Guild Wars 2

This is more of a suggestion to players than for ANET.

I see a lot of talk about “end game content” by players and players who say that GW2 has no end game content. I am thoroughly confused by this.

In games like WoW and EQ2 and etc, you have level zones and leveling and once you reach max level (or any level above the zone level) you will never ever go back to those zones because you can simply breath and everything around you dies. So, what do max-level people have to do? They need “end game content” so they do not get bored, they need the grind of new things, and RAIDS, and new shinies to occupy their time and keep them playing.

GW2 is different in one major aspect from any of these games. It has dynamic level scaling….and yes, I know that a level 80 downscaled to level 5 is way more powerful than a normal level 5, but ANET keeps improving this scaling and I have to say, that now, it is far more fun to go to a lower level area than it was early on in the game…and yes, you might actually get defeated by something in a low level area!

But more importantly, this scaling means that you have a much larger world in which to do things than you do in WoW (since you can go to any zone and not just your level appropriate zones).

So, to these people who want “end game content” that they can do to keep from getting bored with the game I present some things you can do:

1: Level an Alt of each class to learn how they work.
2: Level a character of Each race and go through their personal story (can be combined with 1).
3: Level a character of Each Faction (vigil, priory, whispers) and go through their story. (can be combined with 1, 2)
4: Do each of the different forks of your various race / faction.
5: Find and succeed at each of the jumping puzzles in the game even if you hate jumping puzzles. It teaches you good game mechanics for later.
6: Find and succeed at each of the mini-dungeons in the game.
7: Complete all dungeon story-modes and each of the explorable paths of every dungeon…not just COF P1 and HOTW P1.
8: If you want challenging content: Get to Personal Reward level of 51 in FOTM…(this will also give you ascended rings for all your alts as well as 20 slot bags for your alts and possibly ascended weapons).
9: Complete all the “goggles” locations around the world.
10: if you like to grind for something, complete all your “Slayer” achievements.
11: if you like to grind for something, complete all your “weapon kill” achievements.
12: Find every mini-chest around the world and defeat each of their “guardians”.
13: Complete your world exploration to 100%
14: Solo a dungeon…or two….too easy? Solo FOTM and see how high you can get and still solo it.

And now people will say: “but I want rewards!”….if you do all of the above, it is probably 3-4000 achievement points. That is several achievement boxes worth of stuff, not to mention several of the things above give you titles that you can show off to show how “leet” you are.

After you have completed all of those…then come here on the boards and talk about how ANET needs to add more “end game content” and I will be right there with you…I have personally done: 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14 (highest solo fractals set is 12 currently including MAW). I am one jumping puzzle away from 5 being complete (and I hate jumping puzzles)…Im a LONG way from weapon kills achievements….only have 5 weapons complete.

This is all “end game content” for after you have successfully leveled your first character to level 80. Since I started doing these things with guild-mates and friends, we have all started playing more often, started exploring the world more (and discovered things we never saw before), and started having fun within the game again with each other and even other players (you meet a lot of people when you start helping them with mini-dungeons and jumping puzzles)! And we have all gotten a ton of titles and rewards to show off to other players…and none of this even includes the WvW and PvP achievements! (we have now started on the WvW achievements, none of us likes PvP but maybe after WvW).

Asmodeius.2751:

Moshari., insta-80 would only be allowed after leveling first 80. That solves the problem with noobs. Asides from that, there is no hard enough content that would require you to have a full dedicated group like the heroic raids in WoW, every thing is linear, stack here, dodge this.

I’m sorry, but because you are level 80 on a warrior does not make me think that you have any clue how to play an elementalist, or a necro, or a thief, or even a guardian. You would be a noob…heck I have a friend who started with a warrior and now alt-leveled an elementalist, he is constantly dying when we do anything together because he simply cannot remember to keep himself out of melee range with his ele!!! I get frustrated doing dugeons when he brings his Alt because he sucks so bad at it!! And he leveled it up from level 1….I can not imagine the caliber of players we would have with insta-80.

Asmodeius.2751:

Zalman, It’s already hurting the game, without the scroll. ANET need to invent more cool world events with worthy rewards and scatter them to different zones. Just because i’m forced to re-level doesn’t makes me do the dead content. i just grind easy quests and etc. bypassing every thing that is not time convenient and that is it. why enforce that burden on me?

No. Zalman is right. At least right now people have to return to these areas to level new characters….cant you see how an insta-80 scroll would make areas even MORE dead? You can’t complain about zones being empty and then propose a system that would only decrease people in these zones!

I agree that ANET needs to do more things to make the lower level zones more attractive to higher level characters…and think that the rewards should increase based on your level in the zone (so a level 80 in a 1-4 zone gets greater rewards for “helping” in those zones)…but giving Insta-80 scrolls would completely defeat the purpose and as we have pointed out…give us a ton of really crappy level 80 players making dungeons and etc…even worse with PUGs…suddenly you will have no one playing with pugs….and if you are a lone player you will find yourself unable to do anything in the game, because no one will trust that you aren’t one of these “insta-80” players. Its already pretty bad with some of the elite guys not wanting to or kicking players they deem as sub-standard like rangers in PUGs. Now throw in a ton of “insta-80” characters and see how often you will be able to get a PUG together.

If they were to do it, it certainly shouldn’t cost 300-400 gems, it should be 30,000 to 40,000 gems so that at least it wouldn’t be done very often.

viehawk.3498:

For me having instant 80 is like getting a job. Doing what you are supposed to do and getting your paycheck and after that first month you won’t go to your job but in the end of the month you are at your bosses office telling him to give you your check for not doing your job.

I agree. Earn your 80…earn your paycheck. Instant 80 will do nothing but add a ton of level 80 “noobs” to the game who will be worse PUGS than there already are. At least now, those guys had to at least level to 80…if they were insta-80’d they would be even worse in not knowing how to play!! Can you imagine the bad players on the servers if they were allowed to insta-80! I think I would have to quit…Peoples keyboards would permanently have the L, 2, and P keys broken from constant yelling.

Asmodeius.2751:

why not? make it only available after you level your first 80 on the account and that’s it, than leave the choice to people, to get isnta-80 or level your self.

People in this game are already lazy in my opinion. They don’t want to play the game, they want instant rewards. If you gave an instant-80 scroll in the game you would just have a ton of 80th level characters with no one playing in the lower level areas anymore. On my second (and subsequent) characters that I leveled I was able to help a tremendous amount of new players by “showing them the ropes” as well as maybe showing them mini-dungeons or jumping puzzles, or other things that I had discovered my first time around.

By forcing “veteran” players to play the game again to level their alts, it kind of forces them into helping the “new” players…this helps the over-all game…otherwise only “new” players would be leveling…and they would be as lost as many of us were when we first started the game…until a “veteran” helped us.

I don’t like it for the simple reason that I would have liked it months ago, but then I would have missed a lot of stuff that I saw when leveling an alt.

I started my first characters right when the game was released, played them to 80 and then started on some ALTs….I wished so hard that they had an instant 80 scroll so that I wouldn’t have to level another character all the way to 80….but then something happened. As I was leveling another character to 80, I noticed that there were things that have been added to the game since I leveled my last character. Little things, like a new jumping puzzle in Caledon, or a Troll cave that I never noticed the last time (even though I had 100% world exploration). It might even be that these things were not added to the game, but that I simply hadn’t seen them before because I was now playing from a different perspective (Charr, or Human, or Sylvari, or Norn, or Asura) from my first character.
Now I love leveling alts (on my 7th right now…..and I level all of them by playing the areas, not by crafting or just running COF p1…I do hearts, and personal story, and explore). I can honestly say that on every character I have leveled to 80, I have found or seen something that I didn’t see before…even though I have 6 level 80s already. I’m glad I didn’t get an instant 80 scroll.

