Guild Wars 2

Imagine an airsoft establishment which announces plans to expand its facility regularly with cool new stuff for its patrons. A million dollars and a massive time investment from the owners yields not new fields and layouts which might facilitate new game modes or larger games, nor an expanded armory with special equipment to change the dynamic of their existing games, but a single room. And every week, the most expensive ex-special forces trainer available comes by to give a new 10 minute sit-down recital of a mission he once partook in.

The patrons didn’t come to the establishment to listen to this guy discuss past glories. They came to play airsoft. They can’t help but imagine what it might be like if this guy would play games with them while telling the stories, or if the investment had instead been directed towards the expanded play facilities mentioned previously. So, they see that their admission fees aren’t being used to meaningfully maintain and expand the facility, and decide to attend a competing establishment which is constructing those very improvements on a regular basis.

This establishment sounds like an isolated Bizarro-ville, with owners completely detached from the realities of their business and their competition. And yet a similar mindset has existed at ArenaNet since before GW2’s release. They have made a game for which their express priority in ongoing to development is to not expand it with compelling gameplay on a regular basis. New gameplay is a rarity, and in interview after interview, ArenaNet continues to support that development philosophy as some evolutionary innovation in the industry, when all evidence supports the contrary.

For the vast majority of the video game industry, new gameplay is a common thread that connects all downloadable content updates and expansion sets of all kinds. With each new update, additional facets of gameplay are added, explored, fleshed-out, and given to players to keep the game fresh and exciting, and to add value for newer players as the game expands. Iteration on existing mechanics, or simply adding more game, is never a bad thing; even when mistakes are made, improvements result over the long term.

But Guild Wars 2 exists in a vacuum where story takes overwhelming priority over gameplay. Its developer, rightfully inspired by the likes of tabletop RPG’s, have arbitrarily decreed its characters and stories to be the most valuable form of “content,” and missed the fine print that states that a DM has to continually create a massive world full of interesting places and fun encounters in order to keep his players engaged, regardless of the static nature of the game mechanics. Alas, they haven’t made a tabletop RPG. They’ve made an MMORPG. A video game genre which, more so than any tabletop campaign, lives and dies on its ability to provide players with exciting things to do.

And yet here we stand, over a year and a half later, with little by way of additional engaging gameplay. Living World has turn out like a collection of very short stories tied together into a small novella. The Season 1 novella was simply burned chapter-by-chapter with a “Too bad, we’re being innovative” excuse. The Season 2 novella is shaping up to be its own waste of time, a collection of story beats with deplorably half-baked mechanics thrown in which will have eaten up development time that could’ve been spent on a massive collection of zones and dungeons and fixes to WvW complemented by appropriate story beats. Time that could’ve been spent on enormous amounts of gameplay. An expansion. (An obscenity, I know.)

Every interview ArenaNet partakes in concerning the Living World development pipeline makes them seem like they’re constantly on the verge of exploding. It’s as if artists and writers and designers don’t have enough time to flesh out their ideas with any true depth before they cycle on to a future update. They’ve constructed a production line in a creative business, the dangers of which I should not have to elaborate on.

Fact is, improvement in voice actors aside, the otherwise decent story Season 2 is telling would work far better as the aforementioned novella or as a series of released short stories, with playable content tying into these characters and places tangentially as a pacing element for new, exciting gameplay and tons of awesome content (like a potential HOST of new Maguuma zones). But our “new” gameplay is instead Zephyrite crystals, we have one new zone, and our time every couple of weeks is spent clicking through too-simple dialogs and engaging mediocre mechanics. That party in Divinity’s Reach would’ve made for a fun read, but instead it made for a tedious slog.

There’s a reason GW1’s expansion structure was so successful. There’s also a reason your community insists on new Super Adventure Box content. It’s because they were meaningful, engaging, fun gameplay. Do not underestimate the value of those lessons.

That’s quite a large wall of text to essentially say ‘everything in your game that isn’t gameplay, put together, is nothing compared to the importance of gameplay’.

I’d much rather write a lengthy, reasonable argument than an elevator pitch to be dismissed off-hand. People tend not to take sweeping, declarative statements seriously without qualification. To each their own, though.

There should be a balance….to little text ppl will not take seriously…to much text ppl won’t even bother.

As for your Great Wall of Text about something that has been stated in almost countless threads so far. The game needs an expansion

LS in my opinion is just the buffer between major content expansions.

