Guild Wars 2

The only problem with that, timmyf, is that if you kill a dragon and his minions disappear how is someone who comes along 2 years from now going to experience killing that dragon? What you are suggesting is that the devs make content aimed at current players with no thought of future players or how to catch them up.

That’s currently one of the biggest problems with the Living World; the inability of brand new players to experience the stories. They play through the personal story, kill Zhaitan, and then are thrust into Nightmare Tower with no way of knowing who Scarlett is, where she came from, why she’s the villian, what she has done previously to make her a threat, etc… it’s like coming in to a TV show half-way through the season. Do you watch the remainder, or wait for it to hit Netflix so you can start from the beginning? Problem is, there is no Netflix for old content, so new players are simply out of luck.

Atlas.9704:

So could ANet stop the Personal Story by level 20 or so?
Because the “Personal” part of the story is over by the time you pick an Order.
This could free you up in twisting the overarching story on its head somewhat.

I don’t make a suggestion like this lightly, in fact I don’t envy your job because its a tough one and I applaud any efforts you all are making in working with this.

At the moment it seems like GW2 is stuck between what it wants to do and where it was with GW1. You don’t want to keep old events around but still need them to build the narrative of the “present”. New players need to know about big Z and the Pact, but with that Personal Story your hands get tied when you want to do something extreme (like kill off Jenna or anyone high ranking).

Honestly, I know ArenaNet is on the fence with the idea of an expansion. I was initially against it, but now, I think this may be the best of all possible worlds:

1) Create an expansion that opens up new territory.
2) All characters start within the existing structure.
3) Once you join an Order, you can access the “expansion” content.
4) Expansion areas have no Hearts (like Orr) and become the most frequently-changing areas in the game. Build the zones with long-term change in mind.

This gives all new players enough time to learn the game mechanics before heading to a more complicated zone AND your Order can be the primary reason you head into the new areas.

For example: you must venture deep into the Maguuma jungle to study the Bloodstone (Priory), infiltrate the White Mantle (Whispers), or begin an offensive against Mordremoth (Vigil.) There could be almost a second chapter of Personal Story along with this, so if you buy the game and expansion and start fresh, you can choose whether to fight Zhaitan or Mordremoth once you join an Order. That kind of thing.

Most Favorite: Labyrinthine Cliffs / Bazaar of the Four Winds

• Introduced a new zone
• Insanely gorgeous visuals
• Catered to exploration via the sky crystal hunt (which included extras and did not require a slavish following of a third-party guide)
• Made references to GW1 lore
• Introduced a new skill mechanic of movement (though latency-related issues could be better improved)
• Had dynamic events in zone for a group zerg to travel up and down
• Had separate spawns for lone farmers to peacefully farm by the shoreline
• Had related mini-activities such as an in-zone jumping/race DE to contribute to the chain and Sanctum Sprint
• Instances were soloable or groupable, with adjustable difficulty up to four tiers (rewards could have been better improved)
• Eventually led to a player’s choice/vote scenario that affected future development of the game (though consequences should be more obvious and not so distanced by time and other updates)

Least Favorite: Lost Shores

• Waiting. Unpredictable amounts of waiting for a one-off event to start, at possibly different timings in different overflows. (Tequatl waiting and other spawn camping like krait blood witch come in as close seconds.)

• Not crash-proof. If you crashed out of one overflow, you could turn up somewhere else where the event was completely over.

• Lag-ridden and unplayable. Bags of ridiculously high hp. See champion karka phases where everything came together for 45 minutes of horror – single-digit frame rates and skill lag with too many people together, champion karka with two layers of armor to break through for three separate hp bars per mob.

• Only catered to one playstyle. In this case, zerg everything. Nothing for other playstyle preferrers. A little bit of something for everyone: zerg, 2-5 man groups, solo is nicest.

• Permanent fork-in-the-path choices. Continue with Ellen Kiel or go escort a group of asura to a side outpost. This event plays once only and you can never see what happens on the other side. Players should be at least able to experience everything for the duration of the update (or flashback via a memories system) before the opportunity is taken away by the passage of time and further updates.

