A Consolidation of Community Suggestions to Improve GW -- Both PvP and PvE

About PvE (Nothing new from me, but good points/suggestions from another thread)

- Character development comes alittle too late, skills you get later in game come too late to really use in PvE much. Upto the desert most classes have a single or a handful of optimal builds, and some roles can't be taken at all untill later game, such as any kind of elementalist except fire.


- Replayability in general is pretty small, majority of co-op missions only have one path, and no variability in mobs. The same goes for the smaller npc given quests, after the first time they loose their appeal but for the rewards, which are mostly unnecessary or even useless, except skills and exp. So it has been sugested that missions have a random factor introduced into mob spawns.


-=- A bigger sugestion is a differant kind of co-op be added alongside the storyline missions. They would be mostly unscripted (as in no cutscenes) and each built around a simple objective.

Such as :

• Defend the fort - A faster paced and more compact version of the end of thunderhead keep, perhaps with siege worm style enemies or toned down balistae within range of outer walls but not the inner courtyard to give a choice of whether to sally forth or hold the courtyard
  
• Protect the caravan - Simple escort mission, not entirely sure about this one, since the mission critical npcs in GW are so fragile, but the general idea is to escort a caravan along a route defending against randomly generated attacks and maybe one predetermined attack with random mobs at one obvious location, such as a crossroads when 3 groups can come from 3 sides
  
• Timed race to activate pedestals - Pretty self explanetory, race in a laberinthine location to activate pedestals scattered across the map, time should be short enough that there's always a sense of urgencey, as in tighter time constraints than the Elona's rech mission, pedestals could be located randomly out of a larger number of set locations, but im not sure I'm in favour of that since it may just make it frustrating not fun/challenging
  
• Steal the relic - Set in an almost arena style mission, quite a small size. All the groups would have interlaced patrol routes and would respawn on a timer, not at the relic location but on either side and resume patrols, which don't pass within agro range of the relic. The relic would be guarded by a boss and a slightly larger group and would only drop on the death of the boss, then relic must then be returned to a pedestal at the start
  
• Boss assasination - Almost a reverse of defend the fort. The boss would be located in a fort with a large number of closely packed groups, the group would start with friendly npcs marching in from either side of the fort, the npcs would be made to inevitably loose to the mobs inside the fort, but they would be numerous to grab the agro of most the outer groups, the group must assasinate a single boss or a group of 2-4 bosses (depending on difficulty, a single boss seems too easy). The difficulty should come from defeating bosses and inner groups before the outer groups finish the friendly npcs off and avoiding being dragged into the larger melee.
  
• Survival - The ever popular fight to the death set in a pretty open arena, had to include it, though im not sure how it would have a "finish", maybe scale the reward dependant on how many waves are survived. Also not too sure about the game's capacity to spawn in enemies, but hopefully the ressurection system from thirsty river works similarly enough to be used.

I'm not suggesting these scenario's specifically, but they are fairly specific examples of the type of play style the missions should have. Short intense missions with no running or filler groups, a fairly interesting objective to keep it alittle fresher than an endless meatgrinder of mob killing and an openness in map design so players can be inovative about how to get these objective's done (IE not a single path with mobs placed at regular intervals untill the end boss).


The mob spawns would be almost entirely random, within some fairly liberal parameters, but still with a wide range of enemies likely to spawn in any one mission, and differing difficulty each time. The missions should be replayable and the reward obtainable each time, be the reward experiance, an item, faction, maybe even a skill of choice from a set. These would all be aimed at post ascension characters, and wouldn't be required to advance the storyline in any way.

If some fluff is needed they could be explained as more of the trials the spirits of the fallen go through. With this they could all be linked to from npcs in a single area, as in temple of ages and fissure of woe/underworld, and could even mean the rewards could be in the form of another type of faction (Dwayna? Grenth?). That could help party building too by not spreading players out across various locations. Or they could be done individually each with their own story if the trials explaination is too far out of character, neither is intergral to the idea.

I would like to see one compromise in story continuity be made in the case of enemies in the mission though, a wider range of possible mobs would help keep the challenge evolving so I don't think mobs should be restricted to a single sub-set for any of the missions. I wouldn't mind if I see the forgotten fighting alongside the titans or any mismatches like that in these missions.

The differance each time they are played would give them at least some replayability and, with a fun enough concept as the main objective, could be played multiple times in lieu of pvp for someone looking for a bit of quick fun rather than moving on to the next mission. Since no matter how fast new content is added, there's going to be a last mission eventually.

[Edit x3] Yup still editing it fleshed it out on request.

Regarding the Auction House, I'm pretty sure an ANet representative hinted somewhere (I think it was a fansite friday article) that they are working on some kind of auction house. No dates were given.

I'm not having any luck with finding the article.

It was mentioned in the last Fansite Friday that ANet is working on a new, more efficient method of trading. However, it was never really clarified as to whether or not it'll actually be an auction house -- only that the issue of having easier trading forms is being looked at.

Have you ever used the prot bond build? Unless you have a completely different set of armor you CANNOT play normally anywhere with enchantment removal. Want to do stuff in the shiverpeaks? watch out for them arcanists! Want to go up against the mursaat? Not if they've got spectral agony!

What do you mean by "most powerful"? I've seen warriors who can solo pretty much anything by using cyclone axe, bonneti's defence, live vicariously and healing hands. The issue is NOT with protective bond. Soloing, or the reasons for soloing rather, is the real problem you want to address here.

Ding ding ding, read my first post about how to change their cash cow into an incentive to form parties to go out and clear maps. Wouldn't YOU go to mineral springs more than once per character if upon clearing every group of mobs a chest spawned with 2 golds per player?

Any area in the game can be done by 3 characters with fairly decent builds. Damage soaking, Healing and damage. People used to 3 Man UW run all the time before prot bond: doesn't change the fact that as long as people are offered more loot for their time that they'll take said method. Even without prot bond, a protector monk and a self smiting/healing monk can EASILY clear all that the single can, but with less worry and more areas available to them.

Again: this isn't about prot bond. The skill is only useful in 1 or 2 builds that twink it to the max. This is about why pve encourages people to go off and solo. If you want incentives for real teamplay, then add them in instead of trying to gimp soloers. Let the soloers solo if they want, but if full teams are getting more rewards for their time, then don't you think many soloers would start joining teams?

"Create a system for inter guild PvP matches. This would essentially allow guilds to GvG against themselves."

I am in favor of this. After bugs and balance issues, this should be the next thing put in for pvp. It will get people who don't pvp interested, as they can get their feet wet with people they know. And if the guild is good and has strong teachers, they will push the members to get better through practice against each other.

"The issue of being unable to find a GvG match is more or less due to the inactivity of guilds doing GvG and there is no quick fix."

The game is only a few months old, I think that one will work itself out on it's own. There's one solved!

For the purposes of this thread I will assume that there will be [EDIT: *no*] UAS although I belive that is the true final solution.

Varyag's proposal has several really strong points that can accomplish a few things. That was the idea of reducing faction costs drastically and attaching a scaling mechanism.

I believe that the costs should be calculated using the following ideas:

*A character should be able to unlock all 450 skills through PvP
*The overall time cost should be comparable to farming skill points in PvE so they are equal.
*This means that it should take 450 * (14 minutes per skill point) = 105 hours to completely earn all skills in the game.
*This will allow people to play for an enjoyable period of time and achieve something.
*The faction costs should therefore average to a skill per 14 minutes if averaged over the collection of all skills.
*The lowest end of the scale should be incredibly cheap skills for new players so they gather up skills quickly. It should be such that after about halfway through (50 hours) they should have 75% or 80% of the skills (including at least a third of the elites).
*After about 60 hours worth of play, the rate at which you gain skills should be steady and not increasing - to keep incentive to keep learning more.
*This will lead to an evening of the playing field as most people will soon have most of the skills for most professions.
*I don't know about how much faction runes and mods should cost so someone else must post about that. It should not be grindtastic though


The big idea is newer players will have build up a good library of skills and earning them fast will encourage them to play, so enriching PvP for everyone. This will help the huge wall PvEers face because of the current state of PvP and should help bring the communities together. Then everyone will have enough competitors and enough people of their level to play with.

