Guild Wars 2

Come one come all!
Let us brainstorm some ideas real factual ideas to be placeholder content for gw2 until HoT comes out. I’d like this to be content that would be permanent. In example not an event that goes away. Let me get this started as an example for my own idea.

As we are all aware Gemstore/Black Lion Weapon and Armour(outfits) skins are a lot better then the skins made on release. Dungeon skins are something that add pseudo-prestige to ones character, and let’s face it prestige is what most of us want in an MMO. But now the game is where, because of time or pvp tracks, many players now have these skins and there is no prestige from these items anymore.

But it would be just a boring grind if we have to just do the same thing we’ve been doing. So the second solution fixes that. Which is to add more dungeon paths. Lore friendly and current events friendly paths into the game.

This doesn’t have to be three paths per dungeon, but should be at least one per dungeon. And does not have to be all at once either. After the paths are added I think they should add another set of armor and weapons priced at an additional 1000 tickets needed. Granted this would be pointless with the people who have saved up thousands of tokens or so from playing dungeons paths for gold. I think Arena Net should think of another way to do this or make it a new set of tokens from these paths themselves.

The way I see these paths being added is similar to the Aetherblade path, an NPC is added to the dungeon opening a new path into the dungeon, at level 80.

Let me know what you guys think of this idea or your own idea. Please no SAB comments.

Topic TL:DR
Come up with new or reused content to place hold HoT until it is released.

Example TL:DR
Add new dungeon paths based on lore or current events, being mordy the tendril dragon, and add new dungeon skins for a larger possible new currency.

UPDATE: The following are the total suggestions so far.
1.Dungeon Path-Doable but would be a close call to release of HoT anyway.
2.Revamp a map, South Sun cove, with new and more fun events.
3.Revamp the Shatterer, or even Jormag, world boss to lost until the release.
4.Add more Lost coins to other maps.
5.Scavenger Hunt for a new weapon or armor set in the game.
6.Pavilion
7. WvW Tournament
8. Revamp more vanilla map event to be multi staged events.

that would be nice….and even if they aren’t willing to make one new path per dungeon, they could very easily add the new skins. while that doesn’t solve the probelem of grinding the same content for 3 yrs, it does add further incentive to do the grind.

Wait what did i just read to be suggested?

So this thread is about content we can come up with ourselves rather than old content being re-used? Also, just want to point out that asking for no SAB comments is like asking a dog not to bark at a cat.

For me it’d be pretty cool if adventures came out for the old world before HoT. It’d give me something to do while waiting other than the stuff I’ve already done, plus more incentive to log in.

The new dungeon paths idea might be ok if we wanted HoT to be released about a year or two from now, as that would probably take a lot of time and resources.

An idea that might not take away too much HoT resources would be to implement a ‘Nicholas’ for GW2. Only the one NPC and the gathering would be of items already in-game, and the rewards could be items already created, but either retired now, or difficult to obtain, as well as more common things offered.

Good luck on anything being released before HoT, though, as far as playable content goes.

@MrWubzy This can be content already in the game or something you can think up of, sorry if this wasn’t clear. I thought my example would have cleared that up.

Does anyone have any thoughts?
So far we have dungeons and new dungeon skins, suggested by myself. Adventures in Vanilla maps, suggested by MrWubzy. And a collector NPC for reward goodies, suggested by Inculpatus cedo.

It’s nice to speculate, but I hope you realize they aren’t going to have time to fit your ideas into their production schedule before HoT. The release is going to be sometime in the fall; possibly August 28th (GW2 anniversary). Studios plan their productions out months or years in advance, and production itself takes months. HoT is between 3 and 7 months away. Believe me, they already have plans for up to 12 months or more. Any suggestions you have here would have to be carefully considered by Anet and placed near the end of their current plans so as not to disrupt things they are already working on.

@Xenon, I am aware of production scope and time. The second HoT Was announced I knew exactly the time frame they’d think on releasing it. And I am aware of their busy schedules. But to come up with a bunch of Ideas, instead of dismiss them is the point of the thread, as it will be sent to them and they can decide if they want to do any of them, or spark their own ideas. I for one gain a lot of thoughts and ideas of my own by seeing other ideas.

Forum hide and seek.

