Guild Wars 2

Firstly lets just admit here universally this idea was admirable but poorly implemented, and here’s why:

This Patch literally depends on World Events to advance the plot which causes Mega Servers to Lag and Bugs to happen frequently

I get what you were trying to do, try interacting more with the world, its not a bad idea, but the deliverance is terrible, and the fact it literally requires you to do certain world events to advance things is a lesson that should be learned.

A-Net, don’t do this again, its just a bad idea, there’s no reason to do this, period.

The last two episodes were pretty nice on the ride side of things but this one felt rough and surprisingly a little rushed.

I am hoping the next episode will be a little more indulgent and story heavy as this one felt more like a filler than a plot, granted, it is Part 1 of possibly 2 or 3 or whatever.

TL:DR?

What Worked:

- The Episode Story does continue and gives some interesting plot twists.
- The new backpack will be a time sinker.

What Doesn’t:

- Plot actually felt weak compared to the last two episodes, character bonds between certain characters could have been invested into more instead feeling hallow and a little empty.
- The method of advancing plot via World Events was just a bad idea, period.

How to Improve:

- World Events should stay separate from the story side of things, yet perhaps offer achievements and little ventures of their own to be rewarded for.
- While I wont spoil the story, I will say that A-net needs to avoid SHYING away from forcing char development on chars and literally doing things with them.

This is a vast, growing world that has potential.

Sadly, this episode, it felt more or less like a giant filler for whats coming more than a decent transition.

The ending was a little anti-climactic too, maybe its just me, but it just felt weaker than it needed to.

Actually, I preferred this implementation of the story..so far. Much more enjoyable than the instances.

To each, their own.

[Spoiler in my post! Be warned!]

Farzo.8410:

[Spoiler in my post! Be warned!]

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The things I have to complain about is the way you help Eir and Rytlock

Starting with Eir; you are supposed to take care of Son of Svanir and their totems, alone. But this instead got pushed into a world event with loads of other players, really making all of it uninteresting. Zerg content is always boring, uninteresting, this is no different.

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Helping Rytlock to find the crown pieces; so anticliamtic. This legendary, special, mystical crown, just being scattered around like nothing. All I did was following the green star, search some rubbles and repeat. That was so uninteresting and gave me the biggest ’’meh’’ feeling I’m sure even ArenaNet could feel a cold breeze in their neck.

I get your first point, although I was wondering how it will work out in a couple of days later on, when it’s less crowded. Same for the events in Iron Marches.

Agree 100%, got disconnected during the part in Frostgorge and when I log back in the whole event is over.

My legendary feat is apparently running to a point on a map and clicking on some random piece of ice. Why? No idea, I’ve missed that whole part of the story.

I prefer open-world stuff. Instancing is boring.

I enjoy open-world stuff when it doesn’t deal with my Personal Story, Living World or otherwise. The way the last two were done was just fine. Achievements and fun times with the rest, storyline with my friends.
Didn’t we learn from Scarlet that zergs overall dumb down the crowd and spoil the morale? No? Guess we need a reminder.

Farzo.8410:

[Spoiler in my post! Be warned!]

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The things I have to complain about is the way you help Eir and Rytlock

Starting with Eir; you are supposed to take care of Son of Svanir and their totems, alone. But this instead got pushed into a world event with loads of other players, really making all of it uninteresting. Zerg content is always boring, uninteresting, this is no different.

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

Helping Rytlock to find the crown pieces; so anticliamtic. This legendary, special, mystical crown, just being scattered around like nothing. All I did was following the green star, search some rubbles and repeat. That was so uninteresting and gave me the biggest ’’meh’’ feeling I’m sure even ArenaNet could feel a cold breeze in their neck.

Regarding your second point, there are events that are done first. You just got there after they’d been completed. But, they aren’t new events.

No thanks, I’ll take the instances over this any day.

Nilkemia.8507:

No thanks, I’ll take the instances over this any day.

