Guild Wars 2

Personally, I quit Living Story about a month ago.
I just don’t care about the °cough° “new” °cough° content anymore or achievements or special rewards.
Maybe it’s time to add a new map or zone? Or perhaps start making a new expansion?

Anyone else shares the same feeling?

There are many many threads about this and yes a lot of people don’t like it and many people like expansions (some don’t).

After the 4 winds thing, I cared less and less for the LS after I realized all of it is pretty much temp content for AP and an ugly back piece.

Didn’t even bother with SAB. It might have been funny and “cute” once, but it does not fit into GW2. The Queens Gauntlet and Pavilion was “ok” the first day. Again, it passed and has had no impact on the “world” content. The new path in TA is “ok”. Finished it the day it came out in about an hour, got my ugly back item. Whoop dee doo.

Living World I thought would be adding content, changing the world, changing the landscape, cities, new monsters, etc. etc. After some time I have realized Living World = Temp content scavenger hunts with ugly back items.

Give me an expansion please.

It seems the majority of players are either ambivalent about it or outright dislike it. There are many good reasons why, too, the biggest ones being:

a.) continuously being thrown on time-gated achievement cycles starts feeling like a chore very quickly and both the achievements and the rewards become very trite.

b.) It’s a gimmick that very obviously revolves around the gem shop and results in very little world-building.

c.) temporary content is a waste of development time and hurts the game more and more the longer it remains the primary focus

d.) the overarching narrative is totally broken by the ‘flavor-of-the-month’ style of the LS and results in a world and gameplay experience that feels very shallow and fragmented.

The part that I have to collect some ticket scraps from Black Lion Chest to get a nice weapon skin was the last straw.

Not giving them anymore money until I see real content — that means dragons, Vigil cannons, etc.

I dislike the idea a lot. I stopped playing just after Southsun content came out, mainly because of the huge mess that was.

I’ve tried to come back to the game a number of times since then and find something enjoyable to do only to find that I don’t have enough time to take part in the current living story.
Either that or I do the living content that’s out, get bored while waiting for more and simply go off and play something else and don’t come back finish it.

There have been quite a few items that i would have like to get from these living story events, sadly I wont ever get them now and that gives me less of an incentive to play.

I dislike LS as well. It feels like a chore and takes my limited time away from me to do other fun things, like leveling an alt. Since these other things take time, that is less time to do the LS and because the LS is time-gated there is a time trade off which I don’t like at all. If it was permanent content then I could do the LS in my own time but as it stands now I cannot. So I’ve stopped doing LS with the exception of Tequatl which I sometimes do with the TTS guild although that is winding down quickly.

If LS was filler to give the 80s something to do while waiting for an expansion, then ok I guess. But I still won’t participate much in LS.

I pretty much agree with everything posted in this thread, especially about the one time only items/skins; couldn’t have come close to typing it better myself.

Einlanzer.1627:

It seems the majority of players are either ambivalent about it or outright dislike it. There are many good reasons why, too, the biggest ones being:

a.) continuously being thrown on time-gated achievement cycles starts feeling like a chore very quickly and both the achievements and the rewards become very trite.

b.) It’s a gimmick that very obviously revolves around the gem shop and results in very little world-building.

c.) temporary content is a waste of development time and hurts the game more and more the longer it remains the primary focus

d.) the overarching narrative is totally broken by the ‘flavor-of-the-month’ style of the LS and results in a world and gameplay experience that feels very shallow and fragmented.

That’s a very succinct and accurate list. I think you are spot on with all of those.

Personally I’m very glad that the TA update is light on APs. I did the dungeon the first day and I completed the whole meta achievement in one run. I felt relieved when I noticed that the only things I had left to do were permanent dungeon achievements that probably won’t take me long to do if I choose to do them a few months from now or today. It’s depressing that I was relieved that I finished the temporary meta achievement so quickly, it makes me dislike the idea of the next patch returning to the old check list style that soaks up time and takes you away from other content you might like to play.

