Guild Wars 2

We are in 2014, and we’ve seen posts from the devs about how great year it was. So I looked back what changed.

Mostly content that isn’t aviable anymore. GW2 doesn’t changes. Except the small changes like wallet, balance changes, a few added fractals, it’s the very same world. Not a living one. Living World is nothing else but a constantly growing graveyard of wasted talent, workhours and fun content thrown out of the window for no reason.

We got Southsun Cove, it was fantastic, an actually rewarding event with nice backpieces, FUN content that is STILL AVIABLE, plus the templorary content that was given to players as a process of a story – the invasion of LA, helping the settlers, then an epic fight against the karka broodmother. The island is still there and I consider this the only worthy update.

I loved the Bazaar of the Four Winds more than anything. It’s gone. Wasted work from dev. side and a wasted potential of world expanding.

4 months passed with Flame and Frost only. All it added to the game from today’s perspective is some random name to black clone mobs in Scarlet’s hilariously lore-broken army, gem store skins and 2 NPCs we hardly care about. Plus a nice bossfight for fractals. 4 months.

Sky Pirates? Random Scarlet mobs plus a fractal and a juming puzzle. Countless patches.

Queen’s Jubilee? Remember how fearsomely dark that hole was in Divinity’s Reach? We built an arena to it’s place that looks multileveled, deep, well designed… oh you want to check it out? Too bad, you should’ve played months ago. I mean, it could be filled with friendly NPCs, made to be a training ground for the seraph or something, but naaah, cut from the game.

Bazaar of the Four Winds. A place where I wanted to live the rest of my life in. Fantasic, “feels like home warm” enviroment with breathetaking design and audio, the collecting was fun, all the crystal using movement was fun, the racing, the PvP, the balloon ship, diving to the water, or just running around, listening to the singing (oh that singing!) of the NPCs. It was fantastic. Cut from the game. And it changed nothing. Don’t tell me this needed to be cut from the game to get an “okay, not too bad” level fractal update after the elections.

Living World is NOT living. It’s dead. When I look back to the past year, all I see is some nice WvW changes, Karka stuff, account wide wallet and that’s it. The game didn’t expanded. Didn’t evolved. All the hard and quality work of ANet is wasted because of this horrible design they call Living World. Oh of course we go the mindless farming of Scarlet’s invasions, thanks, totally not breaking the well made areas.

All the updates seem to be the same. A 2 week of achievement farm for a mini or a backpiece skin. It’s not fun. It’s boring. It’s hardly worth to even play this content, and not because it’s not “cost effective”, but because I’d rather spend that time doing anything else now.

I can’t wait to disembowel Scarlet and get rid of her stuff spammed all around the world because ANet wants to tell a story. I remember months of frustration because of this character, who broke the lore in countless ways and didn’t added anything to the game. She just stole time that could have been spent for other updates like the Bazaar or the Karka updates. Or actually expanding build diversity by new weapons / weapon extension between classes / alternative skillset for existing weapons.

OR DRAGONS. HOW ABOUT THAT?

If a new player joins to the game now and sees some things out there and asks others what is that, they can tell a story about how cool (or nowadays, not so cool) that update was, we could do that, jump around and travel lightspeed on the cliffs, we defended a city from the invading insects or whatever Karka is, we defeated the flame legion… and when the new player asks WHEN can he do things like that, he is low leved now: the answer is never again. It was cut from the game. The first question will be: why?

And there is no reasonable answer to that.

Ultimately: I give another chance to GW2 and keep playing. ANet said they’ll finish Living World Season 1 with 4 more updates that will be bigger than the last ones – honestly I couldn’t care less, I can see it already, another clone update with achievement farm and daily forced daily achievements with a depressing lore and enviroment like it always was (except Karkas and Bazaar. Then we’ll get a features update. I’m more excited about that and I really have high hopes about it, especially from character evolution side (weapons, skills, new builds). But if these last 5 updates turn out to be just as bad as the last half year was, I see myself quitting GW2. Not for another game, no. I just don’t want to be here anymore if things will keep going on like this. Anywhere but away from here.

