Guild Wars 2

I wonder why we don’t see any more of the cool art-cutscenes like the one in Ascalon Catacombs. Are the guys who made this in the company still? It was one of the major reasons why I like the style of GW2 and now… not much left of it

Uruz Six.6594:

Counter-points: Sauron, Emperor Palpatine, the Daleks, the Borg (pre-Voyager). Not every great villain requires an involved tragic backstory, sometimes you can easily get away by simply dropping a giant threat and letting it loose on the world.

nah, Sauron wasn’t a good villain, more interesting than him were the fallen 9 ringwraiths. The finale in LotR was just bad – no direct confrontation with the villain at all. Palpatine had sort of a backstory – haven’t you seen episode III? The Borg had that queen, was a pretty interesting villain.

without the living story there would only be Orr-grind and CoF-grind. Because of the living story people actually go to other zones than max. level.

add some permanent change to the home instance. For people who finished all the Living Story achievements unlock new stuff in our home instance.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1emlrz/home_instance_living_story/?sort=new

I agree too, why not creating small lore-books with this blogpost-content… these could be rewards for getting all achievements of the Living Story content for example.

+ a first step in creating more of those books which are hidden in the open world and there for people to pick up and read whenever they want.

I honestly think I’m the only one in my guild (Europe) who reads Anet blog posts. It’s kind of sad that this storytelling is missed by a lot of people.

proof that people don’t only want Orr-related things: Final Rest. Tons of people farmed low level Events to get this staff.

+100% of 1% = 2%… wooow now that’s bad…. not. Let people who like boring farming and grinding max. level zones do this. They get no other unique rewards from Orr though, once they have the exotic set complete. They could get new unique rewards in each zone though

And what do you do after you have your legendary? Grind the next one? Or enjoy the other areas you haven’t seen yet. (And don’t tell me you’ve seen everything, events aren’t up all the time and heart-completion is only a small part of the game).

ah, I forgot the bag. Make it a 22 slot then ^^ I don’t care; it was an example

not much discussion going on :-(

I’ve made a reddit-post here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1emlrz/home_instance_living_story/

maybe a better way to introduce new ideas, kind of frustrating to be ignored

not much discussion going on :-(

I’ve made a reddit-post here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1emo5y/weekly_zoneachievements_antigrind_idea_which/

maybe a better way to introduce new ideas

Henge.3907:

idea! A rogue Largo does it, he’s found an ancient power and it brings a largo hero/ally to join Braham and Rox.

I love it, bring it on!

http://i47.tinypic.com/2061n5d.png
http://24.media.tumblr.com/5caad3975328cdbfb7b3f665b3e4ec6e/tumblr_mif3cqU9nb1rk1pgmo1_500.png

Imagine a villain who randomly raids different zones and obliberates every ally. So you are doing an event when suddenly this huge army falls in and kills everything.

Now this would be memorable. It’s sad that I have no idea who Kudu and Gaheron are… they aren’t memorable enough / aren’t acting outside of dungeons (I guess).

Wouldn’t it be nice to see a random spawning event in the Maguma Jungle zones where Faolain and 15 champions, 20 veterans and tons of normal nightmare court members raid across an area? Impossible to kill, only there to evoke fear among players. (for those of you who played WoW-Cataclysm: remember Deathwing laying waste to different locations everywhere in the world – and you being 1-hit).

I think the Living Story content is a great way to enhance our home instances. We could show off stuff we’ve experienced/achieved to our friends who haven’t.

