The dream update

[:1]DISCLAIMER

This is a repost of Kaons Dream update as found on GWG, TeamQuitter or Wartower. I did not write all of this and I have personal permission to repost it, so don't go there.

I wanted to bring attention to this over here as well since I know Kaon has never been visiting this forum. Therefore I'll speak up for it here to spread the discussion and hopefully bring something good of it other than perhaps some life to this place



First off I feel I should introduce Kaon as to better bring out the perspective from which the post was written. Credentials if you might.

Kaon is one of few active players who've been playing at a high competitive level since the month the game was released. He probably had his tiger emote before many of you completed the Prophecies campaign. He's led several european guilds(Empty Skillbars[EaSy], Double Click[Play]) to the top of the ladder and consistently played at a top level until a couple years ago when he retired from the absolute competitive environment and started playing BYOB.

This is where I can enter the picture and how I know him.

The guy is ****ing smart, dedicated and overall a really cool guy with a lot of damn skill. When he talks, you listen.

Now that it's clearly established why the post is centered around PvP and the integrity of the community, let's get on with it.


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This is basically a list of things i'd love to still see implemented in the game. Many of these things are unrealistic. Many of these things are very realistic and some are baffling that they haven't been implemented yet. It's inspired by Grimpaw's Dreampatch http://www.guild-hall.net/forum/showthread.php?t=24979 posted in July 2005.

The thread has originally been posted in the PvP section of this forum. Personally I haven't played PvE in 6 years but I have 5700 hours of PvP experience. Please understand from which perspective this is written. Don't bother attacking the bugs because they undoubtedly exist. Some issues may seem weird or even wrong from a PvE viewpoint, but they all make a lot of sense from my perspective.







Bug Fixes



Some of these bugs have been in the game for a very, very long time. The first 3 actually got introduced (as in: They weren't part of the game at release.) and we're never fixed.

1) Rubberbanding. Rubberbanding got introduced somewhere inbetween Factions and Nightfall release. It decides a significant percentage of the games played today. Not only GvG but also in HA. It is very, very frustrating to suddenly find yourself at a completely different location than your screen says you are. At the very least give us an indication when your cli�nt is out of sync with the server. In the early days using /stuck or a skill would return you to your original position straight away. Now it does not.

2) PvP clock. If you lag out for a few moments your clock goes out of sync. This can make a tremendous difference in matches since timers matter! Resurrection times and 28:00 are key moments in the game. Your clock could easily sync with the other players' clocks or check itsself every minute.

3) Reconnecting bug. If you disconnect, then reconnect straight away you'll leave the game because the server has not established the fact that you've disconnected yet. Again, this never happened the first year or so after the introduction of reconnects. Also the team got a "your member has disconnected" message straight away, and not after he's already reconnected. These 3 bugs all seem to be connected for it appears a lot of things have been made cli�ntsided rather then serversided.

4) Energy bug. If you baseres with maximum energy, you don't instantly have it all available. You might be almost on full energy but it will still say "out of energy" when you use word of healing or any other skill on someone. Cycling through all your weaponsets before you cast something seems to help a little bit. It seems to increase the amount of available energy, but it won't max it out.

5) Fix entourage. Right now it works so that the guild lord uses it constantly, meaning that even if you have 8 people in their lordsroom and they have one archer, the lord may very well still be protected for the first few seconds. This has cost my guild a few games already, because for some reason the guild lord took no damage.





Community Relations

Most of the issues this game has or had are a result of the abysmal communication between players and developers. ArenaNet is no exception; pretty much every game developer and website does not communicate with their cli�nts. This is not an excuse though.

1) Game developers need to read and post regularly on large forums. The way it has been in the past, we only got a "yes we're reading everything" once every month on the forum. This does not suffice. Developers need to post in important topics that they're actually reading this. It is incredibly important that the community at least feels they're being listened to. The old policy is basically a husband comforting his wife that he does listen to her rambling while he obviously doesn't. The only person that I feel at least gave the PvP community a sense of respect was Andrew Patrick, he posted very regularly on guild-hall.net in many topics, really giving us the feeling that at least he listened to us, although the big bosses didn't. Martin Kerstein really is a cool guy IRL and he cares about PvP. He claims he reads pvp forums but i've never actually seen him post so as far as we know he (and therefore Anet) never reads anything.

