Guild Wars 2

or allow players to earn more Karma at the expense of XP!

In Guild Wars 2 the end game starts at level 1…. but it doesn’t since a major part of the endgame involves doing activities to obtain karma in order to get cultural armor etc.

So the problem:

There are several MMO play styles and Arenanet tries to cater for them by adopting a median approach to XP gain: The most extreme are 1) Rushers: Rushing to max level ASAP & 2) Explorers: explore everything completionism.

The problem is that those who verge towards the explorer style (such as myself) tend to over level the content and please note despite the down scaling, this makes the gameplay insufficiently challenging for many experienced players – in fact a better experience for many can be had a couple of levels under the content, I think.

So the Idea:

Explorers take much longer to get to max level than rushers do, so that means they take much longer to get to a place where they can start earning the karma in sufficient quantity to progress obtaining their cultural armor. Consequently, rushers will get their armor a long time before explorers do, even though they have played the game less (and some would argue in a more gamey style).

So to even this out a bit, it would be possible to start earning the karma for max level armor from level one by selecting a play style option that would boost the amount of karma you get from karma rewards at the expense of getting less XP for activities. This would have to be carefully balanced out of course….

Oh and as a side benefit – it might actually encourage some of those rushers to take a more leisurely route through the game and enjoy all the content that Arenanet have put into it.
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P.S. this suggestion is an elaboration of something that came up in other thread – thanks Kal, I think it was.