Guild Wars 2

Hey there. Some people here may recognize my name from posts in the past, others might not. I don’t think I post all too often, but when I do I usually make some pretty substantial posts. But something has been bothering me as of late. The community here in Guild Wars 2 has been incredibly volatile, not only on the side of those who don’t like Living World, but also those who do like it.

I guess my main reason for making this thread, is that I want to have a discussion. I want to have a discussion where each and every one of us can sort of get our feelings out and discuss them. For example, those who do not like Living World say that it doesn’t produce enough content, or that it doesn’t produce the right, or satisfying content. Those who support Living World say it does produce enough content, or that it does produce the right, or satisfying content.

So what constitutes satisfying content? What constitutes enough content? Some seem to say that each release lasts only an hour, and when you bring up the non-story related things, they say that doesn’t count. Others say it does count. Where do you stand, and why? Does it not count because it’s grind? What would count?

And there seem to be other things. For example, some complain about the breaks, saying that it leads to boredom. Others think the breaks allow them to focus more on other things, which is a positive thing. In some cases, someone may just be rather neutral about it.

And on top of that, we have people who say the story is interesting, and those who say it’s uninteresting. We have people who say ArenaNet is incompetent, while others think differently. So what is your position? What is your stance on the Living World, and where do you think ArenaNet should take the game? Perhaps they should keep the Living World but add an expansion on top of that? Or perhaps they should just eliminate Living World altogether?

Whatever your thoughts may be, I made this thread to discuss these very different, opposing viewpoints, in the hopes that we can perhaps see what motivates those on the other side of the fence to argue from their position. What makes them see the game the way they do?

Discuss!

Am I the only one thinking that going into Christmas with no exciting content is a bad business decision? Imagine if drytop or silverwaste released today. It just seems like very poor planning. They instead drop recycled Wintersday content… an old ugly wool hat. I suppose this could be taken as a good sign. They must be so far in the black they are comfortable taking a substantial break with nothing new or exciting.

I can only speak for my self, but I think people who get bored by the Living World (including my self) is in need of a model like the old GW. I worked very well with a new expansion once a year or half year. We got new areas to explore freely – no-one forcing us to flock to one new map once a week. We got a few new professions with every expansions (except EotN), and it added a huge amount of new content to the game, enough that you never got bored with it.

The living world also add some content, but it gets old really fast, and you have to wait a few weeks for the next, its really not worth it. I also got to the point where I only log in once a forthnight to do the new content. Really, theres no diversity to the the chars either – same skills, same maps, same everything. zzz

jason.2043:

They must be so far in the black they are comfortable taking a substantial break with nothing new or exciting.

Or maybe they just want to spend time with their families over the holidays, instead of frantically trying to churn out the last LS episode and respond to inevitable bugs?

In response to the OP, I’ll keep it brief: Living Story is a fine and interesting method of delivering content that, despite vehement dissent from a very vocal minority, has proven quite successful. I don’t foresee ANet moving away from this model for GW2 anytime soon, and I’m perfectly willing to accept that and play whatever they release, as much as I want to and no more.

If you find that there is not enough content in the game for you, you need to take a step back and consider that maybe you’re just playing too much.

Andred.1087:

jason.2043:

They must be so far in the black they are comfortable taking a substantial break with nothing new or exciting.

Or maybe they just want to spend time with their families over the holidays, instead of frantically trying to churn out the last LS episode and respond to inevitable bugs?

Maybe. In that case they should have prepared the pacing of the story better. It’s not like they couldn’t have planned for it beforehand, and yet it still looks as if the Wintersday’s coming had completely surprised them.

I just want people to stop saying “Living Story.” It’s “Living World,” kitten it!

Just some quick thoughts, here.

It’s a wise decision to space out the content in the way they’ve done Living Story. WoW learned their lesson with Burning Crusade. The heaviest users finished their content in under a few months, content that had taken years to produce. And Living Story releases aren’t too badly paced. While it’s active, its two-week release schedule means that the story content comes at a reasonable pace, while the bonus material stays available as a time-grinder. While I could agree that the actual primary content has a habit of being short, there’s at least a little replay value. (Or there would be if they would let us bypass the story parts for the challenges.)
Assessment: I’m fairly satisfied. I don’t have to rush to do the content as it happens, and I finish fast enough that the next week becomes a whatever-I-want game again.

