Guild Wars 2

I find the renown hearts in a zone to be the least interesting, least innovative component. They feel like old quest-hubs like we had in every other MMORPG since EQ. Collect 10 legionnaire shoulder pads, reward me for every apple I bring, snore

Yet I feel obliged to do them, because they’re so prominent on my zone-completion, and cuz I want the chest.

If instead of having to do the hearts, perhaps zone completion could be tied to doing that same number of different dynamic events. That’d get players to actually explore what’s it take to trigger and follow event chains.

And I’d be freed of the chore feeling renown hearts bring. ^.^

I feel like they are good for zone completion because they give you more of a feel of the region and the culture of the people in the area. They give you more of a social aspect I think with the people of the town/village/farm so that you can identify more hopefully. Also, they often allow you to do three or more different things to get it, so its not like they are always saying to get one specific item 10 times or whatever. I am pretty sure whichever “reward me for every apple I bring” one has more than one way to do it also. In addition, its not like you have to return to them with every item each time or anything. If you don’t want to do them, you don’t get the chest… the chest is supposed to essentially be a reward for getting to know the area really well.

Wouldn’t/couldn’t you know the feel of the culture and zone just as well if you did X dynamic events, rather than X renown hearts?

The dynamic events aren’t consistently there and it would make them a lot easier to miss and locate. Also, “participating” in dynamic events really depends on what the event is… if it is a caravan guarding thing, then you really just have to be in the area; if it is an item picking thing you really just have to get one item and wait; if it is fight the boss all you really have to do is get a single long range hit on the boss pretty much. It is really easy to “participate” in dynamic events, so easy it would help make it ridiculously quick to just count participation in x events as the completion if the number was low and if the number was high and didn’t allow overlaps people would struggle for several hours to look for all the locations for the dynamic events (I am assuming not looking at strategy guide/wikis since you can’t assume that ever). The renown hearts are there, marked on the map and always there (except if a monster downed them for a short time of course). The renown hearts are also useful markers on the map for if you need to go back and buy items from karma vendors like ingredients and stuff like that later on.