Riku.4821:

@Xenon, I am aware of production scope and time. The second HoT Was announced I knew exactly the time frame they’d think on releasing it. And I am aware of their busy schedules. But to come up with a bunch of Ideas, instead of dismiss them is the point of the thread, as it will be sent to them and they can decide if they want to do any of them, or spark their own ideas. I for one gain a lot of thoughts and ideas of my own by seeing other ideas.

Yeah that’s fine, I was just trying to be realistic. Not trying to dismiss. By all means, post your ideas, but unless they are very minor tweaks, they are extremely unlikely to implement any of this before HoT. After HoT is another story.

For example, new dungeon paths is an awesome idea. I’m all for that. But realistically there is no way they can finish that project from scratch before HoT comes out. The scope described in the OP is just way too big to fit in before this fall.

Could they tweak rewards for dungeons? Maybe. Adjust existing boss health/damage? Sure. But add entire new paths to every dungeon? No way. That requires at minimum designing a new boss encounter per dungeon. New scripted events. Possibly new mechanics. And it all has to be tested and bug fixed. How “new” do you want these paths to be? Reskinned old bosses? Copy/pasted assets? Or do you expect them to actually make new models, environment, animations, enemies, etc?

Maybe you are fully aware of all of this, I don’t know your level of knowledge on the subject. However, I’ve seen time and time again average players just throwing over-scoped ideas around with lots of wishful thinking. I try to explain the reality of game development in the hopes that they have more realistic expectations, so that they don’t end up disappointed in the end.

As said, I am a game designer, and after rereading my first post, it is aware to me it seems all dungeons at once, however, I meant one at a time. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.

I feel stripping one art, level, concept, audio designer and two programmers from the project, which I personally don’t feel everyone at A-Net is working on it all at once. Then have them form a team and either during work hours or paid overtime, depending on how desperate they want this done and back on track, start working one dungeon path, one dungeon at a time.

They wouldn’t have to be completely new or have “HoT Mechanics”. Just “reskinned” and “shuffled” dungeons with new rewards I feel would be enough to fool the Community who aren’t as design-oriented until August.

The cost, resources, time involved, beta testing, reward sign offs, writing time involve multiple teams who are prob pretty knackered atm. We are talking likely a few months for any dungeon revamp for something unlikely to generate much interest to a wider community.

I cant think of anything they would have time to produce before HoT, but ill play ball and throw out a suggestion or two anyway.

Southson. Revamped with new events focussed round a meta like recent zones

Lost coins in more zones

Revamp Shatterer and a couple of other bosses.

None of which could be achieved by HoT, but they would have wider appeal and be a welcome time sink perhaps

Riku.4821:

As said, I am a game designer, and after rereading my first post, it is aware to me it seems all dungeons at once, however, I meant one at a time. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.

I feel stripping one art, level, concept, audio designer and two programmers from the project, which I personally don’t feel everyone at A-Net is working on it all at once. Then have them form a team and either during work hours or paid overtime, depending on how desperate they want this done and back on track, start working one dungeon path, one dungeon at a time.

They wouldn’t have to be completely new or have “HoT Mechanics”. Just “reskinned” and “shuffled” dungeons with new rewards I feel would be enough to fool the Community who aren’t as design-oriented until August.

A single new dungeon path for one dungeon is probably doable, but they would have to get started right now. Even then, they wouldn’t be finished with it for another 2-3 months, which puts it in August which is the suspected release of HoT anyway. And that’s in the case of a brand new path with new assets, scripted events, bosses, etc. Doable, but the timing is bad. They would have to have already been working on it a few months ago to release it before HoT.

Also, copy/pasting old assets into a rehashed dungeon doesn’t strike me as Anet’s style. They would want to build new assets and make something unique. I mean, sure they could (for example) try to copy Lupicus into CoE and add the Flame Effigy boss for a cool double boss encounter, but that’s too superficial in their eyes, and I believe a lot of players would complain that it’s lazy design even if the intent is just to give us something quick to hold us over.

Edit: I feel like I’m derailing the thread now so I’ll try to throw in my ideas to get back on track.