I hope that satisfies the requirements of the thread and I hope this thread gets read and taken seriously

First off, thanks for starting a thread that isn't mindless complaining and ranting about A.Net and their buisiness practices.

While it would be nice to get rid of refunds, it opens the door for abusive tactics of respecing attributes in the middle of fights. I guess the solution to this would be to only allow changing of attributes in towns.

Guild Unlocks:
A solution I haven't seen for skill unlocking is the guild unlock. The idea is that everyone in the guild shares the same unlocks, be it for skills, or weapon modifiers. I feel like this solution is viable because it ties the pve and pvp aspect of the guild together, which is what A.Net seems to wants. This would also mean that players that were new comers, or friends of guildies, would have access to the skills others had and would be then capable of competing with the group. The solution also helps significantly for the guilds where one person has a plethora of skills, and also ideas for builds, but doesn't have the man power to put any to fruition. If a player left the guild they would lose unlocks that they themselves did not have.
Possible Problems:
Leechers and small guilds. The problem for smaller guilds could be solved by simply keeping faction around; with shared unlocks they should easily be capable of generating enough builds to get faction for more. Faction may still need to be increased, but that's what testing is for.
The problem with leechers could be solved by forcing players to beat the PvE once through to have guild unlocks availible to them.

I'd love to hear more feedback on this, tweaks, criticism, whatever.

Skill Imbalances:
For nature's renewal, I'd like to see it elite so it can't be used with oath shot, or simply have it remove less enchant's and hexes, like 0, 1, or 2 per person, so that its main purpose is to double casting time of enchants and hexes.
For Zealot's Fire/Ether, I think the problem is more with the lack of single target enchant removal over issues with the actual skills. That's just my opinion though. Reduce the recast time on rend enchantments, or improve skills like rend/chillblians. Reducing the mana cost on moves like lingering curse may also be helpful, though I'm not sure if that would cause more problems. The point here is, the cooldowns on enchant removal have to be better than the cooldowns on the enchantments.
Putrid needs a cast time, limit on targets, or maximum damage. Like putrid can hit 3 targets max, or putrid's damage deals 300 damage, distributed equally across targets with a 100 max. Something like that. The problem with the second two solutions is that it still limits the use of other corpse exploiting spells. Although I guess this could be seen as a counter to powerful spells like well of profane.
Fertile is simple, someone before touched on a good solution of not effecting other spirits, and not being allowed to heal spirits.

A HoH solution to eliminate ganking and a last second putrid fest: making it a 5 team tournament where the defending team gets a bye to the last round. So basically if there are 3 teams in the HoH, 2 teams fight it out, and the defending team waits. If there are 5 teams, there would be two 1v1s, then another 1v1, and then a 1v1 between the defending team and the remaining challenger. There could be a time limit and sudden death to prevent stalmemates and extreme waiting. And if this isn't implemented... atleast change the HoH so its the team that holds it the longest, where the defending team doesn't stay on the altar, to prevent the 8 minute wait till the 2 minute putrid frenzy.

As for the priest's of balthazar being in high level areas, it would seem to me that anyone that plays pvp should have atleast one character that far into the game. It's not particularly difficult to do and doesn't take that much time. A.Net's stance seems to be clear that they want PvP to include PvE and if that small amount of PvE isn't tolerable then a solution is unlikely to ever come that would satisfy those people.

A solution to increase interest in pvp might be to make WC3 styled tournaments on a regular basis. Tournaments where theres a limited entry time, qualification time, then a final tournament to decide the winner. This could draw a lot more people to pvp.

I've played protective bond builds before, and short of very aggressive enchantment removal (think 10+ single removals, rend, lingering, profane or NR) there's nothing a little chaff enchanting can't stop because linked mobs will simply take turns using their single enchantment removal on you, with a good 2 seconds inbetween each of their casts. I mentioned Zealot's Fire/Divine Boon as an easy combo along with this - you can pop Divine Boon back on every time they strip it, spend maybe 20 energy before the fight starts, then their enchantment removal options are recharging and you smite them to bits.

A warrior you described is similarly powerful, but unlike a bonder (who only has to worry about enchantment removal, which still in 75% of cases isn't present at all, and in 90% of cases isn't severe enough to stop him) has to actively heal himself. A bonder can /dance for all he cares, survive any kind of spike damage where such a W/Mo would be in quick need of a clump of enemies to cyclone through for health. The W/Mo you describe is powerful but loses out to the bonder when it comes to tanking potential, and given the recharge on cyclone axe I believe the damage potential of a bonder can be higher as well - that's why as far as PvE concerned I'm still convinced a bonder is the most versatile and powerful solo option.

I used this example simply as part of the reason why this particular group currrently keeps quiet about bond abuse, just as farmers seem to zealously guard their secret farming spots, because right now there is a cash cow incentive so to speak. Balance issues aside, I believe that was one part of the three-part reason why there's not more discussion on this issue.

I agree that a talented three-man team with a clever build setup can (and should) take on challenges that would otherwise require eight mediocre players. I'm not so convinced GW is served by allowing one person to have damage soaking, healing and damaging all on one character (and in a way that makes each of them practically effective, there's nothing wrong with someone trying to be three things at once and fail on all counts), which is what the Protective Bond setup provides. Perhaps even a two-man team can meet the challenge, through clever builds adapted to circumstances (I frequently go out in a two-man team formation, and the added manpower actually often makes things more dangerous, but it's much more fun). Indeed, Protective Bond is really only good in one or two builds, that's what I meant with killing off experimentation and versatility - one or two builds answer 90% of PvE challenges adequately and more effectively than most other custom-fit solo builds because of passive soaking/healing (practical iddqd), I think a healthy game encourages more diversity and creativity than that.

Finally, this might not be the right place to discuss this particular skill (although I'm interested to hear what you have in mind to encourage teamwork for areas), perhaps we can move the discussion to that old thread I started on the issue, then when we've reached some form of conclusion either leave the issue from this thread, or add it in in a consolidated form, as was the original purpose of the thread?

I think PvE loses much of it's replayability because it's actually often disadvantageous to do all the quests. Even when an NPC gives me a quest that gives 1000 exp as a reward and some crappy item, my time is better spent completing the next mission and going on to the next part of the game. On my first character, I completed every single NPC mission before going on to the next part of the game. However, once I go to the next part, monsters don't give much experience because my levels are already high. On my second character, I just keep going forward and the monsters I kill give much higher exp (because I am lower level). I am not going to invest half an hour to gain 1000 exp when I can just kill 10 guys in 5 minutes on the next map to gain the same amount. I think they should change those quests so instead of giving a long sword with +5% damage vs charr, they should give a rare long sword instead, with the possiblity that it will unlock some high end parts (or perhaps it will actually be worth using). Or maybe even give some faction as rewards for some harder quests, so players can unlock some of the skill or modifiers that are particularly hard to get. That way people would actually do the NPC missions instead of paying runners to get to the end of the game as fast as possible so they can start farming for cool looking gear.

I'd like to thank Sarus for starting such a great thread. The first post is already a good summary of many of the issues we've seen in the community, and I hope it will improve over time. The feedback in this thread is very valuable.

Now I know you don't want generic "We've read your thoughts and..." responses but instead more detailed feedback from us. That's not always possible, however, for a variety of reasons. A good example is the "Auction House" issue; we're commited to implementing a better trade system, but until we know exactly how we're going to do this we can't give you any details. Frustrating for a fan, I know.

The "State of the Game" letter from James Phinney is imminent, and I'll wait until you've had a chance to read that before I comment on any of the issues here.

PvE and PvP Skill Balancing: Yes, it should continue to be done until the end of time. UW farming with Protective Bond... who cares? It's only an issue because of related PvP issues IMO, namely for skill points which are very hard to come by after a certain point. Other than that, I don't find it unbalanced, rather just the sort of clever use of skills and items that makes GW a great game. PvP skills simply need to be monitored and balanced on an ongoing and regular basis.

