Guild Wars 2

Last year Anet said there would be no new holiday content because of size and depth of the HoT release. What is your excuse this year? Common guys!!!! Enough is enough. Time for new Holiday Content!!

LW3 .

Since I didn’t get to enjoy it much last year, it’s pretty new to me, and I’m loving it.

I don’t want new Halloween content. I want more changes to the world (Living World & current events) and more festivals that are mostly repeats.

Put another way, I’d rather see dev resources applied to changing the game’s permanent content rather than on a festival that lasts only a few weeks.

What Na said. Producing new content for a once a year festival is a wasteful use of resources, considering they have LS3 and an expansion to work on.

Helloween did get worse every single year since 2012. Less content, more DR and more stuff with super tiny RNG (this year two new account bound minis and 2 aura items) every year.

As someone who has been playing since the first halloween event, casually at that, there is literally nothing for me to do but work on that nightmarish bullkitten of a backpiece, the ascended bat themed one. Which is a giant wast of time with how much resources/gold/dumb luck it takes, could spend all my playtime with no guarantee that I’ll even get everything to make it with before the event ends, and that with spending obscene amounts of gold as well.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I don’t want new Halloween content. I want more changes to the world (Living World & current events) and more festivals that are mostly repeats.

Put another way, I’d rather see dev resources applied to changing the game’s permanent content rather than on a festival that lasts only a few weeks.

Why not both? They could pull this off when they first launched the game with the bare bones of a plan for what they were going to do for both the holidays and the living story, with just as many or possibly even fewer developers and resources than they have now, and with less experience under their belts at that.

How exactly they have they become worse at pumping out content with time? It doesn’t make any sense, if anything they should have been improving and developing a more consistent pipeline over the last four years.

I couldn’t care less about Halloween. No interest in it at all.

Conncept.7638:

As someone who has been playing since the first halloween event, casually at that, there is literally nothing for me to do but work on that nightmarish bullkitten of a backpiece, the ascended bat themed one. Which is a giant wast of time with how much resources/gold/dumb luck it takes, could spend all my playtime with no guarantee that I’ll even get everything to make it with before the event ends, and that with spending obscene amounts of gold as well.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I don’t want new Halloween content. I want more changes to the world (Living World & current events) and more festivals that are mostly repeats.

Put another way, I’d rather see dev resources applied to changing the game’s permanent content rather than on a festival that lasts only a few weeks.

Why not both? They could pull this off when they first launched the game with the bare bones of a plan for what they were going to do for both the holidays and the living story, with just as many or possibly even fewer developers and resources than they have now, and with less experience under their belts at that.

How exactly they have they become worse at pumping out content with time? It doesn’t make any sense, if anything they should have been improving and developing a more consistent pipeline over the last four years.

Exactly!! I do NOT want them to pull away from LW3, nor do I want to see the continual wait, wait, wait for Legendary ARMOR.

Anet, you did it before. Please honor those that have stuck with you for 4 YEARS and put in some new content for the festivals.

Conncept.7638:

As someone who has been playing since the first halloween event, casually at that, there is literally nothing for me to do but work on that nightmarish bullkitten of a backpiece, the ascended bat themed one. Which is a giant wast of time with how much resources/gold/dumb luck it takes, could spend all my playtime with no guarantee that I’ll even get everything to make it with before the event ends, and that with spending obscene amounts of gold as well.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I don’t want new Halloween content. I want more changes to the world (Living World & current events) and more festivals that are mostly repeats.

Put another way, I’d rather see dev resources applied to changing the game’s permanent content rather than on a festival that lasts only a few weeks.

Why not both? They could pull this off when they first launched the game with the bare bones of a plan for what they were going to do for both the holidays and the living story, with just as many or possibly even fewer developers and resources than they have now, and with less experience under their belts at that.

How exactly they have they become worse at pumping out content with time? It doesn’t make any sense, if anything they should have been improving and developing a more consistent pipeline over the last four years.