…and noo i didn’t read even the first paragraph of what u said, it’s just a hunch. Your text is bigger then most patch notes ANet gave us.

Frankly, I was too lazy to read the content of the post, but to answer the sentence from the topic – perhaps I wouldn’t mind that, if the story wasn’t so childish and shallow.

If a low quality story is used as a vehicle to deliver gameplay, oftentimes (especially in the MMO genre) that is accepted. Conversely if a high quality story takes a substantial amount of emphasis away from gameplay, that can also be accepted, but this is obviously geared for an entirely different target audience.

The issue here is that the LS production-line model is not conducive to either of these examples, as time needed for both refining story and gameplay simply is not permitted, it isn’t even a “one or the other” sort of deal. Much of the wealth of updates we get are full of bugs and inconsistencies with lore, both of which can easily be remedied by simply giving the devs more time than a strict schedule permits. A focus on one aspect of the game over others is a viable strategy when working with insufficient time. The problem though is, there are many players who would prefer quality over quantity when it comes to these updates.

Also a lot of the limited dev time seems to be going into the (largely temporary or otherwise hidden away and unrewarding) LS when we would love that content to be, for example, added into dungeons. It’s not like Anet has wholey abandoned gameplay: the Marionette, the LA bosses, the Dragon at the end of the most recent LS episode, those would have been great if those sorts of things were added into new dungeons. Two of those examples no longer exist (nor were they scaled for non-zerg content, therefore you won’t be able to field the numbers needed outside of the flavour of the month zerg content), and the third example is behind a bunch of dialog boxes, as well as lengthy and unchallaging (to an enormous degree) story instances… here the aforementioned issues with focusing on LS are extremely apparent.

tl;dr: Limited dev time is not being allocated properly to create a a quality of story and/or gameplay that many of the players deem satisfactory.

A post longer than the story dialogue we get in an update might be a bit too much for the audience. The point is solid though, this game is focusing on narrative solely while throwing every other aspect of the game (aside from monetization via gemstore) under the bus. It took them 5 years to build gw2 from ground up. It’s been 2 years since the game launched and we haven’t gotten 40% of the content that we got at launch, probably closer to 10-15% and vast majority of that stuff has been temporary. So at the end of the day we got temporary narrative (now permanent and monetized if you missed it) and still no new dungeons, no improvement in wvw mechanics, sPvP still gets much needed balance patches every 6 months, no new skills, no new weapons, no new classes and so on.

Narrative > gameplay is really killing this game. Only people still actually playing the game are repeating same routine dungeons, wvw, spvp that have been there since launch. Only addition to this cycle is fractals which don’t seem to be under any developement anymore either

Anyone who calls this a wall of text clearly does not know what a wall of text is. If it has proper spacing and punctuation and you’re just too lazy to read it all, “tl;dr” is a bit more applicable.

Pedantry aside, I agree pretty much completely agree that Anet has thus far prioritized story over gameplay. However, I do believe that making LS content replayable (and thus no longer temporary content) is a small step in the right direction.
Though most players would likely agree that the content this game is hurting for the most is not a new LS episode that they finish in less than an hour, but actual, real replayable content (and not just a handful of LS achievements). New dungeons, new zones, new puzzles, and new things to work towards like skins, titles, minis, or fun cosmetic bundles – that’s what this game sorely needs.

Dry Top was a great addition, and I certainly want more like it. My only complaint was that there wasn’t enough to buy with geodes. More incentive to farm the hell out of the zone would be great, especially for the people who didn’t like how the ambrite weapons look.

Hopefully with how new content is being added as of late, we are moving towards having more permanent content in general. And I do hope the unfortunate news regarding dungeons is just one of those weird PR things where they don’t want to talk about something before they have a proper release date. Otherwise, that does bode ill for GW2’s future as a whole.

Thread has too much story. Needs more gameplay.

No, but seriously, I didn’t read closely enough to confidently say whether I agree or disagree. I will just say this: I am mostly of the opinion that good gameplay trumps good story in a video game.

The problem is, these bigger games I think are kind of becoming cinema wannabes, sprinkled with interactivity. Which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. For example, Assassin’s Creed 3 did a lot of interactivity silliness that was (I guess) supposed to make you feel like you were more a part of the story, but instead I just wanted to smack them for introducing mechanics that were out of place and difficult to understand. Some of the earlier games in the series were the same way.

But on the flip side, had they left too much to story, I might have complained about it being an aggrandized movie.

