Guild Wars 2

I have recently left this game, but maintain a high level of trust among several gaming communities out there. I recently discussed the pitfalls of this game and the greatest I have come across is the way “The Living Stories” are implemented.

Its not that the content itself is horrible, bad, idiotic, stupid etc…

Far from it, as there are new schemes and mechanisms tried out with the different patches.

What makes it fail is the following:

The living story is something many players look forward to try out. Players want to run the stories together either with their home server, their friends, or their main guild. Unfortunately to the majority of players that will not happen.

The last eight living stories I was always thrown into an overflow after the Living Story was patched. I was a guild leader and wanted the guild to experience the story together but the different overflows and many of them filled to map cap prevented us from playing together.

Nevermind guilds, not even those in my friendlist could play with ease in the same overflow unless we made arrangements.

The sacrifice we all make is that if we arent those first 100 lucky people who park their butts in day one to the main server, chances are on high population servers you wont enjoy the LS with your server, your friends, or your guild.

Your options become fighting in an overflow and waiting until all the large guilds and most proficient players in the server, willing to wait to get in and plant their butts there. finish the living story achievements to give other players a turn, in which the proficiency of the server will be slightly higher than a standard overflow, yet still limited to 100 players or so…or whatever the map cap is…

This system is not friendly to guilds, nor friends. I remember having five friends, all on different overflows, all those overflows full for the event….unable to play with them..

The other part of this system that is unfriendly is that if you miss a living story you might not see it again.

I remember the first time I missed a living story event…..coming back and people accusing me of being lazy….telling me thats what i get, those who dont play, get nothing..

Know what I was doing?

I was burying my real life brother who had died the last week of June. I was out there dealing with my real life. The second time I took a break or reduced playtime, I was dealing with graduate studies and the coursework was intensifying.

I couldnt just park myself 8 hours on a queue waiting for the server to accept me. So I started playing other games while parked in a queue and I was happy I could run with my friends, my guild (the one i am in the other games) and my own home server without ever arguing or thinking about it. It became natural.

Its like I am member to my server when nothing important is going on, but when all the good stuff happens, i dont have a home server, instead i have an overflow..

…and that is not fair.

Other MMOs have channels. Why cant this game have channels?

For a game that claims to be friendly to its playerbase, this is one of the unfriendliest systems out there….along with the fact that so much content is created that can only be enjoyed for 2 weeks.

In fact if we factor out the living story and talk about permament additions to the core games, every other mmorpg that has released an expansion in the last year and a half has had more content additions than GW2.

2014 is the year of a lot of games everyone is after are coming out. Be prepared to really fight to maintain your playerbase. I was taken by another game because playing gw2 made me appreciate the stability in other games to at least have my home server and play with a group of people through everything and sadly, guild wars 2 does not offer this.

I do not think I am asking for much in simply wanting stability on a server and the response (oh transfer out to a lesser populated server does not solve the problem) as my characters have lived through nine servers already. ^^

If you played on a less populated server, this wouldn’t be an issue.

Alice.8694:

If you played on a less populated server, this wouldn’t be an issue.

Because some of the content wouldn’t be done at all.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

Alice.8694:

If you played on a less populated server, this wouldn’t be an issue.

Because some of the content wouldn’t be done at all.

You cannot have it both ways… Either you have a full map and therefore overflows, or a partially full map and no overflows.

There is some truth to this tho, as from personal experience what keeps people coming back to, say, WOW is the social element of being able to hang out and do things with friends. The random dispersal across overflows counteracts this.

I am really surprised that ANet have not programmed overflows so that it will attempt to put party and guild members on the same server if at all possible.

It would likely cause a bit more load time tho, but it would be worth it in my opinion.

digiowl.9620:

I am really surprised that ANet have not programmed overflows so that it will attempt to put party and guild members on the same server if at all possible.

It would likely cause a bit more load time tho, but it would be worth it in my opinion.

