Guild Wars 2

Let me just say I like this game. ArenaNet did a great job with this, thank you.
However, how can we truly, meaningfully improve this game? To make it grow?

The living story was an attempt to give us a new experience but it fell short. This game needs something new for pve & living story is not it.

Permanent content. That should do the trick. Successful other MMOs added it, and people liked it.

Have you ever seen someone complain about more (good) permanent content?

Compare it to the amount of complaining about the temporary content. There you got your answer.

JTGuevara.9018:

Let me just say I like this game. ArenaNet did a great job with this, thank you.
However, how can we truly, meaningfully improve this game? To make it grow?

The living story was an attempt to give us a new experience but it fell short. This game needs something new for pve & living story is not it.

No, this instance of Living Story didn’t work as well as was hoped. It can work, with some reworking and refocus on actually expanding on the game and/or altering things so it actually has impact.

Which, notably, the last third of this ‘season’ did.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

It can work, with some reworking and refocus on actually expanding on the game and/or altering things so it actually has impact.

Which, notably, the last third of this ‘season’ did.

This is a really good point in my opinion. LS has a lot of potential. It is something new. Learning how to use any tool (and LS is a storytelling tool) well takes some practice. Some trial and error. This is an area where I think Anet gets too much flack. They should be allowed the time to either make it work, or to decide that they cannot make it work and to switch gears to something else.

Maybe a LS that doesn’t occur in existing areas but in new ones. Adding a new zone every couple of LS issues.

Ashen.2907:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

It can work, with some reworking and refocus on actually expanding on the game and/or altering things so it actually has impact.

Which, notably, the last third of this ‘season’ did.

This is a really good point in my opinion. LS has a lot of potential. It is something new. Learning how to use any tool (and LS is a storytelling tool) well takes some practice. Some trial and error. This is an area where I think Anet gets too much flack. They should be allowed the time to either make it work, or to decide that they cannot make it work and to switch gears to something else.

That’s not how the industry works. Players are not willing to see crappy content as active beta testers for something that maybe won’t work.

They should have had a bloody business plan before they released an long running MMO. The LS was an afterthought, badly executed and rushed.

Look at our current incarnation of the LS, the great final. There are more bugs than the story has lines to tell. A bulletproof way to get rid of some customers.

I would say, add in swappable weapon skill slots (so more weapon skills), more weapon types, air combat (have steampunk wings, asura hoverboards, whatever), swap gear stats, and have a environment weapon skill.

For the environment weapon skill, imagine this, I find a branch, and decided to put it in my inventory. I can use a button (let’s us alt) and I immediately equip it. So I can just buy a bunch of gears from Skirtt and start throwing them giving them a bunch of conditions. I can also use this for tonics and stuff if I ever want to use them instead of pressing I and finding them, which is quite inconvenient.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

That’s not how the industry works. Players are not willing to see crappy content as active beta testers for something that maybe won’t work.

And yet that is how it works in every other game (that I’ve encountered). Players actively play through content that maybe won’t work. Most of those games, or at least the ones released recently, have ended up failing with their original presentation and ended up having to revise in order to survive.

There are players out there right now that have enjoyed the LS since its inception.

Other games have a PTS and get some feedback early on.

On the other hand, in GW2 you get a new bug fest every two weeks, that gets deleted from the game as soon as they get their stuff sort of fixed.

So everyone rushes to see the content, everyone get’s the bugs smashed in their faces, and get annoyed. This LS is pressuring players to play the content that is not polished at all.

That will just cause burn out and people flocking to other games.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Other games have a PTS and get some feedback early on.

On the other hand, in GW2 you get a new bug fest every two weeks, that get’s deleted from the game as soon as they get their stuff sort of fixed.

So everyone rushes to see the content, everyone get’s the bugs smashed in their faces, and get annoyed. This LS is pressuring players to play the content that is not polished at all.

That will just cause burn out and people flocking to other games.