^I agree.

I do have to say, I keep thinking.. where’s the stuff to do with my guild/friends? Open world zerg events don’t really mix with that given we know the pains of megaservers, plus it would be us among a sea of random strangers. The story has vastly improved, but where are our dungeons or instanced group encounters?

I had expected that S2 would rejuvenate my guild a bit, but honestly, we all seem to be logging in less and less, which is sad. We all want some new stuff to do together. We want to be playing this game together. But many have reached saturation point with the same dungeons and guild missions week after week after week.

Open World Events being required for personal story continuation is fine, except when everyone else is doing the same thing.

Wait a few days and the problems would be lessened. Wait a month and there’d be very few doing them.

But if ArenaNet wanted to be truly good with it, they could have had a splitting storyline ala the personal story, so not everyone would be doing the same path, so open world events would have folks spreading out a bit.

I still don’t think that using world events to advance a story is ever a good idea, it just creates unnecessary clutter and in some cases just like fighting Zhaitan, the emphasis of personal looses its flare when you have to do a dungeon to finish your “personal” story.

People are upset not over the personal story but because the game lacks anything outside it to do “with friends” the story was never meant to be something you did “with friends” its meant to be “your” personal adventures in Tyria and thus the idea of making it part of a “you and whose army” vibe is a dumb way to sell a point.

Really, the game needs more features OUTSIDE personal story to give groupies their much needed dose of world event heavy stuff and a motive to “do” that stuff.

Right now the personal story “is” the selling point, and its a sad thing because it obviously cant cater to a group nor should it, rather, we need something else “to” do so that groupies get something on the side of their individual goals.

SPOILER

Helping Rytlock to find the crown pieces; so anticliamtic. This legendary, special, mystical crown, just being scattered around like nothing. All I did was following the green star, search some rubbles and repeat. That was so uninteresting and gave me the biggest ’’meh’’ feeling I’m sure even ArenaNet could feel a cold breeze in their neck.

I agree with this, it’s too much handholding for something that is a permanent addition to the game. I don’t have to complete this on day 1. Why not give the people some hints (see: Halloween, the first one) where people have to follow the clues (and not some markers) to find the item. It should feel like a difficult search. I had all parts comleted in less than 10minutes(

It was an awful update.

I actually had the worst problems with instances.

SEVERAL second lag happening every 15 seconds does not make for good boss fights. Literally all I could do was blind queue up moves and weapon switching and hope things went sorta right. Which they didn’t really, because that’s not responsive gameplay.

If there’s more updates like this I’m done with the game. It’s nice of them to update it but if it works like crap there’s really no point to actually playing it.

This is a very bad update, all this should have been tested…but it’s Anet.
It’s also a issue if you wanna repeat, once people finish it and leave, you won’t be able to complete this like you could with other 2. It’s another blob to win content Anet said they wouldn’t do this living story so soloing any of these events is out of the question.

I do wish ArenaNet would stop holding our hands for everything. What make this different from GW1 missions, is the fact missions in GW1 had no green stars telling us what to do.

I really loved the boss-fight against the Duke though, felt really well balanced. Getting there would have felt more rewarding if the way to it would have been a longer road though… I agree with the “less handholding please” statement.

Agreed. Give me my kitten instances. I hate people and I HATE working with them. Let me do my kitten alone. TY.

I haven’t even played through the content but yes, I do not like this patch so far regarding the open world. The time-gated events and such was one of the major turn offs for me in the Living Story S1. Some of the reasoning as to why I don’t like them is because:

1. As mentioned before, most of these events are just a large zerg (maybe only for the moment) which then causes massive lag. To some of those that have outstanding computer, it will not cause lag; kudos to you.

2. I find it counter-intuitive (if that is an appropriate word for this). I feel like a story should be centered around characters and how they develop. The events just feel like filler garbage that doesn’t really add to much of a story. It’s simply boring.

