Good day ladies and gentlemen!
An idea just popped up in my head about GW2’s achievement system and the fact that as things are going right now, we can’t expect ANet to continue the personal story (a logical way to do it is an expansion disc, but they made it clear multiple times that they don’t even know if they want one). Sadly, this way a huge part of the world may stay unexplored simply because players lost motivation to read and really “live” things. I started my journey in Guild Wars 2 as a sylvari, and I loved them so much, I could spend hours, even day with just reading books I find, talking to people to know more about the world I “lived” in as a sylvari. Hundreds of hours later, I find myself seeing these events as numbers, something to reach, something to farm, something that stands between me and reaching 100% world completition. And this is wrong, really wrong, especially because I see that the only permanent content ArenaNet usually adds to the game is all about stats, numbers and farming. While these are needed to keep the endgame alive, it doesn’t meens the lore live in the shadow of the current “2 weeks farmfest for Achievement Points”.
So my idea is, to add a lot more kind of DAILY achievements and connect them to the 3 biggest orders of the game: the Vigil, the Whispers Order and the Durman Priory. The idea is to do “quests” (pretty much achievements) to these orders. Yes, you actually have to go there instead of a menu popup window bind to a hotkey. There you could talk to some NPCs telling you what’s happening in the world and where could you help. There isn’t even a need to add tons of new open world events.
For example:
The Whispers Order would like to know more about the Soundless (a small sylvari faction in Caledon Forest on an island), go there and talk to them or (re-)do the heart-event nearby, helping them.
You see the difference between this and logging in, hotkey H, kill 30 innocent rabbits and complete a dungeon? I mean, why? For another kind of currency? Where did Guild Wars 2 went wrong and became the only thing it tried to avoid to be: “another” MMO instead of being unique. I realized that the world of GW2 after completing the main story (did that a really really long time ago) is just… boring. If I try to look at it the way I used to, there is literally nothing for me in the game – nope, I don’t want to farm a dungeon a dozen times for a new armor skin, that’s not motivation.
I think I went a bit too far from the original topic. So, changing the achievement system like this (or just adding it as an option) would be really nice, especially if the 2 weeks special event (I think we can expect coming with it) allows us to change which Order we’d like to be a member of. An option for those who completed the story already. It’s just to wrong that after the personal story, the 3 biggest orders or tyria are nothing more than armor skin vendors.
Adding new achievements related to already existing content (encouraging world exploration) and giving the player a STORY reason to do them (here comes the faction part) would add a lot more fun to the game in my opinion. Definitly more than another invasion or farming arena. Rewarding players a “lil” bit more than 1.5 silver for doing these by allowing to earn laurels this way and spend them or permanent skins (like the Zenith system works now) for both armor and weapons is just a single way to make players WANT to do these kind of things, and create heavens for those who already want to do these kind of things but tired of the game’s farming formula.