Guild Wars 2

So one of the issues some people have with the Living Story is the sense of a one and done deal. not only that, but I can only imagine it can get tiresome for the Dev team to have to work on new material every two weeks, even with four whole teams working at a time. So here’s my suggestion for Rotating Content.

What is Rotating Content? As it sounds, it’s content that will not always be there but reappear in time, working much like festivals or the daily activities rotation in Lion’s Arch. As for what kind of things can become rotating content, here’s a list of ideas:

Seasonal Events: (It’s the time of the season for lovely)
Every three months or so, dynamic and event chains are swapped out for a different set in various zones. These events can be related to the season, like the Flame Legion gets more aggressive in the Summer, striking as far as even Kryta and unleashing new plots along with their aggression.

Or just a general sort of event chain which could be the logical conclusion of various zone events being done or undone. Like Harathi Hinterlands getting overrun with a surge of Centaur reinforcements, making the zone events all about trying to get folks (re)establishing a foothold. (next rotation we get the default event chains, then we get a season where the Centaur of Harathi are driven into caves and so forth and must operate as insurgents)

This could help add a nice spice of variety to regular event chains and dynamic events, give a sense of the changing seasons with some, and as devs decide to add more or more needs to be added, they can go ahead, or just reuse the cycle of seasons once the initial batch is finished.

Part 2
Personal Story Expansion: (Hey! You’re not finished yet!)

These would be fairly short, one up to three-shot adventures you could do daily (or even weekly if the content needs to be stretched out) which involve a rotation of different NPCs representing different tiers of your story, namely racial (the NPC will be a member of Destiny’s Edge), Order (the original Order you chose), and Pact. And each NPC will give you one quest from a small rotation pool of them (which, as always, could be expanded later as time goes on)

The racial ones could all be fairly generic, like Zojja mentions a new college is trying to start up and they want your expertise, or Logan wants help dealing with some bandits, or Rytlock wants to investigate an AWOL soldier, etc. As time and development go on, perhaps ones related specifically to your personal story choices could be added (like followups on your flame shaman father, who rescued you from the White Mantle as a baby, etc.)

Order and Pact quests could all be fairly generic, thankfully, mostly relating to things like: “Hey, the Order of Whispers needs you to infiltrate this place.” or “Commander, we would appreciate of help assessing Jormag’s forces”

These things could go a long way to helping us reconnect with our personal story.

part 3
The final one is not entirely essential, and might even be too complicated, but basically goes…
Pact Lieutenant: (“Your orders today, commander?”)
Basically a flavor NPC who does not ask you to do missions, but each day he presents you with a list of options on where The Pact should go, send reinforcements to, or supplies. You tell them what to do, and they forward your orders to the rest of The Pact.
If we really want to get crazy, we could have it set up with WvW-like world effecting statistics. Mostly minor ones. But at the end of each day, it could be tallied up who voted for which choices, and the choice with the most votes results in the next day’s events seeing some minor changes, such as supply shipment focus buffs various Order/Pact NPCs in the location you sent them to. Reinforcements will have more allied NPCs to back up players during events. While theoretically exploitable, isn’t it half the fun to imagine server wide votes on where players want The Pact the most?

In conclusion, these things could provide repeatedable content which could always be revisted and fairly easily expanded on, help pull players back into the narrative of GW2’s world, and help players feel more significant. And with the world at large it could help keep maintain a sense of changing and living world without the same strain needing to rapidly produce the Living Story could cause, allowing more focus on quality.

Some additional things to note as possible choices include…

Continuity: Naturally, certain NPCs (such as the Order or Pact ones) should not show up until you’ve reached a certain point in your personal story. Also, when you do reach certain points, off-hand, text-only handwaves can help keep players understand why, even though they’re a Pact commander, why they’re still taking orders from Almorra Soulflame of The Vigil. (Namely: Because she doesn’t care if you’re the freakin’ Khan-Ur. You signed up with the Vigil, you’re still under her orders when operating on Vigil business.)

Using the home instance: I highly recommend the NPCs for the PSE (Personal story expansion) appear and rotate around the players home instance. This would help add further utility to it without requiring living story achievement completions (which can be missed and even lost forever), as well as give players more reasons to visit it regularly.

Familiar Faces: Remember those Order NPCs who helped you join your order, the ones that were all your race? Perhaps this could be a chance for them to reappear. Like Hiroki hanging around Salma. Not only that but a Charr player’s warband could also get back in on the action outside of elite racial skills, and in general this could be an elegant way to keep some old and familiar faces relevant to the players.

I hate to bump my own thread, but I realize I forgot to mention or ask for any input from everyone else or their thoughts or opinions on the subject.

Do any of you have any suggestions to improve this suggestion? would you prefer something like this over the present Living Story, or at least feel it would be an excellent supplement to it?