Guild Wars 2

Exploration is one of my favorite aspects of RPGs and other open world games. It may even be my #1 favorite aspect. The sense of discovery is always so rewarding.

But restricting the Map Completion achievement to a single character discourages exploration, rather than encourage it. Let me explain why, with my own personal experience.

My first character (started 2 months ago) was a Ranger; I got her to Level 80, and got about 50-60% map completion with her. But recently I wanted to explore new classes, so I made a Guardian alt. Now I’ve discovered that I enjoy the Guardian more than the Ranger, and I’d rather play that class. But there is now no incentive for me to explore with my Guardian, because obviously if I ever do go for Map Completion, it’s going to be with the character that already has almost 60% done (but the character I like less, unfortunately).

I understand it might be difficult on the technical side, but I think MC should be both character based and account based. Each character would obviously have there own MC, but the overlap would count toward the total account MC.

To see how this would play out in the game, let’s take a Heart quest, for example. Say my Ranger completed it, but my Guardian did not. If my Guardian mouses over it, it would look the same as it does now (uncompleted) but underneath that would be another line of small text, something like “Account completed”. That way I would know not to complete that Heart (at least not for the purpose of MC – I might complete it anyway just for the experience or karma vendor).

As it is now, my sense of exploration with my Guardian is tainted. There are still many parts of Tyria I haven’t fully explored… but if I go to a new place with my Guardian that my Ranger hasn’t been before, my first thought isn’t “wow, look at this interesting new place!” – it’s “ugh, I’m going to have to come here and do all this again with my Ranger when I go for MC”…

Clearly, that thought is not conducive to an atmosphere of exploration and discovery with multiple characters.

Edit: A good way to summarize why this bothers me: MC being restricted to a single character makes it feel more like a chore than an adventure. Opening it up to multiple characters would let MC flow organically just from playing the game, and would hence increase immersion and actual fun.

this has been covered several times; it wont happen anytime soon, if ever.

Gift of Exploration to name one of the many issues.

I know it sucks starting from the beginning, i have 1 100% map completition, 51% on another, and 16% in the last one, believe me, your problem is not unique.

Personally I dont care too much about it unless I want more than 2 legendaries, in which case i havent even finished 1. The map completition comes naturall for the most part. If what you want is the WP then I can advice you to run around the maps solely getting them, I did this with my 3 toon that way i can be anywhere without actually having to do every single map from scratch.

Hope it helps, /cheers

-Fortus

Fortus.6175:

this has been covered several times; it wont happen anytime soon, if ever.

Gift of Exploration to name one of the many issues.

I know it sucks starting from the beginning, i have 1 100% map completition, 51% on another, and 16% in the last one, believe me, your problem is not unique.

Personally I dont care too much about it unless I want more than 2 legendaries, in which case i havent even finished 1. The map completition comes naturall for the most part. If what you want is the WP then I can advice you to run around the maps solely getting them, I did this with my 3 toon that way i can be anywhere without actually having to do every single map from scratch.

Hope it helps, /cheers

-Fortus

Since I’m a fairly new player, I’m not totally familiar with the relationship between Map Completion and Legendaries. But it sounds like 1 Legendary per character with 100% MC (or something similar)?

Well, I have a fairly easy solution to that. Like I said, we could divide MC into Account MC and Character MC.

- Account MC would only count toward the achievement and the player title
- Character MC would count toward anything related to crafting Legendaries

Like I said already, my main concern is with exploration, and the sense of adventure you get from exploring and discovering the great, wide world of Tyria. Forcing that sense of adventure to be restricted to a single character (or experiencing massive redundancy otherwise) really discourages the exploratory aspect of this game.

I don’t think a solution is outside the realm of possibility. I have little hope that ANet will explore this avenue (pun intended)… but an MMO player can dream…