I'm not claiming developers should plow through every bull**** thread, but it is quite easy to spot the useful threads in the mess that is guild wars. You really need less than an hour a day of forum-skimming to be up to date with pretty much every thread. This is not a lot of work, especially for someone who is paid to do so. Also by sitting on forums you can spot the intelligent posters and therefore perhaps even a selection who to ask for balance advice next patch. Better than the random ****ters there are at the balance forum.

2) Weekly appearance on radioshows. Basically Izzy or someone else should've come on WoC every week, this would've given a tremendous feeling of attention to everyone here, and the developers would learn something every week. Lone Samurai still has his radio I think. In any case when someone exists that dedicates a RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing radio channel to your video game and gathers a large listener base, it is incredibly rude and retarded not to utilise this mean.

3) PvP needs to be advocated. Every month, there should be a notification on your log in screen that the monthly is again this month. Every monthly an ingame announcement should be made that goes along the lines of this: "The monthly tournament has started, press B to see the best guilds of guild wars fight it out in GvG. Check with Tolkano in your guild hall to follow the scores and how you can participate next month." This should've also happened in all earlier tournaments. During the GWFC an awesome dvd was made, however it has never been released. This things needs to be released instantly. I have never seen any video images of the GWWC. What's the point of organising such huge events if they aren't used for any PR purposes at all? Not even the biggest competitive fan got a good glance at what it was like.

I'd like to pay a bit of special attention to the next item:

4) A cli�nt or customer support for guild wars that you can actually call with your phone. Every real life company has a customers support. Game developers and websites (not even facebook) have none. This is ludicrous. Guild Wars players have no rights. The moment you get reported for anything you or your guild WILL get banned for no reason whatsoever. I've been banned for saying "English please, I don't speek sauerkraut," my guild Endangered Feces [DoDo] got banned after 1 year and 1600 gvgs, and my guild Super Kaon Action Team [SuKa] got banned for "an abusive guild tag." Every player here can dig up stories much more ridiculous than this. Once you get banned you have to send an e-mail and wait for days to get unbanned if you get unbanned at all, since it is much harder to explain the situation properly over e-mail than by phone. When SuKa got banned I received a bull**** story about how they "couldn't unban guilds" while they already did it before. It took weeks (and costed us the monthly!) before the situation was resolved. It could've been resolved within 5 minutes if I could've just dialed a RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing phone number. If you charge people for calling this, it is even possible to make money out of a customer service.



Chat improvements

The first two items might even be the most important thing on this entire list.

1) Drastically increase the amount of friends you can have on your friendslist, preferebly unlimited. Above all guild wars is a social game. Interacting with people is the most important reason people keep playing this game, all efforts should be made to accomodate this as much as possible. I have to delete people on my friendslist all the time to add new people, but when those old people log on a few months later, we don't know of each other's existance anymore because we both removed each other, therefore our friendship was effectively ended by the friendslist cap. Everyone i've ever known has this problem. Simply raising this cap would dramatically increase the fun a lot of people have with this game and each other. This also leads to point two:

2) Add ingame chatboxes and forums of some sort. Guild chat and Alliance chat are ingame chat boxes. But it would be great if you could create more. A teamquitter or #gwp chatbox without having to resort to Mirc or facebook. Facebook is a truely great way to organise GvG. You have direct chat, indirect chat (comments) and you can make events. It would be great if this was implemented ingame.

3) Allow you to add personal notes to your friends in your friendslist. Basically say I rightclick on someone in my friendslist I can say: "Monk from The Guardians of Ascalon, fairly good" or "American from Teamquitter, pretty bad but funny guy. Take him in byob but not in serious gvg." or "PvE addict that wants to do the deep all the time." This helps keeping track of the people in your friendslist.

4) Implement an ingame notepad that allows you to list guilds and their players, automatically records your history, and allows you to make notes. For instance I could add Eight Below [eB], I could then see which of their players are in my friendslist. It would say I've played against them 7 times last month all on my own guild. That we lost 6 times and won once, including date and rating change. Then I could add a note that each time they played Invoke Lightning spike and the map on which we played, how hard the match was etc. Being able to share these files would be awesome. If replays were saveable, you could even add the replays to this information.

