zellurs.8601

First of all, I want to say this was a great decision and long overdue. The MMO Rift which came out around the same time as GW2 reportedly had the highest amount of new players ever once they had their f2p launch on Steam. If you're at all familiar with the Guild Wars 2 subreddit, I'm sure you've noticed that there are constantly new posts by people who are shocked by how much they like the game and the fact they've heard next to nothing about it - I'm certain a Steam launch will draw in new players that will stick with Guild Wars 2.

I'd really like to see this transition go well, so I'd recommend the following things:

**1) Incentivize current Guild Wars 2 players to log in and put in hours through Steam. ** - I recently decided I wanted to pick up a looter-shooter and I was deciding between Destiny 2 and Warframe. Ultimately I went with Destiny 2 first because it had twice the amount of players logging in that Warframe did at the time. Set a time frame where veteran players get some exclusive or rare items when logging in through Steam. Make it worth it.

**2) Cross promotion ** - I'm not sure if Valve really does this much anymore, but I know with Team Fortress 2 they did lots of cross promotion cosmetics, for example buying Deus Ex net me some TF2 cosmetics based on items featured in Deus Ex. I believe the same thing is done with DOTA2, and the high fantasy settings mesh with GW2's well. I really think if this option is available that it should be leveraged. Maybe doing a quest in GW2 ties to unlocking an achievement in your Steam profile, which unlocks a skin for DOTA2.

**3) Steam Marketplace **- Not many developers really engage with the marketplace and that's a missed opportunity. I realize the amount of work it'd take to consolidate the player's entire inventory on Steam, which is why I think a "giftwrap" option would be a good idea. Basically you buy a piece of wrapping paper from the gemstore and you can put a tradeable item inside of it, which transfers it to your linked Steam account Inventory, which can then be sold on the marketplace. I'm not sure if devs get a cut from the market purchase, but you'd be making money on the wrap at the very least.

**4) Steam Cards **- more of an afterthought really but having Steam cards, emojis, backgrounds etc is always nice.

I'm positive simply having GW2 available on Steam will draw in new players, but I really do believe that if Anet goes the extra mile in integrating and promoting within Steam, it could be the flagship MMO of the platform.

Still waiting on an update as to:

1) why this was decided to be done now after the game has been out for over 6+ years

2) why no alternative methods were offered.

3) Why arenanet didn't take into account the **VARIOUS** issues presented by players in this very thread into account when flipping this switch.

4) when we can expect a viable alternative from arenanet

This feels far less to do with security, and more to do with the fact that Arenanet wants you to see their launcher so they can throw more ads at you or harass you to sign up for SMS. Neither of which I have any interest in.

I don't think I can articulate how bad of a taste this left in my mouth. To suggest that it's due to security is a slap in the face for the people who know the risks and have not been compromised in their time playing this game.

I can't stress enough how important it is to me that this change is reversed.

> @"YtseJam.9784" said:

> Pretty sure everyone that is entering their username and password in a shortcut are aware that anyone can see it, so they know what they are doing. If this is because people are using 3rd party launchers and put their username and password there, on a 3rd party app, and getting their accounts stolen, then that's on them.

This is actually a point I hadn't considered, my first thought after seeing that this was an intentional change on the part of the dev team made me think of what third party options are out there. I had gw2buddy awhile back but didn't really need the multibox functionality so I stayed with my shortcuts. Not sure if gw2buddy is even working now, but my point is that by making this decision, anet is inadvertently pushing people towards third parties who can fill the void. And if there isn't one currently, there will be one eventually. Personally I'd like to take my own responsibility for my security instead of having to download some software based off of good word of mouth to circumvent an otherwise laborious login process. It's kind of insulting that I had a quick way to log into my account and my alts taken away from me based on "security" when I've been using this process for as long as I've been playing GW2.(which is a long time). My post history may not reflect that, but it should also indicate how strongly I feel about this decision.

This was a poor decision on behalf of the dev team. Every single instruction on how to set this up clearly informs the player that their passwords and account info are stored on the local computer. If a player is compromised through having these shortcuts, it's on their shoulders. All this does is inconvenience long term players with multiple accounts who know a thing or two about security. Please revert ASAP.