Please read till the end before answering.
I have a big issue with the way Living World works.
It was fun to see changes in flame and frost. Revamps on Shiverpeaks and Ascalon locations it was fun. All said its boring for a month release but still was fun.
When we started to get RUSHING content it makes me kinda mad since ANet is forcing me to play periodically. I have to get more time every 2 weeks to do something before it goes away?
That’s stupid, but I guess it will work like addiction for most ppl who spend a lot of time in GW2. I love that they are making stuff every month but why take it all after 1 month or 2 weeks?!
Let’s face it. We are getting nothing that makes Tyria bigger. Only some scraps.
They made new map for Bazar (small, but VERY! nice) and we won’t have a reason to go in there after it ends. Cause there will be nothing to it.
The same happened with Southsun Cove.
Why? Cause those aren’t added to world map. They aren’t placing hearts there, there is not chest reward at the end, Vistas and all that it would make people want to visit it with every (or most) character and do it.
We are still stucked with barely breathing world when we could have living expanding world.
Imagine we could get every 2-4 month a new map, with a living story and after Living world ended it would change to explorable map. The world could expand (expansion could add some other maps or preferred go for Cantha world map like so many people hope for). Please don’t tell me it’s a lot more work than it already is, cause I’m not buying this.
ANet has the potential and it was showed already by making great dungeons like MF and AR (why aren’t they in fractals or just in world map so that people could play them again without achievements after Living story?), great JP like No so secret…, great maps like Bazar map, great story and cinematics like for Dragon festival investigation.
BIT ITS ALL WASTED for the concept of exclusiveness that more and more people are sic with.
The problem is only that ANet is wasting resources and that is why people are bored. If world expanded people who stopped playing would came back after a month or few and witnessed that they have very much to do even, if they missed actual Living story somewhere there is this 1 or 2 maps you can go into and have fun, it would make them play a lot, believe me I know that! Instead we have ALMOST NOTHING after each Living Story despite what they said we will have.
ANet said they wanted to make something out of Southsun, yet they only gave us some hard events with no equal to reward and nothing else happened with the map. Adding few walls and buildings wasn’t that hard. What else left? Nice metaevent that is undoable by people now when most just went away?
Why didn’t you made it world map? Only hearts and few more secure areas across map are missing. Difficulty would need to be lessened (only a bit) and we would have a quite nice map what should have some people by most of the time like on others world maps. Instead we have a dead map, that no one wants to go into except of farming passions flowers. Really, making like 2-3 Vistas and around 8 hearts would make it nice lvl 80 explorable map.
About wasted potential again.
Imagine how hard would it be to add 5 hearts/3 POIs/1 Vista for 1 or map each month to make people go in there and explore instead of FORCING us do obsidian sanctum and other jumping puzzles again and again (and yes thinking about it makes me SO MAD!!!) I made them already so long ago. Just stop it already!
Running around for kites, pirate boxes and such is no fun at all and you just could do a lot better without forcing people to redo all those JP when you don’t even give us title for completing them all.
On the other hand scavenger hunt for sky crystals was great. Why? Because it was new, just like going with Lion’s Arch founder and not some very stupid revamp on JPs. I bet making LA scavenger hunt didn’t took too long and it was still fun not to mention story scavenger hunt for 5 more suspects. Forcing me to redo JP that I did are no fun at all. Jumping Puzzles are fun the way they are, so please stop messing with them.
In the end I don’t want to so pessimistic. I really appreciate all the good work you make, but its still so much misguided. The world needs to expand and believe me everybody wanted it when we gear about living world, yet living is not only breathing (as it is now) it’s expanding and learning new things (well new things are on nice level), visiting new places, meeting new people and getting more and more to do. Not some mini games (which are nice anyway), but that is not what people want. We all just want A LOT permanent content especially more new maps.
WHO ISI WITH ME SAY AI!!!