Guild Wars 2

“Please note that the core gameplay and structure of this story instance has not been changed—the difficulty has been adjusted to allow for solo play and will therefore be more accessible for players.”

^ Does that mean I can solo the dungeon now but I cannot open that first gate alone? Or did they change the gate? (Right now it needs 2 people to step on the plates to open it).

Many thanks to the story line repair!

I still have a question, it has to do with the “why” you mentioned in your introduction: Why did you do the changes last year in the first place? This is something you never explained. I’m just curious, not trolling.

I never understood why you removed content and left the game in a state worse than it was before. Instead of putting the work into enhancing it. And keep it like this for more than half a year. For me, it appeared as a burning and bleeding open wound in the story line. Yes, the Apatia part of the story never was the best content, but it was not so bad that it was worth removing – in my opinion.

Sweet legion yes! Its finally going to happen!

Thanks! Good to see Personal Story has been restored

Many thanks for the info and the upcoming changes. The opportunity to solo the final piece really has me excited. I have done it a bunch of times in groups…so the chance to go it alone is exciting to me. Fortunately, I have a bunch of alts at various stages of the story so I am good to go.

I would really love to see what is happening to Arah happen to all the other dungeon story modes. Just allowing for difficulty scaling based on number in the group would be a wonderful thing.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Thanks! Good to see Personal Story has been restored

You mean “being restored”

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Less teamwork required =/= good.

I think unfortunately it’s fall back because dungeons never got fully revitalized after what happened with the Aether Path. So group effort for something like this is meaningless in their eyes. Also I have a feeling that HoT will be like the Factions campaign, where they focused on merging one aspect of the game instead of making it fully rounded. With Factions they tried to blend in their well received PvP system with their flawed PvE system.

HoT will instead have their efforts in trying to force the group mentality throughout the entire thing. Which could turn out to be a really bad thing, if there are certain mistakes that are made. Just like how Factions was not well received when it first came out. I suspect history might repeat itself with HoT. Only if HoT focuses it’s efforts on certain aspects, and throws out other convention completely out the window.

Orpheal.8263:

A question that jumps my mind also first:

Has the Zhaitan Battle anyhow been improved within these works?

According to WP there was a video interview where Colin Johnson said there would be no update to the Zhaitan fight. Simply because of flawed developer logic of: “people want new things more then they want things to be fixed that were broken and rushed during launch of the game.” I never found this interview. However Angry Joe’s interview was kind of exactly what I expected out of CJ. As in there was a PR person always pulling his strings.

Joe: Is there going to be a better end fight for the game beyond the one button mashing we did to bring down Zhaitan.

CJ: Oh, but it looked coooooooooooool though.

Joe: Sure.

CJ: Well gosh; you know we have learned from our mistakes by the content we did for season 1 and 2. Which you can’t criticize Joe, because it was so mildly entertaining you did not even participate in any of it. However thanks for the positive review on the original game, only now to learn how that fight really ended. We got great sales bonus because of that Joe. Cha-Ching.

Jesse Cox: Yeah…… this is why I thought this whole trip was pointless. Good thing I am not going to a video on it at all, because this is pointless market pandering.

Some of that was a changed a bit, due to my current bias on the game. Nevertheless you can see the real interview here: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG5oUKqbIVM). The question occurs around 7:51 mark.

Malkavian.4516:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Thanks! Good to see Personal Story has been restored

You mean “being restored”

So.. Good to see personal story has being restored? :P

Ok all jokes aside, what is wrong with “has been restored”?

BobbyStein.2315:

Personal Story Restoration

• If your character is currently playing “Against the Corruption,” “Cathedral of Silence,” “Romke’s Final Voyage,” or “The Source of Orr,” you must complete your story steps through the Source of Orr to begin chapter 8. If you do not complete “The Source of Orr” before the Personal Story restoration goes live, you will be advanced to “Victory or Death” upon completion of “The Source of Orr.” “Victory or Death” is the final Personal Story step (and you will miss out on most of chapter 8 with this character). This is due to these steps being moved back into chapter 8 and the successor steps being restored to their original state.

