Armor skins are an important part to your endgame horizontal progression. You must reward players these without using current ingames currently only. I know what you may be saying, thats stupid! However, current in game currencies are not satisfiying to use. If they’re not that means that players will easily buy them and they dont get the same satisfaction out of them.
For starts time frame. You should be introducing new armors in the game (not just in the gem shop, the actual game) every 1 1/2 to 2 months. The biggest and most important part is how players unlock these. Players must do something that is hard. Something that requires skill. Something that can be done with a few players. See the biggest issue tequatl has is that it requires all these people. I’d recommend organizing something with a minimum of 8 players in mind. Then scale the event to fit players larger than that. This means players will have to interact with the community to some extent, but it doesn’t take a huge amount of people like tequatl.
Lets talk about this event that will unlock it and how it unlocks the new armors. So say you introduce a new armor set for each type (heavy, medium, light). Lets just use the light set as an example. This light set can be obtained by doing certain things in one zone. What these “things” are are not timed to timers. They must seem random to promote exploration and they must not just suddenly appear. An example would be to put the light armor events in caldeon forest. At a minimum I’d say 7 areas inside the map could have the event that would give you the chain. Do not put a big marker on the map to show people where it is. Do it similar to a dynamic event. The difficult of them should be on the level of a guild challenge/queens gauntlent. You must challenge the players so you dont just afk attack like in champion trains or some world bosses. Some may be saying, why not just use guild challenge? Guild challenges use a UI to tell them where it is. It doesn’t promote exploration, it is timed, it is guild only, and it is not immersive at all because of the UI. So me and my party explore caldeon forest to look for the event to help one of our friends get the armor. Somone in map chat killed him. Ah alright, the event would have a 5-10min cooldown and then it would start again in a randomly selected area out of the 7. Here is an example in Caldeon.
Ruins of the Unseen- Skritt have found an ancient artifact of the Unseen and activated its power. You must stabilize the rift that has form from killing many of the surrounding wild life! The event would start, again it would challenge the players and require teamwork. Should they fail the event (dont just make a mission fail to a timer or to some npc dieing, gotta put in more ways that events can fail. NPC escorts are frustating for a lot of players. Timers get boring after a while), then the event would go on cd for 5-10mins and then spawn somewhere else.
Once a player completes the event they get a token. Only one and you can only get one token a reset. You take this token to the NPC in the zone and you can exchange it for one piece of the armor set. You can also exchange it for some gold (1g at the very least since it will be hard) so those who cant use light will have a point in doing it.
Do something similar for each armor type. This may seem like a lot of work, but it will keep players involved and something to do in the game. Something that can’t just be bypassed with some gold or karma.
What about WvWers? If WvWers deeply desire these armor sets and don’t want to do PvE at all, you can offer the armor set for a considerable amount of badges and ascended mats (ones you get from champions only, not crafted).
So with the new zones being released, and already considerable amount of zones to choose from, this system will do a ton for the game. It will offer challenging PvP content, an addition to the small gear look progression in the game, and it will begin to populate dead zones a bit better. With each new zone you have a new choice for a new set of quest and armor.