It’s very simple – The vast majority of the team are working on the next expansion.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I don’t want new Halloween content. I want more changes to the world (Living World & current events) and more festivals that are mostly repeats.

Put another way, I’d rather see dev resources applied to changing the game’s permanent content rather than on a festival that lasts only a few weeks.

If they don’t have enough resources to complete both tasks at the same time, the game is in a deeper pile than I thought. F2P games that have consistent expansions can do both at the same time.

CMM.6712:

I couldn’t care less about Halloween. No interest in it at all.

I went into the Labyrinth, ran around following a mentor tag, killed 3 bosses, closed some doors, got 8 achievements done and ended up with 173 bags which in turn are oc full of useless crap. There’s nothing available with candy corns that i didn’t get last time, so i don’t see the point in farming the same instance over and over unless it’s to do it like champ trains (mindless numbing farming) for some extra cash.

I’m just getting some achievement points and that’s it. Same boring crap like usual for those that already have experienced it before. For those new to halloween it might be somewhat exiting and a change of pace.

Sthenith.5196:

CMM.6712:

I couldn’t care less about Halloween. No interest in it at all.

I went into the Labyrinth, ran around following a mentor tag, killed 3 bosses, closed some doors, got 8 achievements done and ended up with 173 bags which in turn are oc full of useless crap. There’s nothing available with candy corns that i didn’t get last time, so i don’t see the point in farming the same instance over and over unless it’s to do it like champ trains (mindless numbing farming) for some extra cash.

I’m just getting some achievement points and that’s it. Same boring crap like usual for those that already have experienced it before. For those new to halloween it might be somewhat exiting and a change of pace.

Not trying to be down on the game or anything , I would just MUCH rather see new content in the form of LS or expansion or free new maps or ???

I was hyped till reading patch notes and being ingame for 2 hours. Did the Lab, bosses die way to easy now…no use for fangs or nougat. Terrible drop rates in ToT bags /reddit. I would have liked some new cool items for achievments or at least a bit fresh wind this year. Played Halloween last year-that was fun crafting nightfury and speculating on reddit about the recipe with tons of players. The year before and this year. But this year I didnt like it at all. Lab is nice, I did my achievments, farmed a bit, opened like 10.000 bags for fun and got nothing interesting. Thats Halloween for me and many more I`ve asked.

CMM.6712:

Sthenith.5196:

CMM.6712:

I couldn’t care less about Halloween. No interest in it at all.

I went into the Labyrinth, ran around following a mentor tag, killed 3 bosses, closed some doors, got 8 achievements done and ended up with 173 bags which in turn are oc full of useless crap. There’s nothing available with candy corns that i didn’t get last time, so i don’t see the point in farming the same instance over and over unless it’s to do it like champ trains (mindless numbing farming) for some extra cash.

I’m just getting some achievement points and that’s it. Same boring crap like usual for those that already have experienced it before. For those new to halloween it might be somewhat exiting and a change of pace.

Not trying to be down on the game or anything , I would just MUCH rather see new content in the form of LS or expansion or free new maps or ???

Why should there be a need to choose between them when they should both be worked on? F2P games can do both at the same time.

Galtrix.7369:

Why should there be a need to choose between them when they should both be worked on? F2P games can do both at the same time.

Someone already answered this above- they’re working on the next expansion, too. I think you’re grossly underestimating the amount of effort it takes to maintain a game, plus create new live content (not just the LS3 maps, but the smaller event chains and things they’ve added over the past few months) AND new content for an EP.

Plus, I think they’ve mentioned before that some of the season one stuff isn’t easy to bring up to the new code. I would give anything to have the PvP games from the first Halloween back, but it is what it is. I trust that they’re not withholding things from us because they’re mean or lazy.

Galtrix.7369:

CMM.6712:

Sthenith.5196:

CMM.6712:

I couldn’t care less about Halloween. No interest in it at all.