Faction: The current faction rewards are really only viable for GvG, and even there they are insufficient, or at least the costs of skills (particularly) are too high. Tombs is less satisfying and less fun (mostly from the 6 team map that involves an hour or more of waiting each other out), and Arena rewards are simply a joke, though it's the most fun activity in the game based on how long it takes to get setup vs. how much exciting gameplay you get out of the activity.

Somewhere in ANET's corporate memory a document surely exists that states the length of gameplay intended for GW. So, what is it? Is it a 50, 100, 200, or 500 hour game? ANET, share the vision with us!! If it's a 200 hour game, what is the intended balance between PvE and PvP? Should it take just as long for either? Is PvP intended to be 150% of the time investment of PvE to acquire the same skills? If you don't know, you should. If you do know, then share it with your players. We don't have even a baseline vision to work with here other than skill>time, a vision which your player base simply can't see in the actual product.

If the blind are leading the blind here, smack someone on the head with that useless flashlight you're carrying.

To get somewhat back on topic, here are specific faction suggestions:
- increase faction rewards for arena in particular, so newer PvP players have a greater incentive to play.
- allow players to buy fame with faction (feudal knighthood was bought as often as it was bestowed), so newer PvP players will have a chance to get on better Tombs teams that require rank
- lower the cost of skills at the PoB, and put one in every competition lobby

Skill Acquisition: Other than stating that UAS is a bad, bad, bad idea that never should have been implemented for wide audiences even in beta, I don't have alot to add. There are many good ideas out there, from unlocking your two professions entirely upon ascension (minus elites) to drastically lowering the cost of skills from the PoB, to reimplementing skill charms, to Guild based unlocks, etcetera ad nauseum. As I have stated elsewhere, skill gems worked just fine for me, and they stimulated a meaningful trade economy.

Guild Issues: Low on my list of priorities, but nice to have lots more in the way of stats and scrimmage options. Not a core game issue.

Smurf Guilds: Ratings Decay. C'mon so-called inventors of Battle.net! You practically invented ratings decay!?!

PvE General Issues: <Shrug> WaW is fine, it's the need for skill points for PvP that makes UW such an issue. Solve the skills problem and there won't be significant issues with WaW or UW, except from the Euro Nihilists who will whine anyway in their black turtlenecks and disrupt Lebowski's bowling...

Auction house? Sure, nice to have, not a core issue IMO. There are bigger fish to fry, maneaters in fact.

General PvP issues: Tombs is not fun, but there are rewards. Arenas are fun, but they are a waste of time. GvG is fun and rewarding in theory, but takes just as long as Tombs to set up a team (because of players struggling to put a build together with insufficient skills), is inconsistent with it's auto matching, delivers diminishing returns the higher up the ladder your guild is, and has a real problem with smurfs and dead or stagnant guilds at the top. Obviously, ratings decay and skill acquisition reform would go along way towards solving GvG problems.

For Tombs, just let the 6 team map go. I simply won't play Tombs anymore because waiting each other out for an hour really isn't fun. Or, give a DP bonus to the team who wins based on how long it takes to win as an incentive to move things along. This really is a ridiculous situation, an online game really needs to reward offense over defense, because fun>boredom. As much as the devs might hate the idea, every good competetive game ends up at this conclusion, and sitting on the fence only makes your crotch hurt longer.

General Issues: Player drops -- c'mon, solve this, it's fundamental to competition. Good steps have been made in the arenas, but the arenas (aside from being alot of fun) are irrelevant.

Observer mode is shiny and good, and it will certainly move GW in the direction of a solid competitive game. BUT, it solves none of the core issues and will, at the moment, simply propogate FoTM at a faster pace. Plz don't waste development resources on it until skill acquisition and the PvE/PvP balance has been sorted out.

On a final note, I'm not a big PvE player (I do it to relax, or as "work" to make my PvP experience better) but, I have to ask, what is the end game here? Surely UW is not the whole of the vision. How about true Raid level encounters with multiple parties in coop vs. big baddies? Why isn't Leroy Jenkins playing GW?

Thank you for the feedback so far.

Here is a list of Thursday morning updates to the main post located here

• Added 3 community concerns. These are:
  1. Item Unlocking Difficulty
  2. PvE Replayability
  3. Party Formation (Both PvP and PvE)
• Added several links to past fansite fridays which address many of the suggestions we've provided. I'm still hunting down past fansite fridays and reading through to try and fill out all of the "Anet's thoughts" sections
• Updated the last updated dates (hehe I know that's kinda lame)

I'm still working on consolidating arguments for and against the skill balancing issues and that's what i plan on getting up next. To be honest though I have yet to read any real valid arguments against balancing NR and the other mentioned skills.

Also just wanted to mention that there may be some cleaning up of the thread. The goal is to keep it as concise and readable as possible. Again if you have a problem with how the cleaning up is done just PM me.

Sec II. Faction System Issues (In-Depth Version)

• PvE Requirement to the Faction System
  It is currently required to have an advanced PvE character to spend faction which seems to go against the intended purpose of the faction system which is to allow PvP players to unlock skills solely through PvP.
  Suggestion [Learn More]: Have a Priest of Balthazar with all skills and upgrades available at the guild hall and at the Tomb of Primeval Kings.
  Anet’s Thoughts: Unknown

Overview
Since this is my own suggestion I decided I should probably provide a slightly more in depth analysis of why I think the PvE requirement is an issue. To begin, I can understand why Anet has put into place the requirement that you have an advanced PvE character to spend your faction. After thinking about it for a little bit I came up with 3 pros to the current system.

1. Anet would like to ensure that people purchasing GW with the intention to only play PvP are forced to at least try PvE in the hopes that they will enjoy it and thus feel compelled to buy any expansions.
2. Anet would like to gurantee that there is always a constant influx of new people even in the lower level missions to make certain that new PvE players will always have people to group with and not be forced into using henchies.
3. Anet would like to foster interaction between the PvP and PvE communities.

Counter to Pro 1
Since Anet is a business and at the end of the day businesses have to turn a profit I think pro #1 is the most compelling argument in favor of the current system. However, I think the underlying assumption here which is that PvP players will not PvE unless forced to is incorrect. When I first played GW during the WPE I knew I was playing the game for the PvP. However, I was still interested in checking out the PvE content. In addition, most gamers who go out and purchase a $50 game are going to at the very least explore all the game has to offer (both PvP and PvE). This means that most PvPers that purchase the game will explore the PvE on their own even if it's not the first thing they do. Granted, not all PvPers will like the PvE enough to complete the missions but forcing them to complete the missions as the current system does is not winning you any fans. So long as future expansions contain more than just new EA's I think they will appeal to both PvP and PvE players regardless of whether or not they have been "forced" to experience the PvE aspect of the game.

Counter to Pro 2
This is a very valid argument as well. Forcing PvP players to PvE helps keep the number of people that are doing PvE missions up (although I'm not sure how much it helps). However, I think this is the wrong solution to the problem at hand. Instead of making people do things they would rather not do why not make the missions non-linear so they're worth doing multiple times? Maybe figure out some sort of incentive for doing a missions more than once. Ensuring that there is always a body of willing and able players to complete missions with is going to be tough but pushing people into it isn't a great solution. To be honest I don't think the lower level missions will ever run out of people doing them even without PvP players there.

