Guild Wars 2

This is, from my point of view, a list of things that are counterproductive, frustrating or just plainly wrong with the current format of the Living Story. Please feel free to add items to the list as you see fit.

Missed content

There are players who cannot schedule their life around LS updates. Two weeks of uptime is way too little to guarantee that I can locate a suitable time slot for checking it. Thus, there were several episodes that I missed because of circumstances beyond my own control.

The LS is supposed to have a continuing story arc, and for that to work it is essential that one can follow it through. With a TV series, I can record any episodes that I’d otherwise miss, and then watch them at a more convenient time. No such option exists for the LS — when I miss something it’s gone for good. The result is, I don’t have any incentive to check the following episodes, either, since I already missed the train.

For any future LS arcs, it is imperative that there is an updating “happened so far” module from the beginning of the arc to the current episode, that players can work through at their own pace.

No accumulation of worth

For a customer thinking of purchasing GW2 at the moment, the entire effort put into LS has zero value. Instead of using the time after release to expanding the game and giving people more things to do, the developers have poured most of the resources into throwaway content that ceases to exist after a very limited time.

It doesn’t matter how cool a dungeon or a boss fight was, if new players don’t have any way of experiencing that content then it only becomes a source of resentment. There’s a very good reason for the continuing demand for DVDs/streaming of TV series that have already aired. The ability to watch through the backlog is a huge factor in deciding which series to pick.

Forgettable NPCs

The current crop of NPCs just doesn’t cut it for me. I cared more about my GW1 heroes than I do these LS characters. There are several factors to this, but the two most important ones are that, as I already mentioned, I missed episodes where these characters were introduced, and thus there is very little difference between a supposedly major character of the story and random redshirt A that is used in one episode and then discarded. Second, when playing the game I see these characters maybe five minutes per month, usually in a context with more pressing things demanding my attention. In most cases, game mechanics specifically force me to ignore whatever allied NPCs there are — they are either useless and tanking dirt or invincible and useless. Thus, and knowing ANet’s tendency of fishing sympathy points by killing major characters, I couldn’t care less what happens to them.

Also, the writing doesn’t rise to the minimal level of enabling my willing suspension of disbelief. Case in point, despite romantic F2F relationships getting +10 bonus points in my eyes, the feeling triggered by the final cutscene was something akin to embarrassment. “Here we have a plastic Barbie doll giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to another one of similar persuasion. Look, it worked!” Eh … this had something to do with the story? If you want me to get immersed, please provide immersive content.

Bad achievement design

The guiding design principle of the game was supposed to be to foster co-operation, by eliminating game mechanics that encourage anti-social behavior. Despite that, episode after episode comes with achievements that do the exact opposite, actively rewarding behavior that is detrimental to the group effort. Please take a long, hard look at the way LS achievements are chosen and how they interact with game mechanics.

Bad scaling

And this is the big one. The combination of requiring a zone full of players and tuning an event to “a bit above average player” (as acknowledged on these forums), with the current server/overflow mechanic, is stunningly bad design. I know that the devs want to provide “epic content” but what they are still not acknowledging that it doesn’t matter how epic content is if you can’t access it! There’s nothing epic in the fact that I have yet to see the big holograph fight even once because people fail the assault knights with 100% consistency.

As it currently is, the entire format of massive open world content fails. Either you spend hours during the initial mad rush of a couple of days to ensure a place in the main instance (and suffer from bugs), or then you are permanently locked out of finishing the content when achievement chasers move elsewhere and the zone population drops below critical limit.

If you want to have raids, give us proper tools to manage that. If you want to have casual open world content, make sure that it scales down to whatever is needed for everyone getting a chance to experience the content. This unholy chimera that we are being served right now combines the worst of both worlds.

Well, I don’t agree with half of what you said here, but your second point esp rings home.
Because the Living Story does not add permanent content 9/10, the world has not expanded or really developed in any substantial way.
The game is more or less exactly as large as it was at launch, and I find that bloody criminal.

We’ve had plenty of quality of life stuff, a few balance changes, one new zone that you can actually go to, fractals, and a whole huge swath of temporary content.
And while the LS has gotten much better, the world remains relatively small, and there is only so long you can stare at the same background before it’s time for a change.

If the LS was used as the vehicle to introduce new content, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, but quite frankly, it’s not.

I may end up leaving once Dark Soul 2 PC edition comes out, because if I am going to play an unchanging, uncaring world, might as well be one that has gameplay with actual depth.

Achievement design is the major annoyance with the last few LS updates for me as well but for a different reason. Having server-based achievements is a terrible idea. The 6 minute knight and Spider Queen achievements are the worst culprits of this trend. If you aren’t on a full server on a prime time (good luck getting that lately with most people not in LA cause they have everything already), then you’re boned if you want these achievements. The Spider Queen is just bad from the start, why have an achievement everyone wants that only requires a single griefer to pull the spider queen and ruin it for everyone trying hard to get it?

Fixing the scaling will go a long way to solving this. You could properly have server achievements like 6 minutes if it didn’t require the zone to be hard capped. It should be as easy/hard with 30 people on each knight as it is with 50 or 15, and its not even close right now.

Yoh.8469:

the LS has gotten much better, .

disagree with you here its still as buggy and poorly thought out as it was when they started, in some ways its gotten worse as now it can only really be completed during prime time with a zerg. not to mention the ascended gear checks

they keep saying they are “learning” from things, but i have yet to see them put it into action, the same mistakes are repeated again and again, an have to be hot fixed again and again thats if they even bother, given its only available for 2 weeks on average, some things they just ignore or rebrand a “feature”

tmakinen.1048:

Bad scaling

And this is the big one. The combination of requiring a zone full of players and tuning an event to “a bit above average player” (as acknowledged on these forums), with the current server/overflow mechanic, is stunningly bad design. I know that the devs want to provide “epic content” but what they are still not acknowledging that it doesn’t matter how epic content is if you can’t access it! There’s nothing epic in the fact that I have yet to see the big holograph fight even once because people fail the assault knights with 100% consistency.

This issue needs to be emphasized more. It has been an ongoing problem which has snowballed to disastrous proportions because it has been constantly ignored; During Teq Rising, the devs completely ignored the numerous thread complaints/pleas against Teq’s poor scaling.

The only comment they made was that they were disappointed with how fast some servers managed to kill Teq instead of spending months trying to defeat it (really? that’s the only disappointment that you find with this world boss remake??).

Then months after Teq, we got Marionette and 3-Wurm, where complaints/pleas came again and the response this time was “were now looking into this scaling issue” as if it were a problem that was relatively new.

And then we got Knights, where the proverbial finally hit the fan because this problem has been left to persist, was ignored, and not acknowledged for the longest of time. I hope that Anet seriously, seriously learns from the crapstorm felt during this LS and not ignore issues for months on end; stopping problems while they’re minute is better than pretending that they are non-existent.

In my view, big World Events should be in-game.
But on a different level. As a filler.
Not as only worth mentioning PvE content

It’s fine if you make them big world events but implement a district like system that isn’t home-server based, i.e. when you zone into the area it puts you on a seperate overflow like server that is always filled (then a new one created, like overflows). This way players not on the big 3 servers will ALWAYS have a chance at seeing content versus feeling the need to guest to other servers making the home-server situation even worse.