Elisabeth at Massively was posted her Guild Wars 2 wishlist just as I was drafting mine. I am always surprised that we seem to share much of the same wavelength with the Guild Wars 2 pulse, and yet, great minds and all that. I too have a wishlist of things I would love to see come to Guild Wars 2.
Lion’s Arch Freeport
Everybody that has sat staring at a waypoint fee before traveling is likely aware that the only way to reduce travel costs is to head into the Mists, wave to all the friendly PvP players having tea and cucumber sammies, and head straight through to the portal to Lion’s Arch. Let’s quit this charade and cut out the middle-man. I don’t see a reason to add another loading screen putting strain on the PvP area while annoyed PvP players sit there watching a stream of PvE luddites take 10 seconds to run through to the portal. Pick one waypoint in Lion’s Arch and make it free from anywhere.
Click’n’Change Builds
My favorite MMO build mechanic is the soul mechanic in Rift. Players basically buy a slot that holds an entire build of traits and skills. Switching between souls takes a couple seconds, and it costs gold to retrait a soul.
This would be a perfect gem store opportunity. Create a soul slot mechanic. Give players one extra soul for free, and then sell more in the gem store. Everybody wins! Want to head to WvW? Just click on your WvW soul. Friends going to a dungeon? Dungeon soul up.
sPvP players will likely need something more akin to what was found in Guild Wars 1, but retraiting, reskilling, and regearing are free there anyway.
Harder World Dragons
I like the three dragons. They are neat. Who cares if they are loot piñatas? They get people together, and it’s a fun time. It’s almost like bash-the-dragon happy hour. They are too easy. Way too easy. I feel Claw of Jormag is definitely closest to being the best difficulty, but even there it could be amped up a tad.
Give them better loot tables, or unique drops, and ramp up those suckers. The chatter prior to each dragon’s arrival should be the vets teaching the noobs on what to look out for. How to win. What to stay away from. What stages and attacks to look for. We should be hearing cries for help from Lion’s Arch asking people to come please help this horribly difficult world boss instead of The Shatterer dropping a couple minutes after he lands. Give people running Orr for legendaries and gold a reason to come bag and tag a dragon, but make those dragons a big challenge.
Commander Battle Plans
In WvW, I want a war room type chart that commanders can use to set objectives. That way, players can pull up the annotated WvW map they are on and see where the commanders want them. Constant communication is better, but a lot of text can get lost in the muck and translation.
If a resource camp needs taking, the commander can ask 10 people to head for it. Another note can demand supply to siege a keep. Another note can ask the western front to regroup at a tower. I would say a limit of three to five objectives could be placed at any time, and it would be cool if players could sign on to an objective. I think this would also be a great way to split the zerg and get a lot of players thinking on multiple fronts.
Minipet slot
I love my minipets for all the gold and gems I have used on them, but I have trouble remembering the take them with me and let them out of the bag. It’s even worse since I don’t have an invisible bag yet, and each click of the deposit all collectibles nets my current favorite minipet back to the bank.
I would love to have a minipet slot on my character sheet that would automatically take my pet out. If it gets too crowded just systemically disable the automation, and also allow players the option to see no minipets, only owned minipets, and all minipets.
Book of Encounters
This wishlist will be on every MMO. ArenaNet came so, so close to it too. Early beta events showed off a Creature Codex Library which had books of specific encounters in Guild Wars 2. ArenaNet used the books as skill points and gold sinks, but ultimately scrapped the idea. Warhammer Online actually came the closest with the Tome of Knowledge.
I want a book showcasing creature models and creature lore. It sucks that the only way to examiner the wondrous job of the creature modelers is to hope a tonic turns you into one of them. I would love to have a book that has a chapter for each species with pages for each creature. Each creature could get a chance to drop a fragment of alchemy. Players take the fragment to the Mystic Forge and with a few others things turns it in to a page for their book. Now the book has the model of that specific creature.
I know ArenaNet loves their completable storybooks, and I am hoping they make a return in Guild Wars 2 somehow. Having one on the denizens of Tyria would be an amazing start!
–Ravious
On the Mists to LA Expressway I’ve been expecting ANet to get around to closing it rather than legitimizing it. I use it but I know I shouldn’t. It’s dangerously close to an exploit in my estimation.
Saving Trait builds is something I’d love but agian it seems counter to the way ANet think, or appear to think. Just about everything in GW1 and 2 is about making situational choices from a large set of tools. Saved trait builds would undermine that. If they put them on the Gem Store, though, I’d buy some.
Speaking of the Gem Store, it barely looks started let alone stocked. There’s hardly anything in it. I don’t know if that’s because their heart isn’t in cash shops, or that they’re ultra-cautious about negative reaction to “selling power” or just that they haven’t gotten around to it yet. I wish they’d put some more stuff in there – I’d like to give them some money but they’re not selling anything I want or need.
