Guild Wars 2

The whole LS till now – aka Season 1 – was really “an expansion worth of content”
I enjoyed it a lot and if we would put together all the “quests” we needed to do they are really a huge pile.

Just count down all the achievements from all LS content and you will see it.
I am not counting in here the other Col updates and other improvements as these should come naturally, but if we put together all what we have players over the last year and a half, it is really awesome.

Instead of letting us getting bored for 1 year and then add content for 1 month, the LS story it is the future of MMOs expansions.

The concept is great and many updates were very cool. we nned to count here how much A-net has learned in this year from all these different experiences and we can only hope for the best.

Thank you A-net for this LS season 1
It has been great

3/10

The only redeeming qualities about the Living Story were the well-written character interactions between Braham, Rox, Marjory, and Kasmeer. Everything to do with Scarlet was pure garbage.

While some of the early chapters started out strong (Flame & Frost, Secret of Southsun), the quality declined with each consecutive patch. The bugginess and stability issues alone were bad enough, but when the chapters did work, the content focussed on tedious grinding. The rewards also kept getting harder to achieve, requiring more and more time, partly due to time-gating…

Also, the two-week time limit to acquire rewards was completely insensitive to a large portion of the player base (i.e., people with lives).

I’m sorry, but the Living Story format needs to be reworked or retired. This past year on Guild Wars 2 has been a severe disappointment.

5/10
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I LOVE almost all the stories from every single patch, also the characters, the cutscenes of the last patch and the idea to improve the game though living story.
Other than the story element, these are the patches I like.

Bazaar of the four winds and Cutthroat Politics
No zerg content, no necessary grind, beautiful new map(sad to be temporary), wonderful mini-games and choice made by players. Can we have Aspect Arena game back?

Twilight Assault
Wonderful permanent dungeon path with good story and challenging content.

The Edge of the Mists
A whole new WvW map and a good story telling instance.

But I don’t like the slow pace of story and frequency of patches that causes the less polished contents. I would rather have a lager and well polished patch every month.
Also I hope there will be less zerg, grind or temporary content in the future patches, and no more contents that force huge amount of players to cooperate (it is a disaster when there are people not willing to cooperate or learn).

If I only consider the story overall, then I will give a 8/10 or even 9/10, however, the bad gameplay experience( zerg, grinding, bugs, requiring cooperation within massive unorganized strangers/trolls etc.) ruined the fun almost every time!

7/10

This was definitely a concept being figured out as they went along, but I think by the final updates they found their footing. It had lots of promise but a lot of stumbling trying to get it all working together. If they mix the story telling aspects from Tower of Nightmares on with standalone events like Bazaar of the Four Winds, New Dungeons, World Bosses, etc. and keep the arcs more focused and developed like the last half of the living story has been, they could have a winner on their hands.

So I look forward to Season 2 to see how things will develop from here on out.

Kinda hard for me to put a number on a rating because there were some things I liked a lot, and many things I did not care for. My biggest complaint is that we as players were not invested in Scarlet at any point in the story. Did my toon ever hear of her before Queen’s Jubilee? Why not? She’d been making waves in asuran schools and no one EVER mentioned her? None of her other teachers ever mentioned the unusual sylvari that learned their craft and then disappeared? We should have had some LS content at the very beginning that introduced our toons to Scarlet and created some sort of friction or gave us a warning that she would be up to no good.

Now that the story is concluding, these forums are STILL rife with speculation about so many story related things. A well crafted story would have given us answers and explanations for motivations, not more questions. Anet may have had a good story somewhere, but it was lost in the telling.

It’s been said before that people remember the ending most. What’s the first thing you mention about that concert you saw and loved? The encore (I bet). The bug-ridden finale has to be a large reason many people are scoring the LS so low.

Sinbold.8723:

The bug-ridden finale has to be a large reason many people are scoring the LS so low.

Nope, the Unliving Story has been rubbish from the very beginning.

3/10

Some parts of the story were interesting, but it’s a poor substitute to expansions and the story was dragged out waaaay too long.