3. With the above note said, the instanced events they have created now are much better as far as a story goes. There is ample voiced dialogue which again, in my opinion goes a long way. The walls of text from the events are yet again boring.

4. Lastly, I realize this is an MMO and it is meant to be played with others; however, many players are not team-oriented and simply play for themselves or simply have a very kitten-poor attitude. I love the instanced story chapters because I can avoid all of the attitudes and drama that people like to stir. If I want drama and attitude, I will go pug a dungeon.

I could add more to this but I think most of you get the gist of it. I hope that these events don’t come too often. Come to think about it, this Living Story is supposed to be replayable. Are they going to have these vines and events associated with them here forever now? Instanced stories are much easier to have replayable.

Anyways, enough blabbing from me. Continue the instanced content please!

Its just a fluff patch while they work on making sure the Mordremoth fight is as perfect as possible. What I’m hoping for is that we don’t get to something like “Part 10: Mordremoth is still in the bathroom, but he’s almost done!”. With games like Archeage coming out soon, I’m hoping Anet can have a good answer to some quality content ASAP. Dry Top and the Feature Pack back in April have both been pretty good so let’s keep going on.

We need a dungeon for the story. One that stays instead of coming back 4 months later. They are all great. Except this time it needs to be one that has a weaponsmith and Armorer with full sets that we can buy with tokens and three paths. If that can’t happen, it needs to be one that gets added to the Fractals. That’s great that the content is permanent. But you know what keeps people playing permanent content? Loot does You have to have an actual reason to repeat it. None of the instances for S2 have loot. After I have watched the story once or twice, I am never going to do this content again. It feels like there is a big disconnect between lore design, and content design. The content designers need to give the players a reason to complete the content multiple times. That reason is loot.

I like the idea of having the open world being part of the story, the technical side of it is a disaster. This is a lesson that should have been learned in past releases, but they keep trying it. Having progress rely on events, especially chained ones, is asking for progress-stalling bugs like this.

We don’t have the info to know what the cause is, but it’s clear that they have great difficulty in making this type of content functional. If they can’t figure out how to get these things running smoothly without multiple patches over the course of several days(or even weeks), then it’s best to just not do things this way at all. The last two releases relied on instances for progress, and both went rather smoothly. Today’s patch managed to break 1 minute into the open world portion.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

SPOILER

Helping Rytlock to find the crown pieces; so anticliamtic. This legendary, special, mystical crown, just being scattered around like nothing. All I did was following the green star, search some rubbles and repeat. That was so uninteresting and gave me the biggest ’’meh’’ feeling I’m sure even ArenaNet could feel a cold breeze in their neck.

I agree with this, it’s too much handholding for something that is a permanent addition to the game. I don’t have to complete this on day 1. Why not give the people some hints (see: Halloween, the first one) where people have to follow the clues (and not some markers) to find the item. It should feel like a difficult search. I had all parts comleted in less than 10minutes(

This was my experience, too. Underwhelming. And unbelievable. Really, the crown pieces were just laying there this whole time? You must be joking.

From a higher-altitude, looking down on it, getting a bunch of people together so they can have a meeting is just not terribly exciting, and no amount of detour quests thrown in are going to make it exciting.

It’s also unbelievable that these NPCs would be so DUMB.

“Hey remember how the whole world went to war against the elder dragon Zhaitan? Well the next elder dragon is messing things up now.”

“Oh I’m gonna act all petty about things and not go to your silly little ‘save the whole world’ meeting unless you kill 10 rats for me.”

“…………”

On the good side: the awkward dialogue between Braham and Eir is great, I loved it. Phlunt’s voice acting is superb. Rytlock is awesome. The Mordrem combat mechanics are interesting (if frustrating). And the encounter mechanics were also interesting.

My opinion was that the patch suffered from plot holes and an obvious disconnect between the quests and the storyline.