I went into the Labyrinth, ran around following a mentor tag, killed 3 bosses, closed some doors, got 8 achievements done and ended up with 173 bags which in turn are oc full of useless crap. There’s nothing available with candy corns that i didn’t get last time, so i don’t see the point in farming the same instance over and over unless it’s to do it like champ trains (mindless numbing farming) for some extra cash.

I’m just getting some achievement points and that’s it. Same boring crap like usual for those that already have experienced it before. For those new to halloween it might be somewhat exiting and a change of pace.

Not trying to be down on the game or anything , I would just MUCH rather see new content in the form of LS or expansion or free new maps or ???

Why should there be a need to choose between them when they should both be worked on? F2P games can do both at the same time.

Just as an aside, in the Guild Wars franchise, the holidays have always been relatively the same, with a couple of new shinies added every year.

Batelle.1680:

Galtrix.7369:

Why should there be a need to choose between them when they should both be worked on? F2P games can do both at the same time.

Someone already answered this above- they’re working on the next expansion, too. I think you’re grossly underestimating the amount of effort it takes to maintain a game, plus create new live content (not just the LS3 maps, but the smaller event chains and things they’ve added over the past few months) AND new content for an EP.

Plus, I think they’ve mentioned before that some of the season one stuff isn’t easy to bring up to the new code. I would give anything to have the PvP games from the first Halloween back, but it is what it is. I trust that they’re not withholding things from us because they’re mean or lazy.

I’m a programmer myself, so I can estimate with a certain accuracy how long something should take to develop. I don’t think I’m grossly underestimating the effort that it takes to do both at the same time.

Anet has previously mentioned that armor sets take about 8 months to develop, and that is very, very suspicious to me. It may be something that’s completely unique to GW2 that makes it difficult to develop items/quests/armor/etc., but it shouldn’t take a massive amount of effort to create new holiday events.

In general, yes, I would like focus to be on new content rather than changing temporary festival content. However, the problem with Halloween is that they seem to go backwards and take away what I like about Halloween bit by bit. Honestly the straw that broke my back over Halloween is the decorations in LA. Compare New LA and old LA decorated for Halloween and there is zero contest. It used to be creepy and absolutely atmospheric – I looooved it!. Now LA looks like a childrens’ Halloween party with candy corn scattered all around. I know this isn’t exactly what the OP was talking about, but it is something that really did make Halloween less enjoyable for me. I used to just hang out in creepy LA for the atmosphere. Now, why bother.

I also still have a few tonics in my bank from the first halloween – zombie, skeleton and maybe ghost? Why did these go away? The zombie was actually rather disturbing with my head twisted to face backwards. Like I said, taking fun away for no obvious reason.

Galtrix.7369:

I’m a programmer myself, so I can estimate with a certain accuracy how long something should take to develop. I don’t think I’m grossly underestimating the effort that it takes to do both at the same time.

Anet has previously mentioned that armor sets take about 8 months to develop, and that is very, very suspicious to me. It may be something that’s completely unique to GW2 that makes it difficult to develop items/quests/armor/etc., but it shouldn’t take a massive amount of effort to create new holiday events.

I respect that you’re a programmer and that you have a good understanding of these things, but I feel that unless you actually work at Arenanet on GW2 or have done work on this game specifically, you can’t speak with great accuracy on time tables or speed of development. Every program has different requirements and hurdles to jump through, not to mention intra-company politics to deal with.

If you are a current developer for Guild Wars 2, you probably have a good understanding of why things take the amount of time they do. Without that first-hand experience, it’s really hard to judge the timetables Anet adheres to with any real accuracy.

I don’t mind that nothing is new, but did they really have to nerf the bosses in the Labyrinth? It was a great, easy-access place for newer players to mesh with veterans and learn to play the game. Now, instead of occasionally having to turn your brain on for boss spawns it is 100% mindless and borderline unbearable for it.

Programming is the easy part. It’s all the assets that need to be developed and integrated and then tested to see if it’s “fun” that’s the tough part.

Pretty Pixie.8603:

What Na said. Producing new content for a once a year festival is a wasteful use of resources, considering they have LS3 and an expansion to work on.

