Guild Wars 2

Hi guys, sorry I’m a bit late to this conversation! I’ve been a faithful supporter of Guild Wars 2 since years before its release and I’ve poured hundreds and hundreds of hours into it. I pre-ordered Heart of Thorns and feel that I’ve committed more than enough time, money and love into this game to feel that my voice should be heard and understood as coming from a place of insight and not ignorance(along with everyone else in this thread).

I love this world. I loved the original Guild Wars lore and have loved being immersed in Guild Wars 2 despite it having its rocky patches in the personal story (which the living world seasons really learnt from! Good work Anet!) and the fact that it has yet to really honour or expand on Tyria’s history and unanswered questions (please hire WoodenPotatoes as a lore master Anet!).

I’m glad that I purchased Heart of Thorns and completed the personal story, but I have to be honest I have felt neglected and excluded in my experience of participating in the expansion.

Here are my demographics:
- None of my friends play mmo’s or this game bar 1 who only tunes in on the release of expansions or living word seasons for about 2 weeks before disappearing into the ether. I am alone amongst my peers in my love for Guild Wars 2.
- I am not a hardcore player, never have been never will be. Doesn’t mean that I’m not good at GW2 (or other games), I just don’t find fulfilment in grinding for money, experience, achievement points or top tier gear (only one of my chars have all ascended gear and one legendary – the rest will have to settle for exotic).
- I have probably made something close to 20 chars and spend an immense amount of time creating the look and feel of my character and enjoying the role playing elements of this game. Settling on a build can be infuriating for me as I care more about what weapons I imagine my character to have then what weapons are actually viable (desperately wanted my main Guardian to role sword/shield, but have finally settled with the fact that the mace/shield & hammer is the better option).

So with this in mind, what I loved about the core game of GW2 was the fact that I could immerse myself in exploring the world, being the hero that aided those heart quest people, participating in the local wars and struggles of different map militias and feeling that it was significant to my character’s experience (I.e. fighting in the harathi hinterlands with my human seraph guardian) and being able to do all this at my own pace, being able to observe and speak to characters, inspect and discover lore, enjoy vistas and landcscapes and feeling enjoying my well earned title of THE commander of the pact (now I bear in mind that the Heart of Thorns personal story did a great job okittennowledging this and honouring it!).

My problem with Heart of Thorns is that the excitement of engaging in the content I purchased including: 4 new maps, exploration, map completion and thus masteries as well as the lore, motivations and characteristics of the local inhabitants and new races, has been robbed of me by the fact that the difficulty has been escalated to the extent that it is necessary to engage with other players who all want to engage in different content at different paces, just to explore a beautiful golden city or luscious jungle treetops. Anet: It feels like you have been pressured by the minority of hardcore players to shape the game to fit their opinion of what the content should looks like.

There is no reason why hardcore content can’t be delivered in formats like raids, fractals/dungeons and word boss events without having to compromise the accessibility of the rest of the PVE environment. Please change this! Please utilise champion/elite mobs properly based on the number of players present rather than having areas that are flat out inaccessible to solo players. Please change hero points in the expansion to be completable by solo players instead of having to recruit a bunch of players to complete ridiculously long jungle climbs to tackle a boss that offers a reward that appears pretty insignificant in context of the effort required to put in.

Please just open the world up for me to be able to enjoy its gorgeous detail and design without the fear of being absolutely trashed because I’m on my own.

Thanks for hearing my thoughts.

Also a thought for the UI, you could have an option on the right click drop menu (when right clicking weapons and armor) that states "Bind to build. " which when clicked could bring up a simple selection box that allows you to select one of the builds that you have created. (This would likely require the builds to have a naming function.)

When gear is unequipped/swapped a warning should display to say “this action will unbind the item from it’s current build. Continue? Yes/No.”
That way we can keep track of item swapping in builds so I don’t swap to my build and find that my char is naked and weapon less because I’ve upgraded my gear and forgot to bind it.

Can we integrate inventory and item storage in this as well? I.e create a “kit” associated with your chosen build that stores all of your specified weapons, armor and trinkets as one item. That way switching between builds (and thus gear) won’t take up all of your inventory space and won’t mess it all up (I.e. moving certain items out of invisible bags which happens when switching from 2handed to 1handed).
This “kit” could cost 20 gold to ensure balance in regards to the value of having inventory bags.
I think we should have the ability to create custom names for our builds and sharing them should use a UI similar to the current pvp trait & gear panel.
Can there be an “inspect” option when right clicking on a player’s name (in chat bar, party ui and health ui top mid screen) that will allow us to peek at that player’s gear, traits, achievement points etc without them having to ping/share it?
Also could this feature be implemented into pve combat with a long cool down to swap builds mid combat? That way when you go into a fight and realise that your current build isn’t effective against the enemy you could hot-swap mid combat (and then a 10 mins cool down trigger). Obviously this could make pvp/wvw really imbalanced so probably not an option there.