I’m not happy with the story. The writing is, and I’ll be blunt, juvenile. I know writing for MMOs is hard, but that’s mostly because of a lack of permanence. BUT common mistakes in character and pacing are not something a dedicated writing team should be making. The whole script for this should have been planned a year ago, and it feels like it hasn’t.
The “biconics” are questionable in their behavior, sometimes sickeningly so with how disjointed they are. Character representation is so hideously one-sided: Scarlet, Canach, Faolin, Caithe, Trehearne… They’ve been a parade of terrible representatives to an otherwise interesting race, paired with lame, poorly-executed motivations. And Norn are still boring, as evidenced by Brahm taking a backseat as a babysitter to a more interesting Taimi.
Assessment: Get better writers who understand both characters and MMO semi-persistence.

Getting new zones is at least something to look forward to. While Dry Top can cave itself in with an earthquake, Silverwastes keeps my interest. I’ll be honest, Dry Top would have been much better if the overhead map made it clear how to get around and get to the event locations. It’s the biggest problem with having a “vertical” map. Silverwastes has a lot of little moving pieces that work much better for this. Sparse waypoints, skritt tunnels as a reward to help move around, plenty of events, and even a few underground puzzles that some players have enjoyed.
The rate of release doesn’t match other expansion-based models, but I cut ANet some slack for having less money than God, instead of more, like Blizzard. But it does create a standard. If WoW can release 6+ new zones in two years, along with new PvP maps, I could only give GW2 an A for effort if it released half that. Which, in two-ish years, we have Southsun, Dry Top, Silverwastes, and Edge of the Mists. Two flops, a win, and a WvW overflow map. But they can’t all be winners. (Isn’t that right, Krasarang Wilds?)
Assessment: A solid C+, but I’m eager to see where they’ll go with it and if it’ll mean new races/classes.

The problem I have is a matter of relative content and pacing.

Season 2 ep1-4 had quite a bit of content in them. Ep 1&2 also had better quality content than most of season 1 (in my opinion). Ep 3&4 had the same amount of content but the quality was a bit diminished from Ep 1&2 which made us go into the break on a low note.

2 month break.

Starting with Ep 5 the writing quality seemed to improve a bit over Ep 3&4 but the relative content felt like half an episode. The rest of the episodes also felt like half episodes preventing momentum in the story from building. So now we’re going into a 4 week break without much of a build up and it feels less than stellar.

1 month break.

All momentum in the story feels gone now. If you’re going to give us an extended break then you should really leave us on a high note so we’re pumped up and excited for more. All I feel is frustration at the short episodes and lengthy breaks.

It’s the same problem I have with TV networks when a series gets multiple breaks during a season. It just kills the momentum and makes me want to shelf the series until it’s completely done. Then I can watch it at my own pace. The difference between TV and GW2 though, is that I can’t really avoid the story in GW2 while I’m playing like I can with a TV series. This gives me pieces and parts of the story, including spoilers, that make watching it later less fun.

Astralporing.1957:

Andred.1087:

jason.2043:

They must be so far in the black they are comfortable taking a substantial break with nothing new or exciting.

Or maybe they just want to spend time with their families over the holidays, instead of frantically trying to churn out the last LS episode and respond to inevitable bugs?

Maybe. In that case they should have prepared the pacing of the story better. It’s not like they couldn’t have planned for it beforehand, and yet it still looks as if the Wintersday’s coming had completely surprised them.

I had the exact same sense, like the living story team didn’t plan on having a Wintersday patch. Maybe there is some friction between the different teams?

I wouldn’t expect some extraordinary stories from an mmo, tho i hope they make each episode a lil bit longer. You don’t need to add more story in it. Just add more fights. Something like a large scale fight where you need to survive against endless mobs in 2-5mins (with some epic background music). Each chapter could also use some story branching (while still keeping the one conclusion) like what anet did in personal story.

