User:Sjeng/GW2 Suggestions

GW2 Suggestions
Here's a list of ideas I like for GW2: You can find these on my Feedback page.

Guilds:
 * Stop making the recruiters pay for the invites, make the new recruits pay for their own. It would serve to limit guild-hopping for one thing. (officers could always choose to pay the money back to the new members).
 * Real Guild Hall improvements. You buy land and a basic building. You add houses, expand buildings, get guild vaults, ect. Think how neat it would be to come into the Guild Hall and see a new fountain in the center of your little town or what ever.
 * Guild halls can be upgraded with member houses/corners, taverns, cosmetic stuff, seasonal decorations (that can only be put up during those seasons).
 * Have guild halls be located in actual towns! First, your guild has to earn the right to "found" a guild hall in a town by gaining the favor of that town's mayor/chief/lord. This can be done by working for them, doing quests, etc. Once you have a guild hall, it stays there permanently, untill you choose to get a new guildhall in a different town. These towns should be neutral/equal, meaning that it won't matter in which town you place your hall (no advantages over others, a guildhall in town A is equal to a guildhall in town B, except for the looks). The guild hall itself is a pre-built building in each of the towns that may have one, that is like a seperate instance, only accessible through either the maptravel option / visit guild hall button, and a guard NPC that sends you to your guild hall instance. That way, all guilds that have their hall in the same town make use of the same building, using seperate instances, with the ability to upgrade it. It's really the same as it is now, only the building is a real structure in a town you can actually walk to, instead of an island on a map you can only maptravel to. Additionally, you could also walk out of the front gate of your guild hall instance, and appear at the front gate of your hall in the town your guild is stationed in.
 * More ranks in a guild then just leader, officers and members.
 * Ability to see your allied guild's rosters.
 * Crests - Don't be forced to have your guild emblem only on your cape! Be proud of your guild and let a blacksmith put a crest on your armor's chest or shoulders. (also on cloth with paint!)

PvP/PvE:
 * Add a way to duel agains someone in pve area's, this way pvp and pve is more connected. Both parties would have to accept a challenge invitation though. Players could even set an ante in the form of gold or perhaps a recent drop.
 * Duels could happen not only in the form of battle, but perhaps also in the form of minigames such as a gambling game, a race with mounts or vehicles etc.
 * Give more freedom in terms of what your story will be, if I want to join the white mantle, let me. (I so loved the secret thieves guild in Gothic II!)
 * Monsters that aren't hostile. They could be hunted for food/materials. They turn hostile after you killed like 100's of them. They turn helpfull in combat if you feed them or something.
 * Massive Player battles. Not just things like the current AB, but full scale battles. For Instance: Say there are two nations that are at war (luxon vs Kurzick for example) and there is word through the village that there is going to be a battle. There should be an NPC that I can talk to that takes me to the site of the battle for whatever side I wish to be on, and there are several hundred other players like me there, ready to fight. It would be similar to a large scale AB or GvG, trying to capture resource points or kill an NPC officer, but maybe also killing a high ranking player in the area or decimating the enemy ranks to a certain number.

Graphics:
 * Seperate customizations from character type/profession, so you can cutomize your character more. * RGB-color sliders for everything.
 * have facual effects in emotes or better yet, be able to put your mood in a facual expression.
 * Ragdoll physics.
 * Make the fighting animations show more action.

Emotes: This suggestion came to me when I had this weird dream about Anet suddenly having changed all /dance emotes in guildwars 1 (yes I know, I play way too much GW)... So I woke up, thinking how strange this dream was, but it got me thinking about all the different dance emotes there currently are in guildwars 1. There's a different dance for every profession, and for every gender, totaling in 10 times 2 = 20 different dance emotes. So, I thought, what will Anet do in GW2? There's an unknown amount of professions, 5 races and 2 genders. If I assume there will be a maximum amount of professions, no more than we have now, being 10, then there might be the same amount of /dance emotes in guildwars 2. So, 20 different dance emotes. Now, I really can't imagine an Asura dancing the same way a Norn does, or a Charr dancing like a Human. Not only would that look funny, it might also be physically impossible. Taking that into account, Anet might have to make different dance emotes for each race as well, which might result in up to 10 professions (presumably) times 2 genders, times 5 races = 100 different dance emotes!
 * Give more emotes than we now have, /faint, /hug, /kiss, /scream, /facepalm, /jazzhands. More emotes basically.
 * Allright, this is going to be a lengthy one:

