There’s no LS1 anymore because of LS2 which is what you want.
Okay, as you don’t seem to be reading anything I’m saying, I’m going to thank you for the conversation and bow out.
And I guess you’re paying the extra 100 devs needed to programm and invent all of this?
Well sort of, yeah. My gem purchases, the people I encourage to buy the game, their gem purchases. Then multiply that by every other player.
If the game had stayed at the level it was in LS1, with permanent additions keeping it constantly growing, then fewer players would have grown disillusioned, and they would have encouraged more people to buy the game, who would themselves have bought gems and encouraged others to join.
Whether the LS1 model could have been self-sustaining, I don’t know. But it isn’t like I’m suggesting the devs work for free.
Thats not true. There basically would still be a content drought as a content drought means no NEW content. There’s enough content in the game to play, just not everyone is playing it. Even if that content would still be in the game, it would be at least a year old.
I’m not saying that LS1 should have been permanent and then they should have done what they did afterwards anyway. I’m saying LS1 should have been permanent and then they should have continued with the LS1 model.
Imagine if every two weeks from the start of LS1 we’d received permanent updates on the scale of the Molten Alliance dungeon, or the Marionette, or the Silverwastes. Heck, not even every two weeks, every month.
The game would be crammed with content. We’d have dungeons to run, SAB to play, the Queen’s Gauntlet to try, Fractals to do (remember they came in LS1 too), new maps to explore… Who knows what else we could have had.
Instead, we have very little from Season 1, new players need to buy a lot of Season 2, HoT was a disappointment, and the most exciting thing we’ve had in a year and a half is that they turned on content that they chose to turn off in 2013.
Living world 1 didn’t fail. Just a general opinion that kept popping up was that people were missing out. And ArenaNet was being strained by trying to push our releasesevery two weeks. Thats all that happened. Other than that every release there were lots of people playing it. Maybe due to the being available of a two week period only. But definitely popular regardless.
The reason why temporarily activation of SAB is better is just that it makes it so players don’t get burned out on tbe content.
When I said LS1 failed, I didn’t mean it wasn’t popular. Obviously it was. Personally I loved LS1. What I meant was that it failed as a business model. Spending countless hours making content that would then be almost immediately taken away didn’t serve ANet or the players’ interests. Players wind up with a game that doesn’t grow over time, and ANet don’t have anything more to offer new customers (and actually, new customers wind up looking at a story they can’t actually experience the whole of).
Yes there was a nice feeling of “I was there”, and we have nice memories, but we could have had those anyway. Remember the first time your server or guild killed the new Tequatl? That isn’t taken away just because the fight is still in the game. What it means is that new players can still actually enjoy that content instead of just hearing about it.
Ideally we would have had LS1 style updates, but without actually taking them away. There was no need to shut the Tower of Nightmares, or the original Molten dungeon. Rather than constantly rebuilding LA they could have made a new city (or two, given the amount of updates it’s had). If they’d been doing that from the start (throwing in things like Dry Top and Silverwastes) we’d have probably more content than we do now, even without HoT, and never have had to go through this content drought.
Trib rewards (exploits aside) are some of the best designed rewards in the game. They have identical skins to a set that is available via RNG/TP, so they aren’t “superior” to skins that everyone can get, but they also offer distinction for effort/skill. Thus neither the casual player nor the player wanting exclusive rewards lose out. (Infusions complicate this, but auras seem to be intended as a rare thing.)
There should be more rewards in the game like this, not less.
That’s why it should stay as temp content to bridge the content gaps between whatever they plan for the main game, be it living story or expansion. And new worlds added if time allows. Since no game company can produce quality content fast enough to keep new things coming out at the rate at which players consume them.
Why do SAB players have to be the ones to lose out? Turn off PvP eleven months of the year and use that as a bridge.
This is the first time in months that non-pvpers have had something to do. In a bit over a week, we may be back in that same position until the next “bridge” comes along, and that’s assuming it’s something we actually like.
If you don’t want to play SAB, don’t play it until the next content drought. For those of us who do, why penalise us?
LS1 never failed. LS2 was implemented because there was a new thread every other day, demanding to be able to replay the stuff someone has missed.
We had a lot of fun during LS1 – not only with the marionette it was a fun way to meet all the people on your server and to stuff together. The only problem was that you had to have enough people in most cases, that’s why people guested because there was no megaservers around yet.
I may be in the minority but I liked LS1 a lot better – LS2 feels like a chore to me.
