Guild Wars 2

I wonder how much players will come back / enter the GW2 universe when Anet changes the term “living world” into “growing world”.

I see a strong trend in implementation of permanent content, which is a good thing. They listened to us previously and now we see the result. I like that shift. Now I just feel that the story-delivery has to come on par with this trend. Let people play on their own pace, new stuff every two weeks is awesome,… after this two weeks make those new temporary story parts kind of instanced, so that everyone (even players who start a year from now) can experience it; and players who enjoyed it can repeat it.

Example: a storyteller tells you the story of Braham and the battle of Cragstead. You relive what happened in Brahams eyes… like the GW1 storybooks.

AdrianTanith.5742:

snip…
There are some things I don’t agree with. While having repercussions for failure would be nice it would be too difficult for many people. If the centaurs for instance were to take over an entire map, instead of seeing people work together to take that map back people would simple just stop going there. Just like Teq, it’s too hard so people are just not doing it anymore. …snip

Well seeing as I mentioned it, I will elaborate. Some players may not bother, but therein lies the problem with most of the maps currently, ANet needs to have a reason for players to revisit the areas. If for example an NPC in one of the major towns at the end of the chain offered something that cannot be gotten anywhere else (think temples) that is beneficial to the player then players will group up to get to said NPC. Increasing the rewards as the map is taken back could also offer a large incentive to those that want lootz. As I said in my previous post, there are many many things that would need to be discussed in order to make this a reality, but I stand my my original post that we NEED consequences.

As for Teq, I have already stated in another post that he/it isn’t exactly open world material and this pseudo raid content shouldn’t have been implemented in it’s current form. If it requires a dedicated guild that will seek out an overflow in order to defeat him, it isn’t exactly pug friendly.

My two cents:

I’ve been following the LW ever since I started playing last year, and I personally have noticed quite a lot of disparity in the quality and ‘bulk’ of different releases. For instance, I loved ‘Bazaar of the Four Winds’ (Leif Chappelle, I adored your work on this release) for the varied nature of what you were doing – new mechanics, a new and different style of map with lots of stuff going on and great rewards (please bring this back soon!!). Same with Super Adventure Box, Crown Pavilion, the Southsun content, and the majority of Flame and Frost.

Then there are events like Dragon Bash that feel very lacking in substance and creativity (go here, click 100 of these, click that, use some tokens or whatever). Cut-Throat Politics in particular felt like a half-baked filler between two of my favorite releases, with (what I felt to be) very little player influence. Even if we did influence the outcome of that event, how can you account for all the people that spammed the badges just to get the achievement points? I know of very few people that actually supported one of the candidates outright, which seems completely contradictory to the whole point of the event.

Like many other posters here, I have noticed that certain releases keep players engaged for the duration of the event, while others drive people away completely. There will always be people like myself who just want the achievement points, but please, could ya make the grind a little more interesting?

Then there is the issue of permanence. A lot of people here are QQing about how there isn’t enough content that stays, and while I agree that there are certain bits of content that I have been sad to see go, I feel that the content that does stay permanent (Karka Queen events and the new TA path, to name just two) gets forgotten after players have got all the achievements and the LW aspect has finished. It wasn’t until fairly recently that my server started to run the Southsun meta regularly, after a gap of around 3-4 months where Southsun was practically deserted 24/7. Then there is Tequatl. I think the raid style re-vamp is fantastic – content that is always available, that requires a considerable effort on the part of every player that attends the event. But it’s just that; the amount of co-ordination a server needs to actually have a chance of taking this dragon down is often too extensive, and players look to other areas of content to get their dose of GW2. Since the Teq stuff finished, Sparkfly seems to be deserted most of the time, and I suspect that it will remain that way until some kind of nerf.

That’s enough from me. Thanks for reading and I hope this is helpful.

Hey Chris and every other developer in Anet I’m really loving this collaborative approach, I’ll try to be as much as objective as I can.
First thing first, I was one of the few who supported Living World/Story concept, as I consider it to be a brilliant idea, and some of patches we got were really good. BUT Over the past few releases I kind of stoped caring about what is happening to the world. Reason I think is obvious… it doesn’t have an impact on the world or my character. Scarlet was nice addition, but I think she overstayed her welcome. For some reason I find Guild Wars 1 story and ideas to be more interesting and mature, something that is missing in Guild Wars 2 so far, I honestly can’t pinpoint in what way exactly but I belive I’m not the only one that feels this way.
I think that Living World should come with more content, I didn’t like Blood and Madness at all, I found it to be the weakest patch so far.
I would also like to see current in-game lore being used, there are plenty of all ready interesting facts, npc’s and ideas in the game, expanding on them would be right thing in my honest opinion.
As in other post, please find a way to bring those short-stories from website in the game somehow, I am of strong belive that story in game should be told via it’s mehanics. That is the best way to do it, if not then at least add some NPC or book in game where we can read about that story.
Pace of the living story is, well, slow and doesn’t flow at all, elder dragons seems to take a backseat here and I find it odd indeed. Why can’t we have living story that involves edler dragons and/or their champions. I think people will be far more intersted in that story.

I know I said a lot of negative things about Living World, but I think this will be better feedback then me saying how great it is, since it is… Idea is great, but some patches were really bad, and some were good.

P.S.
Please no more festive events and off-topic: I do hope you are planing expansion or some new zones

I really liked the way that Flame and Frost was handled. It was a slow buildup that gave us time to understand the situation and get to know the characters, and by the end of it I really cared about what was happening. Southsun was kind of that way, but a little bit shorter, and it definitely could have used more development.

What I’m saying here is TAKE YOUR TIME! Make a story that makes sense, and take the time to tell it right.

Also, please stop trying to force Scarlet on the playerbase. Her backstory is ridiculous (why has no one mentioned the super genius sylvari who’s somehow mastered every scientific discipline of every major race?), and she’s more childish than a Saturday morning cartoon villain. I don’t even play her content anymore, because I just wish she wasn’t part of the game. Totally out of sync with the rest of GW lore.

Maybe we could see some expansion into new parts of the map, or even an instanced underground zone. I’d like to explore the dwarven or asuran tunnels and see what kind of nasty things have moved in.

Ok, my 2 cents.

The razing of the forests in Kessex, the destruction of the abandoned housing…winners. Do not bring them back by copy pasta-ing them back after the event, this makes some of the other environmental changes from GW1 to GW2 understandable.

I’m on the fence about Scarlet. I am hoping the story arc will tie the whole together, but am coming to the end of my patience in the wait. The story writing has brought out some interesting characters, good and bad, however, the expectation of players is that there should be some way to see the ending by careful attention. (ex. The Sixth Sense had a surprise ending, but if you paid careful attention there were hints in the movie as to what it was. The worst case of the withholding of information in storytelling is the Sherlock Holmes series…)

I have enjoyed the volatility of the LS. If I miss something, the game is unapologetic about that. Would I like to see some historical information left behind to get a flavor of what happened? Of course. That is what lore is about. It was frustrating to not see the Lion’s Arch lighthouse go down..more frustrating was trying to find information about what happened…yes, a shout out to the community did get the information, but after the immediacy, a little NPC interaction could have made the lore findable for those missing the event.

Things that are just plain bad:

Why should we be required to read a short story outside the game to find out lore based information? How about a newspaper in game that is delivered to your mail box? Or two, one from the Black Lion Trading Company and one from the Consortium. Opposing views of the same situation. Another option is dialog, since cut scenes cost money, adding dialog to NPC’s, that can be sleuthed from the newspaper articles, can fill in more of this type of information…leading to more integrated role playing and deeper ownership of the storyline to the player.

Gating LS content behind achievements. I have not had a problem finishing enough to get to the rest of the story, but I can definitely see how this is a problem for a lot of players. I feel that THIS does go against the idea of ‘no grind’. It was obvious before release that there was going to be long term objectives that would require ‘grind’, but there was a promise that there would not be a ‘requirement’ to do this grind to be able to play all the content competitively. This needs to be stopped, and never revisited.

I do thank you all for taking the time to attempt to fix the issues, we as players want fixed, and the hard work that is required in keeping this beast in control. Good luck and I’ll see you in game.

Azalea Crupp
Yak’s Bend

These are my biggest concerns about the Living Story:

• Lack of low level dungeons.
• Scarlet Briar.
• Lack of Activity-grouping.

I will elaborate it point-by-point below:

Lack of low level dungeons.
I have a friend who tried the game out, but was confused at what he is supposed to be doing. The heart events take too long, the dynamic events are far and few between, and the content we experience is not hard enough to get his adrenaline going. Most games uses the holy trinity to get them set and comfortable with group content at an early level, Guild Wars 2 does not. My proposal is low level dungeons that start from something as early as level 5 or 11. I personally have played AC explorable dungeon two times and that’s it of my dungeoneering since release! AC explorable became a joke at our expense, we felt unfairly treated, and by the time I said “Should we try another dungeon some other time?”, all I got was a resounding “Nah”.

(Please don’t take this like I want the content to be easier, I just want more easier content on earlier levels)

For the sake of creating healthy groups of friends and companions, and in my case, keep my real life friends playing beyond level 15, I think low level dungeons should be a thing. They don’t need to be hard. They don’t need to reward level 80 players. Just make it fun for those who are not used to the game, get them hooked for the next dungeon. Level 30 is way too late, and the threshold is way too steep.

Scarlet Briar
To explain, I don’t think Scarlet is an interesting character. Scarlet Briar is unmotivated and from nowhere decided that she wanted to be a rebel, and became such an all-knowing and powerful character the moment she was introduced. She is sylvari, which means that she has no parents. No upbringing. No trauma. No previous relations. She is insane, not showing any signs of humanity. Rox and Braham on the other hand are relatable and have a past. Why doesn’t the villain?

At the first patch, I already felt detached from her. The fall of an individual that brings him/her on the darker path, is what makes a villain interesting. Then when the Living Story kept on tacking on (previously) interesting mysteries like the Molten Alliance onto this bland character, I was disappointed. It felt like a cop-out, that you could not come to an interesting conclusion, and went on with creating yet another character when there is already such an absolute abundance of them from Personal Story. It has only continued down this path, which has made me increasingly uninterested in Guild Wars 2’s way of storytelling.

