Official Suggestions Thread - March BWE

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.

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.

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)

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.

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. :-/

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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....

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!!!!

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.

Gwen was great, except the fact I thought she was my friend. I gave her a flute and let her follow me. I rescued her from the otherside of the river. And what does she do?

"Lews Von Xanten, do you want to die?" And then the next thing I know, I am burning. I wonder which admin was in charge of that change of scenery. Was hilarious.

I think this is a problem, I realise that the game is not meant for solo players, and it's more enjoyable as a team but some people will want to solo, why not make this otherwise great game even better for those who want to go it alone? They let you grind if you want, the let you quest if you want, the let you pvp, they let you gvg, they let you do coop, they let you dye your clothes! But they stop you from soloing

Who ever said it above: YES! i would love it if you could do internal gvg matches, where you could battle your friends in little 4v4 matches over and over thatd be so fun

for the soloing, that would be interesting if they could scale the difficulty depending on amount of party members, i dont know how hard this would be for developers but im sure its something theyve already considered

No they don't stop you from soloing. It is just beyond your current ability. If GW was suddenly easy enough to solo, then the group effort would make it too easy. I like retrying an area with the same group and getting to know them, teach them, and learn from them. This is fun. If you make it possible to solo, the havok that a group of four well trained Guild Warriors would bring on the Charr would keep me from playing the game. Make it hard, make it chalenging, make me cry , and when I win I want to celebrate . Otherwise, I might as well just surf the internet .

If you want to solo go get Diablo 2, Champions of Norath 1/2, ?WoW? Come on this is GUILD Wars not solo wars.

You could alway get good enough that you can solo the game. Then you would be a real hardass

Well, saying that you shouldn't solo isn't really the answer.

Making soloers understand that they need to use Henchmen is the first part of the solution.

The second part is some rudimentary control of those henchmen that NEEDS to be implemented before release.

The third and final part is to rebalance the Henchmen's skills/levels to match the increase in difficulty in the seared ascalon areas that was done.

Once all that is done, player soloing will be more feasable. Single character soloing on the other hand will likely never happen. On that one I'm going to have to pull the "GUILD Wars" card. The game is meant to be played as a team, even if that team is only one player and a bunch of henchies.

You could solo and group in Diablo 2, it had a nifty bit of code in it that would essentially ramp the hit points and xp of monsters up as more people joined, so it would be just as difficuilt no matter how many players except you would find it tough to solo with lots of people playing. All I am asking is code that ramps down the hit points and even the xp(so no leveling) and even the drops when you have a one member party. So while you can do it alone, it's much more advantageous to group up. It will still be a challenge to group up for sure (I love it too) but I still say promoting some more solo aspects while not altering groups would be better.

I have to say that I'm all for being able to solo. Besides the fact that this is not, in fact, "SoloWars", there are days when I just don't feel like putting up with the grind of gathering a party, or have had some bad experiences with disconnects and un-loyal party members recently, and sometimes just want to go exploring or gather the last ingredient for a quest and don't want to trouble anyone. I mean, I don't want to piss anyone off by gathering what I want and then leaving them.

I don't really want to have to control the henchmen, I mean, they are supposed to be their own being, and emulate a flesh and blood teammate. I just think that in some cases the henchmen "could" use a little beefing.
I also know someone who I'm trying to "sell" the game too, and he refuses to buy it unless it's possible to solo it with henchmen at an equal level to a successful party. Though I wouldn't mind having a little more trouble than with a flesh party, it'd be nice if it were possible to do everything with henchmen with a respectable amount of work.

I want to see the DP go away from pets. It's really annoying when your dumb AI pet goes around and gets itself killed then you suffer for it.

I totally Agree with removing Death Penality for when pet's die.

I'm trying to "SNIPE" off a huge char seige force and my STUPID #%(* pet runs around about 3 cliffs and now is head to head with 20 Char. (Talking about the mission right after the Ruins of Surmia)

I Can't help it my Pet is dumb. You can't help it if your pet is dumb. Please remove the dumb death penality.

Let's face it, some people still wouldn't go to a specific trade area they'd still fill up the chat with their WTS, WTB, WTT, crap. What we really need and what many people have been saying is to add a specific trade chat for towns that will go between districts.
Was it just me or did they remove the "all" chat in between districts, because whenever I replied to party offers and things, they'd always end up in the same district. Was this a change of amazing coincidence? I did prefer to get chat from the other districts.

