Guild Wars 2

I agree with some of the things said earlier.
Scarlet is, by far, one of the worst villains I’ve encountered in a game.
Then there is the stuff thats just not happening. Constant reports from the pact.
Pact progress in Orr! This would be a living world! Since the Karka rolled over Lions Arch, Zhaitan is officially dead. With that, we should see progress in Orr, nature and people pushing back onto the land, driving the undead (who get decimated largely and ultimatly replaced with new dangerous flora and fauna!) back and exterminating them.
There should be more reports coming from Cantha now, too, since the undead hordes are no longer effectively blocking sea-routes. Even if Cantha isolated itself, some traders or smugglers have to have the ambition to cross the sea.
With Orr finally cleansed – (Temples still active, gaining a new power source from natural sources, incorporating the new wildlife) – the pact could finally focus on the next threat, Jormag, Kralkatorrik or Bubbles, pushing borders towards Elona and Palawa as well as north, reclaiming Norn territory.
There is so much life in the GW Lore now already, Scarlet is just annoyingly distracting.
Perhaps if we could modify the device she used, turn this experience into a Instance: Storymode: due to the massive impact of the vision, the devices flow and graps of the eternal alchemy may only be viewed with 5 people with connectet brains. (Players free the pale Tree from the thornbramble – or at least get to see a wonderful episode while floating in the alchemy!)
Exploration Mode: Disturb Scarlets encounters and hinder her forming her alliances – just like the fractals, lets get rid of her in this manner, avoiding all the fuss she made! (Yay, Time paradoxes inbound!)
Then, please push our story further.
Not Scarlets. Not Malorys. Not Kasmeers. They can appear. But not as Main Charakters.

“This is my story.” ~Irravel Sails (Introductury cutscene, right after creation)

Wow, that’s a lot of pages of stuff. Too much for me to read everything, so I’ll just briefly give you my opinion of the Living Story.

The LS is mostly just background noise.

That is to say, what’s happening with it doesn’t matter to me, it just happens and if some aspect of it appeals to me, like getting a set of dragon wings or something, then I’ll do the stuff that leads to that goal, but mostly I just ignore it and do whatever.

There are aspects of it that are good, I liked the Dragon Bash for its festive atmosphere, and the story-based instances are interesting enough. It’s fun for short bursts to run with a zerg farming the Pavillion and Scarlet’s invasions, but not enough to carry the entire concept. Most of it just fades into the background as busy work to keep bored players logging in.

I do agree with the majority though, Scarlet is a poor excuse for a villainous mastermind. She reminds me of characters from comic books of generations past – you have the ambition to write a Watchmen-style story but feature a villain like Mr. Myx-whatever who can do anything but just ends up being comic relief.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see Scarlet captured, only to have Shaggy and Scooby wander by and pull off her mask to reveal she’s really Old Man Jenkins in disguise. There isn’t anything remotely believable about the character.

It seems like the focus of the each story is too unique, as though every team is just doing its own thing with one team going “I like charr! Let’s do something with the Flame Legion!” while another says “I wanna be a pirate!” and a third says “Quaggans are cute, let’s kill some krait for them!” Scarlet doesn’t work as very well as a meta-plot to tie everything together.

My suggestion is to wrap up the current story ASAP and sit down with every team in one room and discuss LS 2.0. Map out where the story is going to go from the beginning instead of using poorly conceived tropes to provide a framework. Pick the next dragon to be a Big Bad and start nudging the development of the world towards the final confrontation with it. For example, if you want to focus on Jormag then explore the Norns’ frustration at being driven from the homeland and their preparations to take it back. With holiday themes and a subplot of reclaiming Orr from the Risen (zombies are just tiresome these days, so many movies and games feature them that I just groan whenever I see more pop up) you can easily get a year or two of updates just from this plot.

And because the dragons are supposed to be over-the-top powerful forces of nature and chaos, completely alien to and uncaring towards the various races of the world, they are justified as ultimate enemies and already established as a reason for all the races of the world to put aside their differences and join forces. I don’t know why anyone felt the need to create such a character when you already have several waiting in the shadows.

I feel like the Living Story is like questing in most other MMOs: it’s not really connected to the world. One of the most attractive parts of GW 2 was the idea of semi-permanence with the events I do. The Living World doesn’t have that feeling. Stuff is just kind of happening on top of the world and when it’s over the world more or less returns to normal.

One problem with this is the new enemies. The Molten Alliance was novel. The Toxic Alliance is stale. I don’t think the Krait or Nightmare Court needed to be combined to be compelling enemies. I think the Krait tower would have been a compelling story without the help of the Nightmare Court. The biggest problem I had with Farscape is that D’Argo suddenly gets his own functional ship in season 4 with minimal mention of it in previous seasons. It just appears. It’s the same kind of thing with these new enemy alliances and Scarlet. A degree of mystery is compelling, but eventually we have to get a backstory on these enemies and I feel this is unnecessarily complicating. When Crais comes back with Talon, I know who he is and what his motivations are. I know the current enemies in GW 2.

