This started off as a comment on the thread dedicated to Arena Net’s endgame post on Reddit. I’ll just start by saying that I love GW2. WvW and leveling was the most fun I’ve ever had in an MMO, and I was a DAoC player.
However, I can’t believe the amount of grind that they put in the PVE endgame in order to get skins and whatnot.
Some examples:
119 gold for tier 3 cultural armor, (not even exotic)
300 tokens from an explorable dungeon for some 1 hand weapons. The currency is not universal, so you have to grind the same dungeon in order to get that many tokens.
Crafting mats like Globs of Ectoplasm only come from salvaging rare quality weapons level 74+. So if you want to craft, you have to get gear with magic find to farm and hopefully get yellow drops and hopefully get ectoplasm off of them, with there being no chance of getting them off of a drop in harder content. Same thing with rare crafting materials, like scales and fangs, but the opposite: you have to go farm mobs with magic find gear to increase your chances of getting them to drop, or hope they come in loot bags off of mobs, instead of having a chance to retrieve some from salvaging. The point here is there is only 1 avenue to achieve these things, which is a grind that forces you to do one thing over and over.
Other than crafting recipes/somthing for a legendary, if you don’t like god armor from Orr, there’s not much to spend karma on. Cultural weapons are rare quality, not exotic, so you won’t be buying those unless you like the skins most likely.
I don’t mind that there is a grind to get things at the end of the game in PVE. What I don’t like is that the avenue to get what you want at end game is SO narrow that you have to do a massive grind to get it. They should reward you for playing the game and doing challenging content. All of these different currencies limit how you have to play to obtain the things you want. My friend liked the look of the TA token armor. Me, not so much; I like the look of CoF’s. The mechanics of the game therefore immediately encourage NOT playing together, instead of what they intended, which is playing together. Of course I’m a good friend and grinded out TA with him so he could get some things from there, but why does it have to be like that? It severely limits how people play the end game.
The solution is so simple. Get rid of all the separate currencies and just have Gold, Karma, and WvW tokens. Heck, you probably don’t even need WvW tokens. Increase the price somewhat for endgame karma vendors, and viola, all of those problems above are solved.
Gold will be used exactly as it is now, for the TP, buying things from crafters, repairs, and whatnot.
Karma would replace everything that is currently bought with tokens. Instead of getting token rewards, you get karma rewards. You get karma rewards for completing dailies. From events, world bosses, hearts, dungeons in both story and explorable modes, personal story, WvW activities, etc. This will absolutely free players to play how they want at end game. Want to run story mode AC, then explorable Arah, run around and uncontest some waypoints, then siege in WvW? GREAT, we can do that, and also be working towards the skins we want. Do you want the TA daggers and the COF armor? If you have the karma, you can do those without grinding those dungeons only.
I would love it if you had to ‘unlock’ karma vendors that had that dungeon’s armor/weapon karma vendor in it. Lets use TA as an example. Say you want to buy TA armor/weapons with karma. Well, you have to do explorable mode for TA to get to this vendor. At the start when you pick a path, one path at random will have the karma vendor at the end. So after the wurm boss in TA, when you’re offered the choice to go up or forward, the game would pick one at random (and let you know which one so it’s not a guess/grind the easiest path until the vendor shows) and the vendor will be there at the end. Same with WvW. Have 3 different karma vendors with different skins. Have 2 of them be upgrades you can buy at each Garrison in enemy server’s boarderlands, and one be an upgrade you can buy as an upgrade for Stonemist castle. This solves the problem of badge farming/spawn camping. Just offer a small karma reward for killing enemy players instead of a random badge drop.
Karma rewards could and should increase with the difficulty of the content. End-of-the-chain events should yield more karma than the beginning to encourage players seeing the event through towards the end, so people aren’t encouraged to let events fail just to farm them. High level events should always be harder, and yield more karma than level 1 events. So players that are having trouble with finding a group to take down higher level events can go back to lower level areas, make a difference, and still be rewarded, though you shouldn’t be rewarded equally for watering farmer joe’s crops as someone who killed an eye of zhitan.
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