Guild Wars 2

In the latest video I saw, by Collin, he mentioned that Anet would love to hear our feedback. Now I scrolled around here and did find some threads that cover my feedback, but generally only in part, or from a one sided direction. Hence my feedback in a more comprehensive post:

Depending on how you like to receive ‘news/opinions’ either start with the ‘Good’ or the ‘Bad’ and take it from there

The good
- The living story is a nice way to expand on content. Getting something ‘old’ to do with a new angle makes for decent replay value. And tbh. the living story brought me to places I personally hadn’t been to, or only glanced over and decided to keep for a rainy day…

- The over arcing story line is generally enjoyable, getting away from undead and dragons as well as various by now more then familiar foes makes one hungry for more. Like the saying goes, ‘a change in spices stimulates the appetite’.

- The amount of things to do is also both diverse as well as plenty full, and luckely differing slightly from event to event. Big thumbs up to the content team for coming up with new formats for tried and tested activities.

- The rewards are decent to good & The one time only part of various rewards, while it may frustrate some, is good for visual diversity in the game world.

The Bad
- The living content sucks the life out of the rest of the game. And especially when it is supposed to be a continuous flow of content every 2 weeks. People will be playing the LS in order to get the latest rewards, knowing they can ‘always’ do the existing content (and due to the one time nature of various elements of these stories, they will have to), but if the content keeps flowing, when will this ‘always’ be…

- The stories seem to be lacking in details, and their influence in the actual game is close to ‘null’. The content just ‘drops’ onto us, and while parts are situated inside the actual game, there is hardly anything in the game to point towards this content.

And with this I mean that while content is advertised to come on the website, there is no sign of it coming in the game. The buzz/talk in towns is not (at least for as far as I experienced) about the Zepherites being docked. The traders are not complaining about the competition, or cheering on the possible business deals. There is no ’Hear hee, hear hee, the Zepherites are docked by the town-criers.

So while the living story is supposed to convey a living world, the ‘living world’ part seems to be lacking.

- A similar thing seems to go on in regards to how the story is conveyed, by leaving out story steps. For example, it took me quite some time to figure out the link between Flame & Frost and Sunset Cove. Mainly because as the Flame & Frost ended there was no obvious cue that the refugees were being coerced to go there.

There were no ‘consortium clowns’ tricking people into signing the resettlement contract. There was no boat docked where these people were heading. All these things would actually tie the story steps together and as such convey this ‘living story/world’.

- My biggest fear is that 6weeks per team to make content will prove to be to less of time to produce quality content, and i rather have quality then quantity. And by making it every 2 weeks, there is no time to actually play the rest of the game, work on alts. Plus there is no ‘time’ to anticipate content coming… If anything it’s causing more of a ‘content burnout’ than rejoicing for what is to come.

Solution
In my views this can be solved fairly easily by changing the set up and timing of the living story. Make the content have a week in between, and fill ‘this time’ with hints on what is to come, or to tie up loose ends, and or introduce characters. Build and Set the stage…

For example:
- Kiel could have mentioned the Dragon festival during the last stages of Sunset Cove, expressing that a resolve should come fast as she received orders to move to Lion’s Arch to attend the Dragon Festival. At the very end she could have introduced an oversee-er to attend to Sunset, introducing another character for that specific area.

- In the week leading up to the dragon festival, there could have been more workers putting up the decorations. It would also have been fairly simple to either replace Dolyak protection runs, with characters that want to get to Lion’s Arch for the festival, or even simply change the text for these traders to something related to the dragon festival, mentioning they need to get their wares there in time. The Town-Criers would be notifying that Dragon festival was to start in X days.

There could also be modifications to other events, related to the start of the festival, for example the wood mills would have been ordered to supply scaffolding and planks for the decorations. This would only be a change of event text… Perhaps players could even turn in their gathered materials to the workers to help build up the stuff.

These would all be little hints on what is to come, fairly easy to realize by changing some texts, and swap some characters around… It wouldn’t be part of any special event, it would just be ‘the living world’.

As of right now, the lead in to the election thing is also fairly marginal, in my views it would be the council in game that would open up the Elections shortly after the dragon festival, pre-selecting the candidates. Mainly in the week between the dragon fest and the zepherites, when lion’s arch is breaking down the decorations. Traders would be going home, leaving LA… The town-criers would be shouting about the elections and the zepherites comming.

Well i’m guessing this is more then enough to illustrate how the ‘living story/world’ could do with short time-outs in between the bulk of the stuff. How with fairly little things the living-content can be woven in better with the existing world. And how this week would give players some time to actually utilize the build up appetite from the change in spices, and devourer some of the usual stuff in the game

Arghore.8340:

The Bad
- The living content sucks the life out of the rest of the game. And especially when it is supposed to be a continuous flow of content every 2 weeks. People will be playing the LS in order to get the latest rewards, knowing they can ‘always’ do the existing content (and due to the one time nature of various elements of these stories, they will have to), but if the content keeps flowing, when will this ‘always’ be…

I couldn’t agree more…you basically nailed the coffin on the temporarily Living Story tight schedule issue…

Just a few points I noticed:

Arghore.8340:

- A similar thing seems to go on in regards to how the story is conveyed, by leaving out story steps. For example, it took me quite some time to figure out the link between Flame & Frost and Sunset Cove. Mainly because as the Flame & Frost ended there was no obvious cue that the refugees were being coerced to go there.

