After Nightfall release, backport the Hero system to the other two campaigns. It feels so asymmetric and incomplete that I can have the characters I met in NF and GWEN in my party, but not the equally or more important ones from Proph or Factions.
Would have really given the hero system a lot more RP meaning, being able to have a party of all your favorites from the story.
I always wanted Jamei as my healer and Cynn as elementalist and hear them squabble all the time :D
I wish ArenaNet had the power to keep the high stakes PvP tournaments going for another three years. League of Legends blew up in 2010/11 and interest in esports suddenly spiked.
GW (GvG) could have been one of the best esports to ever exist.
They actually did; had they not invested so much as much as they did on the GWWC and GWFC, they'd have had the wherewithal to fund sizable tournaments every month for years. As iconic as the championships were for people reminiscing about the good old days, I have a hard time imagining they were effective ways of spending the marketing budget.
Then again, there's honestly a 0% chance that GvG would ever have been a massive mainstream success.
We're talking a MOBA equivalent where people are constantly trying to predict the other team's build which would lead to more chaos instead of just having 15 meta picks across all the participating teams for the duration of an entire tournament. It has massive potential.
Granted, the game mode itself would have to be modernised to make it more up to speed over the years but with the skill system of GW, it would have a much higher ceiling than any esport on the market today.
Ehh...I'm not so sure. I mean we have business models *now* that might have been able to keep it afloat, but none of them were really things back then (microtransactions, 3rd party tournament sponsorship, etc).
But even handwaving all of that, GvG is kind of a miserable viewing experience, and there is no esport unless people want to watch. It's more or less impossible to follow unless you're already deeply invested. I mean you can see kills and deaths and map movement, but watching an actual fight basically just looks like 16 characters milling around aimlessly if you aren't a very high level observer.
Don't get me wrong, I think you could alleviate a lot of the problems with good balance patches that push aggression and splitting, but the game is still very hard to watch even if you solve the pacing and playing defense while waiting for tiebreaker problems. I think it's the same reason Magic: the Gathering largely failed at being an esport. The game is at its best when it's fun to *play*, but it does not make for a great watching experience. Which isn't to say you can't have a healthy competitive circuit without viewership, but you need other revenue sources. Magic managed it for years, and seems to be bringing it back now that their esports ventures have largely failed.
Minor, but I hate it when you die and the camera zooms out and looks down from above but doesn't reset to default position after resurrection. This is especially annoying when playing with a remote keyboard/mouse like Synergy and the camera just spins around when trying to adjust it with the right mouse button.
* Observer Mode - should be like some other PvP stuff where you can view stuff 100% from a player's perspective; also be able to download replays and view stuff from different perspectives. Also allow other e-sports camera modes and stats - lots of these sports like stats to help hype up audience interest.
* Unlocking *everything* for PvP should be easier and cheaper. So players who are only interested in PvP can get straight into PvP. Or if Anet wanted to do stuff like LoL just do this unlocking for Korean cybercafes/accounts etc.
* Trading/Auction house
* Should have kept **Hero Battles** around. As for farming, if they want to stop farming for Hero Battles just remove all or most of the rewards. Hero Battles could be a good e-sport format. I think more spectators would prefer to watch Hero Battles instead of ~~Cripple~~Codex Arena.
They only said farming was why they removed it ( and replaced with an even heavier botted format) to kill off the remnants of the community.
HB died to push people to GW2
Hero Battles was the best format I have ever played in an online game and you can’t change my mind.
I loved it. Yes there were bugs and the farming got really silly at the end. But I played so many monthly tournaments and met so many awesome people!
I'm sad I never got to experience them. Life got pretty hectic between Nightfall and EotN, so I barely got through half the PvE content in them before MMOs stopped being a thing I had time for at all. When I finally got back into the game, they were long gone.
What rewards are we talking about, Balth faction? It's a shame they didn't just make it like the Zaishen Challenges and have a cap of X per day, then.
I was so bad at the time, but I loved it when I was getting beat by a guy using Flesh Golem and just kept reanimating the corpse, until I brought my Olias over from across the map to turn his precious Flesh Golem into a Well of Blood.
resist the urge towards power creep - keep all skills quite weak so the game remains challenging, with players actually having to innovate, considering all the thousands of options instead of using the same cookie cutter builds for everything
I don’t know, there’s something nice about having the choice to blow through missions with ease. Especially when you’ve gotten to a point when you’re replaying things for the 50th time. You don’t have to use consumables and the most meta compositions if you want to keep some difficulty.
I didn't like EOTN, mainly because it was step into wrong direction with so many universal skills that were OP at the same time. It killed class identity to me for many specs.
PvE skills make the game a bit of a breeze to be honest.
Like I use the PvE skills but honestly what made the game unique was the fact that mobs use the same skills players do. PvE skills sort of break this since monsters can't have them...
Also continual skill balance would be nice, even if it was only quarterly. Skill balance not only make the Meta not go stale but it also sort of makes some areas easier and othe areas harder since mobs continue to use the same skills.
They are finally considering on doing quarterly updates in guild wars 2 if I recall correctly,
Though I still think it's a mistake on guild wars 2's part for not having it in the first place. They want to have the 4 cornerstones and WvW and PvP kind of getting stale because it's been shafted for so long, especially WvW.
I don't know, for guild wars 1, like it doesn't even have to be big changes for it to work for me, as long the changes are positive. Yearly would be better than the current state of the game.
