Guild Wars 2

I just came back a couple weeks ago to try out all of the new content after a long hiatus. I was very happy with Super Adventure Box, and I was having a blast playing it on varying difficulties inbetween study sessions. However, I logged on today to find out that I’m unable to play it.

I simply don’t understand why new content is added only to be removed a month later. Forcing players to play the new content by locking out everything else might get bodies where you want them, but I guarantee you’ll have far less long-lasting playerbase than if you released permanent content.

I can understand some content being temporary, but locking players out of things like Super Adventure Box and the Crown Pavilion is absolutely deplorable. It’s an absolute waste of your development time to release temporary content, especially in a case like Super Adventure Box. My friend was thinking about picking the game up solely to play Super Adventure Box, but that won’t be happening now.

As a long-time Guild Wars 1 fan, it really hurts to be forced to break away from a world that you’ve spent so much time in, but I’m honestly just done until there is more permanent content or an expansion.

I agree with you that SAB should be permenant and not just a fill in living story content.

I know for a fact that dev feels the same way, they are searching more options to make living story impactful, and permenant. Just look at the last 2 living story updates. Tequatl is now changed and they made a new path in Twilight Arbor (Assault).

I believe dev is now on the right track and I have been enjoying myself alot, of course, there have been growing pains and each new content will bring more growing pains, but at the end of the day, I believe its gonna get better and better.

Keep your chin up

While I would love that SAB stayed yesterday to finish some achievements, this and the Crown Pavilion will come back later, I’m afraid that we will just have to wait.

However, from what I saw (at least on my server) on it’s last days SAB was pretty much dead, everyone went straight to the newest release or didn’t bothered about it anymore since they got all they needed from it.

Hopefully by the time World 4 is available it will stay permanently, I’ll eagerly await it’s return while the devs work on the next World and fix some things from the previous one

wait I tough SAB came back as Perm……..
so it didn’t….

omg Anet

Yay I bought an infinite continue coin.

Which I can’t kittening use because ‘’hurr temporary cntent)’’

SAB is permanent content, but it’s returning content similar to Halloween or Wintersday. Personally I’d prefer it to stay too, but I’m OK with it returning a few times a year.

Talindra.4958:

:( yes.
can we purchase it to be permenant in our personal instance? my little one has been asking about it!

DO IT FOR TEH LITTLE ONE, ANET!

SAB will return eventually. When World 3 is released, you should be able to play or replay World 1 and 2 again. Hopefully, with updates to World 2 that will cause less player meltdowns due to disconnects for example.

Here’s to hoping.

Zetta.5102:

I can understand some content being temporary, but locking players out of things like Super Adventure Box and the Crown Pavilion is absolutely deplorable. It’s an absolute waste of your development time to release temporary content, especially in a case like Super Adventure Box. My friend was thinking about picking the game up solely to play Super Adventure Box, but that won’t be happening now.

Man, you must have really loved SAB and Crown Pavilion is you feel it is deplorable that they are recurring temporary content. Deplorable? Really?

Sure it would be nice if it were permanent, but I wouldn’t say it is deplorable that it is only recurring. Think of it as a holiday event. When W3 is done it will come back, then go away after a month, then when W4 is done it will come back, then go away after a month, or perhaps they will make it permanent once the SAB is actually complete, who really knows, it isn’t even finished why complain about it?

If you missed something because you took a hiatus, then that’s a shame. I think having temporary content is designed to keep people from taking hiatuses in the first place. You don’t want to take long breaks in case you miss something fun/interesting. I mean honestly, they’ve been doing these 2-week/1month releases since Flame and Frost back in January, if you didn’t know by now that taking long breaks would likely result in missing content then I don’t know what to tell you.

And please don’t try to talk people into buying GW2 just so they can play SAB, that would be the biggest waste of money I’ve ever heard. It’s fun and all, but there are 6 zones….that’s not worth 50.00USD. Plus you knew it was temporary from the first go around, so why would you assume it would be permanent the second? Quite illogical.