Lack of Activity-grouping.
Lack of grouping in activities, it has been said. But going at an event with only guildies, or playing with a friend, needs to be fixed. I feel like I’m playing with NPCs half the time, and I have no reason to bring an offline friend in to play with me. Halloween is the latest example where I hyped up the activities from last year, only to find that the one activity that was doable with a friend (Clocktower) is now also inaccesible.

I know your company has a stance on making it fun for everyone, but you have to understand the nature of an MMO should not to be to shy away from grouping.

Thanks ArenaNet, I wish you luck with the Living Story.

I agree with what many others have already posted.

I like the idea of the living story, but not so much the paste of it. Most of the time, it is too fast for my liking.

I often feel I do not get much room to enjoy other (permanent) areas of the game. When I have to choose between the temporary content and the permanent content… Well, I don’t want to miss out and the dungeons and spvp and exploring the world are not going anywhere.

Sometimes I feel like I am postponing the rest of the game for the living story because often, it is temporary content.

You could argue I could just stop doing that (and you would be correct), but I enjoy the living story. Problem is, I also rather enjoyed the break that used to be in between the living story releases.

I would prefer longer lasting or even better: Permanent living world content and less frequent releases.

It would be nice to have some sort of development in the story itself. Currently, I at least think, many of the living story releases feel somewhat disconnected from one another.

I would prefer for the living story, to feel more as a new chapter in the same book. That there were a great epic story told over time, which we as players would get to be part of and play a part in.

Moreover, it would be nice if the result of our efforts, our wins or loses would leave a mark on the world of Tyria. That the world developed alongside the living story.

Glad to see all the constructive criticism. Less happy to see the flames and recriminations. This is a good opportunity, people. Try not to ruin it for the majority.

What I like:

• I love new characters like Braham, Rox, Majory and Kasmeer. They feel whole and convincing, and I enjoy their company.
• I love seeing existing stories built upon. During August, I was really curious about the tension between Logan, Jenna and Anise. Faren is always fun (so love his role in that month’s dungeon, shame it can’t be revisited), and the minstrel and hobotron are amusing as minor recurring characters. They help make the world feel alive.
• I liked that the August update dealt with the problems facing the human race. It made sense for them to show themselves as competitive with the more technologically advanced races.
• The aetherblade seemed really cool and mysterious at first.

What I don’t like:

• Scarlet uniting all these disparate groups is a stretch to say the least, as are many aspects of her character. Shame to squander a big name voice actor on a character that the majority do not enjoy. It also cheapened the aetherblade for me.
• The lore players are actually interested in (elder dragons) has been ignored. Every time we thought something actually related to the elder dragons, well, it was Scarlet.
• The living story does not build upon the personal story, apart from a few nods. They feel like disparate systems.
• Content is fleeting and can’t be revisited.
• The world is not expanding.

What I expect:

• I want the living story to expand upon the world. I assumed it would take the place of expansions, but until new zones are opened and the greater world lore is explored in greater depth, it falls a little short.
• I don’t object to biweekly updates, but the living story needs to move at a more manageable pace. Similar to other suggestions, I’d like to see a clearer delineation between living story updates and quality of life updates/updates that don’t directly pertain to the living story.
• Maybe super fun box should be annual rather than biannual. It made sense to bring it back, but maybe it was too soon and too jarring.
• I’d like to see a balance between predictability and chaos. Basically I expect a major story arch to span a “season” (either half a year or a year) with the living story updates as “episodes.”

Alright, I have seen a lot of very good points already in this thread. I would like to extend some suggestions instead of just pointing out what needs to change.

1. First and foremost we need to discuss the story. The living world story is amazing, unfortunately you have to look elsewhere other than in-game to fully understand the depth and how everything is connected to each other.

Suggestions: Create a building in Lions Arch and call it the Library. This building will have in game summary of all the lore up to this point. Including the short stories provided to us on the website. A place to go and read what happened in previous living world updates if you missed it. A place to watch cutscenes that you missed in like a “recorded” style. A place where we will be able to make the connections between “E”, Scarlet, Ellen Kiel, Gnashblade, aetherblade, Super Adventure Box, etc….

All of a sudden the back-story of Scarlet will be in-game instead of somewhere on the www. You could even include the personal story information and cutscenes (updated as you progress).

2. The very linear living story events.

I must admit it was a great idea to add scarlet’s invasions to the game. However, it happens so often that it is now overlooked. A lot of living world events become like this as they are very linear. (i.e the same result happens every time you complete it).

Suggestion: The first solution most people will throw out is “increase the rewards” or “make the invasions appear only once a week” both of which could work. However I would suggest a combination of both. What would happen if everytime you beat scarlet’s invasion she spills a little tiny spoiler of her master plan?

All of a sudden you will have people flocking to stop her because we will get more of the story revealed.

This can be done with all living world events “i.e Tequatl” if everytime we got information about the elder dragons every time tequatl died it would be amazing. Which would then update the library.

This will only work if the events are made to happen much less frequently than currently.

Just a few suggestions

hi,

here my 10 cents of how to improve the Living World updates:

Living World/story cadence:
GW2 is this MMO with the flat levelling curve, thus the danger is that people run out of stuff to do (except grinding and all kinds of repetitive stuff). The most honest solution is to add new content and do it fast, so players are not bored. A new episode every 2 weeks for free is imho really, really great! Other MMOs try to occupy people with cheap pseudo-content, like gear treadmill, etc.

Heros and villains:
why do so many forum readers hate Scarlet now? They didn’t hate her, when she was was new. Because she is only hysterical, doesn’t show much personality. If I were Scarlet, I would be seriously angry after being beaten back during the invasions, but no, she is exactly the same hysterical woman in the new Aether Path in TA. Like Trahearne, if Anet had given this poor guy some humor and not only this boring heroism character attribute, he would be liked much more. You don’t need to kill Scarlet, but make her a deeper character, make her more interesting.

Story-telling:
For the last ca. 6 months the Living World updates were unrelated and had no real plot, e.g. Bazaar of the 4 Winds unrelated to Kiel/Gnashblade election unrelated to Queen’s Jubilee related (this time!) to Clockwork Chaos unrelated to SAB unrelated to Tequatl unrelated to Twighlight Assault. This is imho too difficult for people to follow. Story elements are too far spaced out.

Time needed to complete content:
Not every episode in the Living needs to give people the same amount of stuff to do.
Now that you have certain content elements in place, they can be run in parallel to the actual living story, e.g. SAB or Zephyrites Bazaar can be activated for a couple of weeks completely independantly of the Living Story. In real life (and TV shows) there are always multiple things going on simultaneously. Not every episode needs to give people equal amount of stuff to do.

Achievements:
People suffer from the delusion, they have to fulfill every single the achievements of a Living World update. And then they complain they don’t have enough time. Give the achievements a difficulty marker. Good example: The combat challenges in the Crown Pavilion were for the advanced players, while the story elements in Queen’s Jubilee/Clockwork Chaos could nicely been done by casual players. In other MMOs easy/medium/hard content is more clearly separated (e.g. open-world/dungeons/raids).

Finally:
Living World is a real innovation, only a few more tweaks needed. Don’t let the complainers discourage you from doing more of these experimental improvements to this already great game!

I want to second niteskate: I love the Living World, and think it’s an amazing thing for a game to have.

So, instead of repeating some of the great points being made (and I think that there are great points being made in this discussion), I thought I’d spitball some ideas that could be expanded on by others. These aren’t hard recommendations, just ideas to spark discussion.

I don’t think the devs should be afraid to break free of the bi-weekly update schedule if it means they could plan something bigger, more excited, and more polished. If they announced that the next several LS updates would be 3 weeks apart, building up to an even bigger expansion that would expand the world and lore in a meaningful way (which is what I hear many folks asking for), I think it would be met with excitement! Many fans of GW1 miss the shear amount of maps, lore, and newness that was added with the two expansions, and, while the LW is an amazing way to have new stuff more often, I think something somewhere between a normal LW update and a full-on expansion would make a lot of people happy. (Elona and Cantha should eventually come, but we’re willing to trust the devs to take their time to do them right, at their proper time).

For something more specific: A series of updates could expand the lore about one of the more mysterious races, including those established in GW1. There’s so much we could learn about the Seers, the Forgotten, the Largos, the Kodan, the Jotun before their fall, or any others I’m not listing. This would add some connection to the first game, which old fans would love to see, and introduce new players to the larger world/lore of Guild Wars.

And to round it out at three: Something along the lines of the alliance battles from Factions could be implemented, but with a computer faction against a player faction, fighting for control of zones on some specific region’s map. If the players failed, the whole region would become overrun, and remain that way until players fought them back, even after the official story moved on. If such a defeat happened, it would change the environment in the long term, and take real time for it to go back to normalcy (and some permanent changes should also happen, within reason). This would have higher stakes than just “Scarlet’s minions are attacking X,” as there would be more drama; an actual front line, an ebb and flow of victory and defeat that players could see on the map.

Here are just my imperfect ideas, that I hope will give others ideas, and provide good discussion.

I enjoy the living story for the fact that there is always something fresh and new to do, or if I want to ignore it all together that is my choice to make.

However, The story itself is really lacking depth. I’ve read up on the lore of GW1 and it is fascinating! I wish this game was more focused on the interesting lore that has already been established. The personal story fell short, I think everyone is aware of that by now, but Anet has the chance to make up for it in LS and they aren’t taking that opportunity….. At least not yet.

Personally I am one of the few players that enjoy the current Living story situation, and feel that we should not know every little detail, I understand that it’s slowly building to something larger, but I do get that some players are frustrated with how things are.

Just thought i’d speak up and say that their are players that are enjoying things. I’m willing to see things change, but I do enjoy what is being provided.

When the manifesto was released and the promise of a changing world with events that have consequences for failure… one year on I cant help but feel a little decieved.
The only time I’ve actually felt compelled “We really need to win this event” was for the event chain outside Citadel of Flames so I can actually enter the dungeon.

I was looking forward to the living story where Eir reforges the other sword she found in Ascalon Catacombs and escorts Queen Jennah with Logan and Rytlock to finally lay to rest the ghosts in Ascalon.
Instead we get a Mary Sue who suddenly appears with several armys, has been everywhere done everything and is ruining everyones day because EVIL! HaHa ha.

When I tell new players about stuff from my time spent playing, it was the end of beta events or how certain superbosses were alot harder once (Shadow behemoth what happened to you.. r shadow punch?) When people still turned up for Tequatl or how you created a 5hr event chain that dropped precursers.
Living story? What happened?
Did X, Y amount of times. Got a back skin.