So I think there’s a balance to be had and we’re just going to have to put up with it for a while, when we play higher-end-budget games; it seems there’s still a lot of outright experimentation going on in this industry and nobody really knows when or where some of the best choices are going to demonstrate themselves.

As for myself, I feel that the simplest mechanics are often the best and player choice is important to providing a truly interactive experience, if not required

Why would you compare a video game with airsoft, or any kind of physical activity? Why not compare it with book or a TV show, which are story driven? Such analogies are matter of perception and only corrupt our discourse since they stream it in a certain direction (and wrong one that is)

I for one am completely fine with LS and wish more of it, since my main interrest in GW is story. For me, personally, if a game lacks any decent story, I won’t be interested. So, in my opinion ANet pushing with the story is a good thing

Let me just say that I would love an expansion, as this was a wall of text to merely say ‘expansion is the only saviour’ but I do not agree with the OP and some of the statements in this thread…

There was a lot of work put into everything after release, there were several QoL updates, serveral entire maps, armour/weapons/etc tid bits, as well as various memorable temporary big fights. The ‘problem’ is that the QoL work, while major in some cases, isn’t considered ‘content’, while it does eat budget/resources. And where I do agree is that the LS1 with all it’s temporary stuff, left Anet with very little ‘TO SHOW’ for their work…

So the LS delivery method changed for season 2, we don’t even know how many maps we are getting, but from analysing Dry Top, we are somewhat running out of Room to do anything remotely interesting and permanent in there. And for those that still know what ‘covered up map’ looks like, as opposed to ‘non explorable map’, it looks like we are going further into the Maguma…

Now, if this is the way that the LS will go forward, where the story is used to guide people through new maps of the game, similar to how Karka Island and DryTop were unravelled, and these new maps show up at the same ‘speed’ as LS:Chapters, then I do not need an expansion! Sure it be cool, but it’s not really needed from my PoV, we could just unravel an expansion as we move through the LS, which was actually how I though the LS would work in the first place!

So to me it’s not about ‘only an expansion can save Tyria’, no, it’s about ‘how can ANet use the LS to unravel meaningful, gameplay/’expansion’ worthy content’. And seeing a lot of LS1 was likely already planned out before it even started, and was a miss as far as ‘expansion’ worthy goes. For I found it meaningful and gameplay worthy… LS2 takes an entirely different approach, and while it comes closer to ‘meaningful & replayable’ content. It is not yet up to standard of the goal… But from my pov that has more to do with the fact that resources went to ‘replayability’ instead of ‘content’; so now that that part has been somewhat tackled, it’s all about how to design meaningful, gameplay&expansion worthy content within that framework.

kasoki.5180:

Why would you compare a video game with airsoft, or any kind of physical activity? Why not compare it with book or a TV show, which are story driven? Such analogies are matter of perception and only corrupt our discourse since they stream it in a certain direction (and wrong one that is)

I for one am completely fine with LS and wish more of it, since my main interrest in GW is story. For me, personally, if a game lacks any decent story, I won’t be interested. So, in my opinion ANet pushing with the story is a good thing

Airsoft and Guild Wars 2 are both games, by their very nature interactive. TV and books are linear storytelling, by their nature non-interactive. My analogy is valid, and physical activity or the lack thereof is poor grounds for its disqualification; such an issue is irrelevant to the argument at hand.

Arghore.8340:

Let me just say that I would love an expansion, as this was a wall of text to merely say ‘expansion is the only saviour’ but I do not agree with the OP and some of the statements in this thread…

snipped

Another reductive “wall of text” qualifier. Wonderful…

My argument and the contributions of several people in this thread have already taken the stance that, while ArenaNet is turning the ship in the right direction, as you said, the creation of meaningful gameplay and replayable content that is both fun and rewarding will still be next to impossible to do on the breakneck, production-line development pipeline of the Living World.

Production lines as a concept were designed to ensure a safe level of quality control over the production of physical goods which are exact copies; same materials, same process, every time. No Model T rolled out of assembly with any significant differences from any other. By optimizing the process in this way, companies like Ford ensured that each individual unit could be made in exactly the same amount of time; any optimizations to the process would reduce the production time of every unit.

While the nature of creativity is still up for debate considering the modern world’s shift towards neural nets and thinking machines, right now, human creativity is incredibly difficult to regulate to that degree. The incubation of both high-quality ideas and high-quality execution requires time as the most important resource; time and again, companies have learned the hard way that throwing more people and more money at a product does NOT counteract cuts in production time.

