Guild Wars 2

Red Queen.7915:

@StarbornStriker: I’m not 100% sure about that, but I think changing the number associated with your account either requires you to have access to the actual physical phone to do so, or, in case you lose it, another proof of identity/ownership of the account, like a credit card receipt (not sure about the exact process here). I know banks that send transaction numbers to your phone require you to use said phone to change the number (or make any changes to your online account). So any hacker would need to hack or outright steal your phone to change the number.
I suppose a similar system will be in place here.

I assume the same; but if it requires contacting support to change the phone number, I wouldn’t consider it ‘easy.’ Unless there’s a way to strip the phone number from the account while you still have that phone and then add a new one later once you get the number. When we moved from England back to Canada, there was a good week where we didn’t have a new phone number, nor access to our old one. And when we moved from Canada to the UK, we went a month or more without having a phone number. We weren’t very concerned with logging into the game during times like that, but at the same time, I wouldn’t want a number I no longer had control of associated with my account.

And even if that is the case, I fail to see why it’s harder for the hacker to associate a phone number with your account than an authenticator (assuming the account doesn’t already have 2-step verification enabled), because they’d only need one legitimate phone number unless there’s a limit to the number of accounts they can associate it with (or a flag that would be tripped by rapidly associating a number of accounts with one phone number). It would be nice to have a bit more information.

Paul Ella.2037:

Red Queen.7915:

So, this has been asked, but not answered, and I’d really like to know…

Can I use one phone number for two accounts? I don’t give out my landline number on principle, so if I opt for the SMS option, can I use it for both accounts, or is that impossible for security reasons (or because it confuses the computer or whatever)?

Yes

Red Queen.7915:

And can I change the number associated with my account whenever, or is that going to be some complicated process and generally a pain in the rear? In case I lose my phone or ditch the number and get a new one? Because the blog post brags about how “keeping the same phone number for a long time” makes it secure, but what if, for whatever reason, I don’t have access to that number anymore?

Yes, you are able to change the number easily.

So, if it’s easy to change the number associated with the account, and there’s no limit on how many accounts you can use the phone number on, how is this option ‘safer’ than the authenticator? What’s stopping the hacker from simply changing the phone number associated with my account when they steal it? People have spoken on the forums about having double digit numbers of accounts; is there going to be some kind of cut-off or red flag for the number of accounts a phone number is used to authenticate? What about if you have to change the number frequently? I’ve moved pretty much once a year for the last three years. Holding on to a phone number is an alien concept for me.

I’m sure this isn’t really important, but I wasn’t sure if anyone had yet pointed it out. (Also, it’s pretty funny.) We ran Honor of the Waves Path 2 today and at least two members of the party experienced this glitch during cutscenes (at least the last two). It kind of seems like it was trying to render the character’s thumbs combined with his weapons somehow.

Galen Grey.4709:

@StarbornStriker

What you suggest would be amazing but not really doable I am afraid. Providing multiple endings to releases would be either considered super gimmicky (you might get different dialog or a different cut scene but in the end everyone ends up in the same point making those choices feel a cheat rather then a real choice) or fork the story which will quickly become unfeasable. Its already hard to create 1 update per 2 weeks imagine if at the end of the story you’d need to create 8 releases (even if just subtle variations of each other) for a single week to cater for every fork and thats assuming only 3 forks in a season that could only go 2 ways. Not to mention is how you’re going to merge the differences if say in one storyline an npc is dead while in another is not.

This isn’t really what I’m asking for, as I’m quite aware it would be unfeasible.

But I ask, what was the point of rescuing citizens during the siege against Lion’s Arch? To get a better reward? Why didn’t the devs use this in some way when they set up the next part of the living story. You know how easy it is to add an NPC that says ‘because x number of citizens got saved we have this advantage?’ It’s probably really easy. And would the players ever know whether or not we would have had that advantage otherwise? No. No we wouldn’t, no matter how much people speculated.

We could even take it one step further and say that they could have built a mechanic into the release whereby rescuing citizens gave you boons to other areas of the event rather than just better reward bags, so that there would have been a reason for people to help the citizens of Lion’s Arch other than ‘I want the best reward bag.’

The issue I have is that I feel like my presence in the story is useless. What did I really do that wouldn’t have happened the same without me? How did my actions hinder Scarlet? In the end they didn’t. That’s my complaint. And what impact did electing Kiel have? I still have really yet to see this or feel it in the game.

These are issues that can easily be fixed via the framing of the narrative. By wrapping the narrative a little bit more into the activities of each release rather than having the point be achievement points or a meta reward. Rewards are great, but I would like to see the story play a larger role in the living story. And I would like to feel that my character contributes to the events of that story, even if I’m not the big hero who does the ultimate thing in the end.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Video games with a well-crafted narrative cannot really do that well. Yet. There has to be some amount of developers thinking ahead of the players in order for it to really work.

My point here is that the developers profess to want to create a living world; meaning a world in which player actions have impact. In order to do that, there does need to be at least the illusion of choice or impact based on what the players do. Does that require creative thinking and planning? Absolutely. And that’s exactly what this game needs more of. If this game actually wants to do something new and innovative at some point, there needs to be a lot more thinking outside the box.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Season 1 of the LS was stated early on that is was happening at the same time as your PS. The pact was busy taking down Zhitan.

This makes no sense. If I was in the middle of fighting Zhitan how was I present for anything involving Scarlet? Also I believe the Dragon Bash was a celebration of the achievements of the personal story.

BrotherBelial.3094:

I’m guessing you like my self are not a game designer, or work at ANet, so we don’t know how hard it is to make content, not to mention the wasted time and money for content that might never be seen if ANet where to go down the rout of “if the avarage kill time for the scarlet fight is less than (X) we do the rainbows and unicorn ending”. That would mean the total destruction ending could never be seen and people would be on ANet then for wasting time on content we are not even seeing.

No I’m not a game developer, but I am a coder. I know the man hours that go in to making programs that do simple things, so I can guess the sheer amount of energy and effort that goes in to making a game on this scale. It isn’t MMO magic to me, I have enough understanding of code to guess why certain features are implemented the way they are and why certain things will never be added no matter how many times people request them.

I am not asking that Arena Net create two different versions of every outcome, actually, because it’s probably a safe assumption that the players will always do enough content in the game to achieve the set goal unless it’s a ridiculously impossible number.

But if we had more creative planning, like I said above, we could at least have the illusion that our actions had impact. Conversely, it would be nice if there were some battles we did win as well as some that we lost, instead of a long string of failures leading up to a shallow victory.

No one needs to tell me that stories don’t always have happy endings. I’m always the first do defend sad endings. But what we have with the first season of the LS isn’t a case of a sad twisted tale. Instead it’s a comedy of errors, where the people who are supposed to be heroes and protectors can’t get their act together enough to do anything meaningful until it’s too late. Someone put up a feedback thread after the LS ended where they pointed out that one of the major things the first season lacked was the ability for the heroes to have meaningful interaction and confrontation with the enemy, who instead stood on a high mountain and shouted from afar.

I am not asking for unicorns and rainbows. I’m asking for my character’s presence to matter.

I have to say, this is a concern I share, and a major one. If you take a look at the major events of season 1 and remove the heroes from them, what changes? Ultimately, I suppose, Scarlet would have lived if there hadn’t been anyone there to take her down, but everything leading up to that point would have been essentially the same. You could argue that common people would have died in greater numbers without someone to destroy the tower of nightmares, molten facility and atherblades, but that does nothing to ease my sense of pointlessness in the whole affair.

Despite having an organization designed to fight dragons, no action was taken to hunt Scarlet until very late in the story. And when the time came to find her secret base of operations, you simply went to the star on the map when finding her should have been a major part of the story.

Despite belonging to the organization responsible for defeating a dragon, no one believed us when we said there was danger coming to Lion’s Arch. We were unable to save the city because it was arbitrarily written into the story that this would be an impossibility.

If the idea of this game is to have a living world – a world that breathes and changes by the actions of its players – then the very idea should be that the actions of the players impact and change the world. That by saving a certain number of citizens we could have turned the tide in Lion’s Arch. That by defeating the hybrid more quickly in the tower of nightmares we could have mitigated the danger.

