A week of Guild Wars has given me a good idea of what I think was done right, and what was done wrong.

The Right

• Map Travel
  This may be the single best feature of GW. Common in single-player games, but avoided in most MMOs (’cause it supposedly breaks immersion), I’ve found that I can’t stand waiting for boats or taking flights in WoW anymore. DAOC has map travel in the Frontier, although I haven’t personally used this feature. CoH has a limited form of map travel, where from a train station your character can be transported to any other station on that line. EQ has group teleports to limited locations, although this ability is limited to the Druid and Wizard classes. Opening map travel to all characters, at all times, makes travelling to town or completing some quests refreshingly easy.
• Henchmen
  A player can fill out his groups with NPC hirelings–or when soloing, grab henchmen and play at his own pace. The NPC healer is usually very good, and when she has aggro will even run around like a panicked chicken, just like a real healer. The NPC mage is annoying, AOEing single mobs instead of groups, and frequently aggroing non-aggro mobs that wander through the fights. The fighter hold aggro and melees better than a typical warrior player. The ranger is a more precise (than the mage) form of ranged, extra DPS. The mesmer, enchanter, brawler, etc., are more specialized versions of these characters. The henchmen fight whatever mob you have targetted (unless targetting a henchman), so you have to remember not to switch targets until the mob dies. Real players may almost always be better, but I can see taking a warrior, healer, and mesmer any time I need to fill up the group.
• Attentiveness
  GW’s mantra is “pay attention or die.” The game is accurate in requiring player skill, to the point where players like my wife find it relatively easy to hit level 14 or 15, while my limited skills cap my progress around level 10. Seriously. A group of level 8 mobs can do my groups in pretty well. Players who hit autoattack and walk away from the keyboard can find their characters killed by a much lower level mob, even one-on-one.
• Instances
  It’s nice to be able to clear a spot and go AFK for a half hour without worrying about respawn. It’s nice to be able to drop items, visit a vendor, sell, and go pick up the excess inventory without worrying about someone else taking it. It’s nice to not worry about losing quest mobs to other players, or being griefed by training or cockblocking. It can get awfully lonely in the empty-of-people, big zones without a guild, though.
• Downtime
  The lack of downtime is incredibly helpful. After death, between fights, or anytime, you can watch your character’s health and energy restore quickly, keeping the activity of the game fast and furious. Needed for engaging PvP, it makes PvE highly enjoyable as you don’t have to sit for several minutes between fights. Again, WoW is a drag because of the downtime in that game, and I can’t imagine going back to EQ again.
• Storyline
  The missions and storyline are compelling the first time their run. Likewise, many of the quests provide good backstory and the game has a strong narrative arc. Admittedly, at times you feel as if you’re being delivered the game “on-rails”–my wife has finished quests out of sequence, and has received messages or missions out of order (“The prince died.” “The prince and his dad had a fight and he went to Kryta.” “You found Althea’s ghost.” “The prince is pissed that his wife died.” “The prince told off his father and visited the ambassador from Kryta.”)
• The inventory interface
  One window, all your bags. No six-bag windows. DAOC was similar, with more inventory available.
• The shared bank
  Sharing the bank between characters is helpful (again, EQ did this with Ykesha and shared slots). See also below.
• Streaming content
  Though not actually streamed, downloading new regions is a good idea. It means that the client (shipped) is very small, and the player only has to download those regions that he actually plays in. If possible, I’d suggest loading parts of the new region in the background as the player approaches the zone lines, but what is here works reasonably well (especially in a group full of NPC henchmen).
• Online purchase
  GW was easy to buy and relatively easy to activate. All games should be available this way, if only to save the Tuesday morning rush to the store.
• No monthly fee
  While it obviously cuts back on the CSR costs and hurts community behavior (see below), no monthly fee means that we can walk away from GW at any time, and come back without having to reactivate accounts. If NCSoft is making money on this business model, I’d love to see it extended to other games. Of course, GW feels kind of like Diablo II, straddling the line between a FPS twitch game, and an MMO.