Also, I have a few PvP ideas. There should be a feature where about 100 random people go into a huge Roman-like arena and fight, gaining exp from those they kill and possibly even awards according to their rank. When they die, they could either have the option to leave or watch from the side, others could just sit and watch too, maybe even a betting system could be implemented to place bets on who you think will win and have odds based on their win/loss rate and average ranking overall.
Another fun PvP would be similar to this, but have a few arenas that are just running constantly, people teleport in as others die. Have this be a continuing fight fest. If a rank system were to be implemented for this, (or just something for personal record) it could record most time alive and most kills.

EDIT: I haven't done any PvP yet, if anything similar exists, PM me and I'll edit this to more apply to the current things in place.

They should add in better pet control with stay, follow, attack commands

It happened again...my fellow travellers and I were near the end of our journey when POOF! one of our traveling companions (our primary Monk) vanished into thin air...nothing left but a whisp of...of...well...nothing, just a blue tag where a red one used to be...dangit! Abandoned again...*grumbles*

I think it rude when it's abandonment, and sad when it's a disconnected user. When a party loses a character...NOT one that dies, but just leaves...I think it would be TOTALLY WONDEROUS if a henchman of the same class appeared in their stead...even if it were a signet of "Arnok the Bumbler had to go get the kids from daycare"...Henchies can hold their own in most circumstances and I'd rather have a level 10 "bot" than a level 17 "see ya later gotta go"...

In public area click on team mate name in box press space bar. You will run to your team mate.

This was my first BWE and I really enjoyed the game a lot. Three straight nights of staying up to 4 in the morning. Woo.

I have played WoW and I own CoH, and Guild Wars is by far the most beautiful, visually stunning of the three. It was a real pleasure just to walk around in the world. I liked the PvE combat too, and once I figured out some hotkeys, PvP too.

However, having played all three games, there are things from the others that I missed here, and I'd like to suggest implementing GW versions. Most of them have to do with ease of communication.

1 - It would be nice to hear a tone when someone in your party or guild writes to you. There was so much emote chatter going on in the chat window that I often would miss my team-mates talking to me. A little beep would warn me to look at the window.

2 - The names of party members should be a different color than the rest of the population. It was hard to pick out my pals in the crowded cities.

3 - Word balloons over people's heads when they're talking. I know this doesn't make as much design sence here as it does in the comic book world of CoH, but it was very difficult to know who was talking and if they were near me or far away. It made the cities feel very 'silent.' Maybe it would be more "Guild Wars" if scrolls appeared above their heads.

4 - Add a right click drop down menu when you click on other players so you can invite them to your team or add them as friends without having to type out long, bizarre fantasy names that are way too easy to mispell. My in-game name was Neimos Sempramortes. I pity the players who tried to add me as friend.

5 - Allow more customization of the character's looks. The faces and hairstyles were great. Better modeled than either WoW of CoH. But in the game, you never get close enough to another player for those subtleties to read very well. Even though I went for the most contrasty choices I could, I still had a hard time picking myself out from all the other warriors who looked just like me. And when I put my helmet on, my hairstyle went away and I looked even more like the other warriors. Even if it was only allowing us to chose the color of our clothes at the begining it might make a difference.

Picking out your pals is one reason for this, the other is bonding with your character. In CoH, once you're done with creating your character, you are that character. You know how they talk, feel, think and react. They have a personality. I know this is more fighting game than RPG but I would enjoy the action more if I felt I was an individual rather than another clone in brown leather. And buying dyes seemed to me more annoying than challenging. Why do I have to pay to be an individual?

6 - This is a foolish nerdy rant and feel free to skip it, but.... The character design! Yikes! Like I said beautifully rendered, but if you are trying to create an internally consistant fantasy world, you should pick a time period/historical style and stick with it. These guys look like they were put together by 6 different design teams who weren't allowed to talk to each other. The Warrior is Roman Legion, the Monk is Wu-Shu lite, the Mesmerist is Harliequin Romance Regency, the Elementalist is Louis the 14th's hairdresser, and the Necromancer is wearing Goth Club vinyl. They shouldn't look the same, by any means, but they should all look like they came from the same culture. Or at least from the same guy's sketch pad.

Okay, ranting done. Please don't let it affect your judgement of the other suggestions, which I think would actually improve the game play. Thanks.

"Say" "City/District" Channels
Need /say & /city or district channels. There is no ability to speak to those in your vicinity without spamming the entire district. If you need to spam the district, use /city or /district. Also need a /trade or a trade district.

Collectors
There needs to be some item details for collector rewards. The collector may offer 3-5 items for you to choose from, and the only info provided is the item's name. I would like to hover over the item and see what it does. On the topic of collectors, please add the item they collect, along with the rewards, to the quest log. It wouldn't hurt to also add which creature(s) drop the items. "I would imagine that bandits use [worn belts] to carry their tools". I didn't see a single "worn belt" or "colossal jawbone" in any of my travels in pre-searing Ascalon.

