Guild Wars 2

Melliarc.5870:

(speaking of junk collecting dust in our inventories, can you do something about the ascended mats that are account bound? it feels cheap to destroy them but what else is there to do with them when you don’t need those anymore?? we should be able to sell them on TP or simply to merchants)

Piles of Bloodstone Dust is now used for crafting some of the items from recipe sheets you can buy from Marjory after turning 50 spores. The drop rate of the dust has also been significantly reduced.

If you want people’s opinions on their favorite and least favorite releases, Chris, there’s a thread in the Living World Forum just for that (though people do only address particular features instead of whole releases sometimes):

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/Best-and-Worst-of-GW2-Releases-Year-1/first

I posted my thoughts on the first page of the thread:

Top 5 (in no order or preference, and sorry if its lengthy):

1. Flame and Frost Retribution: I’ve said it before, but once everything was out F&F was much better. That arc could have seriously benefited I think from the 2 week release schedule (with Retribution lasting 1 month, and the two “teaser” releases combined into one.), but it was still good in the end.

2. Southsun Cove: I think I enjoy Southsun more in theory than I do in practice, but it’s had cool stuff happen on it, and more importantly, it expanded both the physical game world and the game’s lore. Like many other players, I seriously want more zones in the near future.

3. Shadow of the Mad King: Out of all the holiday releases so far, this one was easily the most fun.

4. Labyrinthine Cliffs: Like what I said about Southsun, it’s more the idea of it than the actual zone I like. LC had a unique design and layout. I wish they’d put that kind of work into future zones.

5. Super Adventure Box: I know players were divided about SAB, but I thought it was a fun little surprise.

Top 5 Worst (in no order or preference, sorry for the length):

1. Lost Shores: Lot of cool ideas in theory, not so much in practice.

2. Cutthroat Election: I’m not against players deciding the future of the game by any means, but I don’t understand why people got to vote for both. Most people I knew who voted only did it for the achievements, so they voted for both. Wouldn’t that have skewed the results?

3. Last Stand at Southsun: Secret was great, but proportionally, Last Stand didn’t offer much, I thought.

4. Return of the Aetherblades: Why did they have to reappear during another celebration after Dragon Bash? It kind of just made them seem like party crashers.

5. Current Overall LS Story: The year’s only got so many months left in it. 2013 has so many seemingly unrelated LS arcs in it, I can’t imagine how they could tie these together without it being unbelievable. I’m not fond of Scarlet either. I’m hoping future LS Story arcs are bigger in scope and better connected. I’d rather the LS be like the rough equivalent to the campaigns/expansions added to GW 1, where major things happen each time (not immediately, but by the end of each year, things should have noticeably changed).

I think I’ll only add that Blood and Madness is as good as Shadow of the Mad King, in my opinion, and Secret of Southsun should have been number 2 on my Best. And clarify, that I was referring to the first SAB on point 5. No real problems with the second one, but it wasn’t as much of a surprise.

I’m very much for the fortnightly cycles, as I could see very clearly that people found the monthly updates too long and started to become very restless about week three.

I think there’s a perception that the fortnightly cycle is detrimental to quality. This isn’t necessarily true – many teams finish when they finish, and lord knows that being able to release when they want hasn’t stopped plenty of other games from being poor quality. Still, this is a very new thing to the industry, and few players really see how it works. I think a ‘behind the scenes’ series following a living world update from conception to release would give both players, and the wider industry (who I’m sure are all very keen to hear how the hell you’re doing it), a more complete picture.

I think some more thorough post-mortems on content that’s come out would also help. We don’t have a lot of visibility on why certain bits of content didn’t work out, and how the game’s design direction has evolved since the manifesto, and that discontent is really at the heart of why this initiative’s necessary.

Good: I loved loved loved the Bazaar. It’s a striking area, with new abilities, and lots of exploration with little nooks and crannies to find. The hints to existing lore were great, as well, and I quite enjoy the Sanctum Sprint.

I liked the balloon events in the Queen’s Jubilee – having three different kinds of events, that took advantage of the existing world, made visiting each balloon feel fresh. I also liked the Queen’s Gauntlet – although I didn’t finish it, and I found a couple of the fights really frustrating, I liked having to work out how to defeat each boss, put together a strategy, and really explore my abilities.

I liked the invasion events at the beginning, when people were splitting up and trying to coordinate, before farmers worked out how lucrative the Aetherblades were.

I like achievements that take you back to existing content and events that have been given a little festive twist, like the baskets and caches in jumping puzzles and minidungeons. I would have liked to see some minor changes to the jumping puzzles during the event.

Lunatic Inqusition continues to be my favourite activity.

Bad: I don’t really care for zergs – stand here, press 1, get loot. I found the Pavillion insufferable, and while I did farm aetherblades for the achievement, I didn’t want to.

I didn’t find the election particularly compelling, and it’s had no real effect on the world given neither Ellen Kiel or Evon Gnashblade have done anything since. It feels like a fob-off.

Many of the achievements have been of the ‘kill/gather 250’ variety. It’s very easy for this to be the only reason for playing in the content, and while this has been getting better, it poisons any of the fun I had. When there are multiple things to run around the world getting 250 of, I start getting pretty tired of the whole thing. Dragon Bash in particular felt fatiguing.

I didn’t participate much in SAB v2, Tequatl or Twilight Assault: SAB v2 had quality issues (which Josh is now well aware of and I’m looking forward to SAB v3), Tequatl requires organisation, which requires me to navigate guild politics, and TA I didn’t even try because I’m intimidated by explorables and the expectation that you should be wearing zerker gear. I’m an engineer! I have conditions!

Chris Whiteside.6102:

gidorah.4960:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

We are committed to quality not quantity.

Chris

the hard adherance to the two week release schedule seems to indicate the opposite. there has clearly been releases that just seem unfinished. Cannach’s lair comes to mind of something that left the majority of players thinking the content was rushed out to meet a 2 week schedule. There have been others but that was the one that comes to mind first. I think its ok to just have a balance patch and delay content that clearly isnt ready so that our enjoyment of great content is merely delayed not ruined by clearly rushed release schedule.

Hi Gidorah,

To be clear we are absolutely focused on quality. We feel that we can have both this cadence and high quality and are continuing to work toward this. If we feel that we cannot reach this balance then of course like everything, we will evolve as necessary. This said there is a lot we can and are doing to meet concerns regarding the cadence and really polish the positives we have already achieved in this area.. My point is the current plan is to continue with this cadence.

Chris

Your post here outlines the problem for me I guess. Our views on quality vastly differ and I would say I put the bar higher than you. Quality to me means people enjoy it and repeat the content for the content itself. Most of the time now it is just AP chasing and when done they don’t come back. See tequatl and Aetherblade TA path. While from a developer standpoint you can claim it is quality work if no one does it after they get their AP it means you failed.

As for taking a hard stance on the 2 week cycle. That is just bad from the start and pretty much says you don’t want things to improve, because if you do than nothing is off limits. Everything needs to be up for discussion or this will simply be a futile effort.

Well its been made clear that the pace of 2 weeks is here to stay.

With that in mind, please make it less painful. Right now you have released content that takes 250 spores per item. For Halloween you released content that took 10s of thousands of candy corns (that you had made more rare to get) to get items.

2 to 4 weeks to get thousands of looted items that must be obtained by doing the same thing over and over and over and over is not my idea of fun. All to get a recipe or some little reward.

Parts of what you add is fun and entertaining. Parts are just repetitious and fun for the first few times after which it is just tedious to repeat to have a hope of getting enough corn, spores, or whatever to come close to getting the items.

You have improved the ability to complete the achievements in a timely manner.

You’ve set getting the cool weapon skins, the recipes, etc. as obvious rewards for people with lots of money or lots of time and patience with farming.

I do like the story of the current event. I was dismayed when I looked at the cost of the new skill and the cost of getting the recipes at 250 spores each. If I do enough grinding to get those items I will burn out on the game again.

I sincerely hope you rethink the system of having 2 – 4 week events that require some currency in large numbers to get something and then it’s so long, too bad, its gone.

Could someone explain the rationale for having the items for Halloween and the items for this weeks LS cost so much corn/spores? Is this to make it fun?

BobbyStein.2315:

Regarding GW1 lore in Living World and beyond, let’s just say we’re looking at all GW lore right now and picking out threads that we’d like to tie up. Ideas are welcome, as always.

I’ll post more tomorrow. Time to go home.

Here’s a gw1 thread I would love to see in GW2: Why did the gargoyles vanish?

Go. Sleep. You’ve listened to us quite a bit today.

Merus.9475:

I think some more thorough post-mortems on content that’s come out would also help. We don’t have a lot of visibility on why certain bits of content didn’t work out, and how the game’s design direction has evolved since the manifesto, and that discontent is really at the heart of why this initiative’s necessary.

This is a very good point. It’s also one of the reasons why SAB World 2 was such a good release, even for those who weren’t initially fans of the content. Via Josh Foreman, we got a real look at what the intentions were with the design and what the problems were with how it was implemented. We also got a very quick response to some of those issues when an open discussion made it clear what the issues and potential doable solutions were. This is open dialogue and collaborative design.

At the very least, if we’re not going to be getting any sort of advance plan beyond constant reassertion that there is a plan, we need the development team to be open and honest about the work that has been created. There needs to be real discussion about what worked and what didn’t, and how it can/will be done differently next time. Just being told “we hear your complaints” isn’t enough if collaborative development is the goal.

kdose.5309:

Hi everybody,

I wanted to post again today to clarify what I was trying to say yesterday.

Some folks have pointed out that I mischaracterized some player opinion, and/or made generalizations about statistics. I acknowledge that and apologize.

So let me try to say something simpler to make my point:

I implore ArenaNet to consider two groups of players, and do the best they can with all the internal metrics they have to measure how we feel about the game:

Group 1. The players represented by most of the posters in this thread, who have been largely intelligent, articulate, and respectful in listing their concerns with the Living World.

Group 2. The tens of thousands – or possibly hundreds of thousands – of players who are silent in this thread. And to consider a few things that come to my mind as to why they are silent:

- They’ve read your thoughts and agree with you and don’t feel the need to add to the conversation

- They might have something to say but are too timid to post, or don’t think that what they have to say will be considered

- Some players simply don’t know there is a place for us to come and talk about the game together

- They like the game the way it is and feel no need to add to the discussion

I’m not going to reiterate my own personal preference, but just ask again that everyone keep an open mind and think about all of the players (who quite outnumber us forum posters) who have been silent, and think about why they aren’t saying anything.

It’s easy to think that the entirety of opinion is swirling within these 15 pages, but consider that 3 million copies of the game have been sold. Even if you count out the folks who’ve stopped playing or shouldn’t be counted for whatever reason, that’s still a lot of people whose voices we haven’t heard chime in here. I ask you to consider – why?

Just another thing to think about: I wanted to list the number of pages of length on the Living Story topic in other languages, and link to them so you can go see for yourself:

German – 3 pages: https://forum-de.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Gemeinsame-Entwicklung-Euer-Thema-Lebendige-Geschichte

French – 2 pages: https://forum-fr.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/game/D-veloppement-collaboratif-Monde-Vivant

Spanish – only 1 page! https://forum-es.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/game/Tema-de-desarrollo-colaborativo-Mundo-viviente

So what does all that mean? German, French, and Spanish players have less to complain about that American, Canadian, Brit, Irish, Aussie, and Kiwi players?