Another thought about expanding into new zones and areas to explore:
We are aware that you are hesitant to expand the world as it could split the player base further and make zones empty and neglected. Two solutions that combined could completely solve that issue – 1) Non-RNG Reward, 2) World Notification of Meta Events.
Let’s make the Meta Event of each zone run over a much longer spawn period, I.e. 2x a week only, and use a world notification system just like the scarlet invasion events to inform the players when an event is about to occur. Develop the event to cover a significant portion of that Zones’ landmass and then you will have regular episodes of a huge player base flooding previously empty zones periodically.
To make that system work you would need a dungeon token type system that rewards players with tokens to save up towards zone specific prestigious rewards like armor and weapons. This ensures that it is always worth participating in the meta events and rewards the player appropriately to the devotion they give to the game.

I think one of the most convincing storytelling strategies is through utilising deep & meaningfull personal relationships. For the Living Story content to be truly engaging it needs to be delivered with though establishing solid, permanent characters who are experiencing these plots alongside the player. The plot points should not be about characters we meet, but about cultural and political shifts that we, both player and npc are experiencing around us.
Firstly, we – the players – are the heroes in this Story and we should be leading the narrative. We should be initiating the exploration or should be charged with the responsibility of the task at hand due to our renown and fame. Other new characters should be recruited by us, or come to follow us because of the feats we have achieved. Why don’t we, the player, start a guild based in living story lore that seeks to bring unity among races and challenge the threat of the elder dragons, just as Destiny’s Edge have done. Why not make the player the leader of a friendly rival guild of do-gooder’s recruiting talent such as Braham, Rox & Marjory and lead our guild head on to the challenges that a living, changing world brings. Lets bring in characters to the story with the intention of them sticking around as a permanent and consistent ally and friend to join us in our Journey every week, every month, every year. When the next significant chunk of personal story is released I want my guild, friends, allies and followers to be following my lead as commander of the pact.
Secondly, Instead of establishing new factions and cultures, lets focus on developing depth for the factions and cultures that are already established In game so that the players become more immersed and invested in the world already around them. There are so many political tensions, unexplored lands, cultural rivalries and world mysteries forthe lore to tap in to! (A good example is Wooden Potato’s youtube series on gw2 mysteries).

Living Story
Anet has currently promised to commit to producing free content every two weeks for us to experience which is the most generous and amazing concept of content delivery I have ever seen! Anet should be seriously praised for this model! Currently I think they are seeing a lot of success from it and are learning a lot from this process, however I feel that a compromise needs to be made to ensure that the content is regularly engaging, deep, fun and enduring. I also think that the content should be designed in a method that is permanent alongside content that creates living changes to the world. At current we are experiencing a lot of new lore, characters and factions – which is great, however I don’t feel Anet allow themselves the time to flesh these out with proper motivation and meaning.
Currently I feel that it isn’t wise to develop new cultures/factions when there are already so many cultures/factions/mysteries in the games lineage. I think that Anet should focus first on fleshing out content regarding already established lore, for example mysteries regarding race religions, magical artefacts, rival cultures, historical races and characters etc (for example Wooden Potato’s Youtube channel featuring the GW2 Mysteries videos!). This content could be rolled out in-between living world cultural and political content as it would be able to maintain it’s permanence due to being earthed in already established lore and history and therefore not holding present-time critical relevance. This could mean that this content could be explored and experienced at any time in a player’s game career, even years after it’s release. This would truly reflect expanding the world of Tyria and communicating that the game itself is alive.
While I think it is a fantastic Idea for the cultural and political issues of the current times to develop in real life to maintain a sense of a living world I think that Anet should take their time with this to make it meaningful and significantly impacting. New factions should be given time to fully investigate their motivation and reasoning, we should have to investigate the scale of threat/change they will soon have upon the world and there should be a sense of mystery and discovery of stepping through these world changes. The game would feel more fluid and synchronised if time was spent building a story-filled, interesting plot arching over a significant period of time, say 6 months, that will truly reflect the tensions of the living world i.e. the threat of the elder dragons or of established rival factions (for example the Halloween content appears to be establishing a paced plot to intentionally reveal the Lunatic Court as a serious world-changing Faction).
Imagine this: What if the release of the Tengu as a playable race was developed through a plot that led to a rise in tensions between the Tengu government having to face the threat of the Elderdragons on their home territory while being confronted by the challenge of conforming to a world of established races that they lack all trust in. Wouldn’t the addition of Tengu as a playable race be so much more meaningful if we – the players – had to play an active diplomatic role in aiding them in integrating into the modern tyria – maybe in establishing a new government/leadership to take over from the xenophobic zealots of the previous leadership. The Character creation of the Tengu race would then take place in a time of significant development that had been built up to over a period of 6 months. Not only would this keep the player base desperately engaged by tempting us with this future addition, it would also substantially flesh out already popular mystery and lore about a race of people loved by the fans.

