Guild Wars 2

There has to be an expansion in the works. If you were a player who played the game for a few months after launch before moving on and then came back today to see what new content there is to experience, there is pitifully little new to see.

The LS content itself was always extremely short on actual content.

The studio is at least as big as it was during development and, presumably content creation became more efficient with experience.

ANet should easily have been able to expand existing content and play space by 50% in two years. Living story can’t be more than the equivalent of 5-10% of the studio’s expected productivity over the last two years.

So, that additional productivity had to have gone some where!

Some of that might have been sucked up translating the game for China, assuming localization wasn’t mostly handled by the publisher, but there still should have been enough resources for serious work on expansion material.

(The other possibility is the studio working on another game, but I find that hard to believe. NCSoft already has a full stable).

I’m just hoping that LS has been so lackluster because the best developers have been focused on the expansion. An expansion is going to have to be at least as good as the original content and the LS has been orders of magnitude worse than the content the game launched with.

Tycho.8015:

I don’t care if stuff gets blown up either directly or as collateral damage during Living World…but at least let us pitch in to fix it and rebuild!

Let us grind events to clean up Kessex, for example. Make a small group of events/achievements out of it. The same could be done for any other area that gets messed up during a Living World arc.

And don’t make them end-game either, make them within the level range of the area in question, so that people who are there as part of their own story or mapping progress can participate in passing, instead of forcing people to go out of their way to grind it endlessly.

They did this during most of Season One. There was minor destruction in LA from various events, but then it would be rebuilt or new structures built to replace them over time. Heck, there was still new construction in the South West corner of the LA map that had been progressing over a period of months, only to then be completely wiped out in the finale!

When they destroyed LA, there were two distinct possibilities in my mind. Either a.) it was a drastic and desperate attempt to try to provide some form of actual impact from a wasted Season One, or b.) it would just wipe the slate for an update by update rebuilding of the city into something better.

Well, I think it’s clear now that the answer was a.)! In fact, I like the comparison of the destruction of LA by the developers to the temper tantrum destruction of a frustrated child.

It’s so amateurish and counter-productive that it’s hard to understand how it ever was allowed to occur.

I think part of the reason we haven’t seen the city rebuilt is because of the indiscriminate manner of it’s destruction. If only a percent of the cities structures had been destroyed, reconstruction would have been more manageable and far less resource intensive. I think ANet of Now hasn’t shown any indication that they are capable of building a city on par with the LA wrought by the ANet of Then.

Thus, with the resources and the talent needed being in very short supply, it’s probably highly unlikely the city will ever be rebuilt with out major changes at the studio and it’s approach to ongoing game design.

To me, just more evidence that the destruction was a very ill considered desperation move, rather than an indication of a cohesive and constructive strategy for the ongoing development of the game.

At this point, we would be better off if the entire game world was reverted to it’s pre or mid season one state and the game were allowed to progress in an alternate reality were reckless, pointless destruction of the game world had never occurred.

Randall.7306:

I also think that some building and construction could take place in order to change Tyria without using only a clear path of destruction. Unless the intention is to play in a postapocalypse Tyria in the next years.

For example, we had the tower of nightmares in kessex hills (for those who spent some time there the 2 or 4 weeks it existed), destroying/changing some environment and then being destroyed itself.

With a “change without destroying everything” state of mind, we could have now a city/fortress in the ruins of the tower, using it’s base as the foundations of a new fortress, town, small city or whatever. It could be the starting point to a series of tunnels underground, the now destroyed roots of the towers , populated by weird creatures, but source of some unique reward (maybe a champion, a chain of events, a portal, an underground jump puzzle…). The fortress itself may be started by centaurs just after the destruction of the tower, in an effort to gain terrain while the humans were busy in L.A., the fortress may be taken and occupied by Pact forces as an event, or as a part of the Living Story. At the end, you have a unique city built upon the ruins of a big tree-like tower.

I wasn’t around for that event, so I forgot about it.

Yes, I think it provides a key example of why ANet’s apparent need to destroy things to show “impact” is so flawed. Not only was it temporary content, and thus a very inefficient use of development resources, but the “value” of that development effort would have been increased significantly if the tower hadn’t been destroyed and instead had been used to house new permanent content.

When they first announced Living Story and we got the first couple chapters, it seemed like they might have been on the right path, using LS and some temporary content to introduce new permanent content to the game world.

Instead, they seem to have adopted a “leave it as you left it” approach, where the content was temporary and the only mark left on the game world to show that anything happened at all has been the destruction of previous content with nothing new to replace it.

It’s so completely illogical it’s hard to comprehend how they ever started down such a path.

Ranael.6423:

The only things you can’t do without unlocking (by logging in 10 seconds for 2 weeks or paying gem) are the story steps at will. You can still experience them by grouping with people.

Now the content added contains also a new zone with plenty of events, new weapon sets that you can find, a new type of insignia that are craftable by anyone, gizmo in accessible chests, new types of rune (from tuesday) that anyone can wear. There is also a vendor to start the scavenger hunt for Mawdrey (only the 1st part yet but I’m sure they will give him the other objects…. but as you logged in you can access them) for 4 laurels each.

If you pay you only get the opportunity to play the story at will…. I wouldn’t call that a pay wall. If it’s really what you are interested in then exchange gems for gold (17 gold per episode right now) or log in the game during the 2 weeks time. If you are really interested then it is an easy step…. if it is soooo hard then maybe you are not as interested into the game as you are to just log in the forum to despise a game you are not playing anymore.