We have so many compelling storylines in Guild Wars 2 already which can be expanded upon. They don’t even necessarily need to conclude or be particularly threatening. Above, someone referred to the peace treaty negotiations in the Fields of Ruin. A part of the Living Story can be that Queen Salma and Smodur the Unflinching are going to personally meet to speed negotiations. Obviously separatists and renegades are going to try and stop both of them. This is the status quo of the world but it can still be exciting. There doesn’t need to be an extraordinary enemy or plot. There’s a plethora of activities involving all of the enemies native to the Fields of Ruin and Blazeridge Steppes which can take place. At the conclusion of the event, the two simply have to meet. The negotiations don’t have to finish. They can concern something like the territorial rights of the peaceful ogres or ownership of the Searing Crystals as cultural artifacts. However, this is permanently in the lore and is happening in the living world of GW 2.

Look at the Princess in Farscape’s second season had this kind of thing. The cast lands on this planet where mating is done genetically and the princess’s DNA has been poisoned to not have a mate. Jon Crichton, being human and having related but not familiar DNA, is a match. Both the Peacekeepers and Scarans (opposing factions) are attempting to solidify their political hold over the sector by allying with this planet. These are normal things to be happening in the show. The power struggles between the Peacekeepers and Scarans is a theme of the show. It’s the status qou. There is no phenomenal ending for the three-part episode or epic clash. Crighton leaves with the rest of the cast but the episodes fundamentally change the relationship dynamic in the show. It’s not particularly epic but is exciting based on the powerful writing of commonplace events.

If we’re fighting invasions, we can fight the enemies already there. The potential to create very powerful enemies exists in races such as the Jotun, Krait, and Dragons. However, these enemies are deeply embedded in the lore. The Jotun and Krait are both known to have extremely powerful artifacts. The Destroyers, in particular, are supposedly capable of popping up anywhere. If an invasion were to happen anywhere at anytime, then the Destroyers are the most plausible source. Again, this is an antagonist deeply bound in the lore and when we’re done, it’s permanently in the lore. The Destroyers still exist. They’re a permanent part of the world. The Molten Alliance, though, is more or less gone forever and when we’re done with the Krait Tower, the Toxic Alliance will be more or less gone forever.

If something needs to be added to the world to signify permanence, points of interest can be moved or maps can be changed. For instance, for the Destroyers, we can fight a new lieutenant of the Destroyers. Lets call him Cheddar the Mountain Heart and he’s a giant Destroyer Wurm. He dies. Why not leave his corpse in Pinion Pass and add a point of interest? Add “Cheddar’s Fall” in corollary to “Maw’s Rise.” The map could be changed so he could hollow out a cave behind “Maw’s Rise” where Destroyers could live. Although I know that is harder to do than write, it does add a layer of “what I do/did matters in this game.” That stuff happened and there’s big evidence that it happened.

I hope the point I am trying to make is clear. The Living World is alive, yeah, but it doesn’t quite feel like a part of GW 2. Instead of making new things, I feel like evolving the things we have will make a truly Living World.

Nike.2631:

Scarlet is simply too slender of a branch to support all the burden you’re putting on the character. People aren’t buying it. If anything she’s the walking embodiment of what happens when you forget ‘less is more.’..

This post deserves my +1 because it is spot on with the problems I have with her right now.
If she had multiple lieutenants who worked with other races and took what was needed to further her plans, it wouldn’t have been so bad. They sort of did that with Dragon Bash, but those hopes were dashed.

Babylon 5 has come up a few times, and I think there is a subtle lesson in that’s story’s progression that the ANet writing crew could stand to refresh themselves on.

The best thing that ever happened to Babylon 5 was losing regular access to the actor who played the station commander in season 1. Not because his performance was anything less than solid, but because it forced them to split up an overwhelming amount of plot focus across two characters that was originally envisioned as a single character’s arc. Both characters were stronger for the seperation of roles it imposed.

Scarlet is simply too slender of a branch to support all the burden you’re putting on the character. People aren’t buying it. If anything she’s the walking embodiment of what happens when you forget ‘less is more.’ Graduating from 2 Asuran Colleges would have made her amazing, but you couldn’t resist making it a hat trick. Creating any two of the hostile forces we’ve faced in the Living Story would class her as extremely formidable threat, buts she’s done it four times now and shows no signs of slowing down. You’d get more mileage out of about 3 characters being attributed to what you’ve poured onto a single set of shoulders so far. You’d also have been better positioned to sacrifice one or two those character to the players’ greater glory. Instead you have the tediously untouchable Dark Trehearne and this unending “we’ll get her next time!” routine straight out of the Superfriends.

Shriketalon.1937:

Imagine, if you will, how the Charr, Norn, Asura, Sylvari, Humans, Tengu, Largos, and Kodan each wage war. Rather than doing the Pact thing over and over again with the same airships and same harpoons, each race could get its chance to shine in one of the wars. Picture the Charr military machine rolling out every tank, every artillery, every metallic behemoth in their kitten nal, backed by human troops bolstering their army with divine artifacts and ancient rites. Think of the battle with the Icebrood, skirmishing through the shiverpeaks alongside shapeshifting ambush squads, or brawling in a massive fight where a shaman-summoned, forty-foot Spirit of All That Is Bear grapples with a Claw of Jormag and tears out its icy throat. Envision holding the line alongside tengu summoning Star Celestials, buying time for the asura to plug in a certain famous golem into an ancient abode, transforming an entire cubic city into the almighty Sparklemus Prime!

