Guild Wars 2

Having observed certain patterns of complaints from other players in regards to economical progression, I have come up with a pacing-change suggestion in regards to Laurels and their acquisition progress.

As things stand currently, it takes several weeks to acquire enough Laurels for the diverse purchases they could be used for, which in turn, makes them far too valuable to spend, in most cases. And a major source of grief blocking progress and rendering the full development of alts all but impossible.

I would like to propose a slight change to the model: Increase the Laurel per daily over time played. Instead of getting only 1 Laurel per day at most, after every (for instance) 30 successful daily chests acquired, subsequent fullfilments of the category would award one extra laurel, stacking over time, possibly to a cap, which could be anywhere between 5 to 10 Laurels per day.

The progression in tiers of Laurels per day could also be tied to the Achievement Point milestone rewards, awarding +1 Laurel per daily per milestone up to the hypothetical cap of 10 Laurels per daily chest. Starting from the first 500 points milestone, or at every 1000 points milestone.

A slower curve would not make the drag for Laurels more amenable, and a faster one could easily allow for rushing vast tiers of wealth.

But to put into perspective, Amulets, Rings and Trinkets are all available for purchase with Laurels; however, at 30 Laurels per amulet, it takes one full month of every day gameplay to get a single amulet. Plus up to 20 more days for an utility infusion. It makes it extremely unsavory to acquire Rings or Trinkets by means of Laurels, as doing so would take obnoxious amounts of time essentially punching clock on the game. This is even made worse by the release of ascended recipes that require the use of Laurels to acquire.

Personally, I feel that awarding 1 extra laurel per daily chest at every achievement milestone starting from 500, up to a cap of 10 laurels per day at 5000 achievement points would fit progression the best.

Implications being that at the earlier stages, players would receive less currency, both while still at a lower level than the required to use most of the items related and while prone to wasting them on unwise purchases. But at a tier of Respected Achiever, having spent time and effort to build his account up, he wouldn’t be restricted in trying to build alts by having to wait months of artificial difficulty and a rather arbitrary barrier to be able to reach comparable state of progress.

There are economical implications ranging from the fact that a Respected Achiever with nothing better to spend his Laurels on could purchase tier 6 crafting bags and create an imbalance in costs, I do, however, consider that this would be beneficial to the game in general, making the leap from 400 to 500 in the crafting disciplines slightly less costly.

My bottom line is that making a progression curve to allow for faster Laurel acquisition over time would actually make it viable to make use of the options to buy Rings and Trinkets, and making the ride to Ascended gear less arbitrarily frustrating by removing “I have all of everything, except I need to buy an amulet that will have to wait 30 days of nothing but doing dailies.”

Of course, we all want the change to be kind of retroactive, if you do implement it. ;P Though that’s asking for far too much.

Also as a suggestion to introduce the curve, should you decide to pursue it, would be making all subsequent laurel awards from dailies (starting from implementation day) be accurately tied to the accounts Achievement Point tier. No free 1000 Laurels for players from release date, but everyone starts getting Laurels per day in accord to where they’re at in the account progress meter.

Wall of text, I know many won’t have time or care to read all of it. but I like being thorough in my lines of thought and explanations.

Thanks for the attention.

I don’t agree with this idea for one main reason: ascended is the vertical progression for this game, and it should be difficult. The game can be played perfectly well with Rare and Exotic gear, so getting Ascended, currently best-in-slot should take time and effort.

As an aside, I’m actually an advocate for ascended trinkets being removed from all of the vendors we have now once we can craft them, as ascended weapons and armor are not available through means besides crafting.

To be honest, assuming the stance of removing the accessories from the vendor and instead integrating them into Jewelmaking would actually work to relive the stress of Laurel progression, they would them be worth using for speeding up the process of making ascended and legendaries through the purchase of materials. And of course, the Mystery Cat Tonic for adoration purposes.

Removing the option might be a bit drastic, however. I’m not sure about its viability, so I propose a progression to ease the grind, not to remove it altogether.

