This is sort of a combination proposal of three interlinking items, that I think could address a few items on the player base’s and anet’s wishlist.
First aspect is an extension of the personal/racial aspect of the personal story, featuring a set of higher-level missions that see you rising to a position of social/political prominence in your society alongside your DE mentor, and learning more about some of the secrets hinted in the early stages (the White Mantle and Shining Blade, the other Pale Tree, etc).
As you perform these missions, you get the ability to turn your personal instance into something of a stronghold (the second aspect), with NPCs that provide services, NPCs that give you some side missions to flesh out lore and improve the stronghold, a library that serves as the basis for collecting and examining lore (and playing old missions, including some past LW flashback content, for no reward) at your leisure, and so on.
More importantly, the stronghold and its upgrades become the foundation of the investment system which is the backbone of the reward system for WvE gameplay (the third aspect). Your stronghold accumulates WvE Supply, mats, consumables, and occasionally other rewards over time (whether or not you are logged in and playing). You get these things by expending Supply to invest in open world “resource areas”, with multiple tiers of investment for each area at exponentially increasing cost. Like Hearts, this is just personal, nothing that actually appears in the open world to other players or that is contentious. Once you invest in a resource area, a bar starts to fill up, and once it reaches 100%, your stronghold gets some reward, which (in the case of actual items) you can retrieve upon returning, sort of like a black lion pick-up.
However, your investments only bear fruit when workers are actually able to do their jobs. Meaning, if you invest in Nebo Terrace and it remains under centaur control for an hour, production of rewards from that resource area is paused for an hour. So, “WvE” means this overarching objective of trying to keep resource areas on each map under player control as much as possible.
So, the objectives of such a system would be:
- A way to get stuff without farming; right now, the game is focused far too much on extrinsic rather than intrinsic rewards (i.e. grind), to its detriment. With investment, people can play the content they enjoy and let the NPCs get the mats for them.
- A good reason for level 80s to go back and do a variety of DEs across lower-level maps (other than champ farming), but one doesn’t introduce conflict between newbies and farmers — if newbies kill the centaurs and get your workers back in action, so much the better. They didn’t steal anything from the zerg.
- Additional controls on economy for anet, since there are any number of excuses they can introduce to adjust returns from various areas (the miners found a new vein of ore, there is a drought, Scarlet Briar did it, etc.)
- A good reason to care about the state of DE; also, a reason to actually like having the bad guys beaten back and dormant, rather than just considering it boring.
- A good reason for players (and anet) to focus more attention on the home instance.
- A good excuse to add some system to make it much easier to figure out what events are going on in the open world (in order to manage your investments, but also just to find things to do without having to go to mapchat)
- The stronghold/investment system could be extended to guilds and guildhalls…
- Plus, more of the better half of the personal story.
Now, the extent of the systemic changes and the content means that it’s a pretty tall order. It’s not exactly a typical LS update. But, I think it would be something good to aim for in the long run, and would solve a lot of problems.