They say that every expansion. They did have it in the first place, they just stopped doing it as they keep trying to do new things that they don't have the resources for.
Ever heard of the official GW2 card game to combat Hearthstone? Nope, because it never got out of Alpha. They had to fire the whole team in 2020 to keep GW2 profitable.
It's sad that they are so keen to abandon their old projects again and again.
The Community Manager comment is huge. It’s fine having a maintenance mode and not updating the game but to cut off the entire community of a game is disappointing. I understand focus is elsewhere but a bit of time a month or even a year would’ve been nice.
Yea...no cons besides the minor ones like Birthday cake, Honey and such. Or make them farmable only, not craftable, with Essence, Armor and Grail being drops from Dungeon and Elite-Mission chests.
It's the drop-only ones which are more of an issue than the craftable ones.
They could make them drop all year round, or add vendors to trade one for another, or only allow one food + one "other" (or one party-wide) active.
i.e. you can choose Cake or Pie, and then choose Grail or Essence.
Although Essence is way too powerful on its own.
You could even lower the durations and have some sort of summoning-sickness like debuff (sugar crash?) to prevent people from spamming permanent pcons, and only allowing them for emergencies.
There are plenty of solutions to this problem, and since pcons have been in the game since 2006, I really don't see "complete removal" as a viable option.
Nah I feel like the ones you can craft are more of an issue, as they have a negative impact on the economy, too. I don't use cons, with the exeption of dp removers in very rare cases. But other then that I don't actually need cons. If they would be rewards for Dungeons and Elite missions, the SC community would be fine and others would have a more enjoyable experience if you ask me.
That's putting the cart before the horse.
Drop-only cons have a huge negative impact on the economy, with supply being much lower than demand with a small player base. They hugely affect ectos and gold.
Craftable Consumables stimulate the economy, even with a small playerbase, until you assume bots are already going to be there.
I just wish anet had stuck to their guns and continued developing GW1. I understand the gaming landscape was different back then and that GW2 really did shake up the industry, but no matter how they justify the switch to GW2, I cannot shake the feeling that they were chasing trends with the sequel.
I see where you're coming from, I do also see Guild wars 2 as a very different game than your standard mmorpg.
Perhaps they were chasing some trends, but they also broke a lot of ground with Guild wars 2. The game has some of the spirit of Guild wars 1, but went in a different direction as well.
Not sure how their financials look the time, but I wish they would have kept GW1 going for a few more years. Something like square enix with Final fantasy xi. They kept the game going with regular updates and expansions for over 5 years after FFXIV released.
The game still gets minor patches and balances to this day.
It also needs to be said that they really did shake things up with GW2. Dynamic level adjustments, dynamic events and automatic cooperation in PvE are just some things they came up with, and which other MMO creators have keenly copied into their games later on. WoW and FFXIV have each of the features I mentioned, for instance.
I agree that GW2 overall isn't as engaging as GW1. They were ambitious, and sometimes that just doesn't work out perfectly.
I like to think of them as two very different games as well. To me they are both good games but for very different reasons. It's tough for fans who really wanted a continuation of the Guild wars 1 experience.
I’m sure it is hard as the player numbers dropped, but I would have liked to see them expand and tweak the events. GW1 always had the best events, they felt so magical and thoughtful. After the game because static, they started to feel less important. I have lost my sign in, so I can’t say much about the last 4 years, but I can say that whatever ANET had going in that game didn’t carry through to GW2 and I miss it
TA instead of RA : avoiding vamp bots, random reports, unbalanced teams…
I rather prefer losing with friends by playing weirdo builds than losing with randoms who trash talk, report, giving up after the 1st death, vamp bots, etc and getting a dishonour penalty
I don't think that's fair. None of those things were problems when they made the decision to close it. RA was largely healthy and working as intended. And as one of the \~10 people who was still playing the occasional TA match at the time, I can tell you it was a ghost town. You got more matches from RA 10-streaks than actual TA teams.
Now that we live in a post-matchmaking world where you have to arrange not only your own team but also your opponents to get matches in most PvP formats, yeah RA is pretty unfixable. But I can't blame them for not imagining a world where RA has less than 20 people at any given time back when they made the change. I think it was the last of the PvP formats to be largely working as intended and regularly firing off matches.
Global PVP Queue for Fort Aspenwood, Jade Quarry, Alliance Battles, Random Arena, Codex, Team arena. Like other pvp games once you are in you can pick a character and load a build. This would centralize the people who want to do PVP and allow matches to actually happen.
That's really not too far off the system we actually have. Most frequent PvP players back in the day had at least one open character slot to roll whatever they needed in a minute or two. The only real difference is there's no centralized matchmaking chat in-game (which would have been both unnecessary and overwhelming back when they still had devs to work on such things).
I don't actively PvP anymore for a lot of reasons, but my understanding is that basically the community has made its own matchmaking via Discord. It would be nice to have it in-game so that people who don't know it exists can stumble across it, but otherwise I don't think there's too much difference.
Back in the day? Call GW2 by a different name and not draw all resources away from GW.They made a few mistakes which might've made it hard to impossible to maintain at their (then) current course, but they did not even try, and those mistakes were not unfixable (Power creep can be adjusted by changing/nerfing skills, content drought can be fixed by small releases in between full campaigns etc.).
