Guild Wars 2

I realize this has been talked to death, but somewhere I started hearing rumors that maybe, just maybe, ANet was going to slow down their content patches to give the non-obsessives some time to finish things.

And yet, I’m still seeing the same old, tiring behavior as they continue to the finish of Living Story, season 1.

Here’s to hoping season 2 is actually paced well and interesting enough to warrant three- or four-week rotations.

it’s lose-lose for Anet.

for every person asking them to slow down the release pace so they have more time to work on a chapter, there’s another complaining about having nothing to do because they were done the new chapter on day1.

2 weeks is barely time enough for me to get out of bed and brush my teeth, and they expect us to finish all this content in that time? Totes FML.

Rauderi.8706:

I realize this has been talked to death, but somewhere I started hearing rumors that maybe, just maybe, ANet was going to slow down their content patches to give the non-obsessives some time to finish things.

And yet, I’m still seeing the same old, tiring behavior as they continue to the finish of Living Story, season 1.

Here’s to hoping season 2 is actually paced well and interesting enough to warrant three- or four-week rotations.

When you say “time to finish things” what do you mean?

I don’t play much (few hours a week) and I had plenty of time to see the Lion’s Arch event thoroughly.

By “finish things” do you mean acquire the 250 Found Heirlooms required for a completely optional, cosmetic item?

Thing is, there’s nothing, not a kitten thing, that ANet or any MMO developer can do that will stop the inevitable march of content locusts.

Thing is, once they’re done, they coast for a little while, then they come back with the next shiny.

I’d certainly love to see a 3-week rotation. That gives me time to hit content at a good pace, and then I can go back to achieving other goals, like Ascended gear or dungeon/fractal diving. As it is, right now, my 1-to-3 hours of play time per day goes to finishing dailies and trying to get one shot at LS content.

Just one extra week of breathing room would do wonders.

You really only have to do Lion’s Arch once to get the story.

I did it about 8 times and was sick to death of it by the end; I can’t imagine wanting a static event to drag on longer than that.

What am I missing that it is that you want out of the event?

To be fair to ANet, the recent Living Story achievements (except for Origins of Madness, where several achievements were completely out of your hands with attaining them) have all been very quick to complete. Escape from LA had just one where you had to rely on the map (Triple Threat); the others could largely be completed by yourself or with a few people provided the event wasn’t overscaled. You could easily complete all the achievements in a day or two.

2 weeks is pretty much the sweet spot. No reason to change it.

I only started playing in december, but as soon as I caught up on what LW was, I did the content in a few hours. I did most of the new one in 2 hours yesterday. Would’ve finished it all if it wasn’t for all the bugs.

2 weeks is more than enough time. Unless you’re playing for like what, 5 minutes a day?

i wouldnt mind another week added but its because i really dont have the time at home to do much each day. at least at work i can type on forums

I did LA inbetween other ingame activities and STILL got every achievement and my selfless potion.

As mentioned earlier, Anet can never win; please one, disappoint another.

Rauderi.8706:

I’d certainly love to see a 3-week rotation. That gives me time to hit content at a good pace, and then I can go back to achieving other goals, like Ascended gear or dungeon/fractal diving. As it is, right now, my 1-to-3 hours of play time per day goes to finishing dailies and trying to get one shot at LS content.

Just one extra week of breathing room would do wonders.

You are aware, everything is choice right?
Skip a daily, get more time. Don’t ask Anet to cater to your needs when 2 weeks is more than enough.
The pace is perfect.

2 weeks have been plenty of time. I play an hour or 2 after work and have been able to do the LS and move on to other things, no problem. Remember how Wintersday lasted a month or so? Now that was just dragging on. I think Arena Net hit the sweet spot time wise.

Now if they added a way to replay story instances, etc. from the LS that would be nice.

It might not be enough if you want to ‘check off every box’ but in terms of experiencing the content there is more than enough time. You can experience everything there is to do in the current patch in about an hour unless you get stopped by bugs.

Khisanth.2948:

It might not be enough if you want to ‘check off every box’ but in terms of experiencing the content there is more than enough time. You can experience everything there is to do in the current patch in about an hour unless you get stopped by bugs.

actually most of my ls arc(1/2) were uncompleted due to lack of time and i talking the main achievement the chest for getting the main part done part not all of them. i did better after they made a ls point in the daily but still a few i didnt have enough time to do them and im not an achievement getter i get those when i do but try to get dailies due to laurels given out

Personally I’d like to see them take an extra week so they have more time to polish and work out the bugs. If there is one thing that Battle for LA shows us is that they could have used some more time to test and squash bugs. I’d rather them release content when it’s ready than be beholden to a rushed schedule. Just my 2c

2 weeks is just perfect, I hope they can keep it up. I only play about 2 hours a day after work and I am usually done with the meta achievement by the end of the weekend at the latest. And then the coming Tuesday it’s time to get excited about the preview for the new release.

@washednblood They had extra time to work on the final 4 chapters and it didn’t help with the bugs. One week is not going to make a big difference. There will always be bugs, no matter what. Fortunatelly, very few are serious ones and they fix them very fast.