“Living World I thought would be adding content, changing the world, changing the landscape, cities, new monsters, etc. etc. After some time I have realized Living World = Temp content scavenger hunts with ugly back items.”

This is exactly what’s on my mind. Before playing GW2, I thought this Living World thing would add lasting content to the game, would change stuff, but all it does is add temporary (and usually farmable) content that rewards you with some vanity items and then vanishes. I stopped doing those LS things when Teq came out (a single boss fight is just poor, imo), and now we have Twilight Assault, which is just an addition to Twilight Arbor.

I’m very disappointed. :/

I am the minority here, coz I like LS. I like it coz

• if I want to do something different in the game, then I have something new to explore
• I don’t feel forced to do any LS if I dont like them, not like my gear becomes worthless if I skip any of them. Heck, I skip SAB and no impact on me
• There is always something to expect every two weeks, rather than musing if something new is ever going to be added coz the content has been stagnant for x amount of month/s.
• LS is like free DLC, not necessarily free, but hey, I paid the game for the original price when it released, and haven’t spent any more real money (except for electricity) on the game. Free and new and does not impact me negatively is always welcome to me.

I don’t hunt APoint, nor am I looking for pretty skins. I do stuff that I find fun, and skip those I find boring, Overall, LS is a hit and/or miss stuff for me. Those that hit me, good stuff. Those that dont fit my taste, I ignore.

For the most part, I’ve been liking the living story. I like that there’s new content to do every two weeks and has a progressing story.

But since for the last month and a half, we really haven’t gotten any story what so ever. SAB has a mini-side story that’s probably not related with anything, plus I don’t find it all that fun. Tequatl was good in theory, but we all know how that turned out. So far we don’t know if there is any ‘significant’ story about him. Now with the new dungeon path (haven’t completed it yet), it doesn’t seem like there is too much story there either, nor content outside of that to do.

The optimist in me thinks that they’re working on a longer-term goal (significant releases). I’m pretty sure SAB/Tequatl were side-projects by the devs that made it to an actual release. Now we’re coming up on Halloween where the majority of that content is probably going to be the same as last year. Maybe their living story teams have some extra time to work on releases for the end of the year.

Yeah, Living Story is certainly less than I expected, Einlanzer.1627 pretty much summed my thoughts on the matter up.

I play them every now and again, but silly stories like the whole Scarlet shebang is below of what I have expected from ANet, whose compelling storytelling was what made me play seven years of Guild Wars 1 and GW2 since Beta.

Vaxx.3178:

After the 4 winds thing, I cared less and less for the LS after I realized all of it is pretty much temp content for AP and an ugly back piece.

Didn’t even bother with SAB. It might have been funny and “cute” once, but it does not fit into GW2. The Queens Gauntlet and Pavilion was “ok” the first day. Again, it passed and has had no impact on the “world” content. The new path in TA is “ok”. Finished it the day it came out in about an hour, got my ugly back item. Whoop dee doo.

Living World I thought would be adding content, changing the world, changing the landscape, cities, new monsters, etc. etc. After some time I have realized Living World = Temp content scavenger hunts with ugly back items.

Give me an expansion please.

This sums up my experiences and thoughts on LS almost precisely to the letter, except I didn’t even bother with TA’s new path.

Rotating content is an interesting idea rich with potential, but all of it is wasted on thematic paid-for cosmetics and soulless scavenger hunts that shoehorn you into playing the character with which you have the highest map completion.

Einlanzer.1627:

It seems the majority of players are either ambivalent about it or outright dislike it. There are many good reasons why, too, the biggest ones being:

a.) continuously being thrown on time-gated achievement cycles starts feeling like a chore very quickly and both the achievements and the rewards become very trite.

b.) It’s a gimmick that very obviously revolves around the gem shop and results in very little world-building.

c.) temporary content is a waste of development time and hurts the game more and more the longer it remains the primary focus

d.) the overarching narrative is totally broken by the ‘flavor-of-the-month’ style of the LS and results in a world and gameplay experience that feels very shallow and fragmented.