You actually make the argument against while trying to make the argument for. Why are they even charging for this, knowing it IS costing them players who might have returned otherwise, if you get so little? Why create the divide between players who logged in for the freebie and those that didn’t?

Marketing research has shown that the absolute worst thing a company can do is anything that customers consider unfair. Companies can recover from all sorts of mis-steps with their products and handling of their consumers, but once a customer decides that the company has treated them unfairly, it very expensive and time consuming to ever win them back.

What ever tiny trickle of revenue they have derived from this has to be outweighed exponentially by the loss of potential revenue of every person who skips the game, or decides not to return, due to this policy.

Also, if this is really so insignificant a thing, why not charge everyone and offer no free unlocks? Well, I think we all know, it’s because most of the people who got the free unlocks and then have gone on to belittle the concerns about this new pay wall would sing a completely different tune if they were required to pay to unlock the content.

Templar.3418:

lordkrall.7241:

Templar.3418:

I’d rather a subscription then this cash shop BS.

People think you get a better deal when you go F2P or B2P with a cash shop. You don’t when it comes down to it.

This is one reason why.

Cash shops are a freaking corruption of MMO’s.

So you would rather be unable to play at all without paying monthly instead of being able to play anything in the game but be able to CHOOSE to pay for certain things?

Yes, yes I would.

This way I won’t be behind a pay wall when new content comes out. Unless there is some expansion that is.

Which is fine by me seeing as expansions add a ton of content to a game.

As the living story is now I’d not recommend anyone purchasing it. Sure it’s getting better this season but there is still so little extra content added.

Also this gem to gold conversion thing is manipulation to the max. It’s hard to make gold and the ways we could make gold in the past have been nerfed. It was even put in one of their news posts that hey “Remember you can trade gems for gold at the cash shop!” or something along those lines. God it’s so freaking obvious.

I’m sure plenty of people can see through this bullkitten though. >.>

This is the problem with B2P with cash shops and F2P models. It’s so easy to manipulate people. You are inconvenienced by design in order to buy things like exp/crafting boosters etc etc. It’s deception.

Ugh I hate it.

And if Anet was pumping out more content I’d be almost okay with it but they don’t. 2 years and no expansion?

When people feel good about the developers of a game and the game itself they will fork out money easily. Most of us don’t feel that way anymore. I’m sure there are threads on that already though.

I don’t think that ANet’s mis-steps with the business model discount it as viable or even desirable.

One of the biggest advantages of B2P, paired with a benevolent cash shop, is that the incentive is for the developers to keep producing free, quality content to bolster the player base. Being B2P also means that people who hop in and out don’t have to worry about a subscription fee when the mood strikes. If the developers have done their job on the content front, there are ample opportunities to “re-hook” returning players and increase the average play time of casuals.

How does the business model make money beyond box sales? By offering attractive cash shop items that don’t risk a backlash due to a perception of unfairness.

GW2 has failed to live up to it’s revenue potential because of failures on both fronts. They have failed to efficiently convert studio resources into compelling content and a maximized cash shop model.

Look at Tera Rising. It launched as a Pay to Play game right around the same time that GW2 launched as a B2P game and suffered for it. Over the past year, while GW2 has been spinning it’s wheels and sliding backwards down hill, Tera converted to F2P, with an optional subscription equivalent Patron Status and a cash shop that has given players the cosmetic items they want and are willing to pay for.

I have to believe that Tera makes more per player from it’s cash shop, per active player. I also have to believe that if the game had launched as B2P and had coupled it with their current cash shop and Patron Status strategy, the game would have been more successful from the start.

IMO, GW2 was the better game and also had the clearer path for capitalizing on it’s business model due to the game’s design. However, En Masse has been doing everything right to maximize the potential of the game they have, while Anet has seriously squandered their once vast potential by failing to develop for the game’s strengths. The GW2 cash shop also has trailed seriously behind it’s potential due to the lack of quantity and quality of desirable cosmetic items.

The problem isn’t the game’s business model, it’s what Anet has done with the game and the business model that’s the problem.

Malkavian.3751:

I just logged in for the first time in over a year. I saw a new zone had opened up, and that past story was available (at-least S2)

I then saw it would cost me money to access old content everyone else received for free, then promptly uninstalled. It went against everything I thought GW2 was. I would just pay for a subscription game if I was interested in something like this.

Exactly this. It’s a completely predictable and understandable reaction.

The game is diminishing and the last thing you want to do is take new content that might attract people to the game, then sour them to the game once they see the content is behind a pay wall.

They give it to people for free if they just happen to have logged in during a limited time window. What does that accomplish? Well, the people who are most active and most willing to support the game with gem store transaction pay nothing. The people most active on the forums presumable are also actively playing the game, so they also see no impact and contribute no cash towards the content.

Who is the base of potential purchasers? The people least likely to purchase and most likely to turn completely off to the game as a result. New players, returning players and occasional players. The exact people you want to try to tempt into playing the game , with the potential of converting some into paying customers via the introduction of new content!

It makes zero sense, but the concession to active players removes their outrage and makes most of them into “yes (wo)men”, telling ANet exactly what it wants to hear.

I had five RL friends who bought and played GW2 during year one. Everyone drifted away for various reasons. and Every one of them has mentioned they they were interested in returning to check out the game, after hearing that Season Two was better, but decided “$^%&@ that” after learning that the content was behind a pay wall.

