Guild Wars 2

So agree with the OP.
Devs, all we need is:
1) An update with
a) new map zones (min. 2 of them)
b) new dungeons (at least 2 duneons with its patches)
c) new fractals (we are repeating the same fractals all level-wide…)
d) new classes and races maybe (with additional free character slot if this expansion comes up with payment)
e) new arenas
f) some kind of easy dungeons which can be made by low-lvl chars (at least 4…)

2) Living story content to be more pernament.

Having the same fractals every level is by design.
If they didn’t have it like that it would basically end up requiring you to grind Agony Resist in order to experience some content in the game, which they most likely never will add.

lordkrall.7241:

Whole new map in WvW.
Rework of borderlands.
New skills.
Several new PvP-maps.
New dungeon(s).
New reward systems.
New world-bosses.
Etc.

Should I go on? All these things are permanent changes. Then add the massive amount of temporary things added and we have a rather large amount of new stuff.

Reworking exsisting content dose not make it new.
The only things I’ve seen that are “new content” are a few PVP maps. Great if you like PvP. I’m personally not a big fan of PvP in MMO’s so I don’t play a lot of it. I’ve probably played 10 hours max of PvP since launch.

New WvW map. It’s great. But again I don’t play a lot of WvW. Also not a big fan of the map.

The evolved jungle worm. Very challenging and fun. Not beaten him yet. But with the addition of the mega servers and the times I can play I now miss the event.

Fractles. Nice addition. I’ve enjoyed playing them.

Atherblade path in TA. I’ve not done this path. So far I’ve been unable to comit to the time I’ve been told it takes to complet it dew to other commitments to my personal life that mean I can’t play for hours at a time.

So over than the map changes and blance and polish. That not a lot of content added to the game in comparison to a exspantion. Now I’m not saying that the LW stuff has not been good. It’s been great. But I do think that the story parts of it and the final parts of the story should be instanced so people an always play them. It seems like a wast of time to me to make content like this that has in essence, binned.

Someone else said about the PS. I quite liked it. I didn’t think it was as good as the story as in guild wars. But I still enjoyed it. I thought by now the story would have continued and I’m disappointed that the story has been left since the death of Zhitan. The LW is a nice distraction. But that’s all it is. It’s a distraction from what the game is missing.

@lordkrall.7241:
Yea, but adding just 4 more instances into to the loop wouldn’t do any bad thing, don’t you think? Just wider scope of posibilities.

As I posted in another thread, the living world does not bring permanent content, but then again, nothing in the real world is permanent either.

You are free to post “mind = blown” anytime.

Pogromca.4512:

So agree with the OP.
Devs, all we need is:
1) An update with
a) new map zones (min. 2 of them)
b) new dungeons (at least 2 duneons with its patches)
c) new fractals (we are repeating the same fractals all level-wide…)
d) new classes and races maybe (with additional free character slot if this expansion comes up with payment)
e) new arenas
f) some kind of easy dungeons which can be made by low-lvl chars (at least 4…)

2) Living story content to be more pernament.

That sounds like an entirely new game, not additions (Sorry just joining the discussion here).

a) We can already assume that we’ll be getting some more Jungle zones soon (didn’t Jory’s sister go on a mission to a zone we haven’t charted yet?). So we are getting that.

b) As for new dungeons, all of the dungeons have a story. The ones that launched with the game are the story of DE getting back together to fighting Zhaitan. The ones that came out with the living story were connected to the living world.

Personally, I think they should have kept those dungeons as is, but they’ve been reincarnated as fractals, so they still exist.

c) See above, we did get new fractals already. And I’m sure we will eventually get more.

d) At most we maybe need a 3rd heavy armor class to round it out to 9, but ask yourself what new class could be introduced that brings something “new”. Sure from gw1 each full paid expansion added 2 new classes, but there we started with 5. GW2 launched with 8, and we already have a wide variety of class options.

Personally, I’d rather give our current classes more roles (which they’ve started to with the new grandmaster traits). I’ve love if conditions somehow got an overhaul (very subpar in PvE, but very strong in PvP) to bring them into more consistent damage across game modes. I want chooseable weapon skills (2-5) so you have different build options with a certain weapon. Maybe even new weapon types/current weapon types for new classes as others have suggested. I’d rather the game we have become very polished instead of introducing more, potentially tarnished stuff.

As for races, well that just takes a lot of development time, and who knows if/when we’ll see it.

e) If you mean something in PvP besides “king of the hill”, I agree. Event a simple death match wouldn’t be bad.

f) Those dungeons already exist in the game now. You can beat AC with lvl 20 (or whatever level it unlocks) characters. Besides, the way the game is designed, if you made something to easily be beaten by say lvl 30, lvl 80 people would speed run it more than they do the current dungeons. And putting a “max lvl” on it would go against the principle of the game. (It’d also most likely enrage a lot of players who keep saying that there’s no “end game” content.)

