Guild Wars 2

@OP: how do you think Elder Dragons will be more fun and engaging than Scarlet? At least she has a character, the only Elder Dragon encounter we had was an utter disappointment. Scarlet CAN have a lot of interesting dialogues, story arcs, and turns… Elder Dragons can not.

Oh, Happy Thanksgiving then

I’m waiting for something official too, is it a bug and will it be corrected? Please, Anet.

Karizee.8076:

His internal expectations are so very high they will never be met

A more interesting story than what we have now… yeah VERY unrealistic, I know.
Sarcasm off

Developers want to give us stories which are similar to TV-shows, I’ve never seen a 5min-dialogue-TV show though. WP mentioned in the video above about the potential the new fractals clip had. It lasts a few minutes and Dessa talks to us for a few seconds. One doesn’t have to be a writer to see that something is wrong here.

Quality may get better and better, I loved the bits about Glint during the Labyrinth Cliffs update, but the quantity in this game is just poor. I’m not satisfied with 5min of story every 2 weeks, sorry.

actually most of his videos are about stuff he likes about GW2. Some of his latest tweets:

“Edge of the mists tonight was a blast and had some great guides to show me the ropes!”

“People are SO mad about scarlett in the fractals! Ridiculous! She’s such a scapegoat for peoples frustrations and they don’t even know it.”

“Okay some pretty insane kitten can happen in WvW O.o (finally going for my meta)”

“Without a doubt! Dessa is awesome.”

Finnway.2183:

Why don’t you list his criticisms in bullet points and edit your thread title? You might get more replies, instead of making us watch a 10-minute video.

start at 10:10… it lasts 3 minutes

I won’t take the time to transcript the video when you simply can watch it with one click.

Karizee.8076:

How many videos is this guy going to make about how he likes GW1 better than GW2? It’s like he doesn’t get it that GW2 is a completely different game and wants the entirety of GW1 rehashed/replayed in the GW2 universe down to the last pixel.

Your quote tells me that you must have been living under a rock since long before release, WP has done a great service to the fans of GW2 with his videos. His criticism is as valid as it can be, and from what I can tell you: he loves GW2.

GW2 IS a different game, but that’s no excuse for poor writing and implementation of lore. Even the developers can see this since they are currently working on an improvement on the lore-delivery of the living story.

On the other hand I know you Karizee as a lover of GW2 as well. I’ve never seen you posting something non-positive about GW2 though. GW2 isn’t perfect and constructive criticism is healthy for the future of the game.

I watched a lot of WP’s videos, and I don’t agree with your post above. He never asked for anything like a copy of GW1 or something like that. Someone who doesn’t like GW2 doesn’t create lengthy lore info videos on GW2 in good quality and Anet retweeted his stuff as well.

he talks about “the perfect expample of the way that writing is going in this franchise at the moment”.

(start at about 10:10)

some criticism here, what do you think?

I was so excited for the Abaddon fractal, but people stated Thaumanova would be so much better. We would learn something about the lore of the Elder Dragons? It would be much more epic than fighting a god.

…now was it?

not everyone has as much gold as you… It IS a prestige object for a lot of players and if you saved your gold until you finally hit the 120g mark and now you get it for half the price with an extra effect, you’ll feel screwed over.

I don’t like this. A cultural set available to all races for half the price? Now this makes the real t3 lose it’s value for me.

Anet stated that they don’t want to include the jetpack etc in the new versions of the dungeon because it’s would be unfair for everyone who got it in the past. Now they do this… Kind of inconsistent.

if you want compensation for getting set back to 30, what is the fee you should pay to get all your other/new characters to your highest level for free?

You guys always demand…

idea for tower-event:

train a npc to become a dolyak supporter:

• challenge a npc for a race
• if you win, you’ve successfully trained the guy
• he now will accompany the next dolyak to the supplycamp and casts swiftness in regular intervalls.

train an npc to handle a arrowcart

• build an arrowcart and show the npc how to hit fast moving targets (he puts some chickens out there)
• When successful the npc will handle an arrowcart at the position you want him to, until a player comes along.
• you can send the npc to the nearest supply camp. He will craft an arrowcart there and he will defend that area as good as possible. Players will still need to tap the arrowcart in order to make it stay.