If you want high-quality content, there is little debate to be had. Updates need to be made semi-regular, and the teams working on them need more time.

I don’t think an expansion is the answer for what you see as ailing the game. I think if there was an expansion, it would change things for exactly four weeks before it became “business as usual, let’s farm stuff”. (Barring the inclusion of time-gating, or entry ‘quests’ needed to reach certain areas of the expansion.) Either that or the expansion is then where all the action is, because it’s new and fresh and probably “better” than the older stuff, which leaves people out of luck all over again.

I say this largely because that’s how I recall expansions mostly going when I still played games which used them as a means of delivering content in great amounts. There was one exception, which was Ultima Online . . . and that’s due to that game having a peculiar focus on a lot of sandbox play before sandbox play really was “a thing”.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I don’t think an expansion is the answer for what you see as ailing the game. I think if there was an expansion, it would change things for exactly four weeks before it became “business as usual, let’s farm stuff”. (Barring the inclusion of time-gating, or entry ‘quests’ needed to reach certain areas of the expansion.) Either that or the expansion is then where all the action is, because it’s new and fresh and probably “better” than the older stuff, which leaves people out of luck all over again.

I say this largely because that’s how I recall expansions mostly going when I still played games which used them as a means of delivering content in great amounts. There was one exception, which was Ultima Online . . . and that’s due to that game having a peculiar focus on a lot of sandbox play before sandbox play really was “a thing”.

Much of this is due to what some see as an inherent obligation to raise the level cap. Here’s a dangerous idea: Don’t. ArenaNet hasn’t added much in the way of better gear aside from Ascended items, and they’re vehemently against the gear treadmill, so there’s little motive for a raised level cap. This is much like how Guild Wars 1 added its enormous amount of expansion content with the vast majority designed for level 20s; gear was still sitting at a homogenized baseline over the game’s lifetime, and no content became obsolete.

Why not make expansion content stick to level 80 for every release? New content could be zones made for both 80 characters and middle levels, and new dungeons and world events would complement what’s already in the game to expand choices for level 80s. None of the content they’re making now is raising the cap and obsoleting old content; why do it in an expansion? This strategy seemed to work out fine for Guild Wars 1.

Nerve.9581:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I don’t think an expansion is the answer for what you see as ailing the game. I think if there was an expansion, it would change things for exactly four weeks before it became “business as usual, let’s farm stuff”. (Barring the inclusion of time-gating, or entry ‘quests’ needed to reach certain areas of the expansion.) Either that or the expansion is then where all the action is, because it’s new and fresh and probably “better” than the older stuff, which leaves people out of luck all over again.

I say this largely because that’s how I recall expansions mostly going when I still played games which used them as a means of delivering content in great amounts. There was one exception, which was Ultima Online . . . and that’s due to that game having a peculiar focus on a lot of sandbox play before sandbox play really was “a thing”.

Much of this is due to what some see as an inherent obligation to raise the level cap. Here’s a dangerous idea: Don’t. ArenaNet hasn’t added much in the way of better gear aside from Ascended items, and they’re vehemently against the gear treadmill, so there’s little motive for a raised level cap. This is much like how Guild Wars 1 added its enormous amount of expansion content with the vast majority designed for level 20s; gear was still sitting at a homogenized baseline over the game’s lifetime, and no content became obsolete.

Why not make expansion content stick to level 80 for every release? New content could be zones made for both 80 characters and middle levels, and new dungeons and world events would complement what’s already in the game to expand choices for level 80s. None of the content they’re making now is raising the cap and obsoleting old content; why do it in an expansion? This strategy seemed to work out fine for Guild Wars 1.

I am not talking about the level cap, not really. From what I recall EverQuest didn’t raise the level cap between Kunark and Velious but Velious still drew most of the players due to the drops/items/areas there just being overall . . . better. Similarly, Shards of Luclin didn’t raise the level cap (though it did introduce “Alternative Advancement” or AA points to add traits to your characters).

And it wasn’t the level cap which was an issue with those two expansions – it was how the high-end game was RNG dominated, increasingly time-gated, and the incredibly crazy in the worst ways concept of the Sleeper’s Tomb one time event.

You think Lost Shores was bad? Well, it was. This was way worse in different ways.

