Guild Wars 2

For the unaware I’m refering to this interview . Read up, it’s an interesting interview.

It’s nice to know ANet has identified that the current LW model isn’t working, and is willing to change that. That said, one paragraph specifically made me cringe. Made me wonder whether ANet had actually understood what went wrong with the whole Living World program in the first place…

“It’s very distracting to players,” observed Johanson. “It’s almost a muddled message, where we put these releases out and we want them to be excited about the story, to follow the story, and we also want them to be excited about the features that are coming with it. And either one or the other tends to be the thing that people cling onto.” And the other thing, people ignore.

This is what ANet considers went wrong with the LW update… That, essentially, people are too stupid to follow both story AND gameplay releases. That’s the one thing they think went wrong… That they were releasing story and gameplay…

…oh god…

Colin… Colin… No… No. No! No!

Colin, the current LW system was flawed in two different directions, one pertaining to the story delivery, the other to the gameplay delivery.

Story wise it had two major flaws: flow and quality.

As far as quality… I’m sorry but Scarlet’s story so far is terribly written. I’ve been on and on about its many issues, and so have many others. Not going to repeat myself. You guys are saying that it’s all justified because of the ending, I’m not buying. I’m not seeing how any ending ever conceived can justify all the writing issues Scarlet has had so far. PLEASE prove me wrong. If you do I will personally write an extensive public letter of apology to your writing staff.

As far as flow it’s very simple: too little too far apart. Even if we disregard the quality issue you’ve simply given people too little story. With far too much nothing in between. Consider the following: The LW story has been going on for a year now. You could sum up the entirety of the story in the back of a small napkin, leaving nothing relevant out. In fact you guys did a video sum up of it in less than 1 and a half minutes! And that left no relevant part of that story out!

That has nothing to do with having gameplay and story delivered together! Nothing to do with even the 2 week update rate! You could have made the bi-weekly update work for the story, but there’s simply not enough story here. How can players stay engaged in the story when it’s moving at less than a crawl? It’s like trying to be interested in a very small book reading 1 or 2 sentences every two weeks! The little story we did get, regardless of quality, has been stretched so thin it broke.

It doesn’t help the case that unlike, to quote the interview, “a show like A Game of Thrones (and the book series A Song of Fire and Ice beyond that)” the LW updates don’t come with re-runs or tivoing. If you weren’t in the game before you a certain part of the story came to pass that’s it. You can’t go back and relieve it. It’s just gone. This hasn’t affected me because I’ve been here since the start of the LW, but I’m sure people that joined halfway through would be even less compelled and interested in knowing what the hell is going on.

1/2

Which leads us to the other side of the Living Story issues: Gameplay wise.

Gameplay wise the LW had (has?) one major core issue: its transitory nature. THAT is the one thing that completely destroys and undermines the fun of the gameplay changes. The crushing majority of it is temporary. The achievements are temporary. The rewards (at least most of them) are temporary. What this means is that every release becomes an initial grind to complete all the content as soon as possible, to guarantee you acquire it before it expires, followed by burnout.

See crappy MSPaint graphic
(Paint skills off the chart, I know…)

The players feel forced to do the content as soon as they can, to guarantee that they acquire it, and proceed to grind it out. Once that’s done the last thing you wanna do is go back and do more of it for fun.

Take Super Adventure Box for example. In its own right an amazing addition to GW2. However, also a temporary one, with temporary skins you can only acquire THAT update… Result? People grind SAB out to acquire the skins, quickly getting sick of it. And when they do want it? It’s not around. Cause it was temporary.

I’m not saying it’s not ok to have some temporary content. I think the Wintersday event is a good example of good temporary content. It’s available around christmas and, at least so far, returns every year with (mostly) improvements. But those should be few and far between… The norm should be permanent content… Why is something like SAB even gone? Why are the SAB skins temporary?

