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Arnox

The Top 5 Issues with Guild Wars 2 in 2021 [Arnox]

Original video creator(s): Arnox - script writer, video maker

Creator's description: Guild Wars 2 is one of, if not the best MMO to play in general. Nevertheless, its brilliance makes its flaws stand out all the more. These are things I hope ANet will fix when End of Dragons launches.

Game source(s): Guess.

Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
00:30 - Disclaimer
01:42 - 1. Guild Features
03:40 - 2. Guild vs. Guild
05:06 - 3. Rankings History
05:36 - 4. Public Skins and Achievements
06:26 - "But people might be annoying with it!"
07:37 - 5. Miscellaneous Chat Tools
08:14 - Conclusion

Transcript:
We’re all getting excited for End of Dragons to arrive, and it’s clear that the content offered in the expack is really shining through, but there’s other much more worrying and, in my opinion, important things that are not getting talked about at the moment. And all of them have to do with the features and modes in Guild Wars 2, or should I say, not in it.

Now, I want to be very clear. This is not a video trying to bash on the good work being done on the content of End of Dragons. In fact, content wise, EoD looks incredibly full of that. I’m pretty sure that it will succeed greatly in that regard. With that said, there have been some problems that Guild Wars 2 has had for years now, and some of them are quite glaring, of which I will name these specific problems soon.

When I first heard that EoD was announced, I was really excited and hopeful. Not just because we were getting a whole other landmass to explore. Not just because many new people would inevitably be introduced to GW2 alongside the launch of the expansion, but because certain problem areas would possibly be getting fixed on top of that.

As we are approaching launch day, we’re getting lots of new details and roadmaps on the expack contents, but after they released the last roadmap, my hopes are slowly beginning to dwindle. Let me explain by talking about the first and most important problem I see. From there, the problems will shrink in terms of seriousness. Nevertheless, I feel all of them are pretty important to go over.

Now, this first problem is an often memed one in the GW2 community, but the sad thing is that it’s pretty damn true, and that is overall guild support. Although there are a few neat things about guilds in the game, for the most part, they haven’t been touched at all since launch. Normally, if the guild system was adequately built, this wouldn’t be a problem at all, but as it stands now, ArenaNet STRONGLY needs to consider adding more guild tools into the game.

For example, one of the most notable omissions in Guild Wars 2 guilds is a seemingly small one, but nevertheless, it’s responsible for a ton of casual annoyance. Namely, if a guild leader wants to communicate something to the entire guild, what are their options? Why, the guild message of the day of course! Except the problem there is that nobody usually checks that, and there’s no notification at all given to the player that a guild’s message has changed. So, because of this one little thing, guild leaders are forced to use a full-on third-party client like Discord in order to communicate even basic announcements.

Guys, this is no bueno. It is really bad game design for players to have to utilize a third-party tool outside of your game just to get access to basic features that should be in the game. And especially communication features in an MMO. And ESPECIALLY for a game that’s called Guild Wars 2. And before you even say it, yeah, I know the Guild Wars was technically a lore event. It doesn’t matter.

Some other possible features to add to guilds would be guild watching, rival guild designation, a mass-send mail feature for guild leaders only, guild event calendar, custom guild teams, and a global list of all guilds in the game that all players can sort and search through.

Onto our next feature now, and you probably thought we were done with guilds, didn’t you. Nope, not yet. We’re gonna talk about guild vs. guild now for the PvPers. At the moment, PvP has been stagnating so much in the game, and ArenaNet REALLY needs to start giving it some love. They need to start cleaning out all the bots and cheating, and they also need to come down on match manipulation. But unfortunately, that’s just the start. There’s a fair amount to do in this area, hence my asking for the return of guild vs. guild.

Honestly, it’s just baffling to me why this mode is so non-existent in Guild Wars 2 when the original Guild Wars to this DAY is still going due to guild vs. guild. And the amazing combat of course. Now, I know what some of you are going to say, and no, world vs. world is not a replacement for guild vs. guild, although I am glad that they’re finally giving that some love at the moment too since it really needed it, but I digress.