Looking For Group
LFG tool, similar to EQ1. I would like to enable "looking for group" and have a flag of some sort show visually. It would also be quite handy to have an actual interface for viewing and browsing groups that need players or players that need groups. EQ1 handled this better than any other MMO I've played.

Weapon Stat Details
Need to be able to view weapon speed or DPS (dmg per second). It's somewhat of a guessing game when it comes to deciding on which weapon to use. Having all weapons of the same type attack at the same speed seems a little lazy too.

Auto Follow
Need the ability to type /follow or /fol to auto-follow an NPC or player character. Have a command system that is intelligent enough to determine that /fol = /follow if there are no other commands that start with "fol". This should apply to all "slash" commands.

Invite Command
I also favor a /invite command. If "Guild" Wars is truly meant for guilds and groups, then make it easier to form them.

Show Players on Map
Friends or allies show up on the map when you go to the overview map. This is very useful in World of Warcraft. If you need to find someone in a large, highly populated district, you could /invite them, and then see them on your map.

Area Switching Confirmation
Some sort of notification that a party member has left the area and a confirmation for the person that does the leaving. I had someone help me open the northern gate in pre-searing Ascalon, and then they promptly went back through the gate to get back to town. They took me with them. They had no idea that it would happen that way. They needed a confirmation that they were going to drag the group with them. I could have used a confirmation letting me choose to leave the group and stay where I was. There already is a similar confirmation displayed when a group member attempts to map travel. It warns you that you will leave your group and asks if you still wish to do it.

Targeted Emotes
If I target "player b" and type /laugh, on my screen it should say "You laugh at player b". Player b should see "Ignotus laughs at you". Everyone else should see "Ignotus laughs at player b".

Bank
Bank, or other type of storage is needed. At level 10 I had my original inventory slots and one 5 slot pouch. My inventory was always very tight.

Mail
A mail system would be great! World of Warcraft is the only MMO I've played that has on, and it's very useful. It seems to require a lot of resources on Blizzard's part though, so I'm not sure if it's feasible for a game with no subscription.

Party Window
It needs to provide more info than simply the HP of the other members. It should also provide the energy of the other members at the very least.

Loot Distribution
The ability to "pass" on a dropped item that has been reserved for you would make inventory management less of a hassle.

Who Command
I never found the equivalent of a /who command. If it doesn't exist, please implement one. This is the only MMORPG that I've ever played that doesn't have a /who command. I would like to see what level my guildmates are and where they are located at the very least.

Target Command
This would help with finding a specific NPC or player in a crowded area. It also helps with finding specific mobs or PvP targets. If someone says "target the monk", you should be able to type "/tar player name" and have it target them. If there is only one person/NPC in the area whose name starts with "ric", then "/tar ric" should be sufficient.

Group Window Location
I solo'd all of the pre-searing sections. I moved my group window to the bottom right corner of the screen, and I had the mini map in the top right. Every time I entered a new area, the group window would move back to the default location. This was annoying.

Ignore Command
Is there a /ignore command? I want to put everyone who randomly invites me onto the ignore list.

Academy
I had no clue what the academy was. If it gave me any warning, I missed it. I was standing around talking to my guild while my groupmate was getting owned. We lost the encounter. I didn't choose my partner, and I had no idea that PvP was involved.

Linking Items
Add the ability to ctrl or shift click an item to link it to the current chat window.

Info In Pre-searing Ascalon - Gwen
I had no clue that this accomplished anything. I gave her a new flute. I also gave her a couple of flowers. She kept wanting to follow me. Does any of this accomplish anything? There was a cape that could be purchased from an outfitter, but I wasn't sure if it was for her or not, plus I couldn't afford the 200g for it. This type of information was definitely lacking.

Off Topic
This last part has nothing to do with the topic other than I saw it while reading it. Either this person does not understand the definition of the word "mob" in MMORPGs, or they wish that it wasn't used this way.
Anyway, here's what it means, and it is singular.
One monster is referred to as a "mob". Blizzard calls them "creeps", but most people call them "mobs". It has nothing to do with the official definition of the word mob.

When being invited to join a group the rest of the group should be visible not just the leader.

Nuf Said IMOH

I'd like a button to toggle forced walk, i.e. ignore the bounding boxes of enemies/friends and just walk to where was clicked. I use mouse targetting for all of my movement and combat, and moving into the middle of a group of four enemies (for melee-distance area of effect nuking) was sometimes quite difficult due to not being able to direct my character to walk to 'behind' the enemy.