Living Story is great. I enjoy it. But it fails in one regard. Even lumped all together it is not to the level of us having had even one expansion in the 2 years since GW2 released. When there isn’t living story going on, for instance right now with the WvW Tournament, the game feels very much the same it did the day it released with nothing really new to do. Yes there are new things such as dungeon paths, world bosses, pvp, LA destroyed, etc. But let’s not kid ourselves here. Combined, that’s all very minor when compared against having new land areas and new permanent stories/missions we can play through. I can’t replay the whole LA thing. Even if I could it was a massive zerg event which goes into the other problem with LS.

Anyway, I love LS and the fun things it brought us every 2 weeks, but I also think we need an expansion whether that’s a boxed expansion or a gigantic update. But we need something more permanent then world bosses and a new dungeon path after 2 years.

In my point of view LS is necessary in GW2. It would no more be the same mmo without it.

But I can understand we have to wait, cause of LS, 2 years instead of one to have huge expansion; not more.

If this year will pass without any expansion annuncement i’m sure a LOT of people will leave up.

And that’s it.

current content release structure is fine.

what more do you want ?

be patient, huge content will come “when it’s ready….”

The Living Story has its positives and negatives.

Even though it’s usually in the form of a massive zergfest, there’s something exciting about there being a flavour of the week area that you know if completely packed with people trying to get their achievements. It feels like the holiday events in a way.

But the problem is that if you have a life and can’t religiously log into the game every week/every two weeks, you end up missing episodes of the Living Story. Eventually the problem becomes compounded and you don’t really know what’s happening. The story becomes meaningless. To be honest, I find it quite strange that the devs expect people to play according to a set pace or miss out. I would have expected them to implement something to cater towards players who may have busy or erratic schedules…even if it’s in the form of instanced “storybooks” that allow you to “travel back in time” and replay certain events.

Lydon.1890:

The Living Story has its positives and negatives.

Even though it’s usually in the form of a massive zergfest, there’s something exciting about there being a flavour of the week area that you know if completely packed with people trying to get their achievements. It feels like the holiday events in a way.

But the problem is that if you have a life and can’t religiously log into the game every week/every two weeks, you end up missing episodes of the Living Story. Eventually the problem becomes compounded and you don’t really know what’s happening. The story becomes meaningless. To be honest, I find it quite strange that the devs expect people to play according to a set pace or miss out. I would have expected them to implement something to cater towards players who may have busy or erratic schedules…even if it’s in the form of instanced “storybooks” that allow you to “travel back in time” and replay certain events.

I’ve called for a story book thing in the past as did others. ANet said it wasn’t going to happen, but they where planning to add things to fractles, so you could exsperiance the game play. As let’s face it. There is no real story in there. Or if there is I’ve missed it dew to slow loading into it, or party members rushing ahead.

azizul.8469:

current content release structure is fine.

what more do you want ?

be patient, huge content will come “when it’s ready….”

Not if they’re spending all their time working on temporary content. How can they work on huge content if they’re releasing nontrivial updates every 2 weeks? I sincerely hope they use the revenue from China release to substantially increase the size of their story and dev teams.

Rebound.3409:

This discussion is so 2013.

You, good sir, should be banned from this forums for this sentence alone.

ANet openly said they understood the community’s concerns related to the lack of permanent content. That’s why they decided to take longer breaks for story stuff to come out. The test will be when Season 2 starts…we will see then if they actually learned anything at all or not.

I remember them saying they are heavily considering expansion style content for the future and are taking in consideration if it will be payed or not.

For now it’s literally useless to point out things they already said they are trying to address in Season 2. U can start QQing again if things don’t get improved during S2..but not prior

They said they will do a season 2. Do you really think they step away from temporary additions? I honestly never read anything about them trying to deliver more “expansion-style” content. They’ll tweak some things, like they always do, but it will be still just temporary additions. The bazaar wont stay that’s for sure. So there is already one proof against your thesis.

lordkrall.7241:

Whole new map in WvW.
Rework of borderlands.
New skills.
Several new PvP-maps.
New dungeon(s).
New reward systems.
New world-bosses.
Etc.

Should I go on? All these things are permanent changes. Then add the massive amount of temporary things added and we have a rather large amount of new stuff.

The fact that you’re a GW1 player and seem to think that this list is satisfactory at this point in the game is completely baffling to me.

- One new WvW map and one new PvE map. Factions added thirty-three new zones, and Nightfall thirty-four. This doesn’t include towns, minor zones, guild halls, or the Realm of Torment.