Imagine once you have the meta-achievement for the living story, something changes in your home instance. The fact that LS is temporary content makes sure that not everyones home instance looks the same. This would turn our temporary achievements into something permanent.

let’s say they would have done this for Flame & Frost:

• you can find one of the people you’ve helped finding his stuff in there.
• a npc which sells you the F&F-weapon skins for 100 laurels/piece.
• Braham and Rox as Skill-challenge like encounter: you can spar with them, each time you beat them they get stronger & stronger. Beat them on difficulty: “elite” to turn them into vendors who sell you their weapon-skins for 100 laurels each. (difficulty elite: you have to be alone in the instance to participate).
• Once a week you can get a skillpoint by beating them again on elite difficulty.
• a small Asura portal to Wayfarer Foothills / Diessa Plateau

or for the secret of Southsun

• a npc which sells you the SoS-weapon skins for 100 laurels/piece
• Inspector Kiel as Skill-challenge… (see above for rewards)
• a small Asura-portal to Southsun Cove
• grow passiflora plants (farm 1 each 12 hours)

then they could add certain dialogue lines where LS-NPCs chat with each other sometimes. Imagine Braham hitting on Kiel ^^

This place should be something where you could see all you’ve achieved in LS, something to be proud of.
_______________________________________________________________
small suggestions to make the home instance more relevant

• introduce a portal-device which ports you to the home instance on first use, and
  back to where you came from on second use.
• your group members will be teleported too, if they want
• implement a sparring area in there where friends can duel

wow no need to come along rude, I read both books and to me elder dragons are just pure chaos. Snaff looked into one’s mind and didn’t find anything else.

Shiro is a great villain because you fear him, you even die confronting him which is something that doesn’t happen often in storytelling.

It really doesn’t matter if those concepts are in the game already, those were examples of how I’d wish a villain would look like, not like this:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/thumb/f/f4/Canach.jpg/133px-Canach.jpg

This topic isn’t called: “I want exactly these concept arts as villains in GW2”. It’s about how I miss scary evil villains with a cool background-story. The pics were just examples, get over it.

I have to say I’m a bit disappointed about the villains we have in GW2 so far. The Elder Dragons are just beings without any character, then we get some characters which aren’t really that scary. (SPOILERWARNING: I’m talking about Canach and a Karkaqueen)

GW2 has such great concept art and really scary looking characters… why not flesh out a storyline which introduces those as dark lords, nemesis, someone to be feared and present (not hidden at the very end)?

http://www.kekaiart.com/uploads/5/4/7/6/5476798/9027365_orig.jpg
http://www.kekaiart.com/uploads/5/4/7/6/5476798/442814_orig.jpg
http://www.kekaiart.com/uploads/5/4/7/6/5476798/1626017_orig.jpg

My ideal villain would be like Shiro (Guild Wars Factions)
http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/8377/gw997m.jpg
this lore-video gives you a pretty good idea what I mean:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thVuIZDdn80

what do you think? Which villains would you like to have?

Deified.7520:

Sadly, before she arrived, one settler took things into his own hands. A skilled slyvari, he begun planting plants that would cause the local wildlife to go crazy.

wait, are you talking of Canach? He isn’t a settler… he was leader of the first Consortium expedition to Southsun Cove. Or did I get you wrong?

I had this small idea for more incentive to do a variety of open world events

• do 15 unique events in a zone in a week to get a zone-token. (kind of a weekly zone- achievement)
• for 2 zone tokens you get 1 piece of zone-related gear/a skin. (for example a Queensdale Guard Helmet, or a Kessex Hills Centaur-Hunter coat.

this would mean you’d spend at least 12 weeks in a specific zone to get a full set of zone related armor. People wouldn’t farm the same events over and over, instead they would have to look for other events in that zone. To explore the zone.

you could buy other things with the tokens too… for example:

• a 28-slot centaur hunter bag which automatically sells all centaur-related junk-items for vendor-price.
• a centaur-chief head for future housing-decoration. Only 10 tokens (lol).
• a lucky centaur-tail. You get +100% magicfind on centaurs. 5 tokens.
• a piece-treaty offer: centaurs are now neutral to you until you attack them. You can talk to certain ones. 30 tokens.
• a guild mission unlock – battle against the centaur-chieftain. 8 tokens.

…things you can show off – so that others see that you really know and are an expert of the zone.