I actually thought the scaling was pretty good. Started going up with a group of 3, we ran into nothing we couldn’t handle, as we climbed we joined 2 more and then another group of 4 who were having trouble progressing, and finally at 3rd level we ran into the zerg. After that it was all massive zerg-spawns. But it seemed that the lower two levels were easily handled by our group of 3-5-9 on our way up….and we didn’t run through, we fought our way through raising each other as we went down.

takatsu.9416:

my complaint is that the main dungeon was way too easy lol it needs a slight buff at least for the final boss. I solo’d it and it hit like a wet noodle :S and idk if it’s scaling but the toxin didn’t bring down my health either xD but I hear parties saying it’s easy too. I haven’t had the right timing to gather friends since they’re on a diff times when I have school and hw but I’ll def see how it is as a party when I finish soloing the achievements…. I guess it’s also good that it’s solo able

the run up the tower is a lot of fun as well rly puts you on ur feet. the times I’m online in the day there’s not that many ppl for some reason and I actually never ran with a Zerg and had to rly be on my feet. the final third level to dungeon entrance run I had to get sword torch and focus with full four stealths and focus pull to get mobs off me, that rly means I had to change things to do this so it’s nice to need to adapt. I can imagine it being harder for non stealth classes if u wanted to run thru

it’s fun and looks epic. just the final boss needs a buff to be actually a challenge…

what might be crazy but interesting is if it scales according to your toughness and dps. less damage against less armor and more health and cc against zerker. might be crazy tho lol

This scales with the amount of people in the instance. I easily solo’d it, but had much more of a challenge when we took it on with 5 people.

I will say I was quite happy with the scaling that was done in this whole LS. I was pleasantly surprised that I could solo instances but also still have fun when I repeated some with my guild-mates. The main rooms also….since we started with only 3 people it was do-able, and by the time we were in a “zerg” of 30-40 it was still fun (having TONS of mobs spawn around us)…we never facerolled anything really but at the same time, even though tons were dying while we were in the large zerg….it was still do-able and eventually we cleared it out and then set about raising all the dead (bodies all over!!) I consider myself a pretty good player and never found it “easy-mode”…and several people around me were constantly dying so I dont’ think they thought it “easy” either…and this was maintained from when we had 3 all the way up to the zerg size, so I will say WELL done on the scaling aspect. Good players shouldn’t die, but it also did not completely overwhelm the not-so-good players to the point where they wanted to quit advancing in the tower.

I have to agree. I thoroughly enjoy the tower, The side instances are good. The over-all feel of the tower is good…it really makes you feel like you are invading a tower and that the bad guys are putting more and more resistance against you. I felt like it really made you want to work together towards a goal also.

I started out with 3 of us in a party, but quickly ran into 2 more people who were downed where we had to clear the bad-guys to help them up. One of those two joined our party while the other one quickly ran off ahead as soon as we raised them…he quickly learned the error of his ways as he died just a little ways further once more….and even though I argued not to raise him (he did, after-all deserve his death from running off) my party-mates raised the guy, who then joined our party and stayed with us from then on (even raising us as we went down).

We ended up hooking up with even more groups as we went up the tower, our force growing from 3-5-9-15-20-25 people as we went further and further up the tower. By the time we reached the final instance I actually feldt a good comraderie with my fellow players (myself and 2 other guardians kept rotating our walls of reflections to defend the ranged players from ranged attacks from the creatures we were melee’ing, we all worked together with Ele’s and rangers putting down wells to heal us and remove conditions…‘stand your ground’ was constantly being shouted and “for great justice” by warriors.

It felt good to not have anyone griefing, or screaming “L2P IDIOTS!” like has been happening lately in a lot of the LS content.

My only complaint is that the story didn’t really progress. We really didn’t learn much about Scarlet or her motivations….but overall I enjoyed it.

Heck, they could even keep the locations of the personal story the same as well, as long as they prefaced it as your “history” instead of “story”…you could travel to the wayfarer foothills and replay your “Personal history” of how you came to be who you are….going all the way to the (now clean) resort village on the (formerly) cursed shores to see how you helped unify the pact and destroyed the elder dragon Zhaitan. Inside the newly rebuilt temple city of Arah, you could replay the “history” of the dungeon with all the paths to see how you cleaned up the former “lost” city. The dungeons can ALL stay, as a history of the area…defeating the dredge, the inquest, the Jotun, the nightmare….

All while the world around them changes…Its not a major change….add two little letters to your “personal story” to make it a “personal history”.

Tobias Valin.5893:

The only problem with a phased, or instanced, game is that it seems to go directly against what the developers want the game to be. They want everyone to experience the world together, such that everyone experiences the changes at the same time. Colin himself stated that in the Colab. Development thread as one of ANet’s core pillars: that “When something in the open world happens, it needs to happen for everyone.” So, that said, there’s no re-living it.

Other people have brought up the fact that by instancing, or phasing, the game it fragments the playerbase. If you are off re-running the death of Jormag, even though you want to because you found it fun, you’re not present in the same world, doing the same content, as everyone else. ANet doesn’t want that. They seem determined to force everyone to take on the same threats. That’s why none of the new Living World content has talked about Zhaitan’s defeat. If it did it’d force them to acknowledge that the LW takes place, chronologically, after that and would inevitably confuse new players in the future about exactly which content is ‘present’ and which is ‘past’.

Lets be honest, the living story is already instanced…the battle of Claw island is not actually happening outside of Lion’s Arch all the time)…so I still don’t see the big deal of simply moving the instances to a different space, or prefacing each instance with “this happened in the past”. Dungeons are already “instanced” with the story mode of the dungeon being instanced story…all of this fragments the player base to the exact same extent that further instancing their personal story would.

If what Colin said is law, there will NEVER be a truly living world, nor will we ever see another dragon…and I personally think they designed the game wrong for their plans.

Here’s my point:

If you are designing something to be “living” and to change with time for all players, all at the same time, then you design the world to be static (villages go here and here, trees are here, lake is here) and then you ADD the drama with the living story from the beginning (oh no! The centaurs are attacking this village…go help and save them and drive them off….oh, you failed..darn my village is burned, help us re-build it…thank you for rebuilding it…..oh no, here come the centaurs again!)…you can then change the drama elements at will and whenever you want (oh no, now instead of centaurs, its Krait that are attacking our village…save us!)….Voila! living story world that changes for everyone in real time. If you have a personal story at all, it would be within the confines of this…being a “living personal story” that changed as the world around it did.

If you want a “living” world, you DO NOT design it with Drama as a static element. The personal story is static, (It makes no sense that the undead are still in ORE after you have done your personal story), so for that entire part of the player base, the world is frozen in time…and not “living” at all by the simple fact that the personal story is supposed to be happening now. The Centaurs constantly attacking in divinity’s reach…the Jotun, the nightmare court… all of this seems to be part of their world that cannot be touched (static) right now because it is part of the various personal stories. As long as Colin and the others hold to that belief, there will never be a living world or living story.

I hope ANET does read this thread. There is a serious flaw in their thinking if they think they can both have a living world as well as keep things static with the personal story (outside of further instancing the personal story as a personal “history”).

Yeah, I am extremely disappointed that there has been only 2 dev posts in this entire thread….one 9 days ago, and one 6 days ago. I love my guardian, but I am beginning to think that the devs don’t. Lots of posts in the Elemental, Necro, warrior, and thief threads in the last days…no love for guard.

Not much of a “discussion” going on when it is one-sided.

Think of it as a “Previously….in the living story…”

I think it’s great to give people a recap.

BobbyStein.2315:

Part of the reason we’ve been including Scarlet in multiple releases is so we can build on her character. It’s kind of funny that we routinely get two types of feedback on the Living World story. From some people it’s, “Stuff feels random. I don’t know these characters.” From others it’s, “Stop using X character. I don’t like them.” So we’re presented with two competing bits of feedback (usually from different people but it’s hard to track opinions on a forum).
.

Chris, Bobby, there really is no conflict in the information you are getting back… “stuff feels random, I don’t know these characters” is EXACTLY the reason why “Stop using X character, I don’t like them” comes about.

I think the majority of the people who hate scarlet hate her for the same reason, that she seems to be a “mary sue.” A character that is all-powerful with no reason behind being all-powerful. The lack of story surrounding her the “why” directly contributes to a hate of Scarlet…

Whenever there is a question about why…the answer seems to be “Scarlet.” With no answer to “why Scarlet?” As an example: Why did the Aetherblades attack Lion’s Arch? Answer: Scarlet told them to. Follow up question is: Why did Scarlet tell them to? no real answer… Why did the Molten Alliance form? Answer: Scarlet. How did she get them to corporate….why would they listen to a Sylvari?? Again…no answer. Why is the Nightmare court working with the Aetherblades? Answer: Scarlet… why would the Aetherblades work with the nightmare court and why would either of them listen to a little Sylvari that they could eat as a salad? Again, no answer….