JTGuevara.9018:

the living story was a drunken man telling an epic tale.

Well said. That is the best way to describe the writers for Season 1. At least the vanilla story with traherne had halfway decent characters.

Leshain.6720:

JTGuevara.9018:

the living story was a drunken man telling an epic tale.

Well said. That is the best way to describe the writers for Season 1. At least the vanilla story with traherne had halfway decent characters.

I’d beg to differ, as the characters between the two different storylines weren’t necessarily much different. The telling was better in the Living Story since it was more focused. Well, except for Scarlet – she deserved better than the disjointed mess she was introduced with.

The Personal Story, on the other hand, was just chock full of characters made solely to be sacrificial lambs, or momentary plot-facilitators never to be used again.

8/10

This is my fifth MMO with a lot of hours invested. It’s my favorite by far. That may color my opinion of living world.

I work in software development and product strategy. I’m very impressed with the ability to juggle activities of multiple teams and deliver in these short cycles. It’s pretty incredible to do all this while getting ready to enter a major new market (and it would be very tempting to limit investing in the current customer base given the revenue model).

It amazes me how harsh people can be on something that was clearly a ton of effort and a huge amount of added value for the game as a whole – especially considering this is something that costs a one-time payment of $50.

I had fun. I played different segments to differing degrees. Sometimes I felt a little stressed when I decided that I had to get certain achievements. Especially toward the end, I really started looking forward to the next installment.

But mostly I’m really happy that the Anet team got up every day and worked hard to add something cool to the game. Thanks folks!

6/10

Great content updates are ones with replay value. It’s important to note that replay value =/= free stuff. The fact that the only reason people have been bothering with all of this toxic alliance and LA stuff the past few months only for the sake of farming for loot and achievements does not show that the majority of the playerbase enjoys the content. When easy rewards — especially limited time only rewards are released, of course people are going to try to get them. I fear that they might use the metrics of participation to their advantage for the sake of advertisement, just like any other company would, in order to give off the impression that everyone is immersed in engaging combat and challenged with new content regularly… which really isn’t the case.

On that note, it’s pretty depressing to see how little attention the game receives outside of the Living Story. I didn’t dock off any points for this, but if I had it’d be a score of about 3/10 instead of 6.

4/10

Highlights are updates like SAB, Bazaar of the Four Winds, new maps, they work well as standalone updates and introduce new interesting gameplay mechanics.

Low points are mostly zerg fests like Queens Jubilee, Tequatl, excessive bugs and uninteresting overall story with forgettable/unlikable characters.

Aedelric.1287:

4/10

Highlights are updates like SAB, Bazaar of the Four Winds, new maps, they work well as standalone updates and introduce new interesting gameplay mechanics.

Low points are mostly zerg fests like Queens Jubilee, Tequatl, excessive bugs and uninteresting overall story with forgettable/unlikable characters.

Heal-o-Tron alone brings the overall score down for being the most useless running gag of all.

2/10

By overlaying LS across a perfectly good game; that should have been expanded, LS has progressively destroyed my interest in the game.

jweez.7214:

Just give your honest appraisal of how the LS season 1 has been on a scale of 1-10

I would say 7 out of 10

The story taken bit by bit is underwhelming but as a whole it is pretty good. I know saying that sounds flawed but I think that moving at a faster pace could have helped it aloooooot (maybe two arcs over the course of a year).

The combat seemed really poor however with some of the more recent fights I have come to believe that mass numbers combat can be interesting. I am excited to see if anet can overcome the inherent obstacles in the form of combat they have chosen to elect (difficulty coordinating, lag, and griefers).

Finally, implementation these past few patches has been poor. Anet, you have got to find a way to make these patch days run smother.

All in all this first ride of the LS has had high and low points for me. Their have been moments where I sincerely thought this story was going absolutely no place and I am glad that anet has been able to turn the story around. However, I can say that the end still leaves much to be desired. Good experiment run, next season is the real thing and I hope that you leave the MMO world stunned.

