Hi, please read and comment on what you think. Thank you.
Mounts:
- Only realistic types such as horses, camels, trained dolyaks
- Only acquired by completing a gruelling amount of events / dungeons (i.e. extremely high NPC merchant cost or extremely rare and lucky dungeon drops)
- Speed is a maximum of 55% faster than walking
- Can be used in PVE world.
- Can only be used by pickup from stables out in the world. (what i mean here is that it is not a spell that you summon, you must choose where to store it and you MUST go there to get it, take it wherever you want in the open world, and if you want to store it or remove it, you MUST put it in a close by stable – you cannot ever just click to unsummon.
- You have to feed it once per 3 hours of active playtime and will get a reminder to do this by the stablemaster.
-You can leave the mount unfed for a maximum of 3 active days of playtime before it permanently dies and you have to grind yourself a new one.
-You can pay a certain amount of gold to the stablemaster to automatically feed your horse every 3 hours.
-Feeding the mount costs gold depending on what food it will eat. You can choose with the NPC stablemaster which food to feed it, and can choose to indefinitely feed it every 3 hours of active playtime.
-When you pickup your mount, you pay the bill in gold. If you don’t have enough gold, you cannot pick it up and go out with it.
- When out questing or exploring, dismounting will leave your mount in that position for 2 hours of active playtime. If you do not return to your mount within that time, your mount will abandon you and you will have to regrind for a new one. (so you could logout and leave it there, login and it will be there, so long as within 2 hours of active logged in playtime you return to it and pick it up).
Benefits:
- Some players would prefer to mount it across the open land using it as a tool for great exploration and discouraging themselves from using waypoints all the time, although can still use them.
- Mounts are quite right a stale, boring, and old fashioned form of travel in MMORPG games. This way, turning your mount into a companion that you HAVE to take care of as if it were your own in real life, makes it far more interesting and realistic, and could warrant the good use of a mount in GW2 that would not ruin any aspects of the current gameplay system.
- In the older days of MMO games, mounts were seen as a very high achievement and players looked on that had one, were cheered and respected or even envied because the other player without one – really wanted one. This way, players will play their hearts out to get one. And once having one, they and everyone else knows that to keep that achievement active with them, they have to undertake a certain responsibility. Doing so makes mounts once again, a really awesome cool thing to have, not just a stale boring item that no one cares about.
PVP:
- No, not yet. I don’t know how this would work in PVP, so I leave that part of the topic up to NC Soft to debate and discuss if they wish. As far as I am concerned on this idea, it is for the open world PVE environment only solely for exploration purposes and an alternative to travelling around instead of waypoints.
Implementation:
- It does not have to be now. We expect expansions to come for GW2, and those expansions may include entire new maps and more open world space, where we may need to hop onto a boat to get to them. Mounts would probably a better time to implement as part of one of these later expansions. The game as it stands now would probably not have the capacity or the games engine is simply not designed to support it at the moment.