Guild Wars 2

If town clothes can now be utilized in combat, what the heck is the point of the tonics and forcing former town clothes and outfits to be “all or nothing”?!?!?!?

Can’t we just get a full Costume tab that includes all the body part slots: Helm, Chest, Hands, Feet, Legs? If there are some parts of special outfits that can’t be split, like the top/bottom of a Wintersday gown, then just weld those two pieces into a single item that takes up both the chest and leg slots. Only weld pieces where absolutely necessary and give players the ability to mix and match pieces just like with ordinary armor.

It’s not brain surgery.

The only reason they aren’t offering a completely free form outfit tab where any piece of armor or piece of outfit can substitute for the pieces with stats is because they don’t want to lose Transmutation Stone revenue. Why not just make it so Transmutation Stones convert an item from a stat based item to a purely cosmetic one, which can then be used a multi-slot Costume tab? You lose potential revenue from players not having to buy transmutation stones to preserve a look every time they acquire pieces with better stats, but lets be honest, that system has probably limited the sale of gem Store armors more than anything. It may be close to a wash and players would feel less nickle and dimed by a system that punishes them for finding armor with better stats once they’ve already transmuted their desired look onto their armor.

It also avoids this convoluted and dissatisfying “solution” where purely cosmetic items can’t be mix/matched in the Costume tab.

This isn’t much different than the way GW2 has always handled things. It’s just a much more aggressive form of Overflow, where each server no longer has it’s own primary instance of each game zone.

Before, unless you were in overflow, you knew that everyone in a given zone that wasn’t guesting there was from your server. With this change, even if the system is weighted to try to increase your odds of being in the same zone instance as others from your server, or your guild, or your party, the people you run into will be a mish mash of people from every server. Essentially, every zone instance will be in what used to be called overflow.

This allows them some of the benefits of server merges in order to try to make game zones feel more populated, while avoiding the headaches and bad press that server merges often entail. However, it really destroys any sense of server community outside of World vs. World. It also makes it extremely difficult for guilds to recruit players, out in the world, that play on the same server. Will guild mechanics change so that there is no longer any sense that a guild, it’s membership and functions, are tied to an individual server? If so, good luck with that, if not, guild related headaches will be severe with the coming changes.

I saw ESOs mega-server strategy as one of the last nails in the concept that MMOs should be about community. GW1 has guilds, but one of the biggest reasons it was, for most, a single player game, with almost no social element, was due to the lack of server based communities and the random nature with which you were grouped with people into town and city instances. In GW2, game play zones are not individualized instances, but with this change, any sense that the people you run into are part of the same community as you are shattered.

There are short term benefits for those who lament how empty many of the game zones often appear, but it’s just an outgrowth of the reality that the game is failing. Losing players in general, while also embracing “Adventure by Checklist” content strategies that have done nothing but destroy exploration of the vast game world and amplified the population issues for the game zones.

The game isn’t dying because game zones feel empty; game zones feel empty because the game is dying. It’s dying because of the horrible Living Story strategy and the way it sucked up all the development resources that were supposed to go into providing a flow of fresh world content that would have given players a reason to keep revisiting the zones in the greater game world.

Megaservers are a further symptom of the game’s woes and a band-aid for dropping world populations that may just accelerate the loss of players, while trying to hide those losses by pooling people together on as few instances of each zone as possible.

Kudos to the OP. Brilliant. I actually got emotional reading it and laughed a few times as well. I’ve found so much to hate about Living Story from a purely game play and development resource perspective, that I lost site of how badly it also fails at story.

I firmly believe the entire concept has failed. An amateurish story poorly adapted to the game in which it resides, paired with temporary content that has added zero value to the game for returning players or those who decide to ignore the story? Well, that’s just a horrible waste of development resources no matter how one looks at it.

If LS had somehow managed to provide some value as an actual story, that might have slightly counterbalanced the negatives associated with the concept. It did not. Seeing it laid out in this very accurate point by point critique, which, if anything, bent over backwards to lessen the sting in order to increase it’s chances at being seen as constructive criticism, made me realize one thing: The Story of Living Story is exactly what a D&D player might expect from a bad ten year old newb Dungeon Master attempting to run his first campaign. That really sums up the entire effort in as concise a way as possible.

Looking at the developers replies, I’m actually just as pessimistic as ever moving forward. Blaming technical limitations for really bad storytelling and lackluster content is a mind blowing response. We have all seen story telling and content much, much better in games with very primitive game systems and tiny, underfunded development teams, essentially since there has even been such a thing as computer gaming.

There are vast multitudes of computer games with extremely compelling stories, paired with meaty, fulfilling game content, many of which were built using tech that would be laughable today. Heck, there are still small independents that pump out games that look like they were made 15 years ago, but still manage to find an audience based on the strength of the storytelling.

Technical limitations may limit the type of content that can economically be produced in support of some grand story telling ideas. There are a lot of movies being made today, with the perfection and reduced of CGI effects, that just couldn’t have been made twenty years ago, while doing justice to the story being told. That doesn’t mean that only today can good stories be told, in fact many bemoan that special effects too often substitute for good storytelling.

Tip for Arenanet, if Season One was somewhat near the best you could produce given current technology and available resources, then Living Story is clearly just not a concept for this time and for this game. You guys had already produced tons of innovations in game content design and delivery with the core game which are sustainable with your tech and resources. Why not get back to that, instead of pursuing a fantastical pipe dream that has failed on so many counts?

Blaming extremely bad story telling on technical limitations is just one more thing about Living Story that leaves me just dumbfounded. If a story can’t be properly told within the confines of the game and the limitations of your resources and technology, there are an infinite number of other stories that should be able to be presented properly within the game and paired with compelling content.

GW2 , with it’s associated reputation, payroll, manpower, revenue potential and other resources is not the platform for trying to realize someone’s adolescent fantasies of the ultimate, (in reality very bad), D&D campaign storyline. Season 1 of Living Story would have been just as complete a failure as story in a medium where the only limitations are those of the imagination.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Belenwyn.8674:

CureForLiving.5360:

Fiontar.4695:

The original ANet plan was to release new World Dynamic Event content every month, (along with occasional dungeon and other content), with the goal of doubling the Dynamic Events in the game during the first year of free updates. Some would advance the stories told by the original DEs for the zone. Others would become part of a rotation of DEs in and out of the game, in a fashion that would ensure that you’d find new content and a different combination of content when ever you returned to a zone after a month or two.

Actually this does sound pretty cool.

They did this strategy in the beginning. But people did not appreciate it. They had to change the strategy.

No. No no no no no no no.

It really wasn’t that people didn’t appreciate it. A lot of the DEs jsut came unannounced so people didn’t know it was there, and that plus the fact that rewards for DEs are just screwed on a core level (this is a MMO, people need loot as an incentive) meant of course it would be unappreciated.

For me, temporary content doesn’t work either, on so many levels.

1. It doesn’t add to the core game. Yes, LA is pretty cool, but what do we still do on a day-to-day basis? FotM, CoF1, etc etc, hasn’t changed for a long time.

2. Its a massive waste of effort. People often complain that the game has so little content compared to other games (notably GW1), but that’s not exactly true. If you count the amount of content that’s been released so far, its more than what most games get in 2-3 years. It’s just that its all temporary. Battle of LA is basically a new city, that’s an entire temporary city, that’s just such a huge waste of effort.

3. It concentrates players, and takes them away from other content because you put a deadline on them to play it soon as possible.

I agree on everything except with the scope of the temporary content in the second point. The meta-achievment grinds have stretched what little actual content there was out exponentially vs. the actual amount of playable content that has been introduced and then disappeared, with each Living Story update.

Being temporary has just made it easier for them to cover up the fact that the content they have produced was very thin on actual content.

Your third point is one of the most important. The problem with Living Story goes beyond how little the game has to show for it. It has actually been a method of providing game play that has trained participants, like mice in a maze, to think that the entire world is actually just a series of temporary mazes to be navigated for a reward and that no greater world or game play of any value exists outside of the latest maze. It not only concentrates players in one area, pulling them from the larger game world, but it degrades the perceived value of all that world content and destroys sustainable game play patterns that utilize all that content they spent over five years creating.

Belenwyn.8674:

CureForLiving.5360:

Fiontar.4695:

The original ANet plan was to release new World Dynamic Event content every month, (along with occasional dungeon and other content), with the goal of doubling the Dynamic Events in the game during the first year of free updates. Some would advance the stories told by the original DEs for the zone. Others would become part of a rotation of DEs in and out of the game, in a fashion that would ensure that you’d find new content and a different combination of content when ever you returned to a zone after a month or two.

Actually this does sound pretty cool.

They did this strategy in the beginning. But people did not appreciate it. They had to change the strategy.

Not only does that sound extremely odd, given that they had said the plan was NOT to blatantly draw attention to said content, but they literally gave it one month before switching strategies. From the perspective of many, Living Story has been one of the worst content development strategies seen in the history of MMOs and they’ve stuck with it for almost a year and a half.

A senior developer said a few months ago, to paraphrase, “the game will probably have to continue to lose players for another year or so before we’d have to give up on Living Story and try something different”. First, the comments showed that the strategy has not stopped the loss of players; second that they are so obsessed with Living Story that even though it has failed to provide hoped for levels of player retention, they are committed to it through 2014, no matter how bad the bleed of players becomes. All in the defense of a content strategy that has added close to zero in the way of permanent content!

They were willing to completely abandon the design principles and ideals the game was built upon a few months after one of the most successful MMO releases of the last decade, but they will cling to a strategy that not only isn’t working, but doesn’t even produce content of long term value for the title? If some of us come of as hyperbolic in our descriptions of the level of folly here, it’s because the entire mess is truly, objectively unfathomable.

