Guild Wars 2

fear + torment will be fun too it seems. Since people move when they’re feared :o

I would like to share an interesting article.
(Your thoughts….)

http://www.eldergame.com/2010/11/how-to-balance-an-mmo-and-how-to-stop/

“Eventually I realized that balancing for “fairness” was pretty unimportant compared to balancing for “awesome”. You need to get the “fairness” thing in the right ballpark, but players will never be satisfied… however, if they’re all feeling awesome, they won’t quit over it. It’s a lot easier to make sure everybody is awesome, too, as opposed to balanced.

If you focus on making sure everybody is having fun, even though they’re not perfectly balanced, it will all be okay in the end."

We’ve all heard the QQ’ing about the Living Story and how the content is limited time only.

• Players who can’t log on consistently or new players end up missing a lot of good content.
• Furthermore, they may be dropped into the middle of a narrative they never had the opportunity to begin.
• Lastly, some of the content like dungeons takes a lot of work to create and balance, just to have it disappear in a month – this may not be most efficient use of resources and creative talent.

However, limited time content also has it’s positives.

• It presents the world as living, breathing, and evolving rather than static.
• It encourages players who can log on consistently to do so – this keeps the persistent world alive and populated.
• And finally, it helps the gem store sales by increasing demand for items that are unique to the event while also giving them a context.

I propose the Historian as a compromise toward the first 3 points, without stealing the luster from the last 3 points.

The Historian is an NPC who records and offers to players his account of the past events in the Living Story.

The Historian’s account should include:

1. Story
The story is simply the Historian telling (voiced or written) in his own words the story that took place. This includes what happened in the dialogs, cutscenes, the open world activity, and the instanced parts. Concept art and screen shots should supplement the story. The story driven cutscenes may or may not be included.

2. “Flashback” Instanced Missions
This includes the very same dungeons and instanced story missions that ran during the event. These instances are arguably where the quality gameplay is in the Living Story. Though I won’t presume that it takes more developer resources than the open world activities, instanced content is the typically more fine tuned and replayable.

Because it is completely instanced it does not threaten the new state of the world for people who participated in the actual Living Story event, nor does it require participation of the world. For all intents and purposes, it is simply a playable “flashback”. But for those who missed it, this is a chance to experience without disrupting the world continuity for others.

The Historian’s account should NOT include:

1. Open World Activities
What can be considered the “Living” part of the Living Story – the activities that took place in cities and explorable areas. For example: killing the dredge sonars, helping the refugees, collecting southsun samples, and smacking piñatas.

These open world activities definitely have a place in the event making it feel like the story was really having an impact on the world. However, these activities didn’t really offer anything unique or challenging to the gameplay, rather most of it depended on community coming together to be meaningful. Even the boss events were just the same old damage spam for an hour.

Also, re-implementing open world activities that were supposed to have been in the past presents serious technical and continuity challenges in itself. Attempting to bring open world activities back to the world could destroy the permanence of the changed world that the developers were trying so hard to create, or split the playerbase more than necessary between shards.

2. Achievements, drops, cosmetics, and other exclusive items

One of the goals of the Living Story is to reward players with that prestige “I was there when it happened” titles, and exclusive cosmetics. Allowing others who weren’t there to easily pick them up later through the Historian would diminish that sense of pride. It would also decrease demand for the cash shop exclusives during the event, which doesn’t benefit the company financially.

I’m not saying certain rewards should never be offered again in the future, but that it should not be the purpose of the Historian.
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=== TL;DR ===
The Historian is intended as a compromise for new players or those who can’t make it to the live events, while remaining in line with the original purpose of the Living Story – a one time event with a permanent effect on the world.

Players will be able to read/listen to an account of the Living Story events and play the instanced missions/dungeons as flashbacks. Players will not be able to engage in the open world activities from the event (they will be summarized in the story) nor can any of the achievements or exclusive items from the event be earned through the Historian.

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The Historian is primarily aimed at the story related content, not exclusive drops and rewards.
If you wish to discuss ideas about bringing back previously exclusive items or achievements, PLEASE START A NEW TOPIC ! ! !

I would say it has to do with stuff making sense.

