Hi,
I was more than happy to see that ANET is taking steps to include the players’ opinion in future development of the game. Actually what CAN make Tyria & GW2 a Living being – is the players’ choice, and that’s why I’d like to share a few opinions on LS/LW, some of which will echo what’s been said before.
Abstract:
1) The pace is wrong. It’s too fast with too superficial contents, leaving no time and no reason to immerse.
2) There’s no story in story – random, unconnected events. The narrative explaining the plot is carried out in wiki & website, and not in-game. New items/resources/mechanics are introduced in the same manner: website&wiki instead of NPCs / in-game content
3)Players’ actions have no real impact on the world. The war with dragons is in a stalemate, success/defeat in boss events changes nothing, new content is introduced out-of-the-box with no players’ influence on it.
Long story:
1) The pace: most people here say the pace is too fast. I’d say that’s correct, but not because of the amount of things to do in each release, but just the opposite: we get small, repetitive bits of content every two weeks, with 0-2 cut-scenes / talking-heads’ dialouges and some grinding. Every two weeks. and…
2) The story/narrative: the LS releases are completely unrleated to each other. For me (I’m a relatively new player – started in June) it’s just a handful of totally random characters and mobs. Personally, I don’t even see the problem of improbable alliances and ither things like that, which have been mentioned by others here, beacuse I totally don’t see the Story in Living Story.
The fact that there is some plot behind all those events should be outlined INSIDE the game, and not on a forum/website/twitter. For me it’s ridiculuos, that every two weeks I need to spend an hour on:
reading official release info > find no story, no answers, just a list of places/mobs/rewards > go to the game and talk with NPCs > find out nothing > go to wiki, 3rd party websites, blogs, and finally get some rough idea of what’s going on…
Seriously – you have so many NPCs who could tell the story in-game, and I need to read a website to understand the new content? I get one letter in-game, most often with a pretty good narrative, then a main NPC with 10-15 lines of speech and that’s all the immersion. All that’s left afterwards is grinding.
Oh, you say there are minigames and activities? That’s really, really cool (no sarcasm here), but I don’t play them, you know why? Because you totally don’t explain them:
CTF in Cutthroat Politics was fun, but I had to reach for 3rd party sources to understand the mechanics.
Lunatic Inquisition: get dropped in a labirynth with a goal: survive or kill. That’s all to it – nothing else. No clue what’s going on, total mess, lot of players (great, but what are they doing?).
Mad King Says – anyone played it? I even didn’t know about it until I looked into the achievements panel, and even then – I still don’t know when/where/what.
You introduce new items & materials and you choose to tell me about a new dagger skin on wiki? There’s a new crafting recipe and i find about it on wiki? Come on! Make the main NPC tell me a story of a lost / discovered / invented new technology / magic / whatever which explains the appearance of tons of new resources and items. Show me a cutscene or a render of a new weapon or a new resource discovered in some deep mine / dungeon.
3) The impact: So tell me, what true changes happened in Tyria beacause of players’ decisions? We had an election, which was so close to Earth politics as can be: they changed nothing except prices of travel (temporary) and the choice of pass-times (like in ancient Rome: “Panem et Circenses!”). We defeated Scarlett bazillion times. She returns again. We killed Tequatl, Shatterer, Claw… they return and their minions too… What would happen if we didn’t do any of these? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, and Tyria would remain the same.
And if something changes in Tyria it’s completely independent from our choices. We received the Crown Pavilion. Thank you, I really liked the boss runs. But it was a gift. We had nothing to say/do here, while we could have, for example, built it ourselves: gather materials, do side quests to help the construction, consult the choice of mobs/bosses via in-game actions (e.g. if players bring more destoyer trophies there’d be destroyers in one zone, if more pirate trophies – pirates, etc.).
So these are basically the three main concerns about LS/LW in my humble opinion.