Guild Wars 2

2/10

I’d have gone as high as 4/10 without the bugs, but ugh. I don’t mind a zerg, but I’m so sick of the DPS checks combined with 4-5 random hoops to jump through designs that fail 80% of the time in what should be a completely accessible story to all players. This is the living story. Let everybody have FUN. Even winning is simply tedious. Leave the volumes of fail for the Teq and Wurm crowds.

Story was OK, and I didn’t need to be shocked, but since it was as expected all it could do was be implemented well. It was. But the event itself felt lame, I felt impotent, and uninspired. The last LS was totally the opposite. It felt like a war, and I felt like I was contributing and making a difference. More of that please.

Story 9/10
Temporary content: gameplay 8/10
Temporary content: rewards 4/10
Permanent content (fractals aside) 3/10
Fractals of the mists 6/10
Progression updates (crafting, WvW level, etc.) 7/10
SAB 9/10
Overall 6.5/10 (D+)
Well done, ANet, you almost got a passing score!

Good
Scarlet’s Demise and the npc reactions to it.

Bad
Just about everything else. Some of the decisions have left me dumbstruck.

Ultimately, Fail. Scarlet’s Demise counts for a lot, but not enough to make up for the rest.

I enjoyed it a lot. Was fun to play through with friends, and I looked forward to logging in during each update. 8/10

For the most part I really enjoyed it except…when Scarlet asks,

I mean, can you imagine that being the last line of an engaging on the edge of your seat novel?

Otherwise I was really impressed with how much was added (and taken away) during the whole first season of the Living Story.

9/10

Depends, if i go by story, gameplay, npcs, overall feel, i’d say
8/10, if i go by the “untested, unpolished, bug-ridden” aspect then probably 5/10.
Despite all the bugs i’m enjoying it and in the end that’s why i play games.

Gameplay wise I think the end of living story is very good. Knights + hologram fights are quite fun, as well as scarlet stomp.
I don’t care about the story.

D- Anet need a lot more effort in making LS more interesting and less bugs

It was really bad. 2/10 They really need to find more employees.

i think its telling that the finale is just so full of bugs they can’t get it sorted out. For all their talk about how they can handle the release schedule their QA clearly can’t. The story part was really bad they tried really hard to save it in the end but set themselves up for failure with a terrible start. some of the updates where really good but alot where not. also dont forget the “expansion worth of content”.

Pass- I loved it! Love the hologram fight, love the instance, and loved all the new characters, especially Rox and Braham. I don’t understand all the hate LS is getting=/

Depends. If it comes to story then I must say that I loved how they finished it. It was just like with Guild Wars Eye of the North ending .
If it comes to event overall, Im a little bit dissapointed. I simply hate zergology and the way Knights are scaled. Devs simply didn’t considered fact that this game is played by ppl that play different builds (not only full dps) and that there are ppl with lower level than 80. On top of that archivement where we need to kill all 3 knights in 6 minutes is simply a joke. During this few days when ppl could zerg knights one by one all knights were dying 90% of times. Now when they changed to 50/50/50 zerg we are able to complete is 30-40% of times. And on top of that last Knight usually dies around 10 seconds before end. I’m ot sure how it looks like on other servers but everytime I want to join event it looks this way (no matter if main server or overflow).

The finale event is a fail in my opinion. The random drops off the knights/bosses to get 10 power cores of the same kind. That is too much like raiding which is why I quit other games. Please stop with the ridiculous rng already. This is the epic finale conclusion to a year long living story and they gate it? Seriously? Other than that I am so sick of grinding achievements over and over. There were some good releases throughout the year but this and the marionette thing were abysmal.

In terms of Story, I would rate Season 1 as a 7/10, with the last few chapters being better than the early stuff.

In terms of gameplay, I would have rated this final update as being 8/10 or so on Tuesday night, but after the more recent patches they’ve dropped it to 2/10. In its current states it’s one of the weakest LW updates they’ve had, the Knights just won’t die to small zergs.

I’d say the need to improve the overall story telling and mechanics. It feels like the latest updates have been really good. Flame and Frost had excellent story telling though. Same with the latest ones. ArenaNet are getting close to perfect Story Updates.