And so…people hate Scarlet…because she is the answer to why everything is attacking and forming alliances…but there has never been a reason WHY everyone listens to her and forms these alliances….so she feels like a half-baked character…someone who is able to accomplish great things just because…she’s Scarlet.

A good villain needs a back-story…and more than just simple “she saw something in a vision that may or may not have been entirely in her head”. A good villain needs to have a reason why everyone fears, or needs her to lead them. So what if she learned a bunch of stuff from different races….why the heck would a Char Warband listen to a piece of Salad? HOW did she get the flame legion to follow her… HOW did she get the Aetherblades to follow her… HOW did she get the nightmare court to give her the time of day…she is NOT firstborne, she doesn’t speak for the Pale Tree….they don’t listen to Caithe, why would they listen to her?

This is why people say the same things: “Stuff feels random” (Scarlet did it…there is no why or how, just Scarlet), AND “I don’t know this character” (Scarlet mostly), AND “I hate X character” (Scarlet, because of the other two). She could have been a good villain. With a little fleshing out of her story….so we could understand her motivations, as well as the motivations of every other group that has joined her…right now it just all feels so random! Scarlet did it!

Favorite Release: bazaar of the four winds. It was gorgeous! It was new! It was different! It was something I could brag about to friends that left the game as a way to entice them back! It was fun! I enjoyed the new skills, the jumping…the possibilities! I had really hoped this would have been expanded on and possibly give us eventually a new zephyrites skill tool in order to use the skills of the zephyrites that we learned in the sanctum in the rest of the world…The zephyrites themselves as a new people! The Zephyr Sanctum!! This release gave me so much hope for the future of LS, and it also dashed those hopes more than anything when it all disappeared….I was never so crushed as when that ended and went away…I thought for sure only the zephyr sanctum would leave and that the Bazaar was a permanent area….but no…even access to the bazaar ended….I was crushed…but that also shows how good the release was, that it crushed me when it left.

Least favorite release: Tequatl Rising: I was so excited for this release but in the end it was the worst one yet. There was no story, there was no reason given to Tequatl changing, He is not even the highest level dragon in the game, yet is now the toughest… the fight itself became the catalyst that tore apart many servers with more people getting angry at other people than I have ever seen anywhere previous…both in the world and here on the forums….People transferred servers from low-pop to high just because of this release (and the thoughts that this is the future of ANET releases)…which made the disparity even worse between servers…more griefing, more zerg combat, being forced to guest onto servers or cheat into an overflow in order to defeat him…Lack of scaling in the fight itself meant a whole part of the game (a whole dragon fight) was removed for many players…unless they guest or have a friend on TTS. In the end, I think this was the stupidest thing ANET did in the LS….it added absolutely nothing to the world as a whole and in fact removed something…the old tequatl fight was so easy it sucked, but it was accessible by everyone….

Where Bazaar made me hopeful for the future of LS and what could happen, Tequatl made me fearful of future LS content and which direction ANET was going with the game.

Conncept.7638:

Sorry for the superfluous post. The thread bugged out when I posted, I’ve seen it happen before, it’s some bug with previously deleted posts when a new page is created, and the only way to fix it is by adding posts.

So anyway, sorry again. Here’s my post that bugged out the thread, carry on.

Not bad, still don’t understand why the pact has to go. Can’t the majority of the pact leader vs non-pact leader be solved in two different sets of dialogue?

Even without the personal story your character wanders the world slaying monsters and spirits and beasts, delving ancient dungeons, and single-handedly fighting entire wars. Why is such a strong explanation needed for why the character wishes to fight the dragons in light of all that?

I kind of agree with this, they could transition into your ideas simply by having a set of dialogue with the pact being dissolved since they only formed to kill Zhaitan. or you could continue to use the pact as a means towards the other dragons. I don’t think that ANET really needs to change their current personal story other than to instance the whole thing as a sort of “this is my story” out of phase history of you.

You could do your entire personal story in your “home” instance traveling around the Tyria of yesteryear (a piece of dialogue to establish that you are not in the here and now)….ANET wouldn’t have to change anything with the personal story…and they could add to it by adding additional “Home” instances every year re-playing (provided they are scalable) the events that take down the additional dragons so that even a new player on year 5 could re-play the events that lead to the destruction of all 5 dragons…leading into the “current” time-scene of the living story. These “home” instances could be run with a party which would make them almost essentially a giant “history” or “Chronocle” dungeon that you could enjoy with your friends whenever you want. Loved the battle of Jormag? RE-play it in your “home” instance.

This makes it re-playable as well as doesn’t leave new players feeling lost and feeling like they missed out.

LostBalloon.6423:

Hi All,

I think most players that enjoy PvE (and not WvW) are not bound to look at the WvW forums. Thus I find it important to inform all of you that in the thread of collaborative development regarding WvW population balance issues, the suggestion ANET is the most paying attention to, is attempting to balance WvW population with server transfer costs.

Here is a snippet of the discussion and why I think that even as pure PvE players you should all keep an eye on that thread (for those that don’t know, Devon Carver is the WvW Coordinator from ANET):

Blaeys.3102:

DevonCarver.5370:

Sticking to the lines of transfers, what are reasonable restrictions to place on players after they transfer? No WvW for the rest of the match? No WvW for 24 hours? Would that help any or would it actually exacerbate the problem?

When transferring to higher ranked server, I think restrictions have to be multifold and palpably punitive. At minimum, blocked from WvWing for at least one week. I would also add some kind of PVE ramifications – something along the lines of temporarily (and significantly) reducing magic find on a sliding scale based on how high ranked the server you are transferring to is.

Likewise, I would look at rewarding people who choose to transfer to lower population/ranked servers – no cost at minimum (possibly even giving people gems who transfer to low population/losing servers) and a temporary increase in magic find in PVE and WvW.

As a primarily PVE player (although I do enjoy WvW also) I am all for balancing the servers….it would solve complaints from both sides. On low-pop servers people have trouble getting enough other players to accomplish things that on the high-pop servers they have far too many people for (and they complain about over-flows).

As example. I am on a mid-size server (according to rankings)…but yet, there are still a few nights a week where we do not clear the temples on the cursed shore (and I cannot remember the last time Balthazar was cleared). But you constantly hear people complain on the forums who are from high-population servers that every time they try and go clear temples (for the ascended materials) they are kicked into overflow and they are sick of it!

Simple solution…even out the servers…I can’t imagine anyone on an actual low-pop server would not like to have more players to accomplish things like the Karka Queen or Tequatl.

So what helps WvW (population balance) also helps PVE whether you are in a high pop or low pop server.

Redenaz.8631:

How do people that want personally challenging (as opposed to group challenging) content feel about sPvP? I’ve never touched it, because I’m never a serious PvP player in games, but it seems like that stacking strong players against strong players would be very challenging. Is it too unbalanced? Is the inability to use your PvE/WvW rewards too off-putting?

(I’m honestly asking, because I’d like to hear what people think of “PvP as the ultimate scaling difficulty PvE.”)

I don’t do PvP anymore (I have a bit in the past) because I am just not into fighting other players….to me, PvP is simply who can take advantage of their class’s strengths vs anothers weakness at that point in time (since it will change next patch). If you have two truly great PvP players it can be fun to watch, but then ultimately it comes down to who’s class is better and who tweaked it that slight bit better for battle against another player.

I play fantasy games (and sci-fi) to escape from reality and to have fun with the fantastical elements of that game. If ANET decided to give me a solo dungeon where all I did was fight a human or charr in each class I would get bored with it very quickly….I would much rather solo a giant, or a dragon minion, or a whole gaggle of dredge (they come in gaggle’s don’t they?) than fight another player…to me there is more fun in fighting game “creature” content. That’s just me though.

Kimyrielle.3826:

slurpey.6014:

I wish Anet would focus more on the “hardcore” player than the “casual player”.

If they did that the game would die fairly fast. There are simply not enough of you guys around to keep the game funded.

