User:Morgaine/Feedback

This is the personal (unofficial) GW2 Feedback & Suggestions page for user Morgaine.

[There is no official Feedback wiki space for GW2 --- the discussion forum is currently being used as a poor man's alternative. However, the forum is only a temporary vehicle for feedback of suggestions to developers, as this clear post indicates. I'm not surprised at this. The forum format is extremely inferior and unhelpful for detailed presentation of ideas, and evidently ArenaNet has realized this themselves.]

Quick reference links

• None yet.

My official suggestions

• None yet.
• Why "None yet"? Because the forum is not a good place for considered feedback that is visited repeatedly and improved over time as the ideaas are developed. (Even ArenaNet has acknowledged that it is not very good). Your input vanishes "like tears in the rain" almost from the moment of writing, and old posts are ignored. If one is going to waste one's time to nil effect, one might as well waste it in a place where it doesn't disappear from sight almost immediately. Hence, this wiki page.
• In short, a chat forum is an inappropriate mechanism for hosting considered feedback articles that are honed over time.
• If one day ArenaNet provides a better vehicle for GW2 suggestions/feedback, I'll select a few topics from the list of ideas below.

Issues for future suggestions

The following list highlights some problems, solutions, or issues which interest me. One day, one or more of these may lead to official suggestions being written up. Anyone reading this should feel free to take anything from this list as input to their own suggestions. It would be nice if you let me know if you do this so that I can provide you with feedback and support your suggestion, but it's not required. Ideas are free.

[The following list is not in order of importance, priority, impact, or any other kind of order, just "as they occur to me".]

Fix targeting problems

• Targeting of foes has been in a dire state since launch. Sometimes it's so bad that it feels essentially random. Here's one post I found on the forums about the topic. No doubt there are others because cursing at the targeting is so common in-game, and it was obvious that it was broken within the first hour of playing. Poor moas, so many millions die needlessly ... but agroing moas just because targeting is almost random ceases to be funny after a while. After some months of playing, the comedy has disappeared entirely. We're trying to fight foes, but instead we're having to fight the targeting.

• [I will fill this section in later with details of what is broken about targetting, since it deserves quantifying carefully, and solutions offered.]

• A note on expectations. I bind [F11]Targetting->Nearest Enemy to 'C', just like in GW1 (Closest Enemy). Once such a target is acquired, I want this foe to remain targetted until it is dead or has stealthed. I don't want targeting to switch to another foe, and never ever under any circumstances do I want targeting to switch to a yellow non-agro animal unless I specifically click on it, and never when using Tab. Pretty simple requirement, I'd have thought.

• Almost every day I just shake my head in disbelief, as 'Nearest Enemy' or <Tab> pick out some foe in the far distance instead of the one right in front of me. This isn't random at all, it's just incomprehensible. My ranger is just continually astonished, as her pet disappears into the far distance towards some completely irrelevant target. What ... The .... **** .... Thank goodness for Return to Me [F3]. The situation is just totally crazy, beyond belief.

• LOL, I just dispatched a bunch of Toy Ventaris from an exploding present, and as the penultimate one fell dead leaving only one right in front of me, I pressed 'C' for Nearest Enemy and '1' to attack. Did I really want the bandits at 1200 distance agroed? Um, no. They were happily having a siesta and not in the least bit interested in anything else in the neighborhood, and nor was I interested in them. But of course ArenaNet has a completely different concept of what deserves to be agroed, and what we want to fight seems to be irrelevant. Why do they even bother giving us targeting keys? Just get rid of them altogether and make targets pop up randomly. It would save people a lot of grief from the false expectation that targeting is something that players control.

• The utter brokedness of targeting in the game tells me very clearly that there is no effective regression testing being applied to targeting, as the failures would have been picked up immediately. My first suggestion in this area is therefore going to be to add three regression tests to the test framework (I assume that ArenaNet has a very good one), one test for 'Nearest Enemy', one for <Tab> target acquisition, and one for default targeting in the absence of an explicit target.

• My second suggestion on targeting will be that Anet disable the selection of non-agro targets by 'Next Enemy' (<Tab>) and 'Nearest Enemy'. A non-agro target is not an enemy. It is only the badly implemented targeting that turns it into an enemy unintentionally. Use of an AoE skill can also agro a non-agro animal, but that is perfectly acceptable and correct since by definition AoE selects everything within an area.

• GW1's targeting worked perfectly. There is no excuse for the current mess that is targeting in GW2.

• Addendum: A known (but rare) bug in the client occasionally disables all targeting with the mouse (picking), making it impossible to select a target with the mouse at all until the client is restarted. Since picking with the mouse is the only means of overriding the very frequent key-based targeting errors, this bug combines with the broken targeting extremely badly. [I have not see this occur in the last few months of play, so I assume that Anet found the bug and fixed it.]

• Another note on targeting expectations, here specifically for the case when no target is currently selected. In this situation, the player's heading or orientation should take priority in the selection of targets, ie. the potential targets in the direction in which the player is looking should be weighted more strongly than any others. If the player is moving then potential targets in the direction of movement should be massively prioritized above all others. The current behavior is flawed even when it's not behaving randomly, because it routinely brings in foes from left and right (sometimes even from behind), producing many "WTF moments" during gameplay.

• I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Next-Enemy and Closest-Enemy targeting should never target a yellow non-agro animal. They are not enemies (yet). If some people want to kill wildlife, fine, but more tactical players who don't want extra agro should not have to endure this mis-design in the targeting system. (GW1 got this right, you had to specifically select non-agro animals if you wanted to fight them.)

• I propose that a checkbox be added to the UI, "Target Non-Agro Wildlife as Enemies". Introducing this checkbox ticked by default will provide full backwards compatibility with current behavior, while unchecking it will restore sanity by eliminating non-agro wildlife from targeting actions.

Improve usability of marks placement

• Anyone who uses mouse-based movement (hold down right mouse button to enable direction panning, press left button to move in that direction) will have noticed that placement of marks is impossible while moving. This places such users at a large disadvantage while kiting. Only WASD users can place marks as they run, so this mechanic is biased in their favor. Mouse-based movers either have to forgo the use of marks in such situations or risk standing still while they move the mark around and place it on the ground. This is unfortunate, and not fair.

• Problems with marks placement must have been noticed by ArenaNet already because they provided a Fast-Cast Ground Targeting checkbox option in the General Options [F11] panel. Unfortunately this doesn't help the mouse-movement user at all, and seems to have been added as yet another benefit for WASD users who can now cast marks even faster. When the mouse is being used for movement, the mouse pointer is not at any useful location, and indeed the pointer disappears completely as soon as you pan because the pointer location becomes irrelevant. Consequently, that checkbox is unusable for the mouse mover.