+ people would go back to low level zones
+ there would be a new progression to get the full set
+ great for RPers to dress up as a band of centaur slayers
+ people wouldn’t farm the same spots over and over
+ they would see more of the world by exploring the zones looking for events
+ a new reward system with non-power progression
+ unique rewards

same problem for me. It doesn’t help that the Omlette is soulbound. Another “problem” when I did this event with 2 friends (and 2 random people in the area): the eggs respawned SO SLOWLY… it took us quite a while to complete the event. You can imagine I wasn’t too happy as I learned that I can’t consume the omlette :-/

I don’t get it, why do you have to do every single daily? Do you already have every single achievement in the game already? O_o

First I thought this would be a dumb hate-thread but I can see the OP has some fair points here. I imagine the stress which goes with developing monthly content… They have to give us a schedule before, else people would rage even more: “it’s only there temporary and they can’t even tell me how much time I have??!!11”

Maybe it would be wise to introduce a living-story free week in order to grant the developers more time for new content.

what I don’t like: an achievement which can only be done by max. level players on Southsun Cove: The Omlette achievement. You can’t eat it on lower levels + it’s soulbound.

I saw plenty of Charr winning the game, size doesn’t matter.

do we need a black lion key for the SS supply crates?

Personally I’ve played on Southsun since release of the event and I haven’t gotten a single one. I wear no magic find gear though to be fair. If we need no keys for the crates, then I like the fact that these boxes drop now.

I’d love to see some tension-building in getting those RNG-drops though – like getting some puzzle pieces which can be combined to the weapon which would normally drop. Make those pieces drop a bit more often so that the chance to get the item is the same as before, but now you can see how far you are away from it. Imagine: you have 5/6 pieces and now you really want the item. It gets more exiting.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_release

the most important things:
-) daily achievements & being able to choose which to do
-) monthly achievements & also being able to choose from a list
—> playing the game how you wanna play + rewarded with laurels

guild missions
-) content for larger organized guilds http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_mission
-) start a mission in the open world for your guild. Others can participate and support the guild

fractals
-) mini-dungeons which are getting more difficult each time you comlete a set of 3 in a row

living story
-) temporary content which revives old zones with a new storyline, new content (last month we had a decent dungeon)

SAB
-) a retro-jumping puzzle zone (it’s HUGE)
-) a mishmash of Mario & Zelda-games – buy upgrades, open new secrets
-) Level 1 was active, it will return with level 1 & a new level 2

WvW
-) traps, a progression system, more armor for badges

sPvP
-) new maps

Guild Bounty Training

A Guild Bounty Training is a type of Guild Bounty, with only one target instead of two or more. It costs far less to unlock, thus giving smaller guilds the opportunity to build influence more quickly to unlock other types of guild missions, but does not award any Guild Merits.

source:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Bounty_Training

Living Story isn’t only a personal mission like the Personal Story. It’s a broad range of content: events, jumping puzzles + exploration, a dungeon, achievements, a pvp minigame,…

To ignore all of this is like playing only half of the game. Temporary or not – there will always be a Living Story running with everything that comes along with it.

If there was no Living Story people would all hang out in LA to lfg or grind Orr… the way it is now Wayfarer Foothills, Diessa Plateau & now Southsun Cove felt/feel alive. No empty zones anymore. And new things each 2 weeks, so far from getting boring.

I already posted it but something that bugs me in this department:

I wanted to get the omlette for the achievement with my lv.35 thief. I did the event (collecting eggs, respawned VEERY slowly) and was able to buy a omlette which is soulbound and can only be consumed at a higher (lv80?) level. Kind of annoying.

Donari.5237:

A guild has to start it and pay the influence to make it go. But this game is all about being able to help and not kill-steal etc, so of course others can help get the guild mission complete. The merits and influence gained all go to the sponsoring guild, however.