The Pact had its turn. Let’s let the other forces of Tyria flex their muscles and show us what makes them amazing.

I giggled at Sparklemus Prime. :P

I like this concept of allowing each of the races to take a kind of leadership role in dealing with respective dragons. The Norn have the most experience with Jormag so it only makes sense to follow their lead. Same with the Asura and Primordus, Charr and Kralkatorrik (via the Branded) and maybe the Sylvari and Mordremoth depending on how the devs tie him into the story. No one has experience with Bubbles so it could be another Pact-like thing to deal with him, which could possibly lead to the opening up of the southern and western landmasses. Each race being able to take a leadership role might also bolster the number of players in the less-populous races (I’m looking at you, Charr.)

One thing that is important, that bears repeating again and again until the devs acknowledge it, is that the content must be replayable, without having to reroll. One of the most annoying things right now, to me, is that if I want to go back and play through the Human Noble storyline again, I have to roll a new character. Or if I want to run “A Vision of Darkness” again as a Sylvari, I have to re-roll and then level until I can do it. I don’t want to do that: I just want to re-run the mission I have already beaten. A new player 2-3 years from now should be able to go back and beat Zhaitan, Kralkatorrik, etc. That was one of the great things about Guild Wars 1; you could go back to old missions and re-live the content, without having to level an alt.

I am in awe of the post and would love to play in any pen and paper campaign you ever run. Please, ArenaNet, pay heed to this person and hire him or her as a writer and then let his or her stuff actually happen!

Before the discussion continues I’d like to clarify a few things with everyone.

First, there is no such thing as running out of lore. Everyone who has written q story can tell you that anything, absolutely everything can be expanded upon indefinitely if you continue to work on the details. This is especially true as Anet has demonstrated they are not above retroactive amendments with the Halloween story arc.

Second, running out of dragons to slay is not a concern, for two reasons. One, each dragon has its own aspect that they represent. These aspects can be elements, like primordius or jormag, but also abstractions, like kralkatorik. This allows for potentially an infinite number of dragons to exist. People will get bored of killing dragons before they run out. Second, if they decide to end the dragon menace, it will be perfectly acceptable for new story drivers to replace that void, in fact that would allow for more creative freedom. The Winds of Change story arc in gw1 happened at a time where the world is not on the verge of collapse and it was one of Anet’s more solid attempt at storytelling.

So please don’t cite “lore pacing” as justification for stagnant story lines any more. It is a myth and it dies right here.

Fallout.1798:

I think that Anet needs to just realize that there are people who will never do their personal story missions (yet still know the lore that happens). Anet can’t put in a requirement that you have to have completed all personal story to be able to do the living story missions that involve the Pact, so go with alternatives that still include the Pact.

Part of the problem with a persistent world is that you’ll never be able to do all the content. As the world changes and old content gets overridden, you cant go back and experience it the old way. New players to the game will never be able to see the Great Collapse in DR, because it’s been built over. New players will never get to do Twilight Arbor Forward/Up, because it’s gone. Persistent games are not made for new and future players: they are made for the players playing right now. That said, the Living Story should be made on the premise that everything that has already been released has already happened. New players playing through the ‘time capsule’ stories will just have to live with the notion that the instances they play in the ‘time capsule’ are considered the ‘past’ of the persistent world. It’s the only way to allow new players to experience old content AND acknowledge that veteran players already have.

Anet should not force people to play the PS as a requirement to play the LS, this is true, and so far they haven’t. However, if they implement the Time Capsule as stated by the OP they would never have to. It would allow players to go back and replay all the “dragonslayer” content, including (ideally) the original Personal Story involving Zhaitan. The side stuff would be temporary (couldn’t go replay Zephyr Sanctum, or Lost Shores, or Twilight Assault, or SAB) but they could play any dragon-related content, whenever they want. This would allow all future players access to all the dragon-related content so that they could get caught up to where the current LS would be.

Say a new player starts in late 2015. Under the OP’s idea, that new player would be able to start a personal story and work his way through killing Zhaitan, Kralkatorrik, and Primordus at his leisure, while still taking part in the then-current, non-dragon-related content. Eventually he should be caught up to the veteran players and be ready to take on the next Dragon in early 2016.

Again, this is a brilliant concept for maintaining a persistent world while still allowing new players the ability to experience all of the content. It’s a little immersion-breaking, bouncing between the ‘past’ and the ‘present’, but better that and having a coherent story than the disjointed mess we have now.

Greetings and salutations.

I come to you today with a comment about the Living Story’s direction, though I know those are in abundance these days. What I’d like to do is hopefully a bit different. I would like to describe what the game would need to do in order to smoothly transition back to the war against the dragons. At present, that is impossible due to an incompatibility between players starting the Personal Story and those who have finished it, and conundrum which can be solved in a single sentence.

