Guild Wars 2

So, first two comments on ideas that were mentioned earlier:

Adjusting the map cap according to the lowest population server.

As an Underworld player, I am on a very high population server with a relatively low WvW population. So this wouldn’t help us much.

If it were based on the amount of players online in WvW at that time, I think there would be a lot of screaming and shouting going on to keep players out of WvW to make sure that we limited the cap only to self-proclaimed ‘good’ players.

Gating

This could be cool if there is a way to tackle the queues and give WvW players something to do. It would be awful for active WvW servers to be in a matchup to a very poorly represented server. Then many would be missing out on WvW for a week. (Or more, if the next matchup is similarly uneven)

And now two ideas of my own:

What if there was a mechanic that encouraged attacking the strongest server?

Better world xp/some points to the score for capping a strong server keep/higher droprates on taking down players from the leading server at that time. Of course there would have to be a benefit to being in the lead aswell. Otherwise servers might do awful strategies that encourage playing bad… leading to arguments between those that want to win the matchup and those that just want to take that keep.

Something that makes losing not that bad

• What if, after losing for half a week, you would suddenly gain access to plan B? This plan B would be an attack that can only be activated by a server that is far below on points and it allows for an amazing comeback. Maybe it is a massive siege engine, perhaps it is a more powerful NPC commander or a ‘play dirty’ kind of buff that allows you to bribe guards? (Thinking outside the box here)

• Or it could be this new map they’re talking about, offering a place to fight where the score doesn’t count and perhaps the map cap is lower, so even weakly populated servers have a place to fight for a few hours to make a change. So they can have a feeling of victory somewhere halfway through a week where they have been the lowest on points all the time.

The obvious downside to this would be that the main WvW maps may not see action from this server at all… Then again, if players are having fun playing WvW, does that matter?

Why would anyone think the score should be adjusted for population? It seems obvious to me that it shouldn’t. Population being put into the battle matters. What doesn’t matter is the score. I’m not even sure what the point of showing a score really is.

I get that there’s a lot of behind the scenes stuff rewarded based on the score and matchups also factor it in, but overall it would seem better off gone. It’s not as though a world couldn’t generally tell if they were winning or losing without it. And if a couple teams thought they were winning when one actually wasn’t, so what?

The question would be, would not having a score help or hurt world population and WvW participation. My initial thought is that it actually help participation on the lower scoring servers and lower it on the higher servers. While this would not be a bad thing, what would it do to overall WvW participation?

Chris,

I believe you may need to be more specific when posting these topics for discussion (that is, unless the purpose is to cast as wide a net as possible). In this instance, it’s not overly clear exactly what flavour of population imbalance we are supposed to be discussing, as I’m reasonably sure there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

There is the global population imbalance (i.e. total WvWvW population on server X is greater than that on server Y), there’s the timezone imbalance (i.e. the Oceanic population on server B is way higher than any other server in that timezone), and then there’s the hour-by-hour population imbalance (i.e. it’s no fun to play WvW on Wednesdays at 3pm because we’re always outnumbered twenty to one).

I’m guessing the overall flavour is the gross imbalances, but at times they’ve all been hot-button issues.

I suppose it would be nice to know what the cap is at now and then compare the average attendance of the servers. Even if you did balance out the population, there is the issue of non stop coverage that a server recruited for, vs a server of exclusive na or eu players.

One possible solution would be to color code the matches as opposed to direct server vs server. Then rotate the servers assigned to the colors – this way eu servers and na servers can join 1 common match to have that round the clock coverage without the need to transfer.

The individual servers would then be ranked based on their participation of the match along with servers on the most winning colors. This would eliminate 1 server winning because it has all the people. so if x server capped the most points in their color – they get ranked based on that number. Then the top score would simply represent the most active wvw server – as opposed to “the best pvp’rs”

there could be 3 matches going on with 17 servers per color – which brings it to an average of 4.25 servers per color per match.

Each color would be a mix of bronze, platinum and gold servers. That can join any of 3 matches ( or 4 – which would probably compliment the overflow system you are working on now )

there would be no ques for any of the servers – because a new match would spring up as each map got full.

and if a guild wanted to join and play together – then they could have a choice to que up for the map the rest of their members are on …or just join a new map while they wait.

heres my opinion:

• living world goes too fast with little story, i remember in gw1 interacting on everything gave you 1 or 2 paragraphs of lore on everything, we dont have that anymore,.
• gw1 finished with primordius waking up over 250 years ago, but we decided to go straight for zhaitan instead, if i was to write storyline id say that an experimental asura portal that was built (like the ones being build for a year in LA) was turned on, but where it was to the ruins on the central transfer chamber, and there would be this attack on lions arch where the players could vote to fight thier way in and establish a base or we could destroy the gate but see more occurrences of destroyers resurfacing.
  tl:dr more dragons!
• rewards from LS need to be more rewarding, ive got 8 bank tabs and i have 1 just filled with LS stuff that im not sure if i need or i dont want to lose incase i want for another character, id be happy with more luck essences like 1k luck for 10 achievements, plus skins reward boxes whatever.
• more maps, i loved the cliffs we had for the zephyrs but i was dissapointed that the whole map was gone when the ship left, it could have been developed into an explorable with a world event such as a krait overlord attacking the town and we have 20 minutes to thin the ranks with 3 or 4 legendary foes, to destroy and this overlord causes a tidal wave (similar to tequatl) upon failure. i dont know. but overall we got the janthir isles, underground, ring of fire chain, the desert and the north still open to be explored, its a great excuse to have more tie-ins to guild wars 1 lore.
• no more tokens or at least have a place to store, like i said before i have 8 banks tabs, in order this is what its full of : wvwvw stuff , living story stuff, wintersday stuff left over from last year, and about 8 stacks of bloodstone dust, 2 tabs full of black lion harvesting stuff and boosters (so many boosters), more back skins and SAB stuff, and the last two are filled with materials and legendary crafting materials and gifts. thats alot of random stuff but most of it is skins, but before the wallet i had zero space in my bank. i cant afford any more methods of stuff i have to collect. (also bring back azurite, it came in for a month then dissapeared as a gathering material)
• pre-cursors, ive collected everything for my bifrost except the legend, because unlike everyone else ive ever known, ive never recieved a pre-cursor of any form, and its killing me slowly that i must rely on rng to get it. ill leave it at that.

i get excited every two weeks to read the patch notes and to see the next upcoming update ill admit, but i see every time these days the release preview goes out there is less and less to be released, i fear that pushing yourself to release something every two weeks has an impact on the quality of the release, id be happy to have a release every month like before, but every week post a blog or update on the website of what your working on currently to see if the player base can give constructive feedback on how to make things more epic, hold a poll more often, it may have more of a devastating impact (in a good way ) on the game itself.

