Guild Wars 2

Discuss. I hope ANET sees this.

Why is the rule every 2 weeks

Why not have the release schedule vary according to the needs of the content? Sometimes we might gets lighter content that’s released every 2 weeks, but other times it may be more “epic heavy content” that can be released every 2 months. I think this would add more variation in the living story content as well as in player expectations.

I do not think that we need an expansion yet, what we need is to have the current game… “stabilized” (some things people are begging for PvE, PvP and WvW), there are a lot of things that they are going to do this year that will greatly help the game and they should focus on this before even thinking of an expansion.

Plus some zones seem to be dead, if we get a “normal” expansion it will feel like in other MMO’s when players are only found on the newest zones from the expansion, with only a few running around doing old content.

Well as you can see I’m against expansions because I don’t like the idea that some players are locked out of content because they’re not able to get the expansion right now, I like the things that come with an expansion but I feel like they’re more than able to introduce those things with Living Story releases. Expansions are great but they should not be currently focusing on it.

I hope that one day we’ll see an update something like a battle against Jormag, which revolves around the Pact making an assault further north and we help them reach the dragon, fighting some epic Icebrood enemies on the way… I hope…

What if a major expansion itself was free? Or cost somewhere around $10 to $20 instead of the usual $40 to $50 price tag? At the same time Arena Net would introduce new items in the gem store, and they would be cosmetic/utility items; which would have no real direct impact on game play. The items they put into the gem shop would be a reflection of what people willing to pay for during the living story updates. All the awhile keep the initial box price of GW2 at a stable price, while they do discount every now and again.

I think that the living story has been a testing ground for figuring out what the player base wants. If they are not happy with the results is they try something new. However it feels like the updates are planned six months in advance. Hence why it took them so long to wind down to get exclusive permanent contest updates out (with small batch of temporary content attached).

The other thing is that they are fixing technical issues they could not fixed before launch. Trading post item preview option, eliminating culling system, LFG tool, wallet mechanic, and excreta were implemented to make the game more accessible. Two major issues after that has been fixing risk versus reward system and all game play issues with past content. Which has taken up most of their time and they still have a long way to go. Fixing the rest of the dungeons, world bosses, dynamic events, scaling system, and reigniting player interest in “dead maps.” They have approached doing all of these things in the last year, but only about 20% of the work has been completed. They are still gathering player feedback/data, and creating new encounters to keep players interest high within a bi-weekly schedule. Arena Net is basically juggling everything at once.

Why have we not received an expansion within the first year? Well imagine that all of the content they put in the game was a reflection of what was done in the living story. Only difference is that there was no major feedback from the players. WP is correct when he say’s they fear of repeating past mistakes with GW1 campaign/expansion system. Guild Wars Factions was not a universal success by game play or narrative standards. It was a major setback because it was a reflection of what they thought the player base wanted. A PvE with PvP hybrid campaign, which turned out to be a gigantic mess. It took them a long while to fix alliance battles up to decent quality standards. What happened to the Jade Quarry AB was an extreme example of this. They did learn from these mistakes when they created Nightfall but by then everyone wanted to return to the mainland in prophecies.

When might a expansion will be released? Probably when they get everything to where it needs to be (quality wise) in the current game. When they are satisfied with the player feedback and state of the game itself, then they might move forward with an expansion. Especially if the game can hold it’s own even with an expansion come into play.

A new expansion now would just create power creep problems.

With expansion we can finally continue personal story and we dont need to wait new players to kill Zhaitan.

Well, if you want some baseless speculation, either as an Expansion, or more Living Story…

I was watching a Gw2 advertisment on a website, and I noticed that after all the meaningless stuff, the Ad then showed a map, that then zoomed out, then panned east. The first part of the map matched up with the map in the game almost perfectly. It was of Claw Island, Bloodtide Coast, and parts of Sparkfly Fen.

The East part goes way across Tyria to the east coast of the continent. While all those X marks seem pretty pointless, it was interesting to see them go east instead of stay in a familar part of Tyria.