LS1 clearly did fail, which is why we don’t have that model any more.
Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t mean to say LS1 was bad. I preferred it to LS2 and HoT. But the problem is just that, I prefer*red* it. It has gone. I don’t get to enjoy it any more, new players never enjoyed it, and I can’t convince anyone to buy the game to play it.
If LS1 had been similar in structure, but permanent, it would have been awesome. There would have been fewer complaints, we wouldn’t have had as many cries for an expansion, and we would have a lot more game world than we do now. It wasn’t permanent, so we got all those things.
Yes, you enjoyed the marrionette. So did I. But the marrionette doesn’t give me a reason to log in today, and it certainly doesn’t give anyone else a reason to buy the game.
I wish they’d go back to the LS1 model, just without the temporary content. Instead of destroying and rebuilding LA twice, give us one or two new cities. Instead of making a dungeon then taking it away, don’t take it away. Instead of making a giant tower and then destroying it, just make it and leave it. A lowly populated area is still better than an area that no longer exists.
I do love SAB as much as most people. But what I said are my observations : no permanent content is as praised as non permanent one. The reason underneath is quite simple : when it comes only from time to time it looks fresh. After a month it is “usual content”. Vinewrath is fought everyday sure but nobody I saw in game talked about this fight as one of the best in the game world… it is just one world boss for most people.
If PvP leagues were open all the time, there would not be so much players, because nobody feels the urge of doing it so we’d postpone it to a later time. WvW tournaments were (will be) the same, it attracts players to do thing they would not necessarily do at that moment and by driving so many players together at one time it creates a much more enjoyable experience.
Turn SAB permanent and after 2 or 3 month, less and less people will play it. It will still be enjoyable but not in the same fashion as a festival. Even during the first year when SAB had been available 2 times (April and Sept), the “Back to School” update was less successful (from dev comments at that time).
Apologies if I made assumptions about you not liking it.
I think you’re cherry picking your cases a little. Fractals was permanent, and its by far one of the best additions in the game, despite the repeated attempts to ruin it. Heck, thanks to swamp it’s currently more repetitive than SAB, but no one asks for it to be turned off eleven months of the year.
I’m bored of fractals, and have been for a while. That doesn’t mean that I think they should be turned off. Not only would that mean that people who still like them will suffer, but it would also mean that when I eventually decide to go back to them, they’ll probably be unavailable.
I really don’t understand why the decision has come down on the side of turning SAB off. In no other game mode (apart from the ones tied to obvious holiday events) is this an issue. The only exception is the Queen’s Gauntlet, which I’d also argue should be permanent because it adds variety (specifically, moderately difficult solo play).
I don’t. I think it is funny for 5 minutes and then dead content. I just don’t understand why everyone raves about it. It’s a bad parody on a different game genre and I don’t think the devs should spend any more time on it at all. It should have stayed dead and buried imo.
So, please don’t try to speak for everyone.
To be fair, while I agree it is wrong to speak for everyone, you yourself just said that everyone raves about it, but you still don’t think the devs should spend any more time on it. So while you aren’t speaking for everyone, you do seem to be asking the devs to cater specifically to your needs at the expense of everyone else.
SAB is only a cool feature because it is temporary. Anet understood quite early that temp content is the best experience for players hence all LS1.
How many speak about Marionette as the most exciting boss they fought in GW2? Yet when Vinewrath was was released, everybody mentioned how it reminds the Marionette… but after 6 months few people still care about it.
Tower of Nightmare was super fun ! But it was just a zerg fest in a small map. The fact it lasted only 2 weeks makes it one of the funniest experience in the game.If you want to continue to love SAB so much, it is better that it remains a temporary content.
LS1 failed because it was temporary. That’s why LS2 was permanent, and then the LS model was replaced with an expansion model.
People still fight Vinewraith. Heck, Dry Top and the Silverwastes are two of the best things to come out of the Living World. They still get played today. Yes, the Marionette is remembered fondly, but that’s because it was part of a bigger and more exciting world, with constant updates. Not because it was temporary. Tequatl still gets killed many times a day, and it’s arguable a less interesting fight.
As to SAB only being a cool feature because it’s temporary, that’s just not true. It’s also weird how many of the people invested in keeping SAB turned off seem to be people who don’t actually like it that much. I don’t love WvW, but I don’t try and get it shut down eleven months of the year.
