE, but they would also have to include a bit more customization and depth to the current system.

2. It would be interesting, but a feature best left for off-line games.

3. As long as they don't give any actual benefits, titles are fine. They're just the 360 equivalent of achievements (sans the rewards).

4. Trading sucks in GW, and to not improve upon it would be abysmal.

5. The lack of emphasis on gear was kind of boring to me, but that's just personal opinion. I'll leave this one alone.

6. Agreed.

Thanks for even more replies!

Let me refine some of the ideas I presented.

1) Passive abilities. I don't intend this to be something that would be layered on top of the GW system. Rather, GW2 would need to incorporate it as a design philosophy. This would not at all preclude the use of active skills; on the contrary, it would work hand in hand with these skills to either further boost their effect, mitigate their removal, or otherwise provide synergies that would be *unique* to your character. The more ways to differentiate yourself, the better IMHO. If you have two SF elementalists with identical skillbars and attribute point allocations (and GW somewhat promotes this with the template system) then the only difference between the two is player skill. That's fine, but what if there were passive abilities that would make a group want to bring both rather than just one? Perhaps passive abilities that synergize with other players,etc. Same could go for healers, tanks, etc.

2) Dungeon design. This one was by far my most radical suggestion. I still think it's implementable. How's this as a variant that might be better suited to GW:

A guild alliance of some suitable stature (don't know what they would use to determine this - size, or money, or some measure of competitiveness) can purchase, in addition to a guild hall, a "guild grounds". They can hire AI mercenaries to guard the guild grounds, and they can CREATE groups of AI mercenaries with whatever skillsets/attributes/compositions that they desire. There could be some sort of resource allocation system involved: high ranked guilds might have high amounts of resources while low ranked guilds would have less. Defeating the "guild grounds" would be a mini-game prerequisite to challenging a guild to some contest. Different guild ranks could be used for different benefits (GvG rank might increase the mob level, some other rankings might increase the number of AI or how many elite skills are allowed, etc)

This provides another avenue of creativity: guild members will actively create and test their own groups of AI to provide sufficient challenge so as to gain some sort of benefit when another guild challenges them and does not succeed in overtaking the "guild grounds" mission. (Perhaps some sort of guild fame rank)

3) Titles. Agreed with everything everyone has said. Some gamers want to grind, so giving them the ability to do so is fine. However, this game has taken the path of providing tangible PvE benefits for higher PvE titles. Lightbringer ranks give +50% dmg against end-game nightfall foes, high ranks of Norn rep are often required to run Ursan groups, some title-track skills unfortunately need high ranks to function properly. These should be avoided in GW2 at all costs.

4) Trading system. Nothing to elaborate on.

5) I don't want to mis-state myself when speaking of the need to stratify weaponry. I do NOT want to see "high end" weapons being able to do things that "lower end" weapons cannot. IE - functionality should not be impaired by stratification. Rather, functionality should be varied through stratification. An example:

perhaps in GW2 there are two different kinds of armor sets- those that are crafted in exchange for materials, and those that are acquired via collectors. in GW1, both sets can be modified to be exactly the same (looks aside). perhaps in GW2 there can be a tangible different in how each armor set works. perhaps there could be different armor levels for a given profession with tradeoffs for energy regen/some other stat. perhaps armor is the same but some inherent mod is different. or perhaps one set can be modified with a subset of insignias while the other would be modified by a different set of insignias -- perhaps one geared for defense and the other offense. don't take my ideas as literal suggestions, just as examples of what i mean by stratification and differentiation.

6) World interaction. I think the inclusion of siege weapons and more traditional dungeon elements would be great (more complicated traps, more puzzles, etc)

i like how we all work together as a comunity and help out as much as possable

I am afraid nothing you've said is particularly novel. This thread seems to be a collection of suggestions, and we have a forum for that specifically. Where everything under the sky has already been suggested in twenty different forms. If you truly care about GW2's development and want to have Anet's ear, try their official wiki or apply for a job with them. Here your audience is just other players, who by the available evidence have limited (tending to nil) influence in designing GW2.

if you get a job u might get a mini frog appealing as anything ...but having to deal with actual people would be hard

I originally posted this in the Sardelac Sanitarium, as it was my intention for the thread to mainly be about my parting ideas/suggestions and reflections upon the game's appeal.

I agree on all points, but the (2) dungeon design thing while sounds really very cool, sadly it would be extremelly hard to implement. That would be user made content on official servers and would require additional software or a Very powerful ingame interface for that.

And this one is exactly my take on it!

I really hope they don't screw up on this in GW2.
I mean, you CAN have a game that's Not gear-based, that's NOT focused on grind to progress to next ranks of significantly better gear (like most other mmos) BUT still have an interesting varied item system. It doesn't have to be perfectly balanced to be accessible for casual players. Only PvP needs perfect balance, and we know competetive PvP will be separated from PvE in GW2.