What needs to get better is how they polish content and also how repetive the content is, i mean there is two weeks between LS updates, so the content need to be fun to play over and over, also needs to be bug free and rewards has to be good.

Good Idea—Looks great!
Implementation (not out of 10—just a letter grade) POS.

Anet, you had a lot of great ideas, which have barely shown through the fecal veil of the rushed 2-week schedule. Slow down, give those good ideas time to nurture. Work on your dialog writing. And kitten please put more effort into QA- remember, playtest early, playtest often. Your ideas are good, but ideas need time to nurture, to polish, and to grow properly. This LS season started strong but slowly each update became more and more rushed, it seemed. Please lose the 2-week release schedule.

That having been said, I’d looking forward to SAB part 3 when (and ONLY WHEN) you’re ready to release it.

Story 2/10.
Implementation 5/10.

I dont care about stories and did not pay attention to this one, so i can not rate story at all.

So not bearing story in mind at all, it was a failure in my opinion. I have been more annoyed than I enjoyed myself. My reasons in no particular order:

It frustrates me when I can not do content because the overflow i am stuck in does not have the right amount of people. That is not how it should be. I started out being a fan of the overflow idea and now I really hate it because I dont think its done well (e.g. no progression into the next best overflow, no chance to play with friends unless they travel to the bad overflow etc, guests taking spots in the main zone of our server etc).

I I think expecting that we organise 100 strangers or more in order to get to the next step of an event is naive, especially when you do not give us no tools other than map chat for communication. (If it was not overflow we could use TS..)

I also can not understand how loot bugs can take days to fix. Then drop rate of the cores… I still have not seen any core drop, yet people claim they drop a lot and are even worth farming? Then again apart from some cash I might make with it on the TP, i dont care about it because i dont want to display a back piece that looks like spiderlegs, no matter what colour it might have.

Bearing the problems of empty overflows in mind, I really do not understand how – after some patches – you force us to split up for the different fights.

I think that the mechanics of the fights are quite fun – in theory. The fun then gets ruined by the amount of HP of the encounters though. It just takes too long and feels repetitive.

I really like GW2, the LS has not ruined the game for me, but i am glad that this content does not stay because i rather see people doing content I enjoy myself as well.

I have to say 6/10, at best.

• Too many bugs.
• I’m very tired of Yet Another Zerg.
• I’m very tired of bosses who are big bags of HP. Standing around doing the same thing for 15 min. is not fun.
• Since I didn’t like the back skin, I discarded all my blade shards. Only to find out when this installment dropped that it was a shortcut to the end cinematic. I wouldn’t care either way except that it now appears unlikely I will get a group that can successfully complete the fight.
• For the most part, this final installment felt just like the previous one, which I was already bored with very quickly.

For me, the best releases of the year were SAB, the Zephyr Sanctum (hands down, my favorite), the holiday JP’s, and the Marionette. Everything else was dominated by “Here a zerg, there a zerg, everywhere a zerg zerg!” If I want to do nothing bu zerg, I can follow the champ trains. I don’t need a new zerg backdrop every 2 weeks.

Love the game, love the world, love the concept, but pretty much had it with zerg fests.

8/10 initially. Each patch has taken 1 off that score.

The story content is fantastic and I love the concept of the boss fight. The music, presentation, and mechanics were really cool. There were bugs initially, but nothing too unpredictable, and they patched them the first night so the event was very fun that night and the next day.

…Then came the extra patches, rendering the content unwinnable by all but the largest population servers because they didn’t like the way the smaller servers found to beat it, breaking the HP display in the progress, then outright removing the HP display instead of fixing it to “reduce confusion” by making you completely confused how the rest of the event is progressing.

Basically I would gladly trade night one and all of its bugs for what each of the updates has done to it, and my score of the event has fallen drastically as a result. It was a really good event, and I’m grateful for it, but literally every patch has made it worse to run.

Their heart is in the right place, though, and I’m looking forward to Season 2 on the whole. They’ve done a lot more right this year than wrong. Just that this event went from good to nearly unwinnable on my server.