• One-time only. (Dynamic events, update, etc.) If you missed it, for whatever reason, you’re screwed. Recurring seasonal content works better for me personally – catch it within this season, or else wait for the next time it comes back. More permanent content to be played at one’s own time is best, of course.

- City / outpost Invasion system (simillar to RIFT’s world map events) where waves of mobs attack an entire City or an small outpost and players have to defend it to get rewards
- NPC routines (like in the Elder Scrolls games). Some quests the player must talk to a npc only at day / night period
- Faster Day / Night Cycle (like AION’s Day-Night Cycle) where 24 hours in game time = 2 hours real time
- Weather Cycle ( Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter) which makes the world more “living”. Every week players can see and feel the climate changes like snow particles falling from the clouds / sky and ammounting in the ground, foliage falling from the trees (color changing from green to a brown-like color), trees decaying, flowers and fruits sprouting, etc.
_ Skill animations could be better. There is too many simple animation skills. Personally i would like to see cabal and aion animation skill types.
- Improvement of Aesthetics of GW2: DirectX 11 implementation, better tesselation of equipment and weapons textures, open GL 4.1+ implementation, Global Illumination / lighting, real-time shadows, better water shading and physics (like Cryengine 3 water) or an sea-engine like the one from Assassin’s Creed IV (could implement naval sieges / battles!), etc.
- Housing System: a player can make his house in any part of world map or on a specific area. Player can craft in his own house and can teleport to it through a scroll or skill
- Ground Mounts and Flying Mounts (players like free roaming and adventuring with a mount too!)

P.S.: take a look at Aion Vision trailer on youtube and see what can be useful from that on GW2

I want to second niteskate: I love the Living World, and think it’s an amazing thing for a game to have.

So, instead of repeating some of the great points being made (and I think that there are great points being made in this discussion), I thought I’d spitball some ideas that could be expanded on by others. These aren’t hard recommendations, just ideas to spark discussion.

I don’t think the devs should be afraid to break free of the bi-weekly update schedule if it means they could plan something bigger, more excited, and more polished. If they announced that the next several LS updates would be 3 weeks apart, building up to an even bigger expansion that would expand the world and lore in a meaningful way (which is what I hear many folks asking for), I think it would be met with excitement! Many fans of GW1 miss the shear amount of maps, lore, and newness that was added with the two expansions, and, while the LW is an amazing way to have new stuff more often, I think something somewhere between a normal LW update and a full-on expansion would make a lot of people happy. (Elona and Cantha should eventually come, but we’re willing to trust the devs to take their time to do them right, at their proper time).

For something more specific: A series of updates could expand the lore about one of the more mysterious races, including those established in GW1. There’s so much we could learn about the Seers, the Forgotten, the Largos, the Kodan, the Jotun before their fall, or any others I’m not listing. This would add some connection to the first game, which old fans would love to see, and introduce new players to the larger world/lore of Guild Wars.

And to round it out at three: Something along the lines of the alliance battles from Factions could be implemented, but with a computer faction against a player faction, fighting for control of zones on some specific region’s map. If the players failed, the whole region would become overrun, and remain that way until players fought them back, even after the official story moved on. If such a defeat happened, it would change the environment in the long term, and take real time for it to go back to normalcy (and some permanent changes should also happen, within reason). This would have higher stakes than just “Scarlet’s minions are attacking X,” as there would be more drama; an actual front line, an ebb and flow of victory and defeat that players could see on the map.

Here are just my imperfect ideas, that I hope will give others ideas, and provide good discussion.

Glad to see all the constructive criticism. Less happy to see the flames and recriminations. This is a good opportunity, people. Try not to ruin it for the majority.

What I like:

• I love new characters like Braham, Rox, Majory and Kasmeer. They feel whole and convincing, and I enjoy their company.
• I love seeing existing stories built upon. During August, I was really curious about the tension between Logan, Jenna and Anise. Faren is always fun (so love his role in that month’s dungeon, shame it can’t be revisited), and the minstrel and hobotron are amusing as minor recurring characters. They help make the world feel alive.
• I liked that the August update dealt with the problems facing the human race. It made sense for them to show themselves as competitive with the more technologically advanced races.
• The aetherblade seemed really cool and mysterious at first.

