Guild Wars 2

Or did they disown me? The priory is on the scene, researching this strange alliance and the bizarre ongoings and yet… they didn’t call me. They had no task for a Magister of their order. They didn’t even have the decency to write to tell me personally about their findings. Even if they don’t need me, I’m still part of the priory. I love learning, research, and adventure as much as the rest of them but I have to seek out some silly priory robot thing to learn what in the world’s going on.

Likewise… The order of whispers clearly has covert operations going on but they didn’t call me up and ask me for help. I’m a Lightbringer—someone directly responsible for the downfall of Zhaitan but they don’t need my help. Instead, they enlist the help of random nobodies that happen to be wandering through the Black Citadel. What? They don’t even have the decency to tell me that I could be useful. Instead, I hear about it from the Heralds. How is it that they know more about what my order’s doing than I do? Especially when I’m one of the highest ranking members…

Drama aside, I really do feel like there was a huge missed opportunity here. You put the orders on the scene—orders that we joined but haven’t heard from since the defeat of Zhaitan. A new threat shows its face and they still carry on as if we’ve nothing to do with them. The Living Story is meant to bring the world alive. Overall, it’s been extremely underwhelming. The Personal Story took place in the world too and I distinctly recall a dev commenting on the fact that the living story gets complicated because of the events of the personal story. Despite that, there’s no point at which the two touch. They have no common storyline or characters. They are completely separate happenings. Here, we see our orders (the ones we are supposedly all-important members of) working hard to figure out what is going on and then fix it but they don’t call on us. They don’t even stop to tell us what’s happening. Instead, we’re told by our old mentors to seek out these silly gossip-mongers standing on boxes in cities for our information. Don’t we rate a little more than that?

You could have prolonged the fun of the living story and made it more relatable by pulling our orders into it. The questlines for the living story, once there actually were questlines, were easily finished in one evening. Then there was only the evidence left in the world. The events, the peri-sonic scope thingys, the dead and dying refugees, the foreverly broken sign posts, and the ice and dust storms. It just doesn’t feel life-threatening or important. There’s nothing relatable in it and I don’t feel needed. All these people send us mail at the beginning of the month, begging for help, claiming they’re swamped and don’t know how to handle anymore. Yet, when you go to them, there’s nothing to do. There’s too much drama for the tiny amount of activity. There could have been tons of mini-quests from our orders, or really from anyone, keeping the living story alive. But there wasn’t. When I compare the living story to the personal story, it falls extremely short. It seems like no one really needs us, they’re just sending us out with busywork to keep us out of their hair. My point is: the living story has fallen extremely short of expectations (at least for me) and the orders could have been an excellent tool for really bringing it to life but ultimately, they became a wasted opportunity.

about the orders being involved: they can’t necessarily have the orders involved because not everyone is in an order in their personal story yet. It ties in to what the dev actually said, which is that tying personal story characters into living story is complicated because not everyone is at the same place in their personal story. imagine the the orders were involved, and the OoW put Tybalt as their point man. do you see the issue with that?

The Vigil seems to be the one you get the notification from, and it makes sense. The Order seems to be doing more observation and the Priory probably will just be handling clean-up. The Vigil pretty much the group to turn to when you need to combat a force like the Molten Alliance.

kitanas.3596:

about the orders being involved: they can’t necessarily have the orders involved because not everyone is in an order in their personal story yet.

You can’t experience everything in the dungeon from this update until you’ve completed last month’s questlines with Rox and Braham. Likewise, obviously if you’re not in an order, you can’t be called upon or contacted by them. There are already achievements in place for being in an order so it would have been simple to simply write two letters and have the system check your achievements to see which one you get. Or your quest progress since achievements are account-bound and each character may not be in an order.
They already did this to some extent because if your character has become Pact Commander you can enter the charr leadership meeting in the instance where Rytlock sends Rox out on a mission. If your character hasn’t become Pact Commander, they kick you out. They proved they can tell the system to distinguish where you are in your personal story.

kitanas.3596:

It ties in to what the dev actually said, which is that tying personal story characters into living story is complicated because not everyone is at the same place in their personal story. imagine the the orders were involved, and the OoW put Tybalt as their point man. do you see the issue with that?

Over the past few months of design work on the Living Story, we’ve overcome many challenges. Writing story in an MMO environment resembles building a giant puzzle. We want to avoid temporal paradoxes, for example. From a player perspective, the Personal Story is unfolding simultaneously with the Living Story, but how can characters be in both places at the same time? Furthermore, do we all presume that So-and-So is dead, because he died at level 80, or do we assume the opposite? There’s a minefield of possible paradoxes that we have to carefully move through when writing the Living Story, and we’ve had to shift our thinking a bit to accommodate that. This has taken a lot of thought and forethought.

There’s what the dev said in her post back in February. The orders are huge. There’s no reason they needed to use Tybalt. They could have created a completely new character from that order. Which they did, but they didn’t make good use of him to draw players from the OoW further into the story.
I think the problem here is that they assumed with their storyline that everyone was still working through the personal story questline which is simply not true. I completed that questline months ago. Many other players, in fact I would guess a majority, have as well. From our perspectives as players, these events are happening way after Zhaitan.

I think that they should have created questlines including the orders for those who are past a certain point in their storyline. I would guess that the majority of the players out there have completed it on at least one character. That would make it last longer because if you have one character in the Order of Whispers, you can experience as a spy. If you have another in the Vigil, you can assault their bases. If you’ve got one in the Priory, you can research what’s going on. Or something like that. People who haven’t completed the personal story questlines miss out. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing because people who aren’t playing right now are missing out on this whole story arc. It rewards your dedicated players and inspires less-dedicated players to become dedicated. It shows that it pays to achieve.

BunnytheSwordsman.4173:

The Vigil seems to be the one you get the notification from, and it makes sense. The Order seems to be doing more observation and the Priory probably will just be handling clean-up. The Vigil pretty much the group to turn to when you need to combat a force like the Molten Alliance.

I don’t have a character in the Vigil so I can’t say whether or not they draw Vigil players into it more. Notification is nice and would be a good step in the right direction, but mini-missions or quests would be even better. There is more to war than just the combat. We were told that the priory was researching what was going on. Where did they get their information? Likely they were searching camps and the like for any pre-existing hint of alliance. The Order had people undercover, sending out battle plans and camp locations etc. The Vigil is basically organizing raids. The three orders worked together to bring down Zhaitan and here we see that they are working together or at least covering the different areas and facets of war. The difference is with Zhaitan, the player was not just called upon but depended upon for help. With the Molten Alliance, the orders have almost forgotten who the player is and basically sends us to pick up trash.

Almorra sent my ranger, who is in the Vigil, a message back when The Razing started.