Guild Wars 2

Reading the feedback in the jumping puzzle thread, I have some conclusions and a resulting suggestion:

1. Everyone agreed the puzzle this time was easier, not everyone agreed that this was a good thing. But many did.

2. Some people hate jumping puzzles, others hate timed ones. Not sure you can satisfy them without removing timing altogether.

3. Pretty much every comment on the subject of splitting up the route came down in favor of the move… this really helped the overcrowding issue and even added a small amount of replay value.

4. There were a fair amount of calls for different difficulty levels… but a lot of those people didn’t want to reward the more difficult path.

It’s 3 and 4 I want to address. Making the three paths easy, medium and difficult seems like an obvious move, but what should be the reward for choosing a more difficult path? There seemed to be a particular bias against giving hard jumpers more goodies.

At first I thought maybe make the harder paths shorter, rewarding more skilled players with getting it over with faster, but shorter paths tend to reduce the difficulty… and falling down increases the time, so this idea seemed to contradict itself.

But then it hit me: mere visible recognition might be enough to incentivise the harder puzzles. Here’s how it works: Everyone gets the same level of reward, but at the end of each path, you get a special set of 3 one-use dyes which can ONLY be applied to the final reward. The most visually appealing and more expensive dyes are for the harder runs. So say everyone gets a backpack, but those people who complete it at the hardest level gets to choose from Abyss, Midnight Fire and another expensive non-black dye, medium gets to choose from gold and blue rare colors for their backpack, and easymode gets the same stats on their backpack but they can choose from brown, brown, and brown :P

That way people can self-select based on their epeen level, which dovetails nicely with the epeen levels of the people agitating for harder puzzles. I say that’s win, win and win.