Most people have no problem with the idea of paying for actual expansion content, but Living Story tinkers with the core game world in major ways and represents the entirety of what was originally promised as “free regular content updates”.

Putting it behind a pay wall for anyone creates bad will and lost opportunities, while being entirely pointless.

BladeNinja.4671:

Gibson.4036:

I’m still not sure what to make of their decision to blow up the best received update of the first year of the games life.

Blog post, “People loved Zephyr Sanctum!”

LS2 “Let’s create a new zone littered with the smoking ruins of Zephyr Sanctum!”

I get it. If people loved it, what better emotional impact when it’s destroyed? But looked at from another angle it can have the flavor of thumbing their nose at the player base.

Not saying that was in all the intent. But it can easily feel that way.

I got kittened when they blew up the Sanctum. If it was anything anyone knew i liked most in the game its was the Sanctum. i could live up ther if it was real. I think Michael Bay is working for Anet. Too much stuff getting nuked (if you catch my drift)

LA and Sanctum came across as just passive aggressive punishment for fickle fans who just wouldn’t get on board with the waste of time and resources that has been the majority of LS, to date. Zephyr Sanctum was, by far, the best thing LS ever produced. All the best events beyond ZS took place in LA. SO what do they do, destroy LA and ZS!

Cross those off the list and the Super Adventure Fun Box becomes the much loved offshoot of LS that they haven’t destroyed, but we find that they just don’t see a place for it in the game moving forward.

I think many of us would refuse to honestly answer a poll meant to identify what is most loved of the remaining content, for fear that it would just be used to establish the next ANet Hit List of content to destroy.

The entire thing comes off as “it’s my ball and if you don’t play my way, I’ll just take my ball and go home”.

The destruction has come across way more strongly as a developer’s temper tantrum against the “unappreciative fan base”, than as something that has provided narrative impact. Scarlet didn’t destroy LA as part of her mad plans, ANet destroyed LA because they are mad at players for not embracing Living Story over all the other ways the game could have been expanded since launch. That’s the unmistakeable impression and it has turned many fans off to the game.

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

Just a question here because I am curious. The idea of the Living World is that there is a storyline that you take part in, that you are involved in events that shape Tyria in permanent ways—how would you all convey the sense of progression and change without also making changes to the landscape? I see a couple of comments regarding creating things, not simply destroying. Do you all have any other ideas?

I agree with many others. Changes to the landscape are fine, but why are you so obsessed with destruction? It subtracts content from the game and tarnishes the great work Arenanet did prior to the game’s launch.

Why can’t we get new structures, forts, settlements; along with new Dynamic Events, that portray the ways Tyria is mobilizing against the escalating threats?

Destruction is very cheap and is getting very old. That you seem to believe that destroying the most loved aspects of the game world is what we want or what the game needs shows the massive disconnect between the studio and the fans.

The impression has become that living story is the narrative expression of the post launch philosophy of “lets see how quickly we can destroy the game’s once promising potential”. I hope that impression is incorrect and unfair, but you all keep adding new evidence that makes it impossible to dismiss.

The changes to the game world have done nothing to further the narrative found with in the dynamic events existing with in each zone. Instead we have had “Power Ranger” quality story lines coupled with the needless destruction of existing game content, seemingly just to prove that somehow Living Story actually means something and has an actual impact on the game world.

It’s impossible to be shocked at bad changes to GW2, the trend has been sustained and predictable. There might be some entertainment value in checking out new patch notes to see how they will outdo themselves in the realm of self sabotage, but it is nothing but frustrating for those who want to see the game become great once again.

I’d play again if they offered GW2 Classic servers that reverted the game to it’s state in spring of 2013. Wishful thinking though.

As to the trait system changes, I don’t get it. Every person I played with who came from another MMO wished that the game would introduce traits at an earlier level, because it was one of the clearest ways of obtaining a sense of progress for their characters. I don’t think I ever heard or read a comment any where suggesting the desire to see the trait system pushed back further and I definitely never heard anyone wish for fewer, less frequent trait point dispersals.

They gave us one good thing on traits, ease of respecs, which many people did ask for, then ruined the trait system almost seemingly as if out of spite.

I’ve never seen an MMO so determined to ignore the player base and focus on things people don’t want. If they were doing what was best for us and the game by turning a deaf ear and blind eye, that might be courageous, but little they have done in spite of the players and the original GW2 manifesto has been anything but detrimental for the game.

Can we please retire Living Story now? ANet gave open world, dynamic event driven content three months before they decided to stop ongoing development of DEs to try Living Story instead. Living Story has been ongoing for well over a year now and, no, it has not gotten better. Even with all the flaws, Frost and Flame was the closest to what Living Story could/should have been. We’ve had one or two nice interludes from poor LS events, Bazaar of the Four Winds comes to mind, but the overall concept has devolved on a fairly consistent downward trajectory.

LS isn’t just a failure in content production, but the ramping up of “Adventure by Checklist”, “Jump through hoops for juicy rewards” strategy has killed the game world.

I honestly can not imagine a worse strategy for GW2 ongoing development. LS may have been able to enhance a static, tired, uninspired WoW clone, but it has been an absolute mis-match for the incredible game that was GW2 at launch.

Enough is enough. Do we need to see LS further erode GW2 for another year before the devs wake up?

