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Fortnite's Events is what GW2's Living world was supposed to be.


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I don't play Fortnite...but i'll be honest, I'm following the whole Fortnite seasonal event thing as if i did play it. Each event that Fortnite does is always a worldwide mystery, endeavor, or just highly anticipated for. Each event ONLY happens at one point in time and you can NEVER experience it again.

I'm pretty sure that is what GW2 always wanted to do with it's own events...a single, once in history style events (this is what the living world was supposed to be at the beginning with season 1)

I'd like to know why gw2's events never reached this hype level that Fortnite has? Is there any sort of difference?

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That was Season 1 of the living world. While it was awesome, that's exactly what new players complained about--not being able to experience it after the fact. That's why they had to change it for what it is now from Seasons 2 and onward, and why in your Story tab in-game you can only watch a summary video of Season 1.

Yeah, Fornite's events might work for a Meme-Shooter and its...younger audience. That doesn't work for a MMORPG where everyone wants access to everything, and at their own pace.

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They did exactly that early on. The first Halloween and Wintersday worked like that, with activities becoming available gradually through the festival and then being removed when it ended, and the first release of Season 1 was a more elaborate example: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lost_Shores

As for why they didn't continue...it was a mess. If you weren't able to be online during the one weekend it was running then...oh well, you missed out. No story, no rewards, nothing. If you were there then to be honest it wasn't much better. Even in this game where the servers can create additional maps as needed (which existed before the change to mega-servers, but in a slightly different format) getting everyone into one map all at the same time causes problems. There was massive lag, little/no FPS, and players disconnecting and being moved to a new copy of the map where the event was at a different stage so they either missed a chunk or had to repeat something and hope they wouldn't disconnect at the same point again. My memories of the "epic" battle against the Ancient Karka are of watching basically a static image while spamming skills and hoping when it updated I wasn't dead, I'd actually hit something to get credit and I'd be able to catch up to the boss without being able to see where I was going.

Not to mention several of the earlier events had bugs which prevented them being completed, so Anet had to either add ways to progress while skipping it, or patch them and then players had to go back and repeat them in the wrong order, which somewhat ruined the effect.

Incidentally The Matrix Online was an entire game built around this model, and as well as problems GW2 had they also found it was relatively expensive and time consuming to run for little benefit over traditional gameplay designs, and as time went on more and more players missed at least some parts of the story so they kept having to add ways for them to catch up without having been there, and it was more and more difficult for new players to get into the game because they'd missed so much. It ran for 4 years and apparently when it closed in 2009 it had fewer than 500 subscribers.

I've never played Fortnite but I can imagine tempoary events are easier to run when the whole game is built for short-term matches with the map resetting after each one, but it doesn't work so well in an MMO. (Although if you ask my cousin Fortnite's latest idea was terrible because she had a very stroppy son for 2 days after he couldn't log in and all his friends told him the game had been deleted.)

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@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:I don't play Fortnite...but i'll be honest, I'm following the whole Fortnite seasonal event thing as if i did play it. Each event that Fortnite does is always a worldwide mystery, endeavor, or just highly anticipated for. Each event ONLY happens at one point in time and you can NEVER experience it again.

I'm pretty sure that is what GW2 always wanted to do with it's own events...a single, once in history style events (this is what the living world was supposed to be at the beginning with season 1)

I'd like to know why gw2's events never reached this hype level that Fortnite has? Is there any sort of difference?

Anet did that once. There was a one-time huge monster karka event. You had to log into that event on the given day to participate. If you did particioate you got a special reward. It was a truly awesome and epic boss battle that took place in the open world and all you had to do to join was get on a map. After the event people were up in arms about to the unfairness of it, so it was never done again.

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It was all, essentially, Season 1. Kessex Hills and Lions Arch looked completely different before Scarlet's terrorism events. These days you just see the aftermath / the rebuilt Lions Arch. The Karka events, the Halloween events--all awesome to have been there and experience (and I'm glad I got to), but they got all kinds of heat for it as newer players joined in and found out they were essentially SOL for having missed it.

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@"Healix.5819" said:It is however the (distant) future of MMOs.Na, not even in the slightest really. That's like someone paying to buy/rent a movie, and it automatically starts halfway through no matter how badly they want to start at the beginning. Then telling the person "Oh well, tough luck" when they want to watch it from the beginning.

You seriously think a MMORPG can work like that? Nope--already tried, already failed. (But was a hell of a show to watch before it was fixed.)

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I'm really trying to talk more about why gw2 doesn't have hype, while fortnite does, despite both games doing roughly the same thing (at one point in time at least)

I think gw2's biggest hype train around living world content was around before Lazarus appeared, and during Lazarus's plot line before he is revealed to be Balthazaar. I think everyone on reddit was trying to figure out what was happening in the plot of the story, creators like WP wholly focused on the mysteries, and back then, Deroir was making lore video's about the whole thing. Maybe the hype might not have been strong outside gw2, but the hype was definitely there for almost everyone that played the game.

