Guild Wars 2

I honestly do not know what ArenaNets though process behind this temporary content shenanigan.

As they have claimed, teams put around 4 months of work into each release, so why do these teams hard work only stay for two weeks and never heard of again?
Not only is it degrading to the team to know that the content that they put effort into is only going live for a few weeks and many people will not be able to experience it, but also the fact that you are wasting money on something temporary…

Dumping money into something that doesn’t increase the overall quality of the game as a whole (excluding some bug fixes).

Stuff like F&F dungeon would have been great additions to the game as a permanent thing but no instead its down the trash after its “time”.

What are you trying to achieve? I guess I will never find out…

Living breathing world . Did you get it ? Cuz personally I didn’t ..

There’s plenty that goes into running a game that isn’t immediately apparent. For example, the more dungeons you have, the less people you have doing each dungeon. People who love dungeons think that dungeon runners are the bulk of the population but I don’t think that’s the case. Moreso, I don’t think it’s ever been the case.

So less dungeons mean more people doing each. In games with tons of dungeons, you have older dungeons that never get done (much like story mode here), in favor of the more popular dungeons that people do all the time.

By limiting dungeons to a time limit, Anet controls traffic. They get people doing the content and then they get people doing different content. Because of achievements, people who would have never done the content in the first place might be tempted to do it, and some do. I’ve seen that in my guild.

Just imagine a multiplayer game with thousands of dungeons. There are already dungeons and dungeon paths that people hardly ever run. Put in a popular new dungeon and everyone will run it and forget about the old dungeons.

Anet has said more than once they’re against dividing the game’s population too much. It’s one of the reasons they used for having only one type of SPvP and another reason they gave for not having stand alone expansions like the original factions.

One of the key things about MMOs is that everyone is interested in who else is playing. No one wants to start playing an MMO that no one is playing. By directing traffic, Anet gets to show people that people are playing their game, in significant numbers…and that’s good for everyone.

Because if Anet didn’t do some traffic direction, and everyone spread out doing whatever they wanted, I think the world would end up looking pretty lonely. It’s a big world. They need lots of players out in it.

Whilst I understand that, it inevitably will happen anyway. If we speculate that one day Elona and Cantha are added to a fully mapped Tyria…the population will spread out anyway. It’s extremely difficult to manage traffic – players don’t generally like being managed. They want the feeling of being able to go where and do what they want.
GW1 added massive amount of content and although it’s a diff game and ppl were more city confined for congregating, it didn’t suffer as they added more.

Also, keeping the content in game is a good way to retain and more importantly attract more ppl and thus balance out the population a bit. I’ll prob get flamed, but GW2 has a strong amount of launch content – if it kept everything that has been released over the year – incl the dungeons, SAB, Bazaar…it would only enhance the product as a marketing. Not only are they busting a gut to get content out every 2 weeks, but hey you get to play it whenever you want!

Festivals and competitive activities are the exception – in fact the rotating activity was the best way to handle those.

I’m not against the Living World, but I prefer to see things like the way Tower and TA were handled (ie changes) than the way Bazaar, SAB, F&F were handled (ie removed)

The thing is, if you just purely do temporary content, it’s very hard to get old players back. People leave game’s when they get bored of doing the same things over and over and come back when more content is released, temporary content does not provide this.

Also, there’s a potential serious concern in terms of staff morale. To the devs, sometimes the content they make is their baby. Watching it just gets used as filler then getting removed without a trace can be disheartening. I wouldn’t be surprised if people resigned at Anet for that reason.

Also, why would the devs bother putting effort into a project if it’s just going to go poof in 2 weeks?

I doubt very much any of the past LS content has gone "poof"as one of the poster above suggests. It would be all stored on their database and don’t be surprised if u see some of that stuff return, perhaps in a different form but still.

I have to agree though, too much temp content isn’t good for a game. An MMO in particular has to keep growing to keep their players entertained. As beautiful as it is the limited amount of Tyria we see now, it eventually gets taken for granted when u see it time and time again. People stop looking and rush about (as i see them do all the time nowadays and do it myself too) as there isn’t much new stuff to see.

Believe it or not, people can even get sick of paradise, as Tyria first appeared to me. To give u an example, A number of years ago, all i dreamed about was living on The Great Barrier Reef. So i moved there and lived in a most gorgeous area, a paradise to be sure, but after seeing the same places over and over for several years, i got bored of it and moved away again.

So i feel that if Anet wants to keep their players, they need to open up this massive land of Tyria and so what if players get spread out? They are spread out now anyway. Well not so much spread out as being funneled into certain areas/events which still gives the feeling of many zones being unpopulated.

New expansions, new zones bring in new player and many of them will start from scratch, so in fact you may see many of those currently empty zones actually being played.

Vayne.8563:

There’s plenty that goes into running a game that isn’t immediately apparent. For example, the more dungeons you have, the less people you have doing each dungeon. People who love dungeons think that dungeon runners are the bulk of the population but I don’t think that’s the case. Moreso, I don’t think it’s ever been the case.

So less dungeons mean more people doing each. In games with tons of dungeons, you have older dungeons that never get done (much like story mode here), in favor of the more popular dungeons that people do all the time.

By limiting dungeons to a time limit, Anet controls traffic. They get people doing the content and then they get people doing different content. Because of achievements, people who would have never done the content in the first place might be tempted to do it, and some do. I’ve seen that in my guild.