• Items that we can get from the LS-Achievements. We only get one item per account, so there’s no way alts get the item too, and if one doesn’t like the item from begin, it’s just a waste of inventory space, but throwing it away is also not really an option because who knows, maybe in a year it’s the most fashionable thing one can imagine. My suggestion to make this better: Instead of giving us a chest with one item (or skin), let us unlock a slot in the achievement-panel so that we can get the skin as often as we want and when we want, just like the Zenith-skins.

• Living Story itself: To be honest, I thought for a long time that there’s a connection between everything the living story showed us so far, but it feels more and more ‘random’ to be honest. I don’t want to blame anyone, but for me, it feels a bit like a very bad story which is told even worse: ‘now this happens, and here that happens, and well this happens too…’. It doesn’t feel like GW2 should feel for me somehow, it’s not authentic. Of course, you can’t let us kill an elder dragon every two weeks, and that’s ok, but there are other threats too, like the sons of svanir, inquest or nightmare court. They don’t need new villains like Scarlet with her aetherblades to be dangerous, they already are, just let them smash something and make the players fix it. I think it would be a lot easier to make the story more authentic. But who knows, maybe you already go in this direction with the next release, at least that’s what I was thinking when I saw the changes in Kessex Hills.

• Less timegated content/achievements, more replayability. This was already mentioned quite often, just want to support it because to be honest, it feels like grind for me, and that’s exactly what GW2 should be not, in no way.

PS: Sorry for my bad English, I tried my best but it’s not my mother tongue.

Content seems rushed and lacking depth. the first few events you held ( in 4 acts, eg. Halloween & xmas) were amazing and I think you should go back to this method. We explored more of the story, and we saw real progression ( with the act system). we had an introduction and a climax, and I thought this was very exciting. We also got to meet characters and feel more of a connection to them. Bi-weekly updates where each event is tenuously linked to the next gives the impression of being put on a treadmill. Each update glosses over the story and lacks the impression of impacting the “living story”. Just my thoughts, you can agree or disagree.

I agree about Scarlet, horrible annoying villain who felt like a cheap Harley Quinn knockoff. Please be done.

I too think huge WORLD changing events would be nice. MYSELF…. I would love to have a ‘flashback’ living story that might cover the events of Orr. One of the things I hear MOST in this game is ‘I wish I could see what Orr looked like BEFORE….’

Ive heard that SO many times and have thought about it myself. I think it would bring more interest to Orr, for sure, not to mention would invest the players in the area more if we knew what happened to all its inhabitants.

We have the lore, we have the epic stories – why not build off some of those? Allow players to participate. While we obviously cannot change the outcome drastically, perhaps SOMETHING can be altered, or affected.

But – I agree – more true ‘World changing’ events – but ones that can be handled by slower servers as well. Im on HoD, and we STILL have not managed Teakettle… its now a ghost town there. Everyone just gave up, sadly enough.

Fixing The Living Story Direction

Step One: Hire WoodenPotatoes as the lead writer.

The End

Issues with Living Story:
-Lack of Story
-Lack of access to story after event window
-Neglecting the wider world in favor of the living story

Lack of Story
The current living story is not compelling. There are number of reasons for this. First and foremost story content is being presented on the website and in novels rather than in the game. I play games to experience the story (this is not necessarily true of everyone). I would rather experience half an hour of in game interaction than spend five minutes reading text on a website . I don’t read story content presented on the website. If it isn’t in the game, it doesn’t exist for me. I don’t disagree with making story content available outside the game. I do have issues with story content being available outside the game which is NOT also inside the game.

I would argue that simply having the text in the game isn’t enough either. It has to be interactive in some way. This a game. If my character isn’t interacting with the world, the story is meaningless to me.

Other reasons the story isn’t compelling: it has little or nothing to do with the established lore in the game. There’s a well established threat to the world, yet we ignore it in favor of festivals. If the pact was formed to deal with the threat of a dragon, why can’t it handle a couple of terrorists? There are tons of interesting characters and races in the GW lore that could be drawn upon to make the world more interesting, yet these are being ignored in favor of a flat character and repetitive tactics. Not only is that uninteresting, it makes both the players and the NPCs seem incompetent.

Finally, the player’s character seems to play increasingly less of a role in the story as a whole. A player’s presence is superficial. Whether they are present or not seems to make no difference, both in terms of the overarching story and in terms of things as simple as how NPCs react to them. (Sometimes an NPC will recognize you when you weren’t present at past events or, vice versa, will not recognize you when you were present at past events).

Lack of access to story events after a set event window
This is another reason why the story feels flat or uninteresting. If you miss an event, you miss the ‘story’ related to it. If you miss the story, you have no way to catch up on it except to read sources outside the game. There’s no alternative instance for people who didn’t play this event or who missed that event. There’s no conversation with an NPC to catch you up on what you missed. The story is simply there, simply happening. Eventually, when you’ve missed enough events, it’s easier to just ignore the story. It’s my opinion that’s bad; you can’t build up to a twist or reveal if you’re losing people’s attention along the way.

Reasons for this: all the living story is presented in the form of temporary events. When those story events are yanked out of the game, the reasons for character’s actions and the history of current events is lost with them. New players and returning players have no frame of in-game reference.

The living story feels disjointed because one event’s plot does not necessarily relate to or flow into the next.

