Guild Wars 2

note: bolded some key points in the post to make it easier to skim for the people that are in a hurry, and for the devs that eventually read this, because i know they don’t have all the time in the world to read forum posts.

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so the concept and driving force of the whole living world stuff is this “evolving, ever changing world”. the idea is that things come and go like in the real world, and what happens during those events change the world forever, and what stays in the past, stays in the past.

now i don’t mind that. i think it’s cool that you want to present story arcs, like Colin says, “like episodes of a TV show” (even though TV shows can be rewatched ad infinitum, we aren’t in the 70’s, but i digress). that things come and go, that events from the past chain into new events and the story is driven forward.

but the problem is that the world isn’t evolving. it isn’t even changing actually, when you think about it. the world is playing dress-up.

you see, every month we get a new content update, full of new activities and tasks and such. then the month comes to an end, and the game resets to the status quo. all those new things go away, with a faint promise of “we could totally revisit that if we wanted to” clinging to the air. but practically nothing remains, because there is some unwritten rule that the status quo must be kept and that new month means goodbye old stuff.

the problem starts to become aggravating when major things that have no reason to be removed are dropped. yes, you have a very good lore reason to do away with the molten facility, but keep in mind that, also in lore, there’s this thing called the fractals of the mists, which serves the exact purpose of revisiting past events in dungeon form. and it’s not like you can’t do the current story dungeons out of order.

then you have the new crab toss minigame, which will be released in a week. everyone got excited, because we’re getting new activities! yay! and it’s in southsun cove too, a map that looks gorgeous, but that absolutely no one visits ever because there is no point to! southsun will be reborn! except wait, no, the crab toss minigame is temporary. it’ll be done away by the end of the update, and we can all go back to ignoring southsun cove.

why? why do you feel compelled to throw away time, money and resources like that? the players WANT to play these things, getting rid of them is doing no one favors. so why do you feel that you JUST GOT TO do away with all the cool new stuff you put out?

agree? disagree? discuss.

I dont agree or disagree i like limited time events what makes them so unique all though some stuff like you said crab toss should stay ingame in some form or another.

temporary content puts pressure on people to do stuff now; it’s good for them because more people log in.

I strongly agree. I still think the Lost Shores update is the best we got so far. It was plagued by bugs yes, but the giant meta event on the last day, this epic bossbattle and the permanent new content made it so awesome. I mean we got a whole new area to explore (granted it is pretty small and not too much to do there) and a complete new type of dungeon, that I continue to run even now, months after it was released.

But I also wanted a new classical dungeon, like the first 8, so I was immensely excited for the Molten Facility and extremely disappointend when I heard it was temporary. I can understand that with the Halloween, Christmas and 1. April dungoens, their thematic only works during the holidays, but why this one? They could have just gave it a permanent entry and add 3 explorer paths over the coming months. BAM! There you go, an entire new dungeon for the whole world to enjoy.
But instead they throw it away, all this hard work for a dungeon that’s here for not even 3 weeks. It’s okay to make the overworld stuff a 1 time only thing, but why remove everything the update brought us? How will this be siginificant to future generations of players if nothing is left?
And making the crab toss minigame temporary makes even less sense. It’s a minigame, GW2 right now has 3 of them, that Golem chess that no one plays, except 1 time to test it, Costume Brawl and Keg Brawl. Before the game was released they promised to give us 1 minigame per city. Again, I understand that the holiday minigames vanish with the holiday, but why crab toss? It could be used to actually bring people to the Southsun Cove even after the update. I mean who wants to go there currently? People who want passion fruit, orichalcum and karka shells, that’s all.

If you call it living story, then make it living and not short bursts of entertainment.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

temporary content puts pressure on people to do stuff now; it’s good for them because more people log in.

Its good for people who are actively playing and took a short break. It is in fact bad for people who decided to take a extended leave to see where the game is to come find out its exactly where it was before.

Living story is great for those still playing in some fashion, its horrible when you take any extended leave because you dont have content that has built up over your leave.

About 4 main things have become actual additions to the game in terms of any content.

1- Southsun cover
2- Fractals
3- Guild Missions
4- 2(?) Spvp maps

These are the Major 4 that have stayed around, and out of those 3 Fractal is in my mind is the biggest of the bunch.

