Guild Wars 2

NargofWoV.4267:

In WvWvW, would it be possible on low population servers to “team them up?” I know that is defeatist with regard to server loyalty, but might allow 2 or 4 under served wvw populations to co exist vs a high population server like a BG or JQ ?

Same could be said for instanced encounters like Tequatl, which you run overflow’s for now… but make it more of a permanent overflow for certain low pop servers?

Wrong thread, this is about Living Story ONLY. Because it is the topic chosen by the players in the GW2 discussion panel. Please look for one in WvW to make your suggestion.

Randulf.7614:

daros.3407:

Mesket.5728:

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

Just a quick question. is this the only topic for collaborative discussion or are we getting other ones for the other hot topics (e.g ascended gear, guild systems etc)?

No, this is what we got. I hardly believe living story beat class balance (and the many way players have to call it) but oh wel… class balance doesn’t sell on the gemstore. Living story does, so lets try at least to get this one right.

So this mean we will never get other topics about Asceded gear, conditions in PVE, guilds and others? I thought we will discuss othe topics with devs after this one…
Discussion about just one think won’t help anything. We need to discuss every major topic to help to make this game better.

This is the first pve topic discussion as said in the original post. If successful, they’ll move to the next popular one (prob class balancing or ascended – I haven’t personally tallied the votes)

Thank you for clarifying.

There are a couple of ideas I’ve been thinking about for the LW. First thing that does come to mind is how “alive” the world is. I don’t think the Living World feels very dynamic and alive. I had a suggestion that I thought might help. I won’t summarize it here, to keep this post as short as possible. And I’m not saying go with my idea, I am saying that something should be done to give the world a sense of current events and goings on.

On the achievement/story side of things, I usually finish what I’m interested in (which, admittedly isn’t always everything available) in only one or two days of playing any particular release (about 2 hours for each of those days). And I’m not a person who has the attention span to grind achievements. Usually achievements like “open X bags of Y” I won’t do. If a longer development cycle means less “X and Y” achievements and objectives for Living Stories go for it. Also, I wish the actual story was better connected. I keep hearing how things will connect eventually, but I can’t imagine how that could be accomplished without being a big stretch of the imagination. But I guess we’ll see when the time comes…

I think the problems of the LW could potentially be fixed with maybe a different release schedule. Someone (who’s post I can’t find) suggested that there shouldn’t be a fixed schedule for releases, period. That they should be released when they’re good and ready, and I agree. If there’s a way to make more substantial and less gradual two week releases, go for it, but if having an inconsistent schedule means “meatier” updates, I’d be all for that even more.

I think the LW concept is workable and a nice, free alternative to yearly expansions you have to pay for. I don’t at all think the current system is horrible or broken, it just doesn’t keep my attention very long. All I want from the Living World is just more going on with each release, in terms of story and lore, and in terms of features.

I’ve actually been incredibly impressed with Living Story lately. I feel like it’s been getting consistently better and better throughout the span of the game and that everything you’ve said you want to do with it is exactly what I want to see you do with it.

Perhaps even more overlapping ongoing stories could be good. For example, something like Ronah.2869 said above with the community building something big. That’d be awesome, I think, and it could continue to happen even as other living story updates came out. Achievements could be based on bringing in supply, and maybe even WvW could have an additional set of dolyaks delivering supplies to guard or something, though that might be a bad idea.

My only complaint is when updates feel too separated and like they don’t connect to each other. I like how every update is different though — scarlet, new dungeon, dragon/bosses, etc. I never know what to expect, and that’s super exciting.

Things I enjoy most about the Living World:

• Seeing/exploring new locations
• Changes like those currently in Kessex Hills that are subtle, non-fanfare, mysterious and generate genuine community intrigue and enthusiasm. They also genuinely change the map, which in the longterm makes core gameplay like the progression of alts much more interesting because the maps will be different over time as you complete them repeatedly.
• Some of the cosmetic rewards – I’m less a fan of the novelty ones that look pretty silly on most characters, but the flower backpieces etc. have been really nice.
• We now have fewer excessive grindy achievements than we used to get (see Halloween 2012 vs 2013) although rewards are hit and miss (see Halloween 2013 20-slot bags)
• We now have a smaller emphasis on RNG ticket-based rewards per event, which is awesome. Dragon Bash drove me mad trying to get a Jade Ticket, which I never did manage despite sinking hours and hours into the attempt.
• EDIT: I’ve also appreciated the range of difficulty in content in releases such as the Queen’s Gauntlet and Tequatl.
• EDIT 2!: Jumping puzzles

Things I dislike about the Living World:

Writing/Story

• Scarlet – as a villain, as a character, as a plot device. She’s poorly written, shallow, uninteresting and much, much worse than anything Tyria deserves in its lore.
• The lack of development of existing factions/characters/locations/races/plot elements from the personal story – instead we often seem to get some new flavour of the month villain, like the Aetherblades. This is partly an extension of my Scarlet hate.
• Poor framing of the player character in the story – we often have no idea what is going on. Take Halloween, for example – we could have been the characters discovering the Bloody Prince’s existence. Instead, some much smarter character does it instead and we just get to play personal assistant again.
• Critical story information only being available in prose on the website – this should 100% be IN the game.

Content

• The temporary nature of content – hate this as GW1’s strength was that you could play at your own pace. Even now you could go back and complete all of the content (bar seasonal festivals). While I like the idea of world actually being ‘alive’, what we’ve mostly been getting with the LW is not world change, but an episodic story. Miss an episode, and you have no idea what the hell is going on.
• Gating story progression behind achievement grind (e.g. recent Halloween content)
• Too fine a focus on achievement-driven, checklist-checking playtime and throwaway content that will be played only until people have got their achievements and then abandoned. Focus on content that will be played persistently because it’s fun and has longterm value.
• Meta-achievements that can only be achieved through combined use of daily and static LW achievements – this is extremely inflexible if you can only log in one or two days a week and forces players to play to the game’s schedule instead of their own. See the current Halloween meta, which not only blocks story progress but also requires multiple days of play to complete because you have to complete dailies.

Things I would change:

• Reduce the pace of releases. I’ve seen development quotes bemoaning the lack of resources to put into stuff like cutscenes, but I would quite frankly rather see FEWER updates of HIGHER quality with a focus on that layer of polish which cutscenes would add.
• Even more permanent content (this has improved recently, but I still grimace when I think of the permanent expansion we could have had by now if the LW resources had been spent on that instead).
• Reduce the amount of time-gating. If some of the LW content sticks around permanently, make sure the achievements and rewards stick around permanently, too.
• Work on the story delivery system. This is desperately needed if you want players to be more invested in the LW than “Have I done all the achievements yet?”
• Make meta-achievements more accessible – the best LW instances in this respect have been e.g. the Bazaar, where you could complete the meta via multiple static achievements, all daily achievements, or a combination of both.
• Make sure that critical story info for a LW episode is not lost in a written piece on the website. Either put the prose in the game, or make it more available via cutscenes/dialogue/discovery in-game. Either way, it belongs in-game!
• EDIT3!: Account-bound/reusable cosmetic rewards, via a skin bank or something similar to the Achievement skins panel.

I agree about the dislike for zerg-battles. The most fun I had during LS was mostly content for smaller groups (Zephyr Sanctum scavenger hunt, jumping puzzles, last years Halloween scavenger hunt, Wintersday globe area,… ). Tequatl is the only zerg-like battle I enjoyed, but I haven’t defeated him yet and I’m not sure if I ever have the chance to do so.

I would welcome open world content for smaller groups with nice storytelling, something with depth.

People complaining about Tequatle simply do not know how to play this game. There are tons of organized communities out there who have come together to take down this challenge. All you have to do is find them, and there’s plenty of places to do so. So please do us all a favor and stop trying to solo it because you’re going to die really badly, and then you’re going to come here and complain how much of a debacle Teq is.

Onto the LW/LS…

I think the pace is fast, but can be eased by having it extended like some LS so players can have more time to play through them.

In-game backgrounds on all LW heroes and villains are a must. Because just dropping them in game does nothing without knowing who these people are. We want to care about them, or hate them (in a good way).