I love that ideas. But there needs to be a mechaniscm to help players actually do the job they are supposed to do, scouting, when doing these events.

It could look like this:

• once a player is in a keep/tower a npc appears on the walls who scouts for you. If an enemy is in line of sight of that npc, you’ll hear a warning horn sound
• event-npcs will run back to their positions to be ready to fight (if the enemy crowd is large enough/and/or hitting the keep

Can someone explain to me why guild halls would be better than using any place in the world as a meeting-area for your guild? Guilds could meet in Ebonhawke for example, what do guild halls have that Ebonhawke hasn’t? And why is it important to be instanced?

I don’t think it’s feasable since they have to design 8 different sets to match all the professions and all statures.

I’d rather see legendary rings/amulets which give the player a unique animation. Make players hover 2 feet above ground instead of running, or change the color of projectiles etc.

summary bump? hmm?

my experience:

I grouped with a random guy on floor 1 and he took the lead. We were seperated when I was under CC and he decided to run along a passing zerg. Now I managed to survive and went on. A few minutes later I got a pop-up to join an instance. I was confused, because I didn’t know about the instanced chambers. I thought that he somehow got to the last boss and went along with him. When we got the boss in there he left in an instant and I was thrown out of the instance without knowing if I left some reward inside untaken. I was thrown back into the tower and was alone. No one around, only angry mobs which killed me fast.

To sum it up: I was really confused about where I am and what I’m expected to do in there. Teleporting to instances which were not next to me was odd and going back was and being alone was frustrating.

A thing that annoyed me a bit: the behaviour of some guys to rush through the zone without taking a break to fight the mobs. When I ran with some people, we had a huge tail of mobs behind us and when I was knocked back by a mine… game over.

What I liked: challenging enemies. Challenging environment. It was really difficult to stay alive with a second player on level 3 while the poison-damage drained us of life fast. It wasn’t unfair though imho, since we were successful too a few times.

Story: Well, it felt odd to me that I had Braham & Co around me in the chambers but no sign of them outside (?). I didn’t know they were there until I met them in the instances. The story felt a bit stagnant, the cutscene at the end was a review of the things in the past but nothing about this weird creature (the final boss) or the krait. How were the Krait involved and what was this creature?

Ingame cutscene: I really loved the design of the final boss, but I couldn’t take a good look at him during the battle. A closeup-cutscene would have been really nice. The battle was too frantic/ too much effects as that I would have had enough time to take a good look. (I found nice screenshots in the web).

Eir and Garm, didn’t know how rare they are.

maybe as long as the tower still stands. We have this progress bar on the top right which shows the health of the tower, achievements are related to the tower only(?).

I wonder what happens when players stop running the tower before the heart gets destroyed. Will it stay forever?

At the moment it’s pretty easy to zerg through it with enough people, but how long will it stay this way?

+ spawn some named Elite-mobs in the world, which have a chance to drop unique skins and wander around like the guild-bounties. In WoW I hunted those down, it felt like being a bountyhunter on a mission. They WERE rare, but the chance to get something when defeated was pretty good compared to the champion lootbags and its unique skins.

What would help bringing people out in the world is the feeling of having the chance to find something unique.

At the moment I know for sure that there is not a single piece of unique item hidden anywhere. At best I will find a chest which contains some green items and maybe (rarely) a yellow. There is no urge to delve deeper into those caves because there isn’t anything worth in there. No ancient dwarfen artifacts, no lost Jotun heirloom…

Generic rewards have their advantages, but imagine how awesome it would feel to find an ascended ring deep in a cave-system with a bit of lore attached to it. No one says that these items should be easy to find. These could have spawn-windows in enough places at random times so that guides won’t really be helpful at all.

Even it it would only be a permanent environmental weapon (like the fire elemental you can buy from one of the heart npcs)… it would feel pretty epic to find something unique while exploring.

It may come around a bit harsh, but I wonder where the story is you guys are writing on. I’m not sure if I’ve missed something, but if I remember correctly, the “story” we experienced in the game was a few lines, that’s it. Or do you spend all the time working on the blogposts / the background story for the releases?

as an example I will take the latest release. I can only remember this dialogues:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Thunder_Ridge_Camp

Is there something I’m not seeing?