Personally I’m in the camp that I wish they would just open up SAB world 2 again with no new content. Just let us play it again for a bit. I suspect the reason they haven’t is partly because there’s unknown technical issues under the hood that would need to be fixed, and partly they want SAB to be something that always opens with new content each time.

Randulf.7614:

Lost coins in more zones

This gave me an idea. Something relatively easy they could do is add some scavenger hunt type content to some old maps. Maybe add a single new weapon set that can be earned through collecting lost objects in multiple zones. Think something like the ambrite weapons. Maybe you collect 250 “spirit tokens” to buy a weapon from a new vendor. Maybe the tokens could be added to the loot table of mobs in various maps. Maybe spirit tokens could be hidden in nooks just like lost coins.

Or it could be a single fun item like the birthday blaster. Maybe a staff that summons sandwiches. Mobs in the Ascalon region start dropping sandwich ingredients. You need 250 slices of bread, 250 slices of ham, 250 slices of roast beef, and 250 slices of swiss cheese. Throw that in the mystic forge for a gift of Sandwichmancy. Combine that with a jar of mayonnaise (world boss drop), some ancient staff components (artificer 400+), and some globs of ecto to craft the Sandwichmancer’s staff.

With something like that they aren’t actually building new maps, enemies, etc. Just adding items to the loot tables and some weapon skins.

Riku.4821:

[…]
“…and let’s face it prestige is what we all want in an MMO.”
[…]

No, I do not want prestige, especially in an MMO (RPG).

I dislike when others speak for me or speak in absolutes and state opinions as facts.

@Xenon I can see what you mean, A-Net would want it to be polished as possible which would take quite some time, and in fact putting the release of a dungeon path in late July early August.
@StinVec Being the first person I’ve seen that any prestige at all is not a want I’ll edit that part just for you!
@Randulf I also can see what you mean, when combine with Xenon, If they were to do a single Dungeon “The A-Net way” would take a lot more resources and make HoT pushed back or to late of a release of the path to be efficient. I do like the idea though.

Riku.4821:

So the second solution fixes that. Which is to add more dungeon paths. Lore friendly and current events friendly paths into the game..

Seriously? I think you may not be up to date with the times because Anet has explicitly stated that they have no plans for any more dungeon-type content. And considering how much work they’ve been putting into the current dungeons, you can easily believe dungeons are pretty much abandonware at this point.

At best, we’ll see some recycled festivals (Queen’s Pavilion, Dragon Bash…) and a filler WvW tournament.

You want to know what I want to see? I want to see the systems they themselves have implemented brought to the next level.

I want them to rework the maps and add events and event-chains. This will not be done in one or two weeks, probably not even in one or two months. But it would finally give us a reason to do events outside of just the rewards we get from doing the events.

Right now the most event mechanics are dead simple and have no story relevance. That should be changed.

On each map, there should be multiple layers of event-chains. Event-chains should influence each other, the failure of one event-chain should prohibit the progression of another event-chain (think about Snowden Drifts. One event-chain dealing with Svanir, one dealing with an escort mission through the whole map. If the Svanir manage to destory the bridge in the middle the other event-chain can’t progress).

Each layer should contain two event-chains. One that offensive chain and one defensive chain. As just described, those layers should also interact with each other.

Each chain should focus on a specific part, so you can grow accustomed to the introduced characters and care about the. There are two main crucial points you need to keep in mind when designing this chain.
- It mustn’t look silly
- It mustn’t be redundant
The first point is easy to explain. If a character you protect says that this will be a dangerous fight, but only very few mobs ever attack you or the mobs are too easy to kill or the mobs spawn in too long intervals, the character and the story associated with them will look silly. You need to avoid that at any cost. It is better to have one eventchain fail more often than not, than to have too easy chains and the players just don’t care about them, like it is currently. NPCs should be distinct and not generic, they should not use generic one-liners.
Tuhe next point isn’t hard to understand either. Take the event in Dredgehaunt Cliffs near the entrance to Hoelbrak. This event, where you have to beat up the svanir and then save him respawns roughly every 10 to 15 minutes. This is utterly disappointing from a story perspective.
Event-chains need to be very long, ergo, have to contain a lot of events.