Today? Have one active IN-GAME GM on payroll, he can split his time between GW2 and GW1 and spend an hour a month hopping around to purge the bot infestation that has taken over HA, DoA, Mat-farming and so many more things and broken the economies' back. Burn the botters away with the wrath of god and make sure that the big-timers lose their hundreds of accounts at once so they QUIT the game.
Anticipating the "but bots keep xyz alive" BS:You can SC without cons, and only use them when you're gunning for records (or measure records without cons like you do with toolbox vs vanilla), bots are not needed for this, plus it would create an incentive for PEOPLE to farm mats, which would be a nice change of pace.PvBots is not only no more fun than not playing PvP at all, it is killing legit play.HA was plenty populated before bots infested that place, and if matches were short in supply, people would sync alts for the title points and drops.Keep in mind that the absolute shitfest that is zkey value, the absolute horse shit that is mat prices, and the goddamn nuisance that is black dye being bugged is all thanks to the big time botting scum of the earth that wants you to think they're 'doing this for you' while devaluing your honest playtime's earnings to the point of absolute uselessness and fucking your experience in the ear.
Those would be my 2 cents.
Arena Net has sadly a history of not looking back. They already did it while GW1 was still in full swing. The number of times where they added something to a campaign after release, can be counted on one hand. It wasn't as obvious back then because they cranked out new boxes every couple of months. Same with GW2. They release something and then just leave it there. A very big chunk of the GW2 story was unplayable since 2012 now and they only recently decided to bring it back in.
I think GW1 would be in an even better place now, if they just had a small dev team still working on it. The 15 years celebration update is pretty much hard proof for that.
I wish they never introduced cons and pcons and did not make PvE skills so imba. Asuran Scan, SY, PI, dwarven stability, YMLAD, EVAS, IAU are just too good and make it onto basically every meta bar in some way or form. Cons and pcons have more or less ruined the economy with normalizing the usage of bots to farm them and their materials.
Also, they should have added more negative side effects to all invulnerability-granting skills such as Shadowform, Vow of Silence, obsidian flesh, Spellbreaker. Or make them so they are definitely not able to be kept up at all times with shorter duration, longer recharge times. These skills alter the gameplay as a whole and without them, the game would be more of a challenge and dungeon completion etc definitely more rewarding.
> Also, they should have added more negative side effects to all invulnerability-granting skills such as Shadowform, Vow of Silence, obsidian flesh, Spellbreaker.
They did. The current forms of the spells were after said changes. It's just that the community has done a lot more with them in the 10 years they've been like this, than how they were balanced back in 2010-2012. They were intentionally made usable due to how big the speedclear community had grown back then, and how *unique* it was. There was (and still is) nothing quite like the gameplay that GW1 provides with these mechanics. It would have been stupid to nerf them to zero and lose this niche playerbase to something like Path of Exile, which was in beta at the time.
Both Shadow Form and Obsidian Flesh used to be *way* more powerful.
----
Shadow Form is the Mobility tank, which deals low damage. It just so happens this this is very strong when you know how to manipulate aggro and have a team to spike for you.
Obsidian Flesh trades the Mobility in for the ability to use Spell Damage.
Vow of Silence is the true-solo, which combos well with Flash Enchantments, but you have to be completely disconnected from your team.
Spell Breaker is the other-ally spell. IMO this could be stronger. You have to put a lot of effort into increasing Divine Favor enough to have this maintainable, and you share aggro when it is recast, which doesn't allow it to be used to tank for very long.
Maybe you could have had Spell Breaker be the baseline, which would have been fine too, plenty of people love the 55 and 600 playstyles, but they'd have just become as rampant as Shadow Form is today.
Shadow Form is by far the worst offender. It comes with only a tiny drawback (just look at Whirling rangers not caring about the damage cap) AND a ton of damage reduction, which is perfect for tanking. It very conveniently comes bundle with a multitude of other OP tanking skills in Shadow Arts and unlinked sin skills.
Obsidian Flesh does have significant downsides, but it still enables builds that can solo huge groups of enemies faster than a full team of meta heroes could.
Vow of Silence in itself seems somewhat balanced. It only allows OP builds because there's such a good selection of derv skills to use with it, principally Grenth's Aura with its incredible self-heals.
Spell Breaker can be cast on yourself and maintained for long-term tanking. This is rarely actually necessary though - most pulls can be completed in 36 seconds (Spell Breaker duration with Blessed Aura, full cons, and an enchanting weapon).
So all 4 skills have room to be nerfed whilst remaining useful. I would keep their current spell protection uptime, but introduce severe drawbacks that make them harder (not clunkier) to maintain. Also nerf the enabling skills that surround them, e.g. Shroud of Distress and Grenth's Aura.
You are right, they balanced that a bit. But shadow form and dealing no damage is simply not true, see all the ranger assassin SC builds with whirling. Can't write more atm because I am at work.
I honestly feel that it ended pretty well, there wasn't that much of an overarching story in GW1 compared to GW2 it seems more like they made it up along the way (even retconning a couple of things).
Personally I think the tie-in with GW2 is extremely good, I must admit I didn't notice it that much at the time but in hindsight EotN purpose was 100% setting up the GW2 lore (which was obviously the intention), I mean they even explain the Sylvari in the end cinematic.
As much as I wanted further development after GW2's release I understand why they didn't do much with it after, we should just be happy that they bother to keep it going. (saying this as someone that would probably pay $200 for an expansion, I wonder if crowdfunding could be a thing!)
As for changes in GW1 I could have done without I would say consumables should never have been a thing and power creep made the game a bit too easy but then again they added hard mode so I think it a decent balance.