Excellent summary of the bad part of the living story concept. I agree fully with what you said except for part of (b). I don’t think it necessarily revolves around the gem shop but it does result in very little world building. I’m thinking about that now though…the rng chests with skins related to living story content, the permanent harvesting tools, special minipets, hmmmm….. after thinking about it a while I might start agreeing on this point too.

I do like some of the activities and festivals added that are either permanent or should reoccur. It is hard for me to separate the living story from things that are just game updates.

However, the story part of it is not where it should be. I’m not sure what the story is. Maybe it is a bunch of short stories. I don’t know what they are either. Everything seems disjointed and incomplete.

I have hopes that the updates promised “by the end of the year” will repair some of this.

I do like how they concentrate players into participating in content though. It gives you a critical mass to get things completed. I hope they can manage to do that without using the here today, gone forever in two weeks model in the future.

I don’t feel tired from Living story you know why ?

bicous I was not able to do like 70% of them bicous it got freaken REMOVED !!!!!!!!!!!

I don’t feel tired of the Living Story.

I feel tired of Guild Wars 2 on a whole.

The Living Story did that to me. Especially the 4 months of grinding-based achievements that started with Dragon Bash and ended with Tequatl.

The small changes to Southsun Cove over time was kind nice and what I’d like to see in a “living” world — but most of the LS has just been pressing ‘F’ 50 times for achieves in zones that suddenly appear out of the blue for just that chapter.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I don’t feel tired of the Living Story.

I feel tired of Guild Wars 2 on a whole.

The Living Story did that to me. Especially the 4 months of grinding-based achievements that started with Dragon Bash and ended with Tequatl.

Wow, coming from you, Konig, that’s strangely depressing to read.

I quit over the dev team’s focus on the “living story”.

To ANET:

Just so that you interpret your numbers correctly: I got burnt out on living story and just am not participating now. It has nothing to do with how good or how bad it has been for the last couple of months. It could be the best thing ever to happen in game and I wouldn’t do it at this point. So don’t blame it on the current living story releases in error. I’d hate for particular groups to think their content was bad when it is really the overall burnt-outedness of some players. Obviously, I don’t know if numbers have decreased but if they have I wanted to put this out there.

(I’m taking a break and waiting on mad king activities.)

Yeah I just can’t keep up with it. I don’t play as much as some of the game addicts on here, it can be days or even weeks to get time on the game and I end up missing a lot of it. Most times I’d rather do other things in game rather than be ‘forced’ to play certain content because its time limited.

Apart from the shattered dragons wings, again missed because of life commitments all the other rewards in my opinion have sucked anyway. Permanent content that you can enjoy at your own pace would be nicer, and add more meaningful co-op content and dungeons with more than 5 players!!!!

I like the living story. I like the constant change. It’s nice to know that if something I don’t like is added then in 2 weeks, there will be something else. It’s not the same thing over and over and over. It’s not stale, it’s not static. Every two weeks is something new. I like it.

I played GW1 for eight years, and GW2 since launch. I had hope for the Living Story at first and bits of it I have honestly enjoyed, like the Bazaar (I miss that area terribly), SAB with my friends, and the improved Tequatl fight. Some of the mini games have been great, too, like Sanctum Sprint and especially Aspect Arena.

But at this point, it just feels like work. I could ignore it, I suppose, but guildies (who are close friends) want to do it as well, and I’d rather not miss out on one-time-only items and skins, or any important lore that might crop up.