It’s not a waste of resources. It’s an investment in the future. Look at Guild Wars 1. Their festivals are now on an automatic schedule and they STILl draw a lot of people back for them because there is a lot to do and they are fun.

When GW2 starts to die down then those festivals will be a big part in keeping people coming back… if only for a week or so.

You’re only partly right! Not only is there no new Halloween content, it’s missing a lot of the old Halloween content!

Sthenith.5196:

CMM.6712:

I couldn’t care less about Halloween. No interest in it at all.

I went into the Labyrinth, ran around following a mentor tag, killed 3 bosses, closed some doors, got 8 achievements done and ended up with 173 bags which in turn are oc full of useless crap. There’s nothing available with candy corns that i didn’t get last time, so i don’t see the point in farming the same instance over and over unless it’s to do it like champ trains (mindless numbing farming) for some extra cash.

I’m just getting some achievement points and that’s it. Same boring crap like usual for those that already have experienced it before. For those new to halloween it might be somewhat exiting and a change of pace.

You may want to visit the Vendors, as there are new items to acquire.

Good luck.

Festivals are like honey-traps. They pull an obscene portion of the playerbase together for a brief time, and give a nice filler between “major content”. Probably better that they improve them a bit each time they come around, rather than make them less, considering the community aspect.

Pour one out for skeletal lich, must be hard to fall so far from power. One day you strike fear into the legions of your enemies, the next you get ruined by eight lootsticks.

trunks.1659:

I don’t mind that nothing is new, but did they really have to nerf the bosses in the Labyrinth? It was a great, easy-access place for newer players to mesh with veterans and learn to play the game. Now, instead of occasionally having to turn your brain on for boss spawns it is 100% mindless and borderline unbearable for it.

To be honest I dont think they nerfed the bosses. As someone in my labyrinth map mentioned, with the power creep from HoT and so many elite specs carrying tons of CC, it’s just much easier to kill them with the skills we have now.

drunkenpilot.9837:

To be honest I dont think they nerfed the bosses. As someone in my labyrinth map mentioned, with the power creep from HoT and so many elite specs carrying tons of CC, it’s just much easier to kill them with the skills we have now.

Skeleton lich was absolutely nerfed. It no longer applies nearly as much retal, and the retal does less damage. It also seems to spawn fewer adds less frequently.

drunkenpilot.9837:

trunks.1659:

I don’t mind that nothing is new, but did they really have to nerf the bosses in the Labyrinth? It was a great, easy-access place for newer players to mesh with veterans and learn to play the game. Now, instead of occasionally having to turn your brain on for boss spawns it is 100% mindless and borderline unbearable for it.

To be honest I dont think they nerfed the bosses. As someone in my labyrinth map mentioned, with the power creep from HoT and so many elite specs carrying tons of CC, it’s just much easier to kill them with the skills we have now.

In addition to this, I’m betting there’s a lot more people with ascended gear as the game gets older. Those extra stats all add up when you get a Zerg going.

Festivals used to be the best thing about Guild Wars, now it is just a joke.

Arena Net, just get a small team together to work on festival updates year round. Living World has improved this year but festivals are just embarrassing in comparison to most other mainstream MMO’s which actually make fresh festival content yearly on top of their normal content updates.

Conncept.7638:

As someone who has been playing since the first halloween event, casually at that, there is literally nothing for me to do but work on that nightmarish bullkitten of a backpiece, the ascended bat themed one. Which is a giant wast of time with how much resources/gold/dumb luck it takes, could spend all my playtime with no guarantee that I’ll even get everything to make it with before the event ends, and that with spending obscene amounts of gold as well.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I don’t want new Halloween content. I want more changes to the world (Living World & current events) and more festivals that are mostly repeats.

Put another way, I’d rather see dev resources applied to changing the game’s permanent content rather than on a festival that lasts only a few weeks.

Why not both? They could pull this off when they first launched the game with the bare bones of a plan for what they were going to do for both the holidays and the living story, with just as many or possibly even fewer developers and resources than they have now, and with less experience under their belts at that.