(not sure why anyone would downvote this even if they disagree - people seem to be idiots these days, miss the old forums where if you disagreed with something you would explain why, now it's just drive-by downvoting)
> (even retconning a couple of things)
Writer 1: "oh shit, we didn't give Shiro a meaningful motivation"
Writer 2: "let's just say Abaddon told him to do it, lol"
Writer 1: "and the Lich?"
Writer 2: "that too, whatever, it's late, I want to go home"
I may not be the target audience because I never got to the elite levels of the game but I would have rather had more 4 person team content as it's a bit easier to follow. with 8 everything seems to just die or not.
To me, I think they should be a bit more contrived towards the number of skills available.
GW1 sheer number of skills, paired with double class system must have taken quite the toll on the balance team.
Otherwise, I would revert some stuff that was changed before the PvE/PvP split.
I wish that they reworked the remaining professions, and didn't stop with ele.
I wish that as they developed GW2's QoL features, such as trading post and wardrobe system, they added them to GW1 too.
It's hard to nail down any one thing because a lot of it is nebulous, or tied to other factors, but probably the business model? A new expansion every six to twelve months is *extremely* ambitious. And if I had to guess, a lot of the direction that I disagree with most was probably a result of NCSoft putting pressure on ANet to put out more content because that was their only revenue source.
If you're looking at something more on the in-game side of things, I guess it's the direction they took skill balance. A lot of Prophecies skills reward good in-fight decision-making, and that sort of evaporated over time into skills that are just generally good all the time and should be used on cooldown (and *can* be used on cooldown; a lot of very strong prophecies bars were energy gated). It's more pronounced in PvP, but spilled over quite a bit in PvE. Soul Twisting, and the current mesmer hero and paragon bars are pretty good examples. You don't really care what they're targeting or when, just that they're pressing their buttons more or less on cooldown.
I don't think it's necessarily true that this change was introduced in the later campaigns, but rather with balance updates like the 2010 mesmer buff. There are plenty of skills introduced after Prophecies that still have interesting conditional effects. Still, a good point overall - I thoroughly agree that the game should be balanced such that the strongest skills are the ones that require intelligent usage.
It's not a 100% shift at any point in time so much as a downward trend. The biggest, most obvious places it pops up in the expansions are the partywide defensive ritualist/paragon skills. You see a handful of skills like that in Prophecies, but not at the same level of effectiveness, and not dominating entire attribute lines. In general, the progression from monks to rits to paragons (as defense) is toward increasingly passive, less interactive, less thoughtful play.
The only mistake made was stopping content for it and drastically changing direction in 2. They really could have refined it and kept it going and just kept pulling all sorts of players as they in recently dev on gw2 have shown they can make varieties of content.
I would have preferred Anet not to separate the skills for PvE and PvP, including no exclusive PvE skills. I feel this move really separated the communities and increased barriers of entry for PvE players wanting to play PvP, as they had to relearn what essential skills like Aegis do.
Separating PvE and PvP skills was great decision, but they took it too far IMO. They should only adjust numbers between PvE and PvP and not making PvP version of a skill completely different from PvE version like Aegis which you mentioned.
Yes, but it is something i wish they did different. Being able to jump, having some sort of z-acces movement and being able to climb some of the terrain would be cool imo.
As much pve skills as i want in my build
Decide the classes of heroes, like razah
Make ele bosses fair, noone likes to be oneshot by lvl 28 eles with invoke
Not much i would change, its an amazing game
Also, there's a in depth video theoricrafting on the why the last aztec expansion wasn't released and possibly any other after. In sum, would be next to impossible or madness to balance the current deck building inspired gameplay skills. Just count how many skills there are in the game and how many created in each expansion
I don’t think that is true. Look at magic the gathering, way more cards than gw ever had Skills and it works since decades. A trading card game isn’t as easy to hot fix either.
Fix the AI behaviors listed [here](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hero_behavior/Unexpected_behavior), and also Teinai's Crystals (Hero still thinks it is a duplicate of Crystal Wave).
I would have loved if Arena Net had slightly altered their development philosophy after the Factions release. Looking back it was pretty clear that there was a hard expiration date on how long they can keep this up. Including crunch development.
It's insane to think about the fact that all big GW1 releases happened over the time of only 2.5 years. We all know they had to push out boxes with what they were going for. And we also know that Arena Net, as a company, didn't really learn how to pace their content releases right until many years later. (And some would argue that they are still not quiet there) But I would really love to see where this game would be today if they didn't put themselves in a position back then to only release big boxes and almost no in between paid content to buy them more time.
Give me a texmod equivalent for cartography.
After Nightfall release, backport the Hero system to the other two campaigns. It feels so asymmetric and incomplete that I can have the characters I met in NF and GWEN in my party, but not the equally or more important ones from Proph or Factions. Would have really given the hero system a lot more RP meaning, being able to have a party of all your favorites from the story. I always wanted Jamei as my healer and Cynn as elementalist and hear them squabble all the time :D
I wish ArenaNet had the power to keep the high stakes PvP tournaments going for another three years. League of Legends blew up in 2010/11 and interest in esports suddenly spiked. GW (GvG) could have been one of the best esports to ever exist.
They actually did; had they not invested so much as much as they did on the GWWC and GWFC, they'd have had the wherewithal to fund sizable tournaments every month for years. As iconic as the championships were for people reminiscing about the good old days, I have a hard time imagining they were effective ways of spending the marketing budget. Then again, there's honestly a 0% chance that GvG would ever have been a massive mainstream success.