If Season 2 is another story on railroad tracks, where the main characters are destined to stumble and lose the entire course of the story no matter how hard they try, what’s the point?

I’m not saying it should be easy. I’m not saying the heroes should always succeed at everything they do. But there has to be a balance somewhere. We have to be able to do something good at some point, or why bother?

My apologies if this has already been discussed (15 pages is a lot to wade through). It seems to me that one step towards solving this problem would be removing the cities from the Megaserver.

Isn’t the idea behind the Megaserver that underpopulated areas will now have enough players to make them fun and manageable? So when I’m running around outside Queen’s Dale, I’ll actually encounter people to do champions with.

But why do I need to encounter more people than I used to in cities? You aren’t doing anything in a city that requires socialization unless you want to RP. I’m sure there are lots of places RP takes place out in the world, and the Megaserver might continue to make that difficult. But why can’t we have our home servers when we’re in cities?

I’m on TC, and it’s true that I would often be thrown into OF in Lion’s Arch, but not so often that I couldn’t regularly get into the main map. And every other city I pretty much never encountered OF except for occasionally in Divinity’s Reach. If we could at least have the cities as our home servers, RPers would at least have a haven. A place where they could meet and chat and move out into the world from. It would solve a lot of the complaints I’ve witnessed in this thread.

Way in the long ago, in the days of GW1 we had districts. Several people have already suggested a way of moving from map to map which sounds remarkably like districts (IE a drop down menu where you can move between them and each one has labels). Also way in the long ago, for eight long years, we begged Anet to give us RP districts. IE districts with labels that said RP so the RPers had somewhere to go. We never got them.

One of the things I loved about GW2 was that it felt like home servers solved that problem. We had a place to go. Now we feel it’s been taken away from us. The creation of districts, and RP districts at that, would be fabulous. Failing that, having our home cities back would at least help. Surely since no events take place inside cities, it wouldn’t be harmful to remove them from the Megaserver?

BobbyStein.2315:

What are your top three requests?

1. Make the player character an important, pivotal piece of the story. Give us the illusion of choice, even if it is, ultimately, an illusion. We shouldn’t come to the end of a year and feel our characters might as well not have been present.

2. Absolutely every part of the story and lore IN the game. I don’t mind if I have to go looking for it, but my search shouldn’t include anything outside the inside of the game.

3. Persistent, lasting impact of the story that changes the way we interact with the world, not just the way that it looks (IE; changes to heart quests in areas like Kessex Hills where major plot events have left their mark on the world). And there should be both positive and negative instances of this – so not just rubble littering the map.

I agree, it would be nice to know if this is the final change. It would be disappointing, especially since armors that already glowed, and that thus no one had complained about, have now been affected. But I would rather know before I go spending money on dyes or skins. Even if the devs can’t tell us exactly what they plan to change in the future, I feel we have a right to know whether or not our armor is now considered “finished.”

I, for one, think this thread is a good idea. I think it illustrates how rewards are regarded in PvE vs WvW and that, perhaps, the devs should pay a little more attention to how they reward dedicated WvW players.

I’ll admit, I don’t play WvW that often. When the season rewards were announced, I wanted the title and the Dolyak. For me, that meant learning to play WvW properly and dedicating a lot more time to it than I used to. For me, the title and the Dolyak mini were worth that. I expected the rest of the rewards in the chest to be meh.

Maybe there will be people who dislike me for admitting I came to WvW for the rewards. I can respect that. But whenever I was in WvW, I tried to do my best. I learned what the tactics were, what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do. I did a lot of things I’d never done before (such as roaming with small groups to take camps and unguarded keeps) and I had a ton of fun doing that. I discovered that I actually really like WvW and while I don’t think I’ll do it every day, I think I’ll do it a lot more than I used to. And while I’m not the best at it, I think I know enough to contribute to the team while I’m in there. And I think those are all good things.

BUT, I don’t think WvW season 1 was designed for someone like me – and if it was I don’t think it should have been. WvW Season 1 should have been designed around the idea of rewarding dedicated WvW players for their work in the game. And that reward should have been equal to what I can earn in 7 weeks in PvE. The reward should have been on par with making regular WvW players care about the WvW league and doing well in it when the next go comes around. Aside from the title and the mini, which everyone knew they were going to get, I don’t see anything in this chest that stands out to a WvW player as different from anything they normally get spending an hour or two in WvW.

That’s where I think it fails. Did I expect any more than that? No. Not really. Does that make it okay? I guess that’s up to more dedicated WvW players to say.

MrSilver.5269:

But, it says, Linden quietly changed its contract terms to remove the concept of ownership and has confiscated the property of some users without compensation. The lawsuit seeks more than $5 million in damages for what it says was fraud and violations of California consumer protection laws.

This would be the legal issue. IE the company changed its existing TOS without notifying the population they had done so. You’ll notice whenever a company (say Facebook) changes their TOS, they have to notify you and you have to click on something which says you accept the new terms of the agreement. If you don’t accept the new terms, of course, your account terminates.

If this company quietly updated their TOS to remove the rights their players previously had and did not notify them, thereby allowing them to agree to the new terms of service, then yes, they did something illegal. The new terms wouldn’t be sustainable because the users wouldn’t have agreed to their half of the contract.

Arena net has not done that. They removed an item from their gem store. That’s vastly different from removing terms from their legal documentation without notification.

BeoErgon.9107:

StarbornStriker.6493:

LordByron.8369:

The legal thread about Flamekiss is another..as said many times TOS has no legal value in most countries….

You are totally off topic here

That’s hilarious. If the TOS had no legal value, the game wouldn’t be for sale in that country.

Will play the evil advocate here…
The TOS could perfectly have been used against us that wanted this armor removed.
Anet owned the game and if they decided they wanted that armor out, there was nothing we could say.
But we complained and they listened.

It’s their game, but without customers it is an useless game.

The main point of my post wasn’t really to argue for or against the removal of the armor (I have an opinion, but I’m not going to state that opinion. Because I wasn’t affected by this in any way, so it’s really not my place to comment).

I did, however, notice a lot of argument over how sale of the game is defined. People who want their money back have strong feelings about what is due them after the purchase of a game or gems. But the fact of the matter is, there already exists a legal definition of the relationship between customer and company in terms of game sale. Like it or lump it, arguing about it won’t change it.

Mainly I want to see factual information perpetuated so that people who are upset have the best chance of getting a fair resolution. Angrily making baseless demands is likely to upset the support team, and then they’re unlikely to be generous. Making a reasoned, logical argument based on the available information means the people who are upset are more likely to get a resolution they deem is fair when the time comes.

Unfortunately, that time is not now.

LordByron.8369:

The legal thread about Flamekiss is another..as said many times TOS has no legal value in most countries….

You are totally off topic here

That’s hilarious. If the TOS had no legal value, the game wouldn’t be for sale in that country.

A word about digital sales, for everyone claiming Arena Net has legal obligations because “reasons.”

You don’t rent the game from Arena Net. You don’t OWN the game after you buy the game from Arena Net. Arena Net is not selling you Guild Wars 2.

Arena Net sells you a license to use Guild Wars 2.

This is how most software sales work. Take Windows, for example. When you purchase a PC with Windows installed or buy a copy of Windows to install on a computer, you don’t own that copy of Windows. You own a license to use Windows. There are two types of licenses: Per Device and Per User. Windows tends to be Per Device; IE you can use a copy of Windows only on one Device. If you replace that Device, you can no longer use your copy of Windows on the new one, you have to buy a new copy.

A.Net’s GW2 license is Per User. Meaning you can install their game client on as may Devices as you wish, but they can only ever be used by one Person.

All of this is written in legalese in the Guild Wars 2 user agreement that every GW2 user has to agree to in order to download and install the game:
License Grant — Any Service, Content or Software supplied by NCSOFT is licensed, not sold, by NCSOFT. All title and rights not expressly granted in this agreement, including but not limited to any IP right and the display thereof, are retained by NCSOFT and/or third-parties under agreement with NCSOFT. NCSOFT hereby grants You a revocable, non-exclusive, license for personal and non-commercial use of Service, Content and Software that is non-transferable…

Guild Wars 2’s Terms of Service clearly defines it as a service. You purchase a license to access that service. The same TOS also states that Arena Net has sole discretion to modify their service at any time.

