Guild Wars 2

IMO – the biggest problem with Scarlett (and by extension the whole living story to date) is not her characterization or her storyline, but instead it’s the position she occupies.

Guild Wars 2 was sold on the story of the Elder Dragons. They loom large in the pre-release material and in the Personal Story. They are a huge threat that believably requires the assembling of legions of heroes to face.

Next to that, the machinations of any one mortal being just seems pale and lackluster. Moreover, focusing on those machinations for nearly a year seems like a side-show attraction when everyone is looking forward to the main event.

This is the main problem I have with Scarlett. She’s a distraction.

If the Living Story as written was tightened up and Scarlett split open after her first appearance to reveal she was a pawn / servant of Mordremoth, players may have been more accepting. Tie story to Elder Dragons and it seems like progress. Tie story to random mortal and it seems like distraction and I start asking “when are we getting back to the real plotline?”

There are 5 Elder Dragons active (6 if you decide to bring Zhaitan back for a less disappointing send-off). Even if you do one epic arc per year dealing with the machinations and final defeat of each dragon (which is by no means a necessary schedule) that’s still 5 years from now. Very few MMOs survive for 6 years and counting with anything remotely approaching relevance, and even if GW2 is one of the rare ones – if you aren’t confident that the story team can’t come up with an epic follow on arc, firmly grounded in the rich lore of Tyria, in 5 YEARS then I don’t think longevity should be the primary concern here.

IMO, the take-away from the Scarlett episode should not be “we can do a better job of creating and explaining villains in future”, it should be “we should probably focus more tightly on the epic story we already established rather than dropping in other distracting side-lines”.

For the record – the occasional side-line or distraction is fine. Take Mad King Thorn for instance. Great character, great acting, great storyline. Here for a short while and then put back in his box for a year. Theoretically the same could be done with Scarlett or whoever – as long as they get swatted back down in a short period and we Heroes of Tyria get back to the important stuff of saving the world from the Big Bad.

Oh – and if we’re going to keep using the (IMO wholly inappropriate) analogy of TV and movies as examples of storyline, please never forget that there are quite literally thousands of heroes in Tyria. The storytelling structure has to be closer to something like X-men, Justice League, or some other group of powerful beings. Having a single opposing villain of anything less than cosmic power is wholly unbelievable on the face of it. Several hundred top-level Elementalists should have leveled Scarlett by now and as long as she’s just another mortal, there’s no reason it wouldn’t have happened. Elder Dragons – sure, like Galactus or Darkseid they can take on boat loads of heroes without breaking stride. Generally though you don’t see Lex Luthor taking on the Justice League as a whole single-handedly or even with a small army of thugs, he needs a group around him just as strong as the JLA to serve a believable role as a threat.

Elbegast.6970:

For a Living World, we need:

Seasons
Graphical only or Game Effect? Personally, graphical is a nice-to-have but it’s got to be really far down the list. The Environmental Design artists in GW2 are inspired IMO but they could be much better used making new content rather than what amounts to pallet swaps.

If it’s game effect, then it’s the same amount of graphical work with a ton of programmatic work too. Presumably spawn changes, map mobility changes maybe, environmental effects on characters (you need to wear “winter clothing” to go to Frostgorge in mid-winter. All neat, all very simulationist in intent, but all very big tasks and the question is whether the effort is worth the rewards.

Better Weather Effects
Ditto to the above.

Dark Nights (no, not Christian Bale)
Why? Immersion? Roma Victor had nights so dark you couldn’t see without a torch. The players simply increased their gamma until they could see and carried on. I would confidently say more players would find this a hindrance than would say it’s cool.

Purchasable Real Estate
Meh. We already have the Personal Instance that is under utilized. Why not take the effort and put it there. Decorating and all that stuff that usually goes along with real estate could take place there. Any real estate would have to be instanced, so why the money sink?

Player Owned Shops
To sell what? The only reason a player would seek out a player-run shop instead of using the auction hall would be if player goods differed from each other. When everyone is building the exact same stuff there’s no reason not to aggregate it.

Player Owned Farms (for Livestock and Produce)
Unless it went deeply into farming as a mini-game I don’t see this one working out. Again going back to the Personal Instance, if players could designate their instance as a certain “type” it might lead to something.

For instance, your personal instance could be designated as a farm. Visually it would look different from mine (which could be a mine let’s say) but mechanically it would be similar to the quartz node or candy corn node – a personal source of some crafting good.

The interesting part would be that each account can only pick one kind of resource, thus necessitating trade and selling on the AH.

Fishing, Hunting & Farming Professions
Ditto to the above. Having it in the world is just another kind of mob farming. I’d rather see it in the Instance and have players run a Farm, Fishing Boat, Hunting Camp, etc.

Player-Generated Dynamic Events
Technically already in-game (player picks up shiney, DE starts) but not very impactful. I’m not sure I’d favour the exact types you outline (as they’re a little too far into “let’s build a completely different game than the one we have” for me) but the concept of player agency in Dynamic Events is definitely one of the topmost areas of concern for me.

For a Living Story, we need:
An In-Game Calendar that lists recurring festival events and distinguishes them apart from the Living Story releases.
The recurring events have to be part of the story in a technical sense or else you’re dividing player time intentionally. On-going world events need to be scheduled take a pause around Halloween, Christmas, Bazaar of the Four Winds, etc. or else players will be pulled in two directions by different content and dissatisfaction will ensue

Brimwald.5894:

You’re correct, most games don’t do content releases every two weeks. Most games release new content usually about 12 months apart, which is why I stop playing them because the current content alone is not enough. I usually don’t come back when the new content finally drops, or I come back and don’t play 80% of the new content.

ArenaNet is treading new ground here, and it’s obviously going to be a bit bumpy. New things always are. I am trying way more new content than every other game with the two week release schedule. I think in time we will see that this is the best method.

With two new MMOs and two new consoles coming out ArenaNet can’t let up on the gas now. This method has the possibility of giving them an edge over the competition (besides that no monthly sub thing).

I’m going to quickly counter-point you here as I think it’s still kind of related to the topic.

I have stopped playing GW2 actively because of the constant two-week release cycle. The type of content released and the pace burnt me right out.

So where you are representative of the player that needs constant content infusions to keep you in the game, I am representative of the type of player that can’t or won’t keep up with constant content and leaves in frustration.

Different strokes for different folks, the question is which type of player is more common / more lucrative for ArenaNet.

Brimwald.5894:

Hey Jaken, why would you want a 6 month content release schedule?? They would lose too many players to other games. 2 weeks is great, though monthly would also be fine. This makes the players feel like the devs are constantly trying to update the game with new content. The content isn’t perfect, but it’s better than not getting new content for six months. Besides the whole company isn’t working on a single content release for two weeks; after the Halloween release that group (the holiday event team) probably started on the Wintersday content (that’s a 2 month content release).

Most MMOs don’t release content patches much more than a few times a year. EVE Online for instance only does a Summer and a Winter release.

There are constant patches and changes and improvements between major patches, but the big ones only drop a few times a year.

There’s no reason other than philosophical that ArenaNet has to do releases at this pace.