Some sort of major hints and clues of what these protagonists/antagonists are all about and what plans they might be having ahead. Subtle changes throughout the world, npc’s gossiping, all this hinting at what to expect next.

Would be nice to know how many chapters are there in a story arc. This way we know the beginning, middle and end of a story. Instead of it looking like a long, meaningless story.

Okay, I’ll bring out a few of my issues with how the Living World has gone.

Repeatability
The living world is based almost entirely on account wide achievements. All too often, it seems like you can log in every other Tuesday, and click through most of the content. This is not a bad thing, per se. No matter how big the content release some people will storm through it in no time. (I think it took ~14hours for someone to beat Nightfall after it was released?) The larger issue is that once you’ve gone through the content once… there is very little reason to go do it again. Many times, it’s nigh impossible to do it again.
Many times, you can’t even see how the battle would go with a different class!
Where this gets particually ugly is when later in the week, people who have less flexible schedules come in to play, and all of the more active players have no reason to play with them in doing this content.
There’s no point in making permanent content (which everyone seems in favor of), if you can’t meaningfully play it again.
Then salt gets added to the wound, when every single character you have, even ones created after the event is over, get thank you letters from Lord Faren for something you can never do.

Jump It / Zerg It
Far too many of the LW installments quickly boil down to doing one of following things:
- Crazy mad jumping puzzles (SAB 1&2, Zephyr, Aether Retreat, various metas)
- Joining a juge zerg which just steamrolls any and everything (Jubilee, Clockwork, Labryinth, Karka)

Doing these things from time to time is okay, but there’s far too much of them, and frankly, it doesn’t appeal to everyone. I never set foot into SAB2, because I had no more desire for more jumping puzzles. Mad King Labyrinth? That is an incredibly solo/small group unfriendly area… and once I got my meta done, I haven’t gone back.
Part of the problem here I think is that in both of these modes, you’re not really playing your character. I can pick any class I want, and it doesn’t change how it plays out. The jumping is the same… zerging is just a question of which weapon you sit back and auto-attack with to tag the most foes.

Cohesion
One fortnight we’re zerging karka in Southsun. Then we have this detective story surrounding the LA assassinations, which does bleed into the Aetherblade attack, and there’s a bit of a seque to the Zephyr Bazaar and followup Election… and then poof it’s gone, and we’re riding Queen Jennah’s royal balloons. And when it’s time to reveal Scarlet, do we have some tie in where Majory had discovered a plot and told Logan, which led to Anise being prepared… but nope. Rox and Braham are just tagging along…

And then we just put all of that on hold, and go play in Moto’s box. WHAT?!?
And then Tequatl just instantly becomes harder to kill than Zhaitan. WHAT?!?
Oh Look! back to Scarlet!
Oops, forget Scarlet! Here’s Halloween!

This doesn’t feel like I’m reading a long novel, and getting one chapter a fortnight. I feels like several different books got put in a shredder, and now we’re getting random excepts from each book, but sometimes a page from another book tossed in the middle. Sometimes you get the next chapter in your story… a few months later.

Knowing What To Do
There have been a great many achievements and/or plot points in stories where quite frankly, the game provides essentially zero clue as to what you’re expected to do. Example: Flame and Frost’s “Lost and Found”, where you basically are expected to just wander all over the zone and “happen upon” these items? The clue is “Return 6 belongings to refugees”. Clockwork Chaos’s “Portal Invasion Closer” had /everyone/ confused, thinking it was five portal events, in particular because when the event completed, it said “Portal Closed” (or the like). And then the achievement for doing all 13 zones… with no tracker for which ones you’ve gotten credit for….
I honestly don’t know how we’re supposed to complete some of this content without something like Dulfy’s site. IMO, it’s rather poor game design to rely on external sites to fill in the blanks.

The World isn’t Changing
There’s still bandits raiding Queensdale. The Seraph and Centaur are /still/ going back and forth in Kessex. The Risen are still, well, everywhere, even though Zhaitan is dead. There’s only one new map, which seems to gain more reasons not to go there all the time. The world was changing in Flame and Frost… until it all just went away…

One thing that would make the LS/LW much more appealing to me would to be to move away from ‘installments’ and instead have things feel like they’re happening over time.

On a base level, this would ideally look like characters moving more across different maps. Sometimes you see caravans moving across one map, sometimes with events, but you rarely see people traveling.

• What if there were caravans that traveled from Shaemoor to Applenook over the course of multiple days, stopping at different towns in Queensdale, Kessex, and Genedarren?

• What if Ameranth who loves to travel and see the world stopped sitting in the Black Citadel like she’s done for over a year and started visiting different regions? Maybe she could be like Nicholas the traveler and when you find her in a location she’ll trade something to you for random junk items x times a day.

• What if Braham had to travel down from Cragstead to Hoelbrak to take Asura gates to get over to DR to attend the Jubilee celebrations?

With all of those, events/activites/merchants/whatever would still be available for people when the person/army/whatever reached the correct location but it could happen dynamically day to day, week to week, month to month, on a given date without being a ‘new release’ which we already have half the story for in the patch notes.

Bi-monthly updates could still happen to set all this up but if it happened on a cadence of a moving world instead of an update with a new package.

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this idea, and I’m sure people would have tons of more ways it could be used than the ones I noted above.

Tie Living Story into the original Guild Wars

I personally played GW1 for 6+ years. That was the one and ONLY game I played over that time. The story was full in both depth and breadth. It was both intriguing and thought provoking. It engaged me daily for 6 years straight, which is pretty darn impressive. Now granted towards the end it was just a matter of grinding to get my titles ready for GW2 but the anticipation of the upcoming game kept the drive alive.

Now that I think of it the grind that lead up to the release of GW2 seemed to carry over into the new game but the fleshed out storytelling style did not seem to follow.

I think it is time for the Living Story to get back to basics. Let’s start tying into the rich content base that is already ripe and ready to be picked from the well-stocked archives of GW1.

• Bring on the Mursaat
• Crumble a wall of the Eye of the North and let us wander into the wild overgrown and untamed experience of Gwen’s Garden
• Allow the Jade Sea to start melting and run off into the Echovald Forest
• Imagine how majestic The Falls have become not to mention how they would have been affected by Zinn’s Secret Underground Lair
• Palawa Joko has surely turned the Desolation into a veritable lush Garden of Joko by now

There is just so much history just waiting for the right storyteller to pick it up and run with it.

Remember – It’s not cheating building on a well thought out premade platform. Heck… it was your idea in the first place

Invade Lion’s Arch every once in a while, create some havoc.

The way that Southsun evolved was beautiful. We found it, fought back some of its most pressing dangers, settled it, and are now dealing with ongoing threats. So I have confidence that Anet can execute on the living story concept and I think when you start opening new areas to play in it will go well.

The challenge comes where we have zone already full of dynamic events. For example, the molten alliance is just gone? There is no trace of them; no artifacts, no hold outs, no left over technology, no salvage, no norn/dredge babies, nothing? Something happened in those zones we should be left with at the very minimum a new dynamic event or two.

My only suggestion is to use the systems that you already have because they are good. Dynamic events are awesome and the game needs more of them (which means implement them in a way that allows you to leave them in once the episode is over). I would even like to see new hearts related to the living story. What about vistas that retell the story? These are the things that made me love the game in the first place. Please make more.

Xar.6185:

Skins earned from the living world also need to be ‘living’. By that I mean much more user friendly. Like the zenith and hellfire/radiant skins.

Yes! Please. I want the skins I’ve earned though the different events to be put into the skin bank with my achievement reward skins. This way players can have a copy for PvP and PvE/WvW. And I won’t feel so bad about changing the look of my back piece from time to time so I know I will always have access to the different event skins.

Molten Gauntlets – had to transmute them onto a white lvl 1 something so I can save them for later. But I picked the heavy then and now can’t ever get the medium/light versions.

Scelerite Backpack – Again just got one. Just let me have the skin in the bank. I realize this one came with stats and we could ascend it, but why can’t I have a back up of the skin in my rewards area? And why can’t we infuse it??

