Guild Wars 2

— TL;DR at bottom —

Notice how many zones go untouched and many events are hardly ever done? Notice how Cursed shore, for example, has a focus on about 4 different events that people center all of their time around, and no where else?

I personally hate this, I feel like in order to keep my leveling at a good pace I have to stick to the farmed events that we all know are going to give the best xp/hour. I wished we could still do events around the world and feel like we’re still getting good rewards, or that we’ll find some cool loot that you wouldn’t get anywhere else.

What if events were somewhat like how kill exp worked? If a mob is less farmed, you get bonus exp for it. What if an event is less farmed, not done at all even, and you get higher rewards for it, and less rewards for overly farmed ones? Higher/lower drop chance from event mobs, more money/exp from the event participation reward, etc. This will have players going all over the place for events, exploring zones they enjoyed or doing events that they actually liked, because the rewards will be much closer to what they’d want to be earning.

Events now just aren’t as rewarding as they could be, so a reward for exploration would be nice. People who farm mindlessly will have to put in a bit more effort of course, but end-game farming shouldn’t be all about being a drone and spamming AoE/auto loot. That’s not fun or rewarding at all, we can all attest to that.

TL;DR – Make farmed events less rewarding based on how often they’re done, make untouched events more rewarding based on the fact no one ever does them. Scaling money, xp and loot chance based on their frequency.

Agreed… something needs to be done to encourage players to spread themselves out more. The recent changes have improved this some, but ANet needs to push further. Unfortunately, threads like this get little discussion.

Quite frankly, I think its due a large number of the players being lazy. They have been trained to farm and like it. Why bother roaming around to do a lot of different random events when they can focus on a select few major ones that are easy to join? Gamers by nature game the system to maximize rewards… its been this way since the days of Pong. Its all about the loot.

Currently, the World Events
1) Have a long trigger chain that can be joined at any point.
2) In the case of dragons, have a long final battle that can be joined at any point.
3) Are located near waypoints, making it easy to jump into the action.
4) Occur at regular intervals, allowing players to schedule events to maximize rewards.
5) Guarantee Rare level items.

This keeps all the players in World Event zones, especially the ones with events that are easy to trigger and to zerg.

There have been plenty of other suggestions to solve this problem

1) Make materials not area-dependent. Give a player with an Orichalcum Pick the same chance to get Orichalcum from a Copper node as from an Orichalcum node. Give players a chance to get Gossamer scraps as drops from centaurs. This will distribute material farmers.

2) Make junk loot useable. Create crafting recipes for town clothes or skins using the junk loot. This will distribute the completionists and vanity players.

3) Move to a point-based loot system. Instead of giving a chest or searching the corpse after a kill, just reward the player with a number of points based upon the difficulty of the kill and the number of players who participated. Players can accumulate these points, and then turn them in to an NPC for a tiered choice of random loot – gold, karma, mats, or equipment. The more points, the better the chance for high-tier loot… kinda the way salvage kits work. That way a player who slaughtered every Skritt in an area has a chance to get a rare just like a player that zerged a dragon. Really, what is the use for white or blue equipment to a lvl 80 except to sell for a pittance of coin? Players follow the loot. By making every kill build towards high level loot, every zone will become a warzone.
Heck, points could be awarded for non-damage behaviors too. Rez an NPC? Points. Throw out boons like Mardi Gras beads? Points. This will encourage and reward more cooperative builds instead of just DPS.

Of course, I doubt this thread will get further productive discussion amongst the player community. We can only hope a dev maybe sees this and gets a few ideas.