It wasn’t clear that you could transform in one of the race-animals though, at least not to me. I thought you could only help the guild by clearing the path for them. Nice to know. I wonder if non-guildies can participate in other guild events too…

-) guild puzzle?
-) guild challenge?
…

Nah, zerging isn’t a problem so far for me, a lot of veterans and champions make sure that people find a challenge everywhere on the island. Most of the time I found 5-8 players running around… so scaling wasn’t being broken as much as anywhere else.

pick up a stone – run near the carrier – throw the stone + grab the crab – turn right + dodge backwarts + turn – dash as far as possible away while keeping the button pushed for longer range

before anyone gets me (dodge on cd) I pass the crab to someone else and repeat the actions above. I won a few games with this standard-tactics.

not sure if it’s a bug or intended…

the Omlette from the event in Southsun Cove (you get an achievement for eating it) is consumable only for high level characters. It’s pretty annoying to do an event to collect all these eggs (we were 4 people and spawns were soooo slow) and then can’t use the reward. It’s also soulbound, so I can’t send it to my lv.80s.

well sometimes my lv35 thief gets some green lv.80 loot. I’m not sure what for, but I’m not complaining.

I don’t think you’ll get high level crafting mats… I got the Karka-shells though, but I can’t mine any nodes there because crafting tools for this need lv.60.

@Anet: the Omlette (you get an achievement for eating it) is consumable only for high level characters. It’s pretty annoying to do an event to collect all these eggs (we were 4 people and spawns were soooo slow) and then can’t use the reward. It’s also soulbound, so I can’t send it to my lv.80s.

does anyone else see that something big is going to happen in the karka lair? All the signs: the petrified hole is open again, the mysterious explosions everywhere,…

to the people who think they’ve added little content here: just compare it to repairing sign posts and collecting amulets. It’s only phase one and for that a lot has changed imho.

I love it, you have to play a few games to get into it… and then you can’t leave it because it’s so fun to play. I saw a few decent runs from a player which reminded me of a great American Football run to touchdown.

I’m pretty sure that none of my 10 guildmembers started the guild rush on Southsun Cove, nontheless yesterday I was able to turn into a crab and run through the map chasing blue flags.

I’m confused, I though I’d only be able to support the guild which started it instead of participating in a guild mission my guild hasn’t started?

no idea? anyone?

this “fear” of PvP (even if it’s just a little minigame which makes a lot of fun) is tiring

So I did a few escort events on Southsun Cove (love the enemies there) and when we reached our destination, the NPC disappeared and couldn’t be found in the camp. I found no new vendor either… is this intentional or a bug?

I would love to see any follow-up events also. An event chain. Or is there one I’ve missed?

Electro.4173:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

why not do a simple thing: make those skins available for 100 laurels each. So there could still be a lucker who gets the skin through the RNG-chest and people who show dedication because the love a particular skin can get it through playing the game instead of flipping trading-post offers the whole weekend.

Eh, problem with laurels would be that since laurels are limited to 1 per day and an extra 10 per month, people wouldn’t have time to get enough before the event ended unless they already had some saved up. So “dedication to a skin” wouldn’t really help, because no matter how dedicated you are, you can’t get more than 1 laurel a day.

Hah, I forgot to mention that these skins at the laurel-vendor shouldn’t be temporary of course.

I experienced the same: 2 people with a crab-symbol but the one I targetted couldn’t lose “the crab” (I think he had no crab in his hands, still the symbol).

agree, lag makes it difficult to appreciate it, it’s fun though when you’re lucky and get a minute without lag.

why not do a simple thing: make those skins available for 100 laurels each also. So there could still be a lucker who gets the skin through the RNG-chest and people who show dedication because the love a particular skin can get it through playing the game instead of flipping trading-post offers the whole weekend.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to let the karka target only the player with the crab… it’s hard enough for that player to keep the crab. I feel it works fine at the moment and I saw some decent games. Everyone should feel threatened by the karka imho.

I agree about the lag. Had the crab when a huge lagphase started… it lasted more than 10 sekonds easily and afterwards I had a lot more points than before. Became 2nd in that match, without doing too much.

Lag occured quite frequently in my games (Drakkar Lake).

I love that the enemies in the zone are still a challenge, finally a worthy lv.80 zone I love how you have to watch out where to go instead of careless running through everything. A zone which doesn’t feel bland.

FINALLY a zone where you have to use your skills 2-10 thank you Anet!!

