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I imagine there will be a fairly large number of positive reviews and general touting, but right now, as good as the game is, I have some pretty big issues with it.
The Overflow.
The overflow server basically means no more queues in full instances of a zone, hurray! However there are a few things that make this great idea a hardly stellar implementation. First and foremost is when you're partied up, no one person should hit the overflow, If you're all together, you should stay that way. Everyone should go jolly off into the overflow. Secondly, there is a greater sense of disconnect when 2 people go to an overflow and neither are with each other, where are you? somewhere in the ether i would assume. Which leads me to this next bit.
The Respwan rate.
Just as baddies scale up in power and ability when more people are around and in turn decrease with less population hacking away at them, the respawn rate should also scale. Meaning longer periods of time before that last 6 guys you killed come up behind you after you've just bashed them into the ground. There were many times I found a couple of us getting back hammered simply because we couldn't zerg our way through a cave full of bandits or a crevasse full of destroyers. This is pretty much one thing i completely loathe about persistent world MMO's, and something that Arenanet really needs to get right.
World Events.
Ok, so this is a tough one, the event system as it stands needs tweaking regardless and it being a pretty new type of system, it definitely has some bugs. First and foremost is again the scalability. Yes i understand, big events aren't supposed to be done by less than say 10 people, but however, some of these events don't seem to have logical chains that trigger them. The Shadow Behemoth is one of those that you can easily either never participate in or show up with only 5 people in the area willing to take on the beast. I saw events like this pop up in numerous places and often, for the few of us around, became epic failures. One thought would be the ability to follow some of these events, like you would a forum post. Talk to someone and they would somehow inform you that they desperately need help as the OMG boss is coming, maybe through the email system. This is especially true for those events that seem to be on a timer. It also would provide feedback on the popularity of an event over time and help to make a decision whether to toss out or change a less popular one
Party system.
There's a couple of things i would change with the party system. One thing would be a right click menu option that has "Find on map". It's a friggen pain in the ass to find others in party sometimes, even in the same zone. This is especially true with the blue dot ordeal and being zoomed out of the world map. I almost feel it's better to not be in party and just randomly run around on my own not trying to find and follow various party members. Which leads me to this next bit.
Will the real mini map please stand up?
This is a must have in my book, the radar even with zoom levels is hardly a substitute for the original Guild Wars mini map, i toggled the world map so many times it felt like part of a bad habit than any kind of solution. It's possible i missed some sort of other option here, but i did look for it.
Lack of Auto Follow.
Let's face it, if you're a Guild Wars player, the auto follow features was one of the best mechanics when adventuring with your group. Granted this might be a huge issue when that person you're following is down off a 50 foot cliff and your toon is chasing them to their death mindlessly, but at the very least, if someone is relatively close, You should be able to just run in their general direction without toggling the map or trying to pick them out in the radar.
Targeting.
This may not be a big issue, but targeting is clunky at best. There might have been key bindings for select closest target, but i didn't see it. There is just way to much going on in some battles to be click targeting. Select next and previous targets would be great too!
City Lag.
The cities, any of them, are at best lagfests, if not almost unplayable on some lower end video cards and/or processors. It work great for my i5 and 6970 card, but the Intel e8500 with a 4950 card had some serious lag issues. This isn't even 3 year old hardware! I get the optimization issues still needing to be worked out and perhaps there was some issue with the pc, but it was pretty rough.
Crafting.
Last but not least, and this is a problem with most games crafting systems, is that materials for some disciplines are quite hard to come by while others are very simple and straight forward. It would be really nice if that part of the auction house was available at the specific crafting areas. In Guild Wars you could buy mats directly from vendors, why not make that happen in Guild Wars 2? Have those materials supplied by the vendors, even if they are tied to auction house prices and purchases. For cooks, it's fairly simple to just toss ingredients together and craft something, not to mention many of the items are available from vendors too, but not so for most of the other disciplines.
The Overflow.
The overflow server basically means no more queues in full instances of a zone, hurray! However there are a few things that make this great idea a hardly stellar implementation. First and foremost is when you're partied up, no one person should hit the overflow, If you're all together, you should stay that way. Everyone should go jolly off into the overflow. Secondly, there is a greater sense of disconnect when 2 people go to an overflow and neither are with each other, where are you? somewhere in the ether i would assume. Which leads me to this next bit.
The Respwan rate.
Just as baddies scale up in power and ability when more people are around and in turn decrease with less population hacking away at them, the respawn rate should also scale. Meaning longer periods of time before that last 6 guys you killed come up behind you after you've just bashed them into the ground. There were many times I found a couple of us getting back hammered simply because we couldn't zerg our way through a cave full of bandits or a crevasse full of destroyers. This is pretty much one thing i completely loathe about persistent world MMO's, and something that Arenanet really needs to get right.
World Events.
Ok, so this is a tough one, the event system as it stands needs tweaking regardless and it being a pretty new type of system, it definitely has some bugs. First and foremost is again the scalability. Yes i understand, big events aren't supposed to be done by less than say 10 people, but however, some of these events don't seem to have logical chains that trigger them. The Shadow Behemoth is one of those that you can easily either never participate in or show up with only 5 people in the area willing to take on the beast. I saw events like this pop up in numerous places and often, for the few of us around, became epic failures. One thought would be the ability to follow some of these events, like you would a forum post. Talk to someone and they would somehow inform you that they desperately need help as the OMG boss is coming, maybe through the email system. This is especially true for those events that seem to be on a timer. It also would provide feedback on the popularity of an event over time and help to make a decision whether to toss out or change a less popular one
Party system.
There's a couple of things i would change with the party system. One thing would be a right click menu option that has "Find on map". It's a friggen pain in the ass to find others in party sometimes, even in the same zone. This is especially true with the blue dot ordeal and being zoomed out of the world map. I almost feel it's better to not be in party and just randomly run around on my own not trying to find and follow various party members. Which leads me to this next bit.
Will the real mini map please stand up?
This is a must have in my book, the radar even with zoom levels is hardly a substitute for the original Guild Wars mini map, i toggled the world map so many times it felt like part of a bad habit than any kind of solution. It's possible i missed some sort of other option here, but i did look for it.
Lack of Auto Follow.
Let's face it, if you're a Guild Wars player, the auto follow features was one of the best mechanics when adventuring with your group. Granted this might be a huge issue when that person you're following is down off a 50 foot cliff and your toon is chasing them to their death mindlessly, but at the very least, if someone is relatively close, You should be able to just run in their general direction without toggling the map or trying to pick them out in the radar.
Targeting.
This may not be a big issue, but targeting is clunky at best. There might have been key bindings for select closest target, but i didn't see it. There is just way to much going on in some battles to be click targeting. Select next and previous targets would be great too!
City Lag.
The cities, any of them, are at best lagfests, if not almost unplayable on some lower end video cards and/or processors. It work great for my i5 and 6970 card, but the Intel e8500 with a 4950 card had some serious lag issues. This isn't even 3 year old hardware! I get the optimization issues still needing to be worked out and perhaps there was some issue with the pc, but it was pretty rough.
Crafting.
Last but not least, and this is a problem with most games crafting systems, is that materials for some disciplines are quite hard to come by while others are very simple and straight forward. It would be really nice if that part of the auction house was available at the specific crafting areas. In Guild Wars you could buy mats directly from vendors, why not make that happen in Guild Wars 2? Have those materials supplied by the vendors, even if they are tied to auction house prices and purchases. For cooks, it's fairly simple to just toss ingredients together and craft something, not to mention many of the items are available from vendors too, but not so for most of the other disciplines.
