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Beta Retrospective
User	Phlemhacker
Categories	Mechanics

I was massively impressed by the beta, but a few things I noticed while playing irked me a bit.

One was that the party mechanics are nearly never needed, nor did I ever feel that forming a party would be particularly beneficial or useful. Now to an extent I guess that is the point with events and the hearts all over the map, but what I noticed was that people were always playing near each other and when an event popped up they happened to be all be whaling on the same bad guy, but nobody was really playing with each other. Nobody really chatted with each other save to ask for a revive, and actual cooperation seemed fleeting, lasting only as long as that particular event before the group dissolved and everyone went their separate ways until they ran into another event.

One of the things I loved about the original Guild Wars was the fact that often times you had only that small group of people to get something done and, depending on the content, it took real communication to be successful rather then everyone just happening to show up at the same time to kill a nasty boss.

Now I understand this is the role the dungeons fill, the problem was I realized that the dungeons are relatively out of reach early in the game and compared to events and hearts, there really aren't all that many of them. A few things I suppose could augment this would be different rewards for events and hearts if a player is in a party rather than going it alone(not necessarily better, just different), and perhaps a level of a more traditional "floating exclamation mark" quest somewhere between dungeons and hearts, requiring a party to complete but not instanced like dungeons and requiring a time of completion somewhere longer than events but shorter than dungeons as well.

The only other thing that really miffed me was the way my character's level was more or less changed depending on the location I was in. Again I understand the reason for it, but one of the most satisfying things in a game like this is to go out in the world for a while and find that after coming back to the starting areas again, I can one shot everything that used to trounce me. They way it is set up I don't really feel like I am making progress as the same creatures that give you trouble at the very beginning of the game are also giving you a similar level of grief 20 levels from there. I get that having all of your abilities unlocked augments this a bit by giving you more options, but your character is still nearly just as squishy and damage output is equally low.

As for ways to change this, the way I see it, there should absolutely be places where you should be de-buffed accordingly such as when in the vicinity of events or when playing with another lower level character in your party, but in situations other than those, perhaps raising the debuff to a few levels higher than the surrounding area would be enough, or only de-buffing certain aspects of the character such as health or damage accordingly.

Other than that I love what has been done so far and look forward to future events and release. Phlemhacker