Now, I’ve been thinking, maybe they feel that they can afford to keep flushing the toilet on the game and rely on an expansion to wash away the damage they’ve wrought? That might have been possible, if the entire Living Story hadn’t retrained the player base to expect a series of levers to push for treats. The core game was all about playing the game the way you wanted to play, with many routes to the same or equivalent rewards. It is now all about completing checklists in a limited period of time for exclusive rewards you can’t get otherwise.

Living Story has been an aggressive cancer destroying an absolutely incredible game. It has been an affront to the original GW2 Manifesto, it has killed participation in the massive game world and it has sucked up all the resources that originally were to be spent on producing a continual stream of Dynamic Events that would have ensured that the game world felt like a living, evolving setting.

Dynamic Events were superb at creating the illusion of a living world. That each zone is still stuck on and endless loop of the same DEs over a year later has destroyed the illusion of life and made the game feel like just another stale theme park.

The frustration with this current story arch’s conclusion would seem a very fitting end to the failure that was the Living Story idea.

Of course, even if they suddenly agreed, we’d be told that we’d still have to put up with another couple months of Living Story that’s already been in the production pipeline. To that I say, just trash it. It’s game killing content and it’s almost entirely temporary content anyway. No one is going to miss it and shelving completed content is acceptable when that content has just been an absolute waste of development resources anyway.

GW2 would have been much better off with no new content than with what we got. That all that time, manpower and money leaves the game with almost nothing to show for it for people logging back in today after taking the last year off should be enough proof that it has been an absolute waste, even if one wants to argue that some people have enjoyed completing their checklists for shinies.

This events needed to be beyond spectacular to bring even a degree of redemption to the entire mess. That it’s just another failure in a string of failed content is just sad in it’s level of appropriateness.

If only they had shown a fraction of the commitment to the core game and it’s design philosophy as they have to LS. They gave up way too quickly on everything they spent 5+ years creating, yet cling to a flawed, sub-par, game killing development strategy with fanatical furor.

I just don’t get it.

I’ve hated the past year of living story. Bazaar of the Four Winds, for me, was the only bright spot and I’m completely boycotting the game until the overblown Scarlet storyline has ended.

To me, the Living Story experiment has done nothing to enhance the game. It has just distracted from everything the game did right at launch and has sucked up resources better spent on evolving the Dynamic World content.

IMO, the clear path forward from launch, given the superb core game design and at launch content, was to refresh at least two zones a month with a mix of new and modified Dynamic Events.

The role of Dynamic Events in an actual “Living World” should have taken a modular approach. As more DEs for each zone were added, the ability to mix and match, either randomly or on a set rotation, would have extended to illusion of a living world. As the toolbox of events for each zone grew, allowing for more configurations, their efforts would have snow balled until they fully realized a Living World paradigm.

Instead we’ve gotten almost entirely temporary content that has undermined and detracted from all the content work done prior to launch, diminished the game and doing nothing for players who missed that temporary content.

The beauty of the game’s original design, it’s business model and it’s logical path for expansion was that players could take weeks or months off and come back to find a lot of new stuff they hadn’t experienced before. That’s all gone now and returning from a break just provides you with a list of stuff you missed and plops you into the middle of a story you have no context for.

They don’t need to go bold. Bold comes across as desperate and an attempt to substitute flash for quality. They need to return to the game’s foundational design concepts and expand world content in a way that builds on existing content, rather than drawing players away from it.

The problem with Living Story isn’t just the failings of the content itself. It’s the way that content has detracted from the rest of the vast game world, taught players to play in a way contrary to the core game design, ( “Adventure by Checklist” is anathema to the original GW2 Manifesto) and also the way it has sucked up all the development resources that should have gone toward ongoing development of permanent/modular/reusable content.

I’m not proposing content that Arenanet hadn’t already itself proposed. In the 4th quarter of 2012, Colin Johanson himself talked about their likely strategy for ongoing content creation being one that would embrace the massive creation of new Dynamic Event content which would allow for events in a zone to evolve and would be rotated in and out to ensure the zones would continually provide a fresh experience.

For what ever reason, they’ve decided to do Living Story instead and, in my eye, that has been a devastating decision that will have a long term detrimental impact on the game and it’s potential success moving forward.

At launch, I said publicly that I thought GW2 had the very real potential to be a $Billion+ product over it’s first five years. IMO, the wrong turn at the fork in the road between LS and broad world DE content development have and will cost the company hundreds of millions in unrealized revenue.

The game is still one of the most successful MMOs since WoW, but it is just a pale shadow of what it could have been, should have been and could still be.

Why is this even in game? Love trolling players that much? Have things really devolved so badly?

Silberfisch.3046:

Aveneo.2068:

So basically you have to buy the recipe for 5g in order to craft a consumable item that allows others to get a buff?

Originally it felt decent until I saw the mats. For the Sharpening Stone Station you need 1 Bloodstone Brick, 30 Pile of Crystalline Dust and 5 Deldrimor Steel Ingot!

So I am just going to ignore these recipes and keep using my own personal versions.

Basically, your last sentence sums it up nicely from an individual standpoint. The stations aren’t meant for individuals or small groups.
They are meant for medium to large scale groups, like a guild doing a guild challenge, an organized guild group in WvW and similar occasions.

In addition, with the way new world bosses seem to be designed (read: requiring a large number of coordinated players), those stations come in handy from that point of view.
The only flaw in regard to the new world bosses is, that in a lot of cases the groups participating in those are clustered together from individuals and smaller groups, so almost no one (me included, I’ll freely admit) will put up a station, because unlike in a guild event there simply won’t be the number of people who might chip in to compensate for the high price.
Plus with the slaying potions seemingly fixed, for Tequatl at least, the undead slaying potion will be more useful anyway, I guess.
(And was already, even with the bug induced drawback they had until now.)