The numbers can be tweaked with. Make it so it caps at 5 Laurels per day at 5000 Achievement points, for instance. It does take time and effort to get that global tier, and the payoff per day is not too high as to completely crush the need to wait and invest into developing the characters.

But it would not artificially hamper the development of multiple characters. The system is fine as it is from a perspective of playing a single character. From creation to the point where you actually can use the Laurels, you’ll amass a decent quantity, and once equiped, you will then collect more as you work your way to gearing the remaining slots. Not so much when trying to raise multiple ones, you have bonuses to experience, coin, karma and magic find, you get to the point of using Laurels far faster, and that’s by design. But you’re then hit with a stone wall of real life wait and playing Skinner’s Box for… Well, a rather unreasonable time. (One month for an amulet? REALLY? Scale that up, one character of each class would take 8 months to get amulets alone, not accounting for infusions or any other Laurel things along the way.)

Now take into perspective that we’re allowed to have 5 characters right off the bat, and can even purchase more slots, and the philosophy that Achievement Point milestones already work as a way to reward global time invested in form of Extra Coin %, Extra Experience %, Extra Magic Find % and Extra Karma %.

Also for the dungeon currencies, it’s offered the option of 3 different paths, scaling the currency acquired according to the completion % of said dungeon. And glory was announced as being removed from the game in a future update. Fractal relics being awarded for playing through the fractals. More fractals, more relics, plus, the progression of the fractal reward level.

It seems hideously lacking to me that Laurels are the only currency don’t offer such a progression and scale of effort / outcome. Regardless of the availability of ascended accessories through vendors or not, I still believe that some manner of progression would be beneficial, and is quite critically needed, actually.

Just to make it clear, I’m not advocating for free ascended things everywhere and lots of laurels for everyone: I agree with you that the vertical progression should be difficult. I disagree, however, to the extent of the difficulty. Requiring entire months of every day presence in-game when the content itself is only released bi-weekly appears to me as artificial difficulty at best, and a chore at worst. And for the reasons above, I fear it doesn’t meld with how the game approaches the progression of other currencies.

My numbers are examples and suggestions only. Perhaps 10 laurels per day is far too much, but 2 at 5000 thousand, 3 at 10000 and so forth in sync with the titles would not be nearly as impacting, now would it? ;P

Asking to alleviate a frustration is by no means asking to give me the shinies for free. The economy designers from A.Net can do the math and find numbers that work, I’m just drawing a stick figurine of what I’d like to see so as to give them the idea.

I do agree that it’s really hard to get enough laurels (especially on alts) to get the ascended trinkets. But I believe that a big factor is the fact that we can’t yet craft ascended trinkets, though I feel like that step is coming. My suggestion for removing the ascended trinkets from laurel vendors is ONLY assuming that we may craft them. Before that update hits, I don’t propose that at all. Once that update hits, I think that for a lot of people (especially the alts that have such a laurel-based problem now) will be much more able to get the ascended trinkets from crafting sources.

I guess what I’m saying is that I think the laurels are alright the way they are, because I feel like the ascended trinkets were given to laurel vendors as a way to get them in game before they were ready to update crafting. I don’t know what Anet plan to do with the ascended trinkets that laurel vendors have once they give us level 500 Jewelcrafting, but I think that this conversation will be much more applicable then.

Logical. Even if it costs Laurels to unlock the recipes, the ability to craft the trinkets would reward players who put effort into building their wealth, having amassed supplies, it would be trivial to craft the pieces. Otherwise, they would still be required to scale the ladder in order to be able to afford the crafting itself, rather than the individual pieces.

It’s just that… Well, suppose I play for 10 hours per day. If I run around in WvW for that long, I’ll amass vast quantities of Badges of Honor. Doing events and getting loot already awards Karma and Coin, which again, scales with time invested: If I play for 10 hours, I’ll get 10 hours worth of effort in currency. This is scales directly with the amount of time you put into it, and how good you are at the game: A well organized and successful group running in WvW would get a lot of badges from all those captures and World Ranks, a newbie solo roamer who doesn’t know how to navigate the map would earn less. This rewards both experience and effort.