Colin, I’m collecting ideas for new types of rewards here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1qdrv2/lets_create_new_rewardtypes_for_gw2_one_idea_per/

Narosian.2465:

I sometimes don’t get events. Ive ran into an event hit an almost dead mob once and gotten gold, ive gotten golds before on events despite putting zero effort into the event. Did an event in Queensdale yesterday involving centaurs, was the only person there and somehow got silver. Events need some work imo.

I too feel that events would feel much more rewarding, when redesigned so that you could get an actual challenge if you’d want one.

• bronze medal: participate, do enough damage
  Reward: just the same as we have currently: karma, xp, coin
• silver medal: participate, don’t go down
  Reward: karma, xp, coin + the choice of 1 of 3 random items (common, sometimes rare and even exotics – depending on your magic find)
• gold medal: participate, don’t go down, don’t lose more than 50% health, do enough damage
  Reward: karma, xp, coin + the choice of 1 of 5 random items or alternatively a stack of random crafting material + a zone-token

+ make events easier to fail.

wow I just read Jakens post on the last page. I love these ideas.

I imagine these events as player started (much like guild missions) where other players can participate. I love the crosscountry-run, imagine if other players could help you by providing you with speed boosts and keep new enemies away from you. Just like a guild-rush but for one person while others can participate.

So the orders would give you a mission, you go out there on that mission and by doing this you spawn new events which are there for you and other players to participate.

I also would like to see much more of personal story related events which spawn for players who’ve done a specific personal story path. There is already at least one of those in the game and it feels awesome and VERY personal. It would be like small spin-off stories to your personal story which expand the story and maybe make it feel much more rewarding.

Xar.6185:

This is not what we are currently getting. Its more like
“Hey, awesome, you killed Gormash, the Slayer. What did you get?!”
“Hey, I got this ummm… I dont know what I got… I depostied collecables.. have to go to my bank and check”
or
“Hey, I got this <TotallyEventSpecificCollectable> that if I gather enough of I can exchange them at a vendor for something”

Unique skins are still a reward option. Like what they added to the champion bags. But adding a collectable for every single LS update. Is that what you want to continue?

By this time next year, if the pattern continues, they will have added 8 more collectables.

Oh and I forgot baubles and bauble bubbles plus I’m sure I forgot some more too.

Karma is the currency used at heart vendors. It would be a really good fit here I believe.

Karma would be interesting, if heart vendors would sell lv.80 equipment (exotic) for huge amounts of karma, so that you had a karma-sink again. The karma-skins in major cities were an awesome first step and I don’t get why this hasn’t been continued. They could also sell practical things for huge amounts of karma (like 22-slot bags, a permanent portal-stone to one totally random waypoint so that you won’t have to pay a waypoint fee for porting there anymore etc etc.)

Well we at least agree that loot isn’t very interesting in this game. The interesting loot is far too rare and buying it on the trading post is not very exciting imho. I’d make droprates higher but souldbound on find.

I also agree that the temporary nature of the collectibles isn’t very fun. Imho they could add these collectibles permanently to the loottable of specific enemies. Then decrease the droprate after the LS-chapter. This way you could get these cool LS-items even after the event (and not by buying black lion chests for a random chance of tickets). What do you think?

Xar.6185:

Currency.
Karma would be exceptionally useful to replace all of the collectable currencies. You help with the event? You gain karma. Use karma to buy the living story stuff. Need a special item for a crafting recipe? Buy it from a LS vendor appropriate to the content, Majory for example in ToN.

This gives added value to Karma, adds more karma sinks to the game and stops adding more items that are effectively currency.