SERVICE AND AVAILABILITY You acknowledge that NCSOFT may in its sole and absolute discretion provide subsequent versions, enhancements, modifications, upgrades or patches related to any part of the Service.

The TOS also states (and Gaile has explained this many times):
YOU ALSO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT NCSOFT HAS NO OBLIGATION TO REFUND ANY PAYMENTS, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, RELATED TO AN ACCOUNT WHETHER OR NOT SUCH PAYMENTS WERE MADE OR AUTHORIZED BY YOU, FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INTERRUPTION OR UNAVAILABILITY OF SERVICE (SEE ALSO SECTION 10). YOU ACKNOWLEDGE, AND FURTHER AGREE, THAT NCSOFT MAY, IN ITS SOLE AND ABSOLUTE DISCRETION, TERMINATE UNDER THE PROVISIONS OF SECTION 3© ANY ACCOUNT RELATED TO ANY ATTEMPT TO OBTAIN A REFUND OF ANY PAYMENTS, WHETHER SUCH ATTEMPTS ARE MADE BY CONTACTING AN ISSUER OF CREDIT CARDS OR OTHERWISE

I understand people are upset. They spent money on something. That something is now going to disappear and they feel cheated. But there’s no point in having a legal debate over what Arena Net is obligated to do or not do. Terms of Service exist for situations just such as this one. There is no legal basis here by which Arena Net could be taken to court. The fact that they are willing to refund gems when a quick skim of their terms of service, which you had to agree to in order to play the game, clearly states they’re under no obligation to provide such should be proof that they value their customers enough to make up for their mistakes.

Demanding everything and the kitchen sink is going to get you nowhere. Gaile has clearly stated that the customer service team will address individual questions at such time as it becomes relevant. Until the new skin is released, no action is going to be taken.

And flooding Gaile’s inbox when she’s made that clear is only going to prevent people with other, more urgent issues from getting help in a timely manner.

Edited to add:
Gaile’s statements about how customer service will be handled:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Flamekissed/first#post3276620
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Flamekissed/first#post3276756

Regina’s original post stating you will be refunded (there is no evidence that there will be any kind of discount on the new skin for those claiming they saw it):
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Merged-Cultural-Human-T3-Not-Exclusive/page/12#post3275237

Electro.4173:

StarbornStriker.6493:

I don’t envy Kristen having to deal with this. I feel like the poor woman will never win no matter what she does. And I hope she knows I, at least, have no ill will toward her, no matter how much I want my glow back.

Very much this. Kristin is the only “cultural / racial” developer that ever interacts with the community at all (at least to my knowledge), and its clear she’s listening and trying to do what she can, but I don’t think there’s ever going to be a perfect solution to this whole glowing Sylvari armor thing. One of the hazards of changing something, even something oft-requested, is that no matter how many request it there’s always some who don’t want it changed. Hopefully she doesn’t let it get her down and just keeps doing her best.

While I still don’t understand the decision to alter armor which had been in the game so long, I do think Kristen is doing a phenomenal job. I know my first post in this thread was pretty emotional too, but I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that this woman is working very hard for us.

And I do feel like she’s honing in on a solution. It just isn’t quite there yet. Hopefully there is a way to give us our vibrant glow back while keeping our dark dyed armors. I hope Kristen will chime in sometime after the holiday and let us know what she’s thinking. Until we get word on what may or may not be upcoming, I’ll leave my armor as-is and hope for the best.

I just want to be clear, my complaint isn’t with the reversion of dyes to their original (or close to original) textures/hues for Sylvari armor. I’m relieved to see that was done and I’m glad that people are happy they got their colors back.

My issue is that my armor, which was previously unaffected by the glow/dye issues now no longer glows properly. My dye colors are pretty much identical to what they were before (I even checked screenshots) but my armor does not glow the same way and there’s no way to make it glow the same way unless I dye the entire set white or celestial, which looks horrible.

I think we can expect four main types of posts in this thread:
1) People who were affected by the original change and are happy about the reversion
2) People who were affected by the original change, liked it and hate the reversion
3) People who were affected by the original change and still aren’t happy about the reversion compromise
4) People (like me) who weren’t affected by the original update but are now affected by the change in glow

Considering that, I think we can all agree it’s impossible to please everyone. I applaud Kristen for her dedication, and I hope she’ll continue to work on this issue because there are clearly still a large number of unhappy players.

My personal opinion is that all the changes should be reverted and a second set of each armor should be implemented, with glow for those that don’t glow and without glow for those that do. Glow is clearly visible in the preview window at night, so everyone can pick the type of glow they want. I’m guessing that a glow slider/control option would be more complex than this.

I can’t stress enough that I feel it’s a mistake to mess with items that already existed in the game. Armors are one of the rewards we chose for ourselves, even if we chose a cheaper armor and dye set, it doesn’t mean it isn’t special or important to us. If you weren’t willing to change a hair style because it might upset people who like it, why would you change something people spend their time, effort and possibly money to obtain? I still can’t understand this.

And if the goal here is to make all Sylvari armors glow, why oh why would you reduce the glow of armors that already had it?

To compound this issue, the changes were in the game long enough for people to get attached to the new look and spend equal amounts of time, money and effort to make it look nice. Now where do they stand? Their complaints certainly aren’t invalid. And for those of us who’ve just gotten our armor broken in the latest round of changes, we’re probably going to face a similar problem a month down the road, if and when we see another tweak or adjustment.

The constant changes to my main of late (because he was affected by the sylvari black-eye issue) have totally demoralized me where this game is concerned. I can only imagine how hard it’s been for people affected by the original armor update as well. Time is a very precious thing for me, which I choose to spend very carefully. If all the time and effort I put into something can be undone at the flip of a hat, I start to wonder if there’s a point in continuing. Looking at screenshots prior to this update makes me sad because I fear I’m never going to get that brilliant glow back.

I don’t envy Kristen having to deal with this. I feel like the poor woman will never win no matter what she does. And I hope she knows I, at least, have no ill will toward her, no matter how much I want my glow back.

What about those of us who already had dark colored armor with a bright glow and wanted it that way? Why should armors which already glowed be touched in the first place?

I decided to take some pictures to explain my prior post.

First picture: The way my sylvari looked before the recent update. Note the nice, consistent white glow in his chest and leggings (T2 heavy). At this point, I could not affect the color of the glow at all.

Second Picture: Same dye combo after the update. Note the inconsistent and much lighter glow. The most troubling thing is that the part of the armor that glows on his stomach is his skin color (the brown you see) and it does not match at all the glow color of his sleeves. It’s impossible to make this consistent.

Third picture: Changed the second dye channel (lower left-hand box). Note that this does affect the color of the glow on the sleeves, making it brighter, but does not touch the glow on his stomach.

If I could consistently affect the color of my glow with a single dye channel (IE closer to the first screenshot) I think I’d be fine with the change.

Chiming in here since I guess this is going to become the main feedback thread about the new change.

I’m very disappointed. It sounded from the update description that the change was designed to give control over the glow color to all tiers of armor across the board.

I have NO control over my glow color. Where before my armor glowed a brilliant but subtle white even while it was dyed dark colors, it now barely glows at all. Even if I dye my armor solid white, it still barely glows at all. The glow simply seems to lighten whatever color is underneath it, but it’s spread across all three dye channels in my armor. If I leave my armor dyes untouched, the only color which glows noticably is my skin color – the one color I CANNOT change at all.

My sylvari is a male warrior and wears a combination of T1 and T2 heavy armor. The T1 armor is unaffected because one of the dye channels already controlled the glow.

Considering these changes were designed to bring glow to armors that didn’t already have it, I’m confused as to why armors that already glowed have been touched. Surely there has to be some way to give me my old glow back? I don’t care if I can’t control the color of it. I liked it the way it was. At least the glow was noticeable.