I have no idea. And none of us have access to ArenaNet’s internal metrics, statistics, and polling.

TL:DR Please keep an open mind. There are thousands upon thousands of players worldwide whose voices are silent in these pages and we should ask ourselves why that is.

Thanks guys!
Matt

Edit: now 16 pages

The general problem with “think of the people who aren’t saying anything” argument is… we don’t know what they’re thinking, because they’re not saying it. A lot of people who invoke the silent majority come off as implicitly trying to claim that the silent majority is on their side, but we simply don’t know. (I could rattle off another half-dozen reasons for people not to be coming to the forums to express their opinion, but without knowing the proportions, that’s just not a useful exercise).

If we could get an effective means of polling them all than I’d be all for it, but short of that, either ArenaNet uses the feedback it receives or it uses no feedback at all.

Naturally, this does mean that there will be some selection bias involved, but one thing I would say is that, in general, the people who go to the forums are generally those more invested in the game – whether for good or ill. Now, there probably is also a certain element of selection bias in that people who have something to complain about are also more likely to come to the forum than people who don’t – but there are also a lot of people who come to forums simply to discuss the game. I’ve seen a lot of names come up in this thread that have been active in the lore community for months or years, and the feeling among that group is pretty much unanimous – ArenaNet can do much better than they have been over the past few months.

This is a compliment as well as a criticism – when we say ArenaNet can do better, that’s not empty words. We really do know that they are capable of incredibly compelling stories and backgrounds, and that makes it all the more disappointing when they don’t.

As for the balance between English and other forums – I’d say that’s probably more a function of a) Anglophones outnumbering Espanol, Francais and Deutsch speakers, and b) most Europeans these days being multilingual and coming to the English forums anyway because that’s where the main discussion is (largely because of a)

Hi Chris,

I agree with what many posters have been saying about the Living Story pacing, storyline fragmentation, and Scarlet. While I’m disappointed that you are not willing to reconsider the two week release schedule, as Arena Net has not yet demonstrated this is anything but a hindrance to developing quality content thus far; I’d rather focus on the type of gameplay you are introducing while telling the Living Story as that is my primary concern (though I don’t think the two week schedule is helping you here either).

General Content

Shortly after releasing Scarlet’s Invasion I began to feel “burned out” by the Living story content.The achievement grind is part of the problem, but to be honest even if it were easier to do the achievements I don’t think I’d find them fun.Scarlet’s Invasion wasn’t the first content to have the problems I think the Living Story has, but it was the first where I started to think about what I liked in the game; which is the potential dynamic events have for letting the player base control the outcome of individual stories across the world. I don’t consider loot very meaningful, and if there is too much vertical character progression I’m more likely to leave a game than go through the grind;; but give me the ability to change the course of the story and help shape the world, and you suddenly make me feel meaningful.

I consider dynamic events the bread and butter of your game. They tell short or multi-branching tales where player actions can help determine the outcome. They aren’t always challenging, many don’t have any impact on the world at all, and when they do this impact is usually short lived; but they can be the perfect vehicle for allowing player actions to have meaning in the world. Going forward before you introduce new dynamic events, whether it be huge invasion type content or small events like hunting an arctodus so Edmund can get a new rug; I think the content creators should ask themselves:

• Does this event and surrounding environment give enough story context for why the player is performing the activity?
• During the event, should a player arrive late; is there spoken or text dialogue that can catch a player up?
• Are the NPCs acting appropriate to the context of the tale you are telling with the dynamic event?
• Can the NPCs make meaningful impact on the world around them should players succeed/fail at the task at hand?
• Does the impact have lasting effects on the surrounding area or the zone at large so that the players feel like they did something meaningful?
• Can those effects be changed back to the previous state by player and NPC actions or are they on a timer? If the latter, try to go for the former.

Presently many of the dynamic events, especially those added in the Living Story content, fail to make the players feel like they’ve made meaningful changes on the world. Whether it be the epic dragon fights or smaller centaur incursions, the events repeat too frequently and many times without cause, removing the immersion and reminding players their actions don’t matter. I know it would upset the loot/achievement/farming motivated players, but I’d prefer a more organic world where player and NPC actions matter, as opposed to one where things run on predictable schedules so that people aren’t denied access to their loot pinatas. To make the world feel more organic NPC actions and reactions need to be logical and whenever possible, off timers. If we succeed in winning an outpost from the centaurs, it should open up new events to fortify that outpost from the centaurs. Making it harder for them to take it back. In response the centaurs will have their own “events”, where they must gather resources to build up their attack, descry new combat techniques or spells, scout out the player controlled encampments for weaknesses in the defenses, perform guerrilla attacks on bases elsewhere, and perform assassinations on key players that wander outside the safety of the encampments. Players may interrupt these centaur “events” to make their reclamation of the fortress harder still. To ensure the centaurs aren’t always pushed from the maps, you can add centaur type “break out events”, where the centaurs get a powerful boss to rally to their aid occasionally. This type of dynamic scaling need not be on a timer either, but can be based on how many successes the players of that world have been against the centaur incursions. The idea here being that a warlord doesn’t enter the fray unless necessary. The more event choices we as the players have to help shape the ebb and flow of the Living Story content or any content the better. (cont’d)

Similar changes can be made to the world boss events. Tequatl shouldn’t be entering the fray unless the players are doing really well at controlling Sparkfly Fen. After he is defeated players should have to perform events necessary for combating his eventual return. If Tequatl wins, he should do more than corrupt the shore and then flee. He should stick around aiding his minions in capturing objectives around them map in an invasion style event. If the players fight back this invasions to the shores again, they get another crack at Tequatl. Again, NPCs need behave in context with the tale you are trying to tell.

Event Failing and the Problem of Choice

You mentioned in one of your previous responses that having events fail is a more nuanced discussion, and I agree. I don’t think this is just a problem with event failure, but part of the general problem with giving players choices over how the world is shaped. We saw how vile the player base could be to each other when the choice was between earning more loot from champion farming and completing events successfully during Scarlet’s Invasion events. Although I think that problem would be easily resolved by removing champion boxes and putting them on dynamic event completion; that is not a solution that lends itself to the general problem of players having competing interests.

I’ve read earlier on in development testing that you experimented with having more world impact on event failure/success and this also bred conflict (though I wonder if it was as much as the loot conflicts). I can see how that would be a problem. Let’s say the Shadow Behemoth could not be summoned unless a necrotic ritual was successfully performed by his minions, and that his minions could be stopped by the players. Here the players are given the chance to prevent a powerful enemy that could cause untold destruction (if only he could) from entering the world; but because of this they miss seeing a really interesting boss encounter. Assuming perfect reward balancing between these encounters (i.e., let’s remove loot considerations), I can see how this could still generate conflict as some people would naturally want to save the day, and others would want to see the boss encounter (even if it caused untold destruction on the world).

When it comes to lesser impact on the world this problem doesn’t seem to crop up, at least I haven’t seen it. When it comes to whether or not we should let the centaurs capture an outpost, everyone seems to just help out, no one I’ve seen complains that we shouldn’t win the day to see what happens. So I suspect that this type of conflict escalates in proportion to the type of impact it has on the world, and individual preferences on what would be “cooler” to do (a boss battle followed by a mass burying of the dead, or preventing said boss and a huge festival cheering you on for saving the day). It’s unfortunate that epic choices like these would generate conflict in the community, as the mature thing to do is recognize that people have differing preferences and part of life is negotiating our differences. I certainly would side on making our experience more organic, where player choice matters even on the big world changing decisions; but as a developer that wants to have a positive community it might be preferential to still give us choices here or there where conflict doesn’t appear to spring up (you’ll have to experiment); while leaving bigger choices as fated ; like preventing an epic boss fight or opening a new zone. This isn’t to say player action can’t be responsible for summoning world bosses (see the Tequatl suggestion above), just that player choice shouldn’t be able to prevent it. Again, not that I agree with this, but it is probably the diplomatic choice. (cont’d)

Living Story Evaluation

From my favorites to my least favorites looking at the content, not story told (festivals and SAB excluded):

The Lost Shores

Huge technical hurdles aside. This release delivered to us the players the one time experience of fending off an invasion of Lion’s Arch and helping to settle a zone. We defended Lion’s Arch from an attack, helped build structures, bridges, fight the local wildlife and then had an epic boss encounter at the climax. It felt that our actions mattered here and for some the world that they logged into was not the same as the one they left the previous day (just like the real world). From a story-telling standpoint you delivered us mini-objectives in game to find out information about the island and didn’t need a short story on the website to give us extra information. But… I wouldn’t do it this way again. For one time changes like these (and not changes that can be done and redone again, like other dynamic events) there needs to be better pacing so players can all feel like they contributed. It shouldn’t take seconds to establish and build an outpost, but days (with events to help stock it and protect it even after it’s built). A siege on Lion’s Arch should last minutes, but be an ongoing encounter with players taking objectives back and enemies increasing their strength and fighting back (a tally of casualties/battles won can help determine when the event finally succeeds and moves to the next stage).

Cutthroat Politics

While the impact of this release arc promises to be huge, it was a fairly boring method of enacting that change. We just voted. I can’t offer any other way of doing this arc, as that was pretty much the story. Unfortunately, this one makes it to the top of the list as it’s the only other release where player action seemed to matter greatly.

Last Stand at Southsun

The events added here for the Karka Queen made our actions important for summoning her, which is a plus. However, the event could be more organic if it acted more like a back and forth between the Settlers of Southsun and the Karka. The settlers would have their corner(s) of the map and the Karka have their territory. As the settlers need more resources they risk going out into the island. As players we protect them, but in doing so we start to enrage the Karka Queen. As more territory is claimed by the settlers the Queen responds in kind by initially sending out karka to take back the territory. If she continues to fail she fully enrages and joins the battle. This way a small contingent of players can get the event rolling. Remove her timer ¹ and put failure conditions related to protecting the outposts (and thus her becoming less enraged). As an aside the Karka Queen needs a better model. (cont’d)

¹ – I Dislike Timers

Tequatl Rising

Added challenging dynamic events and event failure, unfortunately based on timers, to many events. Makes our actions seem important, but the outcome of the events is lacking. Tequatl corrupts the shore on failure and always flees, he needs to stick around when he’s winning. I have more elsewhere. ²

Flame and Frost

Though not one release this living story arc developed through time, but player involvement didn’t seem to matter. It would have been nice if the refugees we could rescue was fixed and those that made it to some fixed locations on the map could start settling in. In the next stage there would be no more refugees fleeing, just a number based on how many we saved. A number of lodges/homes/outposts would be established based on number saved. In this phase the dredge and flame legion could attack and destroy these locations (and potentially kill settlers). We would then have to help rebuild, if we failed defending them. Retribution would remain the same, but actually completing a molten facility would reduce the meter and have impact on the world, such as fewer dredge/flame legion attacks and the settlers feeling more safe. At the end of the arc, based on our performance we get a different outcome (such as a mass grave to the fallen or a new outpost). I think it’d be neat to tie performance to a world, but that makes it harder for you to use in the future as you have to create content for worlds that have different outcomes.