I disagree. I don’t think the game needs more generic things. You get (mostly) generic loot all the time. You get generic rewards for events (karma, xp, gold instead of interesting loot). A lot of things in the game are generic. (sure, there are some awesome skins like the new weapons in the champion loot bags, but you can trade those (I don’t like that personally) and the droprate is more than poor. Also, you don’t have to be skilled to run with the champion-train. Risk-reward: non-existent.)

positive: you can do a lot of different things to get the things you desire
negative: it completely takes out the character of the rewards

“Hey, awesome, you killed that huge “generic name” champion. What did you get?!"
“Hey, I got this… karma, lootbag with mostly generic greens which I probably vendor or salvage for generic luck-consumables in order to increase a luck-stat.”

compare this to:

“Hey, awesome, you killed Gormash, the Slayer. What did you get?!”
“Hey, I got this awesome 2hander called Spalta, which he used to kill every single Centaur in the Slavash-war. It’s said that sometimes, you’ll hear the poor souls of the massacre hunt the wielder”

I loved the kite fortunes which could be combined to that nice warhelm. I wished they had included a bit of lore to make the helmets more epic (like the ascended items at the laurel-vendor).

zamalek.2154:

You can also unlock it with 50 (Marjory shop unlock) + 250 (Marjory shop cost) pristine spore samples. That qualifies as a scavenger hunt of sorts (although a very weak-mind-numbingly-brainless-badly-designed-lazy scavenger hunt, your concept of finding the parts is far more interesting).

[/quote]

Well I knew that, but it doesn’t really matter since it’s much easier to simply just buy it for 20 (?!) skillpoints. They could introduce the most fun scavenger hunt ever and it would be bad since you probably have enough skillpoints for months to buy it in an instant. Sure, new players won’t, but let’s be honest: most of the players play the game for months now and there isn’t really an interesting skillpoint-sink.

introduce artifacts (lore-related collectibles) like those in Rift:
http://troublmaker.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/2011-05-01_210611.jpg

Each enemy type drops specific pieces of these artifacts in events. To get all parts of a centaur artifact, you’ll have to participate in many different centaur-related events in various zones. Event A has the chance to drop piece xy, Event B has the chance to drop another piece.

Important: non-tradeable

Artifacts could be combined into new skins, new types of bags (22 slot centaur bag) etc. They could include Legendary artifacts too.

In order to increase the chance to find artifacts, these will be tied to the number of unique events you do. This way people would stop doing the same events over and over again.

like this:

• doing 1 centaur event = no bonus magic find on these artifacts
• finding a 2nd centaur event + completing on gold = +5% magic find on these artifacts.
• finding a 3rd centaur event…
  etc.

So if there are 50 unique centaur events in the game, for each new one you’ll get +5% magic find on the artifacts related to the enemy-type. This would give you a progression as a centaur-killer and people who have found & completed every centaur-event would have a very good chance to get a full set of artifacts soon.

one nice thing about the bonus mission packs was the fact that you could solo them. It was something players could do without the need of other people.

As we have no holy trinity in GW2 I think it would be possible to scale these encounters back to less than 5 players (or even 1 player).

zamalek.2154:

I agree that more interesting content could have been done for the grind unlock; the rest of your complaint is ill informed though.

can you elaborate, please?

I wonder: is there a plan for currencies like karma and skillpoints?

personally I find the way the new healing skill (new kind of reward, great) was introduced horrible. You spend 50 skillpoints and get it. I have more than enough skillpoints of one of my characters already, so it was the most boring way to unlock this skill.

I don’t know how this could happen. We have skill points and karma which are pretty much useless because you can’t buy anything really interesting with those. How hard can it be to make one of the gemstore-armorsets purchaseable with karma only. A prestige armor which costs tons of karma. Suddenly people would have a goal to work towards again, and have something which only few people can afford. Add a few rare components from specific events and you’d get people out in the world again.

The new skill could have been the reward for a scavenger hunt type of content. Gather certain parts for it all over the world (SPECIFIC mini-dungeons, jumping puzzles, dungeons, hidden npcs, wandering guild mission npcs,…). Why going the generic way with 50 skillpoints?

an idea:

• you already have the content, tons of interesting events
• no need to rebuild that stuff, but people should get incentives for finding them.

example: unique collectibles which are the reward for events. Imagine having a few big puzzles for each enemy race. If you complete an event where that race is involved, you’ll get a specific piece of one of that puzzles as event-reward. The pieces of that puzzle can be spread over the whole world, everywhere you have that race active.

example: 6 components of a centaur-hide bag (22 slots) which can be combined for the bag but NOT traded. 12 parts of an exotic centaur spalta, a unique looking weapon for the best adventurers.