4/10

Pretty embarrassing over all.

the Battle for LA wasn’t my kind of gameplay;

not having anything building on the strengths of GW2:

• exploration (I don’t count finding Peter as content for exploration)
• traversing puzzle-like environment
• fun small-scale action combat

instead having content which GW2 tends to have problems with:

• big scale zerg content (scaling issues, stale gameplay, screen cluttering, particle effects)

Personally I tried the events in LA, found them really boring because the legendary bosses take forever to kill – then getting no loot and the bugs that the teleporters won’t work because all platforms are blue instead of 3 colors.

… then skipping the whole final battle via a teleporter… loved the end-sequence but I have the feeling that I’ve missed the whole good part… still can’t bring it over myself to try it because it’s a 1 hour investment to get to the knights and when failed means 1 hour more – with the chance of a bug at the bosses again.

I loved the Marionette and the dead end investigation – my favourite part of the finale.

Characters: 8/10

I enjoyed the characters. In a love/hate kinda way. I think in order to really appreciate some characters you need that contrast. Of course, some characters I dislike in a bad way too. Strictly talking about the last episode of the LS, I enjoyed the way things ended up with Rox and Braham, thought the kiss was appropriate and constructive, and thoroughly enjoyed watching Scarlet die.

Plot: 6/10

A low seven maybe, only because it was rather predictable, but in general I liked the writing. Taking back Lion’s Arch was a sad victory (in a good way) that will change the way I see Tyria.

Execution: 4/10

Though the team was quick to respond to a multitude of issues, the lack of polish was rather disappointing. Conceptually, I’d give it a similar score. Achievements were ill-conceived (the spider queen, In-Tune, among others), easily spoiled by trolls, by game mechanics themselves, or which caused players to change their play style in a way that damaged the experience of others. I felt players were turned against each other at least as much as they were encouraged to cooperate. Examples: Saving citizens vs. zerging events, the Assault Knights and the patched mechanics, and the design of the hologram fight.

2/10, 1 being the worst

5/10

Bad scaling on the events. It’s also another content which automatically becomes zerg content. Not ArenaNet’s fault? Maybe, but they should see to that so players doesn’t make it into another zerg content.

Achievements for this encourages players to stand idle and AFK and not helping in the final fight. The encounter causes delay lag which makes everyone run at the same spot or into a wall, suddenly it comes together and you find yourself downed.

If unlucky, disconnects pushes you outside the last encounter, so everything you fought for was in vain.

The story was alright, and I think ArenaNet have become better with character development.

What I actually dislike is that you the player is the one killing Scarlet, it will just not cut it in the lore.

I still think ArenaNet should stay to their painted cinematics and not try to play around with the models. Kasmeer and Marjory looked horrible in that animation, it made me cringe.

Now where’s my Super Adventure Box, I need to cool myself down.

Hisuichan.7983:

8/10 initially. Each patch has taken 1 off that score.

The story content is fantastic and I love the concept of the boss fight. The music, presentation, and mechanics were really cool. There were bugs initially, but nothing too unpredictable, and they patched them the first night so the event was very fun that night and the next day.

…Then came the extra patches, rendering the content unwinnable by all but the largest population servers because they didn’t like the way the smaller servers found to beat it, breaking the HP display in the progress, then outright removing the HP display instead of fixing it to “reduce confusion” by making you completely confused how the rest of the event is progressing.

Basically I would gladly trade night one and all of its bugs for what each of the updates has done to it, and my score of the event has fallen drastically as a result. It was a really good event, and I’m grateful for it, but literally every patch has made it worse to run.

Their heart is in the right place, though, and I’m looking forward to Season 2 on the whole. They’ve done a lot more right this year than wrong. Just that this event went from good to nearly unwinnable on my server.

Pretty much this. I have really enjoyed the LS. Great concept though I did not do everything throughout the whole story. I did enough to get most of the metas though.

I loved the Marionette but was sad to see a lot of folk just would not stick around to learn the mechanics. It was challenging and fun to figure out what you needed to do to beat each warden. I also loved the Battle for Lions Arch, though the many complaints about the AFKer and Leechers were taking the event down a bit. At the beginning I did not see as many but by the end you could run around and find folk afking everywhere. The citizens rescued kept dropping. Or you had the heirloom hunters which in itself I do understand because after all we were gathering them, but they often upscaled events when they ran through and made it difficult for those doing events. I would have liked to have seen individual rewards for numbers rescued and also server rewards for working towards that. Certain numbers rescued by server as a whole over the event = an additional reward over what was rewarded for the hourly rescues. After all our mission was to fight Scarlet’s troops and rescue civilians. I think the Selfless potion should have been tied to the rescues and the Thoughtless one tied to the rubble.