The speed of the living story is too rapid. Because you only have two weeks for most content, people pay more attention to the items, which will become unavailable after that two week window, than to the actual event or story taking place. Two weeks isn’t necessarily enough time for every player to complete all the story content they would like to, especially if they have a job or a family. And again, if you fall behind, there’s no way to catch up.

It would be nice to have a slower update pace; once a month is enough, especially if completing half of the current event will then unlock the second half of the event for each player (as with Halloween this year). I also see no reason why events can’t overlap, with a living story event being ‘sealed off’ only after a player has completed the story (as with the living story).

I’ve always felt that the current challenge, story-wise, the devs face is that there’s a conundrum in the protagonist’s role. The main hero is supposed to be the player character, but it appears Anet does not want to write them into the story.

Unlike TV episodes, the audience in an MMO is supposed to be an active participant in the story. I think many players expected that, hence the disappointment in the personal story. At least that was a one off thing, but then we come to the living story and the same problem rises up again.

We’ve seen new attempts in other directions, such as Braham and Rox, that attempt to divert the player’s attention away from their own characters but so far that has been uninteresting and ineffective. Okay, maybe the characters were just too undeveloped. Let’s introduce a memorable archetype like Scarlet. Hmm. I’m not sure if I could count her as a success. I suspect Scarlet, too, will be forgotten after her story arc ends.

The solution, I think, is to put the players back in to the protagonist’s role again, with a small caveat—the protagonists of the living story from now on are only referred to as one of the agents in the three orders. This may run somewhat contrary to the personal heroism GW2 is trying to portray, but as we have already seen, you cannot have just one hero in a massively multi-player game. Each players deserve to have their moment to shine, but the game world should be built with multi-player in mind. Once we get over this, more systems can be developed in place for players to get together (via the orders) and bridge the gap between solo’ing in the open world, and Tequatl.

In order to get to that point, each order needs to be iterated on and build to become organizations that players want to be a part of. There is a problem with the different orders having different specializations (The order of whispers frontlining tequatl doesn’t make much sense). Another problem is that the personal story is optional and there currently isn’t another way to join an order. I think these are all problems that can be overcome in future releases, whether via joint operations between orders, or have each future releases be designed in such a way that each of the three specialization have its place. The personal story up until initiation into an order may become mandatory for unlocking LS (also serves as an extended tutorial), and the rest of it scraped and replaced by living story releases.

The new orders can also serve as character development post-lv80, and rising in ranks should prepare players for greater challenges (hopefully not via stat increases). Once this has been taken care of, players will have a much firmer foothold in the game world, and get their sense of permanent progression that they currently expect from the LS updates, even though that isn’t what the current LS updates offer.

I think temporary content is cool. Seriously. However, the amount of content you’re cycling through is excessive. What’s wrong with letting content breathe a little? I feel like anything big enough to have a meta should be in the game for a month, minimum.

Also, tell your stories in the game. The game is your selling point. It is meant to be a vehicle for storytelling. Use the stories to enrich the game, be it about dragons or sylvari or bunnies.

Please keep including some of the temporary content into the main game, as well- the mini-games, for example! I’d love to have aspect arena or dragon ball back in the mix! Sanctum Sprint was brilliant. Gold star to whomever came up with that game.

I want to add something different:

Tie living story content with new mechanics.

If you’re adding new ascended or legendary gear, add a story behind it. Add lore behind it. Add some epic quests behind it. Add something that makes gear-collecting memorable, instead of being a pure, soulless mathematical acchievement.

If you’re adding guild missions, and that suddenly changes how guilds play in the game, then how does Tyria reacts to it, or better yet, what happened in Tyria to create this situation?

Etc.

Living Story Pluses

• Molten Alliance brought new DE’s to old zones
• Molten Facility Dungeon was the best dungeon path I’ve seen
• The sky crystal scavenger hunt was a puzzle requiring thinking outside the GW2 box because of the new jumping skills — very enjoyable, the high point of LS for me
• Invasions as a concept could have brought change to zones

Living Story Minuses

• The world is exactly the same as it was before LS started, except for a few things that are not readily noticeable (e.g., Kiel is now on the Council, but this has no impact on one’s play experience; the Molten Alliance fell apart rather than replacing some of the Dredge and Flame Legion)
• Too much content that has to be completed in a herd
• Player interaction with the stories devolves down to, “Be my assistant and go click on these things/NPC’s.”
• Too much "click on x: in general
• Invasions could have impacted the world, instead the mobs show up, stand around waiting to be killed, then vanish

Hi,
I have a few points or opinions Id like to make about Living Story:
(these are my opinions and feelings)

1. The story itself, in contrast to the personal story, is severely void of any substance or continuity. The personal story had a nice ebb and flow. You had nicely written cutscenes that took you from one place to the other both in story and in the world. You knew what your objective was and you really got an idea of what the characters were all about. Currently, we have had some story on molten alliance, upset creatures on south shore, some delegates trying to get to Divinities Reach only to be stopped by some invasion force. Most recently, you had some stuff going on in Caledon regarding more scarlet. I just dont feel the continuity of the story. To sum this up: It feels disjointed and has been poorly explained. Hard to follow.

2. Why does every Living Story event/patch need to come with a dozen or two dozen achievements? It seems that all these patches contain are some disjointed story and achievements. They feel like a laundry list of things to do, almost like a chore. We do them because we want the shiny at the end..the meta-achievement. This goes back to a thread I had created a while ago…intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards. Why can’t the content be intrinsically rewarding? If the content is quality, how come this can’t be the reward, in and of itself? I got burned out of doing the achievements and I bet I am not alone.

3. The cadence, I think is too much for two reasons. 1. I do not feel there is adequate time to complete all that is needed(especially more casual players). You feel rushed. You feel that you need to drop what you are doing, and stop playing how you want to play, in order to experience all of these content patches and everything in them. 2. I feel that conventional and traditional frequency of content updates have been more successful and widely accepted. Typically, 3-6 months has been the conventional frequency where you are trying to push content out the door in 8 weeks development time?(correct me if I am wrong). Maybe more of every month or every two months we receive content updates. That gives developers more time to write meaningful lore and story, more time to test bugs, and we get more with each patch. That gives us as players more time to freely explore the content so that we are not rushed, and once we are done we can play the game as we want to without getting hammered in a few days with more content. Its too much. Overwhelmed at the moment.