There were no ‘consortium clowns’ tricking people into signing the resettlement contract. There was no boat docked where these people were heading. All these things would actually tie the story steps together and as such convey this ‘living story/world’.

If you visited the refugees in Lion’s Arch (where there was a shiny golden star on the map), and spoke to them you might have caught that the Consortium was in fact doing this.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lionguard_%28Refugee_Coordinator%29
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Administrator_Elpida_Callis
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aggren_Vicegrip#During_Flame_and_Frost
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Henrika#During_Flame_and_Frost
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Refugee_Kirk
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Refugee_Tergvi#During_Flame_and_Frost
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Refugee_Vortius

Arghore.8340:

My biggest fear is that 6weeks per team to make content will prove to be to less of time to produce quality content, and i rather have quality then quantity.

It’s actually 3-4 months (depending on how you count it), since each team takes over the entire month.

Arghore.8340:

Kiel could have mentioned the Dragon festival during the last stages of Sunset Cove, expressing that a resolve should come fast as she received orders to move to Lion’s Arch to attend the Dragon Festival.

The upcoming Dragon Bash was mentioned at least three times (although never by name) during the Secret of Southsun content. Once by Kiel herself in her normal repeated statement, a second time by Lord Faren (and I know several people hung around them for quite a while for various reasons…check bottom conversation), and then once more to Magnus during the final instance after the ship blew up.

And the election storyline was preceded by the entire Dragon Bash/Sky Pirates storyline.

Hope that helps a bit.

@Vakris “It’s actually 3-4 months (depending on how you count it), since each team takes over the entire month.” regarding the time frame the LS teams have to produce their content

As far as i understood Collin’s video they have 4 teams producing content for 2week interfalls. So that means that ‘at best’ a group has 8 weeks to make their stuff, given that during the 2weeks their content runs, they don’t have to baby sit it. Your information ‘was’ correct prior to this 2weeks change that was mentioned fairly recently.

In regards to your ‘mentioned’ instances of things to come, I did figure some of this was going on, and by definition you may be right… then again, the question remains whether this is actually enough of a lead in to speak of a living world…

Take Halloween for example, or any other big event that you may be familiar with (as there is no guarantee for me that you are from the US and thus are familiar with this event. Perhaps Christmas is a better example… How long b4 Christmas does the world get into ‘swing’ for this 2day event, how many people do you hear about it, how many traders (shops, malls, other vendors) try to get you into the mood for them to sell you their wares.

In a world the size of Tyria, with portals all over the place, a big event like the Dragon Bash would almost be a world effort. The saw mills would be busy sawing the planks for the decorations, depending on the time frame at least 3krews would be busy building the projector, and assuming it was build in Rata Sum it would take another krew to get it to LA. There would be traders of all sorts flocking to LA, and apart from traders the supply lines would be extra busy hauling all sorts of goods to LA, in the form of various specially commissioned items and wares. Think of the amount of Zaithaffee that would have to be made, the amount of coffers, the armors and weapons, fire works, etc etc …

Showing just a tad of that, or at least going over events that may have something to do with all of this and changing the texts to reflect the upcoming event, THAT would convey a living world, not 3people mentioning something somewhere along the lines…

Check this article, it has a quote from Mike Zadorojny.

“The game had been out for a couple months so we said we want to look at the game at a more macro level to have a story that’s changing, and adding more permanent content to player interaction and things that are happening. We started this experiment at the beginning of the year with the Flaming Frost team… It gradually got bigger, and now we have four full teams actually working on this. They get up to four months at a time to build one whole month’s worth of content that’s constantly changing.”

There’s another article here

That strategy involves four teams, each given four months to produce two updates that will deploy across their given month.

Each team does two updates in their month, and has 3-4 months to work on the next update after the other three teams do theirs.

All of this is after their change to 2 week updates, because they didn’t announce 4 teams prior to that. Before the announcement, we only knew they had a main team and a secondary team.

And yes, theoretically they could include random changes all over the world in response to each event. I think they’re still in the ramp-up process though (F*F was done by a single team, IIRC, so doing the math I don’t think every team has yet to present their releases), so perhaps that’ll happen more. This is still pretty new to MMOs, so it’s not surprising that they’re focusing more on the actual content than ancillary details.

The Good:
-I’m not really much of a PvP player usually, but aspect arena is pretty fun.
-Aether weapons look amazing.
-The election has made map chat actually worth reading. On my server it seems like there is always a debate going on.

The Bad:
-There isn’t really any new open world content. Dynamic events are my favorite part of the game and I wish there were more of them.
-More RNG chests. (somewhat mitigated by the skins availability on the trade house)