ANet should consider actually serving the taste of their fans who made GW2 succesful, instead of turning it to a grind-heavy game to win players from other games, where they got used to that. If new players is an important source of the income and the gem store isn’t enough, I’m gladly paying for overpriced expansions that ADDS REAL CONTENT.

Well, here is a case of ‘one man’s junk is another man’s treasure’. You love Southsun, others find it useless and boring. You don’t care for the two-week updates, others enjoy the constant stream of new things to do.

Maybe, some day, far in the future, games will be tailored just exactly to each player’s desires. Wouldn’t that be something! =)

I don’t mind the Living World concept. I don’t even mind Scarlet as a bad guy (girl!) I can’t wait to see how it finishes.

I very much doubt they built some of these things to never come back ever. I’d be surprised if the Bazaar didn’t come back, or that at GW2’s next birthday we aren’t reading about people complaining about and praising the Gauntlet again. Maybe even zerging around again for a bit. Or maybe they won’t put these out again. Who knows?

Maybe Anet isn’t serving your taste but I like it.

Living Story needs a driving and engaging storyline! And it hasn’t been that at all.

Consider Scarlette our diabolical villian of late. Ultimatey she is a 2 dimensional character. Stereotypical and therefore boring. Imagine if you actually found out she was a complicated character kitten d and tortured from her youth. In her mind she is trying to create a happy wonderland where the weak and down trodden could live in a fairy land of peace! What if you could join her? You could take sides and which ever side won would change the face of Tyria forever! – And that’s just off the top of my head…

I gave up following the story because it isn’t anything that interesting. I do have to say I liked the cutscenes, like the destruction of the tower in Kessex.

World events are nice, but it needs to be mixed up with some intimacy that the player can have with the world. Not simply another grind of achievements to get another set of gay looking dragon wings for back pieces that I will probably never use.

You may have misunderstood me. My problem with the living world isn’t that it’s a 2 week schedule update system. Storytelling can be improved, add that to the schedule and it’s a great concept, now, it’s “just” good.

Problem is, too many of the implemented content gets cut out later, without reason. Of course the developers didn’t wanted people to keep farming in the Queen’s new arena in DR forever, to make money. So the event was over, and that’s okay. But why make the entire place unaviable and never again accessible? They could have fill them with NPCs, or just rebuild some inner parts of it to be a big empty arena like in the Black Citadel, with some people in it you can interact with, and the best part of it: talk to them about what happend here, what was the living world event all about here. A way for everyone to catch up and know history WE LIVED AND SHAPED.

Why take away the Bazaar of the Four Winds? The Living Story part was over, achievements went inactive, that’s fine and is how it should be, I agree with the main concept. But why can’t we just visit the place again whenever we want? Why does it have to be thrown to the trash bin? What makes it different from Southsun Cove that we could keep and enjoy?

For obvious reasons the Nightmare Tower won’t be back, but it was US who destroyed it. It’s the right way to see the effect of that on the world and is really a great concept. What makes other areas different? We helped to build them? DOUBLE reason why not to it away.

The Molten Alliance got destroyed, that’s fine. But why can’t we acces their tunnels, maybe as an open world area, repopulated by greedy dredge who want to mine there, just like in the southern part of HotW area?

Why can’t we walk down to the corpse/box/chest where we locked inside the Prince of Madness? It’s a random small area of old ruins. An empty area. And it’s just gone because 2 weeks passed. For no reason. Even the asura NPC could have been kept there to tell the story of it.

But there is reason to cut it out. Because much of the living story stuff requires players to do it. Look at Scarlet invasions. They were part of the living story. During the living story people did them. Now, on most servers, they’re dead. A total waste.

There’s a new path of TA, but most people don’t do that either.

I’m pretty sure anything that was left in would soon be abandoned. No one would be doing it. And then, the one guy who wanted to run the Queen’s Pavillion all by himself would find that no one was running it.

Instead of being fun it would be frustrating.

Leaving everything in? It would be like every other MMO. Everyone standing around doing the latest raid, with everything else sitting idle while no one does any of it.