Actually, I quite like the merge idea. You essentially trade off a single set of skills (Ranger shortbow) for the sake of doubling the available skins for builds on three and a half classes (Warrior, Guardian, Thief and non-shortbow Rangers).
That said, I don’t use shortbow Ranger, so I only really gain from that scenario. Having Kudzu on a thief would be awesome though. As would a general increase in skin options for the other classes.
That is to say: I’m sure that SAB is worth investing in, but I don’t think any of us can say whether it’s the best use of that investment, when compared with all other competing ideas
I’ve convinced people to buy GW2 specifically on the basis of SAB, because it represented so much possibility and diversity within the game. I can’t think of anything else in the game that has a similar dev input to consumer output.
To put it in context, even if the 6 man legendary team had produced every single one of the new legendaries in six months, rather than one, that still isn’t a game seller. No one outside of the game cares about a second set of skins. Nor is a third of a raid particularly appealing.
Things like SAB and the Living World were things that I could go to other people with and say “Hey! Check out how alive and exciting the world of GW2 is! It’s all free too!” Since they abandoned that model, put most mini-games on a weird rotation and stuck them in LA, and the NPE gutted a lot of the starter zones of variety, there just isn’t that kind of feeling any more. It’s really hard to tell people that Tyria is a world of possibilities, which didn’t use to be the case.
From me, it’s an absolute “No No No” to any form of compensation and not just in this case.
If the compensation culture gets hold then the devs will end up being unable or unwilling to make changes or introduce new stuff because of the burden of having to compensate half the players for stuff they already had. We saw the same thing with the shared bag slots. If you buy something today, you pay today’s price for it. What happens to the price tomorrow is not relevant.And to anyone who spent RL cash on guild decorations, you are free to make that choice but always be aware of the sequence:
RL Cash -> Pixels -> No residual value
Sure, but the flip side of that is that players become afraid to invest in high cost things because the rules can change. People get frustrated and (in worst case scenarios) leave when they feel like their hard work has been invalidated, it just isn’t fun to play in that sort of environment. However the bigger issue, and the one most directly relevant to ANet, is why would anyone who bought gems to make decs this time buy them again in future?
We aren’t talking about common occurrence changes here. We’re talking about individual players spending thousands of gold. That sort of change doesn’t happen often so there’s no reason to suggest the devs need to be scared of making other changes.
This also doesn’t need to be anything complicated or game breaking. Double the amount of individual decs in a guild’s account where significant cost changes were made. Give a title and some AP to already earned scribing levels (heck, just retire the current achievements and introduce a second set that add AP on to the old ones, like with minis). Just, something.
Okay… this might be the thread that actually restores my faith in ANet. It’s so simple, but it’s this kind of interaction that we’ve needed for two years!
I’d vote fix.
I don’t want to dispute his words but, he himself has said before that when W1 was built ie. SAB was made, it was less people than that… don’t recall what the timescale was like but I do recall it being three to four people for W1 (including the engine stuff to support their UI etc.). W2 was huge by comparison (without the shortcuts) and they also added Tribulation mode for all zones in that (or added it to W2, finished it in W1).
Yeah, I found that odd. I’m not accusing anyone of lying or anything, but I’d like clarification. The story I had heard was that SAB was essentially done in Josh’s spare time. I’m sure that was an exaggeration, but I’d like to know what exactly would take world three so long?
Because permanent would cause a lot of problems (item flooding, not enough people to get a group together as they’re already bored).
Item flooding isn’t really a “problem”. No one worries about other skins being available all year. Also, SAB is one of the few areas of the game where actual effort/skill over grind is required to earn rewards, so it would only increase items in the sense of allowing people with less free time to get them, and allow people to get them casually rather than in a big three week grind. Which is actually fairer than the current system.
As for grouping… SAB is again one of the few areas in the game where grouping isn’t that important (and actually detrimental in some cases).
I really, really can’t understand why it isn’t permanent.
This system just encourages people to grind it as much as possible, rather than just casually enjoy it. We don’t need to turn off other modes or features to keep them interesting (can you imagine if PvP was available 20 days a year?), and SAB is exactly the kind of pick up and play activity that people will log in for a quick run at. The original Super Mario Bros is still fun 30 years later for a reason.
Throw in a time based leaderboard for all three modes and leave it on all year I say.
I don’t know how big a problem this is now, but if there really won’t be a zone 3 next year, then this will become an issue. Giving some reason to run old trib modes would be a good idea.