I understand the point of course: forcing interest. Trying to force players to play NOW… However by its very nature that leads into that rather negative loop of small peak of excitement followed by burnout/exhaustion, etc…

THAT is what’s wrong with the LW system. I’m not the first person to mention it either. In fact that has been mentioned to death and back… So when I read an interview and I hear a dev say that “the problem” with LW was having both story and gameplay content together I’m confused… Why did we bother?

Eh… What do I know…

2/2

Well in all fairness, I think it was perceived that players “cling” to one or the other due to one not being attractive.

When I would read through the patch notes, sometimes I would think the living story didn’t sound appealing, but oh man that new feature sounds amazing, so I would ignore the other.

But in general, it wasn’t the combined update that made majority of the Living Story unappealing, it was the story itself.

Like I stated in another thread.

I was given a bunch of the pieces to this supposed plot, but had no “glue” to put them together, which would have given me a better understanding on what’s going on. This current story has me waiting to get “smacked” in the face with the glue that puts everything into perspective.

So in reality, by the time we figure out everything we will get excited and say hey! but in the same time it’s over. So the enjoyment of the entire story was held off until over a year later.

Granted, I enjoyed some of the updates. Flame and Frost was a cool opening to the story, it just got beaten down by the whole “Scarlet did it” idea.

Very well phrased, I agree wholeheartedly.

However, I hope that Anet actually have been taking our feedback to heart and that this interview reply was just badly phrased.

Subpar writing, rushed releases due to the two week update cycle and then crammed achievement requirements to give the illusion of player interest through activity. Like I’ve said before in other threads, I sure hope Anet uses other ways to measure fun factor than AP accumulation and time spent in zergs.

Again, nice post!

I liked the video “our story so far” more than the 1 on 1 conversations in the game. NEED MORE GLORIFIED CUTSCENES!
But anyway. Scarlet has an interesting backstory along with a decent origin story of why she became mentally unstable, but none of that is shown in the game. why? perhaps with upcoming LS they will explain her backstory.

BUT BUT BUT. they still need to somehow relate it all together. I read her backstory, I read the short story about her origins. However, none of that really shows a great link to what she’s done in the game.

It’s bad writing, lack of cutscenes, really wierd story, and less depth which makes the LS bad.

- maybe they were referring to the Tower of Nightmare? as much as i somewhat enjoyed it because it was different, it was attrocious, without a group or a zerg, it is near impossible to get across it and reach the top. Mobs attack you left to right, either going to knock you down constantly or root you forever, there’s no use trying to kill them cause there are so many and it takes you awhile to down 1 while the others will beat you up.

Again I mildly enjoyed the Tower because it was different, but it wasn’t very effective as a longterm effect.

Antara.3189:

I was given a bunch of the pieces to this supposed plot, but had no “glue” to put them together, which would have given me a better understanding on what’s going on. This current story has me waiting to get “smacked” in the face with the glue that puts everything into perspective.

So in reality, by the time we figure out everything we will get excited and say hey! but in the same time it’s over. So the enjoyment of the entire story was held off until over a year later.

So true. I still hope that the ending will be as awesome as is being hinted at, but that still doesn’t take away the fact that we’ve had to spend one year in a coma state story wise. Not giving any hints whatsoever as to what’s really going on. That is bad writing, or lack of proper dramaturgy to be more precise.

ProxyDamage.9826:

This is what ANet considers went wrong wtih the LW update… That, essentially, people are too stupid to follow both story AND gameplay releases. That’s the one thing they think went wrong… That they were releasing story and gameplay…

They were releasing gameplay in the middle of the story, unrelated to the story at hand. They could have skipped or pushed “Guild Missions” and put a similar amount of effort into something else. They could have used less time focusing on getting “fixes” into LW updates rather than taking more time to include content into them which could stay.

Lest we forget, there were entire updates with little to no “story”. Dragon Bash. Queen’s Jubilee. Whatever came out around WvW Season 1.

They do need to work on that balance and make sure each LW update is focused on getting the storyline out in something less of a “muddied mess” people proclaimed it was.