I do have some good points though!
Halloween and Christmas events are amazing I love the effort put into them and look forwarded to the events again when they return.
Sanctum Sprint, Southsun Survival and Keg brawl making a return as daily activities is good but I still want to be able to enter the same match with friends/guildies, alongside or against either is fun.

Mardermann.7468:

I have Zero feeling that I “live” in a living world.
Lots of little junks with lots of folk who are interesting/semi interesting heroes…
Just I as a player dont feel like a hero…
it started with the abysmal written and also very badly voiced Trehaerne (cant even spell his name right and he does not deserve to be googled)
and all the events (except for the Roxx and Emoguy Norn dungeon) where not really that interesting.
The zephyre market was interesting because different…

Ireally hoped for more character / race driven storydevelopment
(I love Norn… why didnt you write something interesting connected to their lore?
Why are the animal spirits still missing… give us wolverine back or ox… (owl is dead I guess))
divide the living story teams into racial story teams and further the interesting story behind each of the races…
enough of all the little things and rather grindy reward things…. I really dont need a shiny gadget if the story is well written…
just sell that stuff on the bltc and be done with it…

Sadly I have to agree with much of this post, the living story really doesn’t seem to have made the world feel “living” at all and I think there are a number of reasons for that.

First and foremost is the fact that the updates included in the “Living Story” are often disjointed, unrelated and fairly one dimensional. Players can’t get invested in a story that jumps from strange sky people, to new alien islands, to steampunk dredge/charr to who knows what else, it’s just too jarring of a transition. The story needs to pick one very plotline and focus on telling a story that takes it (and in turn the player) to a very specific and compelling conclusion. In addition I really REALLY think right now that plotline needs to be the Elder Dragons and bringing back the menace, the threat and the excitement associated with them especially to redeem them from the understandably very underwhelming confrontation with Zhaitan.

Oh and the poster above also mentioned Trahearne, he’s… a very bad character (to put it mildly) in fact I personally think he’s so bad it’s not even worth trying to redeem him in any future updates. I’m fairly certain about the best you could do with him is allow players to vent some of their frustration at his condescending, fame stealing, holier-than-thou ways by changing him into a villain somehow. Then at least he’d be gone for good and no one would have to worry about him stepping into the player characters limelight again to take credit where credit is most assuredly not due.

So all in all I just think GW2 needs a much narrower focus on the Elder Dragons, tying in established lore from GW and making sure that the player character(s) are taking front stage in helping save and impact the “world” is what this game needs to get people invested in what’s going on. I mean aside from Roxx, Brahme and Destiny’s Edge I think most players have no real idea who any other NPC’s are or what they’re even doing on their screens. And how can you become attached to a story where that is the case? We need to really get to know a few character, to watch characters grow, change and evolve with us as the story progresses. Then we can and will care about what’s happening to them, to our characters and to the world.

Oh and one last thing, I really feel like ArenaNet pulls punches far too often in their narrative to prevent upsetting anyone. You guys really shouldn’t be afraid to make something dramatic but doing to illustrate how “real” things are in your stories.

Hi guys,

Thanks for giving us a chance to speak our mind! I love guild wars 2, it’s a great game, and I’ll be playing it for many years to come. Just wanted to say that off the bat.

In terms of living story there is one thing I think it’s truly lacking, and that is what is called in storytelling, the antagonist’s “kick the cat” moment. In GW1, there was the searing. In star wars, there was princess leia’s planet getting destroyed. In the movie Gladiator, there’s the scene where he finds his family murdered. In the series Deadwood on HBO, there was the moment wild bill gets murdered. I mean, in virtually every genre of storytelling when you see a good story, there’s moments where you suddenly start to care. That’s what the living story needs. It needs a searing. It needs an area destroyed and decimated by the forces of evil. It needs a reason, a source of emotional investment. It needs something to truly fight against, where you’re not quite sure how it’s going to play out and you might lose.

Know what I’m sayin?

I remerber being very excited about Flame and Frost because we were speculating that the story will somehow bring something permanent about Jormag (since it was something going on in the north), which never hapened. Since, I must admit I gave less attention to the story behind the events, doing the Living Story more for the achievements and the loot then for the lore or the story. I think it is because its in game for too short, and does not have a real impact on the world. Some story also were not making sence with the original Kryta lore, it was a bit out of the blue.

At first, I also thought the Living Story was too easy and not really challenging, but then you brought Tequatl, which was very hard and, I must say, impossible for unorganized servors. I did not want to wait for hours in Blackgate to get a chance to achieve it, so after a week of unfortunate tries in my servor, I just gave up and told myself «At least it will disappear soon and we will be able to do Tequatl again». Now its a dead event, nobody does it anymore.

I’m afraid even if something in the Living Story is made permanent, the players will stop doing it once the achievements are completed, if its not rewarding enought. Like the Tequatl event.

Players are eager to complete achivements, use that! Add new challenging achievements to Living Story parts made permanent, like Tequatl or Scarlet. Also, make more Living Story have a permanent impact on the world, like new dungeons, new personnal story, new jumping puzzles, new craftable, activities, new twists on current maps, etc. And, less currencies please.

Even if we are complaining, some desings were very nice and refreshing. The votes were fun, the Christmas event was awesome and soo flavorfull. Keep on the good work, and I’m sure you’ll make it even better!

Ok, my biggest gripe with the LS is that the writing doesn’t seem to follow a coherent plot at all, but appears to be driven by the content instead. I have the impression that the LS a pure wrapper around whatever content is scheduled to release for the game. Devs made a new TA dungeon path? So Scarlet gets to invade it! The entire storyline feels disjointed and thus cannot get me immersed at all for that reason. We got an alliance between Flame Legion and Dredge one week, a party crashing Sylvari the next, but neither storyline is then really continued as far as we could see. It’s not plot driven content, it’s content driven plot.

As for the actual content: I don’t know, but lately the LS seemed to drive waaay into hardcore land. We got a fairly challenging boss arena (Jennah’s Jubilee), hard more platforming (SAB) a super frustrating World Boss (Tequatl), a hard dungeon path (TA)… What’s next? Baseline is, that I have little to no interest in content like this and more often that not didn’t bother with it anymore at all. I love…you know…questing and events. The stuff that made GW2 famous! I love to collect clothing (and not just 10,000 back pieces!!!). What I don’t want to do is bashing my head against hardcore content. There are other games I could have played, had I wanted that.

Also, the LS is one of the things that might look better on paper than in practice. The temporary content leaves this unpleasant feeling to have to log in all the time, or miss out. Also, this way the game doesn’t really grow at all. Some small things change here and there, but overall the changes are not significant enough to keep areas we have visited time and again interesting enough to make one want to go there again and again. In the end, other than Southsun and the Fractals, this game didn’t really grow at all since launch. Even the new dungeon path just replaced another. And the focus on the LS is largely to blame for that.

In the end, I’d gladly exchange the LS for permanent additions, such as new areas. If you guys are absolutely stuck with the concept, -at least- write a coherent plot, that doesn’t leave the impression it’s just an add-on to whatever content you want to publish. Keep the content fun for average players and not just a few hardcores. And add some variety in terms of rewards. This game has enough (more or less silly looking) backpieces already.

Could we do a Hall of Memories, or bring back the Scrying pool in Hall of monuments to allow people to experience past living story events? Similar to GW1 when doing instances that took place before your character came to that land i.e. Canthan characters doing the Ascalonian missions got a prompt “These events took place before your arrival here”

Appoint an npc, likely Asuran like Tessa, to be the director of the events and give players an item like the Golem Assistant that will generate Holographic or ghost versions of Living story npcs in the areas that they were in during the events. We could also track the memory progress much like personal story, and give a small amount of achievement points for completing the chain.

For example, activate Flame and Frost storyline at HOM, watch a short cutscene, or listen to a short voice dialog of our NPC explaining the situation as it was. Head to Wayfarers foothills, outside of Cragstead gate. Double click HOM golem assistant. Hologram of Braham appears, gives short voice dialog, or same dialog options as during Flame and Frost, and updates the story tracking progress much like personal story, and making a personal point of entry into the cragstead instance.

This allows for new, or returning players to see and experience living world the same way that we did, without causing time paradoxes for current players, as the former important NPCs will be either hologram footage, or completely invisible to those without the memory quest activated.This will also only reveal past instance entry points to people reliving the event, just like personal story.

This also serves as compiled endgame story material, as new players will be able to invite friends to help or accompany them like personal story.

This can also be a method of earning missed achievement points from past events, without giving out physical items. For example, you can complete all Flame and Frost achievements, and get the full 75 points for completing all other achievements, but not thee fused gauntlets, as you were not REALLY there, only experiencing it as a memory.

Another option for making this make sense in the world is to have a construct room and clockwork minions emulate the experience. Somewhat like the danger room in Xmen, you could play through all the instances without travelling the world. I think the hologram option makes sense, and benefits old and new players more though.

As you can see, one way or another, but still all problems of LW comes down to it temporality. I do not know why the developers had the idea that remove the content of the game is a good idea. No1 loves temporality in games.
This is worst.
Thing.
Ever.

Let’s see….
- The essence of life in its evolution, growth, moving forward. LW does not leave any impact. The world is changing only at the time of addon, after this it’s returning to its former state. Changes again for a while. Returns. As a result, for half a year that does not change. The world is not actually “living” but just “changing on some time”.

- Too many scattered storylines. They are weakly linked to each other. The developers are jumping from one scene to another. Sense of integrity lost. It’s difficult to find any information about the previous story phase even on the wiki. As a result, new players just do not know about any living “story”.

- Achievements like “gather / kill / visit the 100-200-500” and !time-bound! turn this game into a pure grind. Huge grind on limited time interests very small number of players. Normal player just will not waste time. Casual will scare and run out. Achievements should be temporary, same.

- A lot of players do not want to return, having missed one or another phase of LW. They feel that they missed something important and it’s hard to explain them that it’s was just a dozen achievements. Again: temporality in games is harmful.

- removed even content that could remain logically. For example Pavilion (we released it from Scarlet, right?). Dungeons and the whole location(!) of bazaar. Omg WHY?! I see a massive amount of time and resources spent to nowhere. It… repels.