Just imagine a multiplayer game with thousands of dungeons. There are already dungeons and dungeon paths that people hardly ever run. Put in a popular new dungeon and everyone will run it and forget about the old dungeons.

Anet has said more than once they’re against dividing the game’s population too much. It’s one of the reasons they used for having only one type of SPvP and another reason they gave for not having stand alone expansions like the original factions.

One of the key things about MMOs is that everyone is interested in who else is playing. No one wants to start playing an MMO that no one is playing. By directing traffic, Anet gets to show people that people are playing their game, in significant numbers…and that’s good for everyone.

Because if Anet didn’t do some traffic direction, and everyone spread out doing whatever they wanted, I think the world would end up looking pretty lonely. It’s a big world. They need lots of players out in it.

The world is still lonely, even with Anet’s attempt at traffic direction. I got so tired of barely seeing anyone out in the world that I just transferred servers. And guess what? I literally, and this is no joke, saw more people in 3 minutes on tarnished coast than I did in 6 months on gate of madness. And gate of madness is a high population server. I don’t know what Anet is thinking about that, but they sure aren’t helping the population of the game. So many people have transferred to the three big servers that every other server is left with an extremely small amount of players. And with no responses from Anet on suggestions to merge the servers, it looks like Anet is either ignoring us or stalling to come up with a better idea. The only thing Anet can show ATM is that people are playing and transferring to the 3 big servers. I bet not a single person has transferred from one of the 3 big servers to a smaller one…. Why? Because it makes no sense to do that. I don’t know what Anet is doing but it sure isn’t directing traffic.

The reason is to keep people logging in every month, which also leads more people to buying the also temporary gem shop items, which of course always come along with the Living Story updates..

And these sorts of manipulative tactics to dictate when and how people play the game are why I’m kind of getting sort of fed up with this game, despite liking the core gameplay. Not to mention that one one hand, they seem to want to make the game about collecting cosmetic items, but on the other, they want to make it impossible to keep up with that endeavor unless people eat, live, and breathe this game. That stuff might work for a while, but eventually, some people are just going to say, “Screw it,” and find something else to play where, perhaps with the exception of holiday content, they can genuinely do everything at their own pace, and not have to constantly have this mindset of, “I need to do this now before it is gone forever in two weeks.”

You literally cannot stop playing this game for a month without missing something that presumably will never return. It’s kind of ridiculous. I cannot think of a single other game that does this. I’m sure they are out there (probably some portion of the plethora of low budget Asian MMOs, if I had to guess), but I haven’t played them.

If this sort of business model is the future of MMOs, I think I am done with them after this one. I’m rather torn about whether to stop playing this one altogether or not, as it is. I think that if I had known they were going to do down this path at the start, though, I would have never allowed myself to get reeled into this game in the first place. I suppose it was already a bad sign when they had the unlock-one-dye-per-24-hours thing back in the first beta weekend event, where you could pay gems to bypass the wait. Then of course there were the RNG Halloween chests, and anyone who has been here from the start knows how well that went over. There was the stealth nerf of Black Lion Key drops (post-launch, of course) – not really a major thing, given how dumb Black Lion Chest drops are anyway, but it’s indicative of the general mindset of how to monetize this game. By the way, those Black Lion Chests are entirely pointless except as a bit of psychological manipulation. It’s only the keys that matter. The market is so flooded with chests that the ownership of one is practically arbitrary. They are just meant to give you the itch to “unlock” them like Team Fortress 2‘s crates or various other similar schemes. They could have just as easily sold the (unlocked) chests in the gem shop. Oh, and let’s not forget perhaps the most egregious offender of all (which I admittedly did purchase myself, with gold), the infinite continue coin. I think I’d just rather pay a subscription than deal with all of this nonsense, and I say that as someone who has enough gold to buy all of the dumb gem shop stuff I want without spending a real dime on gems. (Not caring much about legendary weapons helps.)

I was told this game was going to respect the player’s time, but I guess they were splitting hairs in some odd way, because with a large chunk of the content and “rewards,” such as they are (generally dull compared to what is in the gem shop), only being in the game for two weeks, this game doesn’t even respect the player’s schedule.

I am kind of reluctant to post this, because I still genuinely think this is a great game. Unfortunately, I think its potential is being chipped away at little by little by having business decisions dictate the content design.

Randulf.7614:

Whilst I understand that, it inevitably will happen anyway. If we speculate that one day Elona and Cantha are added to a fully mapped Tyria…the population will spread out anyway. It’s extremely difficult to manage traffic – players don’t generally like being managed. They want the feeling of being able to go where and do what they want.

I’m not 100% sure this is true. A certain type of player doesn’t want to be told where to go and what to do, but in my experience, far more players want to be told exactly where to go and what to do. Think of it in terms of sandbox vs. theme park. Sandbox gives you more freedom, but generally has a lower player base. You need more time/energy/focus/intelligence to really participate in a sandbox. Many people get home from work, have a couple of hours to kill and really have to be told where is the best place to kill them.

But beyond that, if people aren’t given a place to gather, they’ll often make a place to gather themselves. I’ve seen this again and again in MMOs. If there is no where where people congregate, they’ll pick a place and congregate there.

Particularly in MMOs, people love to see other people.

The reason for temporary content.

Can easily be rehashed at a later date for little effort and advertised as new content. Especially the recurring content.

There’s very little point to temp content IMO.

Theres no reason for old players to return because they ‘ll still have the same gane that they left and current players will experience change even with perm content. It’s a lose-lose situation.