Which might be one of the worst parts. GW1 didn’t have writing that anyone could really call groundbreaking or anything like that, but its lore was unique, rich, and interesting. The LS.. yikes. I almost feel resentful of it at this point, that it’s taking so much attention away from things that really need to be expanded on. I wouldn’t care if it was at least done well and brought something interesting to the table. As it is, when I learned I’d get to deal with Scarlet again in the new TA path, I just sort of felt sad and disappointed, and not at all inclined to do it until my guildies decided it was time to just grit our teeth and trudge through it.
We were stopped by atrocious bugs in the Clockheart fight, haven’t tried again since, and whenever it gets mentioned everyone in the call groans.

So I’m done. I’m just sort of sitting back, avoiding everything LS/achievement related until Halloween, so I don’t burn out completely and I can actually enjoy the content.

I am starting to dislike it unless ArenaNet will add a more lore-centric LS update or PS arc :S

DarcShriek.5829:

I like the living story. I like the constant change. It’s nice to know that if something I don’t like is added then in 2 weeks, there will be something else. It’s not the same thing over and over and over. It’s not stale, it’s not static. Every two weeks is something new. I like it.

You get this with traditional (permanent) content updates without causing people to feel like they have to play in specific ways at specific times or rush them through time-gated content to experience it. Trust me, the LW concept is not good for the game and never has been.

I love living story it keep the game fresh and if you don’t like it you always have ton of other stuff to do ;P

Killface.1896:

I love living story it keep the game fresh and if you don’t like it you always have ton of other stuff to do ;P

Ton of other stuff? Like what exactly?

Worst pvp of the past decade even by “free” standards?
Actual content people finished… I dono… a year ago?

Farming? Farming isn’t fun by its own definition. Doing dailies is the same thing. Its doing the same exact task over and over again until you get blisters and come to realization that 1 year later you still haven’t done a kitten thing that was fun.

Einlanzer.1627:

It seems the majority of players are either ambivalent about it or outright dislike it. There are many good reasons why, too, the biggest ones being:

a.) continuously being thrown on time-gated achievement cycles starts feeling like a chore very quickly and both the achievements and the rewards become very trite.

b.) It’s a gimmick that very obviously revolves around the gem shop and results in very little world-building.

c.) temporary content is a waste of development time and hurts the game more and more the longer it remains the primary focus

d.) the overarching narrative is totally broken by the ‘flavor-of-the-month’ style of the LS and results in a world and gameplay experience that feels very shallow and fragmented.

I don’t care about any of those points. What I want is a gripping story that is actually interesting. Scarlet = boring.

Kuzletti.9175:

This is exactly what’s on my mind. Before playing GW2, I thought this Living World thing would add lasting content to the game, would change stuff, but all it does is add temporary (and usually farmable) content that rewards you with some vanity items and then vanishes. I stopped doing those LS things when Teq came out (a single boss fight is just poor, imo), and now we have Twilight Assault, which is just an addition to Twilight Arbor.

I’m very disappointed. :/

umm, right… you want “lasting content”, but the two Living Story patches you most hate are ‘the one that added a permanent change to a world boss fight’ and ‘the one that added a permanent new dungeon path.’ These are quite specifically not temporary, and the skins and vanity items associated with them are also permanent drops.

I like the concept very much and I’m pretty sure it will turn out great ;-) We’ve not seen everything yet!

Olvendred.3027:

umm, right… you want “lasting content”, but the two Living Story patches you most hate are ‘the one that added a permanent change to a world boss fight’ and ‘the one that added a permanent new dungeon path.’

Except interest in doing Teq is still in decline and such will happen to the new TA path. Back to gear progression and grinding/farming champs/mats.

If the choice were between LS and an expansion, I would choose LS. That is, I believe that a living, breathing, evolving world is a more natural method of evolving a game. That said, contrary to GW2 marketing, we really haven’t seen an evolving world so far out the the LS. What we have seen is a world that comes and goes in fits and starts on a ridiculously short development cycle. At this point, I am not sure that Anet can evolve the world via LS. So, if the choice is between LS we have seen so far and expansion, I would choose expansion.