Overflows do attempt to place party members on the same overflow. If your party doesn’t get into the same overflow (sometimes happens due to overflows being filled at an extremely rapid pace), you can right-click on a player’s portrait and click “Join in [Whatever Location]” to join their overflow.

As far as guilds go, things are less than ideal and I suspect there is no detection, but you can “taxi” people in this way by adding people to your party, having them join you, and clearing out your party to bring over more people.

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

Arenanet has lost sight of a lot of things since launch and I would say that the OP is onto one of the biggest; instead of fostering community and enhancing your experience by playing with friends, the game has been doing the opposite.

The Manifesto was brilliant and the game, at launch, fulfilled a large portion of it. Since launch, there has been a lot of backtracking on and dismantling of the Manifesto. GW2 was the best MMO, at launch, since WoW and in many ways it was even better in context with the era in which it was born.

The game also had exceptional early financial success and was growing through the end of 2012.

There was, however, backlash from players who were having trouble adjusting to a new take on how you should play an MMO. I think the biggest mistake ANet made, which has snowballed in severity ever since, was to react to that resistance by trashing the Manifesto and trying to find ways to make GW2 more match the expectations of players used to playing WoW and any of it’s multitude of clones.

We honestly would have been better off with no new content at all, aside from holiday events or new Dynamic Events to keep the world feeling fresh, for the first year or more, so that the dust could settle and the game, as launched, would have a chance to establish itself. People having trouble adjusting would have flitted back and forth between GW2 and all the failed WoW-clones and most would have eventually discovered they liked the new paradigm more once they adjusted to it.

IMO, Living Story was a knee-jerk reaction to initial player resistance. A common criticism of resistant players was that they didn’t know what to do and needed more direction. Well, now the game is just one big Adventure By Checklist Experience, between dailies and trying to keep up with all the requirements for each chapter in the living story, there is little time, nor reason, to explore the game world and chart your own adventures.

The core game, which was brilliant and paradigm shifting, is dead now and Living Story has killed it.

If only they had shown even half as much commitment to allowing the core game design to work as they have invested in Living Story. We were told recently that the game would have to continue to slide for another year before they would be forced to rethink the Living Story strategy. Really? You’ll give the Manifesto destroying, game diminishing Living Story 2+years to either prove it self or perish, but you wouldn’t give the brilliant game that existed at launch and was the culmination of almost 6 years of effort more than three months before you would start to undo it?

It’s never made any sense to me and as these Living Story events become more frustrating and more counter to the game’s original ideals it just drives more and more people from the game.

The sad thing is that after the disaster that was Pandaria, WoW seems poised to win back most of those who left with the next expansion. The revival has already begun in anticipation. All Arenanet’s effort to attract WoW-mentality players by abandoning what made this game great for more “hand-holding”, directed and zerg oriented game play is likely to be completely for naught. Most will go back to WoW and GW2 will wish it could have back all the players who loved GW2 at launch because it wasn’t like every other WoW-clone out there.

digiowl.9620:

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

There is probably no technical reason they couldn’t do this, but they’ve tried hard to make the game out as persistent, rather than instanced. Apparently, having a list of overflows to chose from would be a bit too much like the way zones are instanced in GW1 and would bust the illusion of a non-instanced world.

It would have mattered if Dynamic Event states within a zone had persistence and meaning. They fell short on that promise at launch and instead of developing new DE content that was more meaningful and more impactful on the state of each game zone, they went the course of Living Story instead.

DEs had given the game world an illusion of life. That nearly every zone has nearly the same static list of repeating and meaningless DE content, a year and a half after launch, has negated any need to preserve the illusion that player’s actions mean squat to the game world. So there is really no reason not to just offer transparent lists of overflow shards for each zone to select from. Being on your server’s “home”, (non-overflow) shard means absolutely nothing.

digiowl.9620:

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

Oh?

I was under the impression that more or less every kitten other game simply didn’t let you play when the server/map/whatever was full.