• Instead, what we need is another checkbox with a descriptive name such as Place Marks at Targetted Foe, and corresponding functionality. The mouse mover would then be able to move and at the same time cast the mark at a usable spot (in this case on top of whichever foe they had previously targeted), just as the WASD user can do already.

Stop obscuring 'M' map details with paintbrush effect

• There is a time for art, and a time for functionality. When examining the 'M' world map, nobody but nobody is looking for art, but only for information, and it's infuriating that most of the detailed and interesting information is washed away by the useless paintbrush effect at every zoom setting except for the most detailed couple of wheel stops.

• If someone is too deeply enamored of the paintbrush effect for it to be removed wholesale, then please at least provide us with a Disable Paintbrush World Map Overlay checkbox which would allow us to turn it off as a personal preference.

• All the above refers only to those parts of the map that have already been visited and revealed, needless to say.

Excessive contested waypoints in Orr

• Waypoints were designed to make places that you have visited previously easily accessible. This was an excellent design goal, and it makes GW2 a lot of fun instead of requiring the tedium of repeated travel to known spots on foot.

• Unfortunately, that worthy design goal is now badly broken in all three zones of Orr, where it is common to find the majority of waypoints in a "Contested" state and unavailable for teleport. As a result, the intended benefits of waypoints have been lost, and we're back to tedious travel all over the map on foot. I doubt that the design team intended to add tedium as a side effect of foe attacks.

• Something needs to be done about this. One possibility is to add more waypoints in spots that are not under attack by the Risen. Another is to ensure that the "Contested" state disappears after a short while. And another is to remove the "Contested" mechanic entirely and replace it with a red-coloured "Under attack" label so that prospective teleporters are forewarned that they will emerge in a battle zone.

Place useful info in unused part of top line

• There are many types of information that would be helpful to see in the client without having to open a window each time. Except for the 10 icons on the left hand side of the top line of the client, that line is empty and it is an ideal place for helpful data. As a starting point I recommend that the following information be displayed in this line:

• The character's name and profession.
• The guild abbreviation currently represented, and number of guildies online.
• The current map and local area name, and current coordinates if possible.
• The completion achievements for map (same as shown on world map).
• Named icons for your most-used waypoints, for fast teleporting. (1)

(1) Waypoint names take up a lot of space, so it might be better to provide a popup window listing most-used waypoints instead. Elaborating on the idea, one could also use this popup window to select just one single waypoint for placement in the top line. This has the very desirable property of providing user control and requiring only a small amount of screen space.

• This will make the top edge of the client very informative, rather than being just an iconic menu bar.

Price Superior Rune of Holding more reasonably

• The price of the Superior Rune of Holding for making 20-slot bags is 10 gold, an utterly outrageous price for everyone except farmers and market speculators.
• Playing normally with a level 80 character in level 80 zones a small number of hours each day doing zone completions and selling all drops, it can easily take a month of play to accumulate 10 gold (much of your earnings is spent on teleports). Having to work for 4 months to afford outfitting a single character fully with 20-slot bags is beyond comprehension. It is not fun. And each account has 5 characters, or more if extended with character slots, so that's 200g minimum, an astronomic and plain ridiculous figure. It's not fun even if each character is given only a single 20-slot bag.
• Training armor crafting to rank 400 already put a serious strain on money, and adding 10g per bag to that is just terrible. 10 gold sounds like a price that players who haven't invested in armor crafting should have to pay, not the fully trained armor crafter. Perhaps that is how it should be arranged, which would encourage armor crafting.
• As mentioned earlier, compounding the problem is the exorbitant price of teleports, which can easily use up most of 1g in a day's play. It may be that the greater proportion of earnings is lost to this. Not having large bags means that you have to use teleports more often to get to merchants to sell your drops more often, so there is a vicious circle here that works against saving up money for bags.
• It is understandable that low-level players aren't yet earning enough from drops to buy level 80 items, but it should not be so for level 80 players. Good bags are not vanity items which are the traditional money drain, but fundamental to making play bearable so that you don't have to visit a merchant every 10 minutes. A level 80 player should be able to afford the largest bags after a reasonable period of ordinary drop sales, and that is not so at present. These top-end runes should be priced more reasonably to match the typical earnings from level 80 drops.

Price waypoint travel more reasonably

• In the previous section I mentioned the very adverse effect of the high price of waypoint travel on the player's ability to save cash for essential purchases. This section amplifies on that.
• Waypoints were added to GW2 in order to make the player's life fun by avoiding the tedium of running to places repeatedly. That is a very worthy goal and a great feature. However, when teleporting is priced so high that it uses up the bulk of your daily proceeds from selling drops to merchants, this avoidance of tedium is not available to you unless you accept being poor. Surely that was not the intention?
• I have now done an experiment to quantify this: Fighting for two days continuous at a single outpost in Orr and gathering money from foes attacking the outpost and in the vicinity, versus my normal routine of hopping around all the high-level zones to avoid tedious repetition and periodically going back to my home town to bank. The result: over 80% of the money from merchanting drops disappeared on waypoint travel. This is appalling.
• Another way of looking at it: local waypoint travel in an Orr zone costs as much as you get for a green drop at a merchant, around 1s40c, and up to the equivalent of 3 greens for travel across the world. It's quite outrageous for a regular service that has the express design goal of removing travel tedium from the game for players.
• It's quite despicable that waypoints cost in proportion to your level, in other words, that the charge is as high as the traffic is expected to be able to bear. This is price gouging at its very worst, and it decreases the mobility of higher level characters who don't wish their account to be drained. Lower level characters don't drain the account so badly, but they are still being bled dreadfully since their earnings from drops are much lower.
• It's worth pointing out the direct positive impact that waypoints have on gaming fun, and therefore the direct negative impact that restrictions on waypoint travel also have:

• Your friends and guildies are active all over the world, and playing with them naturally contributes to fun in the game. When you are dissuaded from teleporting all over the world many times throughout the day because it results in poverty, the gaming fun from companionship is lost.
• Staying in one place is a direct contributor to grinding tedium and boredom. It's one of the largest advantages of unrestricted teleporting that you can vary your experience throughout the day by hopping between the zones that each race provides for a given level. With the current costs associated with waypoints, varying your experience results in poverty, so Anet's cost policy is directly contributing to grinding repetition and boredom.
• One of the most endearing features of GW1 was that we had a "home", our guild hall islands. They became the friendly place to which we returned continually throughout the day, a place of peace and companionship away from the daily "work". GW2 has no counterpart of the GH yet, but we are making up our own "home bases" by picking a nice zone with useful facilities to which we return continually. Unfortunately Anet has made having a friendly home base be an extreme financial burden. This is dreadful, and in no way supports their repeated allegation that they are focused on making the game fun.

