This week's article of The Scrying Pool looks at how story is delivered in Guild Wars 2.

Dynamic Events also fall into this problem of depth that the player never sees. There have been some suggestions as to what could make these events more noticeable. Some of these include  increasing the range around the event where it becomes marked on the map or even just making it visible on the map to any player in that zone. I will agree that making events more apparent would help players to find them, but that doesn’t help with the chain events.

Chain events are a series of occurrences that follow each other. Sometimes these chains even have splits where success or failure leads players to different subsequent events. One problem that these chain events have is telegraphing there is something that comes next. Many times you will see players run off after an event is complete when there will be another event in the chain starting soon.

Again, there have been some good suggestions made to help fix this, such as NPCs telling players to wait after an event is finished or something in the UI to signify a new event in the chain will start soon. Something that I haven’t seen, however, is to create achievements for these chains.

People who have played other MMOs are probably familiar with achievements that have a list of tasks to complete. These might include visiting all the areas in a zone, completing all the quests in a quest line or collecting X out of the following list of collectible items. When players would click on these achievements in the UI, it would expand to show the list of tasks, including checking off or crossing out completed tasks. This is what I would want for dynamic event chains in Guild Wars 2.

The other day I completed a dynamic event chain that included at least six dynamic events. I say at least because there was already an event active when I reached the area and don’t know if that was the first event in the chain or somewhere in the middle. This chain of events, which I will call A Study in Ettins, is located at the very southern edge of Lornar’s Pass (the huge 25-40 zone). The events told some of the story, but the dialogue between each of those events was golden. This is a nice chunk of story that many player probably didn’t see because they left, weren’t paying attention to the chain or arrived part way through.

One of these chain event achievements would not only direct players to this content, but also tell players to stay and possibly enjoy this story. There are only two concerns I could see this system presenting: it diminishes the dynamic, living world by listing all the events and then forcing players to find and do these events to complete the achievements.

The first is a concern, but I don’t think that every event would need to be in an achievement. The stand-alone events and meta events wouldn’t be part of this. The stand-alone don’t need that notice to stick around and meta events already get some good attention through the UI. Not even all chain events might need these achievements if they are easily followed or just short in number of events or dialogue between events. Then the achievements themselves wouldn’t be all that revealing. They might list an event name, which is something players could easily find for most of the events in the game just by searching through the wiki.

As for the second concern, I don’t think it has much weight. The only people who would feel forced into doing these achievements at the moment are completionists, including some of the players that have wanted achievements for completing all unique events since the beta weekend events. These small achievements would be nothing compared to that. As for when regular achievements have some reward or currency comparable to laurels for daily achievements, having these achievements would fall in line with the other achievements to explore the world and coordinate with other players to complete.

As it is now, these chain events, with their added story and dialogue, fall into the same category as having 15 different arcs in the personal storyline. Is it really good to have this depth if no one is going to see it?

Matt “Mattsta” Adams can be found on the Blackgate server, probably leveling one of his many alts.

Q: Matt, what happened to last week's The Scrying Pool?

A: Family Emergency had me out of town last week. All is alright now but being out of town made me busy this week which is why this week's article was so late.

Have a question for me you would like to see answered? Comment below or tweet it to @MattstaNinja.