Sky Pirates of Tyria/Twilight Assault

No open world dynamics events here, but the dungeons were fun and challenging. I’m not a fan of instanced content, as I usually do it once and then never revisit it.
Bazaar of the Four Winds
This is near the bottom, but I really liked where the story could have gone here with the Zephyrites connection to Glint. I eagerly await their return, but they need some more engaging dynamic events.

Tower of Nightmares

I really enjoyed the transition from the personal story aspect of this release to the changed zone. The story also seems to have a bit more exposition as well. However, the events are lacking in impact, though at least there is more variety than Queen’s Jubilee, Scarlet’s Invasions, and The Secret of Southsun events. There doesn’t seem to be any consequences to preventing the toxic offshoots and I’m unsure of what happens on failure as they aren’t very challenging and I have yet to see it. Having them contribute to some overarching goal in Kessex Hill would be great. For example, as we clear more offshoots the land becomes less corrupted, and NPCs start feeling better and capable of defending the outposts from centaurs and the Toxic Alliance.If the offshoots spread, NPCs become mentally ill and start attacking the outposts and players. Outposts and nearby waypoints become unusable and it becomes harder to travel in the zone. Inconveniencing us as a consequence of our failures may not go over well with those who need map completion though. This is yet another unfortunate example of a reward scheme getting in the way of making more interesting content.

The Secret of Southsun/Queen’s Jubilee/Clockwork Chaos

Dynamic events were just used for farming purposes and had next to no impact on the world. In Southsun the events didn’t help further the unraveling of the secrets. In Queen’s Jubilee the events didn’t help to make the humans more jubilant or empowered. In Clockwork Chaos Scarlet’s minions just sat there waiting to be killed and weren’t invading anything of import, just the wilderness.

² – Sad part? This event will die soon.

BobbyStein.2315:

Regarding GW1 lore in Living World and beyond, let’s just say we’re looking at all GW lore right now and picking out threads that we’d like to tie up. Ideas are welcome, as always.

I’ll post more tomorrow. Time to go home.

My top 3 gw lore loose ends i would like to see tied up in living world are…
1.What happened to evennia
2.What happened in elona during the gap..since gw didnt get elona beyond content.
3.How did gwen die?

Since most areas of discussion I would have liked to hear words on have already been addressed by my fellow players I don’t really have much to add in that area.

But on the topic of favorite and least favorite of the past LS I would like to share my thoughts.

Favorite:
Flame & Frost: It felt well rounded. Sure the beginning was slow, but it had lead up and time for the player to wonder what is happening/going to come next. It wasn’t as quickly paced as we experience now. I also liked that the dungeon was doable by almost any group of randoms. Nothing was exponentially hard (like Aetherblade dungeon was in terms of general difficulty for the average player — you also have to account for people being upscaled for this temporary content) for some players, etc. And sure there was some “farm-y” aspects to the beginning portions of the achievements, that is probably the biggest issue I had with the event.

Least Favorite:
Tequalt Rising: The thought was in the right place, but this idea falls flat if you were not on a heavily populated server. During the first week my server “tried” and I put that term loosely but never made much progress. After that first week it was abandoned. And to much of my knowledge no one even really bothers with it even if people try to plan it, just because people have been that dejected over the initial release. At peak time for boss encounters my server usually has the same 20 or so people running them. During the Scarlet events it took almost full effort from every 80 on the server to manage a success because otherwise we were undermanned. I just think scaling should be taken more into account. A lot of people can’t play at peak times or some servers are not as big as others; sure they can guest, but thats just avoiding the issue at hand. It just needs to be taken into account that accounting for always big groups isn’t going to work for everything. I think the mechanics and everything of Tequatl fight could work and still provide difficulty if scaled down for smaller groups but actually be possible.

Conner.4702:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

gidorah.4960:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

We are committed to quality not quantity.

Chris

the hard adherance to the two week release schedule seems to indicate the opposite. there has clearly been releases that just seem unfinished. Cannach’s lair comes to mind of something that left the majority of players thinking the content was rushed out to meet a 2 week schedule. There have been others but that was the one that comes to mind first. I think its ok to just have a balance patch and delay content that clearly isnt ready so that our enjoyment of great content is merely delayed not ruined by clearly rushed release schedule.

Hi Gidorah,

To be clear we are absolutely focused on quality. We feel that we can have both this cadence and high quality and are continuing to work toward this. If we feel that we cannot reach this balance then of course like everything, we will evolve as necessary. This said there is a lot we can and are doing to meet concerns regarding the cadence and really polish the positives we have already achieved in this area.. My point is the current plan is to continue with this cadence.

Chris

Your post here outlines the problem for me I guess. Our views on quality vastly differ and I would say I put the bar higher than you. Quality to me means people enjoy it and repeat the content for the content itself. Most of the time now it is just AP chasing and when done they don’t come back. See tequatl and Aetherblade TA path. While from a developer standpoint you can claim it is quality work if no one does it after they get their AP it means you failed.

As for taking a hard stance on the 2 week cycle. That is just bad from the start and pretty much says you don’t want things to improve, because if you do than nothing is off limits. Everything needs to be up for discussion or this will simply be a futile effort.

I did WIK on 14 characters. Because, I could. No time gating. It was fun. It was lore, connected to the Prophecies storyline, and beyond that, setting lore for a lot of this game. It was long, involved, had goals that had to be met before even attempting it. I consider it a “living story” because it did, indeed, permanently change the game for those who had completed it. It was compelling enough to do 14 times.

I haven’t found a living story yet, here, that is worth repeating, or even able to be repeated, given the time constraints and the “per account” completions. A lot of them I look at and dismiss outright. Others, I may do an element I stumble across but I do not pursue them. The update notes are enough, for me, to say “no, thank you” because the results are meaningless.

The sole interesting LS, for me, was the first Karka event, which did not go off smoothly. It changed the world. I did not get some NPC pulled out of the ether, slapped in my face, and told to “care about”. I got no cartoon villain nor contrived improbable alliance to fight. I felt it fit more into the DE matrix, but on a giant scale. Too bad that approach has been abandoned instead of perfected.

Also, please note that I am comparing Anet to Anet. No other games, TV shows, outside influences. For me, I’m comparing things you have done.

This will be my last input. The simple fact that the 2 week cycle is non negotiable makes any further input from me invalid.

Thanks for the opportunity to comment, tilting at windmills or not.

If you’re doing a poll, I’ll throw in my two cents: (Caveats: I’m starting with the every-other-week releases, and not considering the ones I skipped – Sky Pirates, Cutthroat Politics, and Twilight Assault)

Favorite: Bazaar of the Four Winds. As trite as it is to just say “we want more zones,” it’s the closest we’ve come to a new zone since Southsun Cove. It’d still be abandoned if it were around permanently because there’s not a whole lot to keep players there, but there was actually stuff to do.

Honorable Mention: Super Adventure Box. SAB World 1 is outside the time window I mentioned and didn’t really connect to the overall world, but it was a ton of fun. World 2 did better on both those fronts, but came with its own issues that we’ve all discussed. (And yeah, seconding that hearing the devs talk about what they think worked well and didn’t work well is really helpful.)

Least Favorite: Dragon Bash. It was another festival, without any real highlights. It just felt like filler, and of the recurring events it’s the one I’m not really excited to see return. You’ll notice that the list of patches I skipped started after Dragon Bash, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Dishonorable Mention: Blood and Madness. Halloween was great, but this year didn’t really add to it. The Mad Memoires scavenger hunt and the instance were more compelling than the story this time around, so it feels like a step backward. Its one saving grace is having the Labyrinthine Horror show up when the zerg’s fighting one of the other bosses- that’s hilarious.

Favoutite – Zephyr sanctum – Was beautifully designed, awesome to look at and just a pile of fun with the mini boss spawns and assisted jumping! (I jump like an arthritic turtle. boosting made my day!)
Worst – Southsun – Even though it looks like it was based on the lost pink terraces of new zealand and I wanted to love it, but the enemies just had no character and it felt…bland.

Other Note: In orr you have a small burst of birdsong thats the morning call of one of the local birds here, it’s 11pm and everytime i hear it i glance at the window expecting to see sunlight! you’re all evil!

Favorite: Flame and Frost
Not any given update, but the way the entire arc was handled. It began with a whisper, ended with a bang, showcased character development, and although introduced in phases the entire arc remained playable until it was concluded

Granted, the “whisper” portion of the update was overly long, but that was before the restructuring that gave us the current schedule, which I really do think is a perfect content pace.

In future arcs the “whisper” portion of an arc can be rolled in to the “bang” portion of the following arc… just like how the whisper of southsun was rolled in to the BANG for F&F.

Least Favorite: Queen’s Jubilee
I really DID enjoy the instance, and I really DID enjoy the gauntlet, However everything about this release felt rushed. We introduce a triumphant new achievement for humanity, only to have same achievement rendered null and void within mere minutes. Then we defeat scarlet in the same breath… only that defeat is utterly inconsequential because the thing we just saved is a temporary hole in the ground. "Here’s a place, save it, good job, Oh, the stuff you care about is somehow not saved. Also, we’re gonna let her keep the new steam robots. We accomplished nothing in this episode, we fought nothing of consequence, for no reason of consequence, and our efforts were ultimately futile. The hole itself was equal parts frustration and mindless faceroll that sat on such a difficulty rollercoaster that it was unpleasant to experience, and it’s lasting effect on the world was a series of events that seem to similarly begin and end with no apperant rhyme, reason, or consequence.
Scarlet’s first appearance was deliciously ominous, only to be followed by insane ranting and no clues to move the story forward.

A Treatise on the Scarlet Arc
Obfuscating scarlet’s motives, history, and previous maneuvers was and is a bad move. Her arc hasn’t moved forward since she showed up. Things just happen that she’s responsible for with no rhyme or reason. What was the point of the aether facility? We don’t know. What was the point of the molten alliance? We don’t know. What is the point of the Toxic alliance, or the zone invasions? We don’t know. Her actions have no context that is apparent to us, so it is extremely difficult to care about them.

The entire arc up to this point we have been treating symptoms without any effort whatsoever to attack the disease. No one has discovered any useful information about scarlet’s motives, master plan, or methods of operation. We just kill bad things because they are bad and dangerous and find out later they work for scarlet for some reason that we don’t understand.

This is not how The pact dealt with Zhaitan, and it isn’t even how the various races deal with foes in normal zone events. We don’t need the entire master plot from the jump, but we do need breadcrumbs to follow, and defeating general after general in scarlet’s myriad forces has provided none. Not because the opportunity wasn’t there, but because literally no one has thought to look for them, and we as players can’t make a proactive effort to do so

There can’t be much of a conclusion to the Scarlet arc because there hasn’t really been one. There has been no story progression regarding scarlet at all other than the fact that she exists and people work for her, which we knew as soon as she stepped out of the shadows.