I feel that for this content to be appropriately fleshed out and well-planned it should be released on a monthly basis rather than two weekly, with enough content to keep us engaged through that whole period of time.

I also think that the living story should be documented in the same way as your personal story in the hero panel so player can recap and reminisce over the events that they participated in, and that changed the world as we knew it. On this note I think these summaries (both personal and living story) should be given a voice-acted narration by the player voice actors to be viewed as a sort of story documentary.

I’ve dished out a lot of stuff there, some of which I haven’t thought much about, others of which I’ve thought about far too much. Please share your thoughts and ideas! Let’s see what creations we can develop!

Cutscenes
Cutscenes currently consist of one-to-one dialogue with NPCs, and sometimes animated concept artwork. The living story has re-introduced traditional GW cinematic camera panning cutscenes with Characters being in the world environment. By far, the best cutscene in this game is the one in the Citadel of Flame story dungeon where Logan saves Rytlock from falling – this is a STUNNING sight to see where beautiful concept art is seamlessly integrated with in-game models to create a perfect cinematic experience. I feel that these cutscenes that combine art and in-game models should be utilised as the method to deliver majorly significant, story-progressing cutscense. I feel that the current 1-1 clip should be utilised for more text based dialogue where choice of discussion content can be made (maybe introduce a Bioware-style dialogue selection) which would benefit by being wholly voice-acted and other significant cutscenes in the story should be delivered by the method utilised in the living story (traditional cutscenes) as it aids in emersion by not removing the player from their environment. I think Anet should not be afraid to demand attention to background dialogue as currently it is very easy to miss content due to player proximity to the source of the content or due to other environmental sounds or player triggering dialogue to skip due to progressing to fast. The traditional cinematic cutscenes would aid in bringing more focus and emphasis on content delivered through dialogue.

- Firstly, during character creation we are given the choice of what our character’s personality should be, i.e. dignified, charming, aggressive. I think significant choices in the game will have more impact if the character dialog reflected these personality choices closes consistently through the game. Our decisions should be compared against these core values and we should see some of the internal conflict that goes on if they don’t sit well with each other. This should be consistent in both serious moral decisions and minor decisions to reinforce the player’s ownership of that personality. I.e. Scenario 1 I choose to use untested Priory technology to harness possible significant results rather than rush in with the Vigil to protect the people of the local town from the Risen, but I am an aggressive character, I want to deal with this situation head on and passionately defend my people. I have internal conflict when weighing the risks up and making the decision to choose a high risk – high reward strategy. It eats me up inside that I may lose innocent people because of my decision but I know that it must be done.
Scenario 2 I am dignified, a member of the prestigious blood legion, but in order to achieve the reconnaissance I need I have to wear the disguise of a Flame Legion. I hate this, it’s humiliating, I want to spit on this armour, but I know I’ve got to get results. I hope my warband doesn’t find out.

I think that this consistent internal conflict being brought into dialog cutscenes would help to build a lot closer affiliation between the player and their character they choose to role play as.

- Secondly, We have witnessed some amazing characters who have made a real, meaningful impact on the community playing this game – for example: Tybalt Leftpaw. While Tybalt’s (and the other order mentors) involvement in engaging us in the story has been mostly successful, Guild Wars 2 appears to have a fear of holding onto significant characters and developing meaningful relationships. Each personal story initially establishes specific personal relationships with NPC’s in the game. I feel however that too little time is spent developing those relationships to make them meaningful should that person be in need of saving or be killed off. GW2 needs more developed emotional connections. There are so many NPC relationships that are made with our character that we move onto another before we have had a chance to get immersed in that relationship. Though many people hold a grudge against Trehearn for stealing a little bit of our thunder I feel he is a good example of what could be an appropriately developed relationship. We spend a huge amount of time with him and gradually learn what his values are, his calling is and what his personality is like (though admittedly he is a bit of an introvert!). We should experience longer last relationships with significant NPCs throughout our personal story, establishing them as our followers and aides, and revealing depth of character and interaction along the way. That way, when significant events happen such as losing a friend, the significant emotional connection has been developed to facilitate the expect reaction and experience to that event. Another simple addition would be to periodically be mailed by your NPC friends beckoning you to return to your home instance to have some meaningful dialogue about the world, your quest, their feelings towards you, and a debrief of the events/traumas you have experienced.
I.e. Scenario 1 My Lab partner and his pet raptor join me on every adventure I have. They are constantly providing me with thought provoking questions about the world around me, apologising for not quite holding their own in a fight, and panicking while we deal with the effects of their over curious pet and malfunctioning experiements.
Scenario 2 My Warband has seen me through every success and victory. They have had my back when I’ve doubted myself. We’ve bled for each other, lost some brothers and sisters, gained some new ones on the way. I know that though I’m likely to lead them to there doom, they’ll gladly die fighting by my side to protect Fort Trinity. I’ve had to leave one of them behind, they didn’t make it through the gates in time. I know she’s gone, every time hurts more than the last. The rest of my Warband assure me that I couldn’t have made any other call. I’ll finish this fight for her. I’ll build a monument to her name when I return home.