I like to think of this whole situation as GW2 is a house and Living story is the paint. All the permanent stuff added actually added to the house, perhaps a new kitch or an addition to the house. The living story is simply a layer of paint that gets painted over several time and leaves little to nothing behind because you scraped it off.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

temporary content puts pressure on people to do stuff now; it’s good for them because more people log in.

Temporary content is indeed putting pressure on me: pressure to move to a game without so much temporary content.

I just posted this on reddit about the living world, and how it’s “living” in the same way a person in stasis is technically “living”

the problem is, part of the point of GW2 was that the world is supposed to evolve and permanent changes get made, so far, the only permanent content is the fractals portal and the currently abandoned southsun.

it’s all well and good for it being temporary, but when everything returns to status quo, the world just starts to feel as static as any other MMO, the F&F storyline is going to be removed and diessa and wayfarer will be exactly the same as they were after release, that’s not a living world, that’s just an extended dynamic event.

a true “living world” would be “oh no, kralkatorrik’s back and expanding his territorry, the whole of the fields of ruin and half of the blazeridge steppes are now covered in crystals, and ebonhawke lies in ruins” there would be no “let’s clean up the crystals”, no “oh well, just kill this lieutenant and everything will be fine”, the whole zone is completely changed and that is how it will stay.

THAT is a living world, not a bunch of temporary content, a piece of temporary content that leaves lasting effects. if a meteor hits and aliens come out and invade tyria, you can kill the aliens, but there’s still a dirty great hole in the ground.

the living story isn’t alive, it’s just a big dynamic event chain and like dynamic events, everything goes back to normal when it’s done, there may be an NPC or two after, but that’s about it

a living world can’t be just “fixed”, here needs to be a lasting effect, and I think that there’s one thing that causes that feeling of everything being fine:

We’ve never yet failed.

there has never been a single time when we’ve screwed up so completely that things can’t be fixed, imagine if whilst we were messing around in the molten foundry, the dredge and flame legion blew up butcher’s block and junction haven. and by blew up I mean “destroyed so badly that rebuilding is impossible”, but no, we stopped the alliance before anything bad happened, go us, woo.

(this is another complaint I have, in the iron marches you can fail an event where the flame legion cause ANOTHER SEARING, it takes literally 5 minutes for the charr to rebuild and repopulate their village from scratch, yeah, the thing that destroyed ascalon the first time can just be fixed in 5 minutes)

It seems strange for me to say it, but PLEASE ANET LET US FAIL, our victories always happen just in time to avoid permanent change, let us fail at least once and that failure be reflected in the world forever, make it so that at least once we have a phyrric victory, or the victory isn’t stopping bad things, but just trying to limit the damage. just once. please?

Goldrock.9076:

I dont agree or disagree i like limited time events what makes them so unique all though some stuff like you said crab toss should stay ingame in some form or another.

i agree with that, that’s the point of this topic: temporary stuff is fine, as long as something is left permanently, otherwise it’s just a glorified quest.

sure it makes sense for refugees to stop pouring from wayfarer and diessa, or to not see the story missions where you’re introduced to rox and braham, but crab toss? southsun already suffers from a “no one ever goes there” syndrome, then they add a bunch of cool stuff to it, give us a couple weeks to enjoy, then take it away. the result? nothing changed, and southsun remains deserted.

crab toss is just a random example i picked because it’s in the next update, but my point remains: the living world isn’t alive, it’s just a doll changing clothes every couple weeks.

BuddhaKeks.4857:

I strongly agree. I still think the Lost Shores update is the best we got so far. It was plagued by bugs yes, but the giant meta event on the last day, this epic bossbattle and the permanent new content made it so awesome. I mean we got a whole new area to explore (granted it is pretty small and not too much to do there) and a complete new type of dungeon, that I continue to run even now, months after it was released.

But I also wanted a new classical dungeon, like the first 8, so I was immensely excited for the Molten Facility and extremely disappointend when I heard it was temporary. I can understand that with the Halloween, Christmas and 1. April dungoens, their thematic only works during the holidays, but why this one? They could have just gave it a permanent entry and add 3 explorer paths over the coming months. BAM! There you go, an entire new dungeon for the whole world to enjoy.
But instead they throw it away, all this hard work for a dungeon that’s here for not even 3 weeks. It’s okay to make the overworld stuff a 1 time only thing, but why remove everything the update brought us? How will this be siginificant to future generations of players if nothing is left?
And making the crab toss minigame temporary makes even less sense. It’s a minigame, GW2 right now has 3 of them, that Golem chess that no one plays, except 1 time to test it, Costume Brawl and Keg Brawl. Before the game was released they promised to give us 1 minigame per city. Again, I understand that the holiday minigames vanish with the holiday, but why crab toss? It could be used to actually bring people to the Southsun Cove even after the update. I mean who wants to go there currently? People who want passion fruit, orichalcum and karka shells, that’s all.