What I’m imagining happened here during the launch of Guild Wars 2 was that they probably were going to implement guild vs. guild, but world vs. world started to suck up development time and money, and they decided at least for now to just focus on the three main modes. PvE, PvP, and world vs. world. As time pass though, they just never got around to it.

Ok, now the third thing I’m going to talk about, public PvP rankings and full history may be a small thing, but it’s also significant. Remember that great game design is in the details. So, if you are going to make a competitive game mode of any kind for your game, you need to provide a way for major player accomplishments to be recorded and made available for perusal. Otherwise, it almost might as well not have happened. By doing this, you are giving players a solid reason to compete and make their names immortally noted in the public PvP rankings history.

Alright, you PvE players still with me? Don’t worry, we’re done with the PvP stuff now. My next suggestion has to do with showcasing accomplishments again, but this time, on the PvE side. Specifically, allow players to right-click another player to view their personal message, achievements, and unlocked skins. Also, allow players to turn this off so others can’t see these details if they don’t want them to. It never really made sense to me why Guild Wars 2 goes to such great lengths to accommodate achievements, but only the total number of achievement points can be viewed and there’s no way AT ALL for players to show off their individual achievements besides some titles. Makes no sense. With that said, I do love the titles. Don’t get me wrong.

I can already hear the complaints against this though. Specifically, some people are probably gonna say that, “I don’t want to get annoyed by requests to see my details all the time.” Guys, you have to realize that while it is true that some features absolutely have knock-on effects, you can’t dismiss every single feature because of some remote possibility that bad-acting players will use it. Besides, if people really want to troll and annoy others in Guild Wars 2, there’s already plenty of ways to do so. Some of them don’t even require any communication or interaction from the offending players.

Another thing too is that almost every single feature in Guild Wars 2 can already be used by bad-acting players to be as annoying as possible including dyes, mail, whispering, player instruments, mounts, skill usage out of combat, and etc. We need to decide what is best for Guild Wars 2 while having a realistic view and not be scared of every possible negative player interaction.

And now, the final thing. For this, even I admit, this isn’t really too important, BUT it has a lot of potential for a myriad of different things regarding player interactions. The first part of this suggestion is to let players copy text from chat and mail. Pretty self-explanatory. And the second part would be to integrate a /roll command into chat. This would be a simple random number generator that broadcasts your chosen random number range and result to the channel you want. Amazing for deciding small disputes, role-playing, or just plain screwing around. A very versatile tool.

With that, I have a lot of other smaller suggestions, but these five take precedence over everything else for sure. The rest can be added whenever and would just be nice things to have. And now, I’ll leave that with you all with the wish that EoD makes a huge splash regardless. Guild Wars 2 deserves to be played and experienced by many, and even with these current omissions, I still strongly believe it’s by far one of the absolute best MMOs to play in this time. May Guild Wars live on in this sea of World of Warcraft wannabes.

Oh boy, I'm going to get a lot of hate for that...
On the first point they probably never will because those third party programs liked Discord solved the problem for them.

On the second and third also might never get solved because PvP stopped being the focus of many MMORPGs a while ago in lieu of making everything way too easy to get in PvE in order to enhance that dopamine rush for their players and make them stay on the game. WoW and TOR have the same problem for example but WoW and TOR have had the rankings history from years way before they stopped giving a shit about PvP so they are still there if you want to check them.

On the third and fourth, I'm not really sure since this is a feature available on a lot of other MMO's, WoW has had that feature since they introduced the whole achievements things like a decade ago you can right click another player and check their entire achievements history, their equipment and the transmog they have currently on any piece of equipment along with their PvP history and rankings. So it might just be they are not interested in that feature at all or they simply don't want people to exclude others from stuff like dungeons and raids because they lack a certain item level, achievements, or have never completed the dungeon or raid before and they can check all that if the feature was available (this is rampant in WoW, and has happened to me on TOR a few times.)

On the final one, I also don't know what's going on here since this feature is available in a lot of MMO's, this sounds more like full on lazy mode on their part and not even worth looking at for them.
 

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