The rewards should all be for the level 80 player.

A further idea is to lock waypoints during a mission.

-) optional: you don’t have to, but magic find increases for 100% once you’ve locked waypoints for 5 minutes.
-) compulsory: once you start the mission waypoints get locked in that zone. Now you will run from one objective to the next until you finish the last objective.

Some people miss quests in GW2 because they like more specific rewards other than generic karma,xp,coin and random loot. Others miss quests because of the interesting narrative / stories.

Personally I see little incentive to go out doing open world content because it’s not very efficient when I’m working towards a Legendary or trying to get enough gold in order to buy something nice from the gem-shop.

What if GW2 introduced a new take on quests.

• there are 3 npcs at a certain questhub (each main city) who have missions for you
• each npc offers 1 random mission
• a mission sends you to 3 random locations (where events occur) on a random map near the city you are.
• either “do one event” in that location, kill a certain champ (marked on your map) or find a certain specific drop from a certain mob-group.
• each mission is available for about 1 hour. You have a questlog where your mission gets saved for a while, so you can do it later if you want. You can be sure though, that a lot of players will do that mission when it is available (so events will be crowded).
• The mission is in the log for 6 hours.
• everyone can participate in that mission
• mission accomplishments reward you with a collectible puzzle piece. Once you have that puzzle complete, you’ll unlock a new skin exclusive to these type of content.
• furthermore you’ll get gold equal to a dungeon run and the choice of one of three lootdrops (gear/weapon of rare quality or above)
• while you have the mission active, you’ll get +300% bonus magic find for all mobs related to the mission objectives. This way farming will be rewarded for people who enjoy this.

So here an example: Commander Thorne asks players to help farmer Dyah on his farm (get a gold medal from one of his events), then take out Scarface (a bandit champion) and return with a blessing from the monks (help them in one of the events there). Having done all this rewards you with a Seraph-scrap. Combine 6 Seraph-scraps to unlock a new Seraph-related skin. The mission reward is gold equal to a dungeon run and the choice of one of three random lootdrops (rare or above).

But WHY?

Well the idea was to give people reason to do events again. The reward should be non-generic so that you’ll have to go to a specific zone to get a specific item. It should be directed so that you aren’t alone and group-events are more likely to succeed. Writers could come up with lore which connects the objectives of certain missions (so some might be less random than others).

There could also be legendary missions randomly offered by the npcs. These would be available for half an hour but would be saved in your questlog as long as you need it. Very difficult tasks (jumping puzzles in a certain time-limit,…) and the reward would be a relatively high chance for precursors or exclusive skins, new 22slot bags, etc…

I’m sorry for the wall of text.

TL;DR: NPCs offer a mission (complete certain tasks in one map) which is saved in your questlog for 6 hours. (a main city has 3 missions active at any time). Players can do those missions together without any grouping needed. After 1 hour new random missions appear and the old ones disappear. Rewards are on par with dungeon runs and offer collectibles which can be combined to new zone-specific skins.

well people play mostly for progression. There are different kinds of progression, for example:

• vertical character progression. Make your character more powerful.
• horizontal character progression. Make your character better looking.

What can you do to progress in these options? For new skins or more powerful gear/weapons you’ll need

• dungeon tokens
• gold (stuff in the trading post like rare armor/weapons or for gem-purchases)
• karma (Orr-gear)
• ascended mats

Most of it you can get from doing open world content. But it’s really not efficient to do open world content, compared to dungeons. Why should people who care about progression do anything different than dungeons?

Now is the solution more gold from events? I don’t think so. More money for everyone would simply mean that the stuff you want from the trading post gets even more expensive. Why? Because some people can afford it.

So what should be the solution? Maybe exclusive stuff you only can get in the open world… But people farm these champions in the open world. Why is this bad? Because it’s the most efficient (?) way to farm gold outside of dungeons. Content different than that gets ignored by players (which is a pretty huge amount of interesting content).

about the part where a dev states “we don’t create long texts because people don’t read it”… This makes me sad. While reading isn’t for everyone, there are still tons of people out there who enjoy a good read.

