Guild Wars 2

I tried to search for a thread that just talked about generic good and bad but the search function wasn’t a lot of help.

Good:
-I think there have been improvements in the actual content. The current content is more fun than the kill 100 or click on 50 quests. Now you are doing a variety of things and the killing 50 or 100 mobs happens naturally while doing events. That is MUCH better in my opinion.
- The UI has improved pertaining to LS
- The rotation of minigames is a nice addition.
- The rewards are very cool. Nice little fluff items.
- The experience, karma, and gold rewards are nice. The drops are nice. I feel like I am being rewarded for doing the content.

Bad:

- It is still too rushed. Missing content and rewards annoys many players. (No, I didn’t say all people, if it doesn’t annoy you, good for you. That doesn’t keep it from annoying me).

- When someone has to be gone for a week or two then they may miss something that has a unique reward or has content that they would love to have had access to earning.
That is ok if it is an occasional thing. I missed content in other games due to bad timing on traveling out of town. It was not a big deal. Why is it a big deal here? Because it is a feature of the game. The game is now designed to make sure you will miss one time content routinely.

- It is still too rushed. Bug, bug, bug, and more bugs. So we have content in now that is for two weeks. We have to do 13 hour long events. Some of them don’t count when you do them. Sometimes you get tossed out of your zone and lose an hours effort. However, the developers will have to spend a lot of time debugging this and then poof, it is gone. Perhaps this can be applied to future events and make them less buggy. Perhaps not. I don’t know.

- and seriously…scarlet spawns in a jp? -_-

I could post more but it is at the tl/dr stage already.

Bugs, glitchs, ingame story full of fail (We have quite nice pieces of lore…on the website. Way to go, take this, pandas!), meager dialogues, flawed villains, zergfest as content.
I’m not just whinning about everything, Helloween and Queen’s Gauntlet were really fun. But this amount of nonsense in LS is disheartening

Katz.5143:

- When someone has to be gone for a week or two then they may miss something that has a unique reward or has content that they would love to have had access to earning.
That is ok if it is an occasional thing. I missed content in other games due to bad timing on traveling out of town. It was not a big deal. Why is it a big deal here? Because it is a feature of the game. The game is now designed to make sure you will miss one time content routinely.

It’s also a problem, in my opinion, because the storylines are ongoing. That means that:

1.) If you’re unable to play for even a fairly short time, you may come back and find you’ve missed something crucial in the plot – and you can never repeat it. That part of the story will simply be unavailable to you forever. Thus any given person may be playing a very fragmentary “campaign” that makes little sense because of the gaps, and may find it impossible to put together the broader narrative.

2.) You can have invested months in following the living story only to find that you’re missing the big reveals because it conflicts with real-life commitments. So essentially, you’re losing your narrative payoff because of things outside the game.

All this makes me less inclined to put in the effort of keeping up with the living story. I’m not quitting the game or anything, but it’s harder to see a reason to prioritize logging in for living story when something external at some point (for me, it’s a house move right now) is going to prevent you from seeing all of it anyway.

iron dropped 20 copper the moment this living story began, its is a serious economic problem…

GW Factions came out 1 year after GW1

the living story has come nowhere near an expansion’s worth of content

A lot of what I find lacking with the Living Story is that so much of the actual story seems to be given to us through this page.
- The short stories and all the lore in there are not something we experience in game, rather ANet thinks that “temporary” equals a “Living” and “Breathing” world, and if we get the background story here then everyone will know what is going on, who the villain is… except, of course, for our characters, who in game have never met this person or know exactly what to make of him/her.

I don’t mind updates every two weeks with more features for us, but the story often seems rushed. A week ago no one had ever seen Scarlet, she was nothing more than a myth.

Before “Sky Pirates of Tyria” the Aetherblades were non-existing. I’d never once crossed swords with them on my travels, but now they are invading. And this Scarlet hadn’t been introduced either.
- It would’ve been so much more awesome to have a threat that we knew of before hand, rising up to becoming the huge threat that it is made out to be right now.

Scarlet’s personality doesn’t impress me either. If she’s so smart, how come her vocabulary is lacking as much as it is? “Die, die, die, die-” Let me guess… die?
- The Joker from Batman: The Dark Knight is a villain that we see from his “small time” robbery of mob bosses to his rise through the ranks. How he is introduced, his personality, that is the key essential to him being such a terrifyingly amusing villain.
- Tara Strong, who is the voice actor of Scarlet, is (as is my understanding) a pretty respected VA in the business (the same goes for Gideon Emery, whose voice I have also recognized on the Sylvari characters), however I find her poorly executed. I, personally, cannot take her seriously.

To the writers I can only say that you need to work on your characters, how they are implemented/introduced and whether or not the players have an opinion/relationship to them in some way.
- It’s the moment we all had been waiting for. This Scarlet would be revealed, although no one knew what to expect… but I think that I speak for most of us when I say that this wasn’t it. I respectfully suggest that you look into what truly makes a villain scary, what makes us “hate” them or want to deal with them, and how you can make the most out of each character.
- You also got a lot of lore nuts around here, who might be a good idea of consulting. I think that many fans of the GW franchise will have some seriously awesome ideas that you can use to make this game even better for all of us.

I like the living stories. It gives me things to look forward to every two weeks because I don’t like to level up new character and I don’t like dungeons or PvP. Doing LS is very fun for me no matter if it is smash 300 pinatas or doing invasion events.
If there was no LS, I would feel really bored and would be just hanging around Queensdale and doing the champion run

I agree Sinifair. ANet should ask some of the GW fans for advice and ideas. Some of the YouTube videos that I’ve watched about GW2 lore have amazing ideas that sound like they would be so much fun. Also, the original story didn’t continue at all after the holidays were over. I remember back in October (for some people September) when I defeated Zaitan and Trahearne said that they had started planning to attack the other Elder Dragons. What happened to them?

I also dislike the story fragmentation – it makes living story feel like a chore to me, because I have to do it now or it won’t be there. I don’t particularly care about the skins/rewards, but this weekend was the only time I’ll be able to do the Clockwork Chaos content, so I did. And it sucked. The first one was fun, the 6th one was torture. If I could have spread them out at my leisure it would have been fine, but right now if I do that I will miss the story. Don’t tell me to look it up on youtube; watching someone else go through the funhouse wasn’t nearly as fun as doing it myself, but I’d have had a lot more fun with it if I could have spread it out to my availability.

If you put limited time access to previous content into the gem store for a few hundred gems, I will buy them. And everyone I was talking to on TS last night will too. If that means, down the road, that we have to organize our own guild-based event to get enough people for a clockwork invasion and the rewards aren’t as good as they were when it was live, fine. But it means that I wouldn’t be feeling burnt out right now and I would still get to enjoy the content.