Laurelinde.4395:

DevonCarver.5370:

I wanted to further discuss a couple of ideas. Firstly, several posts have called for reduced map caps in WvW. The problem that would create is that we’d be allowing even fewer people to play in a given period of time if we were to do that. So I wonder if there is another way to accomplish the same goal, while not disenfranchising people who would now be unable to get into the maps?
…

Secondly, there has been some amount of discussion about the nature of server transfers and how that affects population. I think there is some space for us to make changes there, but there is always going to be a tradeoff. For example, what if we restricted or completely eliminated transfers during a season? I think it has some positives, but it might be overly damaging to people who aren’t intending to bandwagon, but legitimately want to change servers. It may be the case, though, that that number is so small that it is worth the cost. Or, what if we prevented people from transferring to the higher population servers, but not all of them?

Reduce match length significantly (to a given number of hours – 2-6 most likely, but slightly longer would also be possible) and allow multiple instances of maps to run as and when. No transfers and minimal queuing required.

At that point, how different is it really from sPvP?

Of course it’s dying. Every MMO is dying, just ask their forums.

Another point to consider re: pace of releases.

If ArenaNet wants the world to be dynamic, part and parcel of that would be the world reacting to the player and NPC actions.

Too many events are written from a standpoint of assumed success. Even though I have done exactly zero Scarlett Briar content, I know for a fact that she will eventually be defeated. The playerbase as a whole could trip over their own swords for 6 months and yet somehow the villainess will go down in defeat.

Writing it this way allows the team to work at the pace that has been set for them, but they have to write the story and then drive it as written because they need to stay ahead of the players by months at a time. In effect, the player characters are going through the motions while the plot leads them wherever, passive viewers waiting for the next instalment of the story.

MMOs and video games are an interactive medium though. It’s not very accurate to follow the same model of storytelling as a TV show or movie trilogy. To truly connect with the content, players need to feel they are an integral part of the content. To a certain extent the election in Lion’s Arch was the best example of the type of content you need to push IMO (if not the best implementation).

I think you should rework the story release schedule a bit. I think you need to block out a couple of months of events which are designed to require a choice, either success / failure or an A vs. B option (which would actually be better from a gamer psychology standpoint).

At the end of the block, the team tallies up the A’s and the B’s across the game and the result drives the direction of the next block. If players drive towards destroying Scarlett at the expense of ignoring Jormag’s activities (for instance), then that should have consequences that reach into the storyline in the future.

Honestly, I can get better storyline and dialogue from a lot of different entertainment sources. Only in video games (and MMOs in particular) is there the potential that I can personally interact with the progress of the story.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Our take on phasing, and why we never did it to begin with is: the world isn’t progressing, it’s just fake progressing for you and the person next to you isn’t seeing it progress simultaneously. One of the biggest things we wanted to accomplish with Gw2 is that the things that happen do matter, they happen for everyone, and everyone experiences them together. This is really putting the social aspect of the game and immersion, above the personal aspect.

That doesn’t make phasing wrong, but if you judge by the above pillar it makes phasing wrong for Gw2. Each design decision we make takes that into account as one of the games core pillars. When something in the open world happens, it needs to happen for everyone, and we gauge everything that way.

Edited to add: This specifically applies to experiences in the open world, and doesn’t mean we couldn’t do things like letting you see moments in time in the past, or experience living world instanced (or “phased”) moments on their own timeline.

??

Really? That pillar is not really apparent in anything I can think of from release.

If anything should fit that bill it should be the Orr story and the defeat of Zhaitan. Yet, that storyline is effectively “phased” in that it doesn’t progress, it’s not a replay, and at any given point in time Zhaitan is both active and defeated depending on the character you speak to. (Schrodinger’s dragon)

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that sentiment (I don’t like the concept of phasing outside of very limited situations) and think that MMOs as a genre would be further along if it were more widely adopted, but to call that concept a pillar seems like wishful thinking more than anything else.

Guild Wars 2 as launched was obviously designed to be a static experience. Almost every system in the game is built to rely on things not changing. To get around that, I believe you are looking at a pretty fundamental rebuild of the levelling and progression system, the personal story, and the design of dynamic events, world bosses and other static / scheduled content.

Honestly – it’s such a daunting task that I don’t think it’s even possible to apply across the existing game world. It might be a worthwhile effort to design new zones around this new type of dynamic content, but the existing content would require such a rebuild as to be practically unfeasible.

For those advocating Phasing:

The main weakness of phased content is the further division of the playerbase. There are a lot of zones in GW2 that are barren on any but the most populated servers. If you add phases into that then you are looking at spreading population even further. Past a certain point, one questions whether there’s a point in having persistent zones at all rather than the instanced zones of GW1.

DevonCarver.5370:

I wanted to further discuss a couple of ideas. Firstly, … <snip> So I wonder if there is another way to accomplish the same goal, while not disenfranchising people who would now be unable to get into the maps? It’s a hard problem because the more populated servers face long queues while the less populated ones face empty maps. From my perspective there aren’t a ton of good options, which is why discussing this problem is pretty important.

…

Again, this is a good discussion, it’s really important to consider the costs to any action and to remember that our goal is to do the best thing for as many of our players as possible.

Devon,

Is there any appetite among the WvW team for solving the problem of queue length by forcibly cycling the queue more quickly? In my view such an approach isn’t ideal but does fulfil your “best thing for as many players as possible” goal.

If players were removed from WvW upon death, to be replaced by queued players, all else being equal you would have two players who both get to play in WvW rather than one playing a lot and another playing very little or not at all (stuck in queue).

It sucks for people that would normally get to play many hours of WvW straight (logging in before the queue begins for instance), but does serve the bulk of the playerbase more equitably.

BobbyStein.2315:

That’s among the many things we discussed doing, but we currently have technical limitations preventing us from making such a drastic change because it would break Personal Story dependencies. Until we have a system in place that separates the timelines of the Personal Story and Living World stories we are limited in the kinds of changes we can show in the open world.

One of the things that confused and confuses me about the Living World development scheme as a whole is where the decision came from to try to take an MMO created and launched with a static design philosophy, and layer on a progressive storyline.

By the very nature of the game as designed you are shackled to inconsequential changes to the background and to the gameplay areas, and if the changes are inconsequential then what point is there in a progressive story? You’d be just as far ahead writing static content that is now and ever shall be just like in every other themepark MMO from EverQuest on down.

Weird situation.

Anyway – unless you do a 180 on the current development direction, you will have to break the static elements of the game to cast off those shackles. It’s going to have to happen to give the Living World any credence at all, so IMO it would be better to do it sooner rather than later, and completely rather than a little at a time.

The personal story is mostly instanced so separating that out wouldn’t be too terribly hard. Simply including a title card or graphic at the start of the major branches indicating the year the instance is taking place would be ok. Perhaps dating it by the Mouvellian Calendar and by X years before Zhaitan’s fall (yeah, it’s a spoiler – but seriously…).

