Regina Buenaobra took the time today to answer some questions the community had about "personal stories" in Guild Wars 2. The questions echo a lot of the community's questions which means that there is a lot of good information in their latest FAQ. Not sure what we're talking about? Read The Impact of Story Pt. 1 - Guild Wars 2 Gets Personal for more details about personal stories.

The biggest thing for me was this quote:

Affect, no. Interact with, yes. Sometimes, your personal story is taken from the same point of plot. “…the things happening all over the world are not isolated or self-contained incidents; they affect everyone in the area, both in large and small-scale ways.” The centaurs are attacking human lands, for example. There may be events to drive off the centaurs from Nebo Terrace, or to attack the centaur camp and kill a leader in their army. Separately, there may be a storyline that follows the path of a lost soldier, tracking him through said centaur camp to find clues as to his whereabouts.

A lot of concern was that dynamic events would affect your personal storyline. So if an event derailed to a certain point then you'd be stuck with your story reflecting a choice that you may not have made. This is not the case and everyone can rest easily knowing that ArenaNet isn't going to make this a frustrating addition.

Another quote that caught my attention was this:

For the most part, no. As with life, when you make a choice, it changes the world around you. You can’t then go back and ‘unchange’ the world – you have made a final, tangible decision. “Our plan is to give you options, not remove them.”If you choose to let someone die, then that NPC remains dead and will be so for the rest of your character’s existence. You may go back and create a new character, playing them through that same branch of the storyline, and make a different decision – but that is a different character, and a different story.

I for one love this because I don't want to "farm" storylines. I don't my completionist side to kick in and cause me to let a guy live, do his entire storyline, and then let him die so that I can the storyline of his family avenging his death or something along those lines. Of course, the other result is me having to make more characters to see everything, but interestingly enough they answer that by allowing you to help a friend through their story and see things along with them giving you a chance to see more events without actually having to do it from the start.

Enough talk! Have at the interview right here over at Arena.net.