To make the Living Story flourish, the Pact must be destroyed.

…Bit of an attention getter, I hope. Allow me to spell on the argument; why the personal story has impersonal problems, what the living story is currently doing wrong, how to fix the two to the benefit of both, and what the results could be for an entire year’s worth of content. I can be a bit overly verbose, so I’ve condensed them into four JPG files for easier reading. Feel free to skip through it if it drags on, but please scroll through the NextYear file to consider what the Living Story could become.

Here we go. The Time Capsule method.

Edit: I’ve been adding to this post slowly throughout the thread, including several new campaign possibilities. For the sake of organization, I’ve added them on to this post. If this is your first time reading this, please beware, the last three images will get extremely verbose. Bring a glass of tea.

The forum doesn’t like 5000+ character posts, so I’ll need to split responses. ’Tis irksome.

Fallout.1798:

Very interesting ideas, but I have to disagree with the idea of destroying the Pact. Its true that the Living story conflicts with the Personal story, but that is mostly because it would be confusing for players who see the Pact in the Living story, while in their personal story they haven’t gotten that far. However this seems often to be mainly because players who have been level 80 for a long time have NOT ADVANCED IT ANYMORE. I see often player screenshots of people in PvE maps (such as lions arch), they are level 80, and guess how far they are in their personal story? Often I see not even up to the level 40 story missions (seriously, the personal story missions offer good exp for leveling up to 80).

While I can respect that you like the Pact, may I attempt to change your mind? Consider the following…

1) Removing the Pact caters to both the people who do and don’t play the Personal Story. You are quite correct, some people will never bother with it, and that should be perfectly acceptable. By removing the Pact from play, there’s nothing preventing the game from telling a good story about the war with a full sense of immersion. If you haven’t become the Marshal, you can still answer the call for heroes to join your race’s force in the grand alliance against Ye Olde Elder Menace. Likewise, if you are the Dragonslayer fresh from the Battle for Orr, this can be acknowledged in the text based dialogue you describe. Everyone wins.

2) The absence of the Pact means more politicking and interspecies tension. The Races of Tyria are not supposed to see eye to eye; the Asura experimented on the Sylvari, the Charr and Humans have barely managed to stop warring against one another, and the Norn do not care, for they are Norn. This doesn’t translate well to the in-game story right now, since the Pact has everyone working together hand in hand. No one questions a massive apolitical army amassing without any diplomacy or leadership right outside one of the major cities, simply because “they say they’re the good guys”. Alas, verisimilitude, I knew it, Horatio…

If the burden of slaying dragons is left up to the species themselves, it will bring the squabbling, in-fighting, and discontent that accompany making monumental decisions. It will mean arguments over whether to sacrifice more Norn lives to go fight Primordius, despite Jormag being right on their doorstep, or letting more Asuran outposts be overrun with destroyers to bolster the alliance attack on Kralkatorric. This is grade A, freshly cut, unfiltered storytelling goodness.

3) New wars mean new ways to wage war. The Pact Attack was based around the three orders, and therefore it fought like an amalgamation of their talents. There was a lot of magitech military hardware, a few ancient artifacts, and a whole lot of sheer manpower. This is a perfectly acceptable way to wage a war, but it’s not the only one. Different races will confront the dragons in different ways, with plenty of awesome potential for each force in Tyria to show their stuff.

Imagine, if you will, how the Charr, Norn, Asura, Sylvari, Humans, Tengu, Largos, and Kodan each wage war. Rather than doing the Pact thing over and over again with the same airships and same harpoons, each race could get its chance to shine in one of the wars. Picture the Charr military machine rolling out every tank, every artillery, every metallic behemoth in their kitten nal, backed by human troops bolstering their army with divine artifacts and ancient rites. Think of the battle with the Icebrood, skirmishing through the shiverpeaks alongside shapeshifting ambush squads, or brawling in a massive fight where a shaman-summoned, forty-foot Spirit of All That Is Bear grapples with a Claw of Jormag and tears out its icy throat. Envision holding the line alongside tengu summoning Star Celestials, buying time for the asura to plug in a certain famous golem into an ancient abode, transforming an entire cubic city into the almighty Sparklemus Prime!

The Pact had its turn. Let’s let the other forces of Tyria flex their muscles and show us what makes them amazing.

The number one issue in my view is the pace of the LS.

Every two weeks we get new content. Every two weeks, most of what was made available gets taken out.

For players who can’t complete the content for one reason or another, this I really depressing. Even worse, it is a cycle of dissuasion from playing. “Well, I missed the story that led to this one…might as well skip this since I’ve not clue what’s happening…..and this next one is even more confusing, now….”

This is also really disheartening when, say, you see Moto in Rata Sum. You look up Super Adventure box and IT’S SO COOL. Great weapon skins, fun idea, but…you can’t play it. That doesn’t make you want to play the game. At all.

Worst of all, though, it makes participating in these events stressful. If you don’t finish in two weeks, or get what you wanted, you’re screwed. This is your one chance. That’s ok for holiday events. That’s kind of their point. But to have this all year long, is just annoying and stressful and Skinner-esque.
This really needs to be fixed. I don’t care that I can catch up with the wiki. I want to play the game, not read it.