I’m creating this thread as a constructive discussion about the delivery of story and lore in-game and I hope to share my thoughts on what the current strengths are, areas for improvement and creative ideas for new content. I would love this to be a forum for other fans to bring their vast creativity together to act as a think tank and (hopefully) a resource for Anet.

I want to stress that this thread is specifically for the delivery of story and lore and would like to keep it positive! The reason we all get passionate about this game is because – at it’s core and regardless of personal opinions – we love it!!

Quick disclaimer – I’m totally unqualified to make any comments about this subject, I’m just a fan that loves this game and the vast lore it has already built up!! Though I appreciate this game is first and foremost an online mmorpg, my choice of games is all about story telling and a sense of adventure.

So here goes…

Personal Story:
One of the amazing strengths of this game is the fact that we have character creation that allows us to decide our lineage and core values. Throughout the Personal Story we see some of the impacts of our choices, though they can seem to have little consequence and feel very finite. Obviously in a world of hundreds of thousands of heroes it’s very difficult to make each player to have the sense of ownership over the fate of the overall world due to their ideals and choices.
My idea to improve this lies in the core values we choose in character creation and the core relationships we choose to invest in.

Hey guys,

Just been trying to tackle the randomisation problem. I’ve found no solution but just had a face-palm moment reading the official wiki again: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Customized_soundtrack

It clearly states there that the MainMenu & BossBattle playlists never randomise. The others do and the silent sound clip works for them.

I’m experiencing problems trying to buy things off the BLTP. Even with plenty of money in my inventory and plenty of the item in stock the ‘Buy’ button remains gray and unclick-able. I have tried viewing multiple items on BLTP but I still cannot click the ‘Buy’ option.

Ok so I want to point out something from the very beggining of this thread nad remake an argument.

A hugely minute and miniscule number of the GW2 community own precursor weapons. This is bad, because they can (and have done) charge what they want and become a financial superpower which dramatically effects the rest of the economy and effectively devalues everything else for them alone. Everything is affordable to them and the majority of the market is not affordable for us. Looking at gold sincs, we can see that this causes inbalance as well. For example map travel – to be fair the gold sinc should scale to your overall finance in the same way that tax does in real life. However it is currently bound by level only, so players of the same level but much less finance will find that the gold sinc in map travel is a significant cost and limits their gameplay in comparison to a rich player.

This represents the flaws in our own real life economy which has lead to nations borrowing money that they do not have and digging deeper debts. (This could potentially be a dangerous real life threat for GW2 players that might want to use real money to buy gold… it’s very easy to get carried away!)

A point that some people are making is that Items need to leave the economy (e.g. thousands of mystic forge attempts) in equilibrium with items entering in order that they may maintain value, which has been highlighted by one of the devs earlier in this post (millions of the same item sitting in TP will reduce their value significantly).

A couple of good examples of this are Anet creating goals and rewards that involve these worthless mats e.g. monthly salvage title – a great way to get basic mats back out of TP. This works incredibly well. Mystic forge itself as a priciple (not involving precursor weapons) does this incredibly well also – buy four items of lesser value for the potential to get one item of greater value.

The problem is that precursor weapons have completely demolished the economy because they are near enough priceless.

Random chance is actually not a fair model at all. Players have purchased this game to experience it’s content; some of that content needs to be worked for and earned – a good ethic that creates a sense of investment and pride in the Player’s account which thus leads them to most likely stay committed to the game for longer. Random chance ensures that some players will never get a precursor weapon – it is likely that they will eventually, but is still possible that it will never happen.

For this problem to be resolved and thus balance returned to the TP and overall economy I believe firmly, as others have stated, that the precursor weapons need to be account bound and thus literally priceless. NOT at all worthless. But priceless. They need to be removed from the TP.