Counter to Pro 3
Fostering interaction between the PvP and PvE community is a great idea. However, the attempts made at it so far (WaW, PvE faction requirements, other things I might not be aware of) don't seem to be working. I suggested bringing back the skill charm system which should promote interaction between PvE players who acquire charms and PvP players looking to purchase said charms. The biggest problem however is that PvP players don't have anything PvE players want other than gold and possibly sigils. To get gold though PvP players need to farm (i.e., do PvE) and if they're farming they'll probably get all the skill charms they need without having to buy them. Not sure how to fix that =/

Reasons to take away PvE requirements in spending Faction
Acquiring skills through faction is already tediously slow. The fact that you still need to use your PvE character to "hunt down" the skills you want once you've got the faction you need just adds insult to injury. I can't see any benefits in requiring that PvP players have a PvE character other than those listed above which I attempted to counter. Of course I personally am not affected as I already have ascended PvE characters but I'm thinking more of the person that goes to Best Buy today, see's GW, buys it for the PvP, jumps straight into the PvP and skips the PvE, grinds out a bunch of faction using a pre made PvP character that is at a severe disadvantage to begin with, wants to spend his/her hard earned faction, and then finds out they can't because they haven't completed all the missions with a PvE character! Or how about the person that goes to Best Buy, purchases GW for both PvE and PvP, plays through to yaks bend and decides PvE is not for him/her, starts playing PvP and loves it, earns up faction to unlock skills, goes to the priest and realizes they have to go back and finish up the rest of the missions to get what they need. How are these types of people going to feel? Are they going suck it up and play through the PvE missions or are they going to just quit altogether?

(P.S. Yes I realize I double posted but I hope it's alright cause I wanted to be able to link to this specific argument from the main post rather than have it as part of the update post above)

I don't know if this has been done already, but I have an argument against putting a full-skill Priest in the high-level PvP areas.

Quite simply, doing so defeats the purpose of Guild Wars' unlock system. The game was designed so that you would go through the game a few times to unlock the skills for the classes you want to use for PvP. Having the Priests be limited in what skills they give out depending on where you are helps that, making you play through the game to get to the higher-level skills.

Having an all-skills priest would be a detour to PvE and totally defeat the purpose of having it. Yeah, it may be an inconvenience to those who bought the game for the PvP aspect, but there is a LOT more to the game than PvP. I think the system is fine as-is.

Solo monk farming:

Two simple ideas that may help:

1. As number of human players increases, drop chance per player stays constant, rather than decreasing. This encourages farming/adventuring/exploring with groups. Sure, some people hate grouping, but I think it's a good idea to encouraging grouping anyway.


2. Rather than drops tables being based on monster type, base them on the group of monsters encountered.

One-dimensional "beast" sorts of groups (ie, 3 hydra, or 2 ettins, etc.) drop very poorly (maybe make them drop collectors items only, but at a high rate?).

Balanced groups of enemies, with disenchants, healers, melee'ers, bosses, etc, drop good stuff. This rewards parties that can handle varying situations, and penalises soloers who rely on "trick" builds. It also encourages building teams that have a complementary sets of skills in PvE, as a mirror to the pvp team building gameplay.


PvE Replayability:

One easy way to get some quick replayability out of the current content - when you create a PVE character, open up a skills selection window just like the PvP character creation. There, you can choose any 8 of your currently unlocked skills to take with you into the game, right from the beginning.

Now you can see what it's like to play a Water Elem in the first 3/4 of the game, or use minions, etc. It makes it possible to have more fun replaying another character with the same primary class.

Something I'd really like to see would be either the option to refuse XP gained from Ascalon and Shiverpeaks arenas, or the option to create level 10 and 15 PvP characters for use is said arenas. Those two are by far my favorite forms of PvP, but unfortunatelly there's only a very limited amount of time I can play in then with any given character. Once I reach level 16 (which, if I start PvPing at level 15, only takes ~3 days), the only way to see more Shiverpeak PvP is to delete my character and start from scratch.

For the team arenas, it would also be nice if there was an NPC there who would "register" you as waiting for certain party positions. So, if someone wanted to start a group, they could talk to this NPC, choose Johnny Alpha (W/Mo), Johnny Beta (R/E), and Johnny Delta (Mo/N) as his teammates, and go.

I've posted this in a thread of its own, but as I'd like for the developers to address my concerns, here goes. I've consolidated any and all of my replies in my previous thread:

As a player who focused primarily on playing the PvE aspect of Guild Wars, I must say that unlike some of my PvE-enthusiast counterparts, I don't think ArenaNet did a very good job with the portion of the game that some people staunchly defend as being the best part about Guild Wars.

I'll be blunt: PvE is boring. There is very little to do beyond trudging through the ultra-linear missions with its uninteresting storyline and repetitive gameplay. The wilderness areas hold even less value to me as a PvE player due to the respawns, the lack of 'loot', which is one of the primary reasons why games like World of Warcraft and Diablo 2 are so popular, and the fact that they are nothing more than static areas with predictable placements of relatively opponents that offer nothing in terms of loot as previously mentioned, or even experience points for that matter, as they're just there to serve as a gameplay hurdle/timesink between you and the next location (e.g. Temple of the Ages).

Another thing: the map design is really bad. I'm not just talking about how players get stuck on blades of grass. I'm talking about the map designs as a whole: they're all maze-like. There are no open areas, except in Pre-Searing. It's really, really unenjoyable to walk around and have to fight a group of monsters every 5 seconds, especially those monsters that are hidden in the ground and pop up as soon as you approach. Is that supposed to be a challenge?

I don't like how the cooperative missions cater solely to classes like the Elementalist, Warrior and Monk primaries, either. The Holy Trinity, as they're called in other MMORPGs. Guild Wars is capable of better mission design with all the skills each class can be decked with, so why isn't it? Simply putting a monk, or even a couple of monk enemies within each enemy cluster would do wonders to diversify the class requirements in each party in the linear missions. Utility classes like the ranger, mesmer and yes, the necromancer would see a lot of demand, as the "Holy Trinity" wouldn't be able to counter such enemies on their own. Of course, while doing this would make it easier for utility class characters to find parties, it wouldn't do anything to change the fact that PvE is still boring.

I realize that Guild Wars isn't Diablo 2, but having a random placement of monsters as well as monster types with varying skills, along with loot, rewarding experience and even randomized quests would go a long way to making PvE a much better experience. The game is instanced, after all, so why not? Anarchy Online does it.

Speaking of which, what ever happened to the boast about each player being able to 'affect their instanced version of the game world', something that was mentioned time and time again in interview after interview?

In any case, having more modes of gameplay would be awesome. Just running through the boring linear missions isn't my idea of a good time. Having the party of players face off against a horde of weak, but numerous monsters besieging a fort would be tremendous fun, and it would certainly offer a great diversion to the tedium of the current game. Besides that, there's really all sorts of gameplay modes you could come up with. Having the players face off against waves of random monsters in a melee would be terrific, and I don't mean to have any of these modes set up as one of those linear missions either, but as a special cooperative gameplay mode. I'm sure it's been suggested before. Let's face it, the PVE is repetitive, and that kills replayability.

Concerning PVP: Adding new gameplay modes would give the game the boost of life that it deserves, and getting rid of the annoying maps like the 6-way PVP would help, too. Also, there shouldn't be any reason why all of the PVP battles have to happen in the Tombs. Some players might just enjoy playing the Relic run maps, or maybe they just like to duel another 8-player party without being in a guild, so why not have separate arenas for these gameplay modes?

Before anyone brings up the subject that "PVE is about grind, as are RPGs", I'll just go ahead and say that you if you do say that, you probably don't know what you're talking about. When I played Diablo and Diablo 2, it never felt like a grind. Why? Because it was fun, and because it was constantly rewarding, either through the accumulation of new items, skill points, or quest rewards that didn't involve some part of the game I wasn't interested in. How interesting is it, really, for a PVE-only player to acquire a skill that's only useful in PVP? While I hold interest in both PVE and PVP portions of Guild Wars, I don't deny that there are parts of the game that we would be better off without: namely, the slow accumulation of skill points, the pointlessness of doing so for a PVE player as there are no real challenges that require the use of most skills, and the fact that PVP players have to spend time doing something they don't consider enjoyable.

In real RPGs like Fallout and Baldur's Gate, not once did you ever have to grind. You merely accumulated levels, skills and items as you continued on your quests, or journey throughout the game, and performed tasks and made decisions that changed the game world. Playing Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur's Gate II and Jade Empire never gave me the impression that I was 'trudging' through the game to some end. It was about the journey, not the destination that captivated my interest for as long as it did.