Same for Dungeons and Fractals. Even though balance measures kick in, such as is the case with Guild Commendations and World Boss chests. Having diminishing returns (Dungeons) or a cap (Agony and Reward Level in Fractals, once per day / once per week for World Bosses and Guild Events respectively) serves as a measure to prevent spawn camping and encourage players and groups to take on various activities. If guild events were unlimited, large guilds could stalk poor Quaggans waddling on Kessex Hills and amass wealth without ever bothering to do other content. For World Bosses, it encourage players to engage several different ones, instead of sitting in the Queensdale train and essentially spawn camping Shadow Behemoth.

For Laurels, however, there’s no such compensation for experience and effort. I don’t count the token Laurels from achievement chests simply because these are not reliable, sure, 10 Laurels at one chest at the 5000 milestone is a massive jump, considering a 1 / day rate. But 500 points is not something easily achieved, even doing the Living World content. After the initial burst of easy permanent points, and before the 3000 mark, we fall into a rate of about 1 milestone per month, on average. Considering Living World. At the 5000 mark, that’s comparable to the Monthly category with 10 Laurels. But at other marks, 1 or 2 Laurels for a month’s worth of effort? That’s just paltry. And it clashes with the remaining bonuses to Coin and Karma, that are a permanent increase to all future acquisition.

Easy Laurels would be bad. I can’t iterate that enough. But a flat gain curve that does not reward experience is just mismatched with the rest of the economy dynamic as I understand it: Building up your account and wealth should allow for easier future development, by means of increasing your global gain rates over time.

For Laurels, and only Laurels, there’s no way to increase the gain rate through effort. And that makes me sad. And a sad Pixel writes walls of text.

Not considering Glory here because that was already announced to be in the works for removal, giving way to Coin as the primary currency. But even that as it stands currently is tied to reward experience and time invested as the Rank and Glory were changed to be awarded according to victory / loss and match length, rewarding the teams that play better with more points, which cements the value of effort and experience as means to improve growth rate.

The more I think about this the more I actually kind of appreciate your suggestion. I don’t necessarily think that we need scaling laurel gain because of trinkets (like I mentioned, once we are able to craft them things should be very different), but I do like the idea of getting a permanent “laurel-booster” at the big Achievement chest marks.

Just to point this out, I think that non-scaling laurel gain is fine, if laurels were not needed for character progression, but they are. In that case, I think that they should be treated more like karma and badges, as you mentioned, and we should get some sort of scale for them.

I think that the balance would have to be pretty thin, because I know that I (having not gotten the big 5000 point Achievement chest yet) would feel really bummed if people with way more Achievements were getting upwards of 4 or 5 laurels a day. However, I think even just the opportunity to get 2 laurels a day (from whatever means) would be great, as even that is double the rate we currently get.

Personally I like the 5000 mark for this hypothetical because of the strong correlation with Laurels being an award more so than a currency. (But I’m only close to the 3000 points myself, so I’d be T_T if they did update it and I’d have to cross 2000 more to get better shiny /Skritt)

And a progression of +1 daily Laurel per Achievement Title reached would not be as unbalancing as it seems. Any account that has reached 5000 points has more than proved regularity and experience with the game, and 2 Laurels per day at that tier of wealth would not be nearly as unbalancing. And suppose someone out there at 15000 Achievements cackles maniacally at 4 Laurels per day… Dude, at that point, with that number of hours invested you’re already buying Legendaries, you’re not going to be worried about scrapping for a Guilded Infusion so you can barely afford a Pearl Greatsword. :P

Of course, given how this subforum moves, it’s hardly likely that this topic, being text-heavy as it is will be seen or given much attention. Though it would be useful to get more opinions from different people on the matter. Enough of an uproar and we might see changes, after all.