If they had had even half the same level of commitment to the original game design and it’s logical post launch, live update progression as they have had to a failed strategy that has produced almost no permanent content after nearly 18 months, the game would be in much better shape.

Also, don’t forget that one huge advantage of the Buy to Play business model was that players could take breaks from the game and always know they would come back to a game with new things to see and do that they missed during their hiatus. That advantage has been completely nullified by the decision to spend a year and a half producing temporary, time limited content.

My brain still hurts trying to understand how such a self destructive content strategy ever got off a white board with out the author of the idea being laughed right out of the studio.

Astral Projections.7320:

They actually put in a few new events, a looong time ago. There were no player comments about them in the forums, no interest generated, so apparently they decided not to put any more in. There was a post by a Dev way after they did this, saying that they had done so and commenting on the lack of player interest. In fairness to the players there were a few mitigating reasons.

1) I’m pretty sure it was during a major holiday, I think it was as the first Halloween with a whole new set of interesting quests to do with the very first vanity back piece iirc.
2) they made no announcement of it at the time.
3) it was only a few new events.
4) they were scattered all over the world.
5) if someone encountered them, they would have absolutely no way of knowing they were new events unless they had all the old events memorized.

So, since there was no buzz of excitement over them when released with no announcement during, I think, a new major holiday, apparently that made them decide adding new quests was pointless. (No comment over the logic of this, just reporting what I read about it at the time).

When outlining the original strategy, they said they would add the content with little or no fanfare and count on players finding it themselves. I thought that was probably a little counterproductive, at the time, but it makes them using the low level of response as an excuse to drop the plan extremely silly.

I think Living Story has proven that some people want the treadmill, the time limits and the rewards that have a “one time only” sort of exclusivity to them, regardless of the actually quality of the content the meta achievements actually revolve around.

They could just as easily have added 20 DEs to a different game zone every two weeks, built a little bit of story and the treadmill, carrot, meta-achievments around that zone and offered exclusive rewards for those who made that zone their focus. The permanent DE content would still be there afterwards, even if the meta-achievement and story line would not. They could even temporarily turn on level-up level scaling for the zone of focus, in order to allow for the strategy to eventually visit and add content to every zone in the game.

If they had done that, same treadmill experience for those who want treadmills, the same long list of exclusive rewards, 18 months of story AND every zone in the game world would have had at least one pass by now that added PERMANENT Dynamic Event content.

;TLDR Those wanting “Adventure by Checklist” and “Limited Time Only” Meta-achievement Rewards could just as easily have been catered to by building the Meta-achievements and temporary story around the introduction of permanent world content.

Lynx Raven Raide.2764:

I am actually loving this stuff. There have been bits I have missed and others I have skipped over, but it makes me feel the world is actually changing, rather than being static. Yes, sometimes I feel “oh kitten, I missed this or that” but I also know when I do get in, there will be something interesting and active, rather than going from a zone into a new expansion area set later, doing stuff, then going back to that first zone to see nothing has changed and they are still stuck in the proverbial 1070 AE

The world is completely static. Destroying LA, or leaving the very, very rare mark on the world that something happened, while the same Dynamic Events the game launched with 18 months ago continue to repeat in an endless loop, has done nothing to produce a Living World.

It hkittentered the illusion of a living world while convincing some that running on a new treadmill every two weeks in exchange for the latest, limited time only treat, is an actual substitute for exploring the world and always finding something new there.

If you removed the rewards and the achievements entirely and just asked people to play the living story content for fun until they had seen enough or gotten bored, how much average game play do you think most people would get out of all the living story content, combined, released in the last 18 months? Twenty hours? Ten? Five?

It’s not just bad because all the actual content has been temporary, but because all the content has amounted to very little in the way of content you’d play just to have fun playing it.

Arenanet used to make fun of MMO treadmills and grinds that aren’t really much fun, but reward a carrot at the end. This game was supposed to do away with “smoke and mirrors” fluff masquerading as actual game content.

What the heck happened? And does finding an audience willing to put up with it in exchange for “limited time only”, Happy Meal toy equivalents, really make it in any way acceptable?

The original ANet plan was to release new World Dynamic Event content every month, (along with occasional dungeon and other content), with the goal of doubling the Dynamic Events in the game during the first year of free updates. Some would advance the stories told by the original DEs for the zone. Others would become part of a rotation of DEs in and out of the game, in a fashion that would ensure that you’d find new content and a different combination of content when ever you returned to a zone after a month or two.

Instead, they chose to do Living Story; completely temporary content that actually has pulled players out of the game world and into a linear, adventure by checklist, “get this exclusive, limited time reward”, sort of play.

We are now 18 months post launch. Is anyone seriously going to tell me that 18 months of producing temporary content that no longer exists to be played by anyone is a better alternative to being able to log in today to find more permanent Dynamic Event content than had originally launched with the game and a content rotation system that would keep each zone feeling fresh for a long time to come?

There are two sins of Living Story that are unforgivable. What should have been, but wasn’t and what Living Story has done as far as retraining players to avoid the game world in Lieu of the most cynical form of “Adventure by Checklist”, “Chase the Carrot while running on the Hamster Wheel” form of “Game Play”.

Living Story has proven the actual antithesis of the game play GW2 launched with and is a stunning exemplar of the sort of sad, silly, vapid, linear sort of game play GW2 was supposed to vanquish.

Lockheart.4312:

Lane.3410:

Meanwhile, I think the entire past year of GW2 has been filled with little more than bi-monthly achievement grinds with nothing of any real interest or substance added.

That is mostly because development of lasting content isn’t happening

they’d rather band-aid us with “living story” than be forced to spend resources on an actual “expansion” or content additions which stayed present.

I have to believe they have also been spending resources on an actual expansion of some sort. Even as they’ve muddied the waters with conflicting comments on an expansion, we do know that most of the studio has been working on something other than Living Story for the past year+.

The problem is that not only has living story been an absolute waste of resources, but it has driven people who would actually want an expansion of real content from the game, while creating a player base that just wants it’s next fix of temporary, time limited content and the associated Limited Edition Carrot. Most of the new class of treadmillers have zero want, need or use for new world content. Who exactly is supposed to buy future expansion content?

How many among those who have left due to a disgust over the lack of permanent world content won’t be wary to return to purchase such content, after witnessing what the studio has done to the game over the last 18 months?

The game has been greatly diminished by Living Story and faith in future development of the game has been shattered by such a blatant squandering of the game’s once limitless potential. They could produce the best MMO expansion anyone has ever seen and it will still be a very hard sell after the 18 month Living Story fiasco. And that travesty isn’t even over, with Season 2 inbound on the heels of the worst 6 months of Living Story having been the last 6 months of Living Story.

At what point does someone with authority wake up and say “what the heck have we done and why are we continuing to do it”?

That people have no idea what to do during a ten day pause in the Living Story, I believe, is all the proof one needs that Living Story has been greatly detrimental to the game.

The core game is not and was never meant to be an “Adventure by Checklist”, chase the carrot, sort of game. I got almost 1,800 hours, between two accounts, playing this game like it was Skyrim Online. Level scaling offers all sorts of freedom and the game world is massive, with tons of redundant content.

The conversion to this vapid new form of game pay and the way it trains people to NOT play the core game are a big reason I haven’t played more than a few hours for several months. That and the fact that the game world, which was supposed to have evolved with tons of free Dynamic Event content, has remained completely static, while they’ve thrown content development resources at temporary content.

I get that some people like to be force fed a linear treadmill experience, which they dutifully run because of “limited time content”, a.k.a. the newest, exclusive, carrot on the end of the stick. However, that’s not what this game was at launch or was advertised to be.

If this is all they wanted to do with GW2 post launch, I don’t even see the point of 80% of the content and game zones they spent 5+ years developing. What’s they’ve been doing for the last 18 months would have been much better suited to a game that needed this fluff to make up for a lack of world space and game content.

Whether the pre-launch content was a waste, or the post-launch “Living Story” content was a waste probably depends on your perspective, or on how easily you were enticed onto the treadmill and how satisfying all those carrots seem in exchange for treading all those miles going no where and jumping through some hoops along the way. Either way, tons of development resources might as well have just been flushed.

The sad thing is that new new game features and re-balance look good. Just the sort of thing that might entice a departed player to come back and check things out and see all the content that has been added since they’ve been away…. oh… that’s right…. there essentially is none.

In autumn of 2012, a very senior developer teased a doubling of Dynamic Event content by the end of year one and how much the ability to rotate DE content in and out of the game would keep the dynamic world feeling fresh and alive. If they had achieved even half that, returning players would find every zone they revisited would have a lot of content they had never experienced before. Now, a returning player has nothing but a list of event achievements they can never complete that represent content that was not only thin, but temporary.

Oh, yeah and they also get to see how what had felt like a dynamic, living world is really just a static, dead place, repeating the same exact content from 18 months ago in an endless, unaltered loop.

Of course, they can’t stop now. They’ve already tossed their original core player base aside in exchange for those easily bribed into playing via dime a dozen carrots on a chase to no where. If they stop with the carrots and turn off the treadmill, many of the remaining players obviously would have zero idea what to do with themselves.

One of the greatest mysteries of game development is likely to be how a studio that created the game GW2 was at launch managed to waste so much time, money and manpower producing temporary content that was, somehow, much worse for the health of the game than even nothing.

Neural.1824:

I’m hoping season 2 is based on what worked from season 1. A lot of season 1 felt like they were just throwing everything at the wall and trying to see what would stick.