• The story step “Victory or Death” and “The Ruined City of Arah (story)” dungeon are being merged and revised to support 1–5 players. The previous version of the Ruined City of Arah (story) dungeon will be retired, and the explorable version will be unlocked by default.

I am glad to see that the story is being fixed, but I am highly upset at how it is being done. I was unaware that the story had been “redone” until I was so confused at all the continuity errors that I came to the forums to see if I was bugged or if this game’s main story was half-kittened together. I was happy to see that at one point the story made sense and was good. Then for some reason arena net decided to screw up the story by having you meet time traveling Eir and Rytlock that talk about the meeting in Lions arch 10 levels before you have the meeting in lions arch. Then after we barely survive fort trinity we have enough strength to push all the way to the gates of Arah to cleans Orr and kill the king eye of Zytan only to hear that I have already killed other Eyes of Z and mouths before (which I never saw). Then after I do all this I finally assault Orr? I mean why assault something I am already freely walking around on?

These were just a few of the moments I was completely lost during and wondering how this was allowed to ship. Then I come here and find that its being “fixed” but that they are not taking the time to let the people who had to play through that junk a chance to play through the fixed content. Is it so hard to just allow players when they log in the chance to start their story again from “A light in the darkness”? A pop up window or in game mail that says if you want to play the corrected story click here or talk to X npc to have your personal story reset back to that point should not be to hard to do in the grand scheme of things.

Personally, I am highly disappointed with everyone that is apart of this team. Why you would allow this content to ship back in September and then not even allow all the people who played through that the ability to see the story as it should be is just shameful. I know that my post here will not be read by those it pertains to but even still my view of Arena net, which until this point was a very high view has been massively tarnished.

Hey Bobby, from what you said with the Arah story mode changes, it looks like we will only be able to complete it once. And if we ever want to do that story dungeon path again we will need to hitchhike with someone who hasn’t completed it yet. Can I ask why this was decided upon. As someone who runs dungeons daily, it’s sad to see a dungeon disappear or be limited to how many times you can run it.

With no news on new dungeons with HoT it makes me a little worried…

So, we’re finally going to be back to where we used to be 7 months ago, with the exception that all the damage done over the past months isn’t going to be amended. Yay? No! Can’t say I’m exceptionally excited.

Though, I’m not personally affected by this, I know a few newer players who started playing GW2 within the past couple of months and aren’t going to delete their main characters and all the progress made. They’ll have to live with a botched personal story now. Well done.

Part of me feels like rerolling my character all over again to enjoy the story as IT WAS MEANT TO BE but then I realize I’d have to re-do all the other stuff my main has, like world map completion and unlocked traits.

I would really, really, really, really like to see some way that you all at Arena Net could somehow let us ..not so much “Re-do” as that seems a wrong wording, more -erase all progress done and start from scratch.- I’d be perfectly content to just do 100% of the personal story all over again. Instead of it being “Repeatable content” just erase my all my personal story progress.

I’m not sure how much work that’d take or if it’d break my game but Shrugs at this point I’d be perfectly find having to redo it all over again to enjoy the full personal story as it was meant to be. That or at least start all over from the point of A Light in the Darkness or such.

I am curious, how much trouble/work it’d be to just clear a character’s personal story and start from scratch.

Well after over 2000 hrs in game I’ve never completed my personal story ONLY because of the dungeon group requirement, so I’m thrilled that I’m now going to be able to complete my story, my PERSONAL story, personally, alone. Thank you.

That people prefer only new stuff over gettign old stuff fixed or returning is just absolutely untrue and in that case, I have strongly to agree with it, that such an opinino would be very flawed.

Every kind of game content is worth it to be improved, regardless if you improve the game with new content, like new explorable places, stuff like specializations or adding new weapons categories like 2H axes – or of its improving old content, like fixing the personal story, fixing the trait system, fixing Ranger Problems with pets or redesigning Zhaitan to become a truly epic battle, that this end boss deserves to be instead of being a boring lame 2 minute pew pew pew fiasco.

That anet shows interest in improving and reiteratign parts of the original game have they shown to us now several times.
For that you have to look only at the Tequatl Redesign which turned a boring battle into a much more challenging battle.