- Nine new skills. Total. Factions added 343 new skills. Nightfall added 364. I didn’t count PvP versions of skills. That’s 707…to 9.

- A few new PvP maps. Zero new PvP modes. Still no GvG.

- Zero new dungeons. New TA path, yes. Factals, yes. There were a couple new dungeons but they were temporary, so why should they count? I can’t play them anymore, therefore they are no longer content.

- The rewards system is getting positive overhauls, yes.

- Two new world bosses. Karka and 3-headed wurm. Only two.

- Etc. I still can’t replay my personal story missions or the living story releases. I can go back and replay all of the GW1 story missions right now (and indeed, I’m doing just that.)

It’s not even close. For me, temporary stuff doesn’t even count by definition. Maybe it does for you. I don’t understand why. New players can’t play it. Old players can’t play it. It is no longer content. If you had a room built onto your house, used it for two weeks, and then had the room removed, could you say that your house has a new room?

So I found this article

I assume this is what people are referencing when they say Anet is considering expansion-like content. I sure hope that’s what they’re doing, and I sure hope it’s paid, because the cash shop shouldn’t be the primary source of income for a B2P game.

For the record, GW1’s release schedule wasn’t even remotely sustainable. That’s why they canceled the third campaign, cobbled together EOTN, and made GW2.

That’s true, although the understanding I had was that largely what was making it unsustainable was that new professions (not to mention a big pile of new skills for each of the new professions) every six months was part of the deal – this created an exponentially increasing balance problem and required the team to do ever more with each new campaign in order to add new stuff to the increasing number of professions. Adding new zones wasn’t part of the unsustainability (note, after all, that EOTN was probably about as large geography-wise as the previous campaigns once you include dungeons, but only added a limited selection of new skills).

GW2, on the other hand, has added much less new virtual real estate than you’d expect even using EOTN as the baseline, and even taking into account that true 3D maps require more development than the quasi-3D maps GW1 had.

Mind you, on the other hand, comparing the numbers of new skills added is a bit of a false equivalence. A lot of GW1 skills were fine shades of difference, which in GW2 would be the same skill with different traits. There’s still less new skills than would be expected even from the most conservative expectations set from GW1 and taking into account the changed philosophy, but directly comparing numbers is being a little unfair.

Been pretty tired of beating the hell out of our 2 wvw zones for awhile now (eotm doesn’t count… doesn’t help server, and feels slapped together)… boarder lands are all the same.

Living story is starting to feel like weeks of farming to get some FoTM skin, that you don’t even want to wear in the end, cause everyone else has it.

Game needs something to refresh alot of peoples interest. And last I checked the dev’s said there was no xpac planned.

…. archage looks pretty sweet though.

draxynnic.3719:

That’s true, although the understanding I had was that largely what was making it unsustainable was that new professions (not to mention a big pile of new skills for each of the new professions) every six months was part of the deal – this created an exponentially increasing balance problem and required the team to do ever more with each new campaign in order to add new stuff to the increasing number of professions. Adding new zones wasn’t part of the unsustainability (note, after all, that EOTN was probably about as large geography-wise as the previous campaigns once you include dungeons, but only added a limited selection of new skills).

GW2, on the other hand, has added much less new virtual real estate than you’d expect even using EOTN as the baseline, and even taking into account that true 3D maps require more development than the quasi-3D maps GW1 had.

Mind you, on the other hand, comparing the numbers of new skills added is a bit of a false equivalence. A lot of GW1 skills were fine shades of difference, which in GW2 would be the same skill with different traits. There’s still less new skills than would be expected even from the most conservative expectations set from GW1 and taking into account the changed philosophy, but directly comparing numbers is being a little unfair.

Excellent points all around. The balancing issues that the team faced in the first game were daunting, mainly due to all the new classes and sheer number of skills, particularly since many skills had PvP versions. This is why I’m completely fine with no new classes on the horizon, no split skills, and less skills total than the first game. It greatly eases the dev’s balance workload and I support that.

You’re completely right about false equivalence between the skills, too. So for the sake of argument, let’s cut the number of GW1 skills in half to account for duplicate skills and the addition of traits. Then let’s cut it in half again to account for the fact that weapon skills are now an inherent part of the weapon. That puts us at about 176. Split between eight classes, that’s 22 skills per class, a much more reasonable expectation of how many skills should have been added to GW2 by now.

The zones are considerably more complex than GW1 zones, so it’s fairer to chop that number (67) into eighths, giving us about eight new zones that should be expected. Which means that if we get six new zones in Maguuma, that’s about on par.