Agreed. What’s worse, the story isn’t even very good. Good enough for the target audience, sure, but not worth neglecting gameplay expansion.

I was given some hope by the recent official responses to player agitation, but still, it does not appear they have sufficient resources allocated to gameplay to do anything other than nerf stuff they don’t want people doing.

Andred.1087:

I was given some hope by the recent official responses to player agitation, but still, it does not appear they have sufficient resources allocated to gameplay to do anything other than nerf stuff they don’t want people doing.

All this does is remind me of several nerfs way back with my time in EQ and this comment coming up time and time again in various permutations. And it was somewhat right – there was very little “new gameplay” introduced, only the same stuff served up on different plates with maybe a tweak to the seasonings.

Generally, with an MMO . . . that’s what you’re going to get. You’re not going to get drastic changes in gameplay in the main game, but in side-attractions. Like “Southsun Survival” which was run in BWE as “Hunger Royale” and tweaked a bit. Interesting shift in gameplay . . . but would be terrible for the main game.

That was a great post, Nerve. Very well said.

I’ve not been very interested in gw2 these past months, it’s all a bit tedious really. I thought I’d check out the Dry Top and storyline updates though. Dry Top is an extremely dull-looking zone, the idea of sandstorms is cool but in reality it just annoys me. I can’t see where I’m going and it’s just tedious. Walking along the bottom of a cliff looking for a way up or around, in bland colours, back and forth, tedious.

And I thought I had purchased an mmo, you know, where people get together and do stuff. All this stuff seems single player – I tried to help a friend with her story and it was so confusing and… tedious.

“Do you have this quest?”
“I don’t think so”
“OK look in this tab, do this, do that”
“It says I have to pay for it. I’m not paying for it”
“Yeah don’t bother. It’s really boring and the rewards are awful, as usual with this game, lol”
“lol”

There is definitely not enough action. I paid attention to the initial personal storylines, but these new ones I really don’t care about. Are you STILL writing stuff about Scarlet? Jeeze. Talk about beating a dead horse. If I want to READ I’ll read a book, not a computer game. In a computer game I want to enjoy the physics and the gameplay, not sit there skipping through masses of painfully uninteresting text, or, even worse, minimising the window and checking my facebook while the characters TALK TO EACH OTHER about more uninteresting stuff. You expect people who missed it to PAY to watch characters talk to each other? Madness.

Cut the story in half and just give us the new dragon already. Give us some action. Give us awesome group events like in the earlier parts of the game.

Just to clarify on my original post seeing as Tobias touched on the idea, “new gameplay” does not always mean gimmicks and radically altered gameplay as with the Super Adventure Box; “new gameplay” can refer to various pieces of new content that amount to more game, such as zones and events, new ways of encouraging group cooperation that aren’t the asocial zerg-fests of said events we have now, new boss encounters with interesting mechanics beyond stack and attack, new items that influence world events, new armor skins that are difficult to obtain and become sufficient motivation in themselves (Guild Wars 1, anyone?); simply, new stuff do to. As MMOs have effectively demonstrated, gimmicks are rarely as polished and fun as developers want them to be, and are largely side-shows on the first run through a new area. I would find ways to integrate these gimmicks into group content, such as against bosses or in dungeon encounters.

Nerve.9581:

Just to clarify on my original post seeing as Tobias touched on the idea, “new gameplay” does not always mean gimmicks and radically altered gameplay as with the Super Adventure Box; “new gameplay” can refer to various pieces of new content that amount to more game, such as zones and events, new ways of encouraging group cooperation that aren’t the asocial zerg-fests of said events we have now, new boss encounters with interesting mechanics beyond stack and attack, new items that influence world events, new armor skins that are difficult to obtain and become sufficient motivation in themselves (Guild Wars 1, anyone?); simply, new stuff do to.

Ah, let’s take this a little bit at a time? First, your “new gameplay” is better served being worded as “new content”. “New gameplay” seems to imply the gameplay is going to be fresh, new, and different than “old gameplay”. (About the only place this might make sense is underwater combat. Still. Again.)

Also, I don’t know about you but I’ve had more social interactions with the “World Boss Grand Tour” train than in doing other content. It’s fun. The somewhat simple nature of it means people can relax and be funny or entertaining, or discuss topics. Such as several I won’t bring up because they spell instant derailment for a thread. (It starts with an “P”).