Thank you to the devs for giving us a chance to discuss this with you. There have been a number of things about this game that have been troubling me for a while. And thanks to the other posters in this thread for your civility so far.

I agree with much of what has been said so far, but I’ll reiterate/rephrase and try to give suggestions.

Slow down. I deeply appreciate that you’re producing so much content for us at no additional charge, but I’m afraid that your effort might be going to waste. I’m a completionist, and for games that I particularly like, I want to experience all the content they have to offer. When you put out something new every two weeks, I have to devote an inordinate amount of time to getting through everything before the next update appears. Even if you daisy-chain the removal of the content, so that it lasts for a month with a two-week overlap, or even if it’s permanent, everyone has moved on to the next thing and I’m stuck playing catch-up. An example is Twilight Aetherpath; it’s much too long and difficult for anyone to have an incentive to retry once they’ve gotten all the achievements, but I’m still missing several.

Worse is when you introduce extremely difficult content that is gone before we have a chance to really learn it. Liadri is one of the hardest fights in the game up to this point, and I had a month to get to know it – only a few hours effectively, because I had a major project that month – before it disappeared. Aetherblade Retreat was even worse, since it was only available for two weeks. Don’t get me started on SAB Tribulation Mode; I finished it at the eleventh hour (again, major project), and I was a jittery wreck by the end. I don’t want to discourage you from making tough encounters (I’ll take issue with your apparent penchant for one-shot kill mechanics in another thread), but leave them available for us to try and fail. It took me years to finally finish the Domain of Anguish, and I still haven’t tried Urgoz’s Warren or The Deep – but I still can if I want to.

And I think Guild Wars 1 is a fine model for introducing additional content, particularly Guild Wars Beyond. It was much easier to do this with Guild Wars’s heavy reliance on instances, but all the work you put into War in Kryta and Winds of Change is still there for me to play years later. And it will never go away. I can experience these quests at my own pace, but with the Living Story, you’ve shackled us to a train that’s getting faster and faster. Invite us to come along with you and enjoy what you’ve made. We’ll join you. Promise.

So please reduce the update schedule to once per month, and make every addition permanent (or at least fully revisitable, achievements and all, in some fashion). I know you got complaints for Flame and Frost being too slow, but that wasn’t because it was once per month – it was four very small installments spread over four months. Surely there is a middle ground.

I know you like to have exclusive one-time events, so that people can say “I was there for Day of the Tengu.” That’s fine, but keep it limited to seasonal festivals like Halloween and Wintersday. There’s no reason to carry that over to everything else.

3. Removal of previous permanent content. This one is more recent, and it stems from the Twilight Assault release and, to a lesser extent, the Tequatl Rising release (by the inability to complete the old Tequatl Boss achievement). Put simply, a lot of us were quite upset that Twilight Assault removed the “Forward/Up” path. I, along with many others, had not had the opportunity to try out that path yet, and now we never will.

I honestly do not see why the new Aetherblade path could not have been added as a new “elite dungeon path” that is accessible by talking to the NPC outside the dungeon. This preserves the ability of newer players to experience the old content, but also the new content. One excellent design decision of the Explorable dungeons was how each was largely self-contained to within the dungeon itself; what happened in the dungeon had no real impact on the outside world. However, this isn’t going to be the case with the Aetherblade path; one day we will defeat Scarlet, and then you’ll have newer players trying out the path who go “Who’s Scarlet? What are the Aetherblades? Why are they in this plant dungeon? This doesn’t make any sense!” Separating the Aetherblade path out from the normal dungeon and into its own elite path instance would solve these issues by making it clear that it takes place in its own point in time, separate from the old Twilight Arbor (and of course, bringing back F/U!)

4. Rewards. This may be outside the scope of the Living Story designers, but in keeping with keeping content “permanent”, I would also like the rewards from the Living Story to remain permanently available to players. I understand the desire to give players “prestige items” they can work for, but I feel that this role is already filled by Legendaries and, to a lesser extent, Ascended items.

As GW2 continues to grow and more and more items get introduced, it becomes easier for players to obtain a unique look simply by choosing whatever items they feel suits their aesthetic, rather than just going for whatever is the most expensive. (Let’s be honest. Look back at GW1. How many Monks do you remember seeing wearing Obsidian armor and Chaos Gloves? We all know that those players didn’t do it because they liked the look; they did it because they wanted to show off their wealth, or “keep up appearances”.)

Legendaries and Ascended items exist for the players who want to show off their wealth. Let the fashionistas have their cake too by letting them customise their look exactly how they want, via permanent content rewards that they can do at any time.

I sincerely hope that you guys will take this feedback on board. I feel that my suggestions would allow the Living Story to continue and grow the world of GW2, but not at the expense of slower or newer players. Thank you for all your hard work and dedication, and I look forward to seeing what the future holds for us.

Hi Chris,

First of, let me start by saying I appreciate the chance to speak directly with you guys and share our thoughts and ideas.