(And to be fair, they had a point when it was Flame and Frost barely giving hints for a month. And Secret of Southsun seeming unrelated, THEN Dragon Bash . . . the flow was all over the place and it did confuse people as to “what’s the story here?”)

As far as quality… I’m sorry but Scarlet’s story so far is terribly written. I’ve been on and on about it’s many issues, and so have many others. Not going to repeat myself. You guys are saying that it’s all justified because of the ending, I’m not buying. I’m not seeing how any ending ever conceived can justify all the writing issues Scarlet has had so far. PLEASE prove me wrong. If you do I will personally write an extensive public letter of apology to your writing staff.

If the storyline had more focus put onto it and more points left for us to “connect the dots” of what’s going on, I don’t know if it would have been so bad. If we could uncover hints as to what exactly she is up to other than the current issue, it might go further to making us feel she has a plan other than “lol I so random!” as the case could be made.

ProxyDamage.9826:

Gameplay wise the LW had (has?) one major core issue: it’s transitory nature. THAT is the one thing that completely destroys and undermines the fun of the gameplay changes. The crushing majority of it is temporary. The achievements are temporary. The rewards (at least most of them) are temporary. What this means is that every release becomes an initial grind to complete all the content as soon as possible, to guarantee you acquire it before it expires, followed by burnout.

A good point, being the rewards are temporary and only used once more often than not. I’d have received the skins much better if we could get a potential to get more than one in case we wanted to change skins from time to time. Because, it’s notable, there aren’t exactly tons of cheap simple back items you can bind them onto.

THAT is what’s wrong with the LW system. I’m not the first person to mention it either. In fact that has been mentioned to death and back… So when I read an interview and I hear a dev say that “the problem” with LW was having both story and gameplay content together I’m confused… Why did we bother?

Because we care.

Hopefully it’ll be better next time around. That’s really all we can reliably do is leave feedback and hope the next time it turns out better.

The main issue with Anet is the same issue movies face when they are trying to create a film based on a book. The book has many more detail that a movie simply cannot produce within their target budget or scheduled deadline. Same goes with Anet admitting that they have to cut some things to meet deadlines that in their mind, the story is great, but during game play, it’s incomplete.

I think they recognize that mistake that having to cut certain part of the story to meet the deadline leaves player scratching their head in confusion.

Very seldom that a movie can capture the essence of the book and not ruin it.

I heard an interesting point yesterday on video game stories. It was made by a director who made the movie The Kings Of Summer. I enjoyed the movie a lot and the director is a fairly cool guy. Anyways, during the podcast I was listening to he made mention that he may be working on a video game movie soon. They went into a long discussion about good ones to make into a movie and the point of story plot came about.

See, he laid it out pretty simply. Most video game story lines are not great nor good. If you take out the immersion of the player or the fact that you, the player, are involved in the game, the stories generally aren’t that great. It’s just the fact that you are more personally involved in that game that you think the stories are better than they are.

For instance, Super Mario. That story isn’t great by any means. Princess is kidnapped and Mario rescues her. Because you, the player, are Mario though, you feel a sense of achievement at the end of the game and are rewarded by rescuing her. He feel that the story was good. That’s out on a limb, I know, but it’s just an example.

So I think that the story has been good thus far. I really have no qualms what-so-ever with it. I also look forward to these last four updates. I’m ready for Scarlet to be done, but only so that we can go on to something else that can be just as exciting.

As for Colin’s comments in the interview, I think that was a direct result in the Living Story CDI that took place. Most of the complaints on that was about the story and feature updates coming at the same time and no chance to enjoy the individually or what they should look forward to every patch. Was it Features? Was it Story? Was it both? That is the confusion. Another giant qualm was the 2 week fast paced story and no room to breath on the releases. That is why the last few Nightmare Tree story updates were a little longer and also why they took a break so they could polish the whole thing up.

