Feedback talk:User/Morgaine

Give me feedback here! :-)

Suggestion to anyone about to write a followup comment here:

• Don't edit any existing section from "Comments galore" downwards as this page has become highly unreadable and your contribution won't be seen.
• Instead, make a new "==" section for your new comment just above "Comments galore" and place your comment in your new section.
• I'll move any old stuff that deals with the same topic into your new section. Morgaine 05:26, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Oh, and Happy New Year 2012. :P Morgaine

Placing sections for my official suggestions in front of the rest of this Talk page.

Improve user choice for WiK and WoC

Suggestion reference: Morg-01::Improve user choice for WiK and WoC

Comments on this topic here please.

Remove repeatedly-required shrine "paperwork"

Suggestion reference: Morg-02::Remove repeatedly-required shrine "paperwork"

Comments on this topic here please.

Reward or Remove Anniversary Storage

Suggestion reference: Morg-03::Reward or Remove Anniversary Storage

Comments on this topic here please.

End the Duncan Closed Door Disaster

Suggestion reference: Morg-04::End the Duncan Closed Door Disaster

Comments on this topic here please.

Z-axis in the GW game engine

• Guild Wars has no z-axis, so coordinates can only be given by x,y. elix Omni 12:44, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I know that it appears to have no z-axis, as evidenced by traps being triggered regardless of height for example. But that's not actually the case, it's just a simplification often made to explain the game mechanics to people. The reality is that at graphics level the z-axis has to be present in the scenegraph for the mesh content to be rendered correctly. What ArenaNet has done is merely not externalize that z-axis data, and it's not present (or ignored) in the events engine too. In case you're not acquainted with how graphics engines work, let me give you a little conundrum to highlight the issue. In the Thunderhead Keep mission there are bridges over the entrance paths into the Keep. If there were no z-axis, how would the game engine distinguish between you being on the path (and hence only being able to move in/out of the Keep) or you being on the bridge (and hence only being able to move at right angles to the path)? Furthermore, despite a ranger's trap triggering regardless of height, the graphics engine clearly knows that you are higher up when you're on the bridge, otherwise it wouldn't be drawing you higher up. The z-axis data really is there, it has to be there for the graphics to display correctly. And so, it can be made available as I suggested as well. Morgaine 18:30, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Comments galore

First: I support many of these ideas, I hope you create the relevant articles so that ANet is more likely to see them. Comments on specific ideas:

Add "Percentage Zone Explored" to zones

• +1

Add campaign maps to the Travel boat menu

• +1 (although I think this might be difficult to program)
• There are a number of suggestions for addressing this in different ways, e.g. Add capitals, ... (there are more... but I haven't tracked them down — I'll see if I can find them later).

Add position coordinates within each instance

• I would use this, but it seems to have a relative low reward:effort ratio compared to your other ideas.

Address the worst cases of hero dumbness

• +1
• Not sure if these are truly the worst case, but everyone spends time trying to work around them (and they seem as if they might require relatively simple AI adjustments).

Allow Guild Hall owners to move service NPCs

• Probably cheaper to allow the leader to decide which NPC is placed in which slot (I'm guessing the actual placement involves trickier code.)
• Regardless, I support the idea: more player choice about how to configure their hall.

Allow skills re-ordering at all times

• You can re-order your skills at any time. I do this frequently when experimenting with new builds, as I discover which order makes more sense.

• Wow!!! I missed that completely, but I just popped into a zone to check and you're right! I see why I missed it before though: the skills bar at the bottom of the Skills window is overlaid with a message "Skills cannot be equiped ..." when in a zone. It never occurred to me that the bar might reappear on mouseover. :P Super, many thanks for that reply!!! :-) Morgaine 14:52, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

• I haven't tried re-ordering hero skills (because I don't really care to worry about that outside of towns).

• Yup, just tried it and it works for hero skill bars too. :-) [Not that they care about order, lol.] Morgaine

Allow the Mission Map to be saved

• +1
• I've been trying to figure out a way to reward toons that have completed Cartographer; maybe this would be one of them.