I wouldn’t count on it getting better. The repeated a lot of mistakes more than once during season one, right up until the end. They just don’t seem to care. From my perspective, with rare exception, Living Story got worse and worse over time. The closest they ever came to a Living Story that might have contributed to a Living World was Frost and Flame. If they had improved on that attempt with more content; more changes at shorter intervals; a lasting impact on the effected zones and what occurred there; with a climax that didn’t require a 5-man dungeon run? Living Story might have worked. Even with the flaws, you could see how the concept could have been made to work. Instead, they retreated further and further from the game world.

There is much, much more to criticize, but it will just have to suffice to say that I have zero faith and miniscule hope that Season 2 will be any better or do anything to undo the damage Season 1 has wrought.

GW2 has gone from a game with a ton of freedom and a vast world to explore, to a stagnant game world where the main focus has been to retrain players to embrace, or revile, an “Adventure by Checklist”, “Chase the Carrot”, “All content is temporary, but there are always new carrots” sort of game. At launch, they presented a bold new alternative for MMORPG design and focus of game play, but Living Story has morphed GW2 into a gross caricature of everything that has been wrong with MMORPGs for the last decade.

I think this sums up the entire waste that has been Living Story very nicely. Probably one of the few things they’ve done right, highlight how flawed and inane the entire effort has been with a perfectly inane ending.

I think this is proof that some people working on LS who would rather have spent the last 18 months designing meaningful content get how bad this all is. It’s an in joke between those enlightened devs and the players who see Living Story for what it really is.

It has to be like living in Bizzaro land. Pre-launch development was brilliant and the game at launch was an amazing accomplishment. Before you even get a chance to pat yourself on the back, you are assigned to work on…this…

Of course, that didn’t fit in with their decision to abandon the organic play model where people never felt forced into doing specific content for specific rewards. They decided what the game actually needed was all the directed, carrot on a stick driven, linear game play found in every other MMO title.

Karma, instead of evolving into a currency that equalized one’s efforts, allowing access to worthy rewards for playing the game “your way” and doing the content you enjoyed, was frozen out of most new rewards and gutted as a currency that rewarded play focused on fun, rather than play focused on narrowly laid out, linear objectives.

I could go into great detail about the continual devolution of the game and it’s design, but that’s pointless.

I’ll just say that the game’s design goals and principles have morphed significantly since launch. Most of those changes have been fun killing, exploration killing, living world killing. Most of them have introduced and reinforced linear, highly directed and very grindy game play, at the expense of the original ideal which was “you can play the game the way you want to play and still earn the same rewards as everyone else with similar time commitments”.

Dailies were a key element in the slide. Though they ostensibly offered enough freedom to allow for some spontaneity, they still changed the focus away from free form exploration and toward the Adventure by Checklist mentality. If the rewards for dailies had only been Karma and the depth and breadth of items available for karma had expanded, the negative impact may have been lessened. However, there was a very deliberate change in design philosophy based on the carrot on a stick metaphor. Rewards would be used to motivate very specific game play, at the expense of “play the way you find most fun”.

Living Story has taken things further in the wrong direction. Not only taking resources from the true Living World concept, but further solidifying the model of “do these specific tasks and earn these very specific carrots”. Made more insidious due to the temporary nature of the content, the time limits on completing the linear checklist of activity and the exclusivity of rewards to that specific content and that limited timer for participation.

I’d argue that GW2, at launch, offered GW1 players the option to play GW2 in a fashion very similar to the way they played GW1. In fact, if ANet had stuck by the promise that there would be very little difference in rewards per hour between doing at level content and doing content you were significantly scaled down for, the expanded level cap and greater time to reach the level cap would have been largely moot for those who liked the GW1 model. Leveling up would just have opened up more and more content to the character, but all content would have been equally rewarding.

However, GW2 is a very different game than it was at launch. It has embraced most of the worst elements found in every other WoW-clone. In fact, I think we would be hard pressed to find another AAA MMO that has gone to such extremes to force linear content on it’s players and discourage adventure in the greater game world.

GW2 has become a Skinner’s Box. Levers to pull for specific rewards. Following the latest checklist provides you with exclusive, time limited rewards. Chase the carrot. Chase the carrot. Chase the carrot.

I asked this in another thread. How many people would actually play the current event in LA for more than an hour if there was no checklist and no grand carrots to chase? How many find the zerg fun enough that they would zerg sans any reward, or if the rewards were non-exclusive and weren’t in any way superior to the rewards for playing any other content in the game?

GW2 has stopped being about players playing because it’s fun to play. It’s all about chasing carrots. New, yummy, shiny carrots, each available for a limited time and each requiring a specific list of hoops to jump through before getting the pat on the head and your special dog treat!

It’s more than an affront to GW1, it’s a cynical, disgusting affront to the GW2 Manifesto and the limitless potential this game possessed at launch. It’s also very insulting to players, who have been reduced to the role of pets or lab rats in the minds of the Developers, who must marvel at the willingness of people to do elaborate lists of tricks for trivial treats.

The funny thing is I wouldn’t have agreed with much of what the OP wrote at and shortly after launch. To me, GW2 was anything but another genre clone. It may be because I studied and understood the Manifesto and all the other insights on the game’s design that they shared during development. What they were trying to do was different than what other MMOs had done.

To my mind, with the launch of the game, they succeeded at about 80% of what they had set out to do. I could also see the path forward where they could continue to fill in the things they didn’t quite manage to achieve.

I felt more freedom to just log in and play, with out pressures of a treadmill and endless carrots to grind for, than I did with GW1. GW1 always felt a bit too linear for me, but GW2, with the redundancy of content and level scaling, brought me more and more freedom to enjoy game play with out feeling I was on rails.

People here from the start know that ANet placed great stress on the lack of grinds. They tossed in a prestige grind with Legendaries, but they vowed that these would just provide a cosmetic reward, with Legendaries being no better than any other Exotic.

There would be no gear inflation beyond level 80 Exotics. Reaching level 80 would just mean that now the entire game world was open to you. They even originally pledged that since they wanted you to play the way you found most fun, that when you played content you were level scaled down for, you would only see the slightest decrease in your rewards per hour of play.

Karma was supposed to be a big element in allowing people to spend their time the way they wished, rather than being forced to do content they didn’t like for X rewards. Karma would be rewarded for all forms of content, at roughly the same rate per hour whether you were roaming the world, doing dungeons or playing in World vs. World. Playing would yield equal access to substantive rewards, while rewards tied to specific content would only be cosmetic, e.g. Dungeon specific skins.

I think, at launch, the system worked, even though the balance between play modes still needed to be tweaked. I played GW2 much the way I played Skyrim. I explored the world and participated in what content I discovered. I was immersed in the world and due to level scaling, I would often find myself in zones much below my level, because that’s where my exploration had taken me and the game made it possible to have fun and adventure with out the level gap being a negative.

However, with the game being so different from other MMOs, some people had difficulty adjusting to the new way of playing an MMO presented in GW2. Where is the end game? Where is the loot grind? Why should I view the game world as anything other than something to blow through on my way to end game?

I played with a small guild of RL friends, six of us in total. All WoW vets, some of us vets of many games over the years. I understood the new paradigm going in, so I embraced the game the most quickly. Everyone else had trouble, to one degree or another, for their first month or two of play and still occasionally yearned for more direction as to what to do once they hit the level cap.

Eventually, we all adjusted and embraced the game as it was designed.

Unfortunately, Arenanet didn’t make much effort or allow much time for people to adjust before they started to panic and find ways to give WoW fans and players of every other WoW clone out there more of what they were used to.

The past year and a half has been a rapid retreat away from the game’s original ideals and a race into the arms of familiar, failed, status quo game design.

We have grinds out the wazoo. We have extreme linearity enforced by temporary content that requires a checklist of things you need to do to be rewarded and keep up with the chase for carrots on sticks. Playing the game organically, exploring the world and finding your own adventures, just is not viable with in the game’s current economy and with so many “end game items” tied to very specific grinds.

Living Story did more to destroy the game than just entice people away from free form exploration and adventure and into an endless pursuit of Adventure by Checklist events. It also soaked up all the resources that were originally supposed to be spent on adding a plethora of new Dynamic Events to the game world. Colin teased that approach in late 2012, with the stated goal being a doubling or tripling of DE content in the first two years via free content updates. He even talked about how all those new DEs would allow rotation of events in zones, which would keep the game world feeling fresh and alive. A true Living World.

We all know it’s not fair to “tax” event rewards. For some people, the 10G is a pittance and for others, it is a significant burden.

The economy is becoming a bigger and bigger mess and gating earned rewards by taking a 10G tax for accepting them is not going to do anything to make the economy better.

What the economy has needed for a long time are luxury gold sinks for those with the most accumulated wealth. Prestige character effects, individual and guild housing, (with 80% of the options affordable by most, but with opulence available at a significant cost), higher tier WvW Commander Ranks with obscene price tags, etc…

Tax luxury, not event rewards.

I feel the opposite. I think Living Story, in general, has been a massive disappointment. I haven’t been impressed with the story or the content. I might wish I could brush it off as “well, it’s free and I don’t have to do it, so I can ignore it”.

However, I think it has cheapened the game, drawn more and more people out of the broader game world, retrained remaining players to “Adventure by Checklist”, rather than “Explore and find your own Adventure”. It has also made heavier and heavier use of “carrot on a stick” rewards to motivate participation, rather than people playing because it’s fun.

How many people do you think would be playing the current event, beyond a sampling, for the “fun of it”, if there were no rewards attached and no check boxes to be checked by doing so?

