Guild Wars 2

I’ve always been an altaholic. One of my favorite things about GW1 was the number of features (low level cap, easily attainable max power armor, skill books) that enabled players to effectively play alts. Sadly, the direction that GW2 has gone in makes alt characters untenable for someone like myself.

I would like to propose a lore and economy friendly solution to the alt character conundrum: Home Instance Affluence.

This concept takes inspiration from other areas of the game as well as some good features other games have had to enable players to play their alts to the same level as their main. Essentially, players would invest gold and materials into their home instance to “level it up” through Affluence levels. Please note that raw #s have been left out of this suggestion as those are something that could be tweaked to hit the sweet spot between investment (of time, gold, materials) and reward.

Different levels of affluence would modify the way the instance looks and give players the ability to unlock rewards that can be distributed to any character on the account for a nominal fee. For example, once I craft a Zojja’s Greatsword, I can donate it to my home instance weaponsmith who will then spend some amount of time studying it. Once he has studied it, I can spend a fraction of the original materials to have him craft one for my alt.

Affluence would require a certain amount of investment (gold, materials, spare items) per month to maintain. If not maintained, it would drop a max of one Affluence rank and then stop degrading, so you could never lose ALL of your Affluence.

Here is an example of how it would work:
I run fractals every day, frequently getting rings that are useless to me.
I can take those rings and contribute them to my home instance for a set number of affluence points. I can also directly contribute gold if I so choose.
At each affluence rank, I can choose to spend materials (wood, metal, etc.) to build an upgrade to certain facilities in the home instance (Weaponsmith, Amorsmith, Bakery, etc.).
After upgrading my affluence to the max level, I can choose to upgrade my weaponsmith to the point where he is able to study Ascended weapons.
Having already created a Zojja’s sword, I gift my sword to the weaponsmith and he starts studying it. He can only study one weapon at a time (perhaps upgradeable through affluence). Once his study is complete, I can log in on any of the characters on my account, go to the same home instance I’ve leveled up, and then purchase a Zojja’s sword.

I would propose that any item in the game should be available through this method.