Guild Wars 2

I feel like most players would agree that rewards are relatively underwhelming in the game. For killing a boss, everyone gets a rare (once per day) and most people will salvage the rare for ecto or sell it on the TP for 18-25s. Sometimes, like with Tequatl, killing the boss in the first place is reward enough – and I’m really good with that, it’s a cool mechanic that actually rewards “memorable gameplay.”

Enter GW1, where you had the Elite Arenas of The Underworld and The Fissure of Woe: Grenth’s and Balthazar’s worlds respectively. These were massive, open dungeons of sorts that players could explore, complete, and plunder the daylights out of. For a normal team, this area would take anywhere from 1-4 hours to finish, and a speed clear team could finish all of the quests inside in a much shorter time.

But the area was completely shut off without “Favor of the Gods.”

I’m a big fan of this elite arena type – where you and a team of 5 could go in and explore just as you would a map of Orr or Queensdale or anywhere else – except it was entirely instanced and a party wipe would shut you out of the map… but I’m getting off topic. The point here is that the reward for a team completing so many rounds of Hero’s Ascent (the PvP match that won you Favor of the Gods) unlocked it.

Or in other words, the reward for completing content was unlocking content.

My suggestion boils down to the idea that instead of rewarding the players with a final scenario (i.e. killing the dragon) and then rewarding them with a trinket, to make the epic content you’ve designed to be so difficult to finish a precursor for something else that players want to do.

A good example of this is the pre-existing Priest of Balthazar situation, where a server must defeat the Risen Priest of Balthazar in order to get access to the Obsidian Shards. What if, upon defeating him, a portal was opened that opened a dungeon where mobs dropped Obsidian Shards?

Food for thought.