Guild Wars 2

At the moment, the level of loot you get for mapping or completing a Personal Story entry is set to a specific level.
As you’re scaled to do the content, it isn’t significantly easier doing lower level content at level 80.
But it sure sucks when you’ve done one of those unbalanced Personal Story phases, dying multiple times in the process, only to receive an item or 2 that is significantly worse than what you’re already using.
And there’s nothing quite like mapping Straits at 80 and getting a non-max level exotic.

So, with that in mind, should this gear be scaled so as to be level appropriate?

You’ll have a lot of people complaining that they’ve already done all this and won’t retroactively get the same reward as someone doing it now.
You’ll also get people saying that players will power-level to 80 then do everything so as to maximise rewards.

Are those valid arguments against implementing such a system?

I would argue that increasing the rewards would ensure more people choose to get map completion on more characters and look to complete their personal stories multiple times too.
And this in turn means they’re playing for longer.

I’d say an argument against it would be that, given how loot-centric most players seem to be, most would wait until level 80 in order to do the story to get max rewards (that is, it would be punishing to play the story the way it was intended; as you level up).

Same with map completion; most earlier zones are a breeze to complete at max level (down to mobs being significantly easier), meaning people wait until max, then get easy loot.

Remember though, all of these rewards are one time only. It’s not like you can complete personal story missions or maps over and over again to get infinite rewards. And what’s really wrong with getting maximum rewards? Mapping an area, even a low level one such as Queensdale, still takes a fair amount of time at 80.

Besides, it’d be another great way of getting people out in the open world.

Mungrul.9358:

Remember though, all of these rewards are one time only. It’s not like you can complete personal story missions or maps over and over again to get infinite rewards. And what’s really wrong with getting maximum rewards? Mapping an area, even a low level one such as Queensdale, still takes a fair amount of time at 80.

True, I guess.

It still punishes you for completing the story along the way though, which is how it’s intended to be completed.

Mungrul.9358:

Besides, it’d be another great way of getting people out in the open world.

There’d be people there, but with the one-track aim of completing the map as quick as possible to get their loot, especially given how lower level area events don’t yield as much gold / karma ect (and no, scaling this up wouldn’t be a good idea unless they made downscaling way harsher).