• I propose a massive reduction in waypoint fees by at least a factor of 10 or 20, so that their cost is no longer a barrier to their use. Alternatively just make teleports free as in GW1. (Note that asura gate travel is already free.)
• "Have fun and be poor" is not a good motto for any game, but that is how it is with GW2 travel. It needs to be addressed.
• Don't tax fun, or your game is no longer fun.

Add dynamic path creation for minions

• Pathing issues in the world create a continuous ordeal for the necromancer. Places abound where the player hops up or down a small distance, and instead of following directly, the team of minions travels all around the houses to reach the same spot as their master, of course bringing with them a huge train of foes. This is not nice, and because most minions cannot be dismissed, it is unavoidable.
• I don't know whether the ranger experiences the same pathing problem with her pet, but since the pet can be stowed at will, the problem can be avoided. The necromancer does not have this luxury.
• I suggest that this problem be avoided programmatically by creating a new dynamic path each time the player moves between different heights of terrain, adding a short-circuit between static paths in the zone. This dynamic path can be removed as soon as the minions have traversed it to follow their master.
• Alternatively, just warp the minions to the new location. This is done already when the separation between minions and master is too large, so it may be programmatically cheaper to apply this shortcut here as well rather than to improve pathing.

Increase damping factor on foe movement

• Damping is an engineering term from control theory. If it's unfamiliar to the reader, you're probably not the target audience for this suggestion.
• Here is the common scenario. There's a melee foe just out of agro range ahead, and you dash to it for a fast hit. Unfortunately as soon as you enter agro range, the foe has the same idea, but instead of the two of you converging at the place of smallest distance between you, the foe heads at maximum speed to the location you were at when you first entered agro range, so it passes right through your meeting point and beyond. Belatedly realizing that you're not where it expected you to be, the foe then turns around and heads for your new location, but of course you had the same idea, and instead of the foe halting when the separation between you is zero it heads right past you as before, and so on. This goes on for 5 years, or until you decide it's time for dinner.
• This problem is often attributed to client-server network latency, but that is generally incorrect in modern game systems. The position at which a client sees a foe is not where the server knows it is, but where the speculative prediction done in the client decides to show it. If it were not so, network latency would make online games horrible to play. The observed position and the real position known to the server are reconciled only periodically rather than at frame rate. Where the foe is displayed is known to the client very accurately at frame rate or even faster at simulation rate, so network latency is not the issue.
• Technically what is happening in the scenario above is oscillation, an instability in the control plane resulting from insufficient damping of movement. Damping provides a constraint on rates of change so that they cannot be instantaneous, and it results in smooth convergence at a target instead of oscillation around it. In respect of foe movement, programmed agents have no natural damping so it has to be added artificially to the physics algorithms that control movement. This is almost certainly done already, but the amount of damping is clearly far too low. You can tell it's too low not only by observing the oscillation (which is a dead giveaway), but also by observing that foes accelerate instantaneously to maximum speed which suggests that damping is absent and that inertial constraints are missing or too small as well.
• As mentioned earlier, the client knows exactly where the foe is located within its speculative prediction, at any desired degree of granularity, and it also knows where the player has made the character move (this is also speculative prediction because the server has not yet confirmed it). Both of these pieces of information need to be used to calculate a speed ramp-up segment and a speed ramp-down segment along the foe's travel path, and this needs to be done at several points in the path from foe to player. If at any of these points it is detected that the player's movement has changed from that predicted previously then the foe's path needs to be recalculated in the same way again. It is not enough to look again only after reaching the end of the current travel segment.
• Adjusted properly, the resulting smooth variations in travel speed and direction will result in foe and player meeting up at the same spot with zero velocity and hence without overshooting each other (this indicates perfect damping), and thus not oscillate back and forth. Human players do this already, instinctively. Foes need to be programmed to do the same.

Make drops on corpses more visible

• It is not easy to see the small and faint rising bubbles or sparkles that mean the corpse of a foe contains lootable drops, even with perfect eyesight and a helpful background. With average backgrounds or less than perfect eyesight, it can be very hard, and in some environments like snowstorms it is close to impossible.
• This needs to be fixed. There is no gaming benefit for players to miss some of their drops, yet this is happening quite unavoidably because of the low visibility. On top of that, it adds considerable eyestrain to search around and try and detect the bubbles against poor backgrounds, and this detracts from the fun in gaming.
• The drop indicators in GW1 were very visible, and there was never a problem of hardship in finding your drops. What's more, the very convenient Alt key allowed one to see one's own drops even at great distances, which was extremely helpful to players.
• I suggest that the faint indicator be made much brighter and multi-coloured and contrast-enhanced so that it shows up well against all backgrounds. I also suggest that GW1's excellent use of the Alt key for showing up object labels at distance be adopted in GW2.
• Addendum: Sadly, instead of making drops more visible, ArenaNet has recently made them even less visible: a tiny dark-coloured chest spawns somewhere around the foe that has just been killed, extremely hard to see against most backgrounds, and lacking even the dim (but at least moving) bubbles or sparkles that sometimes helped catch the eye on corpses. The mind boggles. I can only imagine that this is part of ArenaNet's alleged War on Money, their misguided desire that even more drops be missed. I suppose it's also possible that this is a result of a trainee developer without any experience in ergonomics being given the job to do, and his/her work not going through proper review. I doubt it though, as ArenaNet's dev team seems more competent than many I've come across in my career in the software industry. It has to be on purpose. I'm dismayed.

List drops on the Combat chat screen

• In GW1 every item that drops from a foe is listed either in your personal chat window or in the group chat window if you are in a team. This was extraordinarily useful. It avoided losing good drops (rare and unique drops were highlighted with distinctive gold and green colors in the chat listing), and it allowed you to ignore drops of no interest without having to pick them up to check first.
• None of this useful functionality is available currently in GW2, which therefore represents a regression in that respect.
• The lack of automatic drops listing combined with the poor visibility of drops mentioned above results in drops being lost regularly.
• I suggest that another category "Drops" be added to the chat output types, just below "Combat" in the drop-down list. The Combat screen could usefully have this new category enabled by default.
• The drop message should also state the source of the drop, eg. "Dredge Excavator has dropped Miner's Sack", and the embedded names should be colored to reflect their respective types.
• When an item enters your inventory, that event is currently noted in the main chat window (probably as a "Game Message"). I suggest that these inventory messages be re-categorized as type "Inventory" to allow them the be enabled or disabled independently. The "Drops" and "Inventory" checkboxes in chat window headers will then cover all the options very flexibly.

