Guild Wars 2

Lesser, popular MMOs have been plagued with poor design sturcture that funnels its players almost entirely into a single tier of content. The unfortunate, inevitable consequence is that older content is largely abandoned in favor of the new, decreasing the chances of a player successfully completing any of that older content requiring a group.

My suggested solution is that content which provides higher-tier rewards (namely Fractals of the Mist) require an inexpensive, moderately stackable token of admission that must be purchased from vendors available after completing stategically chosen events in danger of becoming obsolete.

For example, the vendor who appears after completing the Temple of Balthazar meta event could sell fractal admission tokens for a small amount of Karma, while the same tokens could simultaneously be sold by another vendor for a very small amount of Ascalon Tears (5-10).

The cost should be small enough so that several Fractals runs can be purchased for a single event or dungeon run, so that players can still focus on the higher tier of content if they choose (the older content should be more of a diversion than a chore), while still providing the necessary incentive to avoid the abandoning older content.

Any thoughts?

That’s… not a very good idea.

Forcing players to do X in order to do Y is not a good idea.

Rather than force everyone to replay old content, why not give them the option to do either? Employ some mechanism to get new high-tier rewards from existing content. To use your example, the hypothetical tokens earned from opening the Temple of Balthazar could be used to purchase mists essence or converted to fractal tokens. That way, nobody is forced to do anything, but players don’t have to feel guilty for not running the older stuff if they want to.

There’s also the issue of time constraints for busier players. Having to run AC before their fractal daily adds a non-trivial amount of time they need to play each day. It would only serve to widen the gap between players who have time to grind and those who don’t.

@ Oglaf: I disagree. Given enough options to obtain the tokens, players can choose which way to obtain them. And if tuned right, they wouldn’t have to do the older content very often.

The alternative is what killed WoW for me. Fractals offer the best gear, and everyone hangs out in Lion’s Arch in between runs, with zero incentive to leave. The game, while rich in content, becomes largely a ghost world where player experience 1% of that content and complain that it is nonexistent. They then get bored and play something else.

Players go only along the paths that lead to reward. A-Net can either pave that path through their painstakingly-developed content, or they can treat their players like fun-consuming locust who ravage the fun from an area and move on, leaving it desolate.

The thing is, as you mentioned, there are games that let me play the current stuff without having to grind the old stuff. I liked that WoW was almost a whole new game every couple years. I went back to the old stuff anyway, when I felt like it. There were usually achievements or rare drops I missed or something. But the key is, I only had to revisit it when I was in the mood.

If I had to keep playing old content to do the current stuff, then I’d probably go back to those other games. At best, it would be an unnecessary grind. At worst, it would be a gimmick to cut back on the amount of new content they could get away with releasing with an expansion.

@Urthona: I agree that having to run a daily AC would be too much. That is why I mentioned that the rate should be tuned. A single old-content run should be able to purchase several runs. At 60 Dungeon tokens per path, a fractal admission token priced at 5 tears would net 12 runs.

That’s the balance I’m talking about. I’m not trying to wrench people away from the new content so that they spend half their free time doing what they do not want to do. I’m saying players should take a break from the relentless grind in a manner of their choosing that helps other players with content that is amazing and should be kept alive.

I think the developer’s plan to make ascended gear available in more places does more to spread out the population than your plan would.

The best way to get people out of fractals is to make every single reward available from fractals available from any large chest spawn from events (dragons, temples, amung other events). I would farther suggest that anyone re-doing Arah story mode when someone in the group is on the “kill zhaiten” mission have a guarenteed fractal drop at some point in the chests. This lil reward would farther stop the complaints you see of people late tot he game being unable to find runs for a mission that SHOULD have been solo-able due to the nature of it being a story mission requirement.

Everyone should be able to just jump into a fractal without having to first farm for tokens. I would rather see new content added to zones with low populations (such as mini games or special events, which are broadcast to everyone, that trigger when a zone’s population drops to a certain level). I do not like the idea of having to farm tokens before you can do something.

IMO, the current set-up is fine the way it is. All other MMOs have similar issues trying to entice players back into an area to participate in events. Let the local population in an area determine how hard that event is so it is not completely impossible, or have events that are necessary to the story progression so that there are enough players willing to participate frequently enough to support the event difficulty. Heart NPC quests, events, and the need to farm crafting materials or raise alts is good enough for me.