If not, PLEASE tie the glow to a channel I can control. Even looking at NPCs wearing the same armor, it seems the glow is now predominantly the skin color.

This is not a graphical settings issue, it is a bug. Here’s the link to Kristen Perry’s confirmation in the original bug report thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/My-eyes-are-now-solid-black-after-patch/first#post3123442 Still no ETA on a fix though.

Thoughts on living world reward structure:

I think right now achievements drive the living story more than the story. I also think that’s a bad thing. For me it feels like every month I run around, do the same repetitive stuff (kill x number of these things, gather y number of that stuff, ect) just to get the reward item. And even participating in the living world events, I don’t feel like I know the story.

I think there should be two types of achievements for the living world and two types of rewards.

First type of achievements: Are gained by participating in the STORY aspect of the living world. Usually you already have two or three achievements that are like this because you get them from participating in the story instances. Another example are the achievements you received from the TA dungeon simply for completing it (without going to any extra effort).

First type of reward: Should come from completing the STORY aspect of the the living story. This should come in the form of a cosmetic item (which is typical most of the time). It should be relatively easy to acquire through no more effort than participating in the story and perhaps 4 daily achievements (I pick the number 4 because you have to complete 4 sets of dailies for the monthly achievement).

Why should this item be so easy to achieve? Because it was already stated in a previous post that these rewards are meant to be ‘badges’ proving that you participated in the event. Therefore everyone participating in the living story should earn their badge for being there.

Second tier of rewards: Should be harder to achieve. These are the tasks for the achievement hunters and the players who want more challenging content. This is where you put your time consuming achievements. Your kill x number of y thing. Your gather y number of z thing. This is where you carve 500 pumpkins and burn 100 dragon effigies. This is also where you place extra challenging stuff like beat this boss a certain way. Or beat this extra boss. Or do this really challenging jumping puzzle. The Queen’s Gauntlet was a good example of this. People who didn’t want to participate in the super challenging stuff still got their reward. People who enjoy the extra challenge had plenty of other stuff to do.

Second tier rewards: I think titles should fit into this category (since people generally agree you should have to go to effort for titles). Minis would also seem to fit well into this reward system because they’re collectibles.

I don’t think cosmetic items (such as armor and back pieces) should fall into this category because I think less people will be upset over missing things like minis and titles (your millage my vary).

Then you have your third type of rewards at the moment which are nodes in your home instance. I firmly believe these should NOT be specific living world rewards because new players or returning players who have missed the events which offer them are at a distinct disadvantage if they’re unable to receive the nodes.

I like the idea of these nodes existing. I like the idea of them being rewards. But I think they should always be available after the fact.

The only solution I have come up to for this is that they could be tied to the final story instance of living world content (as the candy corn node was). If you’re going to include a way for players to play the story after the fact, then you can tie these nodes to whatever catch-up story instance players who missed the event get access to and allow them to get the nodes that way.

OR for people who miss the current living story event you could create a category where if they complete X number of meta achievements in other living story releases they unlock the ability to access previous nodes.

TL:DNR: Reward everyone who completes the story with their badge of participation. Provide longer-term, more challenging goals for those who want them with a secondary reward. Don’t block access to home instance nodes via living story content because it puts new and returning players at a disadvantage.

On scripting failure into the living story….

I advise you to be very careful with this. I agree that the living story needs real consequences. Characters we care about may need to die. Places we love may need to change. This is the nature of a living, and emotional, story.

However: no one – and I mean no one – wants to spend hours on an event only to discover a positive outcome was impossible. No one wants to spend hours trying to save someone and – oh, no, you can’t. They’re dead.

Scripted failure can seem heavy handed to the player. It can be downright frustrating. If no matter what you do, you’re doomed to failure, you start to wonder what’s the point?

I think it’s best if failure and consequence grow naturally as the result of decisions made. If you can’t give the players decisions to make, at least have the main characters of the living story make some tough decisions that eventually end up being wrong.

I’ll use an example from Stargate Atlantis, one of my favourite TV shows (since comparison to TV seems to be something you’re looking for). At one point the characters encounter an artificial race known as the Replicators. The Replicators want to help them fight their enemy, but they can’t. They’d need to be able to modify their base code and their creators prevented them from doing that. So the main characters help them.

At the time it seems like a good idea. But later it comes back to bite them several times. The Replicators end up being almost as bad as the people they were already fighting. But this wasn’t immediately apparent. At the end of the day, they thought they did a good thing.

And this is a reoccurring theme throughout the Stargate franchise. Sometimes the heroes save the day. Sometimes they save the day at a cost. And sometimes their best intentions get twisted into something terrible somewhere down the road.

This story needs success as much as it needs failure. We’ve been fighting hoards of minions for months now and despite our best efforts we’ve made zero progress. What’s the point of participating in the Scarlet events? They don’t do anything. None of the heroes’ efforts have amounted to anything. The bad guys just run more and more rampant. It was sort of frustrating to get to the end of a 4+ hour dungeon (new TA path) and realize we’d essentially done nothing. Of course we weren’t going to get to fight Scarlet, but we didn’t learn anything remotely important either.

Balance success and failure. We, the players, need to feel like we’ve accomplished something. We need to feel like we won the day, beat the enemy back, earned some kind of temporary respite. I don’t feel this at the moment.

And maybe some of the things we do trying to save the world, end up coming back later to bite us. We can’t always win. It’s a fact of life. But arbitrary scripted failures won’t feel any better than what we have now.

I’d like to offer more suggestions but, frankly, I don’t envy the writers this task. And I can’t, at the moment, think of any other ways to handle it. Hopefully someone else will have input.

BobbyStein.2315:

Player Agency
“Q:What do you guys think about the incredible negative feedback you got for Trahearne?
A:Narrative Designer Scott McGough and I talked about this very topic some time ago. In short, Trahearne was intended to fill a very specific role that, in terms of both gameplay and story, the PC could not fill—an order-neutral character with extensive knowledge about Orr and the magic of undeath who could coordinate a global war effort and make the necessary plans, thus leaving the actual gameplay up to the player. Further, Trahearne’s character design was intentional in that he would be a reluctant hero who, through interacting with the player, evolved into someone who could step up to lead the Pact.

This didn’t resonate well with some players for a variety of reasons.

I wanted to take a moment to comment on this. Because right away with the introduction of Trahearne into the later periods of my personal story, I understood what you were trying to do. And I think it was a great idea. One of the problems with MMO stories is that every character is the hero and you end up just one in a million of faces. Why should NPCs care about you? Everyone’s the same. The introduction of Trahearne fixes that a little. He becomes the focus while the PCs become part of this army that came together to fix the problem. The people of the world then have a specific way of reacting to you that feels a lot less generic than most MMOs.

My dislike of Trahearne stems from one specific moment in the game. Unfortunately, I chose to play the game first as a Sylvari. Had I played with any other race I don’t think this would have been an issue, because my PC would not have already known him. However, when my mentor said “Hey this is Trahearne a good friend of mine.” I was like “Yeah… we know each other.”

Yet when Trahearne and I (my sylvari character) went to visit the Pale Tree she forgot me. Suddenly I wasn’t her son anymore, I was “Trahearne’s friend.” Never mind that he accompanied me on a quest early on in the game. Never mind that I was her avatar for mediating the squabbles between the three orders. Now I was just some guy Trahearne knows. Trahearne’s friend.

To add insult to injury, the pale tree gave Trahearne the sword I got for her during my personal story quest! Without even acknowledging my participation in prior events! Suddenly it was like Trahearne was the favoured son. I was just this guy. Forget what I did. It wasn’t important. Trahearne, now there was a special guy.

Had I played the personal story to that point with any other race first, I would have felt differently. Had I not chosen the personal story path that led me to retrieve that sword I might have felt differently. But there I stood, the person who made all of this possible, and the pale tree didn’t even call me her son anymore.