Anet shouldn’t ignore successful RPGs out there. Skyrim has ingame books with hundrets, if not thousands, of pages of text. Pushing the game towards the Fast Food consumer just makes for a poor quality imho.

As I’m playing Skyrim at the moment because I’m a bit burned out of GW2, I can see that big difference which I haven’t seen before. Quests seem to make the big difference in the storytelling department. I like how Bethesta can create THAT huge amount of stories/quests/lore in that short time (since Oblivion).

I’d bring back a form of the traditional quests. Not the same, but something (a system) that tells us stories again. I’m tired of the generic events.

to make it easier for devs and people to track the series of unique events it could look more like this: A tactician npc shows you a map of the zone where you see the zone in 20 sectors. 20 squares. If you do an event in a square, the square turns green. For each 5 green squares on that map you’ll get a reward chest and progression on the zone-progression bar. The only problem: there should be at least one event in each square. Anet could start doing this for one zone and add a few events to make sure it’s covered. Then they could add this system for all other maps when they’re ready. When the whole map is green (done an event in each square) you’ll get an extra bonus progression, a nice reward and all squares turn non-coloured again so that you can repeat this.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We agree, this is something we’ve been discussing a lot lately and working on some various answers for, but I’m curious:

What rewards would you like to see from rewards? Would they be different when you’re leveling up than when you’re level 80? What would motivate you to want to go around the world playing as many different events as possible, rather than the same 4-5 over and over again?

Some of the fun challenges we are currently solving, but it’s great to hear peoples thoughts on this subject as well.

One of the ideas I came up with (and posted here but without any reply) was to introduce a zone-progression system with unique rewards like themed skins, a slot for minis in your hero-window, specific bags (more about it later in the post),…

You’d get progression by doing a number of uniqe events of that zone. So for example: if you do 10 unique events in that zone you’ll get +10 progression on the zone-progression bar. If you manage to find 15 unique events in that zone and get gold participation for those, you’ll get a bonus and +20 progression. At every specific number you’ll get a reward chest too (as short time goal).

This shouldn’t be time-gated. Not a “weekly” or “monthly achievement” but something you can do on your own pacing. A clearly visible counter would be needed to let people know of their progress. Once you’ve done all events in a zone, the counter gets a reset and you can start all over again.

At first the progression was in form of a token system, but people didn’t like the fact that it’s a new currency again. If you have a certain amount of points on the progession, you’ll unlock new rewards. Prestige rewards would have you doing most of the events of a zone not only once but a few times.

About the rewards. Things should be really non-generic. Something you could only get from the specific zone, so that people don’t repeat this only in “easy” zones. I mentioned a bag, but how could you make a bag a specific item? Well: add a certain functionality e.g. Queensdale: the centaur-hunter bag. A 18 slot bag (prestige: 20 slot bag) which automatically collects the centaur-related junk items and salvages those into crafting materials. No one else can salvage centaur-junk items. Alternative: it automatically sells the centaur-junk items for vendor-price. The mini-slot would only work for Queensdale-related minis. Something like this.

Edit: another word on this:
Heart vendors should really be more useful for high level characters. Most of the people spend their time on lv.80 characters, the longer the game is live, and not everyone has all hearts unlocked once hitting the level-max. The suggestion: give each heart vendor lv.80 versions of the rewards for quite a lot of karma and some prestige rewards (rare and exotic versions, bags, permanent environmental weapons,…) which are even more expensive. Stuff that people want to buy, so that karma gets useful again and people feel rewarded for doing the hearts once they reach a higher level than the zone turns you into. Rewards should be for your level, not low-level stuff… people should feel rewarded to go out in the world and do other zones than max. level ones, not punished because it’s a “low level zone”.

I definitely most dislike Tequatl, because the event lasts too long and you didn’t get enough for the efford.

Imho the event doesn’t last too long, but the preparation absolutely is. You’ll have to be on the map long before the event starts, in order to participate on that map and not in an overflow map. This is horrible. A couple of times I spent about 20 minutes and longer waiting for the event to start… literally doing nothing. Anet created a bad queue here.