I can understand why they push back the final episode to 2015. Beside their holiday reason, i think anet wanna introduce gw2 winter event to China (and new) players before moving on to the last chapter.

and lastly, less RNG pls. The fossil wpn was a pita to make because of the RNG. Mawdrey and the carapace armor were cool tho.

Yukiatsuruko.3784:

I just want people to stop saying “Living Story.” It’s “Living World,” kitten it!

Blame ArenaNet. They called it the living story, but it wasn’t really just a story. It was dynamic changes to the world. They didn’t want to confuse players into thinking it was just story updates, so they started to call it the living world. They still switch between what they call it however, for example, during interviews.

imo, the living world is just the name for the overall concept. The episodes is what I’d call the living story, since it’s basically a continuation to the personal story.

jason.2043:

I had the exact same sense, like the living story team didn’t plan on having a Wintersday patch. Maybe there is some friction between the different teams?

Possibly, but I would imagine they saw it coming for months, and just decided, who actually cares? The last episode will come out next month, and people will play it then, and the only difference is people had to wait a little longer. Not exactly a dealbreaker for most people.

I can’t help but think this is there way of bringing an expansion to the game it all seems to me that there is one coming.

They have some “big projects going on behind the scenes” as Colin Johanson himself said, with all these open story elements i can’t help but get this feeling they are going to release the answers behind an expansion.

If so I am very happy with there delivery process. I am intrigued however if this is not the case how long are they going to drag out these arcs..

I strongly doubt there will be any traditional expansion to this game. What can they do with an expansion that they can’t do with the Living World? They can introduce any new content they desire with the current system; it’s just released slowly over time, and you get it for free.

Maybe not, but i just can’t help but get this feeling they are.

I’m happy either way just hope they resolve these sub plots sooner rather than later. As i can see this trend not going down well with other players.

If they are not going to go down the expansion route however, based on the time frame we have so far, we could be looking at nearly 6 years for us to take out just 2 dragons after Zhaitan, thats provided season 3 takes us to Mordremoth.

I just cant see people playing this game in 15 years in its current format. This is just for the remaining 5 dragons. IMHO they will need to speed up or we will never see any other places in Tyria except what we already know. Perhaps Cantha as we are not sure how close the DSD is to it.

Im just hoping they resolve these or at least give us an expansion per dragon so the LW can be used to lead us to the dragons and resolve any sub plots.

I love the living world story just hope they can make it work without over a decade of it.

(sorry if this makes little sense i’m typing it as my brain spews it)

I think if you want to discuss ls and the fact that no one can seem to meet in the middle on wether it’s been a success or not you need to look at some larger issues and things that look unrelated.

As far as pve and new story are concerned that ls is a bit slow and seems unreliable for delivery where some episodes have added whole maps while only 3 or 2 instances and others have added 5 or 6 instances but no new map. It’s a scrap shoot and we don’t get a lot of warning as to what we can look forward to or what’s in the chamber.

As far as ls delivering on mass bug fixes and character progression through new skills weapons or traits and sweeping game changes as most other traditional mmo expansions do then ls is extremely far behind the curve. ls seems to take away from core or vanilla improvements and push them off the table.

Also concerning is the dev team split where in we have a small ls team a small PvP and balance team and a small gem shop crew so what are the other 160+ people doing day in and out.. there’s no clear communication and what appears to be a serious lack of sourcing the forums.

Yes the forums are kitten to read when you spend your days creating this game but there are some gems on here and some very intelligent people. There are also a.few that show potential as game designers but they are rarely recognised.. a net also tends to have a poor track record when it comes to negative feed back. But feed back is information and all information is useful when it comes down to making directional choices for a product.

I also think many people lash out at the ls because they receive inaction in areas of the game they want changed or improved.. the consistent rehashing on old ideas seems to be taking precedent over working on older and more pressing issues… This is the 4th redo to dailies and the 3rd redo to PvP match making while many bugs and older complaints sit quietly in line to be addressed.

I could write.more but I need a bit to do it more clearly and cleanly