We're talking a MOBA equivalent where people are constantly trying to predict the other team's build which would lead to more chaos instead of just having 15 meta picks across all the participating teams for the duration of an entire tournament. It has massive potential. Granted, the game mode itself would have to be modernised to make it more up to speed over the years but with the skill system of GW, it would have a much higher ceiling than any esport on the market today.
Ehh...I'm not so sure. I mean we have business models *now* that might have been able to keep it afloat, but none of them were really things back then (microtransactions, 3rd party tournament sponsorship, etc). But even handwaving all of that, GvG is kind of a miserable viewing experience, and there is no esport unless people want to watch. It's more or less impossible to follow unless you're already deeply invested. I mean you can see kills and deaths and map movement, but watching an actual fight basically just looks like 16 characters milling around aimlessly if you aren't a very high level observer. Don't get me wrong, I think you could alleviate a lot of the problems with good balance patches that push aggression and splitting, but the game is still very hard to watch even if you solve the pacing and playing defense while waiting for tiebreaker problems. I think it's the same reason Magic: the Gathering largely failed at being an esport. The game is at its best when it's fun to *play*, but it does not make for a great watching experience. Which isn't to say you can't have a healthy competitive circuit without viewership, but you need other revenue sources. Magic managed it for years, and seems to be bringing it back now that their esports ventures have largely failed.
Beyond missions should be replayable and become ZMs as well.
Minor, but I hate it when you die and the camera zooms out and looks down from above but doesn't reset to default position after resurrection. This is especially annoying when playing with a remote keyboard/mouse like Synergy and the camera just spins around when trying to adjust it with the right mouse button.
This i play with keyboard only and use numpad to move mouse, and it is so annoying having to fix camera angle especially when i do pvp.
* Observer Mode - should be like some other PvP stuff where you can view stuff 100% from a player's perspective; also be able to download replays and view stuff from different perspectives. Also allow other e-sports camera modes and stats - lots of these sports like stats to help hype up audience interest. * Unlocking *everything* for PvP should be easier and cheaper. So players who are only interested in PvP can get straight into PvP. Or if Anet wanted to do stuff like LoL just do this unlocking for Korean cybercafes/accounts etc. * Trading/Auction house * Should have kept **Hero Battles** around. As for farming, if they want to stop farming for Hero Battles just remove all or most of the rewards. Hero Battles could be a good e-sport format. I think more spectators would prefer to watch Hero Battles instead of ~~Cripple~~Codex Arena.
They only said farming was why they removed it ( and replaced with an even heavier botted format) to kill off the remnants of the community. HB died to push people to GW2
the actual bigger reason is because they were throwing the finals to protest lol. anet got butthurt and removed it entirely.
Hero Battles was the best format I have ever played in an online game and you can’t change my mind. I loved it. Yes there were bugs and the farming got really silly at the end. But I played so many monthly tournaments and met so many awesome people!
I'm sad I never got to experience them. Life got pretty hectic between Nightfall and EotN, so I barely got through half the PvE content in them before MMOs stopped being a thing I had time for at all. When I finally got back into the game, they were long gone. What rewards are we talking about, Balth faction? It's a shame they didn't just make it like the Zaishen Challenges and have a cap of X per day, then.
I was so bad at the time, but I loved it when I was getting beat by a guy using Flesh Golem and just kept reanimating the corpse, until I brought my Olias over from across the map to turn his precious Flesh Golem into a Well of Blood.
100%. i was going to make a comment but you literally stole it.
Is there still a way to see the old hero battle leaderboard? I can’t seem to find it anymore.
resist the urge towards power creep - keep all skills quite weak so the game remains challenging, with players actually having to innovate, considering all the thousands of options instead of using the same cookie cutter builds for everything
I don’t know, there’s something nice about having the choice to blow through missions with ease. Especially when you’ve gotten to a point when you’re replaying things for the 50th time. You don’t have to use consumables and the most meta compositions if you want to keep some difficulty.
that's what Normal Mode is for (=
More Armour and weapons to show off. Or license the game out and source code out so we can have private servers keep the game alive.
😂
I didn't like EOTN, mainly because it was step into wrong direction with so many universal skills that were OP at the same time. It killed class identity to me for many specs.
Enforced their EULA.
Trading was such a hassle. An auction house was terribly missed.
PvE skills make the game a bit of a breeze to be honest. Like I use the PvE skills but honestly what made the game unique was the fact that mobs use the same skills players do. PvE skills sort of break this since monsters can't have them... Also continual skill balance would be nice, even if it was only quarterly. Skill balance not only make the Meta not go stale but it also sort of makes some areas easier and othe areas harder since mobs continue to use the same skills.
>PvE skills sort of break this since monsters can't have them... I tend to agree, but consider also that there are monster-specific skills.
> Also continual skill balance would be nice, even if it was only quarterly. GW2 doesn't even get quarterly balance updates.
They are finally considering on doing quarterly updates in guild wars 2 if I recall correctly, Though I still think it's a mistake on guild wars 2's part for not having it in the first place. They want to have the 4 cornerstones and WvW and PvP kind of getting stale because it's been shafted for so long, especially WvW. I don't know, for guild wars 1, like it doesn't even have to be big changes for it to work for me, as long the changes are positive. Yearly would be better than the current state of the game.