No one expects miracles here, or that ANet has now to work on thigns liek a Zhaitan Redesign to brign it out in short time. That such tasks take time, is normal and I’m also willing enough to wait for it, being patient, cause I know, if they do it finally somewhen sooner or later, it would massively improve the whole game experience for everyone and would make simply GW2 a so much better game, than it is already, that such improvements should be absolutely worth it to do.

I mean, what can they lose? Worser than Zhaitan already is, can a redesign not end up ^^ lol It can only become better xD.

That Anet would work on the redesign of Season 1 together with a rework of the Personal story to make it all at once in one go together with season 2’s system replayable to bring finally game design continuity into the whole game itself is imo also the most reasonable and logical thing Anet could do and the best thing in my honest opinion that Anet really should do, where I’m absolutely patient for, if I just would know, that Anet is actually willing also to do that.

But imo saying, we can#t make the PS replayable, because it creates bugs is imo an excuse for me. If remaking the PS from sratch just to get rid of these appearing game stopping bugs is the solution – one that means more effort, but means in its results the most perfect solution for the whole game, than that solution should be worth the effort, even it it meant that we players have to wait alot longer for that solution.

So do I see that. I don’t know, if I’m the only one, who sees it that way, but I personally see just onl,y how much Anet already has improved the existing content compared to the original game release version of GW2, so I don’t believe, that somethign like that should stop them from improving the personal story, when they redesigned alreay so many other things and all that stuff also didn’t create any game stopping bugs which hindered them to make those game changes at all and all of that was also just effort, which required several months of effort to implement and weren’t things, Anet could just simply change from today to tomorrow to exaggerate it now for example.

Given, that Anet is already working since a longer time maybe in background on the changes of Season 1 to bring it one day back maybe as part of a larger Feature Pack, it shows already, that somethign like that combined with a sense making rework on the personal story is naturally nothing, what would be easily done, but instead something, that seriously takes time. But its time, that will definetly be worth all that effort and thats the only thing, that counts for me personally.

I have done Victory or Death 9 times, once each on my 8 characters and once to help a friend. It is a long instance, with many boring lulls or lols. It is still buggy as heck, so i hope they will fix things. Like being knocked down thru the airship and falling all the way down to map and death. Buggy interaction with cannons, sometimes you are stuck in falling animation when using it. I don’t know if they change is just to scaling for solo and more party members or a revamp so that its more like the LS instances, shorter duration, challenging for solo, but welcome to party up too. If nothing really changes as far as the current instance is, soloing would probably be super UN-fun

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Malkavian.4516:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Thanks! Good to see Personal Story has been restored

You mean “being restored”

So.. Good to see personal story has being restored? :P

Ok all jokes aside, what is wrong with “has been restored”?

The point, I think, was that it has not yet been restored. It’s at least 8 weeks away from restoration. So “has been” doesn’t work, “is being” does (and the person correcting you left out the “is.”

Donari.5237:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Malkavian.4516:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Thanks! Good to see Personal Story has been restored

You mean “being restored”

So.. Good to see personal story has being restored? :P

Ok all jokes aside, what is wrong with “has been restored”?

The point, I think, was that it has not yet been restored. It’s at least 8 weeks away from restoration. So “has been” doesn’t work, “is being” does (and the person correcting you left out the “is.”

I see. I thought the update was released today my bad ^^

This is great news. Thanks a lot. Four of my characters have been waiting for this for so long.

Will the story instance entrances be returned to their original locations, rather than the current airship ‘airdrop’ thing that currently occurs at Fort Trinity?

The original entrances of the story-missions and what happened on the maps fitted together very well – it makes little sense to me that I had to travel back to Fort Trinity and board a ship to get airdropped at a place I had been a few steps away from.

So I’m at “Battle for Fort Trinity” but not done it yet. Should i wait? Or won’t it matter if i continue?

Awesome news btw getting PS restored, it was terribly disjointed last time i played through it. It’s also good to hear you’re moving toward giving solo options for Arah. It would be even better to have this option for all dungeons. An option to one day be able to reply PS, would be the ultimate awesomeness. But i disagree having your character reset to be able to do it, as suggested by someone above. With lvl downscaling there’s no need to go that drastic. Only the story need resetting not your character.

