First of all, as I look back on this past weekend’s beta event I can honestly say that it was one of the best gaming experiences in my entire life. While no game is perfect, it’s hard for me to find fault in something that has been so fun. But, since I’m suffering from serious GW2 withdrawal (already!) and it’s made me a bit grumpy, I decided to jot down my top five frustrations from this past beta.
Disclaimer: I’m not going to gripe over technical or balancing issues such as lag, dynamic event scaling, profession balancing or log-in issues. These are not a part of the game design and are being worked on.
#5: No First-Person Camera. When you zoom in you get a really nice view of your back that fills the entire camera. Thousands of players that wanted to take screenshots of the scenery couldn’t do so without their character photobombing the shot. Yes, the character models look amazing, but so does the scenery!
#4: Trading through the Mail. There is no actual ‘trading’ between players, so the in-game mail has to be used. That wouldn’t be quite as inconvenient if there wasn’t a delay in the delivery. It took about 10 minutes for the delivery pigeon to finally deliver the sword my brother was trying to give me. WTB faster pigeons!
#3: No skills while on top of the water. When you're under the water or on land, combat is amazing. But when you’re on top of the water, you don’t even have a skill bar and can only just swim. I'm sure it would be asking too much to expect BOTH land and water skills but at least one of them would be nice?
#2: Guild Member Limit. Guild member limit was set to 100 and this caused some frustration for some of our larger communities (including the one I belong to!). Perhaps this was explained previously, but many folks didn’t see this one coming.
#1: Death and Waypoints: When your character dies, you have the choice to respawn at a waypoint. The map opens up and you click on the waypoint of your choice. Simple, right? Well, not for unfamiliar players. Many beginners were a bit confused and some struggled to pinpoint a waypoint to click (especially in areas where they had uncovered very few of them). An option to “respawn at nearest city” or something to that effect would be very helpful.
Well, that’s my list. I actually strugged to find five gripes that were worth mentioning! Overall, I’m very sad that the weekend is over and now I have to try to find a game that will keep me remotely interested until the next BWE. Time to log into GW1 and get those last 10 HoM points!
