By Branskins, posted Jul 30, 01:18 PM
What would be the perfect patch to drive Guild Wars closer to perfect? In my latest Dream Patch, I explore lots of small additions to the game, notably to PvP, that would make casual players more tempted to jump into the glorious world of GvG!
Read on to discover what I think would make Guild Wars more approachable, fun, all while still remaining competitive!
Update – Saturday, June 6
Interface Changes
A new Effects Monitor!
In an effort to bring more statistics and useful information to the players, we have gone back and completely changed the Damage Monitor. With the old Damage Monitor, only offensive skills used against you showed up in the feed. After a few seconds, these events would disappear and not allow you to analyze any valuable information. This new Effects Monitor will not only allow you to track these offensive skills, but it will allow you to track a lot of other useful information. The new feed is highly customizable and we hope it gives players some more perspective on the action going on around them.
- The Effects Monitor now remembers event history. If no event occurs, the monitor will fade away into the background and will only be visible by hovering your cursor over it. New events will also show up in the feed even when the monitor is not totally visible.
- The Effects Monitor now tracks skill usage:
- “Defensive” – skills used against you and your party by your opponent.
- “Offensive” – skills used by you and your team against your opponent.
- Clicking on the “Defensive” tab will only show the events that your opponent uses against your team. The “Offensive” tab operates similarly.
- The Effects Monitor defaults to show skills used against you and your party. This is a combination of both the “Defensive” and “Offensive” tabs. You can view the other two options by themselves by clicking on the “Defensive” and the “Offensive” tab in the window.
- Any hex or enchantment that is cast on an ally will show up with a red or blue border around it to indicate if that hex or enchantment is the current “visible” hex or enchantment.
- In this case, “visible” means the last hex or enchantment casted on someone. This would be the hex or enchantment that would be removed if a hex removal or enchantment removal were used.
- Hovering your cursor over a player’s name in the monitor will cause a pop-up that tells you their primary and secondary profession. Clicking on their name will target that player if they are close enough.
- At the end of missions and PvP battles, statistics, such as how many enemies you killed or how much you healed in total, will show up in the feed. After PvP battles, these feeds can be automatically saved as an image in a folder in your Guild Wars folder for analysis.
- Options:
- A check box at the bottom of the window determines whether you want your whole party to show up in the feed or just your character. With this option checked, the events that will show up will be when the opponent casts a skill on you. If you were to heal someone, this event would also show up in the feed.
- There is an option to have skill text appear as icons.
- The Effects Monitor defaults to “Show Threatening Events Only”. With this checked, you will only see critical attacks and hexes used by the opponent on your team. Unchecking this would allow all attack notification events to enter your feed. For instance, “Elite Warrior attacked you for 25 damage with Frenzy”. Keeping this option checked would filter out such events. Instead, you would only see threatening events, such as, “Elite Warrior attacked you for 55 slashing damage (critical) with Sword Slash”.
The “Extended Party” window!
As with the new Effects Monitor, this new Extended Party window is one more step towards making PvP more approachable and more casual for our players. With these changes, we are allowing our players to have much more information at their fingertips. We feel as if this new Extended Party window will greatly aid midline characters as it allows them to see information that would otherwise have to be announced over a chat client or in the chat channel. This new enhanced party window works as follows:
- Clicking on the new arrows to the left and right of the party list will expand the extended party window in that direction. Clicking the arrow again will collapse the extended window.
- This new extended window will show three enchantments and three hexes in order of application with the third being the last one applied. The latest hex applied will have a red aura around it.
- The extended party window also shows player’s energy.
- The extended party window also shows current DP or Morale.
The Extended Party window operates much like the hero windows players can access by clicking on the box next to a hero’s name. Except, in this case, the Extended Party window is for the whole team and has a transparent background to make it extremely unobtrusive. Between this and the Effects Monitor, our players have never had so much information right in front of them. But wait! There’s more!
Skill Peak
Yellow enchantment arrows and the purple hex arrows in a player’s name now have a number in the center of them to indicate how many enchantments or hexes that party member has. Hovering the cursor over them displays the order of these enchantments and hexes. This functionality can also be used on your opponents and enemies by clicking on their name and hovering your cursor over the indicators in their name. The visible hex or enchantment now has a red or blue aura around it to indicate if that hex or enchantment is affecting or poses a threat to that player’s health (red) and energy (blue). This is an extension of the Extended Party window that can be used without having to expand the window.