I’m not sure how I’d implement it though. Maybe make some decorations tied to it, so you can spam it for extra copies of that decoration? Annoyingly, the obvious decoration for this would have been the King Toad. Z1 + Z2 + Z3 + Cloud = Unimpressive King Toad. Then 64 for the super one.
Doubling up already made decs (or something similar depending on price scaling) seems a good solution to me.
A lot of scribes levelled through spamming WvW upgrades etc. so they still be losing out a bit, but it would take a lot of the sting out of the reduction. Also a lot of scribes got donations from their guilds, so giving stuff to the guilds rather than the scribe seems nice.
Either that or a title or something, like they did with legendary doubles.
Just want to say thank you to whoever designed and implemented these! They’re really versatile, really big, and really good value for ingredients. Brilliant addition!
Keep it as a Festival. We need more Festivals, not less.
Well in that case we should make PvP a “Festival”. Three weeks of the year you can fight against other players! How about making Caledon Forest a festival as well? Have it blocked off except for in July! Maybe we could have a festival of boots, and turn foot gear off for the rest of the year!
Really. SAB isn’t a festival, it’s a mini-game, and the game is screaming for permanent content and variety.
Though I do actually agree with you that the game needs festivals, SAB shouldn’t be wasted on filling the calendar. Besides, new zones could be added every April, if they really wanted some kind of annual thing.
I totally agree:
1) People who can’t play a lot over these 20 days miss out.
2) It makes the game feel grindy to get all the things you want.
3) It isn’t a festival in any normal sense of the word.
4) The game is crying for permanent content.
5) SAB is a fun distraction that people should be able to play when they feel like it, not a specific part of April.
As to the “It will lose its shine”. Not really. This year it was re-released without W3, which was fine because everyone had been waiting two and a half years. Next year, that won’t really fly. So either they will be releasing new content next year, which would bring people in anyway. Or, they aren’t going to (or might not), and it would be better to just admit that now and say: “Hey, we’re not sure about what we’re going to be able to do in the future, but we know you love SAB, so here’s what we have!”
SAB is either a mini-game, like adventures and activities. Or it’s a game mode like PvP and WvW. It isn’t a festival, and it shouldn’t be temporary.
Sure it is. Not all festivals need to be tied to holidays, and festivals can be small, local things.
Omaha, Nebraska has two small festivals that come to mind. “Shakespeare on the Green” and “Jazz on the Green”, both of which happen during the summer. They’re not some big thing celebrated around the country, but it’s a small festival with a theme. Or how about a Renaissance Fair/Festival? Basically, there’s something going on, and people make a party out of it. If it was going on all the time, though, people would get bored with it and stop paying attention to it.
Now, I’ll admit it sucks to not have enough time to play something, and have it go away before you can really get into it. But nothing is perfect, and if they kept it open all the time then there would be nothing to excite us next year at this time.
Yes, but all the things you listed are festivals. SAB isn’t like any of them. It doesn’t make sense to call it a festival either according to the dictionary or the lore.
The game is crying out for permanent content and things to do. SAB is an obvious addition.
SAB shouldn’t be temporary. By design it’s a pick up and play kind of feature, that you don’t want to burn out on in short heavy doses. Having it available year round gives the main game extra depth and content, and allows for people to play SAB at their own pace.
Calling it a “festival” doesn’t make sense. It isn’t a festival.
I don’t know about MMO consumer laws and regulations, but asking for a refund after 7 months of playing a game seems awfully like claiming thy gave you the wrong soda after drinking most of it…
I’d say its more like going into a McDonalds and paying for a meal. They bring you your drink, and a side. You’re thirsty so you start drinking, and as you do, you notice the side has a bug on it, so you send it back.
An hour passes, and they still haven’t brought your food, but they tell you that they aren’t going to bring any fries, just the burger, which will come at some point. They are going to replace your side soon though.
At this point, you’ve finished your drink and you’re really angry and hungry, so you ask for a refund. They tell you that you can have the refund, but they’re going to have to make you throw up your drink before you can have it.
Meanwhile, some people who bought an ice cream are sitting in the corner having been given a single lick three hours ago. They cackle at you dementedly.
Personally, I love the cap. I haven’t hit it yet, but I’m looking forward to doing so.
What we actually need are more achievements coming in that aren’t tied to dailies. The daily ones are boring after the literal years needed to max them out and they don’t show anything more than you logged in for 15 minutes a lot of times.