First trying to get everyone to attend a meeting. The iron marches could’ve easily been enough reason for the Charr to attend the meeting, yet it wasn’t till Rytlock’s actions that they decided to join. This pretty much made it a time sink that did little to advance the story, while the zerg nature of the event chains made Mordremoth seem more of a nuisance than a threat when as soon as an enemy spawned it was drowned by the weight of the zerg.

The Asura reasoning was also poor, considering they have a council. Even if Phlunt was needed in his lab, they could’ve sent someone else.

Only the Norn had a suitable reason not to go since they’re already dealing with Jormag and since Mordremoth hasn’t affected them yet, it not really a concern for them.

Second, they should’ve added a couple of text boxes explaining more about the crown and how they located the pieces. Also would’ve helped if the pieces were “hidden” and not lying in the open.

Though this patch was the best for S2 so far in terms of actual characterisation. The banter between Braham/Eir after destroying the totem was great as well as Rox and Rytlock’s exchange before the final fight. These moments, though small, are the polish needed to actually bring character to the team and make them interesting.

Lastly, the final boss was a good fight and Rytlock is awesome. The vet ooze in Taimi’s bit, with his surprise cc, was also quite a nice mechanic.

I wish personal story had done that once in a while. It’s actually fun involving real world stuff and story it places the story within the world…

…when it works.

Kain Francois.4328:

I do wish ArenaNet would stop holding our hands for everything.

Where’s Miner Toska?

Iason Evan.3806:

We need a dungeon for the story. One that stays instead of coming back 4 months later. They are all great. Except this time it needs to be one that has a weaponsmith and Armorer with full sets that we can buy with tokens and three paths. If that can’t happen, it needs to be one that gets added to the Fractals. That’s great that the content is permanent. But you know what keeps people playing permanent content? Loot does You have to have an actual reason to repeat it. None of the instances for S2 have loot. After I have watched the story once or twice, I am never going to do this content again. It feels like there is a big disconnect between lore design, and content design. The content designers need to give the players a reason to complete the content multiple times. That reason is loot.

We most emphatically do NOT need a dungeon for our PERSONAL story. I realize that there are people who like doing dungeons, but I personally do not. I really wouldn’t want to find another one littering my personal story arcs, forcing me into a style of gameplay I do not enjoy just to clear the arc.

I do think adding new dungeons to the game would be a good thing, so those who like them have something new to do, but they need to be something separate.

As to this latest story update… I find it pretty disappointing. I strongly dislike the open world aspect. These first few days there will be an immersion breaking zerg… and in a few weeks people will have trouble getting them done because no one else is doing them.

I had issues with the instanced stuff too, mind, but that’s more about the fact that some achievement were just unobtainable without grouping. I do not LIKE grouping for my ‘personal’ story stuff.

Also: yesterday all of the Iron March stuff was broken. Today it’s Frostgorge. Fewer story-breaking bugs would be appreciated.

I’ve waited to LFG a working map for EVERY SINGLE step of this story. This is a repeated mistake from season 1 and the karka bullkitten. I don’t know what the people talking about “it’s fun when they use open world stuff when it works its great” It has never worked. Period. Literally, the last time they did this, it didn’t work, and it won’t work in the future. You can’t test this stuff, not on the level it will be implemented, stop doing it.

Making players wait for an event to start, just so that they can progress their story, is a TERRIBLE idea.

And when those events also start bugging out, then you’ve got a large group of very angry players. And understandably so.

Boneheart.3561:

Kain Francois.4328:

I do wish ArenaNet would stop holding our hands for everything.

Where’s Miner Toska?

…in the mine. C’mon, she’s right next to that other NPC you had to talk to! -_-

..yeah, that sometimes makes me a little sad.

I haven’t finished Story yet due to some bugs, but I must say I like idea of using Dynamic Events as part of Living World. It all feels more alive, natural. Truth be told execution prevents me from completing some story steps, but sole idea was brilliant.

AtlasSi.9130:

Agreed. Give me my kitten instances. I hate people and I HATE working with them. Let me do my kitten alone. TY.