These are, of course, just my opinions though. I respect yours as I hope you respect mine.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The main issue with Anet is the same issue movies face when they are trying to create a film based on a book. The book has many more detail that a movie simply cannot produce within their target budget or scheduled deadline. Same goes with Anet admitting that they have to cut some things to meet deadlines that in their mind, the story is great, but during game play, it’s incomplete.

I think they recognize that mistake that having to cut certain part of the story to meet the deadline leaves player scratching their head in confusion.

Very seldom that a movie can capture the essence of the book and not ruin it.

Faces/expressions aren’t a big issue. I mean in guild wars 1, there was less facial expressions and even less voice acting than guild wars 2. however, the cutscenes told a better story than these scriptreadings we see.

Yaj.5973:

Faces/expressions aren’t a big issue. I mean in guild wars 1, there was less facial expressions and even less voice acting than guild wars 2. however, the cutscenes told a better story than these scriptreadings we see.

I beg to differ that GW1’s story was better than GW2’s. Especially if we’re talking about Prophecies.

Delvoire.8930:

See, he laid it out pretty simply. Most video game story lines are not great nor good. If you take out the immersion of the player or the fact that you, the player, are involved in the game, the stories generally aren’t that great. It’s just the fact that you are more personally involved in that game that you think the stories are better than they are.

For instance, Super Mario. That story isn’t great by any means. Princess is kidnapped and Mario rescues her. Because you, the player, are Mario though, you feel a sense of achievement at the end of the game and are rewarded by rescuing her. He feel that the story was good. That’s out on a limb, I know, but it’s just an example.

Hold on there. Different issue entirely. Yes, most videogame’s stories are bad. No, being “immersed” in it doesn’t make them any better if they’re bad to begin with. Super Mario’s story is crap. That’s why nobody played Mario for the story. People played Super Mario because of the gameplay. Not to mention that Super Mario is a game “from a different age”, back from when games were made by 1-3 people. In fact it hasn’t been that long since most games did not have dedicated writers (which isn’t to say some of them didn’t end up having good stories).

Which isn’t to say games have brilliant stories these days… Some do. Most don’t. This does not in any way exculpate the poor writing or invalidate the fact that the writing was/is bad.

I recently wrote about how GW2 did, and continues to do, a lot of things right. If it didn’t I wouldn’t be playing it. Not once did I mention the story or story telling. That’s one thing they really could improve on…

ProxyDamage.9826:

Delvoire.8930:

See, he laid it out pretty simply. Most video game story lines are not great nor good. If you take out the immersion of the player or the fact that you, the player, are involved in the game, the stories generally aren’t that great. It’s just the fact that you are more personally involved in that game that you think the stories are better than they are.

For instance, Super Mario. That story isn’t great by any means. Princess is kidnapped and Mario rescues her. Because you, the player, are Mario though, you feel a sense of achievement at the end of the game and are rewarded by rescuing her. He feel that the story was good. That’s out on a limb, I know, but it’s just an example.

Hold on there. Different issue entirely. Yes, most videogame’s stories are bad. No, being “immersed” in it doesn’t make them any better if they’re bad to begin with. Super Mario’s story is crap. That’s why nobody played Mario for the story. People played Super Mario because of the gameplay. Not to mention that Super Mario is a game “from a different age”, back from when games were made by 1-3 people. In fact it hasn’t been that long since most games did not have dedicated writers (which isn’t to say some of them didn’t end up having good stories).

Which isn’t to say games have brilliant stories these days… Some do. Most don’t. This does not in any way exculpate the poor writing or invalidate the fact that the writing was/is bad.

I recently wrote about how GW2 did, and continues to do, a lot of things right. If it didn’t I wouldn’t be playing it. Not once did I mention the story or story telling. That’s one thing they really could improve on…

I’ll use a different example of immersion as Super Mario was a crap one haha. Oh and BTW, I don’t think you hate the game and certainly don’t direct my post towards only you. It’s more of a general post to the group of people who don’t like the story or hate upon it.

So my other example is Silent Hill. It’s arguably a great game by some opinions. The story for the first game is pretty straight forward..