The Wrong

• The power curve
  GW, like EQ, is highly gear dependent. Level 8 mobs are, individually, a little less powerful than a well equipped level 8 player, and in most cases, the player can win that fight one-on-one. But by level 8, the mobs are coming in groups of two to four, and often more than one group will come at one time. Four Charr Blade Warriors can quickly wipe a well-balanced group–leading to my belief that the best class for most PvE situations in GW (through 15, at least) may end up being the Necromancer, turning dead mobs into new pets to quickly turn the balance of the fight. Imbalanced fights, fights made more difficult by wanderers, and fights with two or more adjacent groups adding quickly make the game frustrating.
• The death penalty
  There’s plenty that’s good: you reappear at the nearest shrine (in most cases), fully equipped and ready to fight within seconds. The death penalty to health and power, however, can be difficult to overcome. The pat answer is, “Take on lower level mobs until you earn enough XP to have it go away,” or “Map travel back to a city and go back out to the [reset] zone.” At 60% death penalty, however, the PC with 220 hits points is down to 100 hit points, and is much more likely to die, even to lower level mobs. This is quickly frustrating.
• Cash sinks
  With the latest patch, Ascalon Keys are 50 gold or more, and other keys cost even more. The purple items usually retrieved from Ascalon chests aren’t worth that much to an NPC vendor, and don’t usually salvage for very much (except for some runes or weapon hafts). Bags cost 100 gold, runes to double their capacity 500 gold, and a full set of mid-level armor is 750 gold. Identification kits are 100 gold in Ascalon City, and Salvage Kits are 40 gold, 100 in outlying cities. A level eight character, fresh from pre-Searing Ascalon could be reasonably expected to have 1000 gold, which will be quickly burned through. Money comes pretty quickly, but it goes almost as fast, especially if a player chooses to buy runes to improve equipment. High level characters might have no problem earning the cash to buy the 15k armor (75,000 gold for a full set of end-game armor), but lower level characters and new players have found themselves in the midst of a high-cost economy, without the resources to bring themselves up to that level. (“Welcome to Guild Wars! Your profession is Serf.”)
• Eight skills
  While good for PvP by necessarily limiting your actions, it’s a huge hinderance in PvE. More than once, I’ve found myself thinking (screaming?) that if I’d only had access to Resurrect, or that defensive buff, or group or area heal, that encounter would have gone differently. I want more bars of abilities, and I want them all available. WoW got that right (although my wife believes WoW may not have been intended to have everything available, all the time, the way we play it today.) Developers, take note: if my character can do something, I want to be able to do it, even in the middle of a mission.
• The game engine
  More frustrating than the engine used in Asheron’s Call 2, I constantly feel like I’m getting stuck on terrain, decorations, smashed staircases, pets, henchmen, mobs, etc. WoW did it better, as did DAOC and EQ. CoH may have done it best.
• The bank
  There are limited slots: not enough to hold dyes and components and runes or hafts. Each character doesn’t get extra slots, but each character must pay to access the bank that has already been paid for. It’s only 50 gold, but it’s another 50 gold.
• Maps aren’t shared between characters
  Every character should have the same map available; this would put runners out of business. If the player has earned the map point for Droknar’s Forge, all the characters should be able to share it, as the player earned the right to travel to the city.
• Developers warring against the players
  I’ve only been paying attention to this game for a few weeks, but it already seems that the developers and players are warring against each other. Developers nerf drops, nerf abilities, and make the game more difficult in response to player trends (farming particular locations, developing the “invincimonk”, or picking particular templates to run groups to difficult-to-reach towns for cash). If the players have found something worth exploiting, or work hard to get around a part of the game design, it’s a flaw in the game design and rather than punish the players by changing the design to weaken that template or ability (aka, nerf), change the design so that it is no longer a source of frustration for the players.
• The community
  The less said about the most vocal, visible players, the better.
• No good duo
  I haven’t been able to figure-out a kick-butt duo to play with my wife yet. I’m thinking it has to be some combination of melee/nuker, since healing is best done by the bot.
• Buffs
  Buffs are either concentration (cutting down on energy regen), 10 seconds, one hit, or 60 seconds. I’d like traditional, long-timer or concentration (ala DAOC) buffs for PvE.