Pre-Personal Story / Season 1 players should get Original Lion's Arch

[Farohna.6247]

Why do these posts always start out so negative....why are we set up that it will be unpopular, everyone will hate it, and do your worst?  Why not just ask what others would think of it?  Odd way to state you position or win anyone's opinion to your side.  Makes it hard to get behind.  

Storywise it would make sense, for those interested in story.  Some might actually want to do the story (and it's a snore for Season 1), just to see how the world changes.  How would that work though for players who immediately want to join their friends though....would they be on different maps, would they be phased and unable to see the same things?  I never found it confising as a new player, just watched the summary in the Season 1 explanation in game and went with it.  Overall it's a decent idea, unlikely to be executed, but wouldn't hurt if they changed it.  

[Teknomancer.4895]

22 minutes ago, Parasite.5389 said:

I dunno, EU LA has a decent population, but i think more people have moved over to Arborstone and we'll probably see a similar migration to the Wizards tower.
which is another reason why forcing players throughh old LA would be a bad idea, eventually it'll be a ghost town, it's basically Pre-searing Ascalon.

There's nothing quite as morale boosting as the gaming experience of frequent "there are few players remaining on this map" prompts, but at least the Prime Timeline's spatial-temporal integrity would be preserved. Or something. 

I mean, they already tried putzing around with the personal story and broke the game once, why not have them give it another go and see what happens? What could possibly go wrong?

[Vayne.8563]

6 hours ago, Xynxycs.6718 said:

I'm talking about hooking players from the personal story, where it's often a make-or-break moment for player retention. I'm talking about the disconnect between seeing new LA and original LA during the personal story where you travel to New LA and go into a story instance and see Original LA then finish the instance and go back to New LA. I'm talking about the player experiencing the mother of all spoilers for the next season when it's entirely unnecessary. 

Do you understand, or do you need further clarification?

 I think the percentage of players that get or don't get hooked by that is probably pretty low and I don't think an 11 year old game is more likely to get new playres than returning players who have some idea of what's going on.   The MMO space is pretty crowded, but I think most people who wanted to try or play Guidl Wars 2 have probably done so already. I don't think making this change is going to make a difference to anyone but a very small segment of new players who are probably a fairly small segment of the player base.  We have a strong loyal player base, but I don't think we're raining new players. I mean we could have a repeat of the bless thing, or ESO can come out with another bad expansion or make some bad choices that drive people away, but I doubt very much this is preventing a pluraility of new players from staying with the game. There are more seriously issues that are probably doing that.

[Mistwraithe.3106]

I tend to agree with OP. I would do it as a default, so for new players who haven't done LWS1 (or anything later really?) the default would be the old version, for other players the default would be the new version BUT any player could override the default and say I always want the new / old version.

Obviously I don't know the numbers but I think Lion's Arch is fairly heavily visited and could probably support having both old and new instances running. I mean the lowest it can go is 1 instance of each version, so how many players would each instance have off peak?

I guess you may end up with a very uneven split, eg only 5% of players are on the old version. This wouldn't be good for newer players who default to the old version as it would mean they are visiting a deserved Lion's Arch. It would however make the core story missions (which show the old Lion's Arch) and LWS1 make a lot more sense and the battle for lion's arch chapter be a lot more meaningful.

[Dante.1508]

17 hours ago, Parasite.5389 said:

the problem there is you're now segregating players on per character level; "oh, you want to meet up in Lions arch? sorry, this character hasn't done their persoanl story"

Technically you can lead them to Lions arch after the initial intro its tedious but its doable.

[kharmin.7683]

17 hours ago, Xynxycs.6718 said:

The difference between your point and mine is that new players are definitely going to care about the story if they plan to stick around

 

You don't know that.  We see a lot of new players hit that level 80 boost and go straight to other content, completely bypassing personal story.

[Xynxycs.6718]

On 7/31/2023 at 5:43 AM, kharmin.7683 said:

You don't know that.  We see a lot of new players hit that level 80 boost and go straight to other content, completely bypassing personal story.

It's an educated guess on the fact that Anet felt that it was financially worth re-implementing Season 1 for story reasons.