First of all I would like to congratulate the Devs for hearing out the community. From my point of view, this is the perfect way to perfect the game. Sadly, very few companies take this approach.
My two cents regarding the Living Story updates as follows (even though most of them have already been said):
- Less characters, but with richer background stories. If I learned anything from playing RPG-s is that the more fully developed the character is, the more I tend to have an emotional response towards him – and I think the perfect examples for this are the supporting heroes from Planescape: Torment. I’m not saying that a little mystery hurts, quite the opposite. But giving only tiny, shallow snippets of info does not help. For example, everyone seems to be complaining about Scarlet. At first, i didn’t like her either, but after reading her story on gw2wiki i became mildly interested in her development.
- More skills. I was really psyched when I saw the last LS update included a new skill and then kind of disappointed when I found out it was a heal skill. I know that skill balancing is one of the toughest jobs for a MMO developer, but after playing gw1 since 2005 and gw2 since last November, I can say that there is nothing that I miss more (skill-wise) than the breadth of skills/elite skills present in gw1.
- Using the lore from GW1 as a building block for the evolution of the game. Two of my favorite moments in gw2 were when I saw that the Fountain from the Henge of Denravi still existed coupled with the fact that there is a event-chain which ends with the killing of the Demagogue (I remember having to do Aurora Glade again and again so that I could finish the bonus objective – this was before the introduction of heroes). The second favorite moment was when I swam through the ruins of Old Lion’s Arch. I believe that these little not so hidden gems made many gw1 veterans really happy. What I am trying to emphasize is the fact that you need to make more connections to the world of gw1. The basic building blocks are already there. The lore from the first game is fantastic. Using this lore more and more can lead to a win-win situation, with veterans wanting to relive certain moments from gw1 again (which can mark an increase in the decreasing player base of gw1) and players who haven’t played gw1 will start to get interested more and more in the lore and the characters from the first game. This can improve the game’s coherence drastically. My opinion is that this is maybe the biggest aspect that needs to improve in the current gw2 game, content wise. For example, these connections can be made using the existing orders in the world, and with this I mean creating story arcs involving the vigil, priory and order of whispers.
- Arcs with epic quests and achievements that naturally flow with those quests. What I observed is that giving the player the opportunity to embark on a truly big quest can get the player to be more involved and can trigger a more powerful emotional response, rather than using simple and small events/quests. This can be even further improved by making achievement points tied to the progress of the arc. Something like you did with the new dungeon path from TA. Not forcing the player to redo the same content over and over for some of the achievements, like the current LS update (and here I am referring to the buffed champ farm). If 70% of the achievement points could be gained by completing the quest the first time, I think most of the players would be happy. The rest who would want the last 30% could repeat parts of the quest or they could try finishing the quest by other means, or respecting different restrictions during the quests’ gameplay.
- Environment changing. I do not want to delve into this subject more than it is necessary, but I think that further updates should address the fact that Zhaitan is dead and Orr is cleansed. What I mean with this is that probably nobody would complain if Orr received subtle, positive improvements regarding the way it looks
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Also, the idea of a Historian NPC sounds really good.