Guild Wars 2

Does anyone else see it as a problem that the economic system stimulates playing in only the endgame areas and fractals?

All the loot that really matters, the crafting materials for the maxed out gear and so on, only drop in the late game areas.This of course tells evenyone who wants to play “efficiently” to go there. A while ago, every map was empty – except Orr. Right now, everything is empty except Fractals.

From what I gathered, the whole idea of level adjustment and so on was to let earlier areas keep their interest. Gameplay wise, they do. Economically, unfortunately, they don’t.

Does anyone else agree that it would be wise to adjust the economy to stimulate diversity in areas players visit?

Possibly give an economic advantage to earlier areas by adding more attractive drops (new suitably impressive area specific skins might be an idea), or make the stuff that already drops there have an actual use late game. Low and mid level crafting materials could be used to create new consumables that wouldn’t be obsolete.

Things like wood, iron and leather crating say a consumable that created a 60 second “improvised arrow cart” and similar?

Or ANet could make transforming materials more attractive. Right now I can dump a bunch of stuff into the Mf and get a random amount of Stuff-1-Level-Better out. If that was a better deal I think you’d see people farming more in low-level areas, since it’s a lot less stressful than high-level ones.

The other problem is that low-level events don’t scale costs very well, so it takes more of them to pay for a single waypoint at high levels. It’s pretty close now though, I think making better crafting materials available would draw enough high-level players in.

Low-level mats are already too expensive for what they are, it’s end-gamers or alts who are buying them up to rush themselves through crafting. To me the issue you describe is an unavoidable consequence of the way the maps are designed. Rather than containing a mix of low and high level content, the maps are linear and have narrow contiguous ranges designed to be finished in one go, with no real reason to go back once it’s done. This could have been different but it’s too late to change. You just have to hope for new content that doesn’t simply obsolete the old content.

Changing drop rates would fix this problem completely. But based on how much money people make from running fractals, Anet just wants to funnel people into running fractals.

The real reason to go back to old areas is because those are fun. Queensdale is a nice area to hang around and Ascalon carries memories in its own right. Being in the norn area is fun because I’m always keeping an eye on Shatterer and Jormag clocks.

Making money isn’t an issue. Copper sells good and spawns abundantly. This makes for a consistent gold source not tied to RNG. Low tier activators can be converted into CCC and then into sturdy picks and black lion keys. Karma rewards are OK in those areas either and most events can be solo’d (or I can carry alts).

Granted, none of those things is “the best”, except for the fun part And for some reason or another, fun is the core value in a game for me.

I don’t know what server you guys are on but I rarely find an area that is ‘empty’, and in my World Completion quest, having been forced to visit all of the worlds I find them all fun (except bloody Lorner’s Pass!). Going into a 1-17 zone as an 80 is a little crazy even with the down levelling but at least it’s not as insanely easy as it might otherwise be.

I totally agree I think they are getting further away from what they wanted to achieve with down scaling .how about adding random event bosses to dailies eg the fire elemental in metrics