I think Anet needs to make a decision. Do you want to attract the “hardcore” players or the “casual” players? Both doesn’t work as we have seen, and sadly that doesn’t increase the player base or satisfies anybody at least not in the long run.

I tend to agree with this. Right now the game seems to be an equal opportunity offender that satisfies neither casual nor hardcore players a lot, and it doesn’t seem to know what it really wants to be.

This. I wont elaborate since I agree with the OP. They need to make up their mind.

I am all for “personal” hardcore content. I love jumping puzzles. Give me a solo dungeon that is difficult (I try to solo dungeon paths and Fractals for the challenge) or even a 5 man dungeon that is difficult…I loved Aether Retreat and love the new TA path but I am not going to lie and say that I do not want the rewards. I have 3000 hours in the game and don’t have a legendary, because I hate grinding….I prefer to DO something, not grind. I will do a different dungeon path every day if given the opportunity…Since the reward is not there I haven’t gotten my legendary, because again, the rewards are not in the challenging content. I never succeeded at Liadri…but I LOVED the opportunity to try with multiple different classes….and personally loved this content.

I HATE HATE HATE (LOATHE, etc) the new Tequatl and Southsun and many of the new events that ANET has put in to satisfy the hardcore players (new laby). These are not personally rewarding in any way. Me, standing in a zerg and every once in a while dodging an extremely obvious attack is not challenging for me….and the fact that it relies on so many other people…does not make it challenging….it goes on my nightmare list…its like saying I will only get a paycheck if everyone in my company puts in 125% on their job. I know I can put in the 125%, but I guarantee, there is someone out there that wont….and I lose out because of it.

I would love if Anet gave us more solo challenges where the rewards scaled to how far you made it….like a solo fractals. Even for just simple bragging rights…a title instead of other rewards.

But do NOT make me depend on more than my small list of friends to do something and call that “challenging.” Because like it or not…90% of players are looking for “easy mode” and I don’t want to have to rely on them to do anything. I want them to nerf Tequatl, and southsun, and use scaling more for all world events…but then temper that with giving us solo or small group challenging content in instances….that would be best of both worlds.

The world is beautiful I simply love running around and exploring and finding new things.

I love the combat.. I hated combat in WoW…this feels much more dynamic and I feel like I do more in combat. Combo’s with other characters are great, dodging…other games feel so static after combat in GW2

I like the different classes, I have a level 80 of every class now and love playing different ones with different styles. I truly wish there was even more build diversity in the classes but each class right now feels different.

I also enjoy playing dress-up with my characters and finding new dye’s (I don’t buy any) and trying them on my characters…designing their “look” to be unique to other characters in the game by mixing elements of different armors.

I love not having the trinity..there is no pressure for me or my friends to play a specific class…in WoW, I really wanted to play a main “blaster” but my friends needed a tank so I was forced into playing a tank whenever we were together…I hated that….with GW2 if I want to play my ele, or warrior, or thief, or guardian…I can grab any one of them (and often do) and go do a dungeon with my friends.

Open world and scaling of events…this is probably the single greatest thing about GW2, in WoW I had to be in a raiding party to enjoy certain parts of the game..in GW2 I feel like I should be able to enjoy all aspects of the game whether I am part of a huge guild or not (part of my frustration with new Tequatl, New Southsun). If the scaling goes away and events can only be accomplished by huge groups or huge guilds…I will be finding another game to play….

DeathMetal.8264:

I did an experiment and guested to about 6 Very High servers when Teq event is up.

Black Gate
Tarnished Coast
Jade Quarry
Dark Haven
Crystal Desert
Sanctum of Ral

and then there’s mine, Maguuma.

The test was done during prime time US: between 6pm EST to 10pm EST

No one has done Teq in those servers when he’s up.

Of course, I could be just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe Teq is being done at JQ, when I guested to TC. Or maybe, Teq’s being killed somewhere CD when I am at DH. Or any combination of those stuff.

Now, on the same servers, I also guested to check if:
Claw of Jormag and Shatterer are being done, on the same time frame.

And surprisingly, these 2 dragons, no matter when I tried to guest, are being done on those servers. Again, I am not saying Teq is not being done exclusively, for example, in my server, Teq is being done on Tuesday so maybe, I am just missing the regular Teq kill for those servers.

But still, the fact remains: many servers skip Teq, but still do all the other world bosses.

…..

Want to kill Teq? Join a specialized guild, camp the zone, and you better hope you get in the overflow before it fills up. If this is what Anet wants, then they succeed. If not, then they better make some changes.

I’m with you…after seeing many people say that they kill teq regularly on their servers I guested and jumped down to sparkfly to give it a try on more than one server…empty on even high population servers…

The only way I get a teq kill is joining in with TTS (I am a member and have killed teq 20+ times with them). I agree with all the posters who say this is a bandaid….it is. I would much rather do teq on my own server with my own friends (or other guild-mates)….who most of the time I cannot get into a TTS overflow because they fill so fast. I have many friends who have not killed Teq yet, and I have been trying to get them in when TTS kills them…but the system is not good for this and most cant take the time to camp sparkfly for the hour + in order to get 1 kill. At first I wore my title proudly showing that I had killed Tequatl…now it kinda makes me feel ashamed that I was able to do something that I cannot seem to be able to do with so many of my friends. We can all do Jormag and Shatterer together…so we do that and I wear one of my other titles.
Tequatl is broken and needs to be changed so that it can be enjoyed by the masses, that’s the point of this open world…I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to do content in the open world (joining TTS, jumping into a overflow…getting there an hour early…etc etc etc).

perilisk.1874:

Regarding these discussions about Personal Story and phasing, I was thinking… “This is my story”

That is, the Personal Story has always abstractly been a retelling of the player character’s personal story, which occurred in the past, to some unmentioned audience. What if that audience became an actual entity?

Say, after the initial sequence, you flash forward to the present, and you are relaying this information to a Priory researcher, so they can archive your expertise on fighting Zhaitan to use against the other Elder Dragons.

They have developed a device that augments your ability to recall events vividly, and can record the corresponding data. However, to function, it needs some base data to work with, so you still have to head out to find people, places, and things that have a strong link to those memories (more or less corresponding to the existing instance points, but perhaps with a marker or memorial of some sort). The PS rewards would officially be given by the Priory for collecting the data for them, and therefore don’t apply to repeat plays, but you can still redo the missions if you want.

The same device could also function with sites related to past LW content, letting the player enter little instances to catch up on the story. It would be clear even in-world that these are mediated, somewhat impressionist, retellings of past events, so slight deviations from the actual LS or the current state of the world would be irrelevant.

Done this way pretty much frees the devs to unlink PS and LW, so long as PS stuff is still accessible in some form.

I LOVE this idea.

Elbegast.6970:

For a Living World, we need:
Seasons
Better Weather Effects
Dark Nights (no, not Christian Bale)
I second these ideas, I would LOVE a world with seasons and better weather

Purchasable Real Estate
Player Owned Shops
Player Owned Farms (for Livestock and Produce)
Fishing, Hunting & Farming Professions
I disagree with these, I hated fishing, etc in WOW. And player owned items dotting up the landscape would just be dumb…and make it much harder on the LW team since now they have to worry about knocking down JIMBOB.8564’s farm in order to have the Margonites attack that area

Player-Generated Dynamic Events
I like this idea, but not sure how it would be implemented.

I would love to see a lot more long-chain events that can be started and continued by players leading to a world-boss, so that world-boss’s can be summoned almost at will….but would require some effort. Like:

1: escort Pact to area of frostgorge >
2: help them take back their camps >
3: help them gather resources to rebuild cannons >
4: have to fight dredge who are stealing resources >
5:fighting dredge causes dredge to attack camps so defend the camps >
6:The Jotun are massing to the north >
7:fight back the waves of Jotun >
8:try to stop the ritual that will turn a Jotun leader into a champion >
9:defeat the Jotun champion>
ALL leading to:
10:The claw of Jormag has sent the damaging crystals and finally >
11:defeat the claw of Jormag….who….at the end of his fight when he is defeated… The Claw lets loose a blast-wave that destroys the pact camps and cannons….which leads back to 1:
This would make the world seem a lot less “timed” and a lot more “living” by doing the right chain of events, you could make any boss appear. And people could join in at any part of the chain. Don’t do the chain, no world boss…

Make these chains for all the world boss’s and the world would seem a lot more dynamic and give PLAYERS more control of their world. Rather than having people yelling out in map “is SB in Window?” followed by “ten minutes” you would have people yelling out “Where are we with the SB chain?” followed by “we’re at the escort of the priory into the swamp to investigate the strange portals part”. This also aids in telling a story (like why does the shadow behemoth spawn…no one I have talked to seems to know), as well as getting younger players involved (they could join in on the chain as it unfolds and not just suddenly run down after people give them a way-point). As part of the dialogue of the npc’s you could even have the world boss tie in with your over-all story.

