Guild Wars 2

I literally quit playing this game after they took SAB out and have been waiting eagerly for this specific day.

I am 26 years old and pixelated jumping puzzle enviroments with dark souls difficulty tribulation mode is the only thing that that appeals to me at all about this game.

Before going to work I logged in only to be disappointed with Moto telling me that I can’t play the best thing that ever happened to this game for me. I know ANet already has my money and I can’t change anything by complaining on their forums. I will however make it known that I am optimistic for its re-introduction into the game. Maybe not today, or even this month. I know it is coming back though. The care and love that the devs put into SAB is special and it belongs to an era that I grew up in.

This is all speculation.. I know. I still want to believe that I will be able to be jumping about and listening to the beautiful music once again.

BobbyStein.2315:

Part of the development process is prioritization, so I’d like to know what you feel are the highest impact items you think would improve our storytelling delivery. What are your top three requests?

Aight. I’m behind pretty much everything the OP summarized but personally the most important to me are the following:

1. Show, don’t tell. The interviews and information outside of the game are a byproduct of this problem. We have been told Scarlet’s this and that and that. We are told the alliances still follow her because of this and that reason. We have to be told a bajillion things because they don’t fit into the releases due to lack of time, resources or what-have-you.

Problems this causes: Cheapens the feeling of the plot by a lot, leaves potential plotholes, important parts of the plot are easily missed and difficult to track if they are explained or lampshaded outside of the game. They’re also possibly lost forever if they’re on some 3rd party site or the forum (while at it, hint hint the lore forum needs some mod-love, care and stickies)

2. Enemy Lieutenants are allowed to be fleshed out too. Like the OP post says, they can facilitate the plot, be used to explain plotholes, show some of the main enemy’s personality via the big bad’s influence on them and the lieutenants stance towards them – and le gasp, they can be enjoyable characters!
Inb4 Mai Trin, yes Mai Trin had a name. And she was afraid of Scarlet. That’s it. The only memorable thing about her is that she had a name at all, her own boss battle and she was scared of Scarlet (and had outdated text for over half a year). You could have put the Aetherblade Admiral in her place and the difference would have been trivial at best. A good character, foe or friend cannot be easily replaced. And her fear of Scarlet was weak and shallow – keep in mind, if you use a lieutenant to highlight something about a big bad, it should be something the players can get behind emotionally and understand.

3. Marketing. I didn’t see anyone else mention this but uhh… trying not to be rude here, but please keep a leash on your marketing team? The way they present the LS actually puts a huge dent in it, really. Sometimes the hype is way too much but then from the players’ perspective it’s completely unfounded.
In the worst case, it’s also insulting or downright misleading.
Remember when Scarlet was foreshadowed as “a mysterious force behind this new alliance” in the ToN-release? That was really inappropriate and I’m certain more than a few people read that and wondered again what the age of the target group was supposed to be.
Then you’ve got statements that blow things out of proportion. “Rock Tyria to its core, change its face forever in a final confrontation” or what was it.

Changing lion’s arch’s twice for these releases? Probably tons of work from dev-perspective and a huge feat.
A player reading “Tyria’s face being changed forever” and /merely/ sees Lion’s Arch changed? Disappointment doesn’t scratch it.

The LS is a learning experience for the devs and yes it’s a business. But sell it for what it is.
A good example of hype done right is the feature pack I’d say. It lives up to and even beats our expectations in some regards. And that makes players even happier. It’s not perfect yet (see town-clothes stuff) but it’s been hyped for exactly what it is and that’s among other things why we love it already and are looking forward to it.

And… oh yeah, sorry that turned out long. I hope that’s helpful. P:

BobbyStein.2315:

What are your top three requests?

1. Make the player character an important, pivotal piece of the story. Give us the illusion of choice, even if it is, ultimately, an illusion. We shouldn’t come to the end of a year and feel our characters might as well not have been present.

2. Absolutely every part of the story and lore IN the game. I don’t mind if I have to go looking for it, but my search shouldn’t include anything outside the inside of the game.

