Guild Wars 2

I need a bit of help here. I have not been playing Guild Wars 2 for quite awhile, but I found myself with some spare time this weekend and decided to get it updated and give it a go! So I jump in and check out the new Living Story content. Not really a fan of the aspect crystals and mobility challenges, but hey some people are so it’s all good. I take a couple of hours to explore, look around, run through all of that stuff. Everything seems to be right on pace.

Then, after I am finished with all of that, I look around for what is new since last I played. Dungeons? Nope. Fractals? Seem largely the same since Fractured. A quick question in general chat pointed out the Three-Headed Wurm world boss. Hopefully the forums can help me out with a bit more than that. What new content has been added over the last six months?

You missed it. Go to Lion’s Arch.

Fastest content release in the industry

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/

Go check out the new zone released last Tuesday.

So that is the extent of it then? One new world boss, a reorganizing of the ruined city of Lion’s Arch, and an hour or two worth of story instances in a new mini zone?

I don’t mean to sound dismissive, but is this really what ArenaNet considers content now? No new basic dungeons since launch, no new Fractals since November, nothing else new for people to run? Comparing this to what was done in Guild Wars I really have to wonder what is going on. There are several games in end-of-life development that get more content added to the game over six months than this!

Edited to remove some snark.

There’s been a few things since Fractured, off the top of my head:

• Triple-wurm boss in Bloodtide Coast (difficult world boss requiring large coordinated groups).
  New WvW map – The Edge of the Mists with various special features like destructible bridges and control points that give special bonuses.
• Ascended armor can be crafted.
• All the stuff in the Feature pack.

And then of course there’s the new map, new storyline and the achievements for each of them. Plus more coming next Tuesday.

Not as much as usual because they had a break for Christmas and then there was a gap between the end of Season 1 and the start of Season 2, but then everything from this point on will be permanent, which will hopefully make up for it over time.

Having said that though, if you don’t consider a new world boss, a new map and new story content I’d love to know what is.

RedShipRaider.9560:

I don’t mean to sound dismissive…

Too late, you’ve already done so with the title.

RedShipRaider.9560:

So that is the extent of it then? One new world boss, a reorganizing of the ruined city of Lion’s Arch, and an hour or two worth of story instances?

I don’t mean to sound dismissive, but is this really what ArenaNet considers content now? No new basic dungeons since launch, no new Fractals since November, nothing else new for people to run? Comparing this to what was done in Guild Wars I really have to wonder what is going on. There are several games in end-of-life development that get more content added to the game over six months than this!

Edited to remove some snark.

They have been busy revamping the Living Story, making the Feature Patch and releasing the game in China.
Yes, it’s not a lot of content to be added in 7 months, but it’s what we have.

Thankfully they have really upped their game, to the point where now the Living Story is becoming actual end game content.

I don’t understand how you can be surprised at the lack of new content. Since launch, content has been transient- impermanent. They’ve just developed the story journal so that people can access missed content, but it has required a massive overhaul with how the living story functions. So, stuff has happened since you’ve been gone, but most of it is no longer in the game. Nightmare tower, Marionette and defense of Lion’s Arch are all big events that have since gone away.

Guhracie.3419:

I don’t understand how you can be surprised at the lack of new content. Since launch, content has been transient- impermanent. They’ve just developed the story journal so that people can access missed content, but it has required a massive overhaul with how the living story functions. So, stuff has happened since you’ve been gone, but most of it is no longer in the game. Nightmare tower, Marionette and defense of Lion’s Arch are all big events that have since gone away.

They implied having only been gone for six months, so I think they may have caught Marionette and Tower of Nightmares.

Boneheart.3561:

Guhracie.3419:

I don’t understand how you can be surprised at the lack of new content. Since launch, content has been transient- impermanent. They’ve just developed the story journal so that people can access missed content, but it has required a massive overhaul with how the living story functions. So, stuff has happened since you’ve been gone, but most of it is no longer in the game. Nightmare tower, Marionette and defense of Lion’s Arch are all big events that have since gone away.

They implied having only been gone for six months, so I think they may have caught Marionette and Tower of Nightmares.