A short instance could be cobbled together to explain that the glowy star thingies are “touchstones in history” or somesuch, and your character is experiencing the life and actions of the famous hero that reunited Destiny’s Edge. Say that they are an initiate in one of the orders and they are learning from their past examples. It’s not a “Personal” Story any more, but it preserves the existing content with a minimum of fuss and disruption.

The zones have certain dependencies related to the storyline that would need to be jettisoned if the story was to have a real impact on the area (I’m thinking the hearts in particular), but I’m equally thinking that the hearts were a half-measure (training quest-hub players to the DE system) that could probably be tossed if there was enough story in the zones themselves to make it obvious where the dynamic events are taking place.

I’d also personally recommend going a little more grimdark in the tone going forward. GW Prophecies is a more effective storyline experience precisely because it deals with a pretty desperate time in history. Even though the Dragons are just as much (or greater) threats than the Charr armies were, I just don’t get the same kind of feeling of danger or “last light in the darkness”. Might have something to do with all the festivals but it just seems like business as usual in most of the continent.

I guess the closest analogy for what I’m feeling would be that it seems most of Tyria is like North America in WWII. There’s a war on and we’re doing our part, but it’s really far away and more of a concept than a direct threat. I’d be more interested in the storylines if Tyria felt more like the UK during the Blitz.

Random thoughts on a Friday afternoon I guess…

Chris,

In the spirit of honest feedback on releases and pacing, I really enjoyed the game for the first year, but honestly the pace of releases and the type of content starting roughly around Zephyr Sanctum burned me out completely.

Most of the Living World content I’ve seen produced between then and now is very strongly focused on farming / grinding / achieving. There is precious little new content to interest explorers, socializers and even PKers (to use the Bartle types).

Moreover, there is nothing there that really draws players into the story IMO. Each release is different in theme, but the storyline really doesn’t seem to me to be much more than window-dressing over the same basic endpoints:

“The queen is having a celebration” = better farm the champions for their loot.
“Scarlett is attacking the queen” = better farm the Aetherblades for their loot.
“The Mad King is rising again” = better farm the labyrinth for….
“The krait are doing something” = better farm…

I realize this is not unique to GW2 but boy I was hoping that the dynamic event system would amount to more than yet another loot slot machine.

What I was hoping for was a truly dynamic series of zones throughout the game. One which has an ebb and a flow to it rather than just a recycling pattern. I was hoping that this would play into an overarching meta-event driven by the players that pushed the plot forward somewhat organically.

Dream with me for a moment:

Instead of the static zones and scheduled encounters in the zones between Lion’s Arch and Orr, what if each zone had an interlinked series of dynamic events who’s success or failure status drove the status of the events surrounding it in a spiderweb of consequence.

Players need to push towards outposts and defences (kind of like how WvW is but with PvE mobs dynamically spawning as appropriate), they need to fortify them (running supply or escorts), they need to weather counterattacks and send out deep strike forces into very hostile areas (even other zones) to knock out places of power to stem the tide.

Dragon champions periodically swoop from the sky and must be driven off with player-built siege engines (made from limited resources to prevent simply blanketing the place with them). Hard pushes of enemies arrive trying to throw back the players as they proceed. Then as the whole zone is taken by the players, a big fight needing lots of coordination (similar to Tequatl the new) occurs to lock the zone down and open the next.

And importantly – it would be in a cycle. The road to Orr happens over a course of several months, but then when it succeeds (with an epic full zone sized fight against Zhaitan) everything quiets down for a few months to allow players some R and R before the next one begins.

Perhaps I’m rambling…

TL / DR
As much promise as the game held initially for “changing the MMO landscape”, I feel it’s fallen into the same ruts as every other MMO before it. I feel most story releases are simply wallpaper providing flimsy context for the same “grind to make your character better” mechanics used for a decade or more now.

I would love it if I could log into the game and have something put in front of me that I know really does matter to the evolution of the world. Something that I feel I can get behind and pull as part of a team to accomplish. WvW actually does provide some of that feeling (and I enjoyed it thoroughly for a year) but that game type is currently an underdeveloped sideshow that obviously doesn’t get the same resources as the PvE game.

As it stands, at this point there is no motivation for me to come back because I simply am not interested in mindless repetition of the same actions in order to make pretend money or to change the colour of writing on some piece of gear. There is nothing heroic to achieve, thus there is no need for heroes, just farmers.

If we’re keeping the scoring system as it currently stands, then “population imbalance” and “landslides” are a function of having certain coverage gaps. In other words, during prime NA time, three servers might actually be very closely matched, but one of the servers pulls ahead every single time because they also have enough numbers to overwhelm outside of prime NA time.

So then there are a couple of options:
- try to weight the scoring system such that certain times are more meaningful than others. Leads to people playing at off-hours feeling like their contribution is worthless.

- separate the timezones as fairly as possible to allow scores to more accurately reflect the competition in that timezone.

Let’s run with the second scenario:

Three 8 hour blocks. (Block A) 8pm-4am EST, (Block B) 4am-12pm EST, (Block C) 12pm-8pm EST.

Fifteen minutes before the end of a given block, the active zones close to new players and the zones for the next block are spun up (similar to how it works with patches). At the end of the block, all remaining players in the zone are kicked to LA and a snapshot of the overall scores, as well as the ownership and upgrade status of each objective is taken and stored. The zones for the new block are spun up using the snapshot of that block from the day before.

Scores are reported by block throughout the week. People would see their win/loss in the context of the block they play in rather than feeling they were snowed under by a more populated server.

Ideally – if it’s even possible – the server matchups would be done block-by-block rather than having all three blocks with the same server matchup, but I could see why that wouldn’t be possible.

Local superiority becomes all that matters, global imbalance is less concern. If three servers can fill a queue for 8 solid hours, they they are evenly matched regardless of what happens in the other two blocks. Moreover, since there is a defined endpoint, I think you’d see pretty spectacular fighting right up to the block change-over, and then everyone would be able to log off happy, knowing that their efforts will not be undone until the start of their timezone (which I’d bet the more dedicated players would be there to see – it would be like they never stopped fighting).

This scheme also doesn’t marginalize any particular playtime as the first option above would.

I know that the snapshot would be possible. I suspect it wouldn’t be that hard to run a script to automatically flag and upgrade objectives to match the snapshot. The server tech I describe is already used in the game elsewhere. I fully admit I don’t know anything about the backend here, but it all seems plausible from the outside looking in.

Honestly, I don’t think that the 24/7 is ever truly going to promote player satisfaction. Every other RvR-like system I can think of suffered from the problem of population imbalance and the players always always complained about it. GW2 is currently no different from what has gone before on that score – but honestly I think it could be. I think separating out various timezones (fairly and with equality) is virtually the only way this particular game-type can be universally satisfying.

Crazy idea incoming:

What if you could no longer resurrect at a waypoint within WvW zones?

Stick with me here:

The way it is now, if you are queued for a map, you are waiting for someone on that map to either get tired of playing or disconnect. In effect, one person is playing their preferred game-type at the expense of another.

What if (if it’s programatically possible of course) you could no longer rez at a waypoint in WvW zones? Then whenever a player is defeated, they are limited to (let’s say) 5 minutes in the defeated state before they are forced to resurrect in Lion’s Arch (or perhaps those new Edge of the Mists zones) and requeue to enter WvW.