Changing doesn’t necessarily mean expanding. Expansion only means changes that are being made are harder to notice.

Big problem for me is that the NPC’s we’re supposed to care for are all dull as cardboard (and I like cardboard). Marjory this, Kasmeer that. Who cares? I want to be the hero along with other players, not to watch some NPC’s run the show.

I keep hearing good things said about Bazaar of the Four Winds, and I have absolutely no idea what it is because I had important stuff to do irl during the short time that it was on.
And before you say it, I’m not going to read someone else’s account on what happened because that’s simply not how a game is meant to be played.

I’m really curious if ArenaNet sees threads like this and how they justify their current course when these keep popping up.

@Vayne

So you are saying it is rightful to cut out already made and implemented content because people are not interested in it? Except ANet, ANY company in the world would fire you the moment you come up with something like this. It’s like you cut half hour of a Lord of the Rings movie, because if you never saw them you won’t miss them. Nonsense! That’s wasted work! And unlike a movie, an MMORPG that is a “living world” in both meaning, additional content is not breaking the whole picture. There is no reason to remove it, just that hilarious nonsense of “people lose interest, cut it”.

Well guess what. I didn’t lose interest. I want to do the Aetherpath. It’s an option. I’d like to go back to places I’ve been before and were Living World content. What you are saying is literally “Tequatil is killed? So why you expect him to spawn again, he is dead, wait for the new content!”. If you cannot understand how broken, pointless, mindless way of thinking this is, ANet should hire you – no offense to you, neither them, but these are horribly irritating facts neither of us can avoid and I just can’t belive it that you as a player actually support the idea to take content away from you. What’s the point?

Check the relases part of this site, or on wiki. How many content patches we had. Then log in to the game and look around where it lead us. I can tell you already: NOWHERE. Most of those content, hard work of ANet, tons of fun source (remember? you play for fun? It’s P_L_A_Y_I_N_G.), all wasted. Deleted. Like never happend. This wasn’t even the basic idea of the Living World. It was about changing the world around you. The Nightmare Ends was a good update. It worked like how it should. Same for Karka update. Same for the Aether path. But where can you see the rest? Hell, a not moving “mini” you can spawn and watch a video about the Bazaar? Oh excuse me, we may get the race as a randomly choosen daily activity, out of other things like Keg Brawl. Or you have a fr*aking ballon in your hands? That’s what left of the Queen’s Jubilee.

Keg Brawl. I hate that thing. Won’t ever play it again. According to you and the lead design team, it should be cut from the game.

Keep hitting my head to the wall because I can’t belive such nonsense is actually happening

Of course I don’t say that Living World, as an overall idea is bad. It’s good. But it’s so rare to see an update that actually ADDS or CHANGES something in GW2. The rest is gone and everything stays the same.

Let’s say you log in, looking forward to do some dungeons. Look around how many choices you have. Let me tell you: fractals, hurray got some new levels (I like it, no sarcasm or anything), and the very same dungeons with the very same paths WE.ALREADY.HAD.AT.RELASE. Oh excuse me we got aetherpath, and got another path deleted because of it, great. That’s it. More than a year passed. Show me that content you can expect from a game of this level, that was added and you can access it right now. A whole years real products are those few fractals and the aetherpath, when it comes to dungeons. You can’t even imagine what could ANet have done with those resources and time if they work on actually expanding the game. Because the basic content won’t last forever, and if I look back, 95%+ of the game is what we had at relase. That +5% is how much we have right now as “added content”. It could be a 70-30 ratio by now. And that’s wasting of money, that for some
unthinkable reason is not bothering them at all. You know what? It doesn’t bother me either, that’s not my part of their business. Mine is to play, theirs is to provide fun.