I also hate it because of the waste of resources it represents. We could have had an ever expanding list of Dynamic Event content across the world which, by now, would have meant enough redundancy to allow meaningful rotation of events, thus ensuring that retuning to any zone today, or two months from now, would mean you would encounter a lot of content you hadn’t experienced before.

So, I hate it for three reasons. The content itself. The way it has changed the way people play the game. The way it robbed the rest of the game of the continual addition of Dynamic Event content they talked about in late 2012, before deciding to do Living Story instead.

I accept that some people enjoy it, but for me Living Story has greatly diminished the game that once was GW2.

I had joked last Fall that Living Story felt a lot more like “Living Lion’s Arch” than a “Living World”. I think this event really drives that home.

I think it’s inevitable that LA will be rebuilt. Too much of the Personal Story relies on it and ANet has resisted suggestions for content in the past based on the need to preserve compatibility with the Personal Story. (I’m going to guess that many branches of the PS are currently broken as a result of the destruction of LA). That sense of inevitability, for me, erased any emotional impact the “loss of LA” might have otherwise brought.

I think things may be remodeled a bit. LA has been one of those locations that has been able to kill frame rates for many who play smoothly otherwise. However, I do sense that much of it will be pretty familiar once the clean up and rebuilding process is complete.

Since Living Story has felt more like Living Lion’s Arch, it wouldn’t surprise me if a good part of the remainder of the year focuses on rebuilding LA. Sort of a waste, if so, but the alternative is just to have things return to normal with little effort or fanfare, which would make the destruction that occurred seem pretty pointless in context.

Imbune, I get your point, but “not paying for it” doesn’t excuse bad content. IMO, 90% of Living Story has diminished the game. Quite literally, I believe the game would be better off today if we had had no free content at all, aside from Holidays, to this point than we are with the free content we have received.

I’m also frustrated at what I see as a complete waste of development resources. Other MMOs would kill for staffing levels like Arenanet has and I’m sure there are more than a few MMO developers at smaller companies dumbfounded at ANet’s willingness to waste resources on so much temporary content that has done nothing to grow the game’s success.

Besides, although optional, some of us have spent a good amount of money on this game through the gem store and I’m personally disturbed that my dollars went to produce this stuff.

One thing they used to talk about before release was that they didn’t want GW2 to make use of content that forced you to go to the web to figure out what to do. They didn’t want some checklist of quests that you would work down, they wanted you to go out, explore the world and discover content that you could just hop right in on and play.

Living Story has just been a series of “Adventure by Checklist” events that almost always require you to resort to the web, likely a walk through guide, in order to fully play. Because it’s time limited and often concerted effort is required for full completion and the best rewards, even people who might otherwise prefer to puzzle things out in game feel pressure to just follow a walk through, because they know they may not have a chance of completing what they want to complete otherwise.

It’s content that is not only contrary to the game’s original design, but, I would argue, Living Story, combined with Dailies, have essentially killed “explore the world and chart your own adventure” as a primary, or even secondary, play style.

I think this has created a negative feedback loop, where ANet sees fewer people out exploring the game world, so they focus more and more on Linear, directed, check list driven content, which draws even more people out of the game world, which makes them think the solution is even more linear, directed, checklist driven content, etc…

Ok. I see these armors as yet another passive-aggressive slap in the face of customers of the game.

In the email promoting the armors, we get something along the lines of “our most revealing armors yet”. Ok, so they seem to be acknowledging a demand for more revealing armors, for those who want them. Great potential for revenue here, right?

Well, they are revealing, except that in wearing the armors they morph your character in to a blue animated statue. Ooooo…these revealing armors reveal my blue animated stone body, because if they revealed actual skin, well, that would just be far too scandalous!

It’s not just the bird flip to the demand for revealing armor skins that bothers me. Or the price. It’s also that due to the blue stone statue look attached these aren’t mix and match-able. The skins I have bought have all been skins I could mix and match. The ones I have avoided are the ones that don’t mix well. These are yet another promising set ruined by some unnecessary flaw(s).

So, they spend the resources necessary to add a new set of skins to the gem store. The target audience is apparently “those who want skimpier armor options”. However, they completely sabotage the potential for success of those skins with passive-aggressive remodeling of the character’s beneath the skins , higher prices and a distinct inability to mix and match with other skins.

I would love for ANet to explain how any of that makes any sense?

More than one wheel has fallen off the bus. That’s the thought I walk away with.

Buffy.9246:

Anet won’t do this…it’s been a pattern for living stories. Look at queen’s jubilee, nightmare tower, Scarlett’s invasions. Anet is just so set minded on mega zergs to do anything in this game.

Very true and I find it ironic, since around launch time they ruined the range and functionality of in zone event notifications because players were being too “zergy”. I think they over-reacted to early game zergs, with new players and populations concentrated in starting zones with a bad design change that should have been reversed as soon as the population was more evenly spread out. Then, they pull a 180 and begin an ongoing trend of content design that’s completely zerg centric, either by intention or incidental to poor design.

What I hate most about this current event is that it should have been and could have been one of the most incredible experiences in an MMO, but, once again, they just couldn’t design it in a way that didn’t foster the zerg. (In fact, it’s hard to believe that many elements were not designed specifically to make zerging the obvious/safe/less frustrating course of action).

I think posters who say something like “good feedback for the future, but probably too late to save this one” are probably right on. The thing is that it’s deja vu all over again for me. It seems like almost every LS event since launch has been chock full of design short falls that have short circuited the obvious potential, yet they keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, with little respite.

So, yeah, I can hope this time they learn something, but it’s not like an event like this can get a do-over. If you can’t get things like this right, put the idea way for some future time when maybe you will be capable of pulling it off. Too much of LS seems to be a seed of a cool idea planted in fallow soil and watered with sea water.

The OP is 100% correct.

There is no way the Airship introduction was incidental to the destruction of LA and the loss of it’s conveniences. In all likelihood, the Airship was spawned as a way to profit from said destruction.

The old Arenanet would have given everyone a free pass for the airship for the duration of the disruption and then sold passes for those who wanted to keep the Airship access even after the disruption had ended, for novelty, prestige, etc… the new Arenanet, well, this is just another example of why they just aren’t the same studio any longer.

lordkrall.7241:

digiowl.9620:

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

Oh?

I was under the impression that more or less every kitten other game simply didn’t let you play when the server/map/whatever was full.

Most contemporary MMOs offer multiple shards of a zone once it reaches capacity. Arenanet’s innovation was that servers themselves have no hard caps. For most other games, they may shard overpopulated regions, but if a server reaches it’s total capacity, you are facing a queue.

lordkrall.7241:

You are aware that people on these forum have been more or less demanding something like this for about a year, right?

They don’t add stuff that are asked for: People whine.
They add stuff that have been asked for: People whine about them adding it.

They really can’t win, aye?

They might have been able to make something positive out of the Living Story to date if they had rolled it all up into an extensive, thematic, dramatic video presentation of the story to date. This is a google map with pins of concept art for events that have come and gone.

Who the heck is really going to want to dig around the map looking for nothing of actual consequence? In the vast majority of cases, you can’t go to any of these locations and find any sign of what occurred there in the game world. Concept art kicks off the creative process. It’s pointless as a stand alone and not even of value to those who might be curious to compare concept with implementation.

It’s clearly just an effort to quantify all that they’ve done with Living Story, but ironically, the monument to Living Story that is the Atlas just highlights how inconsequential and irrelevant all that “content” actually is for the game world; either as historical context or as a road map for observable impact, (because there just isn’t much of that to be found).

I find the Atlas to just be another thing to shake my head at in disgust and disbelief.

It’s nothing but some self-affirming monument to the Living Story. Like most monuments, in commemorates things that have been and are no more. It’s an interactive resume of one-off content that you can no longer experience and, most of which, never even brought any actual change to the flow of current dynamic events or landscapes with in the zones that they touched.

I see it as a catalog of temporary content that represents a gigantic waste of studio money and manpower. Anyone new or returning to the game will at first just feel disappointment over all this stuff they missed and that now has zero relevance to them or the game world. Those that dig deeper will realize that they didn’t really miss much as far as game play, but they will forever be faced with a list of carrot on stick rewards they missed out on. Completionists will take one look and know they can never have a complete character or account. How many completionists here from the start haven’t missed something do to real life and left in frustration?

The Atlas, IMO, is a monument to the failure that is Living Story. It might make an interesting interactive resume for those who worked on it in the future, unless someone digs a bit deeper and finds that the resume is padded and represents nothing of actual consequence.

A more suitable monument might have been three tickers, not unlike the U.S. Debt Clock; One for Money Wasted, One for Manhours Wasted and one for Revenue Lost, all ticking higher and higher relentlessly as the Living Story concept chugs on and on…

digiowl.9620:

Or they could just do as every f-ing other game, and give the players a list of overflows, and the ability to pick the one to go to. No need for taxi parties or any of those over-convoluted workarounds…

There is probably no technical reason they couldn’t do this, but they’ve tried hard to make the game out as persistent, rather than instanced. Apparently, having a list of overflows to chose from would be a bit too much like the way zones are instanced in GW1 and would bust the illusion of a non-instanced world.

It would have mattered if Dynamic Event states within a zone had persistence and meaning. They fell short on that promise at launch and instead of developing new DE content that was more meaningful and more impactful on the state of each game zone, they went the course of Living Story instead.

DEs had given the game world an illusion of life. That nearly every zone has nearly the same static list of repeating and meaningless DE content, a year and a half after launch, has negated any need to preserve the illusion that player’s actions mean squat to the game world. So there is really no reason not to just offer transparent lists of overflow shards for each zone to select from. Being on your server’s “home”, (non-overflow) shard means absolutely nothing.