Other Significant UI Improvements
- All quests in your quest log that have their objectives in the same explorable area now have indications on the minimap. The current quest picked still retains its green arrow and green star, but other quests in the same area will show up with smaller red arrows and red stars.
- Drawing on the minimap now shows a small pen icon next to your name in the party window.
- The color of the ink has changed when drawing on the minimap to depend on what party member is drawing. Player 1 will always draw in white, player 2 will always draw in blue, and so on. The pen icon that shows up next to a name when that player is drawing also shows up in the color of the ink being used.
- Names of party members in the party list now dim and brighten according to their proximity to you to make it easier to determine who is the closest, as opposed to someone outside your danger zone bubble, to you in missions like Guild Battles, and Alliance Battles.
- A new dynamic search has been added to the skill window to make finding skills easier. This search has also been added to the Priest of Balthazar.
- Stances now have an image indicator in the party window, similar to that of enchantments, hexes, and weapon spells. Stances works with Skill Peak.
- New Friend’s List designators!
- The ability to organize your friends by class has been added to your Friend’s List. For instance, if you enjoyed Exiled Monk’s monking skills, you would want to add him or her to your friends list with a Monk designation.
- The bottom of the Friends List now has a new option, “Organize according to class”, that once checked will separate your friends according to class. If you designate a friend as Monk and as Mesmer, that player will show up under both lists of Monk and Mesmer.
New PvP Rewards
We have gone in and added new rewards to Random Arenas, Hero Battles, Team Arenas, Hero’s Ascent, and Guild vs. Guild battles! At the end of each victorious match, a chest will spawn and allow the team to gain additional rewards. These chests spawn gold, additional faction, and unique items. Some of these unique items:
- New green Zaishen weapon skins found only in PvP.
- New Scroll of Balthazar’s Insight that provides your party with a +150% Balthazar faction gain for 10 minutes and has 5 uses.
- New Scroll of Allegiance that provides you with a +100% Kurzick or Luxon faction gain for 10 minutes.
- New Elite Scroll of Combat that provides you with +200% Balthazar faction and +150% Kurzick or Luxon faction gain for 10 minutes.
- New Ultimate Tomes that allow you to unlock 1 elite skill and 2 non-elite skills for any profession.
- Other items like Sigils, Profession Tomes, Zaishen Coins (copper, silver and gold) and Flames of Balthazar.
We have to be clear about a very important detail here: the amount and quality of the awards greatly scales from Random Arenas to Guild Battles. We have done this because it is important to reward the mechanics that more difficult to master. We find this new addition to be important because it allows PvP focused people to feel like they can find success without having to really PvE. In addition to these new Battle Chests, we have added the following improvements to PvP:
- When speaking to Tolkano, there is now a new option to “Subscribe to Tournament Announcements”. Subscribing to this new feature will allow you to receive important tournament information to your chat window. You will get updates about upcoming tournaments and how long you have to enter, tournament standing updates of the guilds in the top 10 spots, and the winner of a tournament. You are allowed to subscribe to Guild Battle and Hero Battle notifications.
- Tolkano’s interface has been redone. You are now able to view tournament rewards in a window much like how the Priest of Balthazar presents skill unlocks. This allows you to preview armor and weapon skins. You can also buy Zaishen Keys with Reward Points in this window.
- The Priest of Balthazar now has a “Reward” tab where Zaishen Keys can be bought.
- The monthly tournament finals now have separate lists for Guild Battles and Hero Battles in the Observer Mode window.
- Prices of Skill Unlock Packs have been cut in half.
- The cost of skills has been capped at 500 gold at skill trainers. However, the time it takes to get to this cap has been decreased.
- Previously unlocked elite skills can now be bought at major skill traders for 2000 gold.
- Unlocking non-elite skills at the Priest of Balthazar now costs 500 faction. Unlocking elite skills now costs 1500 faction.
Xunlai House Changes
In the past few weeks, we made some modifications to the Xunlai Tournament House that directly linked your account to your Guild Wars account. This was one of our ways of testing some more improvements to our website. Because player accounts are now linked directly to the official website, we are now able to provide a lot of in game information upon logging into the website:
- The Xunlai Tournament House has been renamed Xunlai Combat House to account for these new PvP improvements.
- Skills used in Guild vs. Guild, Random Arenas, Team Arenas, Hero Battles, Heroes Ascent, Fort Aspenwood, Jade Quarry, and Alliance Battles are now able to be viewed in your profile at the Xunlai Combat House. The new skill usage chart shows a breakdown of Execution and Fizzles.