We are “hired” as investigators more or less, and they want to keep things quiet.
Having me running around with 4 other people would make the risk for it spreading much higher than if I did it discreetly on my own.

I don’t think people get what Living Story is supposed to be.

Living Story has temporary content because Anet wanted to make GW2 like a living , breathing world. How can they do that if say the molten alliance stayed in the shiverpeaks and west ascalon? Having temporary content gives the option for developers to overlap or use zones more than once.

So what if new players won’t be able to experience Molten Alliance? As long as they play they will be getting new living stories.

Missing out on skins?? No bid deal IMO since living story provides players with new skins every content release every month or so.

Content does not equal vertical progression. Lets get that straight. Content is lore and exploration and new shinies.

If the player does not care about the lore or roleplaying then why even bother with Living story? There are definitely players out there that know better and don’t even touch living story because they don’t care about lore.

As long as Anet keeps pumping out living story content on a monthly basis no one should be complaining about temporary content.

Halloween.
Wintersday.
Super Adventure Box.
Dragon Bash.
Southsun Cove.
Fractals of the Mists.
Living Story.
2 PvP maps.
New events.
New voice acting.
New soundtracks.
Updating reward systems.
Guild Missions.
Costume brawl.
Crab Toss.
Moa Racing.

Yep. Seems like they only have 5 people working on the game.

Edit: I’ll just add more stuff as people point out stuff I have forgotten.

normyp.8671:

How big is the Arena net team? Because if these small festival events are all they can produce with about 6-7 months I’m worried for the future of the game. Seriously, is Dragon Bash the combined effort of the entire team? Or 4-5 members? I’d hope it was the latter, I can’t imagine it was that hard to create the event. Seeing as a lot is copy and paste, even the flying dragon is a copy of the shatterer flying through the skies in the charr areas… I’d like a statement from arena net promising that we will get better content than this boring, lame stuff. Sorry to sound like an kitten but it’s not great.

Someone seems to have missed the fact that we have gotten new content every single month since release, not just this festival.

And no, they won’t promise anything since people will shout about them lying if it doesn’t happen exactly the way they want it to happen.

1. We’re getting events EVERY month. It’s not just dragon bakitten’s also the other 2 living story parts, sab and holiday events.
2. Full trait overhaul coming for every class on June 25th. I’m absolutely sure that that takes a lot of man power.
3. Someone is forgetting WvW/Spvp updates, guild missions, fractals, new jumping puzzles, new cinematics for the story and other things that we constantly get.

^spoken like someone who’s never seen what a D-series Golem can really do…

Zorby.8236:

Question: Do I use Norn elites?
Answer: No

Also, there are other problems than duration, such as loosing your heal and utilities. On Ranger I loose my pet…

I’d be fine with all those downsides. What grinds my gears about it and forces me to use my profession Elites instead in like 90% of the content, is the fact that I’ll spend most of my time in Wereform on my BACK. why do piddly little rock elementals get Stability yet when I’m a Were’d out 16ft tall beast-of-nightmares, I get flopped around like a hacky sack??? I don’t get that time back either. I get to just lay there staring at my transformation time slipping away, wondering why the Devs won’t just change ONE LITTLE NUMBER in their spreadsheet under “Defiant” from a 0 to a 1. We’re not expecting 3 stacks like Champions get…

But Norn’s been crying about transformations since release and devs don’t care…

okay well that’s just depressing then… didn’t know how long it’s been mentioned here, not a regular reader or the species forums

(And no this isn’t “bumping” a dead thread you darn automated forum-bots, it’s still on the FRONT PAGE)

How come I died so much quickly as Bear than in regular shape?

I’m a Norn Warrior and whenever I switch to Bear form not only I loose my utility skills but also I recieve more damage, loose all my regens and mitigation and my HP Pool (even thou its bigger) drops considerably faster…

If Norn Racial transformation are as useless as they are, and just there for cosmetic,… can ANet please move them to Social Clothing instead of elite skill and let us have fun with them?

Also, all Norn NPC transforming and charging into battle (during personal quests and promotional videos) are nothing but false advertising.- you have worst dps, worst mitigation, worst movement,… you get a bigger clumsy weaker form and die almost instantly as you use it…. having it in an elite slot is a huge trap!