Rauderi.8706:

Thing is, there’s nothing, not a kitten thing, that ANet or any MMO developer can do that will stop the inevitable march of content locusts.

Thing is, once they’re done, they coast for a little while, then they come back with the next shiny.

Agreed.

I do think they could slow down the release cycle to 3 weeks or slightly more with few ill effects.

I would also keep the content permanent in some form, like through some “historical events” instance lobby, possibly scaled down to account for fewer players. This would eliminate the pressure for people to finish the content within a fixed time and also just give everyone more stuff to do.

I would also focus a lot more on PvP modes, since PvP has greater inherent longevity than PvE.

For me two – three weeks is a fine amount of time for each LS update. The flame and frost story arc was released once a month and seemed a bit too long, but I think the achievements were harder to get…not necessarily more challenging, but it would be quite difficult to get them all in one night so people played the content for longer.

Now, I find that I can get over 50% of the LS achievements in the first two hours without really trying. Participation drops a lot after the first week, which is unfortunate because several of the recent personal achievements are impossible to complete by yourself. Having bugged content doesn’t inspire people to keep playing it either.

I think that if Anet continues with the two week release schedule, they should form a couple more LS teams so that each team will have longer to polish the content before it goes live.

Hate the two week rotation. I have a life outside of gaming unfortunately so I miss out on a lot of things because it’s all temporary. Sick of it.

Rauderi.8706:

I realize this has been talked to death, but somewhere I started hearing rumors that maybe, just maybe, ANet was going to slow down their content patches to give the non-obsessives some time to finish things.

And yet, I’m still seeing the same old, tiring behavior as they continue to the finish of Living Story, season 1.

Here’s to hoping season 2 is actually paced well and interesting enough to warrant three- or four-week rotations.

I think a good alternative to 3-4 week rotations is making LS content a permanent part of the game (like the Aetherblade dungeon in TA). That way, casual players can take their time getting their achieves and catching up with the LS.

There also needs to be a good balance between skilled solo content and zerg content.

Looks like “pace” is an unsolvable issue in Living Story because everyone has his own “pace”. An Expansion, on the other hand, would not have this problem. Perhaps, that’s why expansion is still popular and viable in many MMOs.

Two weeks is enough for most people as long as you can get to play at the start of the event. One week into it, if you want all the achievements you are boned. Good luck getting enough to hard-cap the zone for 6 minute knights or people to care about not getting cocooned on Spider Queen. These server-based and easily griefed personal achievements really need to be rethought.

Battledoll.1803:

Looks like “pace” is an unsolvable issue in Living Story because everyone has his own “pace”. An Expansion, on the other hand, would not have this problem. Perhaps, that’s why expansion is still popular and viable in many MMOs.

The problem with an expansion though is it takes so long to create and release that you have long gaps with no content. Take World of Warcraft for example, it’s last patch was in September and as the developers there are working on an expansion now there is no new content at all being produced until the expansion which won’t be until later this year so that game looks like ending up with a 9-12 month gap with no content at all because of an expansion. And then when the expansion is released you have 3-4 weeks of content and then you’ve finished everything again and can expect new content in 6 months time. And that’s a game with revenues vastly superior to everything else in the market at the moment.

There are a number of MMOs now that have moved away from that model, GW2 with its 2 week schedule, ESO is promising monthly updates, SWTOR every 6 weeks. I definitely think it is the way to go as it keeps people interested in playing.

I recall Chris saying in the LW CDI thread that they would stick to the 2-week release cadence while they felt confident in maintaining the quality of releases.

I would hope, given that this release has been one of the buggiest yet with repeated, significant mechanics-changing patches, that it is clear enough it’s not sufficient for quality releases, and they revisit this decision. There are a lot of things on my wishlist for a LW/LS season 2, but better quality/polish and less time pressure for completion are pretty close to the top.

Yzen.1256:

I don’t play much (few hours a week) and I had plenty of time to see the Lion’s Arch event thoroughly.

A few hours a week is, what, 4 attempts at Scarlet, maximum? With the terrible accessibility of this event, a lot of players wouldn’t even have gotten past the assault knights with that kind of available time. 2 weeks might seem a lot of time, but when a lot of the blocking content is group oriented or gated and you can’t reliably say “I can 100% do this on those 2 weekend hours I get to play”, it’s simply not accessible.

I have a friend who’s barely done any of the LS for this reason. She feels totally that the content “isn’t for her” due to story often being gated behind a grind (e.g. having to grind X power nodes or whatever they were from Scarlet’s probes before you could see a critical story instance), unreliable group content, or unnecessarily difficult content. The meta is often unachievable unless you commit to playing multiple separate days and acquiring the relevant dailies – so if you can totally play ALL DAY Saturday and get 12 hours in, you are still probably screwed.

It’s not a friendly design for anyone on a rigid and inflexible gaming schedule and limited time to play (very different from not having any time at all to play), and it disappoints me to see this limitation continue in the LS design.