Long chain events just seem much more “living” in my mind than having the same “clear the spiders from the trees” events happening over and over. Why do the spiders come back? does she actually go and pick the apples? etc etc.

I see a lot of people posting ‘persistent world’ ideas that would involve armies of enemies taking over areas if events fail.

Keep in mind that on low-population servers (I know, I know, I constantly bring this up) these events will fail more often than succeed. I saw one person who posted that if these events fail, it would make these areas more difficult content (more champions, harder fights, etc)…I think this is a bad idea for the same reason, the servers that will fail at these events are the ones that could not get enough people to do the events, if you then make areas harder after the events, you will further encourage this disparity.

The amount of players that simply “play the game” are far far more numerous than the amount of players “looking for a challenge”. This is evidenced by Tequatl. It is a ghost town on most of the servers. Those servers that have the players who are “looking for a challenge” are precisely the ones who will win the event and thus not trigger the challenging content…sure, you might have a few of those permanently switch servers to get the challenging one, but you will have far more people switching servers to go back to “easy mode”…particularly if “easy mode” has +% to mf as suggested by the OP. Why do you think most people run champs instead of fighting Teq or Karka queen.

Instead, any events or LS that changes areas for the better or worse should be done not as a single server, but as an average of servers, similar to the way the votes for Kiel were tallied. This also makes it easier on developers (single code-base to work from). So if all of the servers combined only succeeded in pushing back 40% of the advancing enemy, then yes, the area should now be filled with SCALABLE events to keep trying to push it back (if they succeed, then it will go back to normal).

Everything in LS (and in GW2 in general) should utilize the scaling abilities they already have in the game. You have no idea how difficult some of this content has been to complete on low-pop servers (my server is mid and I can see this). Believe it or not, there are actually people who cannot get achievements (like killing the lich in mad-king laby) because there simply are not enough people doing that event to succeed at it. This trend of introducing boss’s that are ridiculously over-powered even when there are only 5 people on the map has got to stop. I miss being able to do Tequatl on my own server, with my own server’s people rather than with TTS, or guesting to a high-pop server. I miss going to southsun to just roam around killing Karka’s without being annihilated in the camps which are constantly over-run by so many Karka’s that a solo player cannot even run through them without death. And like I said, Borlis Pass is considered a “mid” server….I cannot imaging how bad this is on a truly low-pop server.

SCALING must be used in LS content…and continue after the LS is over with whatever is permanently left behind. Currently the LS has made my world smaller (no longer go to southsun or SW sparkfly) because of the LS. I want a world that grows, not shrinks.

Chris, Bobby, Etc…

One really important thing I want to stress in all living story content (particularly when you start talking about consequences of failure) is to PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE using scaling for the events. Or at least test them on the low population servers first. On my server, Southsun Cove is a no-fly zone because all the camps are constantly under Karka control because we cannot get enough people to clear them…all the temples are almost constantly under a state of Orian Control (except right after re-set when we try (and sometimes fail) to clear all but Balthazar and Grenth usually, since we don’t have enough people to clear those two most of the time). Tequatl is a non-event that has now also become a no-fly zone since it is always covered in the fish heads. And it was extremely difficult for many of my guild-mates to get the blood and madness event achievements because we couldn’t get enough people to kill the lich in the labyrinth.

Lately, the tendancy is to make boss’s with tons of hitpoints and devastating attacks to better fight against the “zerg” and these bosses seem to require about 30-40 people at the minimum to take down…please be considerate of the servers that cannot get that many people on one map at a time…(particularly after the first couple of days of the new LS…we can usually manage for a few days, but after that, people just avoid those things). The minute Kessex hills started, no one could take on the lich anymore in blood and madness, (heck we could barely beat the candy-corn king).

In everything you release….think in the back of your mind…can this be accomplished by the 10 people that are on a low-pop server on a weekday afternoon…because almost all of the content released in the last 3 months (since return to lost shore) has not been.

Very excited about these changes, especially the Ranger, even though guardian is my main (nice to see more damage for guards) I know Rangers have needed some love for a while.

I love it, ANET should definitely use some of these ideas, if they did, they would have me as a loyal player for at least the next 5 years.

titanlectro.5029:

THE PROBLEM

At its most basic level, the problem is population imbalance.

However, the problem is actually two separate problems:
1) Game-wide server imbalance
2) Imbalance within a given match up

Each problem needs to be addressed separately.

GAME-WIDE SERVER IMBALANCE

Simply put, the difference between T1 and T8 is FAR too large. Guilds have been abandoning lower tier servers for stacked servers at an alarming and increasing rate. Why is this happening? It is quite simple.

Currently, the game rewards stacking
No one is forcing people to stack servers. People are doing of their own freewill, because there is an advantage to stacking servers, and no disadvantage (except recently for queue times, which Anet already plans to “fix.”) Because people have been encouraged to stack, they have been making this problem progressively worse.

The game needs to reward balance
If the game rewards population balance, the player base will balance the population themselves. Simply create a sliding reward scale: the lower the servers population, the greater the reward. People will transfer to these “rewarding” places, until the population balances out and the rewards are equal. From that point forward, if ever a massive shift happens to imbalance the populations, the players will correct it themselves.

Ideas for how to reward balance

• Base server transfer fees on server rank
• Scale WvW loot drops by population or rating
• Scale Wxp rank-up chests by population or rating
• Scale guild influence gain by population or rating

IMBALANCE WITHIN A GIVEN MATCH UP

Once an imbalanced match up begins, there is a tendency for the weaker servers to “give up” and for the larger servers to start “karma trains.” The three way battle was supposed to help balance this, when the two weaker servers gang up on the stronger server. Unfortunately, the reality is that the first place server will get a free pass, and the other two servers will “play for second.”

Currently, there is no reward for fighting against difficult/impossible odds
If you are dominating WvW with numbers, you are greatly rewarded with loot, karma, xp, wxp and three bonus chests. If you are steamrolled in WvW, then you are rewarded with not paying an armor repair bill (maybe). There is no incentive to keep fighting, other than personal determination.

The game needs to reward the underdog for not giving up
I’ve watched people wipe and die over and over again in PvE just because the reward was worth it. Give a reward “worth dieing for” to the underdog and they will keep fighting. Both sides will enjoy this more, because even the winning side gets bored in a washout.

Ideas for how to reward the underdog for not giving up

• When a server is losing by a large enough ratio, give them advanced powerful siege
• Give the losing team guerrilla warfare advantages, like weapon caches, hidden passages ways, and hiding places.
• Create a sliding scale MF bonus, based on the ratio between scores.
• Spawn dragons or other powerful monsters to attack and distract the winning team.

Currently, the game promotes playing for second
WvW is a classic prisoner’s dilemma. If both weaker servers work together, they could get first and second place. Instead, because they cannot trust each other, the weaker servers will play for second, make the balance worse instead of better.

The game needs to promote ganging up on the first place server
Due to the inherent nature of the prisoner’s dilemma, the game gives to give additional incentive to “go for first.” The incentive needs to be greater than the incentive to play for second, or it will not break the prisoner’s dilemma.

Ideas to promote playing for first

• Change the victory chests: 1st = 2 chests, 2nd = 1 chest, 3rd = 1 chest
• Give more war points for spiking players on the winning team (could be tied to bloodlust)
• Give better rewards for capping the 1st team’s objectives.

CONCLUSION

People always talk about the “meta,” but the “meta” is just people responding to game mechanics. People steer toward rewarding actions and away from punishing ones. Anet can leverage this to control the meta, and make it promote balance.

