I think, and hope, that what we’ve seen of the Living Story is only getting things moving in much bigger directions. There have been some hints here and there recently of this from ArenaNet guys, and while I’m not expecting too much, I am hoping that they aim to affect larger swaths of the game world with the Living Story. They currently have 4 teams, I believe, working on this stuff, which makes me hopeful that it’s not all separate for each new piece of content, but an interconnected web of content to be rolled out. What we’ve seen so far has, I guess, been done by fewer and perhaps smaller teams, making them a bit rough as they get into it and figure out how they want to do them.
With more teams and hopefully more people, this may lead into taking what they’ve introduced and weaving it into something not necessarily to scale with an expansion, but maybe something close to it.
I’m fairly content with this model for now, personally. I know how expansions tend to go. A burst of excitement for maybe three months, possibly more, then it’s back to wondering when the next bit will come out. At least with this, we know when to expect things more and it brings some life back into parts of the world.
(Ideally, this will last until they’ve refined the base game enough to where they’re willing to roll out their larger expansion-style content release.)
There are people asking for less o.0?!
I think the OP is misunderstanding some topics in this forum.
Some players are asking for a game less focused on rewards, and more focused on fun content that players would play for the sake of having fun, as opposed to play in order to get gold/karma/whatever.
Some players cannot understand this concept, especially MMORPG players. But it’s pretty much what people do in real life – we go watch a movie because we like the experience of watching a movie. Not because we will be paid 1 dollar for each movie we watch.
This.
The people calling for the lowering of rewards for effort in the already dismal loot system are generally just trolls or individuals who got their Legendary back when it was easy to do so, and are afraid they’ll lose their special status. So they intentionally push Anet to make it stupid-hard to get anywhere. Just ignore them.
I’ve been playing since release. I won’t even attempt to touch a legendary unless it just randomly drops from an enemy or pops from a chest. It’s the kind of longterm BS I’ve never striven for, even since GW1, when the BS in play was elite armor and sometimes extremely rare weapons. I don’t really want more rewards nor do I want less, I just want the focus to be more on reward through experience than reward through virtual reward baubles (gold/badges/karma/laurels/whatever the new trendy currency thingy is).
Some 40 or so permanent events were added around the game in our very first content update. They were met with little interest or fanfare. Granted, Halloween may have stolen the show. But those events are still in the game today. I’ve seen very little reaction to them, however, positive or negative.
While the reason he gives is probably true, I also think part of the issue there may have been that so early in the game’s lifespan (the Halloween release was only a couple of months in,) most people hadn’t done all the original events enough times to recognize when something was new.
I suspect that a dynamic event release of that magnitude now would be more noticed.
A ton of DE’s go unnoticed, there were so many patches where in the notes there would be a single line saying "we added “x” amount of DE’s to the game", no mention of where they are, what zone no additional info of any kind. So of course in the eyes of Anet its going to show lack of interest, no one knows where or when to go somewhere.
This. The new DE stuff was basically “ninja’d” in, with no fanfare from Anet to introduce or promote.
Contrast that to the sheer amount of Achievements, visual garbage, mails, and carrots given to promote their second rate “Living Stories”.
Hardly fair to compare.
It especially isn’t helped by the fact that for one reason or another (players will explore, no reason to give them a means to track this stuff, maybe?) there’s barely anything in the UI to aid the player in hunting them down to do. There’s a really good reason most players went after and confused the renown hearts with dynamic events early on. They expected some kind of UI indicator, and they did get it, but it was so inconsistent they didn’t always realize what was what.
Also, to those saying dynamic events aren’t dynamic, you’re both right and wrong. You’re right in that their core content is not thoroughly dynamic, nor is their progression. You are wrong in suggesting that they are outright not dynamic, however. When compared with the previous model of quests in similar games, they are very dynamic by the basic fact that they will at times proceed regardless of your presence. Along these lines, they will also be encountered at different stages, sometimes presenting the appearance of a living world.
The fact that you’ve played enough to notice these trends and call them out as static content or cyclical quests is merely a testament to your observation and comparison skills. Any notions of them being frequently unique or having persistent lasting effects was setting your expectations a little too high. To be fair, the time it took for release and the ensuing hyping up they had to do to market the game certainly didn’t help that at all either.
I am SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO sick and tired of chinese influences in games, or asian overall. It’s probably the biggest stereotype in the industry. Please don’t implement this.
The biggest stereotypes in the industry would be the european medieval ones (with a special honorable mention to the vikings – i don’t see anyone wanting to take Norns out of this game due to being soo stereotypical).
Weelll, personally…
I wanted them to remain dwarves…
As for the events, I don’t believe a lack of positive negative feedback is bad.
Keep in mind that the feedback thing is what they told us. But ArenaNet knows how many players do each kind of content. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have learned that no one is doing the events, excluding those that are farmed.
Well that and maybe some small guilds helping a guildmate level up a character in the starter area by accompanying them as they run about enjoying the place. Not sure if that’s what I’ve been observing every now and again, but I like to think so.
Er…Just play cleverly? I think around level 20-40 or so I was zooming ahead into level 50-70 zones evading enemy patrols and unlocking waypoints. It takes a bit of patience, and you frustratingly can’t fight back, but it can be done.