This would have the effect of force cycling the queued population much more frequently than happens now. Instead of one person playing for an hour while another is queued waiting for that hour, it’s more likely that both players would get to play in WvW for at least part of that hour.

Yes, it’s a worse situation for the people who usually get into WvW first and avoid the queue, but it’s more equal for the playerbase as a whole.

It might have a slight zerg-breaking effect as well. Zergs (generally I’ve found) aren’t terribly organized or team-oriented. As people get dropped, a zerg is less likely than an organized group to pick up defeated people. If those defeated people are replaced with new players from the queue (who don’t know the location of the zerg immediately), I think it’s possible that the zerg might attrit more over time than an organized group would.

Yes, it would be harder for guilds and organized groups to maintain cohesion, but equally, it’s actually important for guilds and organized groups to focus on picking up their dead – counter attacking an area to get to their defeated allies before they are kicked.

This would also introduce a new risk-reward dynamic that might be interesting. People (on high population servers anyway) would be more conscious of the risks of being defeated (i.e. it impacts their playtime) and might make different choices than when defeat is just a small amount of silver and a short run back to the fight.

Specifically on the topic of gross server population differences. The solution (as much as there could be one) was already in place back at launch. The Glicko system (with a few procedural tweaks to keep the ratings within shouting distance between tiers) was reasonably good about generating matchups that were “competitive” relative to the established scoring system. The whole point of the Glicko system was to ensure that servers were matched which could gain roughly similar average PPT over the course of the week.

Of course, because server populations don’t shift wildly from week to week, we ended up playing the same servers (the most ideal populations relative to our home servers) week after week. That was the whole point of the system, but some players interpreted the ranking as a measure of “best” and other players complained of boring matches if the opponents were always the same, so the system was changed and we wound up with wildly imbalanced matchups in every tier. It may be too late to return to that system now, but that was the most “balanced” time we ever had in WvW.

Overall though, main problem that I see with relation to population balance is that the whole system of WvW suffers from a fuzzy objective.

It seems to want to play as a league-type sporting event, but then makes no effort to enforce balanced teams and match-ups.

In some ways it seems to want to simulate open warfare, where a balanced fight is usually the result of a tactical mistake, but then the system intervenes with periodic resets and points accumulation, and on top of that there is no tactical or strategic reasoning behind fighting this fight at all.

If WvW is to be a sporting-event, then world populations need to be balanced the same way that sports league teams are. Somehow teams will need to be picked in a reasonably even fashion and assigned to a given “side”. As pointed out previously, WvW is the only server restricted element of GW2, so it doesn’t really matter what servers are played for – WvW players could be shunted around the servers as needed. I’d imagine that metrics could be generated to give each player or guild a possible home based on WvW activity and timezone – but it would honestly be a lot of work and of uncertain success at the end.

If WvW is instead supposed to be a wargame, then there needs to be an elimination of the “gamey” aspects of points-per-turn and weekly resets, and installation of hard and fast strategic reasons for holding the keeps and towers on each map. The problem would then be engineering it such that the eventual victor has great difficulty holding their gains and the system naturally falls back to a more balanced state. A mercenary system would probably go a long way to help in such a vision as well.

It might seem trite, but I think that the population balance problems are really secondary to much more fundamental issues in the WvW game-type, and without solving those issues the specific problem of pop balance is grabbing for the tail of the problem rather than the head.

Chris,

I believe you may need to be more specific when posting these topics for discussion (that is, unless the purpose is to cast as wide a net as possible). In this instance, it’s not overly clear exactly what flavour of population imbalance we are supposed to be discussing, as I’m reasonably sure there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

There is the global population imbalance (i.e. total WvWvW population on server X is greater than that on server Y), there’s the timezone imbalance (i.e. the Oceanic population on server B is way higher than any other server in that timezone), and then there’s the hour-by-hour population imbalance (i.e. it’s no fun to play WvW on Wednesdays at 3pm because we’re always outnumbered twenty to one).

I’m guessing the overall flavour is the gross imbalances, but at times they’ve all been hot-button issues.

For the record, I personally would find it annoying to have to go to a certain location whenever I wished to check in on the lore. I get that it would be somewhat more immersive to have to go to the Priory library or the home instance, but all-in-all I would rather be able to access the lore compilation (whatever form it takes) from virtually anywhere in the game world rather than one specific spot.

Given that there is rarely a reason to go to the home instance or (even moreso) the Priory, having the lore-bot or whatever stuck there likely wouldn’t actually get many more eyeballs on the storyline than just having it all on the website would (IMO, grain of salt and all that).

A bunch of these suggestions bear really strong resemblance to the Tome of Knowledge interface used in Warhammer Online. For all the faults of that game, the ToK was a pretty effective means of integrating lore, quest UI and achievements all in one place.

(http://warhammeronline.wikia.com/wiki/Tome_of_Knowledge)

For those that didn’t play WAR, the Tome was a book-like UI window with a bunch of tabs. You could get a recap of the general storyline (similar to the personal story window in GW2), a list of achievements and titles (similar to the Hero panel), a quest log, and a few tabs of lore and background info.

The text for the lore and background would unlock as you achieved things. As you kill a certain number of a given mob type, another paragraph on the ecology of that mob would fill in (and the UI icon would blink to show you that something had unlocked). As you met important NPCs, you would get a background on them (usually written in-universe if memory serves). As you explore a zone you get unlocks showing a concise story recap of the zone.

Taken all together, it was a really effective, centralized way of relaying all the important information needed to frame what the PCs were doing in the world, while not beating people over the head with it. As well, because all that other information (quests, achievements, etc.) was centralized to the ToK, players learned to look at that UI element for pretty much everything – so it wasn’t difficult to achieve pretty wide uptake for the lore bits as well.

Honestly, most of the elements you’d need to create a Tome of Knowledge in GW2 seem to be pretty much present all ready. The achievements and unlock structure already exists, it would seemingly just need to be roped together into a single UI element with a bunch of fiction written (which could readily be crowd-sourced from the folks in the lore forum if desired). I believe the Devs would see a huge return on investment if they just cribbed the Tome concept completely.

If cut-scenes are out of the question (I can see why), I think there will be no option but to put something like this in-game if the devs want the storytelling to improve. MMO storytelling is basically a forced first-person limited perspective narrative, and doing stories from that writing style well is insanely hard. Putting a UI like this in-game gives them the out of using a third-person omniscient perspective to set the scene for the players. The website stories are doing the same thing, but because not everyone knows of them it’s really tripping up the storytelling in general.

Maximillian Greil.1965:

I’m not saying they’re not easy to do. I’m just saying I’m tired of doing them. Why are achievements the primary goal of the patches?

Honestly, this is why I stopped playing GW2. It isn’t as though the random tasks in each patch are that difficult (though some are time-consuming), I could certainly do them as I did every other checklist between launch and the Queen’s Pavilion.