RedTurtle.7048:

Everyone is disappointed in the living world, especially because it doesn’t bring any real permanent content to the table. An expansion needs to be released with tons of new content, including: new zones, dungeons, races, and hopefully a new way for the story to be told. The personal story just doesn’t work for me, I was never drawn into it. I don’t understand why anet is so focused on the living story, when they should be using their time and resources on providing permanent content that wil keep players playing. Instead it’s being used on a living story that nobody is even all that fond of. You’re messing up anet, shape up.

Is this a joke? You title the thread “Let’s be Honest” and then your first statement is a total lie. How can you expect anyone to take you seriously?

DarcShriek.5829:

RedTurtle.7048:

Everyone is disappointed in the living world, especially because it doesn’t bring any real permanent content to the table. An expansion needs to be released with tons of new content, including: new zones, dungeons, races, and hopefully a new way for the story to be told. The personal story just doesn’t work for me, I was never drawn into it. I don’t understand why anet is so focused on the living story, when they should be using their time and resources on providing permanent content that wil keep players playing. Instead it’s being used on a living story that nobody is even all that fond of. You’re messing up anet, shape up.

Is this a joke? You title the thread “Let’s be Honest” and then your first statement is a total lie. How can you expect anyone to take you seriously?

While “everyone” may be an exaggeration, the consensus I’ve seen from the forums, players in game, and all of my real-life friends is that the living story was a disappointment (with potential) that did not live up to our expectations. Obviously there are exceptions, as is evident in the high rating of the second post of this thread.

Instead of simply attacking the OP for making generalizations, do you have anything of value to add to this discussion? Maybe an argument as to why you liked the living story and think it was a proper equivalence to an expansion’s worth (see my posts above) of permanent content?

Kalarchis.8635:

Split between eight classes, that’s 22 skills per class, a much more reasonable expectation of how many skills should have been added to GW2 by now.

Well, let’s look at the numbers. By my count, looking at the mesmer, in Prophecies there were about 70 skills, while Factions and Nightfall added 55 between them (not including EOTN since that wasn’t released until after GW1’s second anniversary). That’s roughly an 80% increase. A similar increase to the GW2 mesmer would involve a minimum of:

19 new above-water weapon skills (divided among weapons as appropriate)
2 new healing skills (I guess we technically got this one…)
16 new utility skills
2 new elites

I’m leaving underwater skills and downed skills since we have no choice over those (apart from choosing the same underwater weapon twice, but that seems like a poor choice in most circumstances), but this illustrates what a similar level of expansion of the class would entail.

Now, that’s still a lot, especially given that animation requirements for GW2 skills are certainly a lot higher than GW1 (let’s face it, GW1 never really tried to wow us with its skill animations), but it presents a stark contrast to the two healing skills (one being universal across classes) we’ve received. Personally, I’d be happy with half or even a quarter of the above – maybe one new utility in each category, a couple of new weapons, and a new healing skill (which we’ve been given) and elite (which we haven’t…). At the moment, though, things certainly are looking a little stale.

Let’s Really be Honest

-ANet has heard players don’t like Living Story
-They are still making more Living Story
-You keep throwing more money at them
-There will always be the content problem
-They are too busy getting Chinese money to care

Some Mod will erase this, because it’s criticism and ANet can’t handle criticism.

Soulstar.7812:

Let’s Really be Honest

-ANet has heard players don’t like Living Story
-They are still making more Living Story
-You keep throwing more money at them
-There will always be the content problem
-They are too busy getting Chinese money to care

Some Mod will erase this, because it’s criticism and ANet can’t handle criticism.

ArenaNet have heard SOME players don’t like Living Story.
ArenaNet have ALSO heard some players liking Living Story.
So which group should they listen to? The group that shouts the loudest at the forums or the actual metrics that they have that shows how many people actually do said content?

lordkrall.7241:

ArenaNet have heard SOME players don’t like Living Story.
ArenaNet have ALSO heard some players liking Living Story.
So which group should they listen to? The group that shouts the loudest at the forums or the actual metrics that they have that shows how many people actually do said content?

How about they apply their own standards to the Living Story? Metrics are great for telling you how many people are doing the content, but they don’t tell you if they’re actually enjoying it. Yes, there is a difference. Yes, that difference does matter.

We really could use an expansion. I’m not going to go so far as to say the Living World is a disappointment; I’ve grown attached to the characters and have generally loved the concept, if not always the execution. Nevertheless, the Living World model is a bit thin as far as permanent content is concerned, and it would be nice if they would either incorporate more permanent content into the LW storylines or intersperse the existing model with perhaps yearly expansions.

darkace.8925:

How about they apply their own standards to the Living Story? Metrics are great for telling you how many people are doing the content, but they don’t tell you if they’re actually enjoying it. Yes, there is a difference. Yes, that difference does matter.

Indeed, and quite a few people actually think that it is fun, so they should keep doing it, correct?