Besides, if you’re a true explorer, the fighting is not where it’s at, it’s the new sights and environs that you’re after and it will be the Void or the Mists before anything stops you in your efforts.
Point taken.
Our characters would be even more awesome if they could do some more of these;
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/EmoteAllowing us to interact with our defeated foes, and live human friends more meaningfully.
You just murdered them with a bear, an undead monster, an elemental, a greatsword, a barrage of arrows, a meteor shower, a rocket round, a series of illusionary clones, quick dagger swipes, or any number of other things…That seems pretty meaningful to me! =P
With friends, you complemented their attacks with your laid down AoE effects or defended them from enemy fire or happened to incidentally aid them as you smashed up or blew up the enemy. That seems pretty meaningful too!
However, I do follow your point, regardless.
Absolutely agree. If nothing else happens to the My Story tab, this should certainly be added to it, and ideally should have been there from the start.
I wonder what would happen if ANet did something sneaky and starting adding small events to places like the Brisbane Wildlands. Make no announcements, just with each update add a small event to a chain that eventually climaxes into it’s own big event. what would happen and how long would it take people to notice?
Optimistically speaking: a few minutes to maybe a few hours, from a PvE world or people analyzing the files/.dat themselves (they still do that, right?). Pessimistically speaking: weeks or months, if ever.
This is something I would also at least like to see addressed in some form. I’ve tried to jump back into the game, and while I am in a guild that I can chat with, when I’m doing the personal story I’m crisscrossing areas and barely seeing much of anyone. It’s really a bit disheartening.
I tried chalking it up to the times I play, and that may still be it, but even Lion’s Arch seemed oddly quiet in the chat. It’s just odd.
On my server Lion’s Arch always has an overflow.
Anyway the player base is always going to gravitate to the new content. Forcing people into the under used zone artificially is not a great idea.
Also consider that with all the instanced content in the game, dungeons, fractals, wvw, pvp there is a large amount of the player base doing other things you just can’t see.
Every MMO has spots in the world where you are going to see less players. I personally don’t have a problem with that.
But to those that say they want to see more people, step one is to make sure you are on a high population server, and step two would be to go where the people are.
I certainly don’t want to be forced into zones that I don’t want to be in because Anet is trying to make it look like all the zones are populated.
I understand that and I certainly agree that they shouldn’t force players where they don’t want to be. I do however think that it would be in their best interest to seed new content throughout the world more or better incentivize the revisiting of existing areas. Impressions matter, and if I roll into a world with no one else around and nothing in chat being said, I’m going to play significantly less because I could pretty much certainly get an even better single-player RPG experience in another game.
It’s not that I don’t expect there to be dead spots in a MMO, it’s that I sincerely hope they’re not frequent enough to make me feel like I’m just playing a solo RPG.
The living story events have content that get people out into the zones, but when there are big events going on it is bound to pull most of the people away from the world content.
There is nothing wrong with this.
It is just not realistic to expect all zones all the time to be filled with people.
If you want to see more people as you travel through random zones, join a high pop server.
On Tarnished coast I never feel empty in a zone. I went to a pretty low traffic zone just last night for a specific item vendor. I expected to be mostly alone, but I still saw people in map chat calling out events and organizing into groups.
First part: well yes.
Second part: well no. A player selects a world that says high pop to be his/her home world, manages to get in, creates character, enters first zone…With no one around. They get through it thinking maybe it’s an instance (which it is, buut others can be in it too), then they’re out in the world. Still no one. Chat is still blank. They play for a little while longer…Maybe they find someone, maybe they don’t. Those odds are bad.
If they’re not that into it, they quit. If they’re still interested, they jump to forums to ask around. Those odds are even worse.
Rest of post: That’s all true enough, but I’m pretty sure Sanctum of Rall is still pretty high pop, and I frequently feel alone out in the world. Unless I go to Queensdale or something. I might run into some people elsewhere, sometimes, but more often than not I encounter no one or maybe the occasional afk waypoint dweller.
This is something I would also at least like to see addressed in some form. I’ve tried to jump back into the game, and while I am in a guild that I can chat with, when I’m doing the personal story I’m crisscrossing areas and barely seeing much of anyone. It’s really a bit disheartening.
I tried chalking it up to the times I play, and that may still be it, but even Lion’s Arch seemed oddly quiet in the chat. It’s just odd.
A better event finding tool and new (and fun) events would also help.
My adventurer’s log idea might be great for that. (Link in sig.)
Events could be time gated with diminishing returns to encourage people to spread out and do unique events. For example, the first time you do an event in a day the reward could be 4x what it is now, 2x the second time, and 1x every subsequent time.
I can see where you’re coming from here, but couldn’t you say that the nature of the events themselves is time gated as-is? Besides that, add this on to the idea of only getting rewards for completing the event with a gold status and it might make it a bit more frustrating.
…they’re farming enemies for virtual money for virtual loot that doesn’t matter that much in comparison to the fact that with that virtual loot they’re conjuring dark magics, illusions, elemental attacks or slashing, smashing, and blasting down all manner of crazy creatures and people? Or is that just me?