How exactly they have they become worse at pumping out content with time? It doesn’t make any sense, if anything they should have been improving and developing a more consistent pipeline over the last four years.

Back at launch they weren’t coming out with a new map every single update. Now they’re trying to. I’d rather have that more often than a new halloween thing that I get to play for 3 weeks out of the year.

Vayne.8563:

Back at launch they weren’t coming out with a new map every single update. Now they’re trying to. I’d rather have that more often than a new halloween thing that I get to play for 3 weeks out of the year.

+1

Vayne.8563:

Conncept.7638:

As someone who has been playing since the first halloween event, casually at that, there is literally nothing for me to do but work on that nightmarish bullkitten of a backpiece, the ascended bat themed one. Which is a giant wast of time with how much resources/gold/dumb luck it takes, could spend all my playtime with no guarantee that I’ll even get everything to make it with before the event ends, and that with spending obscene amounts of gold as well.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I don’t want new Halloween content. I want more changes to the world (Living World & current events) and more festivals that are mostly repeats.

Put another way, I’d rather see dev resources applied to changing the game’s permanent content rather than on a festival that lasts only a few weeks.

Why not both? They could pull this off when they first launched the game with the bare bones of a plan for what they were going to do for both the holidays and the living story, with just as many or possibly even fewer developers and resources than they have now, and with less experience under their belts at that.

How exactly they have they become worse at pumping out content with time? It doesn’t make any sense, if anything they should have been improving and developing a more consistent pipeline over the last four years.

Back at launch they weren’t coming out with a new map every single update. Now they’re trying to. I’d rather have that more often than a new halloween thing that I get to play for 3 weeks out of the year.

Absolutely. I have been pretty pleased with the first 2 installments of LS3. I would much rather have something like these than some temporary festival content I WON’T EVEN PLAY.

I somewhat agree with OP, Anet missed an opurtunity here with some storyline within the Halloween event where like, perhaps Mad King becomes Bloodcrazed….would have been cool but oh well, maybe next year we will get a halloween storyline?

I don`t mind recycling.

I do mind the exclusion of of old content that was beloved.
I do mind the lack of polish and balancing towards rewards.
I do mind that there was a story started, which is either unplayable, or not continued in one form ot the other.

Just recycling doesn’t exite players who are around for more than two years.
Reducing the scope and boiling it down to mindless grind and zerg content, isn`t exciting

It just doesn`t feel like a celebration if it is missing the “soul”.
Just some “festival” stuff dropped into LA.

Halloween 2012 was an event. Something to be excited about.
Halloween 2013 was a step backwards, but it added to the experience.

Then we lost more than with what we started with.
Sure there are some nice rewards now, but the overall experience is dulled down.

My investment into this event went down with each year, mostly because it was only “rewards” given out for monotone content.

Like the jokes the mad king tells us, it got old…

Behellagh.1468:

Programming is the easy part. It’s all the assets that need to be developed and integrated and then tested to see if it’s “fun” that’s the tough part.

Yep. No wonder they fail at that about 75% of the time.

• Reaper’s Rumble 2012—2012
• Kryta Scavenger Hunt for Mad Memoires 2012—2012
• Lunatic Inquisition 2012—2014
• Resealing Bloody Prince Thorn story instance 2013—2014
• Ascent to Madness 2012—2012, 2015-
• Mad King’s Labyrinth, version one 2012—2012
• Mad King’s Labyrinth, version two 2013-
• Clocktower Jumping Puzzle 2012-

Their excuse in 2015 was Heart of Thorns.
Their excuse in 2016 is.. Living Story 3?
Right, even though we have endured hiatus before. Longer ones in fact, quite recently as well. I’ll deal with another if it means we get a high quality Halloween update for the whole community to enjoy together, because remember, this is an MMO first and foremost. Annual festivals invigorate the community and encourage people to interact in positive ways.

But no, again, there is very little to do.