While I agree completely that continuing to grow and expand the world of GW2, I honestly feel that the Living Story (or at least its current method of implementation) is not the best way to go about doing it. My dissatisfaction with the current Living Story can best be summed up in three factors:

1. Temporary content. I’m a completionist by nature. I like being able to do everything in a game, given enough time. However, since the Living Story mostly operates off a two week schedule, that only gives me (and many other players, judging by discussions on this forum) a limited window of opportunity to experience the content. Many of us have full-time jobs, families and other responsibilities that mean we can’t devote hours every day playing GW2 (as much as we’d like to!), so we’d greatly appreciate having that pressure of a ticking clock taken off our shoulders.

I know that you guys have made major strides in dealing with this, as shown with the new setup for Tequatl Rising and Twilight Assault. It is a big step in the right direction, and I commend you all for it.

However, there still remain many great and exciting events in GW2’s history that are now permanently out of reach. The raid on the Molten Alliance facility. Defeating Mai Trin and her Aetherblades. And even the smaller lead-up events like helping Braham retake Cragstead, or kicking Scarlet out of the Pavilion.

Could it not be possible to include these events as permanent content, accessed via instances or a “flashback NPC”? For example, we were able to replay the said assault on Cragstead just by revisiting the instance and talking to a NPC, so you guys already have the architecture to do this. It should be a fairly simple matter to allow players to redo the Living Story, same as how the Personal Story co-exists alongside the open world. New players can thus always have the opportunity to experience what older players did, broadening the content and adventures that GW2 has to offer, as well as being able to obtain rewards that they can only now look at in envy.

The GW2 world might move on, but the GW2 content needn’t have to disappear at the same time.

2. “Rushed” Pace. When the two-week release schedule was announced, I and many other players worried about what this could mean for the Living Story. In particular, we were concerned that this would lead to burnout, both among players who “can’t keep up” and for you guys, having to churn out content at such a blistering pace. (I work in software development too, so I know what work is involved in getting stuff created, tested and out the door.) In time, quality often begins to suffer, resulting in smaller, less polished releases.

Sadly, I have to say that this seems to be coming true. While the Living Story releases aren’t bad by any stretch, they feel… unsatisfying. Halloween 2013 in particular seemed to bring this point home. While learning more about Prince Edrick and Mad King Thorn’s history (great work on the dialogue and voiceovers, by the way!) was interesting, it felt like it was over far too soon. In contrast, Halloween 2012 had us going on a scavenger hunt to learn more about Mad King Thorn, followed by the introduction of his Labyrinth, the minigames, and taking the fight to Thorn himself in Ascent to Madness. Then everything wrapped up in Lion’s Arch with classic games of Mad King Says, a fitting conclusion to the end of Halloween.

I honestly feel that moving back to a monthly or bimonthly release schedule would give you guys more time to put together more substantial releases, on the scale of the first Halloween release. It also gives players more time to build up anticipation; part of the appeal of festive events like Halloween and Wintersday is BECAUSE they’re big and rare. Having “new releases” thrown at us every 2 weeks soon starts to get dull, because we haven’t had time to build up that sense of excitement. It’s a bit like riding a rollercoaster, or watching a horror movie. You can’t keep your audience on the edge of their seats all the time; you need to give them periods where they can calm down and relax, to return to a sense of normalcy.

Here are some of the things I’ve observed/my suggestions ><.

Continuity and characterization:

• 1.a Instead of always adding new threats and characters, work sometimes on expanding what’s already there in a meaningful way. Tyria is a beautiful world, full of interesting characters you have already established, yet most of them are relegated to cameo roles.
• 2.a People care about characters. Characters drive stories. Those short-stories on the site are nice, but they can’t be our only reliable source of lore and character development!

Disconnection:

• 2.b The pc so far has been very marginally involved with what has been happening. People do not feel connected to the story.
• 3. Involve your community! Community events [with the living story as their main theme, such as the diorama contest last year] help people forge a deeper connection with their games and usually make for a very positive and creative atmosphere. Take the living story outside of the game and make the players live it! The rewards do not need to be anything grand.

Awareness, continuity and communication:

• 1.b Right now it very much feels like every two weeks some random event pops up somewhere random in the world. I believe this week’s LS (The Tower of Nightmares) had a nice lead up, but too much of it was still left to chance. I would have never known that something weird was going on in Kessex Hills beforehand if I hadn’t looked at the forum/official site. Why not add some npcs talking about it (even very vaguely) in the main cities, for example? We do not need a herald, just some clues here and there.
• 4. The living stories themselves are often lacking in clarity and direction. Why is looking at the achievement panel the only way to understand what is going on, most of the times? It’s either that or some bright gold star in the world map. There needs to be a middle ground.

Pacing and quality:

• 5. It has been said so many times I lost count, but the current pace is simply stressful and kills the fun. Quality and replay value over quantity. Instead of being stuck doing the very same thing dressed up in a different skin week after week, releasing a LS update once a month should give you enough time to truly come up with some unique, different ideas. [Example: People have been clamouring for the home instance to have a use, so you put a quartz node in front of the orphanage in Salma District? Just… why?]