As a woman, I don’t mind makeup on a norn female. But there should definitely be more natural looking options. I assume that not every warrior takes the time to put makeup on in the same way a woman in the real world doesn’t. (I’d like to note that some female athletes DO where make up, however. So a norn wearing makeup is not ridiculous or out of the question.)

A lot of the options seem a little too barbie, which is fine, if they actually offered more variety. They need to have more fierce and rugged options. They should definitely have faces that show their age like the male face options provide. NONE of the female face options show any real age difference or have wrinkles. That’s just ridiculous imo.

And scars should most definitely be a separate category and not just be available for one face. For all races and genders.

Slaunyeh.9852:

I was, literally, shocked when I went to Divinity’s Reach and realized that my character was, like, 8’ tall.

Yeah. It very easy to forget that you’re supposed to be a superhuman giant when you have the exact body type of a normal human female.

My problem with Norn females isn’t really that they are “too pretty”. It’s more an issue that they, to me, don’t really project the sense that they are half giants. The males look massive, whereas the females look like pretty normal (if fairly buff) human women.

The very first character I created in a beta weekend was a female Norn. They looked pretty cool and the Norn culture appealed to me. Sure, there’s the whole “raar we’re giants” thing going on, but I never really thought about it. I was, literally, shocked when I went to Divinity’s Reach and realized that my character was, like, 8’ tall. The Norn males look the part, but the females, imho, just doesn’t. You could scale the character models down to normal human sizes and they’d just be humans.

I’m not sure what exactly should be different about their character design, but I would have liked if they didn’t just look like human women scaled up 40%.

Invisible dye.

Or add the nornish armors that are in concept art.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/images/d/db/Norn_concept_art_4.jpg
http://wiki.guildwars.com/images/a/ac/%22Jora%22_concept_art.jpg

Agreed. At the moment I am only seeing about 40% boobage on my Norn. I want 100% boobage. Now.

Everything was so much better this time around.
Im actually able to follow the story, I know what is going on and I feel like I’m part of it.
The concept-art cinematic was great, and it fits the gw2 universe perfectly.
For once, I’m actually a little bit excited for the next part of the story, and i rarely do anything beside WvW and PvP.

I’ve forgotten how beautiful the zones are… Divinity’s Reach is stunning, haven’t been there for months. It shouldn’t feel grindy to go back to those zones (like the effigies), the story implementation here is exactly how it should be… awesome!

They WILL buy those crates.

That’s why they keep selling them.

People falls for it, so they keep doing that.

I’d like to say “do not support anything that costs money but works only based on randomness”, but it’ll be pointless. They’ll keep buying that. There’s always someone with money to waste or some sort of addition problem that will do it.

They won’t even have some sort “consolation prize” token that always drop and you can exchange if you have enough of them.
If you are unlucky enough, you can spend the maximum monthly cap of gems you can buy and get nothing but useless junk you don’t need and can’t sell out of it.

this is riddiculous…
i just dropped 4000 gems for these crates and not one skin.

The chances for a skin should not be that low.

That is 50€ for some candy…
Screw this!

Considering a whole armor skin is 800 or whatever gems, these skins should not be that rare!!

Cosmos The Cat.2954:

Only a WvW player would pull an all nighter for those extra points.

Only a WvW player would bow to his enemy or sleep next to his corpse.

Only a WvW player has not seen Zhaitan.

Is Zhaitan a new film?

Thanks. I posted a example here: http://godcraft.com/x/gw2/default.htm

I wrote a basic HTML web page that consumes these web services and displays the events for a given server/zone in a table, using javascript with jquery. Once a server and map are selected, it updates every 10 seconds.

I don’t have a computer I always leave on to host it from, but I’ve made the code available here:

https://github.com/PrimalZed/GW2ActiveEvents

Except for “keg toss” actually being called “keg brawl”….
I could have lived with “crab brawl”…

I mean you don’t really toss the crab since you’re supposed to keep hold of it, if anything it should be called Crab Grab.

Hi guys, hi arenanet,

all the achievements of southsun are spoilers… because you can check the end of the story while reading them.
My suggestion: Please add these achievements only when the patch and the availability to do them comes – or write “???” instead of the names.

Greetings