Guild Wars 2

Do you guys believe that Living Story was a good idea to put into motion so early into the game? Or do you believe that it has held back the production of actual core content to the game that had been promised since the beginning?

I personally believe that Living Story lacks anything living about it. The content is largely un-engaging. The only two updates that I personally enjoyed was the Queen’s Jubilee and the Zepher Santum. Other than that this content has been very unrewarded. When you mix this with horrible weapon/armor skins, bugs, and a shift toward zerg exclusive content, I believe it was a terrible idea.

Guild Wars 2 lacks guild battles, guild management, and even a guild last logged interface. Dungeons still have the same bugs in them since beta. Dungeon rewards are very un-rewarding. We have no new dungeons since release, minus fractals and Mai Trin dungeon (Which are good don’t get me wrong). We have no raids. Crafting is still pretty much for leveling only except for ascended gear, and I believe that we are still missing a TON of quality of life content. Classes are still very poorly balanced, and we have only seen two new heals since beta release, and no new weapon sets. I am going to guess that Guild Wars 2 is going to be in a world of pain if they do not get their act together before TESO, Wildstar, Archage, and EQN comes out. I’m sorry Guild Wars, but your image to me has become tarnished. I have seen so much potential in this game when I played beta weekend events, but you seemed to have took that potential and put it in a completely different direction. The players have told you what they want for a very a long time now, and you have listened from time to time, but cmon, up until 2 weeks ago necromancers had a bug on them for an entire year. I could honestly go on for ages about this, but I am going to save it because you have all heard it so many times. Thank you for trying Gw2 Dev team, but I feel that Living Story was introduced WAY too early.

Trying something new and advancing the plot were a couple of good ideas, in theory. How they went about it? Yeah, I’d freely say that I think it’s been holding the game back. The attempt to tell the story was far more important than the story itself, which is bass akcwards. Worse, it took priority over more important game improvements. It’s like someone holding a dinner party and spending all their time on getting the table set just so, but serving stuff dumped out of cans and microwaved at the last minute.

They need to improve and polish the core/main game before adding fancy stories on top of it is going to be worth the effort.

Completely agree with you both.

I’ve been saying the same thing about the zerg content for a while now. I understand why it’s being done but I still don’t think it’s the appropriate way to go about things. My reasoning behind all of the zerg content is that it’s the easiest way to ensure everyone has the chance to participate in the content… at the cost of quality.

Since they’re catering to the majority (casual gamers), we’re not getting truly engaging content. There is no way to gague how useful you are as an individual and chances are you’re just as useful in a huge mesh of people like that by just autoattacking in the back with a ranged weapon as you would be by attempting to go all-out. In the grand scheme of things you do so little as an individual in a setting like that… that it just doesn’t matter.

So, what’s fun about that? Nothing! People are only there for the rewards and nothing else. Sure there are obviously people that love the lore, watch all the cutscenes, go for all the bonus achievements and the like… but setting foot into this new LA at any given point in the day the vast majority of all people in there are either AFKing near one of the waypoints until the knights are up, or farming champs. This is extremely arduous and these Living Stories make for anything but great content with replay value.

I had such a different (positive) impression of Arenanet coming into the game. They really do a great job with first impressions, that’s for sure. Nowadays I feel more and more disappointed as the days pass with little to no signs of them ever fixing exploits/bugs or adding more amazing boss fights like Lupicus.

Well, for a start if you ever played TESO you would already know how bad that game is, bringing it up here as a sort of `threat´ to try and get Guild Wars 2 to change is kind of a joke.

Queen’s Jubilee and the Zepher Santum are mentioned as highlights to the living story. Zephers Sanctum I can agree with but The Queens Jubilee was horrendous, I could not stand that update, now SAB and The Lost Shores, they were good, new map, new gameplay, great ideas. That all said, the living story is not doing well, the promise was to improve and the last few updates would be the best yet. I am quite disappointed as few lessons were learned from previous releases.

The rewards have often been weak and unsatisfying, the story convoluted and lore breaking, the characters forgettable and unlikable, each release seemingly more buggy than the last and the temporary high pace nature of the content means you can never relax and enjoy at your own pace and when it is over you have nothing left to do. I am willing to give season two another shot, but the living story is quite inadequate as it stands and judging by the final four releases I am not optimistic that things will change in the future.

I appreciate Arena Net’s efforts, but putting so much work into such badly written temporary content is not a good way to go forward. For example one year of Guild Wars 2 and we received quite pitiful living story updates, some fun but mostly buggy and badly written. One year of Guild Wars 1 gave us two great fulfilling addons, Factions and Nightfall. I would happily give Arena Net the price of expansions if we could go back to the quality content releases of years past, sadly SAB and a handful of other decent updates does not equal the quality and quantity of those addons we used to get.

They need to do a “Living Maintenance” Arch where they release bug fixes and core content every two weeks.

Eleir.9325:

They need to do a “Living Maintenance” Arch where they release bug fixes and core content every two weeks.

I would be totally down for this. They haven’t done any client optimization and/or features in a while. I’m still waiting for my FoV slider and controller support.

Also, would be nice to get some basic roleplaying support, such as sitting on chairs, eating/drinkin animations and guild halls,/player housing for example.

