Guild Wars 2

wookiee.4631:

1. “We” means nothing. You can’t know how every other player feels. Speak for yourself.
2. Scarlet’s not going away, no matter how many “pleases” you tack onto your demand. And apparently, her story is largely set in stone now.
3. Why is this it’s own thread? It could have easily been posted here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/Does-anyone-actually-like-the-living-story/first
4. Maybe you should have read the CDI – Living World thread (it’s locked now, sadly) before making such a long series of posts that contain complaints that dozens of others (even including me) have made, much shorter in length, on these forums.

EDIT: And no, I’m not trying to minimize your opinion, I just see no point in it being so long and it’s own thread.

1. No, I can’t know. That’s why I said “I think”, because I may be wrong in my assumption and statement. I never claimed infallibility on that.
2. That’s what scares me. That’s why I’m speaking up.
3. Thank you for the link. Forgive me if I just wrote this up and felt like sharing it in its own thread. My frustration levels are running quite high.
4. Why? It’s locked, right? So I can make myself feel even worse? Look at all the negative feedback and cry more deeply on the inside?

And PLEASE! NO MORE SCARLET! No more! -cries- I’m tapping out! I’m done! I cannot participate in Living Story the way it keeps tweaking and tweaking the game and the lore to its needs. Every…single…patch… I’m just worn out. I feel no more motivation to log in and play this charade in a circle anymore.

And the scary thing, Anet? I’m not the only one who feels similar. Not every single bit of my post is going to be agreed with, but I think I speak for a majority of the current playerbase when I say: please, enough is enough.

Please take stock of your game’s quality at launch, and at present. Please take stock of where your devs are headed with this game. Please see how upset and confused you’ve made the players, and how exhausted we all are of this cycle. I apologize for the blunt criticism, I only want this game to revive its former glory, and head back in the direction we all hoped for. I want what’s best for this game, its world, its community. And I don’t believe it is going that way.

Thank you for your time.

A cartoon villain. Always behind every little thing, always commiserating in the background, super devious and evil and unstoppably powerful, and yet she’s thwarted every weekend. But lo, she always gets away! And she comes back next week with ANOTHER devious, evil plan that will destroy the world! I’m just not interested in her motivations, or some half-hearted, kinda-really-unfitting explanation for why she’s up to no good.

I’m sorry but that’s the feeling I get from the Molten Alliance, the TOXIC alliance(Hmmmmmmm………), the entirety of her character and every evil plot she’s been involved in. (The Aetherblades were awesome, but again, this was before we realized the connection) You guys will be fine, you just made a mistake. You goofed. The gamble didn’t pay off. It’s okay. We’re only human. We can forgive you, if you’ll just stop pushing so much content with her and give us a moment to breathe. For the love of Big-Nosed Ted, just give us a breather.

Enough Scarlet. I beg you. Let’s go back to the magic of the game we had at the beginning, which is one of the most visually stunning, wide-open, exploration-friendly games I’ve ever seen outside of sandboxes. And even compared to those games, kitten this is fun! Dragons, oh my! Dead gods awakening, oh my! Power struggles and intrigue! The possibility of revisiting old areas from the first game, and seeing what has happened in our extended absence. Think of what’s been going down in Cantha and Elona and —- endless, fulfilling, INTERESTING possibilities.

Which brings me to my two pleas to you ArenaNet: No more temp content. I don’t mind if we never see an expansion, or if EVERYTHING isn’t kept from month to month, but please. This is just a super-depressing, demotivating business model that saps any will of mine to log in, because I’ll have three days to accomplish everything, and might not even get that much regular time in.

Contd

And now for the big hot button topic of the moment: Scarlet Briar

Scarlet: a deep shade of red.
Briar: Aha! That’s a plant word!

Just the name feels uninspired. Cliche. Does not bode well…

Okay guys—honest. You made a mistake. You thought you’d introduce a nice, clever arc about a character you believed we’d enjoy. But we didn’t. We REALLY didn’t. And I understand that this content has been in development for awhile, so there’s a bit of delay between that and release. But at a certain point you have to be in a position where you KNOW you’re just working on something that is going to hurt your player base, upset them, and just need to stop and perform some emergency surgery on it to save its life. Sometimes even cut the content altogether. Quality assurance, aye? Sometimes you have to know when enough is enough.

Look, you’re not bad people, I’m certain. Absolutely sure of this. You’re just as passionate about games as I am. I’d probably love to sit down at a burger joint and BS about retro gaming, and Star Trek vs Star Wars, and all sorts of gloriously geeky topics with you, for hours. You guys made a mistake, it’s okay, you’re human. It’s not the end of the world, the end of yours, or ours. Life will go on.

