If you’ve not heard of Garry’s Mod, it’s basically a sandbox mod for Half-Life 2 that lets you spawn objects and enemies out of thin air and construct cool machines or challenges for other players.
I was thinking that with GW2’s touted horizontal progression, and with their gem store, wouldn’t it be cool if they created something like that for GW2? Here’s some thoughts:
1) You buy objects and space to design your stuff from the gem shop
2) You can submit your creations or areas to your friends / guildies / whoever to try out
3) ANet selects the x coolest ones a month that are challenges with win/loss conditions and adds them to the monthly achievement
4) A new guild perks tree to give you bonuses for your designs
5) Player housing would be an obvious and simple extension of this idea
From a developer perspective it’s probably monstrously difficult, but if there’s one thing that players have shown time and again here and in other games – we can be incredibly creative!