What I don’t like:

• Scarlet uniting all these disparate groups is a stretch to say the least, as are many aspects of her character. Shame to squander a big name voice actor on a character that the majority do not enjoy. It also cheapened the aetherblade for me.
• The lore players are actually interested in (elder dragons) has been ignored. Every time we thought something actually related to the elder dragons, well, it was Scarlet.
• The living story does not build upon the personal story, apart from a few nods. They feel like disparate systems.
• Content is fleeting and can’t be revisited.
• The world is not expanding.

What I expect:

• I want the living story to expand upon the world. I assumed it would take the place of expansions, but until new zones are opened and the greater world lore is explored in greater depth, it falls a little short.
• I don’t object to biweekly updates, but the living story needs to move at a more manageable pace. Similar to other suggestions, I’d like to see a clearer delineation between living story updates and quality of life updates/updates that don’t directly pertain to the living story.
• Maybe super fun box should be annual rather than biannual. It made sense to bring it back, but maybe it was too soon and too jarring.
• I’d like to see a balance between predictability and chaos. Basically I expect a major story arch to span a “season” (either half a year or a year) with the living story updates as “episodes.”

I really liked the way that Flame and Frost was handled. It was a slow buildup that gave us time to understand the situation and get to know the characters, and by the end of it I really cared about what was happening. Southsun was kind of that way, but a little bit shorter, and it definitely could have used more development.

What I’m saying here is TAKE YOUR TIME! Make a story that makes sense, and take the time to tell it right.

Also, please stop trying to force Scarlet on the playerbase. Her backstory is ridiculous (why has no one mentioned the super genius sylvari who’s somehow mastered every scientific discipline of every major race?), and she’s more childish than a Saturday morning cartoon villain. I don’t even play her content anymore, because I just wish she wasn’t part of the game. Totally out of sync with the rest of GW lore.

Maybe we could see some expansion into new parts of the map, or even an instanced underground zone. I’d like to explore the dwarven or asuran tunnels and see what kind of nasty things have moved in.

Okay, let me try and sum up everything that has been said so far (multiple times) that I agree with.

1) The Living Story updates happen too fast. This would not be a problem if the content was permanent.

2) The Living Story updates are not meaningful to the story at large. This would not be a problem if they connected to previous GW lore. Additionally, they don’t affect the world at large.

3) The Living Story updates do not present meaningful achievements or challenges.

4) The Living Story updates are not well-written.

In case you are worried about incorporating GW1 Lore into GW2 for the sake of players who didn’t play the original game: I did not play GW1 and I do not care. Give me a chance to learn some of the lore from GW1! Connect it in a backwards fashion to what I’ve already experienced. That will keep me happy.

Like others mentioned before, I’d like to see more use of the GW1 lore. This whole game was built on a solid foundation of history and lore that I feel is being almost completely ignored in favor of new story arcs like Scarlet Briar. Unless Scarlet starts riding dragons Targaryen style soon, I really don’t see the point of a new character with plans completely divergent of the storyline we were all sold on and progressed through. Yall could very easily focus LW content around loose ends left over from GW1, adding depth to the already existing world and clearing up unsolved mysteries left over from the first game.

Also, I don’t feel like the changes are at all permanent. Why not keep the Molten Dungeon around and treat it like a mini dungeon?

I personally feel that the GW universe has so much story depth potential that even trying to dig into it in 2 week spans will take way too much time at this point (adding scarlet and krait villains while we need to stop the greater evil – dragons and palawa in Elona…and probably other critters in the universe). Also I know there is a large concern with keeping zones populated for events and community but that is dragging down expansion potential.

I would really love to see the LS lead us to Cantha to prevent horrors of the forest/deep from intruding on the empire – or overthrowing a tyrannical leader. Then take us to Elona to push back undead and save centaurs and humanity…or ally with undead vs dragons. And then we can be on to exploring the remaining islands of the world and their cultures. For me it is the exploration that makes MMOs so interesting. Huge immersive worlds to check out lore and artwork with my friends. I personally wouldn’t mind an empty zone scaled properly like GW1 or we could consider consolidating “worlds” into a single server with districts like GW1 to keep maps as full as possible. Special zoned like WvWvW could have alliance choices where you chose some order you are representing or pair USA vs EU vs Asia etc.