While we might say we want new mechanics other than “stack and attack” . . . I don’t think the majority of players really do. Otherwise there’d be more praise for . . . I dunno, “Triple Trouble”, the evolved wurm. Rather than resounding silence on whether it was good or not.

The last bit? New skins/models/meshes (pick whichever technical term is right) would be interesting. But if you think GW1 had them locked behind “challenging content” . . . oh boy. No, the only thing it was locked behind was either atrocious RNG or incredible amounts of gold grind the like even the Cursed Shore has never seen. GW1 had platinum as the great equalizer – if you had enough of it, you too could sport awesome Obsidian Armor on your warrior and look incredibly dull dying it all black.

Let’s just aim for new stuff not in the gem store, and we can move the target back once they hit it in the sweet spot, right? Right. Moving on.

As MMOs have effectively demonstrated, gimmicks are rarely as polished and fun as developers want them to be, and are largely side-shows on the first run through a new area. I would find ways to integrate these gimmicks into group content, such as against bosses or in dungeon encounters.

Yeah, except the last few times someone tried to integrate things like that . . . I didn’t find the game all that interesting. (Not speaking MMO.) I really found Quick Time Events a blight on gaming, and really would like they disappear entirely. But that’s a gimmick used to “add tension” . . . when what really happens is “add frustration since you missed the timer and now start over again”.

You want to know what I’d rather see against bosses in the open world? Things like what goes on in Dry Top with that Gods-Be-Blasted moa, or the hylek dueling rock, where they rely a lot on people paying attention and cooperating.

As for Dungeons, what I’d like to see are more . . . like a single goal in the dungeon but multiple pathways. You can brute force through encounters, or you can get to levers which bypass some of the mass group encounters in favor of fighting one or two Elites, or you can use jumping to get around to some other route with different challenges. But I know it won’t be something which will likely be designed – because there would be so many who opt for the shortest route or the easiest one (“let’s get a mesmer to portal us through the JP path”) . . . it wouldn’t be rewarding to put into the game for the designer, and the players would find it tedious and pointless after a time.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Semantics bit.

My original post used gameplay to differentiate content that centers around the game’s mechanics and the encounters and places in which they are used from story content that revolves around instances where a bunch of text and half-baked gimmicks are the norm. I suppose that “new gameplay” as a descriptor has become less useful as the discussion has progressed, so might we agree on “new gameplay mechanics,” “new gameplay content,” and “new story content?”

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

World bosses and Triple Trouble

World bosses, by nature of being located in larger world instances where people are actively engaging in other activities, are not well-suited to organized play. Like you said, they’re simple and can be relaxing when mechanics are not demanding, but as soon as any semblance of coordination is required, the presence of people having casually arrived on-scene who are uncoordinated with each other dooms these encounters from the start. A mix of new players, uncoordinated players, and organized groups combine to scale the difficulty of the encounter such that the organized players could never finish it, nor will they ever be able to force anyone to leave the instance because, let’s face it, the zone is public and that would be terribly unaccomodating design. This is why raid instances exist in other games. Difficult encounters are not a fun public endeavor.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Easy GW1 armors and making armors obtainable outside the gem store.

I’m all on board for stuff not in the gem store. ArenaNet has no obligation to honor such a concept, but we are talking in hypotheticals.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Gimmicks and non-linear dungeon design.

Not necessarily quick time events, but neat gimmicks like the Jade Maw crystals (though the rest of that encounter is boring), or, if you’ve played WoW recently, the conveyer belt from Siegecrafter Blackfuse, in which one group member must make split second decisions for the rest of the raid. And yes, non-linear dungeons would be very cool; each route would simply need to be roughly equal in clearing length while also being well-paced from boss-to-boss. This would minimize the possibility of a boring path-of-least-resistance farming scenario, while allowing groups flexibility in what route to take with each clear. Or, make routes such as jumping puzzles much more difficult than the vanilla trash routes they run alongside, making players weigh risk to reward. Not that any of the jumping puzzles in the game are actually difficult, but I’d love to see something like it.

Nerve.9581:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

World bosses and Triple Trouble

World bosses, by nature of being located in larger world instances where people are actively engaging in other activities, are not well-suited to organized play. Like you said, they’re simple and can be relaxing when mechanics are not demanding, but as soon as any semblance of coordination is required, the presence of people having casually arrived on-scene who are uncoordinated with each other dooms these encounters from the start. A mix of new players, uncoordinated players, and organized groups combine to scale the difficulty of the encounter such that the organized players could never finish it, nor will they ever be able to force anyone to leave the instance because, let’s face it, the zone is public and that would be terribly unaccomodating design. This is why raid instances exist in other games. Difficult encounters are not a fun public endeavor.