If they had caught those releases, then they would expect any subsequent releases to have been in the same manner, and know they would have been transitory. So, knowing most content delivered in that manner would not be permanent, why the surprise that the content is no longer there?

Lucky for the OP, moving forward, content will be available permanently, either at no cost for logging in when current, or purchased with Gems, if gone on a six-month hiatus!

Other games have trigger happy devs check them out. Ours keep missing the target.

A topic posing as a question that’s already been answered by the OP. Why the faux disbelief? You must’ve known about the lack of content. It’s obvious by your 2nd reply.

Anyway, welcome back to GW2, where the Living Story: Season 1, was mostly temporary, hence the lack of permanent additions.

They had 4 teams working on the Living Story, at any given time, and basically ignored traditional content udpates, such as dungeons, classes, races, zones, etc.

It was basically an ongoing learning lesson, which dramatically shifted GW2 into another direction, which became heavily story-driven. It tried to be a persistent changing world, instead of having the tradtional permanence found in other MMOs, where the zones, quests, mobs, etc., never change.

It somewhat succeeded, but at what cost? The mobs and events didn’t really change throughout the affected zones, except in some areas. Two years later, and we only have EotM, a couple SPvP maps, Triple Wurm (&Tequatl revamp), Fractals and Southsun Cove (these latter 2 were actually before the Living Story started).

I’d like to see you try and make new content and see how quickly you can do it.

biggest problem of living story 1 was being temporary content, so you can’t see 90% of the content that was added last year. gotta wait for the story journal to update and allow to replay living story 1.
Seems like a lot of resources were wasted on experimenting how to do the living story so the LS1 releases are a bit inconsistent in the amount of content delivered and less coherent when it comes to story and quality.
there should be more content coming tomorrow?

Michael Walker.8150:

biggest problem of living story 1 was being temporary content, so you can’t see 90% of the content that was added last year. gotta wait for the story journal to update and allow to replay living story 1.
Seems like a lot of resources were wasted on experimenting how to do the living story so the LS1 releases are a bit inconsistent in the amount of content delivered and less coherent when it comes to story and quality.
there should be more content coming tomorrow?

I don’t see it as a waste. This is unexplored territory for most MMOs. Anet is doing stuff no one else was doing. Not to the degree they were doing it certainly.

Since it’s never been tested, how is testing it a waste?

MMOs aren’t made for a month or even a year. They’re made for the stretch of time. Until you know what you can do, and what you can do, you pretty much can’t do anything but the same old thing.

Yep. I’m in the same boat, but longer time span. I left during the 1st Super Adventure Box. There just wasn’t much to do but farm dailies and grind Orr.

I figured ok, the game just needs time to grow and mature. I’m not impatient. So I figured a year later I’d hop back in and enjoy a over a year’s worth of new content. Nope. Apparently I missed some cool stuff, and I enjoy that they are making a dynamic world but it’s so incredibly unbalanced and plays against it’s own strength. The fact that the game is Buy To Play means people can easily go on hiatus when the content runs out and come back later.

When I came back the Festival of the Four Winds had a couple weeks left, but getting tokens was so grindy there wasn’t much of a point, since more content was about to just go away for at least a year. . . Oh well, I figured I’d check out the precursor scavenger hunt so I could finally get my Legendary. They had to at least have implemented that by now! I mean, the forums were lit up about how leaving Legendaries to RNG was massively unpopular and ANET had already said they were on it. Lol, nope.

Hell, even the Gem Shop Items just come and go. I would gladly dump a bunch of cash into the permanent harvesting tools.

Devoting nearly all of the content resources to one shot content in a game already very content light is just a bad idea. 25%, sure. After waiting a year, as a casual player, within two weeks it’s back to grinding dailies and Orr.

Also, it’s kind of annoying seasonal events like Dragon Bash skip years. I found out about it after it was gone last time, and part of the reason I came back was so I could see what I missed out on. Why not implement it this year? It’s not like it’s going to tie people up so they ignore the 1-2 hours of personal story released every two weeks.

Don’t get me wrong, in a lot of ways it’s a great game. But there have been some pretty horrible decisions and what seem like management mistakes along the way.