Gem Store:

• 6. Time-gated rng weapon sets is a business practice that puts off a lot of people and has been giving Anet a bad image. It leaves a sour taste in the community that overrides most of the positive impressions.

I am one of those who rarely post anything on the forums, but that does not mean I hate what the developers are doing. I really like the freedom and mechanics of GW2.
However, that does not mean everything is perfect here. Every game has some aspects that do not suit me and it is only natural, because it is impossible to make a perfect game that absolutely everyone likes.
My issues with the living world are:
1. Lore seems a bit shallow and as some have said, disjoint. While I do love the idea of temporary events to progress the story, it is currently hard to say that anything I have done has had any kind of impact. Stuff has happened, even more stuff has happened and… almost everything is as it used to be? I would like to see that living world would really be living, events changing and interacting with each others (I know, this might be really, REALLY hard to do), areas changing and so on. Something that I could watch later on and my character could say “Oh yes, this sight reminds us all that we can’t let things like that happen ever again” (or something like that).
2. Achivements unfortunately guide my way. Living story is pretty much achivement fest for me, meaning me running and wondering “How can this be done” instead of “Oooh… nice story and events… one… more… event. Now when did I do those achievements?”. Add challenge to the achievements so that achieving them would really mean something (something like Liadri-difficult). Also permanent achievements might be nice.

I know I had something else too but my mind is currently blank. Mayby it comes back to me later.

ps. Thank you for communicating with the community. This is something we truly need.

I must say that I’m a little worried about the frequent references to TV shows.

Certainly there are things that GW2 could learn from good TV shows such as:
- having characters the viewers actually care about
- having a sense of it’s own lore and actually using the lore that has been established
- including all of the relevant content in the TV show and not requiring the viewer to go to the internet to acquire basic knowledge
- having a story that feels continuous from one episode to the next with logical conclusions where appropriate
- having a general feeling of consistency and purpose even when the episodes are written/directed by different people
- knowing how best to use a more limited budget than your average movie

But I think it’s very important that GW2 is treated as much as a game as it is a “two weeks per episode” TV series. The actual game content needs to be compelling and there needs to be a realization that the strict two week period is not always going to be in the best interest of either story or gameplay. In the middle of your standard TV season, even the good ones, there’s often episodes that are often filler content. Maybe there’s some character development or some interesting plots, but it’s often just putting pieces in place between the hook of the season start and the finale. That doesn’t work in games because the player needs to be both mentally and physically involved in the proceedings.

minbariguy.7504:

ANET: Hey guys, we’re going to give you Living Story updates every two weeks! Cool, huh?

Players: Um…that’s kind of…fast…don’t you think?

ANET: Nah, you’re going to love it! No one else is doing it! We’re unique!

Players: No, really, we’ve tried it, and it’s too fast. It’s kind of stressful actually. Can you slow it down a bit?

ANET: We’re committed to bringing you Living Story updates every two weeks! We’ll continue to work hard to make this happen, even though it limits the things we can do because of such a tight release schedule. But we’re doing this for you because we know how much you enjoy it

Players: No! Just stop it, okay? Please! We don’t like it. It’s burning us out. Are you even hearing us?

ANET: Hey, look at our new web advertisements! They say “Free DLC every two weeks!” Pretty slick, huh?

Players: <…sob!>

You missed the NEW punch line:

ANET: But we’ve finally acknowledge you have concerns. IF, and we do mean IF we choose to act on that feedback, we can change course in a mere 4 months! The next 8 episodes? They’re locked in!

Hi Colin,

ColinJohanson.2394:

So a fun question to ask to help direct the conversation a bit: What aspects of your favorite television shows would you think would be cool to see reflected in a game medium?

DBZ TFS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkCd5hn3yrI
It is nostalgic but grown up, as much as the esrb rating will allow which is a lot in terms of delivery.

ColinJohanson.2394:

To a large degree, the things we want to accomplish with living world overlap in a lot of ways with what a television series does. Or another example of our goals: if you bought your favorite RPG and the story was constantly expanded or continued, for free on a regular basis.

I’m not saying we’re doing all of these things above, those are simply the goals we have to help make Gw2 unique and something innovative in the genre through a dynamic living world we envisioned 7 odd years ago.

I read about a journal. That is it right there. During the two week meta you get rewards. After you can still use your journal to experience (play?) the ‘story aspect’ of the two week content in a chronological order, instanced, and scaled to solo/group. Gw1 missions with Gw2 two week meta rewards.

If a new player buys Gw2 they can play all the old LS content in a story driven format.

ColinJohanson.2394:

I personally think we have a lot of work to do to get to the point we’re succeeding on these goals, but with every step along the way we’re learning an incredible amount. Some fantastic ideas and comments in this thread, and many of them match our own feelings on living world and what would make it successful as well. Many of these ideas are things you’ve all been suggesting for months (or longer) and will be reflected in future releases. Remember what you see today we started work on 4-5 months ago (or longer), so the lag time to adjust to feedback and what we learned isn’t going to be instant, it’ll come in waves of evolutions with each round of feedback and discussion.