Both - supereasy availability of 'perfect' items and the ability to turn almost any common drop into a perfect make the system really boring. Yes, everything perfect=very boring. (also note that none of those were present in GW1 for the first half year after release and nobody complained - it was obvious nobody ~needed~ perfection for PvE)

I'd absolutely LOVE if GW2 had a system with NO such thing as a 'perfect' item at all, so you could possibly always have a chance of finding something better, even if it was only a tiny tiny bit better. With a large enough number of variable inherent mods that you can't easily say one weapon is 'strictly' better than another, but with still having collector/crafter/quest-reward/etc. items good enough to play through all game content.

I think the player-created dungeon design idea is really quite intriguing. I played a game called Dungeon Siege some years ago. This game could be played single player or multiplayer and was similar in basic structure in a number of ways to Guild Wars as it is now (though not as polished, obviously, since this was an older game than GW).

The makers of Dungeon Siege actually welcomed modding, offering players a downloadable modding toolkit, and a number of people created Dungeon Siege "campaigns" using this modding toolkit. Some of these player-created campaigns were truly amazing, all were freely downloadable, and, in a couple of cases, I felt the player-created campaigns were actually superior to the original game (one, "Legends of Hyperborea", absolutely blew me away: it was longer, far more innovative, and much more difficult than the original game -- but it was absolutely great).

If I were ArenaNet, I would seriously consider an idea such as this, only I would make it so such campaigns had to "pass muster" (i.e., official ArenaNet quality control and approval), then I (ArenaNet) would purchase the campaign from the person who created it (or perhaps offer creators a percentage of the revenue), and then add the campaign into the standard game as optional content . I think this would keep an MMO very innovative and fresh, with a constant supply of new player-created content coming in.

For example, a player could create a kind of "Sorrows Furnace area" and submit it to ArenaNet for approval. If the campaign (or rather, "mini-campaign" or "mission" or whatever) or dungeon "passes", ArenaNet could then purchase it from the player-creator, and offer access to the new content through the game (probably for a fee [think Bonus Mission Pack]). It would be an interesting direction to go for an MMO, I must say.

Just curious, but what do people have in mind when they ask for "skill-based" titles? Sure, I can see how the consumption titles aren't "skill-based," but I think the vanquish/protector/guardian are as close as you can get within the way Guild Wars is set up.

Nice writeup... and, can I please have... (oh, you answered already - nevermind).

/signed


Remove all grind based PvE titles.

I would love a weapon mod trader to be implimented, few things are more frustrating than getting that perfect skin gold and not having the mods to build exactly to your liking. I usually prefer to build my own gold to my liking (especially with BMP golds being available very early on in the game) rather than get a comparable green. Maybe it's just me but I like to build my own weapons, so finding prime mods is high priority to me.

I agree with this one a lot, we needed more space between average goods and rare quality goods and not be able to make everything in the game perfect. I liked it really before inscriptions where you really had to work for a quality item and everyone wasn't running around with a torment weapon/shield or elemental sword. It's just too easy to get everything to max now on anything. +30 hp mods that used to sell for 30k are barely able to get rid of for 5k-7k, same with 20/20 sundering mods that used to sell for 30k to 50k pretty much worthless nowadays. Everything is except a few of the old rares like perfect crystalline swords and chaos axes. Old skins though not much of anything else of value except the torment stuff and eventually that will be worthless as everyone starts to get theirs either farming it or buying it.

In this regard I would have just wished for an expansion pak with RANDOM dungeons in it like LDON of Everquest. Where going into the same dungeon didn't mean you would meet the same mobs and bosses each time. The loot tables would change also so you never knew whatcha was gonna get. LDON to me is the best presentation of dungeon crawling adventure I ever played in an online game. It had 5 zones with 8 scenes in each zone for a total of 40 different views and then an unlimited amount of mobs and types and levels based on the average level of your group to fight against. Too bad the only bad thing about it is you couldn't solo it, you had to have at least 3 players or I probably never would have left EQ.

Sorry, but, I disagree with you on this. I love titles that are important to increasing my power or ability to do things beyond a normal capacity. Like the Treasure Hunter Title, Wisdom Title, Luck Title, Lightbringer and Sunspear and the Norn Title track, Kurzick and Luxon as these things gave me advantages in the game to earn. But, yeah drunkard and those silly childish titles that do nothing to help you within the game they could have just tossed them out. Who cares if you survived the whole game without dying if it's not even going to give you some type of ingame advantage. Who cares if you mapped every pixel in the game you're not getting any advantage. What the truth of the matter really is is that nobody really LOOKS at your titles. I know I don't cause I dont really care what titles you have except the ones I mentioned and only those would be Lightbringer or Norn or Kurzick or Luxon for the SKILLS they give you. <grin>

1) Yeh, but I see it very hard. Can be done, however

2) Only if they are for fun, not for farming

3) Totally, utterly and fully agree. Rollback to 2005, when titles didn´t determinated your skill. ( Unless the PvP ones...well, Hero...eh..tjem)



4) Fokin Xunlai Marketplace pliz. But I´ve heard that the game´s engine do not allow to add that addition.....again, for GW2 /sigh

5) Items are perfectly balanced...if we talk about numbers. Ask the other guys of this thread.




6) Yeh, I also want to rape every NPC chick I see.