To me the living story first has the role of expounding upon and tying up the billion intriguing loose ends of GW1 and GW2 at release. Using it to add new content like Scarlet with no -apparent- purpose makes me concerned I may never see an answer to my questions until GW3!

We would also like to know the living story is going – more lore on the direction events are heading so that we can start feeling like a Hero rather than a firefighter. I’m sure you have a wonderful relevant story plan for Scarlet and etc. but its been half a year and I haven’t more than a few guesses as to what we are doing. I’d prefer to be a heroic detective and infiltrator undermining some grand scheme in pieces.

So here is another rant from me. In summary: love GW2; add CANTHA!

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.

Part 2
5. You guys said, that now LW teams will have 4 months to create content.
I honestly don’t see it. Look at RIFT. Those guys post-launch were able to push new raid instance and bunch of zone-wide events every month. EVERY MONTH.
If I compare it the last scarlet things.. Well from 2 months, it is not even 1/6 of what Trion pushed over one month, for 12-months straight.
I think, that honestly if those guys had 4-moths to work one, and had some creative freedom, we could see new dungeon or fractal every living world update. As I said. If it doesn’t made sense story wise, then just make some stupid story, or don’t make any at all. Who cares ? Players want more interesting content.

6. Also Living World doesn’t make any impact on the world. The world is not living. It’s still static. Villages doesn’t expand, new events are not showing up, NPCs still walks the same path, forest is where it always been. Honestly nothing really changed since launch to call it living world.
To have Living world, you must have procedurally generated content. Otherwise it just “living” withing range of how much level designer are willing/have ability to change some thigns. I can believe they have willingnes to change (who doesn’t ?), they just lack ability to do so, because of some unspoken reason of plans of how game should developer over X period of time.

How to fix it ? Add contested content. Diffrence is good! Lock out players of content is good! (despite what some people think).
Create events that will truly IMPACT world. Like making other content constested., inaccessible to players until they push the event in other direction. You have dragons! Use them. Make dragon minions invade Quensdale. Impress new player by conflict, where they have to fight dragon minions to retake the zone.
It would certainly impress me more when I was new, than killing wurms..

And doesn’t make it scarlet invasion v2.0. This design doesn’t work.
Instead:
1. Split area into influence zones.
2. Players have to cap, and then defend point over, to gain influence over said zone.
3. Players can’t progress further until zone ia secured.
4. Minions doesn’t drop loot. Important. Otherwise we will just have bunch of farmer that will keep zone in permament conflict so they can farm.
5. Instead in secured zones, should spawn merchants that will sell unique items (other problem look above).

Let the cities burn to the ground, NPC killed, villages destroyed. Make permanent impact on the world, until players will fix it.

That would be more living that entire “Living” World have been since start.

And now my personal complain. Halloween. It seems far smaller and less interesting this year. Last year it at least had nice quest line and dungeon. This year ? Bunch of brain-dead achievement, with achievement needed to actually complete quest. At this point I just facepalmed.

Ok.
Here are the problems I have with living world:
1. Those episodes doesn’t really add anything meaningful. More grind achievements every two weeks. Temporary content that is here for 2 to 4 weeks. It’s no meaty. It’s just… shallow.
2. Content is not expanded. It just add some small things (!) and then just takes it away. At this point I don’t give a crap, about if it is imressive, logical or whatever for the story. Almost nobody in MMO really cares about story. It’s just a fact. And those who care probably won’t mind if more content will be left behind, so they can tell their friend that the game is expanding, instead of being in similar state as it was on launch.

Solution for this point is fairly simple. Focus on permanent content, that will truly expand what we have now. Add more interesting events. Zone meta-events, and don’t hide them. Just tell people “we add X new events in zone Y”. Add new dungeons, (not replace old ones…).