*I can’t break it down to an even more simple example than this: you buy a football to a kid and expect him to have fun with it, and let’s say somehow you profit from that. Just for the example, let’s say. Then 2 weeks later, you take it away, and give him a doll, and expect the kid to have fun with that. He will, for a while. Later the kid realizes he won’t be able to play for too long with the next toy he gets, so he decides not to play with it at all, because it’s a PAIN to lose something you love. That’s basic logic. And here comes the a better part: if happiness equals profit for you who bought the toys for the kid, what reason you have to take things away? What twisted logic is that? And the best part: when the kid wants to invite friends over to play together (after some of these toy changing periods ended, they’ll find a SINGLE toy. Instead of all those you already worked for to buy them for the kid. Figure it out how much happiness (=playing = profit) is that for you. Those friends may not even both coming over, and they’ll say: you know what? I’ll go to my other friends in the park (=LoL, WoW, etc.) *

And here you are, 100% convinced what you do is right.
Because F logic.

the meta achievement grocery list garbage is why the living stories all feel the same. there is no backstory quests other than the occasional stupid 2 minute solo instance with bad dialog.

Dr Ritter.1327:

the meta achievement grocery list garbage is why the living stories all feel the same. there is no backstory quests other than the occasional stupid 2 minute solo instance with bad dialog.

Exactly, that’s probably the #1 reason why I barely play anymore. I wanted to see the crystal desert, visit the Blood Legion’s homelands. Explore the underground tunnels of the Asura.. actually tackle the problem of the Elder Dragons. Instead I got this and ill fitting armor. ( I play Charr )

I just randomly met Evon Gnashblade near the TP today, and he had some words about Kiel and the the elections. These are the post-living world effects I want to see, but with all the possible locations being permanent openworld content.

SaltyDave.7346:

Keep hitting my head to the wall because I can’t belive such nonsense is actually happening

Pretty much this when it comes to Living Story.

The people who say they actually like Scarlet and the story surrounding her just boggle my mind.

Like, are you people incapable of a coherent thought process? Do you even know what critical thinking/analysis is? Do you do anything in this game other than mind-numbingly mash skill #1 and farm the next 2 week set of achievements?

It’s people like this that are supporting the ruination of a game like GW2.

In theory, the Living Story was a good idea. By not introducing new lands (which an expansions would surely have to do), they save a lot of dev resources that can be put into creating a more interesting world on top of the lands we already have.

In reality, those savings were squandered on mindless “F” spamming content and a storyline’s on the level of one written by a third grader.

So the Living story was huge potential squandered, much like the game as a whole.

I didn’t make the Queen’s Jubilee so I’ll probably never know how it looks like and I really feel like I missed something each time I’m in Divinity’s Reach.

But I also know that we downloaded all the updates, and we still have the files of all those beautiful places like the Bazaar and other places we can’t access anymore. So I keep thinking that after the first season of LS, we’ll be able to have access of all these things, or else, like SaltyDave said, it’s putting great work in the trash bin.

Problem was how LS was introduced and working with the blob per distric mechanic, it was a ugly method.

Bona fide brand new player here, chiming in.

From my point of view as a new player, the living world events added nothing to my game experience. On the contrary, it was confusing to see these random toxic things that had no relationship to my personal story or anything the game was describing to me via lore, etc. Not only did they make no sense, but those toxic spawns are extremely difficult and frustrating to a lone newbie who is making his way through mostly uninhabited maps.

From my point of view as someone who has been playing MMO’s since EQ1, small biweekly content patches are NOT a substitute for expansions. I worry that this is the kind of mistake that arena.net will only realize “too late”.

I think this system has the opposite of its intended effect. It’s resulted in people feeling that the game has peaked / is stagnating or in a state of decline. A better formula was established by GW1, and by the real storyline of GW2 (which is perfectly fine). You have only to release a new box with a new dragon each year – the whole arc is right there.

In closing, to arena.net I would just put it this way: why do you think 3.5 million people bought GW2? Was it because of an entire new world, new classes, new skills, new game systems and an epic adventure against an evil dragon? Or was it so that they could farm a pet from a meta and learn about toxic spores?

Ashin.5986:

Bona fide brand new player here, chiming in.

From my point of view as a new player, the living world events added nothing to my game experience. On the contrary, it was confusing to see these random toxic things that had no relationship to my personal story or anything the game was describing to me via lore, etc. Not only did they make no sense, but those toxic spawns are extremely difficult and frustrating to a lone newbie who is making his way through mostly uninhabited maps.