Let’s talk about the offensive and defensive event-chains. Each map has one or more main “villians” associated to them. The main event-chain, which should be the the most complex event-chain and usually end with a huge endboss (you could tie all current worldbosses into those event-chains). To not invalidate the progress players have made during those event-chains, an defensive event-chain should start a while (maybe minutes, maybe hours) after the offensive event-chain has finished. During this event-chain the allied forces gat slowly pushed back while it is the main task of the players to prevent casualties and to keep the escape route open and secured.
To further enhance the investment of the players in those chains, the characters should recognize the player and react differently based on how often the player has helped to push the event-chain. (Please let it be more variety than just “did or did not help during this chain atleast once”).

At last, the rewards have to be adjusted too.
The event-chains require hugge time investments and favor those more, who helped to push the entire chain. It should also incetivice to push event-chains that are not as popular as other chains. At last, worldboss rewards have to be buffed significantly for those who helped pushing the event, since worldbosses should be tied to chains.
There should be also local rewards, based on the area you are in, who you’ve helped and who you fought against. These rewards should also (and definitely) contain unique skins you can only get through those event-chains.

That is my idea on how this game, especially open world PvE can be made more fun to play.

tl;dr Read the whole post kitten, this is how GW2 should have been from the beginning.

I’m not sure Nicholas was really a scavenger hunt, and he certainly didn’t give new weapons or armor.

Maybe you aren’t familiar with GW1….

I guess it could be considered a scavenger hunt, but the ‘hunt’ is only for 1 particular item per week. More of a ‘go gather me some of these, and trade them in for a mystery gift’.

But, truly, most of these ideas are things that would never have enough time to be implemented before HoT releases unless the release of HoT is pushed back to accommodate them. I’d rather have HoT sooner than later, even if there isn’t anything new to do.

Though, with the ‘next’ patch, we may find some things to do. Hopefully, soon! =)

It is my hope going forward past the release of HoT that ANet will return to some variation on Living World. Living World teams could generate content, perhaps on a monthly rather than bi-weekly basis. Perhaps allowing more time between releases might allow them to fix some of the issues that dogged LS S2. Meanwhile, they return to the plan where the non-LW teams work on feature packs and work on the next expansion. If they commit to such a plan early on, and there are not major resource sinks like the China release, they ought to be able to better time things so that the story updates do not run out long before the expansion is ready.

Is it just me or does the community grow more impatient? I didn’t hear that many complains about the lack of updates before the living story was a thing. Or maybe it’s just that all the players now notice that there isn’t much to do in PvE outside of farming gold or going for achievements. Maybe ANet will start to work on content that is challenging and fun to play for more than just the first time, instead of focussing on content that only has the notion of having new content going for it (speaking of living world). But to be honest, this text already contains too many "maybe"s to be ever be heard. But a little tip if this ever gets read by a developer: Adding a bunch of Achievents does not equate to good replayable content.

WvW Tournament
SAB
Dragon Bash
Pavillion

Any of these would be fun to do for a few weeks over the summer.

Literally anything is good at this point to distract from the waiting game.

+1 for Super Adventure Box.

Dungeon- and Fractal-specific Achievements and Meta-Achievements. Rewards for individual Achievements would be Dungeon Tokens, Ascended Mats, Weapon/Armor Boxes etc.

The Meta-Achievement would award the player with a Mystic Forge Recipe that lets them create Ascended Dungeon Armor through the following recipe:

• 1x Dungeon Gift
• 1x Ascended Crafting Component 1
• 1x Ascended Crafting Component 2
• 1x Vision Crystal

For example:

• 1x Gift of Baelfire
• 1x Deldrimor Steel Chestplate Panel
• 1x Deldrimor Steel Chestplate Padding
• 1x Vision Crystal

Would create a Chest of Baelfire’s Ascended Chestpiece, which lets the player choose between Zojja’s Breastplate (Berserker), Forgemaster’s Breastplate (Rampager) or Occam’s Breastplate (Carrion).

The regular achievements could be all manners of achievements, such as “Clear Dungeon in X amount of time” or “Clear the Wisp Puzzle in the Swamp Fractal without triggering a single trap” or “Defeat Lupicus without Allowing him to eat a single grub”, dependant on which Dungeon it is.