Fix TP window font breakage for Small UI size

• GW2's UI fonts are crystal clear at 1920x1200 on a 24" LCD monitor at all settings of Options->Graphics->Interface Size, except in one particular window, the Black Lion Trading Company window. In this window, when the Interface Size has been set to Small , the text in every values box is only partially readable, as the font appears fuzzy or broken and quite thin. It's so bad that to actually use the TP and read prices I have to switch to Normal UI size which is far too huge for my liking.
• I would prefer there to be an even smaller UI size than Small , but in the absence of that, Small should at least work properly in all windows.

Provide separate binding for Revive

• When hammering on the 'F' key to pick up loot in the middle of a hectic battle, it is extraordinarily irritating to instead get stuck reviving NPCs that die every few seconds. It disables your ability to fight or heal yourself, it takes some effort to break out of it especially for mouse-movement users, it wastes time and hence lowers your DPS, and it happens again and again in outpost defense events where there are dozens of NPCs dying continually and huge numbers of foes (and many corpses) scattered among them.
• This problem would disappear if a separate bindable action were provided for Revive.
• For backwards compatibility it could be bound as now to the generic "Interact" 'F' key, but appearing in the Options->Control Options window would allow people to rebind it if they are badly affected by undesired Revive operations while picking up loot.

Provide separate binding for Pickup Turret

• The preceding section described a problem affecting all professions, but the poor Engineer suffers especially badly from this issue.
• The Engineer's turrets are currently picked up using the same "Interact" 'F' key that picks up loot, and this makes the engineer's life a misery throughout the whole game as turrets are picked up by mistake. At best this causes downtime waiting for the turret skill to recycle, but at worst it can affect the outcome of an encounter since without turrets all agro is focused on the character.
• To improve this bad situation, provide a separate bindable action for Pickup Turret.
• For backwards compatibility it could be bound as now to the generic "Interact" 'F' key, but appearing in the Options->Control Options window would allow people to rebind it if they are badly affected by undesired Pickup Turret operations while picking up loot.

Allow comparative item popups to be disabled

• When you hover your mouse over a weapon or piece of jewelry in inventory, it not only shows the properties of that item, but also pops up one or two extra popups showing similar items that you currently have equipped. This can be useful, but it can also be a major disaster because the equipped popups can be confused with the inventory popup and lead to unintentional loss of good items to merchants.
• What makes this popup system doubly confusing and annoying is that the location of the popups is chosen dynamically depending on the position of your mouse on the screen, so you can't even get used to the equipped item popups being distinctly located.
• In addition to the above issues, mouseover popups are themselves a well-known accessibility problem, not remaining in place and causing significant hardship when hand-eye coordination is not perfect. Although the entire client is actually an accessibility disaster, the only part I'd like to highlight here is that 3 times as many popups as necessary is 3 times as bad. It should at least be optional.
• I suggest that the extra comparative popups be made optional through a checkbox in Options. While the entire client would benefit from reassessment for accessibility, that is probably too much to ask, but the checkbox control would be trivial to implement.

Allow necromancer's minions to be stowed

• Rangers already have the ability to "stow" their pet, or make it vanish from the scene at will. This is very useful, and addresses the annoyance that pets cause occasionally to others in towns, as well as removing any possibility of unwanted agro that they can bring as a result of pathing idiosyncracies. It is also very useful when climbing or jumping to avoid the pet obscuring one's vision.
• The pet issues that apply to the ranger apply even more strongly to the necromancer. The necro's minions are even more annoying in town than the ranger's pet, and they cause many times more opportunities for unwanted agro through bad pathing, yet the necro has no ability to stow them temporarily. Also, minions obscure visibility much more than ranger pets, so climbing or jumping can be quite problematic for a minions-based necro. This is neither helpful nor fair.
• I propose that the necromancer be given the same stow ability as the ranger has, applying to all minions simultaneously. The necro has F2-F4 function keys unused, and therefore Stow could be assigned to one of these by default.
• Casting any minion skill should automatically unstow any stowed minions, for efficiency in play. (The ranger needs automatic unstow on pet skill use added as well, as it's not even a bindable action so unstowing requires the mouse and hence is slow.)

Remove the modal "Mail sent successfully" popup

• The "Mail sent successfully" modal dialog that pops up when an email is sent provides no information, serves no useful purpose, and just causes game blockage and annoyance. It should be removed.
• Modal dialogs are an extremely widely recognized mistake in almost every case, and should never be used in graphic interfaces except in dire extremis when nothing else in a program can possibly proceed without user intervention. Such a critical situation is not present here. A modal dialog is therefore a design or implementation error.
• If some sort of confirmation of email transmission is thought desirable, then add a status line to the bottom section of the email window to the left of the Clear/Send buttons, and make it informative, listing the items that were sent in the last email, the recipient's name, and if possible the date and time. It should not require user input, and must not be modal under any circumstances. If email sending fails then highlight this problem (in red) in the status line, nothing more.
• I propose that the current modal popup be removed completely, after being beaten up with extreme prejudice.

Remove the modal "moved to overflow" popup

• When you enter a map (say, "XXX") and are placed in an overflow, a message pops up informing you that "You have been moved to the XXX overflow. You are queued to enter the map when it is ready." This popup dialog is modal, and disables everything else in the GUI. You cannot move, type, examine anything with mouseover, nor even click a menu icon. This behavior is a complete disaster in a GUI.
• This popup should never have been made modal as there is no need for it to disable anything. It is purely an informative message after all, and all other functionality could proceed if this erroneously modal popup did not block it for no good reason.
• Because it is purely informative, this message doesn't even need non-modal confirmation. Its "OK" button serves no useful purpose.
• Modal popups are an inherently broken concept in almost every situation (see previous section). They are a design error here.
• Just get rid of it, period. And give its designer some severe instruction about avoiding use of modal dialogs.
• I suggest that informational messages like this one not be delivered as popups but as simple text in the Main chat window.

Mark map names to indicate map completion

• Currently it is not possible to determine whether a map has been completed without teleporting there. This is very unhelpful, as well as costly.
• GW1 used different graphic adornments and colors on the world map to distinguish zones that had been vanquished from those which had not. This was very helpful when working towards titles.
• I suggest that GW2's map names be marked in a similar fashion to indicate the status of map completion.