Great news! 8 plus weeks meh, but I have waited over two years to do another personal story can wait 2 months

Wait, this hasn’t been implimented yet? I thought that’s what today’s patch was. When does it hit then?

Read the OP’s FAQ, it says we have at least 8 weeks to put our alts at our desired PS steps.

How do we unlock the PvP track? Is it automatically unlocked?

Ah, well I hope this patch will also fix my bug, one that a few others seem to have where the Personal Story Journal stops at points. For me, I have completed 100% of the Personal Story on my main character, but the Journal doesn’t show -anything- after “Battle of Fort Trinity.”

I’d at least like this bug fixed so I can have my journal complete. As OCD as that sounds.

Excited, especially that the last step will be soloable.

As for the section about “you just complete it in the next 8 weeks or something bad will happen to you”, that’s really confusing. I don’t suppose someone can throw together a little web page in the wiki or something that lets us plug in what the name of a story step is that we’re on, and it explains what is going to happen to us with that character?

I have maybe 3-4 characters at various stages in the middle of 6 and 7, few that are very early on (and probably won’t be affected), one completed (did the dungeon with a party), and one where I stopped at the last step because I didn’t really want to do that again (but now excited to). For the few characters in the middle of 6 and 7, it’s not clear to me what is going to happen to them.

So annoying that I’m sitting with my main having just completed Romke’s Final Voyage and not yet done Source of Orr. I quit the personal story because it had turned into a confusing, buggy mess. Without a reset, my choices are to play through the rest of the mess, stop and get bumped to the end when it goes live and miss content, or reroll my main/play through it on an alt?

I’m happy you’re fixing it, but disappointed that there’s no appealing option for those of us who are at the wrong place in the chapters.

BobbyStein.2315:

Q: Can I reset my character’s Personal Story progress, or revert my story progress to an earlier state?
A: No. You cannot reset your character’s story progress, either partially or fully.

Q: Why can’t I reset my character’s Personal Story progress?
A: The Personal Story was not designed to be replayable. Attempting to adjust a character’s story progress introduces a wide variety of bugs across various content and game systems. We investigated different solutions for partial and full story resets. In all cases, the changes led to unpredictable results in many different content types, including permanent blocking of story progress.

I realize we can’t reset the story and that makes sense. However,…

Q: What’s the difference between personal story and living story that we can replay the instances of Living Story anytime we like (by chapter) that we cannot replay certain chapters of personal story?

I don’t want to reset my story to try other playthroughs as my character has made certain choices and that should stay. But it would be nice to go back and revisit certain chapters that I have on my character(s). There’s no loot dropped in the story now and we’d only get the completion reward for finishing it, not replaying it.

Is the limitation in the fact that there are diverging paths along the way in personal story (pick a race to learn about) so one person’s story chapters would be different depending on choices made…and with living story, no matter what your choices are in the story, the next steps are the same for everyone? I like the choices in personal story and how it affects what story steps I get next and wouldn’t want that to change.

I still wouldn’t mind just having all progress in my Personal Story erased and have me start out from scratch honestly, since I’ve already done 100% and want to have played it in it’s true form.

I know games are tricky and such, and I don’t fault a lot of mistakes.

Honestly, playing this game over 2 years the only things I can’t forgive Arena Net for is fragging up the Personal Story and the way they ruined town clothing. Fixing the Personal Story is great and all but still sucks for those that completed it in it’s “Broken” state and sort of unfair, but I guess I’ll just hope one day I can do it on my main in it’s meant-to-be form.

I understand you can’t give an exact time for when this goes live, but will we have at least a month to resolve our personal storylines if we are stuck in the chapter 7/8 portion that will cause issues upon update?

If not a month, then at least a week or two weeks?

Mo Mo.1947:

I understand you can’t give an exact time for when this goes live, but will we have at least a month to resolve our personal storylines if we are stuck in the chapter 7/8 portion that will cause issues upon update?

If not a month, then at least a week or two weeks?