Shattered Dragon Wings – This was the reward for the living story, why couldn’t this go in our skin area with the Achievement skins? It was an award for achievements.

Same goes for any of the other skins that we earned through achievements. The ones we earn from drops, I understand we can’t make those unlimited (though I’d love that), but the achievement ones should be with the achievement ones. >.<

I don’t want to delete any of my skins, but I do want to be able to re-use the skins and they’re taking up a whole lot of bank space.

All of the LW patches over the past year were no story parts, that played really a role to the game’s lore at all, nor our personal stories, nothing of it left really great permanent marks to the World of Tyria by changing significantly something and that for a longer time, than just silly 5 Minutes, until the next permanent repeating dynamic event restarts its cycle.
I surely can’t talk here for everybody, but within the following things I want to sum up my thoughts, what I personally expected from the living world feature, how it should have influence on the whole game:

• Persisting long lasting changes to complete maps, that aren’t enchained to a dynamic event row, but changes to the world that come and go only through living story patches.
  Example:

A Living Story patch lets occur are huge Tidal Wave caused through the final appearing and named elder sea dragon, which totally annihilates large parts of a coast line and completely changes large parts of the surrounding maps into which that Tidal Wave flooded into, letting everywhere appear new monsters from the corrupted influence of the elder sea dragon that the tidal wave brought to the lands.

• After that Living Patch, it will let the changed maps stay that way, until Anet brings up a new Living World Patch, that changes slowly again how the maps will look, by letting us players do tasks on those maps, that will help to change the maps back to their former states.

• If something like towns ect. got totally destroyed, let us work on rebuilding them, changing them that way maybe also and IMPROVE THEM, developing the environment further by building up something, that could withstand the next time better such a tidal wave through learning and evolving from the past.

• I expected from the living story to stay alot more nearer on the main story, like the Living Story being alot of different “Side Stories”, which just show us aspects of the world, which happen all over Tyria as a kind of preparement, until Anet continues with the main story.
  Every living story should give us the feeling, that it has a kind of connection somehow at least a slightly bit to the main story, that they prepare the path for the next main story part slowly step by step and are connected with each other somehow at least a bit, like a chain, so that you could grasp the story as a matter of resulting consequences from decisions.

• Decisions is also really a good key word here, please alot more of this. Cutthroat Politics was a good beginning. Please let the community be more oftenly part of the Living Story so that we can have influence on how the living story will change caused through our actions. Games like Dragon Age or Mass Effect for example can have many different outcomes within their storyline, it feels each time you play different, because you get very oftenly confronted with decisions you have to make that can have more or less dramatical influences as regard of upcoming consequences from your choices.

• To make it brief – please reconsider your patch rate and change it like from 1 patch every 2 weeks to 1 patch like every 1-2 months and make sure, that those patches are of higher quality, than quantity. This would solve also other problems, like feeling permanently having to rush through the games content.
  That way would be every patch alot more meaningful. Make differences between Living World Patches, that come every like 1-2 months and other Content Patches, that come just for Holiday Events.
  Bigger scaled patches could be also used to implement with them alot more meaningful improvements to the game in one go together with new story elements.

What I like about Living Story so far:

• New Places.
  (Southsun.)
• Monuments.
  Things that are impacted and left onto the world in a permanent way, that carry a bit of the story of what happened. (Karka Queen’s Corpse, Labyrinthine Cliffs in an odd sort of way).
• Holidays Events as a side-story that gets progressed once a year.
  This year’s Halloween was different from last year’s Halloween, it involved reoccurring characters that were a lore bonus to veteran players, but didn’t rely on that knowledge to understand the story for new players. (More like Kingdom of Loathing’s Crimbo than WoW’s Lunar Festival).

What I don’t like about Living Story so far:

• Lack of lasting Impact on the World
• Pace
  Is a bit much. Seemingly on production end, on the player real life scheduling end, and also on the story end. You can’t have a good story that exists on Rising Action and Climaxes all the time.
• Content not doing enough.
  When the website writings or clickable NPC optional dialogue conveys the plot or characterization more than the content does. When Achievements become the content instead of supplementing it.

Suggestions:

• Multi-chapter Living Story updates (like Scarlet) follow Story Structure to control the Pace and emphasize Impact; Exposition/Rising Action -> Climax -> Falling Action/Resolution.
  It’s alright if all updates are not created equal, you should be spending more resources on a Climax than on Rising Action. Don’t be afraid to devote two whole weeks to Resolution, because while it should be easier it shouldn’t be nothing. If you can’t keep a non-crunching team of people busy showing us how we impacted the world; we aren’t impacting the world nearly enough.

• Multi-chapter Living Story updates have two kinds of achievements;
  the ‘Meta’ achievement which you fill out over the course of the entire story Arc from start to finish, and achievements you need to get during each individual phase.
  This should be a good way to make sure the people with limited schedules can feel like they’re participating in the event as a whole and see some measured progress towards a goal over the course of months, but people who can sign on more frequently don’t get bored. You’re sort of halfway doing this already, you just need to commit the Meta to the entire story Arc.

Im with the others who posted here:

Living story to me should be exactly that…a living story that is working towards something. Right now the “story” is over every two weeks and a new one begins, even if they are related, they feel like a bunch of disjointed “one off” events…

Some suggestions based off what my friends and I have been discussing we would love to see.

Content that doesn’t disappear and achievements that do not disappear. Why not leave the Molten Alliance dungeon, or the aetherblade one, or the queens pavilion, or the Bazaar of the winds….and make achievements that can still be gotten to this day that tell us about the areas and what is happening. (like the utilizing each of the powers of the bazaar, or jumping for the crystals achievement). Make achievements (with “prizes”) that can be gotten by the new players, once they get to a level to actually do the new dungeons and areas.

You can still do your “quick” events (like the Aetherblades suddenly attacking, or the Karka attack on Lions Arch) but then after that quick event is done, the actual content (the “living part” of the living story) stays permanently within the land.

If done correctly, NONE of this would impact the personal story or the world that is already in place for new players. If anything it adds to it. Make the new dungeons have a “story mode” in addition to explorable that explains their place within the world. Did the molten alliance break up? Nope, they are still around, so why cant the dungeon be around. Are the Aetherblades gone? Nope, so leave the retreat. The bazaar makes a fantastic “jumping off” point for future content…so it could stay also. You could slowly introduce entirely new areas with new “story” content that would grow the world.

As an example, we already had the two-week “event” where the Aetherblades attacked, we know they came from the west of Lion’s Arch, in the next “event” we help the lions guard push the aetherblades back to their island (adding another small island to explore filled with towns full of aetherblades, with aethership factories on it, (the aetherblade retreat dungeon could be placed back here)). Achievements could be simply “go to the island” and defeat X number of Aetherblades", and “enter the Aetherblade retreat”…with other acheivements related to that.

By virtue of this fight and this “event” we are forcing the aetherblades further west so then the Tengu come out of hiding on their new island and open the gates within the Caledon Forest inviting us to come and help them with their fight against the Aetherblades. “Aiding the Tengu” and “visit the Tengu” could be achievements. Once we free them from the aetherblades during the next event, now the Tengu area is open. (if you wanted to make the Tengu a playable race, it could be introduced at this time also…unlocked…and then make it a race that was only choosable for players who have first run through an entire personal story as well as the Tengu acheivements). Once the Tengu event is done maybe another event that leads characters further south in the ocean, and then further (helping the quaggan?), and then further (fire island?) to eventually lead all the way to the deep sea dragon in its deep sea cave.

Each of these “events” should encompass both temporary content (defeat the Aetherblades and drive them from the Tengu island) as well as permanent content (opening of the Tengu island as a place to go and explore). They would have both temporary achievements that would perhaps only grant a title “defender of the tengu” while also permanent achievements that would grant achievement points (visit the tengu island for 5 points), or items, or even a new playable race to choose at character creation. If done correctly, this additional story also (by virtue of being in new areas) does not effect the current personal story at all…and people can still enjoy the game from the beginning to the end without feeling like they missed out on anything (since acheivements can still be gotten for the “new” content, new players can still catch up to older players)…they can still enjoy the Zhaitan story on their way to eventually heading to the Tengu island and eventually fighting the deep sea dragon.