5) Be able to copy off the chat. Would be nice, instead of having to constantly template something. We're living in a time of youtube and failblog links.

6) When you call a target, in teamchat it should state both the name and the number. This used to be the case, but 3 years ago was removed in a ninja update. Personally (and i think most other players) I do not keep track of player names but their numbers. This is a remainder of facing koreans that all had the same names, and it's easier to remember numbers than full names. So I keep track of the enemy's morale, skills and skill by their number. This means that if I glance at teamchat during a targetcall the number of the enemy tells me his likelihood of dying. For some reason this number was removed and now I receive less information. Put it back.

7) Add a playersearch option. Often I can't remember the exact name of a player but know it was something along the lines of "Jeppe Nebbe." Using the search engine I would find out that his exact name is "Jeppe on Nebbe" and i could guest him or add him to my friendslist.

8) Add an ingame voice-chat. Counter-strike is 12 years old and has an ingame voice-chat. Why doesn't guild wars? Many PuGs in PvE do not use ventrilo. An ingame voice-chat is a great way for people to bond because hearing someone's voice makes it a lot easier to create a friendship. Sometimes in PvP a ventrilo server crashes, this could be a nice backup.



Interface Improvements

1) An easier way of rearranging the team than kick/reinvite.

2) Add a statistic menu that keeps track of various statistics during the game. How many time you've used certain skills. How much damage you've done over the match. How much damage you've taken. How many kills you've made. How many deaths you've taken. Shooters cannot exist without statistics. Many people enjoy killing people in counter-strike. But pressing TAB and seeing a 13-2 score rank #1 on the server they enjoy even more. Keep track of this data within a guild for the entire day. After a full evening the stats would accumulate and you could see who played the better warrior this evening, or who used more frenzy.

3) Allow attribute and skill changes while "awaiting a worthy opponent." Being forced to cancel out constantly is annoying.

4) When you maintain an enchantment on a certain person, this could be put right next to his healthbar on your party screen. It's nice to see who's bonded or protted and who isn't.

5) Introduce the option to turn off skill description pop-ups when you hoover your mouse over them.



PvP structure updates

1) The moment someone zones to a PvP area, he has all skills unlocked. The lack of UAX at release is the worst mistake that's ever been made in this game PvP-wise. Unlocking for PvP is a bad joke.

2) Put back Team Arena. A lot of players really enjoyed this form of pvp, the only reason it went wrong was because of terrible balance updates. But even then many people enjoyed it. Some of the best competitive memories I have are from TA. Furthermore: something people have been screaming for for years but ArenaNet never commented on:

3) Implement a Team Arena ladder. GvG and Tombs require a lot of players for organised pvp. This is why heroes used to be so popular. A properly competitive Team Arena would be absolutely awesome.

4) When you're in the Team Arena area, you don't necessarily need 4 players in the party to hit enter mission. It used to be this way and it was great. You could form up with 3 and still get a team, or if someone left you got a random ally. Of course 10-time winners in RA move over to TA.

5) Drastically reduce the requirements to join a monthly tournament. I want people to play this game! Every monthly there are competitive players that can't do the mat because their guild disbanded, wasn't active enough to get the QP or other various reasons. Ideally, I don't want any barriers at all, but still keep forfeiting guilds out of the MAT. At least reduce the 7 day requirement to 4 days, and the QPs required to 10.

6) Remove Automated Tournaments, except the MAT. Ladder is more fun than an AT because you can play many more games without waiting all the time inbetween. If you ask a top player why they actually still do ATs while they have 20+Qp they'll always answer: "Because all the other good guilds are in it too, and not on the ladder." If the ATs would be removed, they'd all revert to ladder. Ironically fixing the AT starting times (that used to retarded) has made the game worse. Therefore all ATs need to be removed. MAT qualification goes over ladder. Something like: If your guild has played X matches this month, you're allowed to register. X could be 50, or 35. Better ideas are welcome.

7) Introduce "Themed Weekly Automated Tournaments (WAT)". Every sunday at 20:00gmt a WAT will take place. But it will have a theme: Prophecies only, or factions only, or no monks allowed, or have a weird flux. It will follow the same structure as a regular AT. Large sums of reward points go to the guilds that play it. ATs were originally introduced with the idea that you could easily restrict players in the use of certain skills. It's sad they've never been used this way.