You’re fine. Read Bobby’s FAQ in the first couple of posts:
Q: How long do I have to advance my character’s story past “The Source of Orr”?
A: While we haven’t set a release date at this time, we can confirm that you will have at least 8 weeks from the time of this posting to complete “The Source of Orr”, should you want to advance to step 1 of chapter 8, “Temple of the Forgotten God.” Otherwise, as stated above, you may miss out on much of chapter 8 with this character.

khani.4786:

BobbyStein.2315:

Q: Can I reset my character’s Personal Story progress, or revert my story progress to an earlier state?
A: No. You cannot reset your character’s story progress, either partially or fully.

Q: Why can’t I reset my character’s Personal Story progress?
A: The Personal Story was not designed to be replayable. Attempting to adjust a character’s story progress introduces a wide variety of bugs across various content and game systems. We investigated different solutions for partial and full story resets. In all cases, the changes led to unpredictable results in many different content types, including permanent blocking of story progress.

I realize we can’t reset the story and that makes sense. However,…

Q: What’s the difference between personal story and living story that we can replay the instances of Living Story anytime we like (by chapter) that we cannot replay certain chapters of personal story?

I don’t want to reset my story to try other playthroughs as my character has made certain choices and that should stay. But it would be nice to go back and revisit certain chapters that I have on my character(s). There’s no loot dropped in the story now and we’d only get the completion reward for finishing it, not replaying it.

Is the limitation in the fact that there are diverging paths along the way in personal story (pick a race to learn about) so one person’s story chapters would be different depending on choices made…and with living story, no matter what your choices are in the story, the next steps are the same for everyone? I like the choices in personal story and how it affects what story steps I get next and wouldn’t want that to change.

^ this

IS it ingame allready or jsut its goin to come soon announcement?
I WANT TO KNOW

The difference is “The Personal Story was not designed to be replayable.” (other than by joining someone else’s run). The current LS was so designed. Season One of LS is not replayable at all.

I’m willing to take Bobby’s word for it in the FAQ answer you quoted that they worked on a way to reset PS and found game killing bugs beyond the scope of feasible correction.

ShroomOneUp.6913:

IS it ingame allready or jsut its goin to come soon announcement?
I WANT TO KNOW

Please read the FAQ. Bobby wrote out all these answers in lovely detail. And as people have asked this in the thread the FAQ’s been quoted.

You Have Eight Weeks At Least Before This Happens

Ah well, one of the things that still keeps me in this game is helping others get through VoD. I have over 70 runthroughs as of this writing. One more thing to push me further from GW2.

Other than this niggle, great news!

The question “What to do with characters who stopped progressing the Living Story after the September patch and are in chapter 7 or 8” is still open. I guess that the answer will be to wait for the patch and pretend nothing happened in September? My Engineer is (still) at Estate of Decay and that is for me C8 Step 4A. If I continue now I will miss part of the story (the part that is now the end of chapter 7 instead of chapter 8 )?

Donari.5237:

The difference is “The Personal Story was not designed to be replayable.” (other than by joining someone else’s run). The current LS was so designed. Season One of LS is not replayable at all.

I’m willing to take Bobby’s word for it in the FAQ answer you quoted that they worked on a way to reset PS and found game killing bugs beyond the scope of feasible correction.

I can still hope though, because I’d love to play it as my main in it’s intended form if it could be reset somehow.

ShroomOneUp.6913:

IS it ingame allready or jsut its goin to come soon announcement?
I WANT TO KNOW

The answer is out there.

This is great news.

I already knew the personal story was going to be fixed (thanks to posts in the other thread) but it sounds like it’s going to be a lot more thorough than simply putting the steps back in order.

I can’t wait to play through it on my alts now. Especially since we’ll be able to do the dungeon without having to persuade 4 friends to sit through it all over again.

Archon.3987:

This is great news. Thanks a lot. Four of my characters have been waiting for this for so long.

Will the story instance entrances be returned to their original locations, rather than the current airship ‘airdrop’ thing that currently occurs at Fort Trinity?

The original entrances of the story-missions and what happened on the maps fitted together very well – it makes little sense to me that I had to travel back to Fort Trinity and board a ship to get airdropped at a place I had been a few steps away from.

this change was the best of all… The continually moving back to Fort Trinity doesn’t make any sense… And was annoying as hell…

Good news indeed. I’ve seen the poor choices that went into the original personal story climax run players out of the game. I’ll have to let a few people know that only 3 years later this has finally been fixed.