I see you have some issues with GW2 and bugginess. It’s understandable, but I’m no stranger to it. Early days Everquest was buggier than a honey farm, and a lot of those were denied to exist for long periods until they were “fixed” (read, they were said to be fixed but really were just mitigated). Earlier games would often have emergency maintenance, UO was buggy in a lot of ways never handled and I only hear about recently . . . and notably, both of these had test servers. Though the UO one became less about testing and more about faction combat when I stopped. Good idea and it was fun, but . . .

Other games have that same issue so saying you want to quit GW2 because it’s too buggy and you want a better game? Good luck with that.

Leaving GW2 because it’s just not what you are looking for? I can respect that.

The LS needs to be polished and if they do lengthen the release schedule then it should get better. In theory. In practice, it just means we’ll still get bugs but less. Nothing’s bug-free.

Look, GW2 is one and a half years old.

Returning players, that have stopped playing the game see the following:

Not much new content.
The new content is buggy as hell.
Tons of new grinds that will take them monthes to get back to BiS.
A story they have missed and no idea what’s going on.

Sounds inviting to me.

Now, if people play some other games, only for a month or two, they will already feel like this when they return.

Where will this end?

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Permanent content. That should do the trick. Successful other MMOs added it, and people liked it.

Have you ever seen someone complain about more (good) permanent content?

Compare it to the amount of complaining about the temporary content. There you got your answer.

lol I actually did mean permanent content, I should’ve said it up top in the beginning of the thread. Of course there should be permanent content, always.

However, I DO NOT mean perm content like new zones, dungeons or loot. Believe me when I say this will NOT solve the problem. People will just bust through these in a week after it comes out. I think people really want is a new experience more than anything else.

Let’s start with zones: Oh great! Except that there are plenty of empty zones right now! That brings me to the GW2 event system. Add more events! More NPCs, more stories, more perspectives! Make it interesting. Make the Seraph & Centaur war more bloody like it should be. I believe GW2 will benefit with a huge ever-changing rotations of events & stories in a given area.

Next dungeons: Forget it. Fix the ones we already have. At least make Arah story just for a single-player. Make the dungeons for 1-2-3-4 and 5 people

Next loot: Make better rewards for events. (Ex: World Bosses should give at least 15 silver)

Ashen.2907:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

It can work, with some reworking and refocus on actually expanding on the game and/or altering things so it actually has impact.

Which, notably, the last third of this ‘season’ did.

This is a really good point in my opinion. LS has a lot of potential. It is something new. Learning how to use any tool (and LS is a storytelling tool) well takes some practice. Some trial and error. This is an area where I think Anet gets too much flack. They should be allowed the time to either make it work, or to decide that they cannot make it work and to switch gears to something else.

And here’s where I turn a bit, so forgive me – Living Story isn’t a new concept. It’s been tried again and again in various forms as “GM Events”. Meridian 59 had its Bards supposedly to run minor missions or things to liven up the lore. EverQuest had Bloody Kithicor and other major events happening randomly unannounced. Ultima Online had various events from time to time.

The thing which is new is the whole announcing it ahead of time and letting it run without active guidance by GMs. Which, mind you, is where the bugs start coming in. See, a GM Event had the beautiful thing of having a GM who could unstick scripts on the fly or it was done solely through volunteers playing around. So it couldn’t bug up too much since it was actors in an NPC suit.

What really needs to happen for the LS is they need to sit down a few groups before hand, on this lull, and go “okay, sketch us out season two”. Start work on the outline now. Plan for more permanent additions to keep people interested. Plan for some impacts to the known world to keep it relevant. Plan for some hard elite content, plan for some simple “downtime fun” content. Give us a villain we want to strangle for the right reasons.

Now that’s about the LS. For the game itself? Hopefully the balance/feature patches coming will help and more X months from now (carefully worked on and tweaked) will be good for it.

Cantha would improve this game. It would also increase NCSoft’s revenue stream, as I would throw endless money at them for this content.

Permanent content.