You could do this with each of the four corners of the world (jormag north, Jungle dragon west, Kralkatorik southeast, Primordius northeast, and bubbles in the deep sea). Eventually GW2 would be a HUGE world that players could start at level 1 and then play on and on and on with the new content until they finally catch up to the “Living world” without feeling like they were lost or missing anything.

my 2 cents on what I hoped the living story would be and still could be.

The Living World must be a permanent addition in the game. It must pile up after the Personal Story. Start it from the Lost Shores. Players must be able to do all the pre-existing Living Stories and repeat them at their own leisure. And if I were a developer and saw my content to last merely two weeks then disappeared completely from the game, I would be upset. Please ask the Living World developers their honest opinions after their content is completely removed from the game after two weeks and thrown into archive, you will know how some of the players feel about the Living Story.

The world of Tyria should change constantly as well as we seen in Kessex Hills. That is a great example of a living and breathing world. You guys should put more of that in Guild Wars 2 despite of it not being released in the next two weeks. There will be a lot of speculations and theories to talk about in the forums and in the game. But, if the trees at Viathan Lake in Kessex Hills were to grow after the Tower of Nightmares, that is not how the Living World should be; there should be an event where people have to remove the stumps around the lake and plant new trees.

The Living World should also continue the story that was left in Guild Wars 1. We would like to know about Livia’s whereabouts. Where is Lazarus the Dire? Will we ever visit the Wizard’s Tower and speak with Igarren? Guild Wars 2 may never have an expansion but “According to Jeff Grubb, the bloodstones’ fate will not be revealed in the initial release of Guild Wars 2, but may ‘have an influence in future expansions.’ " Will we ever know the fate of the Bloodstones in Guild Wars? And there several more posted on this thread. The Living World just does not give it all, it is kitten. Plus there is a sylvari lady slowly ruining the lore of Guild Wars.

In Guild Wars 1, my character felt heroic because I became ascended and ultimately felt responsible for unleashing the titans. I want my feelings to be swayed again. Seeing Gwen Thackeray grow up was beautiful. We want those wonderful and epic moments in Guild Wars 2. And some of us don’t like how apparently a cackling sylvari lady is behind all the uprising of the Molten Alliance and Aetherblade Pirates. So really where are the Elder Dragons? The last Elder Dragon fight was underwhelming in my opinion, kill minions, and sit on turrets and spam #2.

The Living World must be about Elder Dragons and not petty Tyrian affairs. The story of Guild Wars 2 must be darker because the Elder Dragons are slowly closing in. Tyrians should not held parties in the hour of their imminent extinction. And nothing has change much in Tyria. Past Living World content just popped like a bubble.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

The living story just feels not epic. I as a player feel like a merc instead of a hero.
I feel replaceable, in a world that is endangered by dragons, I run around and do useless stuff. Why ain’t we going to confront them now, they will only get stronger.

Scarlet is a weak villain, she just feels random. Her character does not fit to the mastermind she is sold as. And she is no dragon. That is a weakness too.

For a year, Zhaitan is dead, for a year the Pact is rotting in fort trinity. Why did the living story ignore everything that was built up by the personal story. It does not feel like a new arc, but like a different game. I do not miss Trahearne, but I miss to be in a cutscene, being part of the story, not just part of the events.

The personal story was sold as one of the pillars, but it is gone, nothing personal at all with the living story.

Pretty much all of this. I want to see a continuation of the dragons given they are the imminent threat to the whole world.

There are lots of good lists of problems here, but I believe a huge number of them are tied to the same core issue:

Because of the Personal Story, the Living World can only modify the game in very limited ways.

(Ignoring the irony that story you shipped with the game has limited the story you can tell afterward,) I have a few suggestions/comments for how you may be able to handle this issue.

1) There is a reluctance to add new zones so as to not stretch out the player-base. I understand this, but you have to let this one go. For many of us, having new areas to explore is one of the reasons we bought this game! That sense of adventure, exploring someplace new, is my favorite thing about this game.

2) If you add new zones, you can build those zones to properly change based on the Living World. You can have cities build or destroyed over the long-term. You can have massive changes to the landscape. You can have enemy types wiped out. Give yourself a new region of the world with the Living Story in mind and you’ll be able to do so much more.

3) To keep players in the old zones, scale rewards for DEs based on the last time they were completed. You get small rewards for events that are finished every 10 minutes, but if it’s been several hours (or days!) since an event has been completed, the rewards should be significantly higher. This will keep players in old zones even if there’s a shiny new area.

4) Tie the new area into GW1 lore! For example, we could explore the ruins of ancient asuran civilization on the way to defeating Primordus.

5) These zones could be rolled out over time. For example, the journey to defeat Primordus could take six months: you have to travel to a specific rift and there’s a new zone that leads you there. Then, when you get to the rift, you have to build a safe way in and out, so that takes a month… Next month, the entrance is complete and you can start to go inside… until you find a gigantic cavern of enemies which must be cleared. (Hello, Queen’s Pavilion round 2!) Then, a month later, you’ve cleared the cavern and can push further… etc.

That’s the kind of stuff that I would find compelling, anyway.

DusK.3849:

A while ago, you noted that the Kiel vs. Gnashblade vote was the “tip of the iceberg”, so to speak, in regards to how Living Story would be a gameplay-driven vehicle in which players could change the world. I’d like to see more of that, because while the Living World offerings have been pretty fun and engaging, none of it — neither the story, nor what gets left behind — has been in any way shaped by the players’ actions.

How has Kiel Vs Gnashblade changed the world in any discernible way?

My comment on this is that kiel Vs Gnashblade is merely a branching story like in the personal story its not a real change to the world.

timmyf.1490:

Because of the Personal Story, the Living World can only modify the game in very limited ways.

While it’s not related directly, I think it would indirectly be beneficial to make the final step of the personal story solo-able. I’d place bets on there being huge numbers of players with characters sitting at that final stage – myself included. Make it less of a hassle to progress past the personal story, and you can worry at least a little less about that.

Hi,
I have a few points or opinions Id like to make about Living Story:
(these are my opinions and feelings)

1. The story itself, in contrast to the personal story, is severely void of any substance or continuity. The personal story had a nice ebb and flow. You had nicely written cutscenes that took you from one place to the other both in story and in the world. You knew what your objective was and you really got an idea of what the characters were all about. Currently, we have had some story on molten alliance, upset creatures on south shore, some delegates trying to get to Divinities Reach only to be stopped by some invasion force. Most recently, you had some stuff going on in Caledon regarding more scarlet. I just dont feel the continuity of the story. To sum this up: It feels disjointed and has been poorly explained. Hard to follow.

2. Why does every Living Story event/patch need to come with a dozen or two dozen achievements? It seems that all these patches contain are some disjointed story and achievements. They feel like a laundry list of things to do, almost like a chore. We do them because we want the shiny at the end..the meta-achievement. This goes back to a thread I had created a while ago…intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards. Why can’t the content be intrinsically rewarding? If the content is quality, how come this can’t be the reward, in and of itself? I got burned out of doing the achievements and I bet I am not alone.

3. The cadence, I think is too much for two reasons. 1. I do not feel there is adequate time to complete all that is needed(especially more casual players). You feel rushed. You feel that you need to drop what you are doing, and stop playing how you want to play, in order to experience all of these content patches and everything in them. 2. I feel that conventional and traditional frequency of content updates have been more successful and widely accepted. Typically, 3-6 months has been the conventional frequency where you are trying to push content out the door in 8 weeks development time?(correct me if I am wrong). Maybe more of every month or every two months we receive content updates. That gives developers more time to write meaningful lore and story, more time to test bugs, and we get more with each patch. That gives us as players more time to freely explore the content so that we are not rushed, and once we are done we can play the game as we want to without getting hammered in a few days with more content. Its too much. Overwhelmed at the moment.