I want all dungeons story mode to be soloable (without any special build or trick), and the explorable to be harder (hard mode) with more rewards and not soloable in any way (not even with the more ridiculous builds).

NeHoMaR.9812:

I want all dungeons story mode to be soloable.

^^ This – and make it doable one/day per character and reward like…20-30 of the dungeon currency so people who don’t want to suffer through groups can slowly work towards the dungeon skins / legendary gift item.

Ty so much for this change Anet!

Excellent news! Thank you, Bobby.

So as someone who was doing old personal story and stopped doing it after you cut of parts and pieces of it I will not only loose possibility to play full story as it was before you broke it but (since after you took away parts of the story) my character was placed after “Forging the pact” at “Battle of fort trinity” and because after your stupid changes you placed my character at that point i wont be able to play restored chapters unless i create new character and play whole story from the beginning. That character will be forever cut of from content. For me, as someone who bought that game because of its good story its infuriating. Its like you prevented some PvE players from playing specific dungeon or PvP some selected PvP players from accessing part of WvW borderlands.

It’s like selling a book, and then going to everyone who bought it, ripping out some pages from that book and giving them whats left of it.

1st you broke the story when there was NOTHING wrong with it, then you started sneakily taking away even more parts of personal story by removing pieces of new character starting instances (witch made them just plain bad and boring) and now when you finally return some of what you took away you are saying… “welll… well give it baaak to sooome playerss… but not to you, because appaaaarentlyyyy you alreadyyy playeeed story sooo… ummmm… you wont get it.”

You are taking away experience from players who actually played story witch means they like it and want it and return that experience to players who didn’t play story witch means they probably don’t care and would rather skip it anyway just to get achievement or something like that.

You only reminded me how angry i am at you for removing more and more story related content from the game.

PS. I finished whole story on my second character and I will lvl up new character, go trough all previous episodes and complete story again just to play this restored part. This doesn’t make yourkitten**d up practices any less f***ed up. You can’t remove parts of product that you already sold to someone.

BobbyStein.2315:

With this release, we are changing a few things about the final Personal Story step “Victory or Death.” For starters, the instance has been modified to support 1–5 players so you will no longer need a full party to complete it. We have converted the story mode of “The Ruined City of Arah” dungeon to be a Personal Story step, so after this update goes live, you may only play it once as part of your Personal Story. We are also unlocking the explorable mode of this dungeon by default so access will no longer be gated by story mode completion. We are also updating the Ruined City of Arah Dungeon Track to be unlocked by story mode or explorable mode completion. Additionally, the “Master of Arah” achievement is being updated to only require completion of explorable mode paths. Please note that the core gameplay and structure of this story instance has not been changed—the difficulty has been adjusted to allow for solo play and will therefore be more accessible for players.

Hmmm, interesting. Not sure I’d like the non-repeating part of it – I’d rather have all story modes scaled to 1-5 players and be repeatable, TBH. I am certainly disappointed that the core gameplay and structure remains unchanged. Was really hoping for an improved Zhaitan fight.

BobbyStein.2315:

The Personal Story was not designed to be replayable. Attempting to adjust a character’s story progress introduces a wide variety of bugs across various content and game systems. We investigated different solutions for partial and full story resets. In all cases, the changes led to unpredictable results in many different content types, including permanent blocking of story progress.

I wouldn’t mind some changes to the Personal Story if it meant being able to replace. E.g., rather than choosing one or the other story path you instead get them in differing orders (or now a certain order). I would suggest investigating such possibilities as well.

BobbyStein.2315:

While we haven’t set a release date at this time, we can confirm that you will have at least 8 weeks from the time of this posting to complete “The Source of Orr”

Two months? Marmelade.

Donari.5237:

All right, I’m trying to parse out which of my alts I need to advance and which I need to hold still until the revision. Of those not yet done completely with PS, I have these pending steps for my alts:

— Temple of the Forgotten God
— Further into Orr
— A Light in the Darkness
— Marching Orders
— Starving the Beast
— Ossuary of the Unquiet Dead

And one alt who is at level 70 PS but I don’t have noted which step.

