Guild Wars 2

Evacuated sub-80 zone populations have always been a problem, and finding a solution that doesn’t open the exploit floodgates is hard. However, one idea I’ve had is to base reward balance on people who prefer sub-80 zones on daily HUD chests or something similar. This would echo hard mode vanquishing from Guild Wars.

The rough idea is to set a requirement for chest disbursement each day, probably by dynamic and/or meta events or something similar, and once a person has completed X events in an area, fulfilled a linked dynamic event chain (meta or non-meta), or contributed in a meaningful way to some objective like % of waypoints liberated, they get a reward that makes up for not being in Orr.

This would give people incentives to explore the map rather than repeat quests over and over ad infinitum. If a person does a plinx run, they can keep doing the same run over and over and risk diminishing returns, or they can travel to other zones and find lucrative quests there with supplemental daily chests to offset the penalty for visiting non-80 zones. If a person wants, they can trigger tons of dailies by doing a world tour, but obviously such a thing would take most of the day and would probably be unbottable.

The objective is always to increase player distribution throughout the world and upkeep novelty without including the frustration of unproductive wealth generation. MMOs have always had a problem with wasted content due to the mathematical min-maxing that controls the economy, and getting out from under this shadow is just another way we can revolutionize the flawed MMO paradigm.