I think ANet has given up on keeping the average player. They see large, organized guilds as a possible counter to the player bleed their content direction is producing. They’ve already desecrated the game’s original manifesto and core principles so badly, will it really surprise anyone if End Game Raids and an End game Loot Grind will be the next desecration?

Guys, it wasn’t the core game that failed to ignite. It was a stunning achievment in MMO design. However, the core game was just the foundation for what could have and should have been one of the most successful Western MMOs in the history of the genre. the seeds were planted and the coming harvest would have been bountiful.

Instead of proper care and watering needed to ensure the game’s potential would manifest as intended, new leadership decided to rip the fledgling crop up by it’s roots, as if it was a field of weeds, rather than a future cash crop, so they could plant some sham magic beans.

GW2s vast potential was due to it’s well thought out doctrine breaking design and the moment ANet decided that it needed to be more like every other failed MMO, rather than building on it’s uniqueness, was the moment it’s once vast potential started to fly out the window.

The event design fosters the zerg and the community, on most servers, is no longer strong enough to make lemonade out of ANet’s lemons.

It’s just another sign of how far this once incredible game has fallen.

You know the frustration most of us feel waiting for an MMO expansion for a game we love? The months or even years where there is little or no new content beyond an end game raid here or there? Well, it’s sad to say, but GW2 would have been much, much better off with the typical lack of inter-expansion content than it is today in the wake of the continuing flow of game cheapening content they’ve vomited upon us.

Yes, their efforts have been WORSE than nothing… Blizzard not only grew their Juggernaut with little inter-expansion content and too long waits for expansions, but they have recovered from what many saw as a failed expansion. GW2 was a much better game, at launch, than that other game was when it launched. The sad truth is that post-launch ANet has systematically destroyed most of what made the game great via the Living Story concept and content.

The game didn’t even have a chance to capitalize on it’s amazing core design and content. If ANet had chosen a traditional expansion path, it would have had a year or two to build it’s player base, critical praise and positive word of mouth before ANet’s diminished “shadow self” had a chance to ruin it.

PolishSausage.1279:

Simonoly.4352:

The GW2 community is fine. There’s probably many confounding variables attributable to your lack of support. Seems unfair to condemn a community just from this.

The community in general is actually pretty terrible. The behavior in instances like this is just a sample of the kittenbaggery that goes on as a whole.

The community was not like this early on. One of the victories of the original game design was how it subtly discouraged negative player behavior and fostered a friendly, cooperative game environment.

The decline of the community is just another outgrowth of the ongoing design disaster that began in early 2013 and has snowballed continually ever since.

It’s rare, but occasionally a person or persons are so key that their loss is devastating to an organization. I think that’s what is happened here, as post launch ANet seems to have no clue how to foster the game they were left with. The result has been a sad withering of what was once boundless potential for a unique and incredible MMO.

(It has to suck to know your decisions have cost your company perhaps hundreds of millions dollars of potential revenue, but I so hate what they’ve done, I can’t feel bad for them).

Players have adapted to the game as the pale shadow that was once Arenanet have re-envisioned it. The players are still to be blamed, of course, but with so many of the game’s core design principles having been ditched under the current leadership, it’s no surprise that game design meant to ensure players work together, rather than in competition with each other, has gone by the wayside as well.

For a game once designed without the carrot, it’s sad decline into the worst kind of skinner box, with many remaining players being little more than conditioned response machines, is just depressing.

At this point, the only source of amusement is guessing which other ways Anet will come up with to desecrate what was once one of the best MMOs ever produced.

minbariguy.7504:

I hated Living Story the moment it crawled out of it’s dark, dank spider hole and shambled into the light of day.

I didn’t need anyone to influence me.

I didn’t feel pressured to go along with the crowd. The only pressure I felt was from Living Story: “Follow this carrot right now, or there’ll be no carrot for you at all!”

I didn’t have to worry about its temporary grindy clickfests “engaging me” against my will.

And given the fact that ANet has been completely dismissive of the idea of altering the 2-week cadence, I certainly don’t feel that hating the Living Story is a way to be “taken seriously”.

I find it odd that there are still people who have a hard time with the concept that many people hate the Living Story for perfectly good reasons, and on it’s own many questionable merits.

I completely agree.

Before Living Story, I never thought any new content would actually make me hate the game and the developers. I thought, at worst, it just wouldn’t be for me and I could ignore it. Instead, it has been an absolute pox on the game.

Adventure by Checklist, in your face and, as you say, catch the carrot now, or no carrot for you, but don’t worry, there will be new carrots in two weeks.

I think what disgusts me about all this is that it represents a 180 degree reversal of the ideals the game was built on an an abandonment of the incredible game world, which felt so alive at launch, but now feels dead because nothing changes outside of the Living Story set pieces and smoke and mirrors fluff.

It’s like pre-2013 Arenanet was completely replaced by Pod People who are only pale imitations of the originals.

We honestly would have been better off with no new content beyond an occasional Holiday, than the massive waste of development resources on game killing “content” that has been 95% of Living Story.