Remove Trading Post NPC from the game

• The Trading Post NPC provides only a negative contribution to the game, adding nothing but recurring travel tedium and frequently also a teleporting cost.
• All the functionality of the Black Lion Trading Company is built into the Trading Post window which can be invoked directly from the client menu, so interaction with the NPC is not a logical requirement. Being in the presence of the NPC has been added artificially for no known reason.
• I suggest that this NPC be removed from the game completely and the Pick Up->Take All action button be enabled without the NPC being present.
• As a bonus, where there was previously a Trading Post NPC, place a fully stocked merchant instead, as those are always helpful.
• This change will make use of the Trading Post feature far more player-friendly.

Auto-manage non-merchantable quest trophies

• Quest trophies are those drops which can be handed in to NPCs to advance fulfillment of a quest. They are usually soulbound and cannot be sold to merchants. When the quest is a heart and hence cannot be repeated, they serve no further purpose but remain in inventory and can only be destroyed, manually.
• Since "Destroy" is the only option available, they might as well disappear automatically when they can serve no further purpose nor provide any value at merchants.
• I suggest that such quest trophies with no further utility either be removed automatically, or else automatically changed to merchantable drops with a small value in the "junk" category.

Do not auto-rotate camera heading on 'M' map

• It is very disorienting to have the scene camera spin around when entering the 'M' world map. For those susceptible to it, the sudden spin produces intense vertigo or nausea every time. (I quite literally feel ill, and it is a fairly common ailment.)
• Character heading and scene view are completely unrelated, and coupling them on map entry is incorrect.
• After exiting the world map, the scene camera is no longer oriented as it was before entering the map, so using the map is not a transparent operation. This serves no purpose and is simply wrong.
• I strongly recommend that the scene camera resetting be omitted from the map display code.

Improve crafting and TP windows behavior

• The crafting window is inconsistent with most other windows of the game UI:

• It does not toggle on and off like most other windows.
• It does not remember its last position on the screen, so the user has to continually move it to a more useful spot.
• It does not have a bindable key entry in the [F11]Options->Control Options->User Interface panel

• The Trading Post window shares one of the above problems (but it does remember its position and have a bindable key):

• It does not toggle on and off like most other windows when activated through 'F'. However, it does toggle when activated through the corresponding menu icon or the bindable key.

• These inconsistencies serve no purpose and detract from the utility of the user interface, so they should be fixed when time allows. The lack of positional memory of the crafting window goes beyond that though into being just plain bad. It needs to be fixed quickly, and it would require very little development time to do so.

Fix missing Soulbound label on some items

• Some items such as "Vigorous Leather Mask of Penetration" made by applying a Talisman of Penetration to a crafted Vigorous Leather Mask do not show a Soulbound label in their popup descriptions. They are nevertheless soulbound as would be expected, and attempting to place them in email proves it (by disallowing placement in the email slots).
• This may be just one instance of a whole class of bug, perhaps applying to all Talismen.
• Whatever the cause or extent, it's a clear bug so it needs to be fed back as such.

Label vendors to reflect their wares

• The tag or label [Merchant] is often unhelpful and annoying in cities and some outposts, as the vendor often does not sell the most commonly sought wares such as salvage kits and gathering tools. How many players head for an NPC labelled [Merchant] and are happy to find a colored Lucky Rabbit's Foot and Slice of Watermelon as the only available wares? Not many I bet. It is unhelpful.
• [Merchant] should be displayed only by fully stocked vendors. Other types of vendor should display appropriately descriptive tags like [Baker], [Grocer], or in one odd instance, [Lucky Rabbit's Feet and Watermelons], and so on.
• The norm for fully equipped Merchants is to carry only the gathering tools appropriate to the nearby surrounding maps. This is adequate, but it would be useful if the special Merchants that carry all ranks of gathering tools were tagged distinctively, for example as [Master Merchant].

Add zoom continuity into first person view

• In GW1, zooming the camera with the mouse wheel worked mostly as it does now in GW2, but with an extra ability. It zoomed in more deeply, taking the camera all the way into first-person view. This provided a variety of extra benefits:

• Many people prefer to play in first-person view in the first place, as it's the natural view in real life.
• Visibility is often better in first-person view, as your character does not obscure any part of the scene.
• Exploring nooks and crannies in caves, shipwrecks and other tight spaces is far easier in first-person view.
• Without the character appearing in every screenshot allows beautiful scenery to be captured without distractions.
• The zoom continuity from 3rd person to 1st person views was very natural, and quite a unique feature in the GW1 client. Its lack in GW2 is sadly missed, and it's a regression in camera functionality.

• I propose that zoom continuity into first person view be added to the GW2 client, or in its absence, that a means be provided for switching the camera into first person view using a bindable key as in many other games.
• While improving camera zoom-in, please also extend the camera zoom-out range, which is very limited currently. It would be wonderful to be able to see the landscape from afar, with the character no more than a spec in the center.
• For bonus points, add a bindable toggling key action that makes the character disappear from the scene without affecting the camera viewpoint.

Enable GW2 servers on IPv6

• IPv6 is officially the current version of IP, as of 6th June 2012. IPv4 is now the previous version of IP, and new IP service deployments should not really be carried out on IPv4 alone. GW2 launched after 6th June, but unfortunately was not made available on IPv6.
• My WoW-playing friends tell me that WoW servers are up on IPv6 as well as on the older IPv4. As a leading-edge MMO, GW2 deserves to be on IPv6 as well.
• I suggest that a few GW2 servers be opened up on IPv6 as soon as possible for testing. This will provide the GW2 support team with early experience of IPv6 operations.
• In the GW2 client, add one or more checkboxes in Options to provide user control over which network to use in the case of both IPv6 and IPv4 being available. A single checkbox such as "IPv6 Preferred" may be sufficient once IPv6 operation is proven, but automatic fallback to IPv4 will be confusing during IPv6 testing and therefore an additional "Disable IPv4 Fallback" checkbox would be helpful.

Add armor weight filter to BLTC window

• The Black Lion Trading Company window is lacking a useful option in its filter: the ability to select desired weights of armor. As a result, armor searches for suitable armor are usually obscured by 2/3 of returned items being unsuitable for the character. This isn't very helpful.
• I suggest that 3 tick boxes be added to the window when the search Category is "Armor", labelled Light, Medium and Heavy, hence allowing any combination of armor weights to be returned. For backwards compatibility, the default setting should be all boxes ticked.