Did everyone completely forget that our characters are pretty much awesome apart from their loot, not necessarily because of or with it? I dunno man. Give your character some love. Go do something crazy. Rocket boot into a group of enemies and pop up a toolkit and smash some enemy heads then overcharge your shot and fire away…If they think they’ll get close then tease them with your personal battering ram.
Do whatever’s similar with your profession. If you’re doing this already and realizing how amusing it is, while making that money and phat loot, good on you. If you’re doing this and forgetting that and just stacking up the money and loot unphased, take a step back to see what your character’s doing. Realize it’s pretty awesome, and that money and loot’s just a side-benefit to your general wickedness.
To have DEs too marked would lose the point of them, they’re supposed to be stories going on the world that you’re supposed to chance upon in your wanderings, and follow the chain, and accumulate players as you go. If they were marked, they would just be farmed like everything else. Calls in chat are sufficient to allow farmers to do their thing with the end bosses; to make the whole system marked would cheapen it immensely, IMHO.
Absentee context through missing the start already cheapens it though. In my opinion, anyway.
I think all DEs need to be pointed on my map, when I enter the area.
Not exactly what I was thinking, but don’t you think that might be a little overwhelming to have all at once?
Definitely agree about this suggestion. Kind of surprised it looks somewhat lackluster in comparison to the original style, which admittedly wasn’t the most impressive, but eh.
A lot of people are interested in the action and they just dont have the patience to live these stories. Whats a bit disappointing is these same players will then complain events are all the same and have no context. Of course if you do the escort event itself without watching this cutscene the resulting escort mission will not be that different then any other escort mission but its not the action that matters its the story and context. An escort is an escort, play a space sim, a navy sim or a fantasy RPG and an escort mission will always boil down to you defending something walking from a to b.
Anyhow I think it would be a big pity if not enough players are interested in DE for Arenanet to push more in that direction. They really have something great here, something I personally would love to see expanded.
That’s just the thing. So many events can be run into midway through that they are reduced to their base mechanics that then makes them easier to ignore than to be intrigued by. The current display method only compounds this problem by giving prompt directions without much context.
That’s why I tend to think some UI tweaking that helps log the event context could aid in interesting players a little more. However, that won’t draw in all players, that much is certain, but it might still help.
Maybe they should have not put in hearts past the starter zones, or just a very few in the next level and then none from then on.This would have encouraged people more to look for events to level rather than going from heart to heart.
The hearts, I think, are actually detrimental to the game as they promote a check list mentality. Of course the vistas, wps, and POIs do also, but the hearts make many people think they are the heart of the game instead of the events.
They do seem to have given up on them. And I can’t really blame them as people don’t even do the ones that are already present.
I’m starting to sincerely believe that this is the result of a major design fault with the UI. What players can’t easily monitor, they won’t try to do. All of what you mention are things that players can aim for. Dynamic events tend to be more of, “I ain’t got time for that!” as they go for whatever else they’re going for. The only ones I really have seen many keep an eye on are the major/meta events.
This is different in more populated areas, mind you, but from what I recall, even when some of the earlier areas were populated, players were doing this. Ignore the in-betweens, shoot for the meta events. This isn’t exclusive to MMOs either; the majority of players will mainly shoot through what’s presented to them, with a smaller group rolling through the sidequests. Some in the majority might do those too, but it’s most likely incidental.
Actually I think the way it is now works best imho:
Players having to rely on each other to find events and learn how to play, get hints and such fosters the spirit of cooperation and community that is rare in other games. I’d hate to see features of the game that bring players together be eliminated.
That’s something I was thinking about. I play in a lot of the dead times or dead areas though, hence this thought. Ideally, and I’ve see it pan out in more populated areas and experienced it early on, the world would play out like you say. Unfortunately, ideal situations don’t tend to last. If they decide to further expand the world, the spread of the playerbase across the world is only going to continue to thin out and concentrate in areas seeing new content added, thus this seems like a decent compromise.
Although, I have to admit, I’m coming at this from the perspective of my own suggestions, wherein the events would not be immediately visible and capable of being monitored until they were encountered.
Lurk in the API forums, and see of someone’s written an overlay for this.
Thanks for the advice, but I’m not looking for it, I’m just interested in what some of the players around here think about whether or not it would be a good feature to have in-game.
Part of that odd dev reply is that I cant imagine any significant number of players knew about 40 extra DE’s in the core world. I certainly didn’t. Considering how many players don’t see every event in every zone, they probably assumed these were there from launch.
Sticking fun and interesting events in with nothing around them wont work for them either – they need to be supplementing new content. They’re kinda doing that now, but with much, much shorter DE’s.
I can’t say I’ve seen anything that suggests they are giving up on them. I vaguely remember them saying new zones are likely to lose hearts in favour of DE’s as they tell the story of the zone better. There’s a lot of threads asking for zones with POI’s, events etc, so the demand is def there for them, can’t say how much though.
I guess it is tricky for them. There’s doubt a fully story based, event filled MMO could hold its own hence why the zerg battles and farming are in there – to cater for the other side. I don’t think they’ve given up though on events. I think they are still experimenting with how they deliver content due to fractured community who can’t agree what they want either.