However, past a certain point I just have no interest in doing them any more. Each patch essentially revolves around carrying a clipboard in hand, focusing on checking the boxes one by one before the content disappears. What story there is gets buried under the to-do list, and isn’t paced well enough owing to the structure and frequency of patches.

Like you, I simply stopped doing the checklists, and suddenly realized there was nothing else to do. Everything else is still in the same state (more or less) as it was at launch and it’s simply uninteresting to me after doing it for a year or so.

Honestly, at this point I don’t think there’s a road back. The playerbase that is still active in GW2 is by-and-large composed of players that either don’t mind or actively enjoy the checklist style of play. Those that don’t enjoy it have been quietly (or not so quietly) disappearing over the course of the last year. If the Developers make any radical changes to the way they present content now, they risk losing those players as well.

Lots of people like structure in their gaming. They like having a to-do list, they really, genuinely like the process of gradually farming coin or materials and getting little trinkets as they go. Sadly, as much as I enjoy aspects of GW2 I don’t think that’s me and I don’t really blame the developers for not catering to my playstyle.

One last thing bothers me about this thread – beyond the nitty gritty of what to talk about and how to do it.

What exactly is going to change that will result in ArenaNet developers coming here and having open and frank “collaborative” discussions with their (volatile) playerbase?

Or – put another way – these forums have been here for a year, yet it is a select subset of developers who have chosen to post at all, and an even more select subset (i.e. maybe enough to count on one hand) who could be considered to be frank and honest in their feedback.

The evidence that we have (which I guess shouldn’t be talked about) indicates that interacting on the forum is not really popular with a number of developers, and that when some devs do interact more constantly it leads to some strife between co-workers.

So I guess my question (and concern) is “what is going to change in the current culture such that more and varied developers from all areas of expertise will want to come here and have more frank discussions with the forum dwellers?”

I mean, I can’t see anything good coming of forcing developers to post here that don’t like posting on forums, nor can I see anything good coming from more red posts saying variants of “good stuff is coming but we can’t talk about it until it’s done”.

Maybe it’s pessimism, but it’s been on my mind since you started this thread and I thought I’d put it out there.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Safari.3021:

In game Polls:

Barmen.

You talk to a barman in a tavern, they chat yto you, ask you questions, you give your responses.

Anet get their poll.
Player recieves tankard of ale for their time.

Encourage participation by making “visit tavern for a drink” a daily achievement when a poll is needed

haha this makes ingame polls actually immersive, nice idea Only problem I can think of: how do you make the connection between the things you want to ask about (a specific event etc.) and the dialogue?

Edit – my bad, missed the bit about the achievement to draw them to the bar. The rest still stands though. I don’t think immersion is as important as making sure the polls are as widely available as possible.

The other problem is how do you get the players to the bar? Outside of the roleplayers I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone ever enter a bar in-game.

A polling option that is completely immersive and rarely used is a waste of time.

A poll about the direction of the game is non-immersive on the face of it. You are asking people about their personal opinion on game development issues. Trying to dress it up is (IMO) adding unnecessary complication and barriers to entry that shouldn’t be there.

You need a poll option to be obvious and available to every player in the game. A blatantly obvious UI option (as was mocked up earlier in the thread) or a polling function in the launcher itself are the best options available.

AntiGw.9367:

Lonesamurai.4852:

AntiGw.9367:

Lonesamurai.4852:

AntiGw.9367:

I don’t see how polls could give you more information than participation, activity and click statistics.

It would tell them what those doing them actually THINK of the content they just did

How is that more useful than actual statistics?

I have done TA 10 times in the last week, I have NOT enjoyed it, but STATS show I have by doing it 10 times….
A poll AFTER would tell them that I HADN’T enjoyed it, but did it for Deadly Blossoms and achievements I felt I needed to do in case it was gated content

Stats don’t show anything, the analysis of the stats does. What you describe is a flawed analysis.

A poll assumes that people answering it actually know what they are doing. The problem is that most people don’t. These forums are covering most of any usable feedback the playerbase can provide, and even then you see how full of crap it gets all the time.

Is there a reason it’s an either/or option for you?

Usage statistics are valuable, but they’re after the fact. Opinion polls and market research are before the fact and can be used to drive development in a direction the playerbase actually wants.

Virtually every major industry on the planet uses market research to drive their product development, there’s no reason MMORPG development wouldn’t benefit as well.

Nuzt.7894:

Grimthagen.6019:

Erick Alastor.3917:

No one will be forced to respond, and invasiveness will be minimal.

My main concern with this would be the fact that if no one is forced to respond, then you will get self-selection bias incorporated into the poll and the whole thing becomes questionable.

For a poll to be of value, it has to take a relatively unbiased cross-section of a population. In this case, MMO developers have the opportunity to actually capture the opinion of every single one of their active players. There are marketing agencies and departments that would give body parts to have that kind of access to their target markets.

I’ve never really understood why MMO developers past and present haven’t taken greater advantage of this unique capability they’ve been given.

Its as simple as voting, the option to use it is there for everyone, if some choose not to use it then they don’t reserve the right to complain about what they couldn’t be bothered to participate in,

Opinion polls are not the same as voting. It is in the company’s best interests to have as many people answering as possible to ensure that they have an accurate idea of the desires in the market they are trying to please.

Democratic systems actually benefit from having lower participation, as the goal for each party is to ensure they win the election. It’s easier to win if a smaller number of people vote, thus giving greater proportional power to organized voting blocks.

However, that is delving into politics and the flaws of a democratic system, which isn’t really on topic.

Kosmo.5187:

Be careful with polls. They may seem like a good solution to many people, but they can also be incredibly deceiving. …snip…

This here would be why I would recommend bringing a specialist on-board. They’ve got an economist to run the economy in-game, if they want a polling system then they should be hiring someone who designs poll questions for a living.

For those that don’t like the fact that polls don’t give enough opportunity for feedback – that’s why we have these forums. Put a hotlink from the poll to a feedback discussion thread here and you’re done. For bonus points, have the login credentials from the launcher propagate to the forums so that anyone hitting the hotlink is automatically logged in and can post their feedback right away.

Erick Alastor.3917:

No one will be forced to respond, and invasiveness will be minimal.

My main concern with this would be the fact that if no one is forced to respond, then you will get self-selection bias incorporated into the poll and the whole thing becomes questionable.

For a poll to be of value, it has to take a relatively unbiased cross-section of a population. In this case, MMO developers have the opportunity to actually capture the opinion of every single one of their active players. There are marketing agencies and departments that would give body parts to have that kind of access to their target markets.

I’ve never really understood why MMO developers past and present haven’t taken greater advantage of this unique capability they’ve been given.

Regarding poll location – I’d put it in the launcher. It’s the one part of the game that every active player sees and interacts with on a regular basis. If it’s in the UI somewhere people will miss it, or they’ll get in game and get occupied with everything and forget to fill it out.

If the poll is put on the launcher, it should override the Launch function but give the player the option of declining to answer (which is a stat that should also be reported) or putting off answering until next time they launch. Leave it run for a week or so and you should have a pretty powerful sample of the population.

I’d also suggest publishing the results to the playerbase rather than keeping it hidden.