I don’t get it and I guess I will never get it. I just hope that the geniuses who produced what made this game so special and incredible at launch are working on another MMO that can come in and actually fulfill the astronomical potential that WAS GW2. I’ve lost any hope that GW2 will ever be more than a shadow of what it could have been and should have been.

This could have been a $Billion title with proper ongoing development. This is by far the closest any developer has come to making an MMO with the potential to approach WoW levels of financial success. It’s also the most dramatic implosion ever, with what they have done to the game and it’s once vast potential in just over a year of “wrong track” development.

A little over a year ago, GW2 showed the world what a real MMO can and should look like, while as 2013 winds to an end, GW2 has also shown that even an incredible game can be ruined if ongoing game design and development falters.

All that all this “free content” has done is that it has allowed us to witness month to month the kind of destruction that a horrible Expansion could rend on an MMO after an extended wait. Rather than enjoy GW2 for a year or two before being handed suckage with a bad expansion, we’ve been receiving it piecemeal.

You’d think that this approach of development would offer the advantage of course corrections if things start to go wrong, but all I’ve seen is Arenanet continue to double down on a completely failed development strategy.

I do not get it…

The game was doing very well until they started with Living Story. The player die off is more than coincidental to what many find to be failed game design.

Living Story killed the game for me and my small guild. Not just is the form of adventure by checklist content repugnant, but it’s anathema to the core foundations that made this game so incredible at launch.

When they Kill Living Story and Devote future content creation to a vast expansion of Dynamic Events across the beautiful, but now stale, game world, they will have a chance to recapture the potential this game originally represented.

As long as they embrace the death spiral that is the failed Living Story concept, there isn’t much hope.

As a long time MMO vet, the frustrations related to this are difficult to impart. Many have been waiting for a game like GW2 since the genre first spawned and the potential for the medium became evident. The game, at launch, was somewhat akin to The Holy Grail of MMO design.

To see the Water of Life poured from the Grail, so that it can be used as a beer stein for drinking cheap swill is just demoralizing.

It’s important for the game and this content to scale and descale properly. Scaling for dynamic content has always been based on near real time adjustments to eliminate the possibility for griefing and maintain proper challenge.

If that system is broken, or just not properly applied here, that needs to be fixed asap. The entire game depends on proper scaling and there have been enough compromises to the game’s core design principles with out them losing ground on this one as well.

BobbyStein.2315:

I mentioned this in another thread, but I’ll post it here for safety. We’re working on a system to direct people through the Living World (and other) content to address many of the issues people have in experiencing a linear narrative in a non-linear setting. This is something we’ve been aware of for a while but we’re now able to talk about since the system is being built. I can’t go into specifics just yet, but the long term plan is to provide players with a central mechanism for tracking content and having a better understanding of the stories in the game.

As always, thanks for the constructive feedback.

I think you would be much better served dropping Living Story entirely. It has proven probably the worst waste of resources one could possibly imagine for the studio that created such an incredible core game.

What happened to Dynamic Events telling a story that you experience organically? Where we become the story?

You guys should have been progressing the story in each game zone via alterations to existing DEs and replacement of old events with new ones that continue the natural progression of the series of events that occurred their previously.

You could even have accentuated regular Dynamic Event creation/modification/evolution across the game world by choosing a zone every month to enhance with Instanced Story content congruent with some big change in the course of events in that zone.

If Frost and Flame had provided a transition to a boat load of new events that were an outgrowth of the story, that would have been content worthy of the game. This linear, inane and mostly temporary content that does nothing to evolve the actual game world really, really needs to go.

The new twice monthly LS schedule has only had one positive attached to it. The pace has accelerated the rate at which we could all come to realize what a colossal waste of resources the concept has been.

It’s not just that it has failed to engage many of us, but it has actually turned some very loyal players completely off to the game and you can count me among them.

So, please, if the goal is to drive players from the game, keep right at it. However, I have to hope and pray that someone over at ANet who is at the controls will pull back on the yoke before the entire title crashes nose first into the ground.

I’m currently so overwhelmed by the way they are force feeding us this… less than appetizing “stuff”, that, yes, if they announced Living Story a failure and pledged never to do that again, I would jump up and down in joy, then find something worth buying on the gem store to reward the decision.

Given time to recover, I might concede that content like this every other month might be acceptable. However, it never, ever, ever should have been the primary or all consuming focus of ongoing “content creation” and, moving forward, should not occupy more than 10% of the Live Team’s resources.

I literally have stopped playing the game and stopped supporting the game financially because they have driven me to loath Living Story to such a degree.

I want the game world to evolve. The game world should evolve by having the Dynamic Events in the world evolve and tell a story by allowing players to actually experience a living, changing world. I do NOT want a series of completely linear, theme park hoops to jump through.

Living Story has greatly diminished the game. Not only due to the nature of the “content”, but the fact that it has used up all the resources that should have been spent ensuring progress of the story lines in each game zone as told by the dynamic events that occur there.

There are some developers who work on new features for the game. I’m fairly happy with that side of things. Reportedly, a portion of the studio is working on “more long term projects”, while they insist they aren’t working on an expansion. (One can only hope they aren’t working on ways to produce even more “Living Story”).

These developers aside, yes, it seems everyone else is now working on this gag inducing Living Story content. Four teams, working on creating an overload of content that many of us would rather had never existed.

How about one team working on this Living Kitten, I mean Story, released every other month and the other three working on livening up the game zones via evolving Dynamic Events? Or, better yet, just recycle the repeatable festivals, drop the rest of the Living Story entirely and have each of the four teams focus on Dynamic Events in a given region of the world, so that every two weeks we get new content in one of the four regions?