I think it’s this more than anything. I wasn’t playing too much around when they implemented the new events, but I did try to keep an eye on the Living Story updates and the updates pages in general, and I don’t really recall them being mentioned in big bold letters. It may be that I overlooked them, that’s entirely viable, however if I know one thing, it’s that at times, ArenaNet really trips over guiding players to anything of interest.
The problem with dynamic events is that they seem to think players will relaxingly tromp about the world, doing renown hearts, gathering supplies for crafting, fighting some enemies, and then run into the events. What ends up actually happening is that people zip from renown heart to renown heart, smashing through enemies, then maybe going after Vistas and map exploration, but more likely than not, just trying to smash through the next area. The dynamic events, with their cyclical and time-based nature are not easily apparent to the players, and so they’ve most likely ignored them unintentionally or done them incidentally.
The game itself doesn’t do a good job at all explaining them to the players or helping them keep a track of them. If the players want to figure out what more there is to do in an area after clearing most of it out, or at least the renown hearts, they have to go to the wiki.
I think ArenaNet doesn’t regret dynamic events, I think they regret thinking players play to play and not to complete certain goals, and in the process, not helping players make discovery and participation in the events another sort of goal.
I was just thinking about this too. They could do a load more with this than they have. It’d be very interesting if it opened up some hidden side-stories based on which you’ve invested most into. A base dignity would have you dealing with certain characters a bit better than ferocity, whereas ferocity might allow you to fare better with some than others, and so on.
Each would open up little elements of the world for players based on how they chose to interact with others, without being so much so as to penalize those that had no real clue whether they’d influence anything.
~little bump~ The more I think about this, I think it could be a big positive. Dynamic events as they stand are still not that immediately understandable to new players. Being able to keep track of them to revisit them, however, might help them in much the same way as the renown hearts guide them to areas where events might occur.
Crazy thought for you all: maybe they scrapped the Great Collapse being the Canthan District for the Arts District because they realized they could have a load of Cantha via the tengu in the Dominion of Winds. You get one of the more interesting races of Cantha that’s not just more humanity silliness, an entirely different yet still compelling backstory for Cantha from the tengu perspective, and you get their unique and fascinating architecture that is a loose blend of Asiatic themes with somewhat avian-stylings.
How awesome would that be? We’ve heard the Dragon Empire’s tale, now let’s hear another perspective. They would, as far as we can tell anyway, be the “best” source of Canthan info on Tyria. Unless they shoehorn in a random refugee boat sailing in.
I liked it too.
This stuff should be ‘discover able’ in the game though. A lot of people miss these lore tidbits, which help to bring the current story alive because they don’t think/know to check the website.
There really should be some way for folks to read or experience this stuff in game if they don’t go to the site.
Very nice indeed.
I was thinking on a way of integrating these kind of stories into the game and its actually very complicated. Doing a cutscene must be a lot of work.So I’m glad we have these posts so whoever is into it can read. A lot of my friends won’t bother reading them (they even skip cutscenes haha). But I can say I’m 100% into it.
Great story.
I’m perfectly happy with these stories being published on the website. Integrating them into the game would cost developer time better spent on playable content.
Actually, integrating these into the game is entirely up to how they want to present it. It’s entirely viable for them to simply go the mail route or update a section of the UI with the text. It’s not much, but there’s a suggestion in my signature loosely covering this. Merely put these under a Living World>Queen’s Jubilee subcategory alongside other relevant material for users to reread whenever they please and know who all these people are.
The current form of presentation is very lacking, since the News section hasn’t any search or visible tags to click to bring up all posts of a certain category. This makes it very difficult for all but the most dedicated users to keep up with all these new faces and stories, which is a bit of a shame, given it buries the writers’ efforts.
There are good ideas in this OP.
Heart quests should be transferred automatically to the “adventurer log” after being read in the mail and took the reward. They won’t never be deleted from there proving the “deeds” you have done.
Clicking the heart in there should bring up a description plus the location button for going into the map (show me) plus what the NPC is selling
Oh yeah! That’s an even smoother implementation than I had considered. The Private Mail category was something of an afterthought as I was writing upon logging in to check how the Achievements Panel functioned and seeing my new mail.
~revive~ …This is a sad place of neglected visions, isn’t it? =(
That is to say, the ability in the UI to monitor events beyond the scope of just near to your character? As it stands, the only way to know whether they’re occurring or what stage they’re at is for there to be others in the area to announce them for those nearby. Integrating this into the UI may seem to discourage communication, but seeing as others are either announcing their occurrence or asking whether they’re occurring, it seems like they’re just filling a UI feature gap to me.
If nothing else, the announcer-type players would still continue to do their thing and helpful players would point to events going on for those interested, so it’s beneficial to communication either way.
…you scroll through the first couple pages of suggestions or general discussion there are no dev replies but you look at Living Story / Queen’s Jubilee, dev reply every other post?
Why is it that valid threads and suggestions brought up by players get a ton of attention and then moved to the suggestion forum where posts go to die?
Yet you see the same thread made 100 times ie: NERF LIADRA! NERF GAUNTLET threads 100x over get made and replied to?