3. The substance of the living story updates seems thin and, forgive the term, ‘fluffy’. There are many themed patches, and many patches where a good portion of the content has been mini games. Id like to believe that most anyone would welcome new zones, classes, monsters, skills, dungeons, lore, personal story, etc rather than a few lines of story, some bug fixes, and a temporary open world content or dungeon, mixed in with some mini games.

Currently, I am not playing GW2. I am keeping a vigil watchful eye on it. I visit the forums several times a week, I log in every once in a while to peak around. But I am not playing. Largely because of Living Story for the points described above. Will I return? Maybe. I am currently enjoying other games and other genres. Maybe I will return again to the game, but I hope some development direction changes are able to be seen. Otherwise I fear that I’ll be in the same situation that I am in now..which is quasi disappointed with where the game is headed.

Thanks for your time.

There are lots of good lists of problems here, but I believe a huge number of them are tied to the same core issue:

Because of the Personal Story, the Living World can only modify the game in very limited ways.

(Ignoring the irony that story you shipped with the game has limited the story you can tell afterward,) I have a few suggestions/comments for how you may be able to handle this issue.

1) There is a reluctance to add new zones so as to not stretch out the player-base. I understand this, but you have to let this one go. For many of us, having new areas to explore is one of the reasons we bought this game! That sense of adventure, exploring someplace new, is my favorite thing about this game.

2) If you add new zones, you can build those zones to properly change based on the Living World. You can have cities build or destroyed over the long-term. You can have massive changes to the landscape. You can have enemy types wiped out. Give yourself a new region of the world with the Living Story in mind and you’ll be able to do so much more.

3) To keep players in the old zones, scale rewards for DEs based on the last time they were completed. You get small rewards for events that are finished every 10 minutes, but if it’s been several hours (or days!) since an event has been completed, the rewards should be significantly higher. This will keep players in old zones even if there’s a shiny new area.

4) Tie the new area into GW1 lore! For example, we could explore the ruins of ancient asuran civilization on the way to defeating Primordus.

5) These zones could be rolled out over time. For example, the journey to defeat Primordus could take six months: you have to travel to a specific rift and there’s a new zone that leads you there. Then, when you get to the rift, you have to build a safe way in and out, so that takes a month… Next month, the entrance is complete and you can start to go inside… until you find a gigantic cavern of enemies which must be cleared. (Hello, Queen’s Pavilion round 2!) Then, a month later, you’ve cleared the cavern and can push further… etc.

That’s the kind of stuff that I would find compelling, anyway.

The Living World must be a permanent addition in the game. It must pile up after the Personal Story. Start it from the Lost Shores. Players must be able to do all the pre-existing Living Stories and repeat them at their own leisure. And if I were a developer and saw my content to last merely two weeks then disappeared completely from the game, I would be upset. Please ask the Living World developers their honest opinions after their content is completely removed from the game after two weeks and thrown into archive, you will know how some of the players feel about the Living Story.

The world of Tyria should change constantly as well as we seen in Kessex Hills. That is a great example of a living and breathing world. You guys should put more of that in Guild Wars 2 despite of it not being released in the next two weeks. There will be a lot of speculations and theories to talk about in the forums and in the game. But, if the trees at Viathan Lake in Kessex Hills were to grow after the Tower of Nightmares, that is not how the Living World should be; there should be an event where people have to remove the stumps around the lake and plant new trees.

The Living World should also continue the story that was left in Guild Wars 1. We would like to know about Livia’s whereabouts. Where is Lazarus the Dire? Will we ever visit the Wizard’s Tower and speak with Igarren? Guild Wars 2 may never have an expansion but “According to Jeff Grubb, the bloodstones’ fate will not be revealed in the initial release of Guild Wars 2, but may ‘have an influence in future expansions.’ " Will we ever know the fate of the Bloodstones in Guild Wars? And there several more posted on this thread. The Living World just does not give it all, it is kitten. Plus there is a sylvari lady slowly ruining the lore of Guild Wars.

In Guild Wars 1, my character felt heroic because I became ascended and ultimately felt responsible for unleashing the titans. I want my feelings to be swayed again. Seeing Gwen Thackeray grow up was beautiful. We want those wonderful and epic moments in Guild Wars 2. And some of us don’t like how apparently a cackling sylvari lady is behind all the uprising of the Molten Alliance and Aetherblade Pirates. So really where are the Elder Dragons? The last Elder Dragon fight was underwhelming in my opinion, kill minions, and sit on turrets and spam #2.

The Living World must be about Elder Dragons and not petty Tyrian affairs. The story of Guild Wars 2 must be darker because the Elder Dragons are slowly closing in. Tyrians should not held parties in the hour of their imminent extinction. And nothing has change much in Tyria. Past Living World content just popped like a bubble.

Im with the others who posted here:

Living story to me should be exactly that…a living story that is working towards something. Right now the “story” is over every two weeks and a new one begins, even if they are related, they feel like a bunch of disjointed “one off” events…

Some suggestions based off what my friends and I have been discussing we would love to see.

Content that doesn’t disappear and achievements that do not disappear. Why not leave the Molten Alliance dungeon, or the aetherblade one, or the queens pavilion, or the Bazaar of the winds….and make achievements that can still be gotten to this day that tell us about the areas and what is happening. (like the utilizing each of the powers of the bazaar, or jumping for the crystals achievement). Make achievements (with “prizes”) that can be gotten by the new players, once they get to a level to actually do the new dungeons and areas.

You can still do your “quick” events (like the Aetherblades suddenly attacking, or the Karka attack on Lions Arch) but then after that quick event is done, the actual content (the “living part” of the living story) stays permanently within the land.

