Hello,
So I’ve been playing the living story since release and it is really going down hill.
You guys really need to work on immersing the players in the story and rewarding them for doing the story.
What I’m finding is most of the people I talk to have no idea what is going on in the story or simply don’t care. They see a new set of achievements and start going for the meta reward.
I love what you did in flame and frost where every few days something new would happen in game. The living story would progress in some way. While I do wish the idea would be expanded upon (it was simply adding in more refugees to the camp) it is a great idea. Progressing the story every 3-4 days but keeping the previous quest for the 2 week time. For exampe the Baazar. Here is what I would have done. Keep in mind that these portions of the game are instanced and can be repeated so that players who come in later can do them. After 2 weeks is up they all go away. 1. Help Kiel gather supplies for the trip to the Baazar- Go around the open world into these story missions where you raid enemies or help towns and they give you various supplies. 2. Kiel and the crew of the ship have stopped in Southsun to restock on a few supplies- Players can go there and see the ship/her crew walking around the camp doing usual stuff. They can enter a instance mission where you have to defend the camp against waves of pirates then barely escape on the ship. 3. The Current part of the living story. Reward players for doing the story. ALWAYS add in a guaranteed reward to the game and make it useful. Don’t give us a already in the game skin with stats that are already in the game. To a game without a gear grind this is useless to most players. You’ve been giving us the guaranteed rewards through the meta achievements, but that isn’t immersive at all and very boring. Take this months LS. I’m finding players just grinding out the achievements and getting bored/annoyed.
You’re turning the achievement system into a quest giver system. Don’t do that, please. Achievements should be a nice reward for players on the side, they should NOT be the main focus of the endgame/living story.
Finally the living story needs to have more of an impact on the world in general. So far I feel like have done nothing. Every living story introduces something new, usually with a new character that I have little to no attachment too. This entire year seems like every LS arc has just been more and more blocks on the base foundation of the LS that you guys are planning on building on. You’ve given us enough characters at this point now, it is time to start getting us attached to these characters. Make these characters interactable outside of the living story. Make them like the Modus Sceleris where they wonder around the world and you can find them and do events with them. Keep in mind that these events need to be rewarding to all players, not just the typical karma+gold+ exp reward. 80s would have no desire to do them. Finally use characters, enemies, and locations already in the game. So far we went to wayfarer, disseau, southsun, and LA. Start spreading these out in these maps and make them over multiple maps. Players are attached to stuff already in the game, when you introduce new locations, characters, enemies, and other things we have no attachment to them which causes the living story to have less of an effect on us.
tl;dr: LS needs to be more immersive. Achievements are too much of the focus and feel way too much like quest givers telling players what to do. We need to start getting attached to characters. Please no more new characters and new enemies. Guild wars 2 open world has so much depth in terms of the story and you guys haven’t utilized it at all.