It kind of makes it seem like all of the choices I made in my personal story were irrelevant because, in the end, I got railroaded through a generic instance that was in no way catered to the way I played the game. I do understand that with a game like this you can’t have deeply nuanced cut scenes for every different possible combination in the game. But don’t you think it makes sense for the pale tree to acknowledge a sylvari character as her child? Or that if you participated in a major plot point earlier on in the story the NPC should maybe remember that?

Anyway, I hope this is in someway helpful. Because I don’t dislike the character or what you tried to do with him. And if the conversation between myself, him and the pale tree had been slightly different, I probably would have enjoyed that particular part of the plot.

Maniac Magee.2643:

It will be easy for anyone who reads this to wonder why I am making such a big deal on just aesthetic issues but it is the time I put in that matters.

Why would anyone invest time into your game if there’s a chance that time will be thrown out the window? One of the cornerstones of MMO play is the ability to CREATE something.

This describes exactly how I feel right now. It’s frustrating to load up the game, look at my Sylvari and think I may as well not bother doing anything with him, it’ll all be down the drain in a few weeks time.

To other people my character might just be a group of pixels on the screen. To me he is a person. He lives in my head. And as a character I write outside the game, he’s a very deeply personal creation. I spent hours painstakingly recreating him in this game. I created him as every different race to make sure I picked the right one. I recreated him as a Sylvari several times to make sure I got the perfect hair, the perfect eyes, the perfect skin pattern, that he glowed just so.

I spend hours running between vendors previewing this armor combo and that armor combo, during the day and at night to see what works best. The game has threatened to kick me out of it because, apparently, previewing dyes in the TP doesn’t count as ‘active.’

How my character looks matters to me. He is my avatar in this virtual world. One of the things I loved about this game was being able to have some personality input as well, to completely customize my game around the character I envisioned. So far I’ve even been able to make choices that tailor his personal story to him to perfection.

But if one link in this chain fails, so too does all my hard work. For me this is the point of an MMO; create a character, experience the world with them. If all the time and energy I pour into that creation can be thrown out the window overnight, why should I bother?

I agree that the work which has gone into this is phenomenal. I was so excited when I read that glow was coming to armors that don’t have it. I totally want that to happen. But I also agree the implementation doesn’t quite work.

I liked the suggestion of two sets of armor, one that glows and one that doesn’t. I’m also okay with not necessarily being able to control the color of the glow if it’s say a white glow (as with my current T2 heavy set, I can’t control the glow of that), if it means having that extra gradient, texture combo that makes the armor so special.

Thanks Kristen! It’s a relief to know this is a mistake and will be fixed!

I really love the idea of all the Sylvari armors glowing. I even really love the idea of the TA armor glowing when my sylvari wears it (because I’m thinking about getting him a few pieces of it at some point). When I first read about this update I was really excited.

After seeing so many screenshots in this thread, I’m scared. My sylvari wears T1 and T2 heavy armor and I spent hours dying it so that the glow would look just so at night and the armor would still look the way I wanted it during the day. My T1 pieces glow blue and are dyed to match the glow of my sylvari’s body, but the T2 pieces glow white. As it stands, I don’t think I can modify the glow color of my T2 armor. But I also kind of really love how it looks. I see a lot of the gradient and texture that really makes the sylvari armors pop being drained after the update. I don’t want this to happen to my sylvari :/

Also, I know it’s been mentioned elsewhere, but my Sylvari now has jet black eyes after the most recent update. Was something done to the sylvari base colors as a part of this change? Was this accidental/unintended? Is it a bug that’s going to be fixed? Because my main character now looks like a soulless husk. Which is upsetting enough but now I’m scared it’s only a matter of time before his beautiful armor gets ruined too.

I’m really glad to see so much discussion on here about plot and pacing, because I definitely think those are things that need to be addressed in this game. But I want to take a moment to point out here that the latest release illustrates a lot of the points I made in my post about the Living Story updates causing issues in the rest of the world. One only needs to glance at the game bugs forum the day of release to note how many things unrelated to the living story are affected by these releases.

On a more personal note, my main (and ONLY level 80) character is now rendered unplayable due to a graphic glitch which makes his eyes appear empty and soulless and I, prone to nightmares, have chosen to continue sleeping over playing the game until it’s fixed. But as the glitch remains unacknowledged by the Devs, it could be weeks or months until said issue is addressed. It’s not uncommon for bugs like this to sit for weeks or months unfixed. Awhile back there was an issue with whisper’s armor having a dye channel inadvertently removed and if I remember correctly it took over a month for it to be fixed.

Things like this might seem ‘nitpicky’, but every time a player is affected by a glitch like this, or a bug with an event they want to play, or the unpolished rough edges of the new releases, it affects their overall enjoyment of the game. And every time that happens it’s a little harder to get them back. When you’re writing a novel, the same is true of your structure, grammar and plot elements. Every inconsistency, every mistake means a risk in losing your reader. How many bugs of this nature, that seem completely unnecessary, does a player sit through before they throw up their hands and walk away? How do you get them back after they do?

It’s another argument for a slower pace. For more time set aside for testing and polish. Are bugs going to happen? Yes of course they are. But not every living story update needs to bring some new disaster with it. It’s to the point where I’m starting to dread the updates because opening the game turns into ’what’s going to be broken this time?’

I’m a bit late to the party on this one. I hope it’s still being looked into (and I hope it’s okay if I post since I just noticed it).

We recently moved and I was away from the game for about a month. I just recently started leveling this character (I have a tendency to create a new character and let them sit awhile before I start leveling them). So it had probably been about two months since I looked at this character. When I started leveling her I thought her hair accessories looked a bit bright for my normal choices but I didn’t think it was worth remaking her over it.

When I saw this thread I went back and looked at my old screenshots right after character creation. I know there’s a day/night difference here but it definitely looks like the new screenshot (left) is brighter and less metallic than the old one (right). Since I was away from the game, and this character, I obviously didn’t equip anything new or change any of her dye colors.

So I searched my history of screenshots. I don’t have a really good screenshot that shows my main character, Domerin, close up during the day so that you can see his eyes. I do have this one I took a few days ago (right), prior to the patch, of him holding a torch inside Sharkmaw. It pairs perfectly side-by-side with the night shot I just took of him after the most recent patch (left).

For me this is a pretty severe issue. Looking at my main character right now creeps me out. I feel like he’s going to steal my soul in my sleep. Also, I never used a makeover kit. He’s been the way he was prior to the patch since his birth when I bought the game. I don’t know if that’s relevant.

Same issue here – Sylvari’s eyes are completely black after the patch. They’re supposed to be blue. In fact he doesn’t look like he has eyes, but rather empty holes in his head. It’s not only ugly, it’s creepy.

In case it’s of any use it’s a male sylvari warrior wearing a combo of T2 and T1 heavy cultural armor.

Neglecting the wider world in favor of the living story
One of my personal, primary complaints is that so much development time seems to go into this living story, yet the wider world seems neglected. There are hearts which are bugged, leaving them difficult to complete. There are in-game events that don’t trigger properly or can’t be completed due to bugs.

A friend and I got stuck in the flame temple once because by the time we had figured out how to do the mini dungeon, the levers inside had somehow stopped working. Our only choice to escape was to use a waypoint – that was one of the most disappointing experiences to me because I try to waypoint as little as possible.

Not only that, living story updates tend to be riddled with bugs, some of which are simply ignored for the duration of the time they’re present in the world (perhaps because they’re available for such a short time frame). This isn’t meant as an accusation. I think this is a result of an unreasonably fast update schedule which prevents things from being tended the way both devs and players might want them to be.

I, personally, would like to see a month devoted to game polish and bug fixes without living story content because not only would it make my overall game experience more enjoyable, it would show me how much pride the dev team takes in their game and wanting to present it as the best it can be.

Final thoughts on a living story
I support whole-heartedly the idea of a living, breathing world, but I feel the current incarnation is falling short of the mark. A living world is a world that evolves – the world rarely evolves because the end of a living story event often resets the world back to the way it was. The minor changes seem largely cosmetic, insignificant or ignorable.

A living story is one where a player feels as though their actions have impact. I would argue the personal story comes closer to a ‘living’ story than the living world because it’s impacted by my actions. I choose a path through it and the story isn’t closed off to me until I experience it. I can’t go backwards. I can’t constantly loop my story. I have to choose a path and stick with it. That, in my opinion, is what makes a story live.