Can anyone more savvy than me say which of these I should advance, and to which step, in order to get the most PS steps?

Don’t advance any except maybe the level 70 PS one (if you’re at Forging the Pact, don’t advance, if you are then advance to Temple of the Forgotten God).

Orpheal.8263:

A question that jumps my mind also first:

Has the Zhaitan Battle anyhow been improved within these works?
Can we ever expect to see there improvements in this very underwhelming battle to become a serious epic battle, that will become absolutely memorable???

Bobby Stein stated that there’s no core gameplay or mechanic changes for Arah story mode, so that would mean no changes to the Zhaitan fight. Unfortunately.

Mea.5491:

“Please note that the core gameplay and structure of this story instance has not been changed—the difficulty has been adjusted to allow for solo play and will therefore be more accessible for players.”

^ Does that mean I can solo the dungeon now but I cannot open that first gate alone? Or did they change the gate? (Right now it needs 2 people to step on the plates to open it).

It means they’re changing the gate and the scaling the mob difficulty to be on par to a story instance (which scales up and down based on number of players).

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Malkavian.4516:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Thanks! Good to see Personal Story has been restored

You mean “being restored”

So.. Good to see personal story has being restored? :P

Ok all jokes aside, what is wrong with “has been restored”?

The change hasn’t come yet. That’s why it hasn’t been restored yet, but is being restored (soon™).

Silmar Alech.4305:

Many thanks to the story line repair!

I still have a question, it has to do with the “why” you mentioned in your introduction: Why did you do the changes last year in the first place? This is something you never explained. I’m just curious, not trolling.

I never understood why you removed content and left the game in a state worse than it was before. Instead of putting the work into enhancing it. And keep it like this for more than half a year. For me, it appeared as a burning and bleeding open wound in the story line. Yes, the Apatia part of the story never was the best content, but it was not so bad that it was worth removing – in my opinion.

This.

Bobby is awesome, no doubt. He’s one of the few people who is willing to step up to the plate and communicate with the players. And it’s not just this post; he has a history of really going out of his way to talk to us on the forums and trying to clarify things as much as possible. So…much love for Bobby.

That said, when this whole thing began, no one from ANet was even willing to answer the question of whether what was going on with the Personal Story was a bug or was intended. The question was ignored and side-stepped just as often as it was asked. No one had the courage to step up and say “Hey, yes, we intentionally made these changes; we were trying to improve the Personal Story by streamlining it, and we really messed things up. We apologize.”

I would respect ANet a whole lot more if they would just start admitting when they make a mistake instead of going all hush-hush and pretending that they didn’t see the question being asked in the forums.

However, not to end this post on a sour note, it really sounds like they’ve been working very diligently on straightening this out. I appreciate the periodic updates along the way, and I’m really happy to hear that the last story step will no longer force you to be in a group if you choose not to. I did not expect that, so it was a pleasant surprise.

So…kudos to you, Bobby and team. I think you’ve done yourself proud this time.

Donari.5237:

“Q: What new voice-over is going into the game?
A: We wanted to update some key lines for several characters in the Personal Story, including those of Trahearne, the Pale Tree, Tonn, and Apatia. In some cases, we are merely re-recording the existing lines to get a more appropriate delivery to match context. In other cases, we are rewriting character dialog to better fit a particular scene.”

Please say this includes the lionguard’s shout in the cinematic on Claw Island where we sink a bone ship and she cries out “A small victory, Gods, there are so many of them.” The VA clearly didn’t know the context and “A small victory” comes out triumphantly rather than full of horror. I think that’s the only line in all the PS that grates on me so harshly every time I hear it. It’s delivered with an entirely wrong emphasis for the situation.

Actually the Lion Guards shout is done correctly, it’s this way: we sink the bone ship and she cry’s out: “A small victory”…(all the other ships start to surface and she says, “Gods, there’s so many of them”. “A small victory” is a triumphant yell, if rather insignificant, followed by the horror of “Gods, there’s so many of them”. Exactly as it should be. it’s nuanced but it’s correctly done. Now, all of my characters waiting at Victory or Death will finally be able to complete the PS.