I was more talking about how zergfests don’t have to be asocial. It’s very rare it has been . . . mmm, unsatisfactory, or to the point where I felt like hitting someone through the monitor.

And yes, non-linear dungeons would be very cool; each route would simply need to be roughly equal in clearing length while also being well-paced from boss-to-boss. This would minimize the possibility of a boring path-of-least-resistance farming scenario, while allowing groups flexibility in what route to take with each clear. Or, make routes such as jumping puzzles much more difficult than the vanilla trash routes they run alongside, making players weigh risk to reward. Not that any of the jumping puzzles in the game are actually difficult, but I’d love to see something like it.

I find there are two really difficult JPs, which are timed and seasonal

I think if there’s ever a discussion more on topic about dungeons and ideas for how to handle it? I’d post more about ideas there.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I was more talking about how zergfests don’t have to be asocial. It’s very rare it has been . . . mmm, unsatisfactory, or to the point where I felt like hitting someone through the monitor.

I will say that world bosses are generally an exception to the rule. When people are standing around waiting for a boss, they’ll socialize. But for every other part of the game, it’s map chat. The vast majority of public events are get in, get out affairs, asocial to an alarming degree; I’d imagine there’s a way to require players to communicate during more public events while not making an encounter especially difficult. Maybe Anet should get their crack R&D team working on that right away.

Nerve.9581:

Maybe Anet should get their crack R&D team working on that right away.

Is this the same one which made quaggans? Because if so, I’d rather they pass it off to someone else. Like the guy who wrote for Trahearne.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Is this the same one which made quaggans? Because if so, I’d rather they pass it off to someone else. Like the guy who wrote for Trahearne.

NO DON’T

@Nerve, hey, you are the one that bolded ‘Expansion’ … as far as your, well it wasn’t so much about an expansion, but… check out who started this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/2-weeks-enough-What-about-when-its-done/first#post4261915

Arghore.8340:

@Nerve, hey, you are the one that bolded ‘Expansion’ … as far as your, well it wasn’t so much about an expansion, but… check out who started this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/2-weeks-enough-What-about-when-its-done/first#post4261915

I never said my post wasn’t an argument for expansions, nor did I swear off my stance on expansions anywhere in this thread. The post was instead an implicit qualification for the expansion argument.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I dunno, “Triple Trouble”, the evolved wurm. Rather than resounding silence on whether it was good or not.

To be fair, most people ignore those sorts of events because they are not implemented well. They require a large and coordinated group of players to accomplish, and then this group must fight against the Megaserver system. The best way to get the massive amounts of players required for this sort of event is for it to be a flavour of the month farm event (which will lack the coordination requirement), otherwise you are largely disadvantaged.

If this content was designed for smaller groups, say 5 to even 20 players, and instanced like a dungeon (and maybe rewards that aren’t simply a reskin with ugly particle effects added behind massive RNG), then this sort of content would be much more appreciated and accessible.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

As for Dungeons, what I’d like to see are more . . . like a single goal in the dungeon but multiple pathways. You can brute force through encounters, or you can get to levers which bypass some of the mass group encounters in favor of fighting one or two Elites, or you can use jumping to get around to some other route with different challenges.

This is a really fun idea, and used to exist to a small degree in this game. However Anet has shown that this is the opposite of what they want (removing the very minor JP skip in SE P3 by simply adding a big ugly wall blocking off the JP, and many other examples).

But I digress.

I wouldn’t say that the game exists in a vacuum, ANet has always tried to distinguish GW2 from all the other MMOs with its emphasis on story, aversion of the Holy Trinity, and this whole e-sport thing; whether or not this is a successful strategy is only something NCSoft bean counters can say and we can only infer from watching their behavior. You might find the reduced emphasis on new gameplay to be a poor business decision, but NCSoft isn’t a charity, if ANet’s strategy really was negatively impacting profits then the publisher would have more than a few choice words about it – and we’d be seeing some changes in strategy pretty quickly.

I’m not sure which dry top the OP was in if he things it didn’t have new gameplay. The majority of the events have new mechanics, and the overall area has an entirely new style of gameplay. The inquest events in particular are totally new.

Sure there a few champs that are pretty standard zerg fests , but this is the minority.