3. Persistent, lasting impact of the story that changes the way we interact with the world, not just the way that it looks (IE; changes to heart quests in areas like Kessex Hills where major plot events have left their mark on the world). And there should be both positive and negative instances of this – so not just rubble littering the map.

BobbyStein.2315:

I’d like to echo Colin’s sentiments. Thanks to the OP and everyone else for posting your constructive feedback here. We’re always evaluating our past work and looking for ways to improve our future releases. Sometimes those improvements may come in the form of developing new technology to support our vision or improve the player experience. Other times it means evolving our writing and game design processes. In other cases, resource and scheduling changes are necessary to support the additional workload. The potential solutions will vary depending on the challenge in front of us.

Part of the development process is prioritization, so I’d like to know what you feel are the highest impact items you think would improve our storytelling delivery. What are your top three requests?

1. I would like to see the story told IN game and not outside of it.

2. I would like to see the currently unexplored plot arcs developed (i.e. Largos or Tengu) rather than the introduction of new characters who remain rather shallow.

3. Make living story items like skins and weapons available through the living story itself; that way we have a sense of achievement in the story, rather than a sense of achievement in having disposable income.

Had to login to give +1, and bump it, it is THAT good.

I will like to add that although I did like the LS, I never considered it the main thing in the game, because for me it was a side story to go with all the others things like gathering skins and stuff.

But now that I’ve realized that LS is our form of “expansion”, I do agree that it is going too slow. Oh well, hopefully next one will be better, and it wont take 2 years

Hey, Bobby, thanks for stopping in. For an idea, look at this quote by John Scalzi.

“This is what happens when the Narrative takes over. Things quit making sense. The laws of physics take a coffee break. People stop thinking logically and start thinking dramatically.”
— John Scalzi, “Redshirts”

Having the Captain’s Council ignore a city-sized airship on their doorstep was dramatic, having them ignore Marjory and Kasmeer’s warnings about Scarlet’s attack is dramatic. This resulted in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of people for the sake of drama rather than logic. Restoring the Captain’s Council to power without any criminal charges for negligent mass homicide is drama. Do you see where this is going?

Also, my chief complaint is time. ANet takes fifteen months to do what Star Trek Online can do in six months, and STO can bang out two seasons of a multi-chapter story arc in that time. The problem I saw is that the writing team thought they were writing a book, when video game narrative structure doesn’t resemble book structure, or at least a good book.

I do commend you for putting more effort into characterization, such as Marjory and Taimi. Now give them a story and a plot that doesn’t underserve them.

Randulf.7614:

Was a bit small to read, but #9 stands out for me as a major bugbear. It’s a flaw in so many films and TV series these days as well.

TVTropes calls this the Idiot Ball.

I’m a bit unhappy when my enemies carry the Idiot Ball. Like installing portals to the important secret base right inside lion’s arch, and giving keys to your leutnants down there. I gladly jump at the opportunity, but it makes the enemies less believable.

I’m really unhappy when my allies carry the Idiot Ball. “Hey Scarlet, just give me a minute here. I’ll finish you as soon as I’m done smacking Rox for abandoning her mission over a broken leg! I’d also smack Marjory for moving close to you instead of letting me snipe your eye with my longbow, but I doubt she’d notice while she’s dead.”
It kinda ruined the final sequence for me.

But if you want to make me really angry, hand the Idiot Ball to my character. The moment Scarlet revealed herself, I knew I should’ve gathered intelligence about her. In Rata Sum’s Archives. In my Order’s headquarters. From the last breaths of the lackeys I killed. I should’ve talked to whoever invented the Watchknights, figuring out how they could’ve been captured. I also knew about the attack against Lion’s Arch since visiting the Secret Lair, but wasn’t allowed to notify anyone – leaving it for Marjory and Kasmeer to discover in a later patch, but even then I couldn’t act on that information, leaving LA defenseless.

Seeing my character lobotomized by a story writer just hurts.

BobbyStein.2315:

I’d like to echo Colin’s sentiments. Thanks to the OP and everyone else for posting your constructive feedback here. We’re always evaluating our past work and looking for ways to improve our future releases. Sometimes those improvements may come in the form of developing new technology to support our vision or improve the player experience. Other times it means evolving our writing and game design processes. In other cases, resource and scheduling changes are necessary to support the additional workload. The potential solutions will vary depending on the challenge in front of us.