I’d finally suggest not being too overconfident in your in-house ability to design polls properly, it’s actually tougher than it appears if it is to be done correctly.

I agree with the tenor of the majority of the post – these forums have become pretty toxic in areas over the course of the year – but then again I suspect such toxicity does come from a genuine place of concern, passion and unhappiness with the game as it stands.

If no one cared, then no one would post. Many can see the potential greatness of the game and are frustrated with the directions taken and the opportunities “missed”.

That said, a couple of points I’d like to put my two cents worth in on:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

We do need to build out more time to be in dialog with you, specifically, following up on our own investigations of your suggestions and concerns.
We will work harder to achieves this.

As the post is titled “Collaborative Development”, I have to say that there is a long way to go on this score. ArenaNet’s policies are very restrictive when it comes to interacting with the forum, and it’s obvious to most people when they are being “handled”. The Super Adventure Box, World 2 situation is my case-in-point on this. Josh Foreman’s interaction with the forum should have been the model case for other developers. Instead it was taken as an example of what not to do.

True interaction with the customers in an MMO forum is messy. Developers will make mistakes and over-state things, community managers will have to do a lot of damage control at times, but if you are honest and detailed in your interactions then the players will eventually trust what you say and feel their feedback is valuable.

I think another element that would help with this would be lifting the curtain on game changes much earlier than what you do currently. As an example, CCP is releasing an expansion on 11 November, but they are already publishing detailed blogs illustrating exactly what changes are being made, right down to the numbers they have in progress on their test server.

This is one example of a more open team that could be described as “collaborative” in their approach to the playerbase.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

We are also trying to forge a truly ‘Living World’. Therefore with your continued support, and patience we can continue to break new ground. Not just with world of Tyria, but with the method by which we build worlds ‘together’.

The Living World is a bit of a conundrum that I wish you would open a more focused debate on. The concept is attractive, but in application it seems to be falling short. It’s an odd concept as it stands, whereas the world was designed and launched as a “themepark” application (with static zones and static attractions), the post-launch focus has been trying to layer a more “sandbox” approach on top of it and the dissonance between the two paradigms jars more than a little.

Personally I think the concept has merit, but the half-measured implementation of the “Living Story” currently is not very strong. Implementing a dynamic world is fine, but to do it right entails revamping the Personal Story to jive with it, reordering and cementing the timeline of the game out of this weird, nebulous “everything is happening concurrently” state it’s in now, and focusing a great deal more on plots, pacing and character development such that people care about where the story is going and are not just looking for the most optimal way to farm the new content.

Which also brings up an important point. Most everyone appreciates the fact that there is no carrot-on-a-stick treadmill at max level, however there does seem to be a real lack of novel things to do for max level characters that don’t involve farming for one thing or another. sPvP and WvW could be those things, but only for a certain subset of the population. What is really needed is some kind of expansive system that draws in max level PvE players. Zone-wide, massive multiplayer, coordinated PvE events / raids – essentially a PvE version of WvW – would be my suggestion, but that’s another area that could stand focused discussion and brainstorming with the active playerbase on the forums.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Killsmith.8169:

Whether you like it or not, you guys already have 3 different games. Each game type has a different structure, different rules, and different goals. I get where you’re going with your analogy, but it’s flawed. You aren’t answering the same question in three languages. You’re answering English questions in English, Japanese questions in Japanese, and Greek questions in Greek.

The way you’re doing it now, you have to come up with a fix for one game type that doesn’t effect the other two too badly. I would argue thakittentakes more work to do that than it does to split the skills and balance to solve issues unique to each game type. The upkeep shouldn’t be costly at all, you just don’t fix what isn’t broken. What could be more cost effective than that?

You can argue it’s different all you want to. But as the people actually DOING the work, you’re wrong. Nice theory crafting though!

We have 3 major factors impacting all work we do for balance: time, scope (the amount of balance work we have to do), and resources (in this case, available work hours). All 3 of these pull from a finite pool of resources, and all 3 have direct causal relationships. If you increase scope (do more splitting of skills), then you can increase scope. Period. This means you’re now putting more stress on the other 2 pieces of this puzzle: time and resources. You’ve made more work. So until we extend the normal day to 26 or 27 hours, or put more days in the year (which isn’t going to happen with the earth’s current distance from the sun and rotation) it’s simply not going to happen, or it’s going to degrade the quality of work you DO get out of your hours.

And it’s more work to balance the game types differently. It still takes time to implement those changes. It doesn’t save time just by not worrying about how the changes will impact the various game types.

Just to drive this metaphor firmly into the ground. Based on what I’m seeing and reading, the people that are evaluating your classwork (i.e. the players) are fairly strongly of the impression that you are doing all three of your classes primarily in English and hoping what little Greek and Japanese you’re sprinkling in is good enough to get by.

BTW – I don’t think you’re passing those secondary classes at the moment, but everyone is hoping you’ll be able to pull it together.

Personally, I’ve always thought it to be patently ridiculous that Zhaitan is “dead”.

I mean really – how do you actually kill the natural force that represents undeath?

In all fantasy literature, you destroy the undead by destroying their corporeal form or disrupting the magic that reanimates the dead flesh. That magic presumably doesn’t disappear but goes back to where ever the magic of undeath comes from. Zhaitan is where that magic comes from – so how could we possibly “kill” it.

I could see destroying its current form. I could even potentially see the logic that Zhaitan is subdued while it recovers from its defeat. However, I just can’t see how it could be “dead”.

To be technical, it’s a pretty long standing trope that the good guys are reactive, at least in typical fantasy literature. Think about it. How often does Batman go out to preemptively find and capture his villains before they can even start their plans?

The “good guys” are almost always cast in the defensive role. If they had their way, the world would stay in whatever the current status quo would be, or it would steadily progress from chaos to order (depending on the state of the world in question).

When the “good guys” start heading off on preemptive missions to exterminate other populations, they start looking a lot more like the bad guys.

In the case of the Dredge, they were held in slavery for many years and are currently a little ticked off about it, not to mention being forced to the surface by the Destroyers.

(Imperfect analogy – but it’s what’s coming to me right now) Advocating for the destruction of the Dredge is a little like the US Cavalry advocating the destruction of the Plains Indians because they were raiding the settlers. Who would you call the “good guy” in this scenario?

Try this tutorial:

AcidicVision.5498:

If you don’t want the cookies Anet is giving out until the cake is ready, you don’t have to have any. But you should know they are delicious. A lot of people like them. One of the new recipes they try might be a bit dry, so we come here and say “Hey Anet, thanks for the cookies, but this one was not as good as the rest because it was dry” and it will most likely be better next time. Also, each cookie means the cake is closer to done.

I cannot believe that I can actually use this quote in context but:

The Cake is a lie.

This development cycle they’re set upon does not promote the production of anything substantial, it promotes the continual generation of bite-size storylines and simplistic tasks. The new focus on achievement points will only reinforce this kind of content.

I would hold out no particular hope that the future will see anything materially different in scope and depth than what has been released in the Southsun / Bazaar / Politics series of patches.