There’s no reason for the gauntlet and SAB to be gone. Perfectly hard and delicious solo content.

akamon.2769:

Talindra.4958:

:( yes.
can we purchase it to be permenant in our personal instance? my little one has been asking about it!

DO IT FOR TEH LITTLE ONE, ANET!

Wont anybody think of the children!?

I sure it will be permanent soon as Mr Moto have finish the game remember it still in beta

Temporary content is probably by far the biggest joke I’ve seen out of an MMO.

They do it just so they can bloat their metrics and brag about it.

“Look at all these people just scrambling to do our new content! It must be really good!”

SAB is like the McRib. Some people love it. Others hate it. Some are indifferent.

Some folks want it on the menu year round. Others could care less.

Anet is like Mcdonalds. They hope that through a periodic release cycle, the hype and excitement will be higher for the return of SAB/McRib.

XD

ANet not only squanders resources on temporary content, but they are so obsessed with “Temporary” that even when they have content that could easily be made permanent, like SAB, they kitten that up and remove it.

Sorry, but 2013 ANet, minus some key people who helped create what was an at launch masterpiece, has really established themselves as just another sub-par MMO development studio with no clue how to advance the genre.

I don’t know where the blame ultimately lies, but who ever is responsible for the inability to retain some very key people who left after launch probably cost the company close to a $billion in revenue over the life time of the game, assuming ANet doesn’t somehow manage to pull itself out of it’s current death spiral.

I don’t care if they would have needed to triple salaries for those key people they lost in order to keep them or quintuple studio wide profit sharing to maintain the enthusiasm and momentum the studio had at launch. It would have been worth it and paid huge dividends.

MMOs with the potential GW2 had come so very rarely. It’s devastating to see that potential tossed out the window, in the same way ANet tosses content in and then out of the game.

It’s all such a massive waste.

folly dragon.4126:

SAB should be permanent

revodeel.2651:

SAB is like the McRib. Some people love it. Others hate it. Some are indifferent.

Some folks want it on the menu year round. Others could care less.

Anet is like Mcdonalds. They hope that through a periodic release cycle, the hype and excitement will be higher for the return of SAB/McRib.

XD

This . its marketing. it will come back. it was there for 30days.

PS: On this same note, pumpkin spice lattes need to be year round , rawr!

Kingmutez.4931:

revodeel.2651:

SAB is like the McRib. Some people love it. Others hate it. Some are indifferent.

Some folks want it on the menu year round. Others could care less.

Anet is like Mcdonalds. They hope that through a periodic release cycle, the hype and excitement will be higher for the return of SAB/McRib.

XD

This . its marketing. it will come back. it was there for 30days.

PS: On this same note, pumpkin spice lattes need to be year round , rawr!

…and, for that matter, the Shamrock Shake! Rah!

I was going to make a topic about this.. but I think posting here will do for now.

I completely agree with your point, and I have also experienced frustration and sadness due to the removal of content.

I took a break from the game… a long break I will admit. But the point is, since I missed the release of a lot of the content, I will possibly never be able to experience it!

I never got to fight through the Queen’s guantlet, or play the SAB, or take part in the karka event(one day only are you freaken kidding me?). I also missed flame and frost, sky pirates, among other content.

I just don’t understand why these things can’t be left in the game so that players can experience them when they are ready and all that work isn’t wasted in the end. If the content was made permanent, that would also keep players playing the game longer.. I know I would have more of a reason to log in right now.

I see no reason why SAB couldn’t be permanently available. It fits with the Asuran way of doing things. It’s repeatable. It could be expanded with some in game lead-in to the creator of the box, perhaps add a heart quest about him. It can be updated over time, adding new levels, more rewards with new levels, updates to tweak old levels.

You can solo it. You don’t need a big concentration of players around to play it.

It is the perfect candidate for adding something that is always available to do.

folly dragon.4126:

I agree with you that SAB should be permenant and not just a fill in living story content.

I know for a fact that dev feels the same way, they are searching more options to make living story impactful, and permenant. Just look at the last 2 living story updates. Tequatl is now changed and they made a new path in Twilight Arbor (Assault).