Silent Hill follows Harry Mason as he searches for his missing adopted daughter in the mysterious town of Silent Hill. Stumbling upon a cult conducting a ritual to revive a deity it worships, Harry discovers his daughter’s true origin. Multiple game endings are possible, depending on in-game actions taken by the player.

Nothing extraordinary but it’s the immersion of the game, the atmosphere, and the game play that makes it better than it’s story.

GW and other MMO’s hang their hat on Lore and Depth though. Slowly ANET is giving us more and more depth and background information on Scarlet. To some it’s not enough and can be a valid argument.

ProxyDamage.9826:

I understand the point of course: forcing interest. Trying to force players to play NOW… However by its very nature that leads into that rather negative loop of small peak of excitement followed by burnout/exhaustion, etc…

This is the single biggest problem with the Living Story, IMO.

I really don’t understand what ANet’s collective mental block is.

Oh, and +1 for using MSPaint. The graphic might not be high-tech, but it’s effective.

The problem with Anet is that they are trying to achieve something akin to Game of Thrones, where viewer are not participating in the story — 3rd person point of view.

While what they should focus on the style of telling story akin to Sherlock Holmes, because to be honest, we, the players, are more like Dr. Watson.

Everything the OP says is right, but the biggest problem with LS is that Anet has convinced themselves into thinking it’s good. They think they’re in the same league as Game of Thrones!

Look at their excuse for why it’s failed: feature and story patches confuse the players. As long as they believe they’re doing a good job and that it’s technical reasons that are pushing players away from the LS, there’s really no hope for improvement.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The problem with Anet is that they are trying to achieve something akin to Game of Thrones, where viewer are not participating in the story — 3rd person point of view.

They’re not trying to achieve something to Game of Thrones, mostly because nobody’s had their wedding rudely interrupted. Or illegitimate children everywhere

No, what they have are a bunch of narratives written as short stories which got put into an arc with a thread underneath. It is perhaps more akin to a project like “Thieves’ World” where authors have a known and shared world, a set of characters to work with from notes, but each have their own tone, their own biases, and their own particular methods in mind.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just evident when you go through a lot of the Personal Story in various races’ paths there’s some stretching in places to make it fit an arc. And the Living World’s story currently didn’t mesh together well into an arc due to the incredibly “start and stop” nature of how it was being delivered. If they can do it better without interrupting the narrative for a month due to Mad King Thorn . . .

While what they should focus on the style of telling story akin to Sherlock Holmes, because to be honest, we, the players, are more like Dr. Watson.

I wouldn’t mind that too much, it almost is how the Factions storyline felt alongside Togo. Master Togo was almost always one step ahead of the player characters.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Everything the OP says is right, but the biggest problem with LS is that Anet has convinced themselves into thinking it’s good. They think they’re in the same league as Game of Thrones!

Everyone is in the same league as Game of Thrones. Every league has its Houston Texans and Cleveland Browns after all

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Everything the OP says is right, but the biggest problem with LS is that Anet has convinced themselves into thinking it’s good. They think they’re in the same league as Game of Thrones!

Everyone is in the same league as Game of Thrones. Every league has its Houston Texans and Cleveland Browns after all

I’d say Game of Thrones is in MLB while LS is somewhere at the bottom of the minors… or maybe NFL vs Pop Warner?

I think that it would be much more enjoyable if they removed the carrot on a stick temp content mechanic and added something like magic find or experience bonuses on the current portions of the story. That would keep more people in the most up to date content, similar to how making it temporary does, but also allow people to enjoy everything at their own pace.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Everything the OP says is right, but the biggest problem with LS is that Anet has convinced themselves into thinking it’s good. They think they’re in the same league as Game of Thrones!

Everyone is in the same league as Game of Thrones. Every league has its Houston Texans and Cleveland Browns after all

I’d say Game of Thrones is in MLB while LS is somewhere at the bottom of the minors… or maybe NFL vs Pop Warner?

