Guild Wars 2

I have been enthusiastic and optimistic about everything Anet has been doing until the most recent LS stuff. I loved this game because there was always alot going on throughout the maps involving other players (Orr used to be so much fun) Now such places have been nerfed and these Living Stories are hogging all the spotlight & there aren’t any players in any other maps besides Lions Arch.

These Living Stories take up all my time in doing silly little chores than actual adventuring with other people. I find myself more solo than ever, even guesting on to less popular worlds just so I can ninja hologram projectors, and now these silly kite baskets. I don’t feel like I’m interacting/contributing to the world as the manifesto had encouraged.. I don’t know why farming areas that used to bring so many people together getting events done had to get nerfed so hard.

Not only is everyone just doing the same dungeon over and over (CoF p1..and resorting to stringent team builds, too.) Now we’re all just getting sucked into new chores every two weeks, where each new content hooks us onto an achievement grind that has nothing to do with what the original manifesto promoted. These achievement grinds don’t make the world feel any more alive. With Dragon Bash+Bazaar Sanctum combined, I don’t feel like I’m playing GW2 anymore.. it doesn’t feel the same when every map is a ghost town, except for the people who are chasing after projectors/baskets like you are. How exciting.

I used to have good reasons for convincing my friend to log on with me. The Dragon Bash grind exhausted her and I don’t know what I’d tell her now. Yes the Bazaar is beautiful and the aspect skills are dandy, but what else after that? Grind again?? More mindless teleporting and running?? And I have to do all of this within 2 weeks for it to count for anything??

I hate to be another whiner, but I never ever felt compelled to complain about anything in this game until now, and it’s for reasons I think are not too blasphemous. Living Story is exciting for the storytelling, but the game’s gameplay overall is declining because there is so much less ‘playing’. Just my 2 cents.

I’m sorry but I am really baffled by these kinds of posts. For me the game is getting better…it keeps me playing, I am having fun, I look forward to logging in so I can see what to do next, I even enjoy the Living Story because for me, it does actually make me feel like the world of Tyria isn’t just another stagnant MMO world, with frozen NPC’s uttering the same thing over and over, even months or years down the line, things change, there are new things to do, explore and strive for.

So I say again, I am really puzzled. I’ve played other MMO’s and for me GW2 surpasses them all.

PolarisNova.3867:

I’m sorry but I am really baffled by these kinds of posts. For me the game is getting better…it keeps me playing, I am having fun, I look forward to logging in so I can see what to do next, I even enjoy the Living Story because for me, it does actually make me feel like the world of Tyria isn’t just another stagnant MMO world, with frozen NPC’s uttering the same thing over and over, even months or years down the line, things change, there are new things to do, explore and strive for.

So I say again, I am really puzzled. I’ve played other MMO’s and for me GW2 surpasses them all.

+1

I agree 100%.

citypigeon.6358:

~SNIP~
I used to have good reasons for convincing my friend to log on with me. The Dragon Bash grind exhausted her and I don’t know what I’d tell her now.

I wanted to pull this out of context because this seems to be the real reason this post was made. I see this time and time again where the game GW2 gets criticized but a specific point is made about a “friend” or someone other than OP not playing causing OP grief with GW2.

The reason I am making a statement about this because, if you’re lady friend liked the content/game, this post probably would never be made.

another keyword is “convinced”. You should never have to convince anyone to play a game They should play for reasons of their own.

I would like more focus on adding more of the mini-dungeons to the open world instead of making yet another temporary minigame like dragon ball or this latest one.

Placing the caches and now kites in existing mini-dungeons and JP was a good idea but not very subtle (and only half as interesting if you already knew them all).

So they should start adding new ones and place some kites there and some in the old ones instead of just re-using the existing content. I wanna say, “Show some effort Anet, we need to see that you care!”.

Valid point relative to the title. The core mechanics of the Living Story (so far) do run counter to some of the elements of the “manifesto” (though I’m really not sure holding that up at this point is particularly valid or fair to the dev team – some of whom probably had nothing to do with creating it).

Always be happy to see other people: Not so much, especially in the last couple of events. The Hologram projectors, the kite baskets – the mechanic behind those things runs directly counter to the philosophy that promoted gathering nodes that couldn’t be snaked in front of you.

No “kill ten rats”: No – I haven’t had to kill rats, but certainly a whole lot of Aetherblade pirates (zone-specific at that), Halloween monsters, holographic monsters, and so on. Each Living story has had some very repetitive grind achievements that were not supposed to feature in GW2.

Changing the world: Very iffy in my mind. Yes, Southsun did change substantially. The rest – not so much. Sure, places are added that weren’t there before (Craigstead for instance) but there’s really no lasting effect from Flame and Frost in those areas.

Play the way you want to play: This one is the one that gets me. I (and it appears many others) don’t really play the way we want, we instead frantically play the latest content with every spare minute we have before it disappears forever. The two week cycle I feel really limits what I can do given that I don’t get to play as often or as long as I used to when I was younger. If I want to do the latest content – I really have to focus just on that to the exclusion of anything else or I simply won’t get it done before it goes poof.

I agree with the original poster. I brought up some of the same concerns in my thread here. It feels like the things that made Guild Wars 2 great at launch are being slowly eroded by the new treadmill content.

The user base seems very divided over this though… I wonder how many people, statistically, are actually happy with the new content? I would say it almost warrants another email poll.

GW2 attracted a bunch of players who sped through the existent-at-launch content, got what they wanted and complained about lack of things to work for, lack of endgame. ANet characterized these players as “some of their most dedicated fans.” The “Manifesto” as a blueprint of the game died at that time.

What has evolved is a different game, a hybrid of what fans of the Manifesto thought it would be and what accomplishment/progression/grind players wanted. This has, as is usually the case with any developer action in any game, displeased some of the people in each camp, and perhaps a bunch of people who might say they were in neither camp. In addition, there is a subset — of an unknown size — of the player base that is having a good time.

One might argue that the dynamic world aspect of the Manifesto is being honored by the Living Story. It seems that way to me, though I’m sure arguments could be made either way. Still, the question for me is not whether the Manifesto is being ground further into the dust, it’s “Is the game fun?” For me, the answer is an ambivalent, “Sometimes.”