Can’t you just get all your guild into the overflow then? what does it even matter WHERE you do the stuff?

lordkrall.7241:

digiowl.9620:

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

Oh?

I was under the impression that more or less every kitten other game simply didn’t let you play when the server/map/whatever was full.

Cryptic for one seems to get it right in their games. And i could have sworn i have played others in the past with a drop down instance list somewhere near the minimap.

lordkrall.7241:

digiowl.9620:

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

Oh?

I was under the impression that more or less every kitten other game simply didn’t let you play when the server/map/whatever was full.

Most contemporary MMOs offer multiple shards of a zone once it reaches capacity. Arenanet’s innovation was that servers themselves have no hard caps. For most other games, they may shard overpopulated regions, but if a server reaches it’s total capacity, you are facing a queue.

Hmm…personally I’m ok with people missing actual living story gameplay as long as they can at least catch up story-wise. You aren’t paying a sub so any content beyond what launched with the game isn’t something you’re entitled to. I’ve gotten fed up and flat out skipped the last 2 or 3 story patches knowing full well I won’t get any little title or backpack (in terms of content it’s unlikely anything particularly game-changing happened, and even if it did it’ll likely be permanent if it was such a huge feature), but I’m back know, back up to speed and thoughts about the 2 patches I missed: ‘meh’.

You can argue that because I felt no drive to play the LS it of course wouldn’t matter to someone like me, however my original point still stands-you aren’t paying a sub so content post-release is not something you’re entitled to.

To the OP’s other main concern…I have to ask-are we looking at the symptom or the cause? The reason why so many people are being kicked into overflow is because of the way the LS is delivered. Literally the game says :‘hey all 4million+ players flood to this one map!’ and that’s the problem and as a result I feel the solution would be more likely in changing the structure of LS in some way. Maybe future LS could be multi-directional; human-centaur and charr-flame legion hostilities (and eventually the human-charr relationship) are two aspects of the world that could be used to bring the world to life simultaneously (that was the goal right?) while not herding everyone on one map. Have it play out with political intrigue and wars akin to Game of Thrones for instance and based on player influence during the events, player-dependent story events will unfold and the landscape between warring factions change (something like how player action impacted the elections). This does apply to dragons (as they are typically singular entities unlike race specific hostilities), should they appear in the LS in that their events would have to be multi-mapped offensive (of course similarly difficult events and similar loot to herd the loot hoarders and prevent them going to the most ‘efficient’ map) for the dragon or perhaps having two dragons at once to spread the players out-and more players in more maps means less OF annoyances.

However, with all that said, if at the end of the day you don’t want the game world to change (and not simply only be able to play with friends, avoiding OF annoyances) then perhaps those other games are what you should be playing because it appears this is the direction they want to take GW2. I like the idea of a transient world (not too thrilled about how it’s presented thus far, but that’s another story) but if you don’t like the idea then you aren’t going to have fun in a game that sports a transient world. It is unfortunate though, that you bought the game when this philosophy didn’t exist-if they had planned for this and marketed it as such pre-release then you wouldn’t have bought the game and would have no problems.

digiowl.9620:

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

Would you believe that the original Guild Wars had exactly this, not to mention an international district you could travel too? Honestly not sure why they changed their minds on this, aside from PvP considerations. PvE should have had this old feature.

Imbune, I get your point, but “not paying for it” doesn’t excuse bad content. IMO, 90% of Living Story has diminished the game. Quite literally, I believe the game would be better off today if we had had no free content at all, aside from Holidays, to this point than we are with the free content we have received.

I’m also frustrated at what I see as a complete waste of development resources. Other MMOs would kill for staffing levels like Arenanet has and I’m sure there are more than a few MMO developers at smaller companies dumbfounded at ANet’s willingness to waste resources on so much temporary content that has done nothing to grow the game’s success.

Besides, although optional, some of us have spent a good amount of money on this game through the gem store and I’m personally disturbed that my dollars went to produce this stuff.