Hopefully Dry Top is the beginning of a focus on more permanent content. New maps, weapons, traits (build diversity seems to have really diminished as well), Dungeons, new Legendary Weapons/Armor, and non RNG Precursors.

The content updates in the past are episodic in nature. If you miss it, you missed it. The world and story moved on without you. They are fixing that sort of with Living Story 2. If you bother to log in once every two weeks to unlock that episode or if you miss it pay a small fee to unlock it, you can then replay it forever.

ViolaVoila, now you have permanent content.

Looks like you’ve been WAY out of the loop, otherwise you would know that LS Season 1 was all about constant updates with temporary content.

If you don’t like that, maybe you’ll enjoy Season 2 more, since it will all be permanent content.

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

RedShipRaider.9560:

So that is the extent of it then? One new world boss, a reorganizing of the ruined city of Lion’s Arch, and an hour or two worth of story instances?

I don’t mean to sound dismissive, but is this really what ArenaNet considers content now? No new basic dungeons since launch, no new Fractals since November, nothing else new for people to run? Comparing this to what was done in Guild Wars I really have to wonder what is going on. There are several games in end-of-life development that get more content added to the game over six months than this!

Edited to remove some snark.

They have been busy revamping the Living Story, making the Feature Patch and releasing the game in China.
Yes, it’s not a lot of content to be added in 7 months, but it’s what we have.

Thankfully they have really upped their game, to the point where now the Living Story is becoming actual end game content.

WAT!

good news is that living story can be replayed from this season. so if u miss something, you can do it later… for a fee of course:P

Don’t worry OP, there wasn’t much added with any real substance.

Teckos.1305:

WAT!

Think he means that you have to be level 80 to get credit for the Living Story, hence it can be considered end-game. Obviously if you aren’t 80 you upscale to 80 if you join someone who is doing the LS, but you don’t get the LS credit unless you are 80 I believe.

It is designed to take place after completion of the Personal Story, which would classify it as end-game as well.

Vayne.8563:

I don’t see it as a waste. This is unexplored territory for most MMOs. Anet is doing stuff no one else was doing. Not to the degree they were doing it certainly.

Since it’s never been tested, how is testing it a waste?

Because the resulting content was horrible and only got a little bit better towards the end, that’s why. they should (could?) have tested such mechanics before or during the game goes live, latter with an already produced and more conservative content running parallel perhaps.
They had nothing though, no clear idea where the story went and no clear idea how to implement these ideas, considering the intention of releasing episodic they should have paid way way way more attention to actually making sure that a coherency will emerge through both story and transitions between episodes.

And worst of all no back up plan whatsoever.

Just a lot of ideas in their concept phase at best, maybe as a mind map somewhere…
I expected them to already have somewhat polished content at the start of gw2, because anything else surely would lead to chaos, at least that was my thought based on any experience I have ever made in virtually any area of expertise; without proper preparation you are likely to run into a wall.

The thing is, they advertised GW2 with the idea of “regular, high quality content worth an expansion” and did also mention that this was possible without a subscription, which I naively believed in.

*I’m glad they found a better composition now and learned. *neglecting the fact that it used up most of their resources, they should have tested it in a smaller scope with beta testers. Just because of common sense and reasons mainly.

It just kittenes me off that developer nowadays release beta products and then have (paying) customers test it, it’s not the correct way to test in my opinion. For some design ideas there is no choice but to test it live, some things should have stopped in the concept phase…

However the content is free and at least the_quantity_of GW2 content at the start justified the price they asked for (50-ish $?), just.

I mean seriously, who’s idea was the temporary content? “Let’s make tv series like content” “great, let’s make it so you can’t rewatch older episodes!” “grea…wait what?”

Things like this don’t have to be tested. Or the Atlas, or Lore outside of the game…
The time they spent on this was simply wasted as the conclusions from their little test would have been available elsewhere.

Again, looks like we are in for better content now and if they rework the LS1 content within the story journal, it might reach the quality they were shooting for but missed so hard.
I’m quite happy with the current content. And all in all it was my mistake of having played parts of LS1 in the first place, would have sent a stronger message to the devs.

Some people, including me, just wanted to see GW2 actually revolutionize the genre in some ways which is still pending.

tl:dr have a great monday