Part of the development process is prioritization, so I’d like to know what you feel are the highest impact items you think would improve our storytelling delivery. What are your top three requests?

1- The story inside the video game.

2- Solutions and conclusions regarding The Pact and the Personal Story and their impact on the Living Story and the open world.

3- This one is up to disccussion because player’s feelings are crossed, but:
The interaction of the player with NPCs in the different situations. Should we get more or less involment? Should we all be The Great Commander of The Pact or should we be useful heroes who hold no name but witness it all?

IMHO.

Also, thanks for the reply.

Greetings and salutations.

With Season 1 of the Living Story drawing to a close, it seems appropriate to offer review and reflection of everything that has come thus far. Sadly, there is much to consider, as the brand new path trod by Anet has many missteps and mishaps along the way.

Rather than talk about individual flaws, I thought it might be best to take a stab at the overall writing style of the Living Story and the narrative flaws it continues to exhibit. Plot holes come and go, individual complaints will always remain, but the best way to help Season 2 is to consider the pitfalls of Season 1 from a writing and gaming perspective. And so, I thought I would offer up a bit of constructive criticism in silly infographic format.

For your consideration, Fifteen Lessons From Fifteen Months of Scarlet Briar.

Thief

• Deadly Arts: Revealed Training – Gain up to 200 extra power when you are revealed, based on your level (Revealed lasts for 3s for WvW, 4s for sPvP)
• Critical Strikes : Invigorating Precision – You are healed for a % of the strike damage dealt. The current rate is 5%. Does not work on ambient creatures.
• Shadow Arts: Resilience of Shadows – Stealth you apply reduces 50% incoming attack damage (does not work against condition damges)
• Acrobatics: Assassin’s Equilibrium – Gain 1s of stability when you are revealed. This is a high skill cap trait as you need to use it when you see a stun/daze coming and attack first to reveal yourself and gain the stability.
• Trickery: Bewildering Ambush – Stealing applies 5 stacks of confusion for 5 seconds.

Warrior

• Strength: Burst Precision – Burst skills have an increased chance to critically hit ( Chance: 100%)
• Arms: Dual Wield Agility- Your attack speed is increased by 10% when wielding a sword, axe or mace in your offhand.
• Defense: Rousing Resilience – Gain toughness when you break out of a stun. The amount of toughness gained is up to 1000, based on your level and lasts for 4 seconds.
• Tactics: Phalanx Strength – When you grant yourself might, grant it to nearby allies as well. 6s of might is granted each time this trait triggers. (It works with blast finishers)
• Discipline: Brawler’s Recovery – Remove blindness when you swap weapons.

All it means is you can’t unequip a weapon after building up stacks, which frankly should have been how it worked in the first place.

If you don’t currently have a stacking sigil on a weapon equipped in any of your weapon sets, should you really be allowed to keep that sigil’s benefits?

No. They’ve made the right move here.

NoTrigger.8396:

arenanet hast learned absolutely nothing. they are destroying their own game. exactly what i expected when the devs said in the livestream “6/6 bonus of ranger runes is doing nothing”

Yes, removing illogical stat-increasing exploits is completely ruining the game.

If they mean by changing the weapon out completely (as in not equipping), I can see how this will affect people. It makes sense to me, that if you’re not using a weapon that grants a certain type of bonus, you shouldn’t get the bonus.

Though it will make classes that don’t have more than 1 weapon equip (Elementalists/Engineers) slightly more annoying, as they only have one option).

I would prefer if it was a leech. That way it does a bit of damage plus healing.

Great seeing that we’re finally getting new traits, although of all things Critical Strikes was the one trait line that didn’t need a new GM. New Adept and Masters ones more-so. I wish they showed a different example.

Except fiction can also be a reflection of the society we are living in.
And it is a sad world we live in

We are constantly reminded about Kas and Jory homosexual relationship.
People celebrated their representation because as society we become more open and accepted toward other sexual orientation.

