Guild Wars 2

Hi, curious what everyone would prefer. Continue with the two-week living story content updates that we receive, or traditional content updates?

By Living Story, I mean two-week content updates with bug fixes, quality of life improvements, one or two instanced scenes telling the living story, some temporary content, some perma content, mini games, new items to acquire, living story that doesn’t connect to the previous living story, more mini games, themed content patches, celebrations, games.

By traditional content updates, I mean every two or three months, give us a new zone, with new events or renown hearts, new mobs and bosses, maybe a new perma dungeon, more personal story, more classes and skills,new items to acquire and bug fixes.

My vote: Traditional content.

Traditional. The Living Story has failed to connect with me. I appreciate the effort, but I just don’t find the content added to be compelling enough to justify the abandonment of traditional content updates (particularly expansions, which this game’s predecessor did very well).

Living story had not been a bad idea, but don’t worked well. And also, is being maked very badly.

I’m wanting to see more content alike the Lost shores content (The only decent REAL content until now , 1 new map, 1 new real feature – fractals, and a real massive boss). If this means a traditional content by monthly, or bimonthly, I’m sure:

Traditional contents.

A balance of both, but more so Expansion Packs that we can actually pay for.

I’m not to keen on this temporary content. It’s generous, sure, and It’s also free. It’s also very overwhelming. I’m not too sure how all this Living Story, temporary 2 week content of the same stuff can also introduce more areas to explore, more dungeons, more fractals, more world bosses and dragons that are actually fun and challenging to fight, and more karma rewards with better armour/weapon design and variety.

Living World is simply a bonus, and I appreciate the generosity. I would also like to see more grander, permanent content and if we have to pay $20 – $30 for it? So be it.

I agree that I’d pay for an expansion. Id wait several months for legit content.

Sticking by preference of traditional content updates rather than living story. I think the game would benefit a lot more from it.

To be a bit factual, it seems they are set in doing the 2 week cycle of living story content for the foreseeable future, and it has its perks. It gives things easy to achieve for the casuals, it gives something to strive for, for the grinders, and may or may not have something for the more hardcore (AR dungeon and the new dome fights for example).

That being said, I don’t remember when they hired the other LS teams, so to be fair, the current content may not have had a 4 month development cycle, like they will in the future. Also, since we have not repeated any events yet, any new zone/area has to be build up from the ground (for example of how this can effect things, the devs for this LS said that they would have liked to include the Mursatt for human enemies but couldn’t for money/time restrictions because they’d have to create whole new models for something that doesn’t exist in the game already).

Also a bit of correction, technically the LS have been building off of each other. So there is a cohesive narrative (do the plots intertwine like a Dune novel, no, but I do like how things are connecting). Also they’ve already stated that they will be added more skills (in some sense) by the end of the year.

My criticisms, if we get new lvl 80 zones, after a while that separates the casuals from the hardcores even further. Also, how can you say they won’t be exactly like southsun, devoid after the initial run. How long does it take you to 100% a zone, an hour? How does getting 1-3 new zones every couple of months keep up with how fast people can devour content. After you 100% the zone, and run the new dungeon a couple of times, you’ll feel you’re done and have to wait another couple of months to get anything new again. (I’ve never played, but didn’t the last WoW expansion, or maybe 2 exps ago take ~1-2 years to develop and only take the hardcore player base 1 week to full beat). Also what role would a new class fill? I think the only way to get a new class would be through a paid expansion (similar to gw1), same goes for a new race or (sadly) any more personal story. And they’ve stated at least a couple of times, they have no plans for a traditional expansion any time soon.

I like how all the LS scales you up to 80, I like how I can take a 2 month break come back and realize that I just missed some skins, and don’t have to now farm/grind out some new gear/skills to stay up to date. I like the horizontal progression this game offers compared to others.

Do I think the LS is perfect, no. But it’s getting better with each patch. Just look at the rnd boxes, Halloween had rare drops in the BL chests, Southsun had them in chests you could buy, but also a very rare drop, Dragonbash had chests dropping like hot cakes but incredibly rare chances, the Bazaar let you collect tokens (scraps) to trade in for a skin you wanted, and also let you have a rare chance to get while playing a mini game you liked. The narrative is also improving, which I like.

My only complaint is that there is no breathing room in between the living story events. I’d rather have all of the content available at the start of the month (which I know won’t happen for narrative and getting people to keep playing reasons) or give us a week of “breathing room” in between each LS month update so people can focus on leveling alts, running dungeons, do whatever they enjoy, or even put down the game to do something else and not feel that they are “missing out” on any content.