“But, Dynamic events are too haaarrdd”…

Well, they produced over 1600 DEs in 5 years. One would assume that their methods and tools improved during that time. One would also assume that now that they are no longer creating all the rest of the content that made up the game at release, they could devote a lot more development time on Dynamic Event creation and modification. 24-48 new/improved DEs every two weeks doesn’t seem at all unreasonable.

(During Development, there was one interview where a developer explained how efficient their Dynamic Event creation tools were. Supposedly, a single developer could develop and tune a basic DE in a day, an event chain in a week. Even if that was an exaggeration, it still points towards the “DEs are too hard” excuse not being quite above board).

Living Story has managed to make holiday content, which is fun on occasion as a change of pace, into something I now want to gag over.

It’s overload of exactly the wrong kind of content and the now twice monthly pace has got to be a sure sign of insanity and not the creative, zany kind.

I love this game. I can even appreciate a lot of the new features that have been added over the last year. However, Living Story is actually driving me from the game, which I would assume is the opposite effect a developer would desire from an investment of time and resources into ongoing, free content.

I might be able to just ignore it, if not for the fact that it has eaten up all the resources that originally were intended to create bucket loads of new Dynamic Events across the game world. With the game world stuck on an infinite loop of what had originally been promised as dynamic content, but is now just theme park performances that repeat ad nauseum, it’s not content one can ignore, it’s content one who enjoys the open world can come to absolutely loathe with deep passion.

BobbyStein.2315:

I can empathize with having a busy life and not always being able to fit my gaming schedule in between work, home life, and social commitments. Your comments are not lost on us.

We’re exploring some ideas for the future, including a system that would allow certain bits of Living World content to be accessed independent of the release. Plans and designs have not been solidified yet, so I want to temper your expectations. But if you have any opinions on the matter feel free to let us know. We’re already looking at ways to leave some LW content behind to evolve Tyria and improve the game. This would be one element of it, should we decide to build such a feature.

I would love to see Living World. Living Story is not a Living World. It’s mostly temporary content that does nothing to make the greater game world feel alive. A few months ago I might have conceded it makes Lion’s Arch alive, but, to be honest, Living Story has just become an overload of linear hoops to jump through, so I can’t even give it credit for achieving it’s goals on even the scale of a single Tyrian city.

Living World would be the evolution of every game zone by updating, evolving or replacing existing Dynamic Events in a way that allowed each zone to tell a story over time via what occurs there.

The type of stuff we get in the living story is the kind of stuff that’s fun as part of an occasional holiday event. Monthly or now twice monthly is just an overload of sweets, with a complete lack of meat.

At this point, many of us would be happy if Living Story would be completely phased out and real, long term or naturally evolving Dynamic Events across the game world would take it’s place.

A form of content best reserved for holidays and festivals is now being thrust at us at two week intervals. The pace destroys the sense of novelty, establishes that inane, temporary content is all ANet cares to produce and provides a recipe of content delivery absolutely guaranteed to produce player burn out.

The writing on the wall came early in the year when a senior developer did a flip flop from “we intend to double or triple Dynamic Events in the world to provide the sense of a living world”, to “Dynamic Events are too hard, so we are going to do ‘Living Story’ instead”.

Novelty content is not a replacement for sustainable content that evolves the game world. Not only is the substitution diminishing the game, but it has ruined the positive role that the occasional novelty content may have on an MMO game world.

The Live Teams inherited a four star restaurant and converted it into a fast food joint because flipping burgers was easier than producing a fine dining experience. It would be comical if it were not so tragically sad.

Game play for it’s own sake can be sustainable, but some form of reward helps to keep enthusiasm for a game high when the novelty of content wears thin.

There are two problems here.

First, the game world has completely failed to evolve. The promise of hundreds of new DEs across the game world never materialized and the once living world now seems to be stuck in a Groundhog’s Day style endless loop of inanity.

Second, though rewards can help maintain interest in static or repetitive content, ANet misapplies it’s reward structure by only rewarding linear game play that pulls players further out of the living world concept.

They have set up narrow hoops that detract from the vast and beautiful game world and reward players for jumping through those hoops, while failing to do anything to encourage sustainable game play out in that vast and beautiful game world.

Not only are players who appreciate the game world for all it offers feeling more and more let down by the failure of ANet to evolve that content, but they see all these new reward systems put in place to get people to jump through inane hoops as not only a discouraging development that deters their hopes that the game world ever will properly evolve, but breeds resentment among those who play the game as it was “originally intended”.

ANet wastes time developing the wrong kinds of content, then develops a reward structure meant to try to convince players that that vapid, linear content is what is most deserving of their play time. It’s almost as if they seek to bribe players into accepting junk food content as being good for them, rather than spending those resources on actually providing delicious, nutritious meals.

What they reward and what they don’t reward really highlights how far off the path the have ventured.

I think it’s time they really re-examined the original GW2 manifesto and how development since launch has moved dramatically away from those lofty ideals.

I think the biggest failure of Living Story isn’t just the waste of development resources on temporary content. It’s the fact that it has ruined the fun that the occassional temporary content, in the form of holidays or festivals, can provide as a change of pace from the normal flow of the game.

GW2 has this vast, incredible game world, but LS pulls people out of the game world and forces them to jump through inane hoops to take advantage of temporary content.