Also creating those huge zergfest-events (Scarlet Invasions, Tequatl) for the living story and making those permanent is quite a noble thought, but are they really permanent? Can you find enough people in a few months (or even now) to being able to complete these events? I just feel that content for smaller groups would be not only easier to balance/create but also more sucessful because players would feel more important, having more impact instead of being one in a million who spams the same key over and over.

Maybe it would be a better solution to let the players unlock new dialogues / npc-interaction not in one bit (all at once when the event is released) but in small doses. Every few hours a new piece of storytelling. I don’t know. It just bugs me that the story-part is done in a few minutes and then there is nothing left for the next two weeks, but grinding stuff.

My favourite release: Halloween LAST year. The scavenger hunt was leages better than any scavenger hunt after that. There was a huge impactful lore / storydelivery, you actually had to solve the riddle to get to the next part and I loved the mini-games (Hylek poisons) quite a lot too. Mysterious characters (the Largos guy) and the ghosts… Awesome. I felt like part of a greater story.

Then we had quite a lot very lackluster scavenger hunts. The worst: Tequatl-teeth. No storytelling, no interesting characters, no riddle solving, no minigames… seriously? I though now that the teams have much more time for each release, the results would be at least as good as previous iterations.

My least favourite release: Tower of Nightmares mostly. I thought the few events were the key to unlock/open the main content. Instead those are the main content. The story-part was again very very short (5-10min) and I can’t see how this can be seen as engaging. When the dungeon with Braham and Rox was released, because of all the conversations, I had the feeling that this works for me. The npcs talked to each other and I felt immersed. Now we got 5min of story and the rest zergish grind for certain loot-drops. I’m not sure what these are for, I think the pollen are supposed to give you the new healing skill from Marjory, but with the hundrets of skillpoints I had left I bought it directly.

I’m sorry, but in the end I can’t say anything positive about the writing. I just feel that we’ve seen the best of it in the beginning of the living story (Halloween scavenger hunt, Braham and Rox) and now it’s far too little for having an engaging story. Personally I feel like I read a page of a comic book every two weeks. Kind of frustrating. I wish the writers all the best so that they find the best solution for the game.

I don’t think those story-missions from the past should be instanced. Maybe a new tech where you enter the mission map in an open world manner. Would if fragment the playerbase? Maybe a bit, BUT you could have days where rewards are greatly increased.

Personally I’d like to see something like that for dungeons:
“One of our Priory agents will take a look at the Crucible dungeon the next 2 days” – gold, xp, token,… +100% for the next two days.

For Living story missions it would look like this:

• “Braham will visit Cragstead again the next 3 days. Get increased rewards while he is home again”.
• The Cragstead area is open for 8 players permanently. Overflows will open once one area is full. Encounters scale for 1-8 players. You will relive history again. The first player who enters plays as Braham.
• In these 3 days the chance for a Braham/Rox Weaponskin drop is increased. +100% Gold, XP, Karma. Daily-Achievement 1: playthrough. Daily-Achievement 2: perfect playthrough without going down + killing all enemies.

I honestly doubt that GW2 can come close to a TV series because of the lack of story-content. I don’t have the feeling that Anet can create enough story missions for each Patch to make an interesting story. It’s just too little content each patch storywise so far, how would you compare a few dialogues each 2 weeks with a 40min epsiode each week?

haha, the ability to watch it again and again. I can’t wait to buy my favourite TV show on DVD/Blueray.

The Walking Dead did the perfect thing to bring my favourite TV show on the gaming-medium. Interesting characters, your character as the main protagonist who has a deep bond with the rest of the cast. You feel like the story changes through your decisions.

so yet again, more whining.

Better to have it in the TP than for the uncontrolled currency: gems

bjwhiteda.7645:

I do agree that the living world just dont feel epic. I also have an issue with most of them being dungeon based. Living world events should allow ALL players to particpate and not feel exc;luded because either (a) not high enough level to really run a dungeon, (b) not high enough to get into groups which tend to exclude players not level 80, © or the event is too heavily dependant upon dungeons to complete. I know I am not alone in my distain against gw2 dungeons.

you are not. Sometimes I find dungeons fun, but I wished that there would be some open world content which isn’t all about zergs but rather individuals and small groups. We already have some open world dungeons, why not build upon those?