One more thing, the big problem in Guild Wars' linear storyline is the fact that you're relegated to the role of 'passive observer' when it comes to having any effect on the setting. It's hard to call it an RPG when you can't control anything that happens to your character, or to the game world you're in. With the way skill point redemption is, it's difficult to say that you're even capable of developing a unique character, because you're not. Killing monsters doesn't result in any rewards, either, so what's the point?

Once you're level 20... that's it. All that remains is completing the rest of the game for the sake of reading the weak storyline. There is no real incentive. I don't much feel like grinding for the useless Fissure/UW armors, just so my character can look pretty, either.

Guild Wars feels like a grind, and I don't like that feeling. The game needs less linearity, and less forced gameplay. Yes, it's true that Guild Wars uses the carrot and stick approach, as do many other RPGs. With Guild Wars, however, the carrot happens to be rotten and the stick is a big baseball bat with bloody splinters all over it.

Please don't squander the game's potential.

I dont know if it differs from the developer's vision for the game, but this is why I think GW shouldn't try to be an RPG - it should be an action game, with RPG elements. Some of my most favorite games are included in this category, Action enough to require physical skill and RPG enough to allow for individuality and planning/building, and to have a "theme" to the character.

I've repeated it a million times already (i should stop, sorry), but examples include Devil May Cry, Phantasy Star Online, Guardian Heroes...

How does GW become such a game? Make the fighting fun. Make every battle a unique challenge. Provide rewards for being creative and for trying different things. Make actions that are more difficult more powerful. Give actions that are more powerful, visual rewards, so you can enjoy doing them, and to let you show off. Make it fun and interesting to experiment. Give us wacky things to do, that are flashy but not as useful, to "show off". Even with a limited palette of actions, design them such that there's a large number of different styles and ways to use those actions. Provide unique challenges that require unique fighting solutions. Especially when it comes to bosses, go for quality, not quantity.

Pulling mobs makes up a tiny amount of pve time in anything except solo hunting, where you have to pick and choose carefully. Though admittedly in some area's you tire of seeing the same enemies over and over. For example spiders on the way through the blood and smoke quest. Nothing. But. Spiders.

For all the groups of single enemy types in the game, there's 2 or 3 groups of mixed types, but the mixes themselves in each area become formulaic and it's rare to have more than 2 types in a mixed group, which isn't a great mix.

So I guess there is a point there, but I'm not sure just going around and tweaking all the map spawns so each group is more varied will have a huge impact. There's still only one (often two for warriors) build for each class in most area's and even the bosses are the same, you invariably know what to expect not matter how much you mix them up.

Perhaps some kind of system for slight variations in skills for enemies could stop you feeling your fighting endless clones (pick 5-6 skills from a pool of 9-10, with some skills linked so they come together for obvious combos), or failing that, could have the unwieldy system of hand making several variations on a theme for each area.

Not sure about making to single enemies stronger and reducing group size. Would shift balance in unusual ways I can't guess yet, maybe a slight shift might be good, single target disables, long recast hexes and slow recharge single target nukes make few appearances in PvE.

[Edit] This was in reply to small deleted post I'm not just bringing up stuff randomly.

Also in retrospect the choosing the skills from a larger pool option might be a bit of a nightmare AI wise, it might not but I could imagine it being a barrier.

As an officer in a mid-tier PvP-oriented guild, here's my two cents on what improvements I think ought to be made to GW:

MAJOR:

- Make all skills unlockable through PvP, from the highest to the lowest. Feel free to make elite skills decently expensive (2000-3000 faction is just dandy for elite skills, considering unlike normal skills, you'll only be able to equip one at a time anyway), as long as you keep normal skills affordable for up-and-coming PvP'ers.

- Cheapen the faction cost for unlocking regular skills from the Priests of Balthazar. 500-600 a pop would probably be better, if you're a moderately competent PvP player you can earn that easily on your own but still have to work reasonably hard for it (i.e. either organize a good team for 4v4, spend a decent bit of time in Tombs or GvG, or even just get lucky over and over again in random arena like yours truly).

MINOR:

- Make the skill inventories for all Priests of Balthazar comprehensive (all skills under the sun available for purchase from the same Priest). One-stop shopping, baby!

- Put Priests of Balthazar in the lobbies of Team Arenas, Tombs, random Arena, and maybe one in the player's Guild Hall too. I for one get antsy to spend my faction after I earn enough of it.

- Make extra armor colors available for unlock by spending faction at the Priests of Balthazar (i.e. the various shades you can get by mixing dyes in PvE).

- Make non-PvP armor sets (i.e. Ascalon, Platemail sets) unlockable for PvE characters by spending faction at the Priests of Balthazar.

- Make the Fissure/elite South Shiverpeaks crafter armor unlockable for PvE characters , but feel free to make it hella expensive.

I'm all for working hard to unlock stuff...as long as I can work hard in PvP rather than PvE to do so. I personally would much rather spend hours grinding random arena while my guildmates are offline for a set of uberl33t armor rather than spend hours grinding UW/Fissure.

The Team and Competetive Arenas should not randomize the maps. I *hate* playing in The Crag, for example (when I kill someone, I want them to stay dead), but the D'Alessio arena I like. What's wrong with letting people choose which map to play in?

Here's a suggestion that I've seen before: Refund Points should refresh every time you visit a town (maybe reduce them to 12 in that case). It's so frustrating to have to go kill mobs for an hour before I can respec from PvE to PvP or vice versa.

Since a large majority of skills in GW is single-foe or PvP specific i'd say following a similar approach on mobs in PvE was the OBVIOUS thing to do.

When i seared the first time whilst in an international district i got into that first PvP arena with JUST henchies [both on my side and against me]. I found it thrilling, it went by a bit too fast to figure out their exact tactics, but at least it had a "sit up and concentrate" effect on me. I see no reason why there must be so many "repetitive" mobs, i rather fight a Glint-like mob [huge dragon requiring to know its weakness/strength to kill] twice per map than fighting 5 Ettins 10 times per map.


Suggestion:
Program more forms of AI behaviour [offensive vs. defensive] and reduce the amount of mobs by making them more intelligent/stronger.

--> This itself would change solo-farming scene, in fact it will probably kill farming all together. Compare solo'ing 30 Griffons vs solo'ing Glint.

Suggestion 2 : With above statement in mind, the reward system can easily be adjusted to "task completion" vs "amount of kills". For example, after you kill something like Glint, a chest appears for each team member and everyone gets their own set of rewards. Only advantage of solo'ing Glint should be maybe extra XP, not drops.


There is almost NONE of this in the PvE game, 99% of all encounters are based on how well you can do "crowd-control" . The end-bosses usually are cake-walks, only reason why they are hard is because you have to fight 50 other mobs before you can kill it.

Some suggestions:

1) Some of the biggest frustration in this game comes from vastly overpriced commodities (dyes, runes, some rare crafting materials) and vastly underpriced ones (that 1-point short of max-damage rare gold weapon that you'll have to sell to the merchant for 50g because no one will ever want to buy it... or salvage).

There's 2 parts to solve the problem, and still have the fundamental needs (weapons, runes, gold) accessible to everyone: more drops and more gold sinks. Creating scarcities has resulted in wild inflation and a lot of player frustration that the various new Traders have only partially helped (plus, in the case of runes, it's still harder to unlock by PvE, trader or no). And, yes, it's encouraged more farming -- because it's seen to be gaining that much more of an edge via having more gold. More drops = lower prices people can demand for those drops. Look at the change in fur price after they fixed the scarcity back in the first month or so.

More (quality) drops helps, but it would also create the need for more gold sinks. If they implement guild storage, it should be something purchased or rented. Optionally, there can be purchasable communal storage there plus purchasable personal storage. If they implemented some form of auction house, it should encorporate a transaction fee based on percentage of the sale (I don't know about everyone else, but not having to spend hours WTS or WTB would be worth something to me) -- and perhaps an initial registration fee to list items there. Dye mixing and usage could be changed so that they need to be done by the dye trader (with a preview window for mixing?) for a fee. The ability to purchase the proposed training wing for your guild hall (accessible by a jump point) would also be great, and perhaps one could even purchase ("rent") different maps for it (i.e. train for the existing capture-the-flag missions).