Arenanet has lost sight of a lot of things since launch and I would say that the OP is onto one of the biggest; instead of fostering community and enhancing your experience by playing with friends, the game has been doing the opposite.

The Manifesto was brilliant and the game, at launch, fulfilled a large portion of it. Since launch, there has been a lot of backtracking on and dismantling of the Manifesto. GW2 was the best MMO, at launch, since WoW and in many ways it was even better in context with the era in which it was born.

The game also had exceptional early financial success and was growing through the end of 2012.

There was, however, backlash from players who were having trouble adjusting to a new take on how you should play an MMO. I think the biggest mistake ANet made, which has snowballed in severity ever since, was to react to that resistance by trashing the Manifesto and trying to find ways to make GW2 more match the expectations of players used to playing WoW and any of it’s multitude of clones.

We honestly would have been better off with no new content at all, aside from holiday events or new Dynamic Events to keep the world feeling fresh, for the first year or more, so that the dust could settle and the game, as launched, would have a chance to establish itself. People having trouble adjusting would have flitted back and forth between GW2 and all the failed WoW-clones and most would have eventually discovered they liked the new paradigm more once they adjusted to it.

IMO, Living Story was a knee-jerk reaction to initial player resistance. A common criticism of resistant players was that they didn’t know what to do and needed more direction. Well, now the game is just one big Adventure By Checklist Experience, between dailies and trying to keep up with all the requirements for each chapter in the living story, there is little time, nor reason, to explore the game world and chart your own adventures.

The core game, which was brilliant and paradigm shifting, is dead now and Living Story has killed it.

If only they had shown even half as much commitment to allowing the core game design to work as they have invested in Living Story. We were told recently that the game would have to continue to slide for another year before they would be forced to rethink the Living Story strategy. Really? You’ll give the Manifesto destroying, game diminishing Living Story 2+years to either prove it self or perish, but you wouldn’t give the brilliant game that existed at launch and was the culmination of almost 6 years of effort more than three months before you would start to undo it?

It’s never made any sense to me and as these Living Story events become more frustrating and more counter to the game’s original ideals it just drives more and more people from the game.

The sad thing is that after the disaster that was Pandaria, WoW seems poised to win back most of those who left with the next expansion. The revival has already begun in anticipation. All Arenanet’s effort to attract WoW-mentality players by abandoning what made this game great for more “hand-holding”, directed and zerg oriented game play is likely to be completely for naught. Most will go back to WoW and GW2 will wish it could have back all the players who loved GW2 at launch because it wasn’t like every other WoW-clone out there.

Dra Keln.2015:

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend with these Living Story updates.

Players don’t seem to believe in reading.

See every patch people complain about not knowing where to go or what to do. And I’ll admit that for a while in the beginning they did a pretty bad job informing us in game. But now we get a detailed mail in game at the start of every patch telling us where to go to get started. You do the thing there and then the Gold panel in the corner updates with where to go next.

But players don’t seem to want to read that.

It seems that many players need the game to literally reach through their screen and slap them with the information.

Content that needs to be explained that way, (and still manages to confuse many), is just plain bad content design. It’s also a full 180 from content promised by the GW2 Manifesto. Remember the interviews during development about Dynamic Events and one of the benefits of their content strategy being that you just explore the world and experience content, rather than having to read a wall of text or resort to using the web to figure out what to do and where to go?

The truly disturbing trend has been the relentless cheapening of this incredible game with horrible Living Story content.

They just don’t care anymore. The years spent building extensive, believable lore to serve as a foundation of a believable fantasy world that feels organic and alive, have been thrown right out the window along with the Manifesto and their reputation for excellence.

When you’ve compromised so much, stuff like this doesn’t even get a second thought.

The most interesting mystery to me is what the heck happened to Arenanet?

Given how much thought the lore writers put into giving Tyria a believable and compelling back story, the departure from compelling, believable content is just another sin against this game’s original ideals that can be laid at the feet of those who have championed or captained the entire “Living Story” fiasco.

Self delusional psychopaths who aren’t born into some sick legacy that supports their ability to manifest those delusions never see those delusions become reality. Even if Arenanet try to back-fill a lame explanation, it could never make any of this any more believable or any less dis-congruent with the carefully crafted lore upon which this game was built.

Thinking this content is somehow the gaming equivalent of Game of Thrones makes my wonder if Scarlet isn’t just the in game manifestation of a self delusional personality being mocked, probably unknowingly, by the people at the studio forced to produce this “stuff”.

If so, I applaud the genius of those subversives still alive over there. I can only hope that they will get to see the day when things get back on track and Living Story can be shelved as an object lesson in how not to develop MMO content.

The entire living story concept, as implemented, makes little sense, so I’m sure that any concern over making the actual content believable has never even been considered as a legitimate concern.

IMO, the Madness is just a reflection of the state of the entity that has created it.

The silver lining is that the implausibility sets the ground work for the entire Living Story having been nothing but a substance fueled mass hallucination, easily brushed back under the rug when, and if, they decide to get back in the business of building on and improving that GW2 game they launched back in 2012. You know the one, right? The one that was perhaps the best MMO at launch in the history of the genre and only hinted at the paradigm shift to come?

I’m sure in some alternate reality, (quantum physicists now assure us that there likely really are such alternate universes), there is an Arenanet that stuck to the Manifesto and looked at ongoing development as an opportunity to continually breath new life into the game world and move the title closer and closer towards it’s original ideals.

kitten , I envy the version of me that lives in that reality…

Canakun.8031:

Well, this is the second Living Story update that has featured raid-style open world content designed as end game goals for large guilds out of like…20 Living Story updates in total which all included casual solo/5-man content, story instances and fetch quests so…I think it’s safe to say there will be more content catered to you in the future…
9/10 patches, presumably.

Raid content for large guilds should in no way be connected to Living Story content. One of the most obvious lessons they should have learned over the last year is never, ever create a Living Story story-line that’s accessible by the masses, then pull a bait-and-switch at the end, robbing the masses of proper closure due to final events being gated by hard-core requirements.

The Arenanet that created the game at launch was genius. The Arenanet creating content over the last year are a pale shadow in comparison.

I saw in a recent interview that even though they sense the rumblings, the game will have to continue to slide for another year before they would be forced to sit down, shelve Living Story and do something entirely different.

Scarlet seems to believe that the only way to save Tyria is to Destroy it. I’m sadly coming to the realization that the only way to save this game’s future may be for it to find the brink of failure.

I don’t know how hard the earth beneath ANet’s feet will need to shake and how big the overhaul will need to be, but it’s sadly becoming clear that the status quo is leading the game toward oblivion.

Ideally, an hour of play would provide roughly the same amount of gold equivalent, no matter what content you decide to tackle.

I think the failure of the economy, for individual players, in GW2 is that there are farming locations and routines that are so much more profitable for time spent that materialistically driven players become a slave to those repetitive grinds.

The game’s economy becomes balanced to those specific grinds, which makes other players feel their time spent playing is not considered equal. It also means that when a particular farming opportunity is nerfed, it doesn’t discourage farming, it just further limits the options of what and where to farm, further narrowing the scope of repetitive game play for those who get stuck in the farm/grind trap.

I see this as a particular failure for GW2 because it was supposedly not meant to be this way. Pre-launch, we were presented with the ideal that your play choices would be near infinite, because no matter how you played the game, you would feel rewarded. This ideal was pushed to the point that we were told that level and loot scaling would allow a level 80 player to do much lower level content, because a zone or content was something they liked or enjoyed and that the loss in earning efficiency would not be more than 15% vs. concentrating on the highest level, most challenging content.

If the game’s economy were actually balanced that way, specific, limited farming options would be the refuge of those obsessed over achieving ultimate efficiency, even if the reward for their narrow focus was only a 15% greater rate on return for time spent playing.

Instead, these farming grinds have become absolutely necessary for anyone who takes end game power/prestige goals seriously and wants to attain them with reasonable time and effort. What may take a determined farmer three months of grind would take someone playing a broad scope of content years and years to incidentally accomplish. That’s just plain wrong and not the game as idealized prior to launch.

I think this is very detrimental for any MMO, but the fact that Arenanet realized this, planned to combat it, yet here we are today with just as narrowly focused end game grinding as any other game signifies this as a particularly sharp failure.

Game play mechanisms are in place to support the ideal where higher character level just means access to more and more enjoyable and rewarding content. Only, the “rewarding” part of the equation has failed to support the ideal.

The narrow focus on Living Story content has played a big role in the emptying of the game world and the wasting of most of the world’s content, but the management of the economy may have had an even bigger role. It has made development of most of the game’s content extremely inefficient on the return of player time spent playing vs. developer time spent developing.

There is nothing wrong with the TP. In fact, it is a necessary ingredient for supporting the ideal. The problem is the massive disparity in reward vs. time spent playing for various element’s of the game’s content. The game has become carrot/stick centric, to the great detriment of the broader game world. Players may vary to the degree with which the carrot is important, but the carrot is made so desirable that even those who normally don’t worry too much about the carrot begin to feel that their game time is not only very lightly valued vs. the time of hardcore farmers, but the message is clear that Arenanet wants them to focus on farming and forget the other 99% of the game’s content.

;tldr

The game, it’s content and systems where designed around the ideal that no matter what content you chose to play, the rewards would be roughly similar, with maybe a 15% increase in earning potential for focusing on specific end game content. Reward for time spent, rather than reward for time spent playing very specific content.

In reality, the economy has been managed such that higher end content is much more rewarding than a broad spectrum approach to game play and specific, narrow farming grinds are much more rewarding than broad spectrum play focused on all level 60-80 content.