Why are you playing a MMO then? Seems not at all logical.

Lothirieth.3408:

Why are you playing a MMO then? Seems not at all logical.

Only thing I long on to do is get this LS out of the way asap and go back to spvp <- reason for kittenin playin a mmo ty. I don’t want to wait hours on end not enjoying my time standing around doing jack kitten waiting for an event to spawn.

… if they spawn at all.

AtlasSi.9130:

Lothirieth.3408:

Why are you playing a MMO then? Seems not at all logical.

Only thing I long on to do is get this LS out of the way asap and go back to spvp <- reason for kittenin playin a mmo ty. I don’t want to wait hours on end not enjoying my time standing around doing jack kitten waiting for an event to spawn.

Then don’t do the LS, stop moaning and just spvp. It’s really that simple.

Lothirieth.3408:

AtlasSi.9130:

Lothirieth.3408:

Why are you playing a MMO then? Seems not at all logical.

Only thing I long on to do is get this LS out of the way asap and go back to spvp <- reason for kittenin playin a mmo ty. I don’t want to wait hours on end not enjoying my time standing around doing jack kitten waiting for an event to spawn.

Then don’t do the LS, stop moaning and just spvp. It’s really that simple.

“You don’t like how this is handled? WELL GET THE KITTEN OUT!”
If everyone who had a small complaint with the game left, most of the players would leave.

Lothirieth.3408:

Then don’t do the LS, stop moaning and just spvp. It’s really that simple.

I do as I please. I will continue to kitten. Like it or not cause I don’t give a kitten. (:

You guys are mixing up megaservers with bugged events.

I honestly think the Living World team used the open world stuff as crutches to pad the content of this episode. The majority of the events used in this release were pre-existing ones.

I think the amount of content in the releases and the increased work loads was simply too much, so this release recycled events in other parts of the world.

Open world content just becomes a drag when giant zergs form, and that’s exactly what happens when you require specific events to progress the story. The worst part is, most of these events weren’t designed for giant zergs.

I’m surprised no one mentioned how irritating some of the new dynamic events in Iron Marches are. The new Mordemoth mobs are great fun to fight in Dry Top because there’s ways to counter their strong attacks and utility (strip retaliation, interrupt the thrasher vine attack etc). But in Iron Marches there’s one event where the mordremoth wolves have unstrippable retaliation (fun? no) and another event where a champion Thrasher along with that horrible vine attack that hits like a truck cannot be CC’d successfully because of defiance ofc.

I find the Thrasher champion particularly awful, because this mob was so obviously designed to have its powerful vine attack susceptible to interrupts, which legitimised it’s strength, persistence and it’s ability to track and hit through stealth. Now you just have to blow through defensive and evasive skills in the hope that the vines will go away, but they actually come back for you quite quickly so you inevitably go down, and there’s a constant stream of players way pointing back as to stop to res someone is certain death.

You can’t just upscale the class of mobs like that without considering their original design. It does come across as rather lazy tbh.

There’s a good counter for the persistent vines attack: melee. That champion doesn’t pose much of a threat from up close, I had no trouble staying upright even when I was the only one doing melee.

Manasa Devi.7958:

There’s a good counter for the persistent vines attack: melee. That champion doesn’t pose much of a threat from up close, I had no trouble staying upright even when I was the only one doing melee.

I did the same thing, but unfortunately switching to melee still had me murdered by vines. Although I did just do the champion ranging and was only attacked by the vines once. Some other poor guy had to waypoint 3 times because the vines wouldn’t leave him alone

Maybe I’m not playing the same game everyone else is, but I’m not really seeing the stuff you guys are.

If anything, the complaints seem to be more about computer performance and server lag. That’s kind of separate from the update itself. You get the same trouble in certain WvW battles.

My only issue is I thought they’d moved away from this open world format because of how it didn’t work with the journal (e.g. season 1 was very open-world, and thus cannot be implemented into the journal without work).