I just don’t understand…
When it comes to the Living Story stuff, I suspect it may be because those sections get higher traffic more often than not. Players are more likely to go there to ask questions, post criticism, and discuss the current content more. Not to say the discussion here doesn’t also do that, but it tends to drift more towards some current broader meta issues.
I don’t really buy into the feminism and gameplay arguments, but I don’t find these watchnights to be the least bit tasteful. Additionally, they showcase the lack the of realism in the game’s narrative design. And by realism I’m not referring to the fact that the game isn’t like real life but to how the storytelling isn’t nuanced with respect to its own logic (and I’m beginning to doubt if it even has any).
A good example how the game fails at this occurs within the same patch. The Aetherblades surprise attack amounted to group recklessly sacrificing personnel to. And the death toll? Divinity’s reach: 0 Aetherblades: about 50. They did this during dragon bash too, except they were able to kill one councilman at the cost of a hundred or so men. Unless these guys have hundreds of thousands of stupid/suicidal soldiers at their disposal, their methods aren’t too efficient. And this is just one example. Don’t get me started on the others.
This more than anything. There could’ve been some better build-up to their mass production than just, well, here they are. There was certainly the backdrop for the automatons in Kryta, but I’m not sure how much suggested larger production capabilities like this.
Johnny Ringo: [Ringo steps up to Doc] And you must be Doc Holliday.
Doc Holliday: That’s the rumor.
Johnny Ringo: You retired too?
Doc Holliday: Not me. I’m in my prime.
Johnny Ringo: Yeah, you look it.
Doc Holliday: And you must be Ringo. Look, darling, Johnny Ringo. The deadliest pistoleer since Wild Bill, they say. What do you think, darling? Should I hate him?
Kate: You don’t even know him.
Doc Holliday: Yes, but there’s just something about him. Something around the eyes, I don’t know, reminds me of… me. No. I’m sure of it, I hate him.
Wyatt Earp: [to Ringo] He’s drunk.
Doc Holliday: In vino veritas.
[“In wine is truth” meaning: “When I’m drinking, I speak my mind”]Johnny Ringo: Age quod agis.
[“Do what you do” meaning: “Do what you do best”]Doc Holliday: Credat Judaeus apella, non ego.
[“The Jew Apella may believe it, not I” meaning: “I don’t believe drinking is what I do best.”]Johnny Ringo: [pats his gun] Eventus stultorum magister.
[“Events are the teachers of fools” meaning: “Fools have to learn by experience”]Doc Holliday: [gives a Cheshire cat smile] In pace requiescat.
[“Rest in peace” meaning: “It’s your funeral!”]Tombstone Marshal Fred White: Come on boys. We don’t want any trouble in here. Not in any language.
Doc Holliday: Evidently Mr. Ringo’s an educated man. Now I really hate him.
I’m not entirely sure why this is here, but I like it. As to the topic, I had no idea amongst was even considered out of style. Last I spoke to anyone, I’d never really had them address any particular aspect of speech, unless they misunderstood or misheard.
I’d kind of forgotten about this idea after release, but I think this is probably something that could be beneficial now more than ever with the living story style content.
Scrap the My Story focus of the My Story tab and switch it to something far more useful. A broader, more utilitarian style all-purpose game story tab. Forget trying to avoid the whole quest log resemblances, and just go with it, sort of.
The newly renovated Story Tab would become an essential adventurers’ log for both the story-driven and the loot-driven. (Heck, Adventurer’s Log might be an apt name for it.) It would roll out into a panel like the Achievements Tab.
The Adventurer’s Map:
The Summary Pane would be modified to instead be an Adventurer’s Map, with easily selectable regions, that would then become easily selectable areas. I.e. Metrica Province > Soren Draa.
The map would then allow you to hover over the relevant icons of the area and see the usual information as you would in the world map or minimap, providing a great in-between for those that want to decide where to go or what to do while still chatting with their friends. It would also display the number of currently proceeding events in the area, at least of those you’ve discovered.
So from the world map, you might see each region and an orange starburst icon over it with the number of events beside or below it that you’ve found ongoing. 0 meaning none, with any other number indicating activity.
In the columns beneath, you could have it divided out into:
World Activity, Region Activity, and Recently Encountered/Discovered Events.
World Activity would indicate the number of ongoing events across the world based again on from what you’ve explored and discovered, alongside a listing of major ones displayed when active, while Region Activity would indicate your occupied region’s activity in the same manner, with major/meta ones taking the topmost spot when active. Recently encountered events would have a log of the said events and possibly your involvement (i.e. rewards).
The Categories Sidebar:
My Story: This is where the current personal story stuff would go.
Living Story/World: This is where all past events and on-going events would appear. It would fall into subcategories based on the naming of the event. I.e. Bazaar of the Four Winds, related backstory stuff (including short stories posted on the site) would display upon clicking, Queen’s Jubilee, etc.
Private Mail: This would remove the renown hearts/personal story/living story spam from your inbox and instead keep it archived here, also allowing them to be navigated according to those qualities. This would basically be a copy/paste of the mail window, just way more convenient and easier to keep a handle on.