Overall I enjoyed this immensely. Ending not so much but not in the story aspect because I am excited to see what comes next and finding out more why Scarlet did what she did. While the current iteration of the Knight fight while not impossible has become difficult enough that anyone not dedicated to doing it right gives up. It is definitely doable but I am not sure enough of the population is willing to learn what to do to make it successful. ANet is not wholly to blame, some does lie on lazy players who do not want to learn skills to at least survive the encounter. If you are constantly going down or dying or keep getting sucked into the knight’s pull it is you, not ANet’s fault. Learn from each encounter and listen to what others are saying in chat and try to improve.

Fail – After day 1 I was 1 achieve away from the meta, with just a few rounds of killing LA. This release as well as the last has lead me to level an alt and clearing map, not farming LA. I give Anet credit for the lofty goal of trying something new with a 2 week release schedule, but it is rushed, unpolished and filled with bugs that are achievement/game breaking. But…. being the best game in a saturated market and no sub fees, I will continue to play here and there until something takes my attention.

Started with promise but ended in epic failure. As usual Anet writers blew it severely. Can we PLZ go back to normal now.

People are whining way too much. Was it George RR Martin crossed with the most epic set-pieces from your favourite insert-single player game-here?

No, but it was OK. Story was wobbly but eventually made sense and there are nowhere near as many bugs or fight problems as people pretend.

People complain MMOs don’t evolve and when ArenaNet put together a half decent pass at it they rage.

Could all the various LS events have been improved? Sure; some, like the Karka event were disastrous and most could use a number of fixes or changes to the reward model but it wasn’t fail, it was OK.

With most things I can see some good and some bad. I personally enjoy the LS pretty much. I turn up each time it opens and look at the achieves and start trying to get as many as possible. But I’m pretty goal orientated and they give me a goal to get a prize if I finish the achieves, so there I go. Also, I miss doing quests so the achieves are like quests for me.

There are parts of the LS that I did not like. For instance the 5 man dungeons which I hate and avoid like the plaque. But I also realize there are many players who live for them. So in a live and let live life stile I just ignore the dungeons and the players stuck in them. As long as I am not forced into them it’s fine with me.

Most of this content is short 2-4 week content and all though well done and fun to explore it is not expected to hold your attention for any longer than a few weeks.. You go, you enjoy something new, you have a good time and then wait for the next installment.

It’s hard for players to not over expect this content. It’s hard for players to not want more. It’s hard for players to not want the next big thing in every new episode. Stuff has gone wrong and things have been miscalculated on both sides. Not everyone is going to like all of the content all of the time. Not everyone is going to hate all of the content all of the time. The devs have a hard road to navigate. And a lot of people to make happy, all of which have a different idea of what the game should be.

Yes, there are quite a few bugs. But they don’t bother me as much as others. I see it as short term content that probably will take a day or 2 to work out. I expect some bugs. A lot of problems happen when the bugs are resolved but not to your liking.

The Knights were a problem. They were designed to do one way and the player base found a different way. Which is always a problem with player bases, we are always working on a better, easier, or more lootful way. The first day, the first time I did it very early in the day we split into 3 groups and finished the knights and went into the ship and waited for the event to start. We won and I was down by the scarlet door and got the notice for the instance and went, never even saw a chest to loot. Missed out big there. But was pretty stoked we won. I suspect the devs thought it was too easy and made it a bit harder after that. Then the zergs started and I enjoyed that too. But doing it that way put you into the holo battle too late to win because the holo battle timer starts when the first knight dies. My biggest problem with a lot of this new content is the gimics to the fights. The Barrels, hearts, bones and lights over your head. I get that You want to make it challenging for us but I got my skills and really just want to use them most of the time. Once in a while a gimic is Ok but I don’t want a lifestyle of it. The colored circles on the floor are hard to see especially if they are under the die if you go here zones.