The Nature Ritual changes seem very nice (no more issues with death penalty discouraging their use), but the summoned spirit was so big it often interfered with targetting, or just blurred sight (I tend to play at a low angle though). Additionally, the glowing ring around the spirit seems rather pointless, since it does not indicate the spell effect range at all (the actual range being much much larger) and stacked nature rituals can soon become a blinding bother. For instance in the Borlis Pass mission the packs of Shiverpeak Longbows liked casting Winter without deciding who would do it, leading to four stacked casts of Winter with mostly overlapping effect areas, needlessly slowing down computers.

Given the intense effect accompanying nature rituals, it would be nice to see some effect on your pet when activating beast mastery shouts; currently only a subtle green field shows up beneath the caster, no indication on the pet whatsoever. A green upward arrow on the pet (similar to enchantments/hexes/conditions) would additionally be a nice reminder that the shout is still active.

The change to selling items took some getting used to, which led to some unfortunate sales at the start of the BWE - the old drag and drop system (or with insta-sell on drop) seems more secure. Also, pressing enter seemed to confirm a sell as well, which was rather tricky when trying to ask a guild member if they wanted a certain item - enter usually opening the chat prompt.

An off-character storage of any sort would be nice. The diversity of crafting materials and more recently the creature-specific drops (mergoyle skull, grawl necklace etc.) meant the more permanent (intended for collecting, not salvaging or selling) part of my inventory quickly got cluttered, eventually leading me to give up on the collector quests altogether and just selling the creature-specific drops for 1g a piece. Additionally, being able to receive even 100g for each completed set of creature-specific drops would give a nice incentive to keep them around - currently there were a lot of collectors that offered starter weapons or items my character could not use very well, a money option in those cases would give the idea the collecting did not go to waste.

The added emotes are nice, but it would help if the action was not written out in public areas (since they have little purpose there other than amusing the bored), thus cutting down on the chat spam. A filter to block them out would work as well.

An option to toggle the guild capes would be greatly appreciated. My guild mostly plays PvE, and we know which guild we are in already. In a weird moment where the guild information didn't load for my monk, I was suddenly able to appreciate the look of the backside of the armour, seeing it for the first time. It would be quite natural for RP'ing guilds to desire something similar; during PvP guild capes could be locked back into place as they function in some part to indicate who is who. About this however: we tried out some PvP at the start of the BWE, and were facing a guild in the red team that had a mostly blue guild cape, leading to some confusion instead of making things clearer. I wouldn't know what to suggest for this however, since the guild cape design is the pride of many guilds, and forcing it to any colour would not likely meet with their approval.

A fellow guild member (on dialup) had some issues with the loading screen - he spent a lot of quality time there (which is understandable and accepted given the streaming content phenomenom), but was quite annoyed by the constant 100% processor time taken during the downloading, effectively rendering him unable to do anything else on his computer in the thirty minutes of waiting. Ofcourse after the game is released downloading will be much less of a problem even for those on dialup, but reducing the processor load during downloading might be something worth looking into.

When rebalancing skills, please take into account that it affects mission difficulty as well - the reduced cast time on the Necromancer corpse animation spells was a welcome change, but especially the hordes of zombie warlocks in the Gates of Kryta and d'Allessio Seaboard missions loved every bit of it, quickly conjuring up masses of minions to swarm over the unsuspecting players if they did nothing to stop them (such as removing the corpses with soul feast or casting Frozen Soil to lock them in place). If players stopped their raising of minions the mission was suddenly quite easy, if they didn't they'd soon find themselves dead, and suddenly mission success relied on the fate of a few corpses on the ground, leaving the actual scripted boss battles just an afterthought.

Finally I'd like to say the mission challenge was great, regardless of those slight inbalances caused by skill rebalancing. Groups charging in without second thought or coordination got punished, and this felt quite right. For certain areas in the Gates of Kryta and Wilds mission, we had to devise careful strategies to avoid facing too many enemies at once (absolutely love the patrolling enemies - the sense of urgency when fighting one pack as another slowly approaches is great), and just discussing these things was a very entertaining activity already. Sometimes when we were unable to complete a mission we explored a little, finding new skill trainers in remote locations that offered new skills to give us that extra edge to succeed where we failed before. Pet death penalty seemed right as well - those players taking Charm Animal along only for a cheap second body were finally forced to notice some adverse effect.

I never thought about this before. THis is a very good point, but the AI should be boosted more in this scenario because right now the penalty sucks if your pet runs off to kill anything that it sees moving.