Anchor the poor disoriented heroes/henchmen

• Please, no. I believe this would break the current gimmicks to get heroes to follow you over impassable terrain (e.g. after corpse traversal). Those exploits more than make up for the tiny inconvenience of have to unflag/reflag heroes to your feet.

• I agree that it would break the gimmicks or helpful exploits that are based on H/H ignoring the geographical constraints. Since breaking anything is a bad idea, if this were to become a real suggestion it would need to be accompanied with a user control of some kind so that existing wierd functionality can be preserved.

• I have a simple scheme that would allow this at the same time as providing a new dimension of flag control: Place another button next to the Cancel button on the radar, labeled Here. When Here is clicked, the existing set of flags does not disappear, but instead all 1 to 4 flags are replanted centered around the player using some algorithm. Two possible algorithms are "Place flag 1 at player's position" (the other flags retain their distribution relative to flag 1), and "Place the median position of the current set of flags at the player's position".

• You may be wondering WTH this is for, lol. Well the end goal which I've been chewing on for a while is to give H/H the ability to fight in formation with you, and my original plan was to have a Follow button on the radar for that purpose. The "H/H disorientation" issue dovetails nicely into that, as Here and Follow would be two different aspects of the same mechanism, static and dynamic team formation control. (I haven't added this to my list of proto-suggestions yet, as I'm still thinking how to control flag-set rotation during Follow.) Morgaine 15:25, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Death Penalty rate limit

• Low reward:effort ratio IMO.
• DP removal is plentiful (and almost cheap).
• I've found changing kit on heroes reduces the amount of trouble they get into. (e.g. make sure Monks have more health, so they don't get targeted first)

• Sure, but emerging from a fight with a single foe group with more than 15% DP serves no gaming purpose whatsoever, and certainly doesn't make for "fun". I think that's just bad game mechanics, and probably unintended. There is already a DP rate limit in the game since you don't earn another 15% if you are killed instantly on resurrect. They've thought about this already, but seem to have pegged the limit to short encounters only. Morgaine 16:03, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Don't forget mapped areas of underground maps

• +1
• See also End underground blackouts of outposts

Don't lose map travel paths on reconnect

• +1

Extend the Quests window

• See also Quest log 2.0

Fix indirect path discovery faults in EotN towns

• +1
• This seems counter-intuitive: heroes don't get stuck in explorables in similar situations. Why do PCs?

Make 'Sell' the default tab at Merchants

• +1

Multiple selection from inventory for Trade

• I'm not actually sure what you mean. Shift-clicking and dragging a group doesn't seem any easier than dragging 7 items one-at-a-time (esp. since I like check/re-check frequently).

• I didn't explain it earlier since multi-select is a pretty common feature, but the saving can be huge. Click on first item in inventory while holding down Shift, Press on last time, drag to destination, Release. That's one key held down, one click, and one press-drag-release irrespective of how many items you are transferring, It's an O(1) operation, contrasted with O(N) for the corresponding set of N individual transfers. No contest!!! :-) Morgaine 16:17, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

PvE/PvP skills toggle

• I would use this.
• I suspect it has a low reward:effort ratio.

• It can be hard to quantify reward sometimes, but in this case you'd get a pretty good approximation from the percentage of PvE-only players (or PvE-mostly) versus all players, which I suspect is quite large. Currently this large PvE player base is underserved by the skills window being in permanent PvP mode when you're in your Guild Hall. It doesn't reflect the fact that the GH is "home" even to those who don't play PvP at all. As for the denominator of the reward/effort ratio, it's really almost no effort at all, since the skills window switches modes automatically already. All this needs is an extra button or preferences checkbox to tell the client what to do when entering the GH. Making it switch modes when already in the GH might require a little more work, but that's secondary and not essential. Currently I can't work on my builds while sitting comfortably in my GH home, which is very suboptimal and just plain silly. Morgaine 16:38, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Remove irritating UI pop-up

• You can toggle this off... at least, I never see it.