- Your account profile now records and displays your wins, losses, and overall win percentage for Random Arenas, Hero Battles, Alliance Battles, Fort Aspenwood, Jade Quarry, Hero’s Ascent, and Guild vs. Guild battles. Statistics for Random Arenas, Hero Battles, Team Arenas, Hero’s Ascent, and Guild battles are shown under the “Competitive” title, while Jade Quarry, Fort Aspenwood, and Alliance Battle statistics are shown under the “Combat Missions” title.
- New optional program to provide feedback on skills. You can do this by logging into the Xunlai Combat House and clicking on “Your Skills” and then clicking on the specific skill you want to provide feedback on.
- The current options are check boxes with the following options: This skill is balanced, This skill is too strong, This skill is too weak. Checking these will prompt other optional choices to provide further feedback. Note: this is one tool that will be used to consider skill balance and does not guarantee that a reaction will occur to your suggestion.
- Any skill that is changed in an update will reset your suggestion and allow you to comment on the skill’s current balance again.
- You cannot comment on skills that your account does not have unlocked.
- Player profiles are now public at GuildWars.com.
We are extremely excited to hear some skill suggestions from players with these new changes. Because it would be difficult to read everyone’s suggestions word for word, we have implemented a question and answer approach to this. Clicking on an answer to our question will cause a tree of other questions to provide further information on a skill. Of course, you could also just submit your information after answering the first question and not providing any further feedback. This information will be gathered and heavily considered in future skill updates to create and promote a healthy and fun metagame.
Guild Battles
Over the past several months, we have noticed a decline in GvG activity. There has also been a decline in Observer Mode activity. One of the factors we can attribute to this is the barrier of entry to GvG. We have already made some significant changes to address some of these issues. We have added more rewards, such as the addition of a Battle Chest for the victorious team. We have added interface enhancements to provide additional information at your fingertips with the Extended Party Window and the new Effects Monitor. It is our hope that with these changes we can make GvG more casual friendly. One big hurdle we see for casual players is the fact that GvG may appear to be complex or too competitive for new players to join in. Players need to use chat clients like TeamSpeak or Ventrilo to stay organized and coordinated. We see this as the biggest hurdle for casual players. We hope with the addition of the Extended Party Window and the Effects Monitor, players will feel like they can be competitive without having to feel pressured to use chat clients. While coordination is easier to achieve over these chat clients, we feel like players now have the chance of easily jumping into the mechanic without as many boundaries. With this, we now have a new GvG mode:
Casual Guild Battles
One of the biggest barriers of entry for GvG has been the fact that you must form teams of 8 in a guild hall. Casual players may have seen this as a barrier and may have never taken the steps to become competitive. Over the last several years, we have seen how successful Alliance Battles and other competitive missions because of their ease of access and low barrier of entry. This can also be seen with Random Arenas where players can easily jump in without having to form a coordinated team. Making changes to the current GvG would have been difficult and would have broken the mechanics. This is why we have gone back and made a completely new mode! This new mode introduces the following:
- Form a team of 6 or just press enter to find a match in the new Team Skirmish outpost!
- Compete against others on a ladder! Because of this, you will be matched up with people similar to your rating. If you are unable to find a game, these restrictions will be lessened so you can find a team.
- There will be two ladders:
- Random Team: teams formed by matching up with random allies and opponents. Your team rating is an average of everyone’s individual ratings. Your individual rating begins at 1000 and increases or decreases depending on whether your team wins or loses.
- Arranged Team: teams formed with specific people. Your team rating starts at 1000 and increases or decreases depending on whether your team wins or loses. This ladder has a high rate of rating decay to ensure that the ladder is not filled with inactive teams.
- A new separate Gladiator title for Team Skirmishes. 1 point is awarded for winning a match.
- Guild Battle maps have been scaled to smaller sizes and there are less NPCs in Team Skirmishes.
- Victory or Death occurs at 18 minutes.
Other GvG Changes
- Guild Halls are now independent of Guild Battle maps. When entering a Guild Battle, you are now able to choose which Guild Hall you want to battle on by checking the box of the hall. If you have no preference, you can check the “Randomize” button. Your guild’s choice defaults to your current guild hall.
- New titles!
- New dynamic title: depending on the rank of your guild or team, you will display a new dynamic title. Beginning with rank 500 (400-500, 300-399, 200-299, 150-199, 100-149, 50-99, 15 – 49, 4-14, 3, 2, and 1). Rank 1 is the title Champion of the Isles. Each rank has a unique emote with /gvg.