His idea is similar to mine, but goes into greater detail…I think these ideas on rewarding balance would work!

I agree, that there has to be an incentive to get players to move down to the lower population servers and get players to play more in the low pop servers.

How about a Dynamic Reward Boost for the lower population on WvWvW which would be visible by mousing over the WvW tab in the game….

So server A, is fighting B, and C. Server A has 3x the current WvW players of B and 2x the players of C. On the WvW tab for Server B it shows that there is currently a 50% reward gain (MF, exp, karma, Gold) while on Server C, they see a 25% reward gain. Players rush into WvW to take advantage of the higher rewards which then starts to stabilize the match…after 10 minutes now A is only .5x more than B but still 1x more than C. B’s rewards have dropped to only a 5% bonus, while C’s is now 10%….as more people come on or leave this dynamically changes the rewards for the lower population servers up and down. I don’t think this should be map based (as that could possibly be abused, but WvW based (players in WvW on your server).

This has a double effect of :

A: making players who play PVE on a particular server think twice about playing in WvW (if the rewards are good, they will come)…at the very least it would get the casual players to perhaps do WvW on a night instead of dungeons / champ farm…

and B: it would entice players and even whole Guilds to move servers down to one of the lower population servers. If your guild likes getting loot from WvW, you would want to be on one of the consistently lower population servers in order to get this loot. Of course moving your whole guild increases the population of that server…it becomes a guessing game for players… (If I move to Server C which consistently has a 25% reward gain, how many other players are also moving there?), but since moves cost money…players wouldn’t move all that much.

If you really wanted this to work fast, you could tie it in with a new armor or weapon skin that only drops in player kill bags in WvW….so players would REALLY be incentivized to get onto a low pop server for their chance at the rare new skin.

Eventually, I would think if this population discrepancy reward chance increase is great enough, you would start to see servers even out. Right now, with giving loot boxes to everyone on a “winning” server, the only incentive is for everyone to move to one of the winning servers to get the loot.

This could also help odd hours of the night, players may transfer just simply to play on a server at an odd time (maybe transfering to a EU server to play at 3:00AM when they are Low pop), which might even out times of the day also.

Its been shown again and again, People go where they can earn gold and stuff the fastest…use that to your advantage.

ColinJohanson.2394:

So a fun question to ask to help direct the conversation a bit: What aspects of your favorite television shows would you think would be cool to see reflected in a game medium?

To a large degree, the things we want to accomplish with living world overlap in a lot of ways with what a television series does. Or another example of our goals: if you bought your favorite RPG and the story was constantly expanded or continued, for free on a regular basis.

.

All of my favorite TV shows kind of follow the same format. You have an encapsulated episode the night of the showing…but in the background, there is an over-arching storyline that is season-long that is right in your face, but you can’t quite grasp the meaning of it.

Example: Farscape: Each week follows a monster of the week format (or situation of the week), but over-all there is an underlying story (evading the peacekeepers in first season, different ones in each other season) with an over-arching bad guy (Crais then Scorpious) with clear motivations for why they hate the protagonists (he killed my brother)…with the characters and events changing things around them (Aeryn Sun going from pure soldier – to caring woman, Chiana and Pilot growing up, Rygel getting less selfish, even Moya (the ship) having a baby! (shes a living ship))…I cared about the characters even as an observer…because I watched them change and grow…and they brought me fascinating places in the universe…alien worlds to explore! Some episodes were serious, some where silly, but all went towards the end-story…which sometimes lead to serious repercussions for the ship and it’s crew.

Dr. Who: Same thing, monster of the week format, kill the monster…but wait….what was that over there? Why does every episode have something about a “bad wolf” in it? oh wait, there is something bigger going on in the background…end of season…holy crap! At least one episode dealing with the “bad wolf” and finally a closer episode to tie it all together and close the season.

In each of these also, things happen, people change…and….“Previously, on farscape…” recaps.

The way I see current living story as a TV show….it is “The Simpsons” Each week, something happens that has something to do with Bart and Homer…maybe Homer sets off a nuclear bomb in the middle of springfield…next week…Springfield is re-set and Bart and Homer and Lisa go on another adventure. While this can be entertaining (with good writing), it can also get old really fast….you don’t care what happens to Bart each week, next week he will be exactly the same as the start of this week.
Actually, I take it back, its not even the simpsons…because right now we do not get an “episode” every two weeks….instead we get a tiny piece of an episode every two weeks….all the content we have gotten so far over the last 6 months has not even given us a single episode…it has a beginning (to a great many things) but still no middle or end to any of the beginnings.

Keirion.9105:

One thing that would make the LS/LW much more appealing to me would to be to move away from ‘installments’ and instead have things feel like they’re happening over time.

On a base level, this would ideally look like characters moving more across different maps. Sometimes you see caravans moving across one map, sometimes with events, but you rarely see people traveling.

• What if there were caravans that traveled from Shaemoor to Applenook over the course of multiple days, stopping at different towns in Queensdale, Kessex, and Genedarren?

• What if Ameranth who loves to travel and see the world stopped sitting in the Black Citadel like she’s done for over a year and started visiting different regions? Maybe she could be like Nicholas the traveler and when you find her in a location she’ll trade something to you for random junk items x times a day.

• What if Braham had to travel down from Cragstead to Hoelbrak to take Asura gates to get over to DR to attend the Jubilee celebrations?

With all of those, events/activites/merchants/whatever would still be available for people when the person/army/whatever reached the correct location but it could happen dynamically day to day, week to week, month to month, on a given date without being a ‘new release’ which we already have half the story for in the patch notes.

Bi-monthly updates could still happen to set all this up but if it happened on a cadence of a moving world instead of an update with a new package.

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this idea, and I’m sure people would have tons of more ways it could be used than the ones I noted above.

I like this idea as well to add more “living” into the living story. Give us some characters that move around. Or even places and things, it makes sense for Queen Jenna to be in her throne room, but does XXX the merchant always have to be standing in the same spot on the street. Let the guy move around! Introduce some characters that we see moving around the world. I think back to Morrowind. In that game there was actually a guy, that if you followed him around over a12 hour day he would get up, leave his house, go to his job (I think he was a butcher), flirt with a woman who stops by, eventually leave with her, go back to her house, and then in the middle of the night sneak back to his place…and the next day he would get up, go to work, and then go home…later that week, his wife confronts him…the developers planned out a whole week of content for him alone to do if you chose to follow him around all day every day!

Im with the others who posted here:

Living story to me should be exactly that…a living story that is working towards something. Right now the “story” is over every two weeks and a new one begins, even if they are related, they feel like a bunch of disjointed “one off” events…

Some suggestions based off what my friends and I have been discussing we would love to see.

Content that doesn’t disappear and achievements that do not disappear. Why not leave the Molten Alliance dungeon, or the aetherblade one, or the queens pavilion, or the Bazaar of the winds….and make achievements that can still be gotten to this day that tell us about the areas and what is happening. (like the utilizing each of the powers of the bazaar, or jumping for the crystals achievement). Make achievements (with “prizes”) that can be gotten by the new players, once they get to a level to actually do the new dungeons and areas.

You can still do your “quick” events (like the Aetherblades suddenly attacking, or the Karka attack on Lions Arch) but then after that quick event is done, the actual content (the “living part” of the living story) stays permanently within the land.

If done correctly, NONE of this would impact the personal story or the world that is already in place for new players. If anything it adds to it. Make the new dungeons have a “story mode” in addition to explorable that explains their place within the world. Did the molten alliance break up? Nope, they are still around, so why cant the dungeon be around. Are the Aetherblades gone? Nope, so leave the retreat. The bazaar makes a fantastic “jumping off” point for future content…so it could stay also. You could slowly introduce entirely new areas with new “story” content that would grow the world.

As an example, we already had the two-week “event” where the Aetherblades attacked, we know they came from the west of Lion’s Arch, in the next “event” we help the lions guard push the aetherblades back to their island (adding another small island to explore filled with towns full of aetherblades, with aethership factories on it, (the aetherblade retreat dungeon could be placed back here)). Achievements could be simply “go to the island” and defeat X number of Aetherblades", and “enter the Aetherblade retreat”…with other acheivements related to that.