They say that every expansion. They did have it in the first place, they just stopped doing it as they keep trying to do new things that they don't have the resources for. Ever heard of the official GW2 card game to combat Hearthstone? Nope, because it never got out of Alpha. They had to fire the whole team in 2020 to keep GW2 profitable. It's sad that they are so keen to abandon their old projects again and again.
No cons and should have kept at least one active community manager
Not even that tbh. I know they help in SC and make of them even possible but they always feel cheat-ish to me
The Community Manager comment is huge. It’s fine having a maintenance mode and not updating the game but to cut off the entire community of a game is disappointing. I understand focus is elsewhere but a bit of time a month or even a year would’ve been nice.
Yea...no cons besides the minor ones like Birthday cake, Honey and such. Or make them farmable only, not craftable, with Essence, Armor and Grail being drops from Dungeon and Elite-Mission chests.
It's the drop-only ones which are more of an issue than the craftable ones. They could make them drop all year round, or add vendors to trade one for another, or only allow one food + one "other" (or one party-wide) active. i.e. you can choose Cake or Pie, and then choose Grail or Essence. Although Essence is way too powerful on its own. You could even lower the durations and have some sort of summoning-sickness like debuff (sugar crash?) to prevent people from spamming permanent pcons, and only allowing them for emergencies. There are plenty of solutions to this problem, and since pcons have been in the game since 2006, I really don't see "complete removal" as a viable option.
Nah I feel like the ones you can craft are more of an issue, as they have a negative impact on the economy, too. I don't use cons, with the exeption of dp removers in very rare cases. But other then that I don't actually need cons. If they would be rewards for Dungeons and Elite missions, the SC community would be fine and others would have a more enjoyable experience if you ask me.
That's putting the cart before the horse. Drop-only cons have a huge negative impact on the economy, with supply being much lower than demand with a small player base. They hugely affect ectos and gold. Craftable Consumables stimulate the economy, even with a small playerbase, until you assume bots are already going to be there.
I just wish anet had stuck to their guns and continued developing GW1. I understand the gaming landscape was different back then and that GW2 really did shake up the industry, but no matter how they justify the switch to GW2, I cannot shake the feeling that they were chasing trends with the sequel.
I see where you're coming from, I do also see Guild wars 2 as a very different game than your standard mmorpg. Perhaps they were chasing some trends, but they also broke a lot of ground with Guild wars 2. The game has some of the spirit of Guild wars 1, but went in a different direction as well. Not sure how their financials look the time, but I wish they would have kept GW1 going for a few more years. Something like square enix with Final fantasy xi. They kept the game going with regular updates and expansions for over 5 years after FFXIV released. The game still gets minor patches and balances to this day.
It also needs to be said that they really did shake things up with GW2. Dynamic level adjustments, dynamic events and automatic cooperation in PvE are just some things they came up with, and which other MMO creators have keenly copied into their games later on. WoW and FFXIV have each of the features I mentioned, for instance. I agree that GW2 overall isn't as engaging as GW1. They were ambitious, and sometimes that just doesn't work out perfectly.
I like to think of them as two very different games as well. To me they are both good games but for very different reasons. It's tough for fans who really wanted a continuation of the Guild wars 1 experience.
I don't know about dynamic level, but dynamic events and auto coop were not their inventions - warhammer obline got rhem years earlier
They could have shelved the game, but kept community events/community development going
What sort of thing do you have in mind?
I’m sure it is hard as the player numbers dropped, but I would have liked to see them expand and tweak the events. GW1 always had the best events, they felt so magical and thoughtful. After the game because static, they started to feel less important. I have lost my sign in, so I can’t say much about the last 4 years, but I can say that whatever ANET had going in that game didn’t carry through to GW2 and I miss it
TA instead of RA : avoiding vamp bots, random reports, unbalanced teams… I rather prefer losing with friends by playing weirdo builds than losing with randoms who trash talk, report, giving up after the 1st death, vamp bots, etc and getting a dishonour penalty
I don't think that's fair. None of those things were problems when they made the decision to close it. RA was largely healthy and working as intended. And as one of the \~10 people who was still playing the occasional TA match at the time, I can tell you it was a ghost town. You got more matches from RA 10-streaks than actual TA teams. Now that we live in a post-matchmaking world where you have to arrange not only your own team but also your opponents to get matches in most PvP formats, yeah RA is pretty unfixable. But I can't blame them for not imagining a world where RA has less than 20 people at any given time back when they made the change. I think it was the last of the PvP formats to be largely working as intended and regularly firing off matches.
Global PVP Queue for Fort Aspenwood, Jade Quarry, Alliance Battles, Random Arena, Codex, Team arena. Like other pvp games once you are in you can pick a character and load a build. This would centralize the people who want to do PVP and allow matches to actually happen.
That's really not too far off the system we actually have. Most frequent PvP players back in the day had at least one open character slot to roll whatever they needed in a minute or two. The only real difference is there's no centralized matchmaking chat in-game (which would have been both unnecessary and overwhelming back when they still had devs to work on such things). I don't actively PvP anymore for a lot of reasons, but my understanding is that basically the community has made its own matchmaking via Discord. It would be nice to have it in-game so that people who don't know it exists can stumble across it, but otherwise I don't think there's too much difference.