A number of carrots have been introduced into the system that are unattainable through broad spectrum game play, difficult to attain even through broad use of higher level content and most realistically obtainable only through grinding very specific content ad nauseum.

This is extremely detrimental to the game, provides a very poor return on investment for most of the game’s content and it is only this way because it has been deliberately set up this way, not because it is a necessity of MMO design or the design of this game specifically.

skullmount.1758:

Theres also this article: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-01-14-you-thought-that-was-it-for-guild-wars-2

While most of its already kinda known, it goes with the Massively one, in which we now know there are 2 big projects that are being worked on in addition to the LS patches.

Mot Bone.4632:

why the giant robot… is using a knife as a weapon??? not laser gun?

Because Scarlet is specifically testing just the robot. There are “parts” on it that look like cannons though…

I don’t find the article at all reassuring. For Living Story, (I hate that they are trying to rebrand it “Living World”, because Living World is the concept they originally touted and abandoned to do Living Story), it seems they are just getting away from the multi-month story arcs and trying to tell a story per month. Then that will have to really fail before they decide to really change course and do something different. That sounds like a minor semantical tweak to a development script that needs to be completely re-written.

They hint at expansion like content, which they “still haven’t decided” how to actually present. Expansion? Monthly additions? Sold via the Gem Store? Then talk about things that will occur over the course of the game’s long term development, which makes me wonder if any of that will see the light of day in 2014.

Oh and they will break out the game improvements from the content patches. Well, good in that maybe it will allow the developers working on that stuff to bask in some credit with out the taint of Living Story obscuring their good work, but doesn’t that seem like an admission from Arenanet that Living Story is indeed a taint on the hard work the rest of the developers put into improving game systems and mechanics?

Worst news from the article is that this “end” to the current story arc will not culminate until March. Of course, now knowing that a mildly tweaked Living Story strategy for Season Two will need to fail before they “really start to rethink things”, it’s looking like the game may need to stay on the shelf another year before we get a chance at things getting back on track. Just as this month is just the Beginning of the End for the Scarlett story arc, 2014 is apparently just the Beginning of the (Hopeful) End of the failed Living Story concept.

…sigh…

I cringed and felt sick when they promoted this as “the beginning of the end”. That just means this will go on for three or four more installments, while most of us are thinking “just put it out of it’s misery already”.

I view the entire story arch as failed game design that cheapens the original ideals the game was built around. I just want to see it end, while I also pray that there will be a major shift in direction over the course of 2014 to undo the damage 2013 has done and get the game back on course towards it’s original, lofty potential.

At this point, I’d prefer to see day one of this event culminate in the floating platform and giant marionette (seriously?), crash and burn on the giant worm, ending the threat forever and commemorating the end of the Living Story concept.

I honestly do not see new zones as much of a likelihood. It seems clear they decided the game world was too big and thus turned to developing content designed to concentrate players in one place each month. As Living story not only pulled people out of the game world, but cannibalized resources that should have been spent keeping the game world fresh and ever evolving, Arenanet seems to have panicked even more over the exodus of players from the game world. Forget that their living story concept was responsible, it just re-affirmed their notion that the game world was too big and isn’t worth the resources required to renew/evolve.

GW2 was always a bit of an “impossible dream”. It represented a true paradigm shift for MMO game design and moved the genre closer to the idealized imaginings of long time fans than any other MMO to date. Such impossible dreams are often pushed forward and fostered by a visionary individual or group of individuals who have to constantly fight status quo thinking among their peers. Kudos to Arenanet management for allowing those visionaries to make the game we got, in spite of other doubts.

It now seems that key people who understood and pushed the innovation are gone and those that remain seem to lack the vision and commitment to the game’s paradigm shifting design philosophy needed to make things work, let alone continue to evolve.

I really think that’s the core issue here and it makes the entire mess even more frustrating. I suspect we get Living Story because it’s just the best they can offer us right now and even if they understood what the game actually needed to nurture it’s ongoing evolution, they just don’t think they are capable of actually delivering.

I remain firm in my belief that if they had actually done what Colin talked about doing last fall, before they decided to do Living Story instead, which was to continually update and add to Dynamic Events across the game world, possibly doubling or tripling the events in rotation with in a year, this would be a much better game and a much, much more successful game.

They could even have borrowed some ideas from Living Story and had some temporary/story content to introduce and draw attention to a few zones for each story arch where the most dramatic zone changes would be taking place.

They could still correct course and do this for 2014, possibly saving the game and the studio’s reputation, but, once again, I see no indication that we should expect anything more than an ongoing commitment to continually devolving Living Story content for 2014.

I hope things will change, but has anyone seen any actual indication that they will? There was a day when I could say, “It’s Arenanet, if something isn’t right, they will find a way to make it great”, but after the horrible turn off that Living Story was over the entire course of 2013, I feel like this just isn’t the studio that I once felt I could trust.

Bazaar of the Four Winds and Super Adventure Box were stand outs. So was Winter’s Day, before it lost it’s luster after a year of what feel like bi-monthly holiday events.

Flame and Frost hinted at potential, but fell far short by the end. It brought focus onto the game world and four zones there in. It made some changes and introduced some new events. However, there were no meaningful permanent changes, the DEs in the zones never evolved to reflect the ordeal. Plus, a world PvE event that featured instanced story content leading up to the finale, decided to deliver it’s story arch pay off as a five man dungeon?

If they had fixed the issues with Flame and Frost, had used Living Story as a frame work for evolving 2-4 zones where the events took place and once things were said and done, the Dynamic Events and locations across the effected zones had evolved, then that would have been a winning formula.

Instead of progressing and improving, Living Story continued to devolve and it became clear there was no intent to use Living Story as a mechanism for changing the game world, it was just a linear, formulaic, “adventure by checklist” mini-holiday event every two weeks.

I can’t imagine content more contrary to the Manifesto and other espoused and implied ideals the game was designed around than what we got with Living Story.

It’s not just the devolution of the concept that has turned me from uber-fan to mourner-in-chief, but the complete lack of any indication from Arenanet that they have any clue that what they are doing is completely failing the game, it’s original designers and many of it’s fans. If they can’t even acknowledge the issues, there is no way they are ever going to fix them!

Delvoire.8930:

CureForLiving.5360:

darwin.2790:

OMG. Kinda shocked with the answers for living world.
I really hope that there will be more of permanent content, more interesting bosses (molten duo!!), more beautiful maps etc.
Lets see how this will turn out.
Thanks for the feedback guys

Agreed, the last year wasn’t horrible but as I look at the game world now and how it was at launch (ignoring technical and mechanical changes) it does feel like the world hasn’t really evolved and grown all that much (i.e. not particularly living).

I agree that I’ve liked the LS and that it will continue. I’d have to disagree that the changes to the game world haven’t been felt. From launch til now, there are have been some great additions and not only from a LS point of view.

Map Changes can be found in the following;
Kessex Hills
Wayfarer’s Foothills
Disseau Plateau
Southsun Cove
Twilight Arbor
Lions Arch
Divinity’s Reach

Then there have been some nice QOL updates.
Champ bags
Tequatl
Fractals
Wallet
LFG tool
Crafting
Ascended Gear
Legendary Stat Swap
No MF armor

Honestly the game is very different and has been changed since launch. The best part is, it’s all be with no sub fees or expansion costs.

Cheers to ANET.

What’s sad is that the QOL improvements and WvW adjustments are utterly overshadowed and washed out by the Living Story debacle. So, yes, Kudos to the developers that have worked to improve the client and attempted to make WvW a better experience.

For me, Living Story has been such a massive negative that the game would have been better off with just the QOL improvements and three or four Holiday events and no additional content at all for 2013. When your entire content development resources result in a large net negative for the game and no content would have been much better than the content we did get, that should be a clear sign that something has gone horribly wrong.

Living Story has systematically destroyed this game and it’s once vast potential, so I have to hope and pray that they will find the courage to admit the mistake that 2013 was and get back to developing actual world content.

Games as good as GW2 was at launch are startlingly rare in the MMO space. I’ve been playing MMOs for 14 years and at launch, GW2 was as close to being “the game many of us had been waiting for since we played our first MMO” as any title ever.

Living Story has abandoned the game’s core design principles in favor of the most cynical, vapid and disgusting “adventure by checklist” content model ever seen in an MMO. It’s not something to be proud of, it’s something to hang one’s head in shame over.

I don’t think anyone who pushed the original core game design, understood it and fostered it through to launch is still with the studio or in a position to shame the current developers into waking up to the waste that has been Living Story.

I used to routinely spend well over a subscriptions worth each month supporting the game. That ended several months ago and will never resume with out a total shift in strategy by Arenanet and a mea culpa on the Living Story mistake.

Revenue has been dropping steadily, based on NCSoft earnings reports. How far does the game need to slide in the wrong direction before someone will wake up?

I still firmly believe this game had lifetime potential for over $1Billion in revenue. This game could have been and should have been one of the few MMOs to increase revenue and active player base steadily over time. That it’s slide has been slightly less pronounced than most other AAA MMOs, post launch, is absolutely nothing to be proud of. So much potential has been thrown away as a result of the Living Story strategy that it frankly sickens me.

We finally get an MMO that starts to live up to the potential for the format and they do this with it? It still flummoxes me when ever I turn my mind to it…

To be honest, as much as I love new zones to explore, I don’t want any new zones at this point.

Why? Because Arenanet have already utterly failed at keeping the existing world feeling like a living place by abandoning the original strategy of evolving current Dynamic Events across the game world and making new events that progress the story with in each zone.