So that got me thinking: Anet is never going to make 100 different dance emotes. It must have been hard to come up with 20 unique dances for GW1, an now thay would have to come up with 100 new ones... Not likely. So perhaps they will only make 1 dance emote for each race, and for each gender, totaling 5 races times 2 genders = 10 different dances. That, to me, would be kind of an anticlimax when GW1 has twice as many dance emotes. Now perhaps the professions aren't as diverse as in GW1, and GW2 might have only 6 professions, just like the first core professions in Prophecies. You'd end up somewhere inbetween (6x5x2=60 new dance emotes). That still seems a lot, but you never know.

So then I got to thinking: if there's going to be this many dances, how am I ever going to be able to dance them all? I mean, in GW1, I play 1 character of each profession, making it possible for me to dance 10 out of 20 dance emotes. So on my mule account I created characters with different genders than I already had. Doing so, I can actually dance all 20 dances. But if GW2 will have more, this is going to be much harder to achieve!

Which brings me to my suggestion (I told you it was gonna be a long story): What if you could gain multiple dance emotes on a character? Let me explain. Imagine you're a Charr, and there are 6 professions (for arguments sake) and 2 genders, totaling in 12 dances for all Charr. Your Charr is male, so depending on your profession, you can dance one of the 6 available dance emotes. If you plan on making 1 character of each race and each gender (equaling 10 characters), you would only be able to dance 10 emotes out of the total of (in this example) 60 (or more depending on the amount of professions).

So what if the other 5 dances for your male Charr can be obtained somehow? There could be hidden quests that you can unlock by doing certain bonus goals in missions or dungeons. You'd have to find these bonus goals first, but when you do, and complete them, a textbox appears saying something like "There is a new quest waiting for you. Go see NPC X in the Charr capital city". Then this NPC gives you a quest that rewards you with a new dance emote. In all there would be a quest for each profession, much like the "path" quests in Prophecies, only this time for unlocking additional dance emotes, and not secondary professions. There would also have to be a dance-quest NPC in each capital city, because as mentioned, each race might have a different dance for each profession. This NPC could be the same NPC in each city, being a traveling bard perhaps, but he/she could just as well be 5 different people. If you're male, you can learn all male dances from your race, not the female dance emotes, and vice versa. This way, you could still do all available dance emotes, plus it would add extra content to the game.

@Anet: if you like the suggestion, I'd love one of those NPC's to be called "Sjeng" :D

User interface: The first two, are self-explained, Campaign Progress would explain what you did, and what you are up to (regarding missions), broke down into days, months, years...like a real diary. Bestiary would give you information on foes you kill (with pictures). Say, when you kill the same monster a few times you'd know it's weak against some types of attacks and such, upon killing it about 20 times, you could get his exact skill bar. 50 times, health points, energy, AL. 100 times ... ... ... On Notes you could write your own personal notes about anything you want, and below on that screen tab there'd be an option to make an article out of that secific note, turning it into a "physical" item you could handle to another person ingame. It would also be possible to insert notes on the world map. These notes are stored locally on your PC, so the servers won't get filled too much.
 * Show the energy level in the party meter, so everyone can see if someone is out of energy.
 * Bigger storage space in Xunlai vaults and inventory, but some items need more slots than others (like diablo). So the below mentioned delta-flyer would take up a lot of space (imagine a folded up wooden set of wings on your back), but could carry you further than the parachute, which would take less space (folded up bundle of cloth). Bigger and stronger weapons take up more space than a small set of daggers. Make smaller weapons stackable, like arrows, throwing darts, shuriken and such, but with a max number. Seperate armor storage.
 * I'd like to see a "diary" feature. Say when you hit "L" (by default) a window pops up with the following tabs: Current Quests / Completed Quests / Campaign Progress / Bestiary / Notes.