I think the once-weekly article about HoT IS the placeholder content before HoT.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Living World teams could generate content, perhaps on a monthly rather than bi-weekly basis.

Content was never generated on a bi-weekly basis. It’s unbelievable people fell for the “bi-weekly” hype: It was maybe four bi-weekly LS releases every six months. That was how much content Anet was capable of putting out which means they simply can’t put out expansions and LS at the same time.

To be honest, I’d be surprised if HoT actually contained what’s traditionally considered an expansion’s worth of content — much less a Factions or Nightfall’s amount of content, which I think a lot of people are expecting.

I would like to play some Destiny Edge stories. Instance 5-man stuff where players could choose to be Snaff, Zojja, Eir, Logan, Caithe, and Rytlock. Like what they did with recent Caithe in the LS. Taking on the Dragons champions. The Dragonsspawn, morgus lethe, Destoyer of Life. The story is already there so they just need to make the content. Of course none of this will happen because of the XPAC

Lord Kuru.3685:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Living World teams could generate content, perhaps on a monthly rather than bi-weekly basis.

Content was never generated on a bi-weekly basis. It’s unbelievable people fell for the “bi-weekly” hype: It was maybe four bi-weekly LS releases every six months. That was how much content Anet was capable of putting out which means they simply can’t put out expansions and LS at the same time.

It’s unbelievable that people have such short memories. It seems you’ve forgotten LS S1, which did bi-weekly updates for over half of 2013. It wasn’t until after Wintersday, 2013 that ANet slowed down, which coincided with the push to the China release.

The “place holder content” is obviously the forum game. We just need to come up with set rules and how to earn points. I think we ought to brainstorm ideas on how someone can win. Maybe they can get a special title. We should brain storm titles too. Even though I’m being somewhat sarcastic there is a lot of truth to this.

Lord Kuru.3685:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Living World teams could generate content, perhaps on a monthly rather than bi-weekly basis.

Content was never generated on a bi-weekly basis. It’s unbelievable people fell for the “bi-weekly” hype: It was maybe four bi-weekly LS releases every six months. That was how much content Anet was capable of putting out which means they simply can’t put out expansions and LS at the same time.

To be honest, I’d be surprised if HoT actually contained what’s traditionally considered an expansion’s worth of content — much less a Factions or Nightfall’s amount of content, which I think a lot of people are expecting.

Actually, living world went bi-weekly ever since the second southsun releases, all the way up to the climax of the Tower of Nightmares :P, now, seeing as after that it went down to less frequent content, suggests that they mightve started working on HoT around that time. Which would mean that you’re looking at nearly 2 years of developement time :P ((If HoT would be out around november)).. Which would mean as much developement time went into it as any other MMO expansion.

Its about time for the next WvW Tournament…
SAB should return finally
Fixing the Personal Story like announced
Reimplementing Season 1 under the Format of Season 2
When Season 1 is reimplemented, remove the Season 1 based Fractals and replace them with completely new Fractals, like that Abaddon Fractal that was planned
Add finally missing content like Bar Brawls, Polymok ect.
Fix the WvW Achievements
Improve existing Achievementsand add more tiers to way too easily maxable ones, like the slayers (1000 kills) to make them better long term achievements (while adding also in the future finally more giants to the game! – everythign that is massively bigger, than us should count also as giant)

That would be already 4 great options that Anet could do to keep us busy, until HoT comes

My suggestion for pre-HoT is the addition of the new event reward system. Rewarding players with a similar system to SW only instead of Bandit Crests you get materials based on zone is an excellent way to make the entire map worth visiting again without creating anything new.

Giving a daily incentive (rewards changing daily) to visit maps that never had enough “traffic” is a very good way to stop boredom, when was the last time you visited zone X and more specifically, when was the time you visited zone X for reasons other than 100% exploration?

Making the entire map our “playground” again should be top priority.
Doesn’t need much development time either.

While the idea of new contents is interesting, I don’t think they have the manpower to do anything big before HoT. For example, the HoM bug fix is taking months because they said they are really busy.

source
“Unfortunately, this came at a time where our resources are tapped to the max, so it’s taking longer than we would like to fix this.”

However, if we are wishing, I would wish for the weekly Nicholas quests to be brought back.