3. The substance of the living story updates seems thin and, forgive the term, ‘fluffy’. There are many themed patches, and many patches where a good portion of the content has been mini games. Id like to believe that most anyone would welcome new zones, classes, monsters, skills, dungeons, lore, personal story, etc rather than a few lines of story, some bug fixes, and a temporary open world content or dungeon, mixed in with some mini games.

Currently, I am not playing GW2. I am keeping a vigil watchful eye on it. I visit the forums several times a week, I log in every once in a while to peak around. But I am not playing. Largely because of Living Story for the points described above. Will I return? Maybe. I am currently enjoying other games and other genres. Maybe I will return again to the game, but I hope some development direction changes are able to be seen. Otherwise I fear that I’ll be in the same situation that I am in now..which is quasi disappointed with where the game is headed.

Thanks for your time.

I love the way the Tower of Nightmares is being presented to the player base this time around. Seeing the change in the world, looking for clues or small insights — that has been great!

This is the very best I imagine the Living World could be. Going into an area, seeing something has changed, working to “fix” things, learning the story as we go, who is behind it, what is happening, what has to be done to aid the people of Tyria, earning the rewards as we play because we’re doing what needs to be done and following the story-arc. It beats the heck out of a checklist of things that need to be accomplished 10 or 20 or 250 times to “finish” the content. If we enjoy playing the content we’ll continue to play it, maybe doing it over and over again; if not, tying an achievement to the repetition isn’t making the game or the living story better.

Ok.
Here are the problems I have with living world:
1. Those episodes doesn’t really add anything meaningful. More grind achievements every two weeks. Temporary content that is here for 2 to 4 weeks. It’s no meaty. It’s just… shallow.
2. Content is not expanded. It just add some small things (!) and then just takes it away. At this point I don’t give a crap, about if it is imressive, logical or whatever for the story. Almost nobody in MMO really cares about story. It’s just a fact. And those who care probably won’t mind if more content will be left behind, so they can tell their friend that the game is expanding, instead of being in similar state as it was on launch.

Solution for this point is fairly simple. Focus on permanent content, that will truly expand what we have now. Add more interesting events. Zone meta-events, and don’t hide them. Just tell people “we add X new events in zone Y”. Add new dungeons, (not replace old ones…).

Another thing are rewards for those events. It’s far deeper problem, than Living Story it self. It can’t be easily resolved. Rewards are not interesting, because game mechanics was dumped far to much. There is finite point to which you can make interesting rewards, if you itemization if primarily made of static stats increases, without much of variation.
Here is the thing. You all played Diablo 2. Are you know why people still Play Diablo 2 ? Because it have interesting itemization. Finding interesting item that will fit my build is reward on it’s own. Unfortunately with your pursue to balance and accessibility that important factor just have been lost.
Either way, rewards can’t be improved without changing some corde decisions behind mechanics.

And without rewards that are worth pursuing, what is the point of playing new content ?

Let’s say you add an new permanent dungeon or really hard meta-event in living story. I will do it once to see it, and that probably will be it. What is the point of doing it again, if all I get are greens and blues ? I mean really. Exotics should have 100% drop chance from bosses. And ascended items should have lower chance to drop but they should drop. Period.
But as I mentioned above, it have it limits. How long I can pursue new items, if they either look the same as bunch of other items, or even more important if they are just the same 4 stats variation over and over again, with no interesting properties what so ever ?

As I said. In that aspect game need deep changes, The question is. Are you willing to make them ?

Ok we have rewards and content discussed.

3. Living Story is not strong marketing point. It won’t bring new player. It also won’t bring old ones who doesn’t play anymore.
It have little coverage over non-mmo sites. (if any for that matter). And Even if it bring old player to the game what he will. Well.. Brutal truth. He/she will see that nothing really change. The content in the game is as it was in when he’she left game. After that such player probably won’t even bother to check game year later. And why would ? In a year there will be more MMOs coming anyway.

4. I personally don’t even feel compelled to do living story achievement. Most of them are either just grind to X, or are so simple, that I complete most of them by accident.
But if I’m lacking something to meta-achievement ? I don’t bother. There is no reason to do them. It doesn’t have any sense of accomplishment or any interesting rewards.

Part 1

Part 2
5. You guys said, that now LW teams will have 4 months to create content.
I honestly don’t see it. Look at RIFT. Those guys post-launch were able to push new raid instance and bunch of zone-wide events every month. EVERY MONTH.
If I compare it the last scarlet things.. Well from 2 months, it is not even 1/6 of what Trion pushed over one month, for 12-months straight.
I think, that honestly if those guys had 4-moths to work one, and had some creative freedom, we could see new dungeon or fractal every living world update. As I said. If it doesn’t made sense story wise, then just make some stupid story, or don’t make any at all. Who cares ? Players want more interesting content.

6. Also Living World doesn’t make any impact on the world. The world is not living. It’s still static. Villages doesn’t expand, new events are not showing up, NPCs still walks the same path, forest is where it always been. Honestly nothing really changed since launch to call it living world.
To have Living world, you must have procedurally generated content. Otherwise it just “living” withing range of how much level designer are willing/have ability to change some thigns. I can believe they have willingnes to change (who doesn’t ?), they just lack ability to do so, because of some unspoken reason of plans of how game should developer over X period of time.

How to fix it ? Add contested content. Diffrence is good! Lock out players of content is good! (despite what some people think).
Create events that will truly IMPACT world. Like making other content constested., inaccessible to players until they push the event in other direction. You have dragons! Use them. Make dragon minions invade Quensdale. Impress new player by conflict, where they have to fight dragon minions to retake the zone.
It would certainly impress me more when I was new, than killing wurms..

And doesn’t make it scarlet invasion v2.0. This design doesn’t work.
Instead:
1. Split area into influence zones.
2. Players have to cap, and then defend point over, to gain influence over said zone.
3. Players can’t progress further until zone ia secured.
4. Minions doesn’t drop loot. Important. Otherwise we will just have bunch of farmer that will keep zone in permament conflict so they can farm.
5. Instead in secured zones, should spawn merchants that will sell unique items (other problem look above).

Let the cities burn to the ground, NPC killed, villages destroyed. Make permanent impact on the world, until players will fix it.

That would be more living that entire “Living” World have been since start.

And now my personal complain. Halloween. It seems far smaller and less interesting this year. Last year it at least had nice quest line and dungeon. This year ? Bunch of brain-dead achievement, with achievement needed to actually complete quest. At this point I just facepalmed.

Living Story Pluses

• Molten Alliance brought new DE’s to old zones
• Molten Facility Dungeon was the best dungeon path I’ve seen
• The sky crystal scavenger hunt was a puzzle requiring thinking outside the GW2 box because of the new jumping skills — very enjoyable, the high point of LS for me
• Invasions as a concept could have brought change to zones

Living Story Minuses

• The world is exactly the same as it was before LS started, except for a few things that are not readily noticeable (e.g., Kiel is now on the Council, but this has no impact on one’s play experience; the Molten Alliance fell apart rather than replacing some of the Dredge and Flame Legion)
• Too much content that has to be completed in a herd
• Player interaction with the stories devolves down to, “Be my assistant and go click on these things/NPC’s.”
• Too much "click on x: in general
• Invasions could have impacted the world, instead the mobs show up, stand around waiting to be killed, then vanish

My problems with the Living Story

1) I know what is going on. I don’t know why it’s going on.
I have played since beta, almost every day and have done each new LS. If a new player were to ask me about Scarlet, my answer would be she is a slvari that attacked the queen and then attacked random maps. Where did she come from? I dunno. Why is she doing this? I dunno. Why is she attacking random maps far from towns and cities? I dunno. The background info is missing from ingame and before I read in a forum thread, I didn’t even know it could be found out of game.

2) it’s too fast and too shallow.
I gather ANet likes the buzz from people logging in for the new LS updates and talking about it but too much is just busy work. Running to different effigies on different maps and dancing like a monkey before each one is busy work. That sort of stuff is fine for holiday rewards, like carving pumpkins for Halloween. People expect frivolous stuff then. Slow down the pace. This will give your people more time to write deeper story plots and better things to do. Now it feels like an achieve race to get it done.