Yes been tired of it, LS is over rated.

I am surprised at how many players enjoy getting a monotonous to-do list every two weeks, a list that is hidden in a weak story. To each their own I suppose.

Before anyone jumps in with their “you don’t have to do the new content” rigamarole it’s not that simple. LS has become that annoying guy at school/work/a party that you try to avoid but sometimes you just can’t.

It would be tolerable if it was a monthly occurrence but every two weeks amounts to spam.

I really enjoyed the September break, sure we had SAB and Teq but those had nothing to do with LS and those were actually fun.

MastaNeenja.1537:

I really enjoyed the September break, sure we had SAB and Teq but those had nothing to do with LS and those were actually fun.

That’s sort of a funny way of looking at it. “Stuff I like won’t be considered part of it, but everything I don’t will”

All of the stuff added in the content releases is part of the living world; it’s not going to all be directly related. It’s all going to be very different too, and some parts you’re (each of us) going to enjoy more than others.

Hawkian.6580:

MastaNeenja.1537:

I really enjoyed the September break, sure we had SAB and Teq but those had nothing to do with LS and those were actually fun.

That’s sort of a funny way of looking at it. “Stuff I like won’t be considered part of it, but everything I don’t will”

All of the stuff added in the content releases is part of the living world; it’s not going to all be directly related. It’s all going to be very different too, and some parts you’re (each of us) going to enjoy more than others.

Except what I was saying is true in that SAB and Teq had nothing to do with Living Story they were a part of the Living World two week update spam however. I would have still liked those two events regardless of when or how they were released.

It is my opinion that as a whole the two week content spam will be detrimental to Guild Wars 2, but that doesn’t mean that everything that comes through is bad. If you keep swinging a hammer eventually you’ll hit a nail.

I am neutral about the Living Story. I log on and do whatever parts I can do in my play time. At one point I was trying to keep up but I can’t. Had to go thru the disappointment of that and change my expectations. One thing the game has done is help me to lower my expectations. Lots of high hopes; like decent rewards vs effort, and no-grind, that I had to deal with. The forum seems to me to be full of folks that are still trying to get ANet to change… But I am happier working on me. The game will do whatever it wants to do.

I like the idea of Living Story much more than I like the execution of Living Story.

Hopefully they’re just working out the kinks and (listening to player feedback and) things will improve going forward.

A lot of this is still new ground for an MMO and I have to give the devs props for even attempting it. Having said that, though, a little dialogue with the player community would go a long way toward easing our concerns.

I can say that I enjoyed some LS, but in the end it becomes more and more boring…
Especially with many stories incomplete and unmentioned for months.

The funny thing is in here:
http://thatshaman.blogspot.com/2013/04/so-much-room-for-expansions-guide-to.html
As you see there are zones that were planned for release but were never ended, but they could use that in LS instead force us to do laps around all old maps, which is no that bad, but is pad if you never add any and only make us do rounds.

At first ANet planned to expand maps in Flame and Frost but you stopped that and it makes it really boring to run all the same maps again and again.
I know you have your ideas for living stories, but really you can add like 1 map each 1 or 2 months and maybe place living story in there? It would mean so much for me and some of my guildies to feel like explorers again. It’s very needed feeling for us.
I have to add that I hopped for that when Zephyr Sanctum arrived but in the end you didn’t even left empty cliffs after it so I can go in and wonder around a bit. The area just vanished…

Please, we need permanent maps to be added regularly.

my opinion: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/Living-World-1-year-later-a-sincere-opinion/first#post2992674

Haven’t even tried the new dungeon path, doesn’t look like many people are doing it too.

Nick.6972:

Haven’t even tried the new dungeon path, doesn’t look like many people are doing it too.

Not true, there’s lots of people doing it, if you like doing dungeons in general then give it a try, but if dungeons are scary and bad then this one won’t be any different.