Guild Wars 2

Hey, I just wanted to post to say I’m REALLY enjoying the whole Living Story, everything about it. Obviously there’s a million things that come to mind as “wouldn’t it be cool if they did THIS”, but that’s not the point of this thread and doesn’t detract from what is.

I love the lore, I love the characters (even Scarlet), I love speculating on what might be and what might not be, I love the achievements (especially the tricky ones that really made you feel like you worked for it), the Marionette event was amazingly fun (even when it was frustrating) and whoever came up with that concept should get a bonus. And I’ve looked forward to every new release with great anticipation.

It bums me out when all I seem to see online is constant negativity meeting every new release, so I guess I just wanted to post to try counter-balance it somewhat. I don’t know if it’s a case that a lot of players don’t like it, or whether it’s just a very vocal minority. But either way, there’s a lot of us that really do like it and I guess because we have nothing to complain about, we don’t tend to post (yay for negativity bias).

I agree, generally people that are having fun, aren’t posting on the forums as much – since we are busy ingame having fun.

I, for one, am extremely impressed that ArenaNet have managed to tie the Living Story together in the way they have done, and I do not share many of the concerns that pop up elsewhere on the forums. The updates have improved so much in quality over the course of the season and I am very excited for the conclusion of this arc. I think AN have really started to find their feet with delivering content in this way, and I believe season 2 will be very exciting to progress through, now that they know what they’re doing a bit more.

I feel the opposite. I think Living Story, in general, has been a massive disappointment. I haven’t been impressed with the story or the content. I might wish I could brush it off as “well, it’s free and I don’t have to do it, so I can ignore it”.

However, I think it has cheapened the game, drawn more and more people out of the broader game world, retrained remaining players to “Adventure by Checklist”, rather than “Explore and find your own Adventure”. It has also made heavier and heavier use of “carrot on a stick” rewards to motivate participation, rather than people playing because it’s fun.

How many people do you think would be playing the current event, beyond a sampling, for the “fun of it”, if there were no rewards attached and no check boxes to be checked by doing so?

I also hate it because of the waste of resources it represents. We could have had an ever expanding list of Dynamic Event content across the world which, by now, would have meant enough redundancy to allow meaningful rotation of events, thus ensuring that retuning to any zone today, or two months from now, would mean you would encounter a lot of content you hadn’t experienced before.

So, I hate it for three reasons. The content itself. The way it has changed the way people play the game. The way it robbed the rest of the game of the continual addition of Dynamic Event content they talked about in late 2012, before deciding to do Living Story instead.

I accept that some people enjoy it, but for me Living Story has greatly diminished the game that once was GW2.