Hide Hero/Bank inventory sub-panels

• One of the more irritating aspects of the GW2 client is the large amount of screen space wasted by enormous windows of marginal utility. Many things contribute to their excessive size, and this section deals with one of them: the embedded inventory sub-panels that appear in the Hero->Equipment and Account Vault->Bank windows.
• The majority of the time, these two inventory sub-panels are of zero utility. The client already has a proper Inventory window so at best they duplicate what is already available, and their non-resizable 4-item wide panels add confusion because in most cases people will not have set their inventory window to such a narrow width, so there is a display mismatch.
• The inventory sub-panel in the Hero window has an implicit filter of Equipable, but this feature should have been added as a simple tick-box on the main Inventory window (which already has a Search filter anyway) instead of enlarging an already bloated Hero window with an extra sub-panel.
• Although it would have been better if these two sub-panels did not exist at all, now that they do exist some people would complain if they disappeared. Therefore I suggest that check-boxes be added to the Hero->Equipment and Account Vault->Bank windows to control whether these sub-panels are to be displayed or not.

Fix missing Heritage transmutation icons

• When a Heritage skin from the Hall of Monuments is applied to an item, the icon of the Heritage skin overwrites the icon of the transmuted item, hence nicely highlighting the Heritage items possessed by the character. For example, any short bows to which Living Shortbow has been applied have the corresponding pretty green Heritage icon shown in inventory and in the Hero window.
• Unfortunately, this Heritage transmutation operation has not been implemented uniformly, and some Heritage skins (for example Ithas Longbow) do not update the icon of the item they transmute, so the original icon remains in place. Since the great majority of items of a given type share the same icon, this is not very helpful when looking for your Heritage items in inventory.
• I don't know how widespread this omission occurs among Heritage skins, but I suggest that they all be checked for consistency.

Fix faulty inventory window reset logic

• Under some circumstances, the user-defined inventory window size and position is ignored, and the inventory window is instead opened in the center of the screen with a tiny default window size. Even if it's well intentioned, this resetting occurs when it is not needed and hence contains a bug.
• The circumstances under which the above happens are not exactly known, but it seems to happen more often when you have 15-slot bags or larger and you adjust the window size to display a whole bag per line. It also seems to happen more often when the large window is positioned in a corner of the screen.
• The best way of quantifying when this problem occurs is by looking at the source code. Only ArenaNet devs can do that.
• As a software developer myself, I understand defensive programming, However, this particular use of (well-intentioned) defensive programming seems to detect too many false positives and so it triggers when it is unhelpful. Its contribution to GW2 quality is negative, and highly annoying.
• I suggest that Anet devs examine the trigger condition for this defensive window reset, and narrow it to a more restricted set of cases.

Add a beep to client timeout warnings

• It is extremely irritating to be present near a machine with GW2 running and to get logged out because the chat window is not currently in view and so the "you will be kicked" message is not seen.
• It is irritating for the user because she has to click on Play again and endure the zone reloading process. It is also bad for the server operators, because immediate zone reloading adds an additional burden and cost on the resources of the server platform, a burden which should be avoidable when the user is present at or near the machine. It just requires better notification.
• The first audible notice of timeout is the music on the character selection screen, which of course is heard after the client has been timed out when it's far too late to do anything about it. This is silly, and after a while it creates a strong aversion to the character selection screen music because it becomes mentally associated with irritating timeouts.
• This problem is easily remedied. Just add a beep to each "Unless you resume active play you will be kicked in N seconds" message. Since the client already provides the option for audio to remain playing even if the window is currently out of keyboard focus, this gives the user a full minute to address the imminent problem, which would be very helpful.

Add name of story path to option dialogs

• At several points in the personal story, the player is presented with alternative paths from which only one can be chosen per character. Although the current point in the story is named in the View My Story Log panel, there is nothing to indicate which path is about to be selected by choosing an option from the dialog. The wiki can identify the next link in the story, but the game should be standalone and informative without needing support from the wiki.
• To make the choices through the personal story easier to identify, I suggest that each choice in the dialog also be accompanied with the official name of the corresponding story path, either in parentheses (which is better for accessibility) or in mouseover.

Add auto-return travel to and from Home

• Every character has a Home city containing their Home instance, to which they return repeatedly throughout their personal story. This city commonly becomes a character's home base, in the absence of a Guild_hall.
• In GW1, a character's guild hall had preferential access, in the sense that it was a special destination to which you could travel without accessing the map and from which you could return automatically back to the place from which you came. This was very player-friendly.
• Travel home in GW2 is comparatively annoying and unfriendly. Not only does it cost money to use waypoints, but this cost skyrockets at high levels and rivals the amount made from drops. As a result, friendly waypoint travel is dissuaded by its cost.
• Players who wish to avoid a life of poverty do have an alternative available which can reduce their travel costs by half. "Go to the Heart of the Mists" is available for free from the client PvP panel, and from this PvP area they can take the asura gate to Lion's Arch. They can then travel for free to the Gate Hub Plaza Waypoint, and finally enter the asura gate to their chosen home city. Four zonings is a very harsh and unfriendly trade-off for the privilege of free travel home. What's more, it eliminates the travel cost in one direction only.
• This situation is highly unsatisfactory. Earlier I proposed that the cost of waypoint travel be reduced massively or eliminated altogether, but in the absence of that preferred solution, I propose the following remedy.
• Make a character's home city a preferential destination, just like the guild hall in GW1. Add a "Home" icon to the top line of the client which teleports you directly there for free. On entry to your home city, this icon should change to a "Return" icon, which when activated should take you back to your previous location, normally wherever you were when you clicked "Home".
• This small change would go a very long way to addressing the appalling state of the game in respect of waypoint travel.

Allow waypoint travel under environmental effects

• Waypoint travel is not allowed "while in combat" in GW2. Perhaps there is a reason for this, but it has never been made clear.
• Be that as it may, being in an area which is under the influence of an environmental effect such as produced by Corrupted Statues in Orr also qualifies as being "in combat" in the game mechanic. Consequently you cannot teleport out of such an area (which is huge in extent) despite having no foe agro. This is extremely unfriendly and serves no purpose other than to annoy players with a pointless restriction.
• Suggestion 1: Drop this annoying restriction.
• Suggestion 2: Consider carefully why you add things, and always ask yourselves the question "Will this contribute to fun in the game?" or "Would Jeff Strain have added this?" If the answer is "No" then you are about to make a serious mistake.
• Suggestion 3: Please document the reason why waypoint travel is disallowed when in combat. If there is no really strong reason, remove this restriction as well.