Living Story rewards needs fixed!

we need more rewarding stuff for completing meta achievements rather than home instance nodes, back pieces, and miniatures

for instance, you guys are adding what we assume to be 3 really cool items already or soon…..yet give us a instance node, and scroll of knowledge(WTF) in the achieves

New Sets of Armors – Gem Store
Dreamthistle weapon skins – Black Lion Keys – Gem Store
New NPC weapons(Marjory, Kasmeer) – Probably Gem Store

it seems like your nickle and diming us for all the cool stuff, instead of earning it in game(technically you can by doing gold>gems, but who wants to champ farm all day)

one of the things…. new armor skins, NPC skins, or Weapon Skins…needs to be an actual reward through playing instead of getting a Scroll of Knowledge/Krait Obelisk Shard

i think the meta reward for each update that gives new weapon skins should give a Black Lion Claim ticket for a free weapon of choice….more than likely people who care about cosmetics(basically everyone who is still playing) will then buy Black Lion Keys to try to get a weapon swap weapon of the same type, or an off-hand AND a weapon swap…..i know i would for sure, i cannot stand non-matching weapons

i know you guys need to make money to fuel the 4 development teams worth of jobs, and to avoid layoffs but at least give us something to make it feel like your not just sucking our wallets for all we’re worth

On Chris Whiteside’s question:

Starting with the positive first, I think my favourites would be a rough tie between F&F and the Zephyr Sanctum. The first, while it did have its pacing flaws, was otherwise quite well done – we started with a few hints, that grew into an increasing tempo of events, that grew into a couple of instanced missions, and finally culminated in the triumphant conquest of a well-designed, challenging, and fun dungeon. As I’ve intimated before, I think this is a good mechanic to follow – and, with four teams now, I think it’s possible to have a reasonably long leadup while another storyline elsewhere is at its climax.

The other would be Zephyr Sanctum. It probably had even more flaws – I’m not a fan of jumping puzzles in general, and the fact that some of the new skills that were introduced for the jumping puzzle elements were buggy as a beehive (Lightning Leap pausing in midleap and having you drop to your doom roughly 10% of the time high among them…) but the place just oozed mystery, atmosphere, and hidden lore. (In fact, having seen the Sanctum, I think I might have an explanation for what happened to those of my GW1 characters (or, rather, their descendants) that didn’t end up in Kryta…) In fact, I’d probably have enjoyed the puzzle aspect of finding the crystals a lot more if it wasn’t for the aforementioned bugs that often left my characted in the defeated state at the bottom of a long fall, requiring either a waypoint fee or for some good Samaritan to come along and revive. The minigames were also interesting – Survival isn’t my cup of tea but I can see how it would be great for those who do enjoy that sort of thing, and the other two were incredibly fun even with the bugs. Kinda makes me wonder what a profession based on Zephyrite magic could do (if that isn’t simply an expansion on elementalist).

On the negative side: Queen’s Jubilee. It’s not that it was the introduction of Scarlet, but in a way it combined nearly everything that has disappointed me about LS so far: the disappointment that a chapter set in Kryta had basically nothing to do with Kryta’s overarching story apart from showing a rivalry between Logan and Anise; the invasions and pavilion events both being effectively zerg-based (just a question of whether you wanted one big zerg with every player on the map or smaller zergs spread out); needing to grind achievements in said zergfests to complete the story; yet another repeat of the annoying “lure the enemy into their own trap” mechanic first showcased with Canach (I actually enjoyed the change of pace the first time, but having it be the mechanic for the climactic fights three updates in a row was excessive) and while I personally never tried the Queen’s Gauntlet, I think it would 1) have been fairer to everyone concerned if it was possible to do the challenges in an instance, and leave queuing for the people who want to show off, and 2) having the fights be on a timer while reportedly having attacks that are practically instant kills is even more push towards “DPS>all” mentalities.

The invasions, incidentally, are one thing that I really wish HAD been temporary. It kinda ruins the experience when you’re in a particular map for some other reason – map completion, for instance – and then BAM! Invasion.

Regarding cadence: I think the first thing to consider is making every event last for at least a month, so everyone has ample time to have a go at it. We can let ArenaNet have the opportunity to get in its stride before we decide that the current 14-day schedule is definitely sacrificing quality, but the main thrust seems to be giving people more time to get stuff done, and resolving that question is easy – keep the content active for longer.

Incidentally, with the topic of rewards having come up again:

Personally, I’m getting a little tired myself of seeing “250” coming up over and over again as the cost for something (when that “something” isn’t explicitly an item like the Candy Corn Cob allowing compression of inventory, anyway). I know that 250 (or, more specifically, 255) is a magic number in IT, but there’s no reason why 2^8 should keep coming up in the reward structure just because that’s the maximum stack size that can be recorded with a single byte of data, and when an item is only valuable when measured as complete stacks it rapidly ends up hogging people’s inventories.

Finally, I noticed on reading through the thread that there were some discussions on the idea of invasions of maps. I have my own thoughts on that, but I feel I’ve done enough typing for now, so I’ll let my thoughts percolate and post on them sometime in the next few days (hopefully).

1.

I have a few things I wanna bring to this discussion. As a former game designer I notice a few loose ends in the design which can be brought together with a bit of effort and hopefully make the players a bit happier!

Let me start by saying that I am really impressed by the bi-weekly releases, they keep us busy and gives us an incentive to check in every two weeks at least to see what all the new stuff is about. It’s a great way to keep retention!

That said there is a downside to these frequent releases, and I noticed that the last three releases have been experimenting with a solution to this problem; namely the short-lived duration of these releases. Take for example Bazaar of The Four Winds we were warned that the Sky People would leave after two weeks and so we had to spend our time well before they left. Now, I, like many here really enjoyed the new map! The vertical design was amazing! Unfortunately as the Bazaar disappeared the map disappeared as well. Maybe it was resources on your side, but I was genuinely sad to see that map disappear. Although you probably hadn’t designed for it I think leaving the map there but having the Bazaar gone would have been a really nice gesture. Still having some of the vendors (maybe relocated) and also the activities still there would have been great.

The example above is not exactly what the real problem with the bi-weekly releases has. The real problem is the switching between story arcs confusing players and ultimately forcing them to not pay little attention to the story. I see you have started experimenting with keeping several living world releases running at once. And I hope that if it works well then we could see individual story arcs lingering in the world as we progress in the other story arcs. This would imply having about 4-5 living world releases running at once, and I’m not entirely sure of the impact of this on your resources, but I hope it’s something that can be implemented.

For some story arcs this wouldn’t be feasible.. like the Queen’s Jubilee, or the Bazaar. But keeping elements of the Living World behind for those who want to seek it out, maybe even allow for completing a few achievements that are still possible to do (like the torch running in Queen’s jubilee, or crystal gathering in the Bazaar) would make the story feel more alive.

TBC

Chobiko.9182:

1. -snip-

2.

When it comes to some loose ends I have discovered in the game, a major loose end is the player home instance. I believe more could be done with it. First of all I feel that it’s unnatural that every player home instance in every major hub acts as a player home instance. I suggest moving the POI outside this instance and instead only allow player’s into the instance that is their home; e.g. a human can only enter their home instance in Divinity’s Reach.

A major concern for players have been the fact that they are put in the back seat of some major parts of the game. More so our home instance was supposed to evolve as we progressed in the game. There are a few aspects of the home instance which could be improved to make it more than the new source of quartz, candy corn, and “a place of power” to a player. It could also play a major role in putting the player in the front seat again.

Let’s backtrack to the Living World again. Whenever there is a new release we are sent a mail where some things are written, usually directing us in the right direction. This aspect might unconsciously feel impersonal. Much like text messaging. It’s like we are simply receiving orders from some commander telling us we better report ourselves for duty since we are needed.

This could be improved a lot with some effort. First the players should have a defined player home in their own home instance. When this is established, whenever there is a new release of Living World the player either receives a mail or is notified in some way that someone/something, is waiting for them outside their home. This way we make the story more personal. The player now travels to their home instance to find, a letter, a dying sylvari, a panicking asura, a human investigator (yes), a legionnaire, a Durmand representative, their own secretary? A negihbour even? it could be anything, but they are awaiting the player with the news of the event. Here we could have cut scenes with the player, or even battle. It would feel more personal to the player to be contacted at their home, and that in addition to some other upgrades to the home instance could vastly improve the immersion of the Living World.

I don’t mean to say that every release should be announced through the player going to their home instance, but it would be, for starters, nice to see this in action with at least one story arc. And maybe expanding to a few more later on, perhaps as the player becomes more renown in the world.

Say if you give the player actual credit in the world, change a few lines of random npcs espcially inside or around the home instance and the areas where the player has contributed to saving. Even in some random places have npcs say; they have heard about you and how you climbed on top of a nasty dragon and struck it to the earth for it never to awake again. This is another aspect of the game which could possibly improve immersiveness of the living sotries as well. Especially if we make rumours act like real rumours where the further away they are heard the more bizarre they get. A tale of how Scarlet struck the Queen’s Pavillion and of how the player drove her away. Could be retold by a quaggan in Lion’s Arch as how a Giant Snake came out of a great hole in Divinity’s Reach crushed the city, and how a valiant hero, the player, split the giant snake in two.
Now going back to the home instance. A major tweak is needed to the quality of life in the home instance, add some vendors selling foods, ingredients, various recipes. During certain events have merchants selling event specific rewards and goods in the instance. Add access to your bank (chest). And as long term goals maybe adding a “Hall of Monuments”, Living Story npcs like refugees that tell some of the Living Story arc they were part of. Also I believe the Laurel Vendors should be relocated from standing near the bank to inside the player home instance.

Finally, the Living World reward system needs to be revamped slightly. One thing is some of the rewards being ridiculously easy to get, another is things like the halloween skins and mini-bloody prince, being nothing but an endless farming session. I like how things are rewarded as you complete certain achievements, but I feel some of the achievement rewards are not directly tied to the achievement itself. e.g. a krait obelisk shard doesn’t just pop out from an achievement. While the current system is convenient it sort of break the immersion when you receive achievement rewards like the zenith skins. I believe this could be improved with a “hall of monuments” where you would have to talk to some npc to receive the achievement rewards.

That is all I have to say for now, I believe. Thank you for reading.

John.5732:

Why won’t the cadence of releases be changed? Why are we locked into two week releases? Please answer this simple question.

This is just my guess, but right now they’re strongly publicizing the game saying that its pillar is the Living Story and its everchanging nature (you can see it even on the kongzhong site).
So if this is how they’re selling the game (imo) they could not change the 2 weeks slogan immediately, even if they think it would be better to do it.
I suppose somewhere in the future we will see a technical improvement followed by a gradual slowdown in the production with a consequent improvement of the originality of different types of content. But again, I’m only guessing and crossing my fingers :P

To respond to Chris:
1. Bazaar of the Four Winds (expecially the exploration to find the hidden Sky Crystals)
2. Halloween 2012 (Clocktower + MKT-Minidungeon)

p.s. Please, if you can, don’t lock the story behind repetitive achievements.

I feel living story could be a lot better if players knew where the story was headed, and if the story continued in a more linear fashion.