+) non-trivial enemies
+) nice artwork & athmosphere (e.g. in the Karka hive)
+) grab toss gets more depth, the longer you play it saw extremely well playing people who held the crab quite a while. Wasn’t that bad myself from time to time
+) being rewarded for exploring, want more of it, Anet. Thanks!

-) I’m not sure if I’ve done something wrong: escorted NPCs to safe places and they disappeared. No new vendor, nothing.
-) haven’t seen any follow-up events… are there any?
-) lag in grab-minigame (long and disturbing lag, the last time I experienced this was during the last karka event in Lions Arch)
-) I’m missing the fantasy-flair a bit, very modern feeling…

I agree on the lag-problem, I won a game by having the grab – run into a huge lag-phase which lasted half a minute or so – and afterwards I had quite a lot points…
perhaps a local queue would be better for the experience

I don’t agree on the luck-factor, you’ll get this achievement when playing risky enough. You can evade the Karka by dodging and skill 3 running through them. I experienced a bunch of chicken behind me not only once.

I saw this one working well on a mobile phone game called Arel Wars

There are bonus objectives (which grant you a nice reward) where you have to stay alive and defend your tower for about 5 minutes before you defeat the enemy. The challenging part here: don’t rush the enemy and kill him before 5 minutes.

1st suggestion: introduce events where killing the mobs as fast as possible isn’t the goal but instead makes it more difficult to win.

how to do this: exactly like in this one event in Orr where you had to enrage a norn-woman by hitting enemies long enough so that those change their state and then attack the norn.

why? because it’s a variation from all the mindless dps-races.

2nd suggestion: Introduce rewards for events for certain bonus objectives which are much harder to fulfill. Grant for example a reward like a chance to get a rare/exotic. This would make events much more appealing and challenging imho.

why? it is a HUGE incentive for people to finish an event (and not only tag it and run away)

3rd suggestion: give us specific rewards for challenges.
-) rare harvesting tools
-) rare bags
-) nice skins (I loved the headband which you could achieve from repairing a Charr-vehicle) something like that.
-) rare gem drops (having 300 gems in your inventory makes it more likely that someone buys the missing 200 gems to buy something cool for 500 gems)
-) lore-pieces (like pages of books, little stories etc.)

+ I’d like to add a question about pacing: Will it be in phases again? If so, we have the finale probably in a 2-weeks-timeframe, something which wasn’t well received by most people during F&F (the dungeon). This would mean you could easily miss content by going on holidays

I wonder why we need this Asura Gate… it’s a second way to travel to SSC in the same city… ?!

I wonder if we will have any incentive to go back to the main cities soon… No mystic forge there makes them useless for crafters more or less. An Asura-Gate from Southsun Cove to cities like Divinity’s Reach would change things a bit I guess.

Hi Robert

Thanks for the info, I’m a bit confused though… aren’t you the dungeon-designer? Was the whole dungeon-team working on the new Southsun content? How many teams are there working on monthly content-updates? Are you taking monthly turns (SAB-Team – dungeon team – SAB-Team – …)?

I really like your work so far, I wonder what a dungeon-designer can bring to open world content. Have you designed some open world things already?

Karka-Event rewars: 2 Exotics, huge bag, …
Flame and Frost reward: 1 Exotic glove + 1h buff

meh

I don’t get it: the Karka-Event finale… we got 2 Exotics, a huge bag and something more; Now we get… a 1 hour buff?!? For all those achievements? I’m REALLY confused right now.

a 1hour buff is the reward for doing all those achievements? O_o

Ayakaru.6583:

Whilst they announced the returning to the dragons just a few days ago.

hm? did I miss something? do you have a source for that?

Relentliss.2170:

So basically it makes sense where the most offensive class, Thief, also can spec to be so defensive 15 people can’t kill them. Great game development, where the strategy is to ‘move on’ and they can follow you around and pick you off 1 at a time. Gj Anet.

seeing your trollish sig I wonder why I read your post, but I’ll respond anyway. Have you ever tried to kill someone playing as a defensive thief? Have you ever played a thief?