But if I had to choose between your two options, I’d still go with the living story. It gives you something to do if you like it, if you don’t like it you can ignore it and keep playing how you were before, no worse for wear.

Having teams improve the existing content is great, and getting free content is also nice. But the fact that 99% of this content is temporary, you feel like you NEED to play that content, rather then at your own pace. Most of those that play have full-time jobs, families, and go to collage/uni. I’m pretty sure that these people can’t keep up with all this temporary content.

If most of this are exactly what Wintersday/Halloween is? That is acceptable. Having festivals and events that come each year that offer new and exciting things is always great. It just feels like they are too focused on this Living Story stuff rather then opening up areas like Ring of Fire, Crystal Desert, Far Shiverpeaks, etc..

And I know that these take time to develop and design. Guess what? That’s where expansions come in, and this is where we are more then happy to wait and pay for it when it;s ready.

Traditional, living story is too much to do within the two weeks! By all means I can still get most of the achivements done by then but I still want to do my dungeon farm, pvp etc and I only got a part time job!!
Even then my leisure hours are still going elsewhere so I barely keeping up with these bi-weekly contents so it feel more like a chore now (yes I know I don’t have to complete them all but I do like getting my Achivement chest..).

Personally I would favor classic content updates with them adding new dungeons and big zones with interesting new mechanics, sort of like what expansions are for most games. The Living Story is nice and all, but for example; the cutthroat politics were 2 minigames, 2 ‘king of the hill’ instances, the rest were just achievements telling you to do things we already did for a year except now we had to use an item during it. Bazaar of the four winds was cool with the new mechanics though and according to Colin these yearly events are going to be built upon to become even better each year. I also agree that southsun with the fotm+new map was actually more interesting to me than the dragon bash etc, heck dragon bash made me skip the pirate LS. I just got bored because it all seemed like a cash drain event with the gambling for races etc. The adventure box was also amazing, that is content that should stick around. But funnily enough, that seems to be whats happening here. The yearly content which has been added all seems to be higher quality than the temporary stuff. That’s understandable since you dont want your hard work to go away. I can see it’s difficult to make all this LS content in such a short time and being limited by a budget/resources.

In a perfect world we’d have both, but sadly that’s not the case. As it stands right now, LS is ok to me but it won’t let me get a long term connection to the game, as is evident by months of personal absence. I think they could introduce some group of adventurers that you can encounter in every zone, depending on the day. Perhaps with an npc in LA telling you where they went off to this time, then you go to the zone, find them and do a chain of amazing crafted story driven events. It’s just an idea, it would require alot of work to get a chain for each zone that is actually relevant to those npcs and the zone. I’m starting to ramble here, so I’ll wrap this up. I’d love to see new zones and actual ‘content’ that don’t rise or fall based on achievements.

I’d just like to add in case anyone at ANet reads this, you guys are definetely improving and doing something that hasn’t been done before. You deserve credit for that and I hope things will only get better.

Traditional. The game needs actual organic growth and expansion-style, character-driven permanent content WAAAAY more than it needs event gimmicks that aren’t really a sustainable approach to world-building and end up just wasting huge amounts of development resources.

Some of the major problems with the current LS concept include:

1. Casual players and completionists both will be turned off by how demanding and time-sensitive it is.

2. The game doesn’t actually grow much over a long period of development, which will become more and more of a problem as the game ages and will turn away intermittent and hardcore players.

3. Samey festival-style events with gimmicks and special items repeated ad nauseum just becomes trite and is already resulting in a feeling of staleness amongst all types of players.

4. The idea is internally inconsistent with game’s design at launch. It doesn’t make sense that the Zhaitan/personal story and all the original dungeons are permanent and character-driven but everything else is ‘living’ aka transient and development-driven. This results in immersion-breaking cognitive dissonance.

5. The narrative created by the LS is too fragmented and shallow which does nothing to draw people into the setting or the characters.

6. The Personal Story, which many people complained at launch was the most disappointingly underdeveloped part of the game, was left alone to stagnate even more as they went in a different direction altogether. Development resources would have been better spent beefing this aspect of the game up instead of abandoning it for something half-baked.

Einlanzer.1627:

Traditional. The game needs actual organic growth and expansion-style permanent content WAAAAY more than it needs event gimmicks that aren’t really sustainable.

This is underscored by the fact that our Personal Stories haven’t progressed an inch since focus shifted to the Living Story. My character hasn’t uttered a single word in spoken dialogue since the fall of Zhaitan. That they went from the Biography, with it’s many branches and different possible stories, to a silent protagonist all so they could churn out content at a high pace disappoints me.

darkace.8925:

Einlanzer.1627:

Traditional. The game needs actual organic growth and expansion-style permanent content WAAAAY more than it needs event gimmicks that aren’t really sustainable.