For gold sinks, I'm talking especially about conveniences and looks. Players have proven that they will pay a lot for looks (witness fissure armor). So as has been repeatedly suggested, new armor, new hairstyles, new weapons (same damage limits but more diversity in "cool" looks) at a price are all called for, and will go vast strides to fixing the economy.

2) Encorporate something to indicate enchantments and hexes on a target. Similar to the icon below left that shows what your target is casting, there could be icons at right (no text unless mouseover) showing enchantments or hexes on them. It'd be a great way to help determine what strategies are being used against you, and a great way for healers to determine some of the habitual oversights of their teammates. "Hmm... he keeps on wailing on that Shadow Beast when he's got Spiteful Spirit on him. No wonder he's dropping like a fly..."

3) Instant Lvl20 PvE option available once you've finished the game (possibly also having to include a minimum % of quests, if that's easily calculable from a prgramming perspective). Includes a set number of skill points, but not as many as you'd have from doing the whole game from scratch, and perhaps the 15 attrib-point quests would be unavailable.

4) Add Lina, a Lvl20 protection monk with best current hench AI to Temple of the Ages, and assign her so that she can only be taken to UW or FoW (plus upcoming bonus areas). If you could have witnessed the joy that took place at Thirsty River when this happened (I was skill-capping there at the time), you'd understand how much of a difference it makes in the worst LFG areas.

5) A max armor level for low-level arenas; possibly one arena designated as an anything-goes area for low levels.

6) PvE unlocks are random vs. PvP Faction unlocks. If I pick up an un=ID'ed gold armor, what if there was a window where I could specify what I'd like to unlock (perhaps with a % chance of failure, varying depending on XP)?

7) Pickpocketing NPCs. Sure. We could try to pickpocket the rune trader, starting with low chance of success (improving with each successful attempt), and each time we're caught we have to pay a fine (another gold sink). OK, go ahead and laugh...

8) The ability to right-click on a party member's name and see how much XP he / she has (and if ascended, infused, etc). It's not a cure-all, but it'd go a long way to determining the quality of person you've just taken on in a PuG, not to mention determining which player is preventing your party from entering UW.

9) A party formation Registrar who you can pay 50g to (another gold sink!) and will display your primary/secondary profession, a descriptor ("smiting"), Level, XP, goals ("UW quests," "skill cap," "bonus only" or "trapping run") and any comments ("have Blood is Power equipped for monk energy support") to all who consult him for prospective party members. This list would be cross-district, and if someone from another district clicks on your name, you get an auto whisper ("Stinker Belle: has invited you to join a party in district 11"). And, of course, once you've accepted a party invitation, you're stricken from the Registrar's list.

10) I'm convinced that the unpopularity of Necros, Mesmers and even Rangers is largely due to the near invisibility of their skills. Dress them up with a few special effects and people will start to notice that yes, they are valuable members of a team. I've been crusading with my necro (Sister Sin) at ToA and others for the past month demostrating the value of BiP, and though it's taking awhile (and not solely due to my efforts -- I'm not that deluded), people are starting to look for necros as team support. It's nice to see. But if there was a little more attention drawn to various skills, we wouldn't see rangers confined only to Hell's Precipice and UnderWorld for good grouping (for example).

11) Some Dispel Spirit(s) skills or signets (with modifiers, penalties, whatever). Would go a long way to rebalancing Nature's Renewal.

12) And what about a way to purchase Faction points with gold? (no flames please, I'm only asking)

For a few specifics that come to mind, if Anet would like to address them: 1) the missing caravan outside Yak's Bend, which shouts "oh no, dwarves! Save us!" before charging at all the nearby Ice Elementals (and yes, also dwarves) and trying to pummel them with weak bare fists; 2) the dwarven fellow just outside Droknar's Forge who's supposed to lead you to the next area but is slain by Avicara 3/4 of the time, unless you're really recklessly rushing; 3) the 3 ghosts at the tent (including the eternal weaponsmith) who will be fine until you've proceeded on into the forge, at which point you notice Kormil's health drop and boom, you're dead. Those skeles have a huge roaming pattern, and it sure doesn't look like they should aggro the ghosts, but they do.

This is an issue of personal concern, but it might bother more than just me in GW:

Descriptions Bugs
This game has a lot of in-game descriptions for items, skills and world effect. From time to time, some of them are bugged. I am listing what I know and I hope others can add what they know to the list as well.

Skills Description Bugs
Currently some descriptions are not truth and is hurting people's playing strategies. I find it hard to believe that after all the alpha/beta testing stage and three months into release, these description bugs still exist. It requires little effort to change some text in the descriptions of known bugs.
Example:
Channelling: "...for x seconds, whenever you cast a spell, you steal 1 energy from each nearby foe." In fact, you do not "steal" energy from the enemies. You simply "gain" energy for each nearby foe. Rumor says that the devs in this case intend channelling to work the way it is right now. If that is true, they cannot be bothered with changing one word for the many patches we've had since the game came out?

Item Description Bugs
I have found some description bugs in collector items as well.
Example:
Item that gives bonus modifiers: "..improves casting speed using divine favor skills (chance 20%)". After testing with skills from the DF attribute for an afternoon, I found that the casting speed bonus and similarily, recharge bonus, only affect spells. Signets and general skills do not appear to be affected by the bonus of these items.

The quickest way to fix these "bugs" are to change the description to fit what is actually happening. If the devs' true intentions are for the mechanism to act as described, but are strapped on resource, it's still better to just change the descriptions first. Factual descriptions are important at build making and strategy planning, for knowledge is power. Little things like description bugs may affect the success of a build. It is not the first time after something doesn't work as planned, me and some friends shrugged: "well, it's Anet..." as if we were expecting the Murphy's Law to apply.

In-game Description Style
Some other skill descriptions are so weird in this game that even a non-native English speaker like myself find the style akward.

- Random capitalization
example: "For 30 seconds, You gain..."; "Improves Casting speed..."
- "Health", "Energy", and "Enchantment" are always capitalized, while other variables like "armor" isn't. (Thx Silmor)

1. I am writing this to give an elegant argument for the drastic increase of faction reward amounts. The numbers that I will be giving will not be including any of varyag's suggestions, but they are good ones, and can definitely be implemented along with a smaller scaler number that I'll be suggesting.

My numbers that I will be giving are proven through the documented gameplay statistics of over 100 Guild Wars players. The data has been collected by the program G-Stats developed by kunt0r. G-Stats is a program, popular on The Guild Hall, that is used by lots of top ranking players (and some not-so-top-ranking players) that can track any number of statistics about their PvP performance. One of the statistics that it can track is faction gained per minute. The raw data that I used to find the numbers can be found by browsing the player profiles.

I have taken the liberty of removing outliers, like players who had not done PvP under the G-Stats program and people who gained less than 1 faction per minute. The numbers that I used from the player profiles were each player's faction per minute. This gives an idea of how long it will take a player to effectively unlock a skill. The values generally ranged from around 3-7 faction per minute. Now, before I delve into my findings, let's do an overview of the faction system.

Each normal skill costs 1000 faction.
Each elite skill costs 3000 faction.
There are 364 normal skills and 92 elite skills.
1,000 faction * 364 normal skills = 364,000 faction required to unlock all normal skills.
3,000 faction * 92 elite skills = 276,000 faction required to unlock all elite skills.
That gives us a total of 640,000 faction to unlock all skills.

Each attribute class of rune costs 4500 faction (1000 {Minor} + 1500 {Major} + 2000 {Superior}) to unlock.
There are 6 (Warrior) + 4 (Ranger) + 4 (Monk) + 4 (Necromancer) + 4 (Mesmer) + 5 (Elementalist) + 1 (Vigor) "attribute" classes of runes, for a total of 28 "attribute" classes.
That Equates to 4500 faction * 28 "attribute" classes = 126,000 faction required to unlock all runes.

