The Living Story - far too vague.

#89 - March 15, 2013, 10:11 a.m.

Raine.1394:

The key to understanding the understanding issue is in their recent blog on the Living Story. What they have given us so far are ‘teasers’, not actual content. There is also a reference to developers rolling off other projects now available to expand upon the story. The monthly events had to happen as they are a key value proposition for Anet. So, absent the ability to provide actual content, they occurred as ‘teasers’. I would expect the content to be fleshed out more properly over time and this should make the story more understandable. TLDR: You haven’t been able to get it because there has been nothing to get.

Correct.

#101 - March 15, 2013, 1:14 p.m.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Yargesh.4965:

BobbyStein.2315:

Raine.1394:

The key to understanding the understanding issue is in their recent blog on the Living Story. What they have given us so far are ‘teasers’, not actual content. There is also a reference to developers rolling off other projects now available to expand upon the story. The monthly events had to happen as they are a key value proposition for Anet. So, absent the ability to provide actual content, they occurred as ‘teasers’. I would expect the content to be fleshed out more properly over time and this should make the story more understandable. TLDR: You haven’t been able to get it because there has been nothing to get.

Correct.

So a vague and convoluted answer is the correct way to think about a vague and convoluted piece of content?

Basically the devs were busy so they only had enough time to make 2 weeks of content and stretched it out into two months. Now that they’re done fixing minion AI and solving world hunger (pfffffft) we’ll return to our regularly scheduled hitting things til they die.

What we’ve released so far is teaser content. Our next release, Flame & Frost: The Razing, is where the story and characters ramp up.

#107 - March 15, 2013, 2:30 p.m.

Max Lexandre.6279:

Bobby do you know if you going to keep it this is with soo many teasers and the action only in the end?

Or there is going to be more action in the next Living Stories?

Because we quite don’t need that much of teasers, maybe a mix of teasers and action.

No. The first bits were drawn out due to a very short development window. Future content will be more substantial. Thanks for your patience!

#109 - March 15, 2013, 2:31 p.m.

azureai.9764:

Honestly, if this was a teaser, it should have been rolled out quietly. No announcement. Then the players would be going nuts trying to figure out what it all means before getting hit with the real content.

Agreed.

#120 - March 15, 2013, 5:10 p.m.

Fiontar.4695:

Yes, that would have made sense, but they needed to fluff up the teasers to cover for the fact that there really wasn’t much actual content in the January/February patches. They needed to preserve the illusion that they were updating and adding content monthly.

Actually, we’ve been adding a lot of content each month of 2013 but most of it hasn’t been related to the Living Story. That’s because the Living World teams were ramping up design and development while other teams were completing their projects. Here’s what we’ve released in the past two months.

January update contents: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-January-28-2013/first#post1321870

• Flame & Frost teaser events/NPCs
• Dailies/Monthlies
• Achievement tracking UI
• Fractal reconnect
• Guesting
• Orr polish
• PvP map
• Bug fixes
• Skill balance
• Etc.

February update contents: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-February-26-2013/first#post1639231

• Flame & Frost teaser events/NPCs (phase 2)
• Spirit Watch PvP map
• Item preview
• Guild Bounty, Guild Rush, Guild Trek, etc.
• Bug fixes
• Skill balance
• Etc.

In short, January and February were teaser months for the Living Story. March and April will have much more story content. As always, we appreciate your patience and look forward to hearing your thoughts once you’ve had a chance to play the new stuff.

#123 - March 15, 2013, 6:04 p.m.

Anzu.5702:

I honestly like the concept and am looking forward to where it goes. I love the fact that you are trying to re-emerge the player with the lore and beauty of the open world. But I have to disagree with the roll out process which overly hyped lackluster content resulting in unsatisfied customers. And frankly with the bad taste that living story has left in many players mouths, I am not overly optimistic that people will actually check out the next release without just writing it off as another lackluster teaser.

Noted. We’ll try to improve on that.

#151 - March 16, 2013, 8:14 a.m.

Conner.4702:

You call it teaser. I call it extremely boring and badly written. Teasers are supposed to grab peoples attention. Not have them running around like headless chickens, because you failed to make a compelling intro.

It helps if you could be more specific in your feedback. Do you mean:

• Badly written (full of grammatical errors, confusing dialog, characters talking “out of voice”)
• Badly designed (lack of logical flow, unclear directions, broken mechanics)
• Badly messaged (“I was expecting more because of how it was promoted”)

Conner.4702:

Let me do it for you.
Step 1: Place some new random crap houses.
Step 2: Burn down one of them.
Step 3: Start rumors about monsters.
Step 4: Burn more of them down.
Step 5: Have people fleeing, while telling horror stories.