This is underscored by the fact that our Personal Stories haven’t progressed an inch since focus shifted to the Living Story. My character hasn’t uttered a single word in spoken dialogue since the fall of Zhaitan. That they went from the Biography, with it’s many branches and different possible stories, to a silent protagonist all so they could churn out content at a high pace disappoints me.

Yes and that’s exactly my point. Instead of focusing on improving this and fleshing it out they went a different direction altogether and now everything pertaining to the story in the game feels very kitten.

I would prefer a traditional expansion. I like the living story ok but being able to look forward to a large release would be nice.

I think its worth pointing out that the Living World teams are only a portion of their development staff. There is a large number of devs working on longer term stuff. What exactly? They aren’t announcing yet. Colin was pretty clear though that the personal story continuation and larger updates (ie. expansion level) were definely intended.

So… why not both?

Lutinz.6915:

I think its worth pointing out that the Living World teams are only a portion of their development staff. There is a large number of devs working on longer term stuff. What exactly? They aren’t announcing yet. Colin was pretty clear though that the personal story continuation and larger updates (ie. expansion level) were definely intended.

So… why not both?

It doesn’t matter; every LS type content they release (and then remove) represents resources that could have been better spent elsewhere. The game just flat out doesn’t benefit from it the way they seem to think it does. It’s almost indicative of a self-sabotaging focus on short-term profit spikes in the Gem Store rather than a proper focus on long-term growth and sustainability.

Einlanzer.1627:

Lutinz.6915:

I think its worth pointing out that the Living World teams are only a portion of their development staff. There is a large number of devs working on longer term stuff. What exactly? They aren’t announcing yet. Colin was pretty clear though that the personal story continuation and larger updates (ie. expansion level) were definely intended.

So… why not both?

It doesn’t matter; every LS type content they release (and then remove) represents resources that could have been better spent elsewhere. The game just flat out doesn’t benefit from it the way they seem to think it does. It’s almost indicative of a self-sabotaging focus on short-term profit spikes in the Gem Store rather than a proper focus on long-term growth and sustainability.

I respectfully disagree with your opinion. Then again, Ive enjoyed the LS. If I was waiting months between updates I probably would be spending a lot less time playing the game. The game would probably be a lot more empty.

The LS also encouraged people to actively go out into the world and visit zones that would otherwise be mostly abandoned. I see that as a pretty big plus too.

Sticking by traditional, sorry.
December was the end of ‘good’ temporary content for me. And I missed out on SAB and Halloween because I was a nooblet who didn’t check the updates in the corner of my screen.

Southsun was people grinding the two bosses in zergs, then was promptly never mentioned again, Dragon Bash(?) was break these piñatas X times and buy 3,000 coffers for these skins, Aetherblades were, er, they suddenly appeared and killed some people for some reason and then they had a ship and I honestly don’t have a clue. The bazaar/council election was just a weird, impractical, buggy event and the only upside was the scavenger hunt was fairly fun. Then we were forced to grind through the minigames for shinies.
QJ is the worst of the worst. Its a laggy joke, with the most backwards, stupid storyline I’ve seen in the game. Can’t say much on gauntlet because I’m only up to Deadeye, but the only ‘skills’ I’ve had were luck and kiting at this point.

Lutinz.6915:

Einlanzer.1627:

Lutinz.6915:

I think its worth pointing out that the Living World teams are only a portion of their development staff. There is a large number of devs working on longer term stuff. What exactly? They aren’t announcing yet. Colin was pretty clear though that the personal story continuation and larger updates (ie. expansion level) were definely intended.

So… why not both?

It doesn’t matter; every LS type content they release (and then remove) represents resources that could have been better spent elsewhere. The game just flat out doesn’t benefit from it the way they seem to think it does. It’s almost indicative of a self-sabotaging focus on short-term profit spikes in the Gem Store rather than a proper focus on long-term growth and sustainability.

I respectfully disagree with your opinion. Then again, Ive enjoyed the LS. If I was waiting months between updates I probably would be spending a lot less time playing the game. The game would probably be a lot more empty.

The LS also encouraged people to actively go out into the world and visit zones that would otherwise be mostly abandoned. I see that as a pretty big plus too.

Nobody wants to wait months between content updates. That’s not what the debate is. The debate is essentially about permanent content or fleeting content.

Moving people around the world could be easily accomplished by permanent updates and/or DE updates.

I’d go with the Living Story on this one. I kinda like how the new system works.

Although they have to add more zones in the Living Story updates…