3) some way of going back to the old Living Stories.
A lore library maybe. Right now, if you missed one, it’s too bad so sad. Interactable books could have the cutscenes and background information. Maybe they could somehow trigger the ones where you actually participated in as an instance. Maybe they could even trigger the old, removed dungeons so new players could do them, even if they don’t get any sort of reward for it. If necessary, these dungeons could be scaled down so they are soloable if it’s too hard to get a group for this.

Keirion.9105:

One thing that would make the LS/LW much more appealing to me would to be to move away from ‘installments’ and instead have things feel like they’re happening over time.

On a base level, this would ideally look like characters moving more across different maps. Sometimes you see caravans moving across one map, sometimes with events, but you rarely see people traveling.

• What if there were caravans that traveled from Shaemoor to Applenook over the course of multiple days, stopping at different towns in Queensdale, Kessex, and Genedarren?

• What if Ameranth who loves to travel and see the world stopped sitting in the Black Citadel like she’s done for over a year and started visiting different regions? Maybe she could be like Nicholas the traveler and when you find her in a location she’ll trade something to you for random junk items x times a day.

• What if Braham had to travel down from Cragstead to Hoelbrak to take Asura gates to get over to DR to attend the Jubilee celebrations?

With all of those, events/activites/merchants/whatever would still be available for people when the person/army/whatever reached the correct location but it could happen dynamically day to day, week to week, month to month, on a given date without being a ‘new release’ which we already have half the story for in the patch notes.

Bi-monthly updates could still happen to set all this up but if it happened on a cadence of a moving world instead of an update with a new package.

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this idea, and I’m sure people would have tons of more ways it could be used than the ones I noted above.

I like this idea as well to add more “living” into the living story. Give us some characters that move around. Or even places and things, it makes sense for Queen Jenna to be in her throne room, but does XXX the merchant always have to be standing in the same spot on the street. Let the guy move around! Introduce some characters that we see moving around the world. I think back to Morrowind. In that game there was actually a guy, that if you followed him around over a12 hour day he would get up, leave his house, go to his job (I think he was a butcher), flirt with a woman who stops by, eventually leave with her, go back to her house, and then in the middle of the night sneak back to his place…and the next day he would get up, go to work, and then go home…later that week, his wife confronts him…the developers planned out a whole week of content for him alone to do if you chose to follow him around all day every day!

I agree with many here that the pace is a bit much. Not only for the players, but for the developers also. It feels like the game becomes a job to get all these meta things done. I don’t mind having the achievements to pursue, but having so little time to do them sucks sometimes. And I feel that the story suffers as a result.
For the whole first year I looked at the things like Halloween, Wintersday, even the Zephers as amazing “ground work” for the years to come. But after seeing the 2nd Halloween event, arguably the MOST anticipated holiday in game, the shining example of a well done event, and almost nothing was added this year. No story really. So now I wonder what will become of the rest of these events when they come back around.
Not having a historian to retell past events has been such a huge deterrent to new players, and also veterans that may have forgotten details, or just want to reread the “story so far”.
Honestly, I feel that even having Zhaitan in the personal story was a mistake given how the company wants to develop the story. Orr should have just been an instance, or dungeon but not a permanent zone that can’t changed ever.
I certainly like the idea in a previous post about contested zones. There is an event in lornar pass where you defend a bridge if you succeed, the bridge is there to use, fail, its gone. Why not something similar to that with towns/outposts?
Also, things like “meatober fest” have been going on for more than a year…maybe change these event, or rotate them with some other events that can exist in the same area.
Scarlett, ah Scarlett. I will not rehash all the things others have said already. She is not well liked by the forum community, and for good reason. Many here would like to move away from the “Saturday morning cartoon” type stories that come with her and her childish mentality.
A big thing I would like to see, is more to do with your chosen order. As it is, there a handful of quests to do where you go from recruit to big-wig ridiculously fast. The living story would be a great way to expand that experience also. It could work as investigative quests exploring the dragons or some other threat, (priory), going undercover to overthrow some bandit organizations or w/e(whispers) or going to retake seized lands/property (vigil). I just think they are a very under utilized resource.
I love this game, to quote someone in the lore forums, “I troll because I care”. Lots here do. We all want this game to be great….for years to come, but please reduce the amount of sugar and cheese (a little is great), and give us something really compelling to drool over!

Hi devs,

I’d like to start by saying that I have generally enjoyed the Living World so far. Everything from the Shadow of the Mad King onward has been basically good, but of course there are lots of improvements to be had. So I think I will begin by listing the things that have happened that I really enjoyed, followed by things I didn’t like and ways I think they can be improved.

What I’ve Liked:

• Lost Shores. Everything about it. I would love to see another attempt at a one-time event & boss, maybe with less loot to soothe the pain of missing it, and with more permanent changes as a result (possibly different changes for success/failure?).
• The length of Flame & Frost. Though many will say the first three months were boring, I think a slower story arc adds anticipation and investment when done properly.
• Both of the temporary dungeons as well as Super Adventure Box. All of them have been some of the best content in the game.
• Cutthroat Politics: the very first player-determined permanent change! More, please.

Complaints:

• Some of the stories have felt short and disjointed. We hop from plot to plot, and haven’t had a months-long one for a while. The only one that came close to a fully coherent plot was Dragon Bash → Bazaar (and that was good).
• Scarlet is not reaching her full potential. I do not hate her, but I can see why many players do. She needs to hurry up and unveil her master plan or purpose or whatever she has up her sleeve. The “mystery” isn’t interesting enough for most players when they simply dislike her. If she can become truly threatening, I think the attitude about her will improve.
• The rewards are piling up. I am running out of bank space for all the unique stuff you keep giving us!

Some Suggestions/Hope for the Future:

• More player choice. This needs to happen. I’ve never seen the community more invested in the game than during Cutthroat Politics, and most of the time it was in a very good way. We need more votes, Living Story events that can succeed or fail based on player participation, plotlines that change and branch depending on what we do. (Example: Scarlet becomes a world boss on par with Ancient Karka, except it’s actually possible to lose. Players can beat her or fail, and depending on what happens, her plot will change.)
• Let’s see some new zones! I realize you said we wouldn’t be getting new zones in 2013, and I fully accept this. But I am very much hoping we will see one or two new zones unveiled in early 2014, because we all want new stuff.
• Please get us out of Kryta for once. Going to the Foothills for F&F was great, and getting to Caledon last month was good too. But 80% of the Living Story has revolved entirely around Kryta, and it’s getting dull! There are so many other cool places the story could go, and I feel like Ascalon in particular is super neglected.
• This is the most important: progress a story. Right now, to many players, it feels like we are in a Saturday morning cartoon chasing around the villain who is concocting plan after plan that we regularly foil. I realize that this is not entirely true – Scarlet has only appeared in person one time. But we have “foiled” her (or her minions) five times in 1 year, and gone that entire year without a whole lot of progress. The story needs to move a little bit faster, and it should be more focused.

That’s about all I can think of right now without blathering on for hours. I still hold quite a lot of trust in the Living Story. I think it has IMMENSE potential, and I’m really looking forward to where it goes. Do not abandon it, no matter what some players might suggest; the Living Story is unique and it’s going to help propel the MMO genre into a new age of living virtual worlds.

Mostly anything I would say has been covered already, but to add to the consensus :

I don’t really care about the living story. The characters are shallow and as someone put it, more like episodes of He-Man or Ninja Turtles, with some baddie of the week or a returning one noone really cares about as they are no real threat. The temporary content is too much, too fast. Its basically farm achievement points as fast as you can. Feels like its being forced down my throat to farm achievement points before they disappear forever.
So, I just dont really care about it, keeping up with it, or doing it anymore. This sin’t a good thing from a MMO trying to put out new content to keep people interested.