At the moment it just feels way too Pulp Fiction.

As an example, could you imagine how awesome the Orr storyline would of been if its zones were added over a patch span of a few months, with players claiming territory and pushing back the risen as we marched toward Zaitan.

Also, living world content is feeling more and more reskinned.
Every patch is gather this, go to all these places around the world, or zerg kill this.

It feels like the game designers are working from a set list of events they can use, instead of creating new unique events.

EDIT:
Lastly :P,

Don’t make lazy content.

The perfect example is the fireworks launchers in Dragon Bash. Having to run around and interact with 100 fireworks launchers is meaningless and just not fun.

It would only take a tiny bit more effort to make a mini storyline where “Fireworks Krewe Leader Bangi” had his fireworks stolen by some skritt, and needs you to find them (i.e. scavenger hunt) throughout Lions Arch. Then maybe once you find them all, Bangi says the fireworks detonator is still missing, and you need to killing a boss Skritt for it.

It’s only moderately more design work, but it turns a boring meaningless grind into something somewhat compelling.

Most Favourite

SAB – by far. Although I’m not one for jumping puzzles and my reaction times are a lot slower than some of the younger players, it took me back to an age that I remember where it was all about fun. It was grinding out stuff because it was challenging, and the 8-bit feel to everything except your character made it even more special. From the background music to the complete minigame layout made me feel like it was a real platformer game, and I was 10 years old again. This being said, I can’t see how this, in any way, ties into the Living Story.

Least Favourite

Without question, it’s Southsun Cove (November last year). This was the first time I actually paid attention to how strained the inner-workings of ANet really were, and how pressed for time and ill-though-out the release actually was. The problem here was too much stuff trying to be implemented at too small of a window for time. What we saw during that weekend:

• The expansion of the map (which I thought was probably the best part of the release), I won’t take anything away from them for doing that.
• The introduction of a new species of animal (karka)
• The introduction of Fractals of the Mists (which too a long time to work the bugs out of, a sign of poor QA and rushing to meet deadlines)
• The first of the Trial Account periods

Needless to say, the last point I made was probably the biggest one to have an effect on the growth of the game. You want people with trial accounts to walk away from their time in GW2 with a positive feel for the game and promote a sale out of their good experiences. During that weekend there were the most bugs I have ever come across in a game. Quests which were incompletable, due to glitches, were the thing which marred the experience for most. It was shameful, and the ‘support’ was lack-lustre due to most staff taking the weekend off for Thanksgiving. What was even more shameful was the approach to the game, thankfully something that you have learned from. “One-time-only” events which are made to get the “highest server concurrency” (ie. American timeframes) doesn’t work all the way around the world. I personally, and a good many more guildies I know, had invested a considerable number of hours (usually between 4am & 7am, typical ANet release times here in Australia) over that weekend, trying to keep up with the rest of my server, who were mostly populated by American’s anyway, not that I could get onto my server/home world, overflows are painful. The worst part about this was the execution of it all… you rewarded those who were online the longest and those who either couldn’t stay online or get online got diddly-squat, regardless of their efforts leading up to the grand finale. Thanks to your release times being so out-of-sync with Oceanics, the finale was released at the most inopportune time of all, 4am on a Monday morning. I may not be speaking for a lot of people but some of the elder gamers have to get up to go to work, and I feel that the event would have been better run over the course of a 24-hour period. I personally really wanted to be a part of that experience, disregarding how painful it was to revive everyone because of the ancient karka boss. Yet you dangled the biggest carrot in front of us (MUCH increased chance of precursor drops), which made not just those who couldn’t get on, but those who also got booted because of server overloading, exceedingly angry. The only thing that was your saving grace here was a patch introduced a week later (thanks to a lot of verbosity from forum people) which gave those who participated in the event the same goodies that the people who managed to stay online got. But the one thing you can’t give to those who missed out is the experience of it all. That’s the one thing I miss the most.

Also I disagree with the 2-weekly cadence you so much insist on, because you can’t have quantity AND quality in such a short timeframe.

PS: sorry if my post is a bit abrasive, but this IS a discussion and you wanted positives AND negatives outlined. It’s also matter-of-factual and made to give a better outline of how things have been implemented to those who don’t either have long memories or haven’t been playing for very long.

Consequence of failure
First of all, there should be more stuff that can actually fail. Events, the entire 2 week update effort, everything that can logically fail should be able to fail. One of the problems here would be difficulty, as you want to find a decent balance between the rates of failure and success. I think the Scarlet Invasions when they were first released were pretty balanced in that regard: they required a good amount of effort to complete, causing it to fail sometimes, but weren’t that hard that it failed most of the time. Also, current event chains are to constricted. Even when we fail all events and the event chain is entirely at it’s end, it still only effects a very small and usually secluded part of the area. Like someone posted before me, there is no real reason the enemy should stop there.

Within the game there are already small consequences too small failures, and I think they can be enlarged to fit the Living World scale of content. We lose waypoints when a village gets overrun, there are extra mobs spawning if an event chain is in a certain stage, there are gates and bridges that we can not pass during certain stages. Applied to the Living World: Scarlet attacks the main control center for waypoints. If she succeeds it will disable most of the waypoints (think 90%) of the entire world. Recapturing the control center will take a large effort (Ancient Karka style). Failed enough invasion events in a certain map? The entire map comes under enemy control, spawns will triple, all waypoints contested and new events starts where we have to take the map back piece by piece (multiple fronts to split the zerg). Overall, think back to the scale of the end events during the beta weekends. Those were awesome and I have missed them ever since.

As for entire Living World chapters to fail: this is way more tricky. There should be some kind of progress through the duration of the event. Is this limited to your server? How about overflows (where the majority of the players eventually will be), will they have any impact?. Can progress be tracked over all servers in the region (EU/US)? And what effects would failure have? As the effects should be visible immediately, this would require multiple scenarios to be developed. Can different chapters influence each other without the need for two separate storylines, like an invasion only being supported by the seige engines we were able to produce during the preparation stage? Will the effects be clear enough to be actually noticed? So many questions, but a very interesting (and maybe an entire different) discussion nonetheless. 

At Bobby,
thanks for your feedback, but here is the question i have to the Scarlet problem:

How will you try to rectify the messed up turn the delivery of Scarlet has gotten since the Queens Speech?
She was okay up to this point, however as soon as you “revealed” her, you went appearently overboard. The way you released information about her at the beginning sparked a big controvery about her character. The kind of that she is too perfect etc.
Her involvement in the story so far doesn`t change that at all.
While we know not all the extend of her character and your plans with her, the amount you have released are allready canon in the minds of many players and it really split the comunity.
It went that far that a lot of players say that everything regarding this character now, is a no-go for the living story.
You put too much “power” into one character. In my opinion it would have been easier to split her “abilities” into other characters alongside her. Maybe some Generals of each army.
However, that is just a thought.

I personaly have no real idea how you want to with it.
You allready started making some “changes” to her story in interviews. Trying to calm down the angry mob by explaining your intentions (before, or the ones who are now needed. Since you decide the story you can say whatever you like, because we don`t know anything), or what we misunderstood.
Nevertheless, you really f***ed up here, because now everything you will do, feels like nothing more then trying to save your hides.

Everything you do will not be enough sadly.
- Revealing her “real” backstory in any way (like beeing a puppet herself to someone, beeing delusional (the current story at least)), won`t work, because you would just retcon for the sake of pleasing everyone.
- killing her off would bring joy to a lot of people, but will feel like: “kitten we made a mistake, quick lets bury her and hope she will be quickly forgotten.”
- making her a decent character? unlikely. The mistakes are in the past (her as a character and yours, because the failed delivery), so pulling her out of that hole right now really requires a miracle, since right now many people won`t listen or care about anything related to her.

So yeah. I don`t really care about the restirctions of: “we can`t say our future plans”, because this is just PR. Saying things like: “we have plans, or we allready discussed it.” doesn`t satisfy anyone, because we heared it again and again.
This goes for all developers here. We like to hear statements about where YOU thought you went wrong. Where you were suprised to here: “hey, the audience doesn`t like what we did.”
You need to show somehow that you think about anything that was said in these threads.
Just gathering feedback and replying with “yes, we can`t disclose any information, but we were thinking about everything you are saying, so everything is good.” is nice and dandy, but aside from “hey we are alive and (might) reading this stuff here.” it is nothing we haven`t heared before.
Righ now it is no real conversation between player and developer, it is an elaborate survey.
Can some developers chime in maybe? Say why they liked certain content, or answer problems that are present?
How about having them give backstory to past events. Explain why they did certain things. What was the reasoning behind the watchknights for example.
This here could be the chance to give us information about your inner workings, about your developement, about the way you are thinking and evolving this beautifull world.

I would really like this collaboration to pick up from both sides, instead of just beeing a aforementioned survey of things you did well and things you didn`t.

I love this world and its races and places – but must admit that it is disheartening to hear that basically – well, thanks for the feedback…but we can’t actually change anything…sorry!.
The hour is late and I have lost all faith and hope in the lore coming back.
Hours in gw2: 2500+ – Should have played tetris instead.
Total Game Cost – about 1.8k NZD – Should have bought a laptop instead.

First, I will say that I don’t have a problem with the 2-week release schedule, but I do think that the four-week ending date can be a bit restrictive. Instead of having the Living World content introduced is removed at the end of four weeks, maybe some smaller ones last two weeks. but maybe some bigger ones last six to eight weeks. Maybe instead of no more than two active Living World missions at a time, three or four of them could overlap, when they are serving a single larger narrative. Of course, when these “extended” events exist, they need to be properly communicated to the players, like with timers on each achievement or at least achievement sets, so that players will know that they have so many weeks left to work on this one.

I was referring to the Clockwork Chaos invasions where the meta designs split groups up in order to complete the objective efficiently. Sorry for any confusion.

My point was that whilst it is clear that we are working toward this in the above method and in balancing of individual creatures, i really liked the idea put forward in the thread of even more focus on individual group play in the open world in releases.

It’s worth noting that the Clockwork events didn’t really encourage splitting up. The zerg was in full effect, especially because players needed large groups to spawn the loot-giving champs, and then further needed them to finish them off. Small groups really had almost no role to play in the Scarlet Invasions. It would also be nice if players that didn’t have Commander badges had better ways of coordinating players. Not everyone wants to shell out for a badge, and while I fancy myself a decent “lay commander” on maps with no commanders, it can still be very hard to coordinate movements without a map icon.

What would help to split zergs would be something else entirely, something more like the Teqatl battery phases, only scaled to be completable by smaller troops (since you’d NEVER see the battery phase with less than dozens of players currently).

Basically it needs to be a thing where the entire scope of the event occurs over the length of a few football fields, within a single region on the map, but where there are multiple “control points” where players are needed to do things, and all of them must be managed at once to achieve the reward. Elite enemies can do well here, since if you use Champs then either they will be too annoying to kill or too rewarding to ignore and will just get farmed instead of working the main objectives. The goals for an event should be in objective completion only, not in mob farming efficiency.

