Guild Wars 2

I’ve been struggling to figure out how to write this post. I’ve been through the high and low of GW2 and am now figuring out why I’ve lost the motivation to play. I’ve got incredible respect for the GW2 Design team for their study of the visceral and psychological experience of people who play MMORPGs, and I feel a lot of love of what has been made here.

So now I’m at mid-game, the terrible 30s to 70s. Any time I think of loading up a character I feel like I’d be dragging my feet to it. The part of the game I want to play and enjoy the most is the regular Area Maps across Tyria, and yet I stall at answering the question “Why do I care about them?”.

I find that the Area Maps have little to no concern for my character. I may have one or two personal story instances per Area, but other than that no NPC or dynamic event cares that I’ve made an Asuran Female Necromancer or a Male Sylvari Elementalist. I don’t seem to meet any NPCs who need my specific Mesmer skills to solve their particular problem, and no-one raises a question that my Charr is, of course, an Engineer.

So I am suggesting that to make me care about the Area Maps, I need to see the Area Maps care about me.
Essentially a different way of creating Personal Story. (I write it here in the Personal Story thread as it’s related to Identity and the individual journey more than anything)

There’s a few ways here that this could be done, but they all depend on the fundamental variables all players make that are crucial to their character:
1) Their Race
2) Their Class
3) Their Gender
4) (Optional) Their Crafting Professions
5) The other Background Story choices

So my suggested methods of increasing character identity in the world, and upping motivation to play the Area Map are:

1) Character-Triggered Dynamic Events:
Create new Dynamic events that trigger when a player happens along that meets criteria based on the variables above. Write story and events that would focus on the presence of, say, a player Thief. Design an event where a Charr Mesmer is needed to help spy the tricks of an imposter Mesmer. Plot a short story where a Sylvari Engineer faces some stigmatism for their chosen class.

2) Character-Specific Personal Story Instances:
Using the character variables, create Personal Story instances that are not quest points on the map. You may see the instance entry point when you are nearby, and party members may join you, but you can’t plot it on the map and run at it.

3) Sharing Your Uniquness:
When a player completes an instance/event as above, give everyone on the map a small, hour-long boon named after the player. The boon is nice but the real effect is
a) showing there are others out there participating in events that are kinda unique to them, and
b) when you participate in them you let everyone know and give them a little buff.
My thoughts were that every Area Map has, say, 20 character-triggered instances, and completing an instance grants a +1% {random 1 of 4 Attributes} buff to all players across the map, max +5% buff to any one attribute.

4) Cause Gossip and Chat:
Have NPCs talk about you based on your character. Have some show love and some show hate, and most have commentary. Many dynamic events would start like this, but often NPCs will just make chat about you.

Events like this would create new and unique experiences for each of the characters you play through an area. It would create flavour and curiosity in the Area Map other than running from Heart to Heart or Instance to Instance. You would pay attention to the environment some more, and feel more immersed and special when it interacts uniquely with you.

Other players would run by and say “What’s this that’s happening? I haven’t seen this before!” and you’d say “It seems to be because I’m a Norn Guardian. I think they’ll want me to do some fighting/defending/bashing/dancing etc etc. Help if you’d like!”.
It’s like those good old times in other MMOs where you are given a quest or mission to do that no other class or race can cause but draws a lot of attention from others and makes you feel special for making the character you’ve made.

I admit that something this important and large would take quite a lot of resources. It’s not a hotfix issue, but something that would take a GW2.6 release, or an expansion to implement. Yet I feel the issue IS important and is worth looking at the factors and options.

This sounds great. A few of those don’t sound too hard to implement, depending on how ANet has coded their engine. The NPC chatter shouldn’t be too hard if there’s a variable floating around with the PC name, and there’s got to be that. It might not be accessible to NPCs yet, but that can be worked with.

Instanced events are probably a lot harder than regular events, but it’s a lot easier to control who’s in them so I’d think they don’t have as complex testing requirement’s. ANet’s dialogue system is fairly rudimentary so far, but I think it could handle changing some parts based on race or profession.

The map bonus is a brilliant idea. GW2 is an MMO, and more ways to pull other players in / be pulled into other player’s stories is almost always a good thing. Plus, ANet could use some refresh of the way they get players to play events anyway.
If this was an expansion, I would definitely buy it. Even if it was a couple expansions – maybe 1 per profession, and one for all the crafting professions?