Guild Wars 2

Let me get straight to the point. It looks like last real content update happened in November. What we got now is just a month long combo of Living Story and holiday event.

ohgodwhy.jpg

Roughly quoting someone on the intrawebz: ANet focuses on their weakest point and does nothing to strengthen it. Storytelling.
Story plot is certainly weak in the main game and it doesn’t really get better the further we go. What we keep on getting now is a bunch of whooping mysterious NPCs that usually will show up after weeks or months. A couple of speech bubbles here and there, perhaps a half a minute long cutscene or two aaaaaaand I think we are done for this month! Flame and Frost was just… Four months for… For content worth 1-2 hours of story.

Speaking of length
It’s even hard to recall what was going on before. 40 minutes total for 2 F&F missions, 20 mins for Molten Facility, 5 minutes for Canach’s Lair and another 5 for explorable mode and…? Ah. And all of that mixed with some achievements. Achievements? More like milestones or a checklist. Meet (as in press F and move along) some NPCs, just play some activity, defeat a couple of enemies. Takes a couple of hours. Hardly a month (or 2 weeks now?) worth of content.
And once you gave us Fractals that people still enjoy – although you said it’s gonna be constantly upgraded feature.

You spin me right round, baby right round
Recycle here, recycle there. Ideas or features. Let’s keep it short. I’m gonna use the ‘Press F’ term again. I’m sorry. Carving pumpkins, building snowmen, fixing signs, destroying pinatas, firing fireworks. Just do it a hundred of times. Pretty exciting, eh? What? No!? Then go and kill me some monsters that came out of these haunted doors. Or this big gift there. Or that shady portal. Or that hologram projector. You must be tired now. Just puke your guts out by eating some candies and we are almost done.

I bet you won’t find a cow in Tyria
Moa racing? Why is it even here? It’s tied to the previous point about recycling. I have no clue why but we’ve already had the betting system since the release. Cattlepult. Pretty much the same stuff. Bet some money, get more or none back. Just with a flat reward and no minipet to get. The only problem is that it was hardly accessible due to bugs.

And what’s bugging me is…
…if the whole QA team got fired by now. ‘We do test stuff extensively but the transition from dev to live builds is what causes problems’. Yeah, yeah. We have seen it countless times already. With every content update you can expect more bugs than features. No reason to get into details here but the best example is right here. Three (3!) exploits in one hour – rigging moa, forging knights, standing with healthy balls.

Random stuff
Activities are fun. They really are. For an hour (agaaaaaain). Then you get your achievements and move on. There is no (long-term) reward. Something like GW1’s skillz title that takes years to max out and you progress towards it through all activities would be one of the solutions. You get your 20 DB wins and that’s it. I don’t think you will keep on going for that 1 Dragon Coffer as the winner reward. It’s gonna be all for your self enjoyment and that will burn out fast.

tl;dr – Recycling, reskinning, no real content AGAIN.

Good points, I agree with most of them.

The game needs a change quickly, because the longevity is not there yet.

The 2-week cycle doesn’t do ANY good to the game currently. After the last patch I was unable to complete Fractals, events and whatnot because of random hot fixes popping randomly every now and then.

I hope Anet acknowledges the problem, is actively trying to figure out and learn the way of handling these frequent updates. Otherwise it’s just detrimental to the game’s health.

Metatail.1306:

Meet (as in press F and move along) some NPCs…

…and then complain there’s no story.

I see that happening a lot.

Everyone in game seems to be quiet happy. Allow me to provide some counter points.

1. It is YOUR opinion that their weakest point is their story telling. I would argue that some of their code is their weakest point, others might say it’s art etc… You should get the point. I like the current way the story is playing out, and yes I’ve played since before day 1. The trick is I also play LoL at a rather high elo, and I play single player games, so I don’t just exclusively play gw2.

2. I think someone needs to say this now, and just be clear about it. No one is MAKING anyone do anything. You can completely ignore this event in it’s entirety and still play the game perfectly fine. Again no one is making anyone do this event. If you find you can’t enjoy it just ignore it.

I can understand if you are frustrated about drop rates, or specific bugs, or anything like that. You seem to be frustrated about how the event is working out. The only advice I can offer is just pretend it’s not happening.