- Champion of War title: each win in GvG adds a point to this title.
- Skill unlock packs have now been halved in price.
We hope that with these changes, some more casual players will be able to approach our high end PvP content without feeling overwhelmed. Our interface changes documented earlier should greatly assist this transition. We hope people feel less pressured with the new idea that they do not have to use a chat client to be able to be coordinated. With the Effects Monitor and the new Extended Party Window, people now have all of the information they need at their fingertips. We will continually make improvements to these services in the coming months to make sure that casual players have all of the information they need to be competitive without the extreme commitment currently needed. We also hope they enjoy our new Team Skirmish mode!
General
- An Item Component trader has been added to all major cities and all cities that have a rune trader. The Component trader will take both perfect and imperfect components, but will put the imperfect ones in an “Imperfect” tab. Prices of components will fluctuate, much like runes, according to supply and demand.
- You are now able to link items to team, guild, alliance, and trade chat by ctrl clicking on the item.
- The Priest of Balthazar window now defaults to the skill unlock pane of your primary profession. Your secondary profession is now highlighted for indication.
- New Options:
- The parent Guild Wars saved data folder can now be changed to a dynamic folder location on the hard drive under options.
- You can now hide Private Messages by unchecking the newly added Private Message check box in the chat window.
- You can now hide system notifications such as World Favor and Take a Break messages by unchecking the box in the chat window.
- There is now a set of options in the options window to log text from Local, Guild, Team, and Alliance chat and save it to their own .txt file under your Guild Wars saved data folder.
- Members of the same party are now able to observe matches together.
- A “Friends Only” status indicator has been added to the friends list. Only friends will see that you are online. The friends list now remembers your status at your previous logout.
- Master Gunther in Fort Aspenwood now behaves like the Guild Lord in guild battles to make killing him more difficult.
- New description fields have been added to the Guild window. A communication field now allows information for chat clients, such as Ventrilo and Teamspeak. A website field allows a place for the website address.
- Upon logging in, if your guild is participating in a guild battle, you will see the following warning in your chat window: “Your guild is currently participating in a Guild Battle verse “Guild” . To observe the match, please go to Observer Mode (O) and go to the “Your Alliance” list.”
- Skill stats in the skill warmup and monitor now accurately reflect the amount of attribute points that affect that skill upon hovering your cursor over the skill icon.
Miscellaneous
- The party leader is now able to teleport the whole party out of explorable areas. Party members are able to opt-out by pressing “Cancel” in the countdown.
- When teleporting to an area that someone in the party has not unlocked, the party leader now has the option to continue with the party members that are able to travel and leave behind the party members that cannot.
- The private message buzzer now occurs every 20 seconds. The option to have a recurring buzzer sound for private messages has been added to the option screen.
- You are now able to observe the guild battles of your whole alliance and not just your guild.
- Party member’s names who are on the verge of death as a result of a hex, a one skill kill, or a general weapon attack now begin blinking until their health is safe or until they are killed.
- The person carrying the flag now has a small flag icon on the far right of their health bar in the normal party window.
- Items unlocked from the priest of Balthazar now go to a new list at the bottom of the window titled “Unlocked Skills”.
- Skill descriptions and stats now default to their PvP form in all outposts and explorable areas in the Battle Isles.
- Guild Battles now take priority over Hero Battles in the Observe Mode window
- Guilds in your alliance tab now display their rating, wins, losses, and current rank.
- A button to delete items on the merchant buy and sell screen has been added. Deleting items will prompt a warning screen before deleting. Items with a value of 0 are exempt from this warning.
- A new compass button that unlocks “U” map functionality on the minimap, such as the important locations in Alliance Battles, has been added.
- Shrines under attack now blink on the “U” map and compass.
- The ability to save multiple interface and control templates has been added.
- A new option that allows open window borders to fade into the background after not hovering over them for 20 seconds has been added. This feature can be turned on for individual windows by checking the box in the “Interface” option tab.
- Players from the same guild or alliance can no longer be on the same team in any randomized matches.
- Offline guild members are now collected in their own list titled “Offline”.
- A login screen toggle has been added to the option screen to control which login screen you get: Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall, Eye of the North, and Random.
I must thank SpaceFreak and Helsvon for their time and help during the last few weeks while working on this! Thank you :)
-Branskins
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