What you don’t do is show the enemy before the main event starts as that just completely kills the suspense

Step 1: We placed refugee structures, but new random houses would have been cool.
Step 2: That would have been neat if we had enough time to build an event around the teaser. We didn’t have the time or resources, so we put the refugee structures in.
Step 3: The characters you met in phase one alluded to attacks but did not specify the enemy.
Step 4: See step 2.
Step 5: We’ve done something similar to this, though the characters are scattered around Hoelbrak and the Black Citadel.

TL;DR version – You have some good ideas that, funny enough, we also thought of during the development cycle of the phase 1 and 2 teaser warmups. The reason we didn’t implement more substantial content for the teasers simply came down to a matter of time and resources. All of the members of the Living World team wanted to do more. They just didn’t have the time to build everything they wanted, which would have added to testing time, iteration time, rewriting, localizing, etc.

#152 - March 16, 2013, 8:22 a.m.

Wayfinder.8452:

You look forward to hearing WHAT !? There is a 2000 thread about guild missions being crap and you don’t even respond to that.

My team and I are primarily focused on the Living Story aspect of the game right now. We support other teams with writing and VO (WvW, Guild Content, etc.) but don’t have a big hand in their process. Unless the bulk of the constructive feedback on Guild Missions is based around the writing or characters, I don’t really have anything to add to that discussion.

Wayfinder.8452:

Do you seriously believe anyone still takes you seriously?

Some do. Some don’t. I do the best I can but don’t lose sleep over it.

Wayfinder.8452:

The few Reds that I’m believe in are on the Dungeons and Support teams + John Smith, love that guy.

They’re a great bunch and deserve all the support and respect that people are willing to give them. They, like everyone else at ArenaNet, work really hard.

Wayfinder.8452:

Other than that thanks for at least talking to the community, you’re one of the few that actually do that. The January patch was my favorite patch up till now.

You’re welcome.

#153 - March 16, 2013, 8:30 a.m.

Aelelan.1639:

I don’t think his enumerating what has been released in the two months in 2013 was necessarily to claim “here are all these other things that we did, why don’t you go do these things instead” but rather to say something more along the lines of “these are all the systems that we’ve been working on while also doing the living story and now that they are done we can allot more resources to the living story”.

That was exactly my point. My listing of the contents of the January and February updates was simply to show that we were working on a lot of different things at the time.

Aelelan.1639:

It’s a pretty flawed argument to claim that “because I’m not going to be playing it, then it’s not content” or insinuate that because something isn’t necessarily applicable to you it isn’t a valued addition to the game/doesn’t take up resources in development.

I agree. While I’m very excited for the upcoming Living Story content, there are other things coming that may resonate with different players.

Aelelan.1639:

I’m all for giving feedback on the personal story – I also thought that the content was very over-hyped – but not only is a claim that these additions are somehow not worth adding to the game irrelevant, it’s also just plain incorrect.

It’s pretty clear from all the responses that our messaging was a little confusing to some. I’ll be working on that with the relevant parties.

#156 - March 16, 2013, 8:45 a.m.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

On a serious question, when you folks get to the next Living Story block you want to work on (after Frost and Flame) may we see something more ambitious as far as changes? Somewhere between the homestead/camps/ranches showing up and the havoc wrought on Lion’s Arch late last year?

Our hope on the Living World teams, provided we get the amount of resources and time required, is to evolve the game with each scheduled update. I can’t be more specific than that right now, but we’re discussing lots of ideas at the moment. I hope to be able to discuss this in more depth once the time is right.

#165 - March 16, 2013, 10:05 a.m.

Brutal Arts.6307:

BobbyStein.2315:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

On a serious question, when you folks get to the next Living Story block you want to work on (after Frost and Flame) may we see something more ambitious as far as changes? Somewhere between the homestead/camps/ranches showing up and the havoc wrought on Lion’s Arch late last year?

Our hope on the Living World teams, provided we get the amount of resources and time required, is to evolve the game with each scheduled update. I can’t be more specific than that right now, but we’re discussing lots of ideas at the moment. I hope to be able to discuss this in more depth once the time is right.

Talk to someone that manages rewards so we can get something other than a Jug Of Karma. These events have been pretty tedious (fedex quests). You probably be able to get alot more people to suck it up and play Frost and Flame: The Fetch Quest if they got something.

It doesn’t even have to be something worth anything. A pos mini/townclothes, hell even a laurel.

I’ll relay this to the teams.

#185 - March 16, 2013, 5:39 p.m.

Tachenon.5270:

Funny that I felt more empathy with those beached whales than I have with the refugees.

Awesome. Our next iconic is a whale.

#217 - March 18, 2013, 2:59 p.m.

Thanks again for all the constructive feedback. It matters.