Guild Wars 2

The general idea here is that instead of the storybooks we go back to the temporary episodes. To do this worlds or servers should be forced to end, at the end of the story of course. Then we can go back and restart the whole story sequence. Or if people don’t want to start the story again, they can stay on non-updating end of story serverworlds.

Why?

• To bring back the feeling of playing in a everchanging world back.
• By restarting serverworlds on a regular base, new players can experience the whole story from it’s beginnings
• Players on the same serverworld are being on the same part of the story wich gives more of a community feeling. At least it did that for me.
• With servers ending regurarly it wil be much easier to find fun ways to end the life of a underpopulated server.
• There should be some end of story servers available so that players that are inactive for a time, can come back and then move to a fresh starting server. This to achieve that they can replay the story once again.
• More possibilities to experience the story, for instance Story parts that can be FAILED as a server, preferably by underpopulated servers. But there are more ideas to be worked out here.

Problem areas:

• What to do with guilds from serverworlds that are ended?
  • My first solution: restart the guild with all it’s benefits in a new server decided by the guild leader. More problems to be solved there though.
  • My second solution: the players of the guild that is being ended all get a certain amount of influence to spend. Problem there would be how much is fair? and in what form?
• Should players be able to move freely across all the servers?
  • My initial thoughts say: no. People should only be able to go back in the story sequence or stay on the same page but on another worldserver.
  • With a server Failing a story sequence part there should be put in some thoughts on whereto let them go? For instance wil they have to go into other servers that are close to the sequence part they were in? Or can they freely move back to a start up server?

Financial Problems?

• Restarting servers wil never be a 100% automated event. Therefore:
  • People are allowed to go into start up servers as many times as they have character slots. Currently that would be 5 times for a standard account. With a weekly update schedule that would be a total of roughly 5 years of playtime.
  • People should be allowed not to restart. Instead they should have the opputinity to stay on non updating end of the story servers.

tl:dnr: Split world servers up into:

• Start up servers. Let people get to know each other and forming of guilds
• Story sequence servers. Let people experience the story in daily/weekly/2 weekly/ monthly updates
• End of Story servers. Let people that have experienced the story once take a break, level a new character, farm a new armor/weaponset etc. Without any updates.
  This instead of the story books.

I have but one word for this….

tldr version: return to LS1 style and after the GW2 story is at the end (probably far into future), restart it.

@OP: That’s… kinda pointless suggestion at this time, don’t you think? Return in 7-8 years when all the dragons are dead and GW3 is announced?

none.9681:

tldr version: return to LS1 style and after the GW2 story is at the end (probably far into future), restart it.

@OP: That’s… kinda pointless suggestion at this time, don’t you think? Return in 7-8 years when all the dragons are dead and GW3 is announced?

i personally would rather see:

• start up servers
• sequence servers for Living Stories 1 and 2
• End of story part servers

• start up servers for Living story Heart of Maguuma
• sequence servers for Heart of Mauuma
• end of story part servers

• start up servers for Living story the next expansion

and so on

It could become server management from hell… what happens when a ‘start up’ server reaches the end of the LS? What if I want to experience LS just with a new character but I’m in a ‘End of story’ server? What happens with Wvw populations?

It’s just easier to bundle LS in personal stories, instanced. Large scale events, as we got in LS1, could become world bosses, maybe triggered through guild events.

Woodsman Silencio.9361:

none.9681:

tldr version: return to LS1 style and after the GW2 story is at the end (probably far into future), restart it.

@OP: That’s… kinda pointless suggestion at this time, don’t you think? Return in 7-8 years when all the dragons are dead and GW3 is announced?

i personally would rather see:

• start up servers
• sequence servers for Living Stories 1 and 2
• End of story part servers

• start up servers for Living story Heart of Maguuma
• sequence servers for Heart of Mauuma
• end of story part servers

• start up servers for Living story the next expansion

and so on

so, if I understand it right… say I wanted to replay LS1:

- I would transfer my character on a LS1 server now
- LS3 comes out, new LS3 server starts, I am stuck on LS1 server and can’t play new content. My LS1 events are now basically a personal instance, as all the other people are on LS3 server
- year later, my LS1 server finishes.
- I can now hop onto LS3 server… or the new LS4 server. That’s… uh… great. I caught up on LS1 and missed LS3 which is now old content

No. Just… no. I can’t see a system like this working.

@none.9681
you forget a important point:
frequency of the updates. The newest LS updates can be done at a lower frequence then that of the already excisting LS content.

for instance.
You convince a friend to start playing, he goes onto a LS season 1 server.
You help him out as he gets his weekly updates.
In between you get your 2 or 3 or 4 weekly updates on the latest story.
After 1 or 2 years both of you wil be on the same “page” or part of the story.
And both of you wil have experienced all of the content.

The story books have as big downside that the developers/storytellers can not have much of an impact on how area’s look and feel or else it wil be so far outside what is presented in the story books that it wil feel too much off.
That is already happening with the Town of Prosperity….

They won’t do it, simply because it doesn’t make sense from a cost standpoint. Not to mention the nightmare of server administration it would be.

jgcd.6041:

They won’t do it, simply because it doesn’t make sense from a cost standpoint. Not to mention the nightmare of server administration it would be.

i know that it’s hard to make it cost effective. Funny fact is now that they found a perfect justification for story telling for a subscription fee based MMO. But their own no subscription rule is standing in their way to fully developped it.

Woodsman Silencio.9361:

@none.9681
you forget a important point:
frequency of the updates. The newest LS updates can be done at a lower frequence then that of the already excisting LS content.

They can’t. You still ned to have something for all the old players to do. You can’t just tell them to “go to early story servers and start again”. Nor can you tell them “sorry, lot of people reached the end of story point, so we’re resetting the server. No, we don’t care you’re at the halfway point now”.

Or just make chapters from LS1 like in LS2 ?

I was going to say that not much of LS1 was structured in a way that would work as a 5-man instance. I got through the chapters up to Dragon Bash listing out the things that would work before I realized there actually is quite a bit that can be isolated off for single-use/5-man parties. You’d still have to miss out on a lot of overworld events and tasks that wouldn’t feel right in isolation, but you could still do a lot of the early story fights.

The problem comes in during the last 3-5 chapters of the first season, where everything was full-map and simultaneous, on the level of Triple Trouble or harder. These fights and events weren’t designed with single parties in mind and cannot be readily downscaled without gutting them and reworking them completely, which defeats the purpose of making them available again.