The Tequatl event would actually be really fun, IF it scaled better for small numbers of players. Ideally if only a dozen or so people showed up, it would revert to the old-school version, completable without using the turrets at all and without a timer. Short of that, either the timer needs to be doubled, or the HP halved, so that you don’t need truly massive, server-overflowing hordes of people to complete it, and thus more people would be willing to bother.

So many long and insightful posts on likes and dislikes!

I will keep mine short:

Zephyr Sanctum was my favourite, I thought the art work was spectacular on top of an already stunningly beautiful world. I’m not good at jumping puzzles, but was boncing around like a gazelle once I got the hang of it.

Least favourite is Tequatl, I’ve found it impossible to complete. Initially it was because I was in an overflow and EU overflows have chat channels that are full of every EU language (no issue with that), but all the different instructions in several languages caused chat to be spammed away. I just lost interest. Maybe the revamped dragon events should be a hard mode option, with related rewards, in a seperate instance.

My overall dislike is having to grind to complete acheivements and to attain enough of the related currency to buy any skins. This is because there are so many other things I’d like to be doing too. Oddly, I don’t mind zergs, I see this as the community working together to acheive an end.

What I would really love to take away from some of these events are guild rewards, gained through influence, such as a guild airship, or darkthistle tower.

BobbyStein.2315:

Regarding GW1 lore in Living World and beyond, let’s just say we’re looking at all GW lore right now and picking out threads that we’d like to tie up. Ideas are welcome, as always.

I’ll post more tomorrow. Time to go home.

Remember… the truest victory, is stirring the hearts of your people.

Whatever you decide about what bring us back from GW1 lore, keep in mind that we (GW1 lore fans) have high expectations since it looks like we were a bit forgotten in GW2 as a sequel because you decided to start completly new stories instad expanding the existing ones. If you want to bring us back some lore and prove us that we are not forgotten, choose wisely what it will be and make it with special love.

If you ask to me, what i REALLY miss is a more deep presence of the Six Gods in GW2 (and when i say presence its not necesary physical but lore involve). GW2 should be a perfect excuse to let us know more about their realms. Underworld and Fisure of Fow are just some examples. And remember, they are IMPORTANT characters from GW’s lore as a whole and not only for humans…so dont be afraid about “we dont want an human centric story”.

Bye

PD: Sorry about my english but its not my mother language.

Most Favorite: Labyrinthine Cliffs / Bazaar of the Four Winds

• Introduced a new zone
• Insanely gorgeous visuals
• Catered to exploration via the sky crystal hunt (which included extras and did not require a slavish following of a third-party guide)
• Made references to GW1 lore
• Introduced a new skill mechanic of movement (though latency-related issues could be better improved)
• Had dynamic events in zone for a group zerg to travel up and down
• Had separate spawns for lone farmers to peacefully farm by the shoreline
• Had related mini-activities such as an in-zone jumping/race DE to contribute to the chain and Sanctum Sprint
• Instances were soloable or groupable, with adjustable difficulty up to four tiers (rewards could have been better improved)
• Eventually led to a player’s choice/vote scenario that affected future development of the game (though consequences should be more obvious and not so distanced by time and other updates)

Least Favorite: Lost Shores

• Waiting. Unpredictable amounts of waiting for a one-off event to start, at possibly different timings in different overflows. (Tequatl waiting and other spawn camping like krait blood witch come in as close seconds.)

• Not crash-proof. If you crashed out of one overflow, you could turn up somewhere else where the event was completely over.

• Lag-ridden and unplayable. Bags of ridiculously high hp. See champion karka phases where everything came together for 45 minutes of horror – single-digit frame rates and skill lag with too many people together, champion karka with two layers of armor to break through for three separate hp bars per mob.

• Only catered to one playstyle. In this case, zerg everything. Nothing for other playstyle preferrers. A little bit of something for everyone: zerg, 2-5 man groups, solo is nicest.

• Permanent fork-in-the-path choices. Continue with Ellen Kiel or go escort a group of asura to a side outpost. This event plays once only and you can never see what happens on the other side. Players should be at least able to experience everything for the duration of the update (or flashback via a memories system) before the opportunity is taken away by the passage of time and further updates.

• One-time only. (Dynamic events, update, etc.) If you missed it, for whatever reason, you’re screwed. Recurring seasonal content works better for me personally – catch it within this season, or else wait for the next time it comes back. More permanent content to be played at one’s own time is best, of course.

I have a few things to say here and there. Its nothing different than one anyone else has said, but maybe one more voice will make a difference.

One thing not mentioned so far seems to be the excessive worthless rewards LS meta achievements give us. I’ve had enough of the immersion breaking backpacks and minipets. I want to be given something useful. By useful, I mean something that can be used to craft ascended weapons, ascended armor and legendary weapons. The krait obelisk is a step in the right direction but its still not quite enough.

I’m also displeased with the repetitive mindless grinding that each month brings. Kill one million enemies, close 3000 doors. Its not fun. Its awful. This week will the last time I grind garbage like this.

BobbyStein.2315:

I suppose I haven’t explained this clearly enough. We don’t have UI or tech to do this. The only thing we can do in the game currently is attach a short description to an object that is triggered by interaction (F to read, for example) or put that information inside a conversation tree. Those are our options. Neither solution is ideal for large chunks of text due to size limitations and usability restrictions. We’ve used both approaches on occasion to present details as you’ve described. But these current solutions are hard limited with how much we can display onscreen. They aren’t really appropriate for the amount of text information we’d put in proper books.

The Founding exists. Surely you could have made an effort. Something like this could have been added in this current patch as meta achievement instead of the pointless krait obelisks.

BobbyStein.2315:

Pacing: …we made the conscious decision to pace out her character development over multiple game builds. In other words, we haven’t gotten to that part of her story yet, but since nobody outside the building has an idea of what’s to come I can understand the reactions that she’s “one-dimensional” or conveniently powerful. We’re aware of the perception and feel that future releases will have content that develops her character.

I guess the question now is whether or not you think you can continue drawing out Scarlet’s escapades without killing what’s left of the community. Everyone I know is tired of Scarlet. I am tired of Scarlet. The living story is awful. Even with knowing that there is an end in sight, I still don’t know if I can continue playing it. I enjoyed the lore of Guild Wars 1 but I’m finding it very hard to even care about LS.

I wish that more time could be spent developing the LS. I really miss the days of Gw1 beyond content. It had a longer development time but it was always worth it when we got it. This kitten approach doesn’t seem like its going to be good for the game in the long run.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

The cadence is something we discuss frequently. We are a very collaborative team and do our best to never sweep anything under the rug (-:

It sounds exactly like you are sweeping it under the rug. Please, I beg you, for my sanity, to please stop with the 2 week release cycle. Its killing me. ._.

Jaken.6801:

So yeah. I don`t really care about the restirctions of: “we can`t say our future plans”, because this is just PR. Saying things like: “we have plans, or we allready discussed it.” doesn`t satisfy anyone, because we heared it again and again.
This goes for all developers here. We like to hear statements about where YOU thought you went wrong. Where you were suprised to here: “hey, the audience doesn`t like what we did.”
You need to show somehow that you think about anything that was said in these threads.
Just gathering feedback and replying with “yes, we can`t disclose any information, but we were thinking about everything you are saying, so everything is good.” is nice and dandy, but aside from “hey we are alive and (might) reading this stuff here.” it is nothing we haven`t heared before.
Righ now it is no real conversation between player and developer, it is an elaborate survey.
Can some developers chime in maybe? Say why they liked certain content, or answer problems that are present?
How about having them give backstory to past events. Explain why they did certain things. What was the reasoning behind the watchknights for example.
This here could be the chance to give us information about your inner workings, about your developement, about the way you are thinking and evolving this beautifull world.

I would really like this collaboration to pick up from both sides, instead of just beeing a aforementioned survey of things you did well and things you didn`t.

I think we need to be appreciative that they are popping in and out interacting with us in this thread and pushing the thread into new directions, such as Colins question about TV vs Video game episodes…Chris’s question of our most and least favorite LS patch. Chris said they will be extending this time to gather all feedback and comment appropriately and they are still developing the game,. Therefor, you cannot expect them to have several posts per page. Their primary responsibility at the moment is development of the game.

With that said, I do agree with you on a few points. A lot of what they say to us, and on fansites and interviews, is PR lingo in my opinion. I’ll recall the Mike O’Brien interview with some fansite(I cannot remember which one) where he was inferring that Living Story is alive and well, people love it, and its ground breaking. Well, people don’t really love it, per say. As evident in this thread. We do it because its there, thats about it. So along with what you said, yes it would be nice to hear a developer acknowledge the mistakes they have made. I honestly would have more respect, a lot more, for a developer if they would acknowledge a mistake, even if it were minor, rather than spin more PR lingo and tout that everything is peachy.

It would be a nice addition to the discussion to hear what LS patches the devs liked and disliked. Arenanet: What is YOUR favorite and least favorite patches, and why? It would be very interesting to hear that!

And lastly, at least we are able to post our thoughts in some form, whether it be forum posts or survey, where the developers WILL be reading it. Heck this thread is created by them, I am sure they are reading it.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Regarding rewards relating to the Living World content I agree that we should make greater effort to ensure that time investment is matched by the reward. We have to be careful in this regard due to constraints surrounding our economy but we have already discussed many ways of meeting this goal and maintaining the integrity of the economy.
…

Greetings. A little off topic. But since you mentioned the issue of game economy.

I do not want to offend you, but the game’s economy is now on the verge of horrible. By itself the basic gameplay, which is really… well… fun, does not bring any benefit. Just for example, in most of mmo games, doing different “casual nonsense” in type of quests or achievment farm, for a couple of days a player able to get good amount of money even at low levels, from the sale of droped things, quest rewards or simply money and trash from mobs. Which he can spend on a variety of interesting things, such as mounts, rare equipment, “chemistry”, enhancements, cosmetics etc. Doing game events and traveling around the world of Tyria whole day, I could hardly even be able score a pair of gold.
Mobs drops the ridiculous amount of money. 99.99% of the things that can drops (and even better quality – exotic, which drops very rarely even in dungeons) are worthless (not more ~1.5g) and will bring more meaning if you’ll just salvage them. Earlier in the chest from epic MEGA bosses lay one copper coin. It seemed a mockery. Now it’s a couple of chests which gives you within ~15 silver coins. It is approximately five uses of WPs. The most valuable (in your opinion) things in this game cost from hundreds of gold and above. On the example of the last event – I have to spend 150 gold on the mini, or 120 on a bag. Rare weapons cost me 400-1500 gold. Cultural sets – 120g.

As you may have realized, just doing what is fun (events, hearts or even achievements of LW) you will never get enough profit to buy something meaningful (and the price of gems growing and growing….). Thus the entire game “economy” is closed in pure and ruthless grind. You simply are bringing certain of its manifestations: grind of blue ingredients, grind of champions, grind of resources, grind of dungeons. But grind – this is exactly the kind of thing that should not have been in this game, if to trust your promises. In addition, the fact that you are trying to immediately cut something that brings more profit than the grind (eg it reminded me shoulders from aetherblade JP or… karma from chests) says clearly not in your favor. It creates a lasting impression that the developers feel sorry for giving gold to players. The policy of “the less they get for unit of time – the more game hours they spend – the better”

Frankly, this halloween just killed all my optimism. Even I am – a person who adored this game – see that the whole event – it’s 300-400 hours a blunt, stubborn grind of mobs in the labyrinth to get the mini(!) to the memory…
This.
Is.
Not.
Fun.