Yet the irony is where we celebration one social group rise up while stepping on others

Imagine Scarlet has a female lover and upon killing them we are forced to make a joke about their death.
just imagine the uproar we would see on the forum

Scarlet was responsible for the destruction and deaths. While her action certain makes her death more justifiable in this fictional world, she does not deserve to be dehumanize (desylvarized).

It would’ve been better if the 3 answers we can choose simply reflect the 3 personalities (honour, charm, agression)

I get that Scarlet was the villain, but I felt horrible listening to Marjory and the others joke about her death.

Previous LS updates established that she’s been driven crazy by some external force that she encountered in the Eternal Alchemy and could no longer mentally fight it. We should pity her or mourn for those she’s killed, not make childish jokes about what it felt like to deliver the death blow.

Not to be rude here, but I’m genuinely curious – do dialogue ideas get checked before they are added? If so, did no one suggest that joking about killing a mentally unstable character might be in poor taste?

People have explained countless times on this forum on why:

The lore reason being it’s not the Pact’s function to protect LA and chasing down Scarlet. The NPC in LA now explains this. Now I fully agree that there could be more padding within the context of lore to explain Trahearne’s reasoning of inaction. Maybe a Pact meeting scene, or even an in-context mail. It’s poor writing on ANet’s part for not giving sufficient and satisfying explanation of the Pact’s inaction.

The real reason being ANet doesn’t want to mingle Personal Story and Living Story. It’s a design pattern that’s been observed since the start of LS updates and there shouldn’t be any surprise nowadays?

And yes, this is the core reason why LS sucks from a lore and storytelling point of view.

From the Nightmare Within patch and on I thought it was pretty interesting and fun. The taking LA back had its issues, but was good enough. Loved the Marionette and the attack on LA.

The epilogue however, was extremely disappointing. It answered very little and much of it was inappropriate I think. I have more to say, but had a post deleted for “infraction” already about it because apparently I was too mean (sorry, didn’t intend it quite that way). So I’ll leave it at that.

It felt weak.
Like an arkward ending to a medicore tv-show.
It was around the same level as an 90s cartoon show.
It was not abd, there was some funny dialog, but there were no questions answered.
It was “just” some character building and some hinting where it will go next, which just felt arkwardly out of place.
Majory`s sister came in like some guest star in a comedy bringing some plot point and then goes away.
The only thing missing was an laugh track.
And then the ending transition with the “to be continued”…

I am sorry, but whilen it had some funny moment the whole presentation and unanswered questions and overall feeling of this szene just so bland and boring that i just wanted it to stop.

I want to like it. There were some nice details, like Brahams crippled sign, but overall it was just hurting me…

LA was making me sad in a good way… this was just making me sad…

The Great: It was a new experience for me as a gamer, I can appreciate at the very basic level of trying new things, and i can honestly say I gotta give anet and NCSoft credit with the constant patches and updates. It came with new weapon skins, new armor, new back items, amazing gameplay balance when it comes to fairness between all classes. Ultimately, from a content aspect, it was great.

The Good: This game is highly about the exploration factor, and they added new places for us to explore, the Halloween Mad Realm (First Appearance) Flame & Frost’s Cragstead/Instance and Bazaar of the Four Winds being my personal favorites.

Oh and the music finally got good and engaging at the final battle. That Leif guy needs to do the entire OST of Season 2 or the expansion whenever that happens.

The Bad: The Characters. This really stood out for me as the story went on. Too many female characters that are mostly not relatable. And as for the fella’s (what few there are), poorly represented due to poor writing.

The Ugly: The writing in general. Played out like a Fan Fiction written by a 13 year old boy who has just noticed girls.

The Worst: Everything else. Oh, and Scarlet.

Conclusion: To be fair I am not sure what’d i’d rate season 1, but it would be negative overall.

Improvement: Either fire the current writing staff and hire a new team or hone dem’ writing skills, because this story was so bad it makes the FFXIII story seem likable, and that is saying a lot since the XIII saga’s story is lackluster at its best.

If this is all we get instead of proper expansions, then it’s a FAIL.

If I have to make peace with the fact that this is the best that Anet will ever provide, then ok, barely a C.