Without giving a certain number, I absolutely agree with you there. The story in itself is good. If you go back and read it all in one sitting, it’s actually not that bad. The main problem, I think was, that we only ever got 5-10 Minutes of the story (or say 1 plot point) every two or four weeks over the course of 1.5 years. It was like you just read one chapter of a book and then put it aside for 2 weeks to read one more chapter and put it aside again. It’s not just incredibly slow paced, it also leaves you with enough time to ponder about all possibilities and (even worse) all the flaws of the story. Whenever you read a good book or watch a good movie, it sucks you right into the story so bad that you hardly have time to actually process all of it and very often the pacing makes you overlook all the little flaws a story might have. And it also leaves you enough time to correctly predict the ending of the story 5 months in advance. I know the devs are now arguing that people didn’t predict Mordremoth and didn’t predict the attack on Lion’s Arch, but the real surprise should have been the arrival of the elder dragon, and not that it was Mordremoth instead of Primordus and that Lion’s Arch was under attack yet again (after it was attacked by the undead (in the personal story), Mad King Thorn, the karka and the aetherblades (at Dragon Bash and when they freed Mai Trin)) Lion’s Arch is number 1 on the “1000 places you need to attack to be a super-villain” list.

Now, I’m not sayin that they should tighten their schedule. Just take some bigger breaks and release more plot…way more plot in a single update.

personally… I can’t give a mark out of ten

I missed a a few really large chunks near the beggining, so hard to comment on them

overall…
the variety of things happening was nice. Like, activites, couple of new areas/maps, new dungeon, new fractals, zerg content, 5 man content, big world bosses…..
I would personally liked to have seen potentially more variation within each patch, and between adjacent patches
but also – for the zerg-based content to be a little more rewarding to farmers simply to stop them giving up on the content (even if this were something like the heirlooms/lost possessions in the most recent patches – a form of currency/item of which a lot is needed just to buy something really special)

the story… some parts were good (I personally loved the new NPCs… a lot)
some parts were… not so good (whilst I didn’t hate Scarlet; I can understand some of the hate… mad villains are really overdone; and we still don’t know her reasoning?)

At the end of the day: it is new content
for free
so… can’t complain, not when some of it has been surprisingly good (whislt others mildly disappointing)

and… I am really looking forward to the next season and what it might bring

I’d like to start with a thank you to anet and their staff for all their hard work and effort that goes it to what is basically a free game after it’s initial purchase. I don’t know what other monthly pay mmo’s are like but I’ve always been impressed with Anet willingness to listen and to try and sort out the problems, as well what content we’d like.
There’s a lot of negativity on these forums ( and I wont argue with some of it) but compared to most games you buy were you get no feedback at all after purchase, I think Anet do well. So good job Anet and thanks for a game I still enjoy playing.

As a whole I’d give LS 7/10 there have been some great updates, I’ve really enjoyed 4 Winds & Marrionette, some that weren’t really my style but I played and some that didnt interest me at all, but at least everyone seamed to get an update in a style they liked. They weren’t all the same things over and over. Some great designs, epic fights and some good dungeons.

What lets it down is the overall polish so as an earlier poster said, don’t release things to a timetable, release them when they are ready. Even if Anet had said “Battle for la out 2nd March” , but at the end of Feb said sorry guys we’re real busy with the Asian launch, Battle’s not quite ready we need another couple of weeks. Yeah there would be disapointed fans but most of us would be happy to wait that bit longer for an update that was fun and worked well.

So please take your time!

PS any chance of changing the armour skins system to the old GW1 version, any skin can be used on any armour even if it’s town clothes. that it goes over the top of your armour so I can keep my exotic set but have different looks for it instead of having half a dozen pieces just so I can change my hat every now and then

5/10
It wasn’t very amazing, BUT I do have a lot of optimism for it in general. I think it is just taking a while for arenanet to get it just right.

I didn’t care for most updates, the holidays were good. My favorite update was Bazaar of the Four Winds. I would like to see more story and less zerg stuff.