• Repeat the same 5-player dungeon over and over again.
• Repeat the same labyrinth door events, over and over again.
• Repeat the clocktower JP, over and over again…

What a disgrace. I’ll not squander my time on these three empty, soulless activities, I’d rather play something else or, dare I..? Spend time with family.. in ..real life?

Have to wait >350 days now to see if 2017 is any better My spooky scrying pool says no

To finish this rant: I, having the capacity to think critically, recognise how little effort and passion ArenaNet have bothered to put in to another recycled Halloween update. BUT, as of course they would, there is a ton of new (and returning) Halloween-themed shinies in the gem store.
…
…
…Do they still expect me to get suckered in and hand over money?
Really?

I know they want it, hell, they probably need it, but they ain’t getting it for kitten.

I’ve used real money in the gem store before but this is their job. Believe it or not, they have to work for it. Next year I want a continuation of Mad King Thorn’s story, involving Magister Tassi, the Lunatic court and possibly visiting the Hall of Judgement and Dhuum, complete with a reimagined design.

Get it right and I’ll buy something from the gem store next halloween.

Am I being too difficult? I’m sorry, I’ll shut up now.

I don’t believe it is “little effort”, because that is what these events are supposed to be.

Stuff they can easily drop in.

However that doesn’t mean they can be “lazy” about it (to clarify: The work is done, let’s just get some polish done and call it a day).
These are events that do have a reputation and excitement.

I don’t believe they want that turned into disinterest.
I personaly don’t have much to go for this halloween.
If you did this two times allready, you also have barely anything excited to aquire.

Just because it is supposed to be easily implemented, doesn’t mean it isn’t allowed to evolve and be expanded upon.
You had your base ready two years ago. Now it is time to add and add and add…

Pretty Pixie.8603:

What Na said. Producing new content for a once a year festival is a wasteful use of resources, considering they have LS3 and an expansion to work on.

Square is able to make unique annual Halloween & other holiday content, with brand new rewards, stories, and events year to year for all events, produce beefy content patches, AND working on the Stormblood expansion while still not reducing quality of any of these. Point to FFXIV!

Silly competition joke aside, Holiday events are usually fun and special for some players. I think its important to keep up with certain events if they were there in the past. If there was a One-Time event for a patch, that can be left out the year after, but Halloween? Its like if they were to take out the Christmas/New Year event; Halloween & Christmas spirit is a good thing to have and it would be nice of A-Net to celebrate that with their player-base. They don’t HAVE to do it, but its nice if they do; it keeps them connected more with their players.

Now if you excuse me, I got the new All Saints Wake Halloween event to do in FFXIV! Bye! :)

Vayne.8563:

Back at launch they weren’t coming out with a new map every single update. Now they’re trying to. I’d rather have that more often than a new halloween thing that I get to play for 3 weeks out of the year.

I understand what you’re saying and applaud Anet’s attempt to bring out new maps. I am skeptical that it will last. Anet has a history of trying a thing, then scrapping it and trying another thing. It’s why a lot of areas of the game feel half-done. Anet has so much potential and a lot of it is fulfilled, but everything just needs polished to make it a really great game. Festivals are part of the polish. For many people, they will see festival content and maps much more often than Bloodstone Fen or Ember Bay over the life of the game.

Hmm, did they also have to nerf the enemies too? There’s already power creep making it easier but now the bosses like the lich seem to have been completely defanged for no real reason.

This is my favorite holiday event, but I’m pretty disappointing there’s nothing new. Adding a few skins doesn’t count, I’m talking about activities.

Excelsior.

I know this is an// U.S.-based game (kitten filter) and yadda yadda yadda, but..
I do not want any more effort being put into Halloween. A big junk of Europeans* do not care about Halloween at all, and in fact, it’s nonsense and, as seen here and everywhere in the United States, just a cheap reason for commerce (Opposed to Día de los Muertos in Mexico for example, which also has a deeper meaning).