One thing they used to talk about before release was that they didn’t want GW2 to make use of content that forced you to go to the web to figure out what to do. They didn’t want some checklist of quests that you would work down, they wanted you to go out, explore the world and discover content that you could just hop right in on and play.

Living Story has just been a series of “Adventure by Checklist” events that almost always require you to resort to the web, likely a walk through guide, in order to fully play. Because it’s time limited and often concerted effort is required for full completion and the best rewards, even people who might otherwise prefer to puzzle things out in game feel pressure to just follow a walk through, because they know they may not have a chance of completing what they want to complete otherwise.

It’s content that is not only contrary to the game’s original design, but, I would argue, Living Story, combined with Dailies, have essentially killed “explore the world and chart your own adventure” as a primary, or even secondary, play style.

I think this has created a negative feedback loop, where ANet sees fewer people out exploring the game world, so they focus more and more on Linear, directed, check list driven content, which draws even more people out of the game world, which makes them think the solution is even more linear, directed, checklist driven content, etc…

Setsunayaki.4907:

The last eight living stories I was always thrown into an overflow after the Living Story was patched. I was a guild leader and wanted the guild to experience the story together but the different overflows and many of them filled to map cap prevented us from playing together.

This is why in my opinion the Living Story content should be instanced like dungeons. If you end up on different servers it won’t matter – You get pulled into the same instance with your party.

Setsunayaki.4907:

Other MMOs have channels. Why cant this game have channels?

This is a good point. GW1 had districts which functioned the same way, I don’t see why GW2 can’t have the same system…

Until Anet fixes this issue, the best way to solve it is to pull your guild into an overflow map. My guild is the largest on the Tarnished Coast server, and we do this all the time for the big events like Teq or Wurm.

HOW TO PULL OTHERS INTO YOUR MAP:

1) Choose a leader.

2) Then create a party with people who are on another map (main map or overflow).

3) Then have your party members right- click on your picture and select “Join in <insert location here>”. So if you want your members to join you in Lion Arch’s overflow map, just have them click “Join in Lion’s Arch”.

4) Once everyone is on the same map, the leader should tell them to leave the party so he / she can pull other people into the map.

PROBLEM SOLVED… for now.

I’m not sure a cut-scene and a farming event would qualify as a living story anyway. Exploring new map areas and discovering new lore would however.

100% agree with the overflow issue.

temporary content is fine, in the real world events happen and if you miss them you can check out some videos on youtube, or the newspapers, but you can’t “play” them again and that is fine, that is how a dynamic world works.

digiowl.9620:

lordkrall.7241:

digiowl.9620:

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

Oh?

I was under the impression that more or less every kitten other game simply didn’t let you play when the server/map/whatever was full.

Cryptic for one seems to get it right in their games. And i could have sworn i have played others in the past with a drop down instance list somewhere near the minimap.

Not WoW, if the server was full enjoy the waiting in the queue.

PeterThomas.7243:

Setsunayaki.4907:

Other MMOs have channels. Why cant this game have channels?

This is a good point. GW1 had districts which functioned the same way, I don’t see why GW2 can’t have the same system…

Because… Gem Store.

It costs gems to transfer from one server to another and it’s cost-prohibitive to travel to popular servers.

Yes, you can buy these gems with in-game gold…
However, at current gem conversion rates, this is ~158 gold for the 1800 gems required to transfer to a “High” population server.

And that’s not even guaranteed to have a “High” population of players that still play the game.

Thobek.1730:

digiowl.9620:

lordkrall.7241:

digiowl.9620:

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

Oh?

I was under the impression that more or less every kitten other game simply didn’t let you play when the server/map/whatever was full.

Cryptic for one seems to get it right in their games. And i could have sworn i have played others in the past with a drop down instance list somewhere near the minimap.

Not WoW, if the server was full enjoy the waiting in the queue.

I rarely (to the point that I don’t actually remember it happening) saw the queue when playing on a “Full” after Cataclysm launched.