They’ve had plenty of good and bad stuff, but the good stuff is all for naught if it’s only in the game for a fortnight.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Other games have a PTS and get some feedback early on.

On the other hand, in GW2 you get a new bug fest every two weeks, that gets deleted from the game as soon as they get their stuff sort of fixed.

So everyone rushes to see the content, everyone get’s the bugs smashed in their faces, and get annoyed. This LS is pressuring players to play the content that is not polished at all.

That will just cause burn out and people flocking to other games.

Unfortunately I have to agree. The living story was badly handled in the beginning, the story itself picked up but every event up to this day still has bugs in it.

I don’t think ArenaNet should do the living story again, unless it’s a side story. Then it won’t hurt the game.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Look, GW2 is one and a half years old.

Returning players, that have stopped playing the game see the following:

Not much new content.
The new content is buggy as hell.
Tons of new grinds that will take them monthes to get back to BiS.
A story they have missed and no idea what’s going on.

Sounds inviting to me.

Now, if people play some other games, only for a month or two, they will already feel like this when they return.

Where will this end?

When they leave.

Look, they’re not going to magically hit a toggle going “bugs == 0” and make it magically work properly. A PTR isn’t going to fix the issues of bugs existing, it will just shift them to something else. What’s going to happen is there are going to be a select few players who see bug posts and go “see, they can’t even do it right with a PTR!” and start this all over again.

And you want to complain about BiS taking months as though another MMO is going to be any easier on that front. Sure, there will be, but how much do you want to cash in your credit cards to get there? And which gold seller do you trust enough to get it to you? Though I hear Blizzard has a new scheme to try yanking money out of you to -pop- you to maximum level, so hey, maybe it won’t take months. If you pay.

Know what the worst part is? You actually have some valid points. It’s just you want to foster your problem with the current and fresh bugginess without remembering other games have the same issue, and will have different ones besides.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Cantha would improve this game. It would also increase NCSoft’s revenue stream, as I would throw endless money at them for this content.

Cantha can go to the Underworld and take those seven-times-kitten ed ritualists with it.

Other games have buggy content, you skip it, you come back when it is fixed, whenever you want.

This game has buggy content, but if you skip it, it will be gone and you have missed it.

There is the difference. If you want to see what the game has to offer, you have to play buggy content. You are forced to go through all the mess, just to see what the DEV’s are creating, just to see the story, before it is gone again.

That is why bug fixing for temporary content has to be number one priority before releasing the content, that is why the LS does not work, that is why I always come back to this point – first things first.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Cantha would improve this game. It would also increase NCSoft’s revenue stream, as I would throw endless money at them for this content.

Cantha can go to the Underworld and take those seven-times-kitten ed ritualists with it.

lol Like I said above, new zones won’t solve the problem! After Cantha is treaded in a week, we’ll STILL be back at square one discussing this stuff.

JTGuevara.9018:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Cantha would improve this game. It would also increase NCSoft’s revenue stream, as I would throw endless money at them for this content.

Cantha can go to the Underworld and take those seven-times-kitten ed ritualists with it.

lol Like I said above, new zones won’t solve the problem! After Cantha is treaded in a week, we’ll STILL be back at square one discussing this stuff.

Actually I just have . . . flashbacks . . . to those goshdarned jellyfish in the Jade Sea. Especially the one skill which makes you a useless target for 10 seconds?

Never. Again.

Also, I want to burn all of Kaineng City down. Mapping that was the second worst part of my Cartography work.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Ashen.2907:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

It can work, with some reworking and refocus on actually expanding on the game and/or altering things so it actually has impact.

Which, notably, the last third of this ‘season’ did.

This is a really good point in my opinion. LS has a lot of potential. It is something new. Learning how to use any tool (and LS is a storytelling tool) well takes some practice. Some trial and error. This is an area where I think Anet gets too much flack. They should be allowed the time to either make it work, or to decide that they cannot make it work and to switch gears to something else.

That’s not how the industry works. Players are not willing to see crappy content as active beta testers for something that maybe won’t work.