Heck, someone could be playing 24 hours a day at weekends and still be way behind someone who is playing an hour and a half total spread throughout the week.
Hehe, try getting a refund on the Infinite Continue Coin. They’ve been refusing refunds or apologies on that since 2014. Even if it comes back tomorrow, how many people that bought it are even still playing?
The “legendary journeys” we have really aren’t that complex. I don’t know anything about coding, but assuming that it is relatively simple to do something like:
“If collection X is active, drop item Y from enemy Z.”
Then I don’t see what the problem is. The collections really contain very little more than that. Yes, there’s some cute other things they threw into some of them, but they were hardly essential enough to abandon the whole process.
Heck they could just abandon the weird gold/karma gating of making you buy the collection in the first place and just skip the first part of that for tier one.
Okay, I’m a guy and I generally find the “Kudzu is too girly!!!” threads to be really silly (it’s my favourite legendary), and I have male and female mesmer characters.
That said, I don’t think jumping on the OP as being homophobic or whatever is really fair. The mesmer effects are probably the most visible of the class effects, and they do have a big impact on looks. The only class that is even close to that is guardian with all the blue.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any issues with a big fiery Charr covered in skulls shooting out pink butterflies, but you don’t have to be homophobic to not want that kind of aesthetic mix for your character.
Still, given what’s going on with legendaries I’d REALLY prefer they don’t take another six people off something important to offer us an alternative mesmer effect. Also its handy having such a quick tell in hectic PvP situations.
Also, word of mouth. GW2 is three years old now, and it isn’t that heavily advertised or visible in stores. A lot of people are brought in through friends, meaning that each player that leaves (or gets frustrated enough to stop recommending the game) is potentially several lost sales.
You have to be kidding? Not Season 1, but during Season 2 most of the expansion complaints started. People were saying we get an update we can do in two hours and then we have to wait. I’d rather have an expansion. This wasn’t said once or twice, This was said multiple times a day.
I remember the complaints from Season 1, and they started because the content was temporary. Even then, it wasn’t everyone. Lots of people loved the LS system.
Players did not ask for a year and a half content drought with a small expansion in the middle at full game price. If ANet had told the players that was the plan, then people would have said “No”. The players can’t be blamed for this, even the minority that wanted an expansion over Living World.
You think giving away gems is going to do that? You’re not serious now are you? You don’t give yourself or others very much credit as consumers if that’s your thinking.
It isn’t about gems, it’s about player loyalty and customer relations. When players feel disrespected they aren’t likely to stick around or put faith in a company to do better in future. ANet have been terrible about maintaining the good will of their players.
I know a lot of players who stopped buying gems because of the Infinite Continue Coin issue. This is much, much bigger.
The Infinite Continue Coin has been useless since 2013, with no refunds or apologies. Placating customers they disappoint doesn’t seem to be part of ANet’s business model.
I can’t be sure here but a lot of the old content they wanna tie this to is just not made for it. Look at the bug fix patches we’ve had after they came out. We’ve had patch notes with over 10 fixes for a single collection. So yeah, I think it’s a bit harder than you imagine. I could also be wrong tho, not a programmer either.
I get that coding isn’t nearly as simple as it looks, but I’m really struggling to see how this couldn’t be done simply. Surely they have the ability to make a boss drop a particular item, and we know that collections are in place. What exactly is causing the issues?
Where does the logic come from that “If someone didn’t make a legendary, therefore it has no value to them”.
Legendaries do way more than just be for players who made them. I’ve helped guildies go for them, I’ve congratulated friends on getting them, I’ve seen them pass me by in LA and thought how cool they looked. I’ve sighed at the sheer volume of Twilights swinging around in fractal runs, and taken second glances when I saw a rare Minstrel or underwater legendary.
I remember when I first did Octovine, there was a guy there with Frostfang and Astralaria, double-wielding. I have little desire to own either of those (because I don’t use axes much), but it was really cool to see, and I remember that more than I remember anything else from that fight.
The world of GW2 is made up of players. It’s an MMO. Treating things like legendaries as something which occurs in a vacuum of one person doesn’t make sense.
I’d really like to understand what the heck is so difficult about making the precursor collections. The collection tech is already in there, and the collections themselves just require items to drop. Heck, a lot of the stages are just things like “Kill this boss” or “Go to this place with this item”.
How does that take months? I’m not a programmer, so I really don’t know, but it sure looks a lot simpler than what the raid team have managed to put out.