If you call it living story, then make it living and not short bursts of entertainment.

yeah, southsun was good for what it was: we got permanent changes to the world, new additions, and the story didn’t drag for 4 months with just one month of content.

that’s another thing: if you want to give us hints at stuff, ANet, do multiple storylines at once. tyria isn’t a single person, more than one thing can happen at a time. so while one story arc is going on, do your preludes to the other one DURING it, not after it. flame and frost took quite a while to take off, and even then everything could be done in the first 3 hours, if that.

I agree. I would really like to see events move beyond being “dress up”. I see no reason why we can’t talk to a bard who will let us “relive” the time Braham, Rox, and their friends took down the Molten Facilities. Sure the actual story should be one time, but there is no reason dungeons and/or events like the crab toss should not stay.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

temporary content puts pressure on people to do stuff now; it’s good for them because more people log in.

Would seem like good logic, until you hear about some players that didnt bother with F+F or SAB content… Purely because they knew the progress they made within each wouldnt matter at all after the content ended.

Dont know whether its a minority or majority, but its still a problem.

Also players returning to the game after months of a break dont see how much has actually been included or changed, they just come back to the same game they completed months ago.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

temporary content puts pressure on people to do stuff now; it’s good for them because more people log in.

Not having that kind of pressure to play being put on me was the primary reason I went with the ‘Pay Once, play until the servers close’ payment plan for GW2 (and would have with GW1, if I hadn’t been given it as a gift), as compared to Ye Olde Subscription. I hated that whole pressure of ‘You must play, otherwise you’ve flushed away your money.’ I far, far prefer the situation where you can take a day, a week, a month off, and then come back and catch yourself up.
This is what is upsetting people about this temporary content, really—the problem that they’re apparently not allowed to take a break from the game (especially when the break is something totally out of their control) without hitting the situation of ‘Hey, they had this fantastic epic content with these great rewards, but it’s been deleted now and will never come back!’
Personally, I’d call BS on Living Story having ‘growth’. Growth means an increase in total content over time, not just revolving-door transient stuff.

I dunno, if Orr really does become cured and begin to regrow it’s vegetation, and offer a new location for humanity as the race is in dire straits right now with only Kryta left, that is an evolution…

And if South Sun really becomes a new city and location for refugees of all races, that’s also an evolution.

of course, we have yet to see any of these supposed long term goals in full form yet so it’s hard to say one way or another.

Parlourbeatflex.5970:

Also players returning to the game after months of a break dont see how much has actually been included or changed, they just come back to the same game they completed months ago.

not true, the concept of the living story is to bring new content each month (or even each 2 weeks as we experience this month)… so those returning players will come back to a game where a story (which doesn’t require to know the previous content) is going on and whole areas have new content.

He assured us that the developers have no plans to slow down. Also, he made a point of saying that all of this content is episodic. In other words you do not have to play the last update to enjoy this one. They want to keep the game flowing so players never miss out on anything. If you chose to go back and do the last update that is ok, you do not need to complete it to enter into Southsun.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/7391/Guild-Wars-2-Isaiah-Cartwright-on-The-Secret-of-Southsun.html

+ nobody said that Wayfarer & Diessa look the same as before when F&F is gone. Yes, they remove the invading events, the dungeon and the story-missions, but it would be logical that those 2 new mini-areas are here to stay and that we’ll probably see some scars from the invasion. Think of it: they want people to see stuff which is long gone and tell others: “I’ve been there”

The more I think of the Living Story, the more I understand. It’s not like now we get it and next month the game is as before the living story. No, there will be other things going on… so it doesn’t matter when you log in, there will be something new. And it stays long enough (come on, 1 month is pretty long to experience the whole thing) to complete all the new things + achievements. (I’m a casual player and got the achievements from the whole month in 3 days (or less).

That said, I think that 2 weeks uptime for a dungeon is quite (too) short.