Guild Wars 2

For those of you, like me, who rarely poke their heads out of this hole, I’d like to bring this to your attention. The devs have asked for our input regarding the Living World, and have promised to chime in and discuss it with us.

In this here lore forum, there has been much… shall we say, critique of that very aspect. I encourage all of you who’ve been active in past discussions here to make yourself heard on this new thread and reiterate your points. It’s very rare that an opportunity arises where the devs promise to pay attention to our concerns; don’t let it go to waste!

Thanks for the heads-up – I’m currently drafting a response. Hopefully, it won’t be buried beneath several dozen pages before I can complete it.

Yeah, I wrote mine right after the post went up, I made page 2. It’ll get buried drax, but you’ll quickly see most everyone is saying the same things.

Fyi, Bobby Stein posted a nice lengthy reply in the thread. Great read, restores a little faith.

Not much, to me, since all it really said is “we hear you, and looking back this is what I wish we did” with the old promises he made before with a reminder we won’t see change for months due to how they develop things. But no mention of how they intend to improve things, just that “we’re working on it” more or less.

Which page was Bobby’s reply on?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Collaborative-Development-Topic-Living-World/page/10#post3115999 This was his first post.

The first step to fixing a problem, is to first admit there IS a problem. I give credit for that. I truly hope their solutions come from good planning and not from this week’s episode of pokemon. I still have hope.

Thanks Konig.

Updated dev replies on pgs 16-18

A bit disappointed that ANet is still firmly committed to the idea of the two week release schedule, although Chris seemed to soften his stance on the next few pages (“well, if it REALLY doesn’t work out, we’re keeping our options open”). I am heartened to see that they have noticed that the amount of stuff to do with each Living Story is taking time away from players to do “regular content” though. My progress through the Personal Story and open world exploration has slowed to a crawl ever since the Living Story came out.

For the record, I think Konig’s suggestion for permanent server-dependent changes to the world is a great idea, and I wish they would do something with that idea.

But I didn’t suggest that by your wording (or rather, I how I read your wording which is “different servers get different results based on per-server interaction”), just changes dependent on the players’ actions using a per-server as a means of showing to the players the progress of said actions (since I doubt there’s an easy way of cross-server player-visible bars).

Konig Des Todes.2086:

But I didn’t suggest that by your wording (or rather, I how I read your wording which is “different servers get different results based on per-server interaction”), just changes dependent on the players’ actions using a per-server as a means of showing to the players the progress of said actions (since I doubt there’s an easy way of cross-server player-visible bars).

My apologies if I misunderstood. But as I interpreted it, you suggested that Living Story can have a different outcome on each server, based on how the players as a collective work together to resolve it.

Any way, I think the core thing I like about what you brought up is simply the idea that we can make a difference; that the outcome isn’t set in stone. There can be multiple ways to implement this core concept, but the idea itself is what I really like. I hope the Living Story team takes that to heart.

I also think that being able to see how far your server is progressing is a good initiative, but I hope it wouldn’t get too grindy. Currently for example, a lot of players are ignoring the Scarlet invasions that sporadically appear. That’s because unless you have a ton of people like we initially had, you won’t beat those events anyway, and it doesn’t really have any impact on the Living Story anyway. This would of course change if there were status bars that showed the safety of a particular zone. Maybe a server must prevent a zone from falling under Scarlet’s controls within a certain month. Or maybe the server simply collects the efforts of all the players and adds them to the collective progress of the server.

It would be neat to log in and see in-accessible zones, with only the zone entrances being a foothold (kinda like wvw borderlands). Maybe having players need to hold areas within the zone in order to take the zone back. Maybe have a 24-48hr timeframe to do it so that multiple timezones can participate. Even if it was a weekly thing, I think that would be pretty cool. Not exactly a 1 time event, but infrequent enough that it could retain some special-ness. Could play well with dragon champ attacks…

Having areas where just the entrances are footholds is basically what Orr is, cept you got an area in the center that’s often a permanent camp too, in order to aid with waypointing. Most people don’t like it.

Kinda funny how people ask for “new designs” in the game, expecting them to be great, but… they’re already in the game in some form, just not the form they’re thinking of, and they’re disliked to varying degrees.

