Guild Wars 2

Here’s an idea to give people a system for unlocking non-combat related progression.

Imagine if they made a new action slot, the “social” slot. This slot would be divided up in to 3 categories: gestures, pets, and toys. The slot could be swapped on the fly, combat or no.

The way it would work is you’d start with nothing in it, but you could unlock new things for it through a wide variety of ways. Some could be from achievements, some could be from rare drops, some could be from accomplishing certain other things.

Attached to this would be a new system: Epic stories. These would be stories for a single zone. One or two might be added per update. They are sort of like mini living stories, and don’t go away when a new patch comes out. They would be side stories that tell about the lore and people of a zone. No kill 5 X type missions, but talk to so and so, protect this other guy, go raid this camp, etc. At the end would be a social action unlock. Each zone might have a few unique unlocks for people to go after.

The unlocks would range from very easy ones to gain to very kittenes. Some might be nearly impossible, or take a long drawn out process.

Moving pets here means you’d have access to all your pets, they’d just take up the social slot while in use. They wouldn’t take inventory as they’d no longer be items.

Toys would be things like the flute or the kite. Move them from items to actions. While you have them in the action slot, you can activate them. For something like the flute, this actually activates a state that temporarily switches your other abilities.

Gestures would of course be unique unlockable gestures. Dances, special cheers and other unique unlockable emotes.

The nice thing about having these actions to try for being non-combat is devs could go wild making them because they don’t need to be balanced, and this gives players something to try for besides yet another shoulder skin. I already have a nice shoulder skin I don’t want to replace!