Reward hard dragon fights more appropriately

• One of my level 80 characters has just spent an hour fighting Claw of Jormag. There were only a small handful of us present, so it was a very hard fight with countless deaths and it was no surprise that it took us so long. That's fine, a long hard fight can be great fun.
• What was not fun was the reward received from the dragon chest: one level-65 medallion and five random blues.
• This is not an adequate reward to receive from the highest dragon fight in the open world. Except for the medallion, it's worse than the drops one might expect from an hour's fighting of random foes, because one or more greens would be expected to drop from ordinary foes over that period on average and you'd also pick up a large quantity of lesser drops.
• For a dragon encounter of this stature, the very lowest quality of reward from the chest should be greens, and perhaps one rare should be guaranteed, to be generous. But even if generosity is not in ArenaNet's game plan, blues and whites are totally inappropriate as chest drops after a dragon fight.
• Rewarding success with player disappointment constitutes poor game design. It should be avoided.

Stop misrepresenting login outage as network error

• When the GW2 login service cannot be accessed, the client reports "This is most commonly caused by firewall or router settings, security applications, or connecting through a campus network."
• The trouble is, this same message is reported even when the problem is caused by GW2's servers hanging, rejecting connections, or being offline, when everything else is working perfectly. Most players have a stable Internet connection which was working just before the outage, nothing local has changed, and the rest of the Internet is still accessible, so the message is completely and obviously incorrect. It's bogus to lay the blame on others when the most common reason is GW2 service outage, and it makes the provider look dishonest.
• Anyone can run a simple traceroute and determine that the plaync.com datacenter is still reachable despite the login attempt failing, so the message displayed by the client can be seen to be misrepresenting the truth, which makes it highly annoying.
• I suggest that the message be rephrased to more honestly reflect the situation, by adding "or because Guild Wars 2 servers are not currently online. Check our network status <here>" . It is more professional behavior to accept responsibility for your own outages.
• While a simple change in the default error message would definitely be an improvement, it would be even better to make the error handling more clever so that it can discriminate between Internet connectivity faults and lack of GW2 server presence. A simple ping test by the client would allow these two possibilities to be distinguished quite trivially. Whichever error message is appropriate could then be displayed.

Add more dragons

• Complaints are mounting about the lack of endgame content in the open world. As more and more players reach 80 and finish their personal story on multiple characters, there is little left to do.
• Nobody wants to do fractals because it's a horrible grind, and who can blame them. We have a lovely open world, and it just needs more high-end content.
• I was listening in to map chat in Queensdale, people moaning about too many players arriving to kill the Shadow Behemoth. Does this surprise anybody? There are only 3 dragons plus the behemoth in the world, so it's natural that these events are very highly subscribed.
• ArenaNet brought this situation upon itself when it purposefully omitted GW1's complex system of skills and builds from the GW2 design, a feature which had given GW1 several years of extra life as players explored the never-ending possibilities of new builds. GW2 has none of this gaming depth, so there is only one solution if GW2 is to avoid premature death. Much more high-end content needs to be added to the open world, quickly.
• A very appealing type of high-end content to add is additional dragon events. I suggest that every zone be given a dragon.

Make all storyline events repeatable

• GW1 provided a very player-friendly ability to repeat storyline missions at will, often portrayed as "reliving" past events.
• GW2 has a very pronounced shortage of high-end content. Developers are undoubtedly aware of this and are working hard to create more, but in the interim a considerable amount of gameplay longevity could be added by making the personal story events repeatable.
• This is very low-hanging fruit because all it requires of developers is to create a way of restarting the personal story instances.
• My preferred implementation of this concept would strive to be simple and player-friendly, as follows. Add Historian NPCs which offer the player to relive past events chosen from a list ordered by story event level. Place these Historians in all cities to reduce congestion.
• Such relived storyline events would then provide additional material for daily and monthly achievements.

Lose the cheating storymode risen abomination

• There is one specific Risen Abomination in the personal story that has godlike powers that far exceed Zhaitan's. This is the single abomination in Ossuary of Unquiet Dead, which continually circles around the perimeter of Cathedral of Eternal Radiance.
• This abomination is not marked as Champion nor even as Veteran, nor does it have a tell-tale large stature. Yet, it kills maxed-armor and maxed-toughness level-80 players (adjusted to 76 for this event) of any profession in the game with a single hit, and only ever hits you once because you are downed on first touch and then instantly pummeled into defeated status.
• I strongly recommend that this particular foe be demoted from godhood before it kills Zhaitan with a flick of its little finger. This would be unfortunate because it would give ArenaNet devs a lot of extra work rewriting the story to accommodate the fact that the dragon has been turned into a thin oily patch of devastated ground with abomination footprints all over it.
• (Funnily enough, the weak NPCs can battle this foe for a long time. It is only players that it insta-kills. Tested on 6 different level 80 professions.)
• Joking aside, this is probably just a simple bug, an incorrect foe being selected which would explain the incorrect label and small size of the model. This is clearly a Champion-level foe from the open world, or even a Risen Priest of Balthazar. Also, Champions in storymode are quite easy to defeat single-handed, unlike their open world counterparts, so the current foe is not normal for storymode even if it was intended to be a Champion.

Name the character on soulbound items

• Soulbound items in the Account Vault bear the legend "Soulbound to another character" when this condition applies.
• There is no means of determining to which character such an item is soulbound except by logging in your characters one by one until you find the character for which this legend doesn't appear. This slow and repetitive manual process is tedious and highly annoying, aka. not player-friendly.
• I suggest that the legend be replaced by "Soulbound to <character-name>" when the binding is to a character that is not oneself.

Allow bound items to be placed in guild storage

• Soulbound items can be stored in the Account Vault, but of course cannot be taken out by the wrong character. This is very sensible and player-friendly functionality. The permissions check is performed on attempted retrieval, not on placement.
• Soulbound and Account Bound items cannot be placed in Guild storage (Stash, Treasure Trove, and Deep Cave), because the permissions check is performed on placement instead of on retrieval. This is very unhelpful and unfriendly.
• Not being able to place bound items in Guild storage means that this storage cannot be used as a display of prestigious items that members have acquired, for all guild mambers to see. Performing the permissions check on retrieval would allow this.
• I suggest that the permissions check for Guild storage be handled exactly as for the Account Vault, on retrieval and not on placement.