Another thing are rewards for those events. It’s far deeper problem, than Living Story it self. It can’t be easily resolved. Rewards are not interesting, because game mechanics was dumped far to much. There is finite point to which you can make interesting rewards, if you itemization if primarily made of static stats increases, without much of variation.
Here is the thing. You all played Diablo 2. Are you know why people still Play Diablo 2 ? Because it have interesting itemization. Finding interesting item that will fit my build is reward on it’s own. Unfortunately with your pursue to balance and accessibility that important factor just have been lost.
Either way, rewards can’t be improved without changing some corde decisions behind mechanics.

And without rewards that are worth pursuing, what is the point of playing new content ?

Let’s say you add an new permanent dungeon or really hard meta-event in living story. I will do it once to see it, and that probably will be it. What is the point of doing it again, if all I get are greens and blues ? I mean really. Exotics should have 100% drop chance from bosses. And ascended items should have lower chance to drop but they should drop. Period.
But as I mentioned above, it have it limits. How long I can pursue new items, if they either look the same as bunch of other items, or even more important if they are just the same 4 stats variation over and over again, with no interesting properties what so ever ?

As I said. In that aspect game need deep changes, The question is. Are you willing to make them ?

Ok we have rewards and content discussed.

3. Living Story is not strong marketing point. It won’t bring new player. It also won’t bring old ones who doesn’t play anymore.
It have little coverage over non-mmo sites. (if any for that matter). And Even if it bring old player to the game what he will. Well.. Brutal truth. He/she will see that nothing really change. The content in the game is as it was in when he’she left game. After that such player probably won’t even bother to check game year later. And why would ? In a year there will be more MMOs coming anyway.

4. I personally don’t even feel compelled to do living story achievement. Most of them are either just grind to X, or are so simple, that I complete most of them by accident.
But if I’m lacking something to meta-achievement ? I don’t bother. There is no reason to do them. It doesn’t have any sense of accomplishment or any interesting rewards.

Part 1

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.

What I like about Living Story so far:

• New Places.
  (Southsun.)
• Monuments.
  Things that are impacted and left onto the world in a permanent way, that carry a bit of the story of what happened. (Karka Queen’s Corpse, Labyrinthine Cliffs in an odd sort of way).
• Holidays Events as a side-story that gets progressed once a year.
  This year’s Halloween was different from last year’s Halloween, it involved reoccurring characters that were a lore bonus to veteran players, but didn’t rely on that knowledge to understand the story for new players. (More like Kingdom of Loathing’s Crimbo than WoW’s Lunar Festival).

What I don’t like about Living Story so far:

• Lack of lasting Impact on the World
• Pace
  Is a bit much. Seemingly on production end, on the player real life scheduling end, and also on the story end. You can’t have a good story that exists on Rising Action and Climaxes all the time.
• Content not doing enough.
  When the website writings or clickable NPC optional dialogue conveys the plot or characterization more than the content does. When Achievements become the content instead of supplementing it.

Suggestions:

• Multi-chapter Living Story updates (like Scarlet) follow Story Structure to control the Pace and emphasize Impact; Exposition/Rising Action -> Climax -> Falling Action/Resolution.
  It’s alright if all updates are not created equal, you should be spending more resources on a Climax than on Rising Action. Don’t be afraid to devote two whole weeks to Resolution, because while it should be easier it shouldn’t be nothing. If you can’t keep a non-crunching team of people busy showing us how we impacted the world; we aren’t impacting the world nearly enough.

• Multi-chapter Living Story updates have two kinds of achievements;
  the ‘Meta’ achievement which you fill out over the course of the entire story Arc from start to finish, and achievements you need to get during each individual phase.
  This should be a good way to make sure the people with limited schedules can feel like they’re participating in the event as a whole and see some measured progress towards a goal over the course of months, but people who can sign on more frequently don’t get bored. You’re sort of halfway doing this already, you just need to commit the Meta to the entire story Arc.

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

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.

Will be a short one.

I’d love to see Living Story updates based on already existing lore – both GW1 and GW2.
What happened to Mursat? Where did Gods go? Why is there a floating castle? Why can’t we access Dominion of Winds, Elona, Cantha, etc. There’s so much lore already.

I’ll add more later.

The “Living World” isn’t living.

What we get is a random rhubard boss and various “new” factions that have no real (or even imagined) connection to old existing lore. No connection, no story, not real involvement by my character (other than boarding the loot train/zerg).