Temporality – not the only problem. But the main. As long as LW temporary – it is bad.

The Living World…where to start?

The Villain
I’ll start with the low-hanging fruit. Scarlet. The writing is easy enough to criticize. She’s a caricature, a parody of a Saturday morning cartoon villain. Every two weeks she shows up unannounced, often interrupting our leisure time, and makes a mess of things. We then spend the next two weeks cleaning up her mess before she runs away, ensuring she’ll be back to do it again next update.

I might be dating myself a bit here, but as a child I watched a Super Mario Brothers cartoon. In that cartoon King Koopa always caused trouble before being cornered, at which point he’d say “he who koops and runs away lives to koop another day.” And then the cartoon would end and he’d be back to do it all again the next day. That’s exactly how I feel about Scarlet. She has about the same level of depth as King Koopa in the Super Mario Brothers cartoon.

In game, we’re presented with virtually no information about her or her motives. Short stories presented outside of the game are not the proper way to present the story in-game. If you haven’t presented me with enough information about an important character in the game, then you’ve done a poor job developing that character. And that leads me to my next point…

The Elder Dragons
This game was launched with the clear threat the dragons presented to the world of Tyria. These all-powerful beings represented an end to all life as Tyria knew it and were the underlying reason for everyone banding together in a grand alliance hell-bent on fighting these antagonists.

But now they’ve seemingly decided they don’t want to destroy the world. Or the Pact has decided they’re no longer a threat. Scarlet showed up, literally out of no where, and the entire world forgot the dragons existed. The dragons themselves seem to have forgot they existed. The Elder Dragons have gone from being preeminent threats to afterthoughts. The story has shifted from an epic struggle for survival to an episodic villain-chase.

Presentation
You guys really need to put more effort into presenting the setup/scene for each installment of the Living Story. A message or a few unspoken lines of dialogue aren’t doing enough to breathe life into what you want to be a Living World. Take Tequatl, for instance; the message didn’t tell us anything beyond “come fight him”. Rox didn’t tell us anything beyond “go look for stuff”. There was no lore, no exposition, and no resolution. It was simply a “we changed this, come check it out”.

That works well enough in some instances, but for much of the Living Story something other than a message saying “hi, come help” would go a long way to adding depth to the Living World.

Release Schedule
I would personally rather have an update every two or three months if it meant the updates were more polished, deeper experience that contained far less content filler. Take the Bloody Prince’s story, for instance. We had a short instance lasting 15 or so minutes, three or more days of time-gated chores, followed by fifteen more minutes of content to close it out.

Far too many Living Story updates are time-gated or loaded with content filler. Remember this about filler content…if it’s not fun enough for you to enjoy it, it’s not fun enough for us to enjoy it. I doubt anyone, anywhere found burning dragon effigies fun.

Breaking dragon pinatas, collecting kites, riding in balloons, and carving pumpkins isn’t content…it’s filler. And filler isn’t fun. If fewer updates meant less filler, fewer bugs, more polish, more depth, and more fun, I’d be the first to sign on for that.

Resources
While we’re on the subject of resources, the more resources the developers pour into the Living Story the less resources are available to expand the game to areas like the Crystal Desert, to expand the Personal Story, or to balance skills and traits or introduce new classes or races. I’d rather have any of those than chase Scarlet around the same zones I’ve fully explored on five different characters.

There’s only so many times I want to visit the same old zones before I pine for some place new to explore. I’d rather explore new places in this game, but if we keep chasing Scarlet around the Harathi Hinterlands I’m eventually going to go somewhere else for that “new” feeling.

The first initial implementation of the living story was a complete flop. But you have been getting much better at it. I haven’t really felt that the events of the living story have any real effect on the actual world. And if it has, I don’t really feel the impact. What would have happened if the election went the other way? I do like the idea of meeting new characters. Rox and Braham are great.

So even though, in my opinion, you have gone short on your goal to make the living world have as much impact to the immersion players have in game. I think you have done quite well in giving us something entertaining to do. You are in the right direction and I hope you continue to listen to the players and improve the living story.

Side note: I hope you plan on doing something with the personal story. I know this virtually stopped after defeating our first Elder Dragon. I wish there was an actual reason to go back to my home instance besides mining rare minerals. I don’t know when you are going to do it, but I know I’m about ready to go after another Dragon.

Side-Side note: I’m still waiting for the shooting gallery in Divinity’s Reach and Polymock in Rata Sum. If you guys upgraded Polymock to be more like a “MOBA” game like SMITE. Maybe have the mobs be 8-bit versions of skritt (since the asurans view them as disposable).

The Living World, and My Part in It
Also relating to the subject of resources and quick updates, the fact that my character hasn’t uttered a single line of spoken dialogue in the Living Story does nothing to make the world feel “living”. I understand there are ten voice actors, none of which come cheap I’m sure, and little time to voice every spoken line. I also understand it’s a waste of resources to voice content that will be gone in two weeks (more on that later).

But my adventure in this game began with the words “this is MY story”. The Living Story has changed that. I’m no a silent protagonist in someone else’s story. My Personal Story has been supplanted by Scarlet’s Personal Story, in which I’m just the guy who pitches in to help out. I feel as though I could be replaced by one of the asuras’ golems and nobody would notice the difference.

Temporary Content
Temporary content is designed that way for a reason (keep players logging in) but it seems like an awful waste of resources to design content to be thrown away. And it has placed a great deal of strain on people who don’t have much time to play to rush to get it all done before it goes away. This strain has cause my brother (the guy who introduced me to the game in the first place) to quite. Permanent content is the way to shape the world. The “be here every two weeks or miss out” approach is burning people out.

*Don’t Break It*
I really hope your idea of a living, breathing world with change isn’t to wreck the masterfully crafted zones your team has worked so hard to make. Burning down Claypool or trashing swathes of Caledon Forest might give the impression that things are in motion, but two weeks later everyone will move on to the next installment, leaving you with nothing but a splotch for new players to gawk at. Let them experience the beautiful zones in the game as they were originally envisioned. And if you must effect change on the world, do it for good reason. “Scarlet threw a tantrum” isn’t a good reason, in my humble opinion.

In Conclusion
That about cover my thoughts on the Living World. I’d rather the resources going into it be used to develop a proper expansion. But if the Living World model is here to stay, give yourself the time to do them justice. Don’t release Living World content just because the two week deadline is upon you. Wait and release it when you can be proud of it…when it matches the quality of the content you had in the game at release. Go back to “when it’s ready.” Wait and release it when you can say to yourselves “now THAT was fun.”

From my point of view, what this game needs is more story, more zones to play, new characters, new skills, more things to do. Not just a limited time story with the same characters and some new limited achievements.

Hey all I love this thread and the idea of collaborative development, its really nice to know that the dev’s are listening to us.

One of the problems I have with the Living world and the updates we have been getting is that I feel like you haven’t added much playable content to the game at all. We have had a lot of nice reward and rank updates, like with the achievement point chests and the champ boxes and the wvw ranks but i feel like we haven’t gotten much in the way of playable content. we have seen a lot of balancing and changing existing content. The only permanent new playable content we have gotten is Southsun cove, fractals, the new TA path and the new fractals coming soon and zephyr sanctum? oh and guild missions which i love. I’m sure there are others but i can’t remember off the top of my head

A lot of the content added to the game is new gemstore stuff and trivial living story stuff like fetch quests like we saw in boss week or running round hitting pinatas or carving candy corn. I want to see some more really solid content like what we saw in October and November of last year. In october of 2012 you had the Halloween patch which had new events a new mini dungeon on top of the awesome Halloween stuff, in November you had a new zone southsun ( which I didn’t really like but its still a large amount of content) and the fractals of the mists. then the next few months it was a lot of fetch quests and run here then go there until we got the AWESOME molten alliance facility. then pretty much the rest of the year has been festivals with running around zones trying to find presents or heirlooms or scales. I would love to see a lot of new permanent content like new zones, dungeons more boss fights in addition to these nice new features like the lfg tool and rank updates.

I would love to see a lot more permanent exciting content added to the game, not temporary fetch quests or little temporary farm zones. I want to see new zones new dungeons and new exciting cohesive storylines, not little pieces of story like we have seen in the last few patches, where we have to piece together little pieces of what scarlet has done over many months to find out whats going on.

I hope this adds to the discussion and helps out I’m not used to posting on the forums. I really love GW2 and I hope this doesn’t come off to nasty.

P.S I wanna see a really evil non-comical serious villain in addition to scarlet. One of those villains that make people really hate him/her and want to kill him/her! but in a good way even better if its a charr XD

The Living Story is a great idea but I don’t think it was implemented properly and really in touch with the story and world we all started out with. As already stated the two week schedule is absolutely insane and pretty much anything in the fall or later in the year I’ll never get to see, let alone get to do since I’m usually gone several weeks at a time.

Why isn’t there a way for the Living Story to progress ? By this I mean say Scarlet part I comes out the first week of September and Scarlet part II two weeks after that; why can’t a player who hasn’t be on-line in a month start off at part I ? Can’t there be an NPC or way in which the content is still available ? This way players can actually be a part of the story and feel as if they are doing something rather then missing something. I only use the example of Scarlet since she seems to be our newest villian but there is so much in the world that seems to have been forgotten. The Dragons, the Pact, Craigstead, and what about the choices we made as characters ? What happened to my Charr’s war band ? His status as a legionarrie or for a norn, now that they’ve become a legend what NPC’s and people will seek their help ? The talent exsists within Anet as far as writers and the creativity to answer a lot of those questions and to make it so our character is more involved in the Living Story and not a foot note in it.

I guess in a nutshell I’d like to see more things in the living story relate to my personal story and something I could do at my own pace and not a break neck schedule as is currently being done. You almost have to choose, should I work on my character ? or farm to keep up with acheivement pts to get the lastest story done ?

Put those creative writers to work but in a way that adds to a characters personal story and changes the world they see as they explore. A lot of the people who bought GW 2 did it to explore and pour themselves into the game and their characters not to grind away like a typical MMO.

Dungeons – There really needs to be a way to do these alone, with NPC’s or a much smaller group. There is no reason for a personal story to be tied to having others help you finish it or rely on certain events to happen on a particular map in-order to be able to complete it. I have three friends who have quit playing because after a year of playing they have yet to even complete the game.

