May I suggest a personal event system that would provide a way to address some of the issues raised in this thread along with having several additional benefits. Personal events are story-driven events that are triggered by specific things the character has done in the game. The system has been designed specifically for Guild Wars 2 and as far as I am aware no other persistent world massively multiplayer game has succeeded in accomplishing something like this.
The personal event system can address some of the issues raised in this thread because it is a highly flexible and adaptable information delivery system.
• Information that links the content of the biweekly releases into a more coherent and connected story can be released through personal events. Players can put the story together by combining the info they get from their own personal events with those others have done. In other words you learn about what’s going on in your living world by talking to other people who are living in the world with you.
• The large scale events introduced in the biweekly updates can be seamlessly integrated into the weave of everyday life in Tyria using personal events that illustrate how the big event affects the lives of ordinary people.
• Large content updates can be foreshadowed through personal events. In addition to a website that says “Strange things are brewing in Kessex Hills” strange things can actually start happening in Kessex Hills in advance of the big event. Players discover that something strange is happening in the world while they are living in the world rather than from a FB or Twitter post that says something is going to happen next week.
• Whether or not the designers decide to slow the biweekly pace of large content updates, new content can be continually added through new personal events. Moreover, the content added through the personal events can better pave the way for the large scale content. Instead of biweekly additions of a lot of new content that seems unrelated to much of what has gone before and goes away after two weeks we get more frequent additions of small scale content that leads up to a large scale event and then tracks the consequences of the big event over time while, at the same time, leading up to the next large event. Rather than trying to tell the story that makes sense of the big event though info dumps during the event or out-of-game resources like websites and social media blasts, the story can be naturally told in Tyria over the days or weeks leading up to the event. The ebb and flow of events in a real living world can be more closely modeled in the game.
Some of the ways in which the personal event system enriches and deepens the Living World concept
• The world will actively respond to individual characters in terms of specific things the character has done in the past which is something that is fundamental to worlds that are alive.
• The personal event system is designed so that players are likely to experience something new every time they log in and play for a reasonable amount of time. Something new can happen every day you live in a living world.
• Every zone in the game can provide new experiences for any character, of any level, at any time no matter how much time the character has spent in the zone or how long the player has been playing GW2. Zones are not static. You can go back to the zones where you grew up but life has gone on and they are not the same as when you grew up there. “Been there, done that” changes to “Been there, . . . whoa, that’s new”.
The personal event system can bring more – a lot more – to GW2 but that’s enough for now. The system was originally designed specifically for GW2 and I hope the people at ArenaNet will be interested in taking a look at it and thinking about whether or not it would be worth further consideration. I have put a good deal of time and effort into the system and if ArenaNet has no interest, it can be adapted for use in other games. For that reason, please forgive me for not discussing the details of how the system works in a public forum like this.
If people at ArenaNet think something like this might be of interest, please contact me and I will be very happy to share the personal event system with you.
Thank you for your time and attention.