Amun Ra.6435:

Anyways…no, this conversation has been going for some time now. LONG before any of the current nerfs were announced.

Unfortunately, this “conversation” (more innocuous than most of the words I could think of :P) really boils down to a playstyle vs. playstyle debate.

A reasonably noticeable number of players believe for one reason or another that accumulating gold is their endgame pursuit. As such they pursue the accumulation of in-game wealth through a preferred playstyle, either through farming or through trading. Trading is demonstrably superior to farming and so the farmers are calling for trading to be nerfed.

Same story as on every other forum here. Classes call for each other to be nerfed. Strict PvE players get upset when they feel they are being forced into PvP, casual players want hardcore content made more accessible, etc.

In fact – this is “conversation” bears a really strong resemblance to the classic PvE vs. PvP / risk vs. reward debate. I’ve never seen that debate resolved so I suspect continuing this one is probably a WOMBAT (Waste of Money, Brains and Time).

Xirin.8593:

Relevant xkcd comic:

That’s both relevant and awesome. Many win points to you.

This is a bit of a stretch IMO.

I really doubt that a city council election in Lion’s Arch is going to have much effect (if any) on anything going on in either Divinity’s Reach or in the Black Citadel. If that was what they were going for – I’d have to say it missed the mark.

I’d suspect it’s more likely that the festival to celebrate the Queen’s rule has been planned for a while (hence the construction hints going in with prior patches) and that the link to the Living Story will be what (inevitably) will happen to disrupt the festivities.

More pirates perhaps, or pirate moles, or pirates with flames shooting out of their heads, or … well, anything other than the world threatening forces-of-nature-turned-physical that are corrupting virtually everything surrounding the continent.

:P

Tom Gore.4035:

Why in earth would you do that, when you can just place a buy order for Twilight for let’s say 10 silver a piece? Your money will be stored there forever with no cost.

Out of curiosity – would someone who is concerned about the lack of a bank / need to use a guild bank explain why this Trading Post Buy order scheme wouldn’t work for them?

Take your lump of gold, create buy orders for something really expensive in whatever denomination you feel is useful, money for buy order is taken from wallet. When you need money you cancel one of the buy orders, no fees apply correct? Worst case is someone sells you Twilight for a few gold.

Am I missing something or is this far more workable than doing the guild bank workaround?

Nice strawman argument there.

Gaile said nothing about looting requiring skill, so extrapolating to that point and refuting it is pure fallacy.

Those rules are pretty clear, especially when applied against that example. “Spamming F” is pretty far from “one key = one action”. The quoted person is either willfully misunderstanding or is simply not trying to understand the point.

I don’t feel it’s so much “filler” as it is “busywork”. Narrow distinction I guess, but generally the same feeling.

Essentially, I get the feeling that ArenaNet is trying to lay down train track ahead of an onrushing freight train. They’re just trying to throw out whatever they can think of to keep the players busy in game and spending gems in the cash shop.

The casualty is that nothing that’s coming out really makes any sense, and moreover because it’s all being worked on simultaneously by different teams it comes across as very isolated and disjointed.

There’s a tenuous thread of continuity that runs through all the releases one way or another – so I would assume that the developers believe they’re adequately tying it all together – but despite the fact that there are some characters and commonality, it doesn’t seem like the stories are really framed to go anywhere (or perhaps they are and I just don’t care about where they are going).

What the Living Story needs is a truly epic overall story arc, something that captures the imagination of the playerbase but is big enough that it can contain victories AND defeats, multiple smaller story arcs (with their own heroes and villains) within the bigger one and is plotted out in enough detail and far enough ahead that it really seems that the world is moving forward with each release.

At the moment I would characterize the Living World as full of “groundhog content”. It pops up, players whack at it for a bit, it disappears, other (totally different) content pops up a couple of holes over, ad nausem.

I took a quick look at the polls.

In future you might want to add “null” response choices. For instance, I didn’t play the Aetherblade dungeon because I don’t generally like the dungeon experience. To answer that truthfully would be a No, but a more accurate response would be “Didn’t try it”. Could get a different metric on what people are or are not doing from the patch content.

You could also potentially break the Yes / No up into a 1-5 ranking. That might help with people who find a boolean answer problematic. There are other problems with a 1-5 ranking of course, but it might help.

So the question is if they changed and were brought out every 3 months, would you quit?

It’s a free game, so really what does “quitting” mean? I’d probably play less as the 3 month mark approached, but it would really depend on the type of content being produced. If it’s a lot of grinding to fill the time, yeah I’d probably quit playing for long stretches to allow content to build back up.

Would you stop spending real money in game?

Honestly, I haven’t spent much real money on the game because there hasn’t been anything worth spending it on. I, as a rule, pay for content not frilly appearance stuff. I’m also pretty good at statistics so I will not pay money for any of those RNG boxes.

New classes, new races, new zones, new things – all stuff I’d consider paying money for (if I judged it worth my time – that’s the weakness of a microtransaction model, the buyer has the ability to say things aren’t worth paying for after the content is made).

Would you be so un happy?

<shrug> I try not to get unhappy about games. It wouldn’t bother me if they changed their delivery schedule if they did it for the right reasons.

If you read the interviews about the LS the devs make it sound like without them the game would die. Is this true?

Tough to say. The concept of a Living World is definitely something that MMOs should be working toward – but GW2 isn’t currently hitting it out of the park. I personally think they should go back to the root storyline. A fight against world-devouring dragons is pretty epic in scale and could have a lot of depth to it. Given there’s a corresponding race to each dragon – there’s a lot of backstory and development being left on the table while introducing second or third string bad guys in places we don’t really need to care about.

And another thought occurs, does their current schedule cause you to spend more real money in game, and play more?

I don’t really play more, but the time I spend in the game is certainly less free-form and more “I have to do this to the exclusion of all else before it goes away”.

Like you, I think a constant stream of new content every two weeks is an unsustainable pace. It will likely wear out both developers and players. I’d rather see a more “module based” approach, where the storyline builds and develops on the two week schedule (or maybe a little longer) but then climaxes and there’s a month or so where not much is going on and the players can take a breather.

Perhaps all of these minigames should come with two “speeds”. Call it “beer league” and “major league” (:P).

Seriously – sometimes people play games with other people just for fun. They don’t keep score, they don’t measure appendages, they just do it for the sake of hanging out with friends.

Other folks are cut-throat competitors all the time, no matter what. They are always looking to measure their prowess.

Create two leagues. Same achievements for both, much better rewards (and scaled from first to last) for the competitive side. Everyone is happy.

I like most of the update – I just wish it was going to stick around. That’s a lot of man hours in ability design and map-making that are just going to go back into the Disney vault.

All the while, WvW players have been hollering for another map as playing the same two for a year is getting pretty dull – but they’ve been told “making maps is pretty hard”.

vOv

Valid point relative to the title. The core mechanics of the Living Story (so far) do run counter to some of the elements of the “manifesto” (though I’m really not sure holding that up at this point is particularly valid or fair to the dev team – some of whom probably had nothing to do with creating it).

