Things #GuildWars2 isn't doing superb in PvE

As much as I fanboi about Guild Wars 2, something that is very easily done if you, like me, play primarily PvE, there are a few things I don't love.
How many of these are beta? Honestly I don't know, and although I read a lot of the news coming out, I miss a lot of them as well.
But enough disclaimer, here is a list without any specific order.

The age of humans

When creating your human character you will see a very low amount of grown ups, specifically among the female characters. They look like girls. Girls that has spent quite a bit of time at the salon.

I tried to create a streetrat ranger, something my personal story allows, and this was the most unkept I could make her. The third one is a guildie that tried to make a streetrat necromancer, hoping to find someone looking scarred and ratty.

I may be complaining about small stuff, but streetrats, and especially rangers, would likely not be spending a large amount of time and money to get their hair done. And a necromancer living in a sewer, seeing if she can make a conga-line of ratcorpses, will not benefit from big 80's hair.


And it's not only the player characters that feel a bit too young for who they are. Below are an old man and old woman (as you can see by their names).

I'm not sure if this is to symbolize that humans are under constant attack and have a very short lifespan or if there is a strong presence of magicians specializing in cosmetic surgery.

Invisible walls

I am not a fan of invisible walls. And no, I have no idea how to do it in a better way.
But when you do add an invisible wall, don't put the most interesting thing you can imagine behind it!

Fortunately it seems that there is a reason for this flying castle though, as the citizens in the small village below it speaks of it frequently.

Insta-spawns

This is a problem that's been present in both betas so far. Hopefully it's just a beta thing in order to provide as much content as possible for players, but it gets ridiculous at times. There are several examples for when this was gamebreaking.
Me and a guildie were doing a jumping puzzle, ending in a long corridor with oozes. At the end of the corridor was a large room of a few ooze bosses and we decided to stop for half a minute to empty our bags.
This was enough time for the entire corridor to be repopulated and we were crushed between the bosses and the respawns.


After having saved Fort Salma me and four guildies decided to continue the event chain (which was an excellent chain by the way) and finally ended up in a large centaur fort.
We got the event to kill their three lords and did so (this was timed) and when they were down a new event was heralded about a centaur champion coming to the camp.
After a really fun fight he was down and happy in our triumph we started to take down the large trebuchets in the fort, killing the centaur engineers.


And this was when it got ridiculous again. While taking down the third trebuchet (about 2 minutes or so after having taken the first down) we suddenly found ourselves under fire from the first trebuchet. 


As there were several in the fort, it's not possible to "liberate" the centaur fort.
And all of a sudden the three lords event was active and immediately after the champion was coming.
Not all that immersive when it takes about a minute for a large siege weapon to respawn when there are no enemies around.


This is of course a strange thought when thinking of other MMOs, but since kills aren't that important in Guild Wars 2, where at least all heart events have some sort of alternative to fighting mobs, being stabbed in the back by the guards you just took down is not optimal.
I'm looking at you Blood Witch barracudas...

Playing with yourself when you're alone

This weekend we played on server Boreal Station instead of Far Shiverpeaks, and the somewhat lower population and my characters high level meant some time alone in the world.
And it was obvious that large parts of the world is not made for this.


To be honest, I don't feel this is that big a problem as I did right after the weekend and I certainly don't want them to dumb down the game, but it could get frustrating to see events pop up and realizing you had no ability to help out.


But I was also aware that it was much better than from the previous beta, as a large event with krait slavers in the port next to Viathan Lake was now soloable if you went slow and finished it by freeing the slaves at the krait tower.

Conclusion

There is not a lot of issues I have with Guild Wars 2 right now from a PvE standpoint.

Human character models could use with an uglyfying and perhaps some fabric in their outfits.

This is not a good idea of how a human should look.

Picture borrowed from thefrisky.com (no idea what site it is, did a Google image search for her).

As for the other races, I really like their looks. The norn has some different styles and the sylvari look really great with their leaves lighting up during nighttime.

Invisible walls when underwater breaks immersion very quickly, as there is no indication on when one will arrive, in fact there is often something beyond the wall that intrigues a lot.

I really hope the insta-spawning is a beta thing. When entering a boss lair I have no desire to have the guards stabbing me in the back and when crushing an enemy fort I want them to spend a bit of time to rebuild so I can gloat, perhaps get a few screenshots, and have some time to look into every nook and cranny of the place.

The difficulty of soloing was a feeling I got when playing, but after having digested the beta weekend I am actually quite pleased with it. I shouldn't be able to win every largescale war when alone. Perhaps I need to look around and find another way to help out instead of Leroy Jenkins everything.

Cash shop

I'm giving this its own headline as so many people think the game is pay to win and a money-grabber.

It isn't. Trust me on this, you can't buy gear to win in PvP. You can't win against other players in PvE, period. There's a different between Players vs Environment and Players vs Players for a reason.

The items in their store are cosmetic or very short time boosts to XP or karma.

You can also buy more bagspace and character slots and character transfers, but aside from the bagspace, I'm not sure how many other games have this for free?

And you will be able to have 100 inventory-slots for free and in addition to that there's account storage with additional space dedicated to all manners of crafting materials and minis.

You can buy gold for real money through gem trade. This will make it possible for you to buy items in the auction house (even though it's not so much auction as supply and demand).

The following are items you CAN'T buy in auction:

Gear better than anyone elses. Perhaps better looking, but not with better stats.

Skillpoints. Or skills in handling your character for that matter.

Tigerblood. Even though that may be available in the Canthan expansion, there are very few tigers in Tyria.

Please add your own comments and things that annoy in the comments below.