First: thanks alot for asking us players!
I’m pretty sure that everything has been said already, but yet I’d like to put my two cents too. In advance please excuse my bad english
So, I also think that the LS concept (releases every 2 weeks) is a great deal and makes this game very attractive. But there’s no – as it has been said a few times – epicness. I mean we’re fighting dragons right? But after one year we only fought one elder dragon and there’s no noticeable progress in orr. The concept of a living story shouldn’t fritter into completely seperated storyline that have nothing(!) to do with the big story (fighting dragons, right?). I feels like reading a novel that has long fotgotten it’s common thread. There’s so much more content to release (only speaking of the elder dragons left) to fill a story that could last the next say 7 years. I don’t want to say there shouldn’t be content or storybranches aside of the mainquest, but everything has to fit, at least sometime, to the big idea.
To be constructive: why not put something like >phasing< to the world. In this stage of storyline (Zhaitan has been killed) there could be 2 instances of orr. The first as it already is, for players who haven’t fought him, and the second with maps on which we can clean orr from his henchmen. That should pretty well fit a serverwide cooperative content for weeks in which orr would change its face completely. Put hearts to it that firstly have to be unlocked by fighting a big boss or something else that needs a lot of players (for instance collecting 10000 whatever). Finally make orr a “normal” questing zone, before opening another say 3 maps that lead the players to the next elder dragon (content to last one year or so).
One thing to fading content: I see a lot of players that feel forced to play a specific type of content to reach all achievements. That’s not fun! I don’t think that making metaachievemts only reachable for players that login say 20 of 30 days is the right thing to do. Currently I see two kinds of LS content: the celebration content like hallween (which is great), wintersday, dragonbash and jubilee and the other “contextless” content. The first sort is well done. You should make every achievement available every time the celebration returns (what I think is your idea). The second sort is problematic. Here there shouldn’t be achievements so hard to reach as they were in the past. If the idea was putting them so hard to get that the players log in as often as possible, that backfires! Acutally that discourages people.
Finally one thing to the philosophy of putting LS instead of “real” expansions. I think there will be a lot more fomer players rejoin the game by releasing an expansion than by releasing permanent updates every 2 weeks. For someone who left the game month ago it’s an opstacle to rejoin because for him it feels like “huh, where do i have to go now?” What’s hard for a player that plays since release to get the living story, it’s nearly inpossible for someone, who made a break. New expansions (new dragon maybe) make a clear cut that potentially encourages those players to give it another try. And speaking for myself, i’d be agreeable to pay for new maps, new classes and such.
I’m closing by saying: Tell us the epic story there already is in the lore of the game.
(edited by PanLazarus.5497)