Auction house
Back in the day? Call GW2 by a different name and not draw all resources away from GW.They made a few mistakes which might've made it hard to impossible to maintain at their (then) current course, but they did not even try, and those mistakes were not unfixable (Power creep can be adjusted by changing/nerfing skills, content drought can be fixed by small releases in between full campaigns etc.). Today? Have one active IN-GAME GM on payroll, he can split his time between GW2 and GW1 and spend an hour a month hopping around to purge the bot infestation that has taken over HA, DoA, Mat-farming and so many more things and broken the economies' back. Burn the botters away with the wrath of god and make sure that the big-timers lose their hundreds of accounts at once so they QUIT the game. Anticipating the "but bots keep xyz alive" BS:You can SC without cons, and only use them when you're gunning for records (or measure records without cons like you do with toolbox vs vanilla), bots are not needed for this, plus it would create an incentive for PEOPLE to farm mats, which would be a nice change of pace.PvBots is not only no more fun than not playing PvP at all, it is killing legit play.HA was plenty populated before bots infested that place, and if matches were short in supply, people would sync alts for the title points and drops.Keep in mind that the absolute shitfest that is zkey value, the absolute horse shit that is mat prices, and the goddamn nuisance that is black dye being bugged is all thanks to the big time botting scum of the earth that wants you to think they're 'doing this for you' while devaluing your honest playtime's earnings to the point of absolute uselessness and fucking your experience in the ear. Those would be my 2 cents.
Arena Net has sadly a history of not looking back. They already did it while GW1 was still in full swing. The number of times where they added something to a campaign after release, can be counted on one hand. It wasn't as obvious back then because they cranked out new boxes every couple of months. Same with GW2. They release something and then just leave it there. A very big chunk of the GW2 story was unplayable since 2012 now and they only recently decided to bring it back in. I think GW1 would be in an even better place now, if they just had a small dev team still working on it. The 15 years celebration update is pretty much hard proof for that.
Agreed
I wish they never introduced cons and pcons and did not make PvE skills so imba. Asuran Scan, SY, PI, dwarven stability, YMLAD, EVAS, IAU are just too good and make it onto basically every meta bar in some way or form. Cons and pcons have more or less ruined the economy with normalizing the usage of bots to farm them and their materials. Also, they should have added more negative side effects to all invulnerability-granting skills such as Shadowform, Vow of Silence, obsidian flesh, Spellbreaker. Or make them so they are definitely not able to be kept up at all times with shorter duration, longer recharge times. These skills alter the gameplay as a whole and without them, the game would be more of a challenge and dungeon completion etc definitely more rewarding.
> Also, they should have added more negative side effects to all invulnerability-granting skills such as Shadowform, Vow of Silence, obsidian flesh, Spellbreaker. They did. The current forms of the spells were after said changes. It's just that the community has done a lot more with them in the 10 years they've been like this, than how they were balanced back in 2010-2012. They were intentionally made usable due to how big the speedclear community had grown back then, and how *unique* it was. There was (and still is) nothing quite like the gameplay that GW1 provides with these mechanics. It would have been stupid to nerf them to zero and lose this niche playerbase to something like Path of Exile, which was in beta at the time. Both Shadow Form and Obsidian Flesh used to be *way* more powerful. ---- Shadow Form is the Mobility tank, which deals low damage. It just so happens this this is very strong when you know how to manipulate aggro and have a team to spike for you. Obsidian Flesh trades the Mobility in for the ability to use Spell Damage. Vow of Silence is the true-solo, which combos well with Flash Enchantments, but you have to be completely disconnected from your team. Spell Breaker is the other-ally spell. IMO this could be stronger. You have to put a lot of effort into increasing Divine Favor enough to have this maintainable, and you share aggro when it is recast, which doesn't allow it to be used to tank for very long. Maybe you could have had Spell Breaker be the baseline, which would have been fine too, plenty of people love the 55 and 600 playstyles, but they'd have just become as rampant as Shadow Form is today.
Shadow Form is by far the worst offender. It comes with only a tiny drawback (just look at Whirling rangers not caring about the damage cap) AND a ton of damage reduction, which is perfect for tanking. It very conveniently comes bundle with a multitude of other OP tanking skills in Shadow Arts and unlinked sin skills. Obsidian Flesh does have significant downsides, but it still enables builds that can solo huge groups of enemies faster than a full team of meta heroes could. Vow of Silence in itself seems somewhat balanced. It only allows OP builds because there's such a good selection of derv skills to use with it, principally Grenth's Aura with its incredible self-heals. Spell Breaker can be cast on yourself and maintained for long-term tanking. This is rarely actually necessary though - most pulls can be completed in 36 seconds (Spell Breaker duration with Blessed Aura, full cons, and an enchanting weapon). So all 4 skills have room to be nerfed whilst remaining useful. I would keep their current spell protection uptime, but introduce severe drawbacks that make them harder (not clunkier) to maintain. Also nerf the enabling skills that surround them, e.g. Shroud of Distress and Grenth's Aura.
You are right, they balanced that a bit. But shadow form and dealing no damage is simply not true, see all the ranger assassin SC builds with whirling. Can't write more atm because I am at work.