I’ve been pretty happy myself watching this game evolve much like the original GW did and I know there should be a way to mesh a little of the original Guild Wars game into GW 2 so you can appease both the true MMO fan and those who enjoyed the private instances in the origianl game ( wasn’t that our personal story ? and what happened to it ? )

Sir Arthur.8905:

Could we do a Hall of Memories, or bring back the Scrying pool in Hall of monuments to allow people to experience past living story events? Similar to GW1 when doing instances that took place before your character came to that land i.e. Canthan characters doing the Ascalonian missions got a prompt “These events took place before your arrival here”

Appoint an npc, likely Asuran like Tessa, to be the director of the events and give players an item like the Golem Assistant that will generate Holographic or ghost versions of Living story npcs in the areas that they were in during the events. We could also track the memory progress much like personal story, and give a small amount of achievement points for completing the chain.

For example, activate Flame and Frost storyline at HOM, watch a short cutscene, or listen to a short voice dialog of our NPC explaining the situation as it was. Head to Wayfarers foothills, outside of Cragstead gate. Double click HOM golem assistant. Hologram of Braham appears, gives short voice dialog, or same dialog options as during Flame and Frost, and updates the story tracking progress much like personal story, and making a personal point of entry into the cragstead instance.

This allows for new, or returning players to see and experience living world the same way that we did, without causing time paradoxes for current players, as the former important NPCs will be either hologram footage, or completely invisible to those without the memory quest activated.This will also only reveal past instance entry points to people reliving the event, just like personal story.

This also serves as compiled endgame story material, as new players will be able to invite friends to help or accompany them like personal story.

This can also be a method of earning missed achievement points from past events, without giving out physical items. For example, you can complete all Flame and Frost achievements, and get the full 75 points for completing all other achievements, but not thee fused gauntlets, as you were not REALLY there, only experiencing it as a memory.

Another option for making this make sense in the world is to have a construct room and clockwork minions emulate the experience. Somewhat like the danger room in Xmen, you could play through all the instances without travelling the world. I think the hologram option makes sense, and benefits old and new players more though.

Also, as a middle ground for physical rewards, you could give out HOM tickets as tokens for completing memory chains, and provide an NPC that will offer any of the chest awards in exchange for a set amount.

Example, getting all achievements for reliving Flame and Frost chain still gives a chest along with 75 achievement points, however, the chest holds one “memory shard” (token). Trade in 5 “memory shards” (tokens) for your choice of Fused Gauntlets, Desert Rose backpiece, Slick Pack, Hot air Balloon, Mad Gauntlets, Quartz node, etc.

Veteran players can complete them for extra achievement points, and use tickets to get items they never got, or for BL keys, or BL tickets. This will give incentive to older players to complete them as well.

What gets me excited about “living world” content:

1. Changing environments (southsun evolving, the statue destroyed by the mad king, etc.)

2. Interesting stories/mysteries (the ghost hunt last Halloween -mad memories-, what was driving the refugees south during frost and flame, etc.)

What I don’t like about what “living story” has become:

1. Grinding achievements. Even though I don’t like playing GW2 like a chore list, I find myself playing to the achievement list so I get the limited time only rewards and don’t miss out. I hate playing this way, but I do it anyway because I don’t want to miss out on some cool skin or other reward.

2. Grindy events. This years Halloween event has been nothing to me except jumping on the loot Zerg in the mad kings labirynth. I couldn’t advance the actual story without grinding 13 event achievements (ridiculous!) so I went into the labirynth and didn’t come out until I had enough to actually advance the story. I followed the Zerg and did probably a couple hundred door events and mined several hundred candy corn nodes on the way. Then when I finally come out to see what the story had in store for me, it turned out to be a 5 minute dungeon in involving a 2 minute boss battle.

All in all I think this years Halloween event is a good example of what is wrong with the “living story” as it stands today: there is literally 15 minutes or so of actual story and several hours of grinding the same mining nodes, the same monsters, the same events….

Hi,
I’ve already posted my concerns over living story in this thread but I wanted to add a few things if I may…

I wanted to say that living story does keep things fresh in the game. You aren’t stuck with the same content for months on end. While the frequency definitely needs adjustment, the concept of living story is a great one. There are positives to the concept. It just needs to be executed a bit better.

As someone else in the thread stated… the teams are given multi week cycles to develop this content. I agree with that poster when I say that I just don’t see the quality in the living story lore and content as we have seen with the rest of the game up until this point. You have a phenomenal game here and a chance to take the MMO genre to new heights. The hype machine pre-launch had the entire MMO community buzzing about what GW2 will be. And the living story concept is a bold one. But it has definate flaws that you do not need to be a developer to see. Too little substantial content released too quickly in the form of achievement grinding with poor story telling. Go back to the roots in how you created content and things will improve. I loved the personal stories. I loved the dialogue between NPCs at a camp when we save the town. Things like that is what set this game apart from the rest.

By the way, my previous response and this one come from a player that is currently not playing your game, but is so passionate and attached to the title that he feels it necessary to do every thing he can to make his opinions heard in this thread and hopefully sway some decision making in the hopes that one day, the development direction might shift a bit and he can return to the game that he was so hyped for. Isn’t that the type of player you want?

Edit: One more thing… Its no secret that living story approval is split amongst the player base. People play through the LS because its there and at the end they get rewarded. That doesn’t mean its a slam dunk success. If you feel necessary, don’t be afraid to revert some changes or admit that parts of the Living Story are not going as well as intended and maybe you should re-think some direction behind it. I’d actually have more respect for a developer that would recognize a few flaws than to say that their content is awesome without flaw.

I agree with all the people who’ve mentioned bringing the Living Story in the direction of the original story, with the dragons etc.

And going off the idea’s Wooden Potatoes (YouTuber) mentioned, it would be really awesome if you focused more on what’s already there as opposed to introducing all these new random enemies, that feel so temporary… Don’t get me wrong though, the massive Scarlet invasions where an entire zone would turn into a massive event chain was awesome. I just think those kind of large scale events tied into a progressive story somewhat related to the original personal stories would be so much more interesting.

When I heard of the Tequatl update I was so excited for a new massive story arc related to the dragons starting, but I was a little saddened to see it was only an updated boss fight… A very good update though (although every time I go to the boss fights lately the servers are always empty)… but that’s another story.

To add to this, exploring new areas and zones as part of the living story would be great too! These obviously don’t need to be every two weeks or anything. But expanding our horizons in new zones would be fantastic.

In short, my ideal direction for the living story would be something like slowly exploring north to the shiverpeaks in search of Jormag, dealing with small story arcs as we progress. We could unlock a new zone, and venture into it, but it wouldn’t be as easy to explore as the normal areas, you could have large group events blocking certain areas that people need to overcome together to gain access to the different corners of these zones. This with some hiccups along the way that could take up 4-6 updates worth of content before we progress further to the next zone.

In summary, a number of smaller side quests and events that slowly explore new zones, but lead towards the larger goal of fighting the dragons as well. At the moment we seem to have these side quests and events, but they all seem very out of place and random, and after it all we’re still no closer to saving the world from the dragons…

I feel that there is just waay too much living world content coming out back to back. It’s too much to keep up with living world and do anything else with this game. Even devoting all the gaming time I have to living world still only gets me those nice rewards half of the time. Also, my inventory is so cluttered with living world stuff I have no room to put anything. It’s just too much.

I could never even kill teq on my server and tried a bunch of times. That wasn’t fun at all. Just a huge money sink constantly portaling back because nobody will rez. If it’s too hard people start to act like a bunch of power gamers and that takes all of the fun out of it.

I have more fun with Guild Wars 1 now because I just got confused and bogged down with all the living world stuff. I want to go to Cantha. If you desperately need to add content to this game add the Echovald Forest please.

1). Living Story
In my humble opinion, I feel as though the Scarlet story is a bit bland. I enjoyed everything from the molten allaince to the aetherblades and then i just lost interest in the living story with the introduction of Scarlet Briar. There was nothing to catch my attention with a psychopathic person wanting to control half of the world just because she wants to. I would actually like to see HOW our Personal Story actually IMPACTED the world. The karka attack on southsun cove captured my attention because it was right after Zhaitan died. It made me want to actually be there. It got my imagination on what would come next.
With Scarlet however, there’s not much we can imagine based upon her story. She is just a small part of the world when there’s giant half a province sized dragons trying to devour the planet. Dragons that can literally wipe her away from the planet just by flying over her location.
What happened to Cantha? What happened to Elona? What happened to the world you built in Guild Wars 1? What happened to us defeating the Ancient Awakened Dragons. More importantly… what happened to the actual story of Us. The story that we were meant to Build based upon our actions as presented by the intro of every one of our characters
Right now all we are getting is a predetermined path with the Scarlet Briar living story in which our interaction with the living story doesn’t change anything rather than going deeper into a story that much of the player base doesn’t even care about. My entire guild quit getting on from the sheer boredom with the Scarlet Briar storyline. In my opinion, get her over with… not worth playing her story line at all.

2) Dungeons and fractals
I liked the dungeons like the Aetherblade’s Retreat and Molten Allaince because they were fresh to the game. Only problem is the newer players will never be able to experience that due to the fact that it was removed after the event. Hopefully they will be added to Fractals to challenge a lot of the players, if bringing those dungeons back will limit the amount of content that can be added to the rest of the world. I want this to apply to the majority of future dungeons that the GW2 team develops so that your beautiful works will not go to waste.
3) Events
Grinding, something the GW2 team said in their trailers that did not want to happen in their game. Here we are grinding achievements every two weeks. Many of us don’t have time to grind them due to the time we spend in school learning and working in our jobs. I want to request that there be monthly events rather than 2 week events so that those of us with less time can actually complete something without spending every minute of our free time getting an item we want.

4)Storage
Event item bank- to clear all of that event item clutter within our inventories. We have been burdened with event items such as skins and such. We barely have room in our inventories to save all of our rares and exotics and ascended weapons from all of the event items.

Increase crafting material storage size so that it is like the wallet which gives us the opportunity to save our crafting materials without having to take out the 250 sized stack to get more materials saved (this is one of my lesser problems)

I really want to ask something though. In all honesty, are you guys ‘holding’ back lore from GW1 and aren’t diving into them because you’re afraid that, the LS being a very new concept and arguably in a stage of experimentation, there’s a good chance they won’t see their full potential realised?