In other words, disconnected and BORING.

Give me dragons.
Give me mursaat/white mantle.
Give me krait with no rhubarb.
Give me a tangible reason to be there other than empty achievements & backpieces/minis
Engage my curiosity.
Tell a story, make the world change, let me actually be a part of my story.

I guess the elephant in the room is that the living world is just not very interesting. Instead of the great lore from GW1, all the locations we wanted to visit and people to interact with, we’re getting new characters, new places and new lore.

Also, if we break it down to event level, the very thing you guys said you wanted to avoid is still there – nothing truly changes. You have said you have created epic, world-changing events. But everything still returns to status quo. Either you need to stop saying you’re changing the world or truly change it. Rewards need to be one time only. Lion’s Arch gets destroyed ONCE. Then it’s rebuilt, eventually. Ogres trash some outpost, you release a new map where it’s a flaming pile of rubble. The scale needs to be bigger. Your attempt is mediocre at this point, either lose it or up the ante.

And yes, making the whole living story emphasis be on Scarlet was a horrible mistake. I’ve lost all interest in all the storylines where she is involved.

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.

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)

I think The Living World will have a very difficult time being impactful to the player base and to the game in general. Arena net’s hands are tied because of the personal story. The Living World can’t change the world in significant ways and can’t kill important characters. Doing so would create a conflict with the personal story.

Scrap the personal story and create a true Living World. Remove the chains that shackles you from unleashing your creativity. Create something impactful to the world and design interesting characters to tell the story.

Copy/Pasted from another thread.

After playing this game for over a year I would like to give an example of what I believe a true living world should be.

First and foremost it NEEDS REAL consequences for failure. If you have centaurs taking over a town when you fail, why must they end there? If given long enough the centaurs can and should take the whole kitten map, enslaving and forcing the npc’s within the areas to be hostile to the PC’s (similar to a flipped keep in WvW). Waypoints, once the map is taken, should all be contested, making the trip to that map impossible save for entering through a nearby map. And why stop there, if the centaurs form an alliance with the dredge they could start controlling even more of the maps. If however they are at odds with the dredge we could form a temporary alliance with one side to defeat the other or at very least see then openly at war with one another.

Large scale invasions like scarlet should be epic in scope (destroying maps/npcs) until rebuilt/defended by the PCs for an extended length of time. Supply runs similar to what we see in Cursed Shore would be a good start, but much more widespread. IF these rebuild actions are not taken by the PCs then they should just lay there rotting (needing more supply runs in the process to repair) until they are done!

I guess my whole point to this post is that without real meaningful consequences we may as well be furniture. Devs please take a page from the way some things in WvW are handled; leaving WvW to the enemies will leave you having to ACTUALLY WORK to regain your ground, and IMO it should be the same in the PvE world. Until it is done in a way that we can and do get hooped for letting things fail, we are no better than bystanders in your game.

Added after concern was posted in regards to day/night cycle and defeat

The day/night cycle would indeed be a pest, however with the extent of data anet gathers it could be handled IMO. For instance they could adjust the events to “fire” only when the server in question has the population to handle the events. The logic behind this could be the enemies have to sleep sometime too. Unlike in WvW where we the players run the show, in PvE it could be made to more suit the population that is in the current area/world.

Also as to the ressing npcs, it could be implemented as you progress into the map. As you free villages/npc’s their militia (a few npc fighters) would come with you to capture the next town and so forth. These npcs should rez the fallen similar to the veterans around the keeps in WvW. As waypoints are uncovered they should become uncontested etc etc.

I’m not saying that there are not many many things to consider with making a living world that would feel alive, but it would be nice if it were to feel less like trying to breath life into a corpse.

Thanks for reading and for opening this topic for your players!

Why have the dragons taken a back seat? I would much rather a long buildup of fending off primordus & jormag while trying to uncover more about the deep sea dragon and the jungle dragon all while kralkatorrik runs amok.

I ask this question in all seriousness. What do you forsee as the lifespan of this game?
5 years? 8 years? 10? It can’t go on forever.

Zhaitan’s corruption is still all over Orr while his minions are still all over the place. There are 5 other elder dragons out there as well.

