Guild Wars 2

I’m kinda new to playing GW2 but I’ve noticed there is a lot of ‘temporary’ content that comes in every couple of weeks. While I really love how there is really active development scene, it’s kind of really sad to see so much of it go to waste and get removed. Never to be seen again.

Does anyone like this temporary content? What’s the reasoning behind it?

Do you think maybe they could add like a ‘time portal’. Which would let you select from a list the past content and experience some of the stuff that was removed.

It just feels like with such an active development cycle, they could be building onto the game and giving more and more things for people to do, for years to come, once the money or development dries up.

What’s your thoughts?

I can understand certain ones being temporary, but I’m going to agree that the new Crown Pavilion coming in the patch tomorrow should have been permanent.

Anet had been talking about making more content permanent, but so far they haven’t seemed to deliver on much on that topic, spare small things like new crafting materials and such.

Hopefully they’ll start adding some real permanent content soon.

i agree with you, i kinda like the living world story as a side story that happens in the world that make it change for good, but there are things that should stay in my opinion (and i’m not talking about stupid minigames). otherwise the story evolves with no repercussions…
so far i’m really disappointed, also this temporary content as it is now don’t keep anyone busy for long time, is not even near to the implementation of fractals. i get the people in the beginning hated it because of ascended gear, but at least it was a shiny new dungeon with multiple levels and a lot to do in it (was because now it became very old and there is nothing to discover in it).

example: we raided the aetherblade retreat dungeons so we could get rid of their base… why that place is not there anymore? even empty, it should be there no evil faction in this world interested in their technology?

the molten facility had the excuse we wiped it out with explosives, what about all the things we didn’t wipe out so far?

Well, I’m dissapointed it’ll be temporary because some bits of it look very fun, but I’ll take a wait and see attitude.

For example, I’d love if suddenly something showed up (mursaat, dragons, destroyers, whatever) destroying the pavillion destroying the area, maybe changing divinity’s reach forever and starting an epic chain of living story events… however if the next patch came up and the place suddenly dissapeared (or was chanced back to a tarp with nothing to do on it), I’d be rather dissapointed.

i don’t think it will happen, in october when the lion’s arch fountain in the mystic plaza was destroyed by the mad king it took months to be rebuild, and everytime they change it it stay changed for a while. only zommoros mystic forge change fast

Jatacid.3725:

I’m kinda new to playing GW2 but I’ve noticed there is a lot of ‘temporary’ content that comes in every couple of weeks. While I really love how there is really active development scene, it’s kind of really sad to see so much of it go to waste and get removed. Never to be seen again.

Does anyone like this temporary content? What’s the reasoning behind it?

Do you think maybe they could add like a ‘time portal’. Which would let you select from a list the past content and experience some of the stuff that was removed.

It just feels like with such an active development cycle, they could be building onto the game and giving more and more things for people to do, for years to come, once the money or development dries up.

What’s your thoughts?

nobody likes the temporary content, and who ever is in charge of living story is too ignorant to listen to the community

Yes it is. End of discussion.

The Living Story Idea sounds better on paper than it ever had any chance of being in practice. Lots of development work that goes into all kinds of stuff for a full year and at the end of that year what’s left in-game to show for it all? A couple of skins or minigames, or small areas in certain zones that were slightly revamped? What’s worse is that it’s internally inconsistent and creates weird flow within the game world. Why are the Zhaitan story and launch dungeons ‘permanent’ while everything else is temporary?

The more I’ve thought it about it over the last few months, the more I’ve realized it was conceptually terrible from the get-go. It’s much, much better to use development resources to expand on the story and world that’s there now and isn’t going anywhere. Then, at the end of the year the game will have seen major additions that will entice new, returning, and veteran players alike. The Molten Weapons and Aetherblade stories could have been added permanently as parallels to the main Zhaitan arc that serve as expansions to the game world and character-driven narrative. Even adding them back in as Fractals is pretty hollow and pointless. They should have just left the full stories there to play through as if they were branching parts of the Personal Story (they even could have made them replayable story dungeons).

IMO, if they were smart they’d do exactly that- reintroduce much of the living story content as permanent new pieces of the Personal Story, creating chains of replayable instances to lay out the narrative.