What would make me more interested is a slower pace of the content and more real content, with lasting ramifications. A month-long turnaround on these stories would better suit them, IMO. With stories that actually affect the world. Its called Living World, but rarely feels like it affects the world or even has to do with the world at all……it feels more like a sideshow minigame to the main event/world.
Recently, the changes have been leaning more toward permanent changes, which is a direction I hope you continue in (Tequatl, new TA path remaining, etc..).

I’ve skimmed through some of the GW and GW2 lore on the wiki and other places and it is beyond me why the LW team is not tapping into this lore and stories (let alone the dragons themselves) for the Living World rather than inventing bad-guys of the week.

I think the living world is good idea on the whole. But what good is it to claim all this content is being put out when most of it is gone 2 weeks later and a large portion of the players don’t even care about it?

Who wants to bet the devs will only read the posts that praise their work, and not the real feedback they deserve? They need to use an in-game poll and be done with it.

I agree with the others in the post so far.

The most important problem to be addressed is that LW doesn’t bring long lasting impact to the world. Once the 2 week period is past , the content is simply vanished without any trace – enemy not to be seen, barren location with no purpose after patch. It is a shame that some content are gone forever without re-playability.

Worse still, the lack of progression of story inside the game – there is no indication what the player and NPCs are going to do. For example, shouldn’t we actively searching for Scarlet rather than waiting her to throw more minions at us? After the clockwork chaos we wait for a whole month for fighting Tequatl and SAB and then she made a new base in Twillight Arbor without anyone noticing? They should at least try to put some aetherblades near TA and fighting with Nightmare Courts and let us know that something is going to happen in TA. However I believe they have addresses this issue as the latest patch they placed Marjory Delaqua to investigate incidents in Kessex Hills for preparing the intro of the next LW story.

Another problem is the lack of content due to forcibly to fit into 2 week release cycle.
Usually once we finished the achievement in 2-3 days than there is nothing much we can do. I would like to have a more polished story like Flame and Frost rather than farm-driven like Queen Jubilee. I won’t mind to slow down the release cycle but please make more polished content rather than farming events.

I can understand people feeling under pressure when thy look at the wall of temporary achievements. Arenanet did some improvement on this field to ease the pressure like providing daily achievement to complete the meta achievement. Carving 5 pumpkins is much more comfortable than killing 300 Aetherblades or 300 holos.

If possible Arenanet should provide much more permanent achievements tied to new permanent content and reduce the temporary ones. Tequatl and the new path in the Twilight Arbor showing the right direction. You should follow it even more.

Regarding the removement of content I have two feelings. The removement of dungeons like Molten Facility or Aetherblade Retreat I can understand. These places were destroyed or cleansed after the chapter closed. The Fractals of the Mists are a great place for reminiscence of the dungeons. The complete removement of the Labyrinth Cliffs I do not understand. It would have been enough to remove the Zephyr Sanctum and let the people explore the rest of the Cliffs. I am sure there could be some achievements completable in the Labyrinth Cliffs without Zephyr Sanctum.

Please leave as much as possible of new zones in the game after a chapter is over.

ONe of the things that makes this world feel living the most is VO dialogue that happens around it. One of most effective things that we can do to make it better is to increase the dialogue that can occur. a lot of the dialogue in the game comes with NPCs interacting with each other my example to this is the NPCs in my Lions arch reacting to the lady walking By and what she is wearing. increasing this or obtain the tools to automate this in a fashion that makes the development of it goes by really quickly would really aid in making the world feel alive. also to aid in this if the development takes a long time you can reduce the amount of voice over work and have the NPCs make a one liner VO comment that leads to a text description of the commentary. maybe present an icon on top of the NPC to advise if I interact with the NPCs at that time and that time only I will have dialogue relevant to the situation the NPCs is in at the moment that is directed just to me. If they move on the icon goes away. with that you can add more dialogue and more content for each Living stoRy release which is what we really want along with a better quality version. I could spend hours just reading and PC dialogue in Guild Wars 1 every time there was a release and I could still spend that amount of time doing the same thing this gives your loving story writing team or responsibility but to be honest dialogue content for every living release is minor. spend a lot of time writing story content in a way that will work, add some voice over content but not as much to stress the update cadence, and provide npcs to give it out and even give it out between NPCs (directed story).

Also for quality…we need more depth and less thin content where the blog posts have depth. Bring the depth to the in game, the adventure box content left me talking for hours after the events and that’s what you want over my 2 weeks of wait for the next.

Belenwyn.8674:

Arenanet did some improvement on this field to ease the pressure like providing daily achievement to complete the meta achievement. Carving 5 pumpkins is much more comfortable than killing 300 Aetherblades or 300 holos.

Agreed. I meant to make this point in my post and it slipped my mind. Adding them in dailies adds more choice about how you want to go about doing the meta and are generally more relaxed (the price you pay for the easier route being fewer Achieve points than someone doing all of them)

I’ll keep it short:

Changes that I’d make:
1. First and most important: Eliminate the concept of soul bound. Everything we earn should be account bound.
2. Do not buff existing bosses/dragons. The teq change was a bad idea. It was great while it was the focus, but now there is hardly anyone ever there. It also reduces the accessibility to newer players.
3. Add new items to the world. I liked seeing the elections with the new map area that was opened. It was fun and well built. The new teq dynamics would have been great as a new dragon.
4. Allow content that can be enjoyed as a single player or as a group. It should dynamically adjust to however someone wants to play.

My biggest issues with the Living Story pretty much mirror my issues with the game as a whole; it doesn’t feel like there’s any actual plan. The Living Story as it currently exists feels like a parade of unconnected achievement point hunts with only the questionable villain that is Scarlet linking anything together. For a world with as much lore and depth as Tyria has, and as many innate threats as already existed in it, it almost feels like Scarlet is being used as an excuse to avoid it all.

The Living World/Story should be:
- Relevant to the history and lore of the game
- Relevant to the player character where possible, and actually at least engaging when not
- A tale that players essentially can’t help but be part of because it actually impacts the world on a day to day, or at least update to update, basis
- The vehicle for permanent removal of content for a large portion of the player base in order to give content to a select niche group

The Living World/Story should not be:
- A testing ground for whatever random idea the developers come up with this month
- Led by a villain and storylines that just sort of sit on top of the world and don’t engage any of it’s depth or lore
- Be solely defined by Achievement Points and the occasional cosmetic

Basically, the drive to participate in the LS should come from how well it’s constructed and how pervasive it’s existence is, not just from “tangible” rewards. Players should actually want to be part of the story because it’s cool or it really feels like if you don’t do it you’ll miss out on a cool experience. Players shouldn’t just be looking at the LS as something they don’t like or care about but feel they have to participate in for a day or two every couple of weeks just because Achievement Points.

I want to add something different:

Tie living story content with new mechanics.

If you’re adding new ascended or legendary gear, add a story behind it. Add lore behind it. Add some epic quests behind it. Add something that makes gear-collecting memorable, instead of being a pure, soulless mathematical acchievement.

If you’re adding guild missions, and that suddenly changes how guilds play in the game, then how does Tyria reacts to it, or better yet, what happened in Tyria to create this situation?

Etc.

There’s a few things I want to touch on:

1. Plot progression. The LS feels extremely disjointed and generally leaves the player without a single clue in what’s happening or where the story is going.

2. The structure of the LS. Also, I don’t believe the Living Story as a whole is glove to work as it us now. Good plots and lore need buildup. Viewing the last episode of any TV series straightaway will not be good as watching the whole thing. And that’s what the LS is at the moment. If a new player joins, he/she will not have ‘watched’ the previous episodes of the story and thus will not appreciate what’s happening no matter how good it is.

3. Not every update needs a story. Looking at RuneScape, they’ve been doing regular weekly updates much like GW2 for a decade and their model has clearly proven to be successful. They don’t give a story for each update, done updates are just huge QoL additions, balance changes or adding new features like skills into the game.

It works because one, it lets them focus on what the meat if the update is. If that update is to revamp a boss fight, they get to focus on the revamp without having to be distracted by a story to fit it around. Two, those updates are very targeted: they can just spend the entire update doing balancing, and that provides much higher quality.

