Guild Wars 2

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend with these Living Story updates.

Players don’t seem to believe in reading.

See every patch people complain about not knowing where to go or what to do. And I’ll admit that for a while in the beginning they did a pretty bad job informing us in game. But now we get a detailed mail in game at the start of every patch telling us where to go to get started. You do the thing there and then the Gold panel in the corner updates with where to go next.

But players don’t seem to want to read that.

It seems that many players need the game to literally reach through their screen and slap them with the information.

I think one of the issues is that it’s actually difficult to realise when the text in the information panel has changed.

I’ve noticed with this living story update that there are times when I suddenly looked at the UI and noticed that there were new instructions. This is the kind of information that need to be delivered in game really. The issue is that there is no direct starting point, e.g. talk to this NPC in Lions Arch or whatever, so people lose a sense of progressing through the content and the story.

The achievements panel doesn’t help in that respect because people resort to that to figure out what to do, and because there is are progressing steps they come against parts that they can’t do because they haven’t done the previous part – and so they’re left not knowing what they’re meant to do/have meant to have done.

That is “in game”, look it should be fairly simple. How did you handle the personal story? You looked at what it told you to do, you went and did it, and then you said great, thats done, let me look again and see whats next. Its the same system, its just yellow instead of green

yeah, i was kinda baffled at the amount of people that seemed completely lost. i looked at the top right, it had instructions. i click on them, they show me where to go. i do what they told me to, the instructions got updated.

it’s not that hard, people.

I missed one or more of the updates, as upon updating it gave a short sound and a flash of light. In the middle of a fight, like the one in the mari lanes, it can be hard to tell exactly what the source of those were. Never mind that i don’t recall the entries being individually interactive before.

…or you can ask other people in game for information…they are part of the game too you know.

The problem with the latest release was that the in game UI told you an exact waypoint to go to for both the marionette and the jungle worm, but when you arrived there, if the event was not in progress it would seem like you were at the wrong place. No NPCs explaining the situation, no timer, nothing. After a few days this is less of an issue because people can help out in map chat, but on patch day, I read up on everything but was still confused about where to go and if I was in the right place.

The yellow stars told me to go to the Vigil camp in Bloodtide & the Marionette in Lornar’s Pass. my problem was:
It did not indicate when to go to the “L.A. meeting in the harbour” and when to go to the secret lair (or perhaps that was kind of buggy on the release day).

IIRC from a Dev post, those two stars appear after you participated in one of those world events.
It would have been better using mechanics from the past to guide us along:
>> send us an in-game mail, telling us that the mysterious probes are now guarded and we should investigate – which would have led to the first two achievements possible.
>> Lock the Secret Lair achievement in the beginning
>> send us a an in-game mail asking to meet up with old friends in LA after the first (non-) successful encounter with the Marionette or Wurm
>> make the meeting instance end with an LS achievement (you never know when it is over). IIRC it was mentioned that Scarlet hid under the nose of the Priory, so…
>> unlock Secret Lair achievement

Gorani.7205:

The yellow stars told me to go to the Vigil camp in Bloodtide & the Marionette in Lornar’s Pass. my problem was:
It did not indicate when to go to the “L.A. meeting in the harbour” and when to go to the secret lair (or perhaps that was kind of buggy on the release day).

Technically it did, but in a very easy to miss manner. Upon taking part in a relevant event there would be a flash of light and a ding sound when the text for one of the two markers in the LS sidebar entries changed to the LA meeting one.

But nothing remained lit on the sidebar, so if you were not looking at it as the effect happened there was nothing to indicate where the effect came from.

So if before you had counted two entries, and you still counted two entries, nothing short of reading said entries a second time would tell you that one of them had actually changed.

For what its worth, the NPCs on the platform with the big chest after Marionette do talk about heading back to Lion’s Arch, so that’s a hint besides just the UI.

That said, you only get to the platform if you win, but the instance opens up as long as you participate (win or lose) so its a bit flawed in that regard. Also, with all the people up there it can be hard to tell what they’re saying, especially if you’re trying to read the text and not listen to the vocals.

Electro.4173:

For what its worth, the NPCs on the platform with the big chest after Marionette do talk about heading back to Lion’s Arch, so that’s a hint besides just the UI.

That said, you only get to the platform if you win, but the instance opens up as long as you participate (win or lose) so its a bit flawed in that regard. Also, with all the people up there it can be hard to tell what they’re saying, especially if you’re trying to read the text and not listen to the vocals.

Don’t that make the whole event a massive paradox? I only got to complete the event long after i had fully cleared out the lab and assembled the journal.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I think one of the issues is that it’s actually difficult to realise when the text in the information panel has changed.

I’ve noticed with this living story update that there are times when I suddenly looked at the UI and noticed that there were new instructions. This is the kind of information that need to be delivered in game really. The issue is that there is no direct starting point, e.g. talk to this NPC in Lions Arch or whatever, so people lose a sense of progressing through the content and the story.

The achievements panel doesn’t help in that respect because people resort to that to figure out what to do, and because there is are progressing steps they come against parts that they can’t do because they haven’t done the previous part – and so they’re left not knowing what they’re meant to do/have meant to have done.

What about the harolds in lions arch you could talk to them and they would read you up on stuff. Problem is most people don’t even know what is in game cause you have to go explore and find it for your self. So much ambient conversations are missed.

or did they get rid of them

I managed to follow along with the prompts in the upper right, but I did have to expand them frequently as the text was usually covered by the box for daily/monthly achievements and nearby DE. Having it ‘locked’ to an open position would probably help and make it easier to track.

This reaction is not something unique to MMOs. People are excrutiatingly lazy when it comes to ‘getting information’ by anything other than standing around and having everything shoved into their faces

I remember that we usually get some NPC conversations at the end of particular story steps giving us a clue about what to do next. I do admit that this is difficult with the marionette fight, but hey, even in other events people just don’t listen.

Dra Keln.2015:

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend with these Living Story updates.

Players don’t seem to believe in reading.

See every patch people complain about not knowing where to go or what to do. And I’ll admit that for a while in the beginning they did a pretty bad job informing us in game. But now we get a detailed mail in game at the start of every patch telling us where to go to get started. You do the thing there and then the Gold panel in the corner updates with where to go next.

But players don’t seem to want to read that.

It seems that many players need the game to literally reach through their screen and slap them with the information.

Content that needs to be explained that way, (and still manages to confuse many), is just plain bad content design. It’s also a full 180 from content promised by the GW2 Manifesto. Remember the interviews during development about Dynamic Events and one of the benefits of their content strategy being that you just explore the world and experience content, rather than having to read a wall of text or resort to using the web to figure out what to do and where to go?

The truly disturbing trend has been the relentless cheapening of this incredible game with horrible Living Story content.