Guild Wars 2

I like what people are saying about tying the LS to the GW1 lore. One of the cool things about this game when I first started playing was that it was the same world…. It certainly doesn’t feel like the same world these days because nothing seems to take cues from the history of the world.

What gets me excited about “living world” content:

1. Changing environments (southsun evolving, the statue destroyed by the mad king, etc.)

2. Interesting stories/mysteries (the ghost hunt last Halloween -mad memories-, what was driving the refugees south during frost and flame, etc.)

What I don’t like about what “living story” has become:

1. Grinding achievements. Even though I don’t like playing GW2 like a chore list, I find myself playing to the achievement list so I get the limited time only rewards and don’t miss out. I hate playing this way, but I do it anyway because I don’t want to miss out on some cool skin or other reward.

2. Grindy events. This years Halloween event has been nothing to me except jumping on the loot Zerg in the mad kings labirynth. I couldn’t advance the actual story without grinding 13 event achievements (ridiculous!) so I went into the labirynth and didn’t come out until I had enough to actually advance the story. I followed the Zerg and did probably a couple hundred door events and mined several hundred candy corn nodes on the way. Then when I finally come out to see what the story had in store for me, it turned out to be a 5 minute dungeon in involving a 2 minute boss battle.

All in all I think this years Halloween event is a good example of what is wrong with the “living story” as it stands today: there is literally 15 minutes or so of actual story and several hours of grinding the same mining nodes, the same monsters, the same events….

Thanks Razzy. You totally hit the nail on the head.

And for the record I don’t have a problem with runners. I’m just bad at it and my play style favors fighting through instead.

So I’m sure is has been beaten to death already, but this happened to me last night and it made me come off as a total jerk to the group I had been playing with. Here’s the story:

Last night a group of us (me, a guildie and 3 pugs) went into TA and had gotten deep into one of the explorable modes. However, most of the group was made up of dungeon runners and I will readily admit that I am terrible at “running” dungeons (I actually fight my way through), and so we hit a point where one of the pugs instructed us to run through a section of the map. I tried my hardest, with and without help from the rest of the group, but I could simply not run through this area (like I say, I’m terrible at running through dungeons).

Anyway, after dying about a dozen times I was getting understandably frustrated and I’m sure everyone could tell. Unfortunately for me, as it ultimately made me look really bad, it was about this point where one of my kids woke up screaming and I had to bail. I posted in party chat I needed to bail due to crying kids (and noted that I didn’t seem to be doing the group any good) and proceeded to leave the group so they could get someone in my spot who could actually help them finish. As I load back into caledon, all I hear over my guild voice chat is " aw man, you were the party leader…"

In my haste to open a spot in the party and attend to my crying kids I had completely spaced on the whole “if the instance owner leaves it boots the group” thing. I didn’t see my guildie load into caledon as I got logged out, so my hope is that they got to continue, but I’m pretty sure that’s just wishful thinking. Since then I have felt absolutely terrible (despite it not being that big a deal in the big picture) and have felt like I pulled a complete jerk move. It made me look like not only a noob for not being able to run the dungeon (my fault) but a troll/griefer as well, and probably didn’t shed a great light on our guild.

I can understand why we don’t want group leaders to be able to boot a pug or whatever the official reason for this mechanic is, but when an emergency rises and you have to leave the group the game should not punish the people who were kind enough to group with you by kicking them.

Just wanted to share my story in the hopes arenanet can find a better way to handle this. And if anyone reading this is one of the folks from last night, believe me when I say I am so sorry if you got booted.