Seems it’s temporary content but set to return from time to time. Colin’s post on another thread:

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey folks,

I wanted to take a moment and address this, it’s a totally fair question and something as a player (removing my GD hat) I’d wonder the same thing as well. As I covered in my blog post last month, a major focus of our living world releases in the second half of the year will be on focusing our living world releases on content that has a larger sense of persistence, and more permanent effect on the world.

You’ll start seeing this strategy come into effect with the release 2 weeks from now, and grow as the year continues. The story of these living releases will occur long enough for it to play out reasonably and then update as the story moves forward, while the content and playable experiences (except specific story beats) will persist forever as a result of that story occurring.

We still want to have some content that can happen each year, our holiday festivals, Super Adventure Box, Zephyr Sanctum, and the new Queens Gauntlet are all intended to be content that will regularly return. The goal of having these in our portfolio of event content that can occur again each year is they allow us the opportunity to easily build on something we’ve already completed as themes for some of our releases for year 2.

We wanted to get to the end of the first year of Gw2 with a decent amount of these events that can happen each year in our pocket, to allow our second year a lot more opportunities to lean on these while we focus on much larger projects we’ve been working on in the background. You will not see another new recurring style event in 2014 once our core portfolio of returning events have been completed with the Queens Gauntlet. You’ll already see the benefits of this as the return of Halloween, SAB, and Wintersday has given some of our teams time to focus on other bigger projects during that time.

As to the point of this specific release, there are a ton of permanent features and content. From the update of mini-games becoming permanent on a rotation, champion loot, solo queue PvP and leaderboards, dungeon reward changes, currency wallet, PvP leaver penalties (dishonorable), the FX culling system and more! However, we do recognize one of the components is returning content rather than constant, we need one more core event in our portfolio to fill out our ability to pull off the ambitious plans we have for next year. We too want to have an even larger playable content impact as stated in our goals for the second half of 2014, you’ll be see seeing that play out shortly.

Soon, you won’t need to ask “is this permanent or temporary?”, you’ll simply be able to look at story specific parts and know the story goes away when it’s done, and the playable core content remains and changes based on the outcomes of the story. As a player, I’d rather login and experience an event knowing the outcome and the results of the story will create content I can see and experience for years, than have it all go away 2 weeks later, and have no impact.

We’re also looking into options that would allow players to experience the story sequences that will go away as the story moves forward for those who missed them, but this is still a ways off as we look at various options.

As a reminder, this is where we’re headed and the goals we’ve given to our teams to accomplish, it just takes a few months until we fully get our projects on this track: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

So I guess we’ll wait and see what happens in 2 weeks now.

There are two types of temporary content: content that only happens once and will never happen again and content that will be recurring. We’ve yet to see any recurring content because the game is less than a year old but we’re coming up on October so we’ll likely see the return of all the Halloween festivities.

When you ask if all of this temporary content is a waste you have to look at ANet’s perspective. They would know better than anyone how many people are actually logging in to experience this content. They would know better than anyone how much money they’re making off the gem store because of this content. Looking at this purely from a profitability standpoint, ANet probably doesn’t think it’s a waste. Making the content temporary creates a sense of immediacy and encourages players to log in on a regular basis. If it was always around then people would not have much incentive to log in because they know it would always be there waiting for them.

I don’t actually agree with how they’re doing things because it just seems like they’re slowly creeping into the free-to-play model. ANet was supposed to be the champion of the buy to play model for MMORPGs but I think they are starting to think it’s not as viable anymore. If you look at some of the free to play MMORPGs that were originally subscription based you’ll often find that their revenue actually increased after jumping on the free to play bandwagon. It sucks for the players because they end up spending more money than if they simply bought the game outright and/or had to pay a subscription.

Dr Ritter.1327:

Jatacid.3725:

I’m kinda new to playing GW2 but I’ve noticed there is a lot of ‘temporary’ content that comes in every couple of weeks. While I really love how there is really active development scene, it’s kind of really sad to see so much of it go to waste and get removed. Never to be seen again.

Does anyone like this temporary content? What’s the reasoning behind it?