If done correctly, NONE of this would impact the personal story or the world that is already in place for new players. If anything it adds to it. Make the new dungeons have a “story mode” in addition to explorable that explains their place within the world. Did the molten alliance break up? Nope, they are still around, so why cant the dungeon be around. Are the Aetherblades gone? Nope, so leave the retreat. The bazaar makes a fantastic “jumping off” point for future content…so it could stay also. You could slowly introduce entirely new areas with new “story” content that would grow the world.

As an example, we already had the two-week “event” where the Aetherblades attacked, we know they came from the west of Lion’s Arch, in the next “event” we help the lions guard push the aetherblades back to their island (adding another small island to explore filled with towns full of aetherblades, with aethership factories on it, (the aetherblade retreat dungeon could be placed back here)). Achievements could be simply “go to the island” and defeat X number of Aetherblades", and “enter the Aetherblade retreat”…with other acheivements related to that.

By virtue of this fight and this “event” we are forcing the aetherblades further west so then the Tengu come out of hiding on their new island and open the gates within the Caledon Forest inviting us to come and help them with their fight against the Aetherblades. “Aiding the Tengu” and “visit the Tengu” could be achievements. Once we free them from the aetherblades during the next event, now the Tengu area is open. (if you wanted to make the Tengu a playable race, it could be introduced at this time also…unlocked…and then make it a race that was only choosable for players who have first run through an entire personal story as well as the Tengu acheivements). Once the Tengu event is done maybe another event that leads characters further south in the ocean, and then further (helping the quaggan?), and then further (fire island?) to eventually lead all the way to the deep sea dragon in its deep sea cave.

Each of these “events” should encompass both temporary content (defeat the Aetherblades and drive them from the Tengu island) as well as permanent content (opening of the Tengu island as a place to go and explore). They would have both temporary achievements that would perhaps only grant a title “defender of the tengu” while also permanent achievements that would grant achievement points (visit the tengu island for 5 points), or items, or even a new playable race to choose at character creation. If done correctly, this additional story also (by virtue of being in new areas) does not effect the current personal story at all…and people can still enjoy the game from the beginning to the end without feeling like they missed out on anything (since acheivements can still be gotten for the “new” content, new players can still catch up to older players)…they can still enjoy the Zhaitan story on their way to eventually heading to the Tengu island and eventually fighting the deep sea dragon.

You could do this with each of the four corners of the world (jormag north, Jungle dragon west, Kralkatorik southeast, Primordius northeast, and bubbles in the deep sea). Eventually GW2 would be a HUGE world that players could start at level 1 and then play on and on and on with the new content until they finally catch up to the “Living world” without feeling like they were lost or missing anything.

my 2 cents on what I hoped the living story would be and still could be.

Tie Living Story into the original Guild Wars

I personally played GW1 for 6+ years. That was the one and ONLY game I played over that time. The story was full in both depth and breadth. It was both intriguing and thought provoking. It engaged me daily for 6 years straight, which is pretty darn impressive. Now granted towards the end it was just a matter of grinding to get my titles ready for GW2 but the anticipation of the upcoming game kept the drive alive.

Now that I think of it the grind that lead up to the release of GW2 seemed to carry over into the new game but the fleshed out storytelling style did not seem to follow.

I think it is time for the Living Story to get back to basics. Let’s start tying into the rich content base that is already ripe and ready to be picked from the well-stocked archives of GW1.

• Bring on the Mursaat
• Crumble a wall of the Eye of the North and let us wander into the wild overgrown and untamed experience of Gwen’s Garden
• Allow the Jade Sea to start melting and run off into the Echovald Forest
• Imagine how majestic The Falls have become not to mention how they would have been affected by Zinn’s Secret Underground Lair
• Palawa Joko has surely turned the Desolation into a veritable lush Garden of Joko by now

There is just so much history just waiting for the right storyteller to pick it up and run with it.

Remember – It’s not cheating building on a well thought out premade platform. Heck… it was your idea in the first place

Okay, I’ll bring out a few of my issues with how the Living World has gone.

Repeatability
The living world is based almost entirely on account wide achievements. All too often, it seems like you can log in every other Tuesday, and click through most of the content. This is not a bad thing, per se. No matter how big the content release some people will storm through it in no time. (I think it took ~14hours for someone to beat Nightfall after it was released?) The larger issue is that once you’ve gone through the content once… there is very little reason to go do it again. Many times, it’s nigh impossible to do it again.
Many times, you can’t even see how the battle would go with a different class!
Where this gets particually ugly is when later in the week, people who have less flexible schedules come in to play, and all of the more active players have no reason to play with them in doing this content.
There’s no point in making permanent content (which everyone seems in favor of), if you can’t meaningfully play it again.
Then salt gets added to the wound, when every single character you have, even ones created after the event is over, get thank you letters from Lord Faren for something you can never do.

Jump It / Zerg It
Far too many of the LW installments quickly boil down to doing one of following things:
- Crazy mad jumping puzzles (SAB 1&2, Zephyr, Aether Retreat, various metas)
- Joining a juge zerg which just steamrolls any and everything (Jubilee, Clockwork, Labryinth, Karka)

Doing these things from time to time is okay, but there’s far too much of them, and frankly, it doesn’t appeal to everyone. I never set foot into SAB2, because I had no more desire for more jumping puzzles. Mad King Labyrinth? That is an incredibly solo/small group unfriendly area… and once I got my meta done, I haven’t gone back.
Part of the problem here I think is that in both of these modes, you’re not really playing your character. I can pick any class I want, and it doesn’t change how it plays out. The jumping is the same… zerging is just a question of which weapon you sit back and auto-attack with to tag the most foes.

Cohesion
One fortnight we’re zerging karka in Southsun. Then we have this detective story surrounding the LA assassinations, which does bleed into the Aetherblade attack, and there’s a bit of a seque to the Zephyr Bazaar and followup Election… and then poof it’s gone, and we’re riding Queen Jennah’s royal balloons. And when it’s time to reveal Scarlet, do we have some tie in where Majory had discovered a plot and told Logan, which led to Anise being prepared… but nope. Rox and Braham are just tagging along…

And then we just put all of that on hold, and go play in Moto’s box. WHAT?!?
And then Tequatl just instantly becomes harder to kill than Zhaitan. WHAT?!?
Oh Look! back to Scarlet!
Oops, forget Scarlet! Here’s Halloween!