I am 99.99% sure that it means absolutely nothing, but I put up a picture so everyone can see it and draw their own conclusions. If it does mean something, then Freaking Awesome! I can finally move on to other areas of the game that I haven’t run through a dozen times. If it is meaningless, well, whatever then…

I believe that an expansion is not needed. As a matter of fact, most major titles that had expansions eventually lead to their ultimate reshelving for me.

The problem with current living story is that it’s not a story whatsoever. They jump around more then Game of Thrones series. The difference there is, you cant wait to watch what will happen next episode. In a living world, you cant really achieve it because its supposed to be happening all simultaneously.

Holiday events and special events are the exception. And see that there is another problem, holiday events and special events arent really living story stuff. They should be called something completely different.

Really it should be 1 team for living world for each race and you could rotate it bi weekly

Char and Asuran – week 1
Sylvari and Human – week 2
Norn and Main (Or new race week 3)
Main – week 4

Then on top of that Special/Holiday Celebrations/Events like Mad King and SAB

Part of any game and the story lines is expanding on them, currently, I am getting dumber and dumber about each race and feel more and more like we are rats in maze trying to find the cheese in the RNG boxes that are hidden away in RNG time gated glimpses.

Its like you scraped all the lore of what pushed each race here and here, then the personal story lead you to Orr, and now your like bouncing around waypoints because some strange lady appeared out of the magic hat, yet, dont you wonder why we still have risen everywhere?

And whats gonna make it even worse will be the Thermanova Reactor fractal where nobody will know why its happening, heck fractals to me dont make any sense in the story. They are a neat system that I love, but they still make no sense.

I still dont know how Flame and Frost happened
I still dont understand the point of Zephyrs
What was the consortiums point
What was the Arenas point?
Why did Tequatl get stronger?
What happened to the spiders in twilight arbor when Scarlet invaded.

The point is, the living world needs help to make it truly viable, to make the story truly bloom, currently, there isnt any any story, just a bunch of glimpses about nothing.

An expansion will just compound this problem. The power dev has can lead us back to less played zones by redesign for now, but it does nothing in actually delivering us a story.

The concept in beginning was right in the players will influence the story. But many of us see that its currently about money grubbing then building a true foundation. Instead of emersing us into the thick of it and challenging Tyria as a whole in a fight that leads us onan epic adventure, we get helter skelter pinballed around like ragdolls where really, we dont know why.

Did anyone else notice that the living story content is shrinking? last 3 weeks the living story content has been even smaller then before. Teq 2.0 was just teq + wvw, twilight assault was just 1 dungeon path. I thought anet was gonna make the quantity and quality of the living story better, the quantity is getting lesser and the quality is bad as allways. Its starting to disapoint even more.

Anyway, yay for an expansion

I’ve been saying this since release. It took a year for factions; 6 months for Nightfall. If they theoretically start on expansion now. We probably won’t see anything until ~2015

Which is why they should have started as soon and GW2 went gold.

I somewhat disagree with Woodenpotatoes’ assertion that the addition of campaigns killed activity in older areas, or made them ‘ghost towns’. It was not that extreme.

Prophecies came out in 2005. Factions NF and EoTN were all out by 2007. There was a period of a couple of years, until around 2009, where all 4 land masses were fairly active. Then people started to condense in EoTN and the elite dungeons of the other 3.

But remember, that’s 2009. They had gone 2 years without any major releases because Anet was working full bore on GW2 at this point.

That is still very impressive, but the GW1 games were a very impressive series. They took 5 long years and turned out a very impressive game in GW2. It is time to go back to the expansion model.

Yeah lets have a PROPER expansion, not this tacked on stuff, there’s no game content in the stuff they are adding now.

Lucky.9421:

I’ve been saying this since release. It took a year for factions; 6 months for Nightfall. If they theoretically start on expansion now. We probably won’t see anything until ~2015

Which is why they should have started as soon and GW2 went gold.

But then an expansion would only have included all the stuff they’ve done up till now, but properly built, vetted, tied together, with decent writing a new race and a class, with some half a dozen or more new areas to explore….

Pfft, who would want that?