I suppose it’s possible that population went up with Pandaria… But probably not much.

And, yet, once you’re in-game… You’re on your sever indefinitely. No having to deal with other servers. (Well, now they’re merging low-population servers… Similar to the “underflow” concept that has been mentioned for GW2.)

I also distinctly remember running into people almost anywhere.

Which is vastly different from GW2 where entire areas can be deserted for periods of time.

This is easily overcome by waiting a couple of minutes until all the rushers are in, and you end up together, or doing what KTA said. I’m not sure why it bothers you if you have given up playing anyway, it seems like more than half the people on these forums don’t play the game anymore and just come here to complain.

It seems to me the reason this bugs you so much is because you cant accept it for how it is and work with it. It isn’t what you wanted, you stopped playing, it could have ended there.

One thing came to mind. I seem to recall that back when the game launched, overflows were described as a temporary measure to deal with the mass influx of players.

Minos.5168:

Thobek.1730:

digiowl.9620:

lordkrall.7241:

digiowl.9620:

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

Oh?

I was under the impression that more or less every kitten other game simply didn’t let you play when the server/map/whatever was full.

Cryptic for one seems to get it right in their games. And i could have sworn i have played others in the past with a drop down instance list somewhere near the minimap.

Not WoW, if the server was full enjoy the waiting in the queue.

I rarely (to the point that I don’t actually remember it happening) saw the queue when playing on a “Full” after Cataclysm launched.

I suppose it’s possible that population went up with Pandaria… But probably not much.

And, yet, once you’re in-game… You’re on your sever indefinitely. No having to deal with other servers. (Well, now they’re merging low-population servers… Similar to the “underflow” concept that has been mentioned for GW2.)

I also distinctly remember running into people almost anywhere.

Which is vastly different from GW2 where entire areas can be deserted for periods of time.

I think that’s because the numbers in wow dropped a lot over the years. And now they have there own problems of having a huge amount of servers that have only a handful of people on them. So they charge them $25 to move to one that isn’t completely dead.

Trust me WoW has a lot of problems of its own that are far worse than what we have here.

After some thinking about the main point of the OP… My takeaway is that we always will be dealing with the lowest common denominator in all the living story events. Constantly dealing with people acting stupid and a multitude of leechers and afkers. It would be one thing if I could do A SINGLE large-scale EVENT with my guild or friends without having to jump out to an overflow that is deserted. Being a player that has been with this game since launch. Today I put this game down. The afks and the leechers, but mainly the unfriendly overflow system, have ruined this game for me. Its not even the fact that i’m going to another mmo because i’m not. I’m just ceasing to waste my time on this one. Address this issue and i’ll reconsider. Otherwise, I find myself putting too much effort into trying to find some sense of organization and friendliness to this game and getting very little out of it.

P.S. I despise people who use hostage type arguments as I have here. In this case however, this is truly how I feel and it has had a profound effect on me and my gameplay.

I bid you all adieu. Hopefully just for now.
-Spirit

digiowl.9620:

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

Then EVERYBODY would pick the populated overflow in order to ‘get things done’ effectively solving nothing.
No one, even guild groups, would pick a channel that has 10 people when you want to get the most out of your participation. Dont even kid yourself.

Setsunayaki.4907:

I remember the first time I missed a living story event…..coming back and people accusing me of being lazy….telling me thats what i get, those who dont play, get nothing..

Know what I was doing?

This is Anet’s fault? People accusing you of being lazy and you feeling affected by that is not something Anet is responsible for.

digiowl.9620:

lordkrall.7241:

digiowl.9620:

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

Oh?

I was under the impression that more or less every kitten other game simply didn’t let you play when the server/map/whatever was full.

Cryptic for one seems to get it right in their games. And i could have sworn i have played others in the past with a drop down instance list somewhere near the minimap.

they don’t have servers, they have shards, so one big server separated in sections depending on the need.
also, i have had plenty of times when the shard was full and i could not join, really doesn’t solve anything.