Been a while since a real "Hawkian overthinks things" post, but my mind has been turning this stuff over since I logged out and I figured I'd share.
It is easy to want more than what we've gotten, but like you all said it's a new piece of content we've got given for free that has at least a few hours worth of content which I for one happily devoured in one go mwuhaha.
I still think it's a shame, like you said Retro, that there's no cool new reward outside of the odd materials/blue gear. The achievements are fun to get as they always are, that damn dive was a challenge and a half
So in addition to the points already made about "how long the content is," people are also happy playing at different paces even if they
do have the time for it. I spent like 3 hours in Dry Top so far, and I did beat the story, but I only have 3 or 4 of the Dry Top region achievements, haven't done the jumping puzzle, haven't opened any buried chests, and haven't done any of the elite achievements. I helped a few people who were stuck on story missions I'd already completed, explored and consumed as much flavor text as possible, did a bunch of the events, did a lot of silly jumps to try and get places creatively, and killed three-toed tootsie (woo!) and the colocal queen once apiece. The fact that we've only seen a fraction of the zone so far is just right in terms of introducing a new kind of progression.
but where's the awesome *insert desert gear piece* at the end of it?
As others have noted, this is definitely the one missing piece of the puzzle right now. There's nothing wrong with doing away with meta achievements, but equivalent unique, cool rewards should still be available for each release. If it's too awesome to just give out for completing that release's story progression, maybe just lock it behind "Complete Story Achievement + 1 Elite Achievement" or something. But especially for future people looking over the season to decide whether or not to buy an episode, the potential for a unique reward- Retro's desert garb assembly kit is a complex and awesome functional example, but anything along the lines of the fluff minis, tonics, scene journals, and toys of previous metas- would be a motivator to spend 250 gems. (I'd also love a toy from one of these releases that let you flip on the Aspect Arena element skills for Costume Brawl!)
This all makes me dig in a little deeper to the design philosophy at work here though, and what I find is actually pretty rock solid and maybe a little brilliant. The releases page has now been updated to fully reflect the "TV season" dynamic:
There's a lot to note here:
1) A season consists of "Episodes" (with a continual story thread leading to a finale, like a seasonal arc), and "Special Events" (think "Christmas specials," "Very Special Episodes," "crossovers," etc.). Season 1 of Guild Wars 2 had 20 Episodes and 9 Special Events (
).
2) Particularly interesting to me is that something like Tequatl Rising- which was not part of the Scarlet storyline but also not a holiday, festival, or other cyclical content- counts as a Special Event.
3) The "offseason" seems like it'll be about 3 months of the year and contain a WvW tournament, Feature Pack, and Special Event
4) Offseason Special Events, like the Festival of the Four Winds, get their own box. We can expect these to last longer than a typical one (FotFW was about 40 days!) and also bridge the gap between seasons with little story hints.
My feeling is that "Episodes" of the season will be designed for level 80s while "Special Events" will be accessible to everyone.
This all leads up to what will be the ultimate expression of the TV metaphor:
ratings. And I'm not just talking about Miktar's 9/10 for this Episode.
The new "unlock while it's live or buy it later" dynamic means that players with level 80 characters have a new role to play in the future direction the game. Retro mentioned how the story presentation allows our avatars to be the Watson; now the player at the keyboard also gets to be
the Nielsen.
Imagine a couple of months down the road, when players hitting 80 on their first characters are looking back over the season and decided on what, if anything, to buy. Some will just go for everything, while some will seek out opinions. People who were there "live" might say, e.g.: "Episode 1 was pretty good but not really necessary to the story, 2 was so-so, you absolutely have to see 3-5, you can skip 6 if you don't like [insert character]" and so on... very much like conversations I've had with people just getting into a TV series. Then at the end of a season ArenaNet can look back at the "ratings" and say, "Ok, that worked really well, that didn't, this one kept people hooked for the next, this one saw a big drop off," yadda yadda yadda, and use this info to adjust and fine-tune the notion of what 250-gems-per-episode is "worth," which in turn can only improve the value of each episode you catch "live" as well.
So just to bring it back to the bit about unique rewards- they'll easily get a good sense of what players think is worth it over time and adjust these. I'm hoping that they do have similar ones to the old meta rewards in store despite the new system- it's worth remembering that some releases did have meta rewards that were roughly like Scarlet's bag of whatsits this time:
Fractured, Edge of the Mists, and even
Battle for Lion's Arch had totally non-unique ones themselves.
All in all, despite a few quirks and limitations at present this new structure is going to benefit all players and massively increase the value of the game. Unless we see a big
drop in quality for the rest of the season- and my suspicions are that we can expect the opposite- this is the same quiet little game changer as the original two-week patch schedule was, and competitors will be playing catch-up for years.