Experienced Events: This would generate a record of all encountered events alongside some descriptive text. What might also be of interest here is the possibility of, upon completion, being able to log their frequency of occurrence, allowing for an in-game tool to alert you to their occurrence. This would allow players to then either continue current behavior of rolling repetitively through areas for the events so as not to miss them, or explore the world and drop back by to redo a beloved event when the game tells them. (This is where the loot-driven comes into play. =P)
Anything Else: This wouldn’t be an actual category, this would simply act as an area where they could add in any additional categories as they see fit.
Which also compels me to again request the implementation of some kind of collectable scrolls/tablets/books under an Artifacts category that would then be organized by region they were discovered in. These would just be some fun little lore bites to better flesh out the world more than anything else.
What do you all think? What would you add or remove from this renovation of the story tab?
(edited by Gmr Leon.1846)
nice character development, I wished it would be ingame though…
I don’t get it why storytelling is so rare in living story updates. I think the new cutscene + NPC chatter is really good in the current update, but much too short imho. Posts like these implemented in the game-UI could be quite a big tool to help players build a connection to the characters.
Or in the world in general. I made a suggestion ages ago very shortly before or after release (probably both), about the implementation of collectable scrolls/tablets that provided some little background to out of the way places that had no real explanation or events to them. It could’ve been rolled into the UI with a multi-tab for Personal Story (My Story), Living Story (Our Story? referring to adventurers or something, I dunno), and History under a revised Story tab.
I’m confused by those pointing to this as niche. As far as I’m aware, don’t most MMOs basically encourage this sort of behavior with those that have alts? GW2’s the exception to the rule by making all currencies accessible accountwide.
Personally, this just seems like a huge security risk on Anet’s part to me. In the past, if an account was breached, the account jacker had to figure out where the player kept their money. Now they know they can just get into any character and try to transfer the money away (unless there’s a measure to prevent this that I’m unfamiliar with).
Ignoring that, it seems a bit strange that they wouldn’t just keep both systems in play. It’s not impossible by any means, I think, and it doesn’t mess with any players’ playstyle. You want to use the more inefficient way, go ahead, you want to use the efficient way, go ahead. The way they’ve done it now is comparable to cutting out the ability to traverse between areas of Tyria on foot and instead forcing you to use the fast travel methods available, except that’s a significantly more niche complaint than this.
I don’t see how keeping your gold on one character to hide it would prevent somone that hacked your account from taking that gold. I think they would go through all your stuff and liquidate everything.
It wouldn’t, of course, but it would very slightly slow them down and inconvenience them at the very least. Then again, it could be argued the mail system may also contribute to that, but nevertheless, I do seem to recall GW1 players who had their accounts hacked being surprised to find that some of their alts still had some items/currency on them while their bank was indeed wiped out.
I dunno, maybe they’re confident their security’s better this time around or something, but having all that gold in one place just screams potential problems to me.
Soundless need some love. Would be the perfect group to involve with the Nightmare Court for a living story event.
I’m confused by those pointing to this as niche. As far as I’m aware, don’t most MMOs basically encourage this sort of behavior with those that have alts? GW2’s the exception to the rule by making all currencies accessible accountwide.
Personally, this just seems like a huge security risk on Anet’s part to me. In the past, if an account was breached, the account jacker had to figure out where the player kept their money. Now they know they can just get into any character and try to transfer the money away (unless there’s a measure to prevent this that I’m unfamiliar with).
Ignoring that, it seems a bit strange that they wouldn’t just keep both systems in play. It’s not impossible by any means, I think, and it doesn’t mess with any players’ playstyle. You want to use the more inefficient way, go ahead, you want to use the efficient way, go ahead. The way they’ve done it now is comparable to cutting out the ability to traverse between areas of Tyria on foot and instead forcing you to use the fast travel methods available, except that’s a significantly more niche complaint than this.
While I think Tengu is the only one that really works as a playable character, I don’t want to play as a Tengu. Yet another oversized animal character is not what I want, lol.
Well, we actually only have two animalistic races, if you think about it. Sylvari are plant-based, charr and asura are the only animalistic ones. Whereas we have two variations of human, which is simply small and large.
What would you propose besides these? Thinking about it myself, it’d be kinda neat if they found a way to throw in a bizarre elemental race somehow (the djinn would be perfect, now that I think about it).
Regarding the topic at hand, on a lore basis, I wouldn’t want to be tengu. They’re cool, but they’ve been too heavily altered to attend to their Canthan origins, and in thakittens older traditional Asian inspirations. In short, they went from fascinating looking bandits to heavily honor-bound warrior culture, which is fairly over done in fantasy settings. With that in mind, I’d be much more intrigued to explore the tribal hylek culture, because while they follow the backdrop of an over done zealous religious culture, it has enough quirks to it to make it a little more interesting to me. They’re not in power, their civilization is not incredibly advanced, but their alchemy, as a result of their immunity to many toxins, is.
What you get from that, is a standard issue religious zealot culture, but with the amusing side-element of heavy chemical abuse, in some parts to maybe even attempt to find some that let them come closer to their god(s? pretty sure most worship solely the sun). Their immunity of course makes that nigh impossible, but it’s fun to think about some of them trying all manner of crazy toxic plants to find some kind of high. Come to think of it, we actually don’t know (or at least, I don’t know), if they ever go into any depth on just how the toxins influence them. They don’t get sick, so do they get high? Hallucinate?