Armor/Weapons/Gear: Armor will not be profession-bound. Great idea! I'd like to add to that:
 * make more seperate armor parts (gloves, armguards, pauldrons, seperate helmets from facial paint/scars etc)
 * add things like magical rings, necklaces, etc.
 * add profession-linked upgrades for armor (like insignia's, only they also give the armor a slightly different look, such as spikes for warriors or a glowing fiery aura for elementalists)
 * Add a quiver for arrows please!
 * Marketplace. A place where players can place an item for sale with an asking price, and the option to choose between set buyout price or auction. You could put 1 item per 24 hours there for example, after which you would get a notice the next time you log on, telling you if someone offered a bid on the item, and if so, a button to accept/decline the offer. The amount would then be taken from the person who placed the bid, at which point that player gets a notice that he has successfully bought the item plus the item is stored in his storage.
 * Dual wielding of melee weapons, and two-handed swords/axes that are HUGE.

Movement/World:
 * Add the ability to really jump and swim. Added Z-axis. But add some railings on high grounds, so people don't accidentally walk off a 100 foot drop and die. Damage should be applied for falling off of great hights: the higher you fall, the more damage you receive. If you wanted to jump off a very high cliff or building, you'd need some sort of spell to land slowly, or even fly for a short time, or perhaps a crude parachute/delta-wing that you can stow in your backpack.
 * More height in the landscape: add mountains, towers, buildings you can climb, outside or inside (like in Dungeon siege). Even though GW1 does have height differences, it's really all in 1 plane, as there is no real Z-axis.
 * Better map traveling system than GW1 has now. 1 click = map (perhaps scroll through maps), 2nd click = zone to destination. The map either simply grows with each expansion, or you can scroll through them.
 * Active Day time Night time and weather cycles over the whole world. Day and Night would conform to the RTC on player's computer. Weather can be determined by servers, with options to disable enable set etc.
 * Mounts! walking, swimming and flying, and even combo's! Mounts should be able to evolve as well. Perhaps start them as regular pets, and let them evolve into mounts. Have certain special quests to give them additional abilities such as flight or greater speed.
 * Ability to invite people in your party if they're in your friends list while they are not in the same outpost. For example, I'm in LA, my guildie is in Kamadan, I wanna go help him and he invites me into his party while I am in LA. I finish up some things and then teleport to him.
 * Crowds in towns. NPC's that walk around, interacting with merchants, guards, and players too. (add the ability to chat with NPC's, like asking for directions, or steal from them, risking the attention of guards, that could fine you if caught for pickpocketing.)
 * "Purpose-driven" AI phylogenies and relationships rather than the standard generic scripted (if then) AIs:
 * AI behavior should not be purely scripted because they are too easy to outplay and after a while boring (see GW which is not to put down this very innovative game).
 * AI behavior could be based on a certain phylogeny that groups certain behaviors of classes of enemies together and nuances them.
 * AI can vary in terms of intelligence depending on the whether this AI is a beast or another "humanoid" or intelligent life form.
 * AIs should have a purpose in the world. The current standard seems to be that AI's are just there to be killed. Though that may be true, it makes these characters seem rather 2-dimensional and uninspired. Examples: Beast AI's could be on the search for food. Herbivores feed of plants. Carnivores feed of herbivores. More intelligent AIs could belong to an "organization" that has a "purpose".

Thanks to: The Pointless, Kyshen, Sorudo, Zsig, Rayham, Merlinf, Akirai Annuvil, the bomb, Thalanor Thornhale, Karura, and all the others who made suggestions on the community forums. Sjeng  14:49, 16 March 2009 (UTC)