Guild Wars 2

How do you guys feel about LS with choice versus without choice?

For instance our current fight with Scarlet Briar you have no impact.

- You can’t choose a side to fight on.

- You aren’t contributing by logging on other than to your bank account. This event is moving forward no matter what so the choice to play or not to play doesn’t matter.

How do you feel about this versus the election for Kiel and Evon? Personally, I want all LS to do some form of requiring player participation like that. That would be amazing.

I feel that my choice didn’t matter and that I was putting in a lot of effort for something that was destined to fail, no matter how close the actual result was.

It is a MMO. Your choice is already decided….You want your own choices, go play single player RPG.

The problem with major choices is that it would take too long to implement. Any choice made now couldn’t take effect until months from now, considering these stories are made several months in advance.

If they were to commonly add choices, they’d have to be fairly minor, with major choices being once an while and dictating future directions. For the escape, a choice could be who lives and who gets to die, based on the total amount of civilians saved game wide. They could have done a whole marketing thing around it, similar to what other games have done to encourage participation, but that would be pretty mean to have a hit list – save 30 million civilians or quaggan dies.

I think they need to involve the guilds into things like escape from lions arch. Imagine letter being sent to guilds asking for assistance and what needs to be done. Now the guild leader could tell his followers lions arch is under attack and the powers that be need help in rescue and others to help with the defense of the city.

When they guild shows up they report to a crisis coordinator and state whether their team is there for rescue or defence.

They guild would get benefits if they did as asked. For instance the coordinator says your guild is needed by bank as a large aether pirate presence was there or we have civilians trapped by the fort.

Just a thought

I don’t ever want a repeat of Kiel/Evon because they tied specific content to each of them. Content that had absolutely nothing to do with that election.

If it didn’t have the fractals tied to them, it would have been fine.

I would love to have a choice to either spare or kill Scarlet. Give each person who will do whatever will be required to defeat her one vote, at end of the event voices are counted and she is either spared or killed

Danikat.8537:

As other people have said it’s a nice idea but it’s not practical to implement.

So in order to give us choices they either need to make it a choice that won’t have any impact until 4 months later, or they need to develop 2 (or more) versions of each release, and then only release one of them. Which means at least 1/2 their time would be going into making content that will never be released. That adds up to a lot of wasted effort.

Well it’s practical if you just have an A or B ending to each storyline. Not everything needs constant repercussions.

Also they can cheat and use the same basic framework of progress anyway no matter what you do, same as all choice games do like Mass Effect, The Walking Dead, etc… They just have to acknowledge what the majority of players thought should be the choice, they don’t have to build an entirely different universe.

The point of choice is just to make it feel its “our” world as the playerbase, not to do the impossible as far as development process.

I think the choice is to either join the Zerg or the rescue squad.

I hate when games make choices for me when there’s an illusion of choice, especially in RPG type games. It doesn’t really feel like an RPG if your choices don’t matter at all.

In LoTRO, there was an incident where you captured an enemy general. I would’ve wanted to kill him then and there, but the game was written so that we take him captive. Then the NPC’s started badmouthing my character for sparing him, he escaped, killing several other NPC’s and I got the blame. Great.

We aren’t the main characters, we’re soldiers. Soldiers don’t get a choice

Zylonite.5913:

It is a MMO. Your choice is already decided….You want your own choices, go play single player RPG.

Even better, a table top RPG. A good GM can tailor the world and stories to fit the players actions. Any unused content is also much easier to reuse later on.

It would be nice to be able to affect the game world, but I understand why it not possible to have those kinds of choices on a large scale. Enjoy the small ones when you can!

Zylonite.5913:

It is a MMO. Your choice is already decided….You want your own choices, go play single player RPG.

Pretty much this. Having choice is nice and all, but it doesn’t work in a themepark MMO, at least not outside instances.

I think it could work in some regards similar to what Healix said – in other words you tie it into the events results.
For example the main thing at the moment is rescuing citizens so you could have something like an average of the whole deployment. If 50% are rescued then certain citizens are saved this will be reflected in npcs that return or don’t return.

If you take the death of Kiel/Evon as an ending. They could have had either in Lion’s Arch trying to spur people to safety but one won’t make it out alive.

If, as an average, across the servers get 75% or more saved citizens we get to choose as a vote. (though it would be intereresting if this was individual server based i.e a server can become different depending on actions – though this could be extremely unmanagable)

You could have something that also could go into the next event.

Take the potions against Scarlet’s armies
If across the servers we got an average of 50% or below saved citizens then get a standard potion
50% to 75% a much better one
75% to 99% even better than before
100% a sort of ascended style potion perhaps

This then becomes available through the next event as something to buy with some as free gifts from the citizens as a thank you. (though this could have different servers with different potions strengths would defeat the object with guesting available)

(Or maybe all of the above)

Finally another example could be the miasma – maybe one of the three areas will still be unavailable once lion’s arch is free. Therefore look at all the events which one of the three was successful less. Therefore when freed an area is still unaccessible (traders elsewhere if need people – somepeople still displaced) thereby leading to another side-story to free it.

To me even the single player games give the illusion of choice i.e everyone goes through the same bits its just the details the journey may be different depending on your choices or in our case actions.

Finally a problem could be people deliberately sabotaging / ignoring one event perhaps but if this is done across all the servers then maybe not so much?