Do you think maybe they could add like a ‘time portal’. Which would let you select from a list the past content and experience some of the stuff that was removed.

It just feels like with such an active development cycle, they could be building onto the game and giving more and more things for people to do, for years to come, once the money or development dries up.

What’s your thoughts?

nobody likes the temporary content, and who ever is in charge of living story is too ignorant to listen to the community

its ok just let them make more temporary content. everyone knows it will destroy the game in the long run.

Well, a lot of people complain what you do in this game doesn’t matter, say you vanquish a dungeon of evil demons and 2 days later they’re all back in there and it breaks the immersion.

Though of course the interesting ones can be preserved for challenging gameplay though in fractals somewhere possibly.

Well according to the devs this temp content is part of a portfolio that will return every year. Apparently after this event all future events will leave permanent things in the game world.

Yes and no.

Yes if it was good, well crafted content that never returns (although it isn’t a total waste if the devs learn from it to produce even higher quality permanent content in the future).

No if a) it was a total disaster that no-one would play again and they learn something from it or b) it makes a return every now and then.

This month’s content is something that I was hoping to be permanent—and I don’t mean just specific parts, but the a majority of it, such as the pavilion. All that work by the dev team just to see something get pushed to be a monthly release instead of a permanent addition makes me sad.

DanteZero.9736:

This month’s content is something that I was hoping to be permanent—and I don’t mean just specific parts, but the a majority of it, such as the pavilion. All that work by the dev team just to see something get pushed to be a monthly release instead of a permanent addition makes me sad.

It’s a monthly release but also a recurring one, so chances are it’ll come back again sometime next year, according to Colin’s post.

Lani.1429:

Dr Ritter.1327:

Jatacid.3725:

I’m kinda new to playing GW2 but I’ve noticed there is a lot of ‘temporary’ content that comes in every couple of weeks. While I really love how there is really active development scene, it’s kind of really sad to see so much of it go to waste and get removed. Never to be seen again.

Does anyone like this temporary content? What’s the reasoning behind it?

Do you think maybe they could add like a ‘time portal’. Which would let you select from a list the past content and experience some of the stuff that was removed.

It just feels like with such an active development cycle, they could be building onto the game and giving more and more things for people to do, for years to come, once the money or development dries up.

What’s your thoughts?

nobody likes the temporary content, and who ever is in charge of living story is too ignorant to listen to the community

its ok just let them make more temporary content. everyone knows it will destroy the game in the long run.

haha yeah, dont worry though theres a new festival every month!

sad because this game has so much potential but instead they just make 5 achievements forcing you to run around the map pressing f on objects

It’s not just that they should leave permanent effects, it’s that the stories themselves should be permanent fixtures to the game. If they’re going to make story content temporary, why have a PS at all and why are Zhaitan and the dragons still in the game?

The Living Story is just not a good concept at this point.

Its not a waste at all. They know no one will be doing their generic mini content in one to three days so why even keeping them in game? They delete them so people put all their attention to the deletion aspect instead of “why is your content so shallow and with absolutely zero reasons to be replayed 1 month down the road”.

If you look at MOBAs for a second. Everyone is essentially ‘maxed out’ in progression. They’ve all reached end game. Majority don’t even play on ladder so that form of progression isn’t there either. Yet, it remains so popular. I think the reason why, is because at the end of the day it comes down to skill of gameplay. And how your skill makes you win. It’s not about the rewards, or the achievements, or the progression. It’s about playing well, and winning because of it.

Long standing MMO content doesn’t need progression, or realistic story. It needs gameplay options that are fun, and challenging in and of themselves.

GW2 is in a fantastic position with very comprehensive gameplay mechanics and a game world with many directions to be taken. All they need to do is introduce content now that is unique and interesting regardless of the rewards.

Why would you run a dungeon over and over with no rewards, unless it was fun?

Combine all the things that make gw2 great into repeatable content that remains fun long after the rewards have dried up.
Combine moving jumping puzzles within dungeons and introduce pvp elements within dungeons. Create challenging and powerful bosses with mechanics that keep you on your toes.

Then, once all your characters have 80’d, you’ve got a full achievement’s book, you’re still playing because it’s fun and there are so many things to do that are fun.