The focus of the living world at the moment seems to be to add items into the game which are only available for extremely limited time periods, marks of people being around at a certain time. I get that. I don’t have a problem with that. However, not everyone plays the game for items. The people who play the game for story are left behind at the moment because they want to experience lore content whether or not they get a shiny badge for it. I wouldn’t have any problem with items and titles disappearing behind locks if I could still access the parts of the living story updates that contained story.

Those are my thoughts.

Issues with Living Story:
-Lack of Story
-Lack of access to story after event window
-Neglecting the wider world in favor of the living story

Lack of Story
The current living story is not compelling. There are number of reasons for this. First and foremost story content is being presented on the website and in novels rather than in the game. I play games to experience the story (this is not necessarily true of everyone). I would rather experience half an hour of in game interaction than spend five minutes reading text on a website . I don’t read story content presented on the website. If it isn’t in the game, it doesn’t exist for me. I don’t disagree with making story content available outside the game. I do have issues with story content being available outside the game which is NOT also inside the game.

I would argue that simply having the text in the game isn’t enough either. It has to be interactive in some way. This a game. If my character isn’t interacting with the world, the story is meaningless to me.

Other reasons the story isn’t compelling: it has little or nothing to do with the established lore in the game. There’s a well established threat to the world, yet we ignore it in favor of festivals. If the pact was formed to deal with the threat of a dragon, why can’t it handle a couple of terrorists? There are tons of interesting characters and races in the GW lore that could be drawn upon to make the world more interesting, yet these are being ignored in favor of a flat character and repetitive tactics. Not only is that uninteresting, it makes both the players and the NPCs seem incompetent.

Finally, the player’s character seems to play increasingly less of a role in the story as a whole. A player’s presence is superficial. Whether they are present or not seems to make no difference, both in terms of the overarching story and in terms of things as simple as how NPCs react to them. (Sometimes an NPC will recognize you when you weren’t present at past events or, vice versa, will not recognize you when you were present at past events).

Lack of access to story events after a set event window
This is another reason why the story feels flat or uninteresting. If you miss an event, you miss the ‘story’ related to it. If you miss the story, you have no way to catch up on it except to read sources outside the game. There’s no alternative instance for people who didn’t play this event or who missed that event. There’s no conversation with an NPC to catch you up on what you missed. The story is simply there, simply happening. Eventually, when you’ve missed enough events, it’s easier to just ignore the story. It’s my opinion that’s bad; you can’t build up to a twist or reveal if you’re losing people’s attention along the way.

Reasons for this: all the living story is presented in the form of temporary events. When those story events are yanked out of the game, the reasons for character’s actions and the history of current events is lost with them. New players and returning players have no frame of in-game reference.

The living story feels disjointed because one event’s plot does not necessarily relate to or flow into the next.

The speed of the living story is too rapid. Because you only have two weeks for most content, people pay more attention to the items, which will become unavailable after that two week window, than to the actual event or story taking place. Two weeks isn’t necessarily enough time for every player to complete all the story content they would like to, especially if they have a job or a family. And again, if you fall behind, there’s no way to catch up.

It would be nice to have a slower update pace; once a month is enough, especially if completing half of the current event will then unlock the second half of the event for each player (as with Halloween this year). I also see no reason why events can’t overlap, with a living story event being ‘sealed off’ only after a player has completed the story (as with the living story).

I’m starting to feel like a broken record. The Devs insist this is the place to post feedback, so I’ll make one last attempt.

I’m disappointed in this update. Since I bought this game, I’ve looked forward to Halloween. Halloween was my all time favourite event in the first game and in seven years, I don’t think I missed a single one. I heard so many great things about last year’s event, I couldn’t wait to experience it all for myself.

Yet it seems that some of the features of last year’s event won’t be returning. In particular, and the one that upsets me the most, is the scavenger hunt which apparently reveals the history and backstory of the Mad King and what happened between his visits to the mortal world.

There has been a lot of banter on the forum since the patch went live. People seem to be of divided opinion as to whether or not the items and titles should be ‘exclusive’ to those who were present last year or not.

If I can’t get the title; fine.
If I can’t get the book; fine.
I don’t understand it. I’m never going to understand it, but fine. I can accept that.

Could I PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do the lore quest anyway? What I don’t understand, what I will never understand, is the constant stream of releases after which there is no way to access the lore or backstory IN THE GAME.

I cannot stress this enough. I’ve run out of ways to try to express it. I play games to experience the story. Maybe other people play for other reasons. I think that’s great. I hope they have fun doing the things they enjoy. I want story. I would not have purchased this game if I hadn’t been interested in the story and seeing it evolve.

Due to real life circumstances beyond my control, I’ve missed several living story updates. I have no idea what’s going on with the current story. With each concurrent update, I care less and less about the story. In fact, I care less and less about logging in. I don’t think this is what Arena Net wants.

I love the idea of a living world that breathes and changes. I really do. But the world isn’t living for me right now. I feel quite the opposite. The living story has become, in my eyes, and endless march of ‘do X number of tasks for Y limited item’ , rinse, repeat.

The story cannot build for new players, or players who are forced or choose to miss updates, if it has no foundation to stand on. Yes; I could read a wiki. Or a walk through. I shouldn’t have to. It shouldn’t be the only way to access the information about the story.

I play games to experience stories. I don’t play them to read books, or watch movies, or read pages and pages on wikis. I want to live this story. You want to make it so I can’t access the actual events afterward? Fine. But please build some way into the game that I can figure out what’s going on after having missed an update. Please put in a refresher instance or something, some method by which people can catch up on the story even if they can’t get the items and titles.

Saying that previous events, that the lore and history of the game aren’t important, is like saying that the Hobbit or Silmarillion are irrelevant to The Lord of the Rings (and yes, I read every word of the Silmarillion). Sure The Lord of the Rings stands on it’s own, but the other books give it more depth and flavor. I would argue the living story of Guild Wars cannot stand on one update.

Yes, a living world changes.

But the thing that really makes a world live is it’s potential. Going out into the world, exploring it and discovering the history, the things we’ve missed, as well as the things happening at the moment, that’s the lure of a living, breathing world. It can’t be in a constant state of flux without some way of documenting or tracking that history. Some way that allows new players to experience the story or its history rather than paging through months and months of updates.

Please re-consider bringing back the Mad King lore quest. The lore would be reward enough for me. During the Lunatic Court plot at the end of the first game, you could play the first year’s quests during the second year – in fact you had to do so in order to unlock the second tier of quests. I was fine with that. I’d be fine with unlocking older quests. During one of the festivals in Cantha there were even NPCs dressed up as chaos creatures to reenact the events of the original festival. I’d even be okay with that.

What I’m not okay with is the wiki being my primary source of story ‘experience.’ I would go so far as to call it poor game design.

I’ve debated with myself for some time whether or not I wanted to write a post on this forum about the current method of living story updates. This thread seems to be asking for community feedback, thus it would be silly to waste a golden opportunity.

Some context: My husband and I are Canadian (both of us play the game). My husband recently accepted a job across the pond in the UK. I’m sure you can imagine the long, complicated process of moving from one country to another, with an ocean in between. Our moving process has been going on for almost two months now.

In terms of living story updates that’s four updates. Four. Two of them we missed completely due to lack of Internet connectivity. One of those updates happened to introduce the main antagonist.

Now here’s where I could complain about all the items and rewards we both missed an opportunity to earn, but I’m not going to. Because in the vast scheme of things, that bothers me less than missing the story.

At this point, I have no idea what’s going on in the living world story. I was sketchy on it at best (and I’ll go into that in a moment) but at this point I’m totally lost. I don’t know who Scarlet is. I have no idea what she’s up to or what she’s been doing, nor any concept of why. And one of the questions I’m beginning to ask myself is; should I even care? (And as a writer I can tell you, it’s never good when your audience starts to ask this question)

I understand that you want to create a living breathing world. What writer, what creator, doesn’t? BUT, you’re trying to create that world within a game, which people have to schedule time for around their real lives (not the opposite way). I hate to say it, but I feel punished for having to make a major life-changing move because there’s no way for me to catch up on the story I missed.

