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How many times have you heard “the customer is always right” in your life? That is the fallback position of everyone involved in customer service who will accept the lowest common denominator of kittenty consumer behavior. It is based upon the premise that, in a comparison between two competing entities where all other factors are equal, the customer will choose the one that treats them better.
In reality, oftentimes the customer is an idiot. Anyone who has worked in retail, food service, the hospitality industry, etc etc can tell you that customers will complain long and loud about, well, pretty much everything. The culture of entitlement that so pervades our modern, spoiled society enables people to whine at will and they expect to be heard and mollified.
I don’t expect the game developers to hang out on the forums answering every trifling whim of the general public. I expect them to be in an office somewhere developing the game I play. If they read every thread and absorbed even 1% of the idiocy contained therein, the game and most likely their entire company would immediately collapse out of sheer banality.
Zypher has it correct above. Simply paying for something does not give you the right to complain and be heard. There are hundreds of thousands of opinions, all going in different directions, and none of them are original or even smart. Let the game developers do their job. Moderators will make sure the forum continues to function. As for those purveyors of white noise, well….if you have so many great ideas, kitten and go make your own game.
Bobby, with all due respect, I don’t understand Anet’s seeming infatuation with the notion that temporary content is this great, revolutionary idea. Apart from the fact that most players are just interested in more available content in general (and not interested in content being removed), it just doesn’t seem like a workable idea in a game like GW2. IMO, The Living Story in its current form just needs to be scrapped, with the already released and removed content being re-released as expansions to the PS (rename it if you want), which future development (both story and gameplay) should build on.
To my mind, Anet should be laying the ground work for the narrative that the player experiences on his or her own terms, not forcefully moving the story irrespective of the player experience. Most people at various points are going to get bored or distracted by something else and stop playing, and the fact that they immediately start losing out on content is just going to make it less likely they’ll want to return.
There are so many things that could be done to shore up the somewhat weak PS structure to make it more interesting (since it isn’t fundamentally broken) in place of wasting so much development on temporary content. You could-
- add deeper, more involved/immersive missions at various levels to fill in the gaps
- add a way to replay missions
- add recruitable henchmen/allies that you can customize and take with you in PS missions.
- make better use of the home instance (decorating, recruiting allies, NPCs to run shops, etc.)The only workable alternative in my mind is to remove the Personal Story from the game virtually entirely and only have a living story that progresses on its own, but with a greater focus on opening new zones than on changing existing ones. However, if you do this, the execution needs to be significantly better than it was in year one (more cohesive, more epic, bigger in general) for it to be engaging or interesting enough to hold player interest and draw back in lapsed players.
That’s just my two cents.
To be honest, having the Living World change every two/four weeks is what keeps me coming back. I’ve been 80 for along time, and fresh content keeps the game moving forward. If I don’t leave my house IRL for two weeks, read a newspaper, watch the news, I lose whatever happened in the world in those two weeks – same goes for GW2. If I don’t follow the storyline in game as well as on the GW2 page I miss out on what’s happening.
When Scarlet first appeared I had been playing other games so it took me awhile to catch up. After the Invasions started I just happened to be wandering around a zone where one was going on. At first I had no clue what was going on but eventually I was swept up by little groups of people running here and there, and I got enough clues. I then read some backstory and got back up to speed.
I like the way things are structured now. I kinda wish the events were more tied together solely in game, but that’s sheer laziness on my part. Having things change every so often is good, and if I don’t play often enough to take full advantage of them that’s on me. If I had my way, certain things would be permanent – SAB, Labyrinthe Cliffs, Molten Facility, et al. I like how certain instances are being folded into Fractals. There’s some really good content just waiting to be tweaked and re-released, and that keeps me coming back.