Good points: LS1 developed cool new NPCs, we (briefly!) explored new mini-areas, we’ve had grand scale events, new megabosses, the story got really interesting when they put in Scarlet’s Lair and we got some clues about the plot (but that was at the very end).

Bad points: all new areas were either small scale, without hearts and temporary (tower, mini-dungeons, Sanctum).
- Ascended gear was implememnted without any story / lore explanation. Instead, suddenly!, we have these über weapons that took epic quests GW1… but here just require mindless grind.
- Story was very poorly presented, so that players had no incentive and didn’t realise what was going on for most of the time.
- The main villain was also very poorly introduced, to players’ annoyance. There was no progress in dealing with her, everything, including the final scene was very deus ex machina.
- Biggest FAIL point: LS barely ties in to the plot of GW2 main story (PS+dungeons). LS also largely ignored all the unanswered questions and issues left over from GW1, GW2 PS, GW2 open world. See: random alliances. All while Orr is still unchanged and our main driving forces in the game came to a halt. And players, who formed a Pact to deal with big issues, ignore that Pact, ignore the big threats like dragons, but go on a merry tour of festivals across Tyria.
- New events requiring zergs without addressing the issue of overflows. Players want to play with their friends, not afk / no-build randoms. Waiting for hours is also bad.
- Most of new skins being introduced only through the gem store.

Honestly.

Story: 3/10
Too disjointed. No closure. No subplots explored.

Execution: 3/10
No cohesion between releases.

Content: 6/10
Most of the content were zerg fests but they were better and more ambitious than the other aspects of LW season 1.

Characters: 4/10
Only reason it’s not lower is because of Tiami and Rox. Mainly Tiami.

Making a lesbian couple be the defining characteristics of two of the main NPCs is kitten character development. I really don’t care about their sexual orientation stop shoving it in my face and give me some real character development.

Overall: 4/10

Not particularly impressed that 90%+ of the new character customization options are gem gated through trading post RNG. More should have been worked into game-play rewards. I’m particularly put off/insulted by the introduction of tormented weapons via black lion chests. Seriously? Kitten off.

5/10

The 5 is entirely for Bazaar of the Four Winds, parts of Dragon Bash, and the actual Teq fight from Tequatl Rising (screw that scavenger hunt sideways). I enjoyed those immensely. As for the rest, I’d rate it considerably higher if nothing concerning Scarlet had ever touched the game.

The whole plot involving Scarlet herself? That gets a 2, if even that, and those points are for the new Elder Dragon waking up and getting to give Scarlet herself a good stomping.

And the end? If we’re talking Dead End meeting here, stone cold 0.

And by the way, yes, I “get it.” I get it and I find it asinine. Bazaar of the Four Winds was the crowning achievement of the entire LS season 1, and was actually pretty spectacular. I’d give just about anything to go back there.

I gave my rating a while back 4/10, but after the last Aftermath patch I thought I should rate it all again.

3.5/10

The quality of writing suddenly got worse again and currently I dread what trash the living story team have cooked up for season two. The team needs to go back to the drawing board and start over fresh, these characters, the plots lines, the gameplay, it just is not cutting it.

Fail 4/10

To me the only thing that keep me playing “living story” are the ap and the sometimes good skins to earn in the meta achievement like dragon bash back was really good and the flower from the bloodtide coast.

But like 80% of all the skins that has been released from living story start until the end is trash. (They even kittened up the tormented weapons from gw1 LOL how hard is it to just copy paste a weapon from the original game?)

I would rate 0/10 but since i get my achievement points and a few good skins I rated 4/10 other reasons to play that content are not existing standing around bosses and press 1 for 10 minutes doesnt seem like a revolutionary gameplay mechanic to me.

2/10

Too many game breaking bugs. Too many disconnects from the server that are on ANet’s end. Too many game breaking fixes to the game breaking bugs. And on a subjective level, the story was horrible and Scarlet was an annoying, cardboard cutout of a villain. I’m glad that she’s dead if only because it means never having to deal with her again.

If this is what comes of “extra polished” content, this game is going to have severe issues reaching the next year at any kind of success.

dire phail .