I believe dev is now on the right track and I have been enjoying myself alot, of course, there have been growing pains and each new content will bring more growing pains, but at the end of the day, I believe its gonna get better and better.

Keep your chin up

The Teq event is pretty much dead on my server, just 2 weeks after the release, people got sick of all the waiting around just to get a chance to kill the dragon for a chance to get good loot. Now whenever I go there there are just about 15 people hanging around there and it’s impossible to do it.

Draknar.5748:

Zetta.5102:

I can understand some content being temporary, but locking players out of things like Super Adventure Box and the Crown Pavilion is absolutely deplorable. It’s an absolute waste of your development time to release temporary content, especially in a case like Super Adventure Box. My friend was thinking about picking the game up solely to play Super Adventure Box, but that won’t be happening now.

Man, you must have really loved SAB and Crown Pavilion is you feel it is deplorable that they are recurring temporary content. Deplorable? Really?

Sure it would be nice if it were permanent, but I wouldn’t say it is deplorable that it is only recurring. Think of it as a holiday event. When W3 is done it will come back, then go away after a month, then when W4 is done it will come back, then go away after a month, or perhaps they will make it permanent once the SAB is actually complete, who really knows, it isn’t even finished why complain about it?

If you missed something because you took a hiatus, then that’s a shame. I think having temporary content is designed to keep people from taking hiatuses in the first place. You don’t want to take long breaks in case you miss something fun/interesting. I mean honestly, they’ve been doing these 2-week/1month releases since Flame and Frost back in January, if you didn’t know by now that taking long breaks would likely result in missing content then I don’t know what to tell you.

And please don’t try to talk people into buying GW2 just so they can play SAB, that would be the biggest waste of money I’ve ever heard. It’s fun and all, but there are 6 zones….that’s not worth 50.00USD. Plus you knew it was temporary from the first go around, so why would you assume it would be permanent the second? Quite illogical.

“Think of it as a holiday event”? Hell no! Why should we justify stupid decisions in their favor? No they and you will have to accept that people don’t like the game they are playing with trying to panic people on their living story content. It is B@!!$#it drama that I don’t tolerate in my personal life and I don’t appreciate here also. they could have just kept SAB and patched it like they do with all their other content. This isn’t an accident it is being done this way it is an attempt to squeeze money out of their player base. This is the wrong way to go about it and they will keep losing people and their faith unless they fix their mistakes soon. I and many others are watching the game horizon and when something does come that takes GW2’s place it will be too late then because they wont get those players back!

People have to take breaks and Anet should not make their content to be too painful in that respect. There are many ways to deal with that like just leaving the content there! Anet will just achieve getting many people to feel they have missed too much content and give up. If people feel they are at too much of a disadvantage because of Anets poor policies then in the end it will be GW2 that suffers not the player there are always more games to play.

It’s perfectly sensible that SAB goes off-line after a while so Moto can improve and expand his virtual reality.

It’ll be back, in a month or 2-3, so if you really hate the rest of the game so much, just don’t play until then. Doesn’t cost you anything but patience.

Though I thought SAB sucked donkey doo, I know people liked it and wished it had stayed around for them.

I just don’t know of anyone (ok, I personally don’t know anyone) who wants the content to be temporary. Living story is great when it grows the content.

revodeel.2651:

Kingmutez.4931:

revodeel.2651:

SAB is like the McRib. Some people love it. Others hate it. Some are indifferent.

Some folks want it on the menu year round. Others could care less.

Anet is like Mcdonalds. They hope that through a periodic release cycle, the hype and excitement will be higher for the return of SAB/McRib.

XD

This . its marketing. it will come back. it was there for 30days.

PS: On this same note, pumpkin spice lattes need to be year round , rawr!

…and, for that matter, the Shamrock Shake! Rah!

you guys dont get it do you? The reason why the shamrock shake and pumpkin spice lattes are so good is because they only come around once a year.

If you had Shamrock Shakes for 4 months straight you would get sick of them. You cannot deny this fact because you know it to be true, you would be fooling yourself.