They should have had a bloody business plan before they released an long running MMO. The LS was an afterthought, badly executed and rushed.

Look at our current incarnation of the LS, the great final. There are more bugs than the story has lines to tell. A bulletproof way to get rid of some customers.

Yeah, this is all a consequence of the two-week cycle. These guys are overworked, man.
You can’t keep up with this stuff in two weeks. However, I like this game. You’re going to have to shut down pvp and wvw to pry me away!

Back to LS, to be fair, the final battle against Scarlet & holograms was insanely good! The battle music was even more epic! The final instance was sweet, I won’t spoil it.

All in all, the living story shouldn’t be the main thing. I think it will be a stepping stone to better things. Let’s see if the event system gets better, more instances are added & most important of all, we get more stories & better gameplay. In the end stories & gameplay are valuable to a video game more than anything else, more so than bytes of character stats & loot.

One thing I would like to see improved upon is the progression of your character from rare < exotic < ascended < legendary gear.

The visual effects are another issue I have and not being able to see the boss, champ, elite or whomever from a blob of light in large groups.

Adding a new class/race is a win/win.

Final blow (finishers) which I’m not a fan of. Wish it was an additional ability we could activate when the npc’s health falls below a certain percent. Unlocked at x level.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Ashen.2907:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

It can work, with some reworking and refocus on actually expanding on the game and/or altering things so it actually has impact.

Which, notably, the last third of this ‘season’ did.

This is a really good point in my opinion. LS has a lot of potential. It is something new. Learning how to use any tool (and LS is a storytelling tool) well takes some practice. Some trial and error. This is an area where I think Anet gets too much flack. They should be allowed the time to either make it work, or to decide that they cannot make it work and to switch gears to something else.

That’s not how the industry works. Players are not willing to see crappy content as active beta testers for something that maybe won’t work.

They should have had a bloody business plan before they released an long running MMO. The LS was an afterthought, badly executed and rushed.

Look at our current incarnation of the LS, the great final. There are more bugs than the story has lines to tell. A bulletproof way to get rid of some customers.

The LS was adaptation. Something was missing or wrong with PvE in the first place, Anet responded by trying something different. Some would call that thinking on your feet.

Of course it will take time to get it right. That’s like anything. If you think any MMO is any different, I’d have to disagree. Most MMOs take a couple of years before they find themselves. Most all but fail before that happens. So far that hasn’t happened to Guild Wars 2.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

No, this instance of Living Story didn’t work as well as was hoped. It can work, with some reworking and refocus on actually expanding on the game and/or altering things so it actually has impact.

- The biggest problem with living story is that it’s not living or organic. It’s created and released every two weeks. They did make permanent change related to living story in Lion’s Arch with that lighthouse. Nobody cares about it because it’s just a prop with no interactivity.

What makes games worth playing is gameplay – number of decisions player can make that are not mutually exclusive. If there was no jumping ability in this game it would be duller, because jumping is one thing that gives player decision. On the other hand if 3 explorable zones suddenly went missing it wouldn’t necessarily make the game any worse, because choosing which zone to explore is mutually exclusive decision. Same with race-specific personal storylines which is biggest waste of development resources imaginable.

Once you’ve burned through the unique content you’re left with the core system of few player decisions, which causes the boredom players experience.

Zenith.6403:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

No, this instance of Living Story didn’t work as well as was hoped. It can work, with some reworking and refocus on actually expanding on the game and/or altering things so it actually has impact.

- The biggest problem with living story is that it’s not living or organic. It’s created and released every two weeks. They did make permanent change related to living story in Lion’s Arch with that lighthouse. Nobody cares about it because it’s just a prop with no interactivity.

What makes games worth playing is gameplay – number of decisions player can make that are not mutually exclusive. If there was no jumping ability in this game it would be duller, because jumping is one thing that gives player decision. On the other hand if 3 explorable zones suddenly went missing it wouldn’t necessarily make the game any worse, because choosing which zone to explore is mutually exclusive decision. Same with race-specific personal storylines which is biggest waste of development resources imaginable.