This doesn’t feel like I’m reading a long novel, and getting one chapter a fortnight. I feels like several different books got put in a shredder, and now we’re getting random excepts from each book, but sometimes a page from another book tossed in the middle. Sometimes you get the next chapter in your story… a few months later.

Knowing What To Do
There have been a great many achievements and/or plot points in stories where quite frankly, the game provides essentially zero clue as to what you’re expected to do. Example: Flame and Frost’s “Lost and Found”, where you basically are expected to just wander all over the zone and “happen upon” these items? The clue is “Return 6 belongings to refugees”. Clockwork Chaos’s “Portal Invasion Closer” had /everyone/ confused, thinking it was five portal events, in particular because when the event completed, it said “Portal Closed” (or the like). And then the achievement for doing all 13 zones… with no tracker for which ones you’ve gotten credit for….
I honestly don’t know how we’re supposed to complete some of this content without something like Dulfy’s site. IMO, it’s rather poor game design to rely on external sites to fill in the blanks.

The World isn’t Changing
There’s still bandits raiding Queensdale. The Seraph and Centaur are /still/ going back and forth in Kessex. The Risen are still, well, everywhere, even though Zhaitan is dead. There’s only one new map, which seems to gain more reasons not to go there all the time. The world was changing in Flame and Frost… until it all just went away…

People complaining about Tequatle simply do not know how to play this game. There are tons of organized communities out there who have come together to take down this challenge. All you have to do is find them, and there’s plenty of places to do so. So please do us all a favor and stop trying to solo it because you’re going to die really badly, and then you’re going to come here and complain how much of a debacle Teq is.

Onto the LW/LS…

I think the pace is fast, but can be eased by having it extended like some LS so players can have more time to play through them.

In-game backgrounds on all LW heroes and villains are a must. Because just dropping them in game does nothing without knowing who these people are. We want to care about them, or hate them (in a good way).

Some sort of major hints and clues of what these protagonists/antagonists are all about and what plans they might be having ahead. Subtle changes throughout the world, npc’s gossiping, all this hinting at what to expect next.

Would be nice to know how many chapters are there in a story arc. This way we know the beginning, middle and end of a story. Instead of it looking like a long, meaningless story.

Things I enjoy most about the Living World:

• Seeing/exploring new locations
• Changes like those currently in Kessex Hills that are subtle, non-fanfare, mysterious and generate genuine community intrigue and enthusiasm. They also genuinely change the map, which in the longterm makes core gameplay like the progression of alts much more interesting because the maps will be different over time as you complete them repeatedly.
• Some of the cosmetic rewards – I’m less a fan of the novelty ones that look pretty silly on most characters, but the flower backpieces etc. have been really nice.
• We now have fewer excessive grindy achievements than we used to get (see Halloween 2012 vs 2013) although rewards are hit and miss (see Halloween 2013 20-slot bags)
• We now have a smaller emphasis on RNG ticket-based rewards per event, which is awesome. Dragon Bash drove me mad trying to get a Jade Ticket, which I never did manage despite sinking hours and hours into the attempt.
• EDIT: I’ve also appreciated the range of difficulty in content in releases such as the Queen’s Gauntlet and Tequatl.
• EDIT 2!: Jumping puzzles

Things I dislike about the Living World:

Writing/Story

• Scarlet – as a villain, as a character, as a plot device. She’s poorly written, shallow, uninteresting and much, much worse than anything Tyria deserves in its lore.
• The lack of development of existing factions/characters/locations/races/plot elements from the personal story – instead we often seem to get some new flavour of the month villain, like the Aetherblades. This is partly an extension of my Scarlet hate.
• Poor framing of the player character in the story – we often have no idea what is going on. Take Halloween, for example – we could have been the characters discovering the Bloody Prince’s existence. Instead, some much smarter character does it instead and we just get to play personal assistant again.
• Critical story information only being available in prose on the website – this should 100% be IN the game.

Content

• The temporary nature of content – hate this as GW1’s strength was that you could play at your own pace. Even now you could go back and complete all of the content (bar seasonal festivals). While I like the idea of world actually being ‘alive’, what we’ve mostly been getting with the LW is not world change, but an episodic story. Miss an episode, and you have no idea what the hell is going on.
• Gating story progression behind achievement grind (e.g. recent Halloween content)
• Too fine a focus on achievement-driven, checklist-checking playtime and throwaway content that will be played only until people have got their achievements and then abandoned. Focus on content that will be played persistently because it’s fun and has longterm value.
• Meta-achievements that can only be achieved through combined use of daily and static LW achievements – this is extremely inflexible if you can only log in one or two days a week and forces players to play to the game’s schedule instead of their own. See the current Halloween meta, which not only blocks story progress but also requires multiple days of play to complete because you have to complete dailies.

Things I would change:

• Reduce the pace of releases. I’ve seen development quotes bemoaning the lack of resources to put into stuff like cutscenes, but I would quite frankly rather see FEWER updates of HIGHER quality with a focus on that layer of polish which cutscenes would add.
• Even more permanent content (this has improved recently, but I still grimace when I think of the permanent expansion we could have had by now if the LW resources had been spent on that instead).
• Reduce the amount of time-gating. If some of the LW content sticks around permanently, make sure the achievements and rewards stick around permanently, too.
• Work on the story delivery system. This is desperately needed if you want players to be more invested in the LW than “Have I done all the achievements yet?”
• Make meta-achievements more accessible – the best LW instances in this respect have been e.g. the Bazaar, where you could complete the meta via multiple static achievements, all daily achievements, or a combination of both.
• Make sure that critical story info for a LW episode is not lost in a written piece on the website. Either put the prose in the game, or make it more available via cutscenes/dialogue/discovery in-game. Either way, it belongs in-game!
• EDIT3!: Account-bound/reusable cosmetic rewards, via a skin bank or something similar to the Achievement skins panel.

Shanaeri, back in the original Collaborative Devleopment thread, he said if the initial topics were productive, they’d continue on with others in the future.

