Guild Wars 2

Since that portion of the forum seems to be archived…

It’s time to add new zones. No one likes the living story at this point as you have done nothing but create boring grinds. I have not spoken to a single person who is content with the games current status, and we need new zones to explore. Server communities and guilds are starting to die off due to stagnant game play, and more will go once the first round of 2014 games launch.

Why has there been no real new content? Why do you continue to remove things like the Bazaar and Adventure Box when the content is in place and would help make our days more interesting? It’s like you want your game to die.

Please add new zones as soon as possible so we can get back to enjoying the game. Before anyone replies, try and have over a years worth of playing this game under your belt first so you know where I am coming from.

Hi! I’m cedo. Now that we’ve met….I enjoy the LS and the release cadence now in effect. I think SAB only being available at certain times is good. Most permanent things seem to lack population, so when content comes back every so often, it seems fresh. The Bazaar was fun. I look forward to its return. Not sure I would spend time there every day, were it available.

New zones will be fun to explore. I hope they won’t go the way of most zones in the game.

Now, you’ve met someone who is content! Yay!

Hi I’m Vayne, and I like the living story. My wife does too. So do some of my guild mates. There’s a buzz of excitement in the guild before each living story update.

And while I’d welcome new zones, I STILL like the living story and would be sad for it to go away. The living story serves a purpose even if it doesn’t serve your purpose.

And zones aren’t full to overflow on patch days because no one likes it.

While I’m sure they are happy to know some people are content with simplistic and minimal content updates you can’t judge the merit of a release by its patch day attendance, you see how active it is two weeks later.

If you have a more active server than mine, congratulations. No one runs it actively on mine as it’s the same loot grind as the previous patch. I see more activity at Claw of Jormag or Shatterer than Teq or Scarlet, every day.

I’m not saying the Living Story system is a failure, just that it’s not a crutch to prop a game up. We need large areas to explore instead of another year of the same event rotation, just like in GW1, so we can enjoy more of the lore, environment, and challenges.

Well, see that’s the fallacy. Anet has said that they’re quite happy with the numbers of people logging in for this new stuff. If it wasn’t working, one would think they’d not use it. But it clearly is working.

If you were a business and started doing something that costs money (and clearly having four teams working on living story does cost money) and it wasn’t paying off, wouldn’t you change it? Of course you would.

Anet did change it. They went from one month releases to two week releases, because it gets people playing and excited it works.

I’d sure trust Anet’s metrics over the observations of any single person on the forums. Metrics aren’t always 100% but they’re sure better than annecdotal evidence supplied by random forum users.

I think they are still looking for a balance for the living story. Both the persistent and the Onetime content expansion in a livingstory fashion can have a place in GW2. And it’s the change of spices that makes people eat (or atleast that is a saying in my country, ‘freely translated into english’). The same goes with the pace of things, for some it is too fast, for others it can’t come fast enough.

Now the pace has been changed just before the wintersday event, so going into the new year we should have a slightly slower pace, with an overlap period, if I am not mistaken. It will be nice to see if I feel less stressed out about skipping a day or two, in regards to being able to finish the actual content.

Another duly noted point is the balance between persistent and ‘one-time’ events on Tyria. Here I will agree that the Scarlet content may have been running to long for being temporary content. On the other hand, some other players complain about empty zones appearing (maybe due to the LS concentrating ppl, or maybe because people scatter all over) meaning that creating more zones will lead to even more empty places (waypoints don’t help there either).

As far as persistence goes, here I see the biggest point, while temporary events can leave persistent marks, they may not leave persistent content. This content though, doesn’t have to be ‘new zones’, it could be new persistent stories, f/e linked to the order of your choice, or linked to events on maps… and largely take place in the existing world/map, some stages perhaps ‘hidden’ in these small instances…

There is a huge potential to do more than temporary stuff, and on that specific part I agree with you (@OP), but I do not agree that the LS is an uninteresting boring grind, the story telling needs some balance as to how long stories last, and in which way they are adding to the game…

Zones need reviving before new ones are added.

I’m just going to respond to some of the key things I noticed. To much wall and my response would be a novel.

1- The 2-week patches were nothing more than a large patch broken up so unfortunately that doesn’t mean much. They are clearly trying to figure out what to do with the living story and sadly keep making new content for it rather than ending a shallow story with no character.

2- My guild mates get hyped as well, when its a new world boss or there’s a balance coming. Don’t mistake patch hype for living story hype.

3- The problem with empty zones is a lack of fresh content and new players/current players leveling new characters. The latter can be achieved by providing fresh content because as players continue playing they want to try new things. I hated leveling alts and I’m on my 4th because the old zones are more fun than this living story.

They can introduce a set of new world bosses for the levels of those zones, not 80s, and that will give the trains more places to go. You will never get the champ trains to stop, and they populate the zones more often than not compared to people leveling there. The same goes for living story content, people only show up when its happening so they achieve nothing greater than my idea.

4- I work for a large electronics company and believe me, they will keep doing what they think is right because they already made a killing off the gem store. People log in because they stopped awhile back, see a new patch and think “I’ll check that out”, and then they don’t log in after patch day. Just check out the lag from patch days compared to every other day, it’s not even close to as active.

5- Persistent content and regularly updating it is always better than temporary content. GW1 is the best example with how to run temp content, you cycle festivals and parties each year. You make it and get to forget it for 6 months allowing your teams to focus on crucial persistent content. Festival launches, patch if needed, and 6 months later you discuss a new addition to it and add it.