Each dynamic weapon upgrade costs 2000 faction (1000 minimum + 1000 maximum) to unlock. Each static weapon upgrade costs 1000 faction to unlock.
There are 10 static weapon upgrades for Axes, 6 for Bows, 7 for Hammers, 0 for Staves, and 9 for Swords. That comes to a total of 32 static weapon upgrades.
There are 9 dynamic weapon upgrades for Axes, 8 for Bows, 9 for Hammers, 8 for Staves, and 9 for Swords. This comes to a total of 43 dynamic weapon upgrades.
1000 faction * 32 static weapon upgrades = 32,000 faction to unlock all static weapon upgrades.
2000 faction * 43 dynamic weapon upgrades = 86,000 faction to unlock dynamic weapon upgrades.
This gives us 118,000 faction to unlock all weapon upgrades.

Total faction required to unlock all skills, runes, and weapon upgrades is 640,000 faction + 126,000 faction + 118,000 faction = 884,000 total faction to unlock everything.

That's a lot of faction. Now, let's look at how fast players accumulate faction. Again, these numbers are taken from real player statistics, not my estimations.

Total Faction to unlock everything: 884,000 faction
Average Faction/Minute: 3.916 faction/minute
Average Faction/Hour: 3.916 faction/minute * 60 minutes/hour = 234.93 faction/hour
Total Hours to unlock everything using Faction: 884,000 faction ÷ 234.93 faction/hour = 3762.82 hours

Now, what to do about these numbers, and the incredible amount of grind that they represent? Well, the easiest fix would be a simple scalar multiplier on faction rewards, or a scalar divisor on the faction unlock costs. What would that multiplier be? Well, that would have to be a function of how long ArenaNet wants the average gamer to unlock everything. As it stands, this would occur in pure PvE situations in about 600 hours, not counting runes or weapon upgrades. In my opinion, (and in many many other people's opinions), this amount of time is ridiculous to invite a casual gamer into the PvP scene. When you look at the amount of time with faction, you get an even bigger shock. But, regardless of that, however, the multiplier based on how much time it should take a player to unlock everything should be based on the following equation:

Faction Multiplier = Total Hours required to unlock everything ÷ Total Hours that should be required to unlock everything

Say that ArenaNet decides that the Total Hours that should be required to unlock everything is 100 hours (which would be very reasonable, I might add). The equation would break down to this.

Faction Multiplier = 3762.82 Total Hours required to unlock everything ÷ 100 Total Hours that should be required to unlock everything

That would come up with a multiplier of 37.63x if ArenaNet wanted players to be able to unlock everything in 100 hours. That's how much Faction needs to be increased.
I'm not going to turn my post into an Anti-ArenaNet bash, but this post just proves that ArenaNet has not done enough testing of their own game on how fast players unlock skills and how long it actually takes them to unlock skills in their own system. Gaile, I'll answer your question, since I am very good with statistics and analysis. To make it so that players can unlock everything in roughly 100 hours, the faction reward needs to be multiplied by roughly 37.63x.

For clarification, are these arena battles, gvg, or tombs?

They are an average of about 120 players playing all of those types. G-Stats does not discern from GvG, Tombs, or Arenas, so it's basically a representation of what everyone's doing.

Your number are off: the rate of accruement for top players dwarfs that of lower players: the weaker you are the harder faction is to get. For a true 100 hour grind you'd have to have a multiplier even larger than you stated.

Balancing for the worst case scenario is not the best solution though.

Its not a worst case scenario. The people who start playing do not have any skills. You can't expect them to waltz into pvp and completely decimate their enemies like the people on TGH do.

I would loosly define that as the worst case scenario.

While I would like an adjustment of unlocking rates things can only be pushed so far before the PvE rewards of the game are devalued (something A.net doesn't want).

I have another idea that, if refined, could drastically lower PvP entry barriers without affecting the PvE negatively.

I would like to be able to *temporarily* unlock skills/items with faction and/or money.

The faction prices of these temporary unlocks would have to be very low, at least in comparison to how much things cost now faction-wise, in order for it to be worth it. Monetary prices, I'm not so sure about how they should be set.

Very low prices for temporary unlocks would allow for easy build testing and dynamic build creation without having PvE accomplishments being trivialized (through their permanent unlocks). It would also increase pick-up group viability for Tombs/team arena, where people hoping to get a good build would only have to have some number of faction on-hand to create a temporary build.

PvE could definitely benefit from another gold sink, too.

If you browse the profiles listed, you'd see that not ALL the players are top 100 guilds or whatever, but the main point is to illustrate is that even "the best of the best" players need a 37x increase in faction rewards to complete the game in 100 hours. The average joe probably needs a 50x+ increase, but that number is not based on statistics, just speculation.

Maybe guild faction would help some of the newer players in guilds with skills? Since every person has faction, they can choose to put their earned faction into a "faction vault" kinda thing. The leader and/or officers have access to withdrawing this faction to unlock skills for ALL people in the guild. Of course, these skills would cost more than normal, but it's a way to help people along PvP. I dunno how far this'll go if implemented, but it's an idea. (sorry if someone's mentioned this here before but posts are too long to search

For the faction system, They need to put a priest of Bathazar in the arens areas so that PvP players can unlock new items with there PvP chars and have the option of adding the weapon / rune upgrades there and then.
Similarly PvE players who gain unlocks should beable to equip them on their characters there and then.
The amount of faction rewarded in the arenas should work off s reward system, in respect to number of wins, i.e. 5 wins gains 2x faction rewards, 10 3x etc. Flawless victories should hold a bonus to faction, which increases the more flawless victories you have in a row. 2x, 3x,4x and increases for each consecuative win. This would only be a fair system if The Preists actually allowed the player to equip their unlock there and then. Rememebering that once something is unlocked it cannot be reunlocked for a new weapon or PvP character,

The PvE game IMHO needs simply to scale more and a minimum XP system needs to be inplace. With scaling areas it would Take away the issue of l33t builds solo, as any character could solo, but in doing so loot drops would decrease as the monsters scale down.
Loot drops should be scaled towards the difficulty level of the creature you are fighting, i.e lvl 3 against a lvl 3 = good drop for a level 3 player, but still only drops a lvl 3 drops if killed by a lvl 15 player, meaning that the loot is useless except for selling.
Instigating a min xp is a must for a scaling system, as a solo explored the creatures would need to be 10-5 levels less than the player for mass attacks, similar level for small encounters. It would not effect the game for other players as it is instanced.
This would also make gold / farming more viable for all players, whilst still remaining a challage, it would stop players using l33t builds farming high level areas for uber loot as it would simply not drop unless you are in a high level group.
This would instantly add more variety and replayablity to the PvE side of the game.

Now for actually loot distribution within a group, I would like to see a lotto system inplace rather than the last person who does damage gets the loot. This system would be infinately fairer, and not really make any difference to those with henchmen.

Then there needs to be more side quests, in the instances to find, not just the quests that you can get in the towns. This actually gives the player more reason to search through the areas.

Have the option to take a boat from Drognars forge to either the Fire chain isles or the desert. Ascention and the main story are good first run through, but second and third runs through the game they can become tedious, having the option to take a boat to these two areas, means that all areas of the world are open to players amd the missions are an option rather than a neccessity.

As for auction houses, etc. Will see how they implement it, If they use existing models from games such as WoW or EQ2 they cannot go far wrong, If they try to be unique they IMHO they are in for a world of hurt. Having a seperate instance for trading, such as a auction house simply would not work, it sounds good, but it would have exactly the same effect as adding the trade chat channel, some would use it, but alot would not and just spam the towns with their wares.

I fully support Wheel in this matter. Previously, I have taken an initiative when faction was released and reached a calculation of 16x faction increase to make it equal to the rate of unlocking in PvE. See the link in my sig for that. However Kunt0r was good enough to create G-Stats and that has a wealth of statistics we can use in a more accurate way than the relatively few player submitted stats in forum posts that I used.

There is the summer update and faction/other changes coming including new quests and accelerated rates of XP gain as James Phinney stated. Since we do not know what those rates are it becomes impossible to calculate what a suitable modifier of faction should be to make it fair to PvE. The method Wheel used is independent of this and so it is fairer and more relevant. It also takes into account a suitable time in which to unlock everything.