1/2
Concerning the Living Story:

1. More lore and immersion- I’ve been noticing a decrease in lore/plot each passing update. I loved Flame and Frost because you actually had a story and you immersed yourself in it, trying to help Braham and Rox and you actually had progressive steps that could be accessible from a certain date. I mean, it’s good to get more info on the characters through your posts in this website, but it feels lackluster when you have next to nothing about them ingame, like in Scarlet’s case. I like her and all but I end up feeling like I could like her more as a villain if I had to find out where did she come from, her motivations, etc, ingame. (Having a mission to Ratasum to discover more about her background so we could battle her more effectively, something like that). Remember what you did with the first Halloween patch, when we had to search for Mad King’s Memoirs and for each we would learn more about him, not only from the Memoirs themselves, but from the ghost NPCs, it was fun!

2. More character development – This ties up with the above, but when you introduce a meaningful character in the lore, please spend the time to develop them. I loved what you did with Braham and Rox, you also did a great introduction for Marjery even if her backstory was out of the game. That being said, I got the feeling that story had a “to be continued” and I would find it a little illogical if you did continue it ingame even though her backstory wasn’t even mentioned once ingame. But I guess we’ll know more about it tomorrow, huh?
As for Scarlet, like I said, even if she has a fun personality, she kinda appeared out of nowhere, without any build up or background story. If you did want to make her appear out of nowhere, you should’ve forced us to do some detective work ingame, to find more about her. Though, I have to give you a thumbs up for tying Scarlet’s story with a certain Asuras’ Personal Story path, it makes things feel dynamic and meaningful.

3. Don’t leave us clueless! (pun intended) If you are going to make us look for dragon teeth, shards, or whatever, for Christ’s sake, give us clues!
I loved the dead drops in Flame and Frost because I could do it without relying on a guide. The Mad King’s Memoirs were also great, they were hard but at least it wasn’t a wild-goose chase for random items that can be anywhere in an area and you’re only ever doing it if you feel like having those extra achievement points. It’s plainly boring and frustrating. If you don’t want to give us clues at least make the hunt worth it, like having a bit of story about each of the dragon lieutenants or something like that. Finding the crystals in the Bazaar was fun though, but that only worked because you had to be creative to get to them and it was a new, explorable land so we didn’t mind exploring each nook and cranny.

2/2

Now for the Living World itself (or at least I hope this qualifies and Living World):

1. Voices and Personality options in character creation – I don’t know if you could even alter it now but I had to mention this, the character creation is lacking. I’m not going to complain about the lack of hairstyles (which you’ve addressed, thank you), face models and the likes, but I am going to complain about two main things: you can’t choose your character’s voice nor personality. Why choosing your character’s voice? Because when you have two or more female humans, you will start to get annoyed by the repetition. They are your characters, you try to make them unique but there are a few things that ruin it to you, the voice being one of them. It would be great if we had two or three more choices. I understand it would require a lot of time and money to rerecord everything, but I had to throw this out there.
This leads me to the second point, the personality. If I’ve idealized my character as someone shy, no matter what, I’ll hear “Welcome to big town! Population: me!”, it’s annoying and once again, breaks the experience. Yeah, you get to choose the “I overcome things with charm, dignity or ferocity” but changes next to nothing. For one, it doesn’t change the god forsaken dialogues and it certainly doesn’t change how the NPCs generally act around you, so that choice is a no-choice really, it has no actual purpose in the end.

2. Personal Story – Yeah, I didn’t want to go “more personal story” but more personal story please. I know it will probably be reserved for a possible expansion when another dragon is introduced, but please don’t forget about it!

3. Bigger servers? – I don’t know if this is the best expression to describe it, and I certainly have no idea how that works, but it is annoying when you require lots of people and coordination for an event such as Tequatl but most of them are sent to an Overflow because the server can’t take it. I know there is no such thing as an infinite server but it would be great if you could improve them somehow.

4. Helmets that don’t make you go bald – Most of the helmets make your hair disappear, especially if your character is a female. There are some that are excusable, like the Citadel of Flame heavy helmet, or even the Dragon Bash helm, since it covers the back part, but most of them just make your long hair suddenly go puff, and in the worst cases, like the Witch hat, it makes you go plain bald. I don’t ask you to make the hair look exactly like the one we chose, but a preset just to make you look… not bald, would be nice.

5. Capes and Scarves please – I know you guys are trying to solve the clipping issue with capes and I just wanted to say, I love you guys for trying. Please don’t forget about scarves and the likes, they would be cool for a back item, even if technically you put them around the neck, details.

And that’s it, hope my suggestions were useful in some way. I haven been playing the game since launch without leaving it, I would love to see it improve in the future. Please, keep up the good work!

It’s great that the Living World has been chosen as the first topic to discuss since right now it’s the most important part of Guild Wars 2. This is currently the game’s driving force for those that have been playing since months and have already seen everything the game had to offer at release. This is also the one feature that needs to be set on rail towards success as quickly as possible for the future of the game (PvE wise).

After all those living world updates though, I feel that the plan missed the mark so far. I took the time to reflect on all the different updates we had so far and maybe 1/3 was good, 1/3 was okay and 1/3 was meh but none of them were really great (except maybe Shadow of the Mad King, Bazaar of the Four Winds and SAB).

Why did it miss the mark?
Simply because the living world/story is not living and doesn’t have any interesting story.

First, everything started kind of slowly. I understand that you had to adjust your development cycle and teams but it dealt quite a blow to the game. Between January and April nothing really had been going on. The ramp up for Flame & Frost was really weak and it should have been released in one go instead. It didn’t lead to any anticipation at all — I didn’t care at all about what was happening. Once Flame & Frost was done we got a bunch of totally unrelated content updates. Some were great by themselves, like SAB and the Bazaar per example, but there was no interesting and important main theme tying everything together. A bunch of different disjointed releases one after the other and it’s starting to show and wear me off after a couple of months. If GW2 is going to become the evolving festival updates galore, I’d prefer to wait 6 months with nothing before getting a worthwhile expansion.

The story part of the “living story” can be summed up by the words “weak, disjointed, uninteresting, unepic, not enough, unrelated (to the existing game world)”. It seems like Anet didn’t plan anything story-wise for the future of the game and that all the different releases so far were just fun projects of various small groups. Like if five people worked on festivals, five on SAB, five on Southsun, five on Scarlet, etc. and then everything was thrown in the box as soon as the content came trickling out.

About the living part in “living story”, I don’t feel it really… living? The words “living world” inspire a world that would be evolving and changing starting time-wise from where the game ended : with the defeat of Zhaitan. However, the whole Pact organization thing is frozen in time since one year. Most existing zones and events didn’t change much if at all. The only part of the game that really changed is Southsun but it’s about only half a zone in itself and have been thrown in at some point out of nowhere. It’s like an island isolated from the game world and living in a different dimension. The only bit of land in the whole world that is evolving. The other modifications were minor.

Another big reason why the “living” is feeling weak is because most of the new content so far is gone. We have almost nothing to show about what happened over the last year.

This leads me to talk about Orr not changing and the problem with changing it (due to screwing up the personal story of new players coming into the game). However, Anet already solved that problem in the first Guild Wars when Prophecies characters traveled to Cantha. All the things that happened before the Prophecies characters reached the new continent were labeled as “Here is a story of what happened previously.” for those characters. The same technique has been used with Elona and also with the rerun of some canthan festivals. Why not using that technique to modify Orr and preserve the personal stories of new players? The personal story is 95% instanced already. This way you’ll be able to continue on with the end of the game and truely make it a living world. By using the same technique, you’ll also be able to keep inside the game the cool temporary content that you removed, maybe via a historian NPC. This would solve two issues :
– Not enough new permanent content
– Bi-weekly updates are too fast for some people (you missed the update? no worries, you can relive the story via our historian dude anyway, so take your time)

All in all, I feel a bit disappointed where the game is going currently with the living world and I had hoped that everything would have been a bit more epic and more true to Guild Wars’ origins instead of a mashup of different ideas coming from the left field. Please, stop ignoring the existing lore of the game world and use it in your releases.

Let’s hope that Arena.net will understanding the feelings of the community and will steer the boat in the right direction for the next year!

I wrote a lot on some potentials of Living Story and put it here. Read if you like. It is very long though.

I really love Guild Wars 2 but I feel like you guys can do a lot more with the living world.
*Make some permanent content that players would love to revisit as opposed to only going to farm whatever may be in store. More complex plots with the living story would be amazing. Make it more dynamic and story driven, instead of just an opening ceremony, closing ceremony, and farming in between.
*Make more dungeons! There are only so many exp paths you can do before you lose interest.
*Also, I think it would be nice if you give the Orders some more significance. I mean apart from the personal story and the occasional Priory member in living world, they are kinda just…there.
*I know some people may disagree with me on this, but some quest npcs in the major towns would be nice. I think it would give some players a reason to come back to the towns instead for something other than crafting and using the mystic forge.
*Also please have instances where our character is the real hero. It’s kind of frustrating that we do everything and a npc gets all the praise at the end.
*I would also like to see new and challenging enemies, ones that have some difficulty (not tequatl status).
*I’m not sure whether this would be appropriate for this forum but I think class/race skill expansions would be pretty sweet. Maybe the skills can be unlocked through missions, especially the racial skills (I would love it if my charr could use flame legion magic, even though i don’t like the FL…just sayin :-P)
*Which leads me to my last thought: please bring back class combinations! I thought that was one of the most unique things ever in GW1!

Gw2 is great game, please make it astounding! I know you guys can

First thing id like to point out is the Living story durations. I know u promised constant content and fun things to do But as many people have established already it can be time punishing for many of us. I know theres a lot of Hardcore players that on this time and era get bored after a week of doing something new but i believe that one of the things that set apart Guildwars was the perfect ombintion of inmersive story and gameplay. I would like to see more " Bulky" Living world content. The Flame and frost content was a well written character developing story arc that moved from point A to point B with logic, explanation and purpose. The characters introduced onto the story not only semed their own but also held connctions to current world events and to current well known characters. On the other hand Kiel and Scarlet seem disconnected, they dont feel like possible friends to you just a guy who asks favors and a loose cannon who so far doesnt sem to know whats shes doing. I know u might have bigger plans for scarlet than what we see now but so far it has been too subtle and the alliances she as gathered seem VERY disconnected. If anything atleast we should have been introduced to a Dredge authority figure an Inquest authority Figure and a Flame Legion Authority figure. Sort of like an Inner Circle of BIG BOSSES to gather and plan on with Scarlet. But the thing that Scarlet simply arrived at their home and said “Hey u bored? join me” and all those different groups just followed her? Where was the one that was commanding them before scarlet arrived? and if she got rid of them we should have atleast been witness to that. The New dungeon Path was GREAT and i LOVED how the cinematics turned out for it. But other than that it still lacked inmersive story. You have 3 well established characters who could have been put to good use on that story and yet u placed an unknow Lionguard in charge of the whole thing. Why not make Kiel shine with her new airship?