1600 hours of game play between two accounts and I never burnt out on the game world. Even with the absolute failure of ANet to evolve the game world via new and altered Dynamic Events across Tyria, there was still easily 2000 hours of playability from the world content the game released with.

However, this Living Story kitten has ground me up and spit me out. It’s content guaranteed to suck the charm out of occasional temporary content, holidays and festivals, while redirecting people away from sustainable play habits into non-sustainable, linear and repetitive obstacle courses of “content”.

Anet is systematically undermining the once strong foundations of the game and turning it into the saddest form of linear theme park one could imagine.

You guys couldn’t be any more off course if destruction of the game was your actual goal. Anyone there who doesn’t see this really shouldn’t have any role in directing the course of the game.

Living Story is not only a diversion of resources best spent elsewhere, but it’s ruining the game by directing people away from the game’s strengths and cramming an unsustainable content path down their throats.

Enough already, enough.

Mouhappai.5406:

Shenmue – A single player game produced by a Japanese company. The entire story was based in Hong Kong, but every character in the game speaks Japanese. No complains.
Hero Online – An age-old MMO. The story was based in ancient China, but the theme song with vocals are sung in Korean, no complains either.
Blade and Soul – A Korean MMO with a mix of mostly Korean and Chinese cultural elements including architecture, fashion and class abilties. Not a single complaint was made. In fact, both the Koreans and Chinese love it to death.

So who is stopping Cantha from making an appearance in GW2? I certainly do not think it is the playerbase.

I have a feeling that someone at NCSoft decided that Westerners just are not able to do an Asian theme with out it somehow being racist or disrespectful of the source. Or that we just can not even comprehend their culture and way of thinking, so any even a well meaning attempt by a Western developer to make an Asian themed game is folly.

Also, yes, there is a lot of friction between the various Asian cultures at the moment, so maybe that plays some role in it as well.

If NCSoft demanded that some of it’s people advise and contribute on any and all Asian themed content in GW2, I could understand if Arenanet just decided it wasn’t worth the effort. They have enough pressures with the ongoing development of the game with out having to worry about cultural politics.

Now, maybe it would behoove Arenanet to hire a writer with experience creating Asian themed lore for MMOs, someone with experience and talent on par with the head writers that laid the foundation for the lore in GW2, and have that person work out Canthan lore that would allow for it’s integration into the current game, while keeping NCSoft happy. If it works out, then you have an option to go forward. If it doesn’t work out, then nothing will really have changed.

As I see it, if Arenanet had to scrap Canthan themed content late in development due to some word from NCSoft, then of course it doesn’t make much sense for them to even consider a Canthan based expansion for GW2 unless they could be absolutely certain that work wouldn’t be hampered by corporate involvement.

As a player, I’m not at all happy to hear this news. I definitely hoped and expected that Cantha would be a clear part of their five year plan, even if it ended up being towards the far end of that time frame. To find out that it’s not part of their five year plan and may never appear at all is disappointing.

I hope the high level plans include making world PvE much more attractive to players. The game world can sometimes feel dead, but there would be no reason for this if an hour of world PvE was considered equal to an hour of FotM.

Wasn’t the initial design intent that players could do Dungeons, WvW or World PvE and be equally rewarded for their time? Time to get things back in balance. (I like FotM, but I still can’t comprehend why something like that was added to the game so early in it’s life span. It seems like the kind of thing you do around year three, when you’ve already lost the fight to keep players in the world zones).

Portal is yet another skill that should have a separate PvP and PvE version. I wish they would stop being so stubborn and just split skills that need to be split. It’s like GW1 skill balancing all over again. It took them a while to reduce their subservience to PvP forum whiners, manipulators and split skills where the “needed” PvP nerfs unnecessarily crippled PvE play.

Also, it really hard to believe that updating tooltips requires more than editing a line of text. If they adjust a skill, changing the tooltip should be a required item on the check list before the change is pushed to the live game.

Efaicia.3672:

Forget it, you are missing the point still. It is not that the ele is too difficult or that i dont like it, it is that it is the only class in the game so dependent on game mechanics. It is not the switching of attunements, it is not the low hp, or the different strats with different weapons, it is not any of those things, it is the fact that it is the only class in game that NEEDS to use the game-wide mechanics even to solo. If they were specific mechanics to the Ele then it would be understandable, but these are game wide mechanics that ONLY the ele is forced to NEED to know. If you all are still going to treat me like I do not know how to play the Ele then I just don’t know what to say. It is not the Ele that needs fixing (other than the list of known bugs) it is the other classes that need to NEED the game mechanics as much as the Ele.

I’m another Elementalist that prefers Dagger/Dagger. Combos aren’t a big deal for my build, which is why I’m often a little surprised when someone makes the point you are making. I’m not saying you are wrong, but I think it’s more build dependent than you think.

I do agree that no profession should require one to fully utilize combos in order to match the level of capability of other professions that can completely ignore their combo fields. If there are builds that are “kittened” with out focused use of combos, then those builds actually need to be buffed. the solution is not to try to force all other professions to be reliant on combo fields in order to achieve parity. In fact, many professions/builds have few or no self combos available to them!

In the mean time, if you are open to experimentation, you may want to try out some Dagger/Dagger builds in order to experience Elementalist with out self combo dependency. I tried all weapon sets and a number of builds and personally find D/D to be the most fun, by a fair margin. There will be a learning curve and the strategies will require some adjustment, but you may find you like it and can appreciate the break from having to worry about self combos.