So ya, i can understand S1 not working out for the structure of the game, but gw2 has fixed that, and it still doesn't perform to the level of fortnite.

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People hated it in GW2. With passion, albeit it did a few great set pieces

What Fortnite did could never work in a progressive story based game. It’s kinda like reading a book and burning each page as it is read - you can never go back and Re-read it

Fortnite basically changed to a new map and carried on. It didn’t really matter

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@"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" said:I'm really trying to talk more about why gw2 doesn't have hype, while fortnite does, despite both games doing roughly the same thing (at one point in time at least)...So ya, i can understand S1 not working out for the structure of the game, but gw2 has fixed that, and it still doesn't perform to the level of fortnite.

You're trying to compare two very different games, centered around very different audiences. That's just not how it works--and I would take GW2's "smaller" community over Fornite's meme-nation any day, any time. Gods, the cancer...

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@kharmin.7683 said:Just do a forums search on Season 1 and see how many people want it back in some form because they missed it.

And just as a side-bar, I could see them achieving that if they made them into Fractals. That'd be cool! (Strictly speaking for Season 1 that is. I don't want to have to spam Fractals for every single possible Season.)

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You cannot do one-time major events in a game about story. Or at least one where you have the original starting story for new players/characters that then jumps into the current story after you finish it.

Arenanet tried that with the Southsun events and LW1 and they have not gone over well. They were a pain in the rear for people at the time (I wouldn't know because despite playing since closed beta, I was busy during that period of time so never got to play it) and completely messed up the flow of the story since you cannot replay them. LW2 may make sense if you played LW1, but if you haven't then you suddenly have characters you're expected to know and care about and references to a character and event that you never saw.

To do that for every event and story would be a monumentally bad decision for an MMO. You weren't there to kill Joko so now you can never play the first half of LW4. You didn't kill Kralk when he crashed so you have zero context for the branded or any plot to do with them. You were busy with work so couldn't be there where Aurene hatched so the first time you see her she's as big as you and apparently you're her champion but this is the first time you've ever seen her. And how to you work with expansions? Does all HoT content poof once PoF comes out? Are all previous LW episodes deleted the moment a new episode is released? And what about achievements and rewards tied to certain places? And how about how the devs feel about their hard work being deleted? Some devs don't have issues with their work being ephemeral, sure, but not everyone is fine putting dozens of hours into something that will last a short amount of time and will only be able to be experienced from Youtube after a week or a month.

A game with no consistent story, such as Fortnite, can do one-time events. Team Fortress 2, which is a far more apt comparison, did do one-time story events but left the maps up so people could play on them forever. An MMO cannot do that because you've forgotten the second half of the acronym everyone drops to keep it short: RPG. A roleplaying game where the story is fragmented and impossible to replay if you weren't playing between two set dates is not fun. Could an MMO be set up to always be evolving and removing content as other content is added? Yes, but it would need to be built from the ground up to do so. GW2 is not and LW1 is infamous among both players and devs as a bad design choice for not being replayable.

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@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:I'm really trying to talk more about why gw2 doesn't have hype, while fortnite does, despite both games doing roughly the same thing (at one point in time at least)

I think gw2's biggest hype train around living world content was around before Lazarus appeared, and during Lazarus's plot line before he is revealed to be Balthazaar. I think everyone on reddit was trying to figure out what was happening in the plot of the story, creators like WP wholly focused on the mysteries, and back then, Deroir was making lore video's about the whole thing. Maybe the hype might not have been strong outside gw2, but the hype was definitely there for almost everyone that played the game.

So ya, i can understand S1 not working out for the structure of the game, but gw2 has fixed that, and it still doesn't perform to the level of fortnite.

I think as well as the reasons other people have already mentioned it's because it's more surprising that Fortnite does it. An RPG, even an MMORPG, having a storyline with massive, world-changing events and huge plot twists is expected. In a shooter with minimal plot it's more unusual and therefore more worth discussing outside of sites dedicated to that game.

I've not heard anything about Fortnite's events except for my cousin trying to work out what they've done that made her kid freak out (cousin is not a gamer), I only know it got media attention because to explain it to her someone linked to a Newsround (BBC news for children) article about it. But I feel like everyone I know has been talking about Untitled Goose Game recently, and in a way that's similar. Firstly that it's my perception of the phenomenon based on my social circle, I really wouldn't have to try hard to find people who have never heard of Untitled Goose Game (in fact I bet there's at least one reading this now). But secondly and more importantly that it's getting a lot of attention not because it's doing something totally new which has never been seen before (except maybe letting you play as an actual goose who cannot do anything real geese can't do, I've not seen that before) or even necessarily doing anything better than other games have, but because it's an unusual combination of gameplay elements. A lot of the discussion (especially among journalists) has centrered around how it's difficult to describe it because it doesn't fit into any of the conventional genres - it's not quite a puzzle game, it's got sandbox elements but limited actions, it's kind of like a stealth game but you often have to call attention to yourself to achieve objectives...

