Currently, we have a system where the devs update the game every two weeks with something big. And I’m fine with that! But between those two weeks, content is released on a schedule.
What if the schedule was player-progression based? WvW has introduced an astounding level of player control on a macro scale, and since GW2 is all about making it easy to play together, why not develop a living story where players have to work together and complete a quantity based goal (…no, not kill ten rats) to progress.
Where this is heaviest on my mind is at the start of an event where the content is introduced. For the Queen’s Jubilee, the content could only be unearthed when Divinity’s Reach reached a certain number of players in the map, an Arrival-of-Mad-King-Thorn-esque cutscene would play, showing the balloons lifting the tent off of the new area, and then whallah. Or maybe it all just happens outside a cutscene! Then, for players who didn’t get to see it the first time, when they enter the part of the map where the Great Collapse was, it would play a rendition of that cutscene a second time for just that player to make them feel involved.
You could also have it so that the collective server has to donate 1,000,000 trash trophies (that get sold in the “Sell Junk” button on the merchants) to a door in order to unlock the path to a new series of Living Story content. Some mechanic like that. It could be the new specific currency to that time. It could be a number of things.
Or it could be neither of those. Just a way to make the players… I wouldn’t go far enough to say “interact with each other,” because then the solo’ers will come at me with torches and tridents. But WvW towers don’t topple because of a single player, but at the same time, there will be enough people on a server to contribute. This could all be done by one’s self, but it would rely on the citizens of Tyria to make the change.