If the living world built up to each dragon (even overlapping their storylines a bit) over 12~16 months time, that would mean in just six years from now we would be fighting the last elder dragon.

So a 7 year lifespan for the just the dragons. Plus there is so much more going on. Murssat, White Mantle, etc. Plus whatever is unleashed through the mists.

The current build up in kessex hills is sort of what I am talking about.
Oh and if it turn out scarlet is a dragon minion or something… that would not be what I am talking about.

We need to be fighting the dragons and cleansing their corruption, while knowing that is what we are doing.

P.S.
The updates schedule is a little rough. It is so rapid that myself and members of my guild are actively choosing to either not log in or skip the events completely. I truly believe that the 2 week schedule is a lesson for players in ‘be careful what you wish for’ when aksing for more ‘stuff to do’.

OK.

So, it might be really useful from our point of view to hear about the pillars of the LW that have often been mentioned and the reasoning as to why we went to such a hectic 2 week schedule completely out of the blue. It’s pretty tight from our playing point of view (for example the TA meta which was also removed after 2 weeks despite being advertised for October) and it often feels we’re playing to a set schedule – one that doesn’t take into account that we all play to different speeds, styles and timescales. In fact its very design appears to assume that we all invest identical amounts and should someone miss a 2 week chapter, the chances of them going along with the rest of the story is lessened.

It also feels you guys are suffering under the workload and pressure which risks content being released before it’s refined. For example, not having any way of tracking the story or catching up with what is going on. I know this being worked on, but we risk going into a year’s LW cycle without it being implemented and I’d have expected LW to launch with it.

I’m also seeing it shut out so many new players. My impression was the Living World would be just that, new content to evolve the world, not simply a story cut into chapters which doesn’t appear to link together at each stage. Tequatl (despite its pitfalls as a too difficult open world raid) was closer to what I expected the LW would be. Potentially the upcoming tower too.

A LW is admirable aim – one I would expect could be better accomplished by fleshing out the existing strengths and unique flavour of the world you launched with incl;

1) Additional DE’s or ones changing/being replaced to reflect the changing world

2) DRagons. OK not them directly, but dragon minions aren’t currently posing a threat. A LW would develop them a lot more. The invasions are good example, but they currently lack motive or reason. They would work so well for minion attacks

3) The World is meant to move on, yet some things haven’t changed at all (Charr/Human peace treaty in the tent outside Ebonhawke. A mini story could be going on here and there could be a whole “where were you when the treaty was signed” rp kind of thing.)

4) Underwater. I love it…but as many thread stated, it needs improvements to mechanics and maybe even a UW heavy zone.

There ya, go…much ramblings

My biggest problem with the Living Story effort is the pace is simply abusive. If you were adding new permanent content every 2 weeks that would be amazing. But you’re not – you’re rotating it behind little 2 week or 4 week windows. It’s entirely too cynical (and blatant) of an exercise in operant conditioning. That the most visible permanent addition lumped under ‘Living Story’ banner is the debacle that is Tequatl is not helping either.

Then there’s Scarlet. Words do not convey my horror that a piece of character writing unfit for a 15-year old’s worst ego-projection power fantasy is being touted as the backbone for a multi-million dollar MMO’s evolving storyline. It embarrassing. You (collectively) should be embarrassed. You have capable writers, but somebody needs to be riding herd over them reining in the blatant Sylvari fetishism/favoritism (is there any NPC in the entire setting who doesn’t fawn over them?) and to pull the suck cord when an idea just isn’t going to build a stronger world setting going forward. This isn’t a cry for grimdark gritty-grit-gritism, but we shouldn’t be looking at your star attraction of the last year and thinking “that’s just absurd…” It’s not building good word of mouth for the game and it’s not the powerful force for retention that the Living Story could be. Many of us aren’t eagerly waiting to see what happens next (which we should be), instead we’re dreading the inevitable re-appearance of Little Miss Writer’s-Fiat and her next ludicrously implausible alliance…

Request: Questionarie at the end of every living story, like the ones you had in the open beta.
Reasons: You’d get more player feedback instantly, forums can never compare to that.