Queens Jubilee LS cut scene was amazing in terms of art where the still picture of the Queen falling. Lord Faren was an E rating. Push the T. Push the infrequent use of strong language and crude humor all rolled up in awesome.

So is anyone from Anet going to respond to the pages and pages of feedback that the pace of Living Story releases is too fast? I feel like we’ve been saying it for months and being completely brushed off. Here’s my take on what’s been happening:

ANET: Hey guys, we’re going to give you Living Story updates every two weeks! Cool, huh?

Players: Um…that’s kind of…fast…don’t you think?

ANET: Nah, you’re going to love it! No one else is doing it! We’re unique!

Players: No, really, we’ve tried it, and it’s too fast. It’s kind of stressful actually. Can you slow it down a bit?

ANET: We’re committed to bringing you Living Story updates every two weeks! We’ll continue to work hard to make this happen, even though it limits the things we can do because of such a tight release schedule. But we’re doing this for you because we know how much you enjoy it

Players: No! Just stop it, okay? Please! We don’t like it. It’s burning us out. Are you even hearing us?

ANET: Hey, look at our new web advertisements! They say “Free DLC every two weeks!” Pretty slick, huh?

Players: <…sob!>

I’m really glad to see so much discussion on here about plot and pacing, because I definitely think those are things that need to be addressed in this game. But I want to take a moment to point out here that the latest release illustrates a lot of the points I made in my post about the Living Story updates causing issues in the rest of the world. One only needs to glance at the game bugs forum the day of release to note how many things unrelated to the living story are affected by these releases.

On a more personal note, my main (and ONLY level 80) character is now rendered unplayable due to a graphic glitch which makes his eyes appear empty and soulless and I, prone to nightmares, have chosen to continue sleeping over playing the game until it’s fixed. But as the glitch remains unacknowledged by the Devs, it could be weeks or months until said issue is addressed. It’s not uncommon for bugs like this to sit for weeks or months unfixed. Awhile back there was an issue with whisper’s armor having a dye channel inadvertently removed and if I remember correctly it took over a month for it to be fixed.

Things like this might seem ‘nitpicky’, but every time a player is affected by a glitch like this, or a bug with an event they want to play, or the unpolished rough edges of the new releases, it affects their overall enjoyment of the game. And every time that happens it’s a little harder to get them back. When you’re writing a novel, the same is true of your structure, grammar and plot elements. Every inconsistency, every mistake means a risk in losing your reader. How many bugs of this nature, that seem completely unnecessary, does a player sit through before they throw up their hands and walk away? How do you get them back after they do?

It’s another argument for a slower pace. For more time set aside for testing and polish. Are bugs going to happen? Yes of course they are. But not every living story update needs to bring some new disaster with it. It’s to the point where I’m starting to dread the updates because opening the game turns into ’what’s going to be broken this time?’

So has anyone else noticed it? You can now be feared, immobilized, and stunned while in mist form. As if they hadn’t nerfed mist form enough already. Nice job Anet.

It always strikes me as bizarre how some people need to cram “fantasy” into the tiniest conceptual box possible for it to count as “fantasy”. Medieval knights and castles =/= fantasy by a long run and airships do not somehow make something less fantastical (rather, they make something MORE fantastical by being impossible in the absence of any attempted scientific explanation).

Furthermore, the classic “cyberpunk” themes of ubiquitous internet and information technology are completely and utterly absent from this game, no matter how many golems and steampunk airships exist, making that argument a non-starter. Constructs and artificially created being have been a solid theme in mythology since the ancient greeks as well as fantastic flying mechanisms, so there really isn’t anything stopping the game from being 100%, genuine fantasy.

It’s still very much fantasy. I don’t mind it being this way, It has always perplexed me how fantasy genre is one of the most repetitious ones
Often it’s just medieval Europe with monsters and magic kind of added in but not really changing anything. Magic is treated as something separate from everything else rather than using it as part of technology. It’s the most boring thing you possibly do with magic.
Guild wars feels a bit patchwork at times but overall I like it.

Let me get this straight:

These elements that you’re complaining about have been in the game since launch. Furthermore, we’ve known that they would be in the game since 2009.

But somehow, now is the time to be all shocked?

Even if we do for the same price as Support Tokens, will we ever be able to vendor Representation Buttons?

An official answer would be nice.

I completed several areas quite some time ago only to find out now that they’re 98 or something % complete and I had to look intensively to find out what I am missing.

I tried searching the forum and googling and haven’t found anything useful.
Due to the fact that POIs and WPs were added in different updates it’s hard to see which and where.

This led me to a thought that t might be a good idea to gather them together in one place.

Locations added since release
Points of Interest:
Diessa Plateau North Nolan Hatchery
Divinity’s Reach The Dead End
Gendarran Fields Second Aetherblade Site
Wayfarer Foothills Rugnar’s Steading

Waypoints:
Brisban Wildlands Proxemics Lab
Cursed Shore Shipwreck Rock Waypoint
Plains of Ashford Langmar Estate
Snowden Drifts Angvar’s Trove Waypoint
Straits of Devastation Dire Shoal Waypoint

I’ll try to add all your suggesions under this post.