Oh you can say what you want, it’s still hard to believe the record the Texans put up for an NFL team

Every time around there’s the great stories, there’s the bad ones, and there’s the mediocre. In my opinion LS is mediocre, no better, no worse. What hurts it was not the actual story behind it – that actually could have been a great story. How it was handled to fit into the Living World system?

That’s what made it suffer.

Yeah, OP’s post is entirely correct, and I’m amazed they seem to continue not getting it, even though in my mind it’s entirely common sense.

Making most content temporary does far more harm to the game than it does good, for painfully obvious reasons, so I cringe every time I see Colin or someone else say something about how awesome it is that all the content is temporary. It really makes no sense at all.

I got the impression that ArenaNet was more concerned that the more popular element of the releases (either story or gameplay) was lost in the less popular once.

I don’t think they were implying that players couldn’t follow one or the other; I think what they were saying was that players would ignore the less interesting part of releases in favor of the more interesting parts.

Most of the time, anyway, it would seem that the (rather weak) story was often lost in the more overwhelming gameplay portion of updates. Therefore, it seems that when they say they plan to “separate the two” it’s more for the benefit of developing each to be able to stand on its own.

Basically, I feel that ArenaNet is criticizing themselves for not being able to make both parts equally interesting.

Theundersigned.4761:

I got the impression that ArenaNet was more concerned that the more popular element of the releases (either story or gameplay) was lost in the less popular once.

Most of the time, anyway, it would seem that the (rather weak) story was often lost in the more overwhelming gameplay portion of updates.

I don’t think they were implying that players couldn’t follow one or the other; I think what they were saying was that players would ignore the less interesting part of releases in favor of the more interesting parts.

Basically, I feel that ArenaNet is criticizing themselves for not being able to make both parts equally interesting.

This interpretation almost meshes with what I was thinking as I read it. Which was “Well don’t push your gameplay refinements or tweaks to take up the time of your LS teams, and alternate. Every two weeks we get updates, but the LS story chapters last four weeks and inbetween each of those we get the feature updates unless it is absolutely crucial.”

OP got it right, I think.

I’d like to see the LS as something that is released periodically, but you can jump in at any point in ‘real life time’ and play the parts with actual story. Even if you miss global events that can only be made by zergs, or elections or whatever, there should be a cinematic of someone remembering them and telling it to you.

And being a game, introduce gameplay/RPG stuff. How the character interacts with NPCs? This should affect further dialogues, or even missions. Or make some NPC available or not (it doesn’t need to have mechanical consequences, but for example just determine a kind of reward or skin or something).

I cannot imagine GW1 with the pre-searing being only available for 2 weeks and after that everyone starting at post-searing. It was there forever, available to everyone who starts later.

Also, I found the overlap of events distracting, like now having funny snowmen and gift boxes and snowball launching in the same area where the tragic-epic-villain nightmare whatever just attempted to destroy Tyria.

It feels weird, it’s like having Save Private Ryan and, in the first scene, the Monty Python is doing funny scenes in the beach while the kitten army is commanded by Rowan Atkinson in WWI Black Adder outfit. YEah it’s fun and I’d buy that, but then we cannot pretend to be serious or care about all those dead or the tragic stuff. Just separate this stuff.

Another problem is that the unfolding of the story takes way too long. For quaggan’s sake, it’s been over a year and still not done? I can read a book within a month, sometimes sooner if the book is something I cannot put down. It shouldn’t last longer than a month because they will lose the interest of the players. The same reason I don’t watch T.V. Series, I wait until the whole season is in Netflix and watch it as if I’m reading a book. So, stretching the story throughout the year is absurd.

They should have just release it like the living story where players can complete it whenever they want. That even if they took a long break from the game, they can pick up the story where they left off and not miss out on both story and rewards.

10/10, you won the Internet.

Let’s hope that they’ve actually identified these issues, and for the purpose of marketing/pr, they’ve chosen a ‘lesser’ issue to be the community scapegoat in place of the larger one(s).

