Guild Wars 2

Continued…

Bring it together. Right now the Living World does not form a cohesive narrative. It feels like a lot of disparate elements are being thrown at me, and they whiz by too quickly for me to connect with any of the characters or events. I have an excellent memory and can recall all manner of arcane minutiae from nerd lore (Turian biology is based on dextro-amino acids, for example), but I can barely remember what Canach was trying to do in Southsun Cove, and I certainly can’t remember why. A lot of the Personal Story characters weren’t very memorable either, but it’s much worse in the Living World.

Scarlet seems to be something of a bête noire for a lot of players, and I have mixed feelings about her. Her personality doesn’t bother me, but her apparent lack of motivation (besides causing trouble) does. She seems to be an attempt to unite the myriad enemies that have been introduced thus far, but there’s no reason why they’ve united or why she’s the one in control. They have nothing in common other than that they’ve been introduced as part of the Living World, so the only way to make sense of the proceedings is to break immersion. I’m interested to explore the ties she seems to have to the alternate steam creature universe that the Infinity Ball story touched on, but for the most part her powers are too vast and inexplicable to be more than mere writer’s fiat.

Build on what works. Guild Wars 1 introduced a large body of intriguing lore. The six gods, the Mursaat, Glint, and so forth. By all means, don’t play all your cards – if you’ve got cool plans for something, save it – but my favorite update so far, Bazaar of the Four Winds, showed that the Zephyrites had ties to Glint. It was just a hint (mostly, regrettably, not in-game but on your website), but it was there; a touch of the old tethering the new and vibrant to the world.

Other updates don’t feel like they fit in Tyria. Aetherblades in particular appear to have sprung into existence ex nihilo. It’s as though you’re throwing things in that seem cool, and I begin to doubt that you ever had much regard for how they fit into the established continuity in the long term. Of course, not everything is known yet, but shrouding everything in mystery for too long will cloud the narrative and alienate the audience.

Tequatl. Great stuff, really. Challenging content that requires a hundred people coordinating to succeed. The trouble is in the execution. Server infrastructure is not conducive to organizing large groups of people. I’ve only ever had success with a dedicated boss-killing guild, but they have to rely on clumsily ferrying guild members into overflows and competing with non-guildies for space. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve clicked the words “Join in Sparkfly Fen”… Couldn’t we select our own overflows?

Fighting Tequatl successfully is an all-day affair. I have to enter the zone hours ahead of time to get a shot at a decent overflow, then spend that time waiting for the spawn window to open. I have to hope that I don’t go AFK for too long, or the server kicks me. Once he finally spawns, usually either at the very end of his window or too soon to prepare, we hopefully win, and I get a chest full of greens that almost (but not really) makes up for all the world bosses I could have fought in that time. This is the epitome of waiting to have fun.

By all means, make another fight like Tequatl. But if it requires a hundred people working together, give us the capability to get those hundred people in one place.

So again, thank you for your patience. I’m looking forward to similar threads in the future.

Thank you to the devs for giving us a chance to discuss this with you. There have been a number of things about this game that have been troubling me for a while. And thanks to the other posters in this thread for your civility so far.

I agree with much of what has been said so far, but I’ll reiterate/rephrase and try to give suggestions.

Slow down. I deeply appreciate that you’re producing so much content for us at no additional charge, but I’m afraid that your effort might be going to waste. I’m a completionist, and for games that I particularly like, I want to experience all the content they have to offer. When you put out something new every two weeks, I have to devote an inordinate amount of time to getting through everything before the next update appears. Even if you daisy-chain the removal of the content, so that it lasts for a month with a two-week overlap, or even if it’s permanent, everyone has moved on to the next thing and I’m stuck playing catch-up. An example is Twilight Aetherpath; it’s much too long and difficult for anyone to have an incentive to retry once they’ve gotten all the achievements, but I’m still missing several.

Worse is when you introduce extremely difficult content that is gone before we have a chance to really learn it. Liadri is one of the hardest fights in the game up to this point, and I had a month to get to know it – only a few hours effectively, because I had a major project that month – before it disappeared. Aetherblade Retreat was even worse, since it was only available for two weeks. Don’t get me started on SAB Tribulation Mode; I finished it at the eleventh hour (again, major project), and I was a jittery wreck by the end. I don’t want to discourage you from making tough encounters (I’ll take issue with your apparent penchant for one-shot kill mechanics in another thread), but leave them available for us to try and fail. It took me years to finally finish the Domain of Anguish, and I still haven’t tried Urgoz’s Warren or The Deep – but I still can if I want to.

And I think Guild Wars 1 is a fine model for introducing additional content, particularly Guild Wars Beyond. It was much easier to do this with Guild Wars’s heavy reliance on instances, but all the work you put into War in Kryta and Winds of Change is still there for me to play years later. And it will never go away. I can experience these quests at my own pace, but with the Living Story, you’ve shackled us to a train that’s getting faster and faster. Invite us to come along with you and enjoy what you’ve made. We’ll join you. Promise.

So please reduce the update schedule to once per month, and make every addition permanent (or at least fully revisitable, achievements and all, in some fashion). I know you got complaints for Flame and Frost being too slow, but that wasn’t because it was once per month – it was four very small installments spread over four months. Surely there is a middle ground.

I know you like to have exclusive one-time events, so that people can say “I was there for Day of the Tengu.” That’s fine, but keep it limited to seasonal festivals like Halloween and Wintersday. There’s no reason to carry that over to everything else.