From my point of view as someone who has been playing MMO’s since EQ1, small biweekly content patches are NOT a substitute for expansions. I worry that this is the kind of mistake that arena.net will only realize “too late”.

I think this system has the opposite of its intended effect. It’s resulted in people feeling that the game has peaked / is stagnating or in a state of decline. A better formula was established by GW1, and by the real storyline of GW2 (which is perfectly fine). You have only to release a new box with a new dragon each year – the whole arc is right there.

In closing, to arena.net I would just put it this way: why do you think 3.5 million people bought GW2? Was it because of an entire new world, new classes, new skills, new game systems and an epic adventure against an evil dragon? Or was it so that they could farm a pet from a meta and learn about toxic spores?

Thank you for this. This is a perfect example right here, of the failing of the LS idea.

Start giving us bigger, more spaced out (needs to be spaced out since Anet’s QA department apparently doesn’t know what an MMO is or how to make it work as intended) Elder Dragon content, while adding new skills, new weapon options, new armor, new traits, etc, etc (expansion style content basically). Not this 2 week set of achievement point content that most people could care less about and that new players don’t have clue what it even is.

And to the people who say if we burn through Elder Dragon content to fast, we won’t be left with anything. Ummm, hello…..we have 4 or 5 more dragons to contend with (that could give us at least 2 to 3 more years of content) as well as Elona and Cantha (each one of those could EASILY give us 2 to 3 years of content, if not more). One thing Anet is not short on is the lore and availability of areas to expand more content. The problem is their refusal to even get started in the most basic way of progressing us this direction. Instead, they insist we only use the world/zones we already have (and quite frankly are bored to death with) and try to force us to care about some crappy villian that appeared out of nowhere and continues to break lore with every content update she appears in.

I don’t know why GW2 is trying to use new lore, when they have lore from GW1.

Bring back the White Mantle.
Bring back the Shining Blade.
Bring back the lore of the Deldrimor & Stone Summit dwarves.
Bring back the lore of Cantha, Factions, Prophecies.
Let us connect to GW1 lore again.

Utilize this rich history: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Lore

Scarlet just came out of nowhere, and people don’t connect with her. She’s not taken seriously, because she’s always cackling and laughing, and playing games. It’s just silly.

Give us a real threat, instead of dragons, because dragons are boring. Every fantasy setting has them.

Give us deep storylines, like the way Blizzard did with the Lich King. It was WoW at it’s best, during Wotlk expansion. He was taken seriously. Just watch the wotlk trailer. He wasn’t laughing like a looney toon.

As it is now, GW2 feels like a cartoon for 10 year olds. It’s not mature or serious enough.

SaltyDave.7346:

I can’t wait to disembowel Scarlet

I can’t wait either… and I want that part to be re-playable, over and over and over again.

please Anet make your next villain(s) a good one. Go google a beginners class to writing if it helps.

nexxe.7081:

I don’t know why GW2 is trying to use new lore, when they have lore from GW1.

Because writers/creatives like to put their stamp of creativity on the game. Its an arrogant way of thinking to discard lore from GW1.

the super adventure box came back, right?

the bazaar will be back, relax
the queen’s arena will re-open once maintenance is over.
we did destroy a lot of robots back then.

relax.

That is so true. Most of LS content should be permanent. The best case scenario is to make some kind of campaign, for some reason we go exploring some different and interesting part of the world, like the crystal desert.

Slowly revealing maps with a “conquest” feel, as in, we go facing an enemy and making their forces retreat (like minions of a dragon, kinda like the personal story, but openworld and revealing new areas), after the month, the map changes to a more “controlled” state, where there are still explorable areas, JPs, achievements and events, but it’s similar to the other open world maps, meanwhile (or maybe sometime later), another map is revealed and we must fight for it.
You could also add a “build” phase after we conquest the map, as in, we help building the camps and stuff to keep everything under control.

This is what I always thought the living story would be, and that, would be amazing.

You could also integrate all of that with a continuation to the Personal Story, as in, even after we conquest the map, players can still relive the events that went down there through an instanced map very similar to the personal story content. Also, no problem using festivals and smaller updates in the middle of these big fight patchs, just deliver quality content.