Remove unecessary restrictions on equipment packs

• If there's no programmatic reason for the restriction: +1.
• (I thought I remembered a developer mentioning that they needed to hack something else to make it look like there was increased inventory, but this is actually using the weapon/armor tables...which would explain why it only applies to the current toon and only to some items.)

Revise Embark Beach

• I like the idea of EB, but I agree it's far from ideal.
• See also: Embark Beach 2.0

Reward playing multiple professions

• nty
• Players already receive substantial benefits for playing multiple profs:
  • Easier to generate wealth by repeating easy activities (festival quests, Augury Rock ZM etc)
  • Those who play multiple toons also get better at playing generally (understanding the enemy better and being able to create better hero builds).

Show the ranger pet's experience bar

• Low reward:effort.
• It's trivial to death level pets in the menagerie, so I'm okay without this change.

Trade window width controls

• Low reward:effort ratio.
• I prefer that the bar is one row (easier to drag stuff to).

Again: good stuff. I look forward to commenting on (and adding support to) the newly created suggestions as they appear. — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 21:50, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

Sign

See also: Quick & Easy Embark Beach Fixes.

/signed! Everything that you and TEF said sums it up perfectly. ^_^

Creating specific suggestions

I notice you haven't yet created specific suggestions for each of your ideas, so I'm not sure that ANet has seen them yet. Do you intend to create those articles? If not, would you mind if I stole/borrowed the ideas I like best and added (variations of) them into my own feedback space? Thanks! – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 16:25, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi TEF. :-) Thanks for your many comments. Yes, I've been very slow at turning critical comments into formal suggestions --- I think it's because of the lack of Anet developer visibility, which makes writing up suggestions rather like waving in the dark -- unfulfilling. :-) You'll note that in almost every case I accompany the comments with suggested solutions, as that's second nature to me, being a developer myself. I'm aware that it's totally unhelpful though, since it's unseen by GW developers.

By all means take anything you want for incorporating into your own suggestions. I've never understood the "ownership" of ideas anyway, one of the most negative and regressive concepts invented by Man. :-) Morgaine 14:27, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

PS. Worth noting that I do get intimately involved with developers in other forums related to 3D worlds, although they're all "virtual worlds" rather than the sub-genre of game worlds. GW is the only game I play anymore, so it would be nice to help influence it at dev level. I guess it's company policy to place an opaque wall in front of devs here. Their choice, can't be helped, but it's a pity I think. Morgaine 14:34, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

It looks like you are sorta/kinda getting around to creating formal suggestions, so (a) I'm going to hold off stealing your ideas and (b) wait to comment on the recent rebooting of some of the ideas. Please pop me a note when you think you're done (or paused for a longer period of time)...and I'll pop back here again.

I would like, again, to urge you to create individual pages for these, otherwise I fear that the dev team won't see them...and, assuming your ideas are on par with this article (or in the same direction), I'm looking forward to adding my +1 to most of them. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 03:33, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

MediaWiki help

If anyone cares to tell me why I have no "[Edit]" labels on the sections of my parent page, and how to make them appear, I'd be grateful. :-)

I believe it's a feature of Feedback/User/XYZ. IIRC, I resolved it by replacing {{feedback user suggestions}} with identical code and removing __NOEDITSECTION__, which ends up (I believe) apply to the article (because of where it appears in the default layout). My page is probably more complicated than you need yours to be, so you might not want to follow my lead. (I believe there's a counter to noeditsection, but I don't remember what it is.)

Since you mentioned that you have coding experience, my guess is that you'll figure out something that will work for you. If not, lemme know and we can figure something out. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 17:24, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

GJ :-) – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 19:47, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Yay, that worked! And you beat me to saying so, lol. Thanks TEF. :-) Morgaine 19:52, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Commenting on the feedback

You have a lot of interesting ideas, but I find it hard to read them (and follow any comments by others) because you have bunched them all up on your Feedback home page. I would like ANet to read them, but I fear they won't b/c you haven't created separate articles (or even an umbrella article for several related ideas). So, I hope that you will give each idea its own page within your Feedback space. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 01:12, 9 April 2012 (UTC)