I could read a wiki, or a blog or a walk-through, I suppose. But I’m not going to. I play games, especially RPGs, to experience the story. I don’t want to read pages and pages of wiki background lore. I don’t even want to read the short stories on your website (though I’m sure someone put a lot of effort into them and they’re perfectly lovely).

I want to experience the story IN the game.

Arena net, you build such beautiful worlds. You create such fantastic lore. When it comes to setting the stage, you’re fantastic at it. But when it comes to utilizing those foundations, somehow you fall short. It seems so often players have to resort to outside sources to fill in the gaps they can’t find in the game. It’s my biggest complaint, overall, about GW2.

What gets me the most is I don’t understand how a game which has a system already built into it to allow private story telling (personal story instances), can’t seem to find a way to catch people up on living story when they miss it. I get that maybe you don’t want people playing past events because they’re ‘in the past.’ I get that. But in the real world there are lots of ways for me to ‘experience’ past events – people make movies, for example. And your game has lots of opportunities to fill in the blanks this way too. Break the fourth wall a tiny bit. Have the Asura make some kind of interactive holographic re-enactment of past story points. Go crazy. Bring back the old dungeons with holographic bosses. Do something to keep your story in the game, even if you want the events to be temporary.

And please, please don’t say this is coming in the form of fractals. As someone who is probably never going to be good enough at this game to play fractals with any regularity, I can honestly say that doesn’t feel good enough. Give me an instance I can do with my friends. Make it cheesy if you want, I don’t care. But please let me live your story.

I have to say, I don’t understand the purpose of these tickets at all. They take up space. I guess they’re supposed to be a money sink, but most of the people who are going to use 100 tickets will probably get them from drops, likely by farming the crown pavilion. Why is it that you need an ITEM to participate in half of the event? Isn’t the point of having an event to encourage everyone to play the new content? Why make them go through a pointless extra step in order to participate? The voting tokens made sense. These do not.

That said, making them soulbound is inane. I use my main character for most of the new content (and will use him in the gauntlet when I eventually get to it) and I use my secondary character to do most of my dailies since I’m trying to level her. Now she’s going to end up with a bunch of useless items that I have to trash because she’s too squishy for me to bother taking her into that kind of event. If these silly tokens have to exist, at least make them make some sort of sense.

Khisanth.2948:

So every character is always carrying all the gold I’ve ever gotten in the game? I’ve already asked this in the other thread but the convenience really doesn’t seem to be worth the drawback. The rest of the change is nice but removing gold storage from the bank is not that great. It just takes one extra keypriss/misclick to basically burn all your gold and I already know what the support response is going to be for something like that.

I second this. My one and only complaint about this change. Depositing the majority of my money in the bank is a safety mechanism. I love the idea of not having to run all the way back to the bank to withdraw money, but at the same time I’d rather do that than accidentally click away my savings.

I’m usually one of the first to complain about RNG (the RNG gods hate me), but I think people in this thread are overlooking some very important things.

1) These items aren’t going to disappear after 2 weeks. Yes the price is going to go up, that’s your incentive to get them fast. But you don’t HAVE to get them fast. They aren’t going anywhere. And who knows, maybe they’ll go on sale in the future, like maybe a year from now when the bazaar perhaps returns?

2) You are NOT required to buy the keys to open the chests. You CAN farm black lion keys. There are several threads on several forums, including this one, discussing how you can easily get 1 key for about half an hour of game play by making a common human warrior and playing through to the level 10 quest non-stop for a key. Also you can farm gold and convert the gold to gems for keys and chances at scraps, which allows you to get the skins absolutely free whether it takes you 50 chests or 100.

I’ve always been of the opinion you should be able to work to gain your rewards in a game. Is farming the kind of work I’d like to get my reward from? No. But if I want something bad enough and that’s the only way to get it, I’ll do it. I wish the fused skins were available via this method. Because even if it took me a year I’d find a way to get the materials to get one.

Certainly money makes the acquisition faster. That’s how A-net is going to make money off of doing things this way. People who want them NOW will pay to get them NOW. If you don’t want to pay for them, don’t. But then you have to pay for them in some other way, in this case time. If you aren’t willing to put the TIME in, and don’t want to pay money, then there really is a problem, because A-net will never be able to please their fanbase. I, for one, am relieved that the skins are staying around. Even if they’re time-consuming to acquire it’s better than previous methods which were always temporary. I even hope to see some of the old skins added to this system.

I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m talking back, but I don’t think I’m the only one who finds it wholly unacceptable that this is the policy for gem purchases. I know enough about how backups and restores work to understand that your company cannot offer a restore every time someone makes a mistake, but why is there no system in the game to help someone protect the purchases they make using real money? The first game was nothing like this. If you purchased a cosmetic item from the store, all you had to do was go to an NPC to claim it on any one of your characters. If you later wanted to make room in your inventory and then go back and get it, you could do that. If you accidentally deleted the character you were using it with, no big deal, you just go back and get it.

What boggles my mind even more is that you already have a system in place for this – the Hall of Monuments. Where everything you unlock is available to all your characters free of charge. If you’ve purchased a cosmetic item from the gem store why can’t it be unlocked in your HoM so that you can replace it if you need to?

Maybe the reasoning is that you only want one item to be available after purchasing the item rather than being able to duplicate it for all one’s characters after purchase (the way it was done in the first game). If that’s the case, I get that. But surely you could still utilize the existing system somehow to allow players to get one replacement item from the NPC if the item is no longer present on their account. Surely this isn’t an unreasonable method of support for paying customers who are only human and, thus at some point in their life, subject to human error no matter how careful they are?

Edited to add that I think this is even more important for limited time cosmetic items that you can’t just replace if you inadvertently delete them. Someone else said they deleted Rox’s quiver by mistake and can’t just buy another one no matter how much they might want to.

Djemo.7153:

To add insult to injury, im 100% sure that they might at some point go and push out a few other pieces due to the outrage.
But your achivement milestone sets are bound to not have an option to “store” your choice no.

To clarify, i dont like these sets since i cant do jack kitten with them.
BUT i will have to choose one on the milestone cause i doubt ill have a choice.
And then when they release something worthy of a light/medium class ill have to grind up to the next milestone.

Djemo.7153:

Glad i have likeminded people, but i think the real problem is like i stated that the sets that will spawn afterwards will require ridiculous amount of achievement grind.

Cause its very bad to make people grind up higher on the achievement ladder to get something just cause they were forced to get something they didnt like beforehand.

This. I don’t like any of the new weapon skins. I’m sure there’s going to be lots of people who like them and that’s really great, I’m happy for them. But I basically have to choose a skin I know I’m never going to use as my ‘reward’ for each new tier I unlock.

I think it’s safe to assume that someday there are going to be more rewards because there’s going to be way more achievement points possible than there currently are rewards for them, and I’d really rather be able to hold on to my choices until something I would actually like to use comes along.

Don’t get me wrong, I think they’re implementing the system well for the most part. At least once you unlock a skin it’s yours forever as many times as you want to use it. But the choice of rewards is disappointingly limited. I was hoping to see some more interesting titles you could unlock with achievement points as well, since there seems to be a dearth of PvE titles. It’s unlikely that they’d go back and let you switch reward choices retroactively when new rewards come out, so it feels a waste to get stuck with something I know I’m not going to use.

Danikat.8537:

Personally I think the final reward for a Living Story arc should be a ticket that lets you claim any one of the other rewards, plus one special but largely cosmetic reward for people who got all the rest by other means.

So for example in this case instead of Marjory’s Journal we’d get a ticket that lets us choose one of the following:
Holographic Wings
Shatterer Wings
Jade Weapon Ticket
Dragon Helm Pack (Gift of the Dragon Bash)
Mini Racing Moa
Holographic Risen Knight
Or Marjory’s Journal

(I haven’t included items that can be bought directly from the gem store because if you want them you can already just buy them, so it’d be a bit pointless.)