8) Introduce Dragon Arena Automated Tournaments. Every week at a certain time or perhaps even more regularly, a DAAT will take place. DA is one of the most popular and fun forms of PvP in guild wars. Snowball ATs are fun, but DAATs would be glorious.

9) Introduce "Weekly Beginner Automated Tournaments." Every week a WBAT will take place. Only guilds and players with a very restricted amount of PvP experience may enter. No guilds above 1100 rating. No players with champion 1+, or rank8+. Sure smurfing will happen, but not as much. This will draw a crowd of noobs to gvg. Perhaps each team is allowed 1 player with high rank to lead them.

10) Put the ladder k-rating back to 30. Reset it every two months. The top 16 receive prizes. With ATs gone, this will give people an incentive to ladder. Of course this will compete together with MATs, but winning a MAT will give you large sums of rating. Besides, after each MAT there is still a few days till the month ends. Forfeiting a MAT game to conserve your rating should be discouraged: Forfeiting will result in rating loss.

11) If your guild accidentally forfeits a swiss round in an AT you are allowed to rejoin once. It happens almost every MAT that someone's connection drops a little bit before join needs to be pressed and then a guild misses the requirements (though now thankfully reduced) to join. They forfeit the entire monthly. They should be able to speak to Tolkano and request a "rejoin" lest it be done within 2 minutes past the forfeit. Forfeiting a game will yield exactly the same effects as joining in and losing. Rating and points change accordingly.

12) Guesting people is free. Why are we paying money for this?[/u]





Miscellaneous updates

1) The maximum alliance size should be drastically increased. Alliances are nothing but large chatboxes. A place for people to meet and befriend each other. A great way to interchange guests.

2) An alliance guild should be allowed to make another guild leader. Right now you have to disband and remake the entire alliance.

3) An alliance should be able to switch allegiance. The alliance leader can hold a vote, and if more than 50% of the alliance guilds (leader has swing vote) agree, the allegiance may be switched.

4) A guild leader may declare it's guild hall "off-limits." This means that no alliance members are allowed to enter the hall while it's in this mode. A lot of alliances now disband during the MAT to remove spying. This also takes away the very amusing and alive chatbox during monthlies, not to mention often the alliance fails to reform.

5) Alliance Battles should be reworked so they take place more often on the fun maps. Etnaran Keys, Saltspray Beach, and Grenz Frontier are simply the most fun AB maps. I remember straight after faction release the game would always run these maps and due to a bug in faction gain never switch to Kaanai Canyon or Ancestral Lands. However KC and AL are so stupidly boring, the faction gain needs to be reverted so it's at the cool maps at least 80% of the time.

6) In Alliance Battles, you once again see the full 12 people in your party screen with all party-wide spells taking effect on them. This is world pvp! It used to be like this and it was awesome. AB is for massive fights and overpowered possibilities. It needs to feel massive. With the 12 men partyscreen it does.

7) In Alliance Battles, you should be once again able to kill the base defender. Regularly one team is just much better than the other. After a few minutes all shrines are taken and they have to wait 60 seconds till victory. It used to be loads of fun to spend these 60 seconds trying to kill the enemy in their base. These past 3 updates are basically expressing my desire to rework AB to the way it was during the Factions Preview weekend in march 2006. That was fantastic.

8) Guilds and characters should be able to change name. I understand this might be a lot of work, so it could be done by microtransactions. This would also stop excessive namechanging.

9) Re�ntroduce premades. Premades were a great way to introduce people into pvp. Ever since EW's premades were removed the level in RA has dropped considerably. The average guild wars player has no clue what to do in PvP, and the premades really gave it to them. Not to mention invaluable tips were given at the premade selection screen. Even the old premades were awesome. Perhaps the #1 ladder guild every two months gets to remove and replace 1 premade build.

10) New Guild Halls. New Guild Halls should be introduced to keep the game interesting. This could by done by:

11) Design Competitions. A great way to get the crowd to love you and make your game better. There have been numerous truely great design competitions in the past and there should be more to come. Perhaps a new GvG map could be made every 6 months?