I know it sounds like Orr, but I was actually thinking more along the lines of the current invasions. Only let the regions of the zone be occupied till liberated and held, ssort of like WvW only a bit longer on the holding. Having it be active for 2 days makes it more impactful than the current invasions, but not as permanent as Orr. Also using enemies that are indigenous to the region affected would add a bit more flavor. For example centaurs or bandits or pirates attacking the krytan areas, flame legion, ghosts or branded for charr etc. Also the fact that it would only take place once (randomly) per week/month would keep it from becoming stale content as fast as other things that have been implemented.
More like uprisings versus invasions, not linked together, no triad or alliance if convenience. Just kittened off enemy NPCs on rampage.

Personally I would make it like this:

Over the course of a month, players are able to affect the course of a Living Story arch, and determine the final result for their server. It’s a cooperative effort, that can cause certain explorables to remain permanently altered. Take what happened to Kessex Hills for example. If a server succeeds in driving off the Toxic Alliance, maybe Kessex Hills returns to normal, and the tower falls into ruin. Or perhaps a server fails, and the corruption spreads to other zones. But I wouldn’t want this to be a weekly grind, that resets a few weeks later. When I say permanently altered, I do mean permanently. Because then there are actual consequences to our actions, and players will feel like they made a difference. This is exactly what they talked about in their Manifesto before, but we have yet to see it.

In some ways I like this, but then I can only imagine what would happen when the next Tequatl-esque LS comes out and makes another Dragon Champ impossible on most servers. Giving players on certain servers no hope or possibility of making their world better just doesn’t make this game good in anyway.

I don’t think the raid-designed content like Tequatl should be used as a means for this. It should be stuff capable of being completed by small groups or even solo and should be scaled to the server’s population.

Much easier said then done.

One, it would put a huge workload on the developers. Each time they make content, they would have to personally fit it to the decisions of each server. And as each server gets more diverse, the longer it would take them to put out content. Every more so, if one server’s previous actions come in conflict with the newest LS. The same problems happens from games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. The more decisions and/or outcomes that are available, the harder it is to write the story respecting them all.

For example, let’s say only half of the servers drive out the Toxic Alliance, but after a year’s time; a new force would invade Kessex Hills, maybe the Destroyers. That means that half the servers get TA vs. Destroyers content, while the other servers get just Destroyers. Needless to say, some of the community would be very upset with that.

Which moves onto the second problem. What happens when people and servers are stuck with choices they don’t want? People can’t play everyday, and small servers might have a harder time completing the necessary events to change the LS outcomes. Even more so, if a good portion of a small servers population is logged off most of the day, and when they do get on; they don’t have the time or patience to do large scale LS events.

Unless they make server transfers free, should they get stuck with permanent LS changed they don’t want?

Erukk has a good point. As interesting a concept as it is, I think it would just be too much work for the devs going forward.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I don’t think the raid-designed content like Tequatl should be used as a means for this. It should be stuff capable of being completed by small groups or even solo and should be scaled to the server’s population.

It should be a combined effort of the whole server, but at the same time each guild makes a difference. I had been saying for ages that World Event shouldn’t just happen in one single spot. It should be in a battle line which a single human zerg should have no chance of winning. The players must spread across the whole map and fight and win their section/sector of the map.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Battle_of_Kosovo_plan.png

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/a/jal5056/Gettysburg_Battle_Map_Day3.png

They can also make World Events zone by zone. Its similar to Company of Heroes. Let’s say the humans have to defend zones A,B, and C. Losing zone C might mean the collapse of the whole front. The battles would be street to street, house to house.

http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/9268/advancedtacmap.png

I’ve honestly proposed something similar to that, having multi-zone battle fronts where players can, in effect, push the boundaries of war for increasing rewards and difficulty. If the players wanted they could push the centaurs out of Queensdale and the remaining hearts would deal with healing the land, building new fortifications, helping farmers start harvesting from their old homesteads, and dealing with the remaining threats (skritt, ettins, drakes, skale, UW portals, etc…). Of course, I didn’t expect them to do something like that with a living world update, it would be a major game overhaul, but in the end it would give the players a greater feeling of accomplishment for your actions and give players more reasons to return to lower level regions. I mean I know if I saw that the Flame Legion were pounding on the gates of the Black Citadel, I’d join in the fight and push them back to the Citadel of Flame, or join the humans in an effort to push out the bandits that eventually turns into a coalition to push the Sinister Triad all the way back to their citadel in Brisban Wildlands.