Once you’ve burned through the unique content you’re left with the core system of few player decisions, which causes the boredom players experience.

YES, someone gets it.

Zenith.6403:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

No, this instance of Living Story didn’t work as well as was hoped. It can work, with some reworking and refocus on actually expanding on the game and/or altering things so it actually has impact.

- The biggest problem with living story is that it’s not living or organic. It’s created and released every two weeks. They did make permanent change related to living story in Lion’s Arch with that lighthouse. Nobody cares about it because it’s just a prop with no interactivity.

What makes games worth playing is gameplay – number of decisions player can make that are not mutually exclusive. If there was no jumping ability in this game it would be duller, because jumping is one thing that gives player decision. On the other hand if 3 explorable zones suddenly went missing it wouldn’t necessarily make the game any worse, because choosing which zone to explore is mutually exclusive decision. Same with race-specific personal storylines which is biggest waste of development resources imaginable.

Once you’ve burned through the unique content you’re left with the core system of few player decisions, which causes the boredom players experience.

So very true. You get past these updates that are only 2 weeks long and you’re left with the same content you had a month ago. The biggest updates that seemed the most well received were Dragon Bash, Wintersday (first time), Halloween (first time), and Bazaar Four Winds. There were plenty of events to do and the game felt different. Most people got to enjoy the updates and it didn’t matter what aspect of the game they played (pvp/wvw/pve) because they got to experience it in some way without having to really grind out any items and miss out on what they love doing the most.

How to improve this game?

More quality control! More bug testing!

A dev should after complete all the latest achievements on a random server (not Blackgate) with pugs and he has to do it incognito…he/she should also after do everything it takes (no cheating allowed) to get full ascended gear, including timegating/earning the gold.

Then they will have more of a understanding how GW2 really plays out.

JTGuevara.9018:

Let me just say I like this game. ArenaNet did a great job with this, thank you.
However, how can we truly, meaningfully improve this game? To make it grow?

The living story was an attempt to give us a new experience but it fell short. This game needs something new for pve & living story is not it.

I agree. I’m waiting on a CDI about content. They did one on personal progression, the one they are doing now in the forums is on fractals of which I don’t like and won’t participate in since it wasn’t the reason I bought the game (quite the opposite) so I’m waiting on the CDI about content in the open world PVE hopefully that one is next because I have alot to say about it.

Blackarps.1974:

Zenith.6403:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

No, this instance of Living Story didn’t work as well as was hoped. It can work, with some reworking and refocus on actually expanding on the game and/or altering things so it actually has impact.

- The biggest problem with living story is that it’s not living or organic. It’s created and released every two weeks. They did make permanent change related to living story in Lion’s Arch with that lighthouse. Nobody cares about it because it’s just a prop with no interactivity.

What makes games worth playing is gameplay – number of decisions player can make that are not mutually exclusive. If there was no jumping ability in this game it would be duller, because jumping is one thing that gives player decision. On the other hand if 3 explorable zones suddenly went missing it wouldn’t necessarily make the game any worse, because choosing which zone to explore is mutually exclusive decision. Same with race-specific personal storylines which is biggest waste of development resources imaginable.

Once you’ve burned through the unique content you’re left with the core system of few player decisions, which causes the boredom players experience.

So very true. You get past these updates that are only 2 weeks long and you’re left with the same content you had a month ago. The biggest updates that seemed the most well received were Dragon Bash, Wintersday (first time), Halloween (first time), and Bazaar Four Winds. There were plenty of events to do and the game felt different. Most people got to enjoy the updates and it didn’t matter what aspect of the game they played (pvp/wvw/pve) because they got to experience it in some way without having to really grind out any items and miss out on what they love doing the most.

Those 4 updates just happened to be party themes, or special events. This goes beyond the typical new dungeon raid, open-world or reward content, these events are something everyone can have fun and take part in. I mean, everyone likes the holidays.