Seriously guys, think about that. Honor-bound stiff warrior culture? Or nutty religious zealot druggy culture?
Because nobody uses Google+. You never heard anything about it. Facebook is the behemoth.
A common falsity, at least in regards to its not being used. The U.S. government has used it, semi-popular comedians (Conan O’Brien) [I don’t keep up with comedians, I have no idea how popular he is] have, NASA and astronauts have used it, and so on.
Isn’t Google + content only seen by friends and subscribers?
How is that different from Facebook, exactly? You only see the stuff from ArenaNet in your news feed if you subscribe (like) their page, or check their page frequently. Which is essentially the same as on Twitter and G+. It is true that G+ has tighter privacy controls allowing content to be disseminated between groups of friends without it being easily visible to outsiders, but media and brand pages don’t use them (except for who they circle back), for obvious reasons.
For what reason should I be concerned with the breaking of the game? It was broken the moment people tried to make it their everyday game. The moment they felt they needed it to serve that attempt, through demanding whatever content made them feel like they had “progressed”.
This is a minor bother, but something I think would be great to add to the game for the PvE side and even the WvW side. Instead of arbitrarily making us go back to the towns to speak with our trainers to reset our traits, simply throw the cost into an option above the traits that you may click when you want to readjust your trait configuration entirely. This would be similar in nature to how it is in structured PvP in that you couldn’t do it during a fight, for obvious reasons, and it would simply encourage more freeform experimentation with your character.
As it stands, the majority of experimentation is left to weapon swapping and utility skill swapping, which is okay, but may give the wrong impression of the skills’ potency without traits appropriately set.
Why do people like to overthink such a simple plot line?
Right? It’s like death, people just overthink it man.
What does that boring history lecture have to do with Gnashblade? As a special operation leader of the Ash Legion, he’s basically got “Operation Steal Lion’s Arch” chalked up as ‘mission accomplished’. Now he’s in the position to attempt to control a type of Mist time machine to go back in time to speak to Abaddon. Can anyone really put two and two together? He’s trying to either get Abaddon to provide more powers to the present through the Mists time machine, OR he’s trying to stop the old human god’s banishing of Abaddon, thus altering the time line and possibly leading to the proper invasion by the Charr to all of Tyria.
…You were doing well up until the last few lines. You are aware that the Fractals typically don’t influence anything outside of themselves, right? Even ignoring that, Abaddon not being banished wouldn’t necessarily help the possibility of a successful Tyrian spread invasion by the charr. If anything, it might reduce the possibility as they then wouldn’t have powerful artifacts supplied by a god through proxy to aid them.
Given the way GW2 handles story, does anyone think, maybe beyond extensions to the personal storyline, perhaps by way of the living story, that it can really develop itself well? Let’s consider for a moment that the current means of handling story in this game outside of the personal story are very, very loose to the point of being negligible.
Renown hearts and dynamic events tend to expect the activities themselves to help express their tales, albeit with more leniency when it comes to renown hearts as there is often a root NPC to get a tiny amount of background. Dynamic events sometimes possess these as well, but to my knowledge, it is not always a certainty.
Dungeons are…At least to me, they’re iffy. They’re not terribly different from missions in GW1, but the core ones outside of the Fractals are frustratingly intertwined with Destiny’s Edge in the story mode (where you might hope to get substantive lore drops). And while there may be more to find in explorable mode, it likely also suffers from the issues of renown hearts and dynamic events (though I honestly do not know for sure, I’d like to think I’m wrong here).
As to the personal storyline itself, even if extended, it is often too narrowly focused to even come close to covering the span of interesting topics that are to be found across Tyria. Given that, how exactly can GW2, using its existing content models, expect to provide much decent exploration of its own lore in-game? I feel it necessary to emphasize in-game, as too often many of the more interesting tales find themselves in short stories in the news posts rather than anywhere to be found about the world.
stick to vagueness, people. too many NEW ideas.
Not that I disagree, but I haven’t seen too many radically new ideas here in particular.
Asura so far are all about golems. Look at the tutorial area: Norn get a huge iceworm-beast, Sylvari an earth-dragon and Asura a golem. Look at the Asura fractal: golems. Look at the Asura dungeon: more golems… I highly doubt that we’ll see an Elder Dragon in a 15-30min fractal (although I would love it).
Thaumanova was also a lot about elementals. The fire elemental is a quite bland boss compared to the Shatterer, Tequatl or the cool Modnir-bosses. As the dragons represent the elements, I’d say we see an earth-elemental/tornado, an frost-elemental/tornado, etc etc.
I’d rather learn how the gods look like, especially Abaddon with the GW2 engine. In GW1 he looked pretty epic already. :-/
This would be all the more reason to make it a bit different then. Though who knows whether that would be the case. At any rate, I’m not entirely sure comparing the Fire Elemental to the Shatterer or Tequatl is really appropriate, considering that it’s more on par with say, the Shadow Behemoth, or other starting area bosses. It’s not really meant to be as incredible as Elder Dragon champions.