I’d have to say I agree with your core concerns OP. Don’t get me wrong, the living story concept has the potential to be something special – and it’s better than nothing, but the achievement hording that comes with each release contributes to this boredom you speak of. And sure, people can say that you don’t need to grind the achievements, but with the lack of storytelling and characterizations there’s just not enough carrots dangling in front of those who care about the story to keep us moving forward, couple that with their insistence of removing amazing areas of the game once the 2 weeks (or however long temporary content lasts) from the citizens of Tyria – and well, you end up where you are now.

But, as one poster mentioned – you can’t make everyone happy. Such is the life of a lonely ranger on Tyria.

The living story idea in of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however the way it was implemented pleased only a few and left many wanting. I guess what people were (or are always hoping for) in an MMO is an evolving environment. Now, that does include change, but I guess what people look for are remnants of the old world within that new environment too, to show that something has been built upon it.

It also doesn’t help that many are unable to complete or fully enjoy the living world content because it is removed almost as soon as it appears. Nothing has really been ‘built’ into the world, it’s sort of like a carnival (holiday festivals?) they just appeared and went like nothing really significant happened.

I think one of the reasons why the Scarlet arc was so disappointing is that so many of the living story arcs were used to build up suspense and anticipation for what equates to a badly done saturday morning cartoon. It wasn’t some fantastic creature like an Elder Dragon (which the game was building up to when it was first being advertised) nor was it a God or a fantastical beast that you would normally expect in a fantasy game. It wasn’t the mursaat who are magically advanced and have been in hiding for centuries, nor was it NEW race the Largos, who could have opened up an entirely new world for players to explore.

No, it was a little Sylvari with too many resources at her disposal and no complexity. TL;DR: It wasn’t an EPIC BOSS. Now that isn’t to say that some of the encounters weren’t epic. The clockwork chaos battles were fun but after all is said and done, nothing of significance really occurred. Nothing earth shattering happened. The antics of one sylvari cannot compare to the invasive poison of the dragon’s corruption, something described as “a force of nature”. In the end, she has little impact on the world itself.

And now that I’ve said this, Scarlet will go and blow up half of Tyria. But not before holding it ransom for 1 million gold pieces.

nexxe.7081:

Give us deep storylines, like the way Blizzard did with the Lich King. It was WoW at it’s best, during Wotlk expansion. He was taken seriously. Just watch the wotlk trailer. He wasn’t laughing like a looney toon.

I mostly agree with you (aside from the dragons), but the thing is that Arthas is an important part of the original Warcraft lore, not to mention that WOTLK was an expansion pack that brought on an entire continent with end game instances. But I agree that you can’t build deep storylines if you are unable to create serious antagonists. Or at least ones that we as players can take seriously.

Which brings us back to the original problem: No reverence or use of GW1 lore and no world building within the existing continent of Tyria. There are large areas of land and ocean that have yet to be opened up in over a year. Why couldn’t the living story have slowly created more and more explorable, permanent areas?

Anet’s refusal to give us expansion-style content with the Living story has been one of their biggest mistakes so far. I seem to recall Colin stating something along the lines of the LS being just as good, if not better than an expansion….boy what a lie and letdown that was. If they had actually given us expansion-themed updates with every LS update (aka, new zones to explore….Southsun does NOT count, the place was a joke….., new skills to learn….and no, 2 new healing abilities for each class does NOT count….., classes learning how to use different weapons, new traits, etc, etc), then it would have been a lot better.

But as it is, we’re still stuck with the same ol’ world we saw at launch, with nothing really exciting or very permanent in nature. They said they wanted to use the current world they’ve already built and change it over time. In that regard, they have failed miserably so far. Now that I’ve said that, they will probably blow up half of Tyria with the end of the Scarlet arc, but I highly doubt it knowing Anet’s track record.

TLDR: Anet needs to start focusing on actual expansion style content and forget about this pathetic and laughable excuse at a “living world” they have tried so hard to do and failed miserably at.