By virtue of this fight and this “event” we are forcing the aetherblades further west so then the Tengu come out of hiding on their new island and open the gates within the Caledon Forest inviting us to come and help them with their fight against the Aetherblades. “Aiding the Tengu” and “visit the Tengu” could be achievements. Once we free them from the aetherblades during the next event, now the Tengu area is open. (if you wanted to make the Tengu a playable race, it could be introduced at this time also…unlocked…and then make it a race that was only choosable for players who have first run through an entire personal story as well as the Tengu acheivements). Once the Tengu event is done maybe another event that leads characters further south in the ocean, and then further (helping the quaggan?), and then further (fire island?) to eventually lead all the way to the deep sea dragon in its deep sea cave.

Each of these “events” should encompass both temporary content (defeat the Aetherblades and drive them from the Tengu island) as well as permanent content (opening of the Tengu island as a place to go and explore). They would have both temporary achievements that would perhaps only grant a title “defender of the tengu” while also permanent achievements that would grant achievement points (visit the tengu island for 5 points), or items, or even a new playable race to choose at character creation. If done correctly, this additional story also (by virtue of being in new areas) does not effect the current personal story at all…and people can still enjoy the game from the beginning to the end without feeling like they missed out on anything (since acheivements can still be gotten for the “new” content, new players can still catch up to older players)…they can still enjoy the Zhaitan story on their way to eventually heading to the Tengu island and eventually fighting the deep sea dragon.

You could do this with each of the four corners of the world (jormag north, Jungle dragon west, Kralkatorik southeast, Primordius northeast, and bubbles in the deep sea). Eventually GW2 would be a HUGE world that players could start at level 1 and then play on and on and on with the new content until they finally catch up to the “Living world” without feeling like they were lost or missing anything.

my 2 cents on what I hoped the living story would be and still could be.

Nick.6972:

Yeah, about that. I got FOTM Longbow. I have no Ranger.

I have 5 maces still in the bank after already giving one to my guardian and warrior, I’ve gotten 3 scepters, 2 tridents, 3 daggers, 1 GS, 1 Sword, 1 torch, and 1 shortbow, but have not gotten a single Hammer, staff, shield, spear, pistol, longbow, or harpoon gun. Its RNG…and for some reason my number keeps rolling “mace”.

I apologize, I had not seen this : https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/tower/Why-I-think-Mordremoth-is-next
Thread. which seems to convey some similar ideas that I had.

Just because it has to do with Scarlet, does not make her the only “big bad”. We still don’t know what scarlet saw that drove her insane…

Everyone has a problem with the Krait joining with her…what if it is not a choice of theirs to make.

What if…what scarlet saw was the Jungle Dragon behind all the corruption in the Caledon forest. The one mentioned in COE. The “lore” has it that the dragons might be the sources of all magic. Silvari are immune to dragon corruption, but what if they are not immune to the Jungle Dragon corruption but it manifests in a slightly different way. What if the entire “Nightmare” is due to the Jungle dragons corruption. What if Scarlet’s going crazy is part of it. What if she is just another “minion” of the Jungle dragon, Like Tequatl is a minion of Zhaitan.

Maybe ANET is thinking more long-term than most of the player base. Look at how slowly this whole thing is moving…maybe it is all leading to the Jungle Dragon and a new area opening up next to the Caledon forest. Maybe the Jungle dragon is spreading its “Nightmarish” corruption through the evil plants, and the reason the Krait’s eyes and skin is glowing in the preview is due to the Jungle dragon’s corruption influencing them.

We know that the aetherblades come from the west of Lions Arch, this is still maguuma, maybe they were enslaved by the jungle dragon also…and since the jungle dragon cannot corrupt humans / charr / norn like it does the silvari, it beats them into submission…

what I am saying is that maybe Scarlet herself isn’t as “kitten” as people say she is, maybe the only reason she has all this “power” is that she is working for something far more powerful and far scarier to the people of Tyria. The flame legion lost primordius, maybe another dragon offered them what they needed.

I could go on…but that is what I am hoping ANET is doing with this whole living story…that it is leading up to something more “grand”.

I’m with you…I do it for the challenge. Whenever I see someone on here calling for more challenging content within the game I wonder what their FOTM personal reward level is.

I once got “one shotted” by a bunny on a FOTM level 71 !!! I laughed so hard I nearly cried and doing that level of fractals was by far the most personally challenging content I have found…everything on that level hits like a champion in the regular game and champions hit like trucks! And you simply cannot “zerg” them, you only have 5 people so it takes tactics and skill to succeed.

However, it has been about a month or so since I last did fractals. The living story eats up all of my free time these days and I already outfitted all 8 of my level 80’s with ascended (infused) rings as well as 20 slot bags. I have over 500 pristine fractal relics and nothing to spend them on! Please Anet, let us buy ascended weapons or armor with pristine (or even regular) fractal relics! (but don’t make it an abscene 10,000 of them).

Warriors have easy access to Aegis….just adventure with a guardian…they spam aegis on everyone around them. Warriors already have practically every other useful skill in the game (except stealth which will probably come in the next patch), please leave some things to the other classes.

You forgot the Jungle dragon (life?) I secretly hope that what Scarlet ran into in your “journey” was the great jungle dragon and that she secretly works for him.

Deus Rift.3951:

However, when you level it means nothing because you essentially stay the same level. Sometimes I just want to mess around and it would be nice to go back and take on the champion monsters with a group when you are a little stronger just to kill a few minutes. Some people play like that now and again. People like me who don’t have all day to play tend to do that a bit. Not everyone wants to always keep going up and up. We enjoy stopping and taking time to just screw around. I can’t do that with this game because of level scaling.

This is what they call horizontal progression. You stay relative to the creatures around you so therefore you have nothing to prevent you from enjoying every area regardless of your level. You actually do get a little stronger. As you unlock more abilities and skills as well as get better equipment you will find that the lower level areas are indeed easier than when you first went there. Heck I solo champions in most of the areas once I got my exotic armor and weapons. So that ability to stop and screw around does exist in the game…I do it all the time. My level 80’s spend time in all the low level areas as well as in the 80 areas…which is something I never did in WOW…in wow, once I was max level, I only stayed in the max level areas and dungeons.
Since ANET is always adding little things to the low level areas (they just added a bunch to Kessex hills) it makes it more bareable to go back to there and adventure a bit without sneezing and accidentally killing all the monsters in a 600 radius around me.

Deus Rift.3951:

I agree. Guild wars at least had a story. This is way too much like WoW. So many junk quests that do nothing. Karma to buy things? Huh? I played for a week and I haven’t been back. Binding the skills to a weapon is so frustrating. Sure it may be a living world with better graphics but it is way too easy to get lost in all the trash quests, unviewed vistas, quests you have to repeat to get “Karma” and all that other crap. This game was hyped up waaaaaaay too much and it wasn’t all that it promised. What is with the level adjusting? I go into a lower level area and I get adjusted based on the enemies there? That is the main reason I will no longer play guild wars. You disappointed me with this game Anet. VERY much so.

LOL, the level adjusting and open world hearts for quests, vista’s are all the reasons I play GW2 over things like WoW. I love being able to go to a low level area and not feel like I am absolutlely trouncing everything (why would you ever go to a low level area in WOW…there was never a reason to go back). I love the vista’s. I also like the repeatable little side quests that you can jump into if you want to or ignore if you want to.

Guhracie.3419:

It’s worth noting that there are two threads about this: One is PVE specific (this one) and one is PvP specific in the appropriate area.

I’m also optimistic about this sort of communication.

There is also a WvW thread in that forum.

Me to, I am hesitantly optimistic, mostly because I really love the game, Ive just become frustrated recently…and it doesn’t seem like I am alone on that aspect….so I am hopeful that many of the ideas (or at least some of them) brought up in the collaborative threads get addressed (and quickly…that will be the key…if it takes a year to address something that they say they will take out of the thread…then what was the point.)

1: Population imbalance between servers (I’m noticing a trend with almost everyone on this one)
2: unique rewards for WvW (make me WANT to play WvW for something cool and unique)
3: Debuff for large groups, buff for small groups, maybe better rewards for small groups accomplishing an objective…get rid of the zerg! zerg = boring.