But we don’t want any more Scarlet. Even her fans are starting to get a little tired by how frequently she’s incorporated in every single thing in the game, to an absurd degree. It’s being force fed to us with every patch. Scarlet is involving herself in EVERYTHING, even things she literally could not have physically been involved in I’m guessing. Would she have traveled back in time in the Abbadon fractal, should that have won? Gone with Garrosh to tame Abbadon and ride him into the gates of Valhalla and toilet paper Odin’s drinking lodge? Races that cannot and will not ever work together, but they do. Impossible incongruencies with the established setting and lore(graduated all three colleges anyone? We haven’t forgotten that one, and what it originally said). And on top of it all? She doesn’t feel interesting.

From a player’s perspective, I am not motivated to participate in content involving her, even if it is pushed towards my face every time I log in. She does not interest me, she is not captivating or memorable, only infamous. I do not enjoy her character, I do not enjoy the content made for her, or altered for her, and I personally feel that she does not fit the setting at all. If you guys had implemented her in a separate game built around that character, she’d do fine. She would fit the setting of such a game! But she does not fit Tyria as the game existed at release. Her arc has spiraled out of control into, quite bluntly, saturday-morning-cartoon-villain fanfiction levels of absurdity. Because that’s what she is.

Contd

Firstly, let’s touch on my biggest beef with the game right now: temporary content.

I do not believe in it. I do not feel inspired to participate in it. I struggled to keep up with it when it was new, and have all but given up hope of doing so now. You guys advertised this game as a “casual-friendly MMO with depth and challenge when you go looking for it”, with no obligation to the latter whatsoever. That people with rigorous schedules or infrequent playing time could still enjoy almost every facet of your game to its fullest, without worrying about dedication or regularity in their gaming. But temp content flies in the complete opposite direction of that. It is just that—-content that never gets reinstated, save seasonal stuff(which I’ve never minded, because it is what it is—holiday content). It is entirely unfair to the player who is as dedicated as any other, who buys gems to support more content, who devotes a great deal of their available free time to the game, to log in and be told “oh man you missed the best patch!”. To know that, unlike permanent content(implemented via expansion or otherwise), where it will always be there for them to go back and experience, they missed the boat. That’s just silly. That’s not taking care of your customers. And don’t get us started on the gamut of achievements for each Living Story patch which feel like a treadmill to get the best items and content out of the patch.

As a player with very irregular playing time, I feel cheated out of content that I COULD have enjoyed, WOULD have loved, but life got tough on me in the wrong spots. And unlike every other major online game I’ve played til now, that content is gone forever. It is not static and in place long-term for me to go back and experience with friends, and see what they were raving about. To enjoy when I can get to it, even if I’m late. I’m not talking years and years, but a few weeks, maybe months down the line, where I can go see where the game has progressed in my absence. I cannot even do that—four weeks and it’s gone. And what of new players? What are we to tell them? In other games, you can always backtrack, follow the trail all the way through the content that’s existing. See it for yourself. But not in GW2. I feel quite utterly robbed, Anet. I feel betrayed. What’s your answer going to be, that your business model doesn’t include casual players, or new players, like them? I’m honestly trying to think of reasons, and I cannot come up with any. I’m very VERY frustrated, guys.

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Before I begin, let it be known…

… that for over a decade I was a fiercely loyal fan of Blizzard, one of your biggest competitors, Anet. They made quality products, without ever sacrificing the story or the continuity of their product. Even you guys have to admit that with Warcraft in particular, they did a phenomenal job re-envisioning the lore for Warcraft III, from a predecessor that was made back in 94 with pixels, elbow-grease and love. And again, in World of Warcraft at its beginning. But as WoW dragged on, and the story became increasingly more bizarre, less consistent, and cartoony in many cases, I lost my faith. The story was uninteresting anymore, the characters less relatable, even laughable, and the content of the game kept gravitating away from where they initially promised to go. That was when I swore off MMO’s, subscription or otherwise, because it was just not worth my time. I’ll leave their other titles aside, but let’s just say that WotLK was the last Blizzard product I purchased for myself.

…that after many years of wandering the gaming landscape, searching for something to fill the massive void left by my once-immense love for WoW, I found Guild Wars 2. I had always heard positive things of its predecessor, but seeing as my time and loyalty was already invested elsewhere during that game’s zenith, I never tried it myself. I watched the gameplay videos for this sequel, listened to the podcasts and the interviews with developers, and I found myself increasingly interested in playing an MMO again. When I finally installed it for myself, and played, and played, and played, and lost myself in it… After all this time, I thought I had finally found ‘the one’ again, that I could pledge my loyalty to another franchise again and really get into this game. I was already shelling out money in support through your gem store, voicing my support on the various forums, stretching my tendrils into the community and just soaking it all in. I found a new home.

So do not misconstrue what I’m about to write as purely hostile. Yes, it will be critical. Yes it will be brutally honest and blunt, but I must be. I’m just not happy with things anymore, and I want you guys to know why, and what I, and many many other players, believe is going wrong. You’ve crafted a wonderful product, a great game that has occupied almost ALL of my gaming time for the last year solid, but it has begun to unravel. And very, very quickly at that.

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