I want to second Xar’s post above.

It’s obvious part of the goal of specific rewards like cosmetic backpacks is to motivate getting involved with that LS installment. I like what we’ve heard about the new skill coming with the Krait installment tomorrow… namely that it will be easier to get during the two week chapter, but available afterward.

It’d be great if that could be true of every reward that is part of the LS. Festivals that repeat yearly are no problem, if you can work toward last year’s reward a year later. Other stuff, like molten alliance items, should be available forever. Make it harder to get, so there’s still motivation to do them during their chapter, but development needs to be creating more and more options for players of the game, not steadily mothballing each bit of variety after two weeks has passed.

Along with the backpacks, we need some way to store novelty items like the journal or zephyr model. They’re just not useful enough to use up bank space for, but it’s painful to delete them after earning them during a chapter. We really need some sort of trophy case in our home instance along the lines of the Hall of Monuments so that we can display these kinds of items, and interact with them years later, rather than cursing them for cluttering up our bank space.

I dislike the direction that the Living World is going in for several reasons.

Zerg content: Massive amounts of players spamming auto attacks in a laggy and boring environment is not a fun execution of ‘Living World’ to me. Examples of this would be Scarlet’s invasions, Queen’s Pavilion (not gauntlet), Mad King’s maze champions, new Tequatl (large amounts of players just show up and go afk, ruining it for everyone else).

Scarlet: She doesn’t seem very frightening as a villian and doesn’t seem to add anything to the current lore. I’d rather the LW draw and build upon in GW1 lore instead of go in a direction that involves scarlet uniting different enemies with no real motive.

Rewards: Queen’s Gauntlet had nice rewards but was overly nerfed in my opinion. Main pavilion area farming was alright. Scarlet invasions loot was nerfed too much and the Aetherblades gave a disproportionate amount of loot. The new TA path is quite long and I don’t think 2g is balanced, though many of the other dungeons have questionable amounts as well (SE p2 1g, HOTW p3 1g, etc, Arah p3 1.5g, etc.).

CC/Condi Spam: This is mainly directed towards aetherblades but some other mobs fall into this category (Mummies). I enjoy mitigating CC and Conditions (preferably through dodging) but some of the aetherblades for example are in my opinion over the top when it comes to CC/conds. I would like the attacks to be diversified a bit more; the cc/condition ones to be put on cooldown in between other well-telegraphed attacks.

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The good: I thought Queen’s Gauntlet (excepting annoying camera and nerfed rewards), Molten Facility and AR weren’t all that bad. The new TA path is quite interesting also – but the unskippable ‘cutscenes’/dialogue are annoying, as is the overemphasis on NPC aggro (generators, oozes, electric floor room). I want content that has interesting mechanics/enemies that is preferably instanced to prevent zergs from occuring (they ruin all enjoyment of the game for me). The daily rewards for resealing the Bloody Prince are also good I think though the fight itself is quite boring (no real mechanic except standing on the candy corn puddle and spamming auto attack on prince…). I also like the champions in Mad King’s Labyrinth, they are quite cool in a small group; I would prefer it if they were in an instanced dungeon instead of a lag-fight with massive particle effects in 60 person zerg.

The living Story may be a good thing “in theory” since it keeps the game “alive” and fresh. However, the amount of problems around it overshadow everything else about it:

Temporal content: Yes, is “LIVING” Story but the fact everything is temporal turn the whole thing into a “Rush or Lose” content.
I like to take my time to play. My objetive is not get to lvl 80, explore the whole world in one week and then start whining about the lack of content.
I had to create a character exclusive to make this kind of content since it would be impossible to keep with the LS just playing normaly.
Additionaly, the LS is a total inmersion breaker. Even if it’s just a bunch of easy-to-do activities, we have to spend a lot of time on it so when I return to my regular game-play is just like: Wait, what am I doing here again?
And the worst, you are turning the whole game into a temporal content. The new dungeon path and the upcoming update is proof of this. Now if players aren’t completed the whole game yet, we are going to miss a lot of things.
At most, the LS should be a short serie of temporal activities leading to a new and permanent content and never affect a well established content. Achievements should be linked to the permanent content and the temporal activities should be at most, be linked with the daily achievements .

Lack of content: the LS is just a grindfest of achievements. It lacks of a strong “story” to support it. Right now is just do this, repeat 50 times, move to the next. Kill the annoying NPC, kill her again, maybe kill her one more time, wait to the next update to kill her again.
And the worst, you keep putting uncharismatic/annoying NPC’s as the leading characters. The players are just the idiots who do all the hard/boring job and Logan/Marjory/Scarlet get all the attention.
You did it with the Personal Story and you are doing it again with the LS.

Bugs: The LS is not only highly bugged when you release it, you are introducing more and more bugs in parts of the game totally unrelated to the LS. Not only we have to deal with the old-well know bugs, we have now to deal with new bugs.
Is really hard to be excited about the upcoming update knowing it going to bring new bugs.

This is all I have to say about the LS, sorry for the long post and I hope it helps even a little bit.

Delete Scarlet. Wipe out every memory of her. Seriously, it’s for the betterment of the game. Start introducing content that makes sense to Tyria.

You have a game world with so many loose ends, it’s like an endless smorgasbord of stories you can pick up and build a true living world around, but instead you introduce a stale villain, unplausible alliances and an unhealthy amount of steampunk, all of which has contributed to my complete dismissal of PvE.

I agree with some other posters, I feel like my character is not as involved With living world as normally the hero of an rpg is. Also, the amount of grinding it takes to finish several living story objectives keeps a semi hardcore player like myself put off from achieving them. I would rather jump into a dungeon than do 50 door events. They’re normally more rewarding, and not boring, to me anyway.

Something I do really like about the living story meta achievements is the ability to do the daily parts that count toward the meta. This is basically the only way I was able to finish the twilight assault or the Halloween events. It was nice to have that option.

Imo, the current direction and pace of the living story is off. I don’t feel like there is any story at all currently. We have so many parties, celebrations, and random mini games that we need to repeat ad-nasium that the whole idea behind the living story is being lost.