1: Balancing encounters / events / everything for low population servers so that everyone can enjoy them…USING scaling better. (Teq, Kark queen, even new labyrinth all require immense amount of players to achieve….not every server has this) I hate having to guest to do open world content.
2: ALT friendliness. Why are things made so difficult to get for multiple characters. (includes Ascended gear)
3: Making Living Story actually affect the world around us. I want to see change…I want to show friends that have left over the last few months that things in GW2 are moving / changing and they should come back at least to see that.

F I R S T.3976:

Release ascended and legendary armors at the same time. at least that way, people would have an option which ever they want to go for and future wise it’ll probably be easier to accept this one time release of both tier.

I actually truly agree to this. We need to see if it is worth it to go for the ascended, or keep going towards a legendary. It would suck to get ascended armor, only to find out a month later that you could have only gathered a few more mats and have legendary and you wasted those mats on ascended.

Or perhaps have a way to turn ascended into legendary? Or maybe even turn exotic into ascended…into legendary.

Lets not get into an argument on gathering of mat’s. That isn’t the point of the topic and I am trying not to get too far off of topic. Like I said, that is part of the debate over ascended weapons. We know Ascended armor will be a grind, but what would make ascended armor worth the grind in its implementation so that the majority of players not only think it is worth it, but would strive for it?

Ahlen.7591:

Hopefully they implement it the same as the weapons. Which to me were implemented quite well (they’re very easy to get).

If this were true, you wouldn’t see people complaining about it. In particular, people with ALT’s. I have rarely seen people with more than one ascended weapon, and know from my casual playing friends, that none of them even have one ascended weapon. This does not make them “easy to get” Getting to crafting level of 500 alone is not “easy to get” since the majority of players do in fact have trouble getting the near 200 gold worth of materials to get to that point, much less the materials then needed to give them their ascended.

But I actually do not want to argue over how difficult it is to get ascended…but this does show the controversy regarding ascended weapons.

Instead, I want to keep this productive. Does anyone have ideas for implementing Ascended armor that would be less controversial than ascended weapons?

Okay, we all know that ascended armor is coming. The real question is how will it be implemented. Since the Devs lately have been coming on here and reading posts I suggest we start suggesting ways they could implement it that are better than the way they implemented Ascended weapons.

I’ll start with what I think happened that was “wrong” about ascended weapons. Personally I think the worst thing with ascended weapons were the increased stats on them over “regular” exotics. Had ascended weapons been simply exotic stats but with an added infusion slot (to add infusions for fractals or slightly better stats) everyone would have received them much better. They ould have even increased the stats on legendaries and no one would have cared! After-all, they are legendaries!

So, my solution to ascended armor is thus: Ascended armor should have the exact same stats as Exotic with two exceptions: #1, they should have an infusion slot for people to add infusions to aid in higher and higher fractals or to put a slight enhancement on it (+5 to a single stat is not game-breaking). #2, To make ascended armor worth the grind (you know it will be one) allow them to have “selectable” stats like legendary weapons do. This would give people a reason to grind for the armor but not grant much of an advantage over people that did not grind. This also gives them a purpose within the game. Right now most of my characters carry two sets of armor, one for PVE and one for WvWvW and PvP. I used to carry three sets (one with MF).

By giving selectable stats to ascended armor people could customize their loadout for each dungeon that they enter (or if they want to change builds) and gives people something to work for after they finally get their exotic armor….but yet, since the stats are the same as exotic, it doesn’t give them an advantage over the people who have only exotic. It would justify the grind, since it would replace multiple sets of carried armor with a single set…and go nicely with the people who already have their legendary but not be game-breaking in WvW or PvP.

Heck, even without the infusion slot, selectable stats on ascended armor would make people want to do the grind to get it and it makes it ALT-friendly! You can grind towards a set for each of your characters.

Post your ideas. How could ANET implement ascended armor with minimal impact to the community where it wouldn’t create the outrage that you see from ascended weapons?

I like your idea, definitely I would love it more if events were more dynamic than simply zerging in one spot and all attacking the same target..but my biggest fear is that ANET will do exactly like you asked and make zones inaccessible if an event fails….

Before you ask something like that, please guest onto a low population server like Borlis Pass and run around. If you make it so that if an event fails, a zone is inaccessible, Borlis Pass will have no zones left. We can barely get enough people to take temples during prime time…if you jump on during the day, you’ll be lucky to find a group of 5 people to do something with…so your events will fail…as pretty much every scarlet event has failed, and as Tequatl is always in a failed state. Heck, even our “zergs” fighting champs rarely get above 20 people.

If you do an event that can close an area, it better be scalable to the amount of people in that zone…so on Borlis, if there are only 5 people in the zone, we fight maybe 40-50 bad guys….not the 10,000 you speak of. My biggest problem with the way Tequatl and even the Karka Queen are right now is that my server rarely if ever even manages to get 50 people together to accomplish them….so sparkfly and now southsun are basically off-limits areas to the rest of us. (I tried with a group of 5 last night to clear the Karka camps…we couldn’t.).

A ton of people left Borlis Pass during the Tequatl event…permanently transferring servers…implementing more things like this will kill the low pop servers entirely and make it even worse for the high-pop servers…you will be in constant overflow since everyone will be there.

I don’t post much, but I read a LOT. One thing that I really wish Dev’s would always keep in mind with ANY new content is the one thing that makes this game different from every other MMO I have played: Scalable content.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE keep in mind with whatever you come out with that not every server is one of the higher population servers. Tequatl is only the most recent example…

The one thing I fear with this new ‘collaboration’ is that once again, the servers with the most people will get great content, while those of us on low population servers will just have one more area that we cannot go to anymore (lost shores made it so we cannot go to southsun anymore since all the areas are over-run with Karka’s and we never have enough people in the area to clear them.)

Here is just some examples from the last week on a low-pop server: I was part of a Shatterer fight that failed, we ran out of time. Tequatl has never been defeated on my server….I have literally tried popping into every single map on the server shouting for people to come to tequatl to try a major attempt at it…only to still not have a full 150 people for the event. Southsun is a ghost land (too many Karka for small groups to even attempt). I don’t think we have taken the temple of Balthazar since the changes to that…I have done numerous Scarlet events lately where we don’t even get past the first stage because we dont have enough people. I couldn’t find enough people in Orr last night to do temple clearing….and that was during prime time….We took Lyssa, Melandru, and Dwayna with only about 8 people, but we had no hope at Grenth, or Balthazar, or any of the others. The biggest guilds (that haven’t already transferred servers) cant seem to get more than 30-40 people on at a single point in time…for even guild events…I could go on.

Lately, this has become the trend, make content that requires hundreds of people to complete…or change existing content making it “harder” by making it require more people.

If there is one thing that made this game the most enjoyable game I have ever played, it was the scalable events…and if there is one thing that has made this the most frustrating game lately, it has been the recent tendency to NOT use that scaling. The latest Tequatl event actually caused a ton of people I know to switch to higher population servers…(which only made my server even LESS populated) and they are loving being on the high population servers…I have guested with them…and was amazed that we can actually fight the Karka Queen, or clear temples, or actually WIN a scarlet invasion.

If your goal is to get the low population servers low enough where you can simply merge them…then okay…merge us and help us out already. If your goal is to make content that is enjoyable to everyone…then PLEASE start using the scaling you already have built into the game and not start the bar so high that low pop servers have no chance at completing this content. Everything else can be dealt with but we cannot conjure people out of thin air (unless you bring back GW1 heroes)….Please, start using your scaling algorithms more when doing EVERYTHING.

We low-pop servers also want challenging content….I am sick of guesting to high-pop servers to do content that was released for all of us…and from what I have read on the forums, they are sick of me coming to their servers as well…but the recent releases have left us absolutely no choice.

A good thing to have happen, might be for the ANET folks to start spending some time playing on the low-pop servers so they can see our challenges. While guesting on the high population servers I saw an ANET person doing each of the events with us! I had never seen anyone with that tag before above their head on my home server. I know it is more fun for them to play on the high-pop servers because there are more people…but then they are not seeing what the low-pop servers are dealing with…and this might be the cause of the lack of scaling in events. Spend some time with us low pop folks and then come up with challenging content that works for us as well.