Guild Wars 2

More like obnoxiously frustrating regressions. Especially after watching Wooden Potatoes’ youtube video about the new update, saying how he liked the new way Arenanet presents Living World directives to players.

So first you get a mail which gives you the gist of things as usual which is cool and all, but the absolutely freaking ridiculous thing is, I kept hearing about this new story instance in LA. Makes sense, to introduce this random Taimi character that they introduced to appease the Asura fans, amongst other things. But why the hell did they not send another in-game mail to your character after participating in the marionette fight to let you as the player know about the story instance and how to get there? I swear to God, it was like an absolute conspiracy. No mail telling us about the story instance, and I even searched all around Lion’s Arch on a character I had stationed there. Then, after thirty minutes of running around and switching characters, you sneaky kittens changed the message in the bottom Living World box in the upper right to allude to the story instance, and even show a waypoint.

What. The. Hell. Seriously Arenanet? Not even going to give the players an in-game mail to tell us about the story instance you spent so much voice acting to create? Not even going to give us a mail TELLING us WHERE TO FIND the stupid text box that you have to click to show you WHERE to go? Good Lord, I haven’t been this frustrated with an update since— nope, this has got to be the most kittenedly un-intuitive “improvement” I can think of.

Arenanet, I love you guys and I love this game, but for the love of all that’s good in the world, don’t make your game more obnoxious to play, and seriously, don’t try to hide your story instance from players. I still can’t believe we don’t get a mail to our character that participated in the marionette fight that says “Hey, meet up with your buds in Lion’s Arch for some cool story!” Nope. Not a kitten word like that. And it took me half an hour to find out where the hidden instructions were because it’s intuitive to have a character near the boss to do the event, and another character in Lion’s Arch (or wherever else the other Living World content may be) to explore the new content. While I can understand why you’d want players to have experienced the world boss first, it’s absolutely inexcusable why it’s so obnoxiously subtle how to find your way to the story instance.

Keep on keeping on, and keep off making the game frustrating with these regressive changes.

Heralds. What are they doing these days? Weren’t they supposed to help with this? What happened?

Seriously guys, use the heralds to:

Tell us context sensitive LS directives

Give us alerts of boss pre-events so the entire player base doesn’t have to default to out of game tools (Precedence: the LFG window)

Give us a rough time estimate of when the current phase will expire.

Umm, the Living Story text in upper right corner of the screen changed from “Fight Scarlet’s New Toy” to “Go to LA and check up on Braham the Tiny and his non norn unimportant sidekicks!”, after the marionette fight, didn’kitten

I know I found it without much trouble “Hmm what now, oh, something flashed! Coo, nice text!”

Meh =\ and yeah, even though I spent half as long inside the story instance as I did trying to find the freaking thing, it was pretty cool and I enjoyed it. Also the marionette boss fight is simply awesome because failure actually means something on epic proportions. While I was doing the fight I thought to myself “Hey, it would be really cool if the superweapon actually activated if we fail” and it did. No sarcasm, it’s nice having failure not just be the big bad guy disappears in thin air, seriously.

Also, kittenedly. That’s actually pretty funny

Yes, I like how we die if we fail, and our armour brakes! It’s consequences! Not big ones, but consequences! Makes me kinda wanna try harder knowing that if I’ll win I’ll save myself than silver piece (I’m kitten poor).

Jesus Christ, getting PMs now from kids trying to be e-thugs. Lemme clarify the situation as it went down for some of you who just don’t get it:

So all I heard about reaching the story instance was that you had to participate in the marionette boss encounter and you could get there. After the fight, I actually did check the Living World orange star thing under Origins of Madness and the second one down did say something about going to Lion’s Arch. I thought okay, cool. I want to leave THIS CHARACTER currently in LORNAR’S PASS right here. I hopped on my OTHER CHARACTER who happened to be in LION’S ARCH to find the story instance. Spent many a minute running everywhere Living World crap usually is in Lion’s Arch, found nothing. Checked the upper-right tab again, and it said something about going to Lornar’s pass to stop the weapon test. Went back to the FIRST CHARACTER still at Lornar’s and since I’d just checked the Living World tab and hadn’t got any in-game mail or other notification, wondered what the hell was going on. I talked to all the npc’s, nothing. Went back to my other character in Lion’s Arch, still nothing.

Long story short, so much for the intuitive idea that’s worked pretty much every single freaking release previously of, you know, having one character where all the stuff is going down and another character in, usually LA because that’s the general hub for stuff, so that you have access to everything without having to way point around everywhere on the same character all the darn time. It saves A LOT on way point travel costs because hey, guess what? It doesn’t cost you money to log out from one character and log in to another who are in two different locations that you would otherwise have to pay in-game currency to travel between! Imagine that!

Just wanted to clear that bit up in case any more kids try to play cute in my inbox.

I have to agree 100% with Mal. I have friends who have been logging on more than I have and they had NO idea there was an instance in LA. I only found it by sheer luck because I happen to read the forums, I could have easily missed reading about it.

ArenaNet has spend months training their customers to expect in game mails that tell us where to find the new content for each update. And so why do they decide to send an email that only mentions the boss fights and completely ignores the instance?

A little marker on the LA map is not enough. A piece of text up in the corner is not enough. They need to make a patch and send out an email.

I’m ticked because I really enjoyed this instance. I’d have to say it is probably the highlight of the update for me. I liked the development of the characters and the refinement of the scene interaction mechanic.

And most importantly, it shows the story in way so that EVERYONE can see it. You don’t need to get an achievement. You don’t need to group up and run a dungeon. This is lore for the whole community. It’s brilliant and I hope to see more scenes like it.

Except ArenaNet hasn’t used the mail system that they have used since launch to TELL anyone about it.

It is aggravating to think people out there may never see this because ArenaNet is failing to clearly communicate with their customers. This has been a ongoing weakness with ArenaNet that I have harped about and even when they have systems to try to fix this (like the ingame mails), they stop using them for inexplicable reasons. /shakeshead.

TLDR; Cool new story instance, but ANet needs to use their existing in-game mail system to tell ppl about it.