Well… I have more constructive criticism on this point. But not in this topic. Just wanted to draw your attention to this problem, since you are attentively watch for this topic.

Siobhan.6027:

I wish that more time could be spent developing the LS. I really miss the days of Gw1 beyond content. It had a longer development time but it was always worth it when we got it. This kitten approach doesn’t seem like its going to be good for the game in the long run.

Thats what everyone in this thread is asking for. Take more time in developing LS instead of meeting the 2 week deadline of releases. It feels rushed, unpolished, and void of any real substance, void of any REAL content.

99% of MMO players have played the traditional MMO with traditional content releases. Id say 99% of people have played at least one of the following: WoW, Rift, LOTRO, WAR, etc. In these games, content releases consisted of skill changes, new zones, new dungeons, new raids, new mobs to fight, new story arc, etc. This is what we want. Sorry, but most of us have been conditioned by these types of traditional MMOs and expect more substantial content with content patches(not just bug fixes and QoL which are very nice indeed).

I also feel that the acheivement system being tied to LS is really watering it all down and destroying it. You want to stick to your 2 week cycle? Fine, however, please remove all achievements. We dont need them! We do them because they are there, and because theres a shiny in the end for us. Can you trust us to simply enjoy new content intrinsically? Forgive the example, but if you put chocolate cake in front of a fat kid, he will eat the cake even if he knows its not a good idea. Same thing here. I dont like LS achievements, but I do them anyways. Why? Its there.

This post will be regarding rewards and achievements in LS and is directed at Arenanet if they wish to comment. A few months ago, I had created a thread about intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards and the responses were mixed. Some people would prefer playing content for the sheer joy of it. Some still want their reward at the end.

Arenanet: Where do you stand? I know the PR spin is to say that there is a happy median, but truthfully, where do you stand? Y

ou cannot have a game devoid of rewards, I understand this. But GW2 showers you in reward, whether or not the reward is worth it, and it makes doing anything in the game trivial. I remember when content was released in other games and being so excited to visit the new zones because its new! It was pretty much a reward in itself. I enjoyed the quests, the lore, the ambiance, the setting.. I did not need to be handed minis, achievement point currency, etc.

So, where do you stand? Do you believe that a game should have more intrinsic reward or more extrinsic?

cesmode.4257:

I think we need to be appreciative that they are popping in and out interacting with us in this thread and pushing the thread into new directions, such as Colins question about TV vs Video game episodes…Chris’s question of our most and least favorite LS patch. Chris said they will be extending this time to gather all feedback and comment appropriately and they are still developing the game,. Therefor, you cannot expect them to have several posts per page. Their primary responsibility at the moment is development of the game.

With that said, I do agree with you on a few points. A lot of what they say to us, and on fansites and interviews, is PR lingo in my opinion. I’ll recall the Mike O’Brien interview with some fansite(I cannot remember which one) where he was inferring that Living Story is alive and well, people love it, and its ground breaking. Well, people don’t really love it, per say. As evident in this thread. We do it because its there, thats about it. So along with what you said, yes it would be nice to hear a developer acknowledge the mistakes they have made. I honestly would have more respect, a lot more, for a developer if they would acknowledge a mistake, even if it were minor, rather than spin more PR lingo and tout that everything is peachy.

It would be a nice addition to the discussion to hear what LS patches the devs liked and disliked. Arenanet: What is YOUR favorite and least favorite patches, and why? It would be very interesting to hear that!

And lastly, at least we are able to post our thoughts in some form, whether it be forum posts or survey, where the developers WILL be reading it. Heck this thread is created by them, I am sure they are reading it.

I am sure someone is reading it. I don`t deny it. This was their idea here, so they need to stick behind it. I am really excited about it and i like the notion, however right now it feels onesided.
Like they don`t know what to do and give us some directions to figure out what we want from them.
However we don`t know what they are able or willing to offer us.
It is not a balanced conversation or discussion, but more a directed filtering of everyones thoughts on the matter (as well as outlet of frustration).

This topic here is a great idea and we got some nice little pieces of information here and there, however it is all behind restricted PR-talk.
This doesn`t help us calming down. It is mostly the nice smile and wave people hate anyway, when they are greeted by “authorities”.

I know about secrecy. I know that they won`t “spoil’” anything for the future. However at this point we need some answers. Beeing vague isn`t the right way.
It can backfire, naturally, however it would be honest, it would be the truth.

There are real people behind the living world. However we only get “filtered” answers and opinions up till now.
We are voicing our unfiltered opinon here, we are trying to be collaborative. However something like this works best if both sides open up and tell each other what is wrong.

Best example is the pacing. While Bobby allready mentioned the different kind of pacing behind the living story, the overall tone right now is “we stay by our decision and won`t budge.”

Well, that is nice… but why? just because? Going back would not be cost efficent? Software, Hardware problems? Orders from above? Weird statistics that say otherwise?

We want to help. We want you to create an amazing game. However, we need more information. Leaving us in the dark about so many things is not helping.
We need to know a direction, the feeling that you listening, some of your thoughts (and from more then the “leaders”).

Is it possible to have everyone take a break from what they are doing and come together with the community in such a thread and just talk? throw ideas back and forth? I know it sounds crazy and goes a bit away from my original statement, but right now the whole thing feels like every other response we got ove the last year.

If this thing should work, we need more lifesigns from your side.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Many of you raised the idea of tying the Living World more deeply into the world of Tyria and also as a deployment tool for enhancing the core of the game. Over the past year we have made many improvements to the core of the game, as part of the releases but not folded into them per se. This is a really interesting idea what we should continue to discuss in this thread and that will be a topic of discussion in the studio. Regarding drilling more into the existing content with Living World is something we have done, are doing now and will continue to evolve moving forward. Related to this many of you talked about making the changes more meaningful to the player’s life within Tyria, all I can say to this is Heck Yeah! This is at the core of what we intend to deliver with the Living World and whilst we have done some work in this area, we are not at a stage yet where we would say that this paradigm is fully functional yet. To create meaningful changes they must impact the day to day of the player and this is at the center of our design philosophy for execution in this area.

Yes. But can we get more ahem, detailed or better straight answer. Will the Living World become really living, or it will still be static world with 2-week updates ? If the later we are not moving anything with it.

As it have been said. To make Living world, living, world must simply… Live. And players must participate in making world being live. I posted my idea earlier so I won’t repeate my self but tl;dr version is:
1. We need meanfull landscape changing events that never resets unless player action is taken. I love the example that Colin have given when talkin about centaurs. It should work that way! That was living world nutshell, it’s shame that it is nowhere in the game.
When centaurs attack village, and burn it the ground it should remain that way until players rebuild it. rebuilding it should take effort. Players should gather resources all over the map, the caravans with resources would be constantly attacked by centaurs, and centaurs them selves would be competing for resource so they can build their own base in place of village.
Building should be by players. Players should have to press buttons to build building. Not some magicall npc, mash with hammer 5 times and new building appear out of nowhere.
That was what I have first imagined when Colin was talking about centaurs and villages.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

A number of you mentioned consequences for failure. This is something we discuss a lot and is quite complex. I would ask that we continue to discuss this topic in the thread.

Consequences for failrue should be severe and meaningful. If the only consquence is that you can’t access one NPC that sells crap items that noone was aware of anyway, the nobody will care if the fail.
If players fail there should be:
1. Content locking.
2. Limitations to travel over map.
3. More dangers (more mobs, more dangerous).
4. Less loot from mob in area.
5. Magic Find DR on mobs.
6. Areas should contain NPC that are selling very interesting items, but only if certain requirments are met. Perfect Victory State.
7. Events for such punishment should be zone wide, and really hard. Not encourage zergining and farming and enccourage wining actuall event. If you fail event, zone is becoming completly contested and will punish you until you can retake it. It will stay contested and in ultimate punishment state, unless player action is taken.

Edit:
To expand on this idea. Even’t really shouldn’t be on timer. Some “events” should happen constantly, like centaurs raiding villages. Because…. Why not ? It’s small thing that would make world feel more alive, than any of the updates so far.
To make it really work, centaurs shouldn’t spawn out of thin air and start attacking village. It wouldn’t pointless. No they should run from their own home base, across the map to make raid happen.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

With this in mind I also want us to be delivering epic adventures, where we forge the future of Tyria and fight mighty foes. And whilst Bobby has and will continue to discuss the intricacies of this, I want you all to understand that this is very much part of the plan.

I actually don’t care about story. I personally could be killing pink cows, if they have interesting mechanics, and have any gameplay meaning to the world (angry pink cows giving black milk that will sicken everyone ;D)

Chris Whiteside.6102:

The Zerg! This is an interesting problem that we had actually fixed to an extent in an earlier release where we created a meta goal that forced players to split up into groups. I really enjoyed this and the feedback was excellent. Personally I quite enjoy the zerg sometimes in PVE ( I tend to be less of a ‘zerger’ in WvW) but I also really enjoy group play in the open world as many of you have mentioned. I would love to see more of this in the open world.

The problem is that game encourage runing in mindless zerg. Zergs that doesn’t have any coordination should be severly punished, by champions, that have alot of anti-zerg aoe abilities. And mean Abilities, which 3 hits will wipe out entire zerg.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Some of you posted about your favorite releases and least favorite. It would be really cool if you have the time to post your single favorite and least favorite and the reasons why for each. This would help a lot and I will share my learning with you etc. from the posts.

Favorite. The one that added Clockwork invasions (or whatever those zone invasions are called). It was good concept, and somewhat exectued not bad, but it was far from being very good.
The issue was and is, that this zone invasions does not encourage players to work togather for victory. Indeed, due to zerging farmers it encourage players to loose the event and and keep farming champions.
There are solutions to this problem:
1. Remove loot from mobs during event.
2. When event fail it should have permament impact on the zone.
3. Rewards for wining should be much better. Including ascended items as guarantee. I dunno why you guys are so hesitant to give people exotics and ascended for really hard content. Other give their best items in such cases all the time, and they are not blowed up yet…

Thanks for posting some nice info there Chris

Now this is my second post and I will try my best and write my thought about some points you wanted to see discussed.

Release cadence:

I really enjoy this bi-weekly release I don’t think this should change, but what needs to change is quality of this updates. I know that we are now starting to see work of people who had more time to work on this updates, and most releases as of late were better than previous one. Only thing that didn’t improve were achivements, some of them feel grindy, but some of them are fun, but I guess you can’t make everything 100% grind free, after all it’s quite hard task to do that.
But IF it will help you deliver better content you can always go back on releasing updates monthly.

Favorite updates:

Zephyr Sanctum, F&F 3rd and 4th update, Southsun Cove, halloween(2012) and wintersday (2012)

Least favorite updates:

Queens Jubilee, Dragon Bash, Blood&Madness
I named these since they were really either too zergy for my taste or/and didn’t really have much to do in them.