How is this part of the story going to work when we move on? I thought all the storyline content was instanced so that players in a year or two can come back and play the story the same way we did. But these events have to disappear eventually, so how is this going to work?

sazberryftw.3809:

My only issue is I thought they’d moved away from this open world format because of how it didn’t work with the journal (e.g. season 1 was very open-world, and thus cannot be implemented into the journal without work).

How is this part of the story going to work when we move on? I thought all the storyline content was instanced so that players in a year or two can come back and play the story the same way we did. But these events have to disappear eventually, so how is this going to work?

They don’t have to disappear. From what I understood, is that those events don’t activate until the story NPC has been talked to. I talked to the NPC, and the event appeared, but it was already almost 50% completed. Of course the boss was there, and people were fighting it, but it didn’t activate as an event for me until I talked to the NPC. Also there was an event where you had to kill a ghost, gash or something. As soon as it was defeated it spawned again. I think that someone else came along and reactivated the event, causing it to spawn once more.

pdavis.8031:

They don’t have to disappear. From what I understood, is that those events don’t activate until the story NPC has been talked to. I talked to the NPC, and the event appeared, but it was already almost 50% completed. Of course the boss was there, and people were fighting it, but it didn’t activate as an event for me until I talked to the NPC. Also there was an event where you had to kill a ghost, gash or something. As soon as it was defeated it spawned again. I think that someone else came along and reactivated the event, causing it to spawn once more.

That’s a little… weird though.
I thought people in the open world were supposed to grow and develop. When Mordremoth is dead and gone, why would his tendrils and Mordrem be such a problem for these charr the same way they are now? Assuming the events stay identical forever – which surely they have to as they are part of the story journal. Surely keeping something like this for forever is the same as sticking the Marionette back in the open world?

The instances, however, are like an interactive story book. What you do there doesn’t have to be present day in the open world (e.g. dungeon dialogue, personal story). I assumed they were going to keep everything that is journal and story based instanced, keeping any open world content not vital to the story (and just supporting content), and therefore this supporting content being able to be removed and changed without effecting the story we (and future players) play.

sazberryftw.3809:

pdavis.8031:

They don’t have to disappear. From what I understood, is that those events don’t activate until the story NPC has been talked to. I talked to the NPC, and the event appeared, but it was already almost 50% completed. Of course the boss was there, and people were fighting it, but it didn’t activate as an event for me until I talked to the NPC. Also there was an event where you had to kill a ghost, gash or something. As soon as it was defeated it spawned again. I think that someone else came along and reactivated the event, causing it to spawn once more.

That’s a little… weird though.
I thought people in the open world were supposed to grow and develop. When Mordremoth is dead and gone, why would his tendrils and Mordrem be such a problem for these charr the same way they are now? Assuming the events stay identical forever – which surely they have to as they are part of the story journal. Surely keeping something like this for forever is the same as sticking the Marionette back in the open world?

The instances, however, are like an interactive story book. What you do there doesn’t have to be present day in the open world (e.g. dungeon dialogue, personal story). I assumed they were going to keep everything that is journal and story based instanced, keeping any open world content not vital to the story (and just supporting content), and therefore this supporting content being able to be removed and changed without effecting the story we (and future players) play.

Not really, the stuff going on in the open world in general, with the exception of LA and maybe a few others, are supposed to be at a time during the PS or before it. Its the same reason we dont see Orr cleansed even though it happened in the PS. Timewise, whenever we go to Orr the pact have just started to arrive and are kind of stuck in that time. All pre the events of season 1. Konig in the lore forums explains it much better. :P

Although they could keep it open world for the duration of the episode and change it to an instance upon launch of the next episode. That might work to keep the continuity, and avoid confusion.

They’ve already made plenty of changes to some explorable zones, like Kessex. They’ll probably keep the mordrem events going just like they’ve kept many of the Tower of Nightmares events going. Anything else is far too complex.