4. Time. Are you sure the devs aren’t sacrificing quality for quantity?

To me the living world does not feel alive. A bit of the game world is dressed up differently for a month or so but it always tends to return to how it was before. I know that the personal story has to remain in perfect shape for new players, and I know living story update has to accommodate a player with a newly created account, but these two constraints seem to have shackled the living world.

The best example would be Scarlet’s invasions. The timberline falls seem like the old timberline falls, then there’s an invasion for 45 minutes, then it’s the same old timberline falls again. Nobody in the zone talks about the invasions at all. It is as if the invasion never happened, which might as well be the case as there are no consequences whatsoever. It leaves no footprint.

Here are some suggestions:
- better attention to detail – eg more NPCs changing their conversations and activity
- heralds to give better information on current activities
- a way to see the history of the living story from within game
- provide rewards through the game world rather than abstracting them into dancing chests and achievements
- let progress through the personal story change a character’s game world, their timeline, and how they view the living story – this is conspicuously absent
- let players enter alternate versions of old zones so they can see an active living story, even whilst other players can still run through the old zones as before.
- move away from 2-state events and give some variation in event chains
- get stories and teasers off the web and into the game world

I don’t mind content being temporary. I think the living story is poor and uninteresting as a story. Artwork, animations, voice acting etc is fine. The living world dungeons are ok. I don’t mind experimentation with living world updates but it is a shame to see obvious problems occurring (like Tequatl as an open access event). I accept that the a fair portion of the world updates will not interest me (activity games, minis). Balancing rewards for time/effort is a big game wide problem and it still hampers all permanent content in a living world update.

And related to “living world”, but not completely related to the current “living story 2-weekly updates”, is player-generated content. Guild missions should be expanded, and other systems be introduced so players can interact and modify the world of Tyria.

What about the possibility of guilds being able to own some of the current temples/ outposts/ villages in the game, and being able to invest resources into building new crafting houses for themselves, decrease their respective WP costs, of even build defensive mechanics to fight against extremely challenging dynamic event raids that attempt to overthrow guilds from their owning areas every week?

What about long-term dynamic events that take weeks to end, and build upon or destroy sections or objects of the world of Tyria depending on the player’s actions?

What if PvE had siege elements and areas that would simulate WvW, except being PvE instead of PvP? With large-scale, challenging dynamic events Tequatl-style that would force guilds to play really well to defend sections of the world? Where by failing, players would be locked out of unique merchants, functionalities, and even specific areas of Tyria? What if all WvW blueprints and upgrade levels also worked for PvE, especifically for this content?

This would make the world far more living, and it would also make the game more consistent between game modes.

TL;DR: Dynamic events are still the future of GW2’s Living World. Please, expand the way the Dynamic Event system works. It can be so much more than what it is now.

The biggest problem I have with living story is what happens after they’re not actual anymore. They just kinda go away and disappear. It’s just a race to get the item of the week (which takes up all your place in the bank, you need to make it like the items from achievements!). Twilight Arbor had one non-functioning meta-achievement and none on a Monday before the next patch, and even though it said October Achievements it ended mid-October. You have not communicated with us properly, we’re just left there questioning you. It’s like talking to a wall. Tequatl is like a Guild Mission, but it’s open world, with above average loot, there’s overflows, and there’s a SPAWN TIMER. You have not told us what your idea is behind this, and for all we know it’s just the LACK of an idea. Make use of the Hall of Monuments and add the Living World items to a NPC there!

I think temporary content is cool. Seriously. However, the amount of content you’re cycling through is excessive. What’s wrong with letting content breathe a little? I feel like anything big enough to have a meta should be in the game for a month, minimum.

Also, tell your stories in the game. The game is your selling point. It is meant to be a vehicle for storytelling. Use the stories to enrich the game, be it about dragons or sylvari or bunnies.

Please keep including some of the temporary content into the main game, as well- the mini-games, for example! I’d love to have aspect arena or dragon ball back in the mix! Sanctum Sprint was brilliant. Gold star to whomever came up with that game.

Going along with what others mention in community involvement, I think events like this should also promote stronger communication. “Temporary” events that only impact players that come on during that time can help create connections between different players that otherwise wouldn’t exist. If these events can involve players not just on the large scale, but also on a small scale (maybe the size of a single party or guild), I think that you might have people come back just for these living world events.

These events wouldn’t have to just include combat as well. Riddles, travel, trading, and much more could all be included. One of the coolest things that I myself could imagine is something similar to ARG’s that we have in the real world, but happening in either just this game, or in both real life and in game.

There would be something special about a game where you know you can look back to that one living world event where you met that particular friend you continue to play this game with. With the looking for group out now, events like these would help grow the community, and allow people to meet and bond with others they might not normally bond with.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Awesome start!

I am reading the thread and will likely join the discussion tomorrow.

Chris

Well if you like how the thread itself is developing then it might count as awesome..
As for the topic the criticizm of the living story content, I’d say its anything than awesome, on the contrary it leaves a lot to be desired.
If you people dont take all this to heart then I dont know what it will take.
I’ve seen excelent points made so far and sugestions on how to correct them in order to set this thing straight.
Lets hope it wont just stop at “Good feedback! we’ll consider it.” and then continue on as if nothing happened.

I’ve always felt that the current challenge, story-wise, the devs face is that there’s a conundrum in the protagonist’s role. The main hero is supposed to be the player character, but it appears Anet does not want to write them into the story.

Unlike TV episodes, the audience in an MMO is supposed to be an active participant in the story. I think many players expected that, hence the disappointment in the personal story. At least that was a one off thing, but then we come to the living story and the same problem rises up again.

We’ve seen new attempts in other directions, such as Braham and Rox, that attempt to divert the player’s attention away from their own characters but so far that has been uninteresting and ineffective. Okay, maybe the characters were just too undeveloped. Let’s introduce a memorable archetype like Scarlet. Hmm. I’m not sure if I could count her as a success. I suspect Scarlet, too, will be forgotten after her story arc ends.

The solution, I think, is to put the players back in to the protagonist’s role again, with a small caveat—the protagonists of the living story from now on are only referred to as one of the agents in the three orders. This may run somewhat contrary to the personal heroism GW2 is trying to portray, but as we have already seen, you cannot have just one hero in a massively multi-player game. Each players deserve to have their moment to shine, but the game world should be built with multi-player in mind. Once we get over this, more systems can be developed in place for players to get together (via the orders) and bridge the gap between solo’ing in the open world, and Tequatl.

In order to get to that point, each order needs to be iterated on and build to become organizations that players want to be a part of. There is a problem with the different orders having different specializations (The order of whispers frontlining tequatl doesn’t make much sense). Another problem is that the personal story is optional and there currently isn’t another way to join an order. I think these are all problems that can be overcome in future releases, whether via joint operations between orders, or have each future releases be designed in such a way that each of the three specialization have its place. The personal story up until initiation into an order may become mandatory for unlocking LS (also serves as an extended tutorial), and the rest of it scraped and replaced by living story releases.

The new orders can also serve as character development post-lv80, and rising in ranks should prepare players for greater challenges (hopefully not via stat increases). Once this has been taken care of, players will have a much firmer foothold in the game world, and get their sense of permanent progression that they currently expect from the LS updates, even though that isn’t what the current LS updates offer.

It always feels like it’s just these fast turnover events, with no ties with anything. Where we’re not “compelled” to help/defeat these random new characters that pop up unknown to most of us who are not knee-deep in lore. Involving races in tyria that seem to have amnesia as soon as the LW timeframe ends, like nothing ever happened? Why isn’t queensdale on super high alert!? why are the dredge not being under close watch by norn, and the flame legion being chased around their zone by other warbands?,

And then here us champions come…sword in hand. Ready to fight the good fight and….

….get achievements…because that’s going to save tyria…how?

I just find I’m at a loss at why I should care. I’m rarely, if ever shown why. Sure you guys say I should care about this…but you shouldn’t be telling me…you should be showing me.

I would like to see the living world changing areas or even better adding new ones, i would also like more world bosses and generally group events related to living story and in addition to that an in game timer i think is essential cause everyone is always checking websites to check when teq is spawn shatterer etc.