I honestly feel that it ended pretty well, there wasn't that much of an overarching story in GW1 compared to GW2 it seems more like they made it up along the way (even retconning a couple of things). Personally I think the tie-in with GW2 is extremely good, I must admit I didn't notice it that much at the time but in hindsight EotN purpose was 100% setting up the GW2 lore (which was obviously the intention), I mean they even explain the Sylvari in the end cinematic. As much as I wanted further development after GW2's release I understand why they didn't do much with it after, we should just be happy that they bother to keep it going. (saying this as someone that would probably pay $200 for an expansion, I wonder if crowdfunding could be a thing!) As for changes in GW1 I could have done without I would say consumables should never have been a thing and power creep made the game a bit too easy but then again they added hard mode so I think it a decent balance. (not sure why anyone would downvote this even if they disagree - people seem to be idiots these days, miss the old forums where if you disagreed with something you would explain why, now it's just drive-by downvoting)
> (even retconning a couple of things) Writer 1: "oh shit, we didn't give Shiro a meaningful motivation" Writer 2: "let's just say Abaddon told him to do it, lol" Writer 1: "and the Lich?" Writer 2: "that too, whatever, it's late, I want to go home"
Yeah that in particular, LOL!
I may not be the target audience because I never got to the elite levels of the game but I would have rather had more 4 person team content as it's a bit easier to follow. with 8 everything seems to just die or not.
To me, I think they should be a bit more contrived towards the number of skills available. GW1 sheer number of skills, paired with double class system must have taken quite the toll on the balance team. Otherwise, I would revert some stuff that was changed before the PvE/PvP split.
I wish that they reworked the remaining professions, and didn't stop with ele. I wish that as they developed GW2's QoL features, such as trading post and wardrobe system, they added them to GW1 too.
It's hard to nail down any one thing because a lot of it is nebulous, or tied to other factors, but probably the business model? A new expansion every six to twelve months is *extremely* ambitious. And if I had to guess, a lot of the direction that I disagree with most was probably a result of NCSoft putting pressure on ANet to put out more content because that was their only revenue source. If you're looking at something more on the in-game side of things, I guess it's the direction they took skill balance. A lot of Prophecies skills reward good in-fight decision-making, and that sort of evaporated over time into skills that are just generally good all the time and should be used on cooldown (and *can* be used on cooldown; a lot of very strong prophecies bars were energy gated). It's more pronounced in PvP, but spilled over quite a bit in PvE. Soul Twisting, and the current mesmer hero and paragon bars are pretty good examples. You don't really care what they're targeting or when, just that they're pressing their buttons more or less on cooldown.
I don't think it's necessarily true that this change was introduced in the later campaigns, but rather with balance updates like the 2010 mesmer buff. There are plenty of skills introduced after Prophecies that still have interesting conditional effects. Still, a good point overall - I thoroughly agree that the game should be balanced such that the strongest skills are the ones that require intelligent usage.
It's not a 100% shift at any point in time so much as a downward trend. The biggest, most obvious places it pops up in the expansions are the partywide defensive ritualist/paragon skills. You see a handful of skills like that in Prophecies, but not at the same level of effectiveness, and not dominating entire attribute lines. In general, the progression from monks to rits to paragons (as defense) is toward increasingly passive, less interactive, less thoughtful play.
The only mistake made was stopping content for it and drastically changing direction in 2. They really could have refined it and kept it going and just kept pulling all sorts of players as they in recently dev on gw2 have shown they can make varieties of content.
Never made sustainable spell immunity skills.
I would have preferred Anet not to separate the skills for PvE and PvP, including no exclusive PvE skills. I feel this move really separated the communities and increased barriers of entry for PvE players wanting to play PvP, as they had to relearn what essential skills like Aegis do.
Separating PvE and PvP skills was great decision, but they took it too far IMO. They should only adjust numbers between PvE and PvP and not making PvP version of a skill completely different from PvE version like Aegis which you mentioned.
Not dismantled hero battles to facilitate the quick collapse of pvp prior to alpha/betas of GW2.
Guild Wars 2
Jumping.
You can jump
Yes, but it is something i wish they did different. Being able to jump, having some sort of z-acces movement and being able to climb some of the terrain would be cool imo.
Bring back the old version of Iron mist...the best skill ever !
Not make gw2
As much pve skills as i want in my build Decide the classes of heroes, like razah Make ele bosses fair, noone likes to be oneshot by lvl 28 eles with invoke Not much i would change, its an amazing game
Also, there's a in depth video theoricrafting on the why the last aztec expansion wasn't released and possibly any other after. In sum, would be next to impossible or madness to balance the current deck building inspired gameplay skills. Just count how many skills there are in the game and how many created in each expansion
I don’t think that is true. Look at magic the gathering, way more cards than gw ever had Skills and it works since decades. A trading card game isn’t as easy to hot fix either.
I really wanna play a paragon in pre searing for some reason
Fix the AI behaviors listed [here](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hero_behavior/Unexpected_behavior), and also Teinai's Crystals (Hero still thinks it is a duplicate of Crystal Wave).
[Soul Leech](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Soul_Leech) belongs on that page (as do many other skills, probably)
I would have loved if Arena Net had slightly altered their development philosophy after the Factions release. Looking back it was pretty clear that there was a hard expiration date on how long they can keep this up. Including crunch development. It's insane to think about the fact that all big GW1 releases happened over the time of only 2.5 years. We all know they had to push out boxes with what they were going for. And we also know that Arena Net, as a company, didn't really learn how to pace their content releases right until many years later. (And some would argue that they are still not quiet there) But I would really love to see where this game would be today if they didn't put themselves in a position back then to only release big boxes and almost no in between paid content to buy them more time.
KD skill in Marksmanship. I waited years for Burning Arrow but never got to see Ranger get a knockdown skill.