Guild Wars 2

Renown Hearts (RH’s)

They’re a neat new concept. A nice slight change-up form traditional questing. While similar to solo quests, group participation is an option for those who haven’t completed them, which is nice. The difference from traditional quests for those who don’t know is there’s not a “quest giver” to start them, they’re just always available to progress until complete.

RH’s are all presented as the same exact things. Fill this progress by doing these various things. There’s good and bad to this presentation. The good is that there are multiple ways to fill the progress bar. The bad is that ultimately you’re doing these things to fill a progress bar.

The idea of the progress bar for RH’s needs to be scrapped. It’s simple to understand, great, but it takes so much away from actually caring about the tasks that fill the progress bar. The progress bar concept feels very grindy. If ArenaNet really loves their progress bar though, a better design of the RH’s would be to have a progress for each type of contribution, and present the RHs as bulleted list with a progress bar for each bullet. I still don’t like that or the idea of a progress bar, because (again) it feels grindy.
I think the best way to present the RH’s is to simply to provide a bulleted list of the things that need done in a particular area (completely hide progress) and put something like a checkbox on the UI so people can see if a task is empty or has a check. Then you’ll know if it’s done or not. RHs wouldn’t be complete until each task is done.

“How will I know how much of something I need to do?” That’s the natural question to ask. You don’t, because, knowing your progress won’t matter. Why won’t knowing your progress matter? Because the number of times and contribution to hidden progress wouldn’t be designed as a grind. It’d be reasonable. There’s really no reason to have players repeat something more than 5 times, it just gets repetitive. It’s also a nice little surprise when a player is alerted a task is complete without an indication of progress.

Keeping numbers for task completion completely hidden and low in combination with players knowing that the number of repetitions will be low due to previously experiencing this, will result in players feeling less grind. More importantly it provides players with a better opportunity to pay attention to content and enjoy it, because they don’t just know and feel like they have to get a yellow bar from 0% to 100%.
Let’s do an example of an RH with the format presented. We’ll use “Help Farmer Diah”.

<3
Help Diah by watering corn, stomping wurm mounds, feeding cattle, and defending the fields.

• Worm mounds stomped [ ]
• Crop destroying worms eliminated [ ]
• Cattle fed [/]
• Fields defended from bandits [ ]

Imagine the “ [ ] “ as a checkbox, which would be checked when the task was done. Completely hidden behind the scenes would be small numbers, for example 4, 4, 3, 5 respectively for each task listed above. I also mentioned ArenaNet could have progress bars per task, but I think that would end up resulting in a grindy feel and them feeling incentivized to add too many repetitions (which in my mind is 6 or more). In several cases it may make sense to allow hearts to be completed by only doing a couple of the total available tasks listed, but I think it makes sense to have completion based on all of them, as they aren’t repeatable and ANet wouldn’t want anyone forever missing out on part of the game’s content.

I doubt we see any of these improvements to hearts until an expansion, but for the sake of making the game better, polished, and refined one can hope to see them rolled out with a content update at some point.

Tl;dr of Renown Hearts
Progress bars feel grindy, but multiple progress bars per task could possibly work. RH Tasks should be bulleted for readability in the UI. A better RH format is progress being task based, this increases game content players are exposed to. Use low quantity (1-5) task repetitions that are completely hidden to avoid grindy feel.

If one progress bar feels grindy having a multitude of them won’t really help.

Not to mention that you would be reducing the amount of ways in which one can fill a heart. You are proposing 4, 4, 3, 5 for each respective task but currently you can do it with 5, 3, 4, 4 as well or even 16, 0, 0, 0 if you’d like. That won’t work under your proposal and I’d much rather fill the heart by killing any and all bandits attacking the farm instead of having to go back and feed the cows because the farmer only cares about the first 5 corpses I made.

the hearts were put in just to get us started. i foresee GW2’s future content being heavy on the DE’s.

nerva.7940:

the hearts were put in just to get us started. i foresee GW2’s future content being heavy on the DE’s.

Same, already we can see that the hearts get more sparse as you go to higher level areas and an individual scout will mark less and less hearts in the comparison to the early zones as a direct consequence.