Add a new guild permission "Show All Characters"

• The Guild window's Roster tab displays the profession and tradecraft ranks for the current online or last logged in character of each guild member. This is well suited for large guilds where more information would be unwieldy, but for the great majority of single person or single family guilds it is not very informative. Typically only one line is displayed, or a small handful.
• I propose that a new guild permission be created, Show All Characters, and a corresponding permission checkbox be added to the Guild->Ranks tab. For any guild member that has this checkbox ticked, all the characters on this member's account are displayed in the Guild->Roster tab.
• The most obvious benefit of this new feature would be to match up other members' character's names with their corresponding professions, as this information can be hard to remember.
• An important second benefit would be that it would show at a glance which characters have which pair of tradecrafts and their ranks currently enabled. This would be very helpful by avoiding the need to keep this information on paper, as it is a moving target and hard to memorize.
• An additional pair of checkboxes somewhere in the GUI could provide user choice over this newly displayed information: Publish My Offline Characters to Guild, and Display Other Players' Offline Characters, which hopefully are self-explanatory.

Revert updated Veteran Risen Acolytes

• Veteran Risen Acolytes used to be ordinary risen veterans, which any player could solo over 1 to 3 minutes depending on profession. A busy cathedral like Temple of Balthazar in Straits of Devastation was fairly accessible for acquiring the Skill Point at the statue, even when it was active and contained many veteran acolytes. It just required good tactics and taking care to limit agro to a small number of foes at a time.
• In a recent update, this SP location was made totally inaccessible for normal players in the absence of a temple invasion force or a dedicated SP group. The main change which eliminated any possibility of overcoming the odds solo by using good tactics was the change to the Veteran Risen Acolytes.
• These Veteran Risen Acolytes are now a total barrier to progress, because they have been made to instantly spawn multiple frenzied foes repeatedly during a fight, typically 4 at a time. Over the course of 3 or so minutes required by a low-DPS profession to kill a veteran, these spawns often add up to a dozen or more extra foes per veteran. As if that weren't enough, the spawned foes include multiple exploding Risen Plague Carriers. There is no profession in GW2 able to withstand even half the spawns that a single Veteran Risen Acolyte generates over a few minutes. The required amount of healing or toughness is simply not available in GW2 even for warriors, and light armored professions die in under 5 seconds if the foes of just one spawn group (typically four risen) make contact with the player while at the same time being nuked by Balthazar statue fire.
• This is not tenable game design. Perhaps it assumes that the zone will regularly provide massed invasions of this statue, but that is not the case here on this European server (Ring of Fire) --- the zone is almost empty. The prospects of obtaining the skill point for zone completion are almost nil after this update.
• As if the odds were not bad enough already, ordinary Risen Acolytes now have a colossal agro range and pursue you over a huge distance, many times what is normal for GW2 foes. It is almost impossible to play tactically to limit agro when some foes have an extended agro range in a tight spot like this cathedral.
• Under the assumption that ArenaNet's goal is to provide fun and viable gaming, I propose that the update which gave Veteran Risen Acolytes the ability to spawn foes be reverted completely. In addition, the ordinary Risen Acolytes agro and travel range should be reduced to normal, or at least much less than it is at present.
• As the game stands right now (16th April 2013), the Temple of Balthazar in Straits of Devastation is effectively inaccessible to players on low-population servers where groups are unavailable. Camping the spot for days on end waiting for another couple of players to turn up is, I believe, the opposite of the "no downtime" gameplay design goal for GW2.
• Being a software developer myself (but not in gaming), I am aware that developers greatly dislike to revert an update because it implies failure. There is an alternative solution to this impasse --- adjust foe scaling instead. Dynamic scaling is very clever GW2 technology and should be able to handle this problem by disabling the massively excessive power of Veteran Risen Acolytes when there are only one or two players present in the temple area.

Solve last remaining form of MMO abuse: trains

• Throughout the long history of GW and GW2 development, ArenaNet personnel have on many occasions referred to the many failures of traditional MMOs, such as camping, kill stealing, repetitive grinding, and downtime incurred on death. It has been a very pleasant feature of the Guild Wars franchise that it has replaced such traditional woes by new solutions designed to decrease the pain and increase the fun of gaming. This goal has undoubtedly been achieved, perhaps not perfectly but nevertheless very successfully.
• Unfortunately there is one remaining form of classic MMO abuse that we still have to endure in GW2 --- having foes trained on us by other players. In almost all cases this is the result of running farmers who just don't care that their train of following foes massacres another player who happens to be in their path. It is rarely intentional, but when you're dead you're dead, and it makes little difference whether it was intentional or not. This is the last unaddressed woe of traditional MMOs that GW2 could try to solve as well.
• A tentative suggestion: When a foe has been agroed by a running player and has been following it for a certain distance, and that player has left the scene, and the foe finds itself with agro against another player that has neither moved nor attacked the foe, then the agro should decrease progressively as the foe attacks the passive player. At some point before the player dies, the foe should disengage agro in confusion, not actually being sure whether this object that looks like a player is alive at all. The foe then returns to its original position outside of agro range of the player that has been trained.
• I haven't examined all the corner cases of this solution, and it might contain difficulties such as an easy way to abuse it. I do propose that the problem at least be considered though. Given the huge number of farmers in the game, most of them quite oblivious to the train following behind them, it is a sizeable issue. Parked in a safe spot outside of any foe agro path while you fix yourself a coffee or attend to other brief necessities, it is unpleasant to return and find yourself dead through the uncaring action of others.
• I don't recall whether ArenaNet's rules of behavior for players mention training specifically, but in case they don't, they should make it clear that while foes are occasionally trained on others by accident, it is never permissible to do so on purpose or to run away and ignore what your actions have caused.

Give necro's scepter some visual feedback

• It is very hard to see what the necro's scepter is hitting because its action provides no graphic feedback. The weapon is just waved around in the air and it's difficult to determine its target by watching the action. The only significant feedback is the white damage numbers, but many things produce damage (minions for example) so the damage indicator just barely helps or doesn't help at all.
• In a group event where other players are generating a maelstrom of graphic effects, it is practically impossible to see what the necro's stealth scepter is hitting at all even by looking for damage numbers. The lack of a strong visual indicator is very unhelpful.
• The semi-random behavior of GW2 targetting is already dreadful enough by itself, but the invisibility of the scepter's action adds to the player's targetting problems.
• I suggest that a thin graphic ray hitting the foe be added to the scepter's action, something like the mesmer's greatsword effect but less intense, and with a color more appropriate for a necro, for example dark green.

Misc Notes

• None yet.

See also

• My User page
• My Talk page
• My GW1 Feedback page
• My GW1 User page