Guild Wars 2

I’m a new player and I have a question about the whole Living Story concept.

First of I all let me say I like concept of it. It’s a great why to keep things fresh for level capped players until an expansion comes out. However IMO they aren’t much of a draw for new players, which brings me to my question.

Question: Is the LS supposed to be accessible and appealing to new players? Because it doesn’t come across that way.

I came in to the game last week. I have no idea about the back story of the current LS (which I know is actually at its end). My main (and currently only character) just hit level 18, I’m still learning how to play with my main, I still learning about the game itself and I don’t even have a clue as to where to go to access the LS events (even if I wanted to). All in all this makes the LS totally unappealing to me as a new player.

Also I know there is upscaling but as I have had it explained to me on another thread,

“The problem with alts/new players is that even though you’re scaled up to 80, that’s based on the gear you have. If you’re in lvl 20 greens/blues with only 1 attribute on the item (non-power based), you’re damage output is going to be nil compared to a true lvl 80 with exotics and you’re pretty much 1-shot dead from the veteran/elite mob (which are 90% of them in these massive zergs). That makes it difficult to do enough damage to tag a mob (they die so fast already especially with the zerging) which means you get no experience or loot.”

This doesn’t make me want to participate in the next season until I’m level capped which may not for a while but as I understand it all LS events are temporary so players can only access the current “chapter”. So If I start playing mid story I can not access the past story elements, that makes them unappealing. Also I have a bunch of friend’s who expressed interest in playing when I mentioned and if they don’t start playing now they’ll miss out on the story as well and but even if they do they’ll also face the problems I brought up in my first question.

It seems like the LS pretty much takes a dump on new players which means it’s a system that is not likely to encourage new players to pick up the game, unless they become permanent or at least have the back story is accessible.

Maybe this has been addressed before, but searching the forum (for “New Players”, “New to LS” or similar phrases and words) didn’t reveal any relevant threads.

The only avenue to get caught up on the Living story to date is to read about it on the Wiki site. But it seems to be that the LS is a series of mini-arcs that occur between chapters of the story. The main story of the original release was taking down Zaithan. The LS season one lead up to the awakening of Mordremoth, our second Elder dragon. Arena Net as mentioned that there maybe some changes to the way the LS will be delivered in season two or in future seasons, we just don’t know how or what.

I would imagine that if they were to have a way to experience LS season one, it would be an abridged version sort of like the Fractals but without getting the achievements or awards that us first timers got.

I have be fortunate in doing every release, and I still spend time reading the story on the wiki.

I’m curious about this as well as I just started recently and also don’t find the Living Story stuff to be a draw for me. I also want to level my toon but I’m concerned that I’ll miss out on stuff. The whole temporary thing seems really lame for people who don’t start from the beginning. So if I don’t level and then participate in the next LS season I get screwed since they don’t make stuff permanent or at least make the backstory stuff viewable. That seems like a bad idea.