Scarlet is a villain no one asked for and it is becoming evident that she is a villain no one wants either. The game was advertised as set in the GW1 universe but with more dragons! It seems that vision has been completely lost. There were tons of interesting, deep, and thought provoking stories and lore in the original GW, and instead we are currently fighting a crazy clown lady who yells DIE DIE DIE.

The biggest change in the living story needs to be the story itself. Tie an old GW story that was never resolved into the next dragon story arch and have it span about 6 months, culminating in facing the next elder dragon. It can involve meaningful DE’s, “mini-boss” style villians who are used, fleshed out and then killed. Chasing one villain around who does the same thing every time is boring and uninspired.

This current krait story line would be a good chance for us to find out why the krait left their homes, why they are consolidating their power, and more lore on the krait. It can tie into the rise of bubbles, and other ancient monsters that bubbles has pulled under his power. After a month of krait we can figure out where this monster is and go face him in his lair. After we kill him the next update can lead us to the lair of bubbles second in command. This can lead to more information on the kakra, all finally culminating in finding and defeating bubbles himself. As this story progresses we should see his corruption spreading throughout the current world, and meaningful DE’s popping up.

What I suspect we are going to get instead is that magic crazy clown lady used her insanity to get two races who hate each other to magically work together in some alliance and then that alliance will magically fall apart after we climb a tower and scarlet will get away… again… And that is the problem.

Finally I would say the 2-week schedule is a bust. The content is made to focus on a 2-week grind to keep players busy instead of actual content. Move back to once a month updates with meaningful content instead of endless grind that is driving players away.

TLDR;

Living story is using shallow repetitive story telling to keep people playing instead of using established lore and the actual threat of the dragons. Additionally the pace of the LS is off due to the literally dozens of celebrations, elections, parties, and mini-games that segment each story.

1. Move to established unfinished stories from the original GW, add depth to the stories, reintroduce the dragons.
2. Reduce updates to once a month to give more polish, more content and less grind
3. Kill scarlet and stop doing the same story every month (alliance→disaster→repeat)

Of all things you could have addressed with Elementalists … I really don’t understand why you picked the things you did to meddle with.

If you wanted to actually help Elementalist you could have addressed some of our long outstanding questions:

1. Why is Balance Stance a 40 second cooldown / 8 second duration on a high armor/high hitpoint class, but Armor of Earth is a 90 second cooldown / 6 second duration on Elementalist?

2. Why does Lingering Elements not affect all attunement dependant abilities such as Piercing Shards and Internal Fire

3. Why hasn’t Zephyr’s Speed and Windborne Dagger been replaced with traits that would be useful? You nerfed One With Air (something people actually used) and left us with their broken and unwanted cousins.

4. Why is ANet so aggressively pushing Burning on a class that, as designed, is not a condition class. If Burning was power based, I could understand … but stacking burning when its only doing a few hundred a tick is asanine.

5. When are the focus and scepter issues going to be addressed? You acknowledged the issues with both since the end of Closed Beta and still nothing has been done. The only benefit/advantage that elementalist has is the fact it has access to more abilities than other classes … so none of them should be lackluster. Example: Shatterstone.

6. With nerfed Mobility, gutted Healing abilities, and the 5 player AE cap … how does ANet justify the low hitpoints/armor that the class was given back in alpha/closed beta? Look at the other low hitpoint classes: Guardian, Thief, Elementalist … which is doing the worst (especially in sPvP)? Look at the other low armor classes: Necromancer, Mesmer, Elementalist … same question as before? Don’t you feel that the drawbacks given to the class have should be reviewed given that you have abandoned the reasoning for them in the first place back before release? It isn’t like other classes aren’t doing the same damage output at Elementalists with far more survivability.

I would also like some clarification on two points that on the surface look completely hypocritical.

1. Why was RTL nerfed and Warriors, Rogues, and Thieves are allowed to do the very thing you deemed improper for elementalists to do in your game?

2. Why are you thinking of moving Vigor on crit to 20 points in Arcane when you give it to both Guardians and Mesmers for a 5 point investment?

This may just be my experience, but I have noticed a distinct likelihood of becoming suppressed while I have my commander tag active, that I do not notice otherwise. If I do not have my tag on, I can generally ping waypoints, chat in /map and /say, and be as communicative as I like without much issue.

However, when I have my tag on, I get suppressed constantly. It happens at least one per Invasion, and also happens during Teq and my Guild’s Missions.

I suspect that this is due to the fact that much of my commanding involves short or one-word orders (“stack here,” “go north,” etc), and pinging waypoints to help control zerg flow. It is beyond frustrating to not be able to communicate with people who are impatiently waiting on you to tell them what to do or where to go next. Here are my main issues, and my suggestions:

1. Suppression in /map also suppresses /say, and vice versa. Short of whispering someone to convey my message while suppressed, I am left with no option to communicate with the people surrounding me. Perhaps at least give me the chance to speak in /say after suppressing in /map, and vice versa.

2. There is no warning when you are approaching being suppressed. There’s no explanation as to which actions with what frequency contribute to suppression (for example, people seem to be able to spam /laugh and other emotes with alarming frequency with no ill effects, which frankly annoys the kitten out of me), so it’s difficult to avoid. A list of guidelines, or a warning in the chat box when you’re nearing suppression, would be immensely helpful. Also, if emotes could suffer the same penalty as regular chat, that would be a great QoL improvement.

3. There’s no way of knowing when you’re not suppressed anymore. Additionally, there seems to be a double standard of suppression regarding chat vs pinging waypoints. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that I can say “wp please” much earlier than I can ping a waypoint, and I suspect that pinging the waypoint actually increases the amount of time I spend suppressed. If there was a timer on suppression, and if there was a transparent explanation of how that timer works, then it would make my life much easier.

I understand the reasoning behind suppression, and I respect it. But it (along with the somewhat ridiculous 2-mail limit) is aggravating, and affects me far more often than I feel it is appropriate to “just deal with.”

I’d really like to see some response to this issue.

tl;dr: suppression sucks when you’re a bossy person