Future of LW:

Kessex Hills and Southsun Cove were great, since we can actually see something change in the world, of course Zephyr Sanctum was great since we got to visit new zone. What I want to see in future releases:
- New zones
- Changes to existing zones (Timberline Falls next please )
- New mobs and gear (try to make some of it obtainable in game not just BTL)
- Try to use existing lore and work up on it more
- Try to spread event on 2 or even 3 zones… I think this will help and decrease that feeling of content being zergy. And when I say spread across 2,3 zones I really mean it, not like we have now where we have to kill 3 krait witches in 3 zones, that is good begging, but meat of the content is still in Kessex Hills
- Please don’t put zerg/farm friendly maps like Labyrinth, Queens Pavilion, etc… If you do make new temporary maps, make them much bigger.

Thanks for listening to us. I’m glad you’re sticking to some of your ideas, since sometimes even fans are wrong and that is something all of US FANS should take in consideration. Please continue working hard, and if possibly even harded We need some interesting NEW content

I stopped playing GW2 for various reasons, but one of the major factors was how the Living Story and new content in general has become innately tied to achievement chasing and rewards.

I’ve come to realise that rewards and achievements are a bad thing for games in general.
It’s lowest common denominator stuff and makes people forget why they started playing in the first place. It all becomes about how much gold or achievement points players receive for repeating activities instead of actually enjoying the content itself.

I’ll use another game as an example.
I’m guessing a lot of ArenaNet developers have played The Last of Us.
I for one found it a breath of fresh air to have trophy and social intrusions completely removed from the game. This was a conscious decision by Naughty Dog. They didn’t want Joel and Ellie’s story ruined by continual pop ups. And it worked spectacularly well.
Free from trophy concerns or whether my friends were online or not, I was free to enjoy the game.

When a big developer like Naughty Dog backs away from achievement culture in such a dramatic fashion, I think it’s worth paying attention.

One of the things that would bring me back to GW2 would be the removal of the achievement hamster wheel and untangling it from so many gameplay elements. At the moment it’s the driving mechanic behind all new content. It’s like ArenaNet believe people won’t play their game unless there’s a reward for it.

Well I stopped playing BECAUSE of all the “rewards”.

If you play Guild Wars 2 at the moment, you’re unconsciously deciding to join the race to get the shiniest stuff or the most achievement points. This causes stress with the 2 week release cycle, and it makes people anxious when they miss out on something because they didn’t have time to dedicate to playing.
People turn around and say that all this content is optional and that you don’t have to play it, and guess what?
They’re right.
You don’t.

It’s just that if you don’t play content dedicated to rewarding you either with shinies or achievements, you don’t play Guild Wars 2.

Like me.

This entire game is optional.

I know you’ve probably built your development around integrating achievements and rewards in to new content ArenaNet, but seriously, take a step back and consider the potential for burnout.

Mungrul.9358:

I stopped playing GW2 for various reasons, but one of the major factors was how the Living Story and new content in general has become innately tied to achievement chasing and rewards.

I’ve come to realise that rewards and achievements are a bad thing for games in general.
It’s lowest common denominator stuff and makes people forget why they started playing in the first place. It all becomes about how much gold or achievement points players receive for repeating activities instead of actually enjoying the content itself.

I’ll use another game as an example.
I’m guessing a lot of ArenaNet developers have played The Last of Us.
I for one found it a breath of fresh air to have trophy and social intrusions completely removed from the game. This was a conscious decision by Naughty Dog. They didn’t want Joel and Ellie’s story ruined by continual pop ups. And it worked spectacularly well.
Free from trophy concerns or whether my friends were online or not, I was free to enjoy the game.

When a big developer like Naughty Dog backs away from achievement culture in such a dramatic fashion, I think it’s worth paying attention.

One of the things that would bring me back to GW2 would be the removal of the achievement hamster wheel and untangling it from so many gameplay elements. At the moment it’s the driving mechanic behind all new content. It’s like ArenaNet believe people won’t play their game unless there’s a reward for it.

Well I stopped playing BECAUSE of all the “rewards”.

If you play Guild Wars 2 at the moment, you’re unconsciously deciding to join the race to get the shiniest stuff or the most achievement points. This causes stress with the 2 week release cycle, and it makes people anxious when they miss out on something because they didn’t have time to dedicate to playing.
People turn around and say that all this content is optional and that you don’t have to play it, and guess what?
They’re right.
You don’t.

It’s just that if you don’t play content dedicated to rewarding you either with shinies or achievements, you don’t play Guild Wars 2.

Like me.

This entire game is optional.

I know you’ve probably built your development around integrating achievements and rewards in to new content ArenaNet, but seriously, take a step back and consider the potential for burnout.

I would like to say that i strongly agree with this post. I’ve been wanting to write this for quite some times :

If you got rid of achievements in the LS/LW, what would be left ? Some tedious, zergy, easy, unsatisfying content.

I would really enjoy if you could step away from the achievement hamster wheel and stop designing content AROUND achievements. I guess it’d be okay if you did create interesting content/satisfying gameplay experience, and eventually add SOME (not a lot) achievement for completing it (but none of the “collect X stuff”, kill Y mobs" sort of achievement.) At the moment it feels more like "let make this repetitive events pop around the map, and because it will be an extremely zergy/repetitive experience with no challenge at all, lets make plenty of achievements so people HAVE to do it over and over again.

This is the reason i usually stay away from GW2’s PVE and why i only WvW. Except that now you have “achievements” in WvW too It makes me feels really sad. So that’s something else : please keep the LS/LW out of WvW. Please

Also what is considered an achievement IRL ? Overcoming your fear of something, succeeding in a difficult task, performing better than usual in the face of adversity etc…

What are achievements in GW2 ? Zerg and repeat. Avoid difficulty. Don’t think. So GW2’s achievements are not achievements at all. (At least the ones tied to LS/LW and the ones like “kill 1000 spiders”. The right kind of achievements are the ones you get once (and ONLY once) you complete a JP for example.

So i guess a good step toward improving LS/LW would be to ask yourself everytime : “is it fun ?” (see what i did here :P) "would it be fun without “achievements ?” And please you don’t have to use achievements to properly rewards players.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Regarding Cadence of release: This is not something we plan to change in terms of timing and I wanted to make that clear from the outset.

This tells me everything I need to know about just how ‘collaborative’ ongoing development is going to be.

I guess I am not included in the target audience of this game any longer.
I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what my breaking point will be.
Which story will I miss and never be able to see again.
Which reward will I think fits my character perfectly that I will never have a chance to earn.

The game is clearly heading in a very specific direction and the options seem to be get on board or tough luck.

Oh well, plenty of other ways to spend my time and money.

Best of luck to you all.

Sligh.2789:

As a former communications manager, I have some insight that may be of help to the entire Anet and Player teams taking part in these discussions.

The problem of in game actions by some members of the Anet team, and some unprofessional posts on these forums, are making it difficult for the average person to separate the personal and business interaction with Anet into separate categories.

Any interaction in game, or on the forums, should be monitored and buffered through a single person to insure consistency and accuracy across the broadest spectrum of interaction.
Yes you can post to the forums, but you need to have someone who understands the consequences of statements that may seem inconsequential to you. Now if we could get the forum members to use the same high degree of thoughtfulness to their posts it would be a grand world indeed.
I highly recommend a Communications Liaison, it will allow you to hone your message and allow you a more focused view of the message that the players are trying to relate.

This is just my opinion. Take it into consideration at your own convenience.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this sentiment. Allow your people to be people and to interact with us as much as possible. Yes, the WvW incident was regrettable, but there was also an apology and MOST people have accepted that and moved on. Personally, I love to see the red tag, both in the forums and in the game. The more the better, the more candid the better, the more human like… You get the picture.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Part 2

Regarding rewards relating to the Living World content I agree that we should make greater effort to ensure that time investment is matched by the reward. We have to be careful in this regard due to constraints surrounding our economy but we have already discussed many ways of meeting this goal and maintaining the integrity of the economy. Regarding Living World Meta Achievement rewards, personally I would like to see more rewards that commemorate the accomplishments of my character and my friends, specifically pertaining to the challenges I overcame (Essentially a rite of passage I can show of). Different types of reward take different amounts of time to make and we have been working to organize our reward distribution better so player’s will see more variety moving forward. I also really like the idea of Arc based Meta Achievements.

Please tell me you aren’t ever going to make rewards the way you did with the new Halloween ones (non achievement based ones). Requiring us to grind out thousands of any items is kinda outrageous (let alone goes against the manifesto, which isn’t even followed anymore). Any of the Halloween items (pail/mini/recipes) should have required like 2,000 max. The achievement based ones, I don’t mind, though it appears other players do kinda have a problem. (The only problem with making us have to do certain achievements first I had was with the first Scarlet one, and that was because it locked us out of the current existing content) Hopefully you’ll never make us require thousands of items that can only be gotten in temporary content, unless the items dropped like crazy (ie. everything/kills gives you at least one of whatever the temp item is.

BobbyStein.2315:

I’ve been in discussions with dozens of folks from many different departments regarding the conclusion of the Scarlet arc. I can’t go into specifics about where, when, and how things will end without spoiling things, unfortunately. But I can say that we’ve been reading as much feedback as we’ve been able (yes, that includes the bad along with the good). We know how strongly some of you feel about her as a character. The most I can say now is that the plan is in motion. You’ll just have to wait and see.

Regarding GW1 lore in Living World and beyond, let’s just say we’re looking at all GW lore right now and picking out threads that we’d like to tie up. Ideas are welcome, as always.

I’ll post more tomorrow. Time to go home.

About the GW1 Lore, well I’m very open, whatever topic I’ll enjoy with the open arms. But sharing some ideas.

- My favourite campaign of GW1 was Nightfall, and I’m dying to hear news for our mate Palawa Joko, Vabbi is very far from the current Tyria so I ‘m not very sure if it’s good add stories about him now or if wait for the future when the map gets bigger and more closer to Vabbi. O.ò But whenever it comes, it will be welcome.

- Maybe some more easy could be stories about the King Adelbern and the fall of Ascalon. in GW1 I heard that Evennia went to Ascalon to ask help to the king… and I don’t know anything more about her. Later, in the books of EbonHawke I read about how the king send the ebon soldiers to the south with its mistery. I would like more stories that extend what happened there, in GW2 or in GW1. Maybe the Durdman Priory between tombs and atefacts, could manage to transport us to a simulation of the past, to recreate some events, and collects clues to solve a threat of the present… O.ò

- The white mantle returns?, I fighted against them in some misions of the humans, but they are very hided yet. (They do well, as hero I won’t allow them attack Kryta nor our beloved queen!!).

- When and why the human gods left Tyria? their avatars don’t appears anymore, I understand the gameplay reason, but I don’t know in story why they leave the humans by themselves when they were helping them in times before? Have humans done anything specially wrong in that time? O.ò

- Livia and the Scepter of Orr, she carried the scepter back to Orr at the end of GW:EN, what she really did there? Is that related with Zhaitan raise? or with the uncorrupted lake that Trahearne use to heal Orr?.

Anyway, some ideas ideas ideas