I actually came on the forums today to look for a post like this. IN MY OPINION, I believe Living story did hold it back. While it is important for an mmorpg to have some kind of story, I feel the living story is more a personal solo experience even though your running with strangers, where as dungeons/raids and actual ‘guild wars’ are more of a sociable, teamwork experience with close friends or your guild, which is the whole reason behind playing an mmorpg. Over a year after release, I feel they should have done half of what has been done on the living story, and bought out some new dungeons, possibly some larger raid type instances. Alot of new skills for each class, as I’m sure many other people feel, after a year, my character doesn’t feel like its changed much, besides the armor…I still use the same meta OP skills and dont get me started on the useless condition damage system for PVE. From what Ive gathered, after this whole Scarlet living story things is done, they were saying they were going to focus on updates and bug fixes, and I really really hope they do…or I doubt ill be playing Guild Wars much longer.

I am tired of red circles, laser beams from no where and jumping around like I’m Mario. I think the living story stuff has gotten out of hand and ridiculous. We skewered Scarlet Cabbage Patch Pippi Longstocking. Let that be an end to over-the-top events until the Mad King visits again.

The Scarlet story has not been made to fit well into the existing world. Lion’s Arch burns while day-to-day life outside the front gate in Gendarran Fields continues as it always has. It’s awkward and uncanny.

Bugs need fixing. Maps need refreshing. “Living Story” should mean following the ongoing adventures of the heart-quests around the maps. Make new ones. Mix them up. Give me a reason to return – to complete the new heart quests as they change.

Make the world “living” and not a strange place that never changes while UFOs, giant mechanical pole dancers and flying corkscrews appear out of no where.

Logged in today, glanced at the dailies, logged out and watched Doctor Who.

Nothing to look forward to. Nothing that excites me any more. Most certainly not the same repetitive zerging around LA that has no real meaning to me. Or the same dungeons I have done a thousand times, or the same fractals, or the same maps with the same heart quests and “dynamic” events over and over… (I had to reaffirm my understanding of dynamic while writing that.)

I would LOVE to enjoy this game again, but that is going to mean new areas, new races, and if not new classes, then new skills.

But as of right now, I am in full agreement with the OP, and bored with the game. I would love to not be bored by it any more because I like it… but it is what it is.

YES, held it back like cripple kid in a wheelchair going up a mountain…

This whole Living World experience was handled poorly, the story is bad, the villain is bad, the events and time spent avoiding to making Holidays better or different was instead spent on this dribble.

On the whole, Living Story was like a Monkey f***ing a football. They didn’t have a clue how to get it right.

As a new player the LS meant nothing for me. I have no idea about the back story or what’s going on so I didn’t participate. Which sucks since it’s temporary I missed out on stuff and the story. IMO LS is only good for level capped players and is NOT a draw for new players.

I think LS has been good for ‘flavor’, but the developers should give more resources or attention to, in order of importance:

1. WvW

I personally think WvW should get more focus than any other part of the game, it has the greatest potential for longevity and player interest.

In any game, I think there are only two ways to make interest in PvE last: either continue to churn out small updates or expansions, or make the game incredibly grindy, this game is more of the former (GW2 is far from grinding hell, I have seen much, much worse…)

To retain interest in a game, I think building and sufficiently maintaining a very robust PvP system is much more effective, and in the long run less effort than creating substantial content updates every 2 weeks.

The players will build their own ‘living story’ of factions and conflict, and the unpredictability, mind games, and emotions of humans will keep the content fresh longer than any PvE could.

2. New skills, traits, weapons

There haven’t been many new skills or traits added since the game’s release, this makes the game feel very static.

3. Permanent PvE content

I think after a year, I feel that the current set of dungeons has inevitably become stale. I would personally like to see more “high end” PvE content, e.g. 10-man “elite” dungeons with more complex mechanics that require the larger # of players, in an instanced setting. The LS has been mostly large open-world.

Eleir.9325:

Did Living Story Hold Back Guild Wars 2?

Absolutely. I don’t understand how anyone could argue otherwise.

+1 on this thread.
If ANet wants to keep their players – things have to change! Take a break from releasing new content and fix things for a while. Either that or release new content once a month and instead make it higher quality. Balance and fix things whenever possible.
No one likes zerg fests. It’s as passive as gamestyle as it is even possible. And as ANet has stated many times before; they don’t like passive because it lacks skill.

So ANet – prove what you’re worth and make the players want to act!

I don’t think the LS held GW2 back. While I didn’t enjoy everything about it, I enjoyed most of it. It was nice to have new content to check out every couple of weeks. GW1 was nice, but it got stale real quick. Was the LS perfect? No. I would have liked to have seen more permanent content, and I haven’t been thrilled with the latest update. But when I come to the forum, I see a lot of talk about the lore, predictions for the future and what’s going on now. These are good signs and suggest there is a lot of life in GW2 at the moment. I look forward to the next season.

Living Story was not perfect, yes. Did it hold the game back? Maybe. But remember that this whole LS season was probably planned ahead, and it was more of a test thing. I can’t remember seeing something like this in other MMOs, and innovation is always a good thing, even if it’s not perfect at first.

I believe the LS will improve from this point, as the devs will be able to implement everything they’ve learned so far. In season one, with the story already planned, they were unable to make drastic changes without ruining the plot, I think.