Untouched story Arcs
Ok we have the 3 orders on the pact, we have the Charr/Human peace treaty, we have The missing Spirit of the wild, we have The Nightmare court and the possibility of another “Pale Tree”, Dragon Minions, and all these are left untouched. Maybe for future use? But the thing is while i understand storylines are in abundance inside this huge world theres Too many hinted things and none resolved. In a living world this feels rather ike as if the time stopped. I believe these already hinted at stories should have been priority before introducing more new and unique things. Once again, the Flame and Frost story is so far the dominant one in terms that it added more than one instance of story and used 2 pre existing storylines and mixd them in a way that made sense. It felt like an expansion of the already established conflict on the shiver peaks and Ascalon. The Aetherblae story should have been continued and expanded over more before introducing Scarlet. Also The Dragon Minions are the most important thing , they shouldnt fall to the back burner just like that. I know that Elder Dragons are being saved for when you can make WAY more awesome thing with them or for the longer run but the minions should pose always a threat, the game although inmersive with many races and dangers, should always remind us the Dragons are the main concern.
Also centaurs. Why have scarlet attack Human when we still have centaurs on the plate?

NonPermanent Content
Ok this is smething that does bother me a lot. I can understand the need to have things that are event exclusive in terms of some quests achievements and the prizes. But i believe some should be permanent. An example: The Flame and Frost instances could work as an extra path in Personal Story when you reach Lv 80. and helps people keep up on the living story even so u have removed all the other achievement and content. The aether escape dungeon and maybe the instances could have also been permanent, once again letting new people do these as side stories to keep up with how the living storyhs been going so far ( I mean new players will have NO Idea who Brahm or Rox are without the inevitable answer " Oh they are from past events " and new players feling like they are already missing on a LOT of the story. )U can replay story dungeons so why not the LIVING STORY dungeons also, without the mid quests and such itll still feel like the world did change for those who witnessed it and those new players but they get to experience PART of it so they have a chance at understanding the story so far Thus also adressing the " so what up with my personal story now?" question.

The biggest flaw in LS right now is depth. As a player, every time there is a new LS, I have to look for it and completely feel detached from it due to the way everything is presented….or rather, lack of presentation.

- If you introduce a LS, everything needs to be there and not in parts (2 weeks and then the other 2 weeks). For example Halloween. I got mail to go meet someone. I meet this someone in the Charr city. I go into an instanced area. Meet the prince….and that’s it??

- LS needs to be more interesting. So far, everything has been shallow and Scarlet as a villain is also shallow. I don’t even know what is her deal. This is an mmo. Let us be heroes. A hero with no sense of purpose is no hero at all. LS needs to play out like an adventure movie.

1) Something major happens – nice cut scene that shows the scale of the incident and not lame cut scenes with no sense of scale. The Queens Gauntlet in-game cut scenes is a perfect example of what could have been an awesome sequence but felt lazy and with no sense of awesomeness. Am I to believe that there is such a small amount of troops protecting Queen Jenna?

2) We heros get involved because we are heros who fight for justice – Perfect chance to show off our character models in a in-game cut scene and acting like we are real heros. We are the boss. Everyone is relieved because I, the hero, is there.

3) We then know or think we know what the villain is plotting. – Also shown in a cut scene after we have completed a series of missions.

4) We go through a series of challenges and actively fight against the minions of the villain the reach the villain – This is where the meat is. Since this is an mmo, we need the sense that the story is revolving around us….that we matter…and that we are doing something heroic.

5) We finally reach the main villain and we get to kill him/her…finally CLOSING the story arc. The villain MUST stay dead, or maybe skillfully bring the villain back in a future LS release.

In order to do this. Every LS arc should be released every month, instead of breaking it up in 2 parts. Cut scenes must be placed throughout the LS arc to keep a sense of story narrative. Do NOT stretch out the LS arc through various LS updates. This completely kills any sense of story narration….and cares given by the players. I don’t even know whats going on anymore after the magician whos always near queen Jenna (that’s right, not US, but some unimportant NPC whos name I don’t remember) saved Queen Jenna.

On top of having the LS arc, you can also include the usual farming achievement quests to keep players busy.

A important note is that with each LS update, a permanent core game content update should also be introduced. The lack of core game updates is what is killing this game.

Also Areas. I know u want to still fill the world u have with many more stuff to do but I found it unnecesary to remove every and all the content of a new area. The Labrinthine cliffs could have stayed and be evolved like southsun. The Bazaar left? Ok make anupdate and remove just the Flying bazaar from the map and leave the cliff. ( Maybe this is harder than it sounds, im not a game developer or anything so id understand if its hard separating the models.) In any case it feels disconected that we visit a new place and while it seems the only thing that leaves is the Flying Bazaar suddenly the area in the cliff gets desolated? Becomes inaccessible? LA has a trading a agreement with the bazaar so why not have the Cliff be the drop off point for their trades and keep the area? A few events could be set to this map. ( a pirate non LA ship bombarding the cliffs to steal the goods traded for one?) and instead of having a single node of Quartz only a few players could get, have this area have the quartz so that new players can have a chance at these also instead of having to stay a whole year hoping an event will come that will allowe them to gain that node so they can be with everyone else in terms of crafting. The home node is Great but its a bit punishing gamewise to those whou couldnt be at the time of the event. Events should feel like something a lil extra and not an avantage. ( with quartz node on the Cliffs everyone has them, those who also have the home node just have a lil extra node to farm)

Another issue are the Town Clothes. I dont have a specific recommendation to this but i feel they should feel more useful dont know if allowing people tofight in them is a good idea ( Much like how costumes work on GW1) But at least make them so that they dont simply get removed upon damage? Id make sense that you need to trigger the suiting up for battle if your in danger and not having it be automatic

Cohesion

The main problem I see with the Living Story is a lack of cohesion. There needs to be something that can unify the threads that have lead up to where we are and give people just hopping in an idea that they are in the midst of a larger/longer event. The heralds are nice for a finger point but they’re lacking.

It feels like you’re straddling the fence between going full on story and being accessible to people just getting on and that’s making things kind of nebulous. Every event is a jumping on point, but if they all are, how can we get anywhere? And if we march blindly on, how will anyone know what’s going on?

I would suggest some kind of summary that pops up at the beginning of each event. A kind of “Last time on Guild Wars 2…” Make it like a newspaper or the first page of a comic book that breaks down what’s happened up to this point, the main players for this segment of the story, and other tidbits that will help someone get caught up on in-game events.

This could also be a nice place to put those stories that appear on the website without having to force them into the narrative at large or put information that just doesn’t seem right for any one character to say. “Tequatl Rages in Spark Fly Fen! Has Zhaitan’s defeat enraged the beast?”

Most of this information and content is there, it’s just bringing it all together in a seamless way so players don’t have to leave the game to get it.

Content

Content wise, I’m seeings lots of cool ideas but I hope they’re all expanded on. This first year, from what I understand, was more about building content that can be returned to (zephyr sanctum, holidays, sab, etc.) and expanded upon so the main focus could be shifted to bigger things, etc. There have been some nice glimpses of this but I can see why people are agitated with it.

Losing the Molten Facility and the Aetherblade Retreat until the end of the year definitely fell into the painful category. Maybe the next time this kind of story dungeon is attempted, setting up a “fractal” and “long” versions at the same time would be beneficial. The game also has the scrying pool from GW1 still accessible, which would be a nice option to give people a chance to replay past events, if fractals wouldn’t fit the content. Some way to replay story beats would be nice, even if it was only cutscenes. The world should live, but someone should be taking notes is all I’m saying.

Invasions are a great idea that need to be expanded on as soon as possible! Dragon minions should be invading their outlying areas regularly. Map wide events like this add a bit of drama to the usual stuff and help remind people that other things are going on in the world. If there’s a chance to really hit home the “they burned down the town and now you have to fight the baddies out of the area to get it back,” I think the invasion system is a good way to do it on a much larger scale. It would also be a nice way to leverage the dragons without having to totally blow a storyline on them before you feel you have a good one.

The two week cadence of updates is a crazy feat and I’m impressed you’ve kept it going. I’ve thought about taking it back to how it was, but it’s something I look forward to now. If anything I would suggest a new cadence along the lines of how Halloween and the Tower of Nightmares are being positioned. New event every two weeks, but each kept up for a full four. It would take some of the burden off the achievement seekers who feel they can’t get everything in the two weeks the “second half” events usually have. I also liked the suggestion above about doing these events in more defined “acts” so the story builds a little more slowly but more cohesively. Take advantage of the extra time by fleshing out the stories a little bit. Most have a beginning and an end, but could use a more defined middle.

I like what people are saying about tying the LS to the GW1 lore. One of the cool things about this game when I first started playing was that it was the same world…. It certainly doesn’t feel like the same world these days because nothing seems to take cues from the history of the world.

Ok, I have been playing GW1 and 2 for a good min and I would have to say GW1 had ALOT better story line and end game. I beat the game on one character and there was nothing else to do after that. Sure I could do a dungeon but as a working college guy, I don’t have the time to do it or the time to wait around for a team, specially when EVERYONE is in WvW or off grinding in a world event.

What I’m trying to say is add Some more end game content, and for the dungeons PLEASE!!!! make them so I can do them by myself (I like parties and all but like i said before I don’t have time and I like to solo things). My opinion is to scale them to difficulty like you do with champions. If you have 5 players doing them dungeons are fine… alittle hard but still completable. But if I wana do them by myself, Im going to get no-where.

Lastly, One of the main things that got me to buy this game was in your big Manifesto that ya’ll came out with, ya’ll Said you were trying to get rid of the concept of grinding. I have no clue what ya’ll think grinding is but it sure is not the same definition as the people who play this game. If I want to make a legendary, I need to grind. If I Want to get awesome dungeon armor, I have to grind. basically to get any achievements or items in the game from weapons to armor, I HAVE to grind and its annoying and will soon get me to stop playing and I believe many other players feel the same way.