Nurgle.6597:

folly dragon.4126:

I agree with you that SAB should be permenant and not just a fill in living story content.

I know for a fact that dev feels the same way, they are searching more options to make living story impactful, and permenant. Just look at the last 2 living story updates. Tequatl is now changed and they made a new path in Twilight Arbor (Assault).

I believe dev is now on the right track and I have been enjoying myself alot, of course, there have been growing pains and each new content will bring more growing pains, but at the end of the day, I believe its gonna get better and better.

Keep your chin up

The Teq event is pretty much dead on my server, just 2 weeks after the release, people got sick of all the waiting around just to get a chance to kill the dragon for a chance to get good loot. Now whenever I go there there are just about 15 people hanging around there and it’s impossible to do it.

I understand the frustration with Teq, and although the server I am on does him server reset, I cant discredit ANET for live testing thing, Teq definately showed them some lessons learned. I am sure they are hashing out ideas of how to correct it to make it better scale, but that takes time, collecting data, sorting data, and tweaking it based on the data. The last thing they want is to anger the other side of the swartz unjustly.

As foe SAB, they realized world 2 difficulty was a bit over the top, however, we wont see fixes until prolly next round world 3 – In search of more funding.

It would be nice if the beauty and art which gets created isnt temporary, and then they continued to tweak it overtime. I believe this will be the new trend, but only time can tell.

Draknar.5748:

Zetta.5102:

I can understand some content being temporary, but locking players out of things like Super Adventure Box and the Crown Pavilion is absolutely deplorable. It’s an absolute waste of your development time to release temporary content, especially in a case like Super Adventure Box. My friend was thinking about picking the game up solely to play Super Adventure Box, but that won’t be happening now.

Man, you must have really loved SAB and Crown Pavilion is you feel it is deplorable that they are recurring temporary content. Deplorable? Really?

Sure it would be nice if it were permanent, but I wouldn’t say it is deplorable that it is only recurring. Think of it as a holiday event. When W3 is done it will come back, then go away after a month, then when W4 is done it will come back, then go away after a month, or perhaps they will make it permanent once the SAB is actually complete, who really knows, it isn’t even finished why complain about it?

If you missed something because you took a hiatus, then that’s a shame. I think having temporary content is designed to keep people from taking hiatuses in the first place. You don’t want to take long breaks in case you miss something fun/interesting. I mean honestly, they’ve been doing these 2-week/1month releases since Flame and Frost back in January, if you didn’t know by now that taking long breaks would likely result in missing content then I don’t know what to tell you.

And please don’t try to talk people into buying GW2 just so they can play SAB, that would be the biggest waste of money I’ve ever heard. It’s fun and all, but there are 6 zones….that’s not worth 50.00USD. Plus you knew it was temporary from the first go around, so why would you assume it would be permanent the second? Quite illogical.

I believe you misinterpreted a lot of what I’ve said. Before playing again a few weeks ago, I hadn’t played since around 4 months after the game’s release. I didn’t know that SAB had left and come back during that time.

SAB’s removal was also the last straw, not the only one. I ran around trying to access a lot of the content I had missed, hearing that some of it was still around to stay. I was left dissapointed every time. There simply weren’t enough players anywhere I was, either. They were all just getting on to fight Tequatl whenever he spawned, then logging off, which is exactly what the “living story” promotes.

I also didn’t try to convince my friend of anything. I simply told him about SAB and he expressed interest. SAB wouldn’t have been the only deciding factor, but it was the primary one, as he’s a huge fan of platformers and retro-styled games, but he isn’t much of a gamer.

I know I’m coming off as a “casual gamer” and thus you’re discounting my opinion; however, you should know that I’m only a “casual gamer” at the moment because my life schedule simply can’t permit anything more than that. I was a diehard GW1 player and played hundreds of hours of GW2 upon its release. Having firsthand seen the success of GW1, I can tell you it was for completely different reasons than GW2’s success, and players in general are far more unhappy in the second iteration of the series.