12) Save and distribute games from observermode. People love to watch back that one game they'll keep remembering. Currently this is impossible. It would be great to be able to save replays and interchange them with other players. It would also make it very easy to create a cool compilation video of yourself or your guild.

13) An ingame Auction House. Yes I said it. An RPG just can't go without stuff like this. I'd love to see it even possible that you can sell and buy items for real world cash, with Anet keeping 10% of each transaction. Everybody wins.

14) Guests can start GvG as long as there's an officer in the party. Why shouldn't they be able to? I know you used to. All the current situation does is restrict you in what way you reorder your team if you have guests.

15) More incentives to GvG. Zaishen Keys and /guild emotes are already great (albeit 6 years too late), but i'd love to see more of this. What about a certain PvE aura like the collectors edition you get after 100 played GvGs? Or to stop afk-farming 100 Won GvGs? The Aura would get cooler the more GvG's you play.

16) Ban bots faster and reward those who report them. Death to all bots. With the phone-cli�nt-support, I could call the number and get a bot banned within 5 minutes after I've faced him. People that get a bot banned should receive some kind of reward. Perhaps a title, or the old rank pimpsticks? THIS SHOULD ONLY COUNT FOR BOTS AND NOT FOR ANYTHING ELSE. Rewarding for reporting is ****stic and wrong.

17) Add a "music menu" that allows you to change when to play which music. I'd love to hear the prophecies intro music again all the time!






As my own note, before anyone jumps at it, it is first and foremost a Dream update. This means some things will realistically be impossible and other just improbable because of the state of the game and the successor. This should not be something that takes away from the actual content in the post on how to improve the game.

Think further and look at it from a different perspective.

Why wasn't this done years ago, why should it not be possible now and not to mention should anything prevent this from being implemented in Guildwars 2?

PS. If I see anything resembling an argument about how the suggestions are void of PvE content, I will have to kill both kittens, bunnies and babies.|||I agree with quite a few of the suggestions, others I don't and a few I think aren't feasible to implement.

I'm not going to address every single point, but just to pick out a few:

- Call Center: Nope. This assumes everyone is capable of expressing themselves in English in such a way they can explain their situation well enough for the center to understand. That's actually more difficult than typing a message, words you do not understand or know, you can quickly translate to end up with a message that should b understandable. The alternative, multilingual customer support, is frankly too expensive to upkeep.

- Unlimited Friendship Lists and Notes: While a nice suggestion, this is probably a problem because it assumes "infinite space", which GW doesn't have and can't maintain. Remember it's a free game and we're using leftover space from other NCSoft games. The simple fact we can do that is because GW has pretty strict limits on the amount of information that is stored for every account, and those limits are only increased if you pay for it. Quite simply, every character and every item can be traced back to a set of templates. This greatly reduces storage space, and the $10 per char slot cover enough of the cost for several years. The same goes for every other item that's "put xxx ingame", safe from Team Chat, since that's volatile info. The only way notes and such would work is if they're stored locally like skill templates.

- Auction House: Same as above, not cost effective, unless you take the Blizzard route of ****** your players' wallets by A) having them pay RL money to put an item in B) having them pay RL money to get an item out and C) having that RL money as purchasable "NCSoft Money", taking back the money costs the players a banking fee. Yay, triple pass.



And, because I hate kittens and bunnies, where's the PvE stuff?|||Ym has the pve stuff.

Again, I'd like to point out that the suggestions you singled out are among those I would refer to as the dreamy ones. The ones that'd be there in an ideal situation, but are hardly realistic. The same notion goes for the gw2 perspective, a game that isn't as technically limited as this game should be able to house some of the things this game can't have.|||Hmm, there's a lot of stuff there, some I won't comment on (as I'm not a pvp'er), but I do have a few comments. Interface improvements, the only issue I know of with those is that some people don't like trackers because they generally become required, and it's too much math for some (to figure out the right build to pump out good damage for the tracker, but still have utility that keeps you alive). I definitely wouldn't mind it myself though, as long as it's more intelligent than the test guy outside temple of balth, I seriously don't think he even knows that life-stealing is damage. The other thing I want to mention from that section is that #5 was implemented some time ago, it's in the main options tab, I believe you get rid of a check mark, not add one.