(And to be fair, after reading up on it, it appears that every other race than humanity gets shafted when it comes to interesting level 15 meta-event boss encounters. A wurm with sylvari, a ghost with charr, and a Son of Svanir with norn. I mean, really?)
I definitely agree. If they don’t want to make brief news posts out of them then they could at least modify the design a little to feature a Twitter feed on the side with tweeted info. At least that way you wouldn’t feel like having to go to either Twitter or Facebook to keep on the up and up with info.
I’m just putting crazy ideas out there, but I wanted to point out the major flaw in the OP’s theories related to TR: chaos was residual after-effect from the explosion that happened at the facility. So the events leading up to the event will not have chaos creatures in it, but instead have much different enemy play.
What leads you to believe that, if we’re experiencing it as it’s going critical, we wouldn’t see those after-effects in fuller force than afterwards? That’s the gist I was thinking at, anyway.
Your ideas sound pretty cool, but I just have a feeling that the Thaumanova fractal will not be too different from the Harpy one, which is just meh.
And regardless of which fractal comes out, the FotM community is just going to do the same. Bully the mesmer in the party to blink and portal to avoid second harpy run, take the shortest route possible in Ascalon fractal, stand on the scaffold for Rabsovich, swap to Decorative Stunt Ranger #641 to speargun Mossman from underwater, stack on Archdiviner for last seal…
I think you get my point. The only thing we seem to be interested in is skip skip skip skip skip tokens yay game over (now we have to wait 15 seconds until the list of loot clears) leave instance gg bai bai see you never again PuGers.
Well obviously both Fractals will eventually be run like every other Fractal, but that doesn’t diminish the fun of speculating on what their contents may be.
With all the intense discussion here, I thought it might be fun to start a thread where we speculate upon the possibilities of what either Fractal may contain. You don’t need to follow my formatting below, as this was more for myself than anything else and to clarify my position on each of the ideas listed. That being said, what do you all really think each Fractal may hold in store for us?
The possibilities listed below are in order of my suspicion of which may be most likely. The topmost being the likeliest, the bottom being the least likely. As to the mentions of playing as something other than your primary character, the first mentioned is what I consider likeliest, the others very small but still viable possibilities.
The Fall of Abaddon may be:
The Thaumanova Reactor may be:
We didn’t see much of anything happen after the Great Destroyer’s defeat in GW1, yet we had a Stone Summit member attempting to capture its energies. It’s very likely this is similar in GW2
Those aren’t on the same scale.
A god’s essence left uncheck will destroy the world, by just existing (maybe overdramatizing, but it’s the gist of Nightfall’s ending scene).
The essence of the great destroyer (so maybe Zhaitan’s essence too) can be put to use, otherwise… nothing.
A subtle but very important difference, if you ask me.
The end point is that we hardly know what either energy left unchecked would do. It appears Zhaitan’s defeat and released energy did nothing, but we don’t know the full repercussions yet. It appeared that Abaddon’s energy left unchecked would do some harm, but we never found out because it was contained.
If you ask me, the biggest fault here lies with ArenaNet claiming the Elder Dragons rival the gods’ power and then making the death of one hardly comparable to the end scene of Abaddon’s defeat. No unrestrained energy released that needs quick containment or something, no dramatic retreat from Orr as it releases and causes a second Cataclysm sinking Orr yet again; arguably all because they seeded it with valuable resources and it was one of few higher level areas for players that reached the end.
In this scenario, game mechanics may have completely ruined a good lore point, or dull writing that favors the human lore didn’t want another group to seem on par to the gods. Or they completely forgot the point that the Elder Dragons are supposed to rival the power of the gods, which given their habit of retconning stuff from the early Movement, wouldn’t surprise me at all.
@Gmr Leon
…I understand that the game is about all 5 races. But the humans took a major step back. All the other racial storylines are far more interesting, the most interesting stuff that happens to the humans is when we uncover Orrian stuff… All the way in Orr….
I do think its time the humans got something to do. They’ve affected the world the most for the past couple thousand years and are now backed into a corner. The other races are really unique and interesting in and of themselves, but what primarily makes humans so awesome is their gods, their history, and their adaptability. I’m not saying to put them on top but give them some limelight in this game.
See, I’d almost be willing to agree with you, except to me the other races’ lore and stories are terribly underwhelming and shallow. The norn are big boastful humans (or half-giants, it hardly matters since they mostly just appear to be big low-tech humans) that are supposed to have great tales and adventures but mostly don’t, the charr are the closest to having some decent background only because they’ve been around since GW1, the asura came from the Depths but have next to nothing to say about their time spent there or anything missed from then, and the sylvari are newly emerged seemingly without much curiosity as to why they behave as they do or whether there may be other Pale Trees out there.
Human lore has to take a backseat or else the other races will forever seem last-minute shove-ins with minimal cohesion with the rest of Tyria, if you ask me. GW1 guys got their human foundations in GW1, and it’s been strung out to GW2, as humans founded two of the three multiracial orders, they founded Orr, and everything found in Orr only serves to flesh out their history, as well as appeal to the GW1 vets with some info on races that are mostly never seen in GW2 besides the jotun.
The solely GW2 guys deserve to have their world elaborated upon, rather than yet another nod to the GW1 guys.
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