I should say first that I sympathize greatly with you at being frustrated that the content you wanted to play was unavailable when you logged in to play it. On the individual level, if you haven’t been paying attention to the release dates, I can understand disliking that they do things this way especially if you didn’t realize a certain activity was temporary.

However, on this point:

I simply don’t understand why new content is added only to be removed a month later. Forcing players to play the new content by locking out everything else might get bodies where you want them, but I guarantee you’ll have far less long-lasting playerbase than if you released permanent content.

I want to stress that such a guarantee might be ill-conceived. ArenaNet hasn’t elected to incorporate temporary content with a rapid release cadence on a whim; they study actually player behavior through metrics and concurrency trends, and have structured their approach around that. To clarify, it’s the difference between reacting to what people say they like on a game’s official forums, and what can be demonstrated with data. It’s not a coincidence that there’s a fairly consistent rate of complaint about it on the forums- when discourse on the forums is not what fueled it in the first place (you may certainly disagree that this is a good thing, though in general listening too much to the official forums has its own dangers).

Secondly while many games have attempted the approach of slowly-released, static and permanent content, a majority of these games have failed to sustain the long-lasting playerbase to which you are referring. In contrast, this different approach is as of yet functionally untested (outside of GW2’s success so far), and that makes it a lot harder to guarantee anything… we’ll just have to see how it goes.

Anyway, sorry again about your experience and I hope you return when you hear about an addition that intrigues you.

Hawkian.6580:

I should say first that I sympathize greatly with you at being frustrated that the content you wanted to play was unavailable when you logged in to play it. On the individual level, if you haven’t been paying attention to the release dates, I can understand disliking that they do things this way especially if you didn’t realize a certain activity was temporary.

However, on this point:

I simply don’t understand why new content is added only to be removed a month later. Forcing players to play the new content by locking out everything else might get bodies where you want them, but I guarantee you’ll have far less long-lasting playerbase than if you released permanent content.

I want to stress that such a guarantee might be ill-conceived. ArenaNet hasn’t elected to incorporate temporary content with a rapid release cadence on a whim; they study actually player behavior through metrics and concurrency trends, and have structured their approach around that. To clarify, it’s the difference between reacting to what people say they like on a game’s official forums, and what can be demonstrated with data. It’s not a coincidence that there’s a fairly consistent rate of complaint about it on the forums- when discourse on the forums is not what fueled it in the first place (you may certainly disagree that this is a good thing, though in general listening too much to the official forums has its own dangers).

Secondly while many games have attempted the approach of slowly-released, static and permanent content, a majority of these games have failed to sustain the long-lasting playerbase to which you are referring. In contrast, this different approach is as of yet functionally untested (outside of GW2’s success so far), and that makes it a lot harder to guarantee anything… we’ll just have to see how it goes.

Anyway, sorry again about your experience and I hope you return when you hear about an addition that intrigues you.

Why such a radical departure from that then? It’s like they tried doing the opposite thing, with no room for compromise. Temporary Living Story updates alongside long-term permanent content releases would be ideal. But they refuse to do that, it’s “Temporary LS at all costs!!” now.

Does no one think to hit the sweet spot in the middle anymore?

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

revodeel.2651:

Kingmutez.4931:

revodeel.2651:

SAB is like the McRib. Some people love it. Others hate it. Some are indifferent.

Some folks want it on the menu year round. Others could care less.

Anet is like Mcdonalds. They hope that through a periodic release cycle, the hype and excitement will be higher for the return of SAB/McRib.

XD

This . its marketing. it will come back. it was there for 30days.

PS: On this same note, pumpkin spice lattes need to be year round , rawr!

…and, for that matter, the Shamrock Shake! Rah!

you guys dont get it do you? The reason why the shamrock shake and pumpkin spice lattes are so good is because they only come around once a year.

If you had Shamrock Shakes for 4 months straight you would get sick of them. You cannot deny this fact because you know it to be true, you would be fooling yourself.

aye, that was what i was trying to get across with my pumpkin spice remark. maybe a /sarcasm would have been more accurate.

SAB shouldn’t exist. GW2 actually feels like a themepark, now with this it’s just the final stab for the lore.