Always be happy to see other people: Not so much, especially in the last couple of events. The Hologram projectors, the kite baskets – the mechanic behind those things runs directly counter to the philosophy that promoted gathering nodes that couldn’t be snaked in front of you.

No “kill ten rats”: No – I haven’t had to kill rats, but certainly a whole lot of Aetherblade pirates (zone-specific at that), Halloween monsters, holographic monsters, and so on. Each Living story has had some very repetitive grind achievements that were not supposed to feature in GW2.

Changing the world: Very iffy in my mind. Yes, Southsun did change substantially. The rest – not so much. Sure, places are added that weren’t there before (Craigstead for instance) but there’s really no lasting effect from Flame and Frost in those areas.

Play the way you want to play: This one is the one that gets me. I (and it appears many others) don’t really play the way we want, we instead frantically play the latest content with every spare minute we have before it disappears forever. The two week cycle I feel really limits what I can do given that I don’t get to play as often or as long as I used to when I was younger. If I want to do the latest content – I really have to focus just on that to the exclusion of anything else or I simply won’t get it done before it goes poof.

DevonCarver.5370:

It is absolutely intended that you can fight people in the JP. The fact that so many people are piling into the map to get the achievement is good for any and all of you who are capable of laying the smack down on them, and, if they manage to fight back is hopefully going to encourage some of them to stick around and play WvW. If you don’t want to get killed by other players, don’t play WvW. Plain and simple. The achievement isn’t required for getting the meta-achievement on purpose.

Devon – this isn’t the smartest way of going about achieving any goal of getting players to stick around WvW.

The jumping puzzle doesn’t showcase any of the fun elements of WvW at all. That why there’s usually very few people in there (unless they know there are a bunch of PvE players coming through that is). It’s a really good jumping puzzle in and of itself, which is why people are asking for it to be turned into a PvE model, but it is a terrible representation of what WvW is all about.

If you are putting Living World achievements into the puzzle so that WvW players don’t have to leave WvW to do them, that’s reasonably fine (though, since the puzzle is separate from WvW now it’s actually not the best approach – putting something new into the existing (and stale) zones would be better).

If you are putting Living World achievements into the puzzle to try to get WvW to appeal to players that primarily do sPvP or PvE – then just stop. Suck back, rethink, and come back out with a different approach.

Put the achievements out in the true WvW zones, figure out a rewarding system for WvW vets that would encourage them to “bring a newbie” out to play, anything else other than the puzzle would work better frankly.

It wouldn’t hurt to spend some actual development capital on the WvW zones either. Adding new skills of somewhat dubious character is nice, but actual additions to either the play area and/or the atmosphere of WvW would be far more likely to encourage new people to check out the system.

Hyung.6140:

Not sure if you’re talking to me or not, but I’m not sure any of that is applicable to what I’ve been saying.

It’s not about ‘feeling superior’ – I’m just going to miss the friendly competition with a couple of guildmates.

I’m also not screaming about it… I believe I’ve just made a couple of level-headed posts pointing out that I’m a little sad a small source of friendly fun has been removed as it’s no longer close to a level playing field between us (us being people I actually know and joke with about achievement points).

I’m definitely not saying people shouldn’t be rewarded for their GW1 achievements. I’m sure they’re very difficult and everyone who has them should be very proud.

I agree with you that it’s bad that people who start now can’t get a whole load of past achievements, in the same way that it’s bad that people who’ve never played another game can’t get everything in this one.

If it’s genuinely a problem for you, I don’t see why you and your friends couldn’t come to an agreement that, for sake of your AP competition, the HoM points simply don’t count. If it’s a friendly competition I’d imagine you can set your own rules and standards.

It can still be done. Look up the walkthrough on dulfy.net (or similar) and just put in the patterns as they appear on the walkthrough, even if you can’t see them. It should still work – I opened the door on TC a couple of days ago without being able to see the right cheek pattern.

Brom Malochson.9306:

Gaile Gray.6028:

Geo.3189:

-snip-

Hopefully they will address to my final request – and so that I can inform the community here – well mainly to those who have more than one GW2 accounts, of what to do, and what NOT to do.

Sorry, but for security reasons, we will not give you details on what took place. I know you want them; I know you feel you deserve them. But with our increased focus on cheating, exploiting, and other forms of abuse, what we tell a reinstated player can be used by people with malicious intentions, so we have to keep that info confidential.

Gaile, I wonder this myself now. If he did not know what he did to get his accounts terminated in the first place, how can he prevent from the same mistake again? The resolution states that the accounts were restored due to leniency, not due to no wrongdoing. Mistakes happen. What if he does the exact same thing (Not that your response is wrong, just that there are two points of view and I’m curious.)

This kind of Catch-22 situation is an absolute plague on current generation MMOs.

I fully agree that most of the people accused of doing wrong are actually doing wrong, and I applaud ArenaNet for doing what reviews they do rather than simply assuming a 0% false positive rate.

Still – being suspended like Geo was is bewildering. Then being reinstated with a dire warning without any further information is really difficult to interpret. If a player genuinely doesn’t know what was wrong in the first place, the warning only serves to make them paranoid about ever playing the game again (that is, if they care about the game at all – i.e. they are good and loyal customers).

I really hope that some company someday will create a policy that actually allows CSRs to say what exactly the player in question is “charged with”. I know why they currently don’t – but I’m simply not convinced that stance is the best practice, just that it’s the most common practice.

Vi Au.8341:

Why not give orbs 5-10 ppt for the team that holds the orb? its relatively insignificant yet still offer wvwers an objective. sure people can hack them but its not like it would unbalance the fights

also since the winning server would usually hold the orb, what is an extra 5 ppt per orb?

If it doesn’t matter then why bother with it in the first place?

zerospin.8604:

If you pay say 50s for an upgrade, it should count FOR YOU, not just for the team. Each successful defense of a tower that you invested in, should grant you 20% of your money back. This means, if you upgraded a tower single handedly you would be getting a load of money back, IF your team defends them. This is good investment. If you placed siege, and that siege was used to deal damage to players or walls, you should get extra credit, gold and exp for it when the defense event ends. This would give incentive for poeple to siege up towers to the max, and guard them, because they can expect to get their money back with percentage if it stays up for a long time.

This makes sense. Though I’d go further and say that if you’ve paid into upgrades, as long as the structure is held by your team and you are in the zone, you get a tick of coin back in return for your investment. Upgrading and defending a tower should be a money-maker IMO.

Yeah – it might promote people making stupid upgrade choices just to get in on the pay out, but I’m really not sure of the value in having the choices in the first place so I’d be ok with upgrading being a fixed, optimal path with no choices.

Define “participating” in WvW. Is a scout who hasn’t hit a person in 20 minutes “participating”? What about someone ticking siege in garrison? Is taking camps “PvEing”?

Also, anything that provides rewards will be the only thing people do. If taking Stonemist provides the greatest rewards, that’s all people will be doing in EB. Ninja groups will be trying to take Bay and Hills on whatever Borderlands they can a couple of minutes before the tick and then abandoning it, hoping it gets taken back before the next tick so they can get loot again.

Sorry – I don’t think it’s viable.