One issue I’ve had with the new content is how often players are downed or killed. I don’t think they are all bad players. I do think that we are given pretty hard challenges and sometime think we are ill equipped for them. We were just given new armor and it has had little effect on game play. Actually I think it’s easier to get downed or die with the new armor and new content than it was with the old armor and old content. I don’t like dying or getting downed and I especially don’t like getting one shot and downed by a boss. Especially when I have no chance of doing it to him. So we’ve been taught to work in numbers to attack a big target with many to do with many what one could not do. But, hence the Zerg. Love or hate it you need a lot of players working somewhat together to do a lot of these things. I’d rather have to deal with a zerg than a lot of 5 man trinity dungeons. I love the open world dynamic content.

So, do I think the LS is an epic fail. No way. Do I think there is room to improve, sure. I’m looking forward to it. Basically, I terms we can all understand I would give the whole thing a B+. Way better than average but with room to improve. Thanks for all the good times and I hope to have a few more.

3 out of 10
I love epic stories… this game couldn’t pass for a children’s novel.

Mian.1945:

People are whining way too much. Was it George RR Martin crossed with the most epic set-pieces from your favourite insert-single player game-here?

No, but it was OK. Story was wobbly but eventually made sense and there are nowhere near as many bugs or fight problems as people pretend.

People complain MMOs don’t evolve and when ArenaNet put together a half decent pass at it they rage.

Could all the various LS events have been improved? Sure; some, like the Karka event were disastrous and most could use a number of fixes or changes to the reward model but it wasn’t fail, it was OK.

I apologize fully that we don’t share your opinion, but I guess we’ll have to live with you disliking that fact…

To clarify my comment, because some here are speaking abou the LS as a whole while others, or at least myself took this to be a thread abou the END of season 1. I liked the LS a lot overall. Some didn’t blow me away. I knew Scarlet had more to her than most thought; she wasn’t a groundbreaking villain but she was fine, and the slow reveal didn’t bother me. World events take time to unfold.

But the final chapter? Kill me now. What a trainwreck of irritation and tedium. Huge letdown after I enjoyed the bulk of every other release.

Trends also scare me, because what I loathe here seems to be the intended direction. I pray I’m wrong.

8/10

Gonna miss Scarlet …

1 year for nothing, absolutely nothing, because if we draw up the balance sheet, there is only some smoke, smoke of a pointless story which is there since more than one year

i don’t care about mordermoth, we will probably wait another year, for a final fight full of bug, again

And for scarlet, a pathetic death for a pathetic character

Content
Content was fairly good, not meaty enough due to constant use of zerg events though. They need to reduce the frequency of zerg events and polish small group(3 to 10 people) content.

Story
Story wise they went in strong, fell off HARD through the middle, and then recovered a bit after Christmas with a pretty satisfying conclusion. Over all, they need to find a better way to get the story to the player. While traditional questing is boring for leveling, it would certainly serve them well for certain story content so I would suggest that.

Overall
Largest problem of the LS continues to be that the content is temporary, and is presented in a format that often times doesn’t allow it to be persistent. Heavier use of instances for the story (perhaps Personal Story style), and lowering the number of zerg events(since they can’t be done at the players own pace and occupy large parts of the world that need to be reclaimed after the patch ends) would help fix this.

Cutscene was great. Story was nice. The game mechanics for the fight, extremely buggy. Heck we had a champion spawn on top of the Green Knight and it wiped the whole event.

My server gave up on the knights and just after the champions. Nice going Anet!
Epic Fail.

1/10 Definitely the worst of the LS. So many bugs. It’s like they took all the wrong lessons from the previous installments. 1. Zerg content. 2. Unskippable cutscenes. 3. RNG. 4. Bosses than are just hp tanks. 5. Story full of large plot holes. 6. Tedious achievements that promote selfish gameplay 7. Many gamebreaking bugs.

Shen Slayer.3058:

My server gave up on the knights and just after the champions. Nice going Anet!
Epic Fail.

Serious suggestion: guest to another server.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing so and it works just fine. Even if you get into an overflow you can still succeed the event, in some cases the overflows actually do better then main server (a perfect example of which being Marionette a few weeks ago, where overflows were consistently doing better then main on my server).

Seems like if you weren’t on the first day your screwed. Been trying to get past the knights for a couple days and fail each time due to not enough people playing. Oh well haven’t played in months and un-installed the game again. Maybe i’ll try the next big event.