The fact that this ticket would only be obtainable at/towards the end of the event, and the fact that you can only get one, would encourage people to still try and get the rewards through normal means, but it would provide a back-up for people who missed something and reduce the chance of people ending up with a bank full of special one-time items we don’t want to use but don’t want to destroy because it seems like a waste.

This. I liked in GW1 how, at the end of all the GW beyond stuff, there was some kind of token or tokens and you turned them in for what you wanted. I think my major complaint with the living story content is we’re not being allowed to CHOOSE our rewards. I would certainly like to be able to get a weapon skin at the end of each event instead of a group of helms that I don’t really like (didn’t open the box so they’ll take up less space in my inventory).

Would be nice too if at some point there were a way to get rewards from past events by passing up an opportunity to get a reward from a current one. But at this point I’d just be happy to see any kind of choice.

Gabby.3205:

Also, I need to know who the hell my nemesis is.

So that you can always carry a picture of him with you to fill you with vengeance? And so that you can sleep with it on the other pillow by your face?

Fiontar.4695:

ColinJohanson.2394:

Any updates to the fractals will need to include additional update to the reward systems as well, agreed.

As for the jet pack, those specific rewards are intended as limited rewards you can only earn during that time, thus making them valuable. It wouldn’t be fair to the people who did earn jet packs for us to bring them back, and suddenly undercut their value entirely.

And yeah that F&F dungeon updated for size would make a good fractal wouldn’t it? =)

Less time and effort creating limited availability “valuables” and more time creating stuff that the majority can enjoy, ok? You guys haven’t been very efficient since launch and the percentage of what you create that only gets very limited access and use is more than a little frustrating.

Variety of skins ensures novelty, while preserving access. You only need exclusivity if you are a tiny game studio that can only afford to pump out a very limited number of new assets every year. Even then, it’s just an evil of necessity, rather than an ideal.

The focus on “l33t stuffs” seems immature and not really worthy of a large, talented and well funded studio.

I also agree with this.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

StarbornStriker.6493:

In GW1 there were no items and weapons that were yanked out of the game forever after introduction and never able to be found/achieved/farmed again. I get the idea of not wanting everyone to be able to get everything easily. I really do. I’m not asking to have something handed to me – before everyone starts to scream ‘entitled.’

Yes there was. There were several Prophecies items which were available only for a short time. I think there was a weapon out of Henge which was highly wanted, and some other collector items which were removed before Factions was released.

And there were some minis which were given out as specific prizes or promotions for a specific time and only a limited amount (by the nature of it being a printed promo code or a rewarded item) were available to the entire world of players.

Then there were the more forgiving “one time only quest rewards” such as the Banana Scythe or a Grim Cesta with specific stats which could never be replicated. If you needed one, you’d need to roll up a new character and complete the quest. If you happened to lose it some how, well . . . new character!

And for the LONGEST of times you could only get the festival hats on the finale day of the festivals. Got sick? Had to work? Maybe you just blanked on the date? Tough luck, no hat for you.

Yeah but if you were able to get things like the Banana Scythe (and I still have three of them sitting around in various character inventories) by rolling up a new character, they weren’t impossible to get were they? And they did eventually add a hat vendor in that stuck around for a week after the event in case you were sick or had to work, ect. They also added another vendor who looked at your hats and allowed you to make as many as you wanted across all your other characters instead of just having one. Accidentally delete it? No problem you just get another one. Same with the costumes. Yet in this game people are paying real money for item skins and if they accidentally delete it OH WELL.

Besides I’d hardly call any of the hats from the first game prestigious. Most of them were just silly. Yeah my horns of Grenth from the very first Wintersday got me lots of compliments from people who joined the game later, but even they eventually became available to everyone. And really that’s all people are asking for here is a chance to eventually get something instead of it being locked behind limited time RNG drops for all time.

Edited to add: It’s also a bit different if someone wins a contest. Yeah that should be something special. But then that person got it through effort, by winning something. And obviously limited time promotional codes in magazines and stuff are going to be limited time codes that are printed. And you got it by buying the magazine. RNG still comes down to luck. And no one’s ever going to convince me luck = effort because one can put a vast amount of effort into getting an RNG item and never see it.

@bluestocking No worries It was after midnight when I wrote the first post and I probably didn’t make it clear there were two sets of NPCs.

bluestocking.6148:

The only downside to this is that once the NPCs die, they seem to disappear. So you basically have to treat them as limited resources.

Hm, my NPCs didn’t seem to disappear when they died. The ones alive were rezzing them as far as I could tell. Inspector Kiel dropped twice and at one point I’d lost all the Lionguards.

Not those NPCs I was able to rez those too. In fact they came back to life automatically when I cleared the first vetran.

It’s the NPCs by the door, the ones that are standing there when you approach that seem to disappear when they die. They stay camped out by the door (and I noticed a few NPCs by another door that don’t seem to notice what’s going on inside the fort). They aren’t even very helpful with the vetrans but they do at least absorb a bit of damage for you before they disappear into oblivion.

Sorry if my post wasn’t very clear ^^;;

I’m not sure how helpful this will be, but here’s my experience.

If you hang back at the doors when you first enter the fort, there are a bunch of guards standing there that will help you defeat the first wave. Try to preserve some of those guys because later on you can lure other enemies back toward these green NPCs when your revivable escorts die and it may help you defeat the mobs while your help is down (especially if you’re unable to risk reviving them). The only downside to this is that once the NPCs die, they seem to disappear. So you basically have to treat them as limited resources.

Aggro carefully. Once you get past the first fight at the door you can back away from your dolyak, let the NPCs all die and lure the other enemies one by one back toward the door (and hopefully waiting help) like I described above. Picking them off one by one is slow, but safe. Especially since there is a vetran in the second group which is pretty tough to tackle if you’ve got a bunch of other guys on you. Once you’re down to the vetran keep moving and try to dodge his grenades as much as possible. The first one seems fairly easy from a distance.

It was the last group that really pummelled me and made me fail the first time. The vetran has a nasty knock down. I used the same strategy (the dolyak never seems to be attacked or in danger so it’s fine if you let the mobs hang out around it for however long). I slowly lured the mobs away one by one until I got to the vetran. I had a bit of trouble with this one because if you lure him too far away and the NPC he’s aggroed on dies he seems to teleport back to the start and regain full health instantly (I was not impressed -.- ). But, I was able to kite him pretty well once I figured out the indications of his attacks (when he’s going to throw something at you or knock you over) and after leading him on a merry chase I was able to take him down. If you’re lower level you probably want to stay as far away from him as possible and use something that gives you health regen because he hits HARD, especially if he knocks you over.

After that you pick the last of the thugs off one by one and you’re done. Hope this is remotely helpful. I was on a level 80 warrior though (though not with all level 80 gear) so your millage my vary.

No it should be in your inventory even if you can’t see it in the hero pane. It’s only the hero pane that shows only level accessible gear. Unfortunately if it’s not showing up, I’m not sure what to do. You could always contact support using the ‘ask a question’ function and see what they say.

Hey there!

If you accepted the item into your inventory you should see it there (the window that pops up when you hit ‘i’). However in the Hero pane (pops up when you hit ‘h’) it will only show items which you can equip. If the required level for the item is level 24, it won’t show until you reach that level (I can see in the screenshot you are level 21). Hopefully that is what’s happening here

I’m sure we’re never going to see the ability to hide all your armor, but I would like to say that something like this would be useful in the preview pane. I can’t count the number of times I’ve tried to preview boots or gloves only to discover that my current pants and shirt prevent me from seeing them. So I have to go into my hero panel and take them off just to see what I’m looking at. Would surely be nice to hide different pieces of armor in the preview pane in case one covers another.

A thousand times this. I don’t WANT to turn off my effects volume just to get rid of the bell sound. I LIKE the game’s sound effects. I’ve encountered a grand total of one person using the bell for what it’s supposed to be used for (creating music) and she did a darn fine job of it! But everyone else just spams the highest note. That thing is horrible. I hear it for several seconds after tabbing out, like it’s ringing in my head. Sorry to whoever designed these things, but what did you think would happen?