Guild Wars 2

The Living Story, at its best, has been pretty unimpressive.

The reason? LS encompasses everything Arenanet is bad at.

There is a difference between World Building and Story Telling. Arenanet are EXCELLENT world builders.

…they are poor storytellers. Even the best of the personal stories only rise to the level of Okay.

And I know some make the argument that the non-permeant nature of the LS has been changing, but the idea of devoting resources to content that’s going to vanish for a non-sub game is absurd. Especially with no real expansion planned.

Thus far the LS has only served to prove right the people who said that a buy2play MMO wouldn’t provide worthwhile new content in the long run.

A big problem with Scarlet is her backstory. It’s the sort if thing you’d find in a fan fic and is the primary reason people call her a Mary Sue. It reads like someone trying to justify, as quickly and lazily as possible, all her skills and abilities by making her a genius amongst geniuses.

That aside, I think she’s too Joker and not enough Kefka.

Kefka, for all his lunacy, was a mass murderer and legit threat to his world. Scarlet is too much like a recurring comic book villain. For all her scheming, she hasn’t shown any teeth. After all this time there still isn’t the sense that this is someone who’s a real, serious threat as opposed to a problem the heroes fight off every few months.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

stormspirit.6598:

Are you kidding? It happens constantly in entertainment. If a large enough part of the consumer base doesn’t like something, it’s changed… or removed entirely. That’s how it works. The last thing ANY business that’s run with a bit of sense would do is stick to it’s guns and shove something the customers hate into their faces.

D20 System D&D, Jar Jar Binks, Highlander 2, Captain Janeway, TNA Impact, Matt Schaub.

Your move

That list really just illustrates my point. These are situations where they didn’t do the sensible thing and change course…. and the results were highly negative. TNA in particular, if you know anything about that company, hasn’t actually made money for most of it’s existence, is only around because the parent company keeps it afloat, and is currently in a state of decline with layoffs left and right.

Highlander is practically dead as a franchise. Seen any new Highlander movies lately?

Voyager finished it’s run, but Star Treks mistakes caught up to it soon after and again, practically killed the franchise until J.J. Abrams saved it.

Jar Jar Binks WAS shifted to the background after fans backlash and was not shoved in our faces, as he was planned to be.

D20 System D&D also has changed and continues to do so. It’s also a template. If you don’t like it, you can change the rules for your own games so it’s questionable if this counts or not.

Matt Schaub? Only a matter of time before either he’s gone or the franchise suffers.

Everything that’s wrong with Scarlet can be seen by simply reading her backstory.

Her tale reads like the profile written really bad roleplayer who’s desperately trying to cover every base and explain away why their Mary Sue has all those cool Godmod abilities.

lordkrall.7241:

ThiBash.5634:

Yes. That’s actually fairly common business procedure: take your losses before things get worse.

It is extremely unusual that lets say a series suddenly decide to delete several months of work (and thus also putting it several months behind, which would mean literally several months of nothing released) just because some people dislike it.
As far as I remember right now it has actually never happened.

Just deleting stuff and leaving this storyline that they have been building on for almost a year hanging would most likely create way more issues than just going ahead with the plan.

Are you kidding? It happens constantly in entertainment. If a large enough part of the consumer base doesn’t like something, it’s changed… or removed entirely. That’s how it works. The last thing ANY business that’s run with a bit of sense would do is stick to it’s guns and shove something the customers hate into their faces.

The only question is, how wide spread is the Scarlet hate and whether or not a significant number of players have stepped away from the game over it.

You know what the real problem is? MMO’s, by the virtue of how they are designed, don’t offer many ways of actually presenting true skill based content.

What we get instead is hallmark of MMO challenge, artificial difficulty.

Skill based gameplay rewards you constantly. Every attempt imparts a tangible sense that you are improving, driving you to try again and again to do a little bit better.

Artificial difficulty doesn’t give you any of that. Instead, the player feels like the challenge is impossible, or reserved for those who know a few key tricks.

Artificial difficulty rewards only a small minority of players. The elitists who will throw themselves at something that isn’t as much fun as it is frustrating. These players, with masochistic glee, endure cheap, poorly designed mechanics for the satisfaction of being able to declare themselves superior to the witless masses, the lowly casuals who aren’t willing to put in the same amount of sacrifice.

chasingfuries.9635:

a lot of you guys really are acting like carebears lol. getting this worked up and offended at the thought of people outgearing you in pvp, even though thats not what most of us in favor of gear treadmills are even talking about… thats just carebear mentality.

also i must say that all the talk about the skill based pvp is silly, because pvp is imbalanced. it’s very far from being all about skill when you’ve got a few classes that are as stupidly OP as the ones in this game

That is ridiculous.

Professional boxing and MMA have weight classes. Sports teams don’t play when one team outnumbers the other. Balance is the very essence of real competition. It’s something to be guarded when you have it and fought for when you don’t.

People like you don’t play for skill based pvp. The idea of two players facing off to find out who is actually better is little more than a joke to you. You play with the hope of getting an edge over the other player, which you then exploit.

I think many of the MMO vets tend to forget that the old games were essentially facebook for gamers.

For many people, Everquest was their very first experience being surrounded by like minded individuals. It was a time when being a gamer was still considered… not quite mainstream. So the idea of inhabiting a virtual world filled with people who like what you liked? Mindblowing.

What we have to keep in mind is that, today, we are innudated with outlets for social interaction. It’s no longer a REASON to play an MMO and trying to force it is only going to slash the player base.

It’s important to take a step back and understand whats going on here. The age old grind is nothing more than a form of psychological manipulation. You can see it in the OP’s own word choice. Some gamers have been playing in a skinner box for so long that they don’t find the fact that they are compelled to mindlessly repeat a tedious task they don’t even enjoy the least bit disturbing.

When the operant conditioning mechanism is taken away, they think there’s something wrong with the game.