I was really concerned by that interview as well. It made me realise they must have a very diverse range of community feedback (like role play forums, foreign language forums or person to person) because I couldn’t see their conclusions reflected in the discussions I had seen over the last year.

I expect they will get us to care about the conclusion of the story not because we cared about the story, but because we cared about the consequences. If an Elder Dragon wakes up, it doesn’t matter how, you care about that. If new lands open up, you care. It’s like the Karka Queen – people didn’t care as much about their lag filled fight because they got their precursor chest at the end of it.

They’re starting with the axiom that the story is great. Thus the failure of the story must be from players mis-understanding them.

I don’t think “temporary” is the problem. It’s part of it, the other part is that we have to “grind” for an achievement — thus resulting to burnout. Whatever happens to the “we don’t make grindy games” promise Anet made?

If they want some rewards to be rare, that’s done by the content being temporary. It can’t be achieved again later, which makes its rewards rare. I think that’s fine. Temporary content is necessary; it doesn’t make sense for there to STILL be refugees from Flame and Frost today, just as it would make zero sens to still have the Tower of Nightmares still up and running next month.

If you want a “Deus ex machine” way to relive past content for future players the best way would be to have a “library archive” place where people can “read about” the history of Tyria and open an instance for that content to “relive it” (similar to how Marjory’s helper lets you redo the Tower of Nightmares).

That said I’m not so averse to not being able to see the old content anymore (and saying this as a new player who missed out in a lot of content).

Mochann.5298:

I don’t think “temporary” is the problem. It’s part of it, the other part is that we have to “grind” for an achievement — thus resulting to burnout. Whatever happens to the “we don’t make grindy games” promise Anet made?

Whatever happened to not doing the achievement just because it’s there? I wrote off tons of stuff in GW1 because it was just insane. Anyone who read that quote who played the original GW1 really had to have a chuckle.

Why? Nine Rings and the Lucky title, alone, qualifies as “grindy”. Fortunately it wasn’t incredibly important.

Pfft, no grind my left boot.

If they want some rewards to be rare, that’s done by the content being temporary. It can’t be achieved again later, which makes its rewards rare. I think that’s fine. Temporary content is necessary; it doesn’t make sense for there to STILL be refugees from Flame and Frost today, just as it would make zero sens to still have the Tower of Nightmares still up and running next month.

There still are refugees, permanently displaced in Southsun cove. Or some lingering in Lion’s Arch (notably the grawl who aren’t leaving).

If you want a “Deus ex machine” way to relive past content for future players the best way would be to have a “library archive” place where people can “read about” the history of Tyria and open an instance for that content to “relive it” (similar to how Marjory’s helper lets you redo the Tower of Nightmares).

We don’t really need to integrate anything like that. We have the Mistlock Observatory already. Add a console to tap into “recent Tyrian history” and boom. There. Done.

I’m convinced Anet only looks at their metrics and not the reasons behind them. Take me, for example. I have 100% completion for nearly every LS update released, so I’m sure on paper it looks like I enjoy them. The reality is I have disliked the vast majority of the LS updates. (The writing is terrible, the objectives aren’t fun, etc.) I do it because it’s the single best way to grind achievement points (they’re like bi-monthly dailies), which in turn earn my account nice bonuses. Were it not for that (coupled with there being nothing else new to do), I honestly would not participate in at least 75% of what they’ve released.

Lord Kuru.3685:

They’re starting with the axiom that the story is great. Thus the failure of the story must be from players mis-understanding them.

Bobby Stein Jr. actually said that to me. He said that the reason I didn’t understand the living story plot line was because I was not playing the game properly or was not paying enough attention to the story details. It was extremely insulting.

Elbegast.6970:

Lord Kuru.3685:

They’re starting with the axiom that the story is great. Thus the failure of the story must be from players mis-understanding them.

Bobby Stein Jr. actually said that to me. He said that the reason I didn’t understand the living story plot line was because I was not playing the game properly or was not paying enough attention to the story details. It was extremely insulting.

Oh dear…