It's a novelty, and that gets people talking. Just like when a game which most people wouldn't expect to have much story or consistency runs a big event which fundamentally changes their map(s?) instead of just releasing new ones like most shooters do.

Expecting the same kind of media attention when GW2 has a major storyline or plot twist would be like expecting people to be as surprised when a murder mystery has a twist ending and a surprise villain as when it happened in Game of Thrones.

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@"Zephire.8049" said:You cannot do one-time major events in a game about story. Or at least one where you have the original starting story for new players/characters that then jumps into the current story after you finish it.

Arenanet tried that with the Southsun events and LW1 and they have not gone over well. They were a pain in the rear for people at the time (I wouldn't know because despite playing since closed beta, I was busy during that period of time so never got to play it) and completely messed up the flow of the story since you cannot replay them. LW2 may make sense if you played LW1, but if you haven't then you suddenly have characters you're expected to know and care about and references to a character and event that you never saw.

To do that for every event and story would be a monumentally bad decision for an MMO. You weren't there to kill Joko so now you can never play the first half of LW4. You didn't kill Kralk when he crashed so you have zero context for the branded or any plot to do with them. You were busy with work so couldn't be there where Aurene hatched so the first time you see her she's as big as you and apparently you're her champion but this is the first time you've ever seen her. And how to you work with expansions? Does all HoT content poof once PoF comes out? Are all previous LW episodes deleted the moment a new episode is released? And what about achievements and rewards tied to certain places? And how about how the devs feel about their hard work being deleted? Some devs don't have issues with their work being ephemeral, sure, but not everyone is fine putting dozens of hours into something that will last a short amount of time and will only be able to be experienced from Youtube after a week or a month.

A game with no consistent story, such as Fortnite, can do one-time events. Team Fortress 2, which is a far more apt comparison, did do one-time story events but left the maps up so people could play on them forever. An MMO cannot do that because you've forgotten the second half of the acronym everyone drops to keep it short: RPG. A roleplaying game where the story is fragmented and impossible to replay if you weren't playing between two set dates is not fun. Could an MMO be set up to always be evolving and removing content as other content is added? Yes, but it would need to be built from the ground up to do so. GW2 is not and LW1 is infamous among both players and devs as a bad design choice for not being replayable.

Ya that makes sense to me when you explain it that way.

But still i believe this is what GW2 wanted to be in the beginning, before Fortnite came along and "showed em all how it's done."

Never-the-less, i feel that gw2 should still come up with something to hype up the game...it seems to just be lacking in that department. I think it's plausible to think that they could still hype up their game in forums outside of the games dedicated media channels and reddit. The little 5 cent ads that appear on website footers just isn't cutting it.

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It’s no debate that GW2 has essentially 0 marketing ability—that much is definitely fact, and I’d love for them to up their game in that sense.

But it should not become Fortnite. They’re two completely different games, and a Fortnite-like community for an MMORPG would be a nightmare.

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@XatraZaytrax.2601 said:

@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:I don't play Fortnite...but i'll be honest, I'm following the whole Fortnite seasonal event thing as if i did play it. Each event that Fortnite does is always a worldwide mystery, endeavor, or just highly anticipated for. Each event ONLY happens at one point in time and you can NEVER experience it again.

I'm pretty sure that is what GW2 always wanted to do with it's own events...a single, once in history style events (this is what the living world was supposed to be at the beginning with season 1)

I'd like to know why gw2's events never reached this hype level that Fortnite has? Is there any sort of difference?

Anet did that once. There was a one-time huge monster karka event. You had to log into that event on the given day to participate. If you did particioate you got a special reward. It was a truly awesome and epic boss battle that took place in the open world and all you had to do to join was get on a map. After the event people were up in arms about to the unfairness of it, so it was never done again.

What I remember was a truly awesome and epic boss battle against lag so bad I couldn’t use any skills and the action was freeze frame. Since it was now or never everybody was there and the servers couldn’t handle it. So fair or unfair, repeat events are better.

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As others have said, Anet did indeed do that in the beginning, for Living Story 1. And it was woeful. So many players were turned off by the once-only events that if you weren't online at X hour you missed it, forever. Credit goes to Anet for trying something new, but it just did not work at all in any shape or form.Things are far better now.

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