As for changing names, I think there should be some way of doing this shortly after the name is first used, maybe within the first 24 hours? I know of some who accidentally misspell guild names so yeah... at the same time it would be a way to get around (I believe) the ignore list, which I do believe would be a bad thing. I'm sorry to hear that the term suka got this guy's guild banned (and I hope for his sake that he really didn't realize what it really meant, cause if he did then I'd consider the ban not just fair but completely called for), but the name change from feces does not surprise me and shouldn't have surprised them either. It should be assumed when playing any mmo that the company will be strict about not allowing bad names.

The last thing I want to comment on is the auction house. I don't know if this guy reads forums at all, or knows what gw2 is going to be like, but it's been stated repeatedly that they wanted to but couldn't put it in gw1 due to limitations and that they will have an auction house in gw2 that you can access (buy items, not sell afaik) without even logging into fully. I think you just need to log into your app account or something.

The big issue I have though, is that he wants to be able to buy/sell stuff with real money... not going to happen if I have any say on it, and I doubt anet would consider it for even a moment. That makes the game buy-to-win, and is a horrible model. I do not want to compete with people spending real money on items when I will be using in game currency. $.10 beats 100 gold+ (they've stated that the currency will be bronze/silver/gold or something similar so 100 gold would be like 100k+ possibly) unless of course you start selling the in game currency for money too, at which point you've become a gold seller. I'm sure, as a pvp player, he did not think of this and merely thought of the issue in the past where pvp players didn't make much money, well we have a better solution now, things like z-keys would help make the auction house affordable, I do hope that there is something similar in gw2, even though I don't play pvp matches often I do want such people able to buy items (especially since they won't be going out and getting them to sell for competitive prices as often).|||I could get behind TA coming back. It seems like most people "play" RA as TA anyway, being a whiny little ****** and leaving if they don't get a monk. It made me stop playing RA.|||It is not difficult to change the music as things are now.

The major problem I see with your wish list has been stated many times by many people, there simply is not enough space on the servers to allow for many of the requested changes. All of the changes listed are nice to haves, not requirements. In short they are a wast of the dev's time and money.|||Quote:








It is not difficult to change the music as things are now.

The major problem I see with your wish list has been stated many times by many people, there simply is not enough space on the servers to allow for many of the requested changes. All of the changes listed are nice to haves, not requirements. In short they are a wast of the dev's time and money.




Meh, I think everyone here understands that a lot of it is in fact not going to happen for gw1. We can have some discussion from the list on what is good or bad in general though right? If nothing else, as a "please do this/please don't do this) for gw2 right? We already know that there will be an auction house in gw2, and that's probably harder on servers than most of anything else mentioned in the wish list.|||This just made me nostalgic for when gw was good.

Dammit, Kedde.




Quote:








I'm sorry to hear that the term suka got this guy's guild banned (and I hope for his sake that he really didn't realize what it really meant, cause if he did then I'd consider the ban not just fair but completely called for), but the name change from feces does not surprise me and shouldn't have surprised them either.




wut|||I would like to see this Dolby Axion this works way better than ant other team chat device.I am not to sure who Grimpaws is but I know of dream patch.It is to bad the TGH is down been so for over a week.|||Illegally download a GW_Prophecies_Intro.mp3 from somewhere. Or legally, I think you could rip it from the original CD even.

Download this thingamoagoo and extract somewhere: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.zip



Right-Click "New Textfile"

Rename textfile "Ye Olde GW.bat" or whatever

Edit bat file

Add the following lines that start with - (of course without the -):

- cd C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\ (or wherever you have GW stored)

- start GW.exe

- start <location where you extracted nircmd>nircmd.exe setappvolume Gw.exe 0

- start C:\ <the location you store all your legal/illegal audio> \GW_Prophecies_Intro.mp3

This starts both GW and your default music player with the MP3. GW intro is muted. Then add:

- @ECHO off

- ECHO Hello Old GW World!

- PAUSE

- @ECHO on

- start <location where you extracted nircmd>nircmd.exe setappvolume Gw.exe 1

- taskkill /f /im winamp.exe

The last line needs your default audio player, so it it's Windows Media Player, it's wmplayer.exe

Run the batch file. Alt+Tab while loading into the first zone, hit any key and alt+tab back to GW. Welcome back Prohecies music.