So this last weekends beta event is over now and I got a couple to a few more hours in the game. To follow up my first thoughts of Guild Wars 2 here are some other pluses and minuses I came away with from this weekend’s Guild Wars 2 Beta Event.

+ Huge areas, especially the cities. Stormwind in WoW should be like Divinity’s Reach here. The size of cities in WoW was a huge disappointment. SWTOR was better than WoW, but I really enjoyed Divinity’s Reach. Hoelbrak was cool as well (no pun intended).

+ Good server performance and little lag… well after the first day or so of issues they seemed to get things under control, that first day was tough… That said I see some people complaining about lag, so perhaps it was hit and miss for some. I think the key issue is picking the correct server, when the server list came up for me, the European ones were first though I live in the US. It should be local servers arranged by density then alpha, then out of country servers by the same arrangement. If they add Asian/Oceanic servers as well as US and European, then I am sure they could figure out which set to display after the local set.

+ Questing. I like the story mode quests, the heart quests and the dynamic events. The story mode quests aren’t as strong as SWTOR story mode is, but very strong none the less. No quest hubs is a general plus for me. It would perhaps be nice if there were a couple odd quests that could be picked up at odd points, but I liked the heart quests overall… of course one could argue that hearts and dynamic quests are just quest hubs without the normal quest givers…

+ Autocast. Once you target and fire, it autocasts, which is the norm, but oddly missing in SWTOR. However, it should have the option to turn it off if for some reason you don’t want it as some people really enjoyed that SWTOR didn’t autocast.

+ Skill system. Some complain, others like it. I am in the latter.

– Camera control. I like to use my mouse to zoom in and out, with the right button acting as camera control. The right button seemed to work somewhat as expected, but the mouse wheel didn’t zoom in and out. They don’t seem to be using it for anything else, so why not make that a default?

– Spawn Rates. The respawn rates of some mobs seem a bit high.

– Some buggy story modes. This is beta, so I would guess they’ll fix the issues. One time there was a lot of dialog going on that wasn’t on the screen, the characters just stood there while the dialog got to the one part that was in the text. There is a disclaimer in the top right that it is a work in progress, so that is undoubtedly what they mean. The color changes too, which is perhaps how solidly fixed it is…

– 5 Character Slots. I know I mentioned this last time, but as an alt-holic 5 slots is too few, and I am thinking even 6 would be too few. 8 minimum… it really depends on how much slots cost. If they use the $9.99 price that is way too much. I guess we should be glad to get 5 over the old 2, but still…

– Bags. Okay, I have a 15 slot bag and an 8 slot bag, I need to repair or something in another bag… I have to do a lot of moving around as after I double click the toolset it won’t let me scroll down or click the other bag to get to it. All bags should have the option at least to be one bag… auto arrange… SWTOR got close to right on this whole thing…

– Local time zone clock. Perhaps it is in the option menu somewhere. Honestly I didn’t make a big effort to find it, but I would like to put a clock with my minimap, this should have the option to be my local time and the server’s time.

– US Servers – No Time Zone Info. The servers just said US Server, and didn’t offer which time zone they were in. If they are all on one time zone, then just saying US Server is probably okay, but see above, there needs to be an option to set the clock to specific time zones (and turn on or off Daylight Savings Time).

– Chat. The /local chat channel is a very large area, so when somebody needs a res, they could well be a very long ways from you. You want a global chat at the same time you need certain things put to a smaller “local” area, such as rez requests and thank yous… of course people will spam the global even if you had a local option… so I am not sure what the best option here is. Perhaps /local is smaller area by default, and if you /yell before the chat it goes where it is going now…

– UI customization. See what SWTOR finally did as a prime example of how to make customization possible without the need for APIs and mods.

– Armor seems to go down too fast and with too little notice.

– More Beta Weekends. Not every weekend, but perhaps every other weekend, and reset the characters each month until release, that way you can get two weekends in with one character set. Of course the game seemed stable, and fairly close to release, so there may be only one or two more months anyhow. I would guess the next main one (end of May) would be testing GPU optimizations…

– No /dance emote. Some cool other emotes, but everyone has /dance and GW2 should be no exception.

– People who QQ in chat and on the forums over game mechanics that were clearly explained in videos and previews. These are clearly people who didn’t read those or watch those videos and just bought the game not knowing really what to expect and wanting it to be WoW or some other standard formula MMO. Don’t buy something you don’t understand and complain it isn’t what you want. It would be like buying an adventure game and complaining it isn’t a first person shooter because the one clip you say showed shooting… Also the people who don’t understand what beta is, especially that first day when they were working out the bugs in the server load.

– Overflow server return. Coming back from the overflow server is a big problem for me. I was in the city and when my server opened, it popped me out of the city and back to the foothills. Not cool. The expense to travel back wasn’t much, but it is more of the convenience factor. If I have to come into the server at a the nearest active waypoint to where I was.

-? Overflow while in parties. What happens if I am in an overflow server and part of a party, does it get split when we move to our server? I would think most likely that the parties will split as they probably come from different servers. I would have to guess that once on a regular server you won’t go to a overflow server unless you leave it for some reason… but what if you as a group go to WvWvW and then return with some going to overflow? Party control needs to be considered when going to and from overflows. EDIT: I’ve read complaints about people in a group and being split to be put into an overflow. Once on a server you shouldn’t go to overflow.

? Friends. I don’t have any friends playing yet so I don’t know how the friends menu works yet. But I do hope it is more like WoW in that I can tell when my friends are on, without having to know all their Alts. How a modern MMO like SWTOR can skip that is beyond me. That said, the one thing I thought Blizzard could have done to make it better is better privacy options. That is, perhaps I want to restrict certain alts to just certain friends or none at all. So perhaps the default is set to all, then you can turn off individuals or groups. I am not sure how that would work in a game menu so making groups (think Google Plus Circles) might have to be done via the web at your account page, but if it can be done in game all the better. We also need a way to group together better.

! Mesmer Illusions. Lots of complaints about how Mesmer illusions disappear as soon as the mob is destroyed. While this is indeed a pain while battling groups or accidentally pulling another mob (too easy to do as I often overcast as I didn’t rely on the autocast as I perhaps should) I don’t think they should stay on full time as some suggest. They should stay on after the mob is destroyed if they are still on cool down, no doubt about that. I think a nice compromise would be to stay on until cool down is over, and then have a short timer for them to disappear if you don’t engage another enemy soon after, if you do then they stick around until their health goes down (or you shatter them yourself, not something I used much at all).

! Age. While I enjoyed the character customization options a great deal, some people do make a good point of needing to add more “old” people to the mix.. to age them.. Also like SWTOR we should have a more “portly” body option.

! Shift/CTRL key Modifiers. I don’t use them, but I can see how others would like them, especially to help with key reach on their bindings.

! Dynamic Events. They are positive and I like them, but they don’t seem as world changing as I expected from the promo material.

EDIT: I only played Mesmer (favorite), Elementalist (second favorite so far) and Necromancer (did very little of) so far.

Overall I still think it is easily the best MMO on the market… well not on the market yet, but soon. To that end, I honestly think they could, depending on how the GPU optimizing goes, could release in July or August.

EDIT: I follow this up with a third post… And Another Thing – Yet More Guild Wars 2 Thoughts.

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Guild Wars 2… worth it IMHO.