I personally am not a fan of them just showing us all of the professions and the elite specializations in the livestreams and weekly posts, and I am 100% against them bread crumb feeding us little bits of HoT via patches, like specialization traits, imo this will make HoT feel less new.

Riku.4821:

I personally am not a fan of them just showing us all of the professions and the elite specializations in the livestreams and weekly posts, and I am 100% against them bread crumb feeding us little bits of HoT via patches, like specialization traits, imo this will make HoT feel less new.

Well you don’t have to read it. Some people like it and some people don’t. There would be more complaining if there was nothing. And you can’t choose to read something that doesn’t exsist, though you can choose not to read something that does exsist. Personally I’ve glanced over most of it but haven’t chosen a new build or really looked at how the traits synergize yet because I want to do that when it comes out in game.

Andraus.3874:

Well you don’t have to read it. Some people like it and some people don’t. There would be more complaining if there was nothing. And you can’t choose to read something that doesn’t exist, though you can choose not to read something that does exsist. Personally I’ve glanced over most of it but haven’t chosen a new build or really looked at how the traits synergize yet because I want to do that when it comes out in game.

Yes this is true, don’t want it, don’t read it. But this is why I said personally/in my opinion.
I don’t watch the live streams, and I briefly skin the blog posts to see what its talking about, the name of elite spec, and what the main thing is. Like Reaper slow dps.
I feel it takes away from the “expansion pack” feel and makes it more of a “patch” feel.

Side note, I wouldn’t say this is a impatient post, but rather
Ideas to think of while we wait that maybe they can include before, or after HoT; preferably before.

Riku.4821:

Let us brainstorm some ideas real factual ideas

add more dungeon paths

add another set of armor and weapons

No offense, but that is one of the least realistic things you could have come up with. ArenaNet has shown no interest in creating new dungeon content at all for a very long time. And creating quality, engaging dungeon scenarios takes a lot of time, creativity, and resources. It’s not something they can whip up in an afternoon, especially while they’re dedicated to getting HoT ready and overhauling the specialization system, traits, how conditions work, etc.

I would love to see some new dungeon content as much as anyone, but we don’t need rushed, cookie-cutter, throw-away content just for the sake of it. Maybe after HoT comes out, but not before.

Riku.4821:

Please no SAB comments.

?_?

In my opinion, SAB is actually the #1 most feasible thing they could put back in the game — both in terms of making players happy and giving us something to do while waiting for HoT, and also in terms of not totally derailing ANet staff from working on their current projects.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Lord Kuru.3685:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Living World teams could generate content, perhaps on a monthly rather than bi-weekly basis.

Content was never generated on a bi-weekly basis. It’s unbelievable people fell for the “bi-weekly” hype: It was maybe four bi-weekly LS releases every six months. That was how much content Anet was capable of putting out which means they simply can’t put out expansions and LS at the same time.

It’s unbelievable that people have such short memories. It seems you’ve forgotten LS S1, which did bi-weekly updates for over half of 2013. It wasn’t until after Wintersday, 2013 that ANet slowed down, which coincided with the push to the China release.

Flame and frost:

Prelude: 1/28/13
Gathering storm: 2/26/13
The Razing 3/26/13
Retribution 4/30/13

That’s once a month for four months.

Secret of Southsun 5/14/13
Last Stand at Southsun 5/28/13
Dragon Bash 6/11/13
Sky Pirates 6/25/13
Cutthroat Politics 7/23/13
Queen’s Jubliee 8/6/13
Clockwork Chaos 8/20/13
Twilight Assault 10/1/13
Tower of Nightmares 10/29/13
Nightmares within 11/12/13
Fractured 11/26/13

May to December (the next one after Fractured came end of January 2014): 11 releases in 8 months

A total of 15 releases in 2013. And they never had bi-weekly releases for more than 5 fortnights in a row, taking multiple one-month breaks.

Bi-weekly would have meant 26 releases in 2013: not even close. And I won’t even say anything about how small some of these releases were.

About the SAB comments. I said not to include them because its fully aware ita #1 most wanted.

@Fyrebrand as pointed dungeons weren’t the best idea possible, but an example nevertheless. And again as pointed out, was not meant to be taken as all three paths foe all dungeons, or a brand new dungeon either.