AP Scaling with Effort
Hum….. changing this for existing rewards may not be practical, as that may change what rewards existing players get….
For new achievements however, I’m all for this.
Repeatable rewards need to be based mostly on the time and difficulty of obtaining them. Limited rewards do NOT—and the general philosophy in GW2, as in many games, is to give diminishing returns. Notice, for example, how your first few experience levels on a new character are easier to earn than later ones, the earlier weapon skills on a new weapon unlock faster than others, the earlier skills require fewer skill points per skill, etc. The slayer achievements clearly fit this pattern.
Repeatable achievements like “agent of entropy” and “hobby dungeon explorer” give constant returns (up to some very high maximum, I think). For those, you could maybe make an argument that some repeatable achievements are easier than others—but even then, it’s very complicated because you can often pursue several objectives at once. For example, completing dungeons for “hobby dungeon explorer” will also give you a bunch of items you can salvage for “agent of entropy” (not to mention all the coin, dungeon tokens, empyreal fragments, and experience points). So it’s actually very hard to say which achievements require more effort.
For example, most of the slayer achievements can be completed in the course of “normal play”, while doing stuff that you would’ve done anyway even if they didn’t exist. One could therefore make a reasoned argument that the required effort for completing them is zero (or close to zero), which by your argument means they shouldn’t be worth any AP at all.