If it must exist. keep SAB in the SAB, keep it an April’s fools joke. Everyone is jumping around with these skins because they glow…

How do you guys have time to keep up with this stuff? I don’t get the online community at all. However you’re managing to feed yourself, play this video game 40+ hours a week, and stay sane is beyond me.

ArenaNet better be working on some permanent content, because these updates hold absolutely no value to me whatsoever.

Anthony.7219:

How do you guys have time to keep up with this stuff? I don’t get the online community at all. However you’re managing to feed yourself, play this video game 40+ hours a week, and stay sane is beyond me.

ArenaNet better be working on some permanent content, because these updates hold absolutely no value to me whatsoever.

kinda off topic but ok,

i don’t understand how you cant? i work 40+ hrs a week and still do the content. You have 14 days, 336 hrs to play the content, i play maybe 8-10hr a week, mostly on weekends. that’s 20 hrs to play the content which only takes maybe 3-4hr tops? They have been moving to more permanent anyway wit the last 2 patches.

Kingmutez.4931:

Anthony.7219:

How do you guys have time to keep up with this stuff? I don’t get the online community at all. However you’re managing to feed yourself, play this video game 40+ hours a week, and stay sane is beyond me.

ArenaNet better be working on some permanent content, because these updates hold absolutely no value to me whatsoever.

kinda off topic but ok,

i don’t understand how you cant? i work 40+ hrs a week and still do the content. You have 14 days, 336 hrs to play the content, i play maybe 8-10hr a week, mostly on weekends. that’s 20 hrs to play the content which only takes maybe 3-4hr tops? They have been moving to more permanent anyway wit the last 2 patches.

Yes, I suppose my problem is that I cant have a slot of allotted time to actually finish anything that takes longer than 30 minutes.

I suppose it was this post that got me worked up:

Draknar.5748:

Zetta.5102:

I can understand some content being temporary, but locking players out of things like Super Adventure Box and the Crown Pavilion is absolutely deplorable. It’s an absolute waste of your development time to release temporary content, especially in a case like Super Adventure Box. My friend was thinking about picking the game up solely to play Super Adventure Box, but that won’t be happening now.

Man, you must have really loved SAB and Crown Pavilion is you feel it is deplorable that they are recurring temporary content. Deplorable? Really?

Sure it would be nice if it were permanent, but I wouldn’t say it is deplorable that it is only recurring. Think of it as a holiday event. When W3 is done it will come back, then go away after a month, then when W4 is done it will come back, then go away after a month, or perhaps they will make it permanent once the SAB is actually complete, who really knows, it isn’t even finished why complain about it?

If you missed something because you took a hiatus, then that’s a shame. I think having temporary content is designed to keep people from taking hiatuses in the first place. You don’t want to take long breaks in case you miss something fun/interesting. I mean honestly, they’ve been doing these 2-week/1month releases since Flame and Frost back in January, if you didn’t know by now that taking long breaks would likely result in missing content then I don’t know what to tell you.

And please don’t try to talk people into buying GW2 just so they can play SAB, that would be the biggest waste of money I’ve ever heard. It’s fun and all, but there are 6 zones….that’s not worth 50.00USD. Plus you knew it was temporary from the first go around, so why would you assume it would be permanent the second? Quite illogical.

Kind of an ignorant thing to say.

i agree. content should be permanent except time related content like halloween xmas etc.

Zackie.8923:

i agree. content should be permanent except time related content like halloween xmas etc.

SAB is an April’s fools joke. Therefore should pass after 1 day each year and should not return until the next.

SAB should have never been introduced in the first place. It totally does not fit in with the GW2 theme. If it was a one-off, like when player characters were all turned into stick people in one memorable GW1 event, then it would be forgiveable.

SAB shouldn’t have been added in the first place.

Wanting SAB or the Pavillion to b permanent is just like wanting Hallowen or Winters Day all year ‘round: Players would quickly lose interest because they know thy have all the time in the world to participate and the lose interest permanently, because they’ve just done it so many times over.
The temporary nature of these things is exactly what keeps them fresh and makes people come back.