FAIL

The story was horrible, the ending didn’t explain anything, the last few patches were crippled by game-breaking bugs. The content is entirely focussed on grinding for rewards that are not worth it.

DaShi.1368:

1/10 Definitely the worst of the LS. So many bugs. It’s like they took all the wrong lessons from the previous installments. 1. Zerg content. 2. Unskippable cutscenes. 3. RNG. 4. Bosses than are just hp tanks. 5. Story full of large plot holes. 6. Tedious achievements that promote selfish gameplay 7. Many gamebreaking bugs.

This sums it up nicely. Like the rest of the Unliving Story, the finale was 100 % fail.

I could rate it if I had any clue what the story was about…..

I killed Scarlet finally, but no idea how she ended up half dead on the floor in some lab….

Also I am never found out who she was or why she attacked GW2….

Content gameplay-wise 0/10
boring, uninspired. The fact that overflows fail the knight says a lot more about the average gw2 player (how can those zerg keep getting pulled all the time by one of the most heavily telegraphed aoe of the game?) than the quality or skill required to complete it.
too many achievs depends on random circumstances (finding yourself with the right people except that you don’t get to chose who you’re playing with in the open world).
mediocre rewards (the hour spent camping for, then killing the knight, then the holograms doesn’t even begin to compare to what you can gain just running 3 paths of a dungeon like AC) with almost no loot (the previous LA event was zergy and bad but at least the loot was good).
The fact that something like TTS is needed along with ferrying people through overflows (what a chore) and camping maps says a lot about the need for actual instanced content in this game, rather than forcing the players to try to circumvent the idea behind the open world by artificially managing their “instances” through overflows and clunky party mechanics. Get it, if you want good content you need instances. Open world doesn’t work.

Also, the biggest challenge to the knight and hologram fights is to not fall asleep on your keyboard.

story 1/10
I only gave it 1 point for the fact that we finally saw scarlet die and LA burn for good. I know letting villains do a speech while they are on their final death throes is cliché, but anet failed by not highlighting her motives more during the whole living story season which means that letting her explain herself during this last scene was the last way to save this sorry thing anet calls a story in my eyes, and they even failed at that by letting one of the most boring npc, braham, interrupt her with even more cliché hero speech (We’re tyrians blabla I wanted to punch him so hard when I heard that line). So we now know what Scarlet did but we still have zero actual clue as for the why. She wakes up a dragon because.. reasons.. great. 1 year of crappy story telling for this? are you guys for real.

The whole Living Story thing basically destroyed any potential guild wars 2 had to be a great MMO. The Ascalonian Catacombs revamp promised that we were going to see a revamp of a all the dungeons in this game, and I personally found the AC revamp to be much better than the previous incarnation of the dungeon (the boss fights are a lot more interesting). That potential went to trash when they got side tracked by the living story and let dungeons rot.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/chris-whiteside-on-the-lost-shores-and-beyond/
This is what they promised and will never deliver.
“Revamping all of our existing dungeons (Story and Explorable versions) through rebalance and overhauled encounters.”

AC was the one and only dungeon they even dared to give a look at.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/robert-hrouda-on-upcoming-changes-to-dungeon-mechanics/

Phase 2 of our dungeons evolution will see a lot of changes to bosses and enemies. We plan on taking a good, hard look at the health values and mechanics of our elites and bosses, and in turn how we reward players for their time investment and risk. This will include looking into every boss in our dungeons and seeing what we can do to enhance the gameplay experience in order to make more memorable and strategic encounters.

It has been a year since that whole press release was written. Everything in that press release is a lie.

Whole living story season : -2/10. Yes, negative scoring. Because overall the living story did more bad than good for the game. Some things, like the queen’s gauntlet, were decently okay, but things like resetting our fractal level for almost nothing (dailies 50 feel easier to complete than the old 48, some bosses have been made completely irrelevant like Ashym since the NPC are so overpowering him with the agony patch) making us grind again is a loss for literally no gain.