I hate Living Story, Adventure by Checklist game design. It drove me from a game I absolutely love more than any MMO I’ve played in over 14 years. With the original promise of constantly evolving world content, plus the B2P business model, taking a break from the game would have been no problem, because I’d come back knowing there was stuff worth exploring every where in the game world that I had never encountered before.

Now, I’m several months from the game, have absolutely zippo worth returning for, other than lists of LS achievements I will never be able to experience because I wasn’t interested in doing time limited, linear content during the given window.

Utter failure is my determined take on Living Story.

I can only pray that after the Scarlett crud comes to an end there will be some major shift in the way they provide content moving forward.

I don’t know how anyone who helped create this incredible game could ever have committed to the Living Story strategy, unless the goal was to muck up everything they accomplished at release as thoroughly as possible!

IMO, Flame and Frost hinted at what LS could have been, if done right, but that wrapped up well short of leveraging it’s obvious potential and, with rare exception, things have gone steeply down hill since.

What’s sad is that Wintersday WAS a great holiday event, but ANet so completely wore out the mode of content that should have been reserved just for holiday events that, this year, it just felt like yet another horrible Living Story extension. I logged in, trying to recapture some of that magic from a year ago, too no avail…

So, 2013, abandoned world development, ruined holiday events, (perhaps forever) and re-imagined the game from being an MMO with sandbox like freedom of adventure into one of the most linear, horribly scripted theme park MMOs in a decade. Absolutely brilliant…

Can we please have a return to sanity and a commitment to the GW2 Manifesto for 2014? For the love of all that is good and to bring justice to the once limitless potential this game had before you completely screwed things up? Please?

BobbyStein.2315:

I can empathize with having a busy life and not always being able to fit my gaming schedule in between work, home life, and social commitments. Your comments are not lost on us.

We’re exploring some ideas for the future, including a system that would allow certain bits of Living World content to be accessed independent of the release. Plans and designs have not been solidified yet, so I want to temper your expectations. But if you have any opinions on the matter feel free to let us know. We’re already looking at ways to leave some LW content behind to evolve Tyria and improve the game. This would be one element of it, should we decide to build such a feature.

That seems like you are doubling down on an already failed strategy. You don’t need to find ways to bring back bits of Living Story content after the related events, you need to admit what is completely obvious, which is that Living Story has been a complete failure of a content delivery strategy.

I can’t see myself returning to this game unless and until you guys wake up, admit that Living Story was the wrong path to take and get back to actually making the world feel alive via ever expanding and changing Dynamic Events.

I was a paying customer, with two accounts, who used to spend a fair bit more than the subscription equivalent on both accounts each month. I loved this game more than any MMO that had come before. You guys have driven me from the game and made me hate what Arenanet 2013 has become.

There is nothing worse than people in charge who just won’t admit their mistakes and continue to throw good money after bad.

LS was an experiment. The experiment was a failure. It’s months beyond the time when you should have moved on. The game can still be saved, but not as long as you guys remain in a state of complete denial.

Gandarel.5091:

I dare to say more than 50% of the GW2 playerbase came from GW1. Or at least 40%. Sometimes i even see random dungeon teams with 5/5 GW1 titles. They make up most of the real core and loyal base.

Still, they don’t continue anything we loved in GW1, however we were promised to have “all we loved in GW1” – manifesto, anyone?

Yet it feels odd. If the community is asking for a GW1 feature, they do the opposite. Do Arenanet devs feel like GW1 isn’t their product, because most of the devs are new to the company?

For example, build teamplates. or GvG. PvP as a whole, is the opposite of GW1’s PvP – lack of variety, no rewards no resources.( Or Cantha! >_> )

Or the birthday gifts… EVERYONE was expecting a nice minipet pack. Instead, we got a Jennah, some booster (which was bugged and totally destroyed the non-existing Pvp economy) and an useless scroll. However… surely a coincidence but the gemstore happened to have a new minipet pack at the 1st anniversary. Feels like they were aiming for Gw1 people to buy their own gifts for money.

Don’t forget the landscape – can you tell me any kind of place that was presented in GW1 and is not in ruins? Most players loved Ascalon – now we have to kill their ghosts, if they are already dead, or blow up the remnants of their kingdom. Just.. no.

Any thoughts?

IMO, they not only have been ignoring GW1 fans, they have been ignoring GW2 fans. It really feels like the current line up of developers didn’t like/understand/grasp the manifesto and the strengths of the core game at release and have been working hard to mimic established, failed MMO design strategies, rather than build on the strong foundation they were handed.

(The Birthday gifts are something I still find completely baffling, kitten much good will could have been gained at almost no cost, but they chose instead to build bad-will with the player base for no logical reason).

I also agree that sometimes it feels like there is a lot of deliberate thumbing of noses at customers, whether they be GW1 vets or GW2 converts.

That’s how I’ve been made to feel by Arenanet over the course of 2013 and I know I’m not the only one.

With the apparent rejection of GW1 and Launch Day GW2 / The Manifesto, I don’t even see a clear definition of their envisioned alternative. We get a steady stream of fairly vapid temporary content, but if you ignore the failed “Living Story” strategy, I don’t see any actual sense of direction on the part of the studio. It really seems as if Living Story is paycheck justifying “busy work” while they grasp at straws trying to figure out how to actually build on the phenomenal core game.

It’s clear that key people left the studio after launch and the subsequent reorganization of the studio has led to an extremely dysfunctional entity. There is little cognizance on the part of ANet as to the failings of the last year. A deaf ear is turned to the fan base on the really important issues of ongoing game development and we certainly can’t do anything as customers to fix their disfunction at the internal structural level.

Sadly, I think a significant portion of the player base is going to have to walk away from the current game before someone, somewhere with in Arenanet or at NCSoft will take the necessary steps to tear down and rebuild leadership at Arenanet.

I think the OP is very indicative of how rudderless Arenanet has become. It’s a confused stream of consciousness exercise that doesn’t do anything but make them seem extremely defensive, while defending their unwillingness to address the things the community feels most strongly about.

It’s just a really, really weird communication to make to your playerbase.

Living story has not been an opportunity, it has been a failure, one that has squandered almost completely a year’s worth of content related development. While many of us pray for some sign of that realization from ANet and a much needed mea culpa addressing that failure, we continue to get deflection.

Living Story has not advanced a sense of a Living World. It just hasn’t. Dynamic Events are the core content of the game and if you want a Living World, that content has to continually change, evolve and expand.

A year ago, Colin talked about doing just that, with the possibility of doubling or tripling the number of DEs in the world, across all zones. Now that would have been a valid use of resources and would have been a very successful enterprise, even if you had fallen short on the projected quantity of events.

It’s really impossible to carry out any other dialogue with you guys if you continue to deflect away from this core issue. Feature build out and other incremental game improvements are pretty much pointless in context with the greater failure of the studio to acknowledge the Living Story mistake and present a strategy for getting world content creation and expansion back on track.

Continuing to push and brag about the Living Story debacle would be like a car company bragging about producing the only pedal powered automobile in a market where no one wants to peddle an automobile. Being a special snowflake doesn’t buy you anything when that snowflake is ugly, tarnished and toxic.

If your player base often seems passionate in their expression of frustration, it’s because it’s so hard to fathom how the studio that produced the incredible core game could have pulled such a 180 with year one development, while continuing to deny what is blatantly obvious to so many others.

Logic and passion have failed to move you, so now I’m wondering how hard the game will need to crash before you guys wake up to reality?

I agree with the OP. What was the point of Ree and Jeff creating all this detailed back story with so many obvious hooks, only to have this junk food content known as “Living Story” do nothing to advance the stories the game’s foundation sets up?

LS is just smoke and mirrors. Temporary content that disappears before some realize how vapid that content is and little actual story to give truth to the concept of “Living Story”.

It’s like watching an entire design studio just do “busy work” to justify a pay check, because they have just thrown up their hands and given up on actually building on the solid foundation the game provided at launch.

Can an entire studio be passive aggressive towards their employers and fans? Well, it’s looks like it can.

ANet not only squanders resources on temporary content, but they are so obsessed with “Temporary” that even when they have content that could easily be made permanent, like SAB, they kitten that up and remove it.

Sorry, but 2013 ANet, minus some key people who helped create what was an at launch masterpiece, has really established themselves as just another sub-par MMO development studio with no clue how to advance the genre.

I don’t know where the blame ultimately lies, but who ever is responsible for the inability to retain some very key people who left after launch probably cost the company close to a $billion in revenue over the life time of the game, assuming ANet doesn’t somehow manage to pull itself out of it’s current death spiral.

I don’t care if they would have needed to triple salaries for those key people they lost in order to keep them or quintuple studio wide profit sharing to maintain the enthusiasm and momentum the studio had at launch. It would have been worth it and paid huge dividends.

MMOs with the potential GW2 had come so very rarely. It’s devastating to see that potential tossed out the window, in the same way ANet tosses content in and then out of the game.

It’s all such a massive waste.

I was a massive fan of this game and still love the core game.

Living Story DID drive me from the game after nearly a year. I was a solid paying customer paying much more that $15/month, as well, so presumably I was one of those customers they wanted to keep.

The turn off was two fold. 1.) The massive waste of resources on vapid, temporary content. 2.) The way Living Story drove all my friends from the game long before I gave up on it myself.

Pre-2013 Arenanet created the best at release MMO in the history of the genre. 2013 Arenanet failed to build on that foundation, blew a ton of potential and has diminished the game, with little hope in sight for a turn around.