Have it some story, some “dark theme” (oooh!), whatever. But do not spend a couple of month for some trivial stuff like this. Yeah, oh, pumpkins everywhere, and bats, and music made with a Theremin. So new. This ain’t elementary school anymore.

(* Guess what, we are still here, paying in hard currencies!)

Thamriyell.5490:

Pretty Pixie.8603:

What Na said. Producing new content for a once a year festival is a wasteful use of resources, considering they have LS3 and an expansion to work on.

Square is able to […]

Square has a subscription based game, with a ridiculous overpriced cash shop (€30 for a costume/skin), charge €23 for shipping for a €65 lore book, the calendar (takes about €9 to produce) is the same price range, want €30 for the Fan Fest stream (that lagged hard on 720p for many people) and much, much more for the actual fan fest and charges you €60 for the core game and €60 for the expansion. They have cheap ingame cutscenes with you, the main character, being a mute, you have no real dubbing and voice acting, the story is awfully boring (one event in GW2 is worth 25 Fates easily, with voice acting, bits of lore and scripts) and lack so much in other departments that would cost money. But if you follow the forums, people are like “they have no moneyz for such nice things”. Of course you save A LOT of money this way. Serving some shiny treadmill for new iLevels and receive 45€ from the people meanwhile by collecting subscriptions for 3 months.

You basically pay a full-price title via subscription payment just to get like two dungeons in a patch in FF14. In order to stretch that boring content even further, they cap the Tomestones and everything else. Even Yoshida himself said that people should quit FF14 in between patch cycles….(!!!) That is awfully bad. The break-even point is reached with just a few ten-thousands units sold I guess.

They also have no real customer service (which is mostly like “Deal with it”) and a stale game that is not engaging at all, being all about memorizing patterns and literally months to clear one out of 13 stages of some dumb dungeon and awful EU service in the beginning – not to mention entire FF14 failed hard at the start and now they have an excuse to collect money with things that should be friggin in the game to begin with for a subscription MMO (heavy brathing… cough cough) With this money-making machine, I could also do make some cheesy Japanese Halloween event with walking bed sheets. Yeah, cool. Not really.

Actually, I have witnessed 2 Halloween events (played from 2013-2015) and they were all as described above: Boring nonsense and recycled stuff. Have fun with it, I do no like warmed-up microwave meals – or “Fan Service” as you would call it Oh wait, you are still here, posting on the forums, so…FF14 might not be as great as you claim? O_o gasp

Now compared that to this beautiful game here. ArenaNet does a great job and easily beats FF14 if you add everything together. For literally peanuts.

Galtrix.7369:

Batelle.1680:

Galtrix.7369:

Why should there be a need to choose between them when they should both be worked on? F2P games can do both at the same time.

Someone already answered this above- they’re working on the next expansion, too. I think you’re grossly underestimating the amount of effort it takes to maintain a game, plus create new live content (not just the LS3 maps, but the smaller event chains and things they’ve added over the past few months) AND new content for an EP.

Plus, I think they’ve mentioned before that some of the season one stuff isn’t easy to bring up to the new code. I would give anything to have the PvP games from the first Halloween back, but it is what it is. I trust that they’re not withholding things from us because they’re mean or lazy.

I’m a programmer myself, so I can estimate with a certain accuracy how long something should take to develop. I don’t think I’m grossly underestimating the effort that it takes to do both at the same time.

Anet has previously mentioned that armor sets take about 8 months to develop, and that is very, very suspicious to me. It may be something that’s completely unique to GW2 that makes it difficult to develop items/quests/armor/etc., but it shouldn’t take a massive amount of effort to create new holiday events.

And what have you released? Anything we played?

Can you fight the bloody prince this year? I’ve not gone to the citadel to check. There is no achievements for him this year, so there could be less this year.

Halloween is fun and they used to change it up despite having Living Story. Maybe the Development team has been downsized? I think they should keep all the old content in the Festival. Maybe add something new every couple of years. Look at all the different things you can do for Wintersday!

That said, I would like to see more Festivals.