So I support his rate of faction increase suggestion. And keep in mind that this is based on the G-Stats data which is publicly available for you to all check and amounts to the results of over 100 players.

I consider myself an intermediate player, one experienced enough to know the game but not one so engrossed within acronymns and casual exchanges of complicated concepts within the game that I've become entirely focused on them. As such I'll try to not make a fool of myself while at the same time, try to offer up some ideas that more experienced players may not have bothered with. I tend to type a lot by accident, so bear with me.

PvE Only

"Hermited" Gameplay

This is one of the first things I noticed, obviously. With combat being a "one man show" in that it's just you on the map, unless you've partied, there's a certain degree of solitude in the game. I don't mind this - playing an area without having to stand around waiting for a lvl 35 rat to spawn is fantastic. However, I think this carries over to other parts of the game, especially Guilds.

I could not tell you the name of a single guild. Aside from the occasional WaW (I believe that's you call it) message and noticing players' tags from time to time, I never see any hint of a Guild in the game. If a Guild has its own hall, you can't travel there, you can't see any hint of its existence. If a Guild has many victories, players or prestige (however this could be determined), there's no way of noticing this within the game.

IE, there's no immersion as far as the players' world as a whole goes. Everything is very much situated on players playing their own game, in their own world, and interacting with other players on a very small level, be it within temporary parties formed with strangers or with Guild members, hidden away in secret either within halls, in the field or via private chat. You can view a multitude of players in mission areas or normal towns, but these are all individuals. The only part of their accomplishments I can notice are their armor, level, and cape.

I could offer up any number of solutions to this, but I'll make a few for the sake of example. Guild-owned/captured properties within towns, small town-like questing areas (think pre-Searing Ascalon or Divinity Coast), or possibly an "ocean map" that allows viewing of/visitation of the islands held by the current top ten guilds. Something along those lines, maybe not necessarily my suggestions, just something to remove the lack of immersion and the air of solidarity that comes with playing through PvE.

Replayability

I'm sure this has been discussed long before I got here, but there is simply nothing to do in this game aside from completing quests (gaining experience) and capturing skills (gaining abilities), which is actually a secondary objective in almost any other MMORPG. You can explore for the sake of exploring, but everything revolves around either buying armor, finding rare items or unlocking a skill.

I for one think a lot of the fear of making skills easier to unlock in PvP stems from the desire to make THAT the reason for replay value. Why do you keep coming back to the game? For the sake of progress, the feeling of accomplishment. Unfortunately, as Guild Wars is a game centralized around proper skill selection, and skill, it also relies on skills to ensure its own longevity. If I managed to unlock every skill in the game (which I may try to do, I am a completist), I would probably play PvP for a while until I bored of it, and move on to another game. Why? There's just nothing left beyond that.

In many other games there would be jobs to perform, other non-combat skills to raise, etc. I'm not suggesting adding in coal mining or something - that certainly wouldn't fit. What I am suggesting would be to put the players more firmly into the economy instead of having them be simply consumers. Let Guilds open their own inter-district shops, the goods listed either by top Guilds or by the best value. This would probably be something to place alongside the Auction House though. I think some form of crafting would fit nicely in Guild Wars, given the massive number of salvageable goods that people simply will never use for their character, or only use once. There's a grand excess in these objects that could be better put to use through modifier enhancements or manual construction of weapon attachments, rather than spending hours trying to find one manually.

Point aside from my meager suggestions, there needs to be something later in the game that you can be used to integrate you into the community, aside from this vital piece of any online RPG being replaced by random farming drops or non-dynamic high level area questing (UW, FoW.)

The Economy

To me, a fairly new player, this is baffling. As I said in another post, dyes especially are perplexing. They're throw-away items, as you can use them for nothing but asthetics, you can't retrieve them after a use, you can't retrieve them (both anyway) after a test mix, you can't preview their effects, and they sell at merchants for next to nothing, even at Dye Traders. Now, if the price at a merchant is determined by what you, the player(s) sells to them, I have no reason to sell to someone that will not give me a reasonable price, and I have no reason to give up my rare find (which you need multiples of unless you like abstract paintings.)

When something that costs several thousand plat (Superior Absorption for instance) is found randomly, why would you ever sell it back to a merchant that will rip you off? By not throwing potential money out the window, the price is never lowered, and the item never decreases in value. I personally hoard these kinds of items for use on other characters or for later, or to sell to a human player that will give me a more reasonable price for such a rare find.

In this respect, I think, if this is really how the merchants work, the economy is broken. Supply and demand in the real world is determined not by the stock of the seller, but also by the rate of trade between consumers. A good manager of his own products will not price items at standard rates when they are being traded privately for dramatically lesser rates. Stores are for convenience, after all, not for financial dictatation.

My suggestion, once more, is to put the economy, as much as it can be placed, into the players' hands and give everyone an alternative to rare drops and purchases from partisan NPCs that do not even offer unlockables. Constructable runes, quest-specific rewards, something.

"Healing" Syndrome

This is not a large problem at the beginning of the game, but more near to the end, especially when you enter into even Yak's Bend, monks become almost necessary components. Too many quests require longevity or survival against many foes. This puts a strain on all players, because too much time goes into looking for one and keeping one. 5/6 groups that spend 15 minutes shouting requests for monks and spamming invitations are all too common. The flip side is that what few monks there are cannot be free in their skill selection unless they play privately with henches, and are often blamed for any failure or death in the group.

The problem here is that monks were created to be the healing class. Some other classes have their own means of healing, but they're always in the form of secondary skills or recovery effects that you must maintain or perform with great caution. This creates a huge burden on the monk class especially, and also narrows the range of all the other classes. Creating future classes for new chapters can also prove challenging because monks in GW are stereotypical archetypes with little range beyond Smiting abilities, which they are blamed for using.

In my opinion, this can't be resolved within the current chapter, which is a shame. You would have to perform major changes that are unacceptable to a great deal of players. I'm sure something like this has been an issue that's come up many, many times however, and probably debated as being an unnecessary complaint, as surely all missions can be completed in some way without a monk. I do feel this is a problem nontheless, however. The only resolution I can think of within Chapter 1 is to place and distribute all classes evenly across all districts or to add in another semi-healing class as a "going away present" for Chapter 1 later to take the pressure off of monks and revitalize the community as Chapter 2 is nearing release.

That is all. Congratulations for reading.

I feel that in order to improve GW is quite simple, just make there an inscentive to explore. you cant base a game off missions, there needs to be other things to do!

Currently, the only way to adjust for selling prices between players is to adjust it all manually, on a continual basis. And the value adjust to is subjective, because one minute ecto is selling for 9k, the next someone's paying 12k, and even later, someone's asking only 7k. Tell me: what's the average selling price for a +1 Protection Prayers staff upgrade? This is far more time-consuming than I'm sure the developers would want, if they're to address bugs, balancing and other issues which some feel more important.

However, this is also an excellent argument for a trade house, as inter-player trading statistics can then be collected and commodified to adjust the economy automatically and reflect a far more realistic buy/sell price.

I think this game really needs improvements to how much information it gives out about what's going on. Best way I can see of doing this is to improve the score board.

The score board right now really doesn't do much to inform how individuals are doing. In an FPS the score board obviously lists frags/deaths, some random guy can come in and see a guy 100/0 and be like, WOW THIS GUY IS AMAZING!!!! You can't do that in GW, there's NO WAY for an individual to stand out really unless like.. you're the last one alive on your team, everyone is watching you, and you do something really crazy, but that's farfetched.

I suggest adding in new scoreboard charts that list things such as .. total damage done, total healed, maybe something along the lines of potential damage avoided, things like that. That way you can see how effective your teammates are somewhat, and perhaps it could aid in the group finding process. If some random players see warriors/necs/mesmers/rangers outdamaging elementalists in their team, they'll probably get more respect and maybe *GASP* convince random players to get different class combinations as substitutes instead of the standard obvious choices.

I think the game's engine limits individual players from standing out from the rest of the pack pretty heavily but something like this can at least help out.