The whole Jormag event took over 50 minutes last night on Yak’s Bend. I like it but that’s too long. I am not up for it being any harder unless that also means shorter.
Is it, by the way, even possible to fail Jormag? If (Claw of) Jormag was to win, what would happen? I have only ever seen it succeed and I’ve done it a lot.
I think that saveable trait builds (and, ideally, utility skill set-ups that go with them) would be a nice way to build more continuity from the GW1 system. They may be all about meaningful choices that actually define your character, but I think they also do want to support the ability to re-stat an old character into a completely new style/role. Anyway, I also would love to see this feature and hold out hope for it in the future.
Most MMOs have a hearthstone. I think it’s good design to always have somewhere save to go back to for free (either time cost or money cost).
I think Guild Wars 2 needs some analogue of this. Right now it is the Mists->LA run. If they shut that down they have no hearthstone equivalent. It would also cause quite a bit of fuss with PvP players.
Now there are home instances, but ArenaNet didn’t have enough time/resources to flesh out the home instance. I think having a hearthstone to the home instance might also be good, but it is still warp to somewhere with a loading screen to get to somewhere else (main city with bank, TP, etc.).
All they need to do is add the Fire Elemental from Metrica Province as one of the minions of the dragons. That will help the ramp-up quite a bit. It took us over an hour to down that boss. One-shots, vicious mini spawns, and burning omg the burning…
I really love your suggestion of Commander Battle Plans. As a casual (at best) WvW player, it would be fantastic to have some clarity to the task at hand.
I think I would really enjoy jumping into WvW and be faced with the option of following strategic orders. Not that they aren’t there in chat, but having that placed in the map would be a really excellent option.
Good one.
Besides a few forum posters, the wish for any kind of useful LFG features seems not really popular. Does everyone join new MMOs only with their already established friends/guilds these days?
Lowering of the barrier to find people to run dungeons with, in order to get to know other players and then join a guild or two, is the only point on my list. I wonder how I should go about trying to get ArenaNet to actually improve anything about it in a timely manner. Anyone else? :)
Of course when that is done, all your fantastic points should be implemented right away as well!
I think there does need to be all-server LFG options. I tend to agree that a random dungeon finder can lead to too intense, acidic play (“go go go tank”).
Honestly, a great change would be to make a separate LFG in the social tab that focuses on dungeon. Someone wanting to create a dungeon run can just pull up the social menu to see all the people interested in joining. The functionality is mostly there, just need to expand the scope beyond zones.
Sometimes I think WoW’s implementation of their LFG/Dungeon Finder kinda ruined it for everyone else.
Say what you will about it or their endgame or the dungeons and how easy they are, whatever, but the fact remains that people use it because it exceedingly comfortable, takes their attention completely off the process (queue, do something else in the meantime) and gets people to the content.
I think by now anything short of that “one click and wait” process is not really gonna be adopted.
If anyone could have made a useful LFG system which is not automatic matchmaking I wished the most it was GW2. In recent major MMO launches I just seem to not see anything in between useless/nothing or copy of WoW dungeon finder (post launch even) and I don’t understand why this is at all.
I agree that things would be much improved by a dungeon LFG tool (and I haven’t even run a dungeon yet!). I wouldn’t like to see an automatic matching tool, but just, say, a server-wide pop-up that showed you a short message from everyone who wanted to run a particular dungeon…it would be handy, and would free up map chat. I’m all for actually communicating when putting a group together, but chat spam isn’t the answer either.
Well good news on one of those points, build templates are on the way and being developed.
In a recent pvp discussion on reddit John Peters clarified this but it is only a small team on it and I would be unsure if it is a pvp only thing…. You would think they would add this quality of life to both though.
Discussion was here http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/10szrq/insight_from_jon_peters_and_karl_mclain_ingame_in/
Both yours and Elisabeth’s lists are good.
I have my own list of points that, after mulling on it for a while, I don’t think I’ll be posting. It would be like barking at the wrong tree, I think.
I like the idea of minipets, I hadn’t thought about that (the rest is of course on my wishlist anyway). I would also want that for town clothes, I rarely use them since I always forget and I am more than sure I would buy some town clothes if I knew I would always wear them when in lions arch. Right now, I know I will forget to wear it and therefor will not bother buying one. Also, stop me from changing into normal gear when taking falling damage in cities, I cannot kill stuff there anyway and I don’t want to change back into town clothes again and again while doing one of lions arch’s jumping puzzles. Actually, they should remove that altogether and just change you back into combat gear when taking skill damage.
I would also like them to add jumping into tonic forms, at least the ones that have animations for it. Right now, I just spam them for the title, but I am sure I could have fun with them. I just don’t want to give up on jumps.
Before a Commander Battle Plans feature was implemented they first would need to change how commanders are created. You currently can be a commander with spending less than 1 minute in WvW.