Conncept.7638:

…
How exactly they have they become worse at pumping out content with time? It doesn’t make any sense, if anything they should have been improving and developing a more consistent pipeline over the last four years.

One word:

Expansions

And to make the counterarguments before they even pop up:
- For HoT, ANet had more devs working on the expansion than working on the core game. ANet is confirmed already working on the next expansion. There go most of the devs inherently. Even the dedicated WvW lead dev was pulled to work on expansion content, despite the ongoing “WvW Overhaul” that’s ANet’s “primary focus after HoT” according to MO.

- ANet has objectively fewer people working on the game than they did at launch. They contracted a massive number of developers to release the core game, like most major game companies do. Odds are, they had people working on making the festivals for Halloween and Wintersday before the game even launched.

- ANet’s revenue is the lowest it’s ever been. HoT was such a failure that the expansion cut regular profits by almost half. If they haven’t laid anyone off, I’d be genuinely surprised.

- As augmentation to the points above, ANet’s parent company, NCSoft, criticized HoT sales being poor and ANet’s revenue also poor. ANet has been told that it must release more expansions, faster, to uphold profits from those who remain. Therefore, there is even more emphasis on developer efforts to new expansions, rather than the core game.

- The remaining content developers are already making new LS content and have been for the past several months/since HoT. Fewer and fewer will be working on the core game as the next expansion approaches, leaving just a small maintenance team to make small QoL changes.

So yea, there are plenty of reasons why the game has less new content, and all of them make sense.

DeceiverX.8361:

Conncept.7638:

…
How exactly they have they become worse at pumping out content with time? It doesn’t make any sense, if anything they should have been improving and developing a more consistent pipeline over the last four years.

One word:

Expansions

And to make the counterarguments before they even pop up:
- For HoT, ANet had more devs working on the expansion than working on the core game. ANet is confirmed already working on the next expansion. There go most of the devs inherently. Even the dedicated WvW lead dev was pulled to work on expansion content, despite the ongoing “WvW Overhaul” that’s ANet’s “primary focus after HoT” according to MO.

- ANet has objectively fewer people working on the game than they did at launch. They contracted a massive number of developers to release the core game, like most major game companies do. Odds are, they had people working on making the festivals for Halloween and Wintersday before the game even launched.

- ANet’s revenue is the lowest it’s ever been. HoT was such a failure that the expansion cut regular profits by almost half. If they haven’t laid anyone off, I’d be genuinely surprised.

- As augmentation to the points above, ANet’s parent company, NCSoft, criticized HoT sales being poor and ANet’s revenue also poor. ANet has been told that it must release more expansions, faster, to uphold profits from those who remain. Therefore, there is even more emphasis on developer efforts to new expansions, rather than the core game.

- The remaining content developers are already making new LS content and have been for the past several months/since HoT. Fewer and fewer will be working on the core game as the next expansion approaches, leaving just a small maintenance team to make small QoL changes.

So yea, there are plenty of reasons why the game has less new content, and all of them make sense.

You may want to read through the recent AMAs concerning some of your points. It could be enlightening. =)

Good luck.

This Halloween event is so disappointing.
Yeah, sure, devs may (and do) have some problems, but this is worst Halloween event I see in mmos this year.
Story part? Forget about it. Go mindless farming on a map that is not even properly re-introduced. Catch-up for new players (and there are always some) to explain what happens around and happened before? Forget about it, go farming. Testing ahead on what few is added? Forget about it, we’ll fix bugs on the move. Cleaning leftovers (like dodge-jumps for puzzle or alike)? Who cares, eat couple new skins and go farming.

Jaken.6801:

I don`t mind recycling.
Halloween 2012 was an event. Something to be excited about.
Halloween 2013 was a step backwards, but it added to the experience

I agree with much of what you say, but at least in 2013 there was a new story (Bloody Prince). On top of that, his outfit was sold at the Gem Shop (I bought one). Then, he’s never to be seen again, so most current players have no idea who he is.

I have to say, I am disappointed with this years event.