I love this game so much and had such great expectations for it, but in the end, I log in, do dailies and log out. There isn’t much else to do once I beat the personal storyline and explored every area. The game became another grinding, boring, party waiting game. I hope the LW that keeps being talked about creates a better endgame and actually changes the game like it was said would be done instead of keeping it the same thing is was last year.

O, and before anyone says that there is pvp or wvw I could play, I like playing PvE. I do not like the playing styles or concept of PvP or WvW. I did not like them in GW1 or any other game that I play unless they are first person shooters.

Hi, all! First of all: I love the intention behind the Living World, and a lot of the content that has come with it. I think that most MMOs keep you playing because the mechanics of the game (gear grinding, etc) make you feel like you need to play to keep up, which ends up feeling like work. Guild Wars 2 keeps me playing because I genuinely enjoy the experience and the world, and want to experience the new content that continuously streams in. I think in general the quality of content created through the Living World has been top notch, and very diverse, accommodating a good range of players’ interests.

However, does anyone remember when the Living World used to be called, “The Living Story”? If not, here’s a link:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-living-story-in-guild-wars-2/

It seems like this subtle shift is indicative of the biggest fault with this system. So far it hasn’t demonstrated the ability to tell any real kind of story. I understand that Tyria is a great, big place with lots going on. I also think that a strong story benefits from diversions from the central drama, to keep things from bogging down in one place and also developing the larger sense of the world. The problem so far is that there doesn’t seem to be any central drama at all. We initially thought that the threat of the elder dragons was the guiding force of Guild Wars 2, but those of us who focused on the Personal Story right out of the gate haven’t heard peep from Zhaitan or any other elder dragon for a whole year.

So what exactly is the “story” of Guild Wars 2 now? Scarlet and her would-twirl-her-leaf-mustache-if-she-could-grow-one schemes? So many players criticize the character of Scarlet as being terribly written, with no depth or interesting motivations, and rightfully so. I actually disagree but I can hardly fault anyone for thinking that, because of the way that she is presented through the Living World. Her arrival lacked any context beyond a few obscure name-drops earlier in the story, and there is no real sense of meaning or purpose to her actions. In fact, the only way that I or anybody else would have any clue about the backstory and intrigue surrounding Scarlet is by reading the articles posted on the website, because none of that information is presented to the player in the actual game.

Ultimately the updates of the Living World feel fragmented, and the attempts so far to create connections (i.e. Scarlet to the Molten Alliance) have come across as contrived and ham-fisted. There is no sense of urgency or foreboding that drives the story from one update to the next, and not enough lasting impact of the world’s events on the story going forward (what ever happened with Ellen Kiel’s election?). Too many events take place with far too little context or preamble. I think that it basically comes does to a sense of cohesiveness, which is currently lacking.

As I said initially, I think the Living World has accomplished a lot of great stuff. I really love the character of Rox, and following along with her story has been one of the highlights of the game for me. I also know that ArenaNet has a fantastic team with a ton of talent, and that the Living World is still finding its footing in the game as a whole. I love Guild Wars 2 dearly, and I have a huge amount of hope for the future of the game, as well the Living World (Story?)’s place in it. Also, if you read all of this, good on you =).

Sonore

My main complaint about LW has to do with Lore. The main reason why I bought GW2 was to find out what happened to all of the people and places that I loved! There is so much history for you to build off of that there is no excuse for Scarlet. Please start looking into the backstory of GW1.

My other complaint has to do with the way the updates connect, basically they don’t. There is a whole bunch of random going on and that isn’t motivating me to play it. Nothing has any depth. Who are these people? Why are they here? What do they want? Silence from Anet. As soon as an update comes out I want to know a million things about it, that’s what gets me excited. If I can’t get any info, it just annoys me.

I’m not against anything new as long as it is fully fleshed out. If you need more time please take it.

Talking about the living world is moderatly difficult, as I’m not entirely certain what Qualifies at the living world and what doesn’t.

For example, Ascended weapons. Those have been coming for quite some time, and were released in our bi-weekly schedule as per normal. Was that just because it happened to be done then, or was that part of our world “Changing” adding this new loot for the Tequatl patch the week after that.

Was Tequatl a part of the Living world? He got an entire update to himself, but there wasn’t any particular story element to him. I believe Rox stood out there for a week wanting to see some dragon teeth, but it more seemed like an excuse to take a week off (for the writing guys) And just have a patch dedicated to rennovating an old/bad event.

I think we can all agree that the Flame and Frost Story was a part of the living world. But the other things that came with those patches? Daily achievements, previewing on the trading post, WvW ranks. Do those count?

I don’t really understand what “Living World” means to A.Net. If it’s more along the lines of a “Living Story” Then I love it. We’ve recently had a lull/slow period, ever since the scarlet invasion it seems the story part of our bi-weekly updates, but Coming here every other week to see the next chapter in the gripping tales of “Guild Wars 2” Is an experience I can get behind, as I can’t find it anywhere else.

Or is the “Living World” more of a promise to change something in the game? “Don’t worry, in 2 weeks we’ll have updated/changed/moved Something that you used to know!” I’m not entirely sure the idea behind that works for me. Yes, the world should change (Orr, southsun, heck, the area outside Divinity’s reach could use a looking at, as we can’t stay at war with the centaurs forever.) but without a sense of Player Agency… a sense of us CAUSING the changes… They’re just arbitrary updates. The world is no less “Living” than… well… any other video game.

I don’t understand what A.Net hopes to achieve with these living world updates. I had thought, pre-release, that it was to provide us the players a method of impacting our world and causing change. That’s not what’s been delivered to us. When we got the first of our living world updates, it seemed like it was a storytelling vehicle. Episodic content. That wasn’t what I was expecting, but it works. But recently…. I’m not sure WHAT you’re trying to do. I suppose that’s the purpose of these threads, to enlighten us as to your direction?

Hello,
I don’t visit the forums often, and although I don’t fully understand this post since its mostly us suggesting. (when there is a suggestion forum) I shall throw my hat in the ring and hope for the best:

1. The world around me – I want to be in the story… to have my character immersed in a war, being a pivotal cog instead of a zombie in a zerg of other players pushing one objective to the next before the timer goes out. zzzzzz.
My suggestions…force the hand of the community to step up more, drive pressure in an area…when Scarlet pops up in Fireheart Rise. I want her to take over a fortress, and the longer the community allows her to entrench herself on that map the stronger her forces become on it. She will begin to setup and take over outposts and roadblocks. conforming locals and bribing guards to her cause…If she takes over that map…her forces will spread to one of the other maps near it..with her minions coming from the portal. Even fighting other enemy npcs like centaurs or dragon minions (with that other map still locked down by her)…I know some might say its drastic but in my mind… “I can’t do CoF without beating this evil woman back to where she came…FOR TYRIA!!” that sounds fun to me.
when Tequatl used to be a zerg hit and run accident it wasn’t fun. But making it more complicated and forcing the community to actually interact with it more made it more fun. Forcing the community to beat the boss before time goes out made it more fun and worth it. So would forcing the community to play its part instead of sitting at a waypoint…zzzz’ing till Shatterer lands…not even helping with the pre-events. and letting others do the work. make things better? In my mind it is.
Lets put that into LW.

2. Um…aren’t there dragons? There are 6 dragons. Zhaitan, Kralk, Jormag, Primordus, Jungle dude, Deep Sea dude.
As far as end game goes…I’d rather want to face the pre-ludes to the others than Candy corn monsters. I mean Zhaitan is undead…Halloween and Zombies go hand in hand don’t they? Christmas? Slap a beard and santa hat on Jormag and lets go!
I honestly yearn for more content evolving off of my story but not dealing with my story…
Joke inc “Why did Zhaitan have a candy corn sugar rush? Because it made him feel alive” BWAHAHA!
Lets put it like this: A Prelude is something that leads up to. But the dragons are already awake. So how about an attempt to conquer from them…the dragons may be an all powerful force of magic consuming devastation plagued on ridding existence of all inferior life as they see fit…but they sure do like to take a back seat. Like a stoner in the back of the class who knows all the answers….hes not doing anything!

I’m sure I will think of more things as I go…
But thanks ArenaNet and Devs for trying to hear us out.. I hope we made this easier than you hoped lol.
Keep up trying to do your best!

ty

So these are my thoughts on Living Story.

Overall I like the concept, and have been back and forth on it’s execution. My favorite LS arc is still the Karka Events, they expanded the game world, the lore, and they let us take part in the worlds growth. There is also an artifact left for us to tell new players about it, so when we go to Southsun Cove I can tell them how “back in my day” there wasn’t no stinking hotel, how we settled the island, and how we battled the original Karka Queen.

I also think the living story doesn’t focus enough on the dragons. As a result, the threat of the elder dragons becomes trivialized. Yes, the threat of the molten alliance is serious, but it is made more serious by diverting resources from the fight with the elder dragons. Not enough emphasis is placed on why these “internal” threats such as scarlet endanger the efforts of the Pact.

I’d like to see the 4 living story teams each permanently take a different region. One team for Maguma and the Jungle Dragon, One Team for the Ocean and the Water Dragon, One team for the North and Jormag, and One Team for internal affairs such as scarlet or the molten alliance. Each LS should expand the the world and at the end of each year, every team should have added a zone as fully developed as any other in the game. This way the pact is pushing all fronts against the dragons and every year the game is bigger than the previous year.

I also feel much of the living story content should be added to the end of a players personal story so that all new players can experience it. Also the player needs to be the hero in the events, It was lame being Trahearne sidekick. It’s lame being Bran, Rox’s, Ellen Kiel, or anybody elses Sidekick. I should not be going to help these characters, they should be coming to me FOR help.

Rewards for the living story should be easiest to attain when they go live, but remain available for players at a later date. I’ve seen more than one new or returning player quit GW2 when they discovered an item they wanted was unattainable.

Last, I feel that living story achievements (and meta rewards) need to take into account that not all players can log in every day. A dedicated player should be able to get the meta-achievement after playing a weekend and not be required to log in everyday to gain 1 or 2 daily achievements.

P.S. Kill scarlet off, she is too much a cartoon villain and doesn’t fit the setting.