Revert the game to a previous state and act like none of this ever happened and it will already be ten times better off for it. Revert it to before the fractal patch, to before dumbfire, healing signet, berserker stance and all that jazz and both TPVP and PVE will be better off for it. Just admit your patches made the game worse for it. Pretty much most of the TPVP forum is criticism about changes you’ve made this past year, rather than the base game and mechanics. Pretty much most of the PVE players are fed up with fractals these days and a lot left the game or stopped running FOTM after the fractured patch. You can still save this game, just admit all the past year work was going into the wrong direction and annihilate it. Scarlet never happened.

I’m not going to judge on gameplay, but I will pronounce myself about the story since, actually trying to make a living out of writing novels, I’m quite into the field.
So I’m going to give it a 5/10 and that’s for me a pretty high of a score already.

The living story works, as it does have the capability to keep you interested in knowing what’s going to happen next, however there is information left unclear, outright confusing, or events that feel plainly wrong.
Like Scarlet’s ultimate target and what happens right before her death. Right when she is about to reveal what was behind all her evil doings… here comes Braham saying “ain’t nobody got time fo dat” and the great heroes of Tyria just proceed to kill her before she can tell her “magical secrets” to everyone.

Well that’s a classic by the book, we’ve all seen that before. I’m sure the story writers want people to find out everything through the next story chapters, but Braham acting like a complete kittenbag there felt quite forced and cliché.
Gathering information on an enemy is always useful, and there’s no way in reality you’d have refused to listen to her revelations, which, in most cases, would most likely turned out to be true. For what sake should a dying individual lie anyways? Unless it means protecting something or someone else still alive. But who would she protect, the dragon? Come on. There were a million other ways to prevent Scarlet from telling the truth, if that’s what they wanted.

The kiss scene between Marjory and Kasmeer… yes, it fits the moment indeed, but… I mean, we could’ve lived without it or the whole love affair. Now I’m not an homophobe, but it all feels forced to follow some trend going on with the media lately, only because it draws attention.

Last but not least: Caithe’s untold secret, so dark she goes berserk on Scarlet to prevent others from knowing it. Well, Scarlet’s dead now and nothing else was anymore told about it. Uh, yeah, where’s Caithe anyways? It looks like everybody just forgot about her after the events of Twilight Arbor.

I’m still amazed they can still make an argument against PTR, the 100 or so in house testers need to be fired with the writers. Super Fail based on bugs and writing alone. Arenanet sales were close to 50 million last year and this year they are headed for the Asian markets, so spare me the we don’t have a sub and that’s why are content is lacking cry.

I rather enjoyed the marionette portion except for the epic fail (5/40 attempts). The fights were actually pretty fun. I give that one 6/10 because of the group fail mechanic. The wurms weren’t my thing, but I think some people enjoyed them, maybe.

I liked the first LA encounter as saving the citizens was fun and I thought the achievements weren’t to onerous. Plus the timer and timing was good. I give this one a 9/10. I did it many, many times.

I didn’t like the latest LA encounter as it was far too buggy. I feel as if I wasted 4-5 evenings on it and that’s no fun. The game mechanics of the holograms went on far too long, gave me several headaches, and to fail at the end of it was like flushing that hour of my life down the toilet. That’s not a particularly good game design. I’m not an achievement hunter but I thought they weren’t very good because of the bugs. I give this one a 4/10. The only reason I still do it is because I can knock out a couple of daily quests pretty easily.

I liked the arcing storyline for Scarlett, but I have to admit, I didn’t really read through all the dialogue and intentionally skipped parts of it. Nice to see her get it in the end.

EotM feels more like a group PVE battlefield than a wvw one. It was sold as the answer to wvw queues, but the long runs back to the action, poor communcations, too many PVE situations, large size, and tortuous pathways make it far less appealing to me. I think most wvw fans feel the same way as I keep seeing them in regular borderlands. I rate EotM as a 3/10 and haven’t been back to it since playing on it 4-5 times. It may get better once Season 2 starts.

Interesting story with teasing finale. So I rate this 7.5/10
Extremely boring last 2 updates for grinders, that basically make 150 ppl help 2-3 that actually get the worthy drops… I am no that altruistically oriented… 1/10 (considering all the bugs + lots of achievements becoming hard because ppl like to troll…)
Nice ideas about all those group mechanics starting with Teq BUT the fact only 2-3 servers area actually capable of doing them is a fail… 8/10 for the idea, 3/10 for implementation…