I have heard a lot of people say that they have completely everything there is to do in a zone just because they got 100% zone completion. Explorers know this isn’t true because a lot of things aren’t counted towards Zone completion, things like Dynamic Events, Hidden areas, hidden Events, unmarked areas etc…
So I thought that It might be interesting as well as incentives people to discover stuff if there was a kind of elite zone completion that required players to complete all the different Event Chains (I mean starting from the first event and stopping in the ultimate success state or to make it easier perhaps just participating in the chain from start to any kind of finish, be it success or failure). As well as finding the hidden secrets be it areas / hidden events (not sure if it would be a good idea to have a progress on this. I can see it either way). And finally uncovering all areas in a zone not just the POIs
I know in a way this turns something organic into a checklist sort of thing so perhaps this was avoided on purpose but on the other hand I can see it serving two purposes. 1 for players who want to experience all there is to experience in a zone can do that and they can know for sure when they are done.
2. Players will not get the wrong impression that achieving 100% map competition means you did all there is to do in the game.
The biggest issue I can see with what I am suggesting is the number of events is not fixed, as future content updates increase the dynamic events in a zone the elite zone completion itself would need to be updated. I can see this work in 3 different ways
1. I doubt the number of event chains will ever get lowered so it can be set to the current number. When new event chains are added you’ll still just need to do less. (Easy to maintain but has the drawback of people missing some of the chains thinking they did all there is to do when this would not be the case)
2. The update which adds the new chains will also update the completion counter, but those who finished it already will keep the achievement. (People starting a zone will know when they did all the event chains but people who already completed the zone will not know there is new content to discover)
3. The update will increase the requirements and will have the completed achievement revered to still missing the one/more chains the player would not have completed yet. (This might be a bit too demanding to maintain but it would be great as it will incentivize people to revisit old zones and explore them in order to discover the new chain(s). This would work great if recompleting again the achievement also gave you a partial reward, say just 1 achievement point or some influence or even just a little XP.)
I think it could work, despite the drawback that it would turn a nice organic experience into a bit of a checklist for anyone following this route.