Now, as a fan who has taken a break from the game and looks in occasionally to see if there is anything worth returning to, I see that my suspicions are true: Living Story provides zero incentive for players who left to return and, in fact, de-incentivizes them from wanting to return.

There is nothing worse that some one who makes a big mistake but can’t admit they were wrong and correct that mistake. Living Story has been the biggest mistake Arenanet could ever have made with the ongoing development of this game, but they just can’t admit the mistake and work on a more viable, more efficient and more appealing alternative.

As someone who has been playing MMOs for about 14 years, I have to tell you that GW2 is probably my biggest disappointment ever, because it promised so much, delivered on that promise on launch, then threw it all away as the studio, sans some very key people, started to flounder.

It’s so rare to see an MMO nearly as good as GW2 was at launch. They overcame the greatest hurdle and produced an incredible game. To come so close to “The Game” many have been waiting for for a decade or more, only to squander it, is just plain sad.

At this point, I guess my hopes are really pinned on a full expansion. Living story offers nothing worth returning for for many of us who have left. I can only hope that their talk of no expansion in the works this past year has just been cover and not reality, as a full expansion is desperately needed if the game has any chance of recovering from the “Wasted Year”.

Another sad element to all this is that the B2P business model provides one big advantage in that people who fall out of the game can take time off, come back later and find enjoyment in all the new stuff added since they went on Hiatus. Players taking time off and coming back to GW2 find a game world that hasn’t changed a peep and lists of achievements tied to temporary content that they will never experience.

ANet hasn’t just abandoned the principles the game was founded on, but they’ve worked in a way completely contrary to the game’s business model.

There is a complete disconnect now between the developer hype and the actual reality. Mike highlights the importance of Dynamic Event content in bringing the world alive and their commitment to delivering an ever evolving world, when, in reality, there has been almost zero evolution of the game world. Temporary fluff content is not an evolution or expansion of the world. It’s a complete waste of the potential that this game could have and should have achieved in it’s first year.

The most apt summary of Year One is: Potential Squandered.

Part 2

7. The Manifesto has devolved into a theme park ride named “The Manifesto”.

What part of the Manifesto haven’t they abandoned? What part of the ideals they managed to do fair justice to in the original core game have they expanded on or improved as part of the Living Story? I’m pretty sure most of us with eyes wide open can agree that The Manifesto wasn’t talking about people standing around in some (circular) field somewhere, swinging a sword, swinging it again and, hey, look, I swung a sword yet again, killing the same mobs over and over again, with no illusion that the players actions matter one bit in the context of the game world.

Queen’s Pavillion is a hyper-exaggerated caricature of everything the Manifesto espoused to despise AND Anet has made it, by leaps and bounds, the most rewarding content currently, and ever, attached to the game.

8. “New Champ loots make the static game world more rewarding. That’s progress, right”?

New Champ Loot has been long overdue and is part of the core game and systems improvements that have been added to the game over the past year. Those improvements and systems have nothing to do with Living Story, other than being part of the same patch.

They don’t justify, in any way, the waste of resources that has been “The Living Story”, nor does making Champions more monetarily rewarding to fight do anything to improve the stale, stuck state of world PvE Dynamic Event content.

9. “But some players earn plenty loot and lots of shinnies from Living Story. Productive use of developer resources, make me more shinnies, yes”?

Well, it’s now clear that the Skritt are actually a poke at a certain type of MMO player, so there is that revelation, but that’s hardly a worthy pay off.

Based on some of the comments from people who like the Queen’s Pavilion for the opportunity to grind content contained in a little circle to earn the most efficient rate of loot production ever seen anywhere in the game, including many methods that were nerfed out of existence for being too imbalancing for the economy, it’s even more clear how much a waste of resources Living Story has been.

Players who want a more free form play experience and want to enjoy a living game world can not help but be disappointed by the Living Story, while, all along, the efforts to placate those only concerned with grinding for shinies could have been completely satisfied with something as simple as the Queen’s Pavilion. Stick that in a field somewhere, call it a day and get back to designing and improving Dynamic Events. Simple.

10. “Yes, but Shinnies, shinnies, shinnies”!

Yes, I know, shinnies. If it’s preferable to playing anywhere else in the game, it clearly does detract from all the vast assets of the game world and GW2’s extensive content. If ANet had only known some would be so easy to please, they could have just passed on the development of the expansive, detailed, dynamic game world and Personal Story and just made the game a series of Grind based instances.

Well, ok then, that chunk of the game’s player base is addressed, so, I guess you can agree it’s now time to get back to addressing the rest of us, yes?

11. “The market is flooded with widgets, I mean doodads, I mean whatsits, I mean sprockets. That means almost everyone is doing it, bathing in the piles of shinnies and making all other pursuits pointless”.

Well, I guess the market has spoken then. Everybody just needs to have those shinny sprockets!

12. “Regular doses of mediocre content are much better than developing real content”.

Well, I can’t see I don’t see the trend. Bread and Circus have long been the means of distracting a population from long term thinking and a realization that a civilization or enterprise is failing.

Living Story has been a series of flashy distractions greatly devoid of real content and a drain on resources that would have been much better spent on building upon the solid foundations of this incredible game. That some are satisfied with the fluff, in place of real substance, because it gives them a more regular dose of novelty, does not mean it’s in the best interests of the game or any less an affront to the ideals the game was built around.

Response to ilovepi.3542

1. Waste of Developer Resources.

I’m pretty sure I’ve delineated between additional features/improvements to the core game and living story in this thread. The programmers have done much to improve the game since launch. the content designers working on Living Story have done fairly little and, yes, I consider their efforts with Living Story content as rolled out and developed in 2013 to be a serious waste of developer resources.

2. Difficulty does not equal quality.

There is nothing interesting about the Queen’s Pavilion Champion Zerg fest. It’s a circle, split up into a pie, with an endlessly repeating rotation of Champion fights and a magic find boost. Farmers and grinders will farm and grind this content endlessly until it vanishes. Other players will do so until bored. Adding a ton of HP to a mob and making it difficult enough to require a number of players to complete it doesn’t make up for the vapid quality of that content.

3. Stale, disappointing balloon rides.

The hype about the beautiful, relaxing, scenic balloon rides to the capital just framed the disappointment over the fact it’s nothing but an instant portal. The balloons and the stands are not anything special or beautiful. The events surrounding them are just another pointless escort mission that does nothing for the game or the game world.

4. Watchwork Sprockets and other special currencies.

These are yet another limited time currency and, in this case, crafting mat. this time, we can’t even earn them via ordinary game play, we have to either grind the sad, “so last century” QP grind, subsidize those doing the grind, or forget about it entirely.

5. The closed circuit that is the event skin grind.

WS plus gold = skins. WS plus Gold for players who don’t drink the cool-aid and actually prefer real MMO content = extremely expensive. WS and Gold for players who hop in on the self contained loop that is the Queen’s Pavilion grind, WS plus Gold = Trivial.

The true cost is the impact of this super accelerated grind loop on the game. People who embrace what is really an extremely sad example of modern MMO content gain wealth at a rapid and unsustainable pace. Not only does this bolster inflation and reward grinders while discouraging people who enjoy a more organic and free-form MMO experience, but there is the very real likelihood that many who do the grind will either burn out on it, or find the post event game play to be so sadly rewarding, in comparison, that they just won’t have the desire to continue.

Happiness is not the quest for stuff. When the grind for stuff doesn’t result in a player who is happy for more than the few moments in which they enjoy the afterglow of their achievments, the entire exercise and the game that provided it may seem completely pointless.

6. “You just need to give it more time. Once you are one of us, embracing the mindless grind, you will wonder why you ever had a thought that this is wrong or unacceptable”.

Sorry, but no. Jumping into a whirling death spiral sucking the life from the game may seem fun for the duration of the ride, but the splat at the end is something to be avoided. I’m sure the lemming must feel some exhilaration being part of the rushing crowd, “boy, we are making progress now”, only to find that following the zerg maybe wasn’t such a good decision after all.

End Part 1

ttyl.6021:

Mia Lunarfang.5826:

In that case, rather than tiers, why not impose skill levels? For example you could fight Linadri at lvl 1 for casual players (akin to tier one bosses); lvl 2 for skilled players who want a bit of a challenge, but are not within the 5/75 category that are able to complete queen’s gauntlet (similar to tier 2 bosses); and then lvl 3, for players who wish to ascend to godhood (the power of tier 3 bosses). If it were structured that way, everyone would be able to face the bosses and complete the meta, but the most skilled players could still experience the challenge they desire. The higher lvl the boss you face, the higher the pay out could be, or even titles could be awarded.

Hmm… So it’s really about the achievements from Liadri and gambits? Otherwise, like Marcus said, gambits are what you described. I can sympathize with completionists and perfectionism. High scores, 100% save profiles, gotta catch ‘em all. It’s in our blood by now.

However, that is a difficult line to draw. Can’t give achievements, skins, or mini-pets because of collectors. Probably title collectors out there too. What reward does that leave for people that like a challenge? Just more efficiency? But then they lose prestige as everyone else catches up. It’s their responsibility to find self-satisfaction? You could argue the same thing about someone distraught over missing achievements, so that’s not a fair.

Imagine event currency was universal: Would a lesser-skilled or time-constrained player be content with choosing 3 or 4 rewards a year while someone completing challenging content can afford each monthly patch’s new cosmetic? 5 or 6 a year? 12 a year? By then the challenging rewards start to overflow and lose meaning. It’s a very subjective.

I think the “lesser skilled, time constrained” players would be much happier with half as many rewards a year than none, not to mention that the current mechanic dissuades them from doing the content that earns the currencies at all, because they know they will not earn enough in the time allotted to get any rewards.