I probably should read the entire thread, but:

Perhaps rename soul reaping to something else, and instead of energy per creature death, it gives an arrow of energy regen? For instance, from levels 1 to 4 you get 1 extra arrow of energy regen, 5 to 8 is another, and 9 to 12 a third.

If ranger rituals could undergo such a drastic change, why cant this? This way it would be useful in PvE and PvP, or am I crazy (ie too powerful or worse than it is in it's current state)?

This was one of the things I wanted to suggest, but could not remember. There is currently no way of knowing what monsters you have to kill to get the items the collector is asking for. I would imagine that a collector, being an authority on the item he's asking for would know where to get it.

I can't tell you how many times I had to re-do a mission because someone walked through a portal they couldn't tell was a portal. (I assume they don't show up if you have low graphics settings or something.) Then there was the Borliss Pass mission where you apparently had to kill EVERYTHING on the map to succesfully complete it, in which someone always walked through the portal before we had done that. I never completed that mission in at least a dozen attempts, (possibly bugged) even when I was with a party that was willing to spend a LONG time running around the map trying to find every last monster that existed on it. We either missed something that was extremely well hidden, or it was not possible to complete.

As soon as you pick up and drop something it becomes neutral and anyone can pick it up. I realize that inventory space is sometimes tight, but this only takes a second to do, and only requires one free inventory slot. I admit that I did not know this was possible until I had someone ask me if I could do it for items I was leaving behind, so maybe it needs to be explained somewhere.

I have to admit I started doing this later in the game because I never got a response to any of my requests for party members. I was pretty much forced to invite everyone I saw that fit the position I was trying to fill in hopes that at least one was actually there and not just standing around AFK or whatever. Maybe the AFK and LFG icons people are asking for would eliminate this problem.

If I'm not imagining it, I believe she heals you if you are injured during an encounter while she's following you. There were several times I was suddenly healed while fighting and this is the only explanation I can think of for that.

I just call one a monster and more than one a group. Seems easier to me.

This isn't so much as specifically for the March Beta, but in a sense, it is, so I figured I'd post it here. Well, three things, actually, and I'm not sure if they've already been brought up.

1) Attack Ranges. I'm not sure if it's just me, but the attack ranges for Mesmers, Necros--really, any spellcasters, seem awfully short. It seems that Rangers have a much greater range, and I just don't understand why the spellcasters need to get so close.

There have been times in PvP where I've literally run right into the middle of a group of Warriors, and I only was targeting the opposing Mesmer/Necro/Monk/Ele that was not a few feet behind them.

While, yes, the range limitation does necessitate the need for the weaker spellcasters to hold back, I feel there should be some type of "distance buffer," for lack of a better term.

I'm not suggesting to nerf the Ranger--far from it. For their profession, their range makes sense. But for the spellcasters, I thought one of the beauties of those classes was long-range (or even mid to long range) spell devastation?

2) Lion's Arch unlock near Beta Finale. With the recent new and exciting PvP character creation changes, I found many (all, lol) of my older WPE and Beta characters deleted to make room to experiment with new, fuller character builds.

At the Beta Finales, we're all well aware of what kind of action goes down in Lion's Arch, but unfortunately, both the PvP characters and any new characters created don't have Lion's Arch on their maps...and for the new characters, getting to Lion's Arch is pretty unsafe unless you've got a solid group.

So, would it be possible to unlock Lion's Arch on every characters' map a few hours before the Beta ends? That way, everyone will be able to get down, dirty, and naked and then get slaughtered by Bone Dragons and Firestorms and such.

3) Private Duels. Now, don't get me wrong. I love the group PvP in GuildWars. But sometimes I just wish I could challenge another player for a 1-on-1 duel. I don't think a ranking system would necessarily be all that important for the duels, but I do think duels would be handy when you're testing out and experimenting with various builds.

I mean, you could go up and challenge a Warrior/Elementalist if you wanted to see how well a Necro/Mesmer build would do, and I think it'd provide worthwhile feedback in the sense that you can see what skill sets/tactics work and which don't, so you can hone them a bit before leaping into the Arena or Guild-to-Guild battles.

Just seems that in the Arena battles, which have random teams and such, it's not totally possible to see what works and what doesn't, because with the random teams, it certainly can come down to three Warrior/Monks laying into your Ranger/Ele combo...and it just doesn't seem like an accurate gauge of what the character can do.

Yes, when you bring that character into the group battles, you're going to be faced with that group battle situation, so some tactics employed in the 1v1 may not fully apply, but you'll at least have a better idea of how to knock out the opposing characters before it comes down to that 3-on-1.

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Thoughts? I don't visit here too often, so I may or may not reply for a few days, but I wanted to throw those three things out there.