What happened was the fan base wasn’t happy with the living story so we switched to an expansion model and the expansion didn’t do well. That’s what happened. If the expansion had done better, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
I think a fairer assessment is that some of the fanbase wasn’t happy with the temporary nature of the Living Story, so they asked for more permanent content like an expansion in addition to it.
I do not remember anyone, let alone a significant proportion of the player base, asking for ANet to abandon content updates for a year to bring out something as small as HoT.
I know that there have always been complaints, and I can sympathise with some of criticism of the player base, but I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that we in any way asked for the last year and a half (Which I’m also aware that you weren’t explicitly doing in that post, but it walked a line and I’ve seen such accusations thrown around.)
Super Adventure Box.
Maybe a little perspective here on Mike’s “communication”… Yes, it’s better than we’ve had in the past, but can we just take a minute to remember that ANet just cancelled a major feature of paid content and people are grateful to them for telling us.
What Mike did isn’t some brave and heroic deed, its an absolute minimum of basic courtesy to paying customers. The idea that he could have simply not told us isn’t something we would even be considering a possibility if we hadn’t had three years of ANet pulling this sort of thing.
Be angry about legendary weapons, sure, but how about the recent drought of content? That kind of thing happens when we spread ourselves too thin, and when we let the content development pipeline empty out so we can fight fires.
It seems to me that this actually happens when you switch paths too often and redevelop already existing content.
Imagine if:
Rather than redesign LA three times, you’d made a new city?
Rather than redesigning traits twice, you’d left them alone.
Rather that redoing the NPE, you’d focussed on new endgame content.
Rather than nerf dungeons, you simply had left them alone.
Rather than make replacements to WvW maps, you’d made additions to them.
Rather than redesigning fractals, you’d made the small and regular map additions that they were designed for.
Rather than turn SAB off after a month, you’d left it in the game permanently.
Rather than making LS1 temporary, you’d designed permanent content for it.
So much development time has gone into reinventing the wheel, making temporary additions, or to starting and then abandoning projects. While I’m glad that the ship is changing course, how much development time has been wasted on legendaries so far? It seems that hours and hours of work go into ideas that don’t actually add to the game, but just move it sideways or nowhere at all.
Well yeah it was, then players demanded an expansion and LW kinda got tossed into it.
Some players demanded an expansion. Even then, a lot of the reason for that was because the LS stuff kept being temporary for some reason. If they’d just stopped remaking Lion’s Arch, redoing systems that already worked, and made content that stayed longer than a month, a lot of those players would have quietened down.
It’s hard to justify HoT on the grounds that players ask for it. Even the ones asking for an expansion didn’t mean “Take a year and a half break from doing other content, stick the content you’ve already said you’ll make behind a paywall, offer an expansion that isn’t as big as we’d expect for the price, then give us about half of it.”
Yes, players complained during the old system, but it nowhere near excuses what we’ve got now.
I’m glad Mike is communicating more, and it does look like the game might finally turn around, but we’re over a year into a content drought now. Honesty about abandoning things we were promised is better than the silence we used to get, but it’s still a bad thing happening.
For all the people thinking this is taking away from HoT’s value, wasn’t continuing LW part of HoT’s value as well? I think somewhere they said you’d need HoT for future LW updates. So isn’t moving Legendary Weapons team into LW team still keeping that development value within what was paid for HoT?
No. HoT’s value was supposed to be both LS and new legendaries. It doesn’t matter which one they’re giving us, it matters that they’re only giving us one.
(And to be fair, the LS3 was supposed to be in the game anyway. They aren’t giving us something with HoT, they just put up a paywall to something they were originally going to do for free.)
As a curiosity question could you guys take some people off of a different team to work on the legendary weapons? Like maybe the fractal/dungeon team or something like that?
The fractal team that have produced one original fractal since release and still haven’t given a leaderboard after resetting everyone’s progress to 30?
I’d like to understand the way things work better. I thought the five people working on raids wasn’t affecting Living Story… but apparently the six people working on a single shortbow can make all the difference?
Yeah, as Danikat said. Tybalt just has the best arc. Its like the Claw Island scene was written for him, and Sieran and Forgal just got given the same ending.
He also has, in my opinion, the best voice acting of the three, and his quirks are a bit more memorable. They’ve maybe taken the apple thing a bit too far with the Stronghold skills (one out of three would have been fine), but it was cool during the story. A lot of NPCs just don’t have something that makes them stand out as more than a plot device, and Tybalt did.
That said, I’d love for Sieran and Forgal to get more attention. Would be great to see them as Stronghold champions, or maybe get some guild hall statue decorations of the three of them.
They mentioned it a couple of times and it was discussed on the forum. From an interview: O’Brien offered a similar thought when asked if players could expect future expansions following Heart of Thorns. “This expansion is about laying the groundwork,” he says. “We are building Guild Wars 2 to be the game that we want to be evolving over the long-term.”
I was aware that this was going to be a somewhat content light expansion but I can see how that information could easily be missed if someone wasn’t diligent about reading all blog posts and interviews.
I’m not sure that really works a defence even if you were diligent. If we take that in the way you suggest it basically says “This isn’t a proper expansion, its mainly a base for allowing us to sell you future expansions… Oh but we’re going to charge the price of the original game for it anyway.”
I think its fairer to treat it as a legit expansion. Just not a very well thought through one. As to the OP, I’ll copy my post from another thread:
I don’t think it’s fair to say they lied. It’s just that, through a combination of their marketing and hype, and customer over-optimism, expectation were much higher than delivered. Some of these expectations changed before HoT, some after. For me:
Price:
Expectation – Maybe half the cost of the base game.
Reality – The same as the base game.
New class:
Expectation – Would come with a couple of free character slots.
Reality – Came with one free character slot, after massive backlash.
WvW:
Expectation – New maps would be added.
Reality – New maps replaced current maps, and destroyed WvW. Also massive gold sinks turned up.
Legendary weapons:
Expectation – We’d get a full set of legendary weapons.
Reality – Five months later we have three legendary weapons, and no time frame on more.
Precursor crafting:
Expectation – We’d have a fun and accessible way to get precursors instead of the massive gold sink.
Reality – We have a fun and accessible way to get precursors, broken up in the middle by a massive gold sink.
Guild halls:
Expectation – We’d get a small hall we could decorate and level with our guild.
Reality – We got a massive and pretty amazing hall we could decorate and level with our guild… with an enormous gold sink. Oh and they broke guild missions for a few weeks.
Story:
Expectation – We’d get a medium length story that addressed Living World questions like where Rytlock has been, and handled a sudden anti-Sylvari climate.
Reality – Eh… It sort of did some stuff well, but was really short.
Maps:
Expectation – Intitial, loads of new maps.
Reality – Actually some pretty amazing maps, but only three you can really explore, and all of them bound to timed metas.
Rewards:
Expectation – Loads of new armours and weapons, including the Revenant weapons from beta.
Reality – Keys. So. Many. Keys.
Fractals:
Expectation – Reworked reward system, including a legendary backpiece.
Reality – Initially broken rewards system, no legendary backpiece so far.
Raids:
Expectation – Three new raids.
Reality – So far, two thirds of a raid.
Dungeons:
Expectation – Nothing really. Maybe a couple of new ones?
Reality – Actively made the ones we had worse.
Post-launch:
Expectation – The content drought would end. We’d get living story again, and maybe even things like SAB or Dragon Bash.
Reality – Unless you’re a raider or a PvPer, then it’s occasional festival repeats for about a year.
Now a lot of those expectations were absolutely my own fault, and not ANet lying. But the problem is that ANet are so tight-lipped about what they’re doing that all you can do is guess about what’s coming. Combine that with some areas where they actually did way over-hype the content that was coming, or at least the time frame it was coming in, and it just makes it very hard to justify pre-ordering the next one.
I think what you are suggesting is probably a lot more work than you imagine. For a start, you’d need animations for all of the new positions.
HOWEVER, I do think that allowing for two handed weapons to be shown alongside one handed weapons would be easy (ish) to pull off. All you need to do is have all weapons displayed, and when there is a conflict (say, a greatsword/staff build) you only show the currently equipped weapon. Shield, as you say, can simply layer over a two handed weapon.
Personally I like Skyhammer for the CC fun. And I liked the water in Raid on the Capricorn.
We have maps for people who want pure PvP. Why not leave more varied maps for the rest of us? They don’t have to be in ranked queue.
There’s a reason the SMASH series isn’t just no items/Final Destination out of the box.